by Bleah Patterson
Every clock will roll back and the bars in town won’t stay open until 7pm anymore, they’ll close at 4pm or won’t even open at all, just to be safe, because by January, dusk will fall by 5:45pm, and the bartenders and busboys will need to make it home before dark. But bars are a luxury—overpriced shakers, long handled spoons that swirl halfway up for reasons we don’t fully understand, a bowl of fresh limes and oranges with some of the peel already removed from old fashioneds past wafting citrus zest for days when you walk by—we can make drinks at home, we can make cots on the living room floor for our friends even when they haven’t had too much to drink, because if one of Them doesn’t get them, a cop patrolling after curfew might give them a ticket. Our friends don’t mind the creak of hardwood, they say it’s good for their aging backs; we can play board games, darts in the closed garages with whirring heaters with nozzles directing fumes outside. Some people have signs out that say “You are NOT welcome” and it’s half a joke, half precaution. Joe down the street has a foosball and a pool table, Becky has her granddad’s antique poker chips. They’re popular for their ability to entertain us. During the winter months, we read more books and binge more television shows, some people hoard newly released video games just for this time of year, and of course there’s always the Internet with its endless games, forums, comment threads, and pornography. We have plenty of ways to stay indoors and stay distracted from what’s outside. The most annoying part, I guess, are the grocery stores and the banks and the laundromats that will use this as an excuse to close at 2 pm, not to be on the safe side but because they can. Until March, the sun will set before dinner and between 5:45pm and 7:15am we will be prisoners inside our homes again. Some call this seasonal depression, but my great-grandmother said that didn't used to mean we couldn’t even go outside.
*
This time of year is hard on Them too though. Sometimes, around sunrise, workers will be heading to their various barista, cook and kitchen prep, grocery bagger, and department store jobs, only to see steam rising from that one bench in Blanchard Park, the one by the edge facing 3rd Street, or falling from the top of a high brick enclosure around the nicer neighborhoods in town, or simply rising from the grass in Main Street's wide median between the crabapple trees. Depending on the weather, some days it’s hard to tell if it’s Their steam or just the morning mist. They know better, of course. This is no accident. They know They need to go back inside, know that around here, the sun rises consistently. But, even for Them, this time of year poses a crisis of identity, a lack of will to go on. So They bask in the sun, burn alive or evaporate into thin air, or both, because we’re not exactly sure how it works since no one has ever seen it happen up close, or at least has never fessed up to it. To the ones who have lost all hope, death is preferable to the monotony of sucking, killing, being villainized in the press. And something about that makes me think maybe we have more in common with Them than most Humans are willing to entertain.
And I wonder about that too, that They are not Humans, but we are. What’s the difference? That They could live forever if They could only endure it? That we die, usually before we are ready to go? It seems like two sides of the same dismal coin. That we have blood to suck and They supposedly do not, that They crave our blood—a compulsion really, if you think about it, there’s no choice in the matter—and we crave only for a life without Them preying on us? I spent a lot of time thinking about how many of Them actually want to suck our blood; surely They could enter our homes without permission if They were truly so nefarious. Instead, we don’t traffic in cattle much here anymore, have resorted to less gory exports like wheat, barley, corn, tomatoes, and chili peppers. We have no more stray dog problems, I’ve even noticed there are fewer squirrels around than before. The geese, ducks, and lone swan in our neighborhood park have slowly gone missing, no one replaces them because that would be cruel, even though some people think we should.
