Frames Of Reference- Chapter 7

~nsequeira119

No words are exchanged between us, none need to be.

She’s sitting on the couch, one of those cheap cozy mystery novels in tow, no doubt checked out from the Pueblo Library, which she seems to be frequenting more and more these days during her off hours. Her left hand is dipped into a freshly opened bag of goldfish crackers, she’s getting crumbs everywhere and periodically looking up at the TV. Some muffled late-night interview. I decide it’s best to leave her alone.

I pass the living room and enter the kitchen, pull out a carton of milk. It’s halfway empty. I decide on a whim to drink all of it straight from the jug, something I haven’t done since childhood. Shit, I’m hungry. Or I need protein, or calcium. Regardless, those concerns can wait. I chuck it into the bin and head upstairs to get ready for bed. I check my watch. 1:20 A.M. It’s going to be quite a day tomorrow.

I won’t need to go into the office to sort forms anymore. Now is the waiting period, the time to relax, to process what I've observed, filter it through my weary sieve consciousness. Weigh my options. She’ll wake up, first thing, and she’ll wonder why I’m sleeping in, but she’ll need to get to her post and treat wounds and administer to patients and all the other things she does so well.

It occurs to me that I don’t do any of those things anymore. I knew the move would entail the beginning of a new chapter, but it seems as if the less I’m around pain the less a threshold I have for it. I’m becoming detached, inauthentic, empty. I’m being scooped out like a watermelon, everything that I was is being gradually replaced by something else, something new and different.

I look into the mirror at the long, dark bags under my eyes, the bags that have been there since I was born, a genetic condition I’ve tried to shake with supplements and creams and ointments, none of them having any noticeable effect. I’ve always looked tired and sallow.

I’m 12 years old and I’m attending public school in Queens, taking the subway each way, every car filled with strangers who will be gone tomorrow, shafts of light piercing across me as the cars cross into the stations, and someone down the row of plastic seats remarks how distinctly Sicilian in appearance I am.

I focus in particular on what’s behind me, on the pearl bathtub with the ornately stenciled feet, the pristine pink curtains, the ivory walls. None of these things are mine, none of them reflect who I am. They say when you move you need to establish your territory, make a place your own, decorate it to your liking. It dawns on me that I don’t even know what my liking is. I’m a complete stranger to myself in a place I know nothing about.

I pad slovenly down the hallway, past the degrees that mean nothing and the perpetual swinging clock, and find that Sheila has beaten me to the punch, she’s already exhausted beneath the sheets, tired from a day of commitment to the common good. I climb in beside her, notice trace amounts of goldfish dust on her lips. She’s snoring smoothly and continuously. Her snoring isn’t disruptive, though- it’s calm and peaceful, little respiratory purrs which endear me to her all the more. She’s an anchor.

The events of the day fade, my worry subsides, I’m drifting out on a boat, calm winds and quiet clouds passing above, the moon is in full splendor and every blade of grass is coated in dew. Moisture. There’s something I haven’t seen in abundance for some time. Humid atmosphere, condensation collecting on my cheeks, rain falling, creating concentric circles on the waves. Beautiful.

I close my eyes and the shore recedes into the distance, the creaking of the wooden hull and the boards with their lacquered temperament, and the waves lapping. I take a deep breath, feel my stomach muscles contract and relax, the physical form of the boat under the pads of my fingers. It’s as real as anything.

The ambient noise stops, the cicadas chirping high up in the boughs of the cottonwoods abruptly come to a halt and I’m in a sitting position, my fingers are resting on a flat synthetic surface, the air is stale and frigid.

I hear my own voice erupting from some tinny device roughly seven feet above my head:

“You have nobody to blame for this but yourself.”

I try to scream, but my mouth is filled with some sort of sickly plastic substance, it gushes down my throat before turning off momentarily to allow an oxygen intake. My vocal cords are inoperative, and when I open my eyes all I can make out is a featureless aluminum surface punctuated by rotating spots of light- illusory whirling spirograph patterns, the result of years of involuntary blindness.

My voice is cold, distant, it reverberates through wherever I am. There’s a dull thud against the two-way mirror in front of me, as if someone is hitting it, again and again, trying to enter against my will, trying to make their way into my sanctuary. Every time the thud hits, I jolt upright, my brain being assaulted by the noise and the lights and the static, which fills my head, I’m frying in a microwave, burning in the sensation of life.

Oh, the static. The cosmic microwave radiation, my only close companion, little grains of rice that keep me satiated, in their infinite chains of fractal complexity. They surge in vibrancy and hue as the pulsing thud intensifies-

“This is all your fault.”

The two-way mirror shatters to pieces with a final resounding impact, one shard catches me in the cheek, sending rivulets of warm blood cascading down my neck, another rips the visor from my brow and right before the whole edifice comes tumbling down, and the whatever from the great horrible maw beyond rips inside to tear me, limb from limb, I catch a fleeting glimpse of myself in the glass-

I’m a skeletal, malnourished being with sunken holes where eyes should be and cheeks that are so indented my face is only three inches wide at the most, morlock hair like cheap yarn. A vision of death. That’s how you look in the casket, when the worms crawl in and begin eating you, feasting on your formaldehyde-laden carcass and you’re no longer a person.

My eyes fly open, I’m breathing rapidly, gulping air faster than my lungs can process it, trying to come to terms with what I’ve just seen. My entire body is beaded with sweat, I’m a frantic mess. I grab hold of something. The comforter. Swing my arm wildly over to where Sheila should be. Nothing, just empty space. She left an hour ago, got to get down to the hospital. No time to wake up, to hug, to reconcile and to look into her eyes and to know that I’m not alone. I am very much alone.

It’s morning and the beams of sunlight are hitting my face, dust streaming in through the eastern window shades in little slits, glass of water on the side table along with an aspirin which I promptly swallow with urgent desperation.

It’s 9 A.M. in Pueblo West, outside I can make out the noise of a midsize sedan kicking dust up and the light chirp of the songbird, a street with little activity. I sit on the edge of the mattress, head held in one hand, folding the cup with the other, mouth still dry and tingly and without relief. I’m staring blankly out into the hallway with the degrees and wondering how my brain is capable of conjuring up such dark things.

All dark things have their basis in fact. All light things have an equivalent wriggling in the depths, this is the balance of the world, the axiom upon which we rotate. For the equation to operate properly, the positive must be canceled out by the negative. Equilibrium.

The cup falls from my fingers and I collapse back down and I cry like I’ve never cried before, tears streaming effortlessly down the bridge of my nose, long sobs punctuating the stillness of the dawn in air raid siren glory, tan walls barely discernible through the crystalline mucus squint, and outside the rising ball of evil orange wax climbs to its supreme position in the deep blue oxygen depths above.