Writing Experiment: Untitled/(Minotaur?) Part One
If anyone could give me a cool title for this, I'd appreciate it :)
Untitled
-
These days it’s safer to keep the lights on. I use hundred-watt bulbs, which are brighter than most ceiling fans, because they cast the smallest shadows with the whitest light and until I can get over this thing stuck in my head like a tumor I don’t want to see darkness again. That’s assuming, of course, that I get over it at all. I’m not eating as much as I used to, and I’m starting to look like some sort of Holocaust victim, a Jew or a gypsy, a woman for whom rescue came too late.
I’m not sleeping much these days, either; even the strongest sleep aids wear off halfway through the night, and then nothing can put me to sleep again. Instead I’m up early, watching television and reading until words stop making sense. Sometimes I watch people in the apartment across from me wake up, and am bitterly reminded how empty my life has become. Those people have visitors; they go out - but I don’t go out; I don’t see people; I just sit at home, reading the Jacobean dramatists and Friedrich Nietzsche and having panic attacks if I’m unoccupied for more than a minute.
Sometimes I’ll think if I could just get out of my apartment, if I could pull on my sneakers and run a few miles, like I did in college, then things would be alright. The physical exertion would somehow cure me. I convince myself of this, pull on my sneakers - and hardly get past the lobby door before I start shaking. I’ve blacked out twice and, each time, when I woke to the concerned faces of the doorman and a few residents, I waved them away and stumbled back up to my room, a failure.
When I think of the days leading up to the bombing, I can only remember, with stupid incredulity, that it wasn’t even supposed to rain. It’s funny, really, how much of that night was dictated by chance. If the commander behind the bombing had decided to wait, or if we’d been moved to another location, like the city had planned; if I hadn’t lost Chris, my boyfriend, on the way there; if it hadn’t rained; if it had rained earlier, or later - might things have turned out differently? That doesn’t change the way things have turned out, but it’s fascinating - and uniquely frustrating - to think disaster might have been avoided with a word, or a glance, or a breath of air….
x
When the siren went off that night, I sat up fast, the book I’d been reading tumbling onto the floor like a shot bird, and reached for my things. That sound always set off a kind of panic in me; no matter how many drills we went through, no matter how many air raids occurred, I could never face it with dry, cynical humor that Chris did. He was at my house that night, actually, though he wasn’t supposed to have been there so late; he’d come over for dinner that evening, planning to leave at eight but staying for a game of cards, and then a movie, and then drinks. It was almost ten thirty when the siren went off.
“Chris,” I said, leaning to see into the kitchen. “Chris, we’ve gotta go. Leave the drinks; it’s fine.”
He was standing at the counter, our drinks in hand, and when he saw me he smiled, swallowing both glasses with two quick tosses of his head.
He drank a lot for the sort of job he had, which was neither lonely nor particularly torturous; he worked for an insurance firm in customer relations, attracting customers and dealing with those who wanted to leave. He wore suits - which I found incredibly attractive - and paid my rent; in return I told him what a fantastic boyfriend he was, and on occasion dressed up in slinky lingerie and met him at the door. We weren’t living together at the time only because his job required him to entertain clients, and this was easier than having to explain my presence in the house. Even if it’s unconscious, people like their businessmen to be married, with kids and a dog, not living in sin with their girlfriends, who are young and pretty and unemployed.
“Come on then,” he said, leaving the glasses in the sink and finding his jacket. “Let’s get this over with.”
In the event of an air raid, everyone in my building was to go to the subway station at Rose and 12th Street. It was a good, safe place, 25 feet underground, and Chris and I walked the half mile in silence, holding our few items, keeping close. It was always like that - grim walk in the dark, sparse conversation, and at the end a staircase leading down, lined with advertisements for mattresses and rum.
