Ophelia, Alive Read online

  “Okay,” I tell her.

  “Okay?”

  Her eyes narrow and she bites her lip, and I’m not sure if she really buys it, and I’m thinking that maybe she expected me to protest, that maybe she was just suggesting something insane out of sheer morbid curiosity, and now she’s genuinely surprised that I agreed so quickly, and she’s thinking on the one hand Is she serious? and on the other Maybe I should have asked her to do even more. I work up my best crazy smile and say, “Sounds good!”

  “Great.”

  Yes, I’ve got her! I’m thinking, or at the very least I’ve bought myself a little time to keep my job and get ahead in my classes or find a real job or get the hell out of town or something, but I can’t let my smile get too big or she’ll see right through me.

  “Do you need any more of the—”

  “No!”

  Damn, I answered too quickly. She was trying to give me more of the stuff, and I knew I couldn’t have that, couldn’t handle it, couldn’t trust my Bruce-Campbell-like hand not to start dumping it down my throat again. Control the breathing, Ophie. Control it. You can’t let her see you panicking like this.

  “I, uh, have plenty.” Clear my throat. “I’m okay.”

  “All right, if you say so.”

  “I...do.”

  And that’s it, I guess. And I’m thinking I should get out of here while I can, but somehow she’s put herself right between me and the door, and I’m inching my ass toward the light, trying to escape the weight of her shadow.

  “I should go. I’ll be late for work.”

  She turns and goes behind her desk, and I jump down and bolt for the door, but I catch myself on the jamb, breathing hard, thinking Don’t look too desperate, don’t look too desperate.

  “Um...so, question,” I say.

  “Yeah?” She’s already slouching in her chair, clicking her mouse, smacking her gum.

  “Any idea when we’ll be done with the...experiment?”

  “When I say we’re done.”

  “Another week? A month?”

  Doesn’t look up. Clicking.

  “A year?”

  “When I say we’re done.”

  I should go. I should go. “What if I say I’m done?”

  Her eyes meet mine, and the gum-smacking stops. “I’ll destroy you.”

  And I laugh. But she doesn’t.

  tues. jan. 18.

  1:57 am.

  triumphant

  “You,” Rachel’s telling me, “are amazing.” And she checks some things off on a clipboard and punches a few keys on her pager, and this might be the first time I’ve seen her smiling. It’s weird, but tonight, I have energy, drive, I can actually get crap done. It’s like I was telling myself before I came in, about how I need to take the right side, to push against death, to push as hard as I can, even if it wins in the end. So I focused. I attacked. I bit my lip and gritted my teeth and did everything they told me, and it feels amazing. “Where did that come from?” she’s saying. “Where was this Ophelia the last two shifts you worked?”

  I laugh.

  “I mean, granted it’s a slow night, but you’ve got us well ahead of schedule. Well done.”

  And I think for a moment that maybe things will be okay after all, that maybe I’m actually good at this, that maybe I can at least work here long enough to finish my degree, that maybe nothing bad will happen. That for the first time, I have a moment to breathe and I feel like I’ve earned it, and outside it’s night, but in here the lights are buzzing bright in time with the stars.

  She says, “Listen, I hate to ask, but...”

  “What?”

  She laughs and rolls her eyes. “Listen, don’t take this as an insult this time, but child psych’s got one of our gurneys again, and...”

  “Go get the gurney?”

  “Uh...yeah.”

  “Sure, absolutely,” I say, and I charge up the stairs, three at a time, thinking There is no way that this level of energy could possibly last. I’ve had moments like this before, where everything seems finally perfect and I’ve found my groove and I think I can go on forever accomplishing things without even needing to sleep. It always turns out to be a lie. I always push myself too hard and then I crash. Or worse, sometimes I’ll get so exhausted that I’ll start to loathe my own accomplishments and start undoing them. Somehow, nothing has a more powerful draw on me than self-destruction.

  So I make myself slow down.

  This isn’t just about riding a groove. It can’t be. It has to be about consciously choosing to do what needs to be done. I’m starting to think that maybe that’s what adulthood is—not going with the flow but being the flow, I guess. Directing the flow? I don’t know. Something.

  I’m back on the seventh floor now, and I push the door open into the cavernous hall filled with light and faces. Somehow this time it’s less overwhelming. This time the endlessly recirculated air isn’t choking me, and I breathe it in, and breathe it out, deliberately, just to show it who’s boss. I stretch out my arms and I fill up the space, making it mine. I’m not afraid of you, hallway full of paintings of old people.

