Where I End and You Begin

by Andra Brynn

  That shocks me, and I laugh, a short sharp bark. “Holy shit,” I say. “I don’t think anyone’s ever just come out and said it like that.” I laugh again, but inside I am hurt.

  “You’re hostile,” he says. “I only want to help you.”

  “Yeah, but why? What’s your motivation? What deep, weird psychological need are you fulfilling by pretending to be a knight in shining armor? What do you want from me?” I almost ask him if he just wants to get laid, because I’m pretty easy to get into bed and he doesn’t have to go to all this trouble, but I catch myself just in time. I cross my arms and scowl at him.

  Above us I hear footsteps. Alice and Jibril are walking carefully over the floorboards. I know this, but I think of ghosts anyway. A little thrill goes through me, and I have to shake my head to get rid of it.

  Daniel doesn’t seem affected. Instead he looks at me, and his wide brown eyes are thoughtful. “Why?” he says. “Well...I felt guilty, getting you put on probation. And when I met you at the bar, I felt bad for you.” His mouth twists. “But I think I really decided that you needed help when you told me you’d be sleeping behind a dumpster if it weren’t for me.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I say. “So I am your charity case.”

  He blows a puff of air through his lips, clearly frustrated. “No,” he says. “It was when you said that other people slept in dumpsters, so it wouldn’t have been so bad. That’s... most people would be full of pride. They would hate themselves for sleeping behind a dumpster or in a dumpster, or they’d look down on someone for it, not think they’d end up in the same place someday. You’re an asshole, but you’re not a bad person. You’re incredibly sensitive. Empathetic. I think you must be in tremendous pain.”

  I stare at him.

  “Isn’t that why you drink?” he says.

  I open my mouth, but my tongue won’t work right. “I...” My thoughts are hollow, rolling around inside my skull. Loud, but meaningless, like bones rattling in a clay pot. I want to tell him I drink so I can’t feel, but isn’t that the same thing?

  I’ve been in pain. I’ve known it. I probably still feel it, right now. A raw, aching thing blaring through me, so loud in the beginning, but after so many years I’ve grown inured to it, gone a bit deaf. So yes. Maybe that’s why I drink.

  I don’t want to tell him that. That’s too much.

  “We’re all just a moment away from sleeping in a dumpster,” I tell him instead. “It only takes a second for your life to change. Why wouldn’t I be fine with it?”

  He frowns. “You shouldn’t be fine with it,” he says, but he sounds unsure. “Doesn’t it scare you?”

  “Of course it does,” I say. “I’m scared to death.” And I am. There’s a dark, yawning void below me. I am suspended above it by the thinnest of threads. When the end of the semester comes, barreling toward me like a freight train, the thread will break. “It’s too late for me,” I tell him. “I don’t think I can save myself.”

  “Let me help you,” he says again. “Please.”

  I don’t get why this beautiful, impeccable person would give two shits what happens to me, but for a moment I consider it. Why not let him make me into his own personal little crusade? The end will come whether I want it to or not.

  “I’m hopeless,” I say, a last ditch effort to save him from himself.

  “You just say that because you don’t want to hope.”

  “Yeah. That’s what hopeless means.”

  The corners of his mouth turn up. Finally I’ve managed to coax a smile from him, even if it is somewhat rueful, and I’m surprised when I smile back. “You’re also stubborn,” he tells me.

  “I know.”

  He inhales deeply. “What can I do, right now, to help you?”

  I think. “In this instance? Or just in general right now?”

  “In general.”

  “Help me study.” The words are out of my mouth before I realize it, and up until this moment I hadn’t even given studying for my midterms a second thought. It had seemed like an exercise in futility. I’ll have to attend every class from now until the end of the semester. No days off. No hangovers. No days too drunk to function. I don’t know if I can do it.

  He looks uncertain. “Help you study? How?”

  “Sit in the same room as me,” I say. “Seriously. Just sit there. Read a book. But if someone is there, maybe I’ll actually do it. And when I start to fall asleep or get distracted or give up, you can tell me how great it is to hope I get straight As. Which I need, by the way.”

