Ophelia, Alive Read online

  She hits her head on the speaker behind her. I hear the thwack and I wince.

  “And then you have a bunch of teachings you’re supposed to live your life by. And none of them actually apply to the real world, but I guess that’s sort of the point.” Takes a drag. “I mean, with Christianity. Not with the alien abduction thing. But maybe with that, too.”

  “I’m...not really religious.”

  She laughs. “Not really religious. Well, okay. God, what am I supposed to say to that? Why do people always say that?”

  “I guess I didn’t know what else to say.”

  “Man, I hate it when people say that. I’m not really religious. As if ignoring important questions makes them unimportant. It’s like the people who tell me I don’t see race. Well, good for you, but race sees me, whether I want it to or not. You might have the luxury of ignoring important stuff, but damned if I do. I’m not really religious. What else are you going to tell me? I’m not really anything other than a privileged white girl? Fascinating.”

  She takes a drag.

  And she adds, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to blow up like that. I can be a jerk, I know I can. It’s just—what can I say to that? It’s just a defense mechanism, and not even a good one. Nah, you’ve been sitting here, listening to my insane ranting for, what, almost an hour now? I’m not mad at you. I should be thanking you.” She stands up, gives me a hand, and pulls me to my feet. “And anyway, I can’t judge. I used to say the same thing to people. It’s a useful line. A good way to deflect important conversations. But you can’t do it forever. I mean, I couldn’t, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “I questioned myself for a second. Dealt with the possibility that I might be wrong about something.” She coughs. “It was scary, but I highly recommend it.” Drops her cigarette, grinds it out with her boot. “Listen, I gotta get back to the coffee shop. They’re probably hoping to close sometime soon, and I still have a couple of speakers to grab.”

  “You want some help?”

  “Nah, there’s really only a couple things. You need a ride?”

  “I drove.”

  She punches me on the shoulder, like a dude. “I’ll see you back at the room, then, all right?” Her eyes catch mine for a second, a flash of white in the dark. And then she starts walking away, up the hill, toward the coffee house. And I’m a little dazed, but I feel like I should say something else. Not let things be awkward.

  “Kate?”

  She turns around. “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. It’s been a while since anyone bothered.”

  “Are you kidding?” she says. “Thanks for listening.” Then she turns back around, and she rounds a corner, and she’s gone.

  And I’m standing here in the glow of her dome light, thinking What just happened? I think she’s probably right about that fucking annoying thing, but it’s not like I can hate her too much for feeling passionate about something. I mean, I wish I did. And the fact that she opened up to me like that when she probably didn’t even want to means...something, I guess.

  So I head back toward my car, and I realize that I’m feeling strangely okay, for the first time in a while. I’m not harboring delusions of I just found my new BFF (well, maybe a little), nor am I nursing a big, lesbian crush (well, maybe a little), but you can’t have someone bare their soul to you and not feel—I don’t know—uplifted, a little?

  This will all seem really stupid tomorrow, I know. I’ll wake up and say to myself Some chick cornered you in her van and started ranting about Jesus and aliens. That’s how serial murders start, you idiot. And while that all makes perfect sense, especially given what I saw the other night, and while I’m sure at the very least I’ll be requiring years of therapy to get over all of that, at the moment it just feels right, like I finally made a small connection with someone, even obliquely and imperfectly. Wasn’t this what I wanted, back when I first showed up on campus? To stay up late into the night at coffee shops, talking with thoughtful people about life’s big, important questions? Wasn’t that what I hoped college would be?

  But that was a long time ago. I barely even remember that girl.

  And now I realize that I’ve been walking for blocks, away from my car, in the wrong direction, back towards campus. I’m already closer to my dorm than I am to my car now, so I guess I can just leave it. It’s Saturday night, and no one will tow it till Monday at least, so I guess I’ll just come by and get it tomorrow. It’s nice outside, anyway, once you get used to the cold. The stars that have been fighting with the heavy blanket of clouds all night are finally out, and the windows of the downtown bars are vomiting their glow into the night.

  There’s nobody out on the sidewalks tonight; it’s too late for the serious student crowd and too early for the bar crowd. The snow is stacked on corners and catching the muted halogen glow of the rare car that passes by. The cuffs on my jeans are wicking water off the ground, but I ignore it.

