Authors: Tracy Clark
My mom wipes her eyes with fingers that are smeared with dried blood. I relent and let the doctor pour the pills onto my palm.
“I'll stay with her until she falls asleep, Uncle Nolan.”
Gran is woken up and led to the door but stops and turns her head my way. “I dreamed you were waiting for me when I die,” she says, her Caribbean accent even heavier with sleep. My mom bites her lip to keep from crying.
Yes, die, girl,
the malicious voice whispers to me.
I'm waiting for you.
I can't react. Must hold still, even though I want to cover my ears and scream. I lie down and pull up the quilt that Gran's mother made many years ago on the island. It wraps me in the blues and corals of the tropics. Palm trees, fish, and the cascarilla plants they farmed for shipment to Italy to flavor Campari all depict the life of the family. There's something comforting about enfolding myself in what came before.
Avery tries to make small talk as the sedative tugs at my grasp on consciousness. It pulls hard at me. Whether it's taking me deeper into myself or away from myself, I don't know. My hold is slipping, and that's what scares me the most. I feel like I could float away.
“Dom is one mopey, lovesick bastard,” Avery says. Her voice sounds far away. “He walks around the DZ with his sketchpad, drawing and scribbling. It's sad. You'd better pull yourself together and get back. There's a line of girls circling like sharks, who'd be more than happy to comfort him.”
“Hmm,” I mumble. It takes effort to talk. “He's hurting. Someone should comfort him.”
“That's crazy talk.” Her hand swoops to cover her mouth. “Are you saying you don't care if someone moves in on him?”
I can't answer. I loved him more fiercely and openly than I've ever loved anyone besides JoeLo. I gave Dom all of me. He was my first. Why are all of our memories in my head but disconnected from my heart? Pictures scroll by, but I feel no attachment to them. Instead of heartache at being separated, I am emotionless.
It's like I've been born again, without a heart.
The next morning, we drive in stony silence into town. My body feels a hundred pounds heavier. “You could cut the tension in here with a knife,” I say, and realize too late what a careless thing I've said.
Nobody responds, but I can see Nolan's jaw working like he's chewing on a gristly piece of reply. I probably should keep my mouth shut.
We continue our slow bounce down the road to see Dr. Collier for his assessment and also to see my regular doctor, who is going to remove the bandages today. Any sane person would be more worried about the permanent disfiguring scars on her face, but all I can think about is how I'm going to manage to seal the vault around my mind.
What's completely frightening about the questionnaire Dr. Collier hands me when I sit down in his office is that I could check off nearly everything on this list.
Yes, I have hallucinations.
Yes, I've been guilty of skipping showers or brushing my teeth, but not on purpose. I just . . . I forget, until someone remarks on my appearance or my teeth feel like wool.
Yes, there are strange things going on that I can't explain.
Yes, there is someone else inside my head who no one else seems to hear.
Yes, I often feel void of emotion.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
There's no way I'm agreeing to any of this.
I'm not crazy. I know I'm not, and there's no way I can let them medicate me. Just the thought of medication causes the most severe case of nausea to rise from my stomach. My aversion to it feels phobic in intensity. Desperate. They can't flatline me. They can't turn me into the walking dead. Whatever they gave me last night has made me feel so untethered from my body that I fear I'll plummet right out of it. It's like I'm the rider on a horse with a loose saddle that keeps slipping sideways. I'm afraid it will take all the fight out of me, and I need my fight to combat
her
.
In order to keep from being medicated anymore, I have to convince them that what my mom suggested was true. What I'm experiencing are flashbacks from the LSD, and I need time. I just need time.
After the physical examination, the written test, and the doctor trying very hard not to look frustrated as I give him as little information as possible, I am led out into the excessively beige waiting area. I wonder if they purposely leave it colorless so as to not provoke emotions in people. The receptionist glances furtively in my direction every few seconds while shuffling papers as Dr. Collier talks to my parents privately. She's acting like she's not watching over me, but I know she is. Everyone is watching me.
