Ophelia, Alive Read online

  I’m not sure if I tripped over something just now or if my strength just gave out, but there’s no point in running anymore. There’s nobody chasing me, so I guess I’ll give in to my burning muscles. I land on my face, in the dirt and the sand, and I breathe hard and gasp till my mouth fills with gravel. It’s big, roundish pebbles, like a mouthful of teeth. I spit them out, slowly, trying not to bite down, and they clean out my mouth with a dull, earthy taste. (So much better than blood. So much better than bone.)

  And the thought of that blood and those bones and that face makes my guts flop around till the vomit pours out of my mouth and my nose. I’m up on my hands and my knees, grinding them in the sand, while the blood and the bile spills out through my face, burns my eyes with its fumes, and they’re acrid and sharp. Their smell turns my stomach. I turn away to breathe, and I fall onto my back.

  I stare at the sky, and it’s black and it’s starry, with halos and clouds that say snow’s coming soon. And the gravel beneath me is cold on my back, like a carpet of ice chips refusing to melt. I stare at my legs, and they’re covered with blood, and they’re bare, and I realize I’m still in my sleep clothes. A thin, tiny tank top, these same itchy boxers, the hair on my legs straight and proud in the wind. And I shiver.

  Aside from the sky and my legs, all I see is a streetlamp, a decorative one like they only put up inside parks or in rich people’s yards, but I think it’s a park that I’m in, from the gravel that’s digging cold pits in my back. Chills and hot waves rush fast through the sweat on my face.

  And I breathe.

  It’s not a calm, peaceful breath, like you hear in a room with a roommate who’s sleeping, or even the sort of rough, menacing breath that you hear in a scene in a lame horror movie where they say Let’s split up and then all walk alone into dark, creepy rooms—it’s a sputter, a sob, just a howling in pain, like a werewolf alone at the end of his big scene, crying out at the moon, not in strength but in weakness, looking down at his claws, thinking What have I done.

  What have I done.

  My mind isn’t totally dark like before. Before it was jumbled, dark memories that dissolved in the light when I woke, but tonight there’s no light to dissolve them. I cry loud, because all I can do to drown out the blood is to fill up my eyes and my ears with more violence, more noise. The noises are sharp and inhuman; they split through the sky while the tears sting my eyes and the snow falls. Giant flakes made of winter that first look like stars, but they’re whiter than stars, and they drift to the ground faster than I expect. They land on my flesh, making pools among the goose bumps, but I don’t even feel them on my blue, icy skin.

  This is it, then, I guess.

  I’m not trying to be dramatic, but the way things are, there’s no reason I can think of to ever get up off of the ground. Where would I go?

  The image is burned deep into my mind—of the blood, of the bones, and of Kate at the end of the hallway, just standing there, thinking I knew it but just didn’t want to believe it, the drips from my hands as I ran for the staircase and stumbled out into the night crying out in the pain and the fear and regret.

  So I can’t go back there.

  And what does that leave? My thoughts wander back to my mom’s place, the one with the manicured lawn and the cheesy brass lion and the room up the stairs with the bunk beds with curtains and boxes I’m filling with books. The one that my mom dragged me up to that night and said, Fill all these boxes, get out of my house. I can’t go back there, either.

  So what can I do? There’s nothing but me and this gravel, this streetlamp, this tattered wifebeater with brown-yellow pit stains and the cold, falling snow that blocks out the stars. I can’t feel my skin anymore.

  There’s a Jack London short story they made me read in high school, where the main character dies of exposure. (That’s seriously the whole story: Guy dies of exposure.) He says something about how it’s not all that bad, it’s like being numbed to death, or something like that. That’s what I’m feeling right now, at least I think. My legs, turning blue, against the black of the sky, while the snow hits the ground and melts deep between pebbles.

  And my back hurts.

  There’s a stabbing in my lower back and a crick in my neck and a sharp, shooting pain in my elbow, which I guess is what happens when you lie down in gravel too long.

