Sinners Circle (11 page)

Carl reaches an arm back and
snaps his finger in my face, I open my eyes, and he looks at me serious
for a second then smiles
, his eyes going back to the road.
“I deal with them all the time at work. Well...” He shifts gears,
“ I
mean
I
don’t
but a lot of the patients have them. Don’t
worry,
you
can’t die from one, no matter how much you
feel
like you’re really dying, you won’t.”

“What?”

He looks in his rear view mirror,
passes a minivan full of car seats and toddlers and shifts gears again. “You
can’t
die
from them.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, so don’t worry about it.”

I scratch the scar on the back of
my knee again, “Well, what the fuck?”

He checks his rear view mirror
and changes lanes.
“What the fuck,
what
?”

I close my eyes, open them, light
another cigarette and try cracking my neck. “Well what the fuck is this? What
brings them on?”

Carl shrugs, “Nothing really.
They can happen for no apparent reason. It’s just the mind’s way of coping with
stress.”

“Oh.”

Alison turns the radio down.
“Amanda, don’t worry about it. I used to get them all the time.”

I tap the ash off my cigarette.
“What made them go away?”

She’s quiet for a second staring
out the window, “I don’t know. They just sort of went away.”

As we’re driving down the bare
road to my house at the very end of the street Carl says, “I’m sure Mike didn’t
even notice, and his sister is cool.”

I nod, check the time under my
glove. “What’s her name?”

He stops the car in front of my
house and spins the dial through a dozen or so radio stations as I undo my
seatbelt. “Oh right, her name’s Sophie.”

I
used to be afraid of pain. The whole idea of having my head busted in, my face,
legs, my tits torn to shreds—it scared me. I was afraid of the headaches and
the tender limbs. The sensation of broken bones and split lips kept me in a
place where I still used Hydrogen Peroxide and band-aids.

I didn’t want my shoulders or
stomach carved up with scars because I was always holding onto the fantasy that
maybe one day I would meet somebody special and the idea of us pushing our
flawless bodies together on a bed sheet, it made me start eating better food.
Plugging quarters into the wash machine twice a week, buying fresh
makeup every four months.
Late at night while masturbating in the dark,
milky skinned sex scenarios, they got me brushing my teeth every twelve hours,
and avoiding cigarettes. I took showers regularly and flossed twice a day. I
bought soap that made me smell like flowers I’d never seen. In the dark, two
fingers deep I imagined meeting some woman somewhere in some office with some
air of intelligence about her, so the next day I started listening to talk
radio, I started quoting the strangers floating through the radio waves as they
discussed the dangers of earthquakes and devastating poverty in countries I
never cared about. But every time I came out of the shower all shiny and new,
my hair reeking of tropical fruit I couldn’t afford at the grocery store, every
time I stepped out of the shower and wiped the fog off the medicine cabinet,
I’d be staring into the same cold blue eyes I’ve been trying to cover up with
green contact lenses. And no matter how hard I pressed that six dollar bar of
soap against the back of my legs or the chin on my face, those scars wouldn’t
go away.

Every time I read an influential
magazine article about preserving our natural resources or saving the rain
forest, no matter how many checks I fired off donating to various causes, I was
still Amanda Troy. I could throw away my VHS tapes, the ones with the hair
glued to the front so I knew which girl was being tortured to death, but I’d
have a brand new collection at the end of the year, just piled up and there’s
nothing I could do to stop that. There’s no amount of money I can give to the
National Geographic Society or the Christian Orphans Fund that could stop the
pain and suffering of all those half dead kids with AIDS and swollen bellies.
There’s no amount of self control I can offer to end the cycle of dead bodies
stacking
themselves
in the root cellar of my house.

Yeah, I used to be afraid of
pain; I used to feel the fear enter into my mind like a beast pawing the limits
of his cage. But I don’t anymore. Something broke inside of me a long time ago.
When my mother was executed at the hands of innocent children who suffered at
the hands of toxic adults, my soul, it became centered inside a prism of
unmatching
light, illuminating clear through the essence of
my being. It’s not that I stopped
caring,
it’s not
that I arrived at some conclusive realization that sent me spiraling down a
slope of depression and misery. The part of me that broke was a mental barrier
of relation and consequence.

