by Jenna Blum
She rubs her arms in her T-shirt. Normally she likes to sit in the living room if she wakes in the night, the little secret of being awake by herself, the solitude. But now all Karena can think about is how cheerful she has had to pretend to be, how smiley at her birthday supper. Is this how it’s going to be from now on? Going up to the U, setting up her dorm room, meeting people, writing letters home—throughout all of it, Karena will have to watch her step, to weigh and measure her responses, to think, Is this normal? Am I acting right? The amount of all the pretending she’ll have to do exhausts her. And she’s suddenly unbearably lonely, as though somebody has taken her by the hand and led her away from everyone else on earth.
Behind her eyes a carousel of images advances in a loop, as it has ever since the incident, like the slideshow projector Tiff’s dad loves to show off. Tchk: Tiff and her sister as toddlers in the wading pool. Tchk: Tiff ’s mom smilingly blocking the lens with one hand. Except in Karena’s case, it’s tchk: the clouds congealing in layers. Tchk: the hail. Tchk: the man on the road. Tchk: Charles digging at his face. The green tornado. The gas station canopy bright with lights. The bats in the dark trees . . .
Charles. Something is wrong with Charles.
Karena knows it, just suddenly knows it despite the silence, as surely as if Charles were standing there yelling in her ear.
She pushes her arms back through the sleeves of her T-shirt and heads toward the cellar. Pauses at the top of the stairs and tilts her head slightly. Listening. Then starts down, the metal no-slip strips on the steps cold on her bare feet.
“Charles,” Karena whispers once she’s in the main room of the cellar, the big room, where they used to play roller-rink in the winter. She stands still again, but she doesn’t hear him crying, his telltale lowing. There’s only the ringing in her ears, a high, atonal eeeeeeeeee—and the smell of old linoleum.
“Charles,” Karena says again and walks toward the lair. There’s a faint blue light beneath the door, flickering as if a TV is on.
“Hey, Charles,” Karena whispers outside his door. She taps on it. “You okay? I just woke up suddenly, and I got scared . . .”
She tries the door. It’s unlocked. She pushes it open. There’s nobody in the lair. Only the papers on the walls, stirring in the breeze Karena has created. And the lightning in the lamps, the branches of electricity frantically crawling across the surfaces of the globes and discs as if seeking a way out.
Karena has been so convinced she would find Charles here that it takes her a second to realize he’s not. So much for the twindar, she thinks. Still not working. Yet she bends over to look beneath the worktable, the cot—and then she hears it, a scrabbling on the other side of the wall like a rodent in the pipes. Of course. Charles’s bathroom. She should have known.
She hurries from the lair and into what’s essentially a cement closet, containing the creepy shower stall and lidless toilet the rest of the family used to use only during emergencies, when the one upstairs was blocked. Now this is Charles’s bathroom, and Karena suspects that in the way of guys, the grosser it is, the more he likes it. And it is gross. Bare lightbulb. No curtain on the stall. Bugs in the corners. In the shower a bar of Irish Spring so old it has cracks in it yet is covered with soap mucus. And Charles, sitting in the middle of the floor in his boxers and T-shirt, taking handfuls of pills from the pile in front of him and popping them in his mouth. Swallowing with the aid of water from his Flintstones glass. Taking more pills. Swallowing.
“No, Charles,” Karena says. “What are you doing? Stop, Charles! Stop it!”
Charles ignores her. He tosses more pills in his mouth. Sips from the glass. Swallows.
Karena runs over and kicks the pile of pills, scattering them like an anthill. Some are covered with lint, others half dissolved. Charles’s lithium—and all the other medications Dr. H has tried him on, but it’s the lithium that terrifies Karena. Although Dr. H has told them it’s a salt that occurs in the body naturally, he has warned them that Charles’s blood level will have to be carefully monitored while he’s on it, because too much lithium is lethally toxic.
Karena sweeps her foot around, stomping on the pills, sending them into the corners. Charles crawls after them. “Fuck off,” he cries. “Get out, K! Leave me alone.”