My parents come out of his office, ashen-faced and grim. My dad gives a tilt of his head that conveys his displeasure.
“Well?” I whisper to my mother as we head to the next appointment right across the street.
“Honestly, Ryan, I don't know what you told himââ”
“Or didn't tell him,” my father interjects. They flank me as we walk: wingmen to the cuckoo bird.
My mother roots around her purse for something, then answers while dabbing fuchsia lipstick on her generous lips without a mirror. “He says he can't conclusively diagnose you at this point.”
“You sound disappointed.”
Ayida stops walking and whirls toward me. “I am not disappointed he didn't diagnose you with bipolar disorder or paranoid schizophrenia or any other mental illness! I am disappointed you weren't honest with him! I have no agenda but to see you well, to see you get back to yourself.”
“You want that, don't you?” Nolan asks me. His voice is uncharacteristically gentle as he opens the door to the medical facility.
I enter, and my footsteps stutter on the gray carpet. It's familiar. Too familiar, but I can't say why. “I don't want to go in here again. This place treats people like walking germs.”
My mother scowls. “Baby, you've never been here before in your life.”
My lips purse together. I could swear I've seen this placeâââthough maybe it was in my bad dreams. The memory is dreamlike, hazy. Haven't I previously shuffled down these long halls lined with enlarged glossy photographs of the desert? “You sure?” I ask. Walking the corridor is like being dipped in a vat of desolation. Every cell in my body rejects the idea of being here. I want to run.
“I'm certain.” She points to the photographs. “You'd think they'd put up pictures of the beach or forests,” my mom comments with fake cheeriness. “We see enough of the desert as it is.”
“Pictures of the beach would just be a tease,” I answer shakily, glancing at a black-and-white of a Joshua tree posing haughtily for the sun. I suck in my breath, seeing the spirit's face flash at me from the thick, gnarled branches in the photograph.
In the next pictureâââthe sun setting behind the Sierra Nevadaâââher eyes pierce mine, her face as stony as the granite mountaintops. I force myself to keep walking.
A still photograph of a menacing, coiled, tawny rattlesnake makes every hair on my body rise. I will myself to stare at it. How can she possibly harm me? But it looks as though venom drips from her open mouth. The sound of the fast quiver of a rattler morphs into her scream. My skin rolls with fear, with the sensation of shedding, like that snake.
Do snakes feel fresh and vulnerable after they've discarded their old skin for new? How long does it take for the new skin to thicken so that sensations don't feel like an assault? My spit tastes like sour, acidic venom.
Photo after photo scrolls by, and there she is, in every frame. My heart pounds as if I've been running an endless hallway. The girl is determined, though. She tells me in a voice like the snarl of a leopard,
I will haunt you forever.
I keep my head down until I'm sitting in the waiting area. My mother asks if I'm okay. Words will betray me. They already have. I nod and sit on my bandaged hands to conceal their violent trembling. We're ushered into the exam room. There are no mirrors, thank God.
First the doctor removes the bandages from my arms and upper thighs. I crinkle my nose at the yeasty smell of the gauze. Is it supposed to smell like illness? My stomach rolls. Something about being in this room makes me feel like my blood is pulsing thick with a spreading disease.
Then, slowly, she peels away the wide swath of cotton gauze on my cheek. The air hits it with cool breath. I feel exposed. My mother's hand flings upward to her mouth, but Nolan seizes it and pulls it calmly to his side. She turns away from me and pretends to search for something in her purse.
“Bad, huh?” I ask my father as the doctor prods my cheek. He'll steel himself and tell me the truth.
“You're beautiful,” he answers without averting his eyes from the lie. That small, unexpected kindness from him is enough to choke me up.
The doctor turns toward the cabinets and opens a drawer, telling me how to care for my wounds until they're fully healed. She turns back toward me and holds up a hand mirror directly in front of my face.
