by Sandra Moran
“Don’t.”
The word came like the crack of a ball striking a baseball bat. But this time, it sounded as if it had come from outside my head. I looked around the room.
“Grace?”
The room was silent—so silent I could hear the steady drip, drip, drip of the faucet in the bathroom.
I looked back down at the tab of LSD. It was dangerous. But everything was dangerous. I swallowed and, before I could change my mind, closed my eyes and pressed the piece of paper to my tongue.
Chapter 18
Eight hours later, I stood against the wall and stared blearily around my bedroom. Smears of paint stained the walls, the door handles, the dresser, and virtually everything else. All of my clothes had been pulled from the closet and were pushed up against the underside of my mattress. My head hurt and my mouth felt dry and metallic. My sheets and bedspread were a mess of paint and paper and pencils and pens. Scattered around the room were large squares of paper with dabs and smears of paint. Several “paintings” were lined up against the wall.
Through the haze of a headache, I struggled to recall the events of the previous night. I remembered that after letting the tab of LSD dissolve on my tongue, I had grabbed the Depeche Mode mix CD borrowed from Roger, put it in my boom box, and hit Play. I waited until the music started before approaching the paper tacked onto my wall. I stared at it, willing whatever muse was supposed to inspire me to appear. Nothing came to me, so I grabbed several of the tubes of paint and squeezed some onto the palette. Next, I picked up one of the brushes and smeared it into the globs of color.
“Just . . . go with it,” I had murmured. “Start small.” I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and was immediately rewarded with the image of a spiral. Tentatively, I began to play with the green and yellow and white paints, mixing them into a limey shade of green. As I began to cover the whole of the paper, I felt the first tingling of something. I remembered glancing at the clock. Exactly, I noted, thirty minutes after I had held Daffy to my tongue.
Until that first tingle, I had been convinced that nothing was happening and even laughed at the thought of Roger and Douglas dancing at the club and wondering why they weren’t feeling anything. But then I felt the tingle and I knew something was about to happen—something bigger than myself. I closed my eyes and held my breath for what seemed like forever. Finally, I exhaled and was almost knocked to my knees by an intense rush of something that felt like being sucked through a straw. I was euphoric . . . powerful. I looked at my green background and realized with sudden insight that it would be wasted on a spiral. I heard myself speaking aloud as I did when I had had too much to drink. But unlike with alcohol, I didn’t feel impaired. Quite the opposite. I felt immeasurably in control. My words were power manifested.
“I can see it so clearly,” I said. “So clearly. I’m going to draw. No, paint. I’m going to paint and I’m . . . you . . . it’s all so . . . I need more.”
It was as if I was talking to another part of myself—a part that was creative and less controlled than the persona I allowed most people to see. My halves rushed together in a bone-jarring whole. I was . . . complete. I began to paint black skeletons of trees in the winter. No leaves, just trunks and branches and a tree house. “Ah,” I said to myself and to the paper, “I know what this is. I know where this is!”
“Where is it?” a voice asked.
I spun around, startled, expecting to see Adelle. Instead, I found myself looking down at Grace, still eleven years old and angular. I felt as if the top of my head had popped off and my brains were exposed. But for some reason, I didn’t mind. Grace was here—not just in a dream, but in reality. She looked both the same and very different from how I remembered her. Had she changed, I wondered, or had I?
“Grace. You’re here. Why?”
“You’re going to need me.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. She looked around the room. “What are you doing?”
“I’m expanding my consciousness. I’m exorcising my demons.”
She shrugged and nodded in the slow, solemn way I had forgotten she had. My scalp tingled and I grinned.
“I’m . . . you . . . this!” I gestured at the painting on the wall. “This is ours!” I turned back to the painting and squinted. I tried desperately to focus, but found that my train of thought was disrupted and I really couldn’t concentrate on anything long enough to complete the task. I felt her disapproval.
“I know,” I said quickly, apologetically. “I need to focus. Detail. I’ll do detail.”
Grace watched as I crouched on the floor over a fresh piece of paper. I focused on the paper and began to paint with purpose. “You probably can’t see it.” I gestured at the images I was creating. “You’re dead. But I can and this is so very vivid. This green, it’s not just green, it’s the most intense green I’ve ever seen. The lines are there. I just need to follow the sweep and curve of the lines that are there. Did you know that? That pictures are already in the paper? They absolutely are. We just have to coax them out. And that’s what I’m doing now. With my hand . . . and this brush. All of my consciousness is located in my hand. It’s so powerful.”
Grace moved to stand behind me. I felt her peering over my shoulder at the face I was painting. Rendered in red and black, the face on the paper had one eye that was obscured with hair. The other stared blankly ahead. The image rippled under my gaze. It was all wrong. In the background, my mind registered “Stripped” playing on the CD player. I pushed the paper away and attacked a fresh sheet.
“I need clarity. I need focus—to just focus on one part. Just one.”
I looked up at her face, grabbed a new sheet of paper, and then began to draw her eye complete with eyelashes. It looked like a cross between a Picasso and a second grader’s rendering of the sun. I compared it to her face.
“It’s not very good, I know,” I babbled. “But I’m not an artist. I’m studying business.”
