Untethered
Authors: Katie Hayoz
Table of Contents
Untethered
By
Katie Hayoz
For my mom,
from whom I inherited a love of books
(and popcorn and bright colored coats).
PART ONE
October 28
th
I’m stuck in this body. And I can’t get out.
I stare at my arms. These arms. They’re not mine, but I’m wearing them. They’re thick and muscular and covered in hair. The veins run like rope down the insides.
I squeeze my eyes shut for the hundredth time, hoping that when I open them, I’ll look down and see my own thin arms. My own delicate veins.
I don’t.
Oh, God, do I need help. I need help. Now.
I stand and my head spins. Grabbing onto the desk, I wait for the dizziness to pass. Wait for my head to clear. It doesn’t happen.
I look from the desk to the bed to the floor to the walls and see where I am. Clarity won’t come. Can’t come. Because I’m not where I’m supposed to be.
My eyes travel to the mirror and the face staring back in terror. “Please,” I say. The face says it back, but sloppily. Like a drunk. “Please,” I beg again. “Where are you?” This time the words feel formed. This time my lips, his lips, work the way I expect them to. Or close to it.
But there’s no response.
I lift a hand. Take a step. My movements are staccato. Jerky. Clumsy. Like electrodes are flexing these muscles. Not me. Everything about this body is heavy and long. I take another step forward and it’s smoother, but I’m not used to the bulk of this body.
And I don’t want to get used to it.
I want out. Of him. Of here.
One
August: Life As Usual (yeah, right)
“Rise and shine, Sylvie,” Dr. Hong says, his voice full of forced cheer. “PSG’s done. You have a couple hours of free time before the MSLT. Go crazy.” I open my eyes and the first thing I see is the bramble of silver hairs sticking out of his nose.
Note to self: Buy Dr. Hong nose hair clippers for Christmas.
He helps me sit up and I look down at myself, feeling like something out of a horror movie. Sticky pads with wires dot my legs and chest. I can’t see the ones above shoulder height, but their glue makes my chin, forehead and the areas around my ears and eyes itch. A heavy ponytail of wires cascades down my back and leads to a machine on my left. Probes tickle my nostrils.
Doc rearranges things and unhooks me so I’m able to walk around. I almost thank him, but catch myself before I do. I’m here because he doesn’t believe me. He’s brought me here to prove himself right. As with all the other tests I’ve taken.
But so far, he hasn’t proven anything. It drives him nuts.
It drives me nuts, too.
I go to the window and open the blinds. Outside, the sun is bright. Another stifling summer day in Wisconsin. Outside, I know the air sticks to your skin like Saran-Wrap and feels thick as cotton wool. I can almost smell the fresh-cut grass, the acrid scent of blacktop burning.
But here, in the lab, it stinks like antiseptic. And it’s dry and cool. The perfect sleeping temperature. That’s what I’m here to do: sleep. It’s the last weekend before school starts, and while everyone else is tanning on the sand, I’m snoozing in a sleep lab.
Talk about social suicide.
Dr. Hong writes something on my chart. “I’m turning you over to the team,” he says. “I think these tests will help us figure it out, Sylvie.” When I don’t respond, he goes on. “You know, the cataplexy – that’s where you have the sudden loss of muscle tone. Then the sleep paralysis ... ” Here he looks up from the chart and directly into my eyes. “And, of course, the hallucinations.”
Of course.
The hallucinations. I stare back at him without blinking. He breaks the gaze first and I feel a ridiculous sense of victory.
They’re
not
hallucinations. That’s what bothers me the most, what scares me and pisses me off: Dr. Hong insists it’s all make-believe.
“Your mother’s worried about you.” Dr. Hong’s voice is accusing. Like I’ve been giving my mom problems on purpose. If there’s one thing I don’t want, it’s to make my mom worry
more
.
“There haven’t been any more incidents,” I say.
Dr. Hong narrows his dark eyes at me. I know he doesn’t believe me. He never believes me. I might actually be offended – if I were telling the truth.
“Well, that’s wonderful, then. But with all that’s going on–”
“I’m doing fine. Really.” No need for him to play shrink any longer.
He’s silent a moment. Then he says, “Okay, Sylvie.”
“Everything’s set for school?” It’s a yearly ritual. Tests, tests, and more tests. Then the paper that declares me fit to fester in the classrooms of my high school.
“Sure. We don’t need these results to know that. I’ll contact St. Anthony’s and let them know everything’s in order for your –” he picks up my chart and looks at it again “—junior year.” He sticks out his hand and I shake it unenthusiastically.
“I’m sure school will be a lot of fun. You must have the boys lined up.” His eyes crinkle as he tries a smile.
“The only boys lining up are those who are trying to get away,” I say.
It wasn’t a joke, but Dr. Hong looks at me and laughs loudly. He throws his head back and I get a direct view up his nostrils.
Note to self: Forget the nose hair clippers. Buy the guy a weed whacker.