The city cut the power a few minutes after we left. It was very sudden, lights going out all down the street in rapid succession, leaving only a streetlamps and a few flashlights. Beyond those circles of warm, yellow light the world was terrifyingly blank, and we walked more quickly, spoke less often, unused to the silent, unfathomable distances which leapt up around us. We were passing under the last streetlamp, only feet from the subway entrance, when I looked up to find that Chris had vanished. I turned; faces bobbed toward me out of the dark, none of them his. I stood there, slightly aside from the main crowd, calling his name and then his phone, but there was no answer at the last, either; he must have left it at home. A minute passed, and eventually I went in alone, the entryway - dull, grey concrete walls with dull, grey concrete stairs - reaching to swallow me like a mouth.
It was dark inside, with tiled floors and walls like something out of a horror film. I couldn’t see a thing, just a lot of shifting, murmuring shadows, and it felt as though I’d entered an insect hive, someplace small and dark, its occupants speaking an quiet, alien language. I edged in, running into walls and people until I found a place at the edge of the platform. There was still no sign of Chris. I spent plenty of time looking for him, but it was too dark, and there were too many people. I would have to wait until morning.
My ears adjusted to the darkness before my eyes did, and I began hearing snatches of conversation. It was some bizarre acoustic effect I think, echoes bouncing off the ceiling and finding me, there on the edge of the platform, completely by chance.
“- the burner on; I told her to turn it off, but I can’t find her to ask and I’m worried that even if the house isn’t bombed she’ll have burned it down.”
“She said I should start seeing a doctor. She said that. I mean really.”
Laughter began and stopped abruptly. Something about the place - bare floors, bare ceilings, water dripping down the walls in long dark lines - discouraged real laughter; it was too nervous a place for that, and though in later months we would acquire the cynical senses of humor necessary to weather these attacks, in these early days we were too terrified to smile, much less laugh. Everyone was fidgeting. No one could sleep. A few kids wandered into the tunnels and had to be brought back, screaming with laughter that we heard all the way from the station, loud, high shrieks of terror and delight. People started yawning. Conversations slowed, then stopped altogether. The station began to settle into that unique stillness one finds only in a room of tired people.
A few flashlights, wielded by sleepless children, cast wild, erratic shadows on the walls. Lights were banned during air raids - that was why they cut the power - but that didn’t keep people from using them, and I often wonder what might have happened if everyone obeyed the rule, if there hadn’t been flashlights there that night. I might have sat on the edge of the platform for hours and hours, until the bombs fell, and the sirens stopped, and I came out, blinking in the sun like everyone else. I might have gone home. I might have been alright. But there were flashlights there, and somebody dropped one at just the wrong angle, sending a long beam of light down into the tunnel. Catching motes and flecks of dust in an epileptic whirl, it disappeared into a darkness so complete it seemed as though we were not 25 feet underground, but a hundred feet, a thousand feet, so far down that neither light nor warmth could reach us. It was not a powerful light; it began to dim several feet in, then stopped completely, but it was enough. I looked.
It was a mistake I’ll regret for the rest of my life.
The glance only lasted a second or so, but I saw the subway tracks, those long silver lines glimmering flat against the ground, and wanted to follow them, to lay the soles of my feet on their cold flat surface and just walk, losing myself in those tunnels until I emerged, blinking and exhilarated, into the sun the next morning. Something about the idea appealed to me greatly, and the next thing I knew I’d decided to go. It was a whim. That’s all it was. I wish I could say I’d had a vision or heard a voice calling me into the darkness; perhaps that would justify what was actually a very stupid decision - but there was no vision, no irresistible siren’s song. I’ve always been adventurous, and that was all that led me into the darkness that night, just my own mind and a long line of light. That’s it.
It was dark, and I would need a flashlight, so I borrowed one from the man beside me - it was a heavy black model, of the sort that construction workers and policemen carry - and promised to return it soon. The batteries seemed fine; the light was good and strong; there were no more obstacles in my way. At the time I was still young enough to think myself invincible, that the odds somehow did not apply to me; I honestly thought that, if I walked into that awful pit of a tunnel, I could walk out again no problem. At the time, obstacles were not ‘would I come back alive’, but less practical things like ‘would I need a flashlight’ or, ‘should I bring my jacket’.
