Authors: Denise Mathew
Norm’s voice came to her as though through a distant tunnel, tinny and meaningless. She tried to grab hold of the sound of it, allow it to pull her out of the dark swirl of fury that enveloped her whenever she was touched. She didn’t want to hit him, though her whole body was poised for just that.
“It’s okay Kaila, I’ll keep my hands to myself, c’mon touch me again, please.” Kaila heard the need in Norm’s voice. The sound of it was enough to tug her out of the darkness that had slipped in all around her. Then Norm was there again, standing in front of her, naked and uncertain, a look of regret painted on his face. Kaila didn’t want to have the spiders invade this special moment, didn’t want their legs to race over her flesh and make her want to flee from her own body. She willed them away, back to the hidden spaces, black areas, where they could lie in wait; ever ready to appear at the slightest provocation.
Kaila pressed her hand to the hollow of Norm’s stomach. She noticed how very large her hand looked against his skinny frame. Norm relaxed against her touch, pushing slightly against her in the closest act to physically touching her that he could manage. Oddly it did nothing to agitate the spiders and Kaila responded to his move, kneading his flesh with the palm of her hand, feeling his bones, muscles and all the parts that made him human. Kaila slid her hand up to the hollow between his breastbones, and there she felt it for the first time in her life, another beings heartbeat. She instinctively placed her ear against his chest, pressed her cheek to his warm flesh that spoke of life and what it was to be alive.
“Your body is beautiful,” she whispered.
Kaila was in awe that she had said the words, because before then there had been no beauty in Norm’s body. Brightly colored flowers, meadows, and crystal clear streams, vast oceans, the rain forest in emerald green, all the pictures that she had studied and committed to memory were beautiful, not this scrawny man. There couldn’t be beauty in this man who had hair in odd places, and who was by all accounts not attractive, yet there was. And she didn’t find Norm’s beauty in the places she had imagined, instead of his exterior there was so much to appreciate inside him, in the humanness that made his heart beat exactly as it was needed, speeding and slowing without his volition.
She felt Norm’s heart quicken against her face, the ticking of his tapping heart on her skin, like the beat of a hummingbirds wings. Kaila knew the workings of the human body, had studied every function, the digestive, nervous, circulatory, respiratory and every other system of the body. She knew the organs and the tasks they performed, but not until she had felt the beat of Norm’s heart did she really know what a miracle the body was. More than that was a new revelation, one that she had always known but had failed to acknowledge, that all humans were the same. Every person on the earth had a heart that beat blood through all the veins and arteries in a body, they had brains that had thoughts and though all brains were different they were identical in their function, a right and left lobe, a parietal lobe, a cerebellum and…
“We are all one,” she murmured against Norm’s chest.
Before Norm could respond Kaila wrapped her long arms around his torso, drawing him into an embrace. Norm remained stiff; fearful that if he responded to her touch that he might set her off.
“We are all one,” Kaila repeated.
She gazed down at Norm, made small by her tall frame. All she could think was how she wanted to hold him forever because in that very moment the spiders were nowhere to be found. In fact they were so conspicuously absent that she was terrified to even send a thought toward them at all, in the event that she disturbed them in the hovels that they nested in.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Norm startled and pulled out of her grasp. Kaila reached for him again; unable to accept the disconnection of their bodies, she wanted to hold him endlessly, never let him go. Somehow their embrace had awakened something in her, something that she hadn’t known had been asleep. She cupped his head in her hands, threading her fingers through the tangle of his hair, pushing him to her bare chest until she felt the almost non-existent stubble of his beard prickle against her breasts.
“We are one, we are one, we are one,” she murmured, her face buried in his hair.
“Break it up you two.”
The voice that she knew well was like an irritating fly buzzing around her head. She wanted the voice and the interloper gone because she couldn’t draw herself away from the moment; she wondered if what she was feeling was love.
Norm struggled to be free of her. The harder he tried to disengage his body from hers, the more desperately she clung to him. Kaila refused to let him go because she didn’t know if she would ever feel this again, so complete, as if a secret to a part of the universe had been dropped into her heart.
“Kaila, let go.”
Norm’s voice was laced with panic now and Kaila couldn’t understand why. Didn’t he feel the magic in that space of time where everything slipped out of existence except for the two of them, the two of them…
“Kaila, that’s enough…”
More flies buzzing, and mosquitoes too, she shook her head, unwilling to let it go, as if it was the last breath of clean air in a room filled with smoke.
“No,” she said, holding, pulling, squeezing…
“Kaila, fuck…I can’t breathe…please…”
Then the spiders came, racing across her body. Norm disappeared, tugged away by the tarantulas, black widows, poisonous, and household spiders too, a million of them in all shapes and sizes, legs and ichor filled bodies covering her. And every body that she plucked away from her skin was replaced with another, because they had taken over everything, they had stolen Norm away and they would never bring him back. And when she thought she would drown or go mad from it all she felt one sting her arm, felt its venom pulse through her veins, and then she was falling into a dark place, somewhere safe, where the spiders couldn’t follow, where only Trillian and she existed.
CHAPTER 6
Kaila woke up in the White Room. She knew that three days had passed when she glanced down at the date on her watch, the only piece of color in the depressingly bland room. Outside the White Room she would have read the clues, but it was for these moments alone that she wore a watch; time couldn’t be measured by happenings in the confines of this place.
The date sadly confirmed that time had passed that she had no recollection of. It wasn’t her first time there, a space reserved for those who lost all sense of reality, who the facility deemed a threat to their own wellbeing, but it was the first time she had lost three full days. Before then she had lost a few hours here and there, the very most eighteen of them, but three full days was unimaginable.
