Ophelia, Alive Read online

  “Why not?”

  “I’m trying to explain why,” she says. “I really am. Like I said, I felt bad for you, as stupid as that sounds. And I knew you were only doing what you were doing because of your sister’s pills, and I wanted to make it right. So—well—I—sort of—hid a body for you. Again.”

  She’s studying my face, trying to see how I’ll react, but I have no idea what to say, what to do.

  “I’m not exactly proud of it,” she says, “but I hid the body in my closet. I picked it up, piece by piece, and I threw it all in my laundry basket. Then I mopped the blood up from the floor. And then I stood there, looking at the shiny, perfect tile, thinking What the hell have I done, and what the hell do I do now? It was surreal.”

  She’s looking at me like I’m supposed to validate her actions somehow, like I’m supposed to tell her she did the Right Thing. “Kate, why the hell would you do that?”

  “Do you remember what I said to you last night, Phelia? Just before I stormed out?”

  “Uh—” It seems so long ago now.

  “I told you Sara was wrong about love. About love devouring and destroying. I promised you I’d prove to you that she was wrong, remember? So—after you ran off, I was standing over that pile of blood and bones, and I thought maybe, just maybe if I did something truly selfless, like hide a body, for you, you’d see that—I mean, I know it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking super clearly at the time. I was running on adrenalin, what can I say?”

  “That’s—that’s—wow.”

  “I know.”

  “And I’m not sure it was really selfless if you did it just to prove a point.”

  “Yeah. But it wasn’t, y’know? I mean, there was that, but I also was afraid for myself, obviously, and, well—I was worried about you.”

  “Why, though?”

  “I don’t know, you’ve just—you’ve given me someone to talk to, to sort through things with. You’re not the only depressed super-senior bouncing around campus, y’know? I mean, in the back of my mind, I knew I was just postponing the inevitable, but it seemed like—I don’t know—I just—”

  “I get it,” I tell her.

  “You do?”

  “Well, I mean, sorta. It’s either the sweetest or most horrible thing I’ve ever heard, y’know?”

  She slides up onto the arm of the chair and says, “I know, right? That’s kind of where I am right now, too. I mean, when we hid that first body, we were just covering our asses, but this was different. I knew you had done it, and I still chose to hide the evidence. At the time, it felt like the Right Thing to Do, but the further I get from it, the uglier it seems, y’know?”

  She picks up a toy off my bookshelf—a sparkly My-Little-Pony-knockoff unicorn, one that I haven’t thought about in a decade. She tosses it from hand to hand. It’s shedding sparkles on her lap.

  “That’s the thing about being Catholic,” she tells me. “People say that Catholic theology is ‘incarnational,’ that we’re all supposed to be Christ to the world, to absorb its evil and create some good, but then when you try, you see what an ugly, messy thing it is, and how inadequate your own attempts are. It’s not a Beautiful thing or a Good thing, at least not on the surface. It’s more like being elbow-deep in someone else’s blood. This time, literally.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “I know, right?” she says. “But I’m starting to see that that’s how things work. And anyway, it really only describes half the problem here. I’m obviously not in a position to absolve you for the mortal sin of eating a police officer—I mean, I didn’t even know the guy. He’s got a family, friends, a job—people who need him. I’m starting to see what that line means, though—Behold, I make all things new. Remember that one? I can’t erase a debt that’s not owed to me, but if I owned literally all the money in the world, I probably could, y’know? I’ve been trying to make things right myself, but I’m seeing how futile that is. All I can do is strap myself in for the ride.”

  She’s combing the unicorn’s mane with her nails.

  “But anyway. I tossed the body in my closet and cleaned up, and after that I realized that I’d better get out of there as fast as I could. I would have called you, but I saw that you left your phone on your desk, so I got in my van and I just drove. Once I’d put enough distance between myself and campus, I just pulled over to the side of the road and slept in the back. And then in the morning, I thought I should probably try to find you, so I Facebook-stalked you on my phone till I found your mom’s address. By then my van was buried in snow and it wouldn’t move, so I just got out and I started walking.”