I think about these things a lot these days, obsess, even. Dennis says it’s because I’ve stopped taking my pills. Though he says this is not necessarily a reason to start taking my pills again if I can’t remember to take them consistently. He says, as a consolation, the obsession with Them is “better than the fits.” I echo Dennis to myself as I flip the doctor’s business card with its ratty, worn, gray edges. “It’s better than feeling like my brain is on fire, better than the screaming and the crying and picking fights, better than the days and days of numbness after.” But, I wonder briefly if it’s because he likes some of the obsession. Sure, it drives him nuts when I start pulling my hair out again, or spend another night into the wee hours of the morning doom scrolling through WebMD, or I embarrass us walking into a building because, inexplicably, I have to exit and enter, exit and enter, exit and enter, even if there’s a line behind us. I know he doesn’t like that I cannot stutter in front of a waitress, or I’ll never be able to go back to that restaurant, so he has to do all of the ordering. “It makes me look controlling.” And I know he hates that we can’t have anything close to a spontaneous sex life because the idea of being dirty, and not close to a shower, is almost as bad as risking being caught fucking in the driver’s seat of his Camry in a parking garage, knees in places knees shouldn’t be, hands pressed hard against the glass for stability.
Despite all of that, he knows too, of course, that loving him is an obsession of mine. Remembering, appeasing, and doting are side effects to the obsession that I doubt he has much interest in losing to the pills. There’s also, again, the meltdowns and erratic moods when the pills are not being taken consistently.
Mom says my obsession with Them is because I’ve stopped taking my pills, too. She says this as a reason to start taking my pills again because, “No one deserves to live like this, Honey.” My mother believes that a calm mind is a blank mind, practices a sort of pop-meditation that you can buy from the self-help section of thrift stores, grossly outdated. Admittedly, I didn’t mean to stop taking my pills. I was taking them diligently, they sat in one of those sectioned off containers by the sink with my toothbrush and my foaming face wash, my floss and my daily vitamins. Admittedly, I was single and I was obsessed with taking my obsessive compulsive medication and every other form of self-care, and my doctor said that was a good thing, not a red flag. “You’re bound to obsess, but let’s make it productive and not life-ruining, m’kay?” He chirped. Admittedly, I felt like the only reason Dennis was able to fall in love with me at all was because I was taking my pills, which makes me feel pretty guilty about the fact that I stopped taking them and he’s left with this version of me he didn’t bargain for. A sort of false advertising.
*
Thanksgiving didn’t change much for us, we were always early eaters before They arrived, my grandma used to say. “I think they call it brunch now, we just called it the holidays,” she’d said. Prepping in the kitchen, I agonized over how much sauce was too much sauce for macaroni and cheese. It would dry out, heated and reheated, but it also couldn’t be soupy or Dad would complain about having to eat with a spoon. Dennis watched me from the kitchen bar, pretended to be scrolling on his phone but his peeking eyebrows gave him away as he glanced up to observe my fretting.
“We could always pick up food somewhere, move it to a casserole dish. No one has to know you didn’t cook it.”
I thought he was joking, so I laughed, “My mother would know. She can spot a fake out a mile away. Couldn’t get away with anything as a kid.”
He wasn’t joking though, my fretting was agitating him. He was getting impatient. The lack of necessity in my worry, the way that to him it didn’t matter at all, made him angry. Or, he was trying to spare me the worry altogether. His problem solving often seemed as a means to the end of his own irritation, but he insisted it was an innate desire to spare me my suffering. I didn’t know if I believed him, believed in his or anyone’s goodness enough. Though maybe I could stomach it if he’d at least entertain that it could be both, simultaneously, two birds and one stone.
“We should get going soon,” he said instead. I could hear his keys clank, he wasn’t rushing me, but he was encouraging me to get moving. I added more sauce, stirred it in, winced at the sound of its sloshing. Too much, I thought. Too wet.
