Where I End and You Begin (9 page)

We both gasp.

Beyond the doors is a huge room, full of light. A ward. Just as it must have been when the hospital was in commission, except now dead leaves and dust blow across the floor, and tatters of old hospital linens, still clinging to the rusty skeletons of the old beds lining the walls, flutter in the chill breeze coming in from the broken windows.

Without a word, Daniel lifts his camera and begins to snap pictures, and when he’s done we press forward.

We walk among the decay, taking it in. It’s the little touches that startle me, that give me an unsettled feeling. On one of the beds is an old teddy bear with no eyes. There is a shoe beneath another, missing its mate, now and forever, and when I reach the end of the room I find a wheelchair there, facing the window that looks out on the small courtyard in front of the hospital, as though someone left it there, just in case some unquiet spirit wanted to sit a spell and watch the world spin on without them.

Suddenly I realize why this place gives me such a strange feeling. I am in the ghost of a building. A fitting place for someone as strung up between the past and the future as me. I’m
in between,
too, and it’s rare that anything outside of myself so perfectly aligns with my inner landscape that I am taken aback.

If I’m ever truly homeless,
I think,
I will come here. I will lie on these disintegrating beds. I will pace the rotten floors. I will look out the windows, and people will see me, and know they are seeing a ghost.

“So you know ghost stories?” Daniel says suddenly from behind me.

I start and turn. He is staring at the rags on the old beds, the mattresses rotting through.

“Yes,” I say.

“Tell me a ghost story,” he says. “About a hospital.”

I frown at him. “You said that was morbid.”

“I said dead babies and dead mothers were morbid.” He gives me a strange look. “But right now... I don’t know. It feels like I should know about them. Like I’m walking on unmarked graves.”

That’s
morbid, I want to say. But I don’t. Instead I look up at the windows and the gray sky outside, the overgrown courtyard, the weeds and the trees, their leaves fluttering away, stripping them down to the bone.

“So here’s a story,” I say. “There was this guy, who tried to commit suicide with a gun to the head. But the caliber was too small or something, and even though he had a bullet in the brain, he was still breathing. So he was rushed to the hospital and put on life support, but the doctors knew that as soon as he was off life support the brain would swell up and he would die. So they had his family come through so they could say goodbye to him. Only his daughter, she was a little girl... she refused to go. She didn’t want to see him like that.

“So after the family comes and says goodbye, they take him off life support and let him pass. Except later that night the call button in the room is pushed, and a nurse goes in to see him. And he’s sitting up, wide awake, and he says, ‘Where’s Annie? Where’s my little girl?’ The nurse doesn’t know what to say, so she tells him Annie will be there soon before rushing out to get the doctor, but when they get back the man is dead.

“After he’s gone, they clear out the room, but the next night the call button comes on again, even though the room is empty, and the nurse goes to turn it off, but she sees the man standing there in his hospital gown, at the window, and he says, ‘Where’s Annie? Where’s Annie?’ Over and over again like that.

“This was a different nurse, so she goes to tell someone that there’s a patient in the room, but of course when they come back he’s gone. And he stays in that room, and every once in a while he’ll reappear, asking for his daughter. But she never comes because no one wants to tell a little girl the ghost of her father is lingering in the hospital waiting for one last glimpse of her... so he stays there and waits.”

Silence fills up the ward. Daniel isn’t looking at me. He’s studying the dry leaves skittering across the floor and gathering in the corners. There’s a heavy, musty smell in the air, and when he reaches out to touch one of the old beds, trying to lift the sheet away, the linens break, so stiff and fragile from years of disuse and the elements that they have decayed into dead plant matter. They fold, disintegrate, their molecules rising into the air, flying out into the world, disorganized and meaningless.

“That was horrible,” he says, watching the dust rise.

“You asked for it,” I say. “There are plenty of things that are real that are way more horrible than that.”

He doesn’t answer, just stares at the sheet falling to pieces in his hand.

“Hey.”

We both turn to see Jibril in the doorway. He gives the ward an appreciative look. “Nice. We should have stayed down here. The floor upstairs is so rotten we didn’t want to trust it.”

I heard your footsteps,
I want to say, but it was probably just the building settling as night comes on.

“Anyway,” Jibril continues, “we should get going. It’s starting to get dark.” He sighs. “It’s better to do this in the early afternoon on Sundays, but I’m out of here tomorrow morning until Sunday night.”

“Going home?” I ask him.

He nods. “Just a weekend. Good to get away, get some home-cooked food, do all that midterm shit.”

