There's that ugly, gray carpet beneath my feet, stained long ago with coffee. Humming beside me is the vending machine. Rays of sunlight pour in through the windows of the vestibule and my vision, I instantly notice, is so clear its almost surreal.
I find myself perplexed that I'm sitting on the stairs in my apartment complex. Even stranger, I'm not even sure of the last thing I do remember. Trying to comfort myself with cozy thoughts, I tell myself that everyone must have mornings like this. Still, I have that sneaking suspicion, that tip-of-the-tongue kind of feeling that something is incredibly, dreadfully wrong.
I take another minute just sitting on the steps sorting through thoughts before I slowly walk to my apartment door. I try the door handle, but I can't even twist it. Pushing, pushing, it doesn't even budge. I'm somehow locked outside. I could check my pocket for my keys, and the desire arises out of me, but just out of habit. I know they aren't there and a part of me knows why, but the dominant part of me is still struggling.
A flash of anger washes over me and I beat my fists on the door, beat them hard, slam them against the wood with so much brutal force I should have either busted the wood or turned my white-knuckled balls of skin into a bloody mesh of torn flesh and broken bones, but no. Nothing happens. Not a damn thing.
So I scream relentlessly, cussing up a swear-storm. Fists up above my bowed head shaking with adrenaline, eyes squeezed closed as I scream. I walk around frantically, opening my eyes just as I brush passed two old women, nearly slamming into them. Seems I had slammed into them at first, but I quickly judge that to be impossible. I didn't feel anything and they didn't fall backward as they would have.
One of them, she has tubes in her nostrils hooked up to an oxygen tank. I know her. This is Beatrice, an old lady no one in this apartment complex could avoid bumping into. I'd often see her in the vestibule, leaning against the wall of mailboxes on my way out the door to go to work. Waiting for the bus, waiting for something. I'd see her in the laundry room downstairs, chatting with an equally elderly neighbor, and she'd greet you with a sweet smile.
And now, now I'd probably made her terrified of me because I'd lost my temper. The guilt in me swells, but when I look back at her she doesn't seem terrified. It seems so unlikely as to be ridiculous, but she doesn't even seem to even realize I'm here at all. She walks right passed me. After a few steps, though, the woman she's with -- I'm guessing this is her daughter -- she slows. Beatrice stops in her tracks and they look at each other. Her daughter asks, with some initial hesitation, "Did you feel that?".
"It's cold," is how Beatrice responds, and she seems perplexed. "An' right outta nowhere. That's weird." Breaking into a smile, she starts to walk and her daughter follows, both erupting into a light, tension-releasing laughter as they move on.
I look after them as if this is a joke, as if they're yanking my chain, but it isn't that kind of laughter. It isn't like that childhood game when a friend you've just pissed off is ignoring you and when you talk he says to another friend, "did you hear something?" No, this is no game. Its as if they'd both just jointly driven a knife into my chest and twisted, twisted relentlessly. Not because they hadn't said hello, or even recognized my existence for that matter, either, but for the notion they've planted in my head. A notion I attempt to escape from as I slam my shoulder against the door, slam it with all the might I could muster. Again and again. I feel no lasting pain, though, and there is absolutely no effect on the door at all.
At this point, I'm frantic. I'm freaking the fuck out. Then my ear catches a ''click'' that comes from down the hall. A door opens a few apartments down. A woman's coming out, slender and snobby, with a brown leather purse. She jingles her keys. I walk, faster, then faster, calling after her, "Ma'am, excuse me? Ma'am?" I'm right behind her, yelling, but there's no nervous locking up. Its not as if she's afraid of me and is trying to avoid me. There's just no response at all.
I slip into the apartment just before she closes and locks the door with another ''click.'' Inside, I scream, "ANYBODY?" As if an answer, my eyes catch the mirror behind the door, coats hanging on the edges, and there's nothing. There's no one there. Absolutely no reflection of me at all.
