We Will All Go Down Together

by We Will All Go Down Together (v5. 0) (epub)

  But I just rolled on anyways, like a bulldozer: “Viv, you get the broom—Aaron, garbage bags; they’re in the kitchen drawer. We’ll do the hallway first.”

  Brave words. The ash, however—eager as it was to come boiling up off floors, walls, and furniture in equally dense, choking, cornea-scratching clouds—proved equally eager to condense clingingly back onto plaster, wood, and fabric; in fact, to go anywhere except into dustpan or receptacle. Before long, the general irritation factor had both Aaron and Vivia coughing up gack and blinking redly, while my unhealing breast-rash flared back to full, radiation-fiery half-life. Finally, Vivia called a halt.

  “What is that?” she demanded, as I paused yet once more —well, “discreetly” had been my first impulse, but it obviously hadn’t exactly taken—to rake at my boobs.

  “Same thing.”

  “Thought I told you to see somebody about that.” To Aaron, as I just shrugged, helplessly: “You—coffee. Fresh coffee. And as for you—”

  She dragged me off into the bathroom to treat my wounds. Demanding, while I held up my breasts with both hands, giving her room to slap on iodine and bandages with equal profligacy: “How long’s it been now, exactly?”

  “Since—”

  (—that experiment started, dumb-ass. The one you hooked me up with?)

  But I wasn’t about to go there, not even at this late date. So:

  “—I don’t remember,” I finished, toneless.

  “Well, strikes me you should be starting to worry about this, I’m serious. Forget the over-the-counter crap; this could be gangrene, for all either of us know.”

  “Re your bedside manner? It needs work.”

  “Fuck you too, Jan-girl.” Vivia straightened up, pressing the small of her back with a groan as I tugged one of her borrowed T-shirts down over the bandages. “That should hold together, for a bit, anyway, and—oh, you’re not serious.” This in response to the fact that I’d flipped open the medicine cabinet and was—even now—popping a couple of Nytols out of their protective foil packet. “You can’t possibly think you’re gonna sleep in that room, Janis.”

  “It’s my room; I’m not letting some poltergeist bullshit force me out of my room, Vivia.” Adding, with a wryness I only wished was a joke: “Besides, you know I can’t sleep anywhere else, Nytol or not.”

  Viv closed her eyes and shook her head. My naturally insomniac bent had long remained a running gag between the two of us, even on those occasions when—like now—it became anything but funny.

  “I’ll clean the rest of it up in the morning,” I added, trying to reassure her.

  “That’s not what I’m worried about.”

  Bitterly, I restrained the urge to snap at her so-well-meaning-it-smothered “concern”: did she think I wasn’t scared? That I was literally too dumb to recognize danger when I—

  (saw)

  —it?

  But the fact is, I was too tired to think about any of it anymore, barely awake enough to breathe. Only awake enough to be aware of exactly how tired—and angry and fed up—I was.

  And beneath that, like static, like bass . . . like some guerilla signal flickering between stations, buried under layers of figurative snow . . . the fear of eight years of half-anticipated failure, dimming me from my skull on down. That indefinable knowing that, if and once I allowed myself to be driven from that room, I’d never be able to enter it again; afraid, on no level I could explain (or explain away), that to lose my home would be to lose—

  —momentum. Faith. Hope. That failure here would mean failure everywhere. Would mean I was a failure; always had been. Always would be.

  (And who’s told me so, exactly, ever? Not Mr. and Mrs. Mol, for sure. Not my so-called friends.)

  Just me, as ever. Me, somehow hollow at the core from birth, struck and ringing now with a dissonant tone pitched so that it could be heard only by dogs, or fish, or insects. Dead houseplants, barren trees. Rats in the walls.

  . . . ghosts.

  “I need to sleep,” I told Vivia, one last time—then swallowed the Nytols dry, and went back upstairs to my ash-choked room. With careful steps, trying to kick up as little as possible, I pulled the blankets off the bed in a cloud of dust, holding my breath to keep the overage out of my lungs. Using my pillows to sweep the last of the ash from the bare dirt-pocked sheets.