I lowered myself from the platform, the dirt hard and cool under my feet when I landed. And suddenly there, there were those long, gleaming tracks just a few feet ahead of me. I followed them for some time, sounds dropping away and the air growing colder, and darker, and wetter until, with something of a shock, I realized I’d entered the tunnel itself, the walls meeting over my head in a wide arc. I’d come quite a distance in a very short amount of time; turning the flashlight behind me, I saw that the subway platform was no longer visible. Untroubled, I turned and kept walking.
I think I had the idea I would find something down there; a lost civilization, perhaps, or the remains of some poor soul who’d come even less prepared than me, gotten lost, and died scratching at the walls with his fingernails in an attempt to dig his way out. I shudder to think how attractive the image was to me then, how I imagined examining his flashlight - the batteries, of course, would be dead - how I imagined his last moments, starved and lost and long past fear, knowing, unequivocally, that he was going to die.
Presently I came to a fork in the road, a place where the tracks separated and made long, curving triangles in the dirt where they crossed one another. (Here is another moment where the night might have gone differently; if I’d chosen the right fork, I would have wandered for a long, long time, eventually coming to another subway station or, if I noticed it, a small metal door set into the side of the tunnel, which opened up into an alley not far from the grocery store.
I took the left fork.
It was indistinguishable from the previous tunnel - same dirt walls, same curved ceiling, same flat subway tracks as before - in every way except one. The temperature was lower. It was not cold, exactly, but there was a noticeable change and I began, unconsciously, to rub at my arms to warm them. When I turned to see how far I’d come since the fork, I saw no indication of it at all. It was then, finally, that I began to grow uneasy. I turned and headed back, first at a slow walk, and then faster, feeling, absurdly, that I mustn’t appear in too much of a hurry in case I made a fool of myself.
The flashlight bounced nightmarishly over the walls, like something out of a home-made horror movie: cheap black-and-white film, hand-held camera with poor focus, catching the occasional snatch of something but, for the most part, missing the action entirely.
Finally, I was afraid. The tunnel was nowhere in sight, though really I suppose less time could have passed than I thought; my cell phone had stopped working - dead batteries or what, I don’t know, but when I went to check the time the screen was blank, and responded to neither slaps nor shaking. I shoved it in my pocket, took a deep breath and began, for the first time, to run.
Time passed. Eventually my fear disappeared, and my breathing settled into a rhythm. A pleasant burn began in my legs. After a while I couldn’t remember how long I’d been running, only that it hadn’t been long enough because I hadn’t reached the subway station, or even the fork.
“This is impossible,” I said aloud, stopping with my hands clasped behind my head. But it obviously wasn’t; neither was in sight, though I knew I should have passed them a long time ago.
Running had, at least, focused my mind; I could now look at the walls without breaking into a panic, but they looked exactly as they had before. Dirt walls, high, arching ceiling, silver tracks stretching into an indeterminable distance. I began to walk, but slower this time, more calmly. Eventually, though, anxiety crept up on me again. It was inevitable in a place like that, where the only non-monotonous thing was the feeling I wasn’t alone, that something was watching me. Stalking me. I began to glimpse things at the edges of my vision; hazy and without definable shapes, they crept toward and, when I turned sharply to see them, vanished. These things were, of course, just products of my imagination, manufactured in my brain and manifested in these long, dark tunnels by means of some optical illusion. I know that now, and at some level I knew it then, too; I was able to shrug these things off, if not with ease then with a certain amount of determination.
There were other things, however, that weren’t so easy to escape from. The darkness, for one - and the feeling that I was being watched.
I began to hurry, losing myself in inexplicably frequent turns. It felt more like a maze than a subway system; though I never hit any dead ends, I kept expecting to find one, to turn a corner and find myself faced with a straight dirt wall, no way through.
The air was now decidedly cold.
It was at about this point that I began to seriously wonder if I was going to get out. I had run for about three minutes, walked for thirty, and still there was no sight of an exit or the subway station; there was no sign of anything at all but long, empty tunnels, twin tracks running ahead into the darkness. How far had I come? A mile? Two? How far was it to the next city, if I’d gone the wrong way?