  Jack London was full of crap. I’m standing up.

  What did the guy know about dying, anyway? He wrote “To Build a Fire” years before he died. And I guess no one had told him that life almost never gives in to death—it always fights back, whether you want it to or not. I remember reading, somewhere, that most people contemplating suicide won’t actually attempt it if they aren’t given a really easy opportunity. You hide the handguns or turn off the gas, no suicide.

  Death is lazy. It only wins when it doesn’t have to do anything.

  I’m back on my feet now, and they’re bare and they’re numb, but I can still stand. The melting snow is washing the blood off my arms and my legs, and they’re turning from a bright red to a vague gray-brown on my tank top and shorts. I catch some of the snow in my hands and smear it on my face. My hair is still wet from that shower, and it feels like it might be freezing, but I’m probably just being dramatic.

  Still, though, I need to get inside soon. Half-naked and wet in the snow has never been a good combination.

  I try to brush the melting snow off my arms, but it’s falling too fast and I can’t fight it. I look around and I see that I’m in the middle of a playground, one of those old-style playgrounds that were built before safety got trendy, with a giant, metal slide and cold, steel monkey bars, and dirty gravel that’s sticking to my back. I reach awkwardly with my jagged nails and clumsy arms, trying to brush it off, but I can only reach about half of it. But I’m almost numb anyway, so I sigh and I sit on the gently turning merry-go-round. I lift up my feet and let it carry me. It’s cold and it’s steel, but I can’t feel my butt, so I guess it’s okay. I hold my feet up, and the thing just keeps turning, like it’s pushed by a ghost in the stiff, snowy breeze. First the slide’s drifting by, then the old monkey bars and a couple of lights; then I get a clear view of the houses around me. They’re small but they’re old, homes that would have been nice maybe 50-odd years ago, falling apart now. They’ve seen better days. The park is the same, with rough patches of dirt and some gnarled, old trees that stand black in the snow and twist roots through the ground. The merry-go-round just keeps turning, till she sits beside me and watches the night spin around us. It’s the girl from the hospital, still in her scrubs, smacking gum with the streaky blond hair like before. She just sits there (she’s silent), a ghost in the snow, which gets thicker and thicker, till she’s just an outline of blond behind white. I bite on my tongue as the houses drift by and the playground creaks softly beneath all the snow, till I think we should speak, and I open my mouth to the white and say, Rachel? At first she won’t turn, she won’t look at my face, but she stares and says, Hi there, Ophelia. The breeze blows in my face, and I say to her, What are you doing here, Rachel? Without turning toward me, she says to me, I go where you go, now, Ophie. The wind pushes harder, then softer, then dies, and we creak and we squeak in the blinding-white snow till I finally tell her, I’m sorry I started that fire. I’m sorry I burned it all down and you’re here now forever with me. She stares at the snow till her eyes are white dots, and says, You just don’t understand, Ophie. You think you do, but you don’t. There were so many people—so many of them—who depended on it for their jobs, to pay bills, to pay rent, to get by. There were so many others who needed the place for their health and their lives. And the wind pushes hard and the spinning speeds up, and she says, Did you realize that ours was the one, only charity hospital here in our city? The only one open to uninsured patients? The poor and the homeless? I tell her I didn’t; she tells me, Of course. You were too busy crying in the janitor’s closet—just too busy pitying yourself to learn something. Too busy being the hero
of your story to see that you’re part of a huge, endless universe filled up with people who matter a thousand times more than you do. Too busy being your own special snowflake to see all the millions of similar snowflakes all falling around you. I look all around, and the snow’s getting deeper. It’s up to my dangling feet, and my toes are dragging through it, making circles around the merry-go-round, but I don’t feel the cold because of the numbness.

