Conscience

by John Skipp

  Nikki was safe: for now, at least.

  And Dottie Neff was alone.

  With him.

  She let the day’s pain seep back into her body gradually, let her memory piece together what it could. Sleep had put a buffer between Wednesday’s Hell and the new one a-bornin’, but that mercy fried quickly in the sweet light of day. Then the damage began to itemize itself, meticulous but in no particular order.

  This morning brought the skull-ache first. It centered on the jaws, the temples, and the space immediately behind her eyes. By the time her brain began to throb, the rest of her body was catching up: the wrenched left arm, the throbbing nipples, the pummeled pussy, all on fire. Before she had even begun to move, the entire inventory had been laid out.

  Then she remembered poor ol’Buzz Royer, which reminded her of the plan, and the ghostly sweet sweet taste of freedom came flooding back to warm and haunt her.

  It didn’t make Hell go away, of course; when she moved, the pain got instantly worse. “Oh, God,” she moaned, but she did so quietly. There was much to do in the next hour or so; the last thing she wanted was to wake up Dale. Not with that flavor so close to her tongue.

  Not when she was so close.

  Her feet edged off the side of the bed and wobbled to the floor. The rest of her followed, wobbling naked toward the open bedroom door. He had not bothered to close it before launching into last night’s hate-making ritual. So Nikki, as usual, had heard it all.

  But for the last time, Dottie silently swore. Baby, I promise.

  Today we say goodbye...

  She shuffled into the hallway and headed for the back of the house. There was a full-length mirror on the bathroom door at the end of the hall. She saw herself in it, could not look away.

  The woman who stared back at her was thirty-two, five foot six, one hundred and sixty-nine. She had big brown eyes with tiny pupils and dark puffy bruises around them. A styleless mop of mud-brown hair, limp as roadkill, crowned her head. There was no tone to the pale white flesh, just bulge and stoop and sag. In fact, there was nothing to commend this woman at all. Except.

  Except that she was ready.

  And that, with every step she took, she seemed to grow...

  June 17

  dear oprah winfrey,

  i don’t know how to start this. i’ve never written to a big star like yourself before! i never thought i had anything that important to say, you know? but i watch your show all the time, and it moved me so much. your so brave and strong and funny. i just wish that i was like you. i think you are the greatest woman in the whole world. i really mean that.

  but the problem is, i’m not like you at all. i don’t have any guts. i think the bravest thing i ever did was writing you this letter, and i bet i don’t even have the nerve to mail it.

  you see, i have problems. most of them are my fault, i know, but i just don’t know how to get around them. when i think about how messed up my life has gotten, sometimes it doesn’t seem like theres any hope at all. it’s just too complicated, do you know what i mean?

  but then i watch your show, and i get hope. i see all these women overcoming all these incredible things, just being so honest and open about their feelings, and i wish that i could do that, but i really cant.

  sometimes it gets me really scared, like when you had on the rapists for two days, or those people who wrote books about murderers like son of sam. and sometimes you make me laugh, like when you had on mel gibson and that black man. and then sometimes you really just make me think, like when you had shirley maclaine. i mean, that stuff was just so far out, i didn’t know what to think!

  but most of the time, it makes me cry. (not that i need any help, thank you!) its just that i see so much of my own life, things that help me explain whats going on in my own life, and i don’t know why but most of the time it just makes me more confused.

  i geuss the reason i’m writing today is because you just had on that woman doctor susan forward again. you know, the one who wrote men who hate women and the women who love them? i had never heard the word misojony before, but i’ll never forget it now, because my boyfriend is just like that. he puts me down all the time. he doesnt let me have any friends. when i try to make myself look pretty, like i buy a new dress or put on makeup or get a haircut or something, he says things like what the blank is that suppose to be, anyway? i swear it drives me crazy sometimes.

  the problem is that i think i could fight him except for my mind doesn’t work too well. my doctor, doctor himmler, says that i get seizures in my brain, in the frontal lobe. thats why my thoughts race around so crazy. the drugs he gives me help a lot, 1600 mgs. of lithium and 500 mgs. of a new drug called tegretol, which he says suppresses the convulsions. but i still cant get a handle on what i’m doing, and besides my boyfriend is even more messed up than me. hes got a different doctor than me, and her gets lots of percodans and this cough syrup that i think is called hycatus, and all i know is that it has a lot of codeine in it, and it makes him so crazy and mean once he gets going that a lot of times i’m afraid for my life.

  the worst part is that i’ve got a little daughter. her name is nicole, but i call her nikki. she’s only six years old, and she doesn’t understand whats happening, but i know that she hates dale and i think she hates me for letting him live here, and i would throw him out except i’m afraid he wouldnt leave, he’d just beat me worse and maybe hurt nikki too. i dont think that i could live if he ever did anything to nikki.

  so you see what my problem is. i dont know what to do. i dont even know what i’m writing you for except that if you were on my side i know i could do anything. i geuss that its too much to ask, but if i was on your show one day, i swear to god i’d spill my guts, and maybe somebody would know how bad i hurt and help me, and maybe other women who are in the same situation could get help. thats the most beautiful thing about your show. you find out that your not alone. thats the most beautiful thing that anyone could ever give a person.

  i love you, oprah, and i hope you read this letter. if you cant every write back, i understand. i wish you all the happiness in the world, and thank you for what youve given me.

  all my love,

  dorothy abigail neff.

