Orpheus Girl

by Brynne Rebele-Henry

  I remember her room with the ceiling that is succumbing to mold and rot. Soon it will be falling down in strips, and eventually her whole room, the one place where I feel like I know her, will fall down. But I won’t be there to mourn it.

  I remember how Grammy said Paul proposed, just before everything fell apart. Maybe she’s already had her quiet wedding, moved in with him and started living the quiet life she’d always wanted, the life that I’d taken away from her with my birth.

  I know that while I can create new girls with new identities to pretend to be, while I can lie and destroy the girl I once was, only to resurrect her when I’m alone, I can’t kill the electricity. I can’t escape it. I can no longer run to my freedom. My body’s too sore.

  Like Orpheus, I can’t save Sarah. And so for the first time in my life, I give up completely. I lie back on the cot they’ve moved me onto and let the dark close in on me until there’s nothing left but the buzzing aftermath of electricity still humming through my bones.

  Part Six:

  The Final Journey

  The days blur into nothing but jolts of electricity and the gauzy feeling of cotton in my mouth. It takes me longer and longer to collect myself after the treatments, to remember the girl they’re burning out of my body. Details fade. The smell of Mom’s old bottle of perfume. The exact shade of gold of Grammy’s cross necklace. The name of the road we took to church several times a week. Whether the girl who laughed when Aristo outed us had hair like the color of fire or the color of old pennies.

  It’s the sameness of the days here that makes it harder and harder to hold onto the past. I pass through them in a medicated buzz, as if I’m underwater and drowning without even realizing it. My bones are always sore. It’s as if once the electricity enters me, it never quite leaves. My skin always feels like it’s on fire, burning with a low, soft flame.

  At night I try to wrench myself back, to remember these things: the face Sarah made when she slapped me after I first got my period. The long purple fleece skirt I’d wear in the winter. The first time it snowed in Pieria, how at first I thought the sky was falling down around me and then I felt the cold white. On that night nobody slept; we all just ran screaming through the streets with our arms held high in the air, mouths open, trying to catch snowflakes on our tongues.

  The day she dropped me off here, Grammy told me she’d write, but as far as I know, she hasn’t. Sometimes I think that she never intended to, that for her this was finally the way to end something she’d never wanted in the first place.

  Some nights I find myself talking in my sleep. I don’t know what I was saying, but I wake up to find Char, who—when not outside smoking and watching the moon—quietly paces the halls. Patrolling, making sure no one is doing anything. In a strange way this makes me feel safe, as if she were Cerberus, always there with her industrial flashlight in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.

  I wake up to find her watching me, the flashlight lit up in her hand like a torch. “You were doing it again.”

  Every time, I say nothing, just turn my back to her. Embarrassed, even though I never know what I was saying.

  But afterward she and I talk. I don’t want to let her know my weaknesses. Still, gradually, I begin to tell her things. I’m just so afraid of forgetting my girlhood completely, because while I’m still a girl, I feel like I long ago passed into somewhere else—into some other place, a place where girlhood doesn’t exist. The therapy has done nothing for my gayness, but I no longer know the girl who was sent here.

  The first time I see myself is on the third day of therapy. Char brings me soap and towels and tells me that I have to shower. I’m so exhausted. Thinking about the effort it will take to shower makes me even more tired.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You’re starting to smell,” she says.

  When I look in the mirror, I don’t recognize my face. At first I think that a stranger has somehow entered the bathroom with me. I was afraid of confronting my body, of seeing what has happened to it. The electroshock therapy leaves red marks from where she attaches the electrodes on my arms. My legs and wrists are ringed with bruises from where I’d struggled against the restraints. I’ve lost weight since coming here, and after the treatments I usually can’t make myself eat or keep down food when I do.

  In the shower I look down at my body, at the bruises from the therapy, the scars on my back that I can see only when I twist in front of the mirror—and something breaks inside my chest. I sit down on the shower floor and rock back and forth. I try to catch my breath. The cheap medicinal shampoo stings my eyes. I stay like this until the water runs cold. Then I scrub myself with a worn-down washcloth until my skin stings. I want to wash it all away: the years of shame, the circles where they tell me I am unholy, that I will never be good enough, the treatments that leave my body ablaze, changed into something that no longer feels like mine, the days spent carrying rocks. All the wasted time I’d spent hiding when I knew this would happen anyway, when I knew it was all beyond hope. I scrub my skin until my arms start to bleed.

  When I’m back in my room, Char knocks on my door.

  “Raya?”

  I quickly struggle to put on my clothes without drying myself off, so she won’t see the scratches or the strips of irritated skin, the bumps where my wings once threatened to blossom. She walks in anyway. She’s brought me some new clothes. My number of treatments has gone up today. I am trying to get dressed, still wet, and I know she sees the scars, the secret that I’d tried to keep for all those years. Years where I wore one T-shirt over another to hide both my growing breasts and the vertebrae wings. I realize I’m almost looking forward to the nothing-like buzz of the aftershocks because then I won’t have to grieve for anything.

