1013. Asleep #2
The light is so bright that, for a moment, I consider that I might have finally reached the end. Then I realize it’s nothing to do with tunnels and such, I’m just on a stage. I’m wearing tap shoes and my feet appear to be moving of their own accord. Nothing new there.
You’re slightly behind me, just over my shoulder.
I try to face you, but momentum smacks me around, forces me forward.
The dance comes very naturally to me, and possibly I am even doing a marvelous job.
I almost settle into the feeling when I realize there are glowing eyes to my right and left, various blinking sets that never seem to leave my motions.
I fumble a step, a cacophony, a small riot. The eyes blink less approvingly.
There are people in the audience, though I can’t see them clearly. One raises her hand politely from the balcony. I’m too far away to see her details, but I know her by her lipstick.
“I would like to solve the puzzle,” she announces to the room.
The dancing stops abruptly. Now I find myself sitting in a chair, on a lap, your hand shoved like a claw up my spine.
“You want to solve the puzzle,” I repeat. I turn my head left but nothing changes. In my throat is a growing urge to cough.
“Yes. Is that so strange?” Now she has her own spotlight. From afar, she looks like a Victorian doll. There are tears painted from her eyes, but her mouth is still a forceful—forced—smile.
She’s lying, you remark in my ear.
“That’s not what you want,” I agree. It’s amazing how I’m not even moving my mouth!
She pouts. “Is it not?”
“You like it here. A brooding, mysterious celebrity. His sidekick caricature of the feminist ideal. A big house with big family secrets. A ritual. A demon. A monster.” My voice becomes a sneer. “Poor you, so bored with yourself and your life that you’re just desperate for a chance to risk it all—”
“You’re not going to kill me.” When she giggles, she lifts one hand to her mouth and pauses, as if for a photograph.
Blood is pouring from a wound across her chest and accidentally spurts into the eyes of the patron sitting next to her.
“Oops,” she says, and politely captures the overflow in one of those enormous refillable soda cups.
“You can’t be so sure,” I warn her, though I can feel that the words I’m saying and the ones my mouth is transmitting are different.
For example, I’m trying to tell her, “I can’t account for it.
I could cut your throat and never even know,” but what’s leaving my lips is “You belong to me now, I’m your master, you’re mine. ”
She lets out another restrained giggle. “You can’t imagine how long I’ve been waiting to hear that!”
She is straining toward me, her hands gripping the balcony railing as she leans. Music plays, a sweeping melody of earnest, unadulterated longing. Prokofiev, for those in the know.
“Isn’t anyone going to stop this?” I ask the audience, the slow-blinking eyes, but what I feel on my lips are the words “Such a pretty smile, so much prettier than you know, enough beauty to sustain me—”
I perform a brief, falsetto aria about her eyes in an octave I can’t possibly reach in real life and blood begins to run down her nose, lovely and fragile. She claws idly at her cheeks until I can see the shards of bone beneath.
“Oh, who am I to deny this?” she suddenly cries, and launches herself forward, her hair clutched tight in each hand, like a set of reins.
“Who am I to condemn such love, though he be a monster? Have not monsters lonely souls, and trembling hearts? Cry not from loneliness, I shall hold my devil prince! Wheresoever he calls me, I shall go—!”
Then she leaps from the balcony.
The theater erupts with applause. The blinking eyes appear watery. I put up my arms to catch her, but the story ends badly. As if I know no other endings, even in my dreams.
Do you remember when we were first bound? you ask me whimsically from the mirror.
“No,” I whisper. She lies broken on the stage, her elbows contorted as she sighs, blissfully pained. Ecstatic with anguish. “You’ve always been here.”
Oh really? Then how do you explain this?
Her body becomes several bodies, littering the stage.
I remember each one of them but only after much concentration.
Not their names, of course. Their methodologies.
This one too sad and full of phlegm, this one angry, yellow bile, treated via kidney.
I was only trying to fix them, to save them.
To honor their souls by accepting their sacrifice.
“No,” I say, pointing. “These women are—they’re from before.” They all have the same face. They all look like a woman who doesn’t exist.
Before what?
“Before…” My head throbs hard and fast. I realize you’re shoving my temples together and my head is nearly concave.
The ritual is failing, you tell me while slurping a bowl of instant noodles. If you can’t fix it, then you’re next.
There’s something in my throat, but I’m scared to free it. I’d rather just choke. Effort mottles my vision, spreading across it in viral black spores.
I think it’s time to wake up now, you tell me with an air of impatience. If we let this go any longer I think there’s going to be some funny business.
She lifts her head from where she lies misconfigured on the ground.
“Wheresoever he goes shall I follow,” she whispers, her eyes leaking subscription box tears.
That’s just disconcerting, you say. I mean, gross, right?
The others lift their heads and do the same. They’re singing, and the spores are growing across their faces, they’re crawling up the side of the chair, they’re descending on me, tiny, so tiny, so easily picked off but suddenly unignorable, they all beg me Master, please, please, please—
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I cry out, but they’re spiders now, trapping me in their thick black webs, each one holding me fast until I feel the pieces of me start to rip, one long tear materializing down the middle of my torso, a dark line like a cesarean scar, a glimpse of my large intestine oozing outward, the inner blackness threatening to spill—
“Wake up,” you say, and it means we are not alone. You never speak to me like that unless someone else is listening.
I open my eyes and she is no longer smiling. “Wheresoever you go,” I whisper.
“It’s just another episode, it happens sometimes. That was a bad one.”
“Is he okay?” Her eyes don’t leave mine.
Anya, Anya. Be careful, if he finds out—
“Be careful,” I force out groggily.
Oh my god, you’re such a drama queen. You roll your eyes and spin your office chair around and around. You’re such a baby.
I can feel myself being swallowed up again, deeper and deeper. Hands reach for me from below. Help me, help me. They pull me lower, down and down.
And I fall back into the dark.