CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I didn't know where reality ended and truth began, and that was a fact. If facts can even be facts. How did one really know truth from a lie, reality from imagination? Was there such a difference? A psychiatric methodology course I took years ago spent most of the semester looking at these questions. I had hoped at the conclusion of the class there would be light at the end of the tunnel, but of course I was only left with more questions. Reality – could it be defined? How does one know and understand reality? Is reality the same for everyone, is it different? Was it possible for things to be real? Relationships, actions? Was life just one long rabbit hole, with a depth unknown? Did most people spend their life merely looking down into that bottomless pit? Was it only those we deemed mentally ill who actually climbed in?
I didn't have the answers. I didn't know if I wanted them. Truth always seemed that much harder to swallow. Lies were easy. Cushy. Simple.
I didn't know how long I had been hooked up to the MEI machine. It could have been a lifetime or only minutes. The pain funneled through my body, lighting me up from the inside, scrambling my mind around until it was forced to produce the images that had been bidden. I relived Maria's death. I relived the funeral and Maria's mom's words: "It should have been you." I relived those lonely days after Maria's family had moved out and we were the only family at the end of Wuthering Lane, when I missed having a friend to play with.
I relived the relationships I'd had in college, the one with Anthony, and other short relationships that had amounted to nothing more than bad sex and loneliness. But then, the memories changed. I was here in Ward Z. I sat on the floor outside of one of the rooms. Aaron's room. I looked up at the ceiling and smiled. My lips moved. I said things, but I couldn't hear them for some reason. The memory changed. I watched the surveillance camera. Lewis walked down the hallway alone.
It changed again.
I stood in my kitchen, a spoon in hand, I stirred it in batter. The house was silent around me. I stirred meticulously before pouring the batter into a tin. A muffin tin. I stood in front of the oven, watching them bake. The muffins. I didn't move – not until they were done. I put them in a basket and headed toward the door. I sat them on them on the porch before moving inside. I changed into my nightgown and went into the surveillance room, my very first time inside. I read through Aaron's file, I watched him on the screen until I jumped, but there was no noise. I answered the door, but no one was there. I spoke, but I couldn't hear my words. I picked up the basket of muffins and took them back inside lingering for a moment, looking out at the empty, darkened path beyond my home.
The memory changed again. I sat on my couch alone. A TV show played before me. I spoke words I couldn't hear. I laughed awkwardly and felt uncomfortable at times. I heard the song, I got excited. I found my iPod, but I was alone.
The memories came one after another after another. I blinked up at stars hidden behind a canopy of trees. Cold seeped into my jacket. I seemed to awaken from some sort of stupor. I walked home alone. I drew my own bath and fell asleep, waking up to cold water.
I stood in Aaron's room, he spoke about love, and I cut my gaze to the shower area, but no one was there. No one cleaned the space while Aaron and I talked. It was just him and I in the room, no one else.
I walked to work alone. The snow crunched against my boots. I spoke silent words, to no one. I dropped the papers I carried. I stared down at the Rorschach inkblot – the one that resembled the month. My fingers trembled, only it didn't move in my memory – just stationary ink on a page.
I cooked a pizza. I spread the sauce on pillow-like dough. I moved meticulously, spreading the cheese, the pepperoni. I watched as it baked in the oven, through the little window. The crust rose, the cheese melted, until it was done. I cut up the pieces and placed them on a plate and wrapped it in foil. I walked to the door and sat it on the porch before going about my business – doing the dishes, cleaning off the counter. A silent noise caused me to jump and I opened the door. More silent words. I picked up the plate, once inside I frowned, removing the foil. Cold pizza?
The memory changed. I was home again. Cold, my body this time, not pizza. I stood in the foyer alone, with melting snow around my boots but soon I was in my bed, hands tearing my clothes off. My hands. I threw them on the floor. I touched myself all over, until I was touching myself there. Rocking into my fingers, screaming silently as I came.
The memories moved more quickly. I smiled and giggled at my empty office wall. I chatted with no one as I moved down the long hallway of Ward Z. One after another they came until they were gone. Until I was back on Wuthering Lane again. Daddy got out of his truck, worn, brown, unlaced boots. They were all I could see until he slammed the door. The engine roared as he moved toward me, but this time I could see him. I looked up and up and up, he was a mountain of a man, that's what my mom always said. My gaze moved from his those old brown boots he never laced until I came to the scuffed nametag on his chest, the one he had to wear for work. My mind's eye frowned at it. The word. The name. His name. Daddy's name.
