I am not sure what she means by this, but it must have something to do with the reality of those of us who are sane but act insane and those who are actually stark, raving mad. It is not exactly crazy that Julia admires but rather the toeing of the line, the tightrope walk between sane and insane. Perhaps even some might say it is the imitation of it. She looks up to me in this one regard because I am a better actress than she. I can scare her when I let the reins out, but there is not a damned thing she can do to scare me.
She beats me at a couple games of pool, and we take a few more shots before I decide to go home and figure it out. I owe it to my aunt to make a decision sooner rather than later.
It is a shameful thing to admit, but I hardly think twice about driving drunk anymore. As an experienced drunk, the reasoning goes I can walk a straight line with a blood-alcohol level considerably higher than point-oh-eight. I have tested myself. We all have; yet another contest we in indulge in. Besides, I hardly think beyond the next day anymore. With Angela and Rose as my benefactors, life revolves around partying and shirking responsibilities. I am supposed to be dispensing neuroleptics and waiting out Rose's therapy sessions from the lobby of the county health department, but instead I live for myself, for now, for my today. The future is intangible and maybe even non-existent. If I drive off a cliff, there is no tomorrow, and it will not matter anyway.
I do not end up going home. Instead, I drive down country roads with all the windows down and the stereo on full blast, singing at the top of my lungs along with melodramatic pop songs and angry commercial rock. They were all written for me, for right now—a predestined soundtrack. The answer is out there, maybe around the next curve, maybe a hundred miles away. I yell and scream out the window, taking mountain curves at speeds with more than a little potential for tragedy. My tears flow free, blurring my vision, and the car swerves both over the yellow line and onto the gravel shoulder. A part of me hopes to die, to be freed from responsibility and freed from myself and freed from Rose and all of the demons she has shared with me.
7
Hours later, I am back home with an empty gas tank and no more answers than the ones I left with. I look in the visor mirror and wipe the tears from under my eyes before removing the keys from the ignition and stepping out into the crisp night air. My buzz has worn to a low hum, but my body and mind are not as tired as they should be. The house is quiet and lonely. Aunt Rose has been gone for a while now, and I miss her as much as I had earlier wished to never see her again.
There is an unopened bottle of Belvedere on the counter. It is all that is left from Angela’s paycheck this week. I take it to my room, and together we plop down on the bed. The first swig burns in a way that leaves the second in a sad state of disappointment. There is a twenty sack in the nightstand, so I roll a joint. With gratitude, my mind gives in to the vacuum, leaving me to stare at the topography of the ceiling and alternate hits on the joint with pulls from the bottle. Is this anything like what my aunt feels in her catatonic state? Peace and quiet at last? If so, maybe it is best not to spring her free.
The opposite could very well be true as well, torture so extreme she is trapped in a silent body. Guilt twinges in the pit of my stomach, begs me to act, but I just lie there.
The joint and most of the bottle are gone before I find myself immobilized in a drunken stupor. My limbs are too heavy to move, and it feels as though there are gallons of water in my head. The ceiling swirls above me, its tiny bumps and shadows move about in a nauseating pattern of twirling circles. There is a constant pressure on my ears as I watch: pressure pushing out from all of the water in my head and pressure pushing in from the cataclysm around me. The overhead light pulses, slowly at first but then with definite rhythm. Soon, the patterns on the ceiling keep time with the pulse of the light. The room throbs. It throbs with such vigor and violence that I cannot stop the vomit from projecting itself up from my stomach, out of my mouth, and all over my bed. It happens again and again, and I am helpless to stop it. My body is too heavy to carry the mere ten steps to the toilet or even turn and puke on the floor instead. It is all I can do to sit there and throw up all over myself and the bed, thankful that I was not laying down when it started. Otherwise, I really would be dead, drowned in my own vomit like a miserable cliché.
8
(Angela) Oh my god, what is that smell? Something sweet and sour like bile and curdled milk. It tries to knock me over coming through the door. "Jane? Jane are you here? You OK?"