It’s hard to keep track of time in my memory - hours shrink to minutes, and there’s so little to remember anyway - but somewhere in here my flashlight started to die. A sharp shake would bring it around at first, but then I had to start slamming it against the heel of my hand, hard, more and more frequently. Eventually it died altogether, and, acutely aware of the darkness pressing in on me, I turned it off and slid it into my jacket pocket. My heart was beating like a hummingbird’s: soft, rapid jerks in my chest.
What now? I thought, staring around me. What now?
I felt for the wall, and when I found it I stopped, unsure what to do next. I couldn’t see; I’d miss the exit even if I found it. I’d starve to death, and no one would ever find me.
That was the worst moment of the night. It was when I finally accepted that I was going to die. And it was then, blinking uselessly with both hands on the wall, that I began to see something creeping toward me out of the darkness. In my memory it is an indistinguishable mass, something I felt more than saw, the way hikers on Mount Everest will stop, sensing a chasm, and when visibility returns find themselves stopped two steps from the edge of a cliff. It wasn’t Death emerging from the shadows to claim me; it wasn’t a cloud of bats or a long-extinct cave bear (which I learned about a few days ago on the Discovery Channel, during a two am special showing); even now, I don’t know what it was. There was no light, so I couldn’t see a thing; there was just a feeling, a terrible dread like what prisoners of war must feel when they’re pointed out for execution before a firing squad: it’s me, I’ve been chosen, I, for no reason I can understand, have been handpicked to die.
I didn’t freeze, though; years of running track in made flight an instinct for me, and that’s what I did, sprinting as fast as I could in the opposite direction, heart pounding, breath coming faster, adrenaline pumping through my body and every muscle supercharged. I was afraid, afraid, afraid, and I only half knew why; it was an instinctive, irrational, gut-wrenching fear that was all the more powerful because of its origins, its power to seize me by the throat and send me reeling, my mind hopelessly and wildly off course.
I must have run for twenty minutes or so, which means I covered about two and a half, maybe three miles, given my speed. Maybe even four, I don’t know. I looked back and the darkness was all one color, without any strange dark masses looming up at me from some undiscovered hideaway in the walls, and I finally stopped, putting my hands behind my head and taking long, slow breaths, the way my high school coach taught me. I felt light-headed and sick, like I needed to throw up, but even that faded after a while. The sound of my breathing unnerved me, though; it was too alien a noise in those long, echoing spaces, so I began to talk, loudly, coming up with elaborate, impossible plans for escape, pretending Chris was there and holding conversations with him, telling him everything. Every so often I’d look over my shoulder, but nothing was ever there.
Time passed. I began to ramble, going on and on and on, though about what I can’t remember. Stupid things. Things that didn’t make any sense. I talked about rabbit warrens at one point; I talked about the walls collapsing - and I was very sure they would; they’d come tumbling down like Jericho or that awful landslide in Arizona or someplace that buried a city, crushing me under twenty-five feet of earth. I talked about the nightlight I had as a kid, shaped like a princess on horseback, and how one of the horse’s legs broke off.
Here my memory begins to fade out. I’m not sure if this is simply because nothing happened, and my memory has altered the time for me, compressing that long period of darkness so as to make it more bearable in retrospect, or if I was so afraid I lost my mind, or if it’s some kind of mental block, put up to protect me from truths too terrible to contemplate. Those last two are not comforting thoughts, but I think there’s some element of truth to them. Now, sitting comfortably at my desk, it’s easy to impose all sorts of lies and elaborations onto those long, terrible hours, but when I look it over it these lies are obvious and forced. Me digging a tunnel to the surface. Me stumbling upon a collection of skeletons - travelers less lucky than myself - whose unfortunate bones I use to build a ladder to safety. It seems nothing will do but the truth - unbelievable, rambling, and incoherent though it is. So that’s what I’ve given you. Make of it what you will.
x
My memory picks up an indeterminate time later, when I’m still afraid but no longer out of breath. The first thing I remember seeing was light, and then the outline of a door - faint white rectangle of light around a metal slab drilled with large, round screws, like the doorways of ships. When I saw it I thought I was dreaming. I must have been; salvation did not rear its head in such unexpected ways - that’s what I was thinking when I put my hand on the metal, when I pushed it forward and - miracle of miracles - it opened, and there I was, squinting painfully in an unexpected 9 o’clock sun.
