Ophelia, Alive Read online

  “Well—” she tries again—“what have you written in the past?”

  “Nothing. Papers for classes. That soggy wad we just dropped off.”

  She laughs. We’re at the door now, the one that leads back to the skywalk, and I can only see some cracks of light around its outline. She leans on it, casually, because she’s not the one that just came face-to-face with a murder victim out there. Her permed dreadlocks catch the light as she runs her hand through them.

  “I try to write sometimes,” I tell her, “but I just end up staring at a blank page for hours.”

  “Been there,” she says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I used to be the most constipated writer in the world.”

  “Ew.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you’re not anymore?”

  She inhales. Bites her lip. “Not so much, no.”

  “What changed?” I ask her.

  She winces. “I—” clears her throat—“I don’t think I’m ready to go into that with you right now. We just met. I’m not quite ready to unpack that particular load of baggage yet.” She pauses with her hand on the door, black freckles lit up in the blade of light. “You ready?”

  “Uh—”

  And then before I can say anything she pushes the door open, the light rushes in and I bite my lip, recoil.

  There’s nothing there. Just like before.

  That crack is still in the glass, splitting the stars, but even the stars themselves are fading into the start of a sunrise.

  I exhale.

  “We good?” Kate says, finally.

  “I guess.”

  She says, “Listen, I have an early class, so I guess I should get going.” Sighs. “Wish I’d gotten to sleep a little first.” Smiles. “Nah, I guess the night wasn’t a total waste of time. You know my damn name now, at least.”

  “Hey, Kate?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What do we do about the—y’know—”

  “What? Oh! The—the body, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  She says, “I mean, are you even sure you saw something? It was late, you just woke up—maybe you should just forget about it.”

  “I mean—you don’t think we should—tell someone?”

  She crosses her arms. Cocks an eyebrow. “Listen, Phelia. I’ve had some bad experiences with cops in my past. So if you call the police, just leave me out of it.”

  “…okay.”

  She laughs. “I mean, come on, though. You have literally no idea what you actually saw. If something’s going on, the right people will find out, I’m sure.”

  “I mean, maybe.”

  “And if something’s going on—I mean—do you really want to get involved?”

  “Uh—” and I pause, scratching the back of my neck, because I hadn’t thought about it that way. She actually has a point. I’m just beginning to try to juggle a full-time work schedule and a full course load. I’ve got graduation, Sara’s experiment, my mother to deal with. With my schedule and my stress already at the breaking point—“I guess not,” I tell her. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll let someone else worry about it.”

  “All right,” she says. “Cool.” And she’s walking away, headed back toward the stairs.

  I’m about to follow when she pauses, looks back, pulls something out of her pocket. It’s a piece of paper, lime green, folded twice, and she’s messing with it, debating.

  “Listen,” she says. “You might be interested in this.” And she hands it to me.

  “What is it?”

  “You can read it for yourself,” she says.

  But now the sun’s coming up, chasing the stars to the west and then out of the sky.

  “Anyway,” she says, “I need to get to class.”

  And she walks the rest of the way across the bridge, and I stumble after her.

  thurs. jan. 13.

  4:55 pm.

  pensive

  It’s only now that I’m realizing what a strange night that was.

  Not just in the obvious ways. Like, clearly, I didn’t leave my room in the middle of a snowstorm thinking I was about to stumble onto a corpse. So that’s not what I’m talking about.

  And it’s not so much that I think I imagined the whole thing. I can still see his dead eyes, smell his mothball breath, feel his moist beard on my face. I know the difference between dreams and reality. A dream was that thing with Hamlet. A dream can feel real at the time, and maybe even for a while after you wake up, but eventually you realize that Oh, that made no sense, that contradicts everything I know, I think the laws of physics work a little different from that. I know what I saw, and if it was a prank, it was a pointlessly elaborate one.

  So no, that’s not what’s bothering me.