  “It is great to hope for straight As,” he says, “but fortune favors the prepared. All right. When are midterms?”

  “Next week.”

  His brows rise. “You want me to sit and watch you study this weekend?”

  I shrug. “Why not? You didn’t have anything better to do on a Friday night than take me out and that’s pretty sad. I figured you’d be free this weekend, too.”

  That was harsh, but Daniel laughs anyway. “Ouch,” he says. “But you’re right. I don’t have anything pressing this weekend. All right. I’ll help you.”

  And then your duty to me will be discharged, I think. “Awesome,” I say. “If I get all As, you have to stop trying to help me.”

  That’s probably a weird thing to say, but right now I don’t care. Daniel McGuire, if he’s really a good person who thinks he can save someone... I feel sorry for him. And it’s pretty bad when I’m the one feeling sorry for someone else. He is patiently waiting for me to tell him what’s wrong, but what’s wrong is everything, and even the things that are right are infected with wrong, and I feel like, if I tell him, I’ll just infect him, too. So I’m going to be silent. I’m going to take his offer. I’ll see if one thing—just one—is fixable.

  His brow creases. “And if you don’t get straight As, I’ll call you up every day and ask you what I can do for you.”

  “That’s weird. And creepy. And stalkery.”

  To my amusement, he suddenly looks worried. “Is it?” he says, as though this hadn’t crossed his mind.

  I raise my eyebrows at him.

  “I suppose that is a little weird,” he concedes. “Look. Just make straight As and we won’t have to have that conversation. But I’ll still take you out to dinner. In a non-stalkery way. And you can pick the place.”

  Oh, goddammit. Tempt me with food. That’s so goddamn low. The administration does it all the time to get people to attend school spirit events. Free hotdogs? We’ll mumble our way through the school song just for packets of mustard. “Fine,” I say. Then, because I have been a jerk, even if he is a little weird, I add: “Thank you.”

  He hesitates. “You’re welcome,” he replies. Then he clears his throat. “Shall we explore?”

  I nod, and he leads the way. We move through the hallway, and at the end there is another narrow hall leading off to our right. We take it and find two large doors. Daniel reaches out and pushes one, gingerly, and it swings inwards.

  We both gasp.

  Beyond the doors is a huge room, full of light. A ward. Just as it must have been when the hospital was in commission, except now dead leaves and dust blow across the floor, and tatters of old hospital linens, still clinging to the rusty skeletons of the old beds lining the walls, flutter in the chill breeze coming in from the broken windows.

  Without a word, Daniel lifts his camera and begins to snap pictures, and when he’s done we press forward.

  We walk among the decay, taking it in. It’s the little touches that startle me, that give me an unsettled feeling. On one of the beds is an old teddy bear with no eyes. There is a shoe beneath another, missing its mate, now and forever, and when I reach the end of the room I find a wheelchair there, facing the window that looks out on the small courtyard in front of the hospital, as though someone left it there, just in case some unquiet spirit wanted to sit a spell and watch the world spin on without them.

  Suddenly I realize why this place gives me such a strange feeling. I am
in the ghost of a building. A fitting place for someone as strung up between the past and the future as me. I’m in between, too, and it’s rare that anything outside of myself so perfectly aligns with my inner landscape that I am taken aback.

  If I’m ever truly homeless, I think, I will come here. I will lie on these disintegrating beds. I will pace the rotten floors. I will look out the windows, and people will see me, and know they are seeing a ghost.

  “So you know ghost stories?” Daniel says suddenly from behind me.

  I start and turn. He is staring at the rags on the old beds, the mattresses rotting through.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Tell me a ghost story,” he says. “About a hospital.”

  I frown at him. “You said that was morbid.”

  “I said dead babies and dead mothers were morbid.” He gives me a strange look. “But right now... I don’t know. It feels like I should know about them. Like I’m walking on unmarked graves.”