*
When I met Dennis, we went out two or three times a week and the routine of my medication and revisiting old workbooks helped a lot. It helped me stop checking my phone incessantly, stopped me sending those annoying and needy “Just checking in,” text messages that had prompted so many guys to dump and ghost me. But then we started spending almost every day together, I started waking up at his apartment and telling myself I’d take the meds and brush my teeth and wash my face, read a book on the patio and meal prep smoothies for the week, when I got home that afternoon. Then, I started staying into the afternoons too, another night without even stopping by my apartment to feed the fish. One day I came home to the fish, all three of them, belly up and I couldn’t flush them for three days because my brain wouldn’t let me. I knew my mental health was going poorly after that, I tried for weeks to bring the pills with me but that inexplicably didn’t help me take them any more regularly. I missed a lot of days, I forgot or I built up some weird block that just wouldn’t let me take them, even though they were right there. I started having flare ups, bad days, pulling my hair out at the scalp again, and again, and again, and lining them up on my thigh and counting them and one getting caught in the wind and having to pluck another to make up the difference. Started flicking off the light again, and again, and again, and of course Dennis understood by now, but also couldn’t hide his wide eyes and then his rolling eyes and then his tired eyes. “Everything comes in threes,” I’d whisper one, two, three times before bed most nights and that’s how I knew it wasn’t just getting bad, that it was bad. I’d forget to take my pills for three days or three weeks, and then take them again for three days or three weeks. I was dysregulated, I was rescheduling doctors’ appointments further, and further, and further out so I wouldn’t have to tell the doctor I was flared up and have him ask me why. “But this isn’t exactly life ruining, I’m in love after all,” I would tell him. “Are you in love with Dennis, are you just afraid of being alone, or are you obsessed?” I could imagine him saying. “Three things can be true at the same time,” I’d snap back, and he’d tell me I needed to start seeing the therapist again.
I didn’t want any of that to happen, but my moods were so up and down. I shook Dennis awake one night, “I can’t feel my heart beating,” I said. “What?” he rubbed sleep from his eyes, reaching for his glasses. He put two fingers to my neck and said, “You’re okay. Your pulse is just fine, Baby. Go back to sleep.” I woke him up again a few hours later, the sky a hazy sort of gray-blue, the light of the phone illuminating my face and bloodshot eyes. “The Internet says I might be having a heart attack, or a stroke. I might be losing oxygen, I do feel a little light-headed. Are my lips blue?” He said, “You look perfectly okay to me, let’s put down the phone,” and he wrapped an arm around me and held me tight and I started to feel that familiar buzzing through my limbs, a sort of tightness in my stomach, and I knew I was having a panic attack. I let him hold me and broke like a wave, in slow motion at first and then crashing into sobs. He kissed my head, “There you go, just breathe.” We fell back asleep, I thought I could hear myself snoring and gave into it.
The next morning, I must have slept through his alarm because he was on a work call in the living room, dressed in office casual from the waist up and in pilled, flannel Betty Boop pajama shorts, in front of his laptop. He eyed me quickly, a small smile, and then back to his screen. I slunk into the kitchen and started the coffee pot, it beeped and I mouthed “sorry” around the corner. He didn’t react, eyes on the screen nodding good-naturedly at a boss or a client who droned on in that dull corporate way. I hung out in the kitchen while the pot simmered, I absentmindedly tapped the side of the glass carafe: one, two, three, and then the counter: one, two, three. I felt the need to tap until the threes added to nine so I tapped the creamer waiting, starting to sweat, on the counter again: one, two, three. I took a deep breath as the coffee maker sputtered to a stop. I poured a cup, added the creamer and stirred: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. No, that didn’t work, again: one, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. Better. I felt sort of hot on the inside and cold on the outside, clammy, I felt irritable and a little jumpy.
Dennis ended his call and I sank into the reading chair across from his set up on the sofa, pulled my feet into the cushion sitting crisscross-applesauce. “So, about last night,” I said, blushed sheepishly. “Yeah, I was thinking about that,” he took a breath in and I felt the mood of the room change, I leaned back and braced myself. “I think if you don’t think taking your meds regularly is possible right now, maybe you should just stop taking them for a while and see how you feel? I think oscillating back and forth is doing more harm than good.” I nodded, I thought about it for a few days. I weighed the pros and cons. I figured that the worst of my symptoms had been alone, or in worse relationships, I thought maybe the stability of Dennis might help quell my worse outbursts and urges. And anyway, this way I wouldn’t have to go see the doctor and tell him where I’d been and how I’d been and who I had been lately.