  What keeps bugging me about the whole thing—what I can’t get out of my head—is how my roommate reacted. She was all like I believe you, but then she wanted to just leave things like that. Don’t normal people freak out about that sort of thing? All she wanted to do was calm me down. She wanted to spend the night chatting instead of freaking out, or calling the cops, or—I don’t know? Literally anything else?

  So really, there are only a handful of possibilities here.

  Maybe she didn’t actually believe me and she was just trying to calm me down because she thought I was nuts. But if that were the case, it seems like she should have been trying to get me back towards a well-lit, populous area, not following me into a dark, deserted hallway.

  The second possibility is that what she said was true—that she did believe me, but didn’t really see the point of doing anything about it. Like I said, though, that’s a strange way to react.

  No, the only possibility that makes much sense is that she was somehow responsible for the body being there. That she’s a murderer. I admit that that presents some problems—like how she had time to hide the thing and then get back to the dorm before I did. And also, I kind of doubt she would have had the strength to slam a guy that size against the wall. But maybe she didn’t actually commit the murder; maybe she just knows whoever did it and was covering for them?

  I’m overthinking this.

  I’m overthinking it because there’s nothing else to do right now. I’m sitting in class, and it’s that boring Shakespeare 101 one we were talking about that night, the one that Kate said she was in. I don’t see her here tonight, though. Honestly, I haven’t seen her basically at all since yesterday morning. I think she’s been avoiding me. Which is weird.

  I mean, not that weird, since the other night was the first time she’d ever really talked to me. But, y’know, still.

  “One of the key themes of Hamlet is the Oedipal complex.”

  Oh geez, here we go. Professor Ben Stein is rattling off the clichés they’ve been teaching about Shakespeare for almost a century. The usual load of bullshit psychobabble that nobody buys anymore, except for English professors.

  “The Oedipal complex, for those of you who have yet to take a psychology course, is the innate desire said to be in every young male to kill his father and marry his mother.”

  I’m thinking about what I was saying to Kate the other night. That I should ask a smartass question just to see his reaction.

  “In this scene between Hamlet and Gertrude, we see there are geysers of repressed sexuality bubbling beneath the surface—”

  I raise my hand.

  “Uh—” he stops and gives me that deer-in-the-headlights look. Shock and disbelief because no one ever raises their hand, no one ever asks questions, no one ever says anything in this class. “I’m sorry, do you—do you have a—”

  “Yeah, uh—isn’t the Oedipal complex something that Freud just made up in 1910? How would Shakespeare have known about it 300 years before that?”

  It’s a softball question, something just to get things moving. But even this one makes him stutter. “Uh—yeah—well, Miss—”

  “Electra. My name’s Electra.” It’s a big class. I’m not r
isking anything at all by giving him a (hilarious) fake name.

  He raises an eyebrow, but he doesn’t question it. “Well, Electra, it’s true that Freud didn’t describe the Oedipal complex until 1910, but that’s not quite the same thing as saying the Oedipal complex didn’t exist until 1910.”

  “But Freud never provided any evidence for it, either—” I just interrupted him, not on purpose, but he jumped when I did it, and I’m trying not to laugh—“and modern psychology has discredited it. There’s no reason to believe in the Oedipal complex, and there never has been.”

  Heads are turning. This is fun. I haven’t been the center of attention like this in a long time. I’m hot and flushed, and I pull off my hoodie.

  “Um, well—you’re right about that, Electra, that mainstream psychology rejects the idea of the Oedipal complex, but it remains a recurring theme in literature—”

  “Yeah, but I mean, do writers keep using it because it’s a real thing, or just because they’re lazy writers?”

  “Um—”

  “I mean, I’m just saying—you can name all kinds of works that turn on Freudian ideas, but almost all of them are from the last century. In other words, they were written after Freud’s ideas became popular. I mean, obviously writers will use ideas that are already popular. It’s easy. It’s lazy. But besides Hamlet and, y’know, Oedipus, is there any evidence that the trope really resonated with anyone prior to 1911 or so?”

