Abandon Me

by Melissa Febos

  You are so lucky, he would say to me. I lay in bed and tried to make a prayer of it. I am so lucky. I am so lucky. Through the wall, I heard him scream in his sleep.

  In this story, I was not the hider, but the hidden. My Captain is no monster. He tried to save me from those other devourers, but it was impossible. Even when we write our own stories there’s no place to hide.

  The sound of my name still shocks me. Melissa, and I startle, as if the sayer has called out to and seen some hidden part of me. It strikes me as both stranger and skeleton key; part cuss, part promise, part secret. Melissa, and I open sesame.

  When lovers call my name—in the bathtub, in bed, over the telephone, or into my ear—it closes my eyes, buckles me, thralls my insides with the sweet terror of being recognized. Sometimes we cannot bear the thing we crave.

  This is not a story about learning to love myself. My name is not a symbol. It is coded with all of this: the unseen, the near-known, the rather-not-known.

  It hurts to hear everything my name holds, but I choose to drink from that river now, to carry that tangled history. I no longer want to change my name. I never did, really. I only wanted to know where I ended and everything else began, and I still do, in these oceanic days.

  Like Franny Glass, I have begged of myself a prayer, begged of my name an answer. Made them the same powerful thing. Aren’t they both gestures of surrender? Melissa may not be another word for mercy, but every name is a name for God.

  LABYRINTHS

  I waited outside of a methadone clinic in Bed-Stuy on a hot June morning in 2002. New York was already steeped in the smell of cooking garbage. I bought three doses off a jaundiced junkie, the whites of his eyes gone yolk. The scalped methadone came in liquid form and its chemical silt collected on the bottom of the plastic container. I poured it into a bottle of grape Gatorade and got on the gypsy bus in Chinatown for a fifteen-dollar ride to Boston.

  I was headed back to my mother’s and hoping to get clean before starting my final semester of college. I had been shooting up for two years. But she didn’t know that.

  That summer, my brother and I split our time between the big old house north of Cambridge that my mother shared with her fiancé and the Cape Cod home of our childhood, which sat on the edge of a pond nestled in the woods. My second day in Boston, I wedged my mickeyed Gatorade bottle in the back of my mother’s freezer and thought, Just one more. Every weekend, I drove to see a boy on the North Shore. We got high, listened to vinyl albums of Miles Davis and Patti Smith in front of the air conditioner, and I took home enough glassine baggies to last until my next visit.

  When we were both home, my brother and I made microwave quesadillas and watched TV. It was a reenactment of our late-childhood pastime. We were not allowed to watch television as kids except in short approved doses. Instead, we repeatedly viewed a small collection of VHS tapes, choice among which was Labyrinth, starring a teenaged Jennifer Connelly, David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King, and a supporting cast of Jim Henson puppets. For every time we watched E.T. or The Sound of Music, we watched Labyrinth ten times.

  Back then, we sat for hours, silently unwinding and rewinding that tape. We curled on opposite ends of the love seat in our den and never spoke about our troubles. Both then and now, I found comfort in proximity if not confidence. In both cases it was as close as I got to anyone.

  Boston oozed under a layer of humidity that curled our hair and glistened our faces. One afternoon we watched a marathon of Freaks and Geeks, Judd Apatow’s smart series about teenagers in the 1980s that was canceled after one season. It featured a brother and sister whose relationship bore a striking resemblance to ours.

  A meaty black fly kept landing on my neck and the touch of its tiny legs sent chills down my back. I periodically jammed my knuckles into my thigh to soothe an ache in my quadriceps. I could do nothing about the eye-twitch, or the terrifying fact that I was broke and growing more dopesick with each passing minute.

  My brother was restless, too. At some point, he became too restless to watch TV. He wanted to talk. His brows drew together in concentration. My brother’s eyes are green like mine but bigger and darker and framed by thick lashes. As a little boy, he had had a huge head and those same enormous eyes. We all called him Boo, a name that I’d given him on the day of his birth. That afternoon, his eyes glowered, pleaded. He wanted to explain something to me, or needed me to explain it to him. His six-foot-two body moved self-consciously, hands damp against his furred knees, ruined skate sneakers planted on the floor. He described a recent afternoon in the backyard when he had tried to give himself a haircut. The handheld mirror had broken and he had cut himself on a shard. Something about the blood. I couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell me and we both grew frustrated.