We are all beings of nature. The
results of unprotected sex and animalistic lust, we are not perfect nor ever
will be, no matter how hard we try. We will always wind up second trumpet to
the asshole we grew up next door to. As human beings, we are designed to die.
Our hearts will fail; our lungs will deflate or swell up due to some genetic
disorder or self inflicted disease, and to think otherwise is a definite sign
your faith blinders are strapped too tight.

The greatest thing my mother did
for me was to die, because she set me free in all ways. The worst thing my
mother did for humanity was allowing me to be born, because people aren’t
supposed to feel like they’re winning. They’re supposed to feel like they
aren’t good enough and that maybe one day, if they say all the right things or
buy enough lottery tickets, they will be rich enough to be put on that giant
pedestal hoisted on the backs of the working class nobodies. All this hopefully
before their tits start sagging.

When I get out of the shower and
I wipe that mirror and look into my eyes, at me watching me, myself staring
back into my own face, I wink. I look at my non prescription contact lenses; I
put them over my old cold blues and blink until I look like the windows to my
soul are warm and unscathed. I put on a shade of soft red lipstick and blot
until the color on my smackers says
tasteful
.
I smile two rows of whites that scream
well
adjusted
. I blow dry my hair, brush and style it until I look benign enough
to start a conversation with. By the time I’m dressed, you wouldn’t push me out
of the way even if your wife was dying and I stood in the way of medical
attention. Because I smell like I love you and I smile like I’ve got a soul and
it’s one of the reasons Jesus bled to death.

But what you aren’t counting on
is the possibility—no
wait
, let me rephrase that—you
aren’t counting on the
probability
that there isn’t a soul. Maybe, just maybe, our sole purpose here on earth, it
isn’t to achieve enlightenment or gain any favor with God, maybe all we are
really here for is to alter the soil the same way the dinosaurs did. Maybe, just maybe, we too are an oil source
for a newer and better future species. Maybe we are born and die and turn to
nothing but the earth beneath us. Maybe there is no greater cause and maybe
there is no God and there is no greater promise and you really
are
wasting your life because Jesus
really didn’t feed the starving masses and maybe if he did die, he certainly
didn’t die for
you
and your
narcissistic desire to live forever inside a mansion inside a kingdom of
eternal glory. Maybe, if we get past all the perfume and hair, the designer
jeans and spinning jewelry, maybe we are just flesh and bone and
that’s it
.

I don’t know, I mean it’s
possible. All things are, aren’t they? That’s what they’ve been telling us
anyway. Go ahead and disagree because you have your faith and that’s cool, but
I know, that deep down in your heart of hearts at the very bottom in those dark
little pockets you’ll never admit exist, lie your doubts. I on the other hand,
I have no faith, and I have no doubt, my spirit is free, my heart is clean. My
own blood, my own tears have made me so, I didn’t have to be dunked in a vat of
blessed city water or fed crackers every Sunday, pretending to eat flesh and
drink blood in the hopes I’ll be allowed entrance through a pair of giant gold
gates. I’m not worried about heaven or hell because I’m already there. I’m my
own goddamn savior and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Because I don’t have
to wait until Jesus comes drifting through the ozone to tell me I’m OK. I’m not
concerned.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know
that in the end, no haloed carpenter is going to come through the clouds,
glowing with his arms out making this big
fuckin
’
entrance through the sky just for shitty old you. I’m aware of and completely
comfortable with the fact that you have to save yourself. I know this scares a
lot of people, and I don’t blame them. It can be scary to realize you really
are all alone and nobody is going to hold your hand after you take the big dirt
nap. I used to be afraid of dying, but now I don’t care. I’ve seen what
happens; I’ve deliberately caused it to others just to see what happens in all
manners of execution. And I can honestly
say I am not afraid anymore, but bless
you
for being so.

Because when you
come
beating down that running path and you struggle with me
and kick and scream and try and throw me off, you aren’t ready to die and that
energy, that fight for life gives me a reason to live. Not a desire, but the
passion you feel, it fuels me.