  “Um—well—” I’m guessing that at some point in his career, he probably would have had an answer for these questions, but he’s been on autopilot for so long that any question at all would have caught him completely off-guard. I feel bad for the guy. No, really. Teaching Shakespeare to a room full of engineering and pre-med majors is bitch work.

  Wait, is it my imagination, or are there eyes on me? Like, not in just the Stop wasting my time way, but in sort of a positive way?

  I look down and I remember that I’m just wearing a wifebeater, my bra straps sticking out underneath. And I don’t look bad, either. I’m only down ten pounds or so—probably mostly water weight, I guess—but that’s honestly pretty amazing for only a few days on the drug.

  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m still kind of a lardass, but I’ve lost some of the bloat, and it makes a huge difference. Not that I really care, obviously. I’m not shallow, but it’s nice not to be so puffy. My boobs almost stick out as much as my gut now, which I’m pretty sure is the look they’re seeking after for the Paris runways, right? Okay, I’m not quite what boys drool over (yet), but I think I could, eventually, potentially, be “hot.”

  I always figured that the hot girls of the world probably went home every day and stripped down to their lacy, expensive lingerie and stood there, admiring themselves in the mirror, thinking about how easy life is when your boobs and your ass are both the right size. And then they’d pull out their little pocket planners (because people use those) filled with lists of all the boys they were stringing along, and they’d laugh to themselves evilly (and hotly) and make little red marks in the margins.

  So that’s something I have to look forward to.

  “Don’t you agree, Electra?”

  “What? Uh—” Crap. I got lost in my thoughts, and now he’s caught me off guard.

  “You agree?”

  “Uh, absolutely.” I’ll get you next time, Ben Stein. Next time.

  “Okay, then. For next week, read the last act, and we’ll discuss it on Tuesday.”

  Everybody shrugs, grabs their bags, and heads toward the door, and I guess I should too. I have to go to work.

  It occurs to me that I’ve barely eaten anything in the last 48 hours (thanks, Sara), and I’m about to pull a 12-hour shift, so I should probably try to choke something down. There’s a snack machine right outside the door to the lecture hall, so I plunk in a few quarters.

  I stand there. And look.

  Everything inside is cold and sterile and not-real-food, wrapped in colorful plastic. Dry, dead plastic made from dinosaurs that everyone forgot about a billion years ago. Dead dinosaurs wrapped around salty fatty sugar that makes your blood vessels swell. Fatty salty sugar that people halfway around the world are fighting wars for so they can sell it to Americans and kill them with it. The fluorescent lights are a million times brighter than the sun and make the wrappers glow like a pukey rainbow.

  I tell my brain that food is a good thing, that I have to eat it, that if I don’t eat it I’ll die, but it’s no good.

  You have a 12-hour shift ahead of you. Eat SOMETHING.

  Ugh.

  I steel my will and I punch in the code for a Snickers because everybody likes Snickers because Snickers satisfies, or something. I watch the spiral of twisted black wire turn and clink and pop, and the Snickers wobbles back and forth and stirs the air up with disgusting chocolatey fumes, till it slips and groans free of its little track and it hits the floor with a sick thud just like a body would.

  I stick my hand in the slot, and it bites down on my arm, and I have to fish around until I find the log, and by the time I wrap my fingers around it, my arm is starting to bruise, or at least it feels like it. And I pull it out of the blinding, snack-selling light and tear the wrapper down the middle with a swipe of my nails.

  I stare at it.

  Just a brown, squarish blob in my hand, like a carefully machined piece of crap, forming tiny beads of sweat that dance iridescent colors in the off-white lights and mock my churning stomach.

  It’s just chocolate.

  And nuts. And caramel.

  And “nougat,” whatever the hell that is.

  I’m staring it down and swallowing sawdust while I climb the stairs and step outside and trudge through the half-melted snow to my car that’s waiting against the curb down the block. I almost walk into a half-dozen people who roll their eyes at me because I’m acting so strange, but I can’t take my eyes off the chocolate because it takes all of my concentration not to throw it away.

