Ophelia, Alive Read online

  It’s not like the black is unwelcome.

  When your dreams are nothing but horror, the right not to dream is a right that you’ll fight for. The ability to shut your eyes and see nothing but the backs of your eyelids is a need that’s inescapable. I thank the blackness, over and over, for making everything go away, and I savor the numbness of the fuzz spreading through my brain, thinking that even if I’m not more than a handful of atoms, at least maybe I’m less. Maybe I’m just a low hum in a radiating chaos, enduring an occasional fit of unpleasant consciousness. And every moment I drown in the sea of black is one more bit of freedom from her voice scratching on the steel and the concrete, worming its way into my ear like a tongue.

  What are you doing?

  It’s the same question again, but in a different voice this time, one made of bits and pieces that still aren’t quite assembled together, still floating in the dark, daring me to catch them, sort them out, combine them. Like some musical notes jumbled at the bottom of a page of empty staffs, or like some sharp Legos lying on the floor in the dark. Not quite an intrusion into my sleep (like an alarm clock), but just a gentle voice waking me, a character in the dream I wasn’t having. A sun coming through blinds or a wind beating hard against the strong side of a warm house. I piece it together and I see that I know the voice, know it better than anything I’ve heard all morning. Not music or a Lego castle, not a whisper from a fiction, but soothing and sharp, like a glass bottleneck sliding up and down the neck of a guitar.

  “Kate?”

  The darkness in my eyes rolls back, and I’m looking up now, and her face is ringed with light that ignites her dreadlocks and sharpens her freckles into deep, black punctuations. She gasps at seeing me half-naked and filthy, but she’s here (somehow?), and she’s trying to smile. What are you doing? she says again.

  I tell her, “I’m trapped here, Kate, I’m trapped in this room. Sara locked me in here, in this room in the psych ward, with burnt bones and rats and my blood and my vomit. I don’t understand how she trapped me in here, but I’m trapped and I can’t tell what’s real, and I just can’t escape,” and she tells me, Calm down. “What?”

  Calm down.

  “How can I calm down? I can’t think, I can’t see straight, I don’t know what’s real, and you’re probably not real, even, I’m seeing things and I keep hearing voices—just so many voices. I wish you could help me, but I’m too far gone, Kate. Just please go away. Just please. Go away.”

  Phelia, all you have to do is walk out.

  “What? What do you mean? I don’t understand, you’re not making sense, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, and she’s waiting out there, and she’s going to hurt me, she thinks that she owns me—Kate, you have to help me, I don’t understand—”

  Oh, Phelia—how can I make you understand? How can I make you see what’s real?

  She stares into my eyes with her boundless brown pools that quiver with tears. And I see her lips trembling. She’s mouthing some words, some words from last night (it seems so long ago), and the words are familiar and cut through the sun.

  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. And she shudders and chokes back a gag, and she pulls off her shirt.

  As the gray sun lights up her brown curves, she kneels down beside me and touches the shirt to my face, and it soaks up the blood and the vomit. Her shirt smells like coffee and sweat and tobacco, the smell of an addict who’s stayed awake all through the night, probably running down dark alleys, shouting my name, and it finds all the dried bits of bile on my face, and it gently removes them. I watch them all fall as wet, wobbly scales, on the ground. And then when I’m clean and my pores taste the air, she tosses it off in the corner of the room, and she lays down beside me, and wraps her arms around me, and holds me in the afternoon light. I cry on her skin, and she cries in my hair, and we lie on the floor in the muck till we’re finally warm.

  It’s been hours of lying here, crying and thinking of nothing, and I say to her, “Thank you.”

  She thinks for a minute and finally tells me, I think that I might understand now. Maybe a little, at least. And the sun’s disappeared from the window, the gray in the room’s gotten duller, and she stands back up and she holds out her hand, and she says, Are you ready to go now?

  “Where?”

  It’s time to leave, she says.

  “How? I’m so confused.”

  Just walk out.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Just walk out.

