Ophelia, Alive Read online

  You are, obviously.

  I was hoping you’d say that, she says, and I see her eyes disappear, leaving nothing but empty, blue space in the slot that once held them, and I squeeze my head (hard) between cold, scabrous hands, trying to stop it from throbbing. Somewhere above me are birds yelling loud, and their sharp, piercing screams dig into my ears while the room spins.

  Let me out. The words are a yell in my head, but only a whisper in my mouth, getting lost somewhere in the dried blood and the caked-on dirt. Let me out! Then I’m at the door again, this time on my knees, but pounding with my fists, and they both make no noise when they strike the immovable wall that it is. Just like my voice, the thump of my fists stops dead just outside of my skin and collapses to the floor where it rolls in the gray like a marble in a maze. I pound until I can’t feel my hands anymore.

  What are you doing?

  That wasn’t Sara’s voice. It was Rachel’s, and in the corner of my eye, I see her scrubs and her sneakers, and she’s standing there next to me, even though I was alone just a second ago. But the more I see people fade in and out, the more normal it seems, and I’m thinking maybe I’m the same way. Maybe I exist as long as someone needs to talk to me, and then I fade into the ether again. How would I know otherwise?

  What are you doing? She says it again, gently, and her voice whistles like a breeze, and I think to myself that I owe her an answer.

  Trying to get out. To escape. Leave me alone. Just let me pound on this door.

  What are you trying to escape from, though? she says.

  The hospital. Obviously.

  But don’t you remember? The hospital burned down.

  Of course I remember, I tell her. I’m the one who started the fire. But here we are. Now just let me pound on the door, it’s all I have left. And I pound on the steel till my head fills with concrete.

  You’re not listening, she says. Have you tried looking through the little window?

  Of course I have. All I can see through it are her eyes—

  But she’s gone now, Rachel says.

  I grab the bottom of the tiny frame with my shaking fingers and drag my eyes into place so I can see through the wired glass, and the flame-red blur drifts in and out of focus, till it finally sharpens into an orange carpet, and a faux-wood desk, and a bathroom scale. Not the white, sterile room I expected, but the one in the basement, the other room that haunts my nightmares. Sara’s office. And she’s sitting inside, hunched over her desk, facing away, filling the room and the room filling her.

  And down by my feet is a shape that’s familiar. A translucent loop of blue beads and a cross. Kate’s rosary, peeking just half a bead under the door, but it’s catching too much of the gray sun to miss. It’s there for a reason. It must be. I reach down and grab it and pull.

  It won’t move.

  A foot coming down and an eye in the window. She’s back at the door, with her foot on the beads, and I hear her voice pounding through concrete. It’s louder this time. Yeah, she says, it’s there for a reason. That reason is because I threw it on the floor the other day and I accidentally kicked it just now. Both were random, stupid accidents. I sink down the door, sliding hard against it with the shreds of my t-shirt, and catching my skin on each tag of the nail-shredded paint. She says, Weird, though, isn’t it, that these two rooms are right next-door now? That our happy memories are finally joined together and we can spend eternity in the prisons we’ve built for ourselves? I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing, Oaf. We’ll sit here and watch the minutes of our lives tick away.

  That’s your plan? To sit here and wait for death?

  And she sighs and she says, Oaf, who says you always need a plan? All plans end the same way: you die. And anyway, what’s left for either of us, now that we’re both murderers?

  The images from last night flood back in a swirl of supernovas, and I gasp. It was all real, then. When I saw you standing over Mom’s body, that was—

  She says, Yeah, I’m starting to think that it was real. It was so strange from the inside, so much stranger than I expected. In my head, it’s still a jumble of images, but I’ll never forget the taste of her blood or the sound of her scream. Now I know why you love this stuff so much, why you can’t get off of it, even when you want to. Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.

  Where did you hear that?

  You say it all the time, she says, when you’re sleepwalking. You said it the other night when you were standing over my bed. And when I gasp, she adds, Yeah, I was awake. But I knew you’d never kill me.

  Why—why would you think that? How could you know that?

  “Because I own you,” she says. “Because you’re mine.”

  What?

  “You still don’t get it. You still don’t remember that you promised you’d always be mine. That you belong to me. That’s why I had to bring you here. Now we’ll be together forever. There’s nothing between you, me, and the embrace of death.”

  But—

  “Love consumes. Love destroys.”

  And Mom?

  “Just a casualty of love. Love, death, life, hate—they’re all the same thing, just expressed in different ways. Why do you think I’ve been making you kill, anyway?”

  What?

  “Why do you think I made you kill, Oaf? You think I didn’t know what effect the pills would have on you? You think I forgot what happened to my rats? You think I had hope for this drug? That I thought it would make me a gazillionaire or something? You think something that was so disastrous in animal testing would ever have made it to market?”

  I’m tracing the scratches in the door with my fingernail and it fits perfectly.

  “I just wanted to know what would happen if my chemical got inside of you. How your body would react. If I could turn you into one of my rats. It’s been a fascinating experiment.”

  But—

  “You just don’t seem to understand that you’re mine. Why do you think I got you fired at the publisher? At the middle school?”