“Right,” I say. It sounds nice. I wonder if I could borrow Jibril’s family for a while.

Daniel turns to me. “Shall we?” he says, gesturing to the door, and the spell of my ghost story is broken.

“Sure.” I step toward him. “So you’re coming over tomorrow to help me study, right?”

He nods. “A promise is a promise,” he tells me.

“You’d be surprised how often that isn’t true,” I tell him. Then I walk past and follow Jibril down the hall.

I
dream of the hospital that night. Dreams are a
bardo.
You can get caught in them, suspended between one life and the next, unable to move on. Dreams are full of danger.

In my dream, it is many years ago, but the hospital is the same as I saw it only the day before. Patients shuffle from tattered bed to tattered bed. Doctors and nurses bend over an operating table covered in dust. The windows blow out as though in a great wind, and the air is full of glass.

Then the hospital changes, and it becomes modern but empty, and I am running down the halls, searching, searching for the right room, the room where he should be, but I can’t find it, and all the doors fly open around me, the floor dropping away beneath my feet, and the whole world is full of holes.

S
aturday.

I wake up full of cobwebs and strange, creeping feelings, the remnants of my dream. It’s a struggle to open my eyes and to breathe, to expel the nervous thoughts scrabbling around in my brain.

When I finally get my eyes open, I roll over and check my text messages. There’s one from Daniel.

Ten o’clock?

I check the time. It’s nine thirty.
Ugh.
This is because I went to bed at a reasonable time last night. Exploring the old hospital had left me drained, and I went to bed at midnight. Now I was awake
in the morning.
On a
Saturday.

If I had it my way, I’d wake up at two in the afternoon every day, but I’ll settle for weekends. Already I can tell pulling out of my death spiral is going to put a serious kink in my schedule. I text him back.
Ten is fine. Thanks.

Then I roll out of bed.

Tanya’s still sleeping, so I slip down the hall and take a quick shower before trying to silently gather all the materials I need for my classes. When I’m ready, I haul the whole lot of it down the stairs and into the lounge across from the kitchen. One advantage of waking up early, I
suppose,
is that I get to claim the whole table to myself. I leave my shit there and wander into the kitchen.

Alice is there. “Hey,” she says. She’s making herself some cereal, and my stomach growls hungrily. She notices. “You want some?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I think I have some Chef Boyardee up in the cabinet.”

“For breakfast?”

“I usually don’t eat breakfast on the weekends. It’s
usually
my lunch.”

She nods. “So what are
you
doing up so early?”

“Daniel’s coming over to help me study for midterms.” I open one of the cabinets and peruse the shelf with my name on it. Just my luck, beef ravioli.
Awesome.
I pull the can down, grab the little saucepan that I think I may have accidentally stolen from someone last year, and set about cooking my breakfast.

“Daniel, huh? He seemed pretty cool.” Alice is still standing in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and shoveling Cocoa Puffs in her face as she watches me. “Where’d you find that guy?”

I’m not sure how to answer that. “My holocaust class.”

“Sounds depressing,” she says.

“It is.”

“Are you guys dating or something?”

I press my lips together. “No. He’s sort of... mentoring me.”

She laughs. “Mentoring. Right.”

I roll my eyes at her. “It’s not like that. Trust me.”

“Okay,” she says. “I trust you. So did you have fun yesterday? You were kind of quiet on the ride home.”

I’d been driving while Daniel had shared his photos with Alice and Jibril, but she’s sort of right. The hospital had left me with a strange feeling, and it made me quiet and contemplative. It stirred up thoughts I wished would stay buried. “Just thinking,” I say. “But I did have fun, I guess. I mean, I’d like to do it again, definitely.”

She brightens up at that. “Really? That’s awesome! We should do it as a regular weekend thing!”

I’m not sure I’m ready to commit that far, but before I can answer someone knocks on the front door of the house. I still have ten minutes to eat my breakfast, so I let Alice answer it.

I’m just pulling my canned ravioli off the stove when Daniel walks in. He takes one look at the pan in my hand and shakes his head.

I scowl at him. “You have a better idea?”

“Eggs?” he suggests. “Toast?”

I laugh at that. “I don’t usually have breakfast. This is my lunch. I’m just eating it early.” I grab one of my spoons from my shelf and begin to shovel ravioli into my mouth.

“You’re not going to get a bowl?” Daniel asks.

“I had a bowl,” I say. “Someone broke it. They gave me a pack of cigarettes in exchange.”