  That’s morbid, I want to say. But I don’t. Instead I look up at the windows and the gray sky outside, the overgrown courtyard, the weeds and the trees, their leaves fluttering away, stripping them down to the bone.

  “So here’s a story,” I say. “There was this guy, who tried to commit suicide with a gun to the head. But the caliber was too small or something, and even though he had a bullet in the brain, he was still breathing. So he was rushed to the hospital and put on life support, but the doctors knew that as soon as he was off life support the brain would swell up and he would die. So they had his family come through so they could say goodbye to him. Only his daughter, she was a little girl... she refused to go. She didn’t want to see him like that.

  “So after the family comes and says goodbye, they take him off life support and let him pass. Except later that night the call button in the room is pushed, and a nurse goes in to see him. And he’s sitting up, wide awake, and he says, ‘Where’s Annie? Where’s my little girl?’ The nurse doesn’t know what to say, so she tells him Annie will be there soon before rushing out to get the doctor, but when they get back the man is dead.

  “After he’s gone, they clear out the room, but the next night the call button comes on again, even though the room is empty, and the nurse goes to turn it off, but she sees the man standing there in his hospital gown, at the window, and he says, ‘Where’s Annie? Where’s Annie?’ Over and over again like that.

  “This was a different nurse, so she goes to tell someone that there’s a patient in the room, but of course when they come back he’s gone. And he stays in that room, and every once in a while he’ll reappear, asking for his daughter. But she never comes because no one wants to tell a little girl the ghost of her father is lingering in the hospital waiting for one last glimpse of her... so he stays there and waits.”

  Silence fills up the ward. Daniel isn’t looking at me. He’s studying the dry leaves skittering across the floor and gathering in the corners. There’s a heavy, musty smell in the air, and when he reaches out to touch one of the old beds, trying to lift the sheet away, the linens break, so stiff and fragile from years of disuse and the elements that they have decayed into dead plant matter. They fold, disintegrate, their molecules rising into the air, flying out into the world, disorganized and meaningless.

  “That was horrible,” he says, watching the dust rise.

  “You asked for it,” I say. “There are plenty of things that are real that are way more horrible than that.”

  He doesn’t answer, just stares at the sheet falling to pieces in his hand.

  “Hey.”

  We both turn to see Jibril in the doorway. He gives the ward an appreciative look. “Nice. We should have stayed down here. The floor upstairs is so rotten we didn’t want to trust it.”

  I heard your footsteps, I want to say, but it was probably just the building settling as night comes on.

  “Anyway,” Jibril continues, “we should get going. It’s starting to get dark.” He sighs. “It’s better to do this in the early afternoon on Sundays, but I’m out of here tomorrow morning until Sunday night.”

  “Going home?” I ask him.

  He nods. “Just a weekend. Good to get away, get some home-cooked food, do all that midterm shit.”

  “Right,” I say. It sounds nice. I wonder if I could borrow Jibril’s family for a while.

  Daniel turns to me. “Shall we?” he says, gesturing to the door, and the spell of my ghost story is broken.

  “Sure.” I step toward him. “So you’re coming over tomorrow to help me study, right?”

  He nods. “A promise is a promise,” he tells me.

  “You’d be surprised how often that isn’t true,” I tell him. Then I walk past and follow Jibril down the hall.

  .0.

  I dream of the hospital that night. Dreams are a bardo. You can get caught in them, suspended between one life and the next, unable to move on. Dreams are full of danger.

  In my dream, it is many years ago, but the hospital is the same as I saw it only the day before. Patients shuffle from tattered bed to tattered bed. Doctors and nurses bend over an operating table covered in dust. The windows blow out as though in a great wind, and the air is full of glass.

  Then the hospital changes, and it becomes modern but empty, and I am running down the halls, searching, searching for the right room, the room where he should be, but I can’t find it, and all the doors fly open around me, the floor dropping away beneath my feet, and the whole world is full of holes.

  .9.

  Saturday.

