Ophelia, Alive Read online

  wed. jan. 19.

  11:53 pm.

  clear for the first time

  When I open my eyes I don’t know how much time has elapsed. The darkness is gone now, but nothing looks quite the same as it did. The ice is gone from the windows and the fog is gone from the air, and my nails are a thousand miles long, like the claws of a rat in a trap. I’m alone now, I don’t know what happened to Kate or Rachel or Cyndi or the fat man or any of my friends, but I still can hear Her in the roof, in the walls, in the nails in the furniture, and I see now that She’s always been there, the screws holding my bones together. I have to extract Her, with tweezers, or pliers, or fire. I may have to tear my own flesh from my bones, but I have to remove Her, I have to. My bedroom is dark, a darkness like nothing I’ve seen. It’s a sopping blue blanket that’s sticking to everything, a smothering blue blob that feels like Her love. It presses down on me, demanding my breath, and it’s holding me down while it stares in my eyes, but I won’t let it hold me, I promise I won’t. I wrestle it off with the strength in my veins and I force myself onto my feet. My heels dig down deep in the carpet. I’m ten miles tall and the room, with its dark, sinking memories, can’t drag me back to my morass. I see now that what Kate was saying, that death and that life are opposed, that they’re separate, was bullshit. They’re two sides of one coin, and you can’t embrace one without kissing the other. Her death, Sara’s death, will feed into my life, and there’s no contradiction. Each life ever lived has been built on a thousand or ten-thousand deaths, and there’s no choice except to make sure that your own life is built on the deaths of all others. I’m a mouse in your trap now, dear Sara, we’re both mice, awash in the flesh of the mouse-crush of old Universe 25, and you must know that I’ll be the one down here grabbing your leg and then pulling you into the dark, where I’ll pick all the flesh from your bones before you get a chance to start feasting on mine. It’s dark and it’s sweaty and hairy down here, Sara, smells like a pile of mouse flesh that’s rotting, but these are the mice that survive through the excess of excess; the ones who can cause the most death live the longest. You think you can win at this game built on shadows and memories and ghosts and (my?) death, but as long as you’re here it’s still amateur hour. You know that it is. Let me show you the pain, let me show you each second of anguish you gave me, in double. I’m tearing the curtain down, dropping it (rough) on the floor, because now I won’t hide from my pain. I’m embracing the Worm, even as (in the drama) he feasts on my flesh. I won’t be the Actress. I will be the Worm, and the Worm always wins, and I will be the Worm. I burrow through floor and through walls and through ceiling. The wood tastes like earth and the earth tastes like flesh, and I send out my thoughts. Hi there, Sara. I’m here. And I’m not in the past anymore. And I’m coming for you, and I’ll pick your bones clean. And I know you can hear all my thoughts, and I’m coming for you. The walls shake, the floor shakes, they pound with Her footsteps—the ones that I’d hear every night when She’d come down to see me. I remember Her back then, ten thousand feet tall, and constructed from stethoscopes, bubblegum, sinews; long, manicured claws that would reach through my curtains and fill my performance with cannibal Worms. But the teeth and the claws won’t touch me this time, and my flesh is like steel and my eyes are like fire. I snake down the hall and I pour myself up through the door to the attic, the one that my mom never opens, the one filled with memories we’ve banished for good. Lab coats and notebooks and footie pajamas, spices and plush toys and dump trucks and Barbies. Everything piled in a dark, blackish mass, which bleeds jagged shadows down into the floor, while the walls stab asbestos deep into my lungs. I see Her again, just a bright Cheshire smile that appears in the corner, and then it fades out and fades in another, and then I’m inside it and dodging Her teeth. Where are you? Come out. And Her voice, like a thunderous whisper, beats out from the walls and the boxes of memories: I am out. I’m in you, around you, and through you. The pills in your veins and the screws in your bones. You said so yourself. So why are you trying to find me? I’ve always been here. I claw at my arms till the blood turns to rivers, but can’t dig Her out of my bones. And I swing at the boxes with arms made of night, and the blood and the stars splatter hard on the cardboard and knock over pages that spill on the floor, where the crayon and the rats mix together. I reach for the smile in the dark that’s Her face, but it’s only the star stickers, bright in the dark, on a ceiling they tore down a decade ago. And Her voice, small and infinite, drifts from the corner; it’s dripping with violence, Her words driven under my fingernails, spikes with a hammer. I try to escape, out from under the weight of the words bleeding pain in my ears, but my sheets are like concrete, my limbs are like twine. I say, Go away, please just leave me alone, but Her breath pins me down, and I soak through the mattress, the bedframe, I’m liquid. I’m black blood that seeps through the cracks of the floor and the pipes and the bedbugs and roaches. I land in my mom’s room, the one that I’d run to when She gave me nightmares, grab onto the bed, the edge of her mattress, and pull my chin over it, feeling the scrape of the quilt on my throat. Hey Mommy? Hey Mommy. The snoring is filling the dark; they’re the snores that I always imagined were monsters down under her bed, but were always my mother just