by Trisha Cull
It’s over. I survived it.
“You don’t ever have to be alone again,” he says.
“Thank god,” I say. I surrender myself to him. I surrender everything, my body, heart and mind. I am an empty vessel. He can do with me what he will. “I still have the bunnies,” I say, hedging, inquiring.
He groans, loosens his embrace.
Somewhere along the way I surrendered my emotional maturity for a false sense of security. I have let myself be controlled under the guise of being cared for.
“Thank god you’re still here,” I say.
He takes me to the bedroom and has sex with me.
It’s just past noon and I am in the bunny room, again, back in my old domain, my pit of self-abuse and debasement, sipping NeoCitran, comfortably doped, Marcello asleep on my lap.
The novelty of being back home is waning quickly. I am back in my old familiar world, only this time I am unemployed.
I spend more time blogging and sleeping. I have begun correspondence with a married man named Richard who has been following my blog. He says he loves my writing. He becomes my solace in a dark time.
In the mornings, Leigh kisses me goodbye and says, lamenting, already pressuring me, “Are you going to look for work today?” I pity him. He still has hope.
I lift my head from the pillow in a DXM haze. “Yes,” I say. I don’t know how to tell him a job right now would kill me. Being in the company of other people is preposterous.
“What’s going to happen?” he says, a question the answer to which is so broad it’s menacing.
The walls in the bunny room are dark green with white crown moulding and baseboards. There is a substantial wood office desk pushed up against the wall by the window, a matching wood cabinet next to it.
Just now, sunlight glows behind the curtains and a balmy breeze plumes the fabric. I smell fresh grass from someone’s lawn mower.
Sometimes I am higher in the morning than when I passed out the night before. These mornings I realize I could have died in my sleep as the drug seized me while I was unconscious. One day I might not wake up.
I walk around keeled over in pain.
My daily highs are compounded by the residual high from the day before, and the day before that. There is never a moment of sobriety. I’m strung out. My skin crawls, itches. I’ve become twitchy.
The drug has taken over.
I have become a zombie. The marriage is dying, definitively this time. Surely this cannot go on forever.
My nights in the bunny room are more frequent, and my evenings in bed with Leigh, sleeping together as husband and wife, lull then cease all together.
Somewhere around the six-week mark it occurs to me I haven’t slept in our own bed more than a few times.
On rare occasions I slip into bed with him in the middle of the night, wrap my arms around him. I kiss him all over. But it’s too late; he rolls over, pulls away, all the way to the far side of the bed.
He’s already gone.
Leigh regards me with increasing disgust. He obsesses about money, harps at me with urgency bordering on despair to get a job, that we are in grave debt, that this is serious, and I begin to suspect that to bring in income is the only reason he wanted me to come home, which in turn makes me resent him and dampens my will to find employment.
Financial issues and getting a job are far down on my scale of self-preservation. Thinking about money, rent, my late student loan payments, credit card bills, buying milk, is ridiculous.
The banks, student loan companies, debt collectors have all been calling for me. Leigh leaves the messages on the machine for me, but I rarely listen to them. The red light flashes on and off for weeks. We seldom pick up the phone these days.
I can’t get through to myself.
Myself… I can’t get through to you.
I take my antidepressants and Ativan, down my cough medicine, forego my dignity all together, and only occasionally proclaim (as if I believe it), “I’m sick, Leigh. It’s not my fault. None of this is my fault.” He says nothing, just stares. I shrivel like a worm shrivels in fire. “I’m depressed.”
“I know you are,” he says. He has begun to move about mechanically, as if half asleep.
I hold the bottle of Febreze in my right hand, finger on the trigger, cover my mouth with my left hand, and say, “Marcello, Caravaggio, boys, hold your breath.”
Marcello goes, “Hack, ack, ugh.” He is being dramatic, making a scene of it.
Caravaggio skulks, washes his face, his eyes, with his little black paws, little mittens. He says, “Oh, must you?”
I reply, “I know, I’m sorry. This stuff is killing us.” And I spray some more.
I want to stay altered like this forever, semi-anaesthetized; a little pickled pig in a bell jar. Top shelf above Mr. Quick’s desk. Biology 12.
Caravaggio’s long ears perk up and curl forward, inquiring, concerned.
I say, “Sorry, babies,” and spray some more, the love seat upholstery, the shelves, the piss-stained floor. My obsession with cleanliness trumps ingestion of toxic, cancer-inducing substances.
It smells good. The bottle is blue. The picture on the label inspires dreams of green grass, blue sky and daisies.
One must believe in something.
My work is passionate but futile.
My fingertips have become rough and scoured. There is at any given time Comet under my fingernails. The slightest trace of dirt under a nail and I want to scald my body clean.
I clean as a kind of absolution, a plea for mercy, to be forgiven for everything, for who I am, for what I’ve become, for the terrible ugliness of my body.
I am so ugly I want to die, can’t bear myself sober.
“Caravaggio, honey, don’t look at me,” I say.
I never cry anymore. Tears have become stunted somewhere inside me. I become blank.