  I look up and she’s gone. Just a hole where she was, filling up with snow now. I push myself onto my feet, and I stand ankle-deep in the snow, and my head is still spinning. The snowflakes are streaks, like rods in the air shooting down past my eyes, and I can’t feel my arms or my legs. I need to go somewhere, get out of the cold. The darkness gets darker, the whiteness gets whiter, and the buzzing in my head just won’t stop. I think I hear a siren, but it’s headed away from me, and it might actually just be an ambulance. I sit on the curb.

  So what can I do? I don’t have my phone and I don’t know where I am. It’s not like I can knock on anybody’s door, looking like this. I can’t go back to my dorm, can’t go to my mom’s. I guess I just have to walk till I find something. But my feet feel like they’re on fire.

  I try walking, but each step is like knives and my legs buckle under. Faces swirl in the snow and the streetlamps glow bright till there’s nothing but white, and my blood turns to crystals that drag through my veins and, my mind’s leaking out through my skin, and I think I’ll lie down and give up and lie down.

  And then there’s a squeal.

  A squeal of tires right next to my head that sounds familiar, because it’s from a car that I drive every day, and it’s my Escort and it’s pulled up beside me. It’s here at the curb and the door is wide open. The passenger door is hanging open for me. And a voice from the driver’s side tells me, “Get in.” It’s a voice that I know.

  And it’s Sara.

  wed. jan. 19.

  2:07 am.

  what

  I stand in the snow, with my mouth hanging open, my skin turning bluish, the snow falling harder, the night spinning faster, my brain getting fuzzier, Sara just sitting there, holding the door, and she’s telling me, “Get in, get in, just get in.” Like she’s some sort of Terminator, nude from the future, and glaring at me through her shades, mumbling (loud) Come with me if you want to live, Oaf. And I do want to live—God, I do want to live—but my sister (not dead!), in my car, is too much. I stand in the snow (like the Grinch from cartoons), thinking What the hell happened, why are you alive, how’d you know I was here, why are you in my car?

  But I can’t say those words because I can’t say anything.

  “Oaf? You hear me? You all right?”

  “Uh—” Nothing to say and nothing in front of me but a hanging-open door and a passenger seat that I don’t think that I’ve ever sat in. A sister with a facial expression I can’t quite read, idling here on the curb, holding onto the brake while she’s gunning the gas. And a roar from the engine that blends with blue smoke pluming out from the vibrating tailpipe, and I can’t look away from the dome light that pulses and glows from the twitch of an old, broken wire.

  And the radio’s on.

  ...still pulling bodies from the wreckage, with the snowstorm likely to slow down their progress. The fire department has traced the blaze to the basement, where it appears to have broken out by accident...

  “You getting in or not?”

  In the dark, by the window, I see her gray eyes flash in the dome light, and the way that she’s gunning the gas makes me wish I could run, but on the other hand it looks so warm in there. I look down at my seat, and it’s soft because it’s never been sat on, and it’s not covered with crumbs like my driver’s seat is. I tell myself What have I got to lose? and jump directly into the path of the heat blasting out from the dashboard.

  “Buckle up,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Buckle up.” She pushes the button that locks all the doors, and she pulls on the stick and she stomps on the gas, and we fly under streetlights that whip through her grin. It shines in the light and then fades into shadows, and I realize I’m huddled up close to my door now, knees pulled to my chest and my seatbelt unfastened.

  She’s wearing her lab coat and scrubs like she was last night, and her stethoscope hangs from her neck. Her makeup is running, bags under her eyes—I can’t even remember the last time I saw her looking this bad. Every night at my mom’s she would always look perfect, but tonight she looks haggard, perhaps a bit manic, leaning over the wheel, jerking hard around corners. I watch houses fly by, and then shops, then more houses. I grab onto the door handle, pull on it hard (to escape? maybe just to hang on), but the child lock is on and the door doesn’t open.

  So many questions, but I can’t open my mouth.

  She goes first.

  “What were you doing out in the snow in your underwear?”

  I stare out the window, lick blood from my lips, and say, “It’s not my underwear.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not underwear. I don’t wear wifebeaters and boxers under my clothes, so it’s not underwear.” I thumb at the door handle again and add, “It’s pajamas. It’s what I sleep in.”