When women aged twenty to thirty
get yanked into the bushes their first thought is, “I hope he uses a condom.”
They aren’t expecting it to be a woman who will cut them into pieces and eat
their flesh in her basement, because, statistically, people like me don’t
exist. People like me don’t exist because people like me, well, you can’t see
us because you can’t catch us. It’s not that we’re monsters; it’s just that we
look too normal for you to ever notice.

The
sun in this room, it will pull your heart apart. The glare on the window, the
transparent me staring back at the real me, this makes me want to die. I can’t
move away from the empty bed at my side no matter how much my thighs shake and
tremble. My mind won’t take me away from staring back at myself in the glass,
my spirit self in an empty room of unhooked breathing machines and clean bed
sheets pulled tight at the corners.

I put my hand on my arm, looking
at the empty bed in the reflection of the glass and gasp when my fingers meet
each other and my cheeks burn from salty beads slipping down the sides of my
face, into the corners of my mouth and drip onto the numb scars on my chin.

I bite my tongue and feel the
same strikes shredding all the way down my heart, the same stinging I felt when
I slid down the walls of my foster home when I was young and mom was printed in
halftone all over the newspaper.

My gaze never leaves the panes of
glass burning my eyes blind with sun light, even when I trace the polished
surface of the bedside table with my fingertips. The bare table that never
changed the whole time Lilly was in that bed remains flowerless, undecorated,
as it always was, dustless and blank.

I close my eyes and feel the
fleshy burden of my wet lids closing together. I remember her.

When we’re finished smoking
against the brick of the building at work, I kiss her forehead, ears eyes and
mouth. I zip up her little red leather jacket. I tell her to have fun and I pat
her on the ass as she dissolves into nothing and is gone.

I open my eyes, wipe the tears
from my cheeks, and lay a pair of pussy willows down onto the pillow. I don’t
look back in the window, I just fold my arms and leave the hospital with little
Lilly’s words winnowing through the cavities of my heart.

“What’s
the best thing about a nine year old girl?” Harry is in his office, shouting
into a telephone I doubt is even plugged in. The customer at my counter, the
one fishing in his pockets for eighteen cents, he looks embarrassed.
Harry’s
feet slap the floor so frantically it sounds like
he’s being strangled from behind. “You can slick her hair back and pretend
she’s a nine year old boy!”

I slip the customers issue of
Leg Show
magazine in a bag and smile as
he walks out of the store all sunken and depraved.

“What’s great about twenty eight
year olds?” His feet slap the floor again like he’s choking to death. “There
are twenty of them!”

For me, the worst thing about
this whole phony phone conversation business isn’t the fact it’s extremely
disturbing to the psyche that he would go on and on about awful things to
himself while pretending he was communicating with another human being because
that’s
fine
by me. No, what makes it
so goddamn awful is he’s so
fuckin
’
bad
at it. He doesn’t pause properly in between sentences
the way you actually would while the person on the other end of the
conversation is responding to your comments. Harry just keeps yakking away like
a maniac. The way he’s going on and on, you don’t even need to see the phone
cord is unplugged to figure out he’s only talking to
himself
.

That scuffing of his feet
shambling the slick cement floor of his janitor closet office comes fulminating
through his tiny space into the front of the store. “What do you call a good looking
corpse?
JonBenet
Ramsey
!”

I check my watch; my shift was
over five minutes ago. I walk to the back, grab my jacket off the rack and
almost run Carl over in the alley while lighting a cigarette as I pull my car
out. “Amanda!”

I roll down my window and tap the
ash onto the ground. “What?”

He walks around the side and
slides into the passenger’s seat. “
Wanna
give me a
ride?”

I tap my smoke out the window
again. “Sure.”

When we’re out on the highway he
points down the street I wasn’t going to take. “Down here.”

I drive for a few blocks while he
fumbles with the radio and lights one of my cigarettes. “Where are you going?”

He blows smoke through a pair of
grinning lips. “What? Do you mean ‘where are
we
going’?”

I stop at a traffic light, a
twelve year old girl and her fat mother are lip syncing to some terrible song
in the mini can next to me. I drop my
cigarette out onto the street and roll up my window. “Huh?”

Carl shakes his head. “Well your
house first, I guess.”

“What the fuck?”

His knuckles tapping his knees,
he turns up the radio and air drums on the dashboard.
“What
the fuck, what?”