I clean fervently in order to abolish myself of sins. Scrub the sickness away. Make the world like bleach, intoxicate it with chemicals and a false sense of cleanliness.
Time warps.
I mistakenly believe yesterday happened a week ago and vice versa—last week was yesterday.
Leigh drifts by now and again. We seldom speak. I pass out on the couch in the bunny room, and in the morning he lifts the overheated laptop from my chest. My blog page remains open in plain view. I write emails to Richard detailing the horror of my situation. He writes back with endearing and encouraging notes.
Marcello bounds across his little den to greet me. “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up!”
“I’ve been dreaming,” I say. I lift him and cuddle him under my chin. He clicks three times, that bunny purr. This clicking is an indication of either pleasure or pain. I worry that he will get sick licking my skin, all that Febreze, Comet and DXM coming out of my pores.
“I’m getting sicker every day,” Leigh says. “I won’t be able to tolerate it much longer, my allergies.”
I’ve been harvesting fruit from the backyard, have mustered up some temporary will to leave the house, have pulled up the rhubarb, plucked blackberries from the bushes along the back fence and picked heart-shaped plums from the tree over the patch of weeds where a garden used to grow. My fingers are stained red. There’s purple under my fingernails, bits of the plums’ skin. My fingers feel chalky from the plum’s dust—that white wax that indicates the fruit is mature and ready to be plucked.
“What do you mean, tolerate it?” I say.
He takes a plum and bites into it. “I mean, the rabbits have to go, Trish.” I resent this plucking of the plum from my basket, that he would be so presumptuous, that he would not think twice about helping himself to the fruits of my labour a moment after telling me my rabbits have to go.
“That’s not going to happen,” I say, snapping a stalk of rhubarb in half. “You can forget it.�
�� The rhubarb bleeds, stains my palms. My hands appear bloodied. I break another stalk, squeeze the two new pieces in my clenched fists, bleeding the stalks of their juice. I feel a rage coming on, one of my uncontrollable fits that has me throwing objects (plums, rhubarb, berries, knives) across the kitchen, or stabbing the walls with steak knives, or smashing bowls on lino. “You don’t own me,” I shout.
He draws the pit from his mouth, pulls it between his lips, then tosses it into the wicker basket with the fresh fruit. “This isn’t going to work,” he says.
“You won’t let this work,” I say. “Do you even have allergies?” I pick up the basket, toss the whole thing into the sink. The fruit spills. Blackberries scatter across the counter, roll to the floor. I kick a berry with my toe but crush it accidentally. There’s a little black stain on the white floor. The stain infuriates me; I just washed the floor. “Fuck,” I say.
I find his plum pit in the basket, clench it in my fist. This is the pit of the satsuma plum: firm red skin and red flesh. I want to squeeze the remaining life out of this pit. I clench my teeth so hard and grasp the pit so tight my body shakes.
He grabs another plum, turns and walks away. “You’re making a big mistake,” he says. “You can’t choose rabbits over a marriage. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Go to hell,” I say, and pelt him with the pit as he leaves the room. “My rabbits aren’t going anywhere.”
Leigh’s allergies have worsened. He’s not faking it, even I can see that now. His claim has legitimacy, but this doesn’t sway my convictions in the least. It’s a matter of principle now; to give up my rabbits is to give up a part of me, the last bit of independence I possess, that last inkling of self-governance I have retained in the relationship.
One Saturday afternoon he wants to talk, sits me down on the couch, stares at me but says nothing. We stay this way for a while, but my sense of time is warped. DXM fosters discrepancies in time and space, the continuum in general. The air in the room has thickened but Leigh’s voice is tinny and far away, comes at me through a tin can, through a vent in a wall.
“What is it?” I say. He has to repeat himself often throughout this conversation.
I’m a rag doll slumped on the couch—a teenager, a girl who is soon to be reprimanded. I’m wearing slippers, old yellow pyjama bottoms and my Rocky T-shirt. I am pale and pasty, have lost weight, have the complexion of one who has not seen daylight, who has not felt the sun against her face, in a long time. Because I haven’t. Soon the skin will grow over my eyes. I will be eye-less.
Leigh looks through me, to the wall, to the painting of the serene woman with a long neck and black placid eyes—the Modigliani.
“What are you doing, Trish?” he says.
The question is too vague. Always he comes at me with these broad philosophical queries, or perhaps he is looking for something specific to which he can anchor himself, some sense of my thoughts and behaviours. But every question pitched at me these days I will regard as too broad and philosophical to be answered reasonably. Every question is ultimately a question of life and death.
I am leaving myself. I am leaving my rabbits and everything I love behind.
What am I doing? I think. Then I repeat this back to him. “What am I doing?”
It feels odd to be gazed upon when you are no longer here.
“What are we doing?” I slur. I’ve just woken up, staggered to the living room. Am I drooling? There is a film, a thin crust, at the corners of my mouth.
Careening into abstraction, becoming a backward projection of myself, my face spinning off the end of a reel of celluloid film in the cutting room.
“It’s about the rabbits,” Leigh says.