My fear extends far beyond how cataclysmic I might look without being able to see it for myself, too, just for the record.
If everyone has mornings like this, I guess they must be too embarrassed to talk about it. Then again, there were stories. I'd read that many people wake up with something brushing against their shoulder and find out its the ceiling. They look down upon their sleeping body, they freak out, and they snap right back in. A bodiless experience wasn't unheard of, then. Yet I wasn't floating, and I didn't seem to be able to walk through walls, either, and everyone knows ghosts can do that. Me, I'd found myself outside my apartment and I couldn't get the fucking door open.
So perhaps this was just a dream. Just a vivid, fucked up dream. Or maybe this was real, but I was just asleep. It didn't have to be that I was dead, it could just be that I was asleep and out of my body.
While looking at the mirror, transfixed by my absence, some movement to the side of me catches my attention. Scares the shit out of me, actually. It turns out to be a girl of maybe thirteen. She has long, brown snarly hair that covers most of her face, sports a raggedy-looking dark flannel a size or two too big and she's clutching a bottle of Rum. A strange image for sure, so now I'm sure I must be dreaming.
I walk up to her as she sits on the ratty couch, places her bottle on the coffee table -- and not on the stained cardboard coaster three inches away, mind you, but on the smudged glass lining the top of it -- and takes a cigarette out of her pack in one smooth movement.
"Starting a little early in life, aren't we?" I say to her. And for a moment she stops, as if someone pressed pause on the Existential DVD player or something. A loud an endless silence envelopes the moment. The lighter held to the tip of her cigarette, un-flicked and flameless, she just holds it there. Watching, silent and listening, I wait for whatever was to happen next. And soon she went on, flicked the cheap Bic lighter. An aura of smoke formed around the burning ember at the end, it glowed brighter and crackled.
Coughing up the courage, I lean forward and ask, "Can you hear me?"
Breathing out smoke, she says, "I loved you, Frederick." She asks, in a whisper, "Why'd you have to die?"
"My name's not Frederick," I tell her, but she fails to respond. I don't know if what's happening here is coincidence or conversation. She rocks back and fourth, the old sofa squealing. Back and fourth, very lightly, taking another drag. Reaching for the bottle. "You can't hear me, can you?" I plead for an answer. "Can you?"
"Of course I can hear you, Fredrick," she snarls before she swigs, the top of the bottle popping as her pale lips leave it. As she speaks, she's not looking at me, just throwing her voice in my general direction. "I'm not fucking deaf, you dumb bastard."
Her tone, not to mention her language, kind of takes me by surprise. "But I'm not Frederick," is all I manage to say. I know she's not listening, but I'm fairly certain now she hears me. Getting up, leaving the bottle behind her and taking her smoke with her, the girl moves towards the piano on the other side of the coffee table. Its up against the far wall. Sitting before it, she puts her long, bony fingers on the keys so delicately. Closing her eyes, she then bows her head, face buried in a mess of hair. Beneath the armband on her right hand branch out criss-crossed scratches, some long since healed, some scabbing, some fresh. With an enduring exhale, she begins playing. And wonderfully. When I ask her what she's playing, she stops, says in an a-matter-of-fact way, "Bach, Frederick. Brandenburg Concerto number two," and then continues.
Her cigarette eats away at itself on the glass ashtray that rests on the left side of the piano. I stand up from where I'd been crouching beside her, walk around her back. Through the slithering smoke I see the framed photograph. Its a picture of the girl and the woman who had walked out the door. I ask her if its her mother and she just says, "Mother's dead, you know that," and she doesn't stop the music to speak this time.
Wandering away from her, I walk down the short, dark hallway. There are two rooms. In the larger room there's nothing too interesting. Queen bed, dresser, desk, and a closet full of ugly cloths, male and female. In the other room, though, in the girl's room, I find myself perplexed. No toys, no computer, no posters on the wall. Just a desk with scattered construction paper on which were scribbled drawings in crayon, and all with the name Sandy at the bottom. A small, bare-bones bed, a quaint dresser.