*
I had been better. That was months ago now. But, I got nervous as the town approached the end of Daylight Savings and all of the stress that included. We grew into a rhythm during spring and summer, we didn’t mind being home by 8:45—sometimes 9pm, in those perfectly long summer weeks—we didn’t seem put out. We hardly remembered that They existed at all. When we saw an article of a recent body found, we said they must have been no good, party girls, drug dealers, or tourists. If anything, it made us feel restrained, smart, superior, that we were happy with the hours we were granted. But as we grew deeper into autumn, winter in view, people grew resentful and grumbled again. “Can’t we exterminate them?” Someone on television would ask rhetorically, “They’re murderers after all, can’t we just line them all up, take a bunch of holy water and garlic and stakes, and get rid of them once and for all?” I didn’t know why, but these conversations made me uncomfortable and I’d said so at Thanksgiving lunch while Dad blared the most recent broadcast.
“Something doesn’t sit right about that. It doesn’t seem that simple, to say they’re all evil and we should just kill them.” Mom rolled her eyes, “Please don’t start, Honey.” But Dad was already riled up, like he’d been waiting. “When are you going to grow out of this phase already?” He turned to Dennis, “Can’t you snap some sense into her? You’re a reasonable man.” Dennis pushed food around his plate with the edge of his fork and forced a smile, “Sorry, sir. She’s hard to sway.” I was annoyed, pushed myself away from the table and went to the kitchen and started filling Tupperware to take home. “We should get going, we like to get settled in before the turkey coma hits and we’re too tired to move.” Mom was joining me, filling up a container of stuffing. “Y’all could just stay the night, couldn’t you? In your old room?” I looked at her and shook my head just barely, “Does Dad mind if we take the last of the green bean casserole? It heats up better than the other sides and it’s Dennis’ favorite.”
“You’re sensitive,” Dad said, looking at Mom, “She’s too sensitive,” he repeated. “You babied her. Indulged too much in these fucking fantasies of hers.” In the kitchen, he grabbed a beer out of the fridge and shook his head as Mom helped me load Tupperware into a paper bag.
“I’m not too sensitive, Dad.” I said this calmly, not looking at him. Trying to shrug him off, feeling my shoulder itch toward a second and a third shrug. I pulled my hand up to hold it down, but it jerked upward anyway. I saw Dad snarl at me. “I’m not too sensitive, maybe you just aren’t sensitive enough. Did you ever think of that?”
That stopped him, “You come and go as you please. Your mother cries because we never get to see you, and then you hear one thing you don’t like and you pack your things and leave. Fucking selfishness. Entitlement. We didn’t raise you like that.”
“Harold,” Mom said. “She just sees the world a little differently than you, we’ve always liked that she’s such a thoughtful girl.”
To that he made a sputtering sound, cracked the lid of his beer and took a long sip while staring directly at me. I felt myself dim under his gaze, felt the room start to lose a kind of focus. I was feeling claustrophobic under his scrutiny, knew that no matter how hard he looked he’d never come to the conclusion of seeing me as I really was. I was all misdirected to him, shooting any talent I had at the wrong things and focusing too hard on validating the parts of me he’d rather forget.
“What good is thoughtful when this is the stuff she’s thinking about?” he motioned widely to the room, but I knew he was talking about Them. About my compassion for the helplessness of the situation, how they were hated for being who they couldn’t help but be.
He was still talking, red in the face, beer dripped down his chin in a frustrated fury.
