Something Fierce (25 page)

Passion destroys.

Kerri bit down hard, crushing him, igniting a searing, bright pain unlike anything he’d ever known or imagined. It roared through him burning so intensely that he couldn’t even cry out.

Need more proof?

He raged against the clanking metal securing his arms and legs, unable to form words or even sounds.

Kerri began to suck the other testicle. Though he was in agony, an impossible second orgasm poured through him, all fire and torture this time, like hot razorblades slicing and burning until he was ejaculating again, not semen but his memories, his life, his future.

This isn’t real. It’s a nightmare. Wake up. Wake up!

But he couldn’t. It didn’t matter that he knew it was a dream. His eyes itched and violent jags of pain shot through them; they were sucked back into his head, burning, pulsating,
bursting
…he opened his mouth to scream, but again, there was no sound, only scorching pain as everything went black.

You have to wake up, Seth! WAKE UP!

He hit the floor with a thud, groaning into the carpet, his head throbbing, heart racing. It was daylight. He rolled on to his back, breathing hard. There were no handcuffs. He was alone. “Just a dream,” he said, touching himself to make sure. “A nightmare.”

A warning. You’re running out of time.

The horrible images began to disappear and he wanted to let them go, but they were valuable clues he could not afford to waste. He crawled to the nightstand and grabbed his journal and a pen. What was the date? April? No. May. It was May. May something. It didn’t matter. He had to start writing before he forgot the dream. Writing was the only way he could keep things straight these days. It was something he could do; it was some kind of action he could take. It was the only thing he could trust. Even if he was doing nothing more than documenting his descent into madness, he believed it was worth doing and hoped it could somehow lead him back home, back to himself.

That ship already sailed, Captain. There’s no way out of here.

“There has to be.” The first part of the dream, he realized as he wrote, had been a memory. Once when Kerri was going down on him, she’d said the very words she’d said in the dream and she’d asked him to promise and when he hadn’t, she’d caught and held him between her teeth and her eyes had turned cold. It had been only a moment, an instant so quick and fleeting and awful that his mind hadn’t fully processed it before it was gone and she’d continued as if it hadn’t happened.

“But it did happen,” he said, writing as quickly as he could. She had threatened him and changed directions too quickly and completely for him to respond and so at the time, he thought he’d imagined it. Even if he would have protested, stopped her and called her on what he’d witnessed, she would have had no earthly idea what he was talking about, a fight would have ensued and the night would have ended with her in tears and him apologizing once again for accusing her of something completely ludicrous and horrific.

His head was pounding so hard that it was difficult to write. He dropped the journal and pressed the heels of his hands into his temples. He stumbled to his feet and over a scatter of books and dirty clothes making his way to the bathroom for something to stop the pain. He paused to look in the bathroom mirror, barely recognizing the pale, sunken-eyed…

ghost

…his reflection seemed to say. His clothes sagged on him. He looked beyond tired. “Like death warmed over,” he mumbled, repeating a phrase one of his hillbilly cousins had used to describe Aunt Rita in the months before she died. He couldn’t look away as he recalled a lecture he’d written on the doppelganger for his composition class. It foreshadowed tragedy. Both in fiction and in real life, when a person reported seeing their own ghost, they often died shortly after, were murdered…or went insane.

He told himself that he was not insane and he was not hearing voices. Not exactly. At least not the way he imagined serial killers and certified madmen heard voices. These were more like thoughts, not unlike what he heard or imagined when he wrote a story. Sure this voice or rather voices—there were two—were distinct and clear and seemed quite separate from him, but he knew they were not. They were his thoughts, simply other sides of himself. It was perfectly normal in times of great stress—

Right. Whatever you say, Professor. But this ain’t no funhouse mirror you’re looking into. This is what you look like now. This is what’s happening to you.