  “Oh.”

  She flies through a red light, her face glowing like fire, and I finally ask her, “What are you doing alive?”

  “What?”

  Just that one little syllable, like she’s totally shocked to learn that I thought she was dead, like in her mind there’s no way she could be dead, even though we all saw the fire and none of us have heard from her in almost twelve hours. “Have you called Mom and Dad?” I ask her.

  “What?”

  “Sara, are you even trying to listen to me? Where are you taking me, anyway?”

  “Mom’s place. Where else?”

  “What? Why?”

  “Would you rather spend the night naked in the snow?”

  I’m not naked. I really want to say that, but it doesn’t seem all that important in the grand scheme of things, so I just turn my head and look out the window till it fogs up from my breath.

  The fog is full of grinning faces.

  I finally say, “You do realize everyone thinks you’re dead.”

  The words disappear into the fog, and I wonder if she even heard them. She jerks on the wheel and we fly under another red light, and the faces look fiery and bloody. She says, “Why would they think that?”

  “Will you stop answering my questions with questions?” I want to punch something, but instead I just sink farther into the door and start drawing an H in the window fog. “What are you doing out in the middle of the night in my car?”

  “I gave you this car,” she says, “remember? You think I didn’t keep a key?”

  So many non-answers. “Well, what happened to your Jag?”

  “This car was closer.”

  “‘Closer’?”

  “Yeah.” I start drawing a backwards E next to the H. “What are you doing there?” she says, looking over her shoulder.

  “Uh—nothing. It’s stupid.” I erase it with the back of my hand.

  “Well, stop.” She jerks the wheel again.

  We’re out of the city now, and the streetlights thin out till we’re riding in nothing but darkness, and it’s hard to see anything but the whites of her eyes and her teeth. She’s gunning the gas even more. “Why haven’t you called Mom and Dad? They’re freaking out.”

  She shrugs like I just asked her what her favorite color is. “I left my phone in my office. Besides, there are certain advantages to having people think you’re dead.”

  My head wants to ask her, Like what? but my gut’s saying No, no, no, no, oh please, just get me out of here, break down the door if you have to, oh please. I hug my knees and say nothing.

  “Anyway,” she says, “I was near an exit when the fire alarms started going off. I didn’t have the chance to go back for anything, but I made it out fine. I’ve been lying low ever since.
”

  Lying low where? is the obvious question here, but again I don’t say it, and even with the heat blasting at me I still can’t quite feel my fingers or toes. My shirt and my shorts are both still soaked.

  She says, “So—” in her best small-talk voice, but then she stops and says nothing and just eyes me up and down in the darkness like she’s trying to make sense of my tawdry appearance. Oh God, watch the road.

  I’m trying to think of a plausible explanation for how I look, like I was in a fight, or I was sleepwalking, or My roommate kicked me out, but nothing I can think of makes sense except maybe Your damn pills turned me into a murder-zombie and now I’ve got nowhere to go and you’re not helping by dragging me to the last place I want to be. But there’s no point in saying any of that, so instead I just ask her, “How did you find me?”

  “Huh?”

  “How did you know where I was, Sara?”

  She coughs a little, bites her lip. “Who says I did?”

  She shuts the radio off, and there’s suddenly silence where there once had been noise, and I clear my throat to cover the dead air. “So you were just driving around, randomly, in my car, in the middle of the night?”

  “Well—” and she slams on the brakes and I fly into the dash and I think I might have dislocated something. “We’re here,” she says. And the car’s in the drive of my mom’s looming mansion, and she unlocks the doors as the security light snaps on.

  wed. jan. 19.

  2:59 am.

  the dread of something

  It’s getting worse.