In a far corner of the room lay a table with a stool before it. Atop it multiple pictures and candles are carefully placed. Another glass ashtray like the one on the piano, like the one on the coffee table, where two tangled butts rest in a sea of ashes. To the side of it, an incense burner. All the pictures are of the same man, in his late twenties or early thirties, smiling broadly in the photos almost without exception. One has him standing before a hospice, another with him and an old woman in a wheel chair. Another is of Sandy and him in a park. At the zoo. In a diner, which I soon recognize as the diner I work at. And at the center of them all is a huge photo of him in a fancy wood frame, smiling within a bushy beard, hand cupped beneath his chin. Above it, on a piece of blue construction paper, she'd penciled in black the words, "I love you, Frederick."
In all my snooping around, I hadn't noticed until now that the music had stopped. She walks in through the door frame of the room, closes the door behind her and latches it, then walks right to the stool. Taking her Bic, with a flick-flick she lights all the candles one by one. With each, she repeats that name, "Frederick." Under her breath, easy as breathing, "Frederick." The mantra of her life, it seems, "Frederick." And when all the candles are lit, she lights an incense stick. When she's done with her little ritual, she interlocks her fingers into a two hand fist, places it down harshly on the hard wood of the table and bows her head, her face now totally lost in clumps of tangled hair.
"Sandy," I say to her as kindly as I can, "Sandy's your name, isn't it? Look, I hate to ask you, I really do, but evidently you're the only person around here that can hear me. So I really need you to do me a favor. Sandy?"
"Frederick," she breathes, "Fredrick."
"I need you to break into my apartment," I say. "The door's locked and if I'm asleep, I need you to wake me up. And if I'm not asleep," and the words hung because the thought stung, "well, I need you to call the hospital. Can you do that?"
She's suddenly annoyed and confused. "You don't live in an apartment."
I try to stay patient, calm, but now I'm getting frustrated. "Look, can you see me? Can you?" And she shakes her head no, and then I put my hand on her shoulder. I feel nothing, my hand just stops. "Can you feel me?"
"My shoulder's like ice," she sobs. "Stop it. STOP IT, Frederick."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I say, my hands up, as if she could actually see me. Stepping back, as if she could tell I was actually doing so. This is as stupid as making hand gestures when talking with someone on the telephone, and I know it, even as I do it, but old habits die hard. So much about us is at the mercy of memory.
"Just stop," she screams, face tomato red, eyes veiny and bleeding tears. And as she screams, I can see her face for the first time. Brown eyes, plump and rosy cheeks, pale lips. Strands of her hair matted to her forehead, she grabs both sides of her head right above her ears and starts clenching fists. Yanking on her hair. "Stop, stop, stop! None a' this makes any sense at all."
"Tell me about it," I say, speaking just below her in volume, lowering it bit by bit as I continue to speak, trying to ease her down to solid ground through the medium of my voice, my only tool is this swirling madness. "I'm not sure we're on the same page," I explain to her, "but I empathize with your confusion entirely. But I need you to do this for me, okay? All right?"
She sniffs, utters, "I can't, Frederick. I'll wake Uncle Greg," with fear evident in her tone. Though still upset, still talking through sobs, she seems to be easing, relaxing. I lean down beside her, speaking straight into her ear. So close that if I were actually there, she'd feel the force of my breath brush her cheek. I say, "It's simple. Just go out the front door of your apartment, go out the vestibule doors, turn left and climb up a bit to the first window. Now its open, but you'll have to push in the screen."
