Ophelia, Alive Page 8

  I’ve the found the stairwell now, so I pull open the door and start climbing, slowly. Like most stairwells, it’s a bland, yellowish echo chamber, perpetually empty because everyone is lazy and uses the elevators, and somehow it’s quiet and loud at the same time. I listen to each dull slap from my feet fill the emptiness, amplified by the endless space above and below me. I start climbing even slower, listening to each tiny sound, because the longer I take on this task, the longer I can avoid work.

  But I can’t make the climb take forever, and soon I find myself at the top, staring down a heavy steel door the same color as the yellow-white walls. It’s slightly ajar; it’s the sort of door that’s always too swollen to close and makes you wonder who designed it and hope he got fired. It doesn’t want to move, but I squeeze through.

  There’s a giant, empty hall up here, one that looks like hardly anyone ever passes through it. The floor is immaculately polished like it’s never been walked on, and the reflections from the lights overhead are bobbing up and down in waves. And across the hall from me, across the empty expanse of tile, is a wall covered with the faces of sponsors. Old, decrepit people with so much money that they decided to give it to a hospital, because why not make a sincere effort to cheat death? A grid of grinning half-dead (all-dead?) faces, with smiles that started flaking even as they were painted.

  The hallway is so empty that it takes me a minute to figure out which way I’m supposed to go. For a moment I’m distracted by a library in the distance off to my right, a room filled with books and devoid of people. Through the dusty glass, I can make out stacks and stacks of bound volumes of medical journals, all in the same color, and a front counter that’s covered in an inch of dust. A thousand medical articles, written over millions of hours, stacked on dusty shelves and never looked at.

  Maybe the library is open sometimes, but now it’s dark, and I wonder how often anyone climbs up those nosebleed stairs, just to read something that was outdated by the time it was printed. Twenty feet below are rooms full of people dying, and these books were here before they were born, and they’ll still be here after they die, and probably never get opened.

  I turn away. I have to focus.

  Even if I’ve been sent on a snipe hunt, I may as well catch a snipe. There’s a door in the distance, in the other direction, a plain beige door with no knob and a dull red sign that says CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, and I half-wonder why they hide the crazy kids all the way up here, away from all the other patients, behind a door that’s four feet wide, with no knob.

  I can’t decide how to open it.

  My first instinct is to knock, but of course my knuckles strike solid concrete and a shooting, silent pain rattles through them. They’re swelling now, turning red, and I punch the door with them to punish myself for being so stupid.

  (Sigh.)

  It’s only at this point (of course) that I notice the ID scanner, one of those magnetic stripe things that are everywhere in this place, hanging floppy from a handful of wires. And Sara says that my temporary ID will open pretty much any door, so I guess it’s worth a try. I hold the thing steady with one hand and grind my card through with the other. It sticks, and I have to go back and forth several times to get it to work.

  HAL, open the pod bay doors.

  There’s a sort of clunky-clicky noise, and the thing opens. I half-expected to see light spilling out, but there’s only darkness behind it. Inside, behind my slightly ajar, concrete-filled nemesis, I can see a dark corridor that leads past several empty, unlit offices. And beyond that is yet another door, a glass one that says CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, in case I couldn’t read the one out here, I guess.

  The glass is frosted, but I see a light behind it. I don’t hear any sound or voices, but I guess it’s where I need to go. It’s a short hallway, but the thick darkness makes it feel longer. Each empty office is dark and bare, with ancient, beige computers and greasy phones. Wires splayed across the desks, walls missing their posters, chips in the paint from old Scotch Tape.

  Then I find my hand on the blackish handle on the glowing door, the one that says CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, and behind it I have no idea what to expect. A bunch of crazy kids, I guess. The hallway is cold but I steel myself and I yank. And the door wooshes by my face and almost hits me in the head because I wasn’t paying attention.

  In front of me is an empty room.

