| I lay in his bed with his arm around me and his warm breath on my neck. The plaid sheets are a different material than my own, and the single comforter isn�t as warm as my many fleece blankets. I feel myself sinking slowly into sleep nonetheless, sitting into a pool of my own identity where none but me have ever entered. In my room of self there are the sounds of guilt and the smells of regret, frozen in time with sorrow. I leave him behind when I go to this place. It is part of both my penance and my sins that I have told no one the whole truth.
I used to be a Catholic schoolgirl. That turns men on when I tell them. That�s usually why I tell them. No, let me start at the beginning. �What was your first memory?� he asked me once. It is this. I am very small. I am crawling up the stairs of my house to my parents� room early in the morning. Across the street, bells in a church are ringing. When I reach my parents� room I crawl into their bed and together we are quiet and listen to the bells. Almost a year ago my sister went to a mental hospital. She used to smile and laugh at things that weren�t there, and get upset by things that weren�t true. We never found out where she got her ideas. Sometimes I wanted to sit by her bed at night and protect her from the demons that flew through her ears, into her mind. One Joan of Arc I would be, armored, armed, waiting for my enemy; at the same time Martin Ladveneau, comforter and speaker of prayers. I pray only at times of need. When I do this I feel guilty and promise to pray at other times, but I never do. I shouldn�t make promises. I don�t keep them. Not even the one about not biting my fingernails. I don�t pray to God anymore, and I never prayed to Jesus. I pray to my friend Bobby. Bobby shot himself two days after my birthday, a week before our high school graduation. By the Vatican�s rules Bobby should be in hell, but I can hear him listening when I pray. It doesn�t hit me on the car ride where we are going. It is a long car ride and we don�t speak much. He rubs my leg and laughs a little, that stupid laugh that I hated so much. I smile back. I hadn�t realized at this time that I can�t stand him. When we get to the sleazy hotel, I begin to wonder what�s so bad about his roommates that he can�t bring women home to sleep with. The hotel is by the airport. There�s a Mexican family waiting by the counter. A woman is holding a small child. I smile at the child, and he gives me a bewildered look, but his mother glares at me. We go up to the room. I�m tired and bruised from the night before. He does the fucking. I lay there and conjugate Russian verbs in my head. Ya dumayu, ti dumayesh, on/ona/ono dumayet� He thinks it�s great. I pretend it�s great, but really I�m thinking Jim Carrey. �I�ve had better.� Ha. I told him I�d pay half the room cost. He never got that money from me. I used to think sex before marriage was a sin. Actually, I used to think it was illegal. No one bothered to correct me until my freshman year of high school. I still think it�s a sin, but I think I�m a sinner, and when I go to hell at least I�ll have plenty of company. Then there was the one whom I hated even more. He was cute in his own way. His voice was like Fred Savage�s. He was such a little brat, and he knew it, too. I had lost my student ID and hadn�t eaten in days. My roommate went to an anime convention for the weekend and brought all the food in our room with her. I told him I�d come over and do whatever he wanted in exchange for some food. What did he give me? Ramen. Fucker. By yon bonny banks and by yon bonny braes, I sang to him. Where the sun shines bright o'Loch Lomond, where me and me true love were ever wont to gae, on the bonny, bonny banks o'Loch Lomond. The baby stopped crying. I walked with him in my arms for an hour, singing into his ear. I knew I couldn�t stop. My parents used to have to do this with me. They used to drive me around the countryside while I screamed in the back seat. My mom sang �Bicycle Built for Two,� only she changed the first two words. Crabby, crabby, she sang. I had a nervous breakdown that night with the baby. I called David, but he wasn�t answering his phone. I haven�t heard from him in weeks. He disappeared as suddenly as he reappeared. So I called Shawn instead, and upon his instruction I went up to my parents� room, sobbed at them to take me to the hospital, and collapsed on their bed. My mother held me tight in her arms until I stopped shaking. There were no bells. We don�t live by a church with bells in this city. Dr. Beld looks at me in concern when I tell him about the past few months. I have had a number of psychiatrists in my life, starting in middle school, when I got suspended for something I wrote. It was a story, a gift for my best friend who thought I was a great writer. The story was from her point of view. I wrote it before Columbine happened, before even mentioning guns in school could get you expelled. In the story I mentioned hand grenades. I later changed it and decided to make the story about magic instead. Someone found the first version though, the one with the hand grenades. I was sent to Dr. Jennings. He had a couch, just like a stereotypical psychiatrist. I asked if I could lay down on it while I talked to him. He said no. I think that�s when I decided I didn�t like him. We switched from Dr. Jennings to Dr. Moffa, an odd bug-eyed man with little hair. Every time I saw him he had a little more hair. My friend Ellen had Dr. Moffa too. She said that he used the shitload of money he made as a psychiatrist to pay for hair implants. Dr. Moffa never really listened to me, which was all right because I didn�t really talk to him. I told him everything that was necessary to get the drugs. Effexor. Chlonazepam. What was that other sleeping pill? I don�t remember. I needed them. Now Dr. Moffa is gone, and I sit with Dr. Beld in his sweltering office, squirming in discomfort at his genuine concern for me. I don�t look him in the eye when I tell him the important stuff. I don�t let tears fall down my cheeks. Psychiatrists aren�t your friends, they�re your drug dealers. Forget that, and you feel foolish. Did I say I would tell the whole truth? No. I just said I have told no one the whole truth. I am a coward. Who are the characters in this story? To my mind there is only me. To the pawn there is only him and the other pieces in his way. But I have played many characters in my time, and even the ones with no lines had a story to tell. I have many stories to tell. I don�t know which ones I am telling