Ophelia, Alive Page 21

  So why is it so hard to say no?

  I’m watching the pill bottle on my desk. Twisted and shredded open, but still half-full, catching the light and flicking orange flames at the walls. I still have memories of Sara that aren’t bad. When we moved into the big house, the McMansion, we both could have had our own rooms but we insisted on sharing anyway. We stacked our beds into bunk beds over my mom’s protests, and when she started dating I’d stay up at night waiting for her and make her tell me every detail. But somehow every story blurred together and ended the same way till I tired of asking, and then she hung up the curtains around our beds, and—

  I can’t remember much after that. Not until she moved into her own room, and shortly after that she was gone. All she ever talked about was how she was going to be a doctor like Dad, when I could barely remember the man. The second she was done with high school, she was rushing through her undergrad work to get into med school, and we barely spoke once she was out of the house. I’d listen to her sometimes when she was home for a weekend or a holiday, sitting across the table from me, and her stories all struck me as the same, simple tales of how she’d been pushing hard for success, and the latest classmates she’d sabotaged, and ephemeral romances, all one-dimensional bits of a life I had no part of. But despite my ennui, I would still come to dinner whenever she was there and I’d sit at the table and listen to every word she said. And later, in the hallway, in the dark, when I saw her smile flash as she walked past, I’d follow the teeth with my eyes, unable to look away, like I was watching the Cheshire cat disappear into the yellow glow of the kitchen. Then I’d be left alone in the naked dark, unable to get to the warmth of the bathroom fast enough. I’d close the solid but too-thin door behind me and press my back against it (hard) while I caught my breath and tried to banish the flash of white from my mind. The bathroom was always the same just after she’d used it, with the hiss of the just-flushed toilet spraying an angry calm into the air until it dissipated to nothing, and a small puddle of water just in front of the sink—the calling card of someone who still hasn’t figured out how to wash her hands without making a mess. I’d always marvel at how an obligatory cleaning ritual could result, in the end, in a mess, even one as small and mundane as this one. Somehow a mess so unspectacular was more of an insult than total chaos would have been—an odorless insistence that anyone after her was somehow not worth considering. And once I caught my breath I would always find myself unable to pee, and when I finally went to wash my hands I would find she had already thoroughly soaked the single hand towel, leaving me to dry them on my pants and sit in my own graywater for the rest of the evening.

  I roll over.

  My bed is wedged into a corner of the room, which means that if I face the right direction, all I see is a cold, gray wall—a smooth nothingness that on some nights will lull me into unconsciousness. Except this time upon turning, I’m greeted not by the immaculate gray, but instead streaks of color that perfectly match the gummy paint underneath my fingernails. Shreds and flakes hang from the wall, piling onto my mattress like dandruff, getting lost in the folds of sheets. I study the streaks in front of me, paint piled on top of paint that tells stories of a wall trying to hide its concrete. It’s gray now, but under the gray is pink from the ‘90s, then brown from the ‘80s, burnt orange from the ‘70s, green from the ‘60s, and gray again from the ‘50s—all of them trying in vain to hide the truth: that this room is nothing but a concrete box poured by the lowest bidder, a holding tank for human beings while their heads are filled and their pockets emptied. But when colors get old, they get ugly as well, and the ugly thing they hid shines through again. I wonder if they knew, I wonder if it ever occurred to them, even a little bit—a fleeting thought in the minds of the painters as they enjoyed their beers after work—that each time they added another layer of paint to the wall, they made the already-tiny room smaller. Not much smaller, I guess, but smaller. Walls closing in a bit more on each generation, till the room is nothing but paint. Till the walls exist only to hold the paint that hides them.

  But I know that before that actually happens, the building will be gone. That it’ll be told it’s no longer good enough to hold its occupants, either because prospective students with real money are applying to schools where the dorms are nicer, or because some neglected routine maintenance is threatening to result in condemnation from whoever it is that condemns buildings. And then, rather than fix or improve it, they’ll tear it to the ground and rebuild on the same spot, this time with cheaper materials and trendier colors.