  MARK AS EXHIBIT A

  After she had thrown up and taken her pills, control began to set in. She could feel it as a cool power running taut down her spine. She could feel it in her movements, the assuredness of them, the sense that she was moving herself and not just being dragged along behind. She was drawing on parts of herself that hadn’t seen light in a long long time. But they were still there. And they still worked.

  She checked herself out in the bathroom mirror. The swelling on her face was expansive and colorful. It would look great on the Channel 8 News Break, she felt quite sure. A picture’s worth a thousand words...

  ...and of course that took her back to poor Buzz Royer, the beetle-black flatness of his eyes in those, his final moments onscreen. There was something in the way that he parted his lips to swallow Death: not like an invasion, but life a lover’s tongue...

  ...and then she was back in the bathroom, and the clock was ticking.

  8:11.

  Time to move.

  She had started off okay enough. Dad was a $50,000-a- year sales manager for York Caterpillar. Mom was up to her bouffant hairdo in garden clubs and church activities. They loved her just fine, albeit always from a distance. They taught her to be well-mannered, obedient, and clean, and above all to put on a happy face.

  Dottie had mediocred her way through school, never seeing the point and not entirely wrong in that. She was bright enough, but it was hard to whip up much enthusiasm. The important thing was to make nicey-nice, to not make waves, and to keep on smilin’. There were always friends, and there were always parties, and someday there’d be a man who would take care of her in style.

  But then the recreational drugs had begun to get serious, roughly one year after graduation; time began to slide by on a moist t
rail of cheap wine, overpriced columbian, angel dust, and ’ludes. It was the early seventies, and the mighty counterculture of the previous decade had shot its mighty wad. Left behind in archeological splendor were the sex, the drugs, the rock ‘n’ roll, the threadbare middle-class rebellion; but its lofty values were nowhere to be found, either driven underground or sputtered off into the ozone.

  It was an empty time to be young and white in America: and while some covered for it with a brave new cynicism, the Dotties of the world muddled en masse toward the center, where they had no fucking idea as to what was going on. Fake it. Hang out. Don’t worry about tomorrow, it’ll take care of itself. Don’t bother building for it, either. Just gimme another hit.

  Her parents responded by throwing her out, after all the hand-wringing and shouting was through. She spent the next few years doing a retro tapdance of her father’s footsteps, selling hot pretzels, silly shoes, and the last of the great black-lite posters as the different jobs shuffled her from one York Mall emporium to the other.

  The party was dimming, and so was her soul; despite a gnawing dissatisfaction, life appeared to go on.

  By the time she met her one true love, she was almost twenty-seven years old. His name was Barry Strasbaugh, and he was tall and skinny, with a nose like a large kosher dill; but he treated her sweetly, and he had a steady job, and she knew for a fact that he wasn’t fucking around behind her back.

  Most of all, he did not try to change her. He accepted her for what she was. There was no greater gift than that.

  She accepted it, and gave him all her love in return.

  A year of considerable happiness followed, the dream not decaying until after the marriage, roughly five months into her first to-term pregnancy. That was when her inability to cut back on the drink and smoke and pills began to erode his patience. The fact that his habits remained unchanged was quite beside the point, he felt. After all, he wasn’t the one who was pregnant.

  By the time Nicole arrived, Barry was yelling most of the time, and Dottie had made the big leap to tequila, vodka, and gin. Little Nikki was tiny indeed – a month premature, at five pounds seven ounces – and there was some doubt as to whether she would live. But after three insurance-free and financially-devastating weeks in the hospital, their daughter was released into the world of hurt.

  It was good of Barry to wait for the baby before he started to slap Dottie around. At that point, he didn’t know what else to do. It didn’t help matters, but it gave him something to do with his hands when he wasn’t busy drinking, playing cards with the boys, or test-driving tanks out at Bowen-McLaughlin.

  The marriage lasted for nearly three years. During that time, she made seven trips to the hospital: two mild concussions, one slightly more serious one, a fractured rib, a badly sprained ankle, a stomach ulcer, and one rather lengthy stay in Three Northeast, the psychiatric wing of York Hospital. It was during that sojourn that Barry took his leave for good, bestowing Nikki’s sickly presence on Dottie’s long-suffering parents.

  Under the expert care of the astoundingly-named Dr. Himmler, Dottie went through six weeks that verified her residence in Hell. She remembered very little of her stay, except in snatches that could just as easily have been dreams. She remembered long stretches of questions and answers, where next to none of the words made sense. She remembered A.A. meetings and sessions with priests. She remembered someone giving her injections in her feet. She remembered a number of strange locations: a slum where crumbling doorways were being rebuilt, a room where lots of teenagers were milling about, a place distinguished by white walls and a steady rocking motion. She remembered waking up to sharp pain in her rectum, then fading out again.