“How many have you taken, Charles? How much have you taken, huh?” Karena spins in a circle, not knowing what to do. Then she drops beside her twin, wincing as some of the pills dig into her kneecaps.
“Throw up, Charles,” she says. “Make yourself throw up. Right now. Or I’m going to make you do it.”
Charles shakes his head.
“Fine,” says Karena.
She grabs the back of Charles’s neck and then, wincing, she shoves the second and third fingers of her left hand down his throat. His mouth is shockingly hot and wet and Karena grimaces wildly, praying he won’t bite down. If he does, she’ll lose her fingers. The strongest muscle in the human body is the jaw. But again Karena is banking on the fact that Charles won’t hurt her, her of all people, and again she’s right. Charles doesn’t stop her, but he doesn’t fight her, either. Karena slides her fingers farther down his throat and crooks them, tickling. She knows how to do this from Tiff, who’s taught Karena how to make herself throw up when she’s eaten or drunk too much. Karena, being naturally thin like Frank, doesn’t take as much advantage of the skill as Tiff does, but occasionally it comes in handy.
Like now. After a minute Karena feels Charles’s throat convulsing and the hot gush of vomit on her hand. She grimly keeps it there, letting the stuff slide down her wrist and patter on the floor. Only when Charles has thrown up three times and his spit is clear does Karena let him go. He falls back from her, gasping, and Karena collapses too, shaking her hand and wiping it on the cement.
“Ugh,” she says. “Gah.”
“Don’t do that, K,” Charles says hoarsely, coughing. “Don’t do that, K. Use the shower.”
Karena looks down at her hand. Its back is scraped and bleeding. She gets up and rinses it off under the stream, forgoing the slimy soap.
“Don’t you ever fucking do that again, Charles,” she says. “You hear me?”
Charles is sitting in the corner, his knees drawn up. He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t change expression. Doesn’t blink. Karena can’t tell if he hasn’t heard her or is just pretending not to. She starts unspooling several yards of toilet paper, to clean up. As best she can, she scoops the mess on the floor into the toilet, flushing handfuls at a time so as not to block the pipes. Charles watches, his face dull with exhaustion.
Finally Karena stands, hands on hips, and looks around.
“I think that’s as done as it’ll get tonight,” she says, more to herself than Charles. “I’ll run the hose in in the morning.”
Then she turns to her brother, who is staring at the wall.
“Get up,” she says. “Come on. I’ll help you.”
She pulls Charles to his feet, and he stands there as if not knowing what to do.
Karena puts her arm around his waist. He’s not smelling so fresh either and should probably go in the shower too. But she’s had enough for one night. She’s done.
“Come on, Charles,” she says, and walks him toward his lair.
37
In the little room Charles settles onto his cot, wedging the pillow under his cheek. Karena shuts off the lightning lamps and fits herself in next to him, feet to head. Legend has it this is the way they always slept as babies too. Siri would put them right side up in their crib, and they’d suck each other’s thumbs to get to sleep, but by morning Karena would always have migrated south, and they’d be fitted together like puzzle pieces, yin and yang.
It’s not quite the same now, since Charles’s shins have become bony and furry, but Karena makes herself as comfortable as she can, pillowing her head on one of his calves.
“You doing okay, Charles?” she asks. “I mean, can you sleep?”
Charles croaks and clears hi
s throat. His voice is a low rasp from the vomiting. “I think so.”
“Good,” says Karena, though she feels as though she might never close her eyes again. She stares into the dark. She can tell Charles is equally alert, although he doesn’t move and his breathing is calm enough.
Presently he says, “You shouldn’t have come down, K.”
Karena shifts uneasily.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what I mean. You should have let me go.”
Karena sinks her fingernails into the scant meat of Charles’s ankle. He hisses in a breath.
“Ow!” he says. “What the fuck.”
“Don’t ever say that, Charles,” Karena says. “Don’t—ever—even—think it.”
“Jesus, K, let go,” Charles says, trying to pull his leg away.
“Never,” she says. “I never will.”