I just stare at him. The light
turns green and I shrug. “Where are you going?”

He covers his eyes with his whole
hand and laughs.
“The
dance
dummy!”

“What dance?”

He turns the radio down. “The
dance I told you about last week at work.”

“You told me about what? Dude,
you didn’t say shit about some dance or whatever.”

“What the fuck? Yeah I did. I
brought you coffee and everything. You were all zoned out, I had to drop the
goddamn cup in front of you and say ‘drink’ to get your attention. Weren’t you
listening?”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“No, I said ‘Oh’ not ‘
No.
’”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So you remember?”

“No.”

“What?”

I light a cigarette. “I mean yeah
I remember you brought coffee I just, I
dunno
,
must’ve
forgot
.”

“Well no one really remembers
coffee I guess.”

“No, I remember that, I just
don’t remember the dance part.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

He scratches his chin and rolls
down his window a bit. “So what’s up?”

“Oh, I
dunno
.
Nothing I guess.”

“No I mean
,
are you coming or what?”

“To the dance?”

“Yeah”

“Oh.”

He points towards the direction
of my house. “Just turn up here.”

“What’s with all these direction
and shit?
I
know the way to my own house.”

He sighs and steals another one
of my cigarettes. “Whatever.”

When we get to my house I shave
my legs in the shower, put some vitamin lotion on my scars and throw on a tank
top and jeans. I’d wear my shell shoes but they’re crusted with blood. Carl
claps two VHS tapes together while I’m lacing up my Converse high tops and
says, “Why do all these tapes have hair glued to them?”

I finish tying my shoes, walk
over and snatch them away from him. “Don’t touch my shit.”

He shakes his head and says,
“Bring a coat.”

I grab my favorite black
hoodie
, and we drive until we’re in the parking lot of the
hospital. “Uh, what kind of dance is
this?”

“Staff.”

“Why isn’t Alison here?”

“Because she doesn’t work here.”

“Then why am
I
here?”

“Because Sophie is here.”

“She works here?”

“Coma ward.
Yeah.”

“But
I
don’t work here.”

“It’s OK.”

“If it’s OK for me to be here
then why didn’t Alison come?”

He shrugs, put his hand on the
door handle.
“Because she doesn’t work here.”

Being led through all these side
entrances and ‘STAFF ONLY’ areas, staring at the back of your friend’s head,
it’s like a bad dream you are inwardly panicking to wake from. The only thing
worse than having a nightmare that resembles this sort of chaos is the horror
that it is actually happening and unlike a dream you can’t wake up and make it
go away. All your conversations have listeners and all your actions have real
consequences.

After following Carl up a hundred
stairs and down a thousand staff corridors we arrive in the psych ward common
area, through a door I never noticed before.

Inside this big room, I have to
open and close my eyes to make sure I’m not dreaming, or off in some field
screaming and crying, high on copious amounts of LSD. The whole place is
decorated,
transformed
into a disco
ball dangling play pen for loonies. All sorts of banners are hung up across the
walls.
Happy Easter
over the punch
bowl,
It’s a BOY
!
,
by the medicine window.
Merry Christmas
and
Happy Birthday
hanging over the DJ switching CD’s, while committed
men and women wearing pajama pants and felt slippers sip anxiously at the red
contents of their tiny Dixie cups.

Carl points at a
Get Well Soon
banner by the couch I
always read
Cherry Blossom
on. “Patients
decorated most of it.”

I nod and scan the room for
Sophie but I don’t see her anywhere, there’s too many people walking around,
bumping into one another and mumbling to themselves. “Oh.”

“Yeah it was sort of an activity
for them for the past couple days.
Motivation exercise.”

“Oh.”

I follow him to the punch bowl.
The King of France is there his little wash cloth cape still pinned to the back
of his shirt. He sees me and walks away, his eyes full of tears. Carl smiles at
a woman standing over the juice.
“Hi Linda.”

She smiles and pours us both
cups. He raises his cup to her, “Cheers.” We walk over to some corner of the
room, him waving at people every two seconds, asking how they are.

I stare into the red juice, swirl
it around in the cup and wonder if this is some kind of mass suicide plan.
A way to thin out the load of crazies.
“So, what’s the
occasion?”