  At the end, she was diagnosed as suffering from irregular brain seizures. This was not good news. Dr. Himmler, however, had just the thing for her: more drugs. He also set her up on the public dole through the Pennsylvania Department of Mental Health, which paid for everything from her house to her food stamps to her drugs and doctor’s appointments. She left the hospital in a cerebrally passive state, free of every nasty habit but smoking and the inability to hold a concrete thought for more than three minutes at a time.

  Time heals, and Dottie’s seemed to stretch forever; so when six months down the road found her both drinking and thinking again, nobody was too surprised. Though she couldn’t find a steady job, or hold it if she did, there was a series of off-the-books housecleaning assignments that kept her in margaritas and occasional clothes for Nikki. For a while, life was almost bearable again.

  And then, one night at the Gaslight Tavern, she met Dale. And Hell resumed in earnest...

  july 20

  dear oprah,

  its been a while since my last letter. since then, things have gotten much worse. sometimes dale takes as many as twelve percodans at a time, and if he isnt hitting me then hes passed out in bed. he got fired from his job at borg warner. and the money i get from the state isnt enough to keep us all alive. sometimes he goes out and tries to bum some, but his family and friends gave up on him a long time ago, just like mine did with me. i geuss i cant blame them, but its still so hard.

  i keep trying to think of something that will make this important, something that makes it different from every other sob story you ever heard. i cant. if there was anything special about me, i probably wouldnt be in this mess.

  no, maybe i’m wrong. i’m sitting here writing this, and suddenly its all making sense somehow. i’m not just an ordinary person, because ordinary people dont sink this low. i’m a very special person, in a very strange way. i’m god’s special fuckup, youll pardon my french. i’m as fucked up as a person can be.

  its like, everybody is born with their own special guardian angel, you know what i mean? and you live and you live, but every time it comes down to the point of disaster, he’s there for you. he sees you thru it, and he kinda gives you a little pat on the head and says its okay, dottie, you made a couple wrong turns there, but i still love you.

  now you still have yours. thats real clear. i watch you up there on the tv screen, and its perfectly obvious that you know why you were born. you laugh and you cry and you ask all the right questions, and you bring millions of us together five days a week to help us remember why god bothered to make us in the first place. its the little voice of the angel in your ear going remember me? come on! we got places to go and people to see!

  but i lost mine, i swear to god, and now i dont know what to do. its like i went this way and he went that, and the next thing we knew we were out in the wilderness with thousands of miles between us and no way back, because there is no way back, everybody always told me you cant go back and i cant help but believe them now because i’m totally totally lost.

  so what can i think? i’ll tell you what. i think that i was supposed to lose it. i think that i’m suppose to be an example of what not to do, you know what i’m saying? i feel like a soldier thats marching off to war, and he knows hes going to die, and he knows that theres no way out of it, and the only thing he can figure out is that theres a bigger picture somewhere, and he’ll be one of the details, one of the bodies in a pile on a page in a textbook on history that somebody will make their little kids read so that maybe they wont make the same mistake. theyll hold on to that angel and theyll never let go until its time to die and they fly away forever. couldnt that be what its like?

  i dont know. tell the truth, i probably never will. i cant stop thinking that if i got on your show, and fifty million people were watching, that maybe my guardian angel would see and get back to me in time.

  but i didnt have the guts to send my last letter, so i bet i wont send this one either. sometimes i dont think i’ll see my angel again until i die, and all that makes me want to do is die faster. you know what i mean?

  i don’t know what i mean. i have convulsions in my brain. how are you suppose to think with convulsions in your brain? so maybe i’m not so wrong after all. what do you think?

  i love you, oprah.
i’m sorry.

  love,

  dorothy abigail neff

  MARK AS EXHIBIT B

  Most of the hardest work had already been done last night, before Dale staggered home and raped and beat her. She had had her shit that much together. And so much of it was simple opportunism: the piles of clothing strewn about, the loose newspaper, the cheap furniture and carpet and paneling that constituted her home.

  Plus one other little thing...

  From there, it was largely a matter of strategic placement and timing. Yes, timing was clearly of the essence; that, and the purchase of three cans of lighter fluid. From there, all that remained was getting dressed.

  And making a phone call.

  And doing it up.

  Dottie slid into the green halter top and frayed cutoffs that she had left in the living room the night before. There was no shortage of footwear by the side of the front door. She opted for the tawny brown leather thongs.

  As she put them on, she thought, these are the clothes that you’re going to die in. The thought didn’t bother her nearly as much as she felt it should have. Funny thing about that. When she thought about Buzz Royer, with his jet-black suit and ridiculous striped tie and balding pate, she felt a burst of ugly pity that was quickly subsumed by the knowledge that he’d died just as he lived. And if that meant he was a fool, then at least he died consistent, he didn’t try to be somebody else as he went out.

  She hoped to achieve at least that much honesty.