breathing the dark in and out, and yet this time it’s different. It’s deep and it’s angry, and liquid is fresh on the sheets, still hot in the black. It drips down my chin and then onto my feet and the carpet and stains both my hands, and the snoring’s not coming from Mommy. It’s higher and darker and wetter and deeper, and eyes are above me, high up toward the ceiling. They stare like two lamps dripping wet with fresh blood, and the red Cheshire grin grabs me hard and inhales my attention. I see Her, ten-thousand feet tall on the mattress, with teeth miles long like a rat’s and a skeleton smothered in fresh, jagged rust, and Her mouth is deep-dripping the blood of my mother. I stare in Her eyes now; they’re galaxies-wide and the Earth is revolving around them. They’re spinning in nighttime and flashing like quasars, electrons and teeth and planets and stars. I quiver on rubbery bare feet (pajamas?) and watch as Her mouth gapes wide open with comets and caskets. There She is, in the dark, with all suns revolving around Her. She’s swallowing kings and devouring kingdoms. I am become death, destroyer of worlds. She is the darkness, the shadows oppressing the room that push hard on the windows until they all shatter, and light from the streetlamps is sucked deep inside Her. A dark singularity, heat death incarnate, the owner of all of me, grabbing for more. Ten tongues, thirty claws, twisting through the dark, toward me, and I’m three feet tall and dive into the closet. The smell of the dust and the pine and the solitude, dense, yellow light, and the choke and the hiss of the furnace, and She never finds me in here, never knew of the deep, secret tunnels. I dive into Hefty bags filled full of clothes, but Her tendrils are right there behind me. No, wait, you can’t do this! My tunnels were where I was safe, you don’t know about them, you can’t find me in here! But the teeth and the claws and the eyes are all scraping my heels, and I dig through the plastic and cotton (a rat or a worm), snake my way through the memories like water as tentacle mouths bite my feet. There’s nothing left now, no part of my soul that She hasn’t invaded. I swim through the night, through the sea of old board games, white dresses, and thrown-away novels, and drag myself (choking on memories) out onto a beach made of concrete, and crash through deep rug burns and doors into darkness. It’s cold and it’s black, and it smells like cadavers and metal and fast-dripping water. I scrape my nose open on steel as I rise, till my eyes meet a sea of dead, cold, graying flesh. You knew that She’d do this, Oaf—knew all along She would chase you back here—that the morgue was the one, only place this could end. You’re just one more to add to the pile of the dead in Her sanctum, a trophy to hang on Her wall. You know this is the place, Oaf, the palace of death where we all end up when it’s all over, but you just gave in so much sooner than most. You can’t inhale death and expect not to choke. You can’t do that, Oaf, and now that She’s
trapped you, you’ve learned that too late. She roars through the wall like an army of storms and of teeth and of knives and of hooks and of thunder. A freight train with headlamps that suck all the light and the heat from the room, till the mouths of the dead give their last drop of moisture up into Her. I try hard to run and trip over my scrubs, while my ID badge loops on a table. She’s a black, gaping mouth that’s as wide as the night, and She sucks glowing dust from the stars on the ceiling, sucks light from the cold winter sun, and sucks heat from the coffee, guitars, and the cigarette smoke, and sucks teeth from my dad’s peanut-goal-kicking smile. It chews through the SpongeBobs adorning scraped knees and the block towers built when the sun showers started. It burns through the songs in my head and the book in my pocket, the crunch of the snow and the glow of the stage lights. Her tongue is a hundred miles long and it’s sharp. I push myself forward, tear thin, brittle skin from the concrete, till bones crack and teeth bleed deep-red, like the Exit sign glowing—the Exit sign! High on the wall, like a weak eye that’s smothered in whiskey and blinking at black tar and long, empty nights. I tear bones from sinew and jump over corpses that fly through the air toward the Nothing behind me. I slide over sharp, rusty drains, through a blunt, sideways hail made of bathroom scales, scalpels, and teeth, lips, and gums, till I find my two feet and I sprint for the exit. I sprint for the red, because red leads away, to the hallway, away from the black fog of Her. I reach for the door while Her teeth and Her lips scrape my back and my thighs and my skull, and I jerk it wide open and slam it behind me, and stare at the light—but it’s strange and it’s gray. It’s a gray that I’ve only seen once, and a smell burns my eyes in a way that I can’t not remember. The four white-gray walls that I spent that long week in, the ones with the bars and the small slot for eyes, and the huge, sweaty fat man with strong, meaty hands. And the clank shakes my bones as She latches the door with Her tongue (and Her claws, and Her spines, and Her eyes), and everything’s white now and everything’s gray, and I look to the sun filtering in through the window for hope, but the light is too weak and the cold is too strong, and I see now that this is the way that She planned it. That through all the night, She was chasing me here, to the room where my soul has been locked up forever. That through all my life, this was where it was leading. The sun’s rising now, just to show me the truth, and She swallows the room, and She swallows the light, and She swallows me, too, and inside Her is nothing but gray.