  Wait, you—

  “It’s because you were trying to get away from me. Don’t think I didn’t know. It’s the same reason I sabotaged your stupid play senior year. The same reason I withdrew your application from NYU.”

  You—?

  “I realized that the only way to keep you to myself was to turn you into something that only I could understand. To climb inside you and teach you to destroy. To kill. So I did. And now you’re mine forever. Now we’ve shared something no one else can ever share. And since no one will understand you anymore—since they’ll all hate you now—you’ll have to stay here with me. It’ll be just like the pretend games we used to play, but now it’s real. We’re in danger, and the only people we can trust are each other. For real. Forever.”

  I stare into the gray behind the blue, and I’ve never seen her eyes smile like this. I search for something to say, but the words aren’t coming because I know that she’s right—that there’s no hope anymore and there hasn’t been for a long time. That she owns me (body, soul, mind), and she probably always has. That I’m swallowed by the gray.

  “I admit I was surprised, at least a little,” she’s saying, “that you started killing so quickly. I mean, the rats did, but rats are rats. They’re stupid. You, though—well, you talk about right and wrong a lot. I thought the whole moral compass thing might get in the way. But it really didn’t.”

  I look for Rachel, where she was standing, but all she is now is a pile of charred bones.

  “It’s weird,” Sara’s saying, laughing to herself, picking under her nails, “how everyone has their moral principles, and yet they’re all so eager to violate them. Y’know? Everyone’s just looking for an excuse. For some of my classmates in med school, all it took was for there to be a good grade or some funding on the line. For you? Just the right mix of chemicals.”

  That’s not the same thing!

  “Isn’t it? We’re all just chemicals interacting with chemicals, are
n’t we? Isn’t money just a chemical, setting off more chemicals in your brain? Maybe you didn’t choose how you’d react to the pills. Maybe you didn’t. But y’know what? My classmates didn’t choose how they’d react to money and grades. It’s all just chemicals setting off chemicals.”

  My hand is still on the beads, still pulling, and I honestly don’t even know why. Just for something to hold onto, I guess.

  “Unless you want to believe in the soul,” she says. “I assume that’s why you’re still yanking on this crappy plastic necklace—because you still want to believe in the soul, right? That the human mind is more than just a bunch of electrochemical reactions? That deep down, we’re really moral creatures? That there’s meaning to everything? That you have some sort of consciousness higher than the random firing of your brainstem?”

  The question just hangs in the air like concrete, halfway through the door, halfway into my skull, and it won’t budge no matter how hard I try to dislodge it.

  “But how is that even a little bit comforting?” she says. “Is it really reassuring to think that you have a consciousness higher than the chemicals in your brain, and yet you still gave in to them? Because, without a soul, you’re just a victim of chemistry. But with it, you chose to commit those murders. Which hypothetical universe do you prefer, Oaf?”

  I inhale to answer, but I choke.

  “But anyway, it was less than twenty-four hours, wasn’t it? Before you killed for the first time? I think it was that night, right? After that last dinner we had at Mom’s? You were packing up the stuff in your room—I was out in the hall, watching—and you passed out. But then you got up and made sort of a beeline for the door. It was strange because I thought you had woken up at first, but then I realized you were still asleep. Well, kind of an altered state of consciousness, I think—not asleep, but not awake, either. But anyway, you got in your car and started driving—it was the weirdest thing—and you headed back toward campus. I was following you in my Jag, obviously. And then when you got there, I was thinking maybe you would just go to bed, or something, but instead you just sort of started wandering. And then you cornered a guy—just some random guy, I guess—you cornered him on the skywalk, and you strangled him against the wall. It was awesome.

  Awesome?

  “Don’t be so righteous, you’ve watched plenty of horror movies. It’s a thrill to watch a murder. It’s a rush. Everybody knows that that’s true, it’s just that some people aren’t ready to say it out loud. But anyway, it was at that point that I realized I should probably hide the evidence. I didn’t want you getting caught before I had full control over you, and I definitely didn’t want your little indiscretion to get traced back to me. So I took the body and slid it into one of my drawers down here. It was only after the second murder that I realized you would come up with the exact same idea. Great minds think alike, am I right?”

  Uh—

  “Of course, when you decided to burn down the hospital—which, wow, by the way—that was kind of impossible to cover up, obviously. But I took the opportunity to become a little dead myself, which was probably the best decision I ever made. Now the collections agencies can’t find me, so, thanks for that.”

  Um—

  “I was a little worried when you swore the stuff off, but I knew that if I kept it in front of you, you’d eventually come around to it.”

  What? How could you know that—

  “Because you want the same thing everybody else wants, Oaf. You want power. We all do. We all want to see people cower in fear when we walk by. Everyone wants to take the people they love and lock them up forever, and everyone wants to take the people they hate and destroy them, and at the end of the day, what’s the difference, Oaf? Either you do have a soul, in which case you chose evil a long time ago, or you’re just a bunch of chemicals, in which case, who cares? Why cling to comforting lies when you can just have what you want? You never really quit the stuff, so I know you agree with me on this, whether you’re going to admit it or not.”