  “What if I hadn’t been here?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Well—” I have no idea what to say to any of this. It’s like a musical wrapped in a horror movie. “Thanks for finding me, but—what do we do now?”

  She’s pulling on the unicorn’s legs, pulling her front legs and her back legs in opposite directions, like she’s trying to draw and quarter her. She says, “I don’t know. I wish I did. I can’t just leave a body in my closet and you can’t just hide here forever. They’re both terrible hiding places, for starters. But I am sure of one thing.”

  “What?”

  “You need to get off these pills.”

  “I—” and I swallow—“I don’t know if I can, Kate.”

  She sits in silence, and I stare at the dragon on my bed in the fading gray light. And then I hear her whisper, almost inaudibly, “The human heart is a factory of idols.”

  “What?”

  She shakes her head like she’s waking from a dream. Looks embarrassed. “It’s a quote from John Calvin,” she says. “A Protestant theologian.” She looks down at my unicorn and adds, “I heard it somewhere a year or two ago, and I always kind of wondered what he meant.” She stands up, tosses the unicorn on the chair, and goes back to looking at my posters. Closely, without judgment, like she’s looking at the tiny dots of ink. “I think I’m starting to understand now, though. That people are wired to ‘serve’ things. That no one exists just to exist. That we all worship something, or serve something, or fight for something, and it’s usually the wrong thing.”

  I find myself sliding off the bed onto the floor, till I’m finally sitting on my black carpet, with my back against my mattress. The book she was playing with earlier is sitting next to me, open to “The Call of Cthulhu.” I tell her, “I keep seeing things.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “People. And—and memories.”

  “What sort of people do you see?”

  “I think they’re ghosts.”

  I pick up the book and read the words, The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

  I tell her, “They’re the people I’ve killed. I didn’t realize that at first, but their faces have gotten a lot clearer lately. They follow me everywhere, and they talk to me.”

  “What do they say?”

  “All sorts of stuff. Sometimes we just chat. Sometimes they help me, give me advice. And sometimes they tell me to...to do things.”

  “‘Do things’?”

  “Yeah, like the stuff that I’ve been doing. Killing people. It sounds kind of stupid, now that I’ve said it out loud.”

  “Not that stupid,” she says, and she sits on the floor next to me and takes the book and closes it.

  “I mean, I’m seeing things that aren’t real. That’s pretty stupid.”

  “Well, what’s real, right? Maybe only you can see them, but that doesn’t make them imaginary. And maybe they are imaginary, but that doesn’t mean they don’t mean something. It’s like what we were saying about dreams: maybe physiologically it’s only your brainstem firing randomly, but that doesn’t mean it’s only that.”

  She leans up next to me against the bed and sighs.

  She says, “I’m Catholic, Phelia. I believe there’s more to the universe than just atoms bu
mping up against each other. I could be wrong, but maybe I’m not, y’know? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, right? I know you’re a fan of that one.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Are you serious? Because, you carry it with you everywhere.”

  “Yeah, I’m actually kind of embarrassed about that.”

  “Don’t be. I get why it fascinates you. Mystery, ambiguity—it’s a work you can think about your whole life and still not fully understand. And, I mean, it makes a good point, right?”

  “What point is that?”

  “That partial ignorance is no excuse for inaction? I mean, that’s the point of Hamlet, right?”

  “I guess. Maybe?”

  “I mean, he spends the whole play hesitating, just because he’s not a hundred percent sure what the truth is. Even though all the available evidence points to only one thing. And he pays with his life for it. I mean, I’m just saying.”

  “I always thought it was about the Oedipal complex. Y’know, like everything is.”

  She laughs.

  “Wait, I never told you, did I? I totally made our Shakespeare prof squirm the other day.”