  So, this isn’t my dream job. But it is where I am, and it’s where I can make a difference at the moment, and for the moment, that’s enough. I won’t be leaving in the morning having accomplished my every goal, but at least I won’t have to slink back to bed feeling worthless and ashamed.

  Is that success? I’m not sure.

  What I do know is that the assortment of old, white, male faces staring at me from across the room look slightly less sinister this time around than they did the other night. Not that they’re any more attractive, just a little less depressing, I guess. They may not have been the sort of people I would ever want to be in the same room with, but I guess the fact that they spent some money to build a hospital means something, right?

  I understand you guys.

  You didn’t ask to be who you are and you didn’t ask for your situation and you definitely didn’t ask to be scary old guys. But you did something with it. You started a hospital.

  Could you have done more? Maybe. I don’t know.

  (Could I do more?)

  (Probably.)

  I walk closer. I stretch out my hand, and trace the frame on a portrait. It’s dusty on top and the corners are sharp like it’s never been touched, and yet somehow it feels exactly like I expected it to. Edges and corners and a grain with a strange smoothness. And inside is the sad, tired face of a man who’s seen more than he ever cared to. Close-up, isolated from the wall of staring faces, he’s no longer creepy or intimidating—no longer a particle in a monolith of white, wrinkly flesh that threatens to topple over and drown me in a pool of sweaty money. Just a man whose name no one knows (except whoever etched it into the placard on the frame, I guess), whose only contribution to the world was to donate enough money to get his face on a wall but not his name on the hospital, who’s rotting in a box somewhere now. And he couldn’t even smile for the portrait hung in his honor. A sad, empty face, staring out from behind a thick screen of dusty glass. I trace his wrinkles in the dust, and as I do the portrait wiggles back and forth, swinging on a wire attached to the wall by a wobbly nail, and his face is nothing but a bit of paint on a canvas, and the eyes that are windows to the soul are just blackish blue dots with nothing behind them but stale air. A flimsy piece of fabric with paint smeared on top of it, and like everything else it will either stretch too tight or sag to oblivion till it’s nothing but dust. And there’s a hundred more of them just like him on the wall, just a hundred sad faces on a wall of a hundred people who never smile but just tried to do their best and now they’re all dead.

  Y’know. I assume.

  I back up slowly, watching the face become part of the legion on the wall, watching the white wrinkliness in front of me expand into a massive panorama of well-intentioned death. I’m starting to see it. I’m starting to see why I shrink away from Sara, and I think it’s because of the pills—the pills
that starve your body till they beat you into a temporary idea of perfection, an idea that only exists because somebody’s making money off of it.

  Or maybe that doesn’t make any sense. Maybe all of that is just the ravings of a mind struggling to dry out from a chemical that’s twisted it to nonsense and refuses to relax its grip. Like when you wake from a dream that you’re so sure was real that you’re ready to call up a boyfriend you don’t even have and break up with him, and maybe it takes you twenty minutes or even an hour to realize that it was all made up, and yet you still believed it even though it made literally no sense at all. Because you can’t get out of your own head, no matter how much you want to. And then you think Well okay maybe it wasn’t real, but the fact that I dreamed it has to mean something, right? as if there’s some deeper reality your dreams are tapping into to show you the future or teach you some profound lesson, but then you read up on dreams and you find out that all they are is just your brainstem firing random impulses into a convoluted tangle of neurons. That’s literally all dreams are, just electrons bouncing around in your head and your stupid brain thinking Wow that’s so deep, even though it’s the shallowest thing in the world. And then you think to yourself If I can imagine something as stupid as my brainstem stuttering randomly means something, then how much other stuff am I imagining? And you realize that there is literally no answer to that question, and that Sara is probably right that the universe is nothing but chemicals crashing into each other, except how do you even know for sure that chemicals are a thing.

  Which do you think is a bigger problem—that you’re depressed, or that superstitions make you feel better?

  She has a point. Maybe I’ll print that on a t-shirt.

  Then the picture, the one I was tracing with my finger, falls off the wall and smashes on the floor, and it’s nothing but glass and wood and canvas and paint. It’s cracked now and he’s staring up at me from the floor tiles, leaning halfway up against the wall, and I want to look away but I can’t. It’s suddenly twisted and I’m the one who twisted it and I need to get out of this hallway before someone who matters finds out.