  Well—mostly. It’s mostly empty. Some of those ugly floor tiles of ambiguous color (off-white with flecks of everything) that you see on the floor of almost every room; a flimsy table with some of that awful-but-tolerable fake woodgrain; one guy seated at it. A massive mountain of a man half-drowning in his own manboobs. Seated awkwardly on one of those tiny plastic chairs with a square hole in the back, the ones that nobody likes to sit in but you still see them stacked everywhere, because they’re cheap, I guess. He doesn’t fit in it and his enormous butt is spilling over the sides. And the room is cold, but there are large beads of sweat running down the sides of his fat, shaved head, bouncing in between the spikes of stubble, while his eyes run up and down me and he twitches.

  Behind him, around the room’s perimeter, are heavy steel doors, each with a tiny window a third of the way up. They’re covered in a wire mesh like the windows of the library, and they’re dark, but I can still see in, and there’s a small pair eyes in each one. Children’s eyes, each pair staring out from a cubicle of thick darkness into the endlessly glowing room. No faces, just eyes—eyes that don’t move or blink or smile.

  One fat man, doing nothing, ringed by dozens of scared eyes, in a room that’s too bright.

  “Can I help you?”

  Manboobs said it. It’s not unfriendly, he doesn’t mean it to be unfriendly, he’s just asking, and I try to look in his eyes but I can’t, and my words catch on the edge of my teeth, and they won’t come out. I think I hear a rattling, like a latched door trying to open, jerked weakly by a hand that’s too small. In the corner of my eye, a light flickers.

  “Can I help you?” He says it again, and I’m backing toward the door and don’t even know why. The eyes are familiar, but that’s crazy, I can barely see them, they’re behind blue glass, like they’re underwater (drowning). “Are you new? You look familiar—”

  Against the wall. I see it. The gurney, just sitting there, with its wheels out. It looks heavy, but my arm feels strong.

  “You are new, right?” He’s getting up, his greasy hands pushing against the table, and my heart is pounding. Why? I can’t relax—

  I run. I bolt toward the gurney, and I feel my hand latch onto the cold, steel handle, I yank, and I run, and it’s dragging behind me. I run down the hallway through the darkness and toward the heavy door, while the gurney punches holes in the wall, and I’m not even sure how I get past it, but then everything’s behind me and the door is closed and I’m in the bright, always-on light of the hospital hallway, but I can’t slow down.

  I tear past the faces, the library, everything, till I find the elevator and pound on the down arrow over and over and over. The door finally opens and I jerk the gurney on and I can’t start breathing again till the doors are closed tight behind me.

  I’m alone.

  I lean on the gurney, heavy, cradling my head in my hands, gasping loud. My face is burning and I can’t decide why. All it was was some eyes, some doors, a fat guy. It’s sad, sure—those kids locked away. But it’s for their own good. There’s no reason for me to be reacting this way. The gasping, the panic. The way that I ran. It makes no sense.

  I can’t do this.

  The elevator dings open, in the first basement, where dispatch is.

  And everyone down here who was waiting for the elevator is staring at me now, their faces uncomfortable and ashen and awkward, unsure whether they should get on or stay off, say something or stay silent. Who is this kid hunched over a gurney, her makeup running down her face and her hair falling out of her ponytail, gasping for breath and choking on the fart-filled elevator air?

  That’s
what they’re all thinking.

  I choke on my throat trying to breathe as I blow past them, dragging my half-shiny, janky-wheeled companion behind me. The gurney jumps and sputters, catching on the occasional crooked tile, and the lights are flying by over my head. I see the blue room with its Elvis dartboard out of the corner of my eye, but I just keep running, without even thinking, faster and faster, till I’m out the door entirely, and I crash into a hedge, dragging the gurney in, and collapse on the ground in a pile of leaves. They’re cold and they’re wet and it’s dark but I don’t care.

  And I’m shaking.

  I can’t do this.

  This is stupid. Am I six years old? A six-year-old hiding in the bushes because she’s too scared? I’m looking up through the leaves now, at the stars glowing an angry shade of so-white-it’s-almost-yellow, thinking Get up. Take the gurney to dispatch. You still have half a shift left.