  I wake up full of cobwebs and strange, creeping feelings, the remnants of my dream. It’s a struggle to open my eyes and to breathe, to expel the nervous thoughts scrabbling around in my brain.

  When I finally get my eyes open, I roll over and check my text messages. There’s one from Daniel.

  Ten o’clock?

  I check the time. It’s nine thirty. Ugh. This is because I went to bed at a reasonable time last night. Exploring the old hospital had left me drained, and I went to bed at midnight. Now I was awake in the morning. On a Saturday.

  If I had it my way, I’d wake up at two in the afternoon every day, but I’ll settle for weekends. Already I can tell pulling out of my death spiral is going to put a serious kink in my schedule. I text him back. Ten is fine. Thanks.

  Then I roll out of bed.

  Tanya’s still sleeping, so I slip down the hall and take a quick shower before trying to silently gather all the materials I need for my classes. When I’m ready, I haul the whole lot of it down the stairs and into the lounge across from the kitchen. One advantage of waking up early, I suppose, is that I get to claim the whole table to myself. I leave my shit there and wander into the kitchen.

  Alice is there. “Hey,” she says. She’s making herself some cereal, and my stomach growls hungrily. She notices. “You want some?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “I think I have some Chef Boyardee up in the cabinet.”

  “For breakfast?”

  “I usually don’t eat breakfast on the weekends. It’s usually my lunch.”

  She nods. “So what are you doing up so early?”

  “Daniel’s coming over to help me study for midterms.” I open one of the cabinets and peruse the shelf with my name on it. Just my luck, beef ravioli. Awesome. I pull the can down, grab the little saucepan that I think I may have accidentally stolen from someone last year, and set about cooking my breakfast.

  “Daniel, huh? He seemed pretty cool.” Alice is still standing in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and shoveling Cocoa Puffs in her face as she watches me. “Where’d you find that guy?”

  I’m not sure how to answer that. “My holocaust class.”

  “Sounds depressing,” she says.

  “It is.”

  “Are you guys dating or something?”

  I press my lips together. “No. He’s sort of... mentoring me.”

  She laughs. “Mentoring. Right.”

  I roll my eyes at
her. “It’s not like that. Trust me.”

  “Okay,” she says. “I trust you. So did you have fun yesterday? You were kind of quiet on the ride home.”

  I’d been driving while Daniel had shared his photos with Alice and Jibril, but she’s sort of right. The hospital had left me with a strange feeling, and it made me quiet and contemplative. It stirred up thoughts I wished would stay buried. “Just thinking,” I say. “But I did have fun, I guess. I mean, I’d like to do it again, definitely.”

  She brightens up at that. “Really? That’s awesome! We should do it as a regular weekend thing!”

  I’m not sure I’m ready to commit that far, but before I can answer someone knocks on the front door of the house. I still have ten minutes to eat my breakfast, so I let Alice answer it.

  I’m just pulling my canned ravioli off the stove when Daniel walks in. He takes one look at the pan in my hand and shakes his head.

  I scowl at him. “You have a better idea?”

  “Eggs?” he suggests. “Toast?”

  I laugh at that. “I don’t usually have breakfast. This is my lunch. I’m just eating it early.” I grab one of my spoons from my shelf and begin to shovel ravioli into my mouth.

  “You’re not going to get a bowl?” Daniel asks.

  “I had a bowl,” I say. “Someone broke it. They gave me a pack of cigarettes in exchange.”

  “You’d better be careful,” he says. “I might start to worry about you.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “You’re not worried about me now?”

  “No need, now that I’m here,” he says, but he’s grinning as he says it and I know he’s teasing me.

  “Great. You can go take my exams, then.”

  “I’m on sabbatical. I can’t do anything that resembles schoolwork. It’s a rule.”

  “What are you going to do while I study?”

  “Read a book.” He holds up a paperback. It’s Moby Dick.

  “Seriously?” I say. “That’s not schoolwork? You’re reading that for pleasure?”

  “It’s hilarious,” he says. “Trust me. If you’re lucky I’ll read you some good lines while you study. Which you should be doing right now.”