by Sarah Bird
Whether real or dreamed, the light blinks off, and Millie fades to black.
In the Dark Forest of the World
IS THERE ANYTHING quite like waking up toxically hungover in the room one occupied in college ten years after graduation to definitively hammer home for one the full extent of one’s all-inclusive loserhood? I open my eyes, discover that Millie is gone, that every cell in my body has been squashed flat as a penny on a railroad track, and that the ones adjacent to my brain have not only been squashed but sharpened to knife edges.
Careful not to move anything other than my arm, I feel around on the floor beside the bed until my fingers close around the handle of the Code Warrior mug.
Ah, bless its handy, no-spill commuter lid.
Without having to lift my head, I tilt the cup toward my parched lips. One drop, two, trickle from the lipstick-smeared opening. Then nothing. All Mama’s medicine is gone.
I shove another pillow under my head and prop myself up a bit farther so I can take better stock of my dire situation. Hanging from a hook on the outside of Millie’s closet door is a full-length white minister’s gown. A purple stole embroidered with golden doves is draped around the neck. A banner above her small, rickety desk reads, BUT THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT IS LOVE, JOY, PEACE, PATIENCE, KINDNESS, GOODNESS, FAITHFULNESS, GENTLENESS, SELF-CONTROL; AGAINST SUCH THINGS THERE IS NO LAW.
Posted beneath the banner is a calligraphy rendering of Bible verses. THOU SHALT LOVE THE LORD THY GOD WITH ALL THY HEART, AND WITH ALL THY SOUL, AND WITH ALL THY MIND. THIS IS THE FIRST AND GREATEST COMMANDMENT. AND THE SECOND IS LIKE UNTO IT, THOU SHALT LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR AS THYSELF. ON THESE TWO COMMANDMENTS HANG ALL THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS.
Okay, that is good information. Now, I am starting to get the picture. Like the bums who have to pay for their two hots and a flop at the Salvation Army, at some point Millie is going to ask me to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. That is doable. As long as I know what is coming, I can deal. And then I notice a few other calligraphic pronouncements:
Enough of the pursuit of pleasure,
Enough of wealth and righteous deeds!
In the dark forest of the world
What peace of mind can they bring you?
Ashtavakra Gita 10:7
And laid out in the shape of a triangle with a lotus hovering at its top is a little something from the Buddha himself:
On life’s journey
Faith is nourishment,
Virtuous deeds are a shelter,
Wisdom is the light by day and
Right mindfulness is the protection by night.
If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him;
If he has conquered greed nothing can limit his freedom.
I figure these last two entries have to do with Mr. Shower Cap. I put my hand down and feel around until I locate my purse and dig out all the pill bottles therein. I lick the dust from their empty interiors and wait, attempting to will myself into any state that doesn’t feel as if my nerve endings were being scrubbed with a pumice stone.
It doesn’t work. I crave a lengthy list of substances, but the only one I have the slightest hope of scoring is caffeine. From the jagged, speeded-up Code Warrior World where everything—parties, people, bicyclists, regrets, recriminations, scruples—hurtled past as if I were on a rocket sled to hell, I plunge into Molasses Land. The seconds, minutes, hours don’t tick by; they haul their sorry asses along, inch by inch, across a Sahara of unmoving time.
Standing up takes patience and ingenuity. When at last I achieve verticality, I shuffle to the door and pause there to listen for the voices of my little mutineers. The house is silent. Coast clear, I shamble downstairs. Without the Warrior to absorb the brutal shocks of life, each step is a spiked jackhammer to the brain.
Downstairs, I double-check that the house is truly deserted before stepping out of the stairwell. On my way to the kitchen, I halt for a rest and sink onto the same cat-piss-soaked Herculon tweed couch that was here during my first tour. The rug that was once the grimy pink of bubble gum on a dirty sidewalk is now a uniform dirty sidewalk gray. Even the causes are the same but more tattered. A pile of leaflets litters the top of the scarred coffee table: Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport. Protect Reproductive Rights. No Blood for Oil.
Check. Check. And double-check.
