Ophelia, Alive Read online

  I must have been sleepwalking again. It’s dark in the kitchen, but a ghostly white is pouring in from the yard that’s filling with snow, and the windows are beaten with sheet after sheet of ice, while lightning and thunder crack the sky and rattle old memories in the attic. I’m trying to sort through the images that remain at the back of my mind, and I realize I’ve lost track of time completely. I think it’s still the same night, the one when Sara picked me up from the old playground and drove me here, and—

  All I can think of are teeth and steam. The night’s a black hole, like the universe after its last star burns out. I was in my bed, and now I’m at the table, and I guess I must have written something in my sleep, but the rest of the night is a sucking chasm. I’m still trying to sort through it all when I’m suddenly awash in the flashing glint of light from her eyes again, because she’s standing right behind me—

  “What’s that?”

  I hear the curled lip in her voice, a sneer twisted around my ear that makes me shiver while I rush to cover up my loopy handwriting. Her fingers are on my shoulders and they’re icy like frozen cold cuts. I look up through the dark air and I can barely make out her face. “What are you doing up?” I ask her.

  “What’s that page in front of you?” she says.

  “It’s—nothing.” I start folding it, awkwardly, into triangles and trapezoids, but her sharp nails snatch it out of my hands and uncrumple it to read it in the illumination from the lightning that pounds on the windows. The flashes reveal half-seconds of smiles and sneers, and her glassy pupils shrink with each flash and then swallow darkness again.

  “Don’t quit your day job,” she says, as she recrumples it and squashes it into the already-full kitchen trash, and the air is momentarily filled with the odor of week-old chicken. She opens the fridge and her face is lit (suddenly) with a yellow light, and the sound of Tupperware slamming into other Tupperware rattles in between peals of thunder. “But then again,” she says, “you actually wrote something, so I guess that’s a milestone, right?”

  I try to think of something witty to say, but she’s right, and anyway what’s the point of arguing with a half-illuminated ass sticking out from behind a fridge door? I look at said ass, draped in way-too-expensive pajama pants that only people who spend a lot of time worrying about being comfortable when they’re unconscious buy. They’ve got an unfortunate cutesy pirate print on them, and I wonder who they were made for—rich girls who wish they were pillaging the high seas (and presumably never learned about the filth and disease involved in that pursuit)? She jerks a Pizza Hut box off of the middle shelf and I hear a plastic container of something clatter to the floor.

  “The thing about life goals,” she says, “is you have to actually work to make them happen.” She rips a triangle of congealed milkfat off of the greasy cardboard, bites off half of it, and chews.

  “Because you worked so hard toward your medical aspirations?”

  “Y’know what? Yeah, I did. I just had a thesis advisor who was out to get me—ugh, this is terrible,” she adds, cramming the rest of her pizza into the trash as well. “What are you doing up, Oaf?”

  “What are you doing up?”

  “Checking on you, obvs. Big sister stuff, you probably wouldn’t understand. Why are you out of bed?”

  “Just...couldn’t sleep, I guess.”

  “Nightmares?”

  “What?”

  “Nightmares. You used to have them all the time when we were kids. You remember, right? You would wake up in the middle of the night, screaming and sweating. And then I’d have to...comfort you.” She picks pizza crust from her teeth as she collapses in the chair next to mine and leans over the table. “You ever hear of something called ‘Universe 25’?”

  “Called what?”

  “‘Universe 25.’ I was just reading about it the other day. There was this guy who built ‘universes’ for mice to live in—just, like, little mouse habitats. He built twenty-five of them, and he called them ‘universes,’ so the twenty-fifth one was ‘Universe 25.’”

  “So?” I’m twisting the pen in my hands between my fingers, and I can’t help but notice how sharp it is as she leans in close and the lightning dances across her face.