  (Gray forever.)

  (purge)

  thurs. jan. 20.

  7:50 am.

  it’s over, isn’t it

  My head is starting to clear as the sun rises over the prairie and fills my cell with the awful, gray light that I know now I’ll never escape. I’ve been dragging it behind me for years now, so it was only a matter of time before it swallowed me whole.

  There’s a pounding in my head that won’t stop, and won’t even do me the favor of finding a consistent rhythm. My hands are shaking and so are my feet, and I’m dressed in clothes I haven’t worn since high school. A t-shirt with a band on it I haven’t listened to in years, and a pair of too-tight jeans with a spiky belt. I don’t quite remember putting them on, but it seems like I’ve been wearing them forever and not at all.

  I’m waking from a nightmare, something about the air becoming a galaxy and then a freight train, something about the blood in my veins eating me alive. My arms are covered in deep lacerations, and my shirt and my jeans are torn a thousand ways, and the shredded face on my shirt looks like mine. What year is it?

  Everything’s quiet.

  I’ve been in this room before. It’s the gray one they shut me away in the night that I tried to hurt Sara. But this isn’t back then, and hasn’t it been years since then? These clothes were the ones I was wearing back then (I think), but they look older and tighter and somehow they’re itchier. Dust and loose threads are invading my veins.

  I feel like I should stand up, but I’m not sure I can move.

  I’m afraid to look up at the window, because I loathe what it does to the sunlight—the way it filters all the radiance from the bright-yellow glow till it’s nothing but a dull-gray scarf of dust landing heavy on the floor. The cold tiles beneath me are whitish with flecks of every color, probably made from the scraps of linoleum left over on the floor of the tile factory. Every color of the rainbow mixed into puke.

  I vomit on my hands.

  When I’m finally done with that, I wipe the reddish bile on my torn shirt and pants while I try to remember how and why I’m here. I remember talking to Kate in my old bedroom—what was she doing in my house?—and then I got chased through the dark. I keep thinking Sara locked me in this room, but that makes no sense at all. I burned this building to the ground. She died in the fire.

  I think. Right?

  From where I’m sitting, in my vomit-soaked corner, I can see that the door, the one with the single slot for my eyes to peer through, is shut tight, and presumably locked as well, but I guess I should at least try it before I give up and pass out in my vomit-puddle. I feel my guts slosh around inside as I push myself to my feet, like my intestines have been hanging loose for a week. And my feet are bare, and the tiles are cold and they’re covered in sunlit dust that clings to my leathery, winter-skin soles. Every step is pain.