Big Lou demands service, bumping against my hand until I scratch between her ears. Her purr is a rumbling clatter as loud as an ancient percolator.
Seneca House is even more decrepit and shabby than I feel. It is just and fitting that I should land back where I started, at a college boardinghouse that is as close to a welfare hotel as makes no difference. Returning to this pit pretty much erases the past ten years of my life, wipes the slate clean of anything I might have accomplished in my life.
Crushing headache, nausea, and an incessant twitching in my right eyelid prod me into the kitchen. I locate a jar of HEB house-brand instant coffee and spoon half the jar into a mug that I fill with water from the house’s handy regiment-size teakettle.
I toddle out, concentrating on holding the steaming cup far enough away that the smell of maltodextrin and anticaking agents don’t make me heave. This causes me to fail to notice that my own personal vision of hell has taken shape in the dining room and is glaring at me with more hostility than a basket of cobras. I try to charm anyway.
“Hey, Juniper, Doug, Olga, Sergio, great to see you guys.”
All my former employees, except the unflappable Sergio, gape openly. The hot pink springs on Juniper’s Z-Coil shoes sproing beneath her as she oscillates in disgruntled amazement. Olga’s freakishly long ballerina/model neck gooses out even farther. Doug simply tilts his head like a puzzled dog. A puzzled dog with, thankfully, friendly eyes.
Juniper, always quick on the uptake, is the first to recover. She all too literally springs into action, bounding forward on the Z-Coils. “What the hell are you doing here? In a giant flowered nightgown?”
I glance down and find that while I was out Millie has, indeed, dressed me in one of the granny nighties she used to wear when we were roommates and she was jumbo size.
Juniper doesn’t give me a chance to answer. “Have you been here for the past three days since the party?”
Three days? I’ve been out for three days?
“We went by your place a bunch of times to get paid. We thought you were hiding until we saw your landlady dragging all your clothes and shit into her house.”
No! No! No! Bamsie took my couture?
“What are you doink here?” Olga demands in a probing tone that reminds me she hails from the land of the KGB.
“I’m visiting a friend.”
“Who is friend?”
“Millie.”
“You’re friends with Millie?” Juniper is agog, her bony features threatening to slice right out of her face. “How can you be friends with such a good, decent, kind, trustworthy, honorable person?”
“Fluke of nature?”
“God, I guess so. I mean, if there was ever an anti-Millie. Someone the complete opposite of good, decent, kind—”
“Listen, Juniper, if you don’t mind, I’m really not up to an all-expense-paid character assassination at the moment.”
“Oh really? Is that so? Is Little Miss Wretched Xcess asking for some consideration of feelings? Is that it? A little recognition of basic human decency?”
I do not like the direction this conversation is taking nor the heavily italicized reading Juniper is giving it. I attempt a brisk derailment. “Hey, you guys wouldn’t even be here without me. Wasn’t I the one who first turned you on to this place?”
Juniper gasps and eye-rolls her way to a response. “Okay, okay, now I get it. Stupid me. Right. The world does revolve around Blythe Young. That, that, is the piece I was missing. Oh, okay, everything is clear now.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Juniper taps her chin, pretending to think, and I brace myself for another
round of nonconsensual sarcasm.
“Actually, actually, now that I think about it you are responsible for all of us living here. I mean, where else could we afford to live on the slave wages you were paying until you decided to pay, oh, the very cost-cutting nothing!”
“Da, this place is like gulag. Is labor camp. For you!”
“Now, Olga, come on. That’s a bit extreme—”
Juniper drops the sarcasm and escalates to direct confrontation. “Blythe, pay us what you owe us. Now. My tuition is due.”
I miss the sarcasm.
“Da,” Olga chimes in. “And I nid to pay rent to lif here.”
“Sergio? Doug? Would you like to jump on this dog pile? Kick me while I’m down?”
Something flickers in Doug’s eyes. Pity? Shame? He shakes his head and looks away. “Not really.” Juniper pokes him, though, until he adds reluctantly, “The bank is threatening to repossess my car.”