  I need to get the gurney and get back downstairs. Anyway, I have no idea how much time I’ve wasted standing here and thinking. My eyes are following the pools of light down the hall, hopping from one to the next, taking their time. Why am I afraid to look toward the child psych door? This whole time I’ve been up here, my eyes have been fixed on the faces on the wall, as if I’m afraid to look in the other direction, and even now, they still hesitate.

  They’re almost there when I remember what Kate was saying about my nails being buried in a door when she found me, and I want to look away and forget everything and pretend that I’ve never been up here before, but it’s too late, I can’t, and before I can do anything my eyes are latched hard onto the mass of beige-and-orange steel down the hall, covered in streaks and slashes with shreds falling off, covering the floor in orange-and-beige dandruff. And now I’m walking toward it, unconsciously, compelled by either horror or fascination (like there’s a difference), and the streaks become closer and clearer till my face is pressed against the shredded steel, and my eyes dart up and down, running beige, and then down to the orange, and then to the silver ruts, where my nails dug down to the metal and left jagged memories of themselves that dance in the artificial light. My fingertips sting, remembering every scrape and cut and bruise, because I can’t help but feel them when they’re written in front of my eyes like this. I look at my hands, and the paint chips are gone now, but my nails are still broken and my fingertips still bruised and sliced. And I’m thinking that Kate obviously wasn’t just blowing smoke up my ass, but why was I trying so hard to get into child psych?

  And why does it make so much sense to me that the door used to be orange?

  In my mind, I can’t banish the image, one I barely remember, of a bright orange door the color of Halloween, and I’m screaming while they drag me inside it. I’m smaller and younger and the old people on the wall stare at me hard, banishing me to night after night in the violent grayness, and I’m crying now, till the orange-and-beige streaks are muddled in my eyes, running down my cheeks.

  Remember to breathe.

  I don’t know what exactly I’m remembering. Nothing that makes sense. Just a jumble of neurons firing in my brain, painting images and sounds behind the streaks, and I muffle them hard and say, Get ahold of yourself, and I choke back the tears and think, Only what’s in front of you, that’s all that matters. I wish I believed it.

  I scan my card.

  There’s a magnetic clunk like always, and the door is way too loud as it swings toward my face, and I jump out of the way just in time. The orange and the beige blur sideways and leave me with nothing to look at but the hallway that’s always dark, lined with offices and frosted windows that bathe it in perpetual twilight, and I’ve walked it before, been dragged through it before, and I never want to pass through it again, but here I am.

  I step inside. The air is cool but it’s musty and stale, and my steps echo hard and they disappear fast, and I’m suddenly, weirdly, aware of my posture. I feel naked and awkward and stumble and stoop toward the door, till I say to myself, Stop slouching so much, and I straighten my back, but my boobs stick out weird, so I end up slouching back down. By the moment I get to the door at the end (like, a thousand years later), I feel doubled-over, like some old, crazy cat-lady. I wince as I pull on the handle.

  It creaks, and the creak is the loudest I’ve heard, and I bend over backwards, turning my head and shutting my eyes. Shrinking away from the blinding light and the other thick doors and the blank children’s eyes that stare out from the dark at all hours.

  “Can I help you?”

  That voice.

  “Can I help you?”

  And then there’s silence. Till I look at that face, and that face.

  “Ma’am?”

  It’s him. I remember that sneer and that face and those hands on my body, and late nights alone in my cell crying tears, saying Please God don’t let him come in. And it’s him, and he’s here, and he’s always been here, and he’s staring me down, and he can’t place my face, and I run.