  And now here I am, lying on the fifth floor, trusting my weight to a structure that sometime in the future will be nothing but some shards of concrete lying in the mud, naked and stabbing up into the sky.

  Because everything dies.

  It’s not a deep or original thought, but it’s a true one, and it’s overwhelming as I lie alone in this wreck of a room I destroyed. Every poster in shreds, her computer on the floor, all her books torn apart. It’s chaos—a swirling death of paper and glass, spread out on the floor and the walls for everyone to gape at and know that Destruction is inevitable.

  I should get up and start cleaning, but why bother when everything comes to this end, anyway?

  My twenty-three-year-old frame is fully formed. I’ve achieved the Holy Grail of adulthood, and now the universe will spend the next 60 years (if I’m lucky) slowly grinding me to dust. Maybe those are just the thoughts of a rich white girl feeling sorry for herself, but am I wrong? This is what happens. We take things that are new—our things, our bodies—we use them until they’re destroyed, and we throw them away.

  The hero, the Conqueror Worm.

  On the floor, between the bed and the wall, Kate’s rosary catches the light and my eyes for just a minute. A flicker of blue amid the gray of the dust and the orange of the Cheetos, sitting where I dropped it in the middle of the night.

  I pick it up. Because what else can I do?

  I turn it over in my hand. It’s nothing special. Some blue plastic beads and a dangling cross. I don’t have a clue how to pray a rosary, and she must know that. And it was obvious last night that giving it to me took everything out of her, though I’m not sure whether that was due to a reluctance to part with it or a general embarrassment that she actually believes in something. Probably both.

  (Her habit of deflecting criticism—I’m no deep thinker, etc.—makes me think she honestly wishes she could be something other than what she is. Maybe it’s a pain in the butt to deal with, but I sort of wish I had the same problem: believing in something so thoroughly that I couldn’t shake it, even if I wanted to. She’d probably laugh in my face if she heard me say that—You have no idea what you’re wishing for, Phelia—but is it so much worse than existing just to exist? Being chained to something—even something insane—sounds a lot better to me than being chained to nothing. Maybe if you caught me at a stronger moment, I’d feel otherwise.)

  So I’m left here holding a rosary that’s useless to me, and that she obviously didn’t want to hand over.

  Why?

  I’ve been turning that question over and over in my head. Last night, she said, You might need this more than me, but she must have known that I wouldn’t know what to do with it. So she just wanted me to have it, I guess, just to possess it, as an object. A talisman, like it has some sort of power. A superstition.

  But it seems kind of mean to dismiss it that way. Everybody calls the beliefs they disagree with superstition, which is a word that really doesn’t mean anything except You’re stupid and I’m not. Am I ready to do that to Kate—to write off sincere convictions just so I can feel like I’m better than her? It seems unnecessarily harsh, as if it would actually mean something to embrace my own nihilism. There is no hope. Take that. I’m superior to you, and then we both die anyway, and then universe itself dies, and nothing mattered, ever.

  But I’m smarter than you!

  And the alternative is just as cruel and insulting: to
embrace hope, but only out of a desperate, generic need for hope itself, not because I think there’s any truth to it. Kate gives me the unmistakable impression that she never chose her beliefs, but that they “chose” her, sort of. That she believes them because she has no choice, not because she wants to. And I didn’t choose this nihilism, either. I was forced into it by years of attrition, disappointment after disappointment. And the knowledge that my life could easily be worse than it is does nothing but aggravate the emptiness I feel. We’re all the products of our own experiences, and if I believe in emptiness, it’s only because mine have been so empty.

  Haven’t they?

  Now I’m thinking back to that lone memory, the one I’d almost forgotten (like everything else) till my dream at the bar. My hand reaching out, stretching down toward the tiny pile of life on the ground, pulling her up into the sun. A connection of flesh and bone, uniting old to new and life to life, filling the air with a brightness that screams We will go on! at the yellow-blue sky.

  And then it was over.

