Ophelia, Alive Page 24

  tues. jan. 18.

  4:21 pm.

  tangled

  “Ow.”

  I’m lying on the floor and I’m thinking How did I get down here? and my head hurts where it’s been rubbing against the tile. I’m twisted in my sheet and my mouth tastes like smoke. I’m back in my room and the lights are on and Kate’s standing over me, confused. I smell like death and my face feels bloody and I can’t move my arms.

  She’s standing over me in skinny jeans, her spiral dreads pushed back under a bandana, laughing. My gut is doing some sort of weird reverse-vomit thing where it’s trying to suck my lips in through my mouth, and somehow the room is spinning, even though the floor feels as hard as bedrock. Every joint I have is bent in a position I didn’t know was possible, and the sun is slapping me in the face, while a TV squawks.

  “When are you gonna get this whole ‘sleeping’ thing figured out?” she says, kneeling to help me get untangled.

  “You’d think after five years of college I would have it down. Ugh, my head.”

  “What happened?” She tries to jerk a twisted sheet off my arm, but my elbow doesn’t bend that way.

  “I dunno. Nightmares. I don’t really remember anything.”

  “What sort of nightmares?”

  “Does it matter? Dreams aren’t real, anyway—just your brainstem firing randomly—ow.”

  She jerks on a corner and says, “I know, I know. I’ve taken Psych 101, too, Phelia.”

  “Ow.” She was jerking the corner the wrong way, turning it into a tourniquet.

  “Whoops, sorry.” She pulls it the other way. “Anyway, just because your dreams are random electrical impulses doesn’t mean they mean nothing.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “Why would it?” she says. “Everything your brain experiences is electrical impulses.” I can finally move my right arm, but it’s floppy and backwards. “You really don’t remember what you were dreaming?”

  I raise my free hand to my eyes to block out the sun. “I think something about...Hamlet. And a locker door. And a...space heater? I think? Ow.” My left arm can move now. “Who cares?”

  “Well, I’m just concerned that you haven’t been entirely—oh my God.”

  “What?” I follow her eyes, and they’re fixed on a building, and the building’s on the TV, and the building’s on fire.

  “That’s my—”

  “Isn’t that your hospital?”

  I can’t say anything, and my mouth is hanging open while my ears buzz with words like fire started in the basement and appears to be an accident. So far the death toll is in the double-digits, and the number of injured in the hundreds, but the fire is under control. It all seems familiar, like none of it is news, and the orange and red spit out from the black shell, and I lie on the floor and repeat, “Oh my God.”

  “Did you know about—?”

  And she stops, abrupt. I look for the words for an answer, but the answer is Yes, and the answer is No, like I saw it in a dream, a dream I forgot, and I don’t think I like what that probably means. I swallow it all, and I lie in the glow from the flame, and I tell myself over and over: “I didn’t.”

  “Was your sister—?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The sun’s behind a cloud now and the room is dark and filled with the orange from the screen, orange that flickers and bounces. My legs are still tangled in the sheet, but they’re numb and I forget them. She finally says, “Y’know, it’s weird.”

  “What is?”

  She says, “Didn’t Stalin supposedly say something like, One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic? Or something? Just a few days ago, there was a single corpse on the floor of our room, and it was horrifying. Now I’m seeing dozens of deaths on the TV, and it should be objectively worse, but my reaction is nowhere near as strong. It’s just some pictures on a screen. It’s like, I know I should care, but my gut’s just not doing the same flip-flops.”

  I know she’s just talking to fill the silence, but I tell her, “I know what you mean. One act of evil is horrifying. A hundred are just numbing.” We sit there on the floor of the room, both thinking What now? because what can you say once you’ve admitted you feel almost nothing? I sit and I wait for my phone to ring, because I know it’s coming.

  After an ocean of orange, it does. It’s there across the room, buried under the pillows on my bed, and its ringtone is muffled and tinny and quacky. I can’t feel my legs, so I drag myself over the floor with my tingling arms. The sheet around my legs drags through the dustbunnies, and I get to the phone just in time.

  “Hello?”

  “Ophie? You’re okay? Thank God.”

  “I’m fine, mom. Relax.” It’s my mom and I was sort-of hoping it would be anyone else, but it’s her, and she’s asking me about a million things, and all I really want to say is, How is it you suddenly care about me when a week ago all you wanted was for me to get out of your house? but I manage to bite my tongue and answer her hysterical, redundant questions as they come.

  Then: “Have you heard anything from Sara?”

  I pause. “No...”

  “She’s not answering her phone, and your father can’t get ahold of her, either.”

  “Oh.”