  She says, “Universe 25 was designed to be a mouse paradise, with everything a mouse could ever want. Unlimited food and water, a perfect sixty-eight-degree temperature all the time—plus the whole thing was completely self-cleaning. The mice didn’t have to do anything but eat, sleep, and fuck. Sounds awesome, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Except that it wasn’t.” She wipes a greasy hand on her expensive pants, and leans in so close that I can count her pores. “Within a couple of years, the whole thing had turned into absolute shit.”

  My back is flat against the wooden bars of my chair now. They’re digging into it hard. “What do you mean, ‘absolute shit’? What’s that mean?”

  “Cannibalism. Constant, random violence. Weird pansexuality. Mothers eating their young, everyone humping inanimate objects, hundreds of them who would just pile up in the middle of the enclosure and then start eating each other out of sheer boredom. Once all of their problems were taken care of, they turned to self-destruction.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I say, and the thunder and rain and snow all fall silent, till there’s only a pale, white glow drifting in through the windows.

  “I just thought it was interesting.” She leans back and starts cleaning her nails.

  “‘Interesting’?”

  “Yeah,” she says, “isn’t it? You take care of all of someone’s problems, you say, I’ll handle your food and your water, your hygiene, everything, and all you have to do is whatever the hell you want, and how do they respond? They say, Oh, okay, I guess I’ll destroy myself, then. You set people—well, mice—free to do literally whatever, and they’re like, Oh, cool, death sounds good, I haven’t tried that. Given a truly free choice, we choose death. Makes you think.” A long bit of lightning illuminates her nails and gives her a chance to really dig hard under her left pointer finger. “Darwin, y’know, he thought life existed to survive and reproduce. The end of life, in other words, is life.” She bites her tongue and winces from the pain. “He was wrong, though: the end of life is death. I mean, isn’t that obvious? The only purpose of any of this comes from the fact that it ends—and deep down, we all know it. The mice knew it. That’s why heaven always turns into hell. Always.”

  I jump when the long stretch of lightning is interrupted by its own thunder, and the house rattles from the basement up. Then the sleet starts beating the windows again.

  “And how do I know?” she says, leaning in till all I can see are her eyes, which in the dark are just black pits. “Universe 25.”

  She takes my hand and picks at it with her perfectly painted, perfectly sharpened nails, and her tongue flicks hard against her teeth when she says these last two words:

  “Love destroys,” she reminds me. Then she drops my hand, hard, and it lands on the wood, and she slinks away into the dark.

