The Breaking of Day

by King, Sadie

  “No, I want you to lie back and close your eyes. As tight as you can. I am not going to kill you. Or even try. But you have to feel what I have felt. You have to accept the truth that I show you.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I will cut my own throat. Right here in front of you. Bleed to death all over your precious library floor. And I won’t let you stop me. I’ll become your next Chloe, your next dead love.”

  “Zora, you are so melodramatic. Grow up. You’re even worse than Chloe. What is it with you crazy fucking women? Do you actually try to be neurotic?”

  “Listen to me Victor. Listen. Are you going to lie back down or not?”

  Her voice contained no emotion whatsoever.

  Victor sighed. A long, resigned release of breath.

  “Are you going to hurt me?

  “Yes, I am going to hurt you. You have to trust me. You need to learn the truth of yourself. You cannot teach yourself that.”

  He looked at her, searching the blankness of her face, trying to sound the depth of her madness. When he saw no trace of anger in her face, nor tension in her hand around the knife, his fear eased enough to submit to her.

  Perhaps he thought she had devised a dangerous game of erotic bloodletting. Perhaps he thought she would do with the knife what he had done with his fingernails, tracing deeply enough into the skin to arouse but not too deeply to truly hurt. Perhaps he thought she was testing his trust with a lie, that she had no intention of hurting him, only of convincing him without his resistance that she would. Whatever he thought, he lay back down flat on the hard floor, closed his eyes and waited.

  She walked up to his naked body and knelt. As she had in his bedroom, she appeared on the verge of prayer. Instead she reached out with her left hand, not the hand holding the knife, and began to pleasure him. He exhaled sharply, more out of relief than arousal.

  “I knew you had something kinky in mind—you are such a little minx. You really had me scared there for a minute, that you were going to stab me or something.”

  “Don’t open your eyes yet.”

  If Victor had been listening, really listening, he would have heard something primitive, something serpentine, underneath her voice.

  It didn’t take long for his penis to become fully gorged. His face was suffused with anything but fear. He was getting more and more excited by the second, more and more expectant of the next move in her devilish game. He was proud he had taught her so well.

  Fast as the blur of a serpent’s strike it happened. Zora flicked her hand with the knife gracefully extended. The blade entered the skin of Victor’s penis just deeply enough to leave a scar. Not so deep to damage vital blood vessels or nerves, yet not so shallow to leave a wound that would heal without a trace. Her calmness was the key to her deftness: had she been enraged, blinded by hate, she could never have imparted to his flesh such a surgical wound. It would have been much messier, had she not been calm. It would be messy enough this way, and permanent.

  She rose from her position of prayer, and dropped the knife onto the floor next to Victor. Blood was starting to burst unchecked from the cut, and his eyes had opened aghast. She walked from the room, from the house, leaving Victor to fresh anguish. She ignored his cries, his curses, not bothering to turn back. She would not come to his aid, nor offer a single word of regret. There would be none of that. No weakness.

  She had shown him the truth of himself. Of the fallen girl. Of the meaning of love and death and life. Pain and pleasure. Eros and Thanatos. The first thing that greeted his eyes, not long after he heard the clatter of the knife, was a paper-thin cut in the shape of a “C,” just beginning to bleed. His very own scarlet letter.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In her room, alone in her body as she was alone in the world, her heart ached and bled. Her body was alien to her: a thing to be desired by men but not loved by them. A thing that had committed a brutal act, in love but without love.

  She had no concern for herself. She cared not whether Victor would seek to imprison her body as he had imprisoned her self. She could not bear the emptiness of that moment, alone in her room, alone in a teeming mass of ambition and hypocrisy, alone in the pain of her violence.

  She sat on the floor of her room, her eyes open in the dark, her pupils fully dilated, seeing nothing but shadows. At last her thoughts came undone, they unraveled themselves: she remembered what she had intended to do after cutting Victor. It was far better, she decided, to mirror Chloe than to mirror Victor. She would extinguish her body as her soul had already been extinguished. A final act of justice, the only fair thing she could do for herself. A final act of strength.

