We are Wormwood

by Christian, Autumn

  “Dark Catherine? Really?” I said.

  “You think that’s funny? Well I’m not giving anyone false ideas,” she said, “about who I am.”

  “You could be anyone you wanted,” I said.

  “If you really believed that, you wouldn’t be here,” she said.

  She walked her plastic fork across the table. She walked it in between her palm spread out on the table. All of the doctors taking notes glanced up at her at once, but their pens didn’t stop moving. One of the doctors brushed aside her hair, and I saw on the underside of her wrist three scarred, sharp points.

  “You’re like everyone else,” she said. “They can diagnose everyone’s problems except their own.”

  She laid her head down on the cafeteria table as she walked the fork toward me. She danced it around my food tray, my hands.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, mocking me, “What are you sorry for? You’re just a stupid girl.”

  Later there were pills. Pills in a tiny paper cup. I didn’t need to ask their names. I knew. Risperdal, Haldol, Xanax. The nurse didn’t wait to see if I swallowed. Someone called her name from the other side of the building and she ran down the hallway, swearing.

  I swallowed anyway. I stumbled to group therapy sick and dizzy.

  Group therapy consisted entirely of women, some in their street clothes, some in paper gowns like mine. They sat in chairs with their bodies curled inwards, some looking down at their shoes, at others. The therapist sat at the center of the circle, cross-legged in a high backed chair. She wore a sleeveless blouse revealing the bluebirds tattooed up and down her arms.

  There were no more chairs left. I sat against the wall.

  “Tell everyone your name,” the therapist said.

  “They let you be a therapist? With all those tattoos?” I said.

  “Your name, sweetheart.”

  “I had a teacher once who told me nobody would hire you if you got a tattoo.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “We’ve all been told a lot of hurtful, untrue things in our lives.”

  Nothing seemed real against white halls, white walls. Nothing seemed real in paper gowns, sitting in a circle, around inked birds flocking onto pale, Ph.D. trained arms.

  “My name is Lily,” I said. “You’re the most beautiful therapist I’ve ever seen.”

  Afterwards I tried to listen to the stories the women told, but their words were like chopped records, the consonants cut away.

  After the meeting was over and the women filed out of the room, I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move. Vertigo kept me from understanding how my legs worked. The therapist leaned down next to me.

  She smelled of the woods.

  “I can’t move,” I said. “They gave me my mother’s drugs.”

  “Sweetheart,” she said.

  Sweetheart became a slow, thin line that stretched across the room until it was no longer a word, but white noise.

  “I need to get out of here,” I said. “This place is making me crazier.”

  “Oh sweetheart.”

  Sweeettthhheeeaaaaarrrttt.

  “You’re too dangerous,” she said.

  I spent another night on the thin mattress underneath the barred window. They’d relegated to checking on me every half hour instead of every fifteen minutes. There were no comfortable positions to lie down in anymore. I tossed and turned, my spine a churning sea. I called for more pills. Nobody came. I bit down on my foam pillow and screamed.

  I saw the harsh glow of the flashlight as it came through my door, but no stomping or huffing accompanied the light. The behind the flashlight was thin, and quiet. Their feet made no sound as they crossed the linoleum floor.

  The flashlight travelled up and down my body. I buried my face into my pillow.

  “You’re not a nurse,” I whispered into my pillow.

  “You called for pills,” she said. “Take your medicine.”

  If I didn’t look, she would go away. That had always been my problem. I looked, and the spider children stirred in the leaves. I looked, and the earth ruptured out from underneath me. I looked, and Charlie jumped one last glorious jump into the dark river, arms outstretched like waxwings.

  The flashlight hovered on my face, the light passing through my eyelids. The insides of my eyes burst with red and yellow spots.

  “Take your medicine.”

  I opened my eyes, blinking into the harsh light. The flashlight did not waver. It appeared to be suspended in mid-air, without a hand to guide it.