x
In the pictures I have, taken the morning after from helicopters and the backs of ambulances, you can always tell where the bombs fell. There will be a circle of ash, the worst of it at the center, and from there the damage will grow progressively less severe until the buildings are completely undamaged - until the eye reaches another circle of another bomb, and the process begins again, this time in reverse. These photographs are newspaper clippings, in black and white, too grainy to make out the worst details. I’ve looked at them so often they’ve eclipsed my own, real memories, more terrible but not more colorful; when I remember that day - stumbling around town, exhausted, lost on streets I knew by heart - I see it in grainy black and white, all the details blurred.
I remembered pictures I’d seen of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, the fire bombings of London, and in my fogged, relief-stunned state I was under the impression that I’d stepped back in time, that I was walking down some foreign, more famous - though similarly decimated - street. I would turn around and see people I did not recognize, on streets I did not know, in a city whose name I could not say and whose language I could not speak.
This sense of unreality followed me down streets and around corners, until eventually, and with preternatural calmness, I realized I was lost. The landscape had changed so drastically during the night that I could no longer get my bearings; familiar landmarks had been flattened or painted over with ash, and I found myself wandering, stopping dead on streets which, under normal circumstances, I would have recognized immediately.
A few days later, Chris would show me where he found me - in the middle of Balsam Street, three blocks from my apartment. That’s how disoriented I was. I felt as though I’d wandered into some other city, in some other part of the world, with no map, no directions, no nothing. These sad, leaning buildings were not mine, could not be mine. And the frightening thing was, I didn’t care. Shocking though they were, these crumbling, burnt-out ruins failed to register; I couldn’t recognize my city simply because I couldn’t see it, couldn’t focus long enough to identify the buildings.
It must have rained sometime during the night, because there were puddles everywhere, but I remember this being terribly disorienting. I’d catch sight of a building or a patch of sky in the sidewalk, and my mind would grind to a halt, turning in circles and trying to orient me before, finally - eyebrows rising, mouth coming slightly open for a moment - I saw the puddle for what it was. I must have looked like an idiot, staring at those puddles, stopped on the sidewalk like somebody’s witless step-child.
The sun was dim, sickly, half shrouded in smoke and clouds and a few times I stopped I thought - though I’m not sure about this - that there were people walking up behind me with light, quick steps. Of course it could have been my imagination, all the paranoia and fear of the past while resurfacing, now that I was free and relatively safe, in brief, unexpected lurches, the way a dream will over the course of a day; even now I feel, occasionally, that I’m being watched, that something will leap out of the darkness and drag me away, if only I give it the chance. The specific fear I experienced in the subway station that night has given way to a more general fear: fear of darkness, fear of small spaces, fear of strangers and the unknown and the fear of nothing in particular, random attacks of anxiety and shortness of breath where I feel like I’m going to faint and have to lie down on the floor, the ceiling stretching hundreds of feet above my head. Walking down streets that day, lost as a child, I felt a much lesser version of that fear; in between bouts of paranoia and anxiety, which struck every five minutes or so, I forgot I had ever been afraid and simply walked, sunk in such a stunned, narcotic calm that I didn’t realize where I was going, or that I was walking at all.
It was a long time later that, with something of a shock, I saw Chris standing on the sidewalk across the street, hands in his pockets, looking the other way. I stopped dumbly, staring at him: navy blue jacket, familiar rumpled brown hair, a little stubble on his thin, lovely face. It was the familiarity of him, more than anything else, which touched me. I knew those shoulders, those hands, that neck. The way he stood, all his weight sunk on one leg, struck a chord somewhere deep inside me, and I actually started to cry.
“Chris,” I said, and then again, louder, “Chris!”
He turned, and oh, how I smiled to see his eyes widen, his mouth open slightly. He ran toward me, swept me up into a hug. His closeness was immensely comforting; I felt him under my hands, felt the rough fabric of his jacket, and he was solid, real in a way I’d missed over the last few hours. I could see him, touch him, slip my hands between his shoulder blades.
