Empty Heaven, page 32
I took my hand and pressed Good Arcturus’s red thread between my lips like a strand of hair, looking at every single person who was touched by his sinews. We were all connected. I swallowed the thread until I choked, spinning the spell into a stable loop with myself as the center.
The woods disappeared.
I was falling through a dark and endless space. Far above me, I could feel Rita’s words, like a rope, pulling me back. Pulling us all back. Pulling herself back to the world where she had control. She was so strong.
“Baby, please don’t do this,” she said. And it was so compelling. I wanted to go to her.
I fell past the sidewalk outside of K-Family Pizza where Senovak and I had argued the day before. I fell past the car ride where I told KJ I loved her in her ruins.
I fell past the nights I’d lain awake over the past almost-year, while Dexter watched me from the dark. I fell past the snowy street in DUMBO where a little girl with long hair was buzzed into a building that had AIR painted on it.
It still wasn’t deep enough. I could still feel Rita far above me, reaching down to pull me out of my mind.
I hoped I could drag her down with me. Otherwise this was all for nothing.
I fell past Dexter, reading from my battered copy of Dandelion Wine.
Chapter 28. The story of the two soul mates who had been separated by a large span of years, one on her ancient deathbed and the other one barely thirty, doomed to keep meeting each other too soon or too late. I’d loved that story so much. I had wanted to believe in it.
But that still wasn’t deep enough.
“Come back, honey,” Rita said. “You don’t want to be alone in this darkness.”
“I’m not alone!” I screamed up into the ether.
And I was right. I saw other things, other flickers of memories that didn’t belong to me. Senovak, impossibly young, surrounded by greenery and vines, in his Army uniform, standing with his forehead pressed against the forehead of Linus Hekekia. There and gone.
KJ sitting cross-legged on the yellow couch in her garage, smoking, wearing a pale blue dress that I’d never seen, with “The Way Things Are” by Fiona Apple—courtesy of one of my carefully crafted mix CDs—playing at top volume. Shuffling through a bunch of Polaroids she and I had taken together the summer before, her eyes undilated for the briefest second, her face tracked with tears.
I thought I would hate the world forever, she said in my head.
Jasper, a tiny little-kid Jasper, sitting up in a hospital bed in a quiet room, looking around with a bewildered expression on his face.
Alex in a dark and abandoned place, wrapped in a blanket, taking a syringe that someone handed to him.
Two little girls who had a familial resemblance to me walking toward Good Earth Way in their child-sized red robes, holding hands.
A minister in the kind of old-fashioned clothing I’d only ever seen crudely replicated in movies, standing in a primitive town center, holding a rifle, pleading with a beautiful dark-haired woman while behind her the scarecrow she’d captured loomed and loomed…
And it still wasn’t deep enough.
“Come back to the world,” Rita said. Her hand reached down into the bottom of the universe in my head. I wanted to take it. I missed my mom.
But I didn’t. I had been trying not to go to the place I knew I had to go.
The worst thing I ever did.
“Come with me,” I said, to everyone inside my head but mostly to Rita. “Let me take you down.”
I grabbed her hand and sank. I felt her coming with me. Falling out of the world and into my mind, unable to guard the prisoners she kept.
Please let this work, I thought. Please let this set Good Arcturus free, because this is everything I have.
It was Christmastime in New York when we stopped falling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Friday, December 13, 1996
We met on Friday that week, just twelve days shy of my thirteenth birthday, and Dexter was in a very dark place. He had been talking about our suicide pact again.
Dexter had been getting worse for weeks, as the days grew shorter and darker, and he was frightening me a little more every time we saw each other. He’d relapsed sometime earlier in the year, and his addiction burned like a conflagration made of everything else in his life, consuming him while the months turned toward winter. Most days I had to give myself my own lessons on his beautiful upright piano, a one-hundred-and-three-year-old Heintzman that I was a little bit in love with.
Sometimes Dexter wouldn’t even come into the recording studio at all. He would just stay holed up in the bedroom at the far end of his labyrinthine warehouse apartment until I went and found him, lying there under his down comforter with his current musical obsession on the record player, tarot cards scattered all over the bed, vintage clothes in piles, the Victorian box (lined in purple satin) that he kept his syringes in thrown carelessly to the side.
But today he was manic, and that kind of darkness was just as frightening to me as his sad moods were. Pacing. Talking about the suicide pact. He had given me a heavily embroidered silk piano shawl as an early birthday present. I stood in front of the mirror in his room while he draped it over me just so, his glasses glinting in the low light like a larger pair of eyes.
“Very cool. Very Janis Joplin,” he said.
“It’s so pretty. But I can’t take it home,” I said. “Dan will say something.”
“Fucking Dan,” Dexter said, his usually soft voice full of contempt. “That stupid prick. I want to get away from all of the Dans of this world, you know?”
I nodded. I did know. He had been talking about it a lot lately. Getting away, of course, being code for killing ourselves together.