Kaila swept her gaze across the room. She realized on closer inspection that this room that appeared the same as the ones she had inhabited before, was marginally different. The bed for one wasn’t a bare mattress on the floor, but a real cot with a metal-frame and a substantial mattress. She also had blankets and even sheets, a pillow too. The double-sided mirror was the same, yet its location was not. Instead of the right side of the room it was on the left side. The door that opened into the room was in the wrong position as well. All clues said that she was in a brand new area. A surge of panic raced through her, but she worked to push it back down. She was more than ready to be out of this White Room and knew that letting her anxiety get the better of her would not hasten her exit.
Another brand new addition to the list, that was growing ever so long, was the intravenous tube trailing from her left hand. It was taped in place with a flesh-colored Band-Aid. A long plastic tube that linked to a half-full bag of clear liquid, dangled on a metal pole. Without hesitation Kaila ripped at the tube, pulling it out with a rapid snapping motion. She allowed herself the luxury of a few seconds to study the foreign body that had been inside her. Kaila pushed at the tip of the cannula of the intravenous device, marveling at the fact that only a few heartbeats before, the small piece of plastic had been a part of her body, feeding her fluids and whatever was contained in the bladder shaped bag. Drops of the fluid dribbled from the intravenous tubing in a steady trickle that had been perfectly calibrated to deliver exactly the right amount of fluids that she had needed.
Though it was the first intravenous device that she had ever held in her hand for real, she had studied the workings of such devices excessively, using search engines that gave her all the answers she needed. Despite knowing all the trappings of the invention, she couldn’t help but be thrilled at actually being privy to the experience of handling such an item. Knowing that the cannula had been positioned in an open vein in her forehand, she also knew what would happen if that very same cannula was tugged out of the vein. Thick crimson blood stained the Band-Aid then began seeping from the pucker that had been left behind by the tube. Kaila watched as the blood trailed down the freckled skin of her hand, running snake like down her middle finger until a huge drop collected and landed with a soft drip onto the rubberized floor.
“What are you doing Kaila?”
Kaila drew her attention away from her hand, onto the gangly nurse who was dressed all in white. She noted that like a chameleon, the nurse could have easily been swallowed from view in the White Room.
Kaila knew all the nurses, orderlies, and general staff in Wildwind, even the floaters that covered when needed, but she didn’t know this woman. She grabbed Kaila’s hand in her blue-gloved hands, pressing on the bloody mess with a gauze bandage that had appeared as if by magic. Kaila felt the tingle of spider legs very soon after.
“I can do it,” Kaila said, giving the woman’s fingers a little shove.
The nurse locked eyes with Kaila as if gauging the next move of a dangerous predator. Obviously she had seen something in Kaila’s eyes that made her heed the statement because she took a few steps back, but her stare remained fixed on Kaila.
“Make sure you apply enough pressure to get the bleeding to stop, you know you really shouldn’t pull IV’s out like that, it can cause a lot of problems.”
Her brown eyes moved from Kaila’s face, to her hand, then back to her face.
Kaila nodded. She appraised the woman that stood before her for the first time, as if she were a specimen under a microscope. It was the way Kaila always took in new information, with precision, gathering every possible detail to store in her memory banks with all her other important Intel. Kaila noticed that there was little of interest in this woman, mid-forties, with a shoulder length bob that curled under at the ends. Her hair was dyed blond because half an inch of grey roots were visible at the top of her head. Her nose was thin, her nostrils pulled in tight, her lips matched her nose and her eyes were hard and cold. Age spots speckled her leathery looking skin, indicating that she loved to sun bathe.
“I think it’s stopped,” the nurse said, pulling Kaila back to the present.
“Where’s Norm?” Kaila asked, suddenly aware of the last moment she had remembered before she had woken up in the White Room.
The nurse cocked her head to the side. Kaila knew that this woman had no idea who Norm was. This fact combined with the idea that she had already lost three days made her agitation grow.
“I need to be out of here,” Kaila said.
It was in that moment that a very human growling sound came from her stomach. She became painfully aware of just how hungry she was.
But more than satisfying her hunger, her fingers itched for a keyboard, a distraction, to be out of the White Room so she could make sense of her world again. Kaila needed to regain the order that she had lost. Kaila was more than willing to let Trillian take control because there was something dark that was opening inside her, something that she hadn’t felt before now. And that darkness was linked to Norm and the realization that he had probably already left Wildwind. Trillian didn’t come forward though, and instead stayed far back and away.
The nurse ignored Kaila’s question. She tugged at the Band-Aid on Kaila’s hand, careful to avoid contact with Kaila’s skin.
“I need to go back to my room, I’m ready now. I want to be back in my own bed.”
Kaila heard the desperation in her voice, the slightly unhinged tone that said she was teetering on the edge of losing control. The nurse continued working on the strips of tape, as if there was nothing as important as her present job at hand. For a fraction of a second Kaila wanted to grab the nurses hand, squeeze her fingers until they were crushed, bones cracking with pops, like snapping branches.
“There,” the nurse said when she had pulled the last piece of tape away.
A half-smile curved her lips. That smile alone was a catalyst that ignited fury that seemed to have no boundaries within Kaila. She wasn’t sure where it had come from, only that it entwined with the loss of Norm. But even imagining that she had lost Norm would have meant that she’d had him in the first place, something that she couldn’t admit was even true. And the thoughts that skated through her mind on the thinnest of ice that crackled when you placed a foot on it, threatened to shatter her. Kaila fisted a hand in the bed sheets, trying by sheer will and force to remain there, to not slip back into the world where she knew nothing but a black hole of time existed.
“Can I go now?”
There was even more pleading and urgency in her tone. Neither emotion seemed to be of her; they were of others, those who cared about the humans that circulated around her in a symbol of infinity without end and having no beginning.
“I’ll have to check with what Dr. Rosell says,” the nurse said.