After a minute Karena feels his muscles relax, and she lies very still. She is terrified to move, to do anything, because Charles has broken the seal. None of the Hallingdahls has ever so much as breathed the S-word among themselves, not after Charles disappeared from the Starlite, not after he jumped twenty feet off the water tower ladder. Not during the days and nights he lies down here, lowing. They don’t mention the uncle who disappeared in his boat on the Mississippi on a perfectly lovely summer day, the great-aunt who stepped quietly down the well. They don’t talk about it because if they did they would invite it, and the only time Karena has ever mentioned the word suicide in connection with her brother was seventy-five miles from here, up at the Mayo, in Dr. H’s office. A safe and sanctioned place where they were supposed to talk about it, where Karena was just doing part of her job to keep her brother safe by describing her observations and fears about his symptoms. No, he’s never said it directly, but—yes, I’m afraid sometimes he might—kill himself. And even then, despite the doctor’s kind gaze and encouraging nods, Karena had felt the superstitious free-fall terror of betrayal, of having concretized the possibility and made it real.
Now she is paralyzed with the responsibility of what to do or say next. If it’s the right thing, Karena might plant the one seed in her brother’s mind that will take hold, sprout, grow, prevent him from action whenever he considers the idea. But if she says the wrong thing?
It turns out to be a moot point, because Charles speaks first.
“I’m sorry, K,” he says. “But I just don’t know if I can do this. It’s bad enough to go Into the Black, and now I have to deal with this guy all the time . . .”
“What’s Into the Black?” Karena asks.
Charles sighs, then coughs.
“It’s how I feel when I’m down here,” he says. “When I’m down, I go really, really down, K. It starts out like that feeling we get sometimes, the Dreads. When you get scared for no reason. Then it gets worse. Everything is—tilted. All the surfaces are untrustworthy. All the familiar things seem hostile, and nothing is safe. The angles are all fucked up, the floors, the ceilings and walls and sky and trees. And they tip me off Into the Black. That’s this tarry, oozy place that traps me and holds me while my brain is raked over and over with a comb made of knives.”
Karena feels a shudder work through him.
“It hurts so much, K,” Charles says. “It hurts the insides of my eyes. Everything hurts from the inside out. But I can’t move. That’s Into the Black. And time is different there. A minute could be a day or a month. It doesn’t matter. It’s like one of those melted clocks.”
Karena tightens her grip on Charles’s ankle.
“But you always come out of it,” she reminds him. “Right?”
“So far,” Charles agrees. “But every time I’m so worried I won’t. That I’ll stay there forever. Death is totally not scary in comparison. To make that needle thing stop combing, to never feel it again or know it’s coming, that would be peace.”
Karena doesn’t know what to say to this. She considers and discards answers at light speed: No, that’s not peace, that’s death. Maybe there’s a way to make this stop happening. Even the drugs have to be better—
“And as if that’s not bad enough,” Charles says, “now I have to deal with this guy.”
“What guy?” Karena says.
“Motorcycle Guy. He comes at night now.”
A chill washes through Karena. She sits up, but in the deep well of the lair she can’t see her brother’s face.
“Charles,” she says, “the Motorcycle Guy—he’s dead.”
“No kidding, K,” Charles says dreamily. “That’s what he wants. For me to be dead too. For me to come with him.”
Karena tries to respond to this but for a minute can only shake her head. Finally she says, “Charles. Motorcycle Guy? He’s not real.”
“He is, though,” says Charles implacably. “He’s as real as you are, K. I wake up and he’s sitting on the cot watching me with his, like, half a face. And I can smell him. He smells like beer, you know how those guys get when they’ve been in the bar awhile. And Swisher Sweets. And meat, bloody meat, like when you take hamburger out of the freezer and the blood leaks into the plastic—”
“Okay, Charles,” says Karena. “I get it. But Charles . . . Motorcycle Guy is a hallucination. Even if you can smell him, it’s a fake out. It’s stress, I’m sure, but, Charles, and don’t get mad, it’s also the chemicals in your brain.”