  A palm extended toward me from the light. A tiny, childlike palm. Empty.

  “You were stupid,” she said, “to leave your friends.”

  She dropped the flashlight. I lunged out of bed and tried to grab her. My hands grasped emptiness. The flashlight still spun on the floor from when she’d let go of it. I picked it up and fumbled for the switch to turn it off.

  A nurse saw me from the hallway.

  “What are you doing?”

  I still couldn’t find the off switch.

  “Someone was in my room,” I said.

  She huffed. Stomped. She grabbed the flashlight out of my hands and turned it off. The room plunged into darkness; her face resembled a child’s crayon smear.

  I couldn’t understand why everyone here was a bad caricature.

  “I need to get out of here,” I said. “Someone is after me.”

  Then I started laughing. Because I was a bad caricature as well.

  She gave me more sedatives.

  She said, “This will be noted on your chart.”

  “I’ve never met a chart that mattered.”

  I lay down, because this was all a bad dream. It had to be. My entire life, a bad dream.

  ***

  I finally met with my Consultant Psychiatrist, four days after being admitted into the ward. We sat in the cafeteria after lunch. I knew they’d increased my dose of pills, without telling me, after the incident with the stranger in my room. At this dose, I could barely sit on the bench. I could barely eat. If I closed my eyes, vertigo could make me believe I sat on the ceiling.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t visit with you until now, Lily,” he said. “We’ve had some trouble getting information on you.”

  I wiped at my mouth. Drool.

  Of course.

  “You were found on the bad side of town. Unconscious, in a ditch. It appeared you’d tried to kill yourself by stabbing yourself in the stomach and uterus.”

  “The bad side of town?” I said. “Maybe to a rich doctor.”

  “The night nurses heard you talking to people who don’t exist. Expressing paranoid thoughts.”

  “I know. I’m a paranoid schizophrenic. I guessed it. Do I win the prize?” I said.

  Yes, there were names for people like me, but only one that mattered. Hopeless.

  “These conditions. They’re very manageable with the right medications. And we don’t lock people up anymore. Not for things like this.”

  “Then let me out of here.”

  “It doesn’t quite work like that, either,” he said.

  “I don’t have a family,” I said. “My mother is crazy. I have no money. Just let me go.”

  “Trying to kill yourself is a serious thing.”

  “You’d want to kill yourself too, if you were me.”

  And then I swore he said:

  “You’re dangerous, sweetheart.”

  Sweeettthhheeeaaaaarrrttt.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THIS COULD BE THE rest of my life. The rest of a long, boring, terrifying life. Take the pills. Soft pills, red pills, blue pills. Pills to make you blind. Pills to make your eyes fall out of your head. A buffet of pills. Go to therapy. Listen to women, as sad and scared as you, talk about kids they left behind, talk about how they might be cured by picking up crocheting or learning astrology. Watch, as their hands turn wrinkled and pale from lack of sunlight. Ignore the scraping and shuddering at the barred window.
Tell the lady therapist with the bird tattoos that she looks beautiful everyday. Know that, you could never get a tattoo yourself, because they’d probably start tearing into your skin and trying to eat you.

  I lay on my bed, spinning, when the demon came and brushed her fingers against my face.

  “Oh god, thank you,” I said. “It’s been so boring here.”

  Her face was ragged and red. Dead insects fell out of her hair.

  “Nightcatcher,” she said.

  The bars of the window bent. The river rushed toward me, angry and boiling. If it could have a face, it would have the face of an old woman, a boil on her nose, her teeth made of galloping horses.

  No. No. No. The drugs aren’t working.

  Something’s after me. Stop forgetting. It’s something that’s been searching for me for a long time, possibly forever, running circles around the earth. Around the entire galaxy, huffing dark matter to fuel its mad hunt. It would distort space and time in my head to slow me down. It needed to devour me, strip by strip, not only my body but also my mind. Own me. Own everything of me, my past, my present, my nightmarescape, my skin, and the hunter’s poise. To force me to lay out everything that belonged to me so it could hold it up to the light and admire it. To preserve me in glass and resin, my bones crystallized and waiting for its touch.

