None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1)

by Laura Giebfried

  And it wouldn’t matter if they believed me or not, because I would never speak again. I would never utter another useless word that would go unheard, or try to reason with what they could never understand. Whether real or imagined or right or wrong, I was something different, just as Beringer had or hadn’t said, and there would always be something barring me from the rest of the world and leaving me out.

  And it occurred to me that the only person I wanted to speak to was Beringer, but that that was impossible. He was dead, and even if he hadn’t been, he hadn’t been who I thought he was. And the loss of him was so strong that I felt something crack beneath the skin stretching over my chest, and it shattered within me and let loose the shards into my bloodstream to rip at every part of me from the inside, and there was no explanation for the pain that I could give to the nurse when she asked me where it hurt.

  He was gone. They were all gone – Beringer, Jack, my mother, Cabail. And the others whom I should have harbored some affection for had only ever been concerned about a part of me that wasn’t any more real than the aria that sounded in the dark campus at nighttime. And I couldn’t blame them for it, because it had been my fault. I had failed to find the answer to the riddle in time to save my mother, or to discover the killer in time to save Jack, or to see Beringer for who he really was, and now that I knew all the answers there was no one to tell who would ever believe me.

  I didn’t know what had happened. I seemed to have stepped away from the world for just a moment too long, and upon returning found everything fragmented and reversed. They all believed that Jack was a killer and that I was insane, and neither of us could save the other as long as they thought so. The rest of the world was holed up in a reality separate from mine, and we were doomed to run parallel without ever touching. Jack’s world had been severed from mine and thrown in pieces away from me, scattered somewhere across border lines and oceans, and I had no idea where it was.

  And it wasn’t the ending that I had been searching for. It wasn’t the final act that I had been waiting for, but rather the poorly thought-up one that had been composed by another writer with a different story in mind. It suddenly occurred to me why Turandot had never been finished: it was because it couldn’t be finished. The characters were doomed to remain stuck in place forevermore with no chance of finding a way onward. The opera was doomed from the moment that Nessun Dorma began to play. The beauty of it was wasted as it gave way to the pain of being unresolved.

  And maybe no one would sleep ever again. Maybe the forced un-brokenness that had stretched over the world like ice had frozen every living soul awake, and we would lie as still as the dead as we were made to contemplate the mysteries that could never be solved. Maybe the world would go on without me now that I had no place in it, and I would lie in the hospital bed unmoving and unnoticed just as my mother had for all those months.

  As the night fell over the room, I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. It was the same sight that I had had every night for over a year as I failed to fall asleep, and yet there was no comfort in the familiarity. The snow had changed to rain, screeching against the glass as it slid down the side of the building, and the blackened sky radiated down on me with its emptiness.

  And my longing to be in the dorm room and turn to the side to see Jack across the room grew so great that it hurt to breathe, and the oxygen mask hissed until the nurse came to check it. And I missed him so badly that it felt as though I would never breathe again, and it was the type of agony that only Beringer had ever been able to soothe. And despite what I knew, the person whom I had known and who he had turned out to be was still oddly misplaced in my head, and I wished intensely that he was there, because he would have listened to me when I spoke to him. He would have brought me back into the world and kept me from feeling so alone.

  But he was dead. And he wasn’t that person. I shut my eyes as I reiterated it to myself, letting the understanding echo inside my head endlessly in an attempt to make it more real, but it only seemed to bound back and forth off of my skull. My mind went unwillingly to how Cabail Ibbot had sat next to me on a bench, his short legs hanging over the side and feet not disturbing the snow, and how sure I had been that he had been there, and of how sure I had been of everything else, too.

  And the sudden fear that I could be schizophrenic came over me with such desolation that it left me shaking, because it seemed impossible that I had formed the entire idea of Beringer being a killer in my head, because then it would mean that I had been deceived by my own mind into killing the person who had done more for me than anyone purely to cope with the questions that I had so desperately wanted answers to.

  And as I thought of how it might have been – how they said it had been – the inconsistent memories untangled to play back in my head. I watched what had happened in the Health Center as though it was a film captured from the ceiling: I was sitting on the white cot in the empty room with a dead expression played upon my face, and then a look like realization came over my eyes, and I stood up and left the room and exited the building, completely alone –

  And Beringer entered just moments afterward, but upon finding the room that the nurse indicated to empty, he went back to the desk and frantically inquired as to where I was. And when she only shook her head at my absence, he took off out the door after me and ran up the path to the forest, following me as I wandered through the trees to the cliffs ...

  And when he found me teetering on the edge there, he ran after me to pull me back, but I struggled against him so violently that he couldn’t keep his feet from sliding on the icy ground, and we plowed over the edge and down towards the rocks, and he was crushed against them as he broke my fall, and I tumbled into the water to sink, but not drown, before the waves carried me back to safety. And I was alive, and he was dead, and I had done it. I had killed him, the only person who had cared for me so deeply and undemandingly, and he had done nothing wrong.

  And as I thought it, I was struck by an intolerable disbelief that emptied me of will. I squirmed where I lay, my face shattering as I thought of what I might have done, and the entirety of the world crashed down upon me and broke everything within me all at once.