"You smell like cigarettes," she says, fanning her face with her hand. At first I find it funny because this little girl is chugging hard liquor and smoking herself, and if I didn't need her cooperation so badly I would've thrown her hypocrisy at her in an instant. Something else perplexed me about that comment, however. If I wasn't in my body, how could she smell anything on my breath? This girl had to be something of an anomaly,
Reluctantly, but without a word, she gets up and walks out the door of her room. She pauses to look through the frame of the other room, right across the hall, and at the snoring man in an orange polo shirt on the bed. His hand hangs off the edge and you can see his watch. Walking quietly down the hallway, she unlocks the door, opens it and closes it quietly. She then makes her way down the hall, stopping just before the stairs. At the door marked 232. "That's where you live?"
"That's where I live," I confirm. For a moment I worry what she might find in there, but I keep telling myself I'm just asleep. Very deep asleep, and all I need is a slap on the face and this will all be over. I'll laugh every time people say that consciousness is just a product of the brain, I'll chuckle like mad when they talk about ghosts being able to walk through walls.
I guide Sandy onward and inside the vestibule. Beatrice is there, breathing in and out through a tube, and she smiles at sight of the girl. Offers a warm, sweet hello. Sandy walks right passed her without saying so much as a word. Once outside the door, I tell her to go to the bushes and then to climb to the top of the air conditioning. With a little struggling, she makes it. "Good," I say, "now I need you to just push on the screen."
Grunting, she says in the midst of it, "I can't do it," and the screen pushes in. Just then an arm from behind me reaches out, grabs her leg, pulls her down. She hits the ground with a thud and a whimper. Her face slams against a large mound of freshly-lain wood chips beneath the base of a bush, her left arm in the bush itself, the rest of her tangled in the grass.
"You stupid little girl," says the owner of the hand, "what in the hell do you think you doin'?" Looking right behind me, I find his face right in my own. Absolutely terrified, for a quick moment I forget the gender implied by his violent words and think he's talking to me. I look down, look towards my gut, and I see his hand protruding out of my sternum. A white-knuckled fist on the end from which extends a lone, accusing finger aimed right at the girl. "You a fuckin' peepin'-tomboy now?"
Brushing herself off, she says, sobbing, "Frederick told me to go in there," blubbering, "he wants me to wake him up," pleading, "Uncle, I wasn't tryin' to do anything wrong."
Looking down at her, brows as tightly squeezed together as his teeth were clenched, between his viced and pearly whites he growls, "For the last time, Frederick is gone. He's dead. Chased a bottle of pills with a bottle of Rum. And using him as an excuse for every little -- "
"He talks to me, Uncle, he does," she cries, "you gotta believe me."
"Get up," he says, and she does. My eyes are still fixed on this arm sticking out of me. While a part of me wonders about the otherworldly physics that would allow something like this to happen another part of me is just overcome with terror. She quickly scrambles to get up and makes a leap for the air conditioning, pulling herself up over it, her tiny fingers worming through the sill into the inside of my apartment. Angrily, he grabs both her legs this time and in blind fear for her I jump on him and try to pull him off of her, but I just end up pushing myself up, propelling myself through the window. Its like I'm in a fucking cartoon.
I'm in my room. Turning around, I see her squirming fingers strive to hold on but quickly disappear, and I run to the sill just in time to see as she hits the ground again. He grabs a clump of her hair, he slaps her, and she's crying for help like mad but I can't help her. Just watching from the window as he back-hands her across the face, "You are never to leave the apartment without us," he says, "never," and she's screaming bloody murder. I try to scream myself but I can't make out any voice, not a sound, not even a noise just her and I could hear. Throwing up my arms in rage, I pace about my room, wondering why I can see everything around me, how at least one person can even hear me but I can't physically effect the world around me.
Then I stop amidst my pacing. Dead, so-to-speak, in my tracks. Rage is replaced with a rush of terror as I see a little clump wrapped in the covers on my bed. A body withdrawn into the fetal position. My body. Crouching down to look at myself, at my physical reflection, I find that I can't read the expression on my blue face. My eyes are open, wide open, and I can't even reach out to close them.
As the skin-on-skin sounds of relentless beating subside, as the ugly man outside my window lets the little girl go, lets her cry there on the ground, I don't even know what I feel anymore. All I can think of is how blue I look. And, strangely, what a lovely color it really is. And to think one day, everyone alive will have a morning like this.