Richard.
I looked into Daddy's eyes. Dark, deep, blue like a stormy ocean. His hair buzzed close to his head, a short wiry beard on his face. He reached me, fumbling with my hands. He spoke words, but I didn't hear them, not this time, because all I could see were his teeth, how they were slightly crooked in his mouth. He smelled like whiskey. He embraced me. Warmth in the chilliness of the day. Maria's body broken and dead just feet away. I didn't cry because I was safe – safe in Daddy's arms.
Things would be okay.
A blaring white light took the memory from me and shoved me back into consciousness. As quickly as they all began, they ended. I was back in that room with Aaron Whitman. He leaned over me, shadowing the light.
"Well, well, well, look at you, Violet. Look at that obscurity in you. You pushed that little girl. That's a fucked up thing to do." Aaron laughed, it was that heinous laugh the one that drove me from Ward Z on that first day. It made the pounding pain in my head more intense.
"He's not real," I whispered.
"You're a fucking monster."
I tried to focus on his face but I couldn't. I couldn't do it. The image of Richard covered my irises, but it wasn't Richard not the Richard I thought I knew. He wasn't real. A figment of my imagination.
My father.
The Richard I knew was a piece of mind I had created. A hallucination.
"You see him. I know you do." Carl McTavish's words came back to me from all those months ago. I'd thought they were just ramblings of a sick man, but it was true. He knew. I was like him. Like Carl McTavish, the doctor that murdered all those people.
I saw the swirling, moving writhing ink on the Rorschach inkblot just like he did.
I'm a schizophrenic.
I had created Richard to help me cope, I realized that now, to keep me from falling fully over the edge of my sickness, my disease, my disorder. The warm arms of my father were the last time I felt safe in the world. The last time he hugged me before the police took him away and my mother never let me see him again.
"Guess what, Violet?"
I blinked and Aaron's face came into focus, there, just above mine.
"I was right about you. You are violent. And more than that—" he leaned closer "—you're fucking bat-shit crazy." He laughed, the sound echoed around us in time with the agonizing screams beyond us. "Your mind created someone else – it literally did everything it could to try and save you from me!" His chest shook with glee. "And now you'll never be free. You're mine now." A rough hand in my hair drug me off the table, and I realized I was no longer strapped down. My head pounded harder as he drug me from the room. The yellowed lights of Ward Z made my eyes burn, but they didn't stop me from seeing.
The pristine white hallway was no longer such. Blood. Everywhere. All the doors stood open. Ryan, the orderly, lay motionless halfway down the hall, his neck at an awkward angle. Someone screamed from a room farther down and when we passed I saw Christopher inside. He laid on his back. Raymond's hulking form on top of him. His mouth ripped and tore at Christopher's flesh. Christopher's gaze met mine, just for a moment, a split second, his mouth gaping, screaming, his crooked, mismatched teeth covered in blood.
Is this real?
I didn't know.
Is anything real?
"You thought coming to me would make would make it better, didn't you Violet." My gaze met Aaron's. "Coming into my room, but you were wrong. You thought I would fix things, didn't you, but look at the destruction I've caused. You caused." He laughed as he drug me forward. "You didn't make things better for yourself. But, my one letter away, you made them a whole lot better for me."
The images of the horror around me, the reality, the truth of them should have been horrifying, so should the dead bodies of the others whom we passed farther down the hall. Calvin lay bleeding out on the white tile, a knife protruding from his neck. Carl McTavish flitted across my vision, jerking the knife out of Calvin. But I wasn't bothered by them. The pain in my scalp grounded me.
I didn't fight Aaron, instead I went limp as he pulled me through the sticky blood on the floor of Ward Z, past the dead, the living, the irrational, the foolish, the crazy. I soaked it all in just like the blood that now saturated my clothes and smiled. My lips curled painfully in time with the pulse of agony inside my head, until my eyes sought their forced solace and my world went black.
Somewhere inside that darkness, the empty pit of oblivion, I found myself. I'd been there all along cowering in a corner. I looked at her, me, at the monster who hid there in my obscurity, with her matted hair and her violet eyes, both pretty and sad.
I held out my hand, my long fingers with the opal butterfly on the pinky. She reached forward and took it, our digits intertwining…until we were one.