by Beth Harden
“Time to go to sleep, lovely,” he hummed. My tormentor paraded me back to the bedroom. I ached to be released into the refuge of my 1000-count Egyptian cotton sheets and the quilt’s safe shield of down but the bed had been stripped clean. Like a stray mongrel marred by unprovoked beatings, I hesitated, afraid to do the wrong thing and enrage the cruel master. I looked to him for a clue. Do I climb up? X jerked his head towards the floor.
“Gotta say your prayers first,” he said. I had no strength to counter his wishes. He lashed me to the bedpost once again but this time in a kneeling position on the floor. Immediately, the risk warning went on high alert. I knew his mind was made up and had been since he first laid a hand on me. What I did at this point in the tragedy might not alter his intentions but I could change who owned the moment.
“I get it, you know,” I said suddenly, interrupting the privacy of his disturbing fantasy. “If you have no future, then this is all okay. Might as well take yourself out with a splash.”
“What you sayin’?” he asked.
“Martyr, right? Some code you believe in that’s worth giving your life up for?”
“Don’t be talkin' stupid shit!” he shouted, growing more agitated.
“I mean, in the end you’ll be forgotten. Maybe your picture comes up on the news for a few days, a week perhaps, and then when they haul you in, case closed. People always move on to something else.”
“Shut the fuck up!” he replied. X had angled my arms so that one elbow was wedged against the bed frame and the other suspended in air. My feet were bound by the same method and shoved back so that I was half-sprawled on my shins, bent in a huddle and posed to petition the Almighty Maker.
“You a Christian?” I asked.
“No, bitch. Why?”
“You better ask forgiveness for your sins. You’ve broken some cardinal ones. The kind you go to hell for.”
“Stop running your mouth!” he said, puzzled.
“Why? Don’t you believe in the judgment seat? You might want to figure that out before you get there.”
“I don’t plan on doin’ no dyin’. Now shut your mutha-fuckin’ mouth!”
“There are worse things than dying. Like spending your whole life in a prison cell.”
“You’re gonna do what I say. Close your eyes, count to three and then start prayin’. When you finish, I’ll be gone.” My torturer crouched down and lifted my chin in his palm. “But before you nod off, take a good look. You’re in the presence of a legend.”
“Boys want to be legends. Men want to leave legacies,” I said. He considered this statement for a moment and then sneered.
“Same difference,” he replied.
“An eternity of difference,” I stated clearly.
“Eternity, it is.” X rose to his feet. “Sweet dreams, lovely. Start counting.”
“One….two…three…four…” I mumbled slowly, trying to stretch out the minutes to buy me my life.
“Lights out,” he said crisply. The first blow to the top of the forehead elicited an automatic flinch response, that base instinct to protect the command center. My hands jerked against the restraints in a failed attempt to push danger away. There was no time to form a cry before the second blow caught me on the right side of my face and temple with a solid force of wood or metal that produced an earthy, organic odor in my nostrils. The smell of blood. My mind began to disengage and float away from the physical parameters that held it. On came a lapse of velvety blackness like a glitch of blank video. An extended pause and then I was back in the presence of near-death standing guard above me. His footwear was chalked with the ruin of the streets. One pant leg dragging, buckling, folding in on itself. Man’s clothing on a jittery boy. Both strikes acted as primitive shots of anesthesia numbing any further sensation on the surface. My body tucked and sagged involuntarily. Blood spattered in a curious trail like an unstrung necklace across the floor. One cheek was crowding up into view distorting all vision. A warm flush radiated down the right side of my neck. Sleep was descending; I couldn’t hold it off any longer. I needed to say something important before I went. But my brain ignored the periods and punctuation marks carefully put in place causing the sentences to buckle up over the tail end of the one in front of it. A fifty car pile-up of reckless words.
