Lights out.
A weighty darkness boxes me in. If I crane my head, I can see a thread-like seam of light at the bottom of the door. But it's tamped down quickly, as if darkness were a mass heavier than light. A five-ton suffocation blanket.
I need water. Hunger curls my stomach, pirouettes and cramps. I scream for help over and over, my voice growing hoarse.
Please. Please. I need water. Help. Help. Please help me.
I'm losing my grip. Is this how death begins. Where you know what you need, but it doesn't arrive, and you fight or let go. I spin round and round with my needs, my greed to live, and the nonchalance of the staff beyond the door. I fight to hold on, but I'm fighting an enigma, something intangible that can't be held to its sins. Something you can't hold a mirror to. There would be nothing to see, only a lambent coal on its way down.
I see the skeleton of my life, the bones behind it. Yes, this is where you broke your ankle falling from that tree. Your dress parachuting up, the gust of air rustling the fabric against your ear. This is the part of the pelvis that juts out when you've lost a bit of weight. It's the tip Jamie likes to kiss. These are the prominent clavicles you inherited from your mother, they protrude no matter how much weight you have on.
And this is the nexus where you decided to meet with Dr. M again. The first time didn't matter because it was curiosity. The second time mattered because it meant you were drawn closer, covertly shaping your destiny. And this intersection is where you didn't call the police right away after taking Danita home. Meeting Danita wasn't the point, it was that you didn't call the police immediately.
I see the origin and the steps streaming after, down stone ledges and finally into a waterfall free fall you can't go back on.
A blink.
A breath.
A hum.
All of these are based on love. I see it, but it's so hard to fathom it. Personify it in life.
During times of trouble, redraw yourself. How can I redraw myself in here. It's about making do, taking the best out of the situation. With this. This.
I need something to believe in. Focus on. Without that...
The static takes over, the crude transmission of self-propaganda. The lies we tell ourselves. The memories we thought we had. The way we hold ourselves in high esteem over others.
Perhaps that is the purpose spirituality serves. To give ourselves something to focus on during times of need. Otherwise, the mind wanders into deserted lands filled with relics of past transgressions and hungers of the ego. All the wounds we endured.
All memories are distorted. True, but not true.
How will Danita ever find me when he's older.
Is Jamie dead or alive. I'm drawing a blank, the connection to his hope forlorn and dissipated.
The darkness is so oppressive. Can I manufacture light in my mind? Imagine it like I did at the Sun Temple? Is that enough to sustain me.
Please. Please. Help me. I scream and thrash. Desperation makes me alternate between the philosophical and rage.
I miss Danita and Jamie like no other. The brilliance and joy and sense of home. The smell of old books and warm, buttered noodles. The scent of wind and dust vaporized onto the fine hairs on Danita's head.
I will focus on memory. My loves. Yes, focus, focus. Craft them from scratch. The glimmers and peeks into me.
The time I pushed Donny against the wall in college.
The time I told a young girl I couldn't play with her because her family smelled.
I am lonely in most of the dreams I have.
Try to craft the good ones. Not bad ones...
The time the man helped our family anonymously. I knew it was him. I prayed for him every now and then for many years. It was my way of saying thank you.
Wildflowers swaying in a field with the wind. The colors colliding yet in unison, in raucous praise of some universal code of beauty. That can never be parsed or analyzed.
What haven't you learned yet?
So much.
What is the purpose of life?
What are we judged on? Are we judged?
I see an arrangement of all my decisions forming the story of me.
Some good, some bad.
I think I know...
A silence.
It's how we treat those beneath us. The ones without a voice, the strangers we aren't comfortable with.
An opening.
I would like to be an angel of sorts.
But I don't know if I'm capable. I would need to be unconditional, to not judge whether one deserves help or doesn't.
To have a certain levity, tireless hope and faith.
I will gather my strength.
Gather my infinite love.
A closing. Try to stay. Try...
Help me. Please. Please.
A skeleton. A female hand sensually touching each vertebrate, discovering all the small curves and caves. When it reaches the tail bone it yanks the spine down, separating it roughly from the body making all the bones fall to the floor in a rattling heap.
And they sound so light. I expected to hear important density.
God in darkness, craving and needing light, thinking of a way to divine it.
A blade cutting open my swollen fingers, deflating them, the pus and pain sizzling out.
Mother standing in a sea of sand. Staring forward, but not knowing I'm there right before her. Father takes her hand, brings her towards him. He leads her away as she scrutinizes and contemplates the atmosphere and landscape, looking and searching. Eventually she turns to him as they walk towards their destiny. Away.
The lightning stabs of pain devouring my body in branches and splinters and wandering spikes. How pain is electrical. Energy.
Mother, father. I am your daughter. Can you see me.
Please.
I am alone.
My last stand against the quixotic and strange. I attempt to find my bedrock through swirls of delirium, but it slips further and further away. Beyond.
A ghoulish, skinny, old man with no eyes in his sockets, bags under each eyelid. He leans in and says, you think you can see because you have eyes. Look again, my friend.
A dark secret being held from the world. Only they know.
I am dismembered, bit by bit. Remembering everything.