“My God,” he said when we parted, “I thought you were dead.”
“I… I almost was. Is it like this all over?” I motioned to the buildings behind us: black, fire-stricken stones, all smoke-damaged.
He shook his head. “And your apartment made it too. It could be a lot worse….”
“The rain,” I said, remembering the puddles I’d passed.
“Yeah…. We’re lucky. They meant it, this time; this wasn’t just to scare us.”
We were silent for a while, staring at the shattered world around us. What is this? I thought. How did we get to this? I was sick of this war, sick of the bombs and the deaths and the looks on my neighbors faces each morning. In my mind it got tangled up with the past few hours, and I saw planes swooping down out of the sky, manned by men whose faces I could not see, who dropped bombs and disappeared into the sky, vaporously, like silver dreams.
I suppose I was only very tired, the sudden absence of adrenaline in my system too much of a shock for my body to handle, but Chris had to practically carry me home. I couldn’t think straight and, once I’d stopped walking, my legs seemed to have forgotten how to move.
We arrived at my apartment building - solid brick walls, bleary windows, untouched except for the film of ash which covered every other building in the city too - and went in, followed by voices and opening doors like some eerie sci-fi movie scene: two survivors limping down the corridor of an airship, the crew coming out to watch them pass. And in a way that was what we were; we’d survived death, stared it straight in the face and gotten terribly, terribly lucky - but that was it. We were lucky, not brave or strong or cunning; our survival was attributed to no special skills, but to a random, capricious god called Luck, just as much as their own had been.
In my apartment, Chris sat me down on the couch, disappearing into the kitchen for a while and coming out with a cucumber sandwich and a glass of whiskey. He tried to talk to me, but I don’t remember saying anything very intelligent; by that point my mind was mostly gone. I remember looking around and thinking the ceiling would fall in on me, the windows would break and shards of glass would lodge in my skin; I was dizzy and hallucinating and needed to throw up.
I ate a little of the sandwich, because Chris kept putting it in my hands and telling me to eat, but I never got to drink the whiskey because I fell asleep.
x
I don’t know what I encountered down there - if, in fact, I encountered anything at all. It’s quite possible that I imagined the whole thing, that those sounds and hesitant visuals were a product of my own fear. But that, I think, is oversimplifying things. There were certain, unexplainable events: the disappearance of the fork and the subway station; the impossible lengths of the tunnels; the appearance of a way out where there is none. I know; a few days afterward, when my hands were steady enough to hold the paper, I went down to city hall and looked at old maps for the subway tunnels. There was no door. Additionally, I saw (and ice ran through my veins when I saw this) there was no fork in the road where I’d found one.
I don’t know what to make of that because, quite frankly, it’s impossible.
But it’s one of the reasons I can’t just dismiss the whole thing, pretend it never happened. Something got hold of me down there, and I can’t get free; I can’t just shrug it off, though God knows I’ve tried. Any idle moment is quickly filled with thoughts of those tunnels and of shadows. I am jittery and nervous. Chris was quick to pick up on this, though less quick to comment; I caught him watching me sometimes, over lunch or whatever we happened to be doing, and he’d look away, shaking his head when I asked him about it, but eventually he did say something.
It was two weeks after the bombing, the two of us relaxing over too many drinks and a bad game of chess, which had degenerated to a kind of guerilla warfare between his pawns and my bishop. He’d taken my king a long time ago, but it didn’t really matter. During a lull in the game, when both of us had gotten bored and sat, chin in hand, staring into space, Chris got up to make us sandwiches - turkey and tomato for himself; cucumber for me. I’m fanatical about cucumber sandwiches; Chris never developed a taste for them, but they’re the only kind I’ll eat.
He waited until I’d taken a few bites, then asked, very suddenly, “What happened that night?”
The alcohol had me pleasantly off-balance, and it took me a moment to focus. The significance of the question didn’t even register. “What night?” I asked.