I find myself perplexed that I'm sitting on the stairs in my apartment complex. Even stranger, I'm not even sure of the last thing I do remember. Trying to comfort myself with cozy thoughts, I tell myself that everyone must have mornings like this. Still, I have that sneaking suspicion, that tip-of-the-tongue kind of feeling that something is incredibly, dreadfully wrong.
I take another minute just sitting on the steps sorting through thoughts before I slowly walk to my apartment door. I try the door handle, but I can't even twist it. Pushing, pushing, it doesn't even budge. I'm somehow locked outside. I could check my pocket for my keys, and the desire arises out of me, but just out of habit. I know they aren't there and a part of me knows why, but the dominant part of me is still struggling.
A flash of anger washes over me and I beat my fists on the door, beat them hard, slam them against the wood with so much brutal force I should have either busted the wood or turned my white-knuckled balls of skin into a bloody mesh of torn flesh and broken bones, but no. Nothing happens. Not a damn thing.
So I scream relentlessly, cussing up a swear-storm. Fists up above my bowed head shaking with adrenaline, eyes squeezed closed as I scream. I walk around frantically, opening my eyes just as I brush passed two old women, nearly slamming into them. Seems I had slammed into them at first, but I quickly judge that to be impossible. I didn't feel anything and they didn't fall backward as they would have.
One of them, she has tubes in her nostrils hooked up to an oxygen tank. I know her. This is Beatrice, an old lady no one in this apartment complex could avoid bumping into. I'd often see her in the vestibule, leaning against the wall of mailboxes on my way out the door to go to work. Waiting for the bus, waiting for something. I'd see her in the laundry room downstairs, chatting with an equally elderly neighbor, and she'd greet you with a sweet smile.
And now, now I'd probably made her terrified of me because I'd lost my temper. The guilt in me swells, but when I look back at her she doesn't seem terrified. It seems so unlikely as to be ridiculous, but she doesn't even seem to even realize I'm here at all. She walks right passed me. After a few steps, though, the woman she's with -- I'm guessing this is her daughter -- she slows. Beatrice stops in her tracks and they look at each other. Her daughter asks, with some initial hesitation, "Did you feel that?".
"It's cold," is how Beatrice responds, and she seems perplexed. "An' right outta nowhere. That's weird." Breaking into a smile, she starts to walk and her daughter follows, both erupting into a light, tension-releasing laughter as they move on.
I look after them as if this is a joke, as if they're yanking my chain, but it isn't that kind of laughter. It isn't like that childhood game when a friend you've just pissed off is ignoring you and when you talk he says to another friend, "did you hear something?" No, this is no game. Its as if they'd both just jointly driven a knife into my chest and twisted, twisted relentlessly. Not because they hadn't said hello, or even recognized my existence for that matter, either, but for the notion they've planted in my head. A notion I attempt to escape from as I slam my shoulder against the door, slam it with all the might I could muster. Again and again. I feel no lasting pain, though, and there is absolutely no effect on the door at all.
At this point, I'm frantic. I'm freaking the fuck out. Then my ear catches a ''click'' that comes from down the hall. A door opens a few apartments down. A woman's coming out, slender and snobby, with a brown leather purse. She jingles her keys. I walk, faster, then faster, calling after her, "Ma'am, excuse me? Ma'am?" I'm right behind her, yelling, but there's no nervous locking up. Its not as if she's afraid of me and is trying to avoid me. There's just no response at all.
I slip into the apartment just before she closes and locks the door with another ''click.'' Inside, I scream, "ANYBODY?" As if an answer, my eyes catch the mirror behind the door, coats hanging on the edges, and there's nothing. There's no one there. Absolutely no reflection of me at all.
My fear extends far beyond how cataclysmic I might look without being able to see it for myself, too, just for the record.
