Orpheus Girl

by Brynne Rebele-Henry

  Apparently the idea is for us to develop a “natural” aversion to our gayness, so we’ll only be able to remember our sexuality as pain. But when that doesn’t work, there’s the next step. I’m afraid. Of what the electroshock therapy will be like. I’m scared they’ll fry me so completely that I lose everything: Sarah, my memories, my mind.

  Clio told me that when they get really desperate for results, they drug you. Administer meds in illegally high doses for disorders you don’t have, until you’re nothing, neither gay nor trans nor straight.

  Char leads me to a windowless room with three chairs, a cot, and a metal examination table. There’s a small chest of drawers and then a machine and a tray next to it with some wires that have little attachments like suction cups on the ends.

  The door is open and I could run, but I have nowhere to go, no money, no one to call, the truck’s crashed, and I’m too tired to run anymore; I just can’t. I know now that it’s all over.

  Char instructs me to lie down on the table. She wheels the machine over and straps my arms in.

  Sarah and Leon and Clio are there too.

  Leon’s holding Sarah back. She’s telling Char she’ll fucking kill her. She’s snarling, so angry she’s spitting. But nothing happens.

  I close my eyes tight, but Char pries them open.

  “I don’t want to have to use clamps. But you need to watch her.”

  I turn my head toward Sarah. Her eyes are bulging, and I realize that she’s terrified for me. Char puts cotton in my mouth so I won’t bite my tongue.

  I try to smile as she turns on the machine. Immediately there’s a strange and blinding pain. I have a feeling that I’m no longer in my body, that I’ve somehow been jarred out of myself. Like I did the night before, I see my body float outside myself, watch my arms and legs flail against the restraints.

  The girl on the table looks smaller than I thought she would. The cotton in her mouth looks bloody. Her skin ripples with some unknown force, like her flesh is giving way to itself. Briefly I think that the girl I’m watching is dying, and then I think that she’s being reborn. Like Orpheus, this is her second chance. But all she does is struggle against the electricity, and then the girl is back in her body.

  I can feel something pulsating and buzzing inside me, making my stomach heave. I can see only blue. There’s no feeling, but there’s this static in my head. I try to look for Sarah, to save her, but whenever I try to hold a thought, it breaks before I can remember it. I can hear people talking, but I don’t understand what they’re saying, though I hear someone’s name and it’s mine.

  Sarah’s standing over me, shaking me. There’s blood in my throat, and I spit out what is left of the cotton. My body feels like every bone in it has been broken. I know it’s not because of Sarah, but when she puts a hand to my forehead before I put my hand over hers, I have to remind myself that she didn’t do this to me.

  I manage to sit up, even though my body feels like it’s not there. I bring my hands up to my face, to my chest, where my heart is pumping too fast, just to make sure something is still there. Then I throw up. Soon there’s nothing left but bile, vomit pooling beside me on the metal table.

  Char gives me a pill and I fall asleep again.

  As I lose consciousness, I think I hear Sarah saying, “When are you going to do it to me too? If she has to, so do I.” And Char saying, “After I’m done treating her.” Before my vision goes black, I see Leon on the now-clean table, the little wires from the machine like the tentacles of an octopus being attached to his arms, a photo of two boys kissing flickering on the screen on the wall.

  I dream of her. I think Char thought she could electrocute my love for Sarah out of me, but it has only caused me to love her more. And now Sarah, too, will have her body lit up, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

  In my dream Sarah and I are sitting in the field we used to ride our bikes to after I’d spent the night at her house, after the nights we’d brushed our bodies together nervously, though we never talked about it. We would always wake up the next morning holding each other and pretend not to have known we were. In the dream she ties the daisies together so they create a crown and drapes them over my head. Her eyes are green in the light. This is before the boys made her cut off all her hair, when it was long and almost auburn and reached the small of her back. She tilts her head, smiles at me. She’s so bright in this moment, as bright as anything when you know you’re about to lose it.

  “You know, I broke into a church once. It was beautiful. So cold that I could see my breath. The day before I’d kissed Bette Millie for the first time, and it had scared me so much it was like I couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t been able to since I kissed her. You know, I’d realized for sure that I’d loved you about a week before, though I’d felt that way for a long time. We were in the field behind the church, and you were running in circles. I don’t know why, but you were. And you would wear your hair in braids then and they’d come undone, and your hair was falling all over your face like fractured rays of sun. I was scared, though, which is why I didn’t say anything. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier; I should have. Anyway, one night my parents were gone and I was all alone in the house. My brother was out. Doing what, I don’t know. So I walked to the church and I just opened the door with the spare set of keys. Raya, if you’ve never been in a church at night, you’re lucky. It’s so frightening and haunted-feeling but also beautiful. And that night, I realized it didn’t have to be holy for something to be beautiful, and that’s how I knew I could love you. But still, I waited for a long time to let you know until the day I kissed you. I was so scared. And I’m sorry I did it because it’s what got you into this mess.”

  She’s picking the flowers faster now, pulling the petals off their stems.