  I don’t.

  “Oh, please, Oaf. It’s over. You’re mine now. You can drop the act.” Her breath fogs the window till her eyes disappear, and she adds, “We can finally be honest with each other. Now what do you really want? Drop the bullshit about wanting to be a teacher or a writer, and just tell me what you really want from life. And think fast, because there’s probably not too much life left.”

  What difference does it make?

  “I just thought it’d be fun for a laugh. But we all know you’ll just tell me you want to be a writer again, because you can’t even be honest with yourself. So just go ahead and say it.”

  I’m not going to say it for you.

  “Fine,” she says. “I’ll say it for you, then. I want to be a writer, Sara!” She laughs. “Cracks me up every time I hear it. Don’t get me wrong, the world needs writers—I mean, I guess it probably does—maybe—but I’ve never even seen you set pen to paper. You don’t want to be a writer, you just want to tell people you’re a writer, so they’ll think you’re cool.” She coughs. “It all comes back to power. You want to feel cooler than other people, so that you can have power over them. Just like everybody else does.”

  I want to say, No, you’re wrong, and that’s stupid, but I can’t make myself say it. Can’t push the words through my dry throat. I’m turning them over and over in my head, trying to see them from an angle that tells me she’s wrong, but my thoughts get lost in the gray.

  Why do I smell coffee and cigarettes?

  And what is it that YOU want, Sara?

  “What?”

  You heard me. Answer your own question. What is it you want?

  The window fogs up and her eyes fade away, and she says, “We both know what I want, Oaf. I want you. I want you to admit that you love me and you’re mine forever.”

  No.

  “What?”

  No.

  “Stop mumbling. Speak up.”

  “NO!”

  “There you go!”

  “You want to know what I really want, Sara?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure?” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Tell me.”

  “Okay. I want to cause you every bit of pain you’ve caused me. I want to add your body to my pile, but I want to do it as slowly and painfully as I can. I want to hear your screams until you beg for your life to end. And then I want to keep you alive, and in pain, for as long as I can.” I’m coughing up blood. “That’s what I want, Sara. That’s what I really want.”

  Her eyes get wide in the blue, and at first I think it’s fear, but then I see the corners of her enormous smile, and she laughs and says, “Finally we’re getting somewhere. Finally we’ve gotten past all that bullshit repression. It’s like I keep telling you, Oaf: love, hate, hugging, kissing, strangling, killing, fucking—it’s all the same thing. They’re all infinite sides of one infinite coin that the universe has been flipping since before you and I were even a thing.” And she winks and she disappears again. And the blue fills with red, and my nails slide down the paint till my face mashes into the vomit and blood on the floor, and my eyes sting with acid and leak red into the brown.

  What are you doing? The voice comes from a pair of boots next to my face, and I don’t have to look up to know that the hipster lumberjack whose name I never learned is back at my side.

  “I’m dying.”

  You’re dying? he says. He sounds skeptical.

  “I’m dying,” I tell him. “I’m giving up because there’s nothing left for me to do. I’m Ophelia. I have three jobs to do in this production: show up, freak out, and die. And I’ve done the first two, so this must be my death scene. Now leave me alone. You’ve never been any help.”

  But—

  “Get away from me!”

  And he whispers, Look in front of you, before he walks away into the heavy, gray air.

  I force my eyes open. The gray light stings hard, and my breath tastes like acid from insid
e my guts, but I choke, and I gasp, till the room is in focus. In front of my eyes, and refracting blue sun into all of the corners of the room, are Kate’s rosary beads, lying with Sara’s foot off of them now. My hand’s saying Pick them up, wrap me around them, and I still feel the pits and the valleys dug into my hand from the last time I squeezed them.

  And so, I’m back where I was mentally just a few days ago, wondering Is there a chance Kate might be right? Wondering if saying, Oh, Virgin Mother, pray for me! will actually result in a virgin mother praying for me. Probably not. Sara’s probably right that there’s nothing more than chemicals reacting with other chemicals, and she’s definitely right that if there is more than that, that that’s even worse—just a bigger burden to bear. She’s probably right about everything.

  But she might be wrong.

  There’s more to the universe than just atoms bumping up against each other. I could be wrong, but maybe I’m not.

  What have I got to lose?

  I don’t know why I feel so weird about wrapping my hand around a dull piece of plastic and string. If there’s nothing in the world but chemicals and reactions, then this string of beads is harmless. A security blanket. Something to squeeze till it makes me feel better about my march toward the grave. And yet the trepidation is shaking my bones, as if it really matters, but I know that it must just be my brain doing weird things to keep me distracted while it finally shuts down. Is it childish to reach for a security blanket, or is it mature to admit there are plenty of things I don’t know? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  Okay then.

  I reach out, I wrap my hand around the beads, and I pull them back, and I hold them close, and I wait. The acid steam in front of my face goes into my lungs and out, and each time I breathe it stings more than before. I breathe my own breath and taste my own vomit, till the pain and the cold turn to numb and to black, and the thought that something miraculous still might happen is the last of the absurd ideas that I banish from my mind.