Grace laughed. “You have no interest in business. I’ve often wondered why you try to shove yourself into that box. Remember how you used to draw? And read? You’re too creative to study business.” She looked at the drawing. “Although, if that’s any indication of your work, maybe you should stick to business.”
“I know! I know.” I jumped up and began to pace back and forth. I could do better. I knew it. I felt the need to convince her—to prove my worth. “I’ll try again,” I announced resolutely. “I’ll do it again. This one will be good. I know it will.”
I sat back down, pushed the paper to the side, and grabbed a fresh sheet. Suddenly, my perception changed and it was as if I had a three-dimensional view of the scene. I was me, participating. But I was also omnipresent—an energy somewhere in the vicinity of the ceiling, watching what was happening below. I could see myself and Grace—how we moved, our interaction. I picked up the green tube of paint and squeezed from the middle, squirting out more paint. I stared at it, mesmerized. It seemed to glow with energy and life. I felt an overwhelming desire to eat it.
“Well, are you just going to sit there?” Grace’s voice broke into my contemplation.
Using bold strokes, I created an outline of an eye. It looked more like an Egyptian symbol than Grace’s actual eye, but I grinned in appreciation.
“It’s beautiful.” I laughed in delight. And then I saw the ant skitter across the floor.
“Oh my god, Grace.” I backpedaled into the corner. “It was an ant. Did you see it? An ant—like the ones that live inside you.”
Grace laughed and her eyes became hollow holes that melted down her face like candles left to burn themselves out. I blinked. What in the hell was happening?
“I can hear what you’re thinking, Birdie. Nothing you think now or ever is your own.”
Suddenly, the room seemed to bend and I felt the movement of time as if it were one of my spirals. The past, the present, and the future were connected to each other even though they happened separately, just like points on a spiral that are adjacent to ea
ch other on a two dimensional plane but are separated down the length of the spiral itself. I blinked several times. My hearing was almost painfully acute.
“I can hear my hair growing,” I mumbled. “It’s life growing out of my body.”
“You should draw your hair,” suggested Grace with a wicked, eyeless grin. “Draw it growing.”
“You’re right.” I crawled out of the corner and over to the paper. I looked around and saw the earlier paintings I had scattered around the room. The eye with the rudimentary eyelashes sprang to life, jumped off the paper, and skittered on its centipede legs to safety under my bed.
“Shit. I’m going to draw my hair growing,” I announced to Grace. “No, no, your hair growing. I’m going to paint that.”
I squirted paint directly onto the paper and then blended it with my brush. Colors smeared together in swirls and trails. It was a deconstructed face, as seen through a prism. It was Grace’s face, but also, not. The result was a supernatural creature with hair and bursts of light behind it. It was magical, I decided, and so I began to hum as I worked. The only song I could think of, though, was far from magical.
“I rode through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to get out of the rain,” I intoned tunelessly over and over. Finally I sat back on my heels.
“Done.” I repeated it for emphasis. “Done.”
Grace crept over and studied the painting. “It’s interesting, but it doesn’t look like anything, really. It certainly doesn’t look like me.”
“When did you become such a critic?” I waved my hands in front of my face. They seemed to melt and then reform and then melt again. I saw movement to my right and turned my head. It was a vine growing out of the floor and creeping along the wall. I lay back and watched, mesmerized, as it expanded and crept. Leaves, first tiny and then robust, grew from the tendrils followed by yellow, bell-shaped flowers. I thought I could smell honeysuckle and then the flowers withered and died, only to be replaced by enormous Venus flytraps that reared and snapped and wobbled on their stems. They smacked their whiskered lips. They wanted to eat me.
Grace began to sing. “Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est.”
“No! Stop singing. I thought you were here to help me! Make them stop!”
“I’m here so you don’t have to do this alone. But I can’t stop it. Besides, none of this is real—it’s all in your head. Even I am. I’m dead—have been for years. You know the truth deep down.”
“Why are you so mean?”
“You try being dead.”
The Venus flytrap was still writhing, the blooms snapping in anticipation.
“No!” I rolled onto my side and faced the bed, my hands clasped tightly over my ears. The eye that had leapt from the page stared out at me from under the dust ruffle, blinking occasionally with its stringy, spindly lashes. My heart galloped as I lay there, eyes screwed shut from the horrors on both sides. Strong and throaty in the voice of a woman rather than a girl, the woman she would never become, I heard Grace call my name.
“Birdie.” Her voice had the reassuring tones of a mother trying to calm and soothe a terrified child. “Come here. Let me help you. You know you never should have done this alone. You should have had that little faggot friend of yours stay with you. As unstable as you are, this was a stupid idea.”
“I needed to.” My eyes were still squeezed shut. “I needed to get rid of all the shit that’s in my head!”
She laughed. “And you thought this would do it?’
“Yes!”
“Shhhhh. You’ll wake your roommate, although maybe you won’t. She’s pretty used to your nightmares, isn’t she? Did you know she’s getting tired of you—and more than just a little freaked out? Between nightmares, your weird hours, and the fact that you’re scared to leave the house, she thinks there’s something wrong with you. And there is, isn’t there? You know it deep down. You can say it’s normal or make excuses, but we both know that in a lot of ways you’re as dead as I am. Or wait, maybe you really did die, too, and this is your purgatory for not helping me—for abandoning me.”