“You come in here and eat our food, take more home for later. All you brought was a bottle of wine and some dry macaroni and cheese—” “Harold,” Mom chided. “—You ask us to help pay for your doctor visits and then this enabler—” he pointed to Dennis, who seemed to shrink into himself, pretending to look at something out the window, “—convinces you to stop taking your pills anyway. What a waste. No wonder you sympathize with Them. You suck us dry all the same.” I was crying before he finished. Dennis had the keys and was halfway out the door with his hand reaching out towards me. Mom tried to push the bag of food toward me, an apology she could not utter, and I shook my head. “Keep it,” I looked up at my Dad, “Fuck you.”
*
In the car, I’m shaking. Dennis extends a hand, “Hey–” he starts. I slip my arm out of reach and turn up the volume on the radio, feel a sort of gnawing in my stomach and groan as I turn the volume down to complete silence and up to far too loud, down and up, down and up. Dennis rolls down a window. “I’m sorry,” I finally say as I start to breath more calmly, I look out the window and run my tongue along each molar, lingering on the tips in between teeth. I haven’t been to the dentist since they took my braces off in high school ten or twelve years ago. I can’t remember for sure. I become certain that a handful of them have rotted even though I don’t feel pain when I push against them, or do I?
I imagine mine and Dennis’ wedding, not that he’s proposed and I’m not certain why he would with how erratic, how moody, how inexplicably venomous I’ve been to him and everyone else who promises they’re just trying to love me. It’s almost like the more they love me, the more I’m convinced that it’s more malicious than that, and they’re trying to compensate for how much they secretly hate me and want me to strike them. Like a snake, I suddenly have fangs, go for the jugular, so that they can blame me before they can make their motives obvious. I am convinced they talk about me behind my back in group messages, clandestine phone conversations, and while I am in the bathroom.
I think again about the wedding that won’t happen and my teeth, wondering if I’ll be able to smile in the photographs or if Dennis will help me pay for veneers. “Do you think it’s very obvious that your teeth are going to fall out of your head before they do? Or do you think some people’s teeth feel perfectly fine and then suddenly they’re black and you’re left toothless?” Dennis is annoyed, I can tell that now. “I don’t know, you should ask a dentist. Or better yet, just go to one.” And now I’m annoyed and defensive even though I know that I am the one being a handful. “You’re just like my dad,” I say before I can stop myself. “Okay, cool, whatever you fucking say,” is all Dennis says. We don’t speak for the rest of the drive and I feel like I’m going to throw up, a sort of motion sickness sets in, even though I only seem to experience it when someone is angry with me, a moving vehicle is never mandatory. I know what I am feeling is pride, defensiveness, and stubbornness, but all of the self-awareness in the world doesn’t mean that I can bring myself to apologize again.
There’s traffic, and I can see that Dennis is worried we won’t make it back inside before curfew, that we’ll get a fine, or worse. I can tell he wants to talk to me about it, but is trying his best not to, so I take a deep breath and try to extend an olive branch. “This traffic sucks, I guess it’s a good thing my dad was a jerk. We left super early so we don’t have to worry about getting in too late.” He relaxes a little and looks at me out of the corner of his eye, “I guess you’re right. The GPS says we’ll be home a couple hours before dark, even with this stand-still. It should clear up at the next exit.”
When we get home, dusk is starting to fall and the sky is a dark and dim blue and the streets are rumbling like empty stomachs as leaves rustle across the cul-de-sac. I think that the town is hungrier than They are. It’s been a long time since a body has been found, drained with two sharp bites at the jugular, or on the shoulder, back, or chest if there are signs of a struggle. I think back to being a child, sitting around the dining table. My mother couldn’t remember a time when They weren’t a problem, but my grandmother could, or at least she recalled the vivid memories of her mother and father who lived in a time before anyone even thought They were real. “Why don’t we just move?” I’d asked, and my father had smiled at my naivete. “Why should we move? This is our home, they’re the intruders.” I didn’t understand, and my mother just urged me to drink my glass of milk and winked, “Hometown pride is a strong thing, Honey. You’ll get it one day.”
