Truth
Anna Catone - { Histories }
Janlori Goldman - { Bachelard's Cabinet } { The Jewish Gauchos of Entre Rios, 1917 }{ One Good Turn }
Elizabeth Howort - { The Sun, That Great Magician }
Sam Abbott - { It Eats You }
Rachel M. Simon - { Seizure } { Title IX }{ Hometown }{ Swish }
Untruth
Rosa C. Li - { Lucky Elephant }
Ken Cormier - { A Day in the Life of a Conversationalist }
Juan Carlos Reyes - { A War for Rigoberto Chismón }
Rachel M. Simon - { After Life }
We Don't Know and They
Won't Tell Us
Rebecca Keith - { Excerpt from Misdirected Postcard, One }
T.M. De Vos - { Leaving Lake Baikal }
Kamilah Aisha Moon - { Going Under } { Don't Move This Dust }{ Burn }{ After Our Daughter's Autism Diagnosis }
| It Eats You by Sam Abbott |
I wake up in a blind panic, clutching for the light switch on the wall. I turn it on and there is nothing there. There is no reason to panic and I try to slow my heartbeat. I am alone; the apartment is empty; I am entering the difficult part.
Julia has been in the hospital for two days. She will be there for five more. I lie in bed and plan the things that I have to do, I need to keep moving, sleep with my eyes open, exactly like a fish, like a little yellow fish. Today I will bring Julia’s things to the hospital. I know what she relies on, the things she would want. She would want makeup, she will cake it on too thick. Mascara for her eyes like plates of water, like shallow bowls of clean cool water. She will want books—she has been talking about The Alchemist, and when things were in the bad way she went on about those terrible vampire books, but I don’t think about the bad way, because I have to keep moving, I see that road and barrel past it, with my hands neatly folded, like the passenger of a train as the trees blur outside.
She will want Sylvester, the filthy stuffed cat she has kept since childhood. I know he will smell like sweat and dead flowers and all the smells that are Julia smells, the way her room smells, which I will have to go in, now. I have kept to my room and the living room, the kitchen, the neutral spaces, where there are neutral roommate things. A miniature television, the ripped-up couch, posters for bands we’ve never seen, inside jokes and drawings of one another taped to the walls, and the pictures—Julia and I, smiling, two dark-haired college girls, best friends. The apartment seems crooked, angled strangely now, there is all this empty space on one side. Her things are still there, waiting, and in the end they will be there, waiting and waiting, for another 5 months, until her mother comes to pack everything up and drive back to Tennessee. But now there is just that booming quiet and her crooked things.
I pack the things she would want into a bag, moving quickly, efficiently. What does she need? Food? No, no. Maybe shampoo, maybe her cowgirl boots, faded as they are. Can’t bring the razor, the belt. She would want the amphetamines that sent her there in the first place, but can’t bring those, no no. Pick and choose. Presents from home. This will mean so much to her, I hope she never thanks me.
I drive to campus, to the hospital. I park in the emergency lot, even though it is no longer an emergency. It was, once (Carolyn and I sitting in the waiting room, the fluorescence overhead, the nurse who led her away, on the phone with her petrified mother, trying to explain, and then the rubber room with the camera and Julia, hysterical with dirty hair and makeup running), but now it is just a normal, ongoing thing. Time is not Of The Essence. I could park in the normal lot and walk, but I don’t.
I walk the same way they led me the first time—through the triage area, to the elevator, to the fifth floor. It is amazing that one simply rides the elevator in this building, like it is just any place. It is amazing that you push the cracked “5” button and listening to the humming of gears, it is amazing that you can do this, this patient thing. In the hallway of the 5th floor there are signs, notices, counseling available, medical services offered. They talk about programs and drugs that I have never heard of, can’t pronounce. I walk to the end and there is a little woman at a little desk behind a plastic window.
“I’m here to visit a patient?” Like it is any office.
“What’s the name?”
I tell her, and after the typing and so on she nods and asks me to wait. While she leaves to fetch something I examine the bulletin board behind me. It is an article about mentally ill patients and art therapy. There are pictures of an older woman with very short hair, smiling, next to a painting of a girl in a blue room with her mouth open, screaming or yawning. It is a good picture, but it isn’t amazing.
“Okay. I need you to sign these forms. We’re going to put a bracelet on you, and if you have anything with you or in your pockets, we’ll need to go through it. She’s going to be in Room 230.”
“I have this bag. This bag of stuff for her.”
She doesn’t say anything, just snaps the plastic bracelet around my wrist and waves me through the door, which buzzes when it unlocks. I hand her the canvas bag and she pulls things out one by one, laying them out on the counter, examining them like an archaeologist.