  “What’d you say to him?”

  “Um—I just pointed out that there’s never been any real evidence for the Oedipal complex, and that only English profs care about it anymore.”

  She laughs. “And what’d he say?”

  “Well, y’know, he just—he pointed out how prevalent it is in literature. And then I told him that was bullshit because you pretty much only see it in post-Freudian modernist lit, and he stammered a little more, and—Kate, I have to ask you something.”

  “Oh?” Her eyebrows go up a little, surprised by my suddenly serious tone. And actually, there are so many things I have to ask her. But let me start with the easiest one. Relatively speaking, I mean.

  “Do you—do you think Freud was right about sexual abuse? Like, that neuroses are rooted in repressed memories of it?”

  “The seduction theory?” she says. “You realize that even Freud abandoned that one, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, if something is too far-fetched even for Freud, then—”

  “But, I mean, is it possible?”

  “A lot of things are possible.”

  “Kate, I don’t know what’s real or what’s imaginary anymore. I don’t even know if you’re really here, if we’re really having this conversation. But I keep having these memories—of a week spent in a psych ward, of Sara’s face in the dark, of hands on me, of things inside me, of—it’s—it hurts so much, Kate.”

  I fall into her arms, and she’s warm and she’s soft and she smells like smoke. And she holds me as the last rays of the gray sun disappear and another long winter night begins. In her arms, it’s warm and it’s safe.

  I don’t know how long I spend in here, buried in her heat and soaking her scarf with my tears, but in the end I look up and tell her, “Thanks for believing me.”

  “Of course.”

  “I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “It’s like I told you the other day,” she says. “Pain is pain, y’know? I’ve lost too many friends to callous skepticism.”

  “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

  “I can’t afford to doubt you. Neither of us can.” She bites her lip. “That guy friend I told you about? The one who got raped by a girl? He’s dead now.”

  “You mean—?”

  “Suicide,” she says. “OD’d on some pills. And, I mean, I don’t know if it was just because I laughed when he told me, but—”

  Now she’s crying too, and I pull her in, and we sit on my floor sharing what little warmth we have. “You think I might be right, though? About the things I’m remembering?”

  She says, “Well, here’s what I know: there’s no shortage of people in the world who see everyone else as a means to an end—who just want to wring whatever power and pleasure they can out of other people, y’know? I remember reading that one percent of all people are complete sociopaths—with no empathy for others at all. And I’m pretty sure the rest of us just differ from them by degree.”

  “Is that what Sara meant? When she told me that love destroys?”

  “I guess.”

  “Do you still think she was wrong?”

  But Kate doesn’t say anything—just holds me till the first star forces its way through the clouds.

  I say, “So what do we do now?”

  She looks at me and says, “I think the first step is to get you off the pills. I’m not an expert on addictions—nicotine aside—but I understand cold-turkey is usually the best way.”

  I’m rattling the pill bottle in my pocket.

  “Will you give me the pills?” she says.

  My hand wraps around them and squeezes them hard, and the plastic is strong and smooth on my skin.

  She says again, “Will you give me the pills? Please?”

  I feel the plastic starting to crack.

  “Please, Phelia.”

  I hand them to her.

  I’m completely surprised. It was easy. Easier than it should have been. And she takes them and drops them in her purse and says, “Well, I guess that’s done.” She pulls the zipper closed and says, “What now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We sit in the dark and she rattles her purse, and it sounds like the sleet on the window. “Well,” she finally says, “we’re not going anywhere tonight, I guess. Are you hungry?”

  I say, “Maybe. I’m not sure. I’ve kind of forgotten what hunger feels like.”

  “Maybe your mom’s hungry. I can cook.”

  “Good, because she can’t.”

  She laughs at that, and I laugh, and I look at her and she looks at me, and she stops and says—“Didn’t your eyes use to be blue?”

  “What?”

  “Your eyes. When we first met, they were blue. I remember. Now they just look really...gray.”