right now. The important thing to know is that they are stories. The truth is not a story to tell, it�s a secret to keep. Bobby knows. He took his truth to his grave. I am not afraid to die. That�s why I went to Shawn�s yesterday. Shawn was trying to kill himself too. I baby-sat him while he paced and shook and chain-smoked until the Valium kicked in. I got a discombobulated message from him this morning. I think he said he was going to the hospital. this is not a home. this is a nighttime place, but it is not a sleeping place. these are walls within walls, steps that lead to nowhere, houses that are false and flat whose doors betray them. this is not a place to live. these are not real farm fields. you can't drive past them and smell manure or frighten the crows- sittin' on a fence- there's no straw man, standing like an effigy at a crossbar, there's no Tin Man- with apple trees in front of his cottage- and there is no cowardly lion, because real cowards are the ones who live lies because they are afraid of themselves. and wicked witches are not green and ugly, they are beautiful and they wear nice clothes and their spells are soft words spoken in gullible ears- or clever fingers typing carefully at submissive keyboards. and it makes me angry, because it has become a truth, of sorts, for me. it's become as real as nursery rhymes or folklore. the mother, the maiden, and the crone- the straw, the tin, the lion. they are half gone now. we are on the spinning line between sleep and awake. i will wake up next week and it'll all have been a dream. i'll never get to say things like you kept rusting up-you kept pulling your own tail-you were a humbug because there will be no one to say it to. they will live their own lives. then i will graduate, and they will grow up, and i'll be nothing to them except a memory with a loud voice and a brick in the green room. and i'll come back, later, to see their shows. and they'll hug me, and smile at me, and ask me how i'm doing at college. but they're the ones wearing the costumes or the headsets and i'm the one flying through their bedroom window, and years have gone past and we don't recognize one another. This is what I wrote last year, when I assistant-directed The Wizard of Oz. I used to eat, drink, and breathe the theatre. I thought I would die without it here at college, and I was right. Where is my auditorium? Where is my scene shop, my green room? Where are my lights and costumes and props? Where are my actors and technicians and stagehands? Where is the place where I am someone else? Where is the place where life is scripted and the people I know are my puppets? I am gasping without it. Fuck. This story is going nowhere. There is no character development or plot or dialogue or any of that shit. There�s just a stream of consciousness, and the wind is blowing hard and anyone trying to read this will be swept into confusion. What the fuck am I doing? Why the fuck am I still alive? I asked Ilya. I laughed when I realized I scared him pretty badly, but now that I look back, it wasn�t funny, because when I went to Shawn�s yesterday I was the one crying, not him. Three Appleton teenagers were killed Friday night when the car they were in went out of control on a snow-covered highway in Waushara County and collided head-on with another vehicle. the wee birdies sing and the wildflowers spring The victims were Elizabeth Guttenberg, 18; Allyce Albaugh, 18; and William Green, 19. and in sunshine the waters lie sleeping The driver of the car, Matthew Busse, 18, of Appleton and another passenger, Alexander Raabe, 19, of Black Creek were injured. Police said they were treated and released from Berlin Memorial Hospital. but the broken heart will ken nae second spring again Guttenberg and Albaugh were graduates of Appleton North High School and were freshmen at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley. Busse also is a UW-Fox Valley student and a North graduate. and the world knows not how we are breathing And now I drink. I drink beer, which I hate, and I get inebriated, which makes me an idiot. But there is one thing to love about it: forgetting. I forget, you forget, he/she/it forgets. It�s easy to forget about death, here, in a hallway surrounded by drunks playing darts. It�s easy to let my mind fly in a blur as we drive on a dark road, and he is next to me and I am clutching his arm. He says to me, �I went there expecting next to nothing, so thank you for being that kind of girl.� I would find out a little while later that it is a song that kind of girl kind of girl kind of girl but it doesn't bother me because it's a pretty song, and now we are driving forward to find where the music is coming from and I don't think about our car or our dark road. We sing together and scream with laughter and I don't think whether Allyce had time to scream about anything at all. But now I think about a tiny girl with art coming out of her fingers and a voice that won�t stop echoing in my ears. And I pray, but it doesn�t help, because prayer is not a map for me when I am lost. Into your hands, O Lord, we humbly entrust our brothers and sisters. In this life you embraced them with your tender love; deliver them now from every evil and bid them enter eternal rest. What does this mean? It�s a shield to hide behind, but I have nothing to hide from, only a road to find when my feet are faltering. Allyce is watching. I drew her on the back of my math syllabus. She is an angel with a gun and wings made of knife blades, black fedora hat tilted rakishly over one eye; badass to the bone, space cowgirl rocking the cosmos. When I see her at the funeral she will be quiet and still like she never ever was, and bells will toll her age and haunt me as much as she does. This story writhes and changes under my fingertips; it will not end until I am at eternal rest. �Into your hands I commend my spirit.� There is a story in the white spaces here that I do not have the time to tell. It is another story about death. All the stories are about death, even the ones about sex, because then I feel my secret and it is death. Don't they know they're making love to one already dead? That song is from the stage. There is no stage here. There are no wings here. The wings are where I fled to, wings of a stage, angel's wings hovering over body lying forlornly on the ground. Now I have only a cave-like room and an apartment, a man's arms, and songs that sing themselves in an empty, hollow theatre where I cannot go. |
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