  There are a thousand emotions right now, both What if she’s dead? and What if she’s not? and there’s fear and relief and there’s pain and there’s guilt and there’s chills, plus a sudden and desperate need to throw up. But I say none of that. I choke the vomit down and hang onto the phone, and the orange-glowing room spins around me. I look over at Kate, and she makes a face and mouths What? and I just shake my head, like Shut up, and immediately feel bad about it. “You don’t know anything?” says a voice in my ear, and I jump because for a second I actually forgot I was on the phone.

  “I—no.

  And after some static, I hear, “Well, let me know the second you hear from her.” And my phone is silent and it falls out of my hand and onto the bed.

  My legs are still numb, but they’re starting to tingle, like the orange TV flames are burning me alive, and I wonder how much longer the stupid news coverage can go on. I get it, guys, there’s a fire. They happen all the time.

  I mean, right?

  Kate’s still just sitting there, looking from the TV to her phone and back to me, her face changing from one shade of orange to another. Finally, I say to her, “Sara might be dead.”

  Her mouth hangs halfway open, somewhere in between I’d better say something and I have no idea what to say. Then she decides on, “Oh no. I’m so sorry.”

  I tell her, “You don’t have to be,” and my hands start untangling the sheets from my legs because there’s nothing else for them to do. They’re wound around them several times. After futilely tugging at one for a while, I add, “I’m not sure I am.”

  Orange silence, and then the news breaks for a commercial that’s whitish and full of used cars and a fat guy yelling. It’s so much louder than the news that we both jump, and she can’t find the remote, and we both just pray for it to end. Then it goes to something quieter, a pinkish ad where single women sit around mooning over yogurt. She whispers, “What an awful thing to say.”

  “Is it?”

  It’s a serious question. I really don’t know—is it so bad if she’s dead? All she’s done lately is manipulate me and pump me full of drugs. I don’t feel sad, just—empty. Like I’m hanging in the air, about to fall into an endless, beige pit. (Is this what freedom feels like?)

  I say, “Y’know what she said to me? Last night?”

  Kate thought that question was rhetorical as well, and she’s sitting there, just biting her lip and waiting for the answers, while the TV blasts noise into the gaping silence. It’s words and music, but in the silent gap it just sounds like noise, like grinding teeth and pounding jackhammers.

  And I think, What would happen if you filled a concert hall with grinding teeth and pounding jackhammers? It would all just sound like the ocean.


  Waves pounding on the shore.

  “She said she would ‘destroy’ me,” I tell her.

  “What does that even mean?” she says, finally, but obviously I don’t know.

  “I told her I was done. With the drug, I mean. She said I wasn’t allowed to be. She doubled my dose, and she said that if I stopped taking it, she would destroy me.” She finds the remote, finally, and turns off the TV. “I don’t know what she meant.”

  “Maybe she was joking?”

  “She never jokes,” I say. “I’ve never heard her tell a joke.” I jerk hard on the sheets, and my legs are finally free, and the air hits them like an electric slap. “I guess she does talk a lot about, y’know, destroying things, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just stuff she used to say when we were kids. About how it would be fun to torture people. I mean, kids talk like that all the time, right? But they’re never serious.”

  “I thought you said she didn’t joke.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I’m trying to get up now, trying to push myself onto the bed so I can at least sit. My legs still won’t do anything. “And there was something else she said to me once, back when we were in high school. I barely remember it—something about how real love isn’t selfless. She told me that love consumes and destroys.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I’m up on the bed now, and I grunt as I plant my ass. “Just what it sounds like, I guess.” With the fire from the TV gone, I suddenly realize how late it is. How dark it is. No stars through the slats in the blinds, just gray.

  “Do you agree?” she says, and I wonder if it’s a real question this time, like if she really needs to know how I feel about love, like it really somehow matters, or if maybe she’s just trying to make a blunt point or fill silence. But the silence can’t be filled by just those three words, anyway.

  “I mean, why not, right?” I say. “Jealousy, divorce, revenge—aren’t those the endgames of love? People talk about selfless love, but have you ever actually seen it?”

  She’s staring out the window. “I—I believe it’s possible—”

  “I mean, possible, sure. All sorts of stuff is possible. It’s possible we’re all just brains in vats. But in your experience? I mean, people talk all the time about love changing people, making them better. It’s a nice thought, sure, but have you seen it happen? Like, ever?”

  She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out.

  “I mean, I’m just saying, every couple I’ve ever known has stayed together as long as they were getting something from each other. And once they weren’t getting it anymore, they split up. Selfless love is a nice thought, I guess, but—”

  I stop because she’s gotten really quiet. Staring hard at the dark clouds out the window, like she’s trying to hang onto the last shred of her beliefs, and at this point I’m just trampling over them, just to be a bitch. I should stop.

  “Anyway,” I say, “now I guess I don’t have to worry about that anymore. But I’m out of a job again, as well.”

  She says, “Was the job important?”

  “It was the only thing keeping me in school.”

  “But is school actually important to you?”

  “Well, it’s—I mean—why are you asking me all these questions?”