  And my mouth drops open and I say, “Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  “Oh God,” I say again, because now everything makes sense, and I have no idea what to say, what to do. The gray eyes. That was the one missing piece, but it all makes sense now. I stand up, and I’m holding the sides of my head, trying to think what to do, and I only now realize I’ve been backing away from her when I run into the wall and the heat from my burning face is sucked out the window.

  “Phelia, what’s going on?”

  “I—I’m not sure—she’s here, Kate, she’s here.” I look toward the ceiling, where I heard her footsteps before. “She’s here, oh God, she’s here.”

  “Who’s here? What are you talking about?” She stands up now, too, but she’s afraid to come near me, and my gray eyes turn bloodshot.

  “Sara,” I tell her. “She’s here. She picked me up last night, and she was in my car, and she was acting so strange, even for her I mean, and then she was gone in the morning and I told myself that I must have imagined it, that she was dead, that she died in the fire, that she wasn’t actually here. But she’s here, Kate, and I think that she’s taking the pills, that she’s on her own drug, and I know because her eyes were gray last night, just like mine turned gray, and I saw them, and I don’t know what she’ll do.”

  “Phelia, calm down. Nothing you’re saying makes sense.”

  “No, you’re not listening, this makes perfect sense. I don’t know why she’d do it, but who knows why she does anything? Maybe she saw the way the drug was making me act and wanted to see what it was like to be on it? Or maybe she’s trying to prove that it’s safe? I knew it, I knew I wasn’t crazy.”

  “Are you sure? Because you sound crazy.”

  “No, she’s here. And I have no idea what she’s going to do to me. To any of us. What do we do, Kate? We could all die tonight.”

  “Phelia,” she’s saying, “just calm down. I don’t think she’s here. Why would she be hiding in your house? That
doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know, right? Exactly. Nothing she’s going to do makes sense, because she’s taking the pills. She’s going to be exactly like me, trapped in her own nightmare world, seeing things that aren’t there, and she’ll kill people. She’ll kill us. I don’t know what to do.” More noise from the attic.

  “Ophelia—”

  “Don’t you get it? We have to get out. We have to leave.”

  “Where would we go? The roads are completely blocked.”

  “Oh God, you’re right.” And now the darkness is pouring in from the window, overpowering the single lamp in the corner, and my throat is starting to close and my eyes land on her purse. The pills. (What? No.) The pills. It’s the cop, the young one with the freckles, and he’s standing behind me and he’s whispering, The pills. I look back at Kate and she’s saying Who are you talking to? and to my left is the girl with the Uggs, saying You need to get the pills. Remember when we killed the cop? What you need is the pills. Take the pills, kill Sara, it’s all over. Then the fat man has my arm in his beefy hand, and he says, Get the pills, now, and I look to Kate’s face, but it’s fading away. I say, No, I can’t, I just finally now got them off of my hands, please don’t make me, not now, and I turn and the hipster, the one with the beard in the flannel, is standing there, saying, We’re almost done. Just get the pills. Take the pills one more time, and we’ll end this, okay? (But why are you back? I was free, you were finally gone, please just leave me alone...) And then in my ear, Rachel’s voice in my ear: You can do this, you’re almost done, just take the pills and we’ll end it forever. I’m looking toward Kate, and her gray, blurry face is filling with fear, and she’s biting her lip till it bleeds, and I tell her, I need those pills back. She says What? There’s no way, but I say, I’m not asking. She runs for the door, but it’s all in slow motion. My ghost friends and I drag her down to the floor, and they all hold her down while I yank on her purse, and the leather first stretches but finally breaks, and then tampons and lipsticks explode to the floor while the cracking pill bottle flies into my hand. I squeeze till the orange explodes into flames and a shower of pills. And the pills fill my hands and my hands fill my mouth and I swallow the handfuls of whiteness. And now as the light fades away and the room disappears, I think, This is how it was supposed to end.