“Over the bridge…trust me….back up….” I stammered. The gears were slipping now. I was coasting in neutral, rolling backwards away from those that loved me. The one racing down the dark Interstate to find me and the others whispering grace with my name in it. I started a mental write of my obituary: “…survived by never-to-be husband Aaron Mitchell, parents Russ and Mel Braum and five brothers.” My family would be sitting down to steaming chicken pot pie and a second helping of warm conversation when the phone rings to tell them. After tonight the number of chairs arranged around the table will be odd, eight minus one. Bubbles bloomed and collapsed at the corner of my mouth as I blew them all faraway kisses.
CHAPTER 2: STAY ALERT, STAY ALIVE
First there was nothing and then there was light. I realized this only after awareness came like a peek through a dusty window blind. I felt like I had had been created or re-created over again. I was conscious enough to realize that a vast nothingness had existed just before that moment. I couldn’t know the size or depth of it; just that it was there.
#
I tried again to open the left eye wider by wrinkling my brow but nothing happened. I squeezed the muscles of the lid itself but it remained in place. Perhaps it would clear like the grogginess after a daytime nap when a latent dream leaves one disconcerted and wondering if it is Monday morning or a Saturday afternoon. There was no preceding dream, just relentless darkness that threatened to roll back over me if I didn’t rouse up and stay vigilant. Either way, it must be time to get up. Time for class. Hurry, get your ass out of bed! The message went out loud and clear. Strangely, I could see it jump from purposed thought into action. The nerve impulse recorded its urgency and leapt to life racing out from the control center. You’re gonna be late. Move it! but the signal weakened and then fizzled right before crossing the gap. Both my arms remained inert and my legs were disconnected, deadened and weighted down. Was I trapped somewhere? Terror ripped through my mind dragging with it my greatest childhood fear of being abducted. The very thought of it used to keep me awake in a house of sleeping people. It was the sheer dread of strangers propping an extension ladder against the house and scaling two stories up to my bedroom window to steal me out from under my sleeping parents. Being kidnapped and buried in an underground coffin alive but only able to draw a sliver of oxygen through a straw that just barely pierced ground level while the world at large rolled along like nothing ever happened. The school bus would bump along with intermittent stops and starts like a jitter bug on the pond with its hinged door flapping open at the end of my drive. I imagined the exasperation of the driver at wasting two whole minutes waiting for absolutely no one. A few of my friends might notice the empty desk in home room and figure it was the stomach flu, but I’d be completely forgotten by noon as they raced out to play four-square. I couldn’t bear the tragedy of never saying goodbye and leaving my loved ones in a dark sphere of mystery like Dorothy Gayle’s Auntie Em who’s stuck calling out to her from inside the magician’s globe but can’t see her beloved niece weeping right on top of her.
At this very moment, my parents wouldn’t know to miss me or begin to wonder where I was; not until our weekly phone call came and went with no answer on my end. My body began to tremble with an acute sensation of loss and a desperate longing to be found. I envisioned my mother tucking the flat sheet into neat hospital corners on my empty bed, rolling up the collection of china animals into newsprint and packing them in cartons labeled with scrawled magic marker: Save for Elise. And where was my father? He must be out on the Turnpike north of Bangor with a sack of forbidden danish drifting under his seat, anxious to unroll the hose and nozzle at the next customer stop and tell them all about h
is only daughter. You know, the aspiring medical psychologist who would heal a universe of unsettled minds.
I could shout loud enough to catch the ear of a passerby who might investigate the curious sound like the pitiful mewing of an orphan kitten that had fallen inside the drain pipe. Perhaps it might locate one random stranger good enough to detour from his own self-absorbed mission to rescue someone else’s stray, who’d dirty up his slacks and drop down to dig me out of this avalanche. The vowels and consonants assembled in the right order ready to take a gunpowder launch up from my diaphragm, but nothing happened. The starting gun jammed; the warning flare fizzled. I could feel something like rigid pipe between my front teeth. The object extended beyond the back of tongue and downwards. Its inflexible presence could be felt if I clenched my jaw and tightened the muscles of my neck. Panic rolled over me. I was suffocating slowly. I tried to reach for the apparatus and yank it from my mouth, but my hands stayed in place. I’m going to die, I said to myself. So be it. Let’s make this fast and painless. What a cruel reversal this was since someone or something had just lifted me from the deadness of no memory into resurrected life.
