Ophelia, Alive Page 22

  I hear the swirling before I see it, because it takes me a second to work up the nerve to open my eyes again and watch the white solids disintegrate into powder before twisting into a cloudy cyclone that snakes its way down the drain. It’s strange how, when you watch a toilet flush, it always seems like it takes forever for the water to actually stop running. The pills themselves are gone in a second, but I stand here, still watching, eyes half-unfocused, listening to my pulse till the bowl refills completely. Then the rushing of the water slowly fades into a hiss that inches its way down the trails of grout in the floor and up the walls and finally into the air till the whole room is filled with a new, blank freedom.

  And silence.

  It’s a calm, ambiguous silence, the sterility of the scent mixed with the yellow light and an air that feels sweaty and dry at the same time. And I feel weirdly and completely alone, till the line between my skin and the air disappears and my body dissolves into mundanity. Then the sparkles take over my head because I’ve been forgetting to breathe, and it’s all dark and there’s nothing.

  The blackness is one I can barely remember, one from a time before everything happened, and it echoes last night maybe a bit, but it’s deeper and darker, a swampy ink with no dreams or unrest, and my arms and my legs dissolve into night, till I’m left as a kernel, an idea of myself, something less than a body (but more), just a blinking light adrift at sea. And the black of the waves pounds harder, seeping into my pores till my pores disappear, and my brain’s finally nothing. No fears and no hopes and no yearnings or thoughts, just a hum in the night like an old TV with the volume turned off. A low whine. A dreamless nothingness I’ve needed forever.

  And then, even before it began, it’s over.

  “Hey.”

  I’m looking up into Kate’s face, haloed in the restroom lights and bouncing dreads, looking worried.

  I feel the floor again. Hard tile, digging into my back at weird angles and mashing the stickiness that never goes away into my sweatshirt, and I’m numb from the waist down. “You okay?” she says.

  “Where am I?” I ask, and she laughs and gestures with her hand, like Look around, and I’m lying on the restroom floor feeling grimy and numb and my ponytail hurts and my ass is sore. “Was I—?”

  “You were passed out,” she says. “I mean, I guess. Unless you’re taking naps on bathroom floors these days.”

  “No—well, maybe.” And then I add, “I did it.”

  “You what?”

  “I dumped the pills.”

  “Well—good,” she says.

  I wait for her to add something else, but that’s all she has to say. Just Well—good. “Now what?” I ask her.

  And she bites her lip, and she studies my face, and she says, “I guess that’s up to you.”

  “Oh. Ow.” I’m trying to get up, but my arms can’t find a floor to push against, and my feet are ten thousand pounds of dead weight. She helps me up, and then I collapse onto the nearest sink while the room spins.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I just—I really thought I’d feel better once I got rid of them, y’know? And all I feel is...tentative. Empty.”

  She helps me stand up again. “You want a guess as to why?”

  “Sure. Why not.”

  She squints in the yellow light and says, “Once you finally beat your demons—that’s when the real work begins, y’know?”

  She just leaves it there, hanging in the sweaty echoes, looking over my face with her chocolatey eyes, and she sees the rosary around my neck, and I know that she does, because her eyes stop on it, but then she looks up and says nothing.

  “What do you mean?” I say.

  She says, “You’re back to zero. Your life isn’t about the wrong thing anymore—now it’s just about nothing. Now you have to make it be about something positive.”

  “Oh.” My knees buckle from the numbness and I almost fall over but she catches me again and she helps me back up.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine, I’m just—I’m a little numb. I’ve been sleeping on a hard tile floor.”

  “Well, why don’t we get you into bed—”

  “No. Wait.” Stupid. “What day is it?”

  “I think it’s Monday. The seventeenth. Why?”

  “Dammit. What time?”

  “Almost six, I think. What’s up?”

  “I’m late for work.”

  mon. jan. 17.

  6:20 pm.

  almost late

  I pull my car into the last slot near the door, and shake my head, trying to clear it. I can sort through Kate’s existential questions in twelve hours, but right now I just need to make it through the night. It doesn’t even matter what I’m doing with my life if I can’t make rent. Or tuition. Or whatever.

  The reality is that, most days, there just isn’t time or energy for life to have anything like “meaning.” Saving orphans and rescuing puppies is nice and all, but they’re not things that normal people can do, not when we’re still wondering how we’re going to stay awake all night and then sit through class in the morning. There are orphans who need saving and there are the saints who save them, and then there are the rest of us: boring people who get trapped in the middle, running on a treadmill until we slip off and die. You were born into an ocean, Phelia, y’know what I mean? But you can find the current going in the right direction.

  I once had this roommate named Kate,

  And the stuff that she’d say sounded great—

  Till I breathed in the air

  Of a world that can’t care

  Whether I save the cat or sleep late.