  I trip forward across the bent shadows of bars on the floor and I reach for the door as I stumble. It’s solid and filled with concrete, just like I remember. A thousand pounds of door, expertly engineered to keep twelve-year-olds in. The lines worn in the paint by my fingernails are still there, or are these someone else’s paint-gouges? I push and pull on the door, but it’s not moving, and my muscles ache, burn, and drip red on the floor. I pound with my fists, but the door makes no sound, doesn’t move, doesn’t shake, just absorbs every punch (every kick) and gives pain in exchange.

  Then my eyes land on the slot, the one in the door I spent day after day looking through, waiting hundreds of hours for something to change, but all that I ever could see looking through was the fat man’s bald head. It seems lower now, and I have to half-crouch to see through it this time, and somehow the crouching hurts more than the pounding, but slowly my knees and my back bend, and I finally can see through the wire-laced glass—and I scream and fall backwards. Pain shoots through my skull, lighting up my hair (jagged and wild), and the backs of my eyelids turn red and then yellow.

  Those eyes, the ones that stared at me through the dark every night, floating (wild) above the Cheshire cat grin, now lit up and crackling with jagged, red veins, and they twitch and they quiver, unable to focus on anything more than my pores. Staring in, staring back at me, pressed against glass, blinking hard in the dawn while the fog from her breath rises slowly, in pulses. From the floor I can’t see them as well, but they’re there, in the glass, staring in through my skin and my bones, and they shake. They stare into me, and I stare into them, while the sun inches into the sky. But the light is still gray, like her breath.

  She licks her dry lips, and she finally says, You’re awake.

  Her voice is ethereal, quivering a little. It soaks through the concrete and steel like a liquid. Slow, like it’s trying to find its way in, but I hear her.

  Good, she says, and the glass puffs up with the fog, just for half a second. As soon as the word disappears, it turns blue-clear again, while a few wisps still lazily cling to the wires.

  I try to find words, to get up from the floor, but I stare and I can’t look away from her eyes, and my mouth tastes like blood and like salt and like dirt, and I choke on my tongue, and I gasp in the cold and wet air, and it stings in my throat like the gray of the sun. Is the floor shaking?

  The memories from last night are (sort of) returning. A chase that began when I took back my pills from Kate’s purse; then it led through the attic, the past, and the wreckage. I chased; then she turned and she chased after me; then she caught me and locked me in here, in this cell. I chew on my tongue, trying to think of what happened to Kate an
d my mom, till it bleeds and the blood runs out over my bruised bottom lip and it adds itself into the pool on the floor. And her eyes (which still quiver) stay framed in the glass of the door’s tiny window, while I find myself backing across the tile floor, crab-walking drunkenly through blood and through vomit. Closing my eyes (but she won’t go away), and I clench brittle fists till my knuckles pop (loud).

  I was starting to think you’d never wake up, she says. You took so much of the stuff. I had no idea what sort of effect it would have. But I’m pleased with what I’ve seen.

  What are you doing to me? The words slip out of my mouth, angry and loud but feeble and choking, desperate to escape my throat but terrified of the sweaty winter air. The fog on the window recedes for a moment as she takes a deep breath and thinks over the question. And somehow I see her smile through the door, through the concrete and steel.

  And she says, Well, that’s an interesting question, Oaf, because I haven’t actually done anything to you. I got you a job. I did that. You’re welcome, by the way. But you took the pills. You’re the one who chose to down them like shots at a frat party. You’re the one who chose to use them as an all-purpose problem-solver. You’re the one who decided that murder was an appropriate response to your fear.

  I say, That’s not fair, but she stares at me through the glass, biting her lip and twitching her eyes till I can feel her pupils bouncing around in my skull.

  Isn’t it? she says. I gave you the pills but you chose to take them. You’re the one who chose to take them when you burned down the hospital, and you’re the one who chose to take them when the cop was at your door, and you’re the one who chose to take them when you heard me in the attic. If it wasn’t your choice, whose was it? If you aren’t calling the shots here, who is?