  Conium maculatum. The source of her last vestige of strength, the means of her last infliction of justice. In Victor’s kitchen, near the knives, she had seen it: a small bottle of botanical oil. Part of the same collection that he had used to lubricate her sexual awakening.

  He hadn’t used this one though, had spared her body from its deadly charms. This vial was meant for Victor, and Victor alone. Oil of Hemlock. The same compound that Socrates had drunk after an Athenian jury had sentenced him to death.

  A poison, yes. But taken in tiny amounts, with expert care, it was a remedy for a variety of ills. A homeopathic miracle. A perfect symbol of alchemy, of the duality of life and death. One molecule less of hemlock, life could be rescued from death; one molecule more, life would be hastened into its opposite. To use hemlock was to walk along the razor’s edge between life and death, between nature’s dream of decay and the human dream of immortality. To drink hemlock is to prove that you are human, that you can die but also that you can transcend death.

  Because Victor was a special kind of alchemist, an alchemist of the erotic, he took hemlock for a special kind of healing. He took it to dampen his sexual appetites. He could rage with sexual desire, crowding out every other thought and feeling. His passions could make him aroused at the least opportune times. At a faculty party, a fantasy about a colleague across the room. A stray lascivious thought about a student in class.

  In moments like these, he was prone to outrageous slips of the tongue. Discussing with a sexy colleague “the holding of the coitus” in a Supreme Court decision. Asking a bosomy student in his Law and Politics class to explain “the ramifications of the upcoming erection.” He got away with it because everyone knew his fondness for dirty puns. His randy Shakespearean wit. And he had tenure.

  In an old homeopathic manual, he had read of a treatment for hyperactive lust: oil of hemlock. It seemed to work. Chalk it up to the chemical effects of the poison on the limbic system, chalk it up to the placebo-on-libido effect, chalk it up to what you will. Victor swore by hemlock just as the Athenians had.

  And now Zora would too. On her way out of his house she had taken the bottle. There in her room, sitting in blackness on the floor, she put the small cold bottle to her lips. She drank its entire supply of hemlock oil in one downward motion. Death for her, for someone so diminutive, would come more quickly than it had for Socrates. Her nervous system would be disabled and then destroyed. But this would be no bullet to the brain, no dagger to the heart, no guillotine blade through the neck. Hemlock was a careful, patient killer that would make a stronger poison, say cyanide, seem like a divine mercy. Her end would come in a cataclysm of convulsions. She would suffer, and suffer horribly.

  She got up and lay on the bed. She had thought in her misery that dying would be easy. She was wrong. Eons of evolution had not prepared the human body to die quickly, like the sudden suffocation of a flame, the vanishing of light from an ember. Human life is a very hard thing to destroy, and it has to be snuffed out methodically, aggressively, mercilessly. That is why the truly suicidal jump from a high bridge, or pull the trigger of a gun against their temple: the power of the body to resist these wrongs done to it is not enough to outweigh the trauma. The mind that second-guesses a long fall to the earth, midway through the plunge, can do nothing to avert its extinction.

/>   In the end, near the end, Zora’s body made the choice that her mind didn’t want to make. The decision to live. The will to live of her body planted a placid thought in the center of her mind: to die would be the most selfish act imaginable. It would make her as bad as Victor. And that was the very fate from which she wanted to escape. Death at her own hands would be false escape; life without Victor, transcending him, would be the truth she had been seeking in the hemlock.

  She picked up the phone and called for help. She told the gentle voice on the other end what she had done, what she had swallowed, what she feared. She begged not to die, and the gentle voice poured hope in her ear.

  At the hospital they lavaged her roughly, like farmhands would treat an animal. She was a foie-gras duck in reverse. Shit pumped out of her stomach to make her whole again, to make her ripe for life, instead of shit pumped down her gullet to make her ripe for slaughter. She faded in and out of consciousness, hearing snippets of medical jargon frantically tossed around.

  endotracheal intubation . . . diazepam drip stat . . . signs of rhabdomyolysis . . . diuresis with furosemide . . . volume expansion with NS . . .