There is an agenda, a plan.
All the thoughts light up like fireflies, flying higher and higher, then dropping dead.
Finally.
Finally.
I lay as an inanimate. Removed and glacial and soundless. The belly of my mind smelting more and more into a blinding, white spell. I understand how they become catatonic, unable to cope, simply unwilling.
I'm deboned, an empty hollow within a shell.
A slam wakes me from my deep ravine of sleep. Someone walks in, someone compact and lithe. I hear padded footsteps shuffling in the silence, in the dark. The light is turned on, it buzzes madly. I see this person's silhouette against a backdrop of light that barely fills the far corner. It is a woman, slim, short hair. She comes closer and closer. Her skin is dark like night so I can't decipher her features until she's a few inches before my eyes. She is a raven, dark hair and skin, penetrating ebony eyes, pointy nose, thin beak of mouth. No smile, only a nasty, thick, raised scar down the side of her face. We look into each other's eyes for what seems an eternity. I see worlds behind worlds. Onyx eggs with a small burning ember in the center.
“Now, don't you say a word.” Her tone loud, intense and angry. Pointed. At me.
She pulls down my pants and underwear slowly. They are sticky and soaked. Coated with menstruation.
I am wondering. Hoping. No. God. No. I look towards the ceiling, watch the lines of tile intersecting in geometric order. All the ninety-degree angles continuing on and on into perpetuity. The terror builds. No. No...
She takes something out of her pocket, pushes my legs apart. Her gloved hands run against my wet inner thigh, grab the viscous underwear. She squishes the thing right b
etween my legs. Snaps my legs together again, pulls the underwear and pants up again.
It's a pad. A pad. My eyes are bright with surprise.
She turns to me, mouth agape. A quiet whisper. “I'm the ugly so they never guess.”
And I know instantly what she means. She is ugly, inconsequential and scarred so everyone assumes she's a nobody. No one capable of great feats or initiative. No one who would think of going against a system. A good, dumb, meek one. Defeated without knowing it.
Simple and menial.
She takes her bloody gloves off and routs around in her pocket. She finds it.
“Open your mouth.”
I don't know if I should trust or not. She helped me, but she's still one of them. I have no choice. This is my present fate. I open it shallow, half-heartedly.
She pulls my jaws wide in a rough, impatient manner and I willingly go along. Mesmerized by her, this raven-human, raven-intruder.
She nestles something in the very back, on my last molar. And gently closes my mouth.
“Don't crush it yet. Do it when the light turns off.”
My eyes ask.
“They gonna kill you tomorrow. But you'll be dead by then. Fake.” The last word trails off as if she weren't so sure, didn't want to promise.
We stare, riveted by the other. Study each other's contours, trying to read the future and past in them. An accumulation of the paths we took to meet like this ever so briefly. My mouth holds it in place securely. Waiting, waiting.
She slowly puts both hands together a few inches from my eyes. And I see it on the backs of her hands. It's been reverse tattooed, bleached into her skin. A white drawing that one can only make sense of when the hands are put together. A lotus.
I understand completely.
I nod my head.
My dead-end friend.
She abruptly turns and walks out the room stridently while snapping her gloves back on. I hear her laughing in the hallway beyond the closed door, yeah, I got her good. And then a man's gravelly voice, insistent and hungry, tell me what you did, did you do it. And her laughing again, acting high on adrenaline, I pumped her real good, that's right. Muffled words, then the two of them laughing loud and jeering. Her playacting the role she chose for herself. High on having power over a weakling because they have no other power in their lives.
I stare at the diagonal light. Its flickering transfixes me, its buzzing pulls my thoughts from my center.
I realize that I am a nobody. A ring of echo. Ordinary. And I thought I was an original. Don't we all.
I am a derivative of a derivative. Nothing special.
It stays with me. Sinks in. Empties my thoughts and emotions into a null realm.
I don't know what the pill will do. Take me into an eclipse, birth me into another world.
If I were to die...
A pause on my breath.
Would that be so bad.
The light switches off suddenly. The dead air deafens.
I close my eyes. Chase a fleeting memory of light. Feel wet stickiness between my legs. Heart pushing down into me. Mind veering skewed and sideways into a crash.
You don't care a bit.
And I crush it. Hard.
PART 4
OUT INTO
Hide and seek.
Kaleidoscope of confused sound and noise.
Body hung and frozen. Without nerve and the feeling.
Blind soul hovering.
A deep humming, raven's voice singing low and monotonous, a chant yet nonchalant. Don't you worry baby bird. Baby bird. Hide and seek. Baby bird.
The drum of machine, strumming infinite. Rattle of heavy trundles. Bulky commerce.
Two men laughing and grousing. Their voices rich with gravy and gravel. The tweet of birds crooning and singing, sweetly untamed, high above.
A metronomed pace. Beat by beat. Scraping. Dampened footsteps, smudging and pushing in dirt.
Swooshed out in a jet stream.
A dazzle of light through my closed eyes. A cracked fissure.
I try and try and try with all my strength to force my eyes open. They feel glued and heavy, almost dead.