  So many gaps in my memory, where everything’s fuzzy and minutes or hours or whole days are missing. I’m here in my bed now, the one I grew up in, awake and alert and unable to silence the static that swirls in my eyes. I think I remember a car ride with Sara, pulling into the driveway, but after that, nothing. I must have come inside and climbed up the stairs and sunk into my bed, but there’s none of that I can remember. I was in my own car, in the passenger’s seat; now I’m buried in blankets (but still so, so cold) and there’s nothing but gray in between. I twist with the sheets and my plush toys, the unicorns, dragons, and dolphins I owned as a kid, and I’m eyeing my room through the gaps in the curtains. These curtains. I thought I had hung them when I was in high school, but now that I see them with newly-awake eyes, I think I remember they weren’t my idea. What was it she said, that one night in the dressing room, something about how she hung them but I couldn’t remember? I’m trying to think of why Sara’d hang curtains, and memories flood back of the move to this house when the ceiling seemed high and we begged Mom for bunk beds, and I get the top bunk, she told me. And all I could think at the time was that it wasn’t fair, the way she’d be on top with a view of the whole room and everything in it, and I would be stuck underneath, staring down at the floor or the gray underside of her bed. Then she hung up the curtains and closed off my view of the whole world except for her face, and she smiled and told me and told Mom the curtains were there for a game we were playing, but it never felt like a game when she came in at night. I’m a doctor, she’d say, and I’ll make you feel better. She always was lying, she never once did. And after, she’d leave, and I’d shake in the dark, with my dragon and unicorn tight in my arms, and I’d pray to forget, just forget. I guess that I must have, because if I hadn’t, then I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be jumping in cars she was driving at midnight, or taking the pills that she shoved in my pocket. It’s weird how the things that you want to forget are the ones that you probably ought to remember—for instance, that night in the dressing room, burned in my dreams, when she breathed in my face those four words: Love consumes, love destroys. Now I shake in the dark and I tell myself, I don’t believe it, but nothing I’ve seen in my soul’s telling me she was wrong. Like that night at the bar with the boy and the beer and the girl who stormed out and the way he just sat there and stared at my boobs and I told him to buy me a drink. Now why would I tell him to do that, unless all I wanted to know was if I could get things out of him with my assets? And he was the same—all he wanted from me were the things that I could do for him. And the girl who stormed out was the same way as well, thinking If I can’t own you, I don’t want to be with you. I say to myself that if that’s what love is, maybe Sara is right—love consumes, it destroys. I look in my arms, at the toys from my childhood, the bears and the cute unicorns and the dragons. The dragon’s the oldest, the one that I’ve had since before I could walk, and he’s missing his eyes and his fur is worn ragged, and each time a new piece fell off and went missing, my mother would tell me, It happens. It’s just ‘cause you love him so much, Ophie. Each time I’d cry, but I’d drag him behind me regardless, and think that My mom must be right, because if she was wrong, that meant I was a horrible monster. (Dragon, I love you, and I will destroy you.) If my mother was right about stupid plush toys, maybe Sara was right about people as well, because how is there even a difference? Clichés people spout about how someone likes them for just who they are are all just what they sound like, just greeting card bullshit. It’s warm it’s fuzzy and makes people feel good, but everyone knows that if we just loved people for being themselves, then we’d all just love everyone all of the time, because what else can anyone do but keep being themselves? All the old people dying in hospice, with dozens of grandchildren, none of whom visit, are being themselves, and nobody loves them for that. And hell, since I’m on a roll, no one loves cheesecake just because it continues existing. They love it for what they can get out of it, and not by just spending some quality time with it, either. Love consumes, it destroys. And I think about Mom and I think about Dad, how they both chose to split up as soon as they had what they wanted to get from each other. I was young when it happened, I didn’t understand, but I think now I do, and I think I can see why this house feels so empty. I think it’s the love, the real love, not some greeting-card love. Through the gaps between curtains, which