Ophelia, Alive Read online

  And he’s saying my name.

  “Ophelia!”

  She’s saying my name.

  “Phelia!”

  What?

  “What are you doing?” A choking voice. A voice that I know, and it’s saying my name, and it’s Kate’s.

  It’s Kate’s and she’s right there in front of me, sat up in bed with my hands on her throat, and she’s sweating and scared and she pulls at my hands while her eyes look around at the things on the floor and the shreds of the wall paint and posters (all torn) and the vases (all smashed), and I’m standing there stupid and gaping (her face!) with my hands on her throat thinking What the hell happened? and What do I do?

  I loosen my grip.

  Her face in a stare of confusion and anger and shock, just a huge, gaping hole asking me the same questions.

  It’s our room, our dorm room, and I never left, and I’m still twenty-three, and my twenty-three-year-old body is standing in the middle of an enormous, horrifying disaster. The paint hangs in shreds from the walls and the vase from her desk is smashed on the floor and her guitar sits broken in the corner. And my nails are ground to stumps and the posters from the walls hang in jagged ribbons and the sun is peeking over the horizon to reveal it all, and she’s sitting there staring into my eyes with bruises on her throat and her mouth hanging open in silent disbelief.

  And the sun keeps rising.

  I watch the yellow morning spread through the fibers of her shag rug, now wadded up under my feet, while we stand there just staring at each other and breathing through our halitosis-mouths. I watch her face while her hands run over the gouges in her throat and she catches her breath and she tries to decide what to do. If she’s smart she’ll run. She’ll bolt out the door and she’ll call the police and they’ll drag me away and she can maybe get on with her life. But she doesn’t do that. She’s just sitting there, studying my face while I’m frozen three steps away, hands raised in the air, half in fear, half in half-assed surrender. Tears run down her cheeks, from the pain and from cold resignation. A look of acceptance at the carnage in front of her, and a final exhale that says What do I do with it?

  I don’t know how long.

  I don’t know how long we stay like this, but the yellow stripes of the sun crawl slowly down her bedposts and we’re still just standing here and gaping at each other and trying to remember how to breathe in the stale, sweaty air.

  And then, finally, she speaks.

  It takes her voice a few seconds to escape her mouth. I can hear it—feel it—stabbing its way up the collapsed maze of her throat. She sputters, she winces, but she speaks, and when she does, her voice is a croak that juts out into the air with ice and with fire. Her eyes don’t leave my face, and she forces out just a handful of words:

  “Are you ready to tell me the truth now?”

  mon. jan. 17.

  7:49 am.

  tentative

  We’re sitting on the steps to our dorm, shivering in giant hoodies and wishing we had some coffee. Watching the sunrise fight against the mist and counting the cop cars on campus. I can’t look at her, but I feel her eyes studying me, and she’s ready to run but she’s ready to listen.

  (I’m not ready to talk, though.)

  I’m thinking back to what she said just yesterday, something about needing a friend to confide in, even if it’s not her. Touchy-feely-girly stuff, the sort of thing no one would ever say to me if I were a dude.

  (But maybe she’s right.)

  I don’t see it that way. Talking about my problems isn’t going to change them; it’ll just make me relive the pain over again. I’ll still be a murderer, sitting here and passively watching the cops close in on me (three cars that I can see), and I’ll still be powerless against this addiction. The only difference will be that someone else will know about it. There’s no universe where talking about this problem won’t make it worse.

  Oh, Kate. You want to pull me out of my shit, but you have no idea how deep this shit goes.

  (It’s too late.)

  Some guys in t-shirts with the sides cut out are playing half-court across the street, dodging and ducking between the fingers of mist. Under other circumstances I might enjoy the view, but it’s hard to distract myself from my situation at the moment. They’re bros who think they’re a lot better than they are, and their fumbling’s moderately cute, but it’s not enough to lighten my mood. The arrhythmic pounding of rubber on concrete provides a soundtrack to my sweatshirt as it swallows me whole.

  “I met up with my dad yesterday,” I say. (I don’t know why I’m bringing this up.)

  “What?” (She wasn’t prepared for me to say anything.)

  I say, “I met up with my dad. Remember yesterday when I said I called him up? He wanted to meet. So we did.” The words hang in the air, and she rolls them around in her head.

  She lights up a cigarette. “That can be really dangerous.”

  “It can?”

  “Meeting up with somebody you barely know?” she says. “Uh, yeah.”

  “He’s my father.”

  “But you don’t know him. You haven’t seen him in a decade.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  She sucks her cigarette down to ash, stubs it out on the step, and offers me one. I figure I’m damaged goods already, so I let her light it and I take a drag. It’s every bit as awful as I’d imagined, but also strangely calming—easy to see why it becomes an addiction for so many people. It’s the perfect mix of pleasure and pain. (It’s not hard to turn down pure pleasure, but when you can punish yourself for enjoying something, it’s somehow easier to accept it. Maybe that’s weird, but I see it all the time in people.)