“During the bombing. Something happened, hon,” he said when, realizing where this was going, I tried to cut him off, “don’t tell me it didn’t. When I found you afterward you could hardly walk, and some of the things you said didn’t make any sense. You’ve been fidgety, you won’t let me touch you; I’ve thought about it a lot but I can’t figure it out, so I give up. What happened?”
I stared at my hands, and said nothing.
“Did -”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He leaned forward across the coffee table. His breath smelled like whiskey. “Why?”
“I just don’t. It’s not a big deal; I just need to sort some things out in my head. I just need time.”
“Oh I don’t buy that, honey. If it wasn’t a big deal you wouldn’t be wandering around the apartment like a lost dog. You’re restless and edgy, and you think I don’t see it? Something happened to you that night, or you saw something, and I wanna know what it was.”
“No,” I said quietly. “I can handle it on my own.”
“Yeah, it sure looks like it.”
“I am. ”
“Sure hon, you’re handling it really well, hanging around in your bathrobe all day, hardly sleeping - ”
“I said -”
“Sitting around like some crazy old woman from the fifties who’s lost her husband. Should I start checking the closets for skeletons? Maybe that’s what’s bugging you. Maybe you’ve got some poor guy’s heart buried under the floorboards -”
“Fuck off.”
I don’t know what my face looked like, exactly, but I can’t imagine it was pleasant. Chris stopped, his mouth falling open, and when I only stared at him, unrepentant, he closed his mouth, cleared his throat, and stood up, taking both our empty glasses into the kitchen. As soon as he’d gone, my anger, so terrible just a few seconds before, left me in the space of a breath. What was I thinking, I thought. This was Chris….
I found him in the kitchen, at the sink washing dishes with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow. The water was on full blast, and the loud crashing of dishes and cutlery filled the air, making it more difficult to speak. Maybe he’d planned it to be like that, I don’t know, but in the end I just went up behind him and put my arms around his waist, my face into his neck, and said, “I’m sorry.”
Slowly he turned off the water, then turned and put his arms around me, the side of his face against mine. It’s a gesture I’d always loved, because it made me feel small and safe and protected, in the perfect care of this man here, who loved me.“It’s okay,” he said. “I was out of line too.”
“Please understand, Chris,” I said quietly. “This just isn’t something I can share.”
He stiffened, turned away. He started the water again with a sharp twist, and went on washing dishes, and I stood behind him, opening and closing my hands over and over again, uselessly. The sound of water mixing with the clink and clank of cutlery was, to me, incredibly sad.
“Chris….”
He didn’t turn, didn’t say anything, just went on washing dishes, and when he finished he gathered his things and left. I heard his footsteps, heard the door opening and then a pause, and I waited, heart in throat. I wanted so badly for him to turn around, to come back into the kitchen and fold me into his arms, and tell me everything would be okay. That he’d stay with me no matter what.
“If you want to talk,” he said, “you know my number. Or just stop by, if you’d rather.”
When the door shut I was staring at the dishes he’d left piled on the counter, watching thin sheets of water trickle down the plates, dripping onto the counter like tears.
I’d relied on him to save me, but I think I was expecting too much. Maybe if I’d told him what happened things would have turned out better, but even if he believed me that subway system was too big for him; it was too big for anyone; the best I could do (not as any kind of self-sacrifice, but simply because I was stubborn) was to hold it as close as possible, a bomb cradled beside my heart in a roomful of people, and wait for the numbers to run out. They still haven’t - and for all I know they never will - but I still have that feeling of imminent doom, the innate suspicion that one day, when I’m so near to falling I can taste the wind in my mouth, it’ll explode, and send me tumbling off the edge in pieces. It’s a terrible feeling, but I can’t shake it.
The only person I’ve told is my mother. She’s in her early fifties now, living alone, doing a lot of gardening. We haven’t talked for a long time, but she called me out of the blue and, out of little more than filial obligation, I told her everything that happened to me that night, in all its rambling, incoherent glory, and by the end of it I was crying into the phone, regretting every word I’d spoken.
She suggested, carefully, that maybe I should start seeing a doctor.
x
(this post was too long to fit into one entry. The rest of this can be found in the entry right below) : )