Pushkin Vertigo

How’s the brainwork going?”

“Better than ever!”

If I were a heroine in a fairy tale, I often thought, and a fairy godmother offered to grant me wishes, I would ask for peaches-and-cream skin, eyes like deep blue pools, hair like spun gold instead of blackest ink. I knew I would be worthy of it all. There was nothing I wouldn’t trade for that kind of magic, that kind of beauty. If you were pretty, if you were normal, if you were white, then the good things everyone saw on the outside would match the goodness you knew existed on the inside.

Don’t you want to meet your real parents?”

How come you don’t look like them?”

“You’re so ugly, your own parents didn’t even want you!”23
It was the first time anyone had ever used my adoption as an insult, and it would have been shocking and painful enough without the eyes, the broken singsong chant. He screwed up his face into a squint, asking how I could see. “Me Chinee, me can’t see!”
Was “Chinee” supposed to be a nickname?

And wouldn’t it be wonderful to go to sleep one night and wake up an entirely different person, one who would be loved and welcomed everywhere? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look at your face in the mirror and know you would always belong?

Are you black?”

Of course the other kids would be curious about my birth family. Of course they would want to solve the mystery I, too, obsessed over

The detectives looked through the glass. The glass was one-way and beyond was a purpose-built chamber. The chamber’s walls were concrete block fitted with ringbolts and against the far wall lay an iron-frame bed, thin mattress wrapped in plastic, headboard hung with manacles. Gazing down at what lay piled beside the bed on the poured concrete floor was the cold glass eye of a wall-mounted camera.

‘What are we talking here?’ Lynch said.

They were standing in the viewing room, a dark and narrow space that ran the length of the chamber, and maybe out of reverence for the dead or owing to the oppressive dimensions of the room, both men whispered when they spoke.

‘Communication breakdown,’ Carlin said. ‘Transaction failure.’

Male and female. Some barely adults. A death-camp pile yoked together by their necks with collars and chains. Their hands and feet manacled. At least three of them had fresh purple scars hacking across the sides of their torsos. All had track-marked arms. All had been branded. All had been shot in the head. The blood