  “You know, I baptized myself once. I thought it would fix me. After the night in the church, I walked to the river. It was four in the morning and nobody was awake yet. I walked in and I put my arms out and just floated for hours. I gave up the idea of being what my parents wanted me to be that night. Soon after that, sometimes when you weren’t there for the night, I’d sneak out of my house when my parents were gone and sit in the quiet of the church and just think. It was the only time I felt like my father’s religion could love girls like me. Like us. That’s what this place is like: all those mornings in church when nobody can meet your eyes, when you’re always afraid that somehow they know. I know you felt that too; I could tell. You’d grip the edge of the pew so hard you’d have bruises on your palms after service. I’d just dig my nails into my hands or sometimes grind my teeth. But I promise I’ll get you out, okay?”

  Then she’s wearing a green dress, though I don’t know why. She’s gripping red flowers in her left hand so tightly they start to fall apart. She stands up, and then there’s a door hanging over our heads and she turns to me. “You go first. But don’t look back.”

  But I do look back. I do. Because she’s so beautiful and I’m so scared of going somewhere without her because my whole life, even before I knew it, I’ve always had Sarah. And when I look back at her, she disappears and I’m alone again.

  I wake up covered in sweat. Sarah’s sitting on the bed next to me. “Raya? Did you hear what I said?”

  “About the church?”

  “No, not church. I told you that I have to do the treatment in the morning.”

  I move over to the end of the cot so she can move in next to me. My body aches, still. She holds me so tightly I can’t breathe at first, and though I’m not sure, I think that before I drift back into the darkness, I ask her not to let me go.

  When I open my eyes the next morning, she’s still holding me, her arms wrapped around my waist and her face buried in the back of my neck. Leon is grinning at us from across the room. He stands up, wearing nothing but his hot pink Speedos, and walks to the end of the room.

  “Ladies, I
couldn’t sleep last night, so I went out and found the other rooms here, figured out where everyone’s sleeping. There are three other kids. They’re all roommates too. Then there’s another doctor’s office where Char stays if she’s not outside smoking. I swiped these for us, though.”

  He attempts to give us three cigarettes each.

  Sarah and I both shake our heads.

  “More for me. If I’m going to get the shocks, I might as well take up the smoking too.” He puts an unlit cigarette in his mouth and starts puffing.

  “Leon?”

  “Yes?” His voice is garbled, six cigarettes now dangling from his lips. “I don’t think this is working.”

  “You need to light them.”

  “Ha, I know. I’ve been smoking since I was a cub. Can’t find a lighter, though.”

  Leon drops the cigarettes on the floor, then shuffles back to his bed. Clio’s on the upper bunk, her arm hanging over the side. Leon high-fives her before pulling the blankets over his head and curling up into himself. I hear footsteps coming down the stairs, and Sarah returns to her cot just in time.

  It’s Hyde, with Char behind him.

  Char’s holding a tray filled with steaming bowls.

  “We brought your breakfast. Since everyone has physical therapy today, we wanted you all to rest.”

  I swallow down the lump in my throat. “How many times do we have to do the shock treatments?”

  Hyde turns to me. “We call it intensive physical therapy, Raya. Usually we give you one treatment on the first day, then twice on the second day, three times on the third day, and then four times a day for two days until eventually, on the seventh day, you’ll get five treatments in a row. Then you won’t need treatment for a week while you recuperate. If you haven’t shown signs of improving, eventually it will go up to ten rounds per session for two months. After that we evaluate it on a case-by-case basis.”

  I could die here. One day my body could just break down from the electricity, or worse, one day my body could become more electricity than girl. I could forget everything and never wake up from the static I felt yesterday.

  At the end of the room, next to the door that connects to the room with the metal table and the machine, there’s a small dining table. Char sets the tray down there.

  “You know, if you want, we can bring you some of your things from the main house,” she says. “Clothes, maybe. Though I think it’s best for your therapy results if you don’t have anything to remind you of your past life, before treatment.”

  My photo of Sarah and me. I want to hold it, to remind myself of everything I lost, the proof of my life before this and the proof of the other life I could have had, the life she and I could have had if everything hadn’t fallen apart around us. I know that if I could hold the picture where she’s looking down at me like she loves me—even though I was born with wings, even though I couldn’t protect her—I would feel like everything was okay, but I don’t want Char touching the picture of us. Because if she sees it or if Hyde sees it, they’ll have found another weakness, and the memories I have of her before this place will always be stained with these memories. So I say nothing.

  Leon asks for his socks with the silver dollars in them. When they refuse, he asks for a sweater and an extra pillow. Clio asks for the college T-shirt that they don’t know belongs to the girl she left behind. Sarah asks for her blue scarf, though really the scarf is mine. I left it behind the night of the party, when everything exploded around us like a wildfire. She must have brought it with her somehow.

  When they leave, Sarah turns to me.

  “I didn’t think I was going to see you again.” She puts her hand on my shoulder, and her fingers are so cold they sting my own. I try, but I can’t warm them.

