CHAPTER ONE: THE INTRODUCTION

I’m not an expert on it, but I think about it all the time.  It seems like no one else does: I know they do, but- I think they must push it back. How else can anyone walk around?  How can they deal with it?  We’re not wired to think about our own deaths.  That’s third-party material.  It’s a survival mechanism. 

Like my Women’s Lit professor mused between post-coital tokes: It was the mindless Neandertal that grabbed women up and cave-fucked babies into them.  The ones that sat around pondering the universe got eaten by tigers or sat alone in caves making paintings.  They didn’t have time to run down a herd of bitches to get their rape on.

Sometimes I can see him, high in his cave above the Ardeche long before it broke through the Pont d’Arc.  He must have cried drawing those horses, just like I cried when I first saw them.  To draw like that?  He’d have no time for babies.  It could be that it was some lone woman escaping up there, but I don’t think so.  She’d be too busy getting scooped up to daydream or draw; too busy to notice the fine details of movement, let alone capture it.  Maybe she was chained there and she wasn’t drawing horses.  Maybe she was expressing her spirit and her desire to be free.  Maybe the drawings just fell out of her more from desperation than design. 

I get this vertigo if I think about time never ending- or if it does end what goes on after it?  They say the universe is expanding, but what is it expanding into?  What’s just on the outside of the universe? I stare off into the night sky and all I get is a feeling of insignificance.  It turns into utter abandonment if I do it too long. God has to be real, how else would we be here; but then, if he’s real, how’d he get here?  He can’t be real.  That’s fine. Religion is fine.  Faith is fine.  Hope is fine.  It’s all fine. It’s pointless.  I’m not going to talk about that.  I just mean for the individual.  It’s fine for the individual.  As long as you don’t lose it.  And that’s the thing.

When I was young I used to have night terrors that I would die and go to hell. I was okay in the daylight but the night would come and I’d be there, alone, and this panic would take over.  It wouldn’t come all at once, but my little sins would haunt me, my thoughts about a boy. My thoughts about one of the other girls being prettier than me, having this thing or that. 

There was this cosmic test I would never be ready for: I read, I took notes, I memorized my bible verses, I knew what I was supposed to do, but it felt like I was going to fail no matter what. It was like those underwear dreams, or the constant detour dreams where you’re supposed to be somewhere important.

It was too much, growing up thinking about hell.  I guess at one point I could feel peace.  I had Jesus for a little bit.  He was my white wizard, the bible was his book of power.  I dreamt of him riding in, saving me from the devil and his never-ending fire.  He would say his magic spell and whatever curse there was would be broken.  I guess when I was thirteen I was even in love with him, but like so many other men, when the devil finally came he was nowhere around.  I’m not the only one he abandoned.  I’m not the only princess in the only overgrown tower that no prince ever came to or was even looking for. I’m not the only one that had to stick her faith in a drawer with Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny and the little pieces of shit she made in kindergarten.

When I gave up on Jesus I gave up on God too, by rote I guess.  After a lifetime of being terrified that I would go to hell I was suddenly terrified there was no hell.  Hell is better than not existing.  In Hell there’s hope you can somehow escape or be rescued.  That’s all life is.

I can’t wrap my mind around not existing.  It’s ridiculous because I know I used to not exist, or else I was someplace and I’ve forgotten. Even if I come back in a new body or as a frog or something, the memories of who I am now will be gone.  I’ll still be dead even if my molecules and my spiritual essence are floating around, morphing into other things or being absorbed back into the universe for all of eternity.  

But here’s the thing- and this is the most important thing:  I’ve become worried about something else… what if neither of these are true? What if I don’t die?  What if I have to keep on going like this forever?  In this same worn-out body?  In the same pointless situation with no way to do it over.  I’ve been longing for a reset button for years, or better yet, an off switch.  I’d give anything for an off switch.  To just die and get it all over with.

I’ve been lying in this hospital for a couple of days now.  They pumped out whatever I hadn’t thrown up, but they’re looking for damage. Seeing if I’m a danger to myself.  I have no friends or family for them to contact so there’s not much else they can do but watch and wait for the shrink’s evaluation.

They could put me up against my will, so I’m on good behavior- laughing, telling jokes, but underneath that little facade I’ve got this sick feeling they’re going to keep me anyway.  Forget what I said about Hell and the feeling that I could escape, I know I can’t.

There should be a really old list of problems like this in my file somewhere, but luckily for me, that part of my life is either sealed or misplaced and I’m desperately hoping I’ll be out of here before any of us find out which it is.

I agree with Dr. Richards that maybe I should talk to AA just to be sure.  I say I’ve been thinking about going to this church near my house- that’s true too, but only because I think I might meet someone.  I don’t say the last part.  On both counts, I know better.  There’s this heavy sensation of being tired, of clothes not fitting right, of looking like a silly elephant in high heels, of being the cat lady even though I only have a dog.  If I don’t go to the church I won’t stand in the mirror getting ready.  I won’t feel those things about myself.  If I don’t say those things about myself to Dr. Richards then they may not be true.

I talk about the positive steps I’m taking in my life- the church, the dieting, the walks in the park, volunteering, the women’s group. Dr. Richards looks at me like I’m a butterfly in a killing jar.  He keeps his giant fascinated eye right on me, distorted and terrifying. It’s like he’s waiting to drive that giant tie tack of his right through my spine and hang me up, label my parts and put his little INRI plaque over my head.  I do not like Dr. Richards and if he wasn’t the one deciding whether I’m safe to go home I might have the courage to tell him.

