Saturday, December 12, 2009

Chapter 11

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…now that they were actually committed to the adventure, felt dread and apprehension.

“So how are you?” Please help me. Three simple words. I want to say them, but there is a force compressing my voice. Kayla. She’s watching me from the corner by the door, behind you, her dark eyes speaking threats. If I tell you what she does to me, she will hurt me. You can’t see her.
“Fine, I guess.” Please help me. I try to say it loud enough in my head while looking you directly in the eyes so that maybe you will hear my thoughts. Or, at least, see the fear in my eyes. You don’t hear. You don’t see. You are writing something down. The paper. Maybe I could write you a message without Kayla interfering. But then I see my wrist, a red vertical line made by a marker running down the artery. Kayla’s promise. I lift my hand and turn my wrist towards you. You will see. You will understand. You will help. I only hold it towards your view for a couple of seconds before Kayla grabs me, her fingers tight around my wrist, though I know her grip will leave no mark. She knows what I was doing. I will bleed tonight.
“What would you like to talk about this week?”
“My door was unlocked.”
“Was it supposed to be?”
“No.” The last time the door was left un-locked was the first time he found me. Upon entering the un-locked house almost a year ago, I made the usual search of rooms, with a large knife in hand, for any intruders lying in wait. There were none, so I readied myself for bed tucking the butcher knife under my pillow, just in case there was still someone lurking in the house. It was impossible. There was nowhere for a person to hide. There was only one closet in the whole place and it was full of boxes. I had checked under the bed. There were no other hiding spots. I was safe. Unless there was someone outside. The door was locked now, no one could get in. Unless they kicked the door in. It wouldn’t be difficult. There was no other exit. If someone broke in, I would be trapped. There was no one. There was no one. I was safe.
My pillow was soft and my blanket was warm. I was safe and ready to sleep. Then he came, the same big, bald man who still terrorises me. He covered my mouth with his hand, which was large enough to cover half of my face. Accustomed to such situations, I assumed the submissive role. It was the only time he ever touched me so intimately, using only his hands, never removing his clothes, and, in a manner, gently.
His large hand stretched the skin between my legs as he pushed his fist inside of me. It was painful, to be sure, but I didn’t complain. I was good. It would be a lie to say I didn’t partially enjoy his hand in me.
The hand covering my mouth to silent my screams moved behind my head to grasp at the hairs at the base of my neck. He pulled purposefully, stretching the skin covering my skull so that I had no choice but to tilt my head backwards to ease the pain of hairs being pulled out of their follicles. He pulled. I bent. He pulled. I bent further until my neck was at such a painful angle that breathing was near impossible and screaming even less so. I began to choke on my heavy breaths and moans. He didn’t release me. Not even when my mouth gaped open and closed like a fish struggling to consume enough oxygen for one more breath, one more second of life.
It was only when he had succeeded in fully pleasuring me that he loosened his fist, untwining his fingers from my curls and removing his other hand from inside of me. His only goal in forcing himself into me had been my gratification and yet, I had insulted him with my fear. After this first encounter he became a sporadic, but regular and violent, visitor. I still don’t understand why he doesn’t like me.
“So what did you do?”
“I locked it, of course.” Then I checked the house, returned to the door, unlocked and re-locked the deadbolt, turned the handle to check the lock was in place, unlocked and-relocked the deadbolt, checked the handle, went to bed, went to the door, unlocked and re-locked the deadbolt, checked the handle, returned to bed. Despite my conviction the door was locked, I doubted the reliability of it actually being closed. I was entirely confident in my memory of locking the door, but fully doubted the ability to recall an event where I may have unlocked it. But the sedatives I had ingested began to outweigh my anxiety and I remained in bed, eventually passing into an uneventful, dreamless sleep.
“So there was no suspicious behaviour associated with the door being unlocked?”
“No. Everything was normal.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m here for a reason, right?”
“I don’t like to label people with specific diagnoses. In my experience such diagnostic labels tend to increase the duration of symptoms the patient is suffering from as it can provide them with an excuse to continue with their unhealthy behaviours. Instead of trying to adjust their perceptions, they justify their actions by claiming the title. ‘I’m depressed, therefore I am justified in sleeping in,’ type of thoughts.”
“I’m not making this up.”
“I am not at all suggestion that you are. I think that your pain is a very real sensation but the attenuation of your discomfort lies in not overemphasising its existence. I don’t usually condone denial, but this is a circumstance where refusing to give your pain attention and thereby reinforcing it, is beneficial.”
“Ignore it and it will go away?”
“Well. Not ignorance so much as a delicate balance of comfort without over indulgence.”
“That sounds kinda difficult.” You’re laughing at my light-hearted, but not untrue, dismissal of your advice.
“It doesn’t have to be. It’s like going through withdrawal at first.” And that’s not difficult? “The mind automatically resorts to unhealthy thinking in response trauma because of negative early life experiences to the point where the response becomes depended on. But if such defence mechanisms are ignored, the mind will begin to look for new survival strategies.”
“But I don’t know any other strategies.”
“I can teach you.” So teach me already. Less talking, more making the crazy go away.
“What if I go through this withdrawal when you’re not around and my mind replaces the current survival strategy with something worse?”
“Like what?”
“Like death.”
“Do you want to kill yourself?”
“No.” Yes. But Kayla will do it before I get the chance. She’s good to me that way. Absorbing the pain so I don’t have to.
“You have a choice in the actions you choose to take.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“What if I don’t want to die, but someone else kills me? It’s like that all the time.”
“Like what?”
“I make a choice and bad things happen anyway. I might as well not resist.”
“Everyone dies. Choosing to live forever might be a little bit of an unrealistic goal.”
“Not necessarily.”
“What do you mean?”
“I am a member of the first generation that could theoretically live forever if medicine keeps advancing at the rate it has been.”
“Exponential curves are typically discovered to be S-curves when enough data has been collected. But it’s an inspiring thought, to want life.”
“Who said I wanted it?”
“You did.”
“No I didn’t. It was a hypothetical situation.”
“So you do want to die?”
“I don’t see that I have a choice.”
“You might not have a choice in the details of your death, but you can influence the outcome by making better choices in your life and thereby increasing the probability that you will live longer and happier.”
“I don’t want to be alone.”
“Nobody is ever alone.” And neither am I. But I could be. Without Laura and Kayla, there would be no one. “It looks like that’s all the time we have for today. Have a good week.”
“Thanks.’

