V. Take pills

Her breathing is heavy, it comes slowly like the air is mercury, uneven, using all her energy. Blankets have melded into her; their quilted stitches have stitched themselves into her lids, and they travel, like insects looping through undense air, the stitches form themselves first on her body and then on her eyelids. In the distance a door slams. The looping both gives her a visual focus which gives her something to do and agitates her stomach. Which is empty but still rejects its phantom contents. Her eyes stay closed. She wants to disappear into sleep. On the coffee table are an empty aspirin bottle and water glasses. There is more warmth nearby, wet red warmth on her forehead, and then it is gone. Her consciousness is a watery furnace. She has only seen red for days.

VI. Dear

‘Vee,’ her grandmother had said, lying in fluffy repose, her kindness having earned her a bed near the window, from the nurses who were kind to her indeed. The word came like baby’s breath, like the space between words, but it was all she could do; it could have been an accidental union of her teeth to lower lip. Vee knew it was her name. ‘Nan?’ she’d said, her hand gripping Nan’s as tightly as she could without shattering it. ‘I’m here, Nan.’ Her grandmother’s hair was as thin as a spider web. Her skin looked ready to dissolve into dust. ‘I’m listening.’ Her grandmother had been in hospice for a month. She weighed less than seventy pounds and had not opened her eyes in a week. Vee leaned closer.

‘Let me out…here,’ her grandmother said.

IV. Scarlet

Ben gets lost after work and finds himself in a series of one-way streets leading away from home. Vee snores to the title screen of High Fidelity.

Tara sits in the passenger seat. She is calm. ‘This city was designed by a madman,’ she says, gazing out the window. ‘It’s true. Charles Erwin III was the city planner. In 1888 he proposed using one-way streets in this part of downtown, for the purpose of reducing traffic and promoting walkability. That’s why all these storefronts are here, but they never lasted, because people got lost walking around them. It’s kind of a labyrinth, which contributes to the high crime rate. It’s twice as high as the rest of the city’s neighborhoods combined.’

Ben stares straight, clenching his jaw to keep from scratching her eyes out of her freckled face.

‘The city accepted it, obviously, and began building right away. He designed one more park, the Arboreum, and then committed himself to a mental hospital. He was never released.’

She’s still. She doesn’t have the nervous energy a lot of people have when sitting with a stranger. Her small hands lay carelessly in her lap.

Ben is calm on the outside but raging inside.

‘Isn’t that interesting?’ she says.

‘Where do you live?’ he asks curtly.

‘Keep going. I’ll tell you when to turn. What’s odd is, he, Erwin, never had a crazy moment until the day he committed himself, and then he was never lucid again. His madness was complete. Some people say he was one of the earliest recipients of ECT, though there aren’t any records of that being used in the U.S. until almost fifty years later.’

‘Mm.’

‘We’re going to turn left at the next intersection. Thanks again for driving me. I think I’ll take the apartment.’

Ben’s fiddling with his tie, feeling the rage boil within him, like lava about to erupt; it’s the kind of anger he finds a morbid pleasure in keeping hidden.

‘Fuck you,’ he says under his breath.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Fuck you. You had no fucking right. You’re a manipulative, selfish slut.’

‘I’m sorry you feel that way. I didn’t make you do anything you didn’t want to do.’

‘Give me the pills.’

‘No.’

‘Or you won’t get out of this car.’

Still calm but with a quiver she hands him the baggie.

‘Thank you. We’re here.’

‘Get out.’

II. Memory

‘Vee,’ her grandmother had said through motionless lips, her skin delicate and clinging to her bones like crumpled silk, her breath a miniature burst of moist warmth in the surrounding dryness of a hospice room, ‘Vee,’ using the name she’d adopted as a teenager, and then proceeded to tell her something.

III. Your brain

Ben’s come home with a bouquet of red roses for Vee on the third day she’s sick; he sits with her, tells her he loves her and hopes he doesn’t come down with it too. The next day at work he meets a woman named Tara, while Vee is lying on the bathroom floor watching the ceiling enclose her and periodically sitting up to vomit, missing the toilet once.

‘This is one of the nicest in the complex,’ says Ben, a leasing agent, holding the door for ginger Tara, lithe for her height. ‘Corner unit, cathedral ceiling in the great room, balcony overlooking the pool.’

She turns and her freckles make his stomach jolt. ‘It’s nice,’ she says, looking at him, not the room.

He swallows and walks farther in. ‘New carpets, all walk-in closets…’

She prowls into the kitchen where he tries to show her new appliances. ‘Show me the balcony,’ she says.

And there, overlooking the pool, where he can see his own building’s roof a few blocks away, she pushes him against the railing; she’s soft and orange-hued; she runs her little hands up his back and says in his ear ‘I have something for us.’ Her small fingers with their clipped nails slip in between his shirt buttons and stroke his prickling skin. In her other hand she produces a plastic bag with two little white tablets, each with a little ‘i’ on it.

At this moment is when Vee misses the toilet; a chunk of watery vomit spews onto the floor before she rests her chin on the bowl’s rim, eyes almost shut with fatigue, and then a new wave of full-body gagging wracks her, and more liquid hits the bowl. On her eyelids the wavy gray pattern of brains wiggles across and forms a lifeless maze.

I. Fever

Pastel streaks bristle thick and harsh on the other side of eyelid veils, behind which everything is red and spangled, kinetic static. It is drawing shapes and they revolve. The heat is unbearable but also pleasing. It would be more pleasing if she could find a position to endure it in. Prone is not low enough. She needs to sink into the cushions but the spangles are too hot. She moves. Her body is a long lump of clay. Melting it sticks into the couch. It is coarse and scratches where her skin is exposed. The red black is soft but sharp. She turns. Her eyes are bristly. Behind her her head is molten and thick.

They open. Her vision is liquid but cooling. The ceiling has shapes in it but fading. Sweat coats her burning skin and then the blankets.

Later she stands up and all her weight has transferred to her head. In the bathroom the cold faucet gives like a spring and the walls are caving in. She falls back onto the bristly couch.

Ben is asleep in the other room. He is blue and under a sheet. Above him the square digits say 4:44.

When he comes home from work the next evening she has eaten soup but is unconscious, the title screen of a DVD looping in the corner.