  She survived without any adverse complications. As a parting gift, the hemlock gave her a trembling in her left hand that would come and go for the rest of her life. The faintest cut from the razor’s edge of alchemy, the merest paling of skin from bathing in the River Styx.

  The diazepam cut short the ripple effect of convulsions spreading to every extremity; the diuresis prevented renal failure. They told her she had narrowly avoided falling into a permanent vegetative state, paralyzed from the neck down. The luckiest patient they had ever seen. She asked the hospital not to notify her parents; they said they wouldn’t. She was a woman, after all, not a child. If only Victor could treat her like the former and not the latter.

  Once she was moved from the ICU, to a regular hospital room with pale blue paisley wallpaper, she had a visitor. With a nametag. Dr. Ivy Weaver.

  “Zora, I’m Dr. Weaver from Wellcome Hospital. I’m a psychiatrist, here to evaluate you and care for you.”

  Zora reached out to shake Dr. Weaver’s hand. The doctor bypassed the hand, swooped in for a hug. Zora was taken aback by this act of clinical compassion. What was next, a lawyer upholding the law? A politician keeping a promise?

  “I’m fine doctor. Really I am. Feeling much better now thanks.”

  “Are you having any violent thoughts, against others or yourself?”

  Dr. Weaver made it seem the most innocent question in the world.

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Why do you ask?”

  Had Victor spilled her secret, as she had spilled his blood?

  “It’s a standard question in a situation like this. When someone tries to hurt themselves, they might want to do it again. Or they might direct their violent thoughts outward. We don’t want you to hurt yourself or anyone else.”

  “I’ve chosen to live, Dr. Weaver. I could have chosen to die. I have no intention of making that choice again, or making it for anyone else.”

  “That’s good to hear. I’ve spoken with Dr. Wilson, your attending, he says physically you’re fine. A very lucky girl. But let me ask you Zora, why did you try to kill yourself?”

  Zora had already prepared her response, had tailored it to manipulate her audience in her favor. She was preparing to be a lawyer, was she not?

  “You know, first-year law school jitters. Too much stress. Nothing that a little break couldn’t cure. One too many questions in class I couldn’t answer. Who knew that dying intestate has nothing to do with your intestines?”

  To complement the tepid joke, she offered up a lukewarm smile.

  “Zora, I believe you, but I’m still going to need to observe you for a few days over at Wellcome. That OK with you?”

  “What if I say no?”

  “It’s your choice. You are not being involuntarily committed. But the law school wants me to sign off on your state of mental health. And like you said, you could use a break. If you agree to a brief period of evaluation and therapy, I can help you return to school in good standing. Shouldn’t be more than a week.”

  Zora was alarmed that a few days had suddenly become a week. But she had drunk the hemlock, she had shown a propensity to think like a complex human being—instead of thinking like a lawyer. And the love in Dr. Weaver’s eyes, the human love, the utterly unlawyerly love, enchanted Zora on a different level than Victor ever could. A level more quintessentially womanly.

  “I trust you Dr. Weaver. I’ll sign the form.”

  “Great. You’ll be processed out of Presbyterian in a few hours. An ambulance will take you to Wellcome, and I’ll see you again there later. Nice to meet you Zora.”

  She gave Zora another hug. Were it not for the nametag she could have been mistaken for Zora’s white-haired grandmother, not her psychiatrist.

  Wellcome State Psychiatric Hospital was a 15-mile drive from Madison Springs. Something the townspeople, or rather their elected representatives, had insisted on. No crazies contaminating their happy lives, no madmen and madwomen loosed upon their unsuspecting loved ones. Just to be on the safe side, Zora was escorted all the way there, in the back of the ambulance, by a security guard. She didn’t take offense, and he didn’t mean any. She and Barry chatted of safe things. No mention was made of hemlock or unraveling minds or the finality of death.

  At Wellcome she settled into her room, a drab cinder block affair painted pasty white, had a lunch of rotini in sauce that tasted like it had come from a can, and was ushered by an attendant to Dr. Weaver’s office for their first formal session.