I see a man in his forties with a mean, bitter expression. Unsmiling and hardened. Beard and crewcut hair. His fingers pry my mouth open. He's surprised my eyes have opened and seen him, as if caught in action doing something wrong. His hands fall from my face, which I can't feel.
He finally smiles briefly and I see the mean melt away for a second. It reminds me that everyone on this journey deceives. We all look like something else, something we are not. Perhaps this is the way. The truth. Knowing that we can't assume.
He looks me over, down my body. What a mess I am. The blood, braless nipples, the swollen fingers. The vulnerability of thin clothing, being exposed. I can see the aversion in his eyes, the repulsion and discomfort. I assume he's seen it all so I'm ashamed that I may be the worst, even if it's not my fault or his. For a second, I hate myself deeply.
He lifts up his thick, muscled finger and on it is a see-through, small square of black. It looks gelatinous, translucent and soft. But it's hard. He squeezes it between his fingers to show me. He coaxes my mouth open and I have no choice but to go along. My body is not mine. He puts it in my mouth, says under his breath, it's on your molar.
I wonder what I'm supposed to do with it. What is it.
He understands that I'm questioning, that I'm in the amorphous. He says, “You'll know what to do... if you hear CLEANING SLIPPERY.”
Without waiting a beat and without looking at me for confirmation he slides the wood cover back on and I'm doused in night again.
How...
A small poke of light filters through a hole on the side. This is the one and only thing, my lifeline.
I close my eyes. Pretend I never opened them.
I'm no longer in control of my life. The circuitry of circumstances, all of it, are not of my construction. They never were, it's simply more obvious now.
REFLECTION OF
She takes my hand, leads me toward the door. Full of gentleness and a downy touch. I look back at the clumps of lettuce leaves and hills of rugs and wooden boxes I was resurrected from. The clear, night sky is devoid of twinkles. My limbs shudder uncontrollably as if I were cold, though I'm not. As if I were scared witless. I'm shedding the drug, shaking it out.
In the bathroom she checks my face, my eyes and ears, my nose. Peeks into it, opens my mouth. She tells me a cavity is starting in the back. It's a security check to ensure no tracking or recording devices have entered the safe house. She has me kneel over the bathtub to check my private parts briefly with her gloved finger, saying softly, sorry honey.
She runs a bath, sets a pile of fresh clothing with a box of pads on the counter. Watches me as I study the horizontal, oblong bruise on my forehead. Leaves me be to absorb, calm myself. Gather and recompose all the annihilated parts, put them together again.
The next morning, I lay still as sun beams stream in. The room is a small rectangle, with a twin bed and desk. Three sets of simple clothing hang in the closet. It's as if I were a student again. Back to basics.
Everything looks so crystal clear and bright. I can't comprehend, as if I've been starved of light my whole life. It fills a hole so enduring and cavernous, leaving me breathless and mindless. I stare at small particles suspended in the air. The way the light glints off the old, wooden desk. The way it's sopped up gently by the bed cloth. How it fills the room effortlessly, like a glowing, borderless cloud expanding forever. It blooms and buoys you.
I lay there staring for some time. Assimilating and floating, laying in amazement. Getting my fill and hoarding, as if it could be vacuumed up and taken away.
I put my clothes on and go downstairs. safe house mother cooks breakfast. Her face is kind, crinkled. A smiling face even when not. Her long white hair sits atop her head in a loose bun. The sizzling sounds of cooking and the warmth emanating from the stove remind me of life in the past: home, lov
ed ones, comfort, a safe space, daily routines with places to go to. All a mirage when I look back. A twang of the missing strikes a distant chord within me. I sit at the table with the others, voiceless and uninterested. I realize in slow-motion that I'm in shock. That I want to be a mute, to shun myself from the others. To be within myself and only within myself. I need time to fill up again, release the other side and recolonize myself.
She serves me while asking for my name, she forgot to ask last night. I mumble, “Sondie Cartem”. I don't trust anyone, even a kindly grandmother type. I eat with the others, silent and focused on the plate. The buttered food piques my palate sharply, waters my mouth as if I'd been starved for ages. I swallow quickly because it could be taken away any minute now. Someone beside me turns their head as they eat, she stares at my scabbed, swollen fingers. I put them quickly into my lap after using the fork. I don't want to explain, just want to disappear into the atmosphere of ghosts.
After breakfast, safe house mother takes me around the home, shows me the garden in the yard where we each have a small two foot by two-foot plot. We can grow whatever we like. She tells me there are group counseling sessions twice a week to discuss our past and how to rebuild. Everyone here has been a whistleblower and has told on the state government in some capacity. Our goal is to recreate new lives and apply for jobs in our new state, which neighbors the one I came from.
The wide expanse of yard, the thriving, dewy greenery, white sunlight, fluffing breeze on my face. Fluttering dragonflies, seedlings of pollen floating and soft landing wherever they please. It overwhelms my senses, astonishing me in place and time. I stop and hold still. Peek at everything from a somber place within, marvel at the fairy tale other worldliness, at how afraid it makes me. It's so lucid and natural, yet how I came here is not. I want to cry, but can't find the tears and emotional energy to cramp my face and gush them out.
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