  Tearing the oxygen mask off, I threw it to the side of the bed and let out a piercing cry that ripped from my throat as though slicing jaggedly through it. I seized the IV in my arm and tore it out violently, wishing that it would bleed me of my mistakes, and then ripped every other wire and tube from my skin as well. I wished that I could feel it the way that I could feel the pain in my mind. I wished that I could hurt like I had hurt so many other people who had done nothing wrong: my mother, Jack, Beringer –

  “Mr. Lund –”

  Someone wrapped their arms around me and tried to hold me down, but I had gained an unprecedented strength that fought against their grip and threw them off again. I rolled off of the bed and onto the floor, knees smacking the tile painfully as my legs re-broke beneath me, and continued to scream into the glossy white as I waited for something, anything, to come and change what I felt –

  “Let me die!” I shouted as the arms reappeared around me, fighting to keep me still. “Let me die! I want to die!”

  “Hold him down – just keep him still –”

  Something pricked against my skin, but it was hardly noticeable amongst the other rips and tears there. I continued to struggle, to scream as loudly as my voice had never risen before, so that I could rid myself of anything and everything that made me feel this way – that made me be this way –

  “Just hold him down. It’ll work in a minute.”

  And I wished that I could tear myself free of them, that I could run through the doors and walls and glass until I had sliced myself to pieces, and then out into the snow and cold and dark to collapse and die alone – because I did want to die. I had wanted it. If only I had done it then, had swallowed just one more of the powder blue pills and curled up to rest forever next to the fragile, broken form in the room at th
e end of the hall, then none of this would have happened. I could have left the world to an unknown ending, a better ending, and no one would have gotten hurt. No one would be gone or dead – no one but me.

  The tranquilizer buzzed in my ears and took over my head, wrapping it in a fog too thick to see through, and my arms fell heavily at my sides and my legs grew tired and numb beneath me. I felt my body slump to the floor, my face pressed against one of the wires that I had ripped from my skin, and the trickling of fluid from the various tubes was like water beneath me – water that should have drowned me, time and time again, but that only ever submerged me for a moment too long, and everything blurred around me to the bright whites of fluorescent lights that had taken the spot of the sun.

  Ch. 24

  They let me sit by the window.

  The view from it was dull and unchanging, like the soft pounding that had come over my head, but the touch of sun was welcome. I leaned my forehead against the glass as I stared out at the remaining snow that the rain had not yet washed away, now just a white blanket filled with holes over the earth, and let the condensation seep into my skin. My skull thudded rhythmically against the glass, but the mind underneath it had gone very still, neither concerned nor content as it settled in place. I could barely hear the voices outside the door from where I sat, but couldn’t bring myself to move back underneath the artificial lights in order to hear them better. I was resolved to stay in the ephemeral daylight.

  “... calm now. We’ll keep him here for observations for a few more days, but then we hope to move him somewhere more suitable.”

  “You mean that he can come home?”

  “No, no, Mr. Lund. That would be a bit premature, I’m afraid. He still needs extended care.”

  “Can’t I give that to him? I’ve had a patient in my home before. A nurse looked after her.”

  “I’m afraid that at this point that won’t be an option. Enim has demonstrated some violence when he’s having an episode.”

  “Yes, but he’s medicated now. You’ve drugged him – he’s calm. You said so yourself.”

  “Yes, yes I did. But you have to understand the situation that we’re dealing with here. The boy killed a man.”

  “That was an accident. Enim would never – he’s not – the entire thing’s been ruled an accident already. They’re not holding him responsible for what happened.”

  “Even so, he’s a danger to himself. He’s tried to kill himself multiple times now. We can’t overlook that. He’ll have to stay here with us, just for a while.”

  “Yes, but ... I don’t live here. Enim only goes to school here – and he’s still a minor ... at least for a short time.”

  “I’m aware of that. In fact, I’ve already spoken to your brother about it. We would be able to transfer Enim to Connecticut; we can get the paperwork all ready for you. But ... he still has to stay in a psychiatric care facility.”

  As they grew silent, I rested my head on another spot of glass to allow my skin to soak up the cool condensation there. It pressed against my closed eyes and numbed some of the throbbing in my skull. I wished that I could tilt my head to the side to shift the layer of fog that had come over it into the bottom corner; then at least I could regain a hold on part of my thoughts again.

  “I ... but ... what will they do with him?”

  “They’re just going to get him adjusted, Mr. Lund.”

  “Adjusted to what? You’ve already given him the medication – he should be fine now.”

  “I’m afraid that it’s not that simple. These things take time. We’ve given him a preliminary dose of antipsychotics, but it’s unlikely that they’ll be the perfect match for him. Schizophrenia affects individuals differently – medications and dosages aren’t an exact science.”

  “But you said that he’s fine – you said that.”

  “No, I said that he was calm. There’s a difference.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The medication that we’ve administered has greatly reduced the positive symptoms of schizophrenia – meaning that he no longer shows signs of experiencing hallucinations or delusions or disorganized behavior. But he’s still showing the negative symptoms of the illness: emotionlessness, social withdrawal, little motivation, lack of enjoyment ...”