“Sergio?”
Sergio shrugs and drops his velvety Latin lids. “Hey, sometimes you get the elebator. Sometimes you get the shaft.”
“Guys, I’m sorry. I reallyreallyreally am, but I am far more conclusively hosed than any of you are. I have nothing. Literally not a thing.”
Juniper takes the olive branch I have extended and starts clubbing me with it. “Well, I’m sorry that the trophy wife wasn’t smart enough to get the trophy—”
“Trophy wife? I’m too smart to have been a trophy wife.”
“Too old, more like it.”
“Hey! Come on—”
“And I’m sorry that you also snorted up everything you made picking the bones of the Internet bubble—”
“Mixing our metaphors there, Juniper.”
“—but that doesn’t mean we’re gonna bail you out just like we’re supposed to work our entire lives to keep you in Depends because you bankrupted Social Security.”
“Uh, Juniper, I’m thirty-three.”
“Who cares? You’ve got that whole the-world-revolves-around-me boomer thing going, expecting us millennials or whatever to come in and clean up after you.”
“Juniper, what is your point?”
“My point is, Blythe, you had your time at the trough. You had the bubble. You had Clinton. Now you owe us. I’m about to get thrown out of school, Olga’s on the brink of eviction, and Doug is dodging the repo man.”
“Try the IRS.”
“You brought your troubles on yourself.” Juniper’s voice is disturbingly calm. “You snorted and lied and connived and conned and cheated and scammed your way into the mess you’re in. You created your own hell.”
This is all beginning to sound like a bad production of A Christmas Carol with Juniper as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Where is Bob Cratchit to counsel forgiveness?
“You owe us.”
“Jes, jew owe us.” When Sergio cuts me with a gaze adequate to etching diamonds, I know that the roaring in my ears is the sound of the falls I am about to go over without a barrel. This is my moment. When backed up against the wall, I always come through. I am a clutch player. I have to deliver. I have to argue my way out of this corner with dazzling rhetoric and spin the likes of which the world has never previously seen.
Or I can pretend to faint, a maneuver that has squeaked me out of many another tight spot. Unfortunately, this time, on the way down, I accidentally knock my head against the table, and the lights truly do go out.
It’s Called a Conscience
JUNIPER? JUNIPER, can you hear me?”
I open my eyes to find an extremely annoying and extremely fuzzy nurse dressed in lilac scrubs grinding her knuckles into the back of my hand and calling me Juniper. I fear I’ve entered the Twilight Zone and been condemned to bounce a mile in Juniper’s Z-Coils.
“Why are you calling me Juniper?” I demand. “Stop calling me Juniper.”
The real Juniper sticks her face directly in front of mine and enunciates very, very slowly, “Joo-ni-per, you are in an examining room at the university health center where we brought you after you fell and hit your head because this is where we bring currently enrolled University of Texas students because otherwise it is very, very expensive to get medical care. So it’s lucky you are a currently enrolled student and that you are entitled to medical care here at the university health center because you are a currently enrolled student. Isn’t that right, Joo-ni-per?
“Juniper,” Juniper continues, “here’s your student ID.” She holds a blurry ID card up to my face. In the photo Juniper is wearing her black-rimmed glasses. I touch my face and find that I am wearing those precise glasses.
“Oh, okay.” I take Juniper’s ID, relieved that I don’t have brain damage. Noticing a breeze blowing across my lower back, I glance down and discover that I am now dressed in a pair of Olga’s jeans of the low-rise sort that make sitting down a pornographic activity.
“Okay, Juniper, make a fist.” A prick on the inside of my elbow alerts me that the nurse is drawing blood. “The doctor will want to do some tests. Find out why you’re so unresponsive. And open your fist.”
I keep my hand balled up tightly. My blood and tests. Not a winning combination. I order my corpuscles to stay in their cozy veins, but the nurse unsnaps the rubber tubing from my arm and the traitorous platelets rush into the syringe.
“The doctor will be right in.” Lilac Scrubs bustles out.