  The traffic lights change, flashing red and then green. Each car that drives by is a blur, and the pavement shines wet from melting snow, while the water flowing in the storm drains spreads out and twists gray in every direction, till it tangles with the night and the snow into a soft, gray carpet. A Berber carpet like the one in the office I used to work in, after one failed career and before another. A soft Berber carpet supporting my shaky feet that were unused to heels. Every day it would rise to meet them when I stepped off the elevator and carry me to my desk where I would answer phones and sort through the slush pile. I’m back there now and it’s morning and the sun is shining in through an enormous window. And the phone is barely ringing and my old boss in her skirt just like mine and her manicured nails is like Hi, how are you? and Good morning, Ophelia, her smile reflecting the gallons of sun pouring in, and I’m glad I got out of that classroom. There’s coffee on my desk, not the fancy kind, just the kind that comes out of a stained carafe every morning, and I know because I make it myself because I’m the intern, the paid intern, so I don’t mind. Sometimes I’m tired and sometimes it’s work, but the memory of the monster children who made me cry is a thousand miles away. I tap at the keyboard, responding to emails, and my nails click and clack because they used to be pretty back then, back before I started biting them. And then I see it, far beyond the pens-with-flowers-taped-to-them, the elevator numbers rising, till it dings and the door opens, and I’m ready to welcome a guest, but she’s not a guest. I see her step out, one bare leg at a time, heels higher than mine. Not even a skirt with those heels, just shorts that are white and hug hips, and her tank top is red. Not even dressed right for the weather, just like always, but she enters the room like she owns it. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t belong here, she never comes here, and I don’t want her here, but she is, forcing her way into my memory and blocking the sun with her white-after-Labor-Day shadow. Her breath still holds the chill of the outside air, and she’s breathing steam in my face like a dragon. Hey Oaf, she says, and I look up and try to see her face among the silhouettes, and it’s the perfect shadow that won’t leave my dreams alone at night. Hi Sara. To what do I owe the pleasure? I look away and pretend I’m alone, but even when I close my eyes I can still see her Cheshire-cat smile. She slams a book on my desk in front of my face and says You left this at Mom’s place last night. It’s Hamlet, the torn copy with the dog-ears that never leaves my pocket, except last night I guess. I breathe in bitter air and say, Why’d you come here, though? You could have swung by my dorm or met me for lunch or stopped by one of my classes. Why would you come here? (It was all I had left.) And the silence that follows lasts forever, broken only by the scream of an ambulance that rips through the sunlight outside and leaves night in its wake. She says, I wanted to see where the magic happens. I wanted to see what happens when I’m performing a necessary function in the world and you’re sitting here, daydreaming, or trying to forget your failed attempt to shape tomorrow’s generation. She takes one of my pens, the ones with the
flowers taped on, and she sticks it behind her ear like she’s a Bic Fairy Princess. The pink matches her tongue and I mumble that my work is important too, and she says, Is it? and I say nothing. You’re living the dream, she says. I say, ‘Living the dream’? What does that even mean? She says, While those of us doing real jobs are working our asses off, you come here and read words on a page and tell people why they suck. While I’m in a basement dealing with the trash we all leave behind no matter what, you’re making ten bucks an hour pushing words around on a screen. You’re living the dream of never getting your hands dirty or bloody, never having to leave that little cavity inside your skull. And I just wanted to see what it looks like when someone tells the whole world they can go to hell and she’ll just sit up in her little tower judging them all. And it’s as boring as I imagined. And she sighs, and she coughs, and she turns around with my pen still behind her ear and starts walking away. I say Why do you care? She turns around and she’s playing with the flower and she says, Excuse me? I say, Why is it your business what I do with my life and my career? If you came all this way just to make me feel bad, you might as well tell me why it’s so important to you that I do. And she just stands there, planted on the spikes of her heels, her green eyes filling with the flame of her shirt. I finally say, Oh my God, you’re jealous, and she stares and says, What? and I tell her, You wish you were me. You wish that you still had a passion for work. And it’s not enough that you’re better than me, you have to make sure I feel worse than you, too, all the time. It’s so hard to open my mouth and say words with her red/green eyes staring right at it. And she says, Hey, Oaf, I was kidding, but we both know she wasn’t, she so fucking wasn’t. I say, Just go home, and she tries to say Wait, but it’s too late, I’m not even listening. And more words pour out from my mouth in a pile of regret-vomit, stuff I can never take back. Just shut up, go home, Sara, nobody cares. So sick of the act, the ‘Oh God, woe is me, the whole weight of the world’s on my back.’ So sick of the way you throw money around on these clothes and the Jag when we both know you’re broke and your cash comes from Dad. And I know every mailing you’ve gotten from Doctors Without Borders has gone in the trash, so just please drop the whole Selfless Martyr routine. Her mouth’s gaping open, a hole in her face filled with dark disbelief that I said that to her. Where’s your lazy-ass boss when I need her? she says. Do you talk to everyone this way when someone comes in here? Aren’t you the receptionist, Oaf? You think you can talk to your clients like that and you’ll still be successful? And she says successful as if she invented it, like she keeps it locked in a box and for one measly dollar she’ll let you peek inside and feed it some breadcrumbs. I say to her, Sara, you can’t just walk in here and treat me like that and expect friendly service, but now she’s not listening. I say Don’t you realize how childish you sound? What you’re doing’s not normal—just—people don’t do this. She says, No, they don’t, and that’s part of the problem. There’s too many people (like you) who do nothing all day while the rest of us have to put up with your shit. And she’s yelling as loud as she can, which seemed strange at the time, but I see now she did it on purpose back then, that any excuse to yell would have been good enough. And I hear a voice, it’s the same voice I heard on that day, it’s my boss saying Come to my office, please, Ophie. She’s calling me in, and it’s all gonna happen all over.