……….


Kayla is punishing me, for my thoughts. We were together today, like before. There was dancing and violence evidenced by bruises on my thighs. I think she’s crazy. She came to help me and I believe it is her intention to save me from suffering. Her methods are…violent, but she needs to get my attention is all. She is only trying to protect me.

What if she is right, that we, the three of us, are happy except for when I try to live out in the real world? I am scared. She is always watching me, censoring my thoughts and my words. I can only write this because she thinks I will never let you see it. I want to believe that she is wrong, that I can show you and you won’t ignore me and you will help me, but I know she is right. You said I wasn’t crazy, so then I must be making this all up.

Kayla laughed as I wrote to you. She let me write, secrets, knowing you will never see a word of it. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you anyway, and then I would lose standing with you. Or you would miss the message. It’s a plain message, but if you missed it, it would mean you weren’t listening and then you would lose standing with me. All of you would have to be discredited. All your advice, your philosophies, would need to be re-examined for lies. That would be worse. It’s better for me not to be heard.

Later that night, after playing with Kayla, I became transfixed by the red ink running down the length of my wrist, where Kayla had marked the place to make the cut. She outlined with a red marker how to cut down the artery, not across. I could bleed and bleed and bleed and sleep. Finally.

I looked at your face today and wondered if I would get tired of it if I had to see you everyday. I have to tell you this. Not the part about your face, I have to tell you about the part of me that wants to die. Do you remember that building you told me about? That’s what my life is, never changing but always different.

