Ophelia, Alive Page 19

  “We all do stupid stuff.”

  “I guess.” I sigh. “Anyway, I guess I must’ve had too much to drink, because it seemed like a really good idea at the time, y’know? I went to the vintage clothing store and I bought this outfit, and then I went to a bar and started flirting with this guy just to see how he’d react. He was there with a girl, though. I don’t know why I chose him, there were plenty of single guys in there. But anyway, I flirted with him till his girlfriend got pissed enough to leave. And now I feel really bad about it.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Nothing. That’s what really bothers me. He just sat there smirking like an idiot. Wouldn’t go after her, wouldn’t put moves on me. Just sat there being amused.”

  “That’s guys for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  She says, “Yeah. They think life is just something that happens to amuse them. They don’t realize they’re supposed to be living it. Playing life on easy mode’ll do that to you.”

  We laugh.

  And finally, she says, “You don’t need to feel bad. You were just having fun.”

  “So why do I feel so awful about it?” I say, and she laughs again, but I don’t.

  She says, “Well—” and she hesitates.

  “Well, what?” I say, and she awkwardly scratches her butt against the sheets.

  “I guess I have some thoughts,” she says, “but they’re not fully formed. Just a handful of ideas bouncing around in my head, if that makes sense.”

  “Run them by me.”

  “Well—okay.” She pulls herself to her feet and then climbs on top of her desk, perching there with her calloused feet resting on a drawer that hangs open, slightly askew. Eyes screwed up and distant, trying to push thoughts without words out into the air. “I guess the more I think about it, Phelia, the more convinced I am that there are only two forces in the universe, y’know? There’s life and there’s death. And everything you do—like, everything, including brushing your teeth and remembering to breathe and whatever—is in either one direction or the other. I mean—does that sort of make sense?”

  “And you’re saying that...?”

  “I guess I’m saying that a relationship is sort of like a life?”

  “So I just destroyed a life? Ugh.”

  “Sort of. I guess.” Sighs. “I mean, if you want to think about it that way.”

  I lie back on her bed, put my arm over my eyes, and shut out red light. “But it wasn’t a good relationship. I could tell just from those few minutes with them that they were both shallow, terrible people. She was controlling and clingy, he was horny and boring. I didn’t destroy anything worth keeping.”

  She leans back against a stack of books and papers, a pile of learning that’s coming unraveled. “You’re probably right about that,” she shrugs, “but a life that’s not worth keeping is still a life, I think—I mean, because the essence of life is potential, isn’t it? Death is just nothingness, but life is growth.” She laughs. “Toddlers are shallow, terrible people, but it’s still wrong to kill them.”

  “What about seventh-graders?”

  “I think those are open-season.”

  “Thank God.” And we laugh again. It’s a stupid thing to laugh at, we both know it is, but we’ll take what we can get on a dark winter night like tonight. “So what’s that mean, then?” I say. “Like, for us?”

  She says, “What do you mean? Like, in terms of What do we do now? or something? I don’t know. I guess I’m just describing the universe the way I think it is, not the way I think it should be. Life and death are two insurmountable forces, and you can’t fight them—you only latch onto one and cling as hard as you can, I think. You either jump into the dark or you jump into the light, and they’re both swirling pits, and they’ll both eat you alive.”

  “That’s, uh, depressing.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” she says. “But the thing is, there are things in the universe that are a whole lot bigger than you, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.” She plays with one of her weirdly perfect dreads, turning it back and forth in the dim light. “You were born into an ocean, Phelia, y’know what I mean? We all were. It’s so much older and so much bigger than us, and if we pretend it’s not real, we just drown. But you can also find the current going in the right direction, y’know?” She coughs, intentionally, I think, to fill the silence. “Does that make any sense at all? I mean, that’s the way I see things, is all I’m saying.”

  I say, “Yeah, I get what you’re saying, I think. But—I mean, that’s not really what I was asking.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, I mean—I was talking about last night. Like, what we did. Last night.”

  “Oh.”

  “We took a dead body, Kate, and we hid it, like a couple of murderers.”

  “But we weren’t the murderers...”

  “Well—” You weren’t.