I do fall back a little when I open the bedroom door. There is vomit ever-EE-WHARE! All over the bed, the floor, the wall—there’s even some splattered on the ceiling. The shower is going, so I dodge the chunks on the floor to get to the bathroom. "Jane?" I call, opening the door.
She slurs some kind of answer, but it don’t make no sense. She’s still dressed, so I help her outta her foul-ass clothes. The shower’s pelting me in the face and soaking my clothes too, but she don’t help none. She just leans against the shower wall and mutters.
"What’s the matter with you?" I ask.
She still don’t answer. She just stands there under the water, watching me take her clothes off for her, watching the water flick the flecks and chunks off, but she’s not really awake. Not all the way. "I’m going to have to wash you," I smirk.
It starts out gross and all, what with the dried-up puke, but sudsing up another girl . . . how could that not turn out good! I roll the bar of green soap around in my hands ‘til it’s got a real good lather worked up. I start with her tits of course, make sure to give both of her nipple rings a good tug. Working my way down, I slap her ass right quick. She giggles a little. Closes her eyes when I slip my hand between her legs, rub the suds back and forth real slow and innocent, pressing down on her clit, tugging on the banana ring in her hood. She groans and a smile spreads across her lips. A great idea hits me, and a grin takes over my own face. I’m gonna make her cum in her half sleep! So I keep on massaging her clit with my thumb and push a couple of fingers up inside her.
"AAaaaaAAh," she moans. It’s all high-pitched, curled in ecstasy and shit. Her sleeping moans show me how to put her in a frenzy. "Fuck me," she slurs. "Fuck me!" She twists, arches her back against the shower wall, grabs both of her wet, soapy breasts and squeezes.
But then, out of nowhere, she goes and wakes up, like she’s all disoriented by the orgasm that’s clenching around my fingers, shaking her from the inside and shit. "What the fuck are you doing?"
My hand slinks away, but I can’t help the smug smile. My clothes and hair are soaking, covered in wet guilt. She hauls off and slaps me. Outta nowhere! She’s all sloppy, so it don’t sting that bad. Still I protest, "You liked it."
"Get out of here," she grumbles.
I step away from the tub and lean up against the bathroom door and cross my arms like I ain’t about to go nowhere. "So you can’t hold your liquor or what?"
"Guess not," she burbles.
"That’s quite a mess you got in there." I nod towards her room.
"You gonna clean it up for me." It ain’t really a question, so I don’t answer straight away, and she yells, "Do it!" and starts stomping her feet and whining like a toddler. "Come on, I gotta go back to bed, and I can’t sleep in that!"
"Well," I joke, "there is always your aunt’s bed."
She don’t think it’s funny, so she grabs a bottle of shampoo and throws it at my head. It bounces off of the doorframe, and I laugh at her clumsy ass.
"What? What’s wrong with your aunt’s bed?"
"It ain’t even a bed." Then she frowns at me for a few moments, tells me to "Go fucking smell it."
I already have. Something like greasy hair and rotten food and decayed trash sprinkled with the putrid rank of death. My best guess is Rose keeps a buncha dead rats in her nest. Jane gets pissed off when I say that. Says it’s just dirty; it’s just that Rose refuses to change her bedding. That’s it. She’s wrong though. Dead wrong. Dead as in dead rodents. She’s in denial. T
hey ain’t even lived here that long! Even if it ain’t never been washed, it couldn’t smell that foul already! Someday, someday Imma get some rubber gloves and tear that thing apart. Find all its secrets. Maybe it will be sooner than later. Maybe even while Rose is in the loony bin this time ‘round.
Jane’s still looking at me, so I grunt and traipse back into her bedroom. The sickened sheets slide off of the bed with a slurp. An empty fifth rolls onto the floor. Holy shit. It’s the one we just bought yesterday, hadn’t even cracked it yet. "You drink all of this yourself?"
She don’t even look at the bottle. "Yeah, I guess."
"That was stupid," I scold. "You know your scrawny ass is lucky to be alive right now!"
She mutters, "Whatever."
"Are you going to get out of the shower?"
Snotty, she retorts, "Are you done cleaning my room?"