  “I thought you didn’t smoke,” she says.

  “I don’t have much to lose at this point.”

  She doesn’t ask what I mean, and for a moment we sit there sucking on the glowing ash. It swirls hot in the air, chasing the mist away. “Well, what’d your dad say?” she says.

  “He said the house I loved was built by bootleggers.”

  “What?”

  Across the street, one of the bros drops the ball and chases it into the bushes. “We used to live in this house when I was little,” I tell her. “It was one of those quaint old bungalows, and it was full of hidden compartments and secret passages. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I thought people just used to build houses that way, y’know? I thought people just used to be cooler, that they just put a little more effort into what they built, to make it interesting. It, uh—it sounds stupid now that I’m saying it out loud.”

  “You were a kid.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Anyway, he told me yesterday that all the passages and compartments were only there because bootleggers built the house during prohibition. It was like if he told me that Cookie Monster was only funny because he was tripping LSD.”

  “Isn’t that what they said about Pee-wee Herman?”

  “Or something.” I can’t make myself laugh this time, and my throat is soaked with tar. I tell her, “I’m starting to realize that nobody ever does anything cool or interesting just for the sake of doing something cool or interesting. Nobody does anything unless they stand to make a buck from it, y’know?” I suck down more smoke and I choke out: “Is that the difference between being a child and being an adult? Seeing the profit motive?”

  She says, “Maybe. That and taking responsibility for your actions.”

  I sigh, and it’s a smoky sigh. I could get up and leave right now, but what would be the point? “I guess you want to know about the bruises on your throat,” I say.

  She nods.

  “Why are you hanging around waiting for an explanation, anyway?” I ask her, studying the muscles on one of the clumsy basketball dudes and watching his sweat turn to steam. “There are cops everywhere. You could just run to one of them. Or you could be at the hospital getting your throat looked at. But instead, you’re sitting there, waiting for me to explain myself.” My mouth tas
tes bitter from smoke. “Why are we doing this, Kate?”

  She shrugs. Heavy shoulders that aren’t easy to lift. Stubs out yet another cigarette and finally says, “I guess I’d rather fix the disease than the symptoms. Y’know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sometimes you just do something because it seems like the right thing to do, even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.” She’s trying to light another smoke, but her lighter won’t cooperate. “Like I told you before, Phelia, I’m not a great thinker. I can’t pretend to be one.” She coughs. “Now you can either tell me the truth, or you can lie to me some more. But if you lie to me, at least make it an interesting lie.”

  I lie back on the landing, my arm under my head. The cold concrete drains the last bit of fight out of me, while I suck the dregs from my filter. The last tower of ash falls to the ground, narrowly missing my cheek. I say, “I guess it all starts with my sister.”

  “Uh-huh.” She’s not trying to sound condescending, but there’s an I knew it in her voice that’s driving me nuts. I guess it’s to her credit that she’s trying to hide it.

  “When I lost my last job, she told me she could get me another one, one at her hospital. But there were strings attached. There always are, with her.”

  “What sort of strings?”

  I close my eyes to the foggy sun and I hear voices in the dark, but I ignore them. “That’s where it gets complicated. See, I don’t keep up with my sister all that well, but somehow she managed to get herself kicked out of med school about a year ago. But she had been doing some research on a drug—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “—and I guess the whole thing sort of blew up in her face. She doesn’t talk about it, and I never wanted to know the details, but I guess it ended in a really ugly way.” I hold out my hand, and she fills it with another cigarette. I’m gonna need it to get through this conversation. “My mom and dad both know more, I think, but no one talks about it. Anyway, she moved back in with my mom and picked up a job as mortician, which she doesn’t seem too happy with.”

  “It’s not a field a lot of people are dying to get into.”

  I ignore the pun. (The only way to win is not to play.) “So, anyway, I show up for my first day of work, and—” I take the lighter from her, light up, and fill the sunlight around me with smoke.

  “And what?”

  “And she’s selling me this weird, Faustian deal. If I want to keep the job, I have to help her test her drug some more.”

  “You’re saying that—?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “Is it?”

  “How is it not?”

  “Um.” I take a drag, a deep one this time, and I’m starting to feel sick to my stomach. I need to take this smoking thing slower. I say, “I mean, I guess it’s unethical. Probably illegal. But sick? I mean, she’s just trying to get back in the game, right? Just trying to prove that the pills work and win back some respect from her colleagues? Right? Or something?”

  “Really?”

  “I dunno.”

  “If that’s true,” she says, “why not just test it on herself?”

  “She says I’m the fat one.”

  “What?”

  “It’s, uh, a weight-loss pill.”

  “A weight-loss drug? Really?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Is that weird?”

  “It’s just—just a weird thing to stake your work and reputation on, is all.”

  “Well—I guess that’s where the money is, right? People’s vanity? No one’s going to get rich developing antibiotics.”

  “I guess.”

  “Anyway,” I say, “I didn’t really ask questions. I needed the job, so I took the pills. I’ve been having weird nightmares ever since.”