  Wait.

  I remember all this. I’m back in a memory, living it over. I’m here. It’s four weeks ago. This is the day I got fired. Laid off. She said It’s a layoff; we both knew it wasn’t. It was Sara. I see. It was her all along. She did it. On purpose? I guess; I don’t know. But I’m here, back in time, and the plant by the window is still turning brown, and my boss is still calling my name. Sara’s strutting away now, her heels stabbing carpet, the same way they did those four weeks ago back when she ruined my life, and her hands dethrone knickknacks from coworkers’ desks, and they crash to the floor once again. The elevator door opens wide and she steps on, again, leaving me here to clean up the mess. It’s the same. She’ll be gone and I’m fired and back at the hospital, her hospital, where she’ll force me to swallow her pills. And I can’t let her do this again, not again. I get up, and I run, and my mouth’s craving blood, and I’ll make her pay this time. I’m out of my chair, leaping over my desk, the spikes of my heels digging into the carpet. I fly by the corpses of tchotchkes she knocked on the floor, and I reach out with claws that latch onto her hair, and I pull and she screams and her screams are delicious. I want more of them (many more), so I slide my nails down through the trickle of blood that they draw from her face, and I wrap them around her pale throat, and I squeeze. She chokes and she gags and I make her say Sorry. I make her say Sorry a thousand times more, little red-lipstick sorries in spit and in blood. They ooze down her chin and out onto my hands, and they spill out like warm sugar syrup. My claws taste the blood and my teeth become hungry and I can’t control them. They reach from my mouth and sink into her skin and she runs as a liquid down into my throat. I taste the sweet-sticky, the salty, the life, and it’s running all over me (warm), and I’m winning. You hear that noise, Sara? The sound of me winning? I choke her and choke her until she turns cold and my hands push through skin and through bone till there’s nothing between them. I squeeze till the coffee dries up and the silver turns brown and the sun reappears and I’m back in my bed and awake.

  And my lip is bleeding. And my pillow’s torn open.

  The sunlight is pouring into my eyes, and I’m fumbling around for my phone, looking at the time, and it’s eight in the morning. Eight in the morning on a Saturday.

  I honestly can’t remember the last time I was up at eight in the morning on a Saturday. And I’ve got a headache, and there’s blood running down my lip, so I probably won’t be getting any more sleep. Kate’s snoring at the other end of the room.

  So I guess I’ve got the morning all to myself. Maybe I’ll go to the gym, or something. That was another thing I promised myself I’d do as a freshman. I’ll go to the gym every Saturday morning. Maybe I should actually do it this week.

  Y’know. Since I’m already up.

  I slide out of bed, disentangling a leg from a twisted sheet, bumping my head on my desk on the way. I pull open my medicine cabinet and fumble around, looking for Tylenol or something. There it is, behind the NyQuil. I need to get organized. (There’s a pair of used socks in here for some reason.)

  I try to swallow a couple of pills, but my mouth is dry and sticky and without water I can’t squeeze them down. I should go to the bathroom and get some, but walking down the hall seems like so much work this morning. God, I’m lazy. I guess that’s why I never made it to the gym.

  But I’m going today. (I am.)

  I shake my head, trying to clear it. That bizarre dream is fading slowly, but in the moment it felt real, like it was really four weeks ago, like Sara was really there, like I really...

  There’s a trickle of blood still on my lip, and I lick it off, and I try to focus on finding something to wear. Shorts and a tank top. Something like that.

  I open my closet door, and I scream as a body falls out.

  sat. jan. 15.