  I hadn’t meant anything at all by it at the time. It was just a reflex—a simple, automatic one that represented nothing more than a cavemanlike instinct to avert injury—and yet, somehow, in memory, it means something entirely other. A monument of flesh and sinew, a determined affirmation of the new, a digging in of my heels and a resolution to stand up against death in all its manifestations—even something as unthreatening as a scraped knee.

  Am I dissecting this honestly, or has Kate just brainwashed me into thinking in arbitrary dichotomies?

  And then in my mind I’m there in the principal’s office, with her bright orange carpet and blank, windowless walls. I remember her lecture so much better than that moment on the soccer field—how she yelled at me and yelled at me, just for giving a Band-Aid and a hug to a hurt, crying child, and then threatened to send me home for good, to block me from certification (as if that matters now). And I remember the long-but-not-long-enough weekend of sitting in bed watching TV and eating cereal and just thinking, over and over, She’s wrong. I took no pleasure in the thought—there was no joy in imagining that I was right and yet would still be trampled by her wrongness (a wrongness born of slow strangulation by bureaucracy and a profound ennui for reality). I kept trying to tell myself It doesn’t matter and I don’t care what she thinks and Life goes on, but I just couldn’t silence the open wound screaming She’s wrong and She’s wrong and She’s wrong.

  You’ve got a good moral compass, Phelia.

  I can’t get Kate’s words out of my head. They feel ancient and musty, but they’re less than 12 hours old.

  I keep using that word nihilistic, but I can’t call myself that, not really. Not as long as I believe in right and wrong, and I guess that I must, because Kate says that I do, and I can’t get the idea of them out of my head, no matter how much I want to. I can’t destroy thoughts like guilt and life, because even when the universe dies, ideas will go on (won’t they? how do you destroy an idea?). I can’t imagine they’re imaginary, even though reality tells me—screams at me—that they are. I want to. God, I want to. But I can’t.

  And honestly, that’s more than I’ve ever had.

  Kate denies she has a moral compass, but do I believe her? Can I believe her? She’s tied herself to a system of thought with rigid, inflexible standards of what’s right and what’s wrong, but she doesn’t seem to quite believe it inside, doesn’t seem to quite feel it. And then here I am, trying my damnedest to doubt any meaning in the universe, but I can’t shake right and wrong. I just can’t. I want nothing to matter, but things keep mattering.

  I roll over to face the reality of my destruction, and I let the rosary and its cross dangle over it, a golden ratio coming into focus in front of the entropy, like a hand reaching out to a scraped knee. And I see now, by the layers of paint scraped off the walls, that I can’t just get lost in the gray anymore.

  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.

  What did she mean by that? That I can’t escape history? That there’s nothing new under the sun? That I’m not really separate from others?

  I don’t know.

  What was the other thing she said, though, about finding a current going in the right direction? The right school of thought? Which I’m sure she’d tell me is hers?

  All I can see is matter bumping into matter until it dies (but I wish I saw more). She sees a world filled with magic, where spirits are everywhere and objects can have power and a string of beads can shield you from evil (but I gather that she wishes she saw less). Am I ready to step into that world?

  (Am I able?)

  I can lie here pretending to be tentative all I want, but if I hang onto these cheap plastic beads, I’m essentially buying into her outlook, whether I want to admit it or not. I’m buying into not just the possibility of a spiritual reality, but a particular one (which I honestly find a little ridiculous). I’m not ready to do that.

  The blinds on the windows cast black, bar-shaped shadows across my face and I know that somewhere outside it are two bodies of people who I killed with my bare hands, plus one living person with my thumbprints dug deep into her throat. And wandering around campus are a bunch of cops looking for me, even if they don’t know it’s me yet. And my career and education are a disaster. Half my possessions are destroyed. And my mother wants me gone. And yet something inside me, my lizard brain, I guess, says Keep going, because your lizard brain always says Keep going, even when that doesn’t make sense.

  Keep going for what, lizard brain?