After a day full of forced napping, I sit in the waiting room paging through old copies of
Good Housekeeping
while Mom fills out paperwork. Despite hating the lab, I suddenly don’t want to leave it. I don’t want to go back home.
I throw the copy of
Good Housekeeping
onto the coffee table.
When Mom is ready, her eyes are glistening but she doesn’t seem overly concerned. Relieved, maybe. We walk to the car in silence. Once the doors are shut she reaches over and pets my head. “You okay, Sylvie?” she asks. “I know you didn’t want to do this.”
I shrug. “I never want to do any of it. I feel like a lab rat.”
“I know, sweetie.” She takes a breath. “Dr. Hong said to keep an eye on you —”
“It’s good, Mom, okay? Can we just not talk about it?”
We both sit staring out the windshield at the concrete wall in front of us. Neither of us wants to go. But we don’t want to stay, either.
Mom starts the car and leaves the parking garage. She takes the long way home. I notice as we get closer she starts swiping at her eyes. She never used to cry.
My own sadness strangles me enough that I know it’s going to happen. I can feel it in the way my limbs go all tingly.
No. Not now.
I slouch down as far as I can in the seat, hoping it’s over quick so that Mom won’t notice what’s happening. If she sees, she’ll freak.
My entire body hums and buzzes with electricity. There’s an insane ache in my head. It’s like I’m being shoved out of a tiny hole in my skull.
Then suddenly, I’m above us both, against the roof of the car. I watch as my body stays still a moment, then crumples in upon itself, my head dropping forward.
Luckily, we turn onto our road and Mom is too engrossed in what’s going on ahead of us to even glance at me. My Dad is hauling boxes into his Volvo. And Sam, being Sam, is looking miserable, but helping. There’s a pile of Green Bay Packer paraphernalia in the driveway, along with Dad’s beat-up desk chair.
I hover near our heads, but I don’t stay there for more than a few seconds because Mom slams on the brakes so hard my body is jolted forward and I’m yanked right back into it. There’s a crack of pain all down my spine and bile rises into my mouth. I swallow it and spread my fingers out on my thighs to make sure I’m solid.
“Last stop,” says Mom, her voice hesitant.
Dad’s just shoving his pillow into the trunk of the Volvo.
Home sweet home.
Two
August: The Girl on the Other Side of the Hedge
It’s midnight and I can’t sleep. I’m at the desk in my room, drowning watercolors, watching them saturate the paper and seep into one another. Sometimes one color dominates, sometimes they stay separate, a jagged line providing the barrier between the shades. But mostly the different colors blend to create something changed. Unrecognizable. Burnt Umber becomes sludgy brown, Rose Lake morphs into pinky gray, and Sepia changes to greenish black. I wet my brush and let water pool in the middle of the page. The textured paper buckles and bubbles as if tortured.
I try not to think about my dad’s leaving. I try not to think about how tonight he’s sleeping in some apartment he’s rented, because he’s decided he prefers that over living with us. I try not to think about how if I were normal, he may never have left. I try not to think about it, but I do.
The pain of it is sharp and thorny. I want to hold back tears, but one escapes and falls onto my paper. It bleeds into the mess of paint. I push the palms of my hands against my eye-sockets, concentrating hard on forgetting.
A low and steady sputtering from outside my window breaks my concentration. I look out to see a guy on a motorcycle pull up next door and Cassie hop off the back of it. Her date. She doesn’t kiss him — she barely even waves – just heads straight up her front steps and into her house. He guns the motor and skids a bit, then disappears down the street.
Thirty seconds later my cell phone beeps. The text is from Cassie: “
Outside.”
I pull my sweatshirt off the back of my chair and quietly open the door to my room. The house is dark. Mom rarely stays up later than eleven, so I’m not too worried. I tiptoe down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door.
As I cross the cool concrete patio and step onto the lawn with bare feet, I hear the squeak of Cassie’s screen door. The moon is a tiny slit, and in the darkness I can’t make out Cassie’s features right away, but I see a flash of pale and know she smiled at me.
We both move towards the hedge that separates our yards. The hedge where we met eleven years ago.
I can still remember Cassie then. Her hair was shiny, almost sparkling, and my five-year-old self thought it looked somewhere between my Crayola colors of Copper and Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown. In it were perched two silver butterfly barrettes, catching the bright winter sun. There was a lot of activity going on behind her, people carrying boxes and, every once in a while, two or three men puffing under some large piece of furniture. My dad was one of them.
The second he’d seen the moving van pull up next door earlier that morning, he’d shrugged on his coat and said, “I’ll see if they need help.”
“I’ll make them some soup, you know, to welcome them to the neighborhood.” My mom was already taking out a large pot.
“I don’t- ” Dad started, but Mom shut him up with a look. I didn’t know it then, but Mom doesn’t cook like other people. We don’t eat like other people. Words like
scorched, congealed
and euphemisms for
gross
are a daily part of our vocabulary.
Delicious
isn’t. I only found out from Cassie a couple of years ago that she and her parents had taken one taste of my mom’s soup then poured it into the toilet.