  But then I don’t.

  And all I can do is sit in the wet leaves, squeezing the bars of the gurney till my palms ache, crying. And I cry until my shift’s over, while the stars flicker in between the leaves.

  And then I go home.

  fri. jan. 14.

  7:37 pm.

  numb

  I open my eyes and I’m in my bed, staring at the ceiling. It’s a cheap dorm-room bed that’s so low I might as well be laying on the floor, except the bed is a tiny bit softer, so there’s that, I guess. All my pillows are on the floor, and my head is wedged between a couple of wadded-up sheets. My feet are freezing and my boobs are sweaty. I pull Sara’s pills off my desk, twist the bottle open, and swallow one, dry.

  I spent all day in bed, and I don’t remember large chunks of it, which I guess means I was sleeping, but I don’t feel particularly rested. There are a couple of classes I missed, but I can probably get the notes from someone. I’m alone in the room; Kate might have been in here at one point, but she’s gone now and the room is empty and cold and gray.

  I throw off the covers and they fall on the floor. My mouth is full of sticky foam.

  My eyes keep darting toward my phone, which sits silently on my desk. All day I’ve been waiting for it to ring, for it to be Sam or someone calling to tell me that I’m fired and not to bother coming back again. I spent all night last night sitting in that bush and crying, and nobody called me. Nobody noticed I was gone. I’m totally expendable.

  I pick up the phone.

  I know everyone has those moments where they pull their phone out and then immediately forget what they were going to do with it. They end up playing Tetris for four hours when all they meant to do was check the time. This is sort of like that, except I know why I picked my phone up but I can’t quite make myself follow through with it. My thumb is hovering over the icon for the phone app—I could call Sam, tell him I’m sorry for wandering off, and beg him for another chance—or I could call Sara and tell her I’m doing your stupid drug, you owe me, you can’t let me get fired—but the more I think about either one, the stupider I feel about it.

  That first option would be suicide. I’d be calling attention to my own incompetence.

  It’s the second one that’s bugging me, though.

  It seems like it should be easy. People call their sisters all the time. How are you, dearest sister? they say. I was calling just to catch up, dearest sister. I miss you and I love you, and whatever the hell else people say to their sisters. But I know that that’s not how it goes because that’s never how it goes. So I just need to put the phone away and forget the whole thing.

  And suddenly her face is on my screen and it says Calling...Calling...and oh God, it’s ringing.

  No, no, hang up, hang up. Your thumb slipped.

  “Hello?”

  My hand is shaking too hard and I can’t hit the End call button.

  “Hello?”

  She saw my name on the screen and she knows it’s me, but she’s saying Hello? anyway. I guess I might as well talk to her.

  “Hello?”

  I hang up.

  My thumb finally found the red button on the screen and she’s gone. But her voice is still ringing in my head: Hello? Hello?

  You knew it was me.

  I slam the phone down on my desk. Just before it smacks into the fake wood veneer, I remember that Hey, stupid, this is your only phone and you can’t afford another, but it’s too late now, and all I can do is pray that I didn’t break it.

  I pick it up once more to make sure it’s okay and I notice the time. That thing Kate wanted me to go to is in about 20 minutes, so I have that much time to walk a dozen blocks to the coffeehouse where she’s performing. I climb out of bed.

  My jeans, the only pair I ever wear (they’re starting to smell), are hanging off my desk chair, and I slide into them. As for the tank top I slept in, it’s good enough I guess, but I should probably wear something over it. There’s a baggy sweatshirt (the kind I like) on the desk next to where my jeans were, but I’m wondering if I should make more of an effort. Nah, never mind. It’s not worth it.

  I throw on the sweatshirt.

  This way I don’t have to mess with a coat, and anyway, I’m just going to get a drink and hide in the back until this thing is over.

  As I step out into the night, I realize just how insanely cold it is outside, so instead of walking I think I’ll drive. My car is just a block down the street from my dorm anyway, so I jump in and instantly spasm at how frigid the seat is. Twenty years of existence have sucked every last twinge of heat from the upholstery. I turn the key and the vents blast cold air in my face.