  And collapsing onto them, closing my eyes, feeling sleep sweeping upon me like fabric falling in thick, multiple layers over my face. Falling out of light, into shadow.

  Into the penumbra.

  | fever breaking

  I slept ’til three that morning, resurfaced only gradually, in horrible increments. And then—

  —I found myself hovering in that half-waking state between fatigue and sleep, the same one during which any or all visions that may have hovered imperceptibly at the corners of your mind all day tend to swim into focus, into sharp and dreadful relief. Yet another long-repressed childhood fear, just waiting for a chance at revelation: the room and its vibrations, resonating in time with my Nytol-induced haze, had conspired to send me ratcheting back to nightmare circuit territory. I would be almost gone, my lids lead-heavy, when suddenly I would know, with utter certainty, that if I did close my eyes, a face would come rising up over the end of my bed, like some hideous, pale sun—

  —and oh, Christ, I can see it now, utterly unchanged by decades of conscious personal evolution: too pink, as if carved from soap-brittle; smooth and overemphasized, like the face of a bad actor. Something inhuman in human form. On occasion, it even put on expressions; an ironic cocked eyebrow, a limp moue of surprise. Its mouth would hang half-open, showing improbably white teeth, but its eyes would be dead.

  One day, I felt, it would speak to me, and if it did, I would go completely insane.

  It wasn’t a dream, not really, because I was never fully asleep when it happened: hic vigilans somniat—he dreams awake. The Roman epithet for poets, seers, or madmen. So which would people think I was, if ever I told them what waited for me on the border—the penumbra—between sleep and waking?

  And: Open your eyes, I remember thinking, sternly. Get up, get out. Wrench yourself bodily away from this smell of ash, breath-cloggingly thick in your nostrils; heat like a djinn’s giant hand on every part of me, pressing me down. Sweat running down my temples, slicking my hair and collecting under my breasts, shaking the itch awake once more—deeper this time, more painful, burning like gelignite in every pore. Like the lit track of a phosphorus grenade.

  I raised my lids, or at least struggled to; felt my eyeballs roll back in my head, zombie-white and scarlet-threaded. Sensed, without seeing it, how the ceiling would shift lazily in my blurred vision, roiling and streaming like a single noxious fume—how it would seem to heave in and out like breathing, the rhythmic lift and lower of something too huge to take in all at once.

  Nightmare breeding on nightmare, giving birth to fresher horrors. And suddenly, I was trapped fathoms deep under a textureless weight of water while a thing bigger than the whole waking world sunk down towards me through faraway beams of light: my formative ideation, alive at last, reborn from the corruption of its own decay—alive, and aware, and. . . .

  . . . hungry.

  More sweat trickled down my face, as icy knots cramped in my stomach. I tried to move. Found I couldn’t.

  No more than mere seconds, inevitably, eddying slow as geological epochs. I knew light, flickering in the corner of my cracked-open eyelids, blurry through the glaze of dried tears; tried to blink my eyes clear, but couldn’t do that either. Felt my limbs, heavy and motionless at my sides, stiff as if I had steel weights strapped to them. Felt a newer, rawer rush of heat lap my face in time with the flickering light, and “saw” the dancing shadows of flames on the wall.

  (Oh God, I’m going to burn here)

  At the end of my bed, a crouched and bulbous outline stood stark black against the flames, hidde
n just below my frozen line of sight. Waiting to rise.

  Sensations scudded across me like moonlight flickering through an overcast: a stitch twanging in my back, reflexive nervous spasm. The pressure of my bladder, acutely, painfully full. And then—with absurd clarity—the wordless echo of Vivia’s voice downstairs, querulous and angry and amused by turns. Which was enough, in turn, to summon every ounce of willpower I had left: contort my lips into shaping her name, letting the autonomic outrush of breath give sound to the only word my numb brain could still form:

  “Vvvv . . . iii . . . vvvv . . . .”

  No answer, of course; but then, what’d I expected? I could barely hear myself.

  As the ceiling sank closer, I knew something was looking at me from the end of the bed, and prayed desperately not to regain control of my eyes. Not to see the face I knew was there and waiting for me; not to see the thing that was casting the shadow, which rose so huge and black against the room’s engulfing flames.