“You’d better be careful,” he says. “I might start to worry about you.”

I raise an eyebrow. “You’re not worried about me now?”

“No need, now that I’m here,” he says, but he’s grinning as he says it and I know he’s teasing me.

“Great. You can go take my exams, then.”

“I’m on sabbatical. I can’t do anything that resembles schoolwork. It’s a rule.”

“What are you going to do while I study?”

“Read a book.” He holds up a paperback. It’s
Moby Dick.

“Seriously?” I say. “That’s not schoolwork? You’re reading that for pleasure?”

“It’s hilarious,” he says. “Trust me. If you’re lucky I’ll read you some good lines while you study. Which you should be doing right now.”

“Let me finish my breakfast!”

“Finish while you study,” he tells me. “Brain food.” He glances at my ravioli. “In a manner of speaking.”

I sigh and show him to the study table.

An hour later I am sitting in the lounge, my hands fisted in my hair. All my books and papers and notes are spread around me, and I am starting to panic. I’ve been studying for an hour, and the despair is starting to set in.

“Everything okay?”

I glance up. Daniel is lying on the couch at the other end of the room, reading his book. He doesn’t even seem to be looking at me, though he has laughed out loud once or twice.

“How can you tell I’m flipping out?” I ask.

“You’re whimpering under your breath,” he says.

Whimpering. How attractive.

“You are extremely worried,” he continues.

“Really?” I can’t help but snap at him. “It’s just life or death.”

“I don’t think it’s that dramatic,” he says.

I say nothing. To me, it is.

He tries another tack. “You are just borrowing trouble from the future if you psyche yourself out about it now. Relax.”

“I don’t get that,” I say. “How can people say that? Of course I’m borrowing trouble from the future. The past affects the present. The present affects the future. Whatever happens now will be in the past and in the future I’ll be like, ‘shit, if only I’d whipped myself a little harder I wouldn’t be giving hand jobs for crack, thanks a lot, past-me.’“

Daniel just shakes his head, and I can tell he thinks there’s no use arguing with me. But I want to argue. It’s way better than studying, and far less terrifying.

“I don’t know how I’m going to do this.” I flip my notes over, searching through them, but I’ve always been unorganized. Everything is flyaway, disordered. I have only the vaguest ideas what to study for, and I have to write ten pages for at least one class. I’m doomed.

“Just take it one class at a time,” he tells me. “Look at the notes you have, recopy them by hand, and then move on.”

“That would be good advice if I didn’t spend half my time in class drawing little comic strips in the margins.”

That gets him to look up from his book. “What kind of comic strips?”

I hold up my notes for one of my gen ed classes, a class on enlightenment and post-enlightenment philosophy. “Like this one about Nietzsche,” I say. “I know in class that day the lecture was something about slave mentality and the will to power or someshit, but all these little sheep are saying in their speech bubbles is ‘Fuck eagles!’ and ‘Let’s subvert enlightenment thought!’“

Daniel grins. “You know,” he says, “that’s a very good summary of the Genealogy of Morals.”

“You’ve read it?”

He nods. “Don’t worry. Just study.”

“I don’t want to study. I want to go poke around in haunted hospitals again,” I tell him.

He lowers his book to his chest and tilts his head. “You do?”

I look back down at my notes. “Yeah,” I say. “I... I had a dream about it last night.”

“What kind of dream?”

I shake my head. All day I’ve been feeling weird, as though I have been knocked out of place and now I lie askew across the parallel lines of the world. “It was just a dream. But the actual exploring was kind of fascinating.”

“I agree,” he says, surprising me. “I’d like to do more, too. Some of the photos I got were out of this world.”

Out of this world. That’s for goddamn sure.

“Do you want to go with me?” I ask him. “Let’s go. There’s all sorts of places out here.”

He frowns, just a tad. “That wouldn’t be... professional.”

I blink, stung. “What? Am I paying you?”

“No...” he says. He seems worried for some reason. “It just wouldn’t be... appropriate.”

“You went yesterday,” I say.

“That was different,” he says.

“How?”

“It just was. It wouldn’t be appropriate to go again.”

“But it would be awesome. I don’t want to go alone. I’ll fall down a stairwell and die. Actually, I’d go alone if you didn’t go with me, and I’ll fall down a stairwell and die, and it’ll be your fault because you weren’t there. What do you say to that?” I’m not sure why I am trying to get him to agree. He’s nosy and interfering and has some sort of complex, I’m sure. But he’s nice. And kind of funny. Easy on the eyes. And he let me tell him a ghost story. And he doesn’t talk all the fucking time.