  I look at her face, and it’s gold in the gray, there are tears in her eyes, and she’s tugging my hand (gently), not toward the door, but away, toward the back of the room. But I can’t pull my eyes from the heavy steel door and its tiny blue window.

  Her eyes fill the slot again (Sara’s cold, gray eyes). They laugh.

  “Where are you going, Oaf?”

  “I—”

  “There’s only one way out, y’know.”

  “But—”

  “It’s through me,” she says. “You know it’s always been through me.”

  My hand’s falling empty as I push toward the door and I say, “I don’t think you want that, Sara.” I press my eyes against the glass, and I stare into hers, and I say, “I don’t think you want that at all.”

  Phelia, please just look up—

  “Oh, I do,” Sara says. “Come get me. Come destroy me like you promised.”

  Please, just look up.

  “Open the door, then,” I tell her. “Just open the door, and I’ll tear you apart—like I should have last night, and the night before that.”

  And she whispers, “Okay.”

  I hear the bolt click, and then slide, and it’s heavy. Kate’s saying, No, Phelia, oh, please just look up, but it’s all just a buzz in my head and I swat it away. The bolt pounds the door and then grinds hard against it. I hear a latch click, and the door opens wide, and there’s Sara.

  That gray pair of eyes and the body attached to them, standing in front of me, daring me (begging?) to strike, to attack. To open her veins and to pour her out onto the tile and the rug filled with mildew. I see now that she’s not the voice that I heard in the attic, and she’s not the goddess who swallowed the sun in my mom’s room, and she’s not the freight train who crashed through the wall with the black, gaping mouth.

  She’s me.

  The door is a mirror, and through it, I see not ephemeral monsters or willowy demons, but just a young girl with the same scars that I have, the same stone-gray eyes, and the same ratty hair. It was never a secret that she was the pretty one; now, though—hunched over, with scars on her arms, and her bones sticking out of her skin, and her clothes torn to shreds, hanging off of her limp, corpse-like figure?

  She’s nothing but me.

  There are bits of her—bits of her pill, I mean—scraping inside of my veins still, and making my nails itch, and whispering, Kill her. But now that I find myself caught in this mirror, I see for the first time that she has the same scars that I do. That these bones in front of me might have done terrible things (and they have), but that mine have as well, and that now she’s just standing here, shaking and baring her throat, just a victim of who she once was, in the past. A victim of atoms? A victim of soul? Does it matter? I see now it doesn’t—not to me, anyway. I see now that I and my atoms (my soul) all need grace (and depend on it, really), and I can’t deny that, not even to someone who’s standing in front of me, begging for justice.

  I’ve killed her before (in my sleep, in my nightmares), and somehow the pain was still there when she died in my hands. I’m starting to see, if this figure in front of me dies here right now—this small jumble of atoms that calls itself Sara—that it’ll be just like the ghosts in my dreams. That her body (her atoms) will fall to the floor and leak fluids deep into the rug, but her soul will still haunt me, will follow me everywhere, staring at me while I sleep, sucking hard at my vein
s like a vampire.

  There’s nothing to do but let go.

  I admit that I don’t quite know how. I admit that a lifetime of pain and regret and some half-repressed memories are hard to let go of. I admit that it’s hard to let go of revenge while she stands here and quivers and begs me to take it. Still, something inside of me (not the pills—something) is saying if not for grace, I’d have been dead long ago. That I can’t undo dung-heaps of wrong from the past (like a single not-killing would make up for Stalin, or even my own checkered history), but to the extent I can influence time, space, and matter in front of me, maybe my goal should be shining a small piece of light. That I don’t quite know how, but that Dammit, I’ll try.

  I look into her eyes, and they’re gray just like mine, and I ask myself, What can I do? And behind me again, I hear Kate’s voice much clearer now (not incorporeal), telling me, “Phelia, look up. Phelia, please just look up.”

  I look up.