I don’t know why I help her out like this, why I’m wiping down the walls and the floor and putting fresh sheets and blankets on the bed when she’s such a bitch. I even take her a clean pair of pajamas and help her outta the shower so her drunk ass don’t fall and break her head open. She can’t keep her balance for shit, can’t even dry herself off, leaning all over me. So I towel her off and put her clothes on for her like she an old woman in a nursing home
"I need to go to bed now," she says, but she don’t make no move in that direction. I laugh a little, and she freaks out. "Quit being a fucking bitch and help me to bed." Her eyes are still closed, and she looks real funny yelling at me like that.
I throw her over my shoulder and she screams about how she’s gonna throw up again. "Guess you shouldn’ta drank so much then, huh?" I carry her to the bed and toss her onto it.
She bounces once or twice and says, "Bitch."
"Thank you." I kick off my shoes and climb in next to her. She curls up in a ball facing away from me, so I tuck my legs into hers, wrap my arms around her.
"What the fuck are you doing?" she whines. She wiggles weak like she wants to wrestle me off but don’t have the energy.
"Stop," I whisper. "Just go to sleep."
"Goddamnit." She squirms and inches away. When her ass finally goes to sleep, she is warm and luscious. I hold her tighter when she can’t mind it, stuck somewhere in between love and lust. It ain’t nowhere near as grand a feeling as the first, but it ain’t as base as that last one either.
9
It is dark again when I wake. My head pounds and my stomach is raw, but at least it no longer churns. My aunt comes to mind first thing. As far as I know, she has spent yet another day lost in the void, waiting for me to rescue her. And a part of me still resents her for it. Why can’t she just be normal? Or at least keep the crazy under control? And yet I feel that, somehow, her state is my fault. The idea is illogical, sure, but that does not stop it from creeping around my subconscious. It is an uneasy guilt that I try to push away, but ultimately it is this feeling, fed by the tiny bit of empathy that is left hidden deep down inside, that drives me to continue on when I really just want to run away. And although I have not made a decision and Rose and all of the doctors are waiting on me, at least I am still here trying to figure it out.
The next day brings round two of the most brutal hangover ever and a call from Rose’s new attending psychiatrist at the crisis center. He would like to meet to discuss her situation.
When I arrive, I am shown to a small interview room where I wait a good half an hour for the doctor to finish his rounds. He is a young man who saunters into the room and offers me his hand. "Hello, I’m Dr. Brown; you must be Jane." He looks too young to be a doctor in that super-cute, Doogie Houser, blond-hair-and-baby-blues sort of way. He sits across from me and begins his spiel. "There are a lot of misconceptions about electroconvulsive therapy," he says. "But the truth of the matter is that thanks to modern technology, the side effects of such a treatment are negligible when compared to the benefits." He speaks professionally enough, but it still feels like a sales pitch; his elitist nature and manner of speaking are aimed at invoking submission from a layperson such as myself. "To be honest," he continues, "so-called ‘shock therapy’ has been a miracle for millions of patients."
He pauses so I interject my concern, "My aunt has had this treatment before, and she was like a zombie for weeks afterwards. She made me promise to never let it happen again."
"Excuse my bluntness," he apologizes, "but your aunt is worse off than a zombie right now." He pauses again, this time for effect, and stares deep into my eyes. He looks so honest, so trustworthy, and I fall for it.
10
(Rose) I know what’s going down the second a herd of hippos and walruses charge into my room. My own body holds me hostage, so I can’t scream or fight or tell them how wrong they are to do this to me. They pick me up like my rigid dead weight isn't anything. They carry me down the hall to a chamber so bright, bright, bright that it burns through my corneas. I try to close my eyes, but even the thin skin of my aging lids is too heavy to move. There’s a two-way mirror and an exam table with leather restraints. They toss me down and fasten me in. I beg my mouth to open and my voice box to scream out but neither cooperates. I plead with my muscles—my fists to pummel, my legs to run—but my body just lies there.