  The black negative of Dr. Abbott’s Holy Grail: a hypnagogic state induced by oxygen deprivation, exhaustion and fear, liberating every paranormal perception I had at once at the potential cost of a total—fatal—disconnection between body and mind.

  Or, to put it another way—Carra’s bag. Coming down.

  The pressure bore on me like that half-remembered, half-imagined lake, a freezing weight slicing with deadly accuracy through the ghost-fire’s stabbing pain. Something was with me, in that split second: beyond reason, only barely conscious, collected from the wreckage of lost lives and desperate for an ideal of communication it no longer knew well enough to name. Something trapped here in a shell of memory, slave-driven to find any way out it could, even one which led nowhere but . . .

  . . . into me.

  And finally, as I managed to tilt my skull to one side, I thought I knew what I had to do; it was like rolling a boulder head-first up a collapsing gravel slope with only your neck and shoulders to support the effort. In the corner of the room, the mirror shone simultaneously bright and black, opaque to the nth degree—the doorway, opened on Dr. Abbott’s oh-so-helpful advice, through which this thing had let me see it for the first time. Through which time itself (perhaps) had sent a backburst-bubble of the original house’s ruin.

  Currents stirred, spiralling inwards in fiery-bright lines, pulling my vision towards that empty hole at the mirror’s centre. And as it did, the anger and desperation swelling around me became infused with a terrible, helpless pleading, a childlike, unselfconsciously selfish fear: Help me, Janis, help me . . . let me in . . . .

  But: “No,” I told it, muscles bunching and swelling, finally beginning to gain some purchase in my own limp body. “You’re . . . dead. Go . . . away.”

  HELP me!

  “Fuck I will.”

  One arm, pushing up against the mattress. My body, tilting up, like mountains folding out of the earth in some tectonic convulsion. My weight shifting, sliding—with excruciating difficulty—towards the edge of the mattress.

  HELP ME!

  At the foot of my bed, something sheathed in fire rose up, its shadow falling over me, backlit in its own combustion. It moved and coalesced further, deepened and darkened; leaned over me, its face nothing but a featureless flame-shrouded oval peering down through gathering blackness—

  And: “NO!” I screamed out loud, flinging my arm over my eyes. “I DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT! I DON’T CARE! FUCK OFF!”

  I felt something give around me, inside me, as that shriek came ripping up from within like a tide bursting through a rot-ridden dam. Went rolling over, off the bed, ash bursting up around me in phantom tsunamis; scrabbled on hands and knees towards the corner where I knew the mirror waited, bright bursts of pain scoring me with every move as fire lashed out at me from every angle, cinders falling on my naked legs and half-exposed back. A smell like roast pork filled my nostrils: me, burning.

  My hand closed on the mirror—and something, simultaneously, closed a huge and burning grip around my ankle.

  Another scream, as searing air burnt the inside of my lungs bright red. I reared up and flung myself at the door to my room, hauling it open with my free hand. Staggered down the hall towards the stairs, seeing myself trailing streams of smoke and ash, clouds of dust settling in stinging glee into my burns. Tear-blinded, smoke-choked, I flailed around for the railing, caught it, hurled myself onto the first step—

  —missed it.

  My foot came down with that stunning, jarring jolt that kicks us out of sleep, and my knee gave way beneath it. I pitched over with a shriek, curling into a ball, protecting my head with my arms, and managed to land on my side, flipping over and over down the stairs like some fleshy coin, carelessly tossed: wham! Wham! Wham! The house whirled around me, my stomach seeming to simultaneously bounce off ribs, throat, groin. Then I came down on the floor of the vestibule, throwing out both hands to brace myself against the impact—and felt glass shatter in a single, high-pitched, discordant crunch, slicing deep into fingers and palm.

  (Uh, ah, AH.)

  In that single instant of shock and silence, I could see again. Everything was clear. No roar of burning from upstairs, no smell of fresh-burnt wood—only shards of silvered glass winking up at me, bright and empty, from the gashes they’d opened in my red right hand.

  A snap, a crack—time, popping back into place with a sick-making wrench, like some dislocated shoulder. And then Vivia came pounding down the hall, screaming my name, dropping to my side, babbling questions I couldn’t possibly hope to answer. Finally pulling out her cell phone and stabbing the 911 buttons, tears streaming down her face.