are narrow by design, I see half-packed-up ruins of dead adolescence, one whose funeral’s been playing on loop for (I guess) several years now, and maybe it’s time to accept that. Open boxes of books filled with titles that drip with the vain purple prose of a time that’s long dead, posters hung on the walls, dangling loose from their corners, with rock bands on them, bands I barely remember, the sort that seemed brilliant a few years ago, but are now just some hair and some teeth. And they all look so miserable, scowling as if they just learned what death is and they think that they might kind of like it. The signature feeling of true adolescence—Adulthood must blow, so I guess I’ll just jump headfirst into this chasm of death, because death is so cool. Just ink on a page, just a mixture of yellow, magenta, and cyan, that looks like a face but is really just paper and chemicals, wrinkling and rotting even now as I stare, and behind it a wall. Ten years (or so) now, since I hung all these posters, and almost as long since I purchased an album by one of these bands, and it’s funny to think that they’ve probably moved on with lives no one knows about—all driving minivans, office jobs, babies. And some of them, by now, have probably died, and I wonder if death is the velvety dreamland they droned about (corpse-robot voices that howled from the grooves in my iPod, now rotting itself somewhere, deep in a landfill, dissolving back into the world, just like everything else). Does it mean anything that the agent of death, the new one, the one who’s been called on to mete out predictable ends to the ones now alive, has become me? Or am I just one in a long line of conqueror worms, just an endless progression of lonely devourers, called on to do the inevitable? I’m reminded of something a drug dealer said to me once, that if she were to stop selling meth, someone else would just do it, and life would go on, and it all made no difference. Those doomed to death, or to deadly addiction, would be where they are without anyone lifting a finger to help them, and all things eventually tend toward the grave, and the only real choice is to sweep up what wreckage we can as we all stumble toward it, or not. And that’s all I am now, a blind wreckage-sweeper, now etched int
o history—me, cancer, AIDS, the Titanic, the Plague, all of us are just peas in a fungus-smeared pod, history’s janitors, mopping up breath for a living. There’s nothing unholy in being the id, in taking from people what never was theirs, what they never had earned and they wouldn’t hold onto, regardless—virginity, innocence, health, money, life. Life is nothing but chance in the time-space continuum, hiccups and spasms inside of a corpse, just a big stack of chemicals, all of which used to be dead, and they’re all headed that way again. And if my teeth are chosen to help them along, then I guess that’s all right—I’m performing a much-needed service that some of the worms in the world just aren’t up to. A small, tiny voice in the back of my head still says I should fight it, and what was it Kate said, about moral compasses, how I might have one that’s better than hers? But that’s bullshit. I see that it is now, and lying here listening as snow turns to rain, then to sleet, then to ice mixed with lightning and thunder, I see that there’s nothing but death in the universe, everything ending with whimpers, not bangs, and that only a fool would choose life over death when all life will surrender to death in the end. There’s a scene in The Exorcist where the two priests talk about why a demon who has all the powers of hell would waste time on invading a little girl’s body, and one of them says to the other the purpose is just to embarrass—to damage and insult the form of a human, to take away hope that a good God could love it. I guess that if God and those demons are real, it all sort-of makes sense, but I can’t get away from the thought that the whole thing’s a huge waste of time, that the real human form will destroy and embarrass itself, if you give it enough years to get the job done. If we all just wait to watch cute people die, we’ll all see what a joke superego, society, manners (all that bullshit) are—that death is the final, unstoppable force, and that anyone fighting against it is nothing but flotsam awash in a grotesque tsunami that drowns life in darkness, with nothing beyond. I lie in my bed and absorb all the thunder I can, and I revel in all the new freedom I’ve found in embracing the death and becoming the id. All surrender to me in the end—but if death is the end (if it’s really the end), then I can’t understand why the dark of my bedroom is swirling with ghosts. The fat man, the hipster, the girl with the Ugg boots, and Rachel, and dozens that I haven’t seen before, weightless and