  Nightcatcher. The name I’d forgotten.

  I heard my mother screaming. Poison in the sunlight. Poison on the bleach soaked apples. Nightcatcher.

  “Someone came to me.” I said, “A few nights ago.”

  “And you’re still alive?”

  The wind outside the window howled loud enough to give me a nosebleed. The bars of the window crumbled.

  We ran out into the hall. There were no nurses on duty, of course. And even if every patient on the ward screamed at once, I wouldn’t be able to hear them over the noise of the wind and the river. If the earth turned up the volume a little louder, my fingers in the demon’s grasp might disintegrate.

  The linoleum ruptured. A carnivorous plant shoved its head through the crumbling tiles and dirt.

  Acid dripped onto my hands and burned my skin away. Again.

  Because of my medication, I saw it happening from far away, through a thick veil of unreality. I would’ve kept staring at my hand, watching the skin bubble like a research project, if Saint Peter hadn’t called for me.

  She stood at the end of the hallway, the hunter’s bow in her hands. She knocked an arrow back as a plant burst from the ceiling above her head, moving out of the way before it could snare her blue hair in its fibrous mouth.

  The entrance behind her blew open.

  The violent air sliced my arms and legs. We couldn’t go out there. Anything could be out there. And everything WILL be out there. The machine and its temporal lobe shattering noise. The heat of the river that could crush my lungs like a collapsing cave. Monsters that climbed into plants and made them angry, angry, angry.

  Yet the tiles behind us were crumbling away. Steam rose out of the rubble like the sweat of hot-blooded plants.

  We ran into the parking lot. The Witch pulled up in Saint Peter’s van. The demon threw open the passenger side and we piled in. The Witch peeled off.

  She was laughing, honest to god, laughing.

  She jerked the van to cut across the middle of the parking lot. My cheek slammed against the window.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” I said, pressing my hands against my cheek, which was already beginning to bruise.

  “She visited you,” The Witch said, “but she couldn’t kill you. Not yet. Oh god, she was so angry.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m magic, babyheart.”

  We raced down an empty highway in the middle of the night. The old tires squealed with the effort. The engine smoked, and its burning, acrid smell filled the entire van.

  It still couldn’t overpower the smell of machine oil.

  I knew there were all sorts of things behind us in the dark. Squirming things, wet angry things. Ghosts who could rearrange themselves into the shapes of my guilt. Those stupid fucking plants.

  And The Nightcatcher herself, child’s hands, rage that could stretch planets.

  There wouldn’t be a hospital to go back to. There wouldn’t be a reprieve, ever again.

  The demon panted into my throat. She gripped me by the wrists.

  Then The Witch stopped laughing.

  “There’s something in the road,” she said.

  It happened in less than two seconds.

  “There’s something in the road. Somethingsomething. In thethetheroadtheroad.”

  She slammed on the brakes, and the van flipped.

  One last chance, I thought to myself. If I remembered how to open my eyes I’d wake up, back in the hospital.

  The demon’s tiny body slammed against my sternum. My stomach dropped as we turned over and over in the van. I should’ve worn a seatbelt. Saint Peter reached for me and fell over my head. All the windows of the van shattered. A set of house keys, left on the bottom of the van for months, pierced my shoulder like a knife.

  Then the van stopped rolling. I fumbled for an exit. The crumbled glass, still left on the edges of the window, sliced into my fingers.

  “Oh god,” Saint Peter said.

  A carnivorous plant reached through the van and pulled me across the highway. I tried to resist, make my body go limp, but it only pulled me harder. My elbows and knees scraped against the asphalt, leaving behind skin and blood.

  It dragged me into the forest, away from the highway.

  I grabbed its head and squeezed. It secreted acid. The skin on my hands was already peeling away. The acid followed the lines of my veins, through my wrists, my elbows.