  I squint into the black, trying to follow her with my eyes and see where she’s going, but now the light from the lightning is gone. Her pale, ivory back disappears into the gray almost before she even stands up, and I’m left alone, listening to small bits of ice playing bells on the window, their soft little plinks all dissolving to thick sheets that build till the snow in the yard’s just a fuzzy impression of faces pressed up on the glass. They’re the faces of ghosts like the ones from my room, the ones I saw wandering in between the door and my curtains, but now they’re outside. They want to come in, and I tell them they can, that I’m lonely and scared, that their sad, desperate faces are better than nothing, but all they can do is press harder and harder, saying We should come in, but we’re scared of her, too. So I sit by myself in the dark while the wind whistles hard. I can see every hair on my arms and my legs standing up in the glow from the faces outside, and I’m slowly aware of the filth fro
m the rags that I’m wearing (again), and I think I might need a hot shower. But still I can’t stand up, can’t bring myself even to lift up my hand and reach into the dark, just because I’m afraid of the things that might wait there to touch it. Damn these long winter nights, won’t the sun ever rise? I’m beginning to see that the night is all hers, that the dark and the winter and whatever’s left when the universe ends all belong to the ones who are willing to kill, to the ones who believe in the nothingness coming, embrace it and love it, and know how to use it to fill all their needs. Love destroys, love consumes, love devours like the black holes that spin at the centers of galaxies. When all things are finally, totally dead, only those who still know how to swallow, consume, are the ones who will still keep on going. I see now that life is a zero-sum game, that the ones who survive are the ones who are able to steal life from others, that love’s just a word for the power to take, and my thin, wasted form (well—at least sort of skinny) that’s flopped in this rickety chair is the proof that she’s now nearly taken what little I had. I say to myself that I have to fight back, that I have to love back (ha!), to turn myself into the thing that she always has been—just a sucking black hole that devours its loves right along with its hates—if I want to survive. Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds. Isn’t that what that one guy, the nuclear physicist, said when he set off the bomb in the desert? I am become death, destroyer of worlds. I think it’s a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, and isn’t it possible Hindu philosophy’s right about this one? That life, love, and hate, and the grave are all one? That to love is to kill, and to kill is to love? I can still feel a tiny amount of her drug in my blood—just a few chalky pieces that scrape on the sides of my veins. A powdery strength that’s dissolving, not gone. I know where she sleeps, and I still hear the beat of her heart, just the way that I did every night when we shared the same room and her breath and her heart woke me up in the dark. But now I’m awake, wide awake, while she sleeps, and I think that I have enough strength in my veins left to finish this game that she started, to end her before she ends me. If everything’s death, and if I am become death, and if she’s been right all these years about love and death being the same, then one more makes no difference, just nudges the universe toward its inevitable fate. Her blood will be blood, whether it’s in her veins or poured out on her bedsheets, regardless of whether it glows rosy-bright in her cheeks or it paints them in scarlet. I am become death, destroyer of worlds. In light from the window that glows off the snow, my frayed, broken nails are all sparkling, all ten of them, broken and bloody, but ready and waiting and thirsting in ways that I now understand. I stretch them in front of me, into the darkness, emboldened now with the new promise of blood, and not blood from a stranger, but blood from a love who’d be proud if she knew. Deep in the dark, I feel ghosts rub against them, the ghosts of the things that once lived here before, all the millions of years before placid McMansions existed, and ever will live on, for millions of years or more, after the last of them crumbles. The Something Alive that my mom tried to scrub from the last of the plastic perfection—it still sticks to things and occasionally jams in their corners, requiring a scrub or a wipe (what a terrible word). But the tools that you clean with absorb all the dirt (they don’t send it to hell!), and it just sits inside them forever. Now I see, Mom, the answer to all the things growing, the things that destroy sparkling dwellings by living—the molds and the fungi, the termites and ants—the solution’s not cleaning, not making things sterile; it’s utter destruction. It’s love and it’s death. And it’s not in the gray-beige of matte-painted walls; it’s the orange of flame and the deep black of entropy churning forever. Now the ghosts from the windows are all here behind me, there’s hundreds of them, and they’re lifting me up—it’s like floating on clouds made of darkness, or wearing a dress with a vaporous train that stretches behind me for millions of miles. And I say, Up the stairs! and my army, my ghosts, my train made of lightning and thunder, all lift me up over their rarefied heads and I float on a pillow of vapor and smoke up the stairs, sharpening nails on my teeth. We float by my room, it’s the one with the posters in shreds on the walls and the old, dirty curtains surrounding my bed, and we float past the bathroom that glows with a nightlight that lights up a toothpaste-flecked mirror I once used to call Bloody Mary (but she didn’t come because all ghosts are lies). Then finally my sister’s room, there on the right at the end of the hall, where the steam-breath that once filled the curtains from my bed now leaks out beneath her closed door. The white of the steam is the pale light of life, and it’s swallowed up fast by the black that’s behind me and pushing me forward, my ghosts. You say love destroys; are you ready for love? All those years when you talked on and on about death, saying it was the only true meaning of life, are you ready to look those words hard in the face? Are you ready to chew them, to feel their blood run down your throat and become you? Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds. With your pills inside me, an army behind me, I’m ready for love and I’m ready for death, and are you? We push on her door, me and all my ghost army, we push on her door till it breaks off its hinges, and fill up her room with our black, inky darkness. It presses on her from above, sinking down, till it chokes out the white and her breath disappears. And I look at her face, and it’s pale, and it’s white, and her eyes have turned gray, and there’s blood on her teeth. She breathes in the black of the death and absorbs it, and somehow her eyes both light up in her sleep, and she doesn’t wake up, but I feel her eyes on me. She sleeps with her eyes open, Sara, she sleeps and she breathes with her dull, gray eyes open, and now I can see that my one chance is now, that I won’t get another chance after this moment to give her a taste of the death that she says is life’s meaning. You ready? I ask her. You ready for Vishnu, for Jupiter, Chronos? It’s now, Sara, now, when time swallows you up, because I AM BECOME DEATH, DESTROYER OF WORLDS. The lightning outside flashes loud, shakes the windows, and lights up her face with gray skin and gray eyes, and it lights up my nails, and it’s time for some blood. I reach for her throat, through the black and the white, for the gray, pulsing skin hiding deep in the mist. I reach from my perch up on top of the black, but like chess she retreats and slips into the white. Either she’s sinking down now or I’m floating up, but somehow my hands never quite reach her throat. And I see now that I can’t destroy the life beating inside my own veins, that the love that destroys swallows everything with it, beloved and lover, the blood, and the air. And there’s nothing to do now but open my eyes, and I see I’ve been dreaming again. I’m back in my bed, in the dark of the night and the smothering curtains, and she’s on my chest, and she’s pinning me down, and there’s nothing to do but stare into the gray of her eyes till the sun finally rises.