“Shut up,” I said miserably. “I don’t need some dead girl whose mother was a druggie telling me what is and isn’t real. I don’t need your help. I can do this on my own.”
“Fine.” And with that, the entire room was silent—too silent. I rolled over, ready to apologize. But it was too late. There she was, lying just like she had in the woods. Back exposed. Pale skin. Smears of blood. One sock. I got to my feet and walked to where she lay. One eye stared glassily at me. Dark green with thick lashes.
“Grace?” I squatted down and stared at her. Nothing moved. No tremor. No blink. “Grace, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. Please. Don’t do this.”
I tentatively reached out and touched her shoulder. She was cold, like meat in the refrigerator. I recoiled, but then forced myself to touch her again, to shake her gently. Nothing. And then I realized what I had to do. I would bring her back to life by capturing her image and then freeing her. I hurried back over to the pile of papers and grabbed a fresh sheet. My movements were deliberate. I squirted paint onto the palette.
“I can do this. I understand now.”
I began to paint. And what emerged was a violin on its side. No strings. No bow. Just the body. That’s what it was, I realized. Grace, the stringless violin. I glanced over at her cold, still form. The green of the vine, which was again just a vine, caught my eye. I stood up to inspect it. I sniffed one of the blossoms. It smelled like cat urine. I wrinkled my nose and returned to my paper. But after a couple of strokes, I stopped. The smell from the flowers was making it impossible to breathe, let alone concentrate.
I strode to the window to let the cool night air pour in. I could hear a drunken rendition of “Margaritaville” coming from an intoxicated frat boy weaving down the street. I turned from the window and the painting again caught my eye.
“It needs another line.” I hurried back to the painting and carefully added a very deliberate line. I glanced at the clock. It was 5:02 a.m. I sniffed. The room still smelled like urine. I climbed to my feet and looked around the room for something to cover the odor. My gaze settled on the green perfume bottle on my dresser. It glowed with emerald intensity. I picked it up and pulled off the cap. It smelled deep and herby. The glass bottle throbbed in my hand and I stared, mesmerized. The bottle was breathing. We just didn’t know it because we couldn’t see. Suddenly, everything in my room was alive. I could feel the atoms and the energy that was holding everything together. I walked around the room touching things and watching them exist.
“This is unreal,” I said softly. “It’s unreal and disturbing . . . so graphic.”
I turned to look at Grace, to implore her to stop playing possum. Her body, though, had become distorted and warped like objects in the distance on a hot summer day. I was simultaneously fascinated and disgusted.
“You’re like Dali’s clocks.” I squatted on the floor at eye level and studied her shimmering form. “Melted blues and whites.” I scooted backwards to my paint supplies and, still keeping my eyes locked on her body, fumbled blindly for a paintbrush. I held the brush in front of my face. The bristles were caked with greenish paint. I mashed the tip against the hardwood floor to crack the dried paint. Flakes fell onto the paper and I blew them off. The brush was still matted with paint. Irritated, I tossed the brushes aside and squirted paint directly onto the paper.
“It was hot that day,” I said. “That’s right.” I used my fingers to create the form. Grace’s back. Grace’s hip.
I glanced up at Grace periodically as I worked. Her form wavered and grew fainter, the blues fading to white and the whites becoming translucent shadows. She was disappearing—leaving me. My heart felt like it was breaking.
“So, now you’re punishing me by leaving, aren’t you?”
I didn’t expect an answer and when I looked up, I wasn’t surprised to find that she was gone. I lay on my bed, exhausted. Ar
ound me, the room slowly returned to normal. As the sunshine poured into the room, the vines shrank and eventually retracted into the floor. The eye skittered from under the bed and jumped back onto the paper. The walls once again became solid. I studied my possessions with a detached eye. I recognized things as belonging to me and as being important to me and my life, but not particularly interesting. I closed my eyes and let my body sink into the bed. I wanted nothing more than to sleep. I dozed and finally slept. A knock on my door jolted me awake.
“Rebecca.”
It took me several seconds to process the sound. At first, I thought it was Grace. But as the fogginess cleared, I realized that the voice calling my name was both real and male. I rolled over and looked at the alarm clock. It was late in the afternoon. “Rebecca, it’s me.”
The door opened and Roger walked into the room. He looked around and let out a long, low whistle. “What the hell happened here?” He cocked his head to look at the painting of the eye and then turned to face me. “I just came by to get my car and to apologize for last night. I was an ass. Believe me when I say you didn’t miss much.” He turned and looked again around the room.
“You know, these aren’t bad,” he said after several seconds. He walked over to the picture of the spiral, knelt and picked it up. “Rudimentary and surreal at the same time—but also really emotional. And this one—” he pointed to the painting I had done of Grace and her growing hair. “—is really intense. It’s like Joseph and his Technicolor Dreamcoat showed up for a—” Roger turned to look at me, his mouth open, his eyes angry. “Tell me what I’m thinking happened didn’t really happen.’