If everyone has mornings like this, I guess they must be too embarrassed to talk about it. Then again, there were stories. I'd read that many people wake up with something brushing against their shoulder and find out its the ceiling. They look down upon their sleeping body, they freak out, and they snap right back in. A bodiless experience wasn't unheard of, then. Yet I wasn't floating, and I didn't seem to be able to walk through walls, either, and everyone knows ghosts can do that. Me, I'd found myself outside my apartment and I couldn't get the fucking door open.
So perhaps this was just a dream. Just a vivid, fucked up dream. Or maybe this was real, but I was just asleep. It didn't have to be that I was dead, it could just be that I was asleep and out of my body.
While looking at the mirror, transfixed by my absence, some movement to the side of me catches my attention. Scares the shit out of me, actually. It turns out to be a girl of maybe thirteen. She has long, brown snarly hair that covers most of her face, sports a raggedy-looking dark flannel a size or two too big and she's clutching a bottle of Rum. A strange image for sure, so now I'm sure I must be dreaming.
I walk up to her as she sits on the ratty couch, places her bottle on the coffee table -- and not on the stained cardboard coaster three inches away, mind you, but on the smudged glass lining the top of it -- and takes a cigarette out of her pack in one smooth movement.
"Starting a little early in life, aren't we?" I say to her. And for a moment she stops, as if someone pressed pause on the Existential DVD player or something. A loud an endless silence envelopes the moment. The lighter held to the tip of her cigarette, un-flicked and flameless, she just holds it there. Watching, silent and listening, I wait for whatever was to happen next. And soon she went on, flicked the cheap Bic lighter. An aura of smoke formed around the burning ember at the end, it glowed brighter and crackled.
Coughing up the courage, I lean forward and ask, "Can you hear me?"
Breathing out smoke, she says, "I loved you, Frederick." She asks, in a whisper, "Why'd you have to die?"
"My name's not Frederick," I tell her, but she fails to respond. I don't know if what's happening here is coincidence or conversation. She rocks back and fourth, the old sofa squealing. Back and fourth, very lightly, taking another drag. Reaching for the bottle. "You can't hear me, can you?" I plead for an answer. "Can you?"
"Of course I can hear you, Fredrick," she snarls before she swigs, the top of the bottle popping as her pale lips leave it. As she speaks, she's not looking at me, just throwing her voice in my general direction. "I'm not fucking deaf, you dumb bastard."
Her tone, not to mention her language, kind of takes me by surprise. "But I'm not Frederick," is all I manage to say. I know she's not listening, but I'm fairly certain now she hears me. Getting up, leaving the bottle behind her and taking her smoke with her, the girl moves towards the piano on the other side of the coffee table. Its up against the far wall. Sitting before it, she puts her long, bony fingers on the keys so delicately. Closing her eyes, she then bows her head, face buried in a mess of hair. Beneath the armband on her right hand branch out criss-crossed scratches, some long since healed, some scabbing, some fresh. With an enduring exhale, she begins playing. And wonderfully. When I ask her what she's playing, she stops, says in an a-matter-of-fact way, "Bach, Frederick. Brandenburg Concerto number two," and then continues.
Her cigarette eats away at itself on the glass ashtray that rests on the left side of the piano. I stand up from where I'd been crouching beside her, walk around her back. Through the slithering smoke I see the framed photograph. Its a picture of the girl and the woman who had walked out the door. I ask her if its her mother and she just says, "Mother's dead, you know that," and she doesn't stop the music to speak this time.
Wandering away from her, I walk down the short, dark hallway. There are two rooms. In the larger room there's nothing too interesting. Queen bed, dresser, desk, and a closet full of ugly cloths, male and female. In the other room, though, in the girl's room, I find myself perplexed. No toys, no computer, no posters on the wall. Just a desk with scattered construction paper on which were scribbled drawings in crayon, and all with the name Sandy at the bottom. A small, bare-bones bed, a quaint dresser.