  I wanted to reassure her, poor creature—to tell her I finally knew what’d been going on all this while, that I’d faced my fears and lived to tell, that I’d cracked the house’s back and made it say uncle. That everything would be fine from now on, because . . . I’d stopped it.

  I was wrong, of course: I didn’t, hadn’t; there was more than sufficient proof of my actions’ consequences already lying in wait just ’round the corner to reveal itself, but not of the crazy victory I felt singing through my half-cooked veins. Not of that, no.

  Not hardly.

  | years later, pt. 1

  The half-hour version of Frottage, which Vivia eventually cobbled together from my unfinished thesis, premiered at Toronto’s Fringe Theatre Festival the year after that; it took honours, got overwhelmingly positive reviews, and was a contextual “success” (even taking into account the fact that no one who came to see it could possibly have paid more than ten bucks a pop).

  It’s not going too far to say it was primarily her/my play’s cultural fallout—rather than her talent, considerable as it’d always been—which got her into a prestigious new writers’ retreat, sponsored by the intentionally outré Theatre Passe-Detout, where she was taken under the wing of local scenester Haroun Farang-Geist. With his mentorship, she was able to spin the show out yet further, garnering a limited run at the Detour; a year after that, the Bravo!Fact Video Arts Fund offered her $20,000 to make Frottage into a 54-minute TV special.

  This next step, however, proved problematic for two reasons: first because, in order to expand it any more, she’d have needed my help, but I was already in the midst of taking a medication vacation in the Clarke Psychiatric Institute. And second—because that also happened to be ’round about the same time Vivia had her first bi-polar episode, precursor to several years of hideously predictable chemical back-and-forth: step one, go nuts. Step two, take your meds. Step three, feel so much better you stop taking them. Step four, go even more (inventively, alarmingly, self-destructively) crazy . . .

  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

  Doesn’t happen to women, usually, let alone to people past the age of majority. Yet there she’d be, near the end—phoning me up at five in the morning to tell me how much she’d always loved me, to ask me if I’d ever loved her back. To say: “Euclid
, Jan-gal—wasn’t that a time? Best work you ever did, you dumbstruck Mainland cunt, and you couldn’t even finish it.”

  And I’d just allow as how she was right, calmly, wincing at the way she wasn’t even trying any more to hide the Maritimer accent she’d once worked so hard to eradicate—at the way she didn’t even seem aware of it any more. Knowing exactly how goddamn embarrassed she’d be, if only she could hear herself played back without her brain supplying some sort of permanent laugh-track.

  Thinking to myself, as I twisted the phone-cord ’round my wrist ’til it knotted, and nodded like she could see me while I did it: Oh baby, oh Jesus. It’s like taking collect calls from Captain Highliner on a bender.

  It took six months before I changed my number without telling her, but somehow, she always seemed to find me again. Up until I stopped answering the phone at all, that is.

  Six months after that, I was rummaging through a Queen Street Starbucks’ recycling bin for the Entertainment section when an article caught my eye. It said former playwright and director Vivia Syliboy had thrown herself head-first into the St. Clair Ravine, probably because the Don Valley Parkway—much nearer the halfway house where she was living on her own recognizance, at the time—had finally put up those anti-suicide screens on either side of its too-low marginal wall.

  | years later, pt. 2

  After I checked myself out of the Clarke, I dug up the results of Dr. Abbott’s “Mental Radio” experiment, which had already been published. No names, naturally, but it was fairly easy to figure out which case study was mine . . . they did put in reproductions of every sender’s drawings, after all.

  Turned out, the man they’d paired me up with—Henry Goshaugh was his name; another sensitive, from Carra Devize’s control group—had died before he could fully complete his part of the experiment. A little more exploration turned up the facts: he’d developed a massive undiagnosed tumour in his abdomen, which broke open unexpectedly, flooding his insides with poison. Peritonitis, internal bleeding. He died in his sleep, and when they did the autopsy, they found foreign human DNA—amniotic fluids not his own, in other words—infecting the imploded ruin of his pelvic region.