  Hyde comes occasionally to check on our progress. He brings a quiz to monitor how we are doing. If we lie and say that we don’t feel gay anymore, that we want to marry a man and live in a house with a white picket fence, he can tell. He threatens to up our therapy, though he never does. Sometimes I lie anyway. Tell him stories from my fake life, talk about Grammy, how I’m going to become the granddaughter she always hoped for. Other times I just say nothing and pretend I’ve forgotten how to speak. Nothing ever happens. He either listens or sits there quietly when I don’t talk.

  After that they separate me from Sarah. They separate all of us. They take us all into small, single bedrooms.

  On the first night we’re separated, I think I can hear Sarah’s voice rising above the buzz that is all I can hear now. But I am not sure. On the second night I try to go look for her, drag myself out of bed and start to hobble toward the door, but I can’t move normally—my legs are shaking too much. Char is at the door with her flashlight. I don’t know if she would stop me and I don’t have enough fight left in me to find out, so I tell her I am going to the bathroom.

  I lock the door and run the faucet for a few minutes.

  In the mirror I see my mother’s face. It is not hers, though it feels like it no longer belongs to me either. I don’t remember the girl I once was. She’s not the bald woman staring back—her eyes ringed with black circles, lips chapped, cuticles peeling and bloody, her ribs and collarbone protruding in ways they hadn’t before.

  Here she is, but where am I? I have disappeared inside my own body, and I don’t know how to return. I have forgotten how to be anything but invisible, what I’ve been training myself to be for the entirety of my closeted girlhood. The shocks have done nothing to make me feel less gay, though they have made me supremely numb. Facts about myself have started to slip away from me. One morning I forget my birthday. Another time, my middle name. I spend half a day scouring my memory for it until I remember that it’s Ava, after Grammy.

  I only want to sleep because it’s the one time when the soft, low hum that plagues me every waking hour is gone. I think a week has passed, though the only way I have to coun
t this is the number of shocks I get each day. Soon the mornings begin to melt into the dark gloom that begins in autumn, and that is when Char tells me that I’m almost done with my treatments. I have one more day.

  We’re not allowed to close the doors except at night, so I always have to get dressed under watch. Today I sit down and hold out my arm when it’s time. I stopped resisting a long time ago, after the first few treatments.

  When it’s over, Char smiles at me through the fog.

  “You know, it’s almost break. You can go home soon if you want to. Just for the break, though. We can’t discharge you for a few more months, until we know that you’re cured completely. You’re one of the best electrotherapy patients we’ve had. I can’t say the same for the others.”

  Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if one day my heart will stop during one of the shock treatments. But I’m too tired to wonder that much. It’s like I’m no longer in my own skin. When they first gave me the shock therapy, I’d spend the entire day experiencing the aftereffects, which make it hard to move, and then I was too spent to do anything but give in. After the first treatments, when they separated us, they moved a projector into the room, and Char makes me watch a video of two girls kissing on a gray couch during each session. Though I miss Sarah constantly, so much that it physically hurts, I’m scared of finding her, of seeing what they have been doing to her.

  One night early on, Leon burst into my room. It was almost three in the morning. He didn’t say anything. I moved over so he could curl up next to me. His skin was too hot, fevered, and his body shook against mine. Eventually he spoke.

  “She is okay. Not good, but she’s not bad either. Is holding up pretty well. Misses you.”

  “I miss her too, Leon. I can’t do it anymore, the fighting.”

  He held me closer. “You don’t have to. Rest now.”

  I knew that wasn’t true, that I should have been fighting for her. When I first came here, I told myself I was Orpheus, that I was going to get my girl and get us out of here, but I couldn’t. I failed. She’s still here, and I can’t do anything to save her. I fell asleep next to Leon. He didn’t need to say it, but I knew in that moment—though the both of us were motherless children, lost and confused with our bodies coursing with electricity—we were safe with each other.

  When I woke up, he was gone, only a strand of blue-black hair on my pillow and a lingering warmth on the bed where his body was.

  Char, I’ve learned, takes these mysterious blue pills so she doesn’t have to sleep. Late at night I can sense her while I stir somewhere between sleep and semiconsciousness, and she often comes and sits with me.

  Once, she apologized to me but spoke so quietly I almost didn’t hear her.

  The next morning I thought I’d dreamed her saying, “Raya, I’m sorry. I don’t know if I can do this anymore, but I don’t know what else to do, because if this entire thing was wrong, then I really lost her. I really did give her up. I’ve lost too much for this.”

  That same afternoon I tried to write Sarah a note, but my hands shook so much my handwriting looked like chicken scrawl.

  I gave it to Char anyway and asked her to bring it to Sarah. I think she did, but I don’t know. Even though she’s the one doing this to me, I don’t hate Char. I think she’s as trapped as I am, though her trap is mental. She only needs to learn how to leave.

  The days still bleed together. Late at night, after my final treatment, I go to get some water and I see her in the hall, hunched over and clutching her head in her hands. The flashlight has fallen, casting shadows on the floor.