  I crane my head upward, exposing my throat to the cold and the sweat, and I see that there’s nothing but blue sky. There’s nothing above us—no ceiling, no roof—just a blue sky, a clear day, and sun shining yellow and melting the snow on the ground up above us.

  And now I can see how Kate got in here.

  Behind me, and above me, a makeshift staircase of burnt, blackened rubble leads down toward the wall with the one tiny window that’s been the room’s only source of light until now. The building collapsed in the flames, but somehow this one room fell through the rubble, survived, and landed in the basement, next to Sara’s office (which, except for parts of its carpet, is charred beyond recognition). Above us is nothing but black, twisted wreckage, wrapped in thousands of rolls of yellow Caution tape, and beyond that I can make out red and blue flashing lights and the sound of a siren or two.

  We’re the tragedy “Man,” in two acts (insanity and death), unfolding in the round.

  I look up at the pathway that leads to the surface, the one that Kate took to get down here, and I see it’s not something I could climb on my own. With two of us, though (or with three), we can easily help each other up. Kate looks into my eyes and holds out her hand, and says, “It’s time to go.” And Rachel, behind me, says, It’s time to go, and the fat man to my left says, It’s time to go, and the hipster with the beard and the girl with the Uggs and the cop with the freckles all agree, and my mother, who’s been standing in the corner, says It’s time to go.

  And I guess that means it’s time to go.

  I look back toward Sara, and I see now that she’s just a charred pile of bones, and she probably has been for days, and I think that she’s only been talking to me because I wouldn’t let her rest. And I know it’s not much, and I know that it’s hard to accept that I mean it (even for me), but I say, “I forgive you,” and I bend down, with the rosary in hand, and I set it on top of her femur. (I think it’s her femur.) Then I say, “Goodbye, Sara,” and Kate takes my hand, and we pull each other up from the rubble and into the sun. And my knees are scraped, and my skin is cold and sweaty and bloody, but someone wraps me in a blanket, and I fall asleep (hard) in the back of a car.

  thurs. jan. 20.

  4:27 pm.

  sleeping. in a cop car

  The seat is hard, and it smells like vomit, but I don’t mind.

  I’m sleeping, in the sun, for the first time in weeks. Not a nightmare sewn from memories or a heavy, black blanket, but just a warm, peaceful nap in the afternoon’s last light.

  The road makes the seat rumble low in my ear, and the tires crunch snow between their teeth. The sun’s yellow and warm and it sticks to everything like melted butter.

  And it’s so strange to me to think that the sun’s always shining.

  Not just when I see it, I mean—not just in the day. Even though I’m asleep right now, it’s still shining. Somehow I know, because I can see it (feel it) through my eyelids.

  And a hundred million miles away, it’s in the process of destroying its own core, crushing its own atoms, just to make light and heat.

  (For me.)

  (And also for everyone else, I guess.)

  (But right now? I’m pretty sure it’s mostly for me.)

  I’m starting to think that Sara was right. That love devours and destroys. Sometimes, when you love someone, you really do end up devouring her. You really do destroy her.

  And sometimes, you destroy yourself, for her.

  I like the second kind of love better...

  sat. aug. 20.

  2:16 pm.

  caged

  I’m sitting alone, in a padded cell, bouncing a rubber ball against the wall. It’s one of those giant SuperBalls, the kind that when you first see them you think are going to be even better than the small ones, because, well, they’re bigger, but then when you throw one you find out it actually bounces less high and less fast than they do. Maybe because it’s heavier?

  The padding on the walls doesn’t help, either.

  I’ve kinda lost track of how long I’ve been here at this point, but it’s not because I’m crazy. Really, it’s not. Once I got off the pills—once I really dried out—I stopped seeing things.

  Well—with a handful of exceptions.

  I’ll spare you the details of my formal arrest and trial, but it turns out I’m a danger to myself and to others! or something, at least for now, so they put me in here for close observation. And it turns out that not all psych wards are horrible, abusive hellholes, and I’m actually fairly happy here. The doctors and nurses are nice, and the food’s not bad, and I have plenty of time to be alone with my thoughts.

