by J. Q. Coyle
“What if I don’t want to understand who I am? If you were me, would you?”
“Yes.”
I shrug. I want to say Bully for you—it’s an expression that Mr. Butler, my neighbor, uses. He and his wife will probably bring their dog, Artie, his amputation still fresh, with them to the party.
“You said things in that one hallucination were falling apart. How?” Jane’s pushing me. Her voice is as hard-edged as I’ve ever heard it.
I take a breath and just hold it. How could I possibly explain that world? Decaying, beautiful, broken, dying … I want to go back. I want to feel it again. I shrug.
“Alicia, if you want to improve—”
“I just can’t explain it. It’s not possible.”
She stands and walks to the front of her oak desk. She opens the top drawer. She lifts something small—a square piece of paper, a photograph? I can’t see, but whatever it is, she’s struck by it. Her face softens.
Then, quickly and nervously, she reaches for something on the back of her desk, blocked by a stack of books. I hear the click of some kind of button pressed, something being turned on or off. Has she been recording this?
She doesn’t look at me; instead she says, “Tell me more about the boy in that world. Tell me as much as you can.” Her voice is quiet, urgent.
“Why?”
“It’s important, Alicia.” She’s very serious, suddenly intense or maybe just scared. “Anything else about this place? Or him? Anything?”
“What’s it matter? None of it’s real. I mean, it’s just my weird brain, riffing, right?”
She takes a deep breath. “Right. Look, Alicia, you’re going to be fine. Trust me. You’ll get through this.”
“Of course I’ll be fine. I aspire to mainstream. It’s all about setting really shitty goals for yourself.”
Jane lets that slide. She reaches back into the drawer, hits the button again. I hear another click. “Your uncle wants to discuss upping your anti-anxiety meds. Is that something you think would help?”
Aren’t they supposed to tell me what’ll help? I’d ask her about the surgery, but I’m not supposed to know anything about it. I sit down on the couch heavily and lean over, holding my head in my hands. My head feels swimmy. My heart’s beating too fast. “I’m tired.”
“You’ve had a hard day.”
This isn’t something I can sleep off. It’s the fatigue of carrying around this feeling of near-implosion. I never told her what I said to the kid who robbed me at knifepoint. I never told anyone. I know what happens to kids who confess wanting to lean into a knife.
“I don’t feel good. I might throw up.” It’s true. The room is lurching like that ship. I feel like I could lose it all over the fancy rug.
“Do you want to use the bathroom?”
“No, I want to go.” I stand up, feeling dizzier, and move quickly to the door.
“Let me walk you out.”
“Don’t. My mom’s waiting.”
Jane nods, rubbing her arms again.
I leave her there, walk down the hall, running one hand along the wall to keep myself steady. I get to the front door and step outside. I see the back of my mom’s car, idling to keep the heat on. I stand there a minute trying to take the deep cleansing breaths that Jane’s taught me. They don’t help.
I take a few steps down the front walk but then realize I don’t have my backpack.
I rush back to the house, not bothering with the bell, and walk down the hall. Jane isn’t in her office.
I feel hot, in my core. I’ve broken a sweat. I see my backpack, grab it, swing it over my shoulder, and head back down the hall.
But then I hear her voice, coming from another room off the hall. The door is slightly open. I hear my name. I tiptoe up the hall and pause near the door, knowing I should keep going.
“She broke through,” Jane says. Then silence; she’s listening.
“This is definitely it. She told me she spoke to Ellington and that he talked back. He knew it was her.”
Ellington is my father’s name. I freeze, straining to hear, as if I could pick up on who’s at the other end of the call.
Jane’s listening again, like she’s taking instructions. “Yes, yes. Okay … But Olsson, he’ll come for her now that she’s broken through. He’ll risk everything. I’m sure you know that.”
Now that I broke through? She can’t mean my father; he wouldn’t come for me. It’s been too long. And who’s Olsson?