  Grammy gave me that scarf on my fourteenth birthday. She’d saved up for it. She would always keep little mason jars marked “for a rainy day” on the kitchen counter. The day before my birthday, when I came home from Sarah’s, they were empty. At first I thought maybe we’d been robbed, but when I told her she only laughed. The next day she gave me the scarf. It was beautiful, with pale purple streaks painted in the silk. For the longest time I was scared to even wear it, and I just kept it folded up in a Ziploc bag and brought it with me everywhere I went. Sometimes I’d take it out of the bag and try it on and stare at myself in the mirror, try to convince myself that I was as beautiful as everyone told me, that I looked like somebody a girl like Sarah could one day love.

  For years I was wracked with an intense guilt that Grammy had sacrificed the funds she’d been slowly saving all those years. Funds that I knew she’d always meant to keep for herself. I’d feel guilty whenever I saw her getting ready for work in the morning—pretending that she wasn’t tired, that her arthritis wasn’t acting up again, even when I could see her tensing her lips like she always did when something was wrong. And always—while she was at work, at church, on her long shifts, all those nights where she didn’t sleep and just paced the house—I also knew that if she discovered my secret, that she would stop, that in her eyes I would be the kind of girl she could no longer love. That she’d look at me with the same disgust with which she’d looked at the two girls before they disappeared. That she’d send me away, and maybe she’d be just a little bit relieved that I was gone. Relieved because finally she could allow herself to grow old. She could stop pretending that I was her long-lost daughter, the daughter who’d left her with a kid neither of them had wanted. And she could mourn both her daughter and her husband with the kind of grief she never let herself show in front of me.

  Maybe she and Paul were already married. Maybe they would start making plans to retire together and move to Florida or start a garden in the backyard. Grow tomatoes and herbs. And at night they could sit and watch all those old movies that she loved so much, and maybe, for the first time since I’d been able to remember her, she would be able to stay awake long enough to finish the movie, to be able to see it through to the end. And finally she’d be doing what she’d always thought she’d be able to do, which was exactly nothing. She could finally be a housewife and live out the quiet existence that she’d always wanted, the kind where nothing ever happens.

  Looking at the scarf, I’m filled with that old sense of guilt. I wonder if Grammy even misses me. She hasn’t called since she dropped me off four days ago. I think now, in her mind, I’m no longer hers. After Sarah’s parents told her, she looked at me like I was nothing, like I’d never been her almost-daughter.

  Char is watching us. “You girls need to have your treatments now.”

  I lie down on the cold metal table. Char hooks me up to the machine. As the electricity courses through my body, I try to remember snapshots of my life before: the wild roses that grow on the sides of the roads in our town. How Sarah crinkles her nose before speaking. How she forgets everything, how once she turned to me, breathless, after she’d left the stove on and had to run back to her house and said, “I’d forget how to breathe if it was possible.” Though we were only thirteen, I knew right then that I wanted to spend my life remembering things for her. I remember how the houses are all lopsided and how instead of building new houses, people just add rooms onto them, so all the houses start to spread out like they’re growing tumors.

  But I can’t stop the feeling of the electricity opening up into my body, and eventually I can feel nothing but the darkness that fills me.

  The second wave of shocks rolls through my body. Then the third. The fourth. Eventually I am conscious only of how it enters into my head and floods into me as if I were drowning in the sparking pain, as if stars have been embedded in my bones.

  Then I’m sitting in one of the chairs and Sarah is being hooked into the table’s straps.

  Her mouth is filled with cotton pads—her arms are connected to what I think are monitors, screens with squiggly lines that I hadn’t noticed before. Her body is seizing f
rom the electricity and her eyes are rolled back so far in her head that I can see only the whites. Her legs are flailing. Spit’s coming out of her mouth, and her hands are jerking against their restraints. She tries to scream, but she can’t through the cotton.

  I’m thinking that I need to stop this, that I need to rescue her, and I’m trying to get up. But I can’t. I think at first that I’m bound to the chair and start looking for restraints, but then I realize that I’m not restrained; my body just isn’t working. When I look at her jerking limbs, I feel like I’m going to get sick. I can’t move my legs, and my arms feel heavy and cold, like they’re carved out of ice. My limbs are still too heavy from the treatments, and when I try to throw myself out of the chair, I succeed only in moving one inch farther down the seat. I can’t save her. I can’t even make my body move. And so I give up on everything and decide that if I can’t leave here, I might as well die here.

  I remember the night back in Pieria before everything fell down around us, when Sarah was frightened and lost and beautiful in my arms, close to having everything she’s ever known disappear—but not there yet. How on the night that we were found, as we ran away from the party, the moon hung so low in the sky and filled the forest with a yellow twilight.

  Sometimes when I don’t dream of the wings, I dream of my mother in a white bathroom at night. She’s standing in front of a mirror and gripping the edges of the counter so tightly it hurts her hands. For a second in the dream I’m in her body, watching myself. I have her face, her long black hair. Then we’re both crying, and though I don’t know what the sadness is from, I can feel it in our bones, can feel it running through our body like a new skeleton. Then she washes her face with cold water, puts a hand to her aching stomach, and ties her pale blue silk robe tightly. She looks one last time at her now composed face and leaves. Then I’m alone in the bathroom and she’s left me again.