  His handsome face clouded. I wondered when the dark circles under his eyes had appeared. There was a thunder in him. The pressure of a storm gathering. I was sealed in my own trouble. I couldn’t help him.

  Labyrinth also features a sister and her younger brother. The film begins with Sarah, a spoiled, fanciful fifteen-year-old girl who resents her half brother, the infant Toby. Consigned to a night of babysitting, she spitefully invents a story, the sobbing baby in her arms. “There once was a poor girl,” she begins, and tells Toby about a Goblin King who is in love with the girl, and who longs to take the baby away if only she utters the right words. And Sarah does. Toby disappears and is replaced by a snowy owl who transforms into the Goblin King.

  Made in 1986, the aesthetic of Labyrinth reflects the era, but my MTV-sheltered eyes had seen nothing like it. Feathered and leathered, the ethereal Jareth juggled crystal balls and spoke in riddles. He was part woman, thin and tortured with skintight pants and so much desire locked inside him. He hated her. He needed her. I saw it in the wounded cruelty of his face as he showed Sarah the labyrinth he’d make her solve in order to retrieve her brother. My heart raced as I beheld that sprawling puzzle, a glowing desert of pathways, a spired castle at its center.

  “It doesn’t look that far,” Sarah lied.

  “It’s farther than you think,” he said.

  Unlike Sarah, I never resented my brother. He had always felt like mine. We had different birth fathers but had been raised by the same man. I never thought of the Captain as my adoptive father. And I never thought of my brother as my half brother.

  Like me, he was born at home—all ten pounds of him, in June of 1984, surrounded by midwives and sunshine. My mother moaned as that big head split her open, squeezing the Captain’s hands bloodless. When I tell people that I was present at my brother’s birth, I am sometimes met with looks of horror. As an adult, I can see how such an experience might traumatize some almost-four-year-olds. But on the cassette tapes recorded that day, over my mother’s grunts and the encouraging murmurs of her coaches, my own small voice rings out elatedly. In the photos I kneel beside her naked body, a toy stethoscope dangling from my ears, one pudgy hand pressing the diaphragm to her chest. I probably thought I delivered him.

  In our house, we knew the correct names for body parts. But we never said shut up, never called someone stupid. My brother and I rarely fought. We invented games and read stories and played dress-up with the trunk of exotic costumes that the Captain had collected in his travels. Sometimes, at the dinner table, as we laughed and laughed over some joke known only to us, I caught a glimpse of envy on my mother’s face.

  Behind his bedroom door, my brother built Lego cities, assembled costumes made entirely of duct tape and cardboard toilet paper rolls. He was Hiawatha, with an athletic-sock quiver and wooden stirring-spoon arrows. He was a Ninja Turtle, with cardboard shell and red-rag bandanna. He was the gentlest creature I knew, trying night after night to make himself into a warrior with the detritus of our home.

  Back then, I hid toys and household objects, delighted by my private knowledge of their whereabouts. Philosopher and ethicist Sissela Bok claims that, “To be able to hold back some information about oneself, or to
channel it and thus influence how one is seen by others gives power,” and in a theory echoed by Winnicott, Piaget, and Carl Jung, sees a child’s early revelation of silence as a necessary differentiation of the self.

  Jung describes his own formative experience of devising a diorama of a “little manikin” he had carved, with matching bed and coat, all of which he kept hidden from others. “No one could discover my secret and destroy it,” he explains. “I felt safe, and the tormenting sense of being at odds with myself was gone.” I had no words for this, but reading his confession as an adult, I knew exactly that relief.