  A girl leaned against a tree and lit a cigarette. She wore mud-caked pumps, her exposed legs scaly and green.

  “Do you like her?” she asked of the carnivorous plant, in a familiar, smoky-dipped voice.

  I clenched my arms, gritting my teeth, heaving with pain.

  “Phaedra?” I asked, “Phaedra, why couldn’t you have gotten a cat like everyone else?”

  “I did. As I recall your girlfriend ate its eyes.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THE PLANT’S HEAD released me, and I fell backwards.

  My head hit the ground. I struggled to get up, but Phaedra kicked me over with her heel.

  “Stay down, loser,” she said. “I have things to tell you and you’re going to listen for once.”

  That cold little bitch, she loved every moment of this. She always wanted to be a noir femme fatale. She probably had wet dreams of this moment, when she could act the Miss Poison Ivy, have me prostrate on the ground, while she lazily smoked a cigarette.

  “Well you better hurry up and tell me,” I said. “I’m a busy girl.”

  “You’re a lazy, drug addicted coward,” she said.

  “And you’re a sociopath. I thought that’s why we were such great friends.”

  She pressed her muddy pump into my throat.

  “Did you ever think about anyone besides yourself? You could’ve stopped for one moment and looked behind your shoulder. Instead you left us all. Me, Cignus, your mother.”

  “I thought you could take care of yourself.”

  Her pump crushed my throat and I couldn’t speak without pain. Dirt and grit touched the back of my throat. The cold air pushed its way into my split knuckles.

  “Tell me what you’re going to tell me, bitch,” I said.

  She released my throat, and I started coughing.

  “Shut up and look,” she said.

  She held her wrists out. There were holes in her skin, pierced through the bone. Her entire body was covered in holes and drained of blood.

  She slipped her still-lit cigarette through the hole in her wrist and pushed it out the other side.

  Through the holes in her body, the river poured, boiling and red. I dragged myself away from her, across the dirt.

  The river se
eped through my shoes and scalded me. I cried out and grabbed a tree limb to try and pull myself out of the water. Phaedra shuddered, like she was trying to laugh but couldn’t quite remember how.

  “She’s behind you,” Phaedra said.

  I looked into the dark, out into the place where the river flowed, beneath the trees and dense clouds. The river rushed to her, parted around her, this creature blackened and bristling. She smiled at me with a glowing mouth, and then she fled.

  “Phaedra!” I called, but she was gone.

  The river was gone.

  I ran back to the highway. Saint Peter and the demon were climbing out of the wrecked van. Saint Peter, miraculously, still clutched the hunter’s bow and the quiver of arrows.

  “Where’s Genie?” I asked.

  “Still in the van. We don’t have a phone,” Saint Peter said, limping toward me. “We can’t call an ambulance.”

  She bled in places stigmata couldn’t reach. The demon bled from her forehead, her skin a network of shredded glass. Her wormwood eyes were so bright and big; they could’ve caused traffic accidents.

  I went around the van to the driver’s seat. The Witch lay upside down, unconscious or dead, her neck at an unnatural angle against the steering wheel. Her legs were crushed behind her back.

  “Can we move her?” I said.

  “What if her neck’s broken? We could kill her.”

  She coughed up blood, but didn’t wake.

  I went back to Saint Peter.

  “Give me the bow,” I said.

  She stared past me, as if she’d heard me calling from the other side of the woods. She had a concussion, probably. And I didn’t even know if there was a hospital within the nearest fifty miles. Not after the one we just left collapsed in on itself.

  “It’s mine, isn’t it?” I said, and outstretched my hand. “Give it to me.”

  Saint Peter handed me the hunter’s bow. It felt warm and familiar in my hands.

  “Where are you going?” Saint Peter asked.

  “I’m going after the thing that did this,” I said. “Stay with Genie. Flag down a vehicle if you can.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “I said stay here. So fuck you and stay here.”