  I turn and my face hits the jamb as I fly down the hall, stumbling into the dark, and the twilight flies by, and I trip over the tile as the faces look on, sneering over their noses, and I hold up my hands to block them out as I fly past. Then my hand reaches out for the library door and it opens, unlocked, and I slam it behind me and crumple to the floor and cry into my knees for God-knows-how-long. The smell of the glue and the musty green carpet, and thick dust on everything from years-upon-years of no one coming up here. Footprints in dust, ten or fifteen years old, telling tales of a struggle. The feet look like mine, except smaller, and I still feel the callouses digging into my skin. Streaks from fingers in the dust on the book spines, gouges in the paper and nicks in the steel. Pain in my fingertips, scars in my throat dug by deep, feral screams, and I fall into dark, through the cold streaks of sweat, till I land on a stage in a spotlight five years ago. Up there, lit up, and in front of a crowd, and my dad and my mom in the dark, in their seats situated at opposite ends of the theater, and Sara somewhere in between them. (She’s biting her tongue and I know that she is from the pain in my mouth.) My dress is miles long and my hair is done up and my nails are deep red, like the red in my blood that pounds hard in my heart every time I’m onstage. They’re all looking at me, and I’m famous, important. I cry. Not real tears, just stage tears; the crowd hangs on my gasps and they hang on my sobs and I make them all feel things. They watch me. (It’s power.) I pull on their eyes, dragging them from one end of the stage to the other, with my eyes and my fingers. Oh Heavenly powers restore him! I say, and they gasp. I have heard of your paintings too, well enough, he says. God has given you one face and you make yourselves another. He throws me down onto the floor, on the rough, black matte paint. You jig and you amble, you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures and make your wan
tonness your ignorance, he says, but my face says far more than his words ever could. Go to, I’ll no more on ’t. It hath made me mad. I’m seething with breath. I say we will have no more marriages. Those that are married already, all but one, shall live. The rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go! Then exit my Hamlet, the spotlight’s on me, and the silence extends to the back of the theater till nothing is left but my spotlight. I gasp, and I choke, and all eyes in the room are now mine. Oh, I say, what a noble mind here is o’erthrown!—the courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, sword, Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down! Then I pause here and gasp and I make them all beg for the lines coming next. (I look unprotected, but they know I’m controlling the room.) And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, That sucked honey of his music vows, Now see that noble and most sovereign reason Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh; That unmatched form and feature of blown youth Blasted with ecstasy. Oh, woe is me, T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see! And I crumple to the floor, and the crowd just sits silent, their mouths hanging open. The crumpling wasn’t planned, and I never rehearsed it. Just happened. I gasp on the floor now, I’m gasping for real, while the crowd hangs on silence, and actors rush onto the stage. They yell and they scream, but no one is listening, they’re (all of them) staring at me, on the floor, sobbing sobs that are real. I glance up and my mom and my dad sit up straight, with their mouths hanging open, both thinking, God, what is it she’s tapping into? And Sara is gone from her seat now, and all I can think is Where is she? Then Exeunt all, and the audience gapes, knocked out cold by the silence, till the room rolls in waves of resounding applause. I ride on the waves, off the stage, to the girls’ dressing room, where I have just two scenes to get changed and do makeup. I unzip my dress, and I hear her calm voice. Nice performance, she says. It’s Sara. She’s there in the door, and the lightbulbs (big orbs hanging over the mirrors) shine bright on her face, and her eyelashes turn into spidery shadows. Her red lips are curled, her deep-green eyes shimmer in half-dark, and all I can think is, Where’s everyone else? The room is deserted—no Gertrude, no extras, just me and the twisted, red grin at the door. I tell her Hi, Sara. She says, Won’t you even say ‘Thank you’? I reach for my zipper and ask her, For what? and the chill in the air as she comes close to me is like ice-fingers up my bare back. I’m shrinking away, trying to hide my cold skin behind my thin locker door, but there’s light peeking in through its slats, and it burns on my throat. She reaches around, fingers curled on the edge of the door, and her forehead and eyes peer around. She says You could just tell me thanks for the compliment that I just gave you, or maybe—and now she’s so close I feel breath on my face—or maybe for giving you pain you can draw from. For helping you live up to that stupid name that Mom gave you so you could receive that ovation just now. For making you into Ophelia. You’re welcome. Lights flicker, like flames. I say, What do you mean? and she shakes her head, slow, and she laughs at me under her breath. She says, You don’t remember at all, I guess, do you? She smiles and says, You don’t remember the curtains I hung up to make our bed into our special O.R., and you don’t remember the ways that I touched you, and you don’t remember the way you attacked me, or any of those seven nights that you spent in the psych ward. She chews on her lip, and I almost feel teeth, and the A/C kicks on and blows