He waves at a girl who looks like
she hasn’t bathed in weeks.
“Hi Caitlyn!”

I’m filled with horror when she
smiles back and her teeth and lips are stained red, I look at Carl as he lowers
his Dixie, and he looks like he’s just chewed through his own leg. The more I
glance around the room, the more I see that almost every single person—staff or
patient, it doesn’t matter— they all look like vexed cannibals bobbing their
heads to nineties hits.

I walk over to the trash bin and
drop my cup in. Bright rays of white light burn into my eyes blinding me as I
walk back to where Carl and I were standing, but he’s not there anymore and
neither is Caitlyn, and a man twisting his t-shirt into a fabric handle is
laughing at his hands and smiling at me with all that red punch stained on his
teeth. Two fat men eating Nanaimo bars off napkins push past me. I stand on my
tippy toes looking for that door Carl and I came through when Madonna’s “Like a
Prayer” comes on.

I can feel the hair on the back
of my neck stand up, my skin getting warmer as a few people by the DJ start
swaying to the words. There’s an approaching sensation I can’t shake, but I’m
not afraid because the stronger it gets, the more calm I feel.

I close my eyes and relax my
hands. My mind is still and my heart is tepid as Madonna’s words float through
me. “I hear you call my name...and it feels like
home
...”

Something warm and smooth touches
my fingertips. I open my eyes to see Sophie standing in front of me, her ribbon
bow lips parted into a grin. She is the only person in the room without a juice
stain. “Amanda?”

“Hi.”

She blushes, looks down at her
shoes, then back into my face. “Hi, I’m Sophie.”

All that terrible light that was
blinding me, but right now as she stands in front of it, if angels were real,
they would look just like her. I’m not sure if they are supposed to have red
hair though. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never seen one, but during my twenty seven
years in this world I can say that without a doubt Sophie is the most beautiful
woman I have ever seen.

“Hi Sophie.”

“Would you like some punch?”

“No.”

She laughs, and my snatch gets so
wet so fast I almost have an orgasm when she touches my shoulder.
“Oh good.
Me neither.” She pushes a finger through her lips,
rubs it along the top of her gums, “Don’t need to look like I’ve been eating
babies!”

The crazies all around me,
dancing under the
Happy Anniversary
banners,
the plastic
Welcome Home
pennons, all
these lunatics with their faces dyed red, teeth turning them all into vampires
and Sophie smiling in front of me, I laugh so hard that I start crying.

She puts her hand on my shoulder,
pinches my arm. I’m smiling, wiping tears out of my eyes and trying to keep my
voice from cracking when she says, “Are you OK? Are you OK?”

I have to step back, catch my
breath; the room’s tilting left then right, it starts spinning, my heart
swelling huge every time Sophie takes a step closer and touches me. The more I
blink, the more my vision blurs and I’m wiping my face so fast I don’t notice
everything go black until I’m on my back laying on the floor. Before I know I’m
even sprawled out here, Sophie’s head is on my chest, the music is off and all
the juice drinking cannibals are staring at me. They look bored. I sit up, my
hand grabbing Carl’s shoe. He kneels down. “You OK?”

I nod, but I’m so dizzy I almost
fall back down, Sophie catches my head. “You passed out. Do you want us to call
a doctor?”

I shake my head. “No, I’m fine. I
just... need some air.”

Sophie looks at Carl, Carl looks
at Sophie,
Sophie
looks at me. “Would you like to go
home?”

I fish in my pocket, hand Carl my
keys. He looks at Sophie. “I have to watch the floor until ten.”

She frowns. “Are you working
shift?”

He nods, tucks my keys in his
pocket. “Yeah...” He helps me to my feet. All the nearby nut cases give me
dirty looks.

Linda from the punch bowl pushes
a cup in my hand, even though its water, I still swirl it around before gulping
it down. Sophie takes it away from me,
crushes it and puts it in her pocket and sighs. “I guess, I mean, I can take
her home.”

Carl pats my shoulder. “She lives
way on the other side...”

The music starts back up and I’m
about to tell them I’m fine, I’m completely OK, but Sophie says, “No I mean
back to my place. She can crash on the couch.” I shut my mouth, put a hand to
my head like I’m still dizzy and just stand there waiting.