I need out of here. My whole stay has been disorienting.  I’m not really good at sleeping in strange beds.  If I had a love life that would probably wreck it.  I live in a neighborhood where half the people don’t even lock their doors at night.  I’ve had mine dead bolted- not my front door; that has two and a chain, I mean my bedroom. There’s a crowbar I wedge between the handle and the carpet in case someone tries to kick it in while I’m asleep.

That may sound paranoid, and maybe it is, but I live across from a big empty park.  Lady Bell died a few months ago.  Without her the park is just some useless place outside my bedroom window where people can stop and mill around in the darkness.

I can’t lock this hospital door.  I keep hallucinating.  That’s not the right word.  Half the time I think I’m at home, the other half I’m in my grandmother’s guestroom on a long-ago Christmas Eve.  The endless busywork of the night-shift nurses becomes the hushed din of aunts and uncles staying up late to get drunk and play Rook or Scrabble or maybe even Monopoly, but that never goes well and sooner or later one of them stumbles through my room on their way out the back to pee or get more beer from the fridge in the garage. 

Sometimes it’s long moments before the angelic glow around the tiny door of my grandmother’s guestroom disappears and the crowded dining room across the hall becomes a nurses’ station.  It’s long moments before the familiar urge to open presents skulks back off to whatever slippery place I lost it.  These are long, long moments, but they are not long enough.  I escape to happier times only to be pulled back when the lights come on.

Early this morning I woke to find a strange man sitting alone in the darkness at the foot of my bed.  He had been there a long time, watching me, making up his mind about something.

I glanced around the abyss of my room.  So far the little lights on the monitors had been my only source of comfort, of companionship, but now those little bouncing lights danced in the dark hollows of his eyes, adding a sinister, mesmerizing glint to his featureless face. He sat for a long time without saying anything.  Eventually I got the courage to speak.  “You're not a doctor.”

Just when I’d convinced myself that he was only my imagination; a forgotten coat perhaps, he stood- twisting himself from a sinister shadow into a hulking mass of empty space.  He stepped toward me in the darkness. I jerked upright and felt his huge hand take mine.  His touch was gentle. Calming.  For the first time since Lady Bell I felt at peace. I settled back into my pillow, wondering if he was Jesus.

A nurse padded past the door on one of her endless rounds and I thought the tomblike stillness of my room would be broken with a rattling handle. Then there would be the jarring lights and my eyes would slam shut. When they opened I’d find myself alone in my room with no dark stranger.  No Jesus.  No savior or sinner either.  Just me.  Alone. Like it’s always been.  But she didn’t stop.  She kept on with her thankless rounds and disappeared far down the hall with only a brief jingle of keys for a goodbye. 

There we were, holding hands in the dark.  He had a musky, masculine smell.  I couldn’t place it, but it would have a been a scent from a magazine ad- a dark Italian man in tight trunks, bare chested, leaning over a bikinied woman with a body no real woman could possibly have but all women seemed to possess in the dreamy black and white fantasy world.

I felt an odd anticipation as my mind drifted away from the portrait of the Adonis and his conquest and back to the shadow.  I was in a state of blank confusion, as if I’d just walked into a room but couldn’t remember what I’d come in for, that feeling we all get now and then- usually when that exact thing has happened, and suddenly I realized what it was I was waiting for…  I was waiting for him to kill me. I didn’t dare move.

For a long time he was silent.  Finally he spoke a single, pregnant word and the gentle baritone of his voice wrapped itself around me.

“Candi,” he said.

I tried to answer but all I could do was shift my eyes from side to side in the darkness, imagining him leaning over me from the edge of a marble pool.

“Do you want to die?”

Was the spell broken?  Was he was snooping for Dr. Richards, figuring out some secret truth?  I didn’t answer and he didn’t say anything else.  We were in a silent tug of war and I found myself nodding to break the tie.  Maybe this was my off button, I thought.  My escape. My way out of Dr. Richard’s killing jar, his pinning block, his spreading board.  Maybe this mysterious stranger would inject something into my iv or put a pillow over me and I could finally go home.

“Do you want to die?” he asked again.

I tried to answer, but there were no words, only a single tear that rolled down my cheek and disappeared into my hair.  “Yes,” I said finally.

He reached up and caressed my forehead with his other hand, and then, leaning in, spoke softly.

“Do you know Emma?”

I kept nodding and my eyes closed as if I were waiting for his kiss.  I imagined cool water dripping from him, beading up on my bronze skin and rolling down my tiny waist to the towel below us.  Another tear fell.

“Yes,” I answered dreaming, “she’s one of the nurses.”

He pulled away from me, and my lips tried to follow him.  He sat up straight, more like a father than a lover.

“You’re being discharged tomorrow morning, Candi.  Emma will roll you downstairs where you’ll find a cab waiting.  It’s already been paid for.  If you’ve chosen to live, and I hope you have, get in and go live your life.  If you still want to die, sit on the bench and wait.  Do you understand?”

“Just… sit and wait?”

“Emma will give you a package.  Don’t open it until you have to.”

He stood and walked to the door, I thought he was going to turn on the light and I squeezed my eyes shut to defend myself.  “Please don’t,” I said.

The door opened and closed and he was gone.