In a far corner of the room lay a table with a stool before it. Atop it multiple pictures and candles are carefully placed. Another glass ashtray like the one on the piano, like the one on the coffee table, where two tangled butts rest in a sea of ashes. To the side of it, an incense burner. All the pictures are of the same man, in his late twenties or early thirties, smiling broadly in the photos almost without exception. One has him standing before a hospice, another with him and an old woman in a wheel chair. Another is of Sandy and him in a park. At the zoo. In a diner, which I soon recognize as the diner I work at. And at the center of them all is a huge photo of him in a fancy wood frame, smiling within a bushy beard, hand cupped beneath his chin. Above it, on a piece of blue construction paper, she'd penciled in black the words, "I love you, Frederick."
In all my snooping around, I hadn't noticed until now that the music had stopped. She walks in through the door frame of the room, closes the door behind her and latches it, then walks right to the stool. Taking her Bic, with a flick-flick she lights all the candles one by one. With each, she repeats that name, "Frederick." Under her breath, easy as breathing, "Frederick." The mantra of her life, it seems, "Frederick." And when all the candles are lit, she lights an incense stick. When she's done with her little ritual, she interlocks her fingers into a two hand fist, places it down harshly on the hard wood of the table and bows her head, her face now totally lost in clumps of tangled hair.
"Sandy," I say to her as kindly as I can, "Sandy's your name, isn't it? Look, I hate to ask you, I really do, but evidently you're the only person around here that can hear me. So I really need you to do me a favor. Sandy?"
"Frederick," she breathes, "Fredrick."
"I need you to break into my apartment," I say. "The door's locked and if I'm asleep, I need you to wake me up. And if I'm not asleep," and the words hung because the thought stung, "well, I need you to call the hospital. Can you do that?"
She's suddenly annoyed and confused. "You don't live in an apartment."
I try to stay patient, calm, but now I'm getting frustrated. "Look, can you see me? Can you?" And she shakes her head no, and then I put my hand on her shoulder. I feel nothing, my hand just stops. "Can you feel me?"
"My shoulder's like ice," she sobs. "Stop it. STOP IT, Frederick."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I say, my hands up, as if she could actually see me. Stepping back, as if she could tell I was actually doing so. This is as stupid as making hand gestures when talking with someone on the telephone, and I know it, even as I do it, but old habits die hard. So much about us is at the mercy of memory.
"Just stop," she screams, face tomato red, eyes veiny and bleeding tears. And as she screams, I can see her face for the first time. Brown eyes, plump and rosy cheeks, pale lips. Strands of her hair matted to her forehead, she grabs both sides of her head right above her ears and starts clenching fists. Yanking on her hair. "Stop, stop, stop! None a' this makes any sense at all."
"Tell me about it," I say, speaking just below her in volume, lowering it bit by bit as I continue to speak, trying to ease her down to solid ground through the medium of my voice, my only tool is this swirling madness. "I'm not sure we're on the same page," I explain to her, "but I empathize with your confusion entirely. But I need you to do this for me, okay? All right?"
She sniffs, utters, "I can't, Frederick. I'll wake Uncle Greg," with fear evident in her tone. Though still upset, still talking through sobs, she seems to be easing, relaxing. I lean down beside her, speaking straight into her ear. So close that if I were actually there, she'd feel the force of my breath brush her cheek. I say, "It's simple. Just go out the front door of your apartment, go out the vestibule doors, turn left and climb up a bit to the first window. Now its open, but you'll have to push in the screen."
"You smell like cigarettes," she says, fanning her face with her hand. At first I find it funny because this little girl is chugging hard liquor and smoking herself, and if I didn't need her cooperation so badly I would've thrown her hypocrisy at her in an instant. Something else perplexed me about that comment, however. If I wasn't in my body, how could she smell anything on my breath? This girl had to be something of an anomaly,
Reluctantly, but without a word, she gets up and walks out the door of her room. She pauses to look through the frame of the other room, right across the hall, and at the snoring man in an orange polo shirt on the bed. His hand hangs off the edge and you can see his watch. Walking quietly down the hallway, she unlocks the door, opens it and closes it quietly. She then makes her way down the hall, stopping just before the stairs. At the door marked 232. "That's where you live?"