  I let their voices drift into the background. In the newfound stillness, I could hear the quiet in my head settling in to stay for a long while. It cozied up to me and pressed itself against my heart like a cat would rub up against my legs: I could feel the fur on my skin and hear the soft hissing. I could have been back in the dorm room at Bickerby with Dictionary and Jack. I shut my eyes and listened for his laugh, and breathed in the smell of his cigarettes, and felt the bed next to me sink down as he hopped upon it to talk to me, to tell me his plan of how we would get away from this place ...

  “He’ll be all right, Mr. Lund. Give it time. He’ll be all right again.”

  “But ... what if he’s not? What if he never moves past this?”

  “Don’t linger on what your son looks like right now. We know much more about schizophrenia than we did ten years ago. It can be better treated now.”

  “But not cured.”

  “No, not cured.”

  My father murmured something too quiet to hear and the conversation died. I shut my eyes and raised my head to the warmth behind the glass. The lids turned an orangey-red against the sunlight, and the thoughts swirling behind them were muddled and confused. I tried to pick them apart to remember, but the fog that had grasped them wouldn’t shift. Everything was either too hard to recall or too painfully clear in my memory. I wished that I could pick and choose which memories stayed and which went, but I had no control over them anymore. I could feel the ones that I was searching for sinking to the bottom of my mind as I tried to bring them up, drowning into the blackness of an empty consciousness.

  It was too hard to decide what was real and what was imagined. The things that I had felt so strongly once were now just whispers against my skin, barely touching and hardly noticeable, and I was still unsure of it all. The medication didn’t make past events any clearer, and it was still too difficult to pull apart what had happened at the cliffs. The two separate memories of Beringer leading me and following me to the cliffs replayed at random and without explanation, and neither made more sense than the other. It was too difficult to decide what was worse: that I had wrongly killed the person who had cared most for me in the world, or that he was someone so starkly different from the person that I had thought I’d known.

  Only Jack would know the truth and be able to confirm it to me, but he was as good as a thousand miles away from me now. We were stuck in different worlds with no way of reaching one another, and I could feel the pain of his absence even through the thickness of detachment that the medication had set over me.

  And if this was all that the real world was, then I didn’t want to be a part of it. I wanted to be sitting beside Cabail Ibbot in Volkov’s class, for once feeling as though I wasn’t the strangest person in the room, or with my mother on the beach, with the aria looping repetitively from the car for hours on end, or, best of all, with Jack, standing on a different beach beneath the sun, someplace far away from here and so close together.

  The door to the room opened and slow, heavy footsteps sounded on the floor. They paused a foot or so behind me, and a shadow cut into the sunlight as it fell over my form. My father’s reflection glimmered behind mine in the window. In the outline that the glass gave of each of us, we had never looked less alike. He was so tall and firm, and I was just something small and warped beside him. He stood behind me for a long while, his hesitation so unlike him, before finally raising his hand to my shoulder as if to grasp it. He let it hover there for a full minute, his eyes staring down at the back of my head with unfamiliarity, before pulling it back to his side again. The movement sent a gust of air down my spine and I shivered. He couldn’t touch me.

  I pressed my face closer to the window. I coul
d hear someone laughing from the parking lot and scanned my eyes yearningly to search the pavement below. The laugh was familiarly lighthearted and untroubled, with just the hint of crackling from smoking. The person getting into his car was not Jack, though. I watched him for a long while, wishfully thinking that the orderly’s uniform and light-brown hair might just be a part of a disguise that my friend had adopted, but then the man got into his car and drove away. I stared after him as he went, still wishing that it was Jack and that I could go with him.

  But I was going somewhere else: back to Connecticut. My father would sign the papers and have me transferred to someplace in the city where I would sit in a cold room day after day, both the staff and my injuries preventing me from leaving to stretch my legs in a long, much-needed walk through the woods. My days would be empty of the chattered-ideas and plans that Jack’s absence had left behind, and filled instead with the meaningless conversations that my father tried to hold during the set visiting hours in the psychiatric care facility. He would come to visit as often as they suggested and say the things that they thought would aid my treatment because he wanted me to get better. He wanted me to be cured. He wanted it so badly, and yet he couldn’t even touch me.

  And I realized that I didn’t want him to. I didn’t want him to come home anymore, and I didn’t want him to look at me the way that he had years ago. I didn’t want him to take the family portraits out of storage boxes and line them up on the mantel again. I didn’t want to go home with him and eat dinner with him at a quiet table, or to have him stand in the audience and clap when I graduated at the top of my class. I didn’t want it – not any of it – anymore.

  But I would have given anything to have Jack there with me, or my mother, or the Beringer that I had thought I’d known. I would have clutched onto any of their hands when they laid them upon my shoulder, and looked intently into their faces for a smile. I would have stayed there peacefully forever if any one of them could be there beside me, instead, without the aid of medicine to keep me calm. Because it was them who had kept me calm all that time, I knew. It was them who had kept me sane.