  “And sleepwalking.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And being...violent.”

  “I guess.”

  “And—”

  She stops. I think we both know what she was gonna say, but we sit silent because neither of us wants to admit that we know what we know. It’s obvious to me, of course, and she might have an inkling, but she won’t say it out loud, won’t admit that she’s thinking it, maybe even to herself. Doesn’t want to acknowledge just how deep the shit is.

  (We’ve all been there, I think.)

  We sit here, both pretending we’re just two friends enjoying cigarettes and watching the sun rise. I think about how I probably needed this and maybe she did too, so she won’t say what I’m thinking, won’t draw the obvious conclusion, won’t shatter the mist. I feel her eyes on me, pondering what I’m capable of, trying to find a reason not to run away.

  She finally says, “What I can’t figure out is why she has this kind of power over you. You’ve been hired, you’ve got the job—why not just back out of the experiment? What’s she going to do, get you fired?”

  “She’s done it before.”

  “She what?”

  “She was the reason I lost my other job. The one at the publisher.”

  She’s gumming her filter, trying to eke out the last bit of nicotine.

  I take a drag, and my gut swims some more, and I say, “She’s got this weird power over people. She always gets what she wants.”

  “Except when she got kicked out of med school.”

  “Yeah, that was surprising. Whatever happened must have been awful.”

  She says, “People who are used to success don’t handle failure well.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Listen,” she says. “This is not healthy.”

  “What’s not?”

  “This relationship. You and Sara. She’s got you putting chemicals in your body, and you don’t even know what they are—and even though you’re obviously suffering from it, she’s blackmailing you to keep doing it. And—for some reason—you seem pretty okay with it.”

  “I’m not okay with it—”

  “Really? I don’t see you fighting too hard. Are you going to keep working at the hospital?”

  “I mean, I guess—”

  “And you’re going to keep taking the drug?”

  “Well—”

  “Sounds like you’re okay with it to me.”

  “That’s not fair,” I tell her.

  “Why not?”

  “I mean, I’m—” I start, but there’s not much I can admit to her. “It’s not that bad. My behavior’s been a little weird, I know—”

  “A little weird?”

  “—but, I mean, look how much weight I’ve lost. In, like, less than a week. The drug works, you have to give her that.”

  “Oh my God, Phelia, why are you defending her?”

  “I—I’m not defending her, I’m just saying the drug works, is all.”

  “Okay—” she says, grabbing my arm—“do me a favor and just listen to yourself for two seconds. Just two seconds. You’re talking about someone who’s blackmailing you to put dangerous chemicals in your body, who deliberately got you fired from your last job, who managed to get herself kicked out of med school—and all you can say is Look how much weight I’ve lost, teehee! I just—”

  I know she wants to say more, but she’s trying to let me breathe. I’m trying to breathe, and I’m trying to think. There are nails in my back, sharp fingernails like from last night, and it’s her, it’s the girl who’s been following me around in the pea coat and Uggs. She’s saying things in my ear, and they’re loud now. Don’t let her tell you what to do. If you throw away the pills then I can’t be your friend anymore. You want all the pills and you want me to stay. Don’t you? You do. I know that you do.

  “Shut up! Stop!”

  “What?”

  “Not you.” I’m not talking to Kate, but she thinks that I am, and she shrinks away. Sharp nails in my back, strong hands on my arms. Strong hands from the bearded boy, the one with the flannel and the knit hat, and now both of my ghosts are here, but I know Kate can’t see them. He grips my arms tight and he squeezes and tel
ls me I won’t let you do that, I won’t let you send us away. You know it meant something, you know that it did, when I washed your face clean in the closet. I say, You’re not real—

  “You’re not real!”

  “What?” He’s not real, Kate can’t see him. She thinks it’s just me, that we’re just out here talking on the steps like we have been all morning. No one but the sun and the smoke and the bros. Just alone. No one else. They’re not real.

  “Listen, Phelia—” Kate’s voice again—“I don’t know anything about you and Sara. I’ve never met her and I barely even knew you until recently. But you need to understand that this is not normal. She’s not treating you like a normal sister would. She’s treating you like a—like a lab rat. A piece of meat. Maybe you don’t understand that because you’ve never experienced anything else, but it’s not normal, and it’s not healthy.” The claws go deeper. The hands squeeze harder. I open my eyes, but Kate’s fading into the gray. Don’t listen to her, don’t—“I can’t tell you what to do. It’s not my business. But please think long and hard about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.” And I hear her walk away while I’m pulled into the darkness by strong hands.

  mon. jan. 17.

  11:13 am.

  and now i’m

  I open my eyes and I’m back in my room.

  This needs to end.

  I’m lying on my bed, on my back, wondering how and when I got here. Scratches up and down my arms, gleaming reddish in the late morning sun from the windows. Kate’s right—what she said about Sara treating me like a lab rat. Unethical. Immoral. Illegal.