But then it occurred to me. I was breathing whether I wanted to or not. A mechanically-induced surge of oxygen filled my lungs and lifted my chest followed by a subtle dip in pressure and a subsequent drop of my ribcage. I stopped struggling and tried to relax into the rhythm. What did I have control of? Like a battle sergeant, I took inventory of whatever resources were still available after the dust of the explosion had cleared. The casualties were many. I ran through the roster.
Sight: compromised and only at thirty percent. The right eye was either blind or refused to operate. I had partial vision in my “good” eye, which now seemed better able to sort contrasts. Shadows were slowly pulling into shapes. Still it was terribly dark with only the faint shine of either the moon or weak sunlight coming from behind me. I allowed that one eye to wander freely trying to locate an edge, a border, anything that would delineate a clean margin. Somewhere to start.
And what about hearing, the last sense to go before someone succumbs to the coroner’s caseload? Mine was keen. There had to be a fish tank nearby. I could hear the flushing of water though a filter and the carbonation of bubbles rising through hydrogen molecules. In the quiet pauses between the click and hiss of a pump of some kind, I sorted out other sounds. A quick tempo beeping from what appeared to be a standing pole on my right and another series of alarms that sounded at intervals a few feet above and slightly behind my head. Farther out on the circumference, I could detect a droning white noise of competing television sets. People bickered on a faraway sit-com. Female voices were exchanged back and forth. A shrill laugh was followed by a male baritone. I began sorting the footsteps. The fast shuffle on soft soles versus a quick rapping of heels. By the number and length of steps, it appeared to be a long busy hallway. Why was no one coming in here? More time elapsed. I heard a waste can rattle, a siren of some kind and then a toilet flush.
I couldn’t define taste or smell. The dryness in my mouth was excruciating and the pipe pressing down on my tongue caused a vague medicinal taste. I wondered if I was hungry or if I’d been fed. Worry began creeping through my veins. How could I chew or drink? I suddenly realized how dehydrated I felt and how horribly thirsty I was. Calm down, calm down. Move on. What did I have to work with? I couldn’t feel anything. It was more a sense that I was supported on something soft and cushioned. My body rocked from side to side on gentle swells as it had when I was a leggy, big-toothed girl warming on the spine of the summer raft as it swayed in the outgoing tide. I let the image lull me into a false peace which was a welcome distraction from the horrifying thought that was rising on the cognitive horizon; but it came on anyway lifting fully into view. Was I paralyzed? At that possibility, I lost any grip on rational thinking and anxiety took over. It throttled in my chest and churned in my stomach. Nausea swelled in my abdomen threatening to rise up and spew out any sense of order or calm. I caught hold of a tatter of sanity and reeled it in. If I allowed myself to get so worked up that I vomited, there was nowhere for the food and bile to go. No way I could do anything but lay here and choke on my own fluids. I tried to concentrate on the metronome of breaths again. In, out. In, out. In, out.
Then it started up, that slight feeling of apprehension like something was about to occur, something I couldn’t identify but should avoid. It loomed into a growing, giant-size sense of dread. An inner voice tried to tell me to look up and get out but too late! What I had failed to take into account was that innate sixth sense, the one always jaded by the handful of other faculties. What had taken root and was keenly working was the irrefutable power of one’s invisible hunch. It had been there brooding under the surface all along. Something horrible was going to happen. Was happening…
“Trust me.”
“Sweet dreams, lovely.”
“Eternity it is.”
It hailed its arrival with a deafening announcement of sheer fright that ripped through the silence and locked its clammy hands on my heart. I fought to scream. That audible instinct to ward off evil, the most basic of all survival instincts failed me now as it had then when utter terror caused instant paralysis and left me powerless. Leave me the fuck alone! My feet jerked spasmodically and my restrained hands yanked against their tethers. An alarm went off. A commotion of bodies converged running from east and west. They’d finally found me.