  Well, sometimes.

  The short version is that the nightmares stopped. I never saw Sara’s face again, never recovered another terrible memory, never again felt the urge to kill. I slept in my bed every night, never sleepwalked, and once I got through the worst bits of kicking the habit (tremors, scratching, the whole deal), I never craved the pills.

  But the thing is, the ghosts never went away.

  Everything else went back to normal. Sleep went back to being a soothing, black abyss, occasionally punctuated by a happy dream about puppies or being naked at the grocery store. Meals went back to being the best time of day, all the spirals and fuzz turned back to right angles, and human blood stopped being so damned delicious.

  But sometimes at night, I’d wake up, and the girl with the Uggs—Cyndi—she’d be standing in the corner, just looking at me with her big, sad eyes. Just standing there, like she was waiting for something.

  Or sometimes it would be Rachel, sitting down at the end of my bed, looking down at her feet, eyes wet with fresh tears. And when I’d say her name, she’d look up, take a breath, and then disappear into the blackness.

  Once it was my mother. I woke up, and she was leaning over my bed, staring into my eyes, her nose almost brushing against mine. I confess to screaming that time. And when I did, the nurses all came running, and my mom disappeared into thin air, and of course then I looked crazy in front of the whole loony bin.

  They didn’t speak to me anymore, I guess because I didn’t have any more words to put into their mouths. They’d just sit there, or stand there, staring at me, refusing to go away, even once my blood started testing completely clean of the drug. Actually, I was seeing them more and more as the weeks went on, until it was starting to feel weirder when they weren’t around.

  I took the rap for Kate.

  I felt a little conflicted about it, but I really couldn’t think of a good reason that she should have to be punished for my crimes any more than she already had been. So the first chance I got, I confessed to absolutely everything, insisting that I acted alone. Then later, as soon as she and I were alone together, she tried to argue, saying that what she had done was wrong and she deserved to serve time for it, but I pointed out that now was a lousy time to be growing a moral compass, especially when she was so close to graduating (I mean, you might as well finish, right?); then she relaxed a little and said Thanks, and I said s
omething cheesy that I don’t remember anymore.

  Sometimes she comes and visits me here. She’ll bring her new guitar, and she’ll play me a few songs, or she’ll bring a deck of cards and we’ll play a game, or she’ll bring a book and sit on my bed and read to me—some poetry or a mystery or sometimes a bit of theology when I feel like humoring her. She told me she was thinking of joining a convent. I understood why. I wish she wouldn’t.

  One night she finished reading and she put the book aside and we just lay there on my bed, staring at the padded ceiling. The silence was kind of nice, so I didn’t want to disrupt it, but when I saw the bearded guy’s ghost standing in the corner, I freaked out and screamed, and pretty much ruined the moment.

  Who are you talking to? Kate said, and I told her, Remember how I told you once that the pills made me see ghosts everywhere? That the people I had killed followed me around and talked to me? They never went away. They’re still standing around, staring at me, almost all the time, and they never say anything, and there’s nothing I can do to get rid of them.

  And Kate said, Well, what have you tried? and I thought about it, and I finally said, I guess pretty much nothing, and she laughed at me and said, Well, maybe you should try something.

  I asked her what I should try.

  She said, Phelia, you’re always talking about how you think of yourself as a writer. Have you been writing at all lately?

  And I realized that she was right—that I suddenly had nothing but time on my hands, and if I didn’t use it for writing, then that was on me, and only me. I was out of excuses. So I asked one of the nurses if I could get some paper and pens, and I started to write. I wasn’t writing poetry, or stories, or anything like that—just a lot of letters.

  I started with a letter to Rachel’s parents. Basically, a letter saying I was lucky to have known such a hardworking patient transporter, and that I felt awful for my actions, and that if there was any way I could take them back, I would. And I told them that I knew it probably didn’t mean much, but that if there was anything I could do, to please let me know.