She holds up a red sweatshirt, my red sweatshirt, the one Julia always liked to borrow. “I’m gonna have to take the drawstring out of this, all right?”
All right. I just nod and shrug. I watch as she pulls on the cord and slips it out of the hood. There lays the sweatshirt, now open-faced, uncinched.
The rest of my things are Good To Go. I say, “Thank you,” turn to try and find Julia’s room.
The place is like any hospital wing, only there’s locks on the entrance and a big open common area with a television, couches, magazines, another room with a ping pong table. I find this funny and disturbing—they really have a ping pong table?
Julia’s room is second on the right. It is bare, as bare as it can be, a hospital cot, an overhead light, and two big windows facing south. Julia’s mom sits on the side of the bed, and in it, reclined, lays Julia, smiling in that terrible way.
“Laney-bear!” She cries in that high happy voice and I die.
I smile and hug her mom, hug Julia. “How you doing?”
“Ugh.” She makes a face and an expression that demands something from me. I nod, sympathetic, like I understand. “I cannot wait to get out of here. Dude, there is nothing to do here, I am so bored. There’s just, like, weird creepy people, and they’re all watching me because they know I’m the smartest person in here. Plus, I am dying, seriously dying for a cigarette.”
I nod and plow on past her terrible words, folding my hands on the train, ignoring the awful trees. “Well, I couldn’t bring you any cigarettes, but…” I empty the bag out on the bed and watch, glad, as she crows happily, sifts through her things and my sweatshirt, holding up lipstick and hugging Sylvester.
“Aw! Thank you!”
“That was very nice of you, to bring that.” Ms. Atkins smiles at me and it is terrible.
“So. What have you been doing? Playing ping pong?” I ask.
“Fuck no,” I see her mom cringe, “they are not gonna get me to play that stupid game. I don’t know, I’ve just been walking around, trying to keep to myself. It’s horrible, there’s this one guy who keeps following me around, and I know that he stands outside of my door at night, so I have to stay awake so he doesn’t come in. And the nurses are idiots, they won’t listen. I told them about my award. And I told them that if they let me out, I would paint for them, I told them how good I am. They keep trying to get me to do art in their stupid therapy sessions but I won’t do it. They can’t make me. I won’t until they let me out,” she smiles smugly.
“You should listen to the nurses, if you want to get out of here,” Ms. Atkins says.
Julia looks at me and shakes her head. “They’re idiots. They just sit around all day and do nothing.”
I cannot stop wondering at her huge eyes and the space behind them. They seem to travel past and above me, plates of clear water, wide, manic. “Yeah. They seemed dumb. They made me take the string out of that sweatshirt.”
She scoffs again. “I need to get out of here.”
“Sure,” I agree, “You could just curl up real tight and I can stuff you into this bag and sneak you out.”
She laughs, “Yes! Yes. Yes, totally, we can sneak out the back stairs. Peace, bitches!”
“Totally, we can bust you out of this joint.” I clap, Ms. Atkins is bristling, I am saying all the wrong things, I know, but I must have this, have her on my side, co-conspirators.
“Did you talk to the police yet?” Julia asks.
“Um. Not yet.” The trees rush past.
“Okay, good. I figured out exactly what to say, and it has to be good, because Wyatt is tricky. That bastard is tricky.” She tells me one more time: how he has been stalking her, how he hired a friend to take the same class so he could keep an eye on her. How he poisoned her hot chocolate, laced it with LSD to make her seem crazy, so that he could sneak into the apartment and rape her. How he changed all the clocks in her apartment to confuse her. I want to believe her, I almost do. It’s possible, isn’t it? And what if we’re wrong? What if all this is true? Would she ever forgive us? Will she ever forgive us either way?
I nod and nod and Julia writes down his full name on a scrap of paper and presses it into my hand, urging me again to report all this, so she can get out of here. I want to stay and I want desperately to leave, and luckily she says she is tired and we should go. Out the big southern windows the sun is setting and I can see the water tower, cast red-orange in the fading light, its lights blinking, on, off, on.
Out in the hallway, Ms. Atkins cries and leans on me, talking and talking. She is saying, amphetamine-induced psychosis, she is saying, did I notice anything strange before, a change in behavior, how much was she taking? Was she taking a lot? I don’t know, I don’t know. She took some, I don’t know if it was too much, I don’t know. She is talking and crying with her hands and I am looking over her shoulder, at the bulletin board, reading the notices, trying to understand.