wandering in between boxes and tracing their hands on my posters (to scoff at the fake, packaged death sold to teenagers). Moaning and singing in time with the thunder, a symphony (silent) that’s filling my ears. I see them in swatches and stripes and in blinks, in the slats between curtains that hang from her bed, just a glimpse of a face (or a back, or a hand), and the faces are angry or sad, pressing out on the walls, or in on my curtains. And I so want to pull all these curtains aside, to reach out and to tear them all down from the bed and look into the faces, ask What do you want? maybe Why are you still around? Leave me alone! or just share the same breath and feel the same dark, but I can’t move my arms and I can’t reach the curtains, although they’re just inches away from my face. My arms are tied up in the dragons and unicorns, buried in memories, unable to move. So I shake under blankets for hours (maybe years?), watching ghosts slowly pick through the ruins of my life, till the lights all go out in their eyes, one by one, and I’m left in the black with just one who remains. She’s the one who (I know now) I’ll never escape, the ghost who will haunt me in life and in death, and her black silhouette stands and waits in the dark, and the lightning cracks (loud), and her Cheshire-cat grin’s looking in, through the curtains, right at me. I tell her I know that she’s not really there, that she’s really asleep in the room down the hall, where she went after parking the car in the driveway (I think?), but she’s still at the end of the bed, looking at me with something like hunger. (The love that consumes, the love that destroys.) It’s time to play doctor the way that we would back when I was a kid. She’s climbing inside now with eyes that flash lightning and teeth filled with thunder, and all I can do is just wait for the pain. Close my eyes and imagine I’m back in the kitchen (my mom’s) eating dinner, a year ago, picking politely at Mom’s mac ‘n cheese, wondering who the hell makes mac ‘n cheese filled with onions (my mom does). The lights in the kitchen are bright and they’re yellow, the three of us silently watching the snow as it fills the backyard. The teakettle whistles for no one, since no one wants tea, but my mom always makes it regardless. We all ask each other the same boring questions we ask every time we’re together. My mom says to Sara, Your research—so how is that going? and Sara looks cold and won’t even get up to go pick up the teakettle off of the heat, and it’s making her wince with its shrill, piercing scream, and she tells her I’d rather not talk about it. My mom stabs the tray of asparagus, wilting and pungent, and tries to fill silence by filling her plate with a vegetable she doesn’t want, as if buckets of foul-smelling pee will make up for this hour spent avoiding real talk about life. She turns back to Sara and says, Is it really that bad? ‘Cause I thought that you said you were right on the verge of a breakthrough, and Sara says Stop. Please. The last thing I need is a mix of I-told-you-so’s and I’m-so-sorry’s. The rats are all dead and the trials are a bust and I’m not even sure Yale still wants me around. Now just leave me alone—doesn’t Oaf have a life we can all scrutinize? Then they both look at me, by the window, still picking at noodles and onions and cheese, and I sigh and I say to myself (in my head), Hey, you can’t be a teenager slouching at dinner, you’re past twenty-two now, you can’t just regress to your old and embarrassing self every time you come home for a weekend or night. But there’s nothing to do now, with both their eyes on me, but let them both know the attention’s unwelcome. My sighing and eye-rolling take me and pin me down into a slouch, like a sad, teenaged ghost that’s possessing my body and forcing it into contortions of apathy. All I can do is regret it as soon as it happens, but now that it’s out there, there’s no way to grab it and pull it back in, and it hangs in the air like the ghost’s foul fart, adolescence’s last gasp in someone who’s just now discovered adulthood is nothing but Insert tab ‘A’ into slot labeled ‘B’ in an endless attempt just to postpone the inevitable. If I still can’t banish my teenagey angst, maybe that’s just because it’s the only response to the world that makes any sense. Don’t say that, my smart adult brain is chiding my lizard-brain, but I can’t keep the argument up for too long, since I can’t think of reasons she’s actually wrong about life, and I say to myself, When did you get so cynical, anyway? And still they’re both sitting there, waiting for me to say anything, something to fill up the silence we live in. They sit and they stare until Sara gets up and excuses herself. And she walks down the hall, and we watch her until she gets swallowed by dark, and