  I’m thinking about going to her when she turns. I don’t know if she sees me. Her eyes are unfocused. So I go back to my room, wait for her to return to herself, for the bobbing light of the flashlight to cast shadows on the walls as she paces around in the dark again. But it doesn’t.

  In bed I let the buzz wash over everything. Then I remember that Char told me that I’m free to leave, to go to the main house now, while I take a break between shock sessions. So I stand up. When I start walking, my knees almost give way and I start to slide to the floor. But I hold onto the wall for support and manage to pull myself up and out the door, shakily. I walk across the lawn.

  Char said the shaking and the difficulty moving would go away as soon as I was done with the treatments, but so far it’s only been a few hours.

  Inside the house it’s quiet, almost dawn.

  Yesterday, in my first act of resistance in a long time, when I was in Char’s old study, covered in dust and littered with outdated medical journals, I pretended to have a violent coughing fit. When Char left the room to get me water, I went through her desk drawers, looking for evidence of the girl she left behind. I wanted to understand Char’s hungry look: as if she’d had spent her whole life fasting, hoping that somehow her hunger could save her. I wanted to know if it were something I could escape too. The bottom drawer was locked, but I found the key taped to the bottom of the desk and opened it.

  She’d probably been told for years, like the rest of us—by our families, by our hometown preachers, by the children we grew up with—that we are wrong, that something about us is broken. She had probably been told this so many times that she believed it, or started to believe it.

  If the preacher said we were wrong, that we needed to be fixed or we’d end up in hell, then our parents or our guardians would ship us off or send us back to get fixed. And no matter how many times we begged them not to abandon us, no matter how many times we’d told them that these treatments could kill us, that we were being broken, turned into something different, that we didn’t know what would happen to us if things continued this way, that we didn’t know what we would change into, they wouldn’t listen. But still, we told them, told them we were tortured mentally and physically. That they poured hot water on our fingers, that they hooked us up to machines that electrocuted us, that they starved us. That like our older brothers and uncles and fathers who served in war and came back as shells, we too were being hollowed out.

  But it didn’t make a difference. Our families gave us up the moment they heard the word “queer.”

  One day either we wouldn’t want to come back, or we would come back as someone else. But none of us ever truly returns. And this is why some of the kids cut themselves even if everything sharp has been taken from them. Why some of the kids stand in the football field and scream until they get the raspy feeling in their chests that you get from crying in the cold.

  I’m always scared that my wings are coming back, that I can feel them reemerging. Sometimes I have to go to the bathroom just to check to make sure they’re gone, because I swear I can feel them rustling in my spine. And the possibility of this being only in my head scares me more than the possibility that the vertebrae are growing again. Every time I twist in front of the mirror, and pull my shirt down to feel the nubby scars, I breathe a sigh of both relief and fear.

  I don’t know what happened with Char’s family. She won’t talk about anything other than the horses she once owned as a girl, before everything. Those horses are the only good memory she seems to have of her girlhood. If I want to delay or avoid therapy, I ask her questions about them and she’ll go off on a jag about equestrian stuff. Sometimes she’ll even talk until the end of my session without doing anything to me, and I can leave relatively unscathed. She gets this misty, faraway look, I think it’s because she gave up actually being free long ago, but when she’s galloping off so fast, maybe she could believe that in the moment, she could escape everything, escape the life she wasted by being held prisoner here and becoming something, someone else.

  In every other aspect of her existence, though, she’s given up. Like I’m beginning to.

  I thought of the horses as I rifled through the drawer. I didn’t have much time, but I found a certificate of graduation from the conversion program with her name on it. I already knew a
bout that, but beneath the certificate there was a picture of a blonde girl in a high school uniform holding a loaf of bread and laughing. Her cheeks were flushed red, and by the way she looked at whoever was behind the camera, I knew that Char was the girl who took the picture and this girl was her Sarah.

  My hands began to shake. Looking at her—ponytail messy around her face, smiling so wide her mouth looked all the way open, like she’d been captured in the moment directly before shouting—I felt something like hunger for the first time since the treatments. But the hunger wasn’t for the girl in the photo, it was for Sarah. I wanted to hold the camera like she did in that picture, to have Sarah look through it and into me like that, to make her smile that wide.

  I returned the photograph to the drawer and felt more like myself for the first time in days.

  Now I’m standing at the entrance to the rec room. I see a familiar choppy head, her buzz cut framing her face like a halo. She’s lying on one of the couches with her hand flung over her face.

  I run to her, throw myself down at her feet, take her hand and pull it toward me. She’s startled at first. I realize that she must have been sleeping. Then she grabs me and kisses me hard enough that it hurts, but not in a bad way, and I kiss her back for what feels like forever. She’s holding me, running her hands over where my wings used to be, and she’s crying and so am I.

  Her skin hurts too; I can tell by the way she shudders when I kiss her shoulder. Later she’ll say that while the shock therapy did nothing to change her gayness either, she has also started to feel hollowed out, her body consumed by a strange burning. Char has told us both that we may experience it for years after the treatments have stopped.