  And I want to tell her. I want to tell her so bad. There’s something in the air, an incense almost, a not-quite-stale scent hovering around her form and glowing yellow in the red that makes me ache to confess, makes me want to tell her everything, but I can’t. Secrets, not sounds, globs of sticky emotion congealed in my gut, buried in niceties and nothings. And finally, I say, “But we still covered it up, didn’t we? Isn’t that, like, sort of capitulating to death?”

  She says nothing.

  “...giving in?”

  She’s looking down, studying the floor. Scratches at a calloused foot.

  “I mean, right?” I say, finally.

  She sighs, “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah, I think. I mean—we did it because we were scared, right? And we did it because we didn’t know what else to do. But no, it wasn’t the right thing—just the easy thing.”

  “Wait, you thought that was easy?”

  She laughs. “Easier than calling the cops and saying, Hey, I’ve got a dead body in my closet, and also I’m black.” She laughs. “That takes real balls.”

  “And, arguably, stupidity.”

  “Like there’s a difference, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ve got a good moral compass, Phelia,” she says, trying to toss it off like it’s a casual, unimportant observation, but the words are heavy from her gravelly smoker’s voice, and they stick to the air.

  “I do?”

  She says, “Yeah, I think so. And honestly, that’s more than I’ve ever had.” She jumps down and opens a desk drawer, starts slamming stuff around in it. (Looking for that screwdriver? Yeah, probably not.)

  “Well, I mean—”

  “I mean it,” she says. “You know when things aren’t right. When you’ve screwed up. That’s further than most people ever get in their lives. You’ve never been to catechism, and you might understand the gospel better than I do. Definitely the part about needing it. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that much. It’s hard to fit the whole ocean in your head, but you’re halfway there, y’know?”

  There’s so much I want to say. Two corpses (more?), tugging hard at my ankles and dragging me down, and I can’t get away from the past. I can try to ignore it, or just not to repeat it, but it’s still behind me, and dragging me down like a current. A pile of the dead, melted into a salty, thick brine, dragging me to dark places I don’t want to go. I could end it all, maybe, by opening my mouth.

  But I can’t.

  She says, “Listen, I don’t want this to be weird.” (Too late.) “But I can tell you’re going through a lot. I’m not sure what all, exactly, and I’m not looking to make you tell me your life’s story. But I’m thinking you might need this more than me.” And then out of the dark, her hand is in mine, and it’s pressing her rosary into it. It’s the one she had earlier, the blue one that was hanging out of her hand that night in the van, now catching the light from the lamp, turning red into blue, with a tiny cross dangling.

  I should say something, but I don’t know what. I
have no idea how to pray a rosary, and I’m pretty sure this one’s important to her. A few weeks ago, I would have said You keep it, but the cold fingernails digging into my ankles tell me I should probably grab it and hold onto it tight. So I squeeze till the beads leave deep tracks in my palm and say, “Thanks.”

  She’s exhausted.

  I can see it in her eyes now, deep brown spirals crisscrossed with jagged red thorns that stab at her pupils, and her gravelly voice fades to a croak. That last reach into the dark, that final Hail Mary pass, took everything out of her. I’m holding a piece of her in my hand now, and it’s long and it’s stringy like entrails, and it hangs loose in my hand while its reddish-blue shadow draws swirls on my bellbottoms. And it’s three in the morning, and tomorrow is threatening to come right on time, pressing the darkness into my face until it almost bursts out with a blinding, bloody light. She feels it too, that the room is breathing, twisting into swirls of red and blacker black, shutting out dreams with hypnotic nothingness.

  She says, “I don’t mean to cut this short, but I have an early class and I should probably get some sleep.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  I stumble to my bed and pass out into the black, clutching the beads till my hand goes numb.

  mon. jan. 17.

  3:49 am.

  confused

  The scratching at my ankles stopped. The swirling faces, the aching memories, the insatiable thirst—they all stopped. For the first time in days, the sleep was nothing more than a black nothingness, a deep gray fuzz that buzzed in my head and pulled my eyelids shut with ten-pound weights. But now I’m awake, and I don’t know why.