  You have to eat it. Quit putting it off.

  I take a few seconds to stab my key into the lock, adding some new scratches to the little sunburst around the keyhole. Then I pull it open with the hand that’s holding my keys because my other one is busy hanging onto my Chocolate Oppressor. I slide into the seat and I somehow get the keys into the ignition and I start the car rolling forward, but I can’t take my eyes off the ugly brown thing sucking the oxygen from the air.

  I stop at a light, and the Snickers glows a moist, snowy red, while it slowly melts into a nutty sludge. I need to eat it because I need to get rid of it before my car smells like cheap, oily chocolate forever. So I close my eyes and I open my mouth, and I pull my lips back so they won’t touch it, and my teeth sink into sticky, chunky slime, and I gag, but I push them together as hard as I can till they scrape against each other and the sound echoes through my skull.

  Then the chocolate flashes green because the light has changed and I’m supposed to drive forward. My tongue is still kneading against the orphaned candy bar tip, and it sticks to the back of my teeth and I’m scared to chew.

  I hit the gas.

  I hit it too hard and now I’m flying along the empty street, but the sad, melty bar with its tip bitten off is still staring at me with its gooey nuts, accusing and angry and daring me to make a circumcision joke. God, I have to chew this.

  It’s awful. Like wallpaper paste mixed with the hairballs of a syphilitic cat. And it turns into goo that refuses to melt, and swells till it fills my mouth and sticks to my teeth and my gums and my tongue. It digs in and foams in every gap and crevice till my mouth is glued shut and tastes like charcoal and mucus. I choke and forget how to breathe, and the next thing I know, my window’s half-down, and the Snickers flies out, onto the street, half-melted, half-chewed. It lands in the gutter, and sits there, flying behind me, as I hit the curb and jerk the wheel. And I choke again and my tongue rolls around in the strands of burning caramel till it gags its way down my throat and I slam on the brakes
because somehow I made it to the parking lot at the hospital.

  I’m here.

  I step out and slam my car door behind me, and the gray sky’s turned black and the air’s turned to ice, and the stars that aren’t hidden by clouds drip silver light everywhere. My mouth is coated in grainy, sugary salt that won’t go away no matter how hard I swallow. I breathe the winter air in deep gasps, trying to flush it away, but the dryness only clings tighter. I can’t see my breath in the cold.

  My phone is beeping.

  It’s a text from Sara: “dnt 4get 2 cm down”

  From the Cloud comes a low, ugly growl—

  My sister’s IT skills are foul.

  I don’t need blinking lights,

  Or a lacy invite,

  But CHRIST, I’m at least worth a vowel.

  That one was pretty good. Call The New Yorker and tell them to stop the presses.

  Actually, I’m kind of looking forward to a few minutes with Sara. Not that we ever have anything to talk about, but at least she’s something familiar. In a week as bizarre as this one, something you’ve known for years can be a comfort, even if it’s not something you’re crazy about. And I shared a room with her for what, ten years? So twenty minutes with her feels like an oasis between that corpse and a twelve-hour shift of pushing sick people around.

  We used to tell each other everything. Maybe I can tell her about...

  So I’m honestly feeling okay, considering, or at least that’s what I tell myself as I force my temporary ID through the floppy scanner, jerk the door open, and take the elevator down to the second basement. Then the door jerks open to reveal a pair of red-glowing eyes and a grin and I jump.

  “God, Oaf, don’t be such a spaz.”

  I guess I’m on edge because it’s just Sara’s eyes, reflecting the glow of an Exit sign, and all I can think is that No one has said “spaz” since, like, 1993. “I—”

  She rolls her eyes, and the red glint stays still while her pupils dance around in it. Then she says “Come on,” and I follow her down the red-painted hall to the morgue.

  “Can you get the door?” she says. “My hands are full.” She’s carrying a stack of books.