  I hold the beads up to the light, and I squeeze them in my hand, and I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel stronger, or safer, or anything—but then again, I’m starting to realize that the way I feel rarely has anything to do with reality. I slip them around my neck, and I think I heard somewhere that you’re not actually supposed to do that, but whatever. I guess this means—I don’t really know what it means. I still don’t know how to use them, but I guess I can hang onto them for now.

  There’s a mirror above my desk, one that always looks dusty, even right after I’ve Windexed it. I stand and I take a look at myself, still in jeans and a sweatshirt, still looking frumpy but finally a little bit skinny. The beads look gaudy and obnoxious around my neck, so I tuck them inside my shirt and the cross tickles me between my boobs. My eyes are a dull gray (they used to be blue), but I think I can still see a sparkle of sunlight.

  And I know what I have to do.

  The twisted, broken pill bottle is still sitting on my desk, scattering orange flickers of light around the dried-out husk of our room. It’s been twenty-four hours now since I realized I had to do this. So I guess it’s time.

  Picking it up is like catching a flame. I hear the pills rattling around inside my hand, but it’s lighter than I thought it would be, and it feels like a toy, like a baby rattle with some weird, jagged edges. This is what I’m scared of?

  No, I can’t start thinking like that. It’s like a black hole, tiny but with infinite gravity, pulling me in. I remember from high school science that weight changes depending on where you are, but mass stays constant, and this is like that. Long after the universe collapses, this pill bottle will still be a million times stronger than me, a weird reality that exists beyond matter, a current I can’t quite fight against.

  But I’m going to try. I look down at the rosary, just some blue beads almost like from Mardi Gras, and I say Help me? and start for the door, and yank it open. The hallway’s deserted—

  “Hi Ophelia! How’s the semester going?” And my RA’s smile is in my face, so close I can count her pores. Where did she come from?

  “Uh, fine.” I jerk the door closed behind me so that she won’t see the destruction inside. Let her find out at check-out in a few months.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Uh—yeah. Absolutely.” She’s blond and she’s skinny and I swear her face is go
ing to fall off from all that smiling and I’m trying to decide whether she’s on her way to or from the gym. My eyes dart from her unchanging face to the restroom door down the hallway, and I just want to run. Just move her out of the way. (Why does she only acknowledge me when I need her not to?)

  “Listen,” she says, “I don’t want to make a big deal about this.” (She doesn’t want to make a big deal about anything.) “But I got a complaint this morning. Something about loud horror movies in your room around three a.m. Any truth to that?”

  “Um—yeah. That’s what it was. Sure. Sorry. Kate and I were watching—uh—something—scary.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, like—that one movie. With the vampires.” God. I’ve seen a thousand horror movies, but my mind is blank.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, we’ll, uh—we’ll keep it down—uh—next time.”

  “No problem! Good talk!”

  “Okay.”

  “I have to get to the gym, so I’ll catch you later! Have the best day, okay?”

  “Uh—yeah.”

  “Great!”

  As she jumps down the stairs, I call out, “Have a good workout!” which is weird, because I’ve never said anything like that in my life. And then I’m thinking maybe I should go to the gym too, get in shape, whatever, but then I’m like, No, stay focused, you have one thing to do.

  Just one thing.

  Let’s do it.

  I walk to the restroom, barely blinking. I stop at a toilet (determined) and pull out the bottle, the orange pill bottle with the chalky, white pills. I swallow and, biting down hard on my tongue, turn it upside down. The pills take a second to work their way out through the broken, twisted top, and they rattle and bounce, but I watch them all drop in the water, one-by-one, and they swirl in the white.

  I always thought this restroom was weirdly overlit, as if whoever designed it was worried that we all needed to get a good, close look at our bowel movements. And now the bright light and harsh shadows paint me a sickening picture of white-on-white, drowning chalk that leaves little trails of bubbles as it sinks into the crystal-clear foulness, and my nostrils are filled with the strange mix of chlorine and feces that only occurs in a freshly “cleaned” restroom. For a moment there’s an urge to reach into the water, to pull the pills back out—Save them from drowning!—but that doesn’t make sense, I tell myself, and I close my eyes tight, and I reach for the steel handle and flush.