“It’s a seizure. Look there. See! The eyelid fluttering, the hands curled up. Like palsy. Push 2cc’s of Diazepam stat. Give it five minutes and we’ll dose again.”
I tried to explain and tell them they were wrong but the explanation was blanketed in a fog so deep I couldn’t imagine wading out to retrieve the verbs and nouns that were sinking into the frigid deep.
#
Sometime later, I regained partial consciousness. Over in the corner of the room, people were huddled together in serious discussion. At first glance, they were only generic figures. Sexless, ageless and nameless. There were three of them, one smaller than the others. Their heads were bent in somber deliberation and they spoke in low tones that were barely perceptible. There seemed to be some discord among them like they couldn’t agree on what to do next or which direction to take. The train of awareness departed and I was left behind.
#
I was back again. Time had assumed a new method of measurement that was free of numbers, defined now by the angle of the beam it allowed to wash white and wax pale on the wall in front of me. I could sense the lengthening and shortening of shadow like on a sun dial. All I knew was that time had passed over, passed on and passed by. My three guardians, whether angels or demons, had made no move to leave. I knew they were there by the noise of their movements. They shuffled paper bags and shifted the mismatched arrangement of chairs by dragging them on squealing feet. They stood to look at their watches, rearranged their magazines and took turns filling paper cups with tap water from the stainless steel sink. Occasionally one would leave the room but was never gone long. Objects began to pull into recognizable forms: a soap dispenser on the wall, a plastic container with a hinged lid that had snapped shut on a limp hospital gown hanging half in and half out. A small television set on a swivel arm that reflected a picture of a young woman strapped to a bed looking up at a television set on a swivel arm. Was this a movie in a movie or something like déjà vu? The Droste effect of repeating images in descending size all within the same frame or like M.C. Escher, one hand drawing the hand that was drawing it. Past creating the future? The present imitating the past? My mind wheeled with the magnitude of the struggle before it shut down.
#
Awake again, this time with better clarity. I knew now that the gliding shapes that came and went were nurses who had to lift up the IV bags and squeeze their plump rear-ends around the spectator group that apologized for getting in the way, but didn’t budge their positions or interrupt their watch. The shapes on the sill were jackets or swe
aters thrown there in haste and the surface on which they lay was an industrial-size radiator that billowed dry heat. When these folks were ready to leave, their outer jackets would be nicely warmed. But for what season? The buds on the maple. Last I recall they were turgid with fertile seed. And what of these spectators? What drove them to huddle at the site of my misery? Money? Curiosity? Were they those that preyed off calamity like jackals on the fringe of a future corpse. Suddenly the screen went black. I could no longer see. I automatically switched the channel to the one with sound only.
“Why do we have to assign blame? It’s nobody’s fault. This is the shit that happens because the world is random and evil.”
“If you knew that to be true, then why did you encourage her to go? To a city, no less!”
“Because we are stewards of the gifts given to us. That includes our children. We keep them for a time but we don’t own them. It is our job to send them off when they are ready.”
“Well, who said she was ready?”
“She did. And she didn’t have to. You could tell it was time.”
“So, we take the word of a child as our guidepost. I mean, damnit, she’d barely been out of Maine and then we send our daughter out to the wolves of this world?”
“Your focus is skewed. You’ve got the finger pointed at the wrong parties. We are not to blame. The ones at fault are the fuckers who did this and they will pay down to the last penny and inch of their lives.”
“But you heard them. The police said there was no forced entry. We must not have done our job properly. She should have known about trusting strangers and making sure the doors were always locked. She wasn’t mature enough or didn’t have the street sense to know how dangerous a place it was.”
“Yes, she is a trusting soul and that may be a downfall of hers but I wouldn’t want to change that quality in her. Why are we questioning the best in her and not believing the absolute worst in others? I should have been there. If I hadn’t gotten a late start, I would have been.”