She hangs up, and I walk quickly back down the hall. I step outside, shutting the door quietly behind me, and run down the path, still dizzy. I slam down the latch on the gate of her picket fence, skinning a knuckle, then push off a post. I slide into the passenger’s seat, and shut the door. “Let’s go.”
“What’s wrong?” My mother looks like she’s ready to go inside and talk to Jane herself.
“Nothing. Let’s just go.”
“Something’s wrong. What is it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re out of breath.”
“Am I?”
“And you’re early.”
“I ran out of things to say.”
“It’s a two-way street, Alicia. If you want to feel better, you have to be willing to work for it.” She puts the car in gear and starts driving.
“I will. I got tired.” I look out the window.
We pass a car parked on a side street. The driver looks up from a cell phone and seems surprised to see me. After we pass by, the car pulls out. Is he following us?
I reach into my pocket and grab my pill bottle. My finger is smeared with blood from the spot where I skinned my knuckle on the gate. I blot it on the knee of my jeans and slide a pill into my palm where all the lines converge. I pop the pill and lean back, closing my eyes.
The boy’s face is there, his blue eyes, his lips and bright teeth. Beautiful. I’m glad I didn’t tell Jane. He’s my hallucination, after all.
As the pill starts to take the world down a notch, I hear my mother whisper something so softly I can barely make it out. “Don’t leave me. Don’t disappear on me.”
“I won’t,” I say. “I promise.”
“What?” she asks. “What was that?”
“I’m going to shut my eyes.” I don’t want her to know that I’m fading out. I don’t close my eyes. I stare out the window.
“You should rest,” she says.
The windshield blurs and disappears. My breath is shallow. Light pours out of everything around me, including my outstretched hands.
The blood on my knuckle is already drying up. And the pain comes, but it’s not all over my body. It’s all fixed in one spot—my bicep. Go on. Take me. Take me somewhere. I grab the muscles in my arm and push. The pain gets sharper.…
* * *
… I’m lying on my stomach on a bed in what looks like an old hotel room that used to be nice—the faded, dusty red-velvet drapes drawn. My shoulder burns with pain. And I know that I’m back in the world where I got shot on the cruise ship, where I talked to my dad and he knew it was me. But he isn’t here.
I see myself in a huge tarnished mirror. An old man is leaning over my back, stitching me up—the bullet wound. He has a long drooping mustache and wears a dark suit. He digs into my shoulder with the needle, and I feel a roar of pain.
Where is my father? Why isn’t he here? I’m alone, and this is what scares me the most. Who are these people?
A woman is yelling in the bathroom. I understand only bits and pieces of her Russian—maybe she speaks a dialect—“She’s lucky he got her out.” She walks into the room and points to a big bulky television, airing footage of a mushroom cloud like the atomic bomb. She has bloody towels bundled in her arms. She’s saying, “The birds will fall from the sky, like Chernobyl, like Japan.”
Each time the old man digs the needle in, my head feels like it’s going to explode from the pain. My vision blurs.
I turn my head from the television and the wo
man with the bloody sheets; I know it’s my blood that’s soaked the towels. I can feel the old man’s needle suturing the wound in my back.
Lying beside me on the bed is a tin tray holding a single bullet, glazed in a thin smear of blood. My blood. My hand starts ringing with pain. My vision dims and dims like someone slowly turning down the lights.
And then I can’t see anything at all.…
* * *
… I’m back in the car, and my mother says, “Hey, you awake? We’re home.”
My house.
Its scuffed front door with the chipped brown paint.
Its small pitted yard.
The cold.
CHAPTER SIX
SIX DAYS later, it’s my fifteenth birthday. From my bedroom upstairs, I hear the regulars my mother has invited to the party starting to arrive. I know it’s time to go downstairs, but I hate these parties. I have to pretend I don’t. They give my mother some comfort—that I am still a little kid she throws parties for, that things are okay, that nothing has to change.