  My room fades in from the sparkling nothing, and everything seems normal. I’m not twisted in the sheets this time. I’m not drenched in sweat. The room is real, the dark is quiet, and my hand that held the rosary is empty. The indent of each bead sits cold in the winter air and I can hear my skin drying out. I glance at my hand and see it hanging over the side of the bed, empty and limp, and the beads must be lying somewhere on the floor below, wedged in between the bed and the wall, buried in dustbunnies and Cheeto crumbs.

  I try to roll over to pick it up off the floor, but I can’t move. My hand hangs there, limp, and my body refuses to roll. I’ve heard of sleep paralysis before, but this is the first time I’ve woken to a dark room that refuses to let me up from my bed. I can’t move.

  Why?

  But, actually, I am moving. I mean, I’m not moving myself, but something’s tugging at my arm, the other arm, the one I can only see out of the corner of my eye. Someone is tugging at my arm, again and again, while they rifle through the things on my desk. Shuffling through papers, slamming pens into pencils, knocking my phone and my purse on the floor. I push my eyes all the way to the edges of their sockets, trying to see what’s going on through all the fuzz.

  There’s no one there.

  No one standing there, and no one tugging at my arm. And yet, the noises continue. The shuffling continues. The tugging continues.

  I’m struggling to move. I really am. But all I can do is lie here and feel the tugging get stronger.

  I push. I twist.

  Using all my strength, I manage to turn my head—and inch or two—and slowly I realize what’s happening.

  And then everything turns cold.

  Through the fading gray static, I slowly make out the shape of my own hand, completely numb and violently stabbing at the things on my desk, slamming them to the floor one-by-one. Dragging itself drunkenly from corner to corner, like a spider tied to a lead pipe, searching, looking for something. My lifeless body is glued to the bed with icy sweat, watching my own (cold, dead) hand tear apart the stacks of homework just above me, like a cop rifling through a crack house. I try to scream but my tongue is just as dead as the rest of me, limply choking air out of my throat, while my tingling arm jerks hard on its socket.

  Across the room I can hear Kate snoring softly, unaware of my silent distress, till her snoring is drowned out by the buzz in my ears that mingles with the silver in my eyes and drowns all my senses in waves. What are you doing (hand)? Why are you like this?

  More sweat bursts out in another chill when I realize the answer. She—it—my hand—is looking for the pill bottle, and she’s almost found it. I see its translucent silhouette, just out of reach, where she can’t get to it, halfway to the window and glowing with yellow streetlights. And I can’t fight. I can’t do anything to stop it. I’m trapped, just a mind in a cadaver, watching as my fingers finally brush the plastic and stiffen, aroused and determined.

  And they pull.

  They pull from the fingernails out, reaching into gray ink, jerking desperately against my knuckles, my elbow, my shoulder. She—my hand—jerks into the night, clumsy but determined, ripping against tendons, till she lands on the bottle and the rattle is muffled by sinuous flesh and angry bones.

  And the first thing I can feel her do is squeeze.

  I feel her fingers, my fingers, press in against the plastic, tearing at polymer strands with a strength wholly not my own, the strength of needles in my bones and fire in my blood. I jerk back on my arm, command her to return, but still nothing moves.

  And I feel it all now, every single ridge of the white cap is quaking through my arm as she digs her nails into them, shredding plastic into splinters and grinding her claws into ruptured stumps. The childproof cap, the flimsy locking device that keeps old people away from their prescriptions—for one moment, that’s my hope, my only chance of getting through the night without being force-fed by my own zombie hand—but then it gives way, too, just a latch, nothing but two sticky globules of pseudo-liquid slipping through each other like ghosts, tearing apart like the shrapnel of a car crash, crushing bones in the goo.