That was the taunting, angry voice. Both voices had spoken to him in the dream. The taunting one had told him that passion destroys and the other one had demanded he wake up. The second voice was angry too but it seemed to be more on his side. It was the voice he’d heard first. The night of the party. The night Kerri fell down the stairs. Weeks ago now. Five weeks ago? Six? It was the one that accused Grammy of putting on a performance that night and called bullshit on Grandpa’s stories. And it didn’t trust Kerri.

The taunting voice was also born that evening. After Kerri’s fall. When Seth had been kneeling over her at the bottom of the stairs, the voice had told him that it was his fault, that he’d purposely knocked her down the steps because he was angry at her and he was drunk. It haunted him with the awful images and sounds of Kerri’s fall even though she had suffered no permanent damage. The blow to the back of her head had left her unconscious and caused a concussion serious enough for the hospital to keep her overnight, but other than being sore and bruised for a few days, she had come out clean. It was a miracle that she hadn’t broken her neck, the doctors had said, and ended up paralyzed or dead.

Everyone believed that she had simply lost her balance. Kerri claimed to have no memory of it whatsoever but one night in her sleep, she’d muttered, “I know you didn’t mean it, baby. I forgive you.”

Those first couple weeks after the accident had been like a new beginning. The weekends had been as amazing as before only less illicit somehow, more sweet. When Kerri confessed the age difference to her mother, as promised, it caused a slight ripple through the family, but it was more shock than anything else. No one treated him any differently. Their first impression of him had been a good one and it was strengthened by the hours they’d spent together in the emergency room. “I told you,” Kerri had said. “It’s not what you tell people; it’s how you tell them. Sometimes you have to lie to get to the truth.”

It was statements like that that triggered the uneasiness he’d been feeling before the accident and started their fighting again. Whatever was wrong with him had progressively gotten worse. The only time he felt good, the only time he didn’t feel crazy, the only time he could think clearly or feel like the man he used to be was when he and Kerri were together and getting along. The rest of the time, he was increasingly obsessed with her. When she was gone—as she usually was on school nights, or worse when she stormed off after an argument and ignored his calls and texts—he was possessed with thoughts of her. He didn’t sleep and he felt anxious and paranoid and heard the voices or thoughts or whatever they were. Drinking was the only way he got through those nights without Kerri. While it sometimes increased the anxiety and paranoia, it usually calmed him down. Intellectually, he knew it was bad for him, but it was the only relief he had. That, and trying to sort things out in his journal. Even the sleeping pills were of little use. They would put him to sleep, but not keep him asleep for long and they gave him nightmares like the one he’d had this morning.

He stood there, looking at himself in the mirror, trying to remember why he’d gone into the bathroom. “Aspirin,” he said, opening the cabinet. There were none. He remembered then that he’d finished them the other day and had forgotten to get more.

He should eat. He wasn’t hungry but couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten and food would definitely help the headache and make it easier for him to keep things straight.

He picked up the journal and surveyed the bedroom. It was as cluttered and chaotic as his mind, which had, for months now, been playing tricks on him. And yet, that same mind was working day and night, exhausting itself, refusing to sleep until some sort of explanation could be reached, until it was at least partially understood how he’d gone from the man he used to be to the fucking mess he was now.

Upstairs, the refrigerator held mostly condiments: ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, two pickles floating in a jar of green juice, nine cans of beer, and some milk that was probably spoiled. The cupboard was empty except for a half loaf of bread, stale, but not yet moldy. He sniffed the milk, definitely spoiled, and dumped it down the drain. He searched for his wallet. The credit cards wouldn’t be of any help because they’d all been maxed out after a second doctor visit where he’d agreed to a battery of tests—very expensive tests—but he was pretty sure there was a ten dollar bill in there that would buy something for him to eat. After not finding it in any of the usual places, he decided to make do with what he had.

He tossed the bread on the counter. From the fridge, he added a can of beer and the condiments.

You’re running out of time. Focus.

“The voices started the night of the party,” he reminded himself, breaking the pickles in half and lining the four pieces across a slice of bread. He’d been planning to put some space between himself and Kerri right before the party. In fact, he hadn’t planned to go to the party at all.