then Mom turns to me yet again and repeats what she said. And I say, Well, you know that I dropped education, and she clears her throat and she tells me, I know. We sit and we pick at our food, and I watch the moon rise on the snow-filled backyard and mix glitter from snow with the sharp, jagged shadows cast long by my swing set (it’s strange how the things that I loved as a child look scary and alien now). She hasn’t looked up from her food this whole time I’ve been staring outside, and I say, Please excuse me, and get up and walk down the dark hall as well. We haven’t turned lights on in hallways for years, ever since the day Sara came home from third grade and she told us about the perpetual energy crisis. I’m not sure if leaving the lights off in places does much to avert the apocalypse; anyway, she was insistent, and soon we all grew used to walking down pitch-dark-black hallways. Like always, we pass in the dark, and her eyes and her smile both light up electric, but this time she stops, and she looks in my eyes, and she says to me, My rats are dead, Oaf. I tell her I know, but she takes a step closer and says, Don’t you want to know why? I look toward the bathroom (so close but so far), with a light she left on to illumine the darkness (or maybe to flip a huge bird at her youthful ideals), and then back to her face, which is inches from mine, with a deep, reddish tongue that sticks to her lips, and I tell her, I guess it�
�s because your big dream drug is poison. She says, No, it’s better, and takes a step closer, and traps me against the white wall that looks black in the dark. It’s better than that, so much cooler than that. I tell her, That’s great, but I just need to pee, but her eyes lock on mine and she says to me, They all turned violent, Oaf. Every last one of them—murderers. The breath from her words is like ghosts, and it hangs in the air as a gray requiem for things best left forgotten. Her smile is so big and so white that the dark can’t contain it. She leans in so close I smell grease in her pores, and she tells me, They all figured out different ways to escape from their cages, and then they found victims and tore their throats open and ate them. The cages all smashed apart, blood everywhere, it looked like a horror flick, Oaf. First the ones I was giving the drug to attacked my control group—they picked them off one-by-one (fish in a barrel), and then when there weren’t any more easy targets, they turned on each other and mutually murdered themselves in a big battle royal that went on for days. I watched it all happen. They slaughtered each other and ate the remains until only one of them was left standing. And that one left standing, y’know what he did? And that last bit of steam-breath, the one from the did?, just hangs in the air there in front of my face, just a sour puff of cold breath that’s dripping with sweat and that’s shaking with anticipation. I finally tell her, Okay, I’ll bite, what? And that cold Cheshire cat grin lights up in the steam and she says Are you sure that you want to find out? and I nod (though I’m actually not, but what choice do I have?), and her nose brushes mine and she whispers He ate himself, Oaf. She watches my face to enjoy my reaction, and adds, There was nothing else left, no more fights to be won, no more murders for him to commit, so he gnawed at himself till he died on the floor in a big pile of rat bones. She smiles. You almost had me going there, Sara, I tell her. But none of that makes any sense. There’s no way you would sit there and watch them destroy both your lab and your research, and I don’t believe that story at all. She says, Suit yourself, I just thought you’d enjoy it, and, dumbstruck, I ask her, Enjoy it? and she says, Well, yeah—that’s why I didn’t step in to stop all the carnage. ‘Cause watching was fun—lots more fun than conducting the study had been. There was nothing more boring than weighing those rats and their food every day, making notes of the tiniest changes, pretending they matter. Pretending that drugs make a difference in life when the people who take them will all end up dead in the ground, anyway. That rat? He was right. He was right all along. And the one (only) reason that people pretend otherwise is that it makes them feel better. I know that it’s soothing, she says, to pretend that your life has meaning. But Oaf, you’ve been studying English for years now, so you must have noticed by now: the words ‘meaning’ and ‘end’ are synonymous. She hovers too close, till I’m smelling her lip balm (it’s cherry and cold in the dark, humid air); then she turns and she walks down the hallway back into the light, toward my mom and her table. I shiver from all the cold steam in the hallway, and walk toward the light, and it’s blinding and yellow and forces my eyes open—