  I can see the bottle now, glowing orange like a flame inside the gray, a twisted, broken mass of waxy fat, shreds of terrible light and heat that burn my hand. And the pills inside rattle loud, tasting sweaty air they weren’t supposed to taste and whispering my name while I beg them to stop. Chalky, unfinished pills with rough, pockmarked surfaces that breathe in the air and swell with humidity and push it back out as angry whispers. No, you don’t own me. I put you away. I’m done, it’s over, I’m done. But the pills don’t listen (because pills can’t listen). She’s angry (my hand is), she’s desperate and hearing the call from the rich, creamy insides of chemical nuggets. Demands them with anger and violence and sharp, jagged claws I feel growing, claws prying the bottle wide open and dragging it in toward my mouth, which won’t close. And my eye tracks the flame as she floats over the bed, a will-o’-the-wisp, a jagged ball of lightning floating stiffly toward my mouth at the end of my spindly zombie arm. And it cracks, like sticks breaking, as the flame shoots straight downward and burns on my lips while its fire pours into my mouth. I try not to swallow, but you can’t not swallow when something’s already in your throat. And now it’s inside me again, sinking into the gaping cavity in my middle that dictates my survival, and it burns all the way down till it lights me aflame from my gut to my eyes, and the dreams start again. The dreams again, the ones I’ve had, the ones that come and go, but this time they’re instant and they’re brighter and louder and realer, and they’re not even dreams. They’re not even dreams, just blocks of concrete that stack on each other, till they’re miles above my head. And gray paint slathers over them, and the window ten feet above me glows dull with the sun, casting shadows of cold iron bars on the floor and the stainless steel mirror and the toilet. I desperately look through the door’s tiny window till the diamond wire pattern is pressing itself deep into my face, among wrinkles that come early from too much experience. Small child’s wrinkles on a small child’s face, but no one ever notices them, ever sees them or asks me why. And a room that should heal them, a room that should smooth them, but instead it’s a cage, it’s a prison for the battered to be battered again. Every day they all find me, collapsed on the floor, on my face, with my nails dug deep into the pain
t, and each day I make scratches a little bit deeper, and they say that She’d better stay here one more night, maybe two, just for close observation. And each night the fat man, the one with the twitch and the bald head and cold, meaty hands and wild eye, he would unlatch the door with a clank and a clunk, and his big, meaty hands would be on me again, and oh God, he’s still there, he’s the man at the table who looked me up and down, I remember the strange way he twitched when he did. His one wild eye traced my curves from the floor to the ceiling, I know he remembered them, I could see drool on his lip like I used to. And now here I am in my cell and can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, and I’m trapped in my body, the old one I used to have, a frail child’s body that’s tapped out and used. And I have to get out, and I have to escape, and the concrete is thick and my nails are unsharp, but they’re all that I have, so I tear at the walls. The thick sound of smashing surrounds me in noise while I strip away paint till my dull, jagged nails scrape against cold concrete that’s been shutting me out from the sky. And my hands don’t stop moving. I’m digging, destroying, escaping. Blood mixes with paint, and the shrapnel keeps falling, till the latch on the door, the one on the outside, unlatches. It’s clicking and clunking and stabbing inside itself, and he’s coming inside. He beats through the cold and steel gray of the door, and he forces his way into my square of concrete, through ten-foot-thick walls that still can’t keep me safe. And a million old memories flash through my mind of the heaving, gray floor and the pain and the shame while I bled. He won’t touch me again. He can’t touch me again. And my hands, with their claws, both still burn with the flame of the substance inside, and I know he won’t touch me, because I have strength now, and no one will hurt me again. The blood and the paint that are under my nails all cry out for death, for a blood sacrifice, and I spring from the floor, dirty nails in the sun, crying out in a voice that’s not mine but belongs to the flame that’s inside me. I land on his throat with my jagged nails ready; my fingers sink into his fat and firm flesh. And I squeeze. He chokes and his eyes fill with fear when he feels all the power in my hands and the flame in my eyes. And I’m not a small girl anymore. I’m not the weak one that you once used to play with, not just a doll you can throw to the floor when you’re done, toss away, toss aside, just use up and throw out. I’m not that! I’ve discovered my strength, I’ve discovered my voice, and my strength is a flame, and my voice is a cry prepped for battle. I’m dirty and bruised, but I shine like the gray of the sun, and the bars aren’t for me, they’re for you, and you’re mine now, you won’t get away, won’t escape till I squeeze every last ounce of breath from your throat. And he begs through his chokes and, and his giant, fat throat’s folding over my hands, and my beaten nails sink into flesh till his voice is closed tightly away from the world.