The instant the door closes, Juniper snatches her glasses off my face and the world clicks into far too sharp a focus. “Great. This is just great. They’re gonna do a toxicology screen and I’ll have every drug known to man on my record. I should have just left you twitching on the floor.”
“Twitching? I was twitching?”
“You were twitching before you fell. Shit.” Juniper plops down on the rolling stool.
“Thanks, Juniper. Thanks for not leaving me on the floor.”
Juniper shakes her head in disgust. “It’s called a conscience. Really makes life so much easier not to have one, doesn’t it?”
The obvious implication being that my lack thereof has delivered me to my current bed of roses. “Well, anyway, thanks.”
“Okay. It’s done. God, why did I ever think you could pass for me?”
“Juniper, don’t worry. I’m really good in these kinds of situations. Fast on my feet. Good in the clinches. Just fill me in on your medical history.”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“Yes, I do. I mean, maybe you’re a hemophiliac or something. That would be important to know.”
“I’m not a hemophiliac.”
“How can I impersonate you in front of a doctor if I don’t know your medical history?”
“This is ridiculous. Let’s just leave right now.”
“That would look more suspicious than anything. Just tell me what your last few visits were for.”
Juniper’s disapproving lips thin even further.
“Juniper, I don’t want you to get thrown out of school for doing me a favor. You don’t want you to get thrown out of school for doing me a favor. Tell me.”
An exasperated, resigned exhalation, then, “Okay, last time I was here was to get an IUD fitted. Time before that was because I needed lower-dose birth control pills. Before that chlamydia. Venereal warts. Thought I had herpes but didn’t.”
“Okay, I got it. Is there a pimp involved in all this?”
“I knew it! I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”
“When you were working for me, did you wash your hands regularly?”
“Good-bye. Any brain damage you might have suffered would be an improvement. I’m leaving.”
Just as Juniper’s hand touches the knob, the door bursts open, and Lilac Scrubs reenters reading intently, mesmerized by Juniper’s Story of O medical chart. “Because of your, ah-hem, ‘history,’ the doctor would like to do a quick”—and then the words, the magic words—“pelvic exam and Pap smear while you’re here. So put this on with the opening to the front.” Sh
e hands me a gown laundered to near transparency. “And this.” A drape quilted like a giant paper towel. “You know the drill,” the nurse says with obvious disapproval.
Before the door closes, Juniper rips the gown and drape from my hands. “That’s it. We’re leaving. Now! What are you doing? Stop taking your clothes off! Are you completely insane?”
“Juniper, I haven’t had medical insurance since I left UT. When I had money, I didn’t have time. I actually had an appointment with a gynecologist, but Trey divorced me before I could get in. Ever since the divorce, basic medical care has been beyond my means. A pelvic exam is winning the lottery for me. A Pap smear, God, a Pap smear…” My eyes actually tear up. “A Pap smear is a hopeless dream.” I grab the gown and drape back. “But a girl’s gotta try.”
Before Juniper can finish counting the ways she hates me, I have my clothes stripped off and am back in the saddle again. Feet in the stirrups, legs in the traditional Happy Thanksgiving position, this turkey is ready to be stuffed.
“Don’t worry,” I assure Juniper. “We’re nothing but body parts to today’s insurance serf medico. These assembly-line docs wouldn’t remember you or me if they’d just seen us ten minutes before for spontaneous combustion.”
The door swings open. I catch a microscopic glimpse of the doctor and immediately yank the paper drape up to hide as much of my face as I can. Since the doctor’s head is down studying Juniper’s chart, I risk another glimpse. Her name tag confirms the awful truth: ROBIN FELDMAN, M.D., PH.D., Scourge of Seneca House.
Robin was living in the house ten years ago at the same time I was while she finished a doctorate in counseling. She used all of the residents as therapy guinea pigs. I myself had submitted to many sessions so that Robin could practice asking how I felt about whatever I’d just said. Apparently, though, screwing with people’s heads had not provided Robin with enough of a career challenge, so she had gone on for a second doctorate that allowed actual penetration.
Of all the gyn joints in all the towns in all the world…