I get my back up, come alive. “What?” I shout it. I can’t ascertain the appropriate decibel, can’t hear my own voice. My lips are moving, but I can’t tell if any sound is coming out. “What?” I say again. I realize just now it’s been days since I’ve spoken. My timbre is off. “What about my rabbits?”
Or maybe I’m a ghost, gauzy and pale, a thread-worn curtain in tatters, and this is what he stares through.
He is the same. Or is he?
His mouth is moving. He looks familiar. I think, You’re different. Something’s different. I can’t put my finger on it.
It’s shocking; I will forever remember this moment.
This is the moment I realize I have ceased to exist to him.
He sneezes, rubs his eyes red, coughs all night long. I hear him in the bedroom across the hall. With each sneeze my contempt for him grows.
“I can’t handle the rabbits much longer,” Leigh says. “I’m getting sicker every day.”
I look at him, defiant and puzzled.
I spend my days in halos of Febreze and artificial light. I clean, propelled by champion impulses to destroy every germ, granule or crumb I encounter. I clean because I hate myself, and all I can think to do to quell the self-hatred is to put the world in order so that at least the space around me is less contaminated. I clean because it is better to be an ugly thing in a clean room than an ugly thing in a dirty room and because, quite simply, I can’t stop moving.
The amphetamine aspect of the DXM hurtles me into motion. I last for an hour then collapse on the couch, then leap up again and start cleaning all over. I vacuum cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling, dust with a Swiffer extendable duster that can reach awkward places, like the tops of the kitchen cupboards and the insides of those hideous saucer-style light fixtures, those little bug graveyards.
I sit on the back porch steps in my pyjamas at three in the afternoon, hug my knees to my chest. There is nowhere to go. Out there in the world, I feel harangued, pronged, meat on a hook; a skinned pig hanging from a hook in a window in Chinatown. I put on slippers and saunter down the driveway as a test, but pain crushes me so badly I can’t breathe. I hurry back inside, run to the bunny couch and tremble, my pulse in my throat.
This is hell on earth.
“I’m not getting rid of the rabbits,” I say.
Leigh is stricken, wounded. His blue eyes are watery. I can’t tell if this is because he is crying or his allergies are actually bothering him.
“You have to decide,” he says.
“No,” I say.
“It’s the rabbits or me,” he says. “You have until Friday.”
The days pass slowly.
On Thursday night I add an array of drugs from the medicine cabinet, little handfuls of pills from each bottle: two types of allergy medication, both prescription brands; Robaxacet; Advil; one Tylenol 3 from when Leigh fell off his bike; and Ibuprofen.
I take them quickly, don’t think about what I’m doing, rattle the pills from each bottle into the palm of my hand, toss them back and wash them down with Neo.
I think, Let’s see what happens. I monitor myself closely, but soon I’m too stoned to correctly calibrate anything, least of all life pitted against death’s onslaught. I press my finger against my pulse, and my heart beats fast.
The bunnies hop on then off me, scamper about the room as I drift off to sleep.
Caravaggio’s long black ears are curved forward. Little invisible beacons on the tip of each one go blip, blip, blip. He’s lying on my chest, looking at me. “Are you dead or alive?” he says.
I don’t know how long he has been there. He feels heavier than usual, and I feel particularly heated up in the place where he lies.
“I’m alive,” I say.
Marcello lies sleeping in his bunny bed in the corner of the room. His body plumes in and out, his flanks filling with air, sighing. He is at peace. When Marcello sleeps his eyes become little diagonal squints, the corners of his mouth curl up slightly and it looks like he’s dreaming of something happy.
“What were you thinking?” Caravaggio sighs.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll never leave you again.”
Journal
April 24, 2009
I’ve been consuming twenty packets of NeoCitran DM each night. I drank it in a travel mug all day at work the other day. Made me high and loopy, but I still made it through the workday.
I take such a large amount now because I need that much for it to have any effect. That’s 600 mg of DXM each night, and now in the days too. I’ll have to start keeping track.
I pray for an overdose now, that I will just go to sleep, but I will sleep so deeply my heart will stop and I won’t wake up. I think I’m flirting with this quite seriously now.
My encounters with all this DXM, combined with lithium, Zoloft and clonazepam are flirtatious to the point of being perilous. I check my pulse throughout the night, cannot tell if it’s beating too quickly or if it’s beating too slowly. My perception is distorted. I think I may be imagining a pulse when there is none. The vessels and veins beneath my skin become dark, almost purple. I noticed this the other day—my legs and arms. When I push down on my skin, anywhere, a pure white spot appears from the pressure of my thumb, then it slowly goes away and after about twenty seconds those purple vessels come back.
I don’t have the courage to do it outright. But this DXM thing, I kind of view it as a potential sideways access into death, a slipping away but only halfway intending to, in case anyone wonders after the fact.
There really just isn’t any point to any of this. I’m certain that I will never be able to escape this affliction.
Nothing is enough to sustain me.
Not even you.
Eight
The Pavilion (May 2009)
“You are not doing well,” Dr. W says, finding me in his office leaning forward with my face buried in my hands.
“No,” I say. “I guess not.”
“How is the medication working?” he asks.