  I switch them off.

  Now the windshield is fogging up and I have to duck to see where I’m going, and I switch the defrost on and it sputters and makes things worse. And I’d get mad about that particular cruel irony, except I’m already here, so I find a parking spot across the street from this place.

  The cold air bites at my face, so I hurry inside. There’s a bit of a line for the counter. I join it, and I glance around the place. I’ve been here a couple of times, mostly during my freshman year, but I decided a while ago that hipstery coffeehouses weren’t really my thing. There was a time when I tried to be the scarf-wearing, MacBook-tapping, beard-stroking sort (chicks can be the beard-stroking sort, right?), but eventually I realized how completely insufferable that sort of person is. I took to just driving through Starbucks and then hiding in my room with my laptop instead.

  But here I am again, so I guess I’ve come full-circle.

  It’s an older building in the “historic” district of town, a designation that in practice means the buildings have been allowed to crumble from the inside out and the beard-stroking crowd has taken it upon themselves to keep them that way, and then sit inside them stroking their beards and congratulating themselves for having lives that are so much more real, man, and making use of buildings that are, like, totally retro and rustic and whatever else, dude.

  I tell myself not to think negative thoughts all night, because I do that sometimes and it just makes me miserable. And anyway, there’s plenty to like about this place. The solid oak floor, the smell of cigarettes and burnt beans, the crumbling-but-thick walls that shield me from the cold.

  And also, the line is moving fast. I almost trip over a box of checkers that someone left on the floor as I finally step up to the counter. A chalk menu and a barista with a bandana on her head.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Uh...yeah. I’ll have a...coffee.”

  “O...kay?” She raises an eyebrow at me like she’s never heard such a generic request before, but thankfully she doesn’t ask me any further questions. She hands me a cracked mug of steaming black stuff, and I push my way through the crush of hipsters toward the back. There’s one of those booths with high-backed benches that seems like the perfect place to camp out and hide. Across the room is a stage made of unfinished wood that looks like they’ve only brought it out a few times before. Shiny bolts, crammed full of amps.

  I reach into my sw
eatshirt pocket for Hamlet, but there’s a different book in there, one I must have grabbed when I was going through my old bedroom the other night. It’s The Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. I start flipping through it.

  It’s a battered paperback, one with dog-eared pages thumbed by a hand that used to be smaller. Amid the various jeremiads is a poem that I haven’t read in forever, one that haunted my dreams when I was twelve, and I never understood it back then, but I think I might be starting to get it—at least a little—now. It’s called “The Conqueror Worm.”

  Lo! ‘tis a gala night

  Within the lonesome latter years!

  An angel throng, bewinged, bedight

  In veils, and drowned in tears,

  Sit in a theatre, to see

  A play of hopes and fears,

  While orchestra breathes fitfully

  The music of the spheres.

  Now the crowd is filing in, taking seats, mostly students. I recognize some of them, I’ve passed them before, walking across campus. Giant pea coats and horn-rimmed glasses and bangs that hide faces. Moleskine notebooks with fountain pens clipped to them. As they find seats, the windows get darker till the winter air is pressing in against the glass, drawing ghosts on both the inside and the outside, and the lights on the stage fade in and out as some grimy dudes do a soundcheck.

  Mimes, in the form of God on high,

  Mutter and mumble low,

  And hither and thither fly—

  Mere puppets they, who come and go

  At bidding of vast formless things

  That shift the scenery to and fro

  Flapping from out their Condor Wings

  Invisible woe!

  If I bury my head in this book long enough I won’t make eye contact with anyone, and nobody will ask me to share my table. And that’s a real concern, since this place is starting to look pretty busy. On the stage, they’re plugging stuff in, tripping over cords. Something emits a crack and throws sparks, and one of them jumps back for a second. And then everything’s hooked up and some smelly white kid with dreadlocks takes the stage to sing off-key about how war is evil. Thanks for the newsflash.