sleet in my face, while a clock ticks the seconds away till my entrance. She tells me, Freud wrote about memories that people repress, but I didn’t think anyone bought into that anymore. I thought it was bullshit like Oedipal complexes. Interesting. Her eyes track my skin up and down, prick at hairs and at bumps. And she says, That’s okay. Guess it’s not like it meant anything, way back then. Not at first, anyway. It was practice for being a doctor, I guess. Just exploring, I think. But then later, it did—it meant so much more. It still means so much more. My eyes flit toward the door, but then there she still is, in my path, and I can’t look away from her eyes. Two black pits in green pools, and they hold me in place, chain my feet to the floor. She says, Hamlet is right, y’know. (What do you mean?) She says, Hamlet. He’s right. In that scene, when he tears you apart. Throws you down on the floor. And I know you weren’t acting, I might as well say. I know how real all of that was. I try to say something, can’t think of the words, and she tells me again, He was right, just to treat you like that, just to tear you to shreds with his teeth. ’Cause that’s how you show love. There are people out there who will lie to you, tell you that love’s made of hugs and of kisses, of sweet, mucky selflessness. All of them, though, are dead wrong. Her face is so close I taste salt from her freckles. She says, Love consumes. It destroys. Love will swallow you whole. And the next thing I feel is her warm lips on mine, and they burn me like blisters filled up with the sun, and she won’t pull away. They stay there and roil with the heat of an army. Mine sink into hers and they twist to eternity, nothing but flesh, melting me, pulling me toward the center. Her teeth catch my lip as she’s pulling away, and the sharp sting of blood says Consume and Destroy, and she’s gone. I open my eyes and she’s not in the room. And I think it’s my entrance. I remember this night. It was five years ago, at the end of twelfth grade—but it’s not senior year anymore. It’s not happening again, just replaying in my head, just my brainstem. It’s firing away with electrons. Asleep. I’ve been dreaming. I need to wake up. But I can’t—I’m alone and I’m hollow, just standing half-dressed in a cold dressing room, thinking What can I do if I’m trapped in a dream? and the girl comes in. It’s Cyndi, the one with the Ugg boots and highlights, the one I keep seeing, who once was a body and now she’s a ghost, and she follows me everywhere (why does she do that?). She says to me, Why are you down on the library floor? I say, What do you mean? and she says to me, Why are you on the floor, hugging your knees? There are battles to fight. Will you lie there forever, just letting your sister control you? I say, No I won’t. She says, Then you need power, the strength to fight back. You’re too weak, Oaf, you need to be stronger. (But how?) And she tells me You know how. You know what the source of your strength is. She looks in my eyes with a squint that’s two daggers, and I say, Oh God, please not that. But she grabs my hand hard, and she pulls me away from the room, through the wall, down the stairs to the basement. Behind my eyes’ lids, I see lights flying by, and I can’t make her slow down. I can’t make her stop. And she drags me through bodies and darkness and throws me down hard on floor of the office that Sara works in. The orange of the rug stings my face as I slide on the floor toward her desk. Open the drawer, she says. I try to say, Why? but she says, You know why. You heard what she said. She’ll destroy you. And you need the strength to fight back. I say, But you know that I can’t take this drug without losing control, but she says, Well, have you ever tried? And there’s silence that hangs in the air a long time because I’d never thought of that question. I ask myself, What if she’s right? When I took it before, sure, it made me do things I regret, but I know what it does now, I’ve seen its effects. Maybe I can control it. I’ll use it to keep myself safe, and that’s it. I’ll take it inside me and then I’ll be stronger than her and use it to end her (just her) when she tries to destroy me. Because she is going to, she said she would and she will and I know that she will, and I need to make sure I’m prepared when she does. That makes sense. Right? I don’t even know what makes sense anymore, and I’m breathing so fast, thinking Maybe I’ll nap on the floor? but my hand’s in her desk drawer now, fishing around, reaching out for the pills in the bright orange bottle. My fingers brush scissors, I think (are they bleeding?), but then they find plastic! It’s round and it rattles! I wrap them around it and pull it out into the light, and it shines like glass fresh from a kiln, and I think Am I sure that I’m wanting to try these again? but she’s saying You do, yes you do, just don’t think. I open the bottle and swallow the pills and they’re chalky and scratchy and claw down the sides of my throat as I push them down into me. It’s so hard without water, to swallow, to take them inside
, but I push and I feel them dissolve and I’m strong again. I look up at Cyndi. I ask her, What now? and she says to me, They need to pay. I say, Who needs to pay? Sara? People upstairs? and she says to me, All of them. Every last one of them. They need to pay for the ways that they’ve hurt you. And I say, Okay, and I look under Sara’s cheap desk. There’s a space heater waiting there for me; a thick stack of papers is sitting up top. It’s easy, and simple, to turn on the switch and to leave the machine lying facedown on top of the papers and head for the door. When I get to the door, it’s smoking already; by the time I get to my car, the sun is rising amid the thick flames.