  Someone told me once, I think it was in a fiction-writing class I took freshman year, that the hero of your story always has to “save the cat” early on—she needs to do something to make herself likeable. I don’t think the world works that way, though, even if fiction does. When you meet someone, you don’t decide if you like him based on how many cats he’s saved or whether he volunteers at a soup kitchen or whatever. You like him because he’s funny or he dresses well or he likes the same things as you—stupid reasons.

  And they definitely won’t be giving me a bonus check at this place based on whether I feed any orphans. All they care about is whether I’m on time and whether I get my job done. In real life it’s never about whether you’re a good person, it’s about whether other people can get something out of you.

  But thinking thoughts like this is a luxury—a luxury for the people who can see the treadmill because they don’t have to run on it. And I used to be one of them, thanks to my mother’s bottomless pile of alimony, but I’m not anymore, so I need to start running, and now is as good a time as any, I guess. What was it Kate said just before I left? Your life isn’t about the wrong thing anymore, now it’s just about nothing. Now you have to make it be about something positive. I guess I can give that a shot.

  I look up at the building that I was standing in front of, waiting for my first day of real work, just a week ago (but it feels like a lifetime). Back then it was nothing but a giant, brick ogre, a monolith of death and disease masked with the odor of disinfectant and breathing its financial halitosis in my face. And now I’m here again, looking up at the height and the shadows, but now I see something else, something hiding behind the thick brick and the windows that won’t open and the stacks of death in the basement.

  And—weirdly—it’s life.

  There’s a twinge in my gut at the realization that death and life can exist within the same space, share the same bodies, use the same toothbrush. It’s a sickening twinge, sort of an angry one, but there’s more to it than that, and I think it’s what normal people call resolve. What Kate was saying earlier, about resolving to side with life over death, and the realization that this space, horrible as it may smell, is where death and life literally fight their battles. And the battle lines are drawn directly onto human bodies, and the infantries charge, and it’s disgust
ing and ugly and terrible and glorious. And it doesn’t even matter whether I belong here or I want to be here, because this is where I am. All that matters is that I fight.

  And it doesn’t even matter who wins, I don’t think, because after all death always wins in the end. But if there’s a line drawn and a battle fought, it still matters which side I’m on, and even if the war is unwinnable it’s still worth fighting.

  You were born into an ocean. Find the right current.

  I think I can at least do that much.

  And now I’m standing nervously on the threshold yet again, thinking that what I’m about to do is tiny but in its own way it’s huge. I jam my ID into the floppy scanner and jerk it up and down until the door clicks, and I yank it open to reveal the familiar basement.

  “Hey, Oaf.”

  Dammit.

  With a breath every thought falls flat, and the five minutes I just spent psyching myself up were for nothing. Just two bodies standing on the grimy, salty tiles, and her eyes are deep red and her mouth smells like cinnamon gum.

  “Hi Sara.”

  “You were on your way down to my office, right?”

  “Um—I mean, I guess—”

  “Don’t tell me you forgot about our standing appointment.”

  “Uh—yeah. I mean, no. I was thinking—”

  “Great. Come downstairs, then.” And she grabs me by my shirt and pulls me down the nearest staircase and down the red hallway and to her morgue, and I smell the flesh and chemicals decaying in the endless chill, and I close my eyes till we’re inside her office and again the air’s warmish and the lights aren’t quite bright enough. “On the desk,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Have a seat on my desk. We’ve done this before, haven’t we?”

  And I sit, and she takes my pulse. “Take your shirt off.”

  “What?”

  “Your shirt. Take it off.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll just be easier to take your vitals. Hurry up.”

  “I’m gonna be late for work, Sara.”

  “Then maybe you should hurry up and take your shirt off?”

  “Um—” and her eyes flash veiny red at me and I sigh and strip off my top.

  “What’s that?”

  “Huh?”

  “That.” She’s nodding at my throat and I look down and realize I’m still wearing Kate’s rosary. I’d forgotten it was there—once it warmed up to my body temperature, it felt like nothing.

  “It’s, um—a rosary.”

  Rolls her eyes. From my vantage point, her pupils seem to disappear for half a second. “I know it’s a rosary. Just, why are you wearing a rosary? You know you’re not even supposed to wear them, right?”

  “No—I mean, yeah. I know that. I just—it makes me feel better, I guess. My roommate gave it to me.”

  “Your roommate.” She jabs me in the ribs with a cold stethoscope.

  “Um, yeah?” My arms fold in around my prickly boobs as my chest turns into gelato.

  She turns her back, shuffles things in her desk. Somehow she’s still blocking the light from the bulb. “Why are you suddenly talking about your roommate constantly?”

  “I just—uh—” and I look toward the door, but it’s far away, and I have no shirt, and where’d my shirt end up? “We, uh, weren’t close before, is all.”

  “And now you are.” She doesn’t look up from the drawer.

  “I—well—I guess we’ve been talking a bit more lately? I don’t see why it matters.”

  She turns around, and the swinging lightbulb makes shadows on her face like she’s telling a ghost story. “And now she’s got you wearing a rosary.”

  “I mean, I guess. Who cares? It’s just a stupid necklace.”