I’ve spent the last six days trying not to think of the beautiful boy from my hallucinations. He’s not real, I keep telling myself, but still he keeps popping into my mind during homework and classes and bus rides and when I try to fall asleep at night. I haven’t had any more extended hallucinations since the day of the cafeteria brawl, but the flashing comes more often and every decision feels like it’s tearing me apart, literally.
My window is iced at the edges even though the heat’s turned up for the guests, the baseboards ticking. I look out the window and see the row of muddy yards across the street. One still has a plastic reindeer. It’s been kicked to its side.
A stray dog, ribs like bony spikes, skitters down the street. I watch it pass Sprowitz’s house. I usually avoid looking at his place—a depressing brown house, its chain-link fence curling in on itself, its windows pink from the insulation lining that’s probably not good to breathe, the crumbling driveway. The house has this dead stare, and I wonder what it’s like for him to live there with strangers. Didn’t he have a home once? Family? I don’t know whether it would be better to have had family and lost them or never to have had them at all. I hate Sprowitz, but I feel for him, too.
And then I notice that one of the upper bedroom windows isn’t fully covered. There’s a pale hole where the insulation has been pulled aside.
It’s not a pale hole at all—it’s a face.
It’s Sprowitz.
Is he looking at me looking at him? Is he waiting for a glimpse of my mother?
I flip him the bird. I know that he’ll make me pay for it. He’s avoided me at school this past week, or I’ve successfully avoided him—hard to say.
I expect him to give me the finger back but he doesn’t.
His face disappears. The pink insulation fills the void.
Hafeez has texted a bunch of times: You sure you don’t want me to come over?
Me: Trust me. It’s not going to be any fun. I’ll save you a piece of cake.
Hafeez: Birthdays are overhyped bullshit. They’ve been no fun since we stopped beating up piñatas. If candy can’t rain down on your head, why have a party at all?
I close my eyes and think of being a kid. Most people my age can’t wait to get older, to get out. But I would gladly go back to when none of this crazy shit was happening to me.
I’ve started to doubt everything. Did I really overhear the conversation that Jane had on the phone, or am I just going insane—like freaking out about people following me in traffic? My paranoia is almost constant no matter how many pills I take.
I’ve been thinking and rethinking my hallucinations—what sets me off and which images appear. I’ve made charts of each of the repeating hallucinations—what I look like in them, what my father’s like, if I see him at all, and how each place seems to be deteriorating. I’ve come up with shorthand names for them in my notebook.
Cruise ship—where I got shot with my father as the ship sank.
Bulldog—where I met the old man.
Where the boy is—where I live in a mansion that overlooks a wasteland.
I’ve written tons of facts about the Dnieper River, the Volga, drones, contaminated water, and A-bomb mushroom clouds.
I flip through my notes, pages and pages of them, my doodles of trees in all of the margins.
Worthless. All of it.
Nothing is getting me any closer to some clear understanding of what I’ve been seeing or why. I hate how nothing makes sense. I hate my birthday. I hate the shitty reindeer in the neighbor’s yard. I hate Sprowitz eyeing us from across the street.
I want to punch the window—one pane at a time, just drive my bare fist through the glass until my knuckles are a bloody mess.
I stare down at my notebook and see the word “blood” staring back at me. It’s the part where I explain how I skinned my knuckle on Jane’s gate.
I turn back a few pages to the fight with Sprowitz. And I see “bloody lip.”
I flip back another page and read about the little piece of paper I tore from my Spanish test—the “blood” from my cuticle.
All this week, I’ve just been flashing between hallucinations, never landing. But if there’s a cut, a scrape, a bloody lip …
My mother calls from downstairs, “Alicia, you coming? Everyone’s here!”
“Coming!” I walk to my bedroom door, but just before I reach for the knob, I hesitate, and in this small momentary indecision—should I go now or wait a little longer?—my heartbeat picks up. I feel like a knife’s been plunged into my collarbone, and then there’s the ripping feeling in my sternum. Jesus.