  Before Sarah summons the Goblin King and enters the labyrinth, she spends her days reciting poetry, imagining herself a tragic heroine. Like Sarah, I was dramatic, and spent hours lost in fantasy. She was infatuated with her own beauty, and I so much wanted to be beautiful. But when I watch the film for the first time in twenty years, what strikes me most, alongside her self-absorption, is her anger.

  “It’s not fair!” she shouts again and again. She kicks the walls of the labyrinth in fits of entitled rage. My brother and I watched, dumbfounded, relieved by distraction. We were not angry. We missed the Captain. We didn’t know how to cure our mother’s sadness or our own. We only knew how to pour it into the hours of familiar stories. And Labyrinth was the most compelling.

  My brother, especially, showed the effects of the Captain’s months at sea. He followed me everywhere. I believed, as my parents did, that I was less troubled and so his protector. But no one could protect my brother from himself. He suffered from terrible nightmares. They came every night for the first two weeks after the Captain’s departures. My brother woke wailing from dreams of Chucky, the murderous doll from the 1988 horror movie Child’s Play. A wooden nutcracker figurine that we brought out during the holidays tormented him. In sleep, my brother’s fear of abandonment took the shapes of scarecrows and toys. His imagination animated them with the same vividness of his art projects and Lego creations. My brother, the creator. The boy alchemist. His tear-stained face and wet lashes pressed against my mother’s chest, inconsolable. I stroked his soft hair. When our babysitters tried to put him to bed, he screamed and ran out into the street.

  A boy needs his father, I once heard my mother say into the telephone. I turned those words in my mind. I barricaded myself in books and secrets. I waited to become a teenager, waited to become beautiful, waited for my own Goblin King.

  I was sad, too. Just a few years away from chaos, from the end of my body as I knew it, I was already itchy, brooding, watching myself cry in the mirror without knowing why.

  One afternoon, I shut my bedroom door in his face. He pummeled it and I flung the door open. There he stood red-faced, cheeks streaked with tears, heaving with the Hulk-ish fury of the powerless.

  I hate you, I said. I shut the door.

  Hours later I emerged. The day had just tipped from blue into black and a few reflected lights flickered on the surface of the pond. My brother sat in an old armchair and his face shone with tears.

  Mom said that big sisters aren’t allowed to hate their little brothers, he said, through anguished hiccups.

  We all carry a small catalog of unsealable wounds. Maybe these breaches of conscience that retain their power to sear are necessary reminders of our own boundaries. We touch them to remember. To prevent future transgression. But no sting compares to this one. It carved something out of me. A space that filled with the shocking light of how much I could hurt the person I least wanted to. It was the first love that made sense of the word tender, which refers not only to a gentle feeling, but to the ache and vulnerability of loving someone. Which is not the same thing as protecting them.

  In the summer of 2002, my brother was angry. He had spent his senior year of high school brooding, stoned, painting self-portraits that now hang on the wall of our mother’s house, beautiful and chilling reminders of that summer. He won an all-city award for high school artists, and was accepted by a prestigious art college in Baltimore.

  My mother was planning her wedding. Her fiancé was a scholar, a man brilliant and funny and sometimes mean. She was looking for a way out of marrying him, but didn’t know it yet. My brother was readying to leave for college in August and had just quit smoking pot. Then, he stopped sleeping.

  He didn’t like my mother’s fiancé. He didn’t like the way he spoke to her or to us. I’m sick of being patronized, he complained. The Captain was planning a move to the furthest corner of the country from us under the misguided impression that we might follow. He had retired from the sea and still we rarely saw him. I was too sunk in my own addiction to care, but my brother had never stopped wanting more from him. He stomped up and down the stairs. He slammed doors and drawers. The world was fucked up and so was our family and he was done pretending otherwise.

  Anger made his body so animal. It seemed the force of it might split him open. I was afraid to touch him, my little brother, afraid of how badly he might need that. I wished he could pull it together. My addiction was ugly, but no one else had to see. My brother was spilling everywhere and it scared me as only a glimpse of our secret selves can scare.