Another time, I’d asked about the teen girl who had been found that morning, already on the news during breakfast. “It’s very sad,” my mother said. “She was so young, such a future ahead of her.” My father grumbled, “I’m not sure what kind of future. Girls shouldn’t be out at night, and you know what they said about her family, the Wilsons? Kind of trashy, don’t even make their kids do their homework on the weekends. She should be at home studying, doing chores, not sneaking out to be with some boy.” I’d never had a desire to sneak out, to do drugs, to steal or join one of the gangs of Hunters who stayed out late at night smoking weed and planning how to catch one of Them, but who never caught anything but a cold, or a misdemeanor when the cops got tired of the old ladies calling to complain about them. I never snuck out with a boy, scattering millet or sesame seeds behind me—a sort of anti-Hansel and Gretel, depending on an old Ukrainian bit of lore that imagined Them as obsessed with counting, incapable of seeing scattered seeds without stopping to count them—to distract them long enough to get a good head start, sneak into a boys window, and leave at dawn. “You’re a good girl though, right?” My mom had asked. “You’d never get caught out at night, so there’s no need to even worry about Them.” And for a long time, I thought that the people who were found—pale and lifeless in an abandoned field, or an empty lot of some business closed for the season, or in the middle of a sidewalk—were bad people, weren’t smart or law-abiding. It wasn’t until I got older, started realizing there were things I just had to do: pinch myself until I drew blood, pluck my hairs until patches grew, check and double check and triple check at the doctor’s office that my stomach ache wasn’t cancer, that I realized that maybe They couldn’t help Themselves, and maybe the people who went out at night couldn’t help themselves either.
*
Dennis is annoyed that night, I can tell because he’s restless. I’ve told him before that I can always tell when something’s wrong—“No,” he bit back once. “You actually can’t. You just always think something is wrong and are bound to be correct every once in a while. A stopped clock, or whatever.”—He fidgets, he can never watch more than twenty minutes of a television show and oscillates between two or three before he finally gets up. When he gets up, sometimes he just paces looking for something he might not even need in the moment, his keys to hang on the hall hook, his allergy pills in case it rains tomorrow, checking to see if his debit card is still in his wallet. This is a pattern. If I told him it was a pattern he would ask why I’m watching, paying attention, what I’m trying to prove. I don’t want to make him defensive so I just watch as, like most nights, he restlessly meanders to the kitchen. He opens cabinets and looks in them for a long time before closing them, looks in a couple more and then returns to the first cabinet and grabs a sleeve of shortbread cookies. “If I didn’t know any better I’d think you’re the one with OCD,” I smirk. “What?” he doesn’t get the joke or didn’t even process what I’d said. “Never mind,” I settle. “Do you want to talk about whatever is wrong?” He doesn’t return to the sofa beside me, but the reading chair in the corner, the show he picked plays on the screen but now he can’t even see it so I switch it off. “Den, please. Talk to me. Something is obviously wrong.” He looks up at me with a mouthful of cookie and shakes his head, “It’s nothing.” I start to feel uneasy and rock side to side on the cushion to feel the spring creak beneath me. Left, right, left. Left, right, left. I don’t get all the way to nine before I look up at him, “Please?” Now he’s not annoyed, he’s angry, and heaves himself up. “I don’t want to talk to you about anything right now. It won’t do any good, just let me get over it.”
I follow him into the kitchen where he returns the half-eaten sleeve, I grab it myself and wrap a twist tie around it. “Well now you have to tell me, Dennis. This is going to eat me up, you know that.” He leans against the counter and runs his hands over his eyes until his face is flush. “I’m just annoyed,” he finally said. “Because of my father?” “No,” he looked up at me. “Because of you. This is all just getting to me.” “What?” I feel anger rising, I’m getting defensive without him even explaining. “This,” he motions toward my body, “this OCD bullshit.” I feel stunned, a weird string of electricity makes its way through me. “You know I can’t control—” “I know,” he says unkindly, snarling. “Oh god, do I know. I know that nothing is ever your fault and you’re just the victim of your own mind, or the subliminal messages you picked up from your parents—did you know I had shit parents too?—and all of the other things they say in the articles you passive aggressively send me, the doctor’s appointments you used to relay like it was no big deal. But do you not understand how exhausting this is? Your fault or not, it’s still driving me fucking nuts.”