My knees buckle. I drop to the floor. My breathing is jagged. I manage to call out, “Just a minute!”
I think again, What if there’s blood?
I lurch to my desk and pull open a junk drawer. I rummage quickly, the pain stabbing my collarbone and my chest, and I pull out an old compass I haven’t used since middle-school geometry, but the point is sharp enough to draw blood.
My hands shaking, I poke the meat of my palm, a sharp sting. A bead of blood rises—quick and dark red.
I push on the ache in my collarbone, but still, it’s like I can’t pinpoint it, can’t really get at it. I roll to my back.
Okay, I say to myself, urging some inner engine. C’mon.
I stare at the blood.
And I feel the floor start to give beneath me.
I look at the ceiling; the dark water stain overhead shifts and swirls. It’s my birthday. I’m sixteen … And I don’t know what the hell I’m turning into.
The room seems to shatter, its pieces scattering.…
* * *
… The wind is hot and dry in my face.
An abandoned development with scorched bare yards.
A distant field with one sickly cow, stalled oil pumps, frozen against the horizon.
“This way.” It’s him. The boy with the blue eyes. His face isn’t streaked with dirt like the last time I saw him. But his hair is a little shaggy and wild, and he hasn’t shaved in a while. I’m stunned to find myself with him again. I’m following him across a field that’s pocked with holes. I know what I look like here with my bleach-blond hair. I try to smooth my hair down and I wish I looked like myself, me. Even though I’m not known for having any fashion sense and maybe sometimes wear too much eyeliner, I suddenly wish he just knew me, the real me.
Up ahead is a chain-link fence, tall and topped with razor wire, around a trailer park. A large placard, QUARANTINE written on it.
He stops in front of a tree that’s half in bloom, half dead, as if split down the middle. One side is puffed with petals, and the other looks like a claw. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
I touch the bark, its thin, papery casing. I remember a Plath poem about a forest that turns to ash. I whisper, “Ash,” trying to remember the rest.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing,” I say, not wanting to sound like a poser,
I quickly add, “Why is it half dead?”
“The question is why is it half alive,” he says. His lashes are so dark they look wet.
I walk around the tree, looking at its limbs, the small rows of buds and then the dead limbs, brittle and dark.
“How’s the special treatment up there?” he asks, nodding to the rows of once-fancy houses I followed him from.
“My mother’s sick,” I say.
“My mother’s dead,” he says flatly. “We’re the only ones now. It’s just us.”
“I didn’t grow up in that house,” I tell him. “That’s not me. I’ve never had money like that.”
His eyes widen. “Oh, hi. I get it. How long have you been here as, you know, you?”
“How do you know…?” I’m stunned. It’s like the moment when my father realized it was really me. “What do you mean, me?”
“Look, I’m glad it’s you.” He runs his fingers down a branch. “This tree is no accident. We only look at the blooming half,” he tells me. “Before my mother died, she explained everything. Perception breeds reality, not the other way around.”
“What are you talking about?”
He pulls a clump of tall dry weeds from the ground and shakes them.
The seeds break loose, drift, and then disappear, as if they never existed. “This world isn’t being held in place anymore.”
I lift my hand. “Can I try it?”
He nods. He hands the bouquet of stalks to me, my hand brushing his.
I touch a few seeds, feel their silky texture on my fingertips for only a second, and then they float off and disappear. “Why?” I whisper. “How?”
“Your dad needs to be looking into this. Tell him that Jax said we need him or this is all going to go away.”
“Jax. That’s your name.”
“Yeah.”
I want to say it over and over again. It feels like something has unlocked inside of me. “What’s going to go away if my dad doesn’t look into this?” I ask. Is my father here somewhere? Is he like an actor waiting just offstage? A ghost?
“The whole thing,” Jax says.
This world? This place that feels embedded in me somehow? Maybe I love it here because it isn’t something I could ever really dream up. I don’t have this good of an imagination, and because it’s so wild, it feels more real.