So what happened?

He left the food and went to his journal. He flipped through it until he found what he’d written about that evening. There’d been a problem with her phone and he hadn’t been able to get through. When he’d gone to tell her in person, she’d been very upset over a friend who had overdosed on drugs.

Has she ever mentioned that friend again?

“No,” he said, squeezing a blob of ketchup onto a second slice of stale bread, then adding a glob of mustard and another of mayonnaise and mixing them like an artist mixing paint on a palette. He put the pieces of bread together, pressed them into a sandwich and took a large bite.

And what about the website?

“There is no website,” he said.

There was one. Until it magically disappeared.

It had been a school night. He and Kerri had been apart and he’d been drinking pretty heavily. It had been one of the nights that the drinking wasn’t relaxing him but was instead inflaming his obsession. In the small hours of the morning, he’d found himself at the computer researching Kerri on the web, looking for what, he didn’t really know.

Kerri had never mentioned a website. In fact, she’d often bragged that she was the only person she knew who didn’t “waste time” on social networking sites. And yet, during that night of cyber spying, he’d found a full-blown personal website. The profile picture had been the one her mother had taken of the two of them the night they’d gone to the orchestra, only he’d been cropped out. There was a quote from Sylvia Plath: “Kiss me and you will see how important I am.” Beck’s “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometimes” from
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
played quietly in the background.

There’d been dozens of pictures of Kerri and her friends but not a single picture of him. Also, there’d been favorite movies—all from their list—music and books. Seth’s own book had made her impressive list of “good reads,” but there’d been no indication that she knew the author anymore than she knew Nick Hornby or Joyce Carol Oates. She’d listed herself as single and her page was linked to over four hundred “friends.” Mostly men: single, married, divorced, men of all ages, all styles. Even the infamous freak—the one who had frequented her store and had a red-eyed gargoyle tattooed on the side of his head—was represented there. His name was Levi.

When Seth had confronted Kerri on the website and described the details, she’d begun to cry. He’d thought it was because he’d caught her in the “other life” he’d sometimes suspected her of her having, but it was because she was certain that he’d gone over the edge, lost his mind. “Honey,” she’d said, her eyes wild with fear, trying to reason with him, “why the hell would I have a website? That doesn’t even make sense. Don’t you see that everything you described was something I’ve told you or something we’ve shared? And if I did have a website for some crazy reason, you would know about it; you’d be all over it!” She’d started crying hard then. “Seth, please,” she’d said, touching his face, “we have to do something.” He’d knocked her hand away and flew into a rage, calling her, among other things, a goddamned liar. He’d grabbed her by the arm and dragged her across the room to his laptop. She’d curled into the fetal position on the floor while he pulled the website up. Or rather tried to pull it up. It was gone…or as she’d said, never existed at all.

It was after this incident that he’d made that second doctor’s visit. Was it possible, Seth had asked the doctor privately, to really have imagined something as detailed and elaborate as the website in a drunken, sleep-deprived fog? “Absolutely,” the doctor had said, very concerned, not only about the forgetfulness and the confusion, but his health overall. He’d lost a lot of weight in a short period of time and his blood pressure and heart rate were all over the place. She said she needed to run tests to determine the possible causes so they’d know how to treat him. He’d explained that he had no insurance, but the doctor insisted that doing nothing could have dire consequences. When he’d asked her to explain “dire consequences,” she rattled off a list of horrors topped by a possible stroke.

So, without insurance, Seth had agreed to the tests which had revealed that there was nothing physically wrong with him other than his body was suffering from too little sleep, too much alcohol, and a tremendous amount of stress (which the tests themselves greatly increased by putting him several thousand dollars in debt).

The doctor had prescribed something to stabilize his blood pressure, insisted he start taking the antidepressants she’d prescribed on his first visit, and gave him free samples of a new sleeping pill.