"That's where I live," I confirm. For a moment I worry what she might find in there, but I keep telling myself I'm just asleep. Very deep asleep, and all I need is a slap on the face and this will all be over. I'll laugh every time people say that consciousness is just a product of the brain, I'll chuckle like mad when they talk about ghosts being able to walk through walls.
I guide Sandy onward and inside the vestibule. Beatrice is there, breathing in and out through a tube, and she smiles at sight of the girl. Offers a warm, sweet hello. Sandy walks right passed her without saying so much as a word. Once outside the door, I tell her to go to the bushes and then to climb to the top of the air conditioning. With a little struggling, she makes it. "Good," I say, "now I need you to just push on the screen."
Grunting, she says in the midst of it, "I can't do it," and the screen pushes in. Just then an arm from behind me reaches out, grabs her leg, pulls her down. She hits the ground with a thud and a whimper. Her face slams against a large mound of freshly-lain wood chips beneath the base of a bush, her left arm in the bush itself, the rest of her tangled in the grass.
"You stupid little girl," says the owner of the hand, "what in the hell do you think you doin'?" Looking right behind me, I find his face right in my own. Absolutely terrified, for a quick moment I forget the gender implied by his violent words and think he's talking to me. I look down, look towards my gut, and I see his hand protruding out of my sternum. A white-knuckled fist on the end from which extends a lone, accusing finger aimed right at the girl. "You a fuckin' peepin'-tomboy now?"
Brushing herself off, she says, sobbing, "Frederick told me to go in there," blubbering, "he wants me to wake him up," pleading, "Uncle, I wasn't tryin' to do anything wrong."
Looking down at her, brows as tightly squeezed together as his teeth were clenched, between his viced and pearly whites he growls, "For the last time, Frederick is gone. He's dead. Chased a bottle of pills with a bottle of Rum. And using him as an excuse for every little -- "
"He talks to me, Uncle, he does," she cries, "you gotta believe me."
"Get up," he says, and she does. My eyes are still fixed on this arm sticking out of me. While a part of me wonders about the otherworldly physics that would allow something like this to happen another part of me is just overcome with terror. She quickly scrambles to get up and makes a leap for the air conditioning, pulling herself up over it, her tiny fingers worming through the sill into the inside of my apartment. Angrily, he grabs both her legs this time and in blind fear for her I jump on him and try to pull him off of her, but I just end up pushing myself up, propelling myself through the window. Its like I'm in a fucking cartoon.
I'm in my room. Turning around, I see her squirming fingers strive to hold on but quickly disappear, and I run to the sill just in time to see as she hits the ground again. He grabs a clump of her hair, he slaps her, and she's crying for help like mad but I can't help her. Just watching from the window as he back-hands her across the face, "You are never to leave the apartment without us," he says, "never," and she's screaming bloody murder. I try to scream myself but I can't make out any voice, not a sound, not even a noise just her and I could hear. Throwing up my arms in rage, I pace about my room, wondering why I can see everything around me, how at least one person can even hear me but I can't physically effect the world around me.
Then I stop amidst my pacing. Dead, so-to-speak, in my tracks. Rage is replaced with a rush of terror as I see a little clump wrapped in the covers on my bed. A body withdrawn into the fetal position. My body. Crouching down to look at myself, at my physical reflection, I find that I can't read the expression on my blue face. My eyes are open, wide open, and I can't even reach out to close them.
As the skin-on-skin sounds of relentless beating subside, as the ugly man outside my window lets the little girl go, lets her cry there on the ground, I don't even know what I feel anymore. All I can think of is how blue I look. And, strangely, what a lovely color it really is. And to think one day, everyone alive will have a morning like this.
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