When I get home I have to rush, I have to move very quickly and do things so that I don’t panic, I will help her, I will, I can do that. I email her professors with explanations that are too detailed. I clean the kitchen, banging pots and pans as loud as I can so that I can hear them over the booming quiet. I stand in the middle of the apartment and I must go in her room, I have to, to pick out that scab, to terrify myself. I walk in, touching things gingerly, leaving the door open, like there is a furious animal somewhere in the room and it may pounce. I run my hand over her desk and then I start rummaging through the papers, I am pulling open drawers, I understand what I need now, I am looking. I open the cabinets, I turn over cups, leaving everything in disarray. I open the wide center drawer and find it: the bottle of blue pills, down to the last two. I take one out, split if in half, crush it up on my mirror with a bottle, nurse it into a line and snort it. It only takes a few minutes.
Then I have enough to do and I know that I will do it I will catch up on all the reading that I have missed and I will be caught up, perfect, head of the class I make a checklist and write it down once and again, organizing it to the proper order but first I need to fix my face, I am on the computer trying to find the right makeup, the one with the best reviews and most cost-effective, so that I will have flawless skin, pure and taught and honey-colored I walk to the bathroom mirror. I lean toward it for twenty minutes, examining it, the problems, where the flaws lie: my too-big pores which must be fixed, the red spots on my nose and cheeks which must be fixed, my wide nose which must be fixed, the heavy brows which must be fixed all of it, everything, I pull and stretch at my face in the mirror, picking and picking, trying to fix it I will fix it I can fix these things, it is important that you DO NOT STOP like a fish if you stop you will die, sweating through my t-shirt, back in the kitchen scrubbing and scrubbing and scraping out the grime scraping, trying to make it clean, gleaming, the things she left on the couch will be washed and cleaned and returned to her room which is a cold cold cave that I must not go in, I must go back to the mirror and fix my face, trying on her makeup, her lipstick, watching my wide and frightened eyes.
It goes on this way, throughout the night. When I wake up I am tired. I have never been so tired. I wake up and I wake up and I hear the phone ringing. I can’t get up to get it. Shoes still on but it doesn’t matter. Light through the dirty windowpanes and it doesn’t matter. I stay this way for a long time. Eventually, after dark, I get up and find her car keys. She trusted me with them. Now I take her car to a coffee shop where I eat a bagel with shaky hands.
It goes on and on: I sleep on Ella’s couch to get away from that terrible room, waking up dazed and light-bodied in the late evening. When the pills run out I buy more from Lilly, that strung-out slut. They help me fix things and be a Good Girl so everyone will know I am O-K. And I finger my own sadness and call it art.
Julia gets out of the hospital on a Friday. She doesn’t take her medication and I bring her back to the hospital, screaming and furious, hating me, until they feed her Ativan and she sleeps on the thin hospital cot. That night I will go out, drink things I hate, press strange flesh, and when I drive her car home I will back into a lamp post, denting it. I never tell her that this was me. I allow her and her mother to believe this was done by Julia herself, she simply doesn’t remember. Who could take her word for it? Who would trust a crazy person?
But before I dent the blue boxy Honda, before I bring her to the hospital and hear her shrieking, before she tells me her mom is trying to kill her and sleeps with a knife under her bed, before she is taken to the hospital in Nashville and returns a zombie, blank-faced and shuffling, full of anti-psychotics, obese and miserable, I took her to the pond. She was already gone, I knew I would have to turn her in the next day. I packed what passed for a picnic in our disabled state—some cheddar cheese slices, saltines that I dropped on the floor, two Coca-Colas. I told her it was a beautiful day, it would be fun. She was excited, but couldn’t drive, her mom might have messed with the car in order to hurt her, she doesn’t want to risk it. So we walk. The day is clean and gigantic. We walk up Merritt Mill, along the ditch by the side of the road, passing the thin pines that ring our apartment complex. Cars hiss by as we keep in step. She talks and talks and I let her, I listen. The pond itself is only a mile away, more of a huge puddle, nothing impressive, and we sit on rocks while we eat cheese and crackers, trying to avoid the goose shit.
I ask, “What would be your perfect day?”
She thinks. Then answers, “I would get up in the morning and paint all day. Then we would drive to Wilmington. We’d swim and lie on the sand, and after dark we’d get wasted, build a bonfire. We’d fall asleep on the beach.”
“It would be like that?”
“It would be like that.”
She looks pleased.
Years later, she will write me from her father’s farm in Florida where she went to be Away. She says she is okay, bored, smokes too much. She includes a picture of the farm from the winter. I see oranges, crowded groves of oranges. They are covered in frost, iced over and glistening, they are ruined and lovely. But at the pond that last day, we are quiet, and we lean our heads back, if only to feel the sun on our face.