“Maybe so,” Charles says. His voice is still soft, pensive. “But that doesn’t make him not real. If I see and hear him, isn’t he real to me? Reality is subjective, don’t you know that by now? It’s how we experience the world that makes it real to us. Like the dish towels.”
“What dish towels?”
“The embroidered vegetables on the kitchen dish towels,” Charles says, “you know they sing to me. In those creepy children’s-chorus voices. Charles, we seeeee you. Charles, we know what you’re doing. And the anchor. The news guy on TV. When I was five. He really did talk right to me, K. Told me I was a filthy, disgusting little boy and I should go get my mommy so I’d be spanked. That really happened to me as surely as you’re sitting here. It wasn’t pleasant, my visions aren’t always, but they’re real.”
“But Charles,” Karena says. She struggles for a politic way to phrase what Dr. H has told them: When Charles sees and hears things that aren’t there, this is called a psychotic break. “What about the fact that nobody around you can see or hear these things? Doesn’t that mean that they’re probably not really there?”
“Not for you,” says Charles. “But they are for me, and did you ever think maybe I am just more advanced? I am a genius, you know. Plus, they’re not all bad. The storms, for instance. They talk to me too. They each have a different—voice is putting it too simply, but essence. Personality. Some are screamers. Some mutterers. But I always know how to find them.”
“Okay,” says Karena. “But—well, isn’t that a reason not to—you know. And your study, what about that. Your abstract. You’d never be able to chase again.”
“I know,” says Charles. “And I’d miss the flying dream. That’s what it’s like when I’m up, when I’m really really really really up, like that dream we both have? The one where I’m flying over the hills for like hours and turn a corner and there’s a tornado there? I’m up so high I can see the pattern, and that’s so beautiful, K. There’s nothing like it in the world. I wish you could see it—I’ve wished that so many times. I’d really miss that if I were dead.”
“Good,” says Karena. She lies back down, tucking her spine against Charles’s legs. “Think about that. Whenever you go Into the Black, think about it.”
“I do,” says Charles. “But I swear, K. Most days I doubt I’ll see thirty.”
“Shut up, Charles,” Karena says fiercely. “Just shut up! If you—did that, don’t you know it would kill me? Don’t you know I’d die too?”
“That’s primarily why I haven’t done it—yet. But I think you should start preparing for life as a half, K. I’ll be wi
th you, I’ll always be there, I just won’t be here. I don’t know if I can take it.”
Karena seizes his ankle again.
“You have to,” she says. “You just have to, that’s all. Promise me, Charles.”
“I can’t, K,” says Charles. “But I promise to try, how’s that?”
“Not good enough,” says Karena.
They lie silently for a while, pushing at each other with their minds. Karena thinks of the axiomatic struggle they learned about in physics class: an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. And she thinks, there must be a way out. There is no way. I have to tell. I can’t. He’ll go to jail, and he’ll never make it. There must be a way out. There is no way—
And then she starts to have an idea.
As if Charles feels her disengage to consider it, he sighs.
“I don’t want to think about it anymore tonight,” he says. “I’m so tired. I just want to go to sleep. Okay, K? Can we do that?”
Karena shrugs.
“Will you stay with me, K?”
“Of course,” she says.
“And would you do me a favor?”
“Depends. What is it?”
“Sing,” says Charles.
Karena can’t help but smile. It has been so long since she heard this request from Charles, not since they shared the room upstairs. Then, often, when he couldn’t sleep, his small voice would issue imperiously forth from the dark: Sing! And when Karena stopped: More!
“Any requests?” she asks.
“No, whatever you want’s fine.”
“Okay,” Karena says. “Hold on.”
She clears her mind, thinking about it, then sings:
Say say my playmate
Come out and play with me
And bring your dollies three
Climb up my apple tree
Slide down my rain barrel
Into my cellar door
And we’ll be jolly friends
Forevermore . . .
“More, please,” Charles says when she is done. His voice is drowsy now. So Karena repeats the verse, then again, over and over until she starts to wind down too, like a music box. By the time the arrow-slit window lightens with dawn, Karena, like Charles, is fast asleep.