  8:13 am.

  can’t breathe

  There’s definitely a minute, or an hour, no, a minute, when I’m standing here, just standing here, trying to push it all away and pretend that this isn’t a thing. Hand on the wall, other hand on my throat, trying to breathe, to scream, but I can’t. And then there’s that silence when the room starts to glow and to sparkle, pressing in on my eardrums till they pop, and I close my eyes hard to keep them from exploding out of my head. I close them until all my thoughts disappear, and I open them again, but I’m still in the same place staring at the same body with the same dried blood on her face and the same pool of red underneath her. The twisted mouth, the torn-open throat, and the arms and the legs splayed in every direction. The glow. The darkness. The glow.

  That moment lasts forever, but then s
uddenly it’s over and I realize I’m falling, I’m losing my balance, I’m buckling from the knees up. I reach for the wall, for the cold, glossy paint, and my hand slips against it, leaving horrible red streaks, and my mouth’s hanging open with sounds coming out of it, sounds I don’t recognize, animal, feral. A scream, or a moan, or something more painful, a howling thing clawing its way up my throat. It’s loud and it shatters the morning and I can’t control it.

  And then she’s awake.

  Kate’s eyes are open. She hears me and sees me, and I’m crouching right here, on my knees, my hands covered in blood that’s been drying to them, and a corpse on the floor lying there with her blue skin, her red teeth, her eyes that bulge open all yellow, just staring. It’s not a secret anymore and I’m not alone anymore. She’s jumping from bed in a thousand directions, shouting out Oh my God, or whatever you’re supposed to say when you see something like this. Backing into the wall while she fights to find words in her throat, unable to run and unable to move, and she stands there while everything in here turns black and it spins and I’m listening hard for my thoughts.

  Hours pass, or they don’t. I hear her voice spinning deep in the blackness, quiet but somewhere. In darkness and stars, rushing by like a train and deep in my dreams. Ophelia, Ophelia... I hear her. I do; but my mouth is still miles away from my mind. I’m trying to cut through the black, icy numbness, but I yell and I tumble deep into the darkness of memories that I can’t escape. I stare at the ceiling, the stars on the ceiling that glowed in the night, in that old, drafty house that I shared with my mom and my dad and my sister a decade ago. We’d sit up at night, every night, because we couldn’t sleep, and she’d tell me the things that she knew about life, about school, about boys, and I’d lie there and stare at the green-glowing stars, in love with the night-wisdom Sara would breathe in the drafty humidity. Stories of school and how she got an A or she sat at the popular table at lunch, back when great news from my days would still all revolve around Sesame Street or an extra-good nap. And I’d hear her voice from the far side of night telling stories of sparkling-bright fantasylands filled with bigger kids (cool kids) and dream of when I could be her. And slowly the stars would grow dim and I’d drift off to sleep. But on nights when I couldn’t, her voice would continue long into the night and I’d hear her say Jeff was a bully again. She’d tell me He tripped me and called me a fatty, I hate him. I just want to tie him up down in the basement and make him eat rats for ten years. I’d nervously laugh, little short bursts of laughs getting lost in the night, and I’d finally tell her, That’s silly. You’re so silly, Sara. And silence would drag, endless darkness and space between star stickers (light-years), and finally I’d hear her voice snaking across through the darkness again: We could do it, y’know. And I’d say Could do what? and she’d say We could kidnap him, tie him up down in the basement. And then we could do anything that we wanted. I’d want to say Why are you stuck on Jeff, still? but since kids don’t have words like that I’d just ask How? and her tired, raspy voice filled the darkness with sharp, jagged stories of how we would give him a fake party invite, and when he was here we would drug him and drag him downstairs and duct-tape him to pipes. And soon I’d be adding ideas in, like big, gaping cuts on his skin that we’d fill up with lemon juice, making him into our hand-and-foot slave, prank-calling his grieving mom, making her cry, and I’d finally say, But we’re just joking, right? Sara? She’d only say, Don’t you think it’d fun? And somehow, eventually, smashing against all the odds, I would drift off to sleep, into dreams made of basements and duct tape and soft pleas for mercy, and then wake up (sweaty) at two in the morning, and run for my mom and dad’s room, where I’d hide in their bed in between them and beg for a way to forget, just forget. And somehow the sun would still rise in the morning, and it’d peek at me (shy) through the slats in the blinds while my dad and my mom would snore loud just to drown out my presence. The past night would all seem so distant; yet somehow it clung to my ankles. I’d go back to playing all day like the night hadn’t happened, but in late afternoon I still knew that I’d see her again and then she wouldn’t leave till the cold night was over. The one way I had to keep clean was to stare at the sun.