  “It’s a superstition, Oaf. I just thought you were better than that, is all.”

  “It’s not hurting anything.”

  I barely notice when she pulls it off, over my head. “Oprah’s not hurting anything either, but her channel still sucks.” She turns around.

  “Like I said, it just makes me feel better.”

  “Better about what?”

  Nothing. “I’m just—depressed, I guess.”

  She’s flicking at something. “Which do you think is a bigger problem—” she says—“that you’re depressed, or that superstitions make you feel better?”

  “I—”

  “You should focus on what’s real,” she says. “Your problems won’t get better until you do.”

  “I don’t know what’s real anymore.” I shouldn’t have said that, but it’s too late.

  “This—” she says, and she jabs me with a needle—“this is what’s real. Chemicals reacting with other chemicals. That’s it.”

  “Ow, what was that?”

  “Just something to calm you down. You seem a little upset.”

  “You could have warned me, at least.”

  “What would have been the point of that? You would have tensed up more and worried about the needle-stick.”

  “What? No, I wouldn’t have.”

  “Yeah, you would have. You’re always freezing up and freaking out when you’re worried about something. That’s why you can’t hold down a job.” She’s across the room, talking away from me while she tosses the needle into a hazardous waste bin. “You really need to learn how to handle stress, Oaf. Can’t go through your whole life being all PTSD.” She grabs her clipboard and stands in front of the light again. “Anything to report?” she says.

  “What?”

  “Y’know, weird stuff. Side effects? I mean, you’ve obviously lost plenty of weight, so it works—but, I mean, I need to know if anything weird is happening.”

  “Um—”

  “It’s not.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not, I know,” she says. “I mean, look at you, you’re the picture of health. Why do I even ask?”

  “Uh—Sara?”

  She stops, surprised to hear my voice intrude. “What?”

  “I think I’ll be going off the stuff. I mean, if you don’t mind. I mean—”

  “You what?” A flash in her eyes in the dark again, like from the hallway at my mom’s. A spark in the darkness that doesn’t say much, but what it says it says hard, like the stare of a threatened animal or a knocked-over block tower. Like King Kong’s grip on Fay Wray—a tiny squeeze that’s a bit more than love and a bit less than a threat.

  “I—uh—I mean, you can see the stuff works, right? What’s the point of going on with it?” It’s strangely difficult to keep my balance on her desk with her shadow pressing down on me like this. The air is dry and it cracks my lips.

  She leans in close and studies my freckles and my graying eyes. All I can smell is cinnamon gum, and she could say anything, but she just says one word: “Why?”

  “Uh—” and I realize, too late, that I should have said nothing at all. That I should have said nothing to her and just stayed off the pills and just crossed my fingers and hoped to God she didn’t find out. That now she wants an explanation, a really good one, and that I can’t sit here and say I kill people and I think your stupid pills are to blame. That I’m trapped now between the truth and myself and my sister, thinking There must be a right thing to do here but I don’t have a clue what it is. Thinking Why do I have this compulsion to be honest when there’s nothing to say except I’ve fucked everything up and I shouldn’t even be allowed to walk free anymore? That knowing the truth doesn’t do a damn thing for me except chain me to a past I can’t do anything about. The truth will set you free my ass.

  “Why?”

  “I just—” and I bite my lip while her teeth and her eyes do that Cheshire cat thing again, and I swallow the words that I really want to say, and—“it just—it gets in my head. The pill does.”

  “It’s supposed to.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I mean—I see things.”

  Nothing. Just looking at me. Waiting. Chewing her pencil.

 
“I mean—y’know—hallucinations, I guess?”

  “What sort of things do you see?” She’s writing now, and her pencil scratches are sharp stabs, and I hear the clipboard buckle under it just a little.

  I swallow. “People.”

  “People?”

  “And...memories.”

  Somehow that word changes something, like a distant crack of thunder in the dry air that I know she must have heard, and instead of at me now she’s looking into the distance, somewhere beyond the beige of the wall, while the air hangs heavy with the moisture of an impending storm. The little twist in the corner of her mouth has disappeared.

  But she shakes it off.

  “What sort of memories?”

  “Forgotten memories. Stuff I’m not even sure happened. I get trapped in them, and I can’t get out, and—”

  “And what?”

  “And—” and there’s so much I want to say but nothing that I should. The storm in the air is headed back toward me, and I shiver. “It’s just scary, is all.”

  “I see.”

  And all I can do is look down at the floor and wait for her to look away long enough for me to breathe.

  “I’m doubling your dosage.”

  “What?”

  “Take the pill twice a day from now on. I saw this same sort of thing in the animal trials. The solution was to increase the dosage.”

  And that’s her answer. And I’m sitting here thinking How stupid do you think I am? but then I see that having her think I’m dumb maybe isn’t such a bad thing, that maybe if I just say Okay that maybe that will buy me the time I need to figure things out. (That maybe the whiteness of her knuckles from squeezing the clipboard isn’t meant for the clipboard at all.)