It's me and it's not me staring back. It's never
just
me. I thrust the mirror away, but the doctor wasn't expecting my reaction, and it clatters to the floor, fracturing into angular pieces. Dozens of different-size eyes stare up at me.
“Ryan, please stay calm.” My mother wraps her arms around me. “It will heal. You're going to be okay.”
The doctor tries to reassure me, telling me that it's always hard for people to adjust to facial scars but that it will heal and be much less noticeable over time. I hear only half her words before running out of the room, crushing eyes under my heels as I go.
T
HERE'S NO WAY
they can catch me. It's painful for my dad to run due to his war injuries, and my mother has nothing on my long-legged speed. I had to get out of there, out of the confining antiseptic of the medical building and into the open air. It's exhilarating to run full-out like this, the exquisite tension and release of every muscle doing its job. Every breath is life itself inflating my lungs, coursing oxygen through my blood. No matter my confusion, uncertainty, and fears, I'm lucky to feel all of it. I'm lucky to feel
at all
.
My heart pounds a cadence:
I'm alive. I'm alive.
Even
she
is quiet right now beneath the thrum of it.
I zigzag through side streets and alleyways until my body is running on fumes, the cut on my cheek throbs with my pulse, and I come to a gasping halt on a street corner. I need to call Joe. He'll come for me, sit with me, let me cry without explanation. He will look at me tenderly. He's the only person in this world who doesn't want anything from me right now that I can't give.
There are already three messages on my cell from my parents asking where I am, begging me to stay calm and let them come get me. Thankfully, Joe answers my call right away. I try to direct him to wherever I am. “I wasn't exactly looking where I was going,” I say, giving him the street names of the intersection in the quiet neighborhood where I finally stopped.
There's something about the names that runs tickling fingers up my back. This neighborhood conjures an intense feeling of déjà vu. A knowing without knowing why. I venture a few feet down one beckoning street in particular, thinking I shouldn't go anywhere, but I can't seem to stop. The gentle dips and sways of the aging picket fences pull me along like the handrail of a bridge toward a mysterious destination. I glance back, looking for Joe, but I have to keep going; I have to know where the feeling leads.
Death is still quiet in my head, as if she's as curious as I.
All I can do is follow my feet, which plod a deliberate path to a vague end. With each step, my agitation builds. I'm simultaneously compelled to search and yet terrified of what I'll find. I don't understand this. As if I've reached a cliff, my feet scuffle to a halt. Rocks tumble over the edge of my mind as I stop and stare.
In front of me is a house. A modest, blah house on a modest, blah street. It's dilapidated and looks abandoned. But I can tell it was beautiful once. The grass is dead and sparse like residual hairs on a skeleton. Stapled to the door, the corner flap of an aged notice rustles in the hot afternoon air.
There is no life in this house. It's a shell of what it once was.
The memory of a death rises up. I recall thinking how a body looks so much smaller when there is no soul to fill the spaces: like a balloon, wrinkled, puckered, half-deflated on the hard, cracked ground. I find it alarming that I can't recall right now whose dead body I viewed. Do I know anyone who has died? My father has never let me see the bodies of the skydivers who bounced. Have I ever attended a funeral?
Tears drop onto my neck, surprising me, like a chaste peck of rain on the forehead. This house makes me inexplicably sad. I can't make sense of it.
A blaring honk startles me. I swing around. Joe leaves the car running as he steps out. His face shines with sweat and a frantic expression. “What are you doing over here? Why didn't you stay on the corner where you told me to go? I've been looking all over for you.” He clutches my upper arms, leans forward to kiss my cheek, pauses, and switches to the uninjured cheek. I'm directed to the passenger side of the car, where he opens the door, sits me down, and buckles me in like I'm two years old.
“I'm sorry.” I don't know what else to say. I wasn't thinking, just following an indistinct trail, mindless, like a hound with the barest whiff of something it wants. A terrified thought rushes in: maybe
she
led me there, somewhere random and empty where people wouldn't be able to get to me until it was too late. Fear wraps its fingers around my heart and squeezes. That's why she was so quiet.