  wed. jan. 19.

  11:24 am.

  snowed in

  The sun’s finally up.

  It took forever to rise, and I counted the seconds, or I would have, if I had had any idea of how fast or slow time was moving last night. Somehow the night turned into weeks. The solstice was almost a month ago, but the nights still get longer and longer.

  But now I can see the sun—bits of it—through the gaps between my bed’s curtains. It’s not yellow and bright like the sun in the spring; it’s a pale, whitish glow that’s been filtered through miles of clouds and two inches of ice on the window. I lay here for hours last night, trapped, just watching the ghosts, with their skeletal faces, all slowly dissolve from the deep midnight black into lingering gray, till the last of the twisted, white grins disappeared, chased away (for the moment?) by pale winter sun.

  And once they were gone, I started to breathe again.

  I still feel hands around my throat, even though there are none. I have memories of last night—dreams and impressions, anyway—and some bits feel more real, and some bits feel more like fantasy, but I have no idea which was actually which. All I can do is huddle in the corner while images of life and death dance around me, and wonder if the shadow play
means anything at all, or if it’s just the last flashes of a brain that’s shutting down.

  Those pills are still rattling in my pocket.

  I slide them out and look at the orange bottle over again, let it catch the light and shine it around my bed, catching the old, stale clouds of her breath. The bottle rattles in my hand because I can’t hold it still, and the clattering whisper tells me ugly stories about the past. In the orangey light, I can see my arms are covered in scratches. There’s still a voice somewhere at the back of my mind saying You need to get off this stuff, but at this stage, what would even be the point? I still feel those pill fragments scraping around the inside of my veins, and I’m not sure I could sort them out from my blood, even if I wanted to. I can’t imagine life without all the faces I’m used to seeing now.

  And when (if) I go off of it, what, exactly, will disappear? What if the wrong parts of my memory, the happy parts, crumble away, and I’m left weak and alone, with nothing? Somehow the parade of mutilated memories and twisted faces seems preferable to the gray abyss of life’s mundanity.

  I know that that’s stupid, that it’s obviously the ravings of a drug addict who spent way too much time rewatching Tim Burton movies in high school, but it’s all I have left. I’ve stood on the edge of the chasm of adulthood, and I’ve seen that I can either give myself to the world or give the world to myself, and at the moment I can’t think of a single reason to do the former. I’d rather ride this roller coaster than get out and push.

  Does that even make sense? It makes sense in my head. I’m just saying, I need to use up the people and things around me, before they use me up. These pills used to frighten me with the way they’d make me see things that weren’t there, but now it’s starting to grow on me. At least it’s not boring and disappointing like real life is. Maybe being followed forever by the ghosts of the people I’ve harmed is better than being alone. Better than living in constant fear of seeing Sara’s—