It’s not just that Dennis is angry, I’ve seen him angry. It’s that he’s venomous, that he both believes what he’s saying and also wants to deeply wound me with a truth he feels he’s been protecting me from. He passes me in the kitchen and I feel sick, dig my feet into the linoleum and lift myself on my heels: up, down. Up, down. Up, down. I can’t bring myself to move or to speak until I'm finished. “I’m sorry, Dennis.” I finally say even though it’s hard to. “You need to go back to the doctor,” he finally says. This time, strained, but I can tell he’s trying to be gentle. He’s back to protecting me. I wonder how long he can go this time before the resentment spews out again, poisonous and deadly. “Please, can you just go see about getting on meds? And actually staying on them this time so they work? Otherwise—” I don’t let him finish, I’m nodding, walking to him, my hands are on his cheeks. “Okay,” I kiss him. “Yes, okay. I promise I will.” I kiss him again and he returns it and I forget about everything else.
*
The doctor charges me a new patient fee because it’s been so long and the woman who manages the paperwork and appointments and takes my credit card looks smug. When the doctor finally calls me back into his office his look chides me, “Long time no see.” And I try to laugh good naturedly, shrug with my neck disappearing into my upper half, meek. “I know, I’m sorry. I let things go a little too long.” He nods. “It happens, I’m glad you’re back.”
After the visit I’m supposed to go to the pharmacy and pick up a handful of prescriptions, some familiar and some new, some for anxiety and for panic attacks. Some to take daily and some as needed. There’s a reminder of familiar side effects. “You might feel jittery, of course. Like you did last time. You might need to avoid caffeine to keep it from becoming unbearable. Conversely, I don’t know if you remember, but your chart says you suffered from severe exhaustion.” Looking off into the distance at his framed degrees I nod. “Fun,” I say. He doesn’t laugh. “And with the new ones, well, it might seem counterproductive but the ones for panic might make you very depressed, you should let me know if you feel this way.” He continued on about possible interactions between the medications, gave me a card with a hotline for emergencies but also suggested going straight to the ER if I have a bad reaction. I keep nodding, keep staring at his degrees and finally he sends me on my way. I pay at the plexiglass and go back to sitting in my car.
I am supposed to go to the pharmacy, but instead I go home and crawl into bed before Dennis gets home from work. I don’t know how many hours I sleep, but he doesn’t wake me when he comes home and instead my clock reads 4am and Dennis is snoring beside me. I wander out into the living room and see dirty dishes in the sink, pad thai containers in the trash, and I suddenly feel overwhelmed and alone and deeply sad. I don’t know what overtakes me. I dig through my purse and pull out the card from the doctor and type the emergency number in my phone, but I can’t bring myself to call it. So many times before, in moments like these—even that one hospitalization—I said that I just wanted to be saved. My father scoffed, my mother sobbed, “This was all for attention?” she shrieked. And I told my therapist, my parents off having their own pity party, rewriting the story however they wanted, that I guess it sort of was, but didn’t we all need someone to pay attention to us when we’re hurting? I feel a similar feeling now, but I also feel a little bit more like I wouldn’t mind if this all went wrong, if no one noticed, and I was just steam rising up from the sidewalk instead. I feel like I’m just a body and someone else is living inside of me, like a shell or a sleeve that has become occupied by someone with nothing to lose. I wonder, briefly, if I’ve been possessed, either way I feel unable to stop myself from putting on my coat and making way into the dark.