Behind the walls of the snow globe, out in the space of our shared minds, I could feel people watching. I had pulled everyone from the black house down here—they were my captive and unwilling audience. No freedom of movement now, not like when KJ had hailed a cab inside my consciousness. They were all in too deep with me. I couldn’t exactly see them, any more than I could exactly remember why we were here. Everything was blurred and indistinct in the snow globe except for this one moment in time. But I knew that I couldn’t reach them… that they couldn’t stop what happened next.
“I think we should do it now,” Dexter said, after a thousand beats of silence. I knew him well enough to know that he was referring to suicide, not sex. I think that was the only tiny bit of mercy in the whole situation, the fact that we hadn’t, on that last day. I knew that Senovak was there somewhere. I didn’t want to make any of them witness a graphic act of child rape. But him least of all. I thought it just might kill him.
“Now?” I asked. I turned away from the mirror to look at Dexter directly, stepping over the Ten of Wands card, which had been carelessly thrown on the floor.
Dexter nodded, pressing his lips together. His gaze looked haunted and tired and sad behind his glasses, and I tried—in a way that was still pretty clumsy, pretty childlike—to emotionally prepare myself for another one of his attempts at persuasion.
“It’s only going to get harder,” Dexter said. “To be together. I’m supposed to go to LA to do some work. The world will pull us apart, apart, apart. Time, babe. Time is against us. If we do it now, we can reset the clock. It can always be just like this. Our souls can be born into a new life together. Like Bill and Helen in Dandelion Wine.”
I wish I could explain to you how many times, how many ways I had already talked him out of this double-suicide plan. I was an expert at it.
Everything will be okay. We’ll be together. When I’m older. When I’m free.
Nothing can stop us then.
We don’t know if death would really give us another chance.
Stay with me, Dex, I love you so much.
I’m not ready to go yet.
And on and on and on.
But that day, at that moment in time, something was different.
I felt something give way inside me. For a moment it was like I was a stranger to myself. I felt my real feelings, the ones I always held back.
The revulsion and pain. The fear of being found out, of being touched again, of being dragged down with Dexter into a place where nobody would ever be able to find me. The self-loathing. And the thin strand of something within me that hadn’t been destroyed: a desire to survive.
To escape. To be free.
“Okay,” I said, and turned around. Gave Dexter a look.
“Really?” Dexter asked, and I nodded.
“I think… I think I’m ready,” I said.
“So brave. So brave, baby,” Dexter said. His face was a mask of wistful pain and pleasure. He kissed me, and I kissed him back. Putting everything into it. Making it convincing.
“But you have to let me do it my way,” I said. I was using my most grown-up voice, the one that had the best success rate when it came to Dexter giving me what I wanted. The voice of reason. “I don’t want to do drugs with you, okay? I want like—like pills or something.”
“You’re such a square,” Dexter said, like it was an adorable quirk, instead of just me being a frightened kid. He hadn’t ever been able to get me to shoot up with him. Honestly he hadn’t tried that hard. Maybe he thought Senovak would sniff that out. Dexter got up and put his single of “Collapsing New People” by Fad Gadget on the record player. He said that the bridge in that track was, to him, the perfect sound for dying to.
The last thing I want to hear, he’d murmur. What about you?
And I would come up with some new answer every time. “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” by Rachmaninoff. Or Natalie Merchant’s “Carnival,” which I thought was incredibly sophisticated, then. But no Debussy, no Chopin, not a whisper of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Valse Suite, none of Tori Amos’s luminous pieces with the brilliant piano playing, the level of genius that I aspired to. Nothing that really mattered to me, not one of the songs that changed my life. Because I didn’t actually want to die, so I couldn’t actually pick the ideal music to score my death. No matter what I said, he would call it an “immature choice,” anyway.
“Come here, babe.”
Dexter was smiling. Holding his arms out. Probably thinking we would rock back and forth and have a nice long heartfelt cry before we killed ourselves. But in my strange new mood, I wanted to get it over with.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, and went into the bathroom. I knew where he kept everything, after two years.
I opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out one of Dexter’s many pill bottles from his library of intensely abused prescriptions. I read the label. My audience watched me through the snow globe. Inside I felt nothing but absolute calm, a bright void.
When I went back, Dexter had finished cooking up his heroin.
“I’ve never done this much before,” he said.
He sat on the edge of the bed, his legs facing toward the headboard, and I sat next to him.
“You will follow me, baby,” Dexter said, “won’t you? I don’t want to die without you.”
For a second, behind his glasses, he looked afraid. If there had been anything left in me, I would have talked him out of it then.
But I didn’t. I gazed at him with an innocence that wouldn’t have been studied, too many years before. But now it was an act.
“Of course I will,” I said, and smiled. Shook my bottle of pills.
Dexter nodded. Kissed me. I was usually very still and compliant when he kissed me. But now, in my moment of crystalline clarity, it was difficult not to flinch when his lips brushed my cheek.
He took his syringe, tapped out the air bubbles. Drew back the needle until he saw one dark and shining drop of blood.
And stopped.
Something came over his face, something… something sly. I had seen that expression before, and it always frightened me.
In the moments when Dexter looked like that, I had the uneasy thought that he was something else, wearing the face of a human being.
“Wait,” he said. “It’s not right unless we both do it at the same time. Show me those,” Dexter said, and took the pill bottle out of my hands.