A little lamb wriggles her way between the bigger starched white uniforms and sticks me with an IV. This is where they pump muscle relaxers and sedatives into my blood. What’s the point when I already can’t move? When I can’t possibly get any calmer? They waste their drugs on me anyway. But something goes wrong. The little lamb doesn't see it on any of her fancy screens. Blood pressure, heartbeat, they don’t tell her anything. She moves along to her next victim, and then a tall, skinny penguin comes in behind her. He hooks me up with electrodes, whistles while he works, doesn't notice that everything has gone wrong, wrong, wrong.
This bright, bright, bright room with its two-way mirror and straps that hold me down is soooo soooo cold, but even so, it’s still heavy as the steam in any jungle. I struggle to breathe in the fog, my coughing and choking hidden within the shell of my body. Somehow I force my mouth open, my scream but a whisper that no one witnesses. The cloud has started to lift, but they don’t see it. They are going to do it anyway. I need to tell them to stop! I need to tell them that something has gone wrong. I need to tell them that I am coming out of it on my own. They mustn’t shock me! All of a sudden, my head slips under water. Their words are full of bubbles. My mouth’s filled and silenced by liquid as I come to. The little lamb gave me the wrong drugs. These are not sedatives that count backwards until you fall asleep. Whatever drips into my arm has the opposite effect. It’s counting forward and coming to.
Last electrode in place, tech penguin turns the dials. Lightning starts in my brain, shoots through every last piece of me, down to my littlest toe. White-hot electricity seizes my cells. My spine arcs and levitates off the table as my body grows taut. Stiff. Like a board. Like a corpse. I smell burning hair. A monitor screams from somewhere. Blood pressure, heart rate, death meter, I don’t know—something. The penguin slaps his flipper against the emergency shutoff switch. My spine flops back against the table. My muscles, my cells, go limp like gelatin. Maybe they will scoop me up and serve me to the other patients at dinner time.
Except it isn't over, and my body gets tight again. It bounces around in violent contortions. The penguin and the walruses look at each other, eyes wide with surprise. Death's shaking my front door, demanding to be let in. The blackness's taking over. There’s nothing I can do but watch the veil drop over my eyes as the life bolts out of me. My time of reckoning's come. The demons gather on every side. God will judge my filthy soul now, and I'll burn for eternity. My sins will parade in front of me one by one. All the evil I've ever done, everyone I have ever wronged, all of the pain I have ever suffered—it’s all here to haunt me in my final hour. The pain of death is psychological torment; my body feels nothing now.
11
The decision to have Rose shocked gnaw
s at me, salts the same wounds it ripped open with guilt. The walls close in, and the verge of breakdown draws closer, so I visit Angela at work. I need something strong, something that can hold the fever off.
"I’ll try," Angela promises as she hands me a tray with my free dinner: a veggie burger with extra extra mayo, onion rings, and a slice of pre-packaged cherry cheesecake.
Now, Angela is the type to spend all of her money within seventy-two hours of payday (not that I help the matter), so she only has enough cash for a twenty sack, and twenties are not easy to find. Without enough for an eight ball, our chances are not very good.
The search does not go well. Her face says it all when she shows up at my house after her shift is up. My spirits sink even further. Madness rakes its claws across the base of my soul.
"I did get this though." She reaches into her pocket, pulls out a worn plastic sandwich bag. One of the corners is tied off to form a small pouch around three or four translucent rocks.
"Crack?"
"Crystal," she corrects me.
I scrunch my nose and forehead into a wrinkled mess. Meth is such a dirty drug.
"Daemon gave it to me."
"Gave it to you?"
"Yeah, I guess he got it on a lick. I know it isn’t what you wanted," she says. "If you don’t want to do it, I don’t blame you. Whatever you want, I’ll go with it."
I weigh my prejudices about this trashy drug against the impending crisis. My gut tells me that the serenity of cocaine will snap me off this train before it crashes, reminds me of how many runaway trains it has already snatched me off of. But will this drug do the same? Will it also bring me peace? Or will it exacerbate the problem? I consider the meth-heads that have overrun the city. It must be amazing if so many people are willing throw their lives away for it. It is worth a shot.
Jane. Page 28