  One afternoon, my mother and I made plans to brunch the next morning. The only safe topic by then was our shared worry over my brother. That night I borrowed her car and went on an all-night drug binge. On the early morning drive home, I came to as my car tires bumped over the sidewalk, my front fender grinding against the fence of the high school athletic field. I crept into my basement room and slept for twelve hours. The next afternoon I staggered into the kitchen and found my mother at the table with her hands wrapped around a cup of tea. Her face was so lonely in the moment before she looked up and saw me. Her familiar shape in the chair a dead weight in my chest.

  What’s going on with you? she asked me.

  I think I’m coming down with something, I said.

  That month, she developed a sudden and debilitating case of psoriatic arthritis. Her knees swelled and throbbed until she could barely climb the stairs of our home.

  I want to be able to dance at my own wedding, she said, and postponed it indefinitely.

  One afternoon, I drove my brother to his friend’s house. I pushed a mixtape into the cassette player and the opening bass notes of a favorite PJ Harvey song twanged. My brother turned up the volume. He nodded his head and when I looked at him, he smiled at me for the first time in a long time.

  This is amazing, he said.

  He kept smiling. That note of wonderment burrowed into his voice and took seed.

  That’s amazing, he said, listening to the peepers chirrup in the pond as late summer drew over us.

  That’s amazing, about a broken chair along the highway between Cape Cod and Boston that he made me pull over to inspect.

  He’s being so nice, my mother whispered.

  I nodded. I wanted to feel as relieved as she looked.

  The word amaze gives us maze, from Middle English, denoting delirium or delusion. To be mazed is to be confused, stupefied, lost. The noun, of course, is a puzzle—a complex network of passages through which one has to find a way.

  And so my brother seemed—mazed, amazed, trapped in a puzzle. He wandered the rooms of our house. He unpacked art supplies to begin projects and left them scattered across the floor. He stood on the shore of our pond and marveled. He wrote page after page in an old spiral-bound notebook. He asked us so many questions, but his gaze shifted as we answered, ever distracted by the next turn and what lay around its corner.

  In the beginning, the labyrinth looks to Sarah like an infinite corridor. She runs and runs and then, frustrated, kicks the glistening bricks, chest heaving. But then she realizes there are openings all around her—Greek walls, hedges, misty groves, and toxic bogs. At first, this discovery exhilarates her; she is trapped not in a monolithic dungeon or an endless hallway to nowhere, but in a fantastical world full of choices. Ebullient, she bounds through a doorway and falls into a pit. She has mistaken her changed pe
rception of the labyrinth for the labyrinth’s changing. However altered its appearance, she is still trapped; the labyrinth’s many magical turns are an illusion created by the Goblin King.

  Though they are used interchangeably, mazes and labyrinths are not synonymous. A maze is characterized by many possible paths, dead ends, and digressions. A labyrinth is unicursal and has only one path to its center. By these definitions, all Sarah has to do to “solve” the labyrinth is keep going. Her real challenge is to ignore the Goblin King’s illusory distractions. Throughout the film Jareth tries to convince her that the labyrinth is too difficult to solve. He drugs her. He sends creatures to mislead her. He promises her that happiness is in succumbing to his fantasy and abandoning her quest to solve the labyrinth.

  “I ask for so little,” he pleads. “Just let me rule you, and you can have everything that you want.”

  I recognized the seeming romance of my brother’s mania. Drugs had also felt like a doorway to a fantastical world of choices. For thirty dollars I could go anywhere without fear. Heroin, especially, leveled the relative danger and value of all things.

  A routine day in my college years included a morning class for which I was always well prepared. I attended study groups and rehearsals of our college chorus. I interned at the Rockefeller Center offices of a national magazine. I drank tiny cups of wheatgrass and ran on treadmills at the local YMCA. Then I met my dealer on the way home and bought three bags of dope and three bags of crack, because while I preferred cocaine it was harder to find in Bed-Stuy. I locked myself in my bedroom. I dissolved the crack with lemon juice and shot speedballs by candlelight so that my roommates wouldn’t know that I was home. I sometimes cradled the telephone on my shoulder so that if I overdosed I might have time to dial 911.