Your hair looked brown this week, dark. I thought it was lighter. I think I might be making you up.


……….


I was driving the other day. It was day, not night. I don’t remember where I was going. I was driving, too fast as usual, when I noticed a dead cat in the middle of the lane up ahead. I could tell it was dead because there was red blood spilled around its body on the grey pavement. I came up on it fast, before I had time to swerve around it. It was already dead, I didn’t need to swerve, but I didn’t want cat pieces on my car.

There wasn’t time enough to avoid it though and I felt the bump of my front tire as it pushed the dead cat body further into the pavement. I looked in my rear view mirror. I don’t know why. Maybe I thought the cat would get up and walk away. Zombie cats. It could happen. Only, when I looked behind me the cat had turned into an umbrella. A red umbrella. Can cats do that?

I was going to the skytrain, I remember now. I had wanted to go downtown, but couldn’t afford the parking and didn’t want to pay to take the bus, so I drove and parked near the skytrain which I could ride without having to purchase a ticket. It was possible I would get caught skipping the fare, but unlikely. I was only going a few stops. And I liked that I could get caught. Maybe somebody would notice me.

This particular station had two rail lines. One ran high above the traffic and the other ran well below street level, though it wasn’t underground. You could look down upon the rails and the train cars and the people from the street above. Kayla was walking on the guardrail separating the sidewalk from the steep walls of the man-made ravine in which the trains ran. The top of the guard rail was square, about four inches wide, wide enough to easily place one foot in front of the other. But the steel fence looked treacherously slippery as small puddles of water had gathered from an earlier rain.

“It would be like floating,” Kayla said as she turned her back to us, Laura and me, to gaze down at the steel tracks and the plants growing up the sides of the ravine. I wasn’t sure it would be like floating. It would be like falling. The terminal velocity of a human is over 50 m/s and that’s only if you’re falling parallel to the ground. To jump straight down, the speed a body could reach would be closer to 80 m/s. 80 m/s is, 80 divided by 1000 times 360, 288 km/hr. That is not at all a speed corresponding with floating.

I wondered if it would hurt when she made contact with the ground. If her legs struck the bottom first, the bones would most definitely break and that can’t be comfortable. Of course, the pain would only last a second before her skull would crack against the ground and that injury could result in a death quick enough that any pain it inflicted would be negligible. Still, when I saw her feet move, just the slightest, closer to the edge of the rail and its assurance of support, I took her hand and pulled her gently, almost unnoticeably, towards me. She resisted, her fingers refusing to grasp mine and moved again closer to the edge and further from me. Maybe it wasn’t my place to intervene. Maybe I should have let her have her peace, but her hand felt so frail and warm and soft in mine that I couldn’t bear to let her fall alone and unprotected. Yet I lacked the courage to go with her. So I pulled on her hand harder. She turned at her waist to look down at me.
“Please come down,” I said. My voice was flat, but my eyes were earnest and were locked on hers.
“Sooner or later you will have to let me go,” she replied.
“Later then.” She regarded me quizzically, as if unsure to trust that when the time came I would let her have her death.
“Come, let’s go,” said Laura breaking the trance of our eye contact. Kayla looked briefly to Laura standing beside me and the muscles of her whole body relaxed as she jumped down from the fence onto the sidewalk. She gave me a quick kiss and a brilliant smile so intoxicatingly full of life that no indication remained in her face or body of the graveness of the situation that had just taken place.

Kayla took hold of my hand as we continued our walk to the train station. I glanced at Laura who was walking on the other side of me and looking forward into nothing disconcertedly. Kayla was ok now and happy, but Laura was still unsettled. I understood why, of course I did. Kayla understood as well. We all knew, one day, she would have to die. There was no avoiding the inevitable and there was no means of ascertaining the moment when such an event would occur. It was awful to have Laura’s sad face reminding me that when that day came, we would be quite incapable of protecting the person we loved. So instead, I looked back at Kayla, who was smiling, and smiled back

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