The sly look was still on his face. He didn’t trust me. I waited without hardly taking a breath until he read the label, opened the bottle, and handed it back to me. He looked at me in a way that made me feel like I was going to crawl right out of my skin. Little half smile on his face. His eyes hidden by the way the light reflected off his glasses.
“You’re really ready?” Dexter asked. He touched my cheek.
“I’m ready,” I said. My voice broke a little on the lie. But Dexter smiled.
“Then take them,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
I knew I wasn’t going to get out of it.
I swallowed several of the pills with a big swig of sparkling water while he watched me closely. Then another handful.
Then Dexter, satisfied, kissed me on the head.
“Good girl,” he said. “I love you so much, Darian.”
“I love you too, Dex,” I said. The room was starting to spin. I felt the effects of the pills stealing over me, making it hard to focus.
I watched as Dexter overdosed. His body relaxed. He laid back, dangling off the edge of the bed until his upper body met the floor, one leg bent and folded under the other, his shaggy gold hair spread around him in a crown. He faced me and the ceiling, his pupils constricted into pinpoints and his eyelids drooping. He looked like his favorite tarot card.
The Hanged Man. The card of sacrifice.
It had probably taken a long time, all of this, from the moment I had agreed to go along with it until this moment. The big suicide thing. But it felt like minutes. Nothing happened inside me. Not even a whisper.
“Darian… Adrian…,” Dexter whispered, looking up at me. His glasses were askew. He was on the verge of nodding off. “You’re… coming? Coming with me?… Right… right, baby. Right…?”
“Yeah. I promise,” I said. My words sounded a little slurry.
Then I got up—I staggered, trying to get to my feet—and walked around him. The room was tilting like it was going to tumble over. When I reached the bathroom, I had to hold on to the doorframe so I didn’t fall.
“Darian,” Dexter said from behind me. “Wait. Wait…”
It seemed like he was trying to get up. But he didn’t have the strength. For a few seconds I watched him struggle before he gave up. Drifting. His eyes falling shut.
Then I calmly walked into his bathroom with the snowy windows and the glass block wall, knelt in front of the toilet, shoved my finger down my throat, and threw up until there was absolutely nothing left in my stomach. Pills and bile poured into the toilet.
When I was done vomiting, I sat against the wall. I rocked back and forth for a while while “Collapsing New People” played over and over and over again.
I sat there for a long time, until it was almost dark and I was running out of time before Senovak came to get me.
Then I got up and walked back into the bedroom. Dexter’s face was utterly pale, his lips blue.
I went into the living room and called the police.
Yes, I’d found my piano instructor. I thought he was dead. Could they please come quickly?
My voice shook, and that was okay. I was crying by the end of the phone call, and that was okay too.
But I wasn’t crying because he was gone.
I was crying because he was sitting in the living room, smiling at me, his eyes invisible behind his glasses.
You promised, Darian, he said. You promised. You promised.
In my memory I hadn’t said anything to his shade, the first time it ever appeared to me. I’d hidden behind the couch in a ball until the police arrived.
But this time I turned toward him. He stood in his Jimi Hendrix jacket and his shining glasses, his back against the huge wall of lattice windows, the snow blowing around behind him.
“You promised, Darian,” Dexter said. “You lied to me. You killed me.”
“I didn’t,” I said. My voice was pathetic and broken. “I didn’t.”
“I needed your help,” Dexter said. His face was sad.
“I—”
“I needed your help and you killed me,” Dexter continued, and he reached one arm out—it was too long, a spider’s arm, and it burned like the hands of the Incorporations. He pulled me across the entire room to him, until we were pressed together. I tried to scream, but I choked on my words.
“That was unforgivable,” Dexter said solemnly. “Now they all know who you really are. You liked it when I died. You delighted in the death of a troubled man. You pushed me.”
He leaned in, his teeth too sharp, kissed my neck as I struggled. But he was so much stronger than I was. So much.
“But now,” Dexter said, pressing another kiss to my neck. “We can finally be alone.”
And I was alone.
Alone alone alone.
Alone with Dexter forever.
I closed my eyes, tears slipping down my face, and waited for it to be over.
And then I felt something. Something very slight and very cold, on my ankle bone.
I looked down, Dexter’s breath hot at my throat, and saw a single strand of shining red.
One tiny piece of Good Arcturus, reaching out to touch me from another world.
MY FRIEND, it said. YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
I took a step back. Dexter reached for me again.
“I’m not alone,” I said.
“Come here, baby,” Dexter said, showing me the inside of his sharp smile. “You owe me.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not alone. And I don’t owe you anything.”
“You owe me. You killed me,” Dexter said. “You KILLED ME, Darian, you killed me—”
“I DIDN’T KILL YOU,” I said. Actually, I was screaming, screaming so loud that it felt like my voice was going to break. “BUT I WISH I HAD, DEXTER, OH MY GOD, I WISH I HAD, YOU FUCKING MONSTER—”
I reached out with both arms, and Dexter reached out at the same time. His hands curled in my long, dark hair. He dragged me close to him. His teeth were razors, so sharp they cut his lips open when he spoke.