I don’t want to admit it, but he’s right. I need someone to be quiet at me for a while.

He sighs. “We’ll discuss it after you finish studying. Which reminds me. What’s your major?”

I color. “History,” I say. It’s one step down from English as an employable major.

“That’s good,” he tells me. “History is fascinating.”

“Especially the really gruesome parts,” I say.

He purses his lips. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

I shrug. “Did you know Anne Boleyn was supposed to have three nipples?”

He lets out a surprised laugh. “No, I can’t say I was ever privy to that information.”

“Right? That’s a sordid little detail no one ever talks about. And what about the Black Death.”

“What about it?”

“Like whole towns died. Every single person.”

He frowns.

“See?” I say. “History. Just as funny as
Moby Dick.
”

He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Just study. You’re getting sidetracked.”

With a sigh, I know he’s right and I try to buckle down. I try not to think longingly of a glass of wine to drink while I study. Just one would help me relax, would keep me from jumping out of my skin with anxiety. Everything rides on this. Sort of a do or die moment, I guess.

I sneak a glance at Daniel, but he’s buried in his book again. I could get up, tell him I’m going to go to the bathroom, and sneak some wine or a swig of that awful whiskey in my room. Just a little something to make me unwind. I’m going to go crazy, looking at all these notes that make sense, but only when I’m reading them, and half of them I was hung over or still drunk from the night before. The other half are a series of disconnected words and phrases, vaguely outlining the concepts. Could they be the basis for an in-class essay exam? I don’t even know.

I’m winding up again, tight. I sneak another glance over at Daniel. He lazily turns a page. I glance back down at the notes from my Vichy France class.
Black market,
and
small farms,
and
rations—
it all makes sense in my head, but I have no idea if I can actually put that sense into words on paper.

I’ll go into class. I’ll sit down. I’ll write up my essays. And if they aren’t good enough, I won’t get an A.

No A, no hope to pull my GPA up.

No GPA, and I’m back home again.

Back home again...

I’m going to fail.

I stand up, without quite meaning to. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I say.

“Take five,” Daniel tells me. He doesn’t even look up.

I walk out of the lounge, through the small hall, and into the foyer.

It’s still a quiet Saturday morning. No one is up.

I climb the stairs.

I shouldn’t do this,
I think. It’d be stupid to do it. I have all I need to succeed in front of me, I don’t
need
to feel better about things. Numbing the fear is what got me to this point in the first place, isn’t it? Give someone enough morphine, and they’ll work themselves to death without feeling the pain. Destroy the fear, and you destroy the drive to survive. The wires are cut, the warnings never go off.

The steps creak under me, and I reach the top landing.

I’m not really doing this,
I think.
I’m really not. I should go to the bathroom instead, like I said I would.

I put my hand out, find the doorknob. I turn it and sneak inside. Tanya is still asleep, passed out on her mattress.

I tiptoe across the floor to the closet. Twitching the curtain aside, I peek in, my eyes immediately finding the bottle of whiskey half hidden under a pile of shoes.

I hate whiskey. Or perhaps I hate eleven dollar whiskey. This whiskey is terrible, and yet I’ve already drunk about half of it. I drink it when there’s nothing else to drink. It’s hard not to puke it back up immediately. I should never, ever want to drink this shit. Ever.

But of course I am on my hands and knees, pulling it out from under my oh-so-hipster-retro saddle shoes.

I look at it. The bottle is cradled in my palm, a heavy, shifting weight as the liquid inside rocks back and forth.

Don’t do this,
I tell myself.

I turn to look at Tanya.
Wake up,
I think.
Wake up and stop me.

But she doesn’t.

My fingers are on the lid, unscrewing it. It comes away in my hand, and the sharp, acrid smell of terrible, cheap alcohol hits my nose.

I bring it to my lips. With just one hit, I can make the fear go away.

And then I think:
Will Daniel smell it on my breath?

I slam the lid back on, screw it on tight, and drop the bottle on the floor. Turning, I sprint to the door, exit as quietly as possible, and run.

Then I am in the bathroom, and I don’t know how I got there. My hands are empty, but I think I should be holding something, and panic is in my brain, infecting me. I try to get out, but I turn the wrong way and slam into the shower stall at the end of the room. The impact brings me back into the moment. I turn and sprint out of the bathroom and then pound down the stairs, running, running, running into the lounge.