I cannot remember the last time I was outside at night, much less so deeply in the middle of it. I start to wonder if I ever have been, but think that I must have. On a vacation as a child, that year I moved thirteen hundred miles away for school and had to drop out after three months, my parents said because we couldn’t afford the cost of living in a college town, but it was the same year I got my first diagnosis. I am nervous that someone will see me and call the police, thwart me. I am nervous, too, that one of Them will find me and that will be that, but then again isn’t that the point? Miraculously, or perhaps perfectly normal despite what the news would have us believe, I make it to Blanchard Park without incident. It looks ominous and also a little beautiful so late, or rather so early as I start to see the dimmest trace of light off in the distance, behind some corner of the earth’s rotation. I imagine, between some dissociation and the walk, it must be about quarter after five by now. The sun will be rising in half an hour and I suddenly feel like I’ve wasted my time. I see the bench on the edge of the park, facing the street, and I decide to sit down and I truly do wonder what might happen next.
To my mother’s frustration, I have never been good at meditating. The idea of being alone with my thoughts is both unbearably unsettling and breathtakingly boring. I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here. I left my phone at home, but it feels like ten or fifteen minutes and I am feeling antsy. I go to stand up, but find myself having to sit back down. Stand back up and sit down again. Stand back up and sit down, finally feeling a rush of relief. I can leave and go home before dawn. But just as I am about to stand again, someone sits down beside me, heavy, and sighs—sounds annoyed. I look over and see a man. He looks nothing like I might have expected, so different than the cartoons in the newspaper speculate. He doesn’t have an impossibly long, angular face or incredibly pale skin. His features aren’t sunken in shadows and his hair isn’t a glossy jet black. He looks humdrum in fact, pudgy around the middle, full lips and invisible cheekbones hidden behind shapeless fluff, and a perfectly combed over head of ordinary brown hair, so typical that I’m not sure why I ask him at all: “You’re one of Them aren’t you?”
He side eyes me, his hands in his lap. He looks back ahead. “I could ask you the same thing.” A moment passes, I feel giddy and terrified, too stunned by my own luck—or misfortune—to move. Then, I think, “Why aren’t you killing me?” This time, he turns his head and looks at me with perfectly normal looking eyes, perhaps a little bloodshot but no more than taking a hit from a bong might give you. “I kind of came here for some privacy. There’s something I wanted to do.” It’s still dark, but the sky looks more blue than black, and the beginnings of a shimmering dawn threaten to peak out over the horizon. I understand and suddenly feel very calm. “Oh,” I say. And then, “I think I sort of came here for the same reason.” He doesn’t say anything, he shifts uncomfortably. “Hey,” I say. He doesn’t look over. “You don’t think you could like, take me out before you do your thing?” I smile and hope I don’t sound horribly callous. His fingers fidget, he inhales deeply and then cracks his knuckles before shaking his head. “No, I don’t really want to do that.” I laugh, “Oh come on, I do lots of things I don’t want to do all the time. I can’t even help it.” I think that if we’re friends, I could nudge him. “Yeah, I can relate to that.” I think maybe I see him smile.
I think I see him twitch. His body moves ever so slightly closer and he takes a long, deep breath, almost like he’s smelling me. We go back to silence and I get nervous, tap the arm of the bench one, two, three times. One, two, three— “I can hear your pulse,” he says. “It’s kind of distracting me.” And then, “I really did want to be alone.” I look at him again and his eyes are closed, the sky is now more blue, almost purple, like someone has put a filter over everything. “Me too,” I say and then, “I’m sorry.” I don’t know why I do the next thing—I feel again as if my body is being controlled by someone else, like I am a puppet or a toy robot—but I reach over and hold his hand. It’s cold, bitterly cold even, he jerks and looks at me and then down at my hand grasping his. “What are you doing?” I don’t speak. I hold it a little tighter and I squeeze it, one, two, three.