  Dr. Weaver’s office was the first she had seen without a desk. Paperwork of any sort was nowhere to be seen. The walls were lathered in kaleidoscopic pastel colors. And life was everywhere, in every nook and cranny. The office was a veritable botanical garden bounded by four kaleidoscopic walls. Dozens of plants, flowering and unflowering, exotic and pedestrian, of every shade and texture that nature had to offer. There was very little room for people.

  What room there was featured two identical deep plush chairs halfway facing each other. And a small round table between them. Which, of course, had several plants on it—orchids to be precise.

  Dr. Weaver warmly clasped both of Zora’s hands, temporarily calming the tremor in the left that had been acting up just then. They settled into their chairs at the same time, crossed their legs at the same time.

  “Peppermint tea Zora? I took the liberty of brewing you a cup.”

  The doctor had already taken her cup in her hands, and Zora’s was sitting on the table before them, steaming and scenting the air alongside the orchids.

  “Love some, thank you.”

  Zora brought the tea to her lips, let the sultry essence of the peppermint waft up her nose and cascade down her throat.

  “Zora, before we begin, I have one rule in this room, and that’s honesty. No holding back the truth. Agreed?”

  Zora, the cup in her hands, holding it meditatively, the peppermint still swirling in her mouth, nodded.

  “That’s why I’m here Dr. Weaver—honesty.”

  “Very good. What I want to start with, what I want you to start by telling me, is everything.”

  Zora sputtered, a fine spray of peppermint settling onto the orchids.

  “Everything? Wha-what do you mean?”

  “Every event, every feeling, every association you have in your mind, from your life, that culminated in your trying to take your own life.”

  Zora looked around the room. No clock. What kind of psychiatrist was this? One without a clock or a cock, thank God.

  “That might take a while Dr. Weaver. I wouldn’t want to waste your valuable time.”

  “Not a concern, not at all. I cleared my schedule for you. I do that for every patient when they first arrive here. There are other doctors to pick up the slack. If it’s more tea you want, I have a whole drawer full of it.”

  Dr. Weaver pointed to
a miniature cherry cabinet across the room, partially concealed by a large Ming Aralia. On top of the cabinet rested a hot water dispenser.

  “Let’s see, I have bergamot, lemongrass, lavender, chamomile—”

  Zora cut her off. The list of teas was unnervingly reminiscent of some other botanical substances, oily ones, she had experienced recently.

  “I’ll be fine with peppermint. So you really want everything?”

  “Yes, dear, every last thing, down to the bitter end. Then it won’t be so bitter. I might ask a question from time to time, but otherwise this is your time to talk. You are the light in this room.”

  Zora fixed the light of her eyes on the light of Dr. Weaver’s. Had there been anything there other than the illumination of a noble soul, Zora would have held back. She would have gilded the truth with shining lies. Beautiful prevarications. But she didn’t, so she wouldn’t.

  For close to two hours, Zora shared everything with Dr. Weaver. All roads led not to Rome, but to Victor. She talked of her childhood—she felt doing so was almost obligatory in a psychiatrist’s office—but mainly she spoke of recent things. Of the fertility of Victor’s touches, of his cold heart, of the calisthenics of his passion, of his Janus face. The face that smiled and kissed, and the face that spit and leered.

  She told of her murderous thoughts, she told of the crescent moon cut into his penis, she told of dreaming of cutting out his heart. She had read of that once in a book on Aztec sacrifice, and she explained to the doctor in excruciating detail, without any question prompting her to, the procedure practiced by the Aztec priesthood. How the heart of the victim was hewn from the chest, hacked out with a knife of black volcanic glass, atop the pyramid of the sun god Huitzilopochtli. The doctor gently sipped her third cup of tea, one bag each of lavender and chamomile, and nodded rhythmically, as if in a trance.

  When Zora was done, she said simply, without fear, “Are you going to report me to the police?”

  “No, Zora. If Victor had wanted to, he already would have. I have worked with plenty of battered women, they sometimes lash out, and the law doesn’t always understand. I am here to heal you, not get you into trouble.”