Of Which We Dare Not Speak
A Short Story
I can’t remember how long I have sat in this spot with the ignition killed, staring intrusive thoughts into my hands at ten and two. The thoughts that filter through my brain are insignificant, coming and going things like passing accidents, until something splatters against the brick wall of my mind, sticking there like ejected saps.
Don’t forget who you’re doing it for.
Her words punch holes in the tender fascia that steadies my heart against my urges. Her voice echoes through the empty spaces in my frame, shaking me until I am forced to move.
I can taste a film on my lips, a wax coating of chemical strawberry. Her kiss lingers there and the words that followed:
“Your daughter needs you,” she said. “I need you.”
Her voice comes to me as if she had never walked away, and for a moment, I hold my breath, hoping I can still hear the echo of her words.
In the silence of the car, even the grinder of the city traffic is suffocated to a dull ether. Parked in this alley in an angled three-stall lot, crudely painted in front of a malignant and rusted metal door, I am wholly and fully alone.
“Nothing has a one-hundred-percent success rate.”
“This DOES,” she says, shoving the pamphlet flat against my face.
I don’t bother to stop her. I can smell the ink tattooed black on the page, thick like sticky ballpoint pens, and it brings me to places I don’t want to remember from times I had thought I’d forgotten.
She drops the pamphlet in my lap and I watch it fold open to words that bleed together and I can’t focus my eyes. I realize I’m about to cry and that makes it worse.
The paper in my lap taps and taps with droplets of shameful acceptance, and when they soak through the page I can no longer read the heading that once said Red Door Rebirth.
The door I pictured is not the one I walk through which has been made red with rust; nor is the waiting room on the other side—gleaming steel and light so white that it holds halos of translucent waves. The floor is some fine sheen of white polymer that coats each surface as if the room is molded from a single organism. Chairs jut from the center of the room like spires—canine teeth, with little cavity seats. A mouth of bleach and tearing things.
A young woman in a smart gray and black half-suit with an orchid tattooed across her throat sits in one of the chairs and pats the black space in the seat to her right. She crosses her legs and nods for me to sit.
I obey.
I had a dislocated shoulder and was on a gurney bouncing around in a metal box when my daughter was born. My car was a twisted heap of barbed metal and jagged glass, caked red and crisp black with parts of me and more of somebody else.
Mag screamed into the phone voicemails I couldn’t understand, pointed spears slipping into my ear like the pressure alone could collapse my skull. My phone was a mortar against the hospital room wall, a wall I hadn’t known helped support the very floor upon which my girlfriend and new baby lay. It was another six days before I met my daughter, in jail—Maggie said the swelling in my jaw was so grotesque and horrific, that she thought they had brought her a stranger.
“I must confirm you understand,” the orchid-throated woman says, red petals and sepals undulating like the flower speaks through her.
“Yes.”
“You chose alcohol.”
“Yes.”
“You have read the procedure attachment for Drug of Choice, Singular, Alcohol Addiction Rebirth.”
I swallow. I can’t help it, even though I tried, because in this room, it sounds like I am unsure of what I want, and that is the very thing I am told I cannot be. It’s dry and almost makes me gag but I tell her, “Yes,” before she is able to ask. “Yes,” I say.
She blinks once and it is a slow thing, considerate, like she is deciding something. I think of the way a lion looks when it is waiting in the tall grass, only I have the sudden cold memory that I have never seen one up close.
She stands and says, “Follow me.”
“Bloodletting.” It was not meant to be said as a question, more so, an exasperation, but my darling, forgiving wife chose to answer anyway.
“Yeah. It doesn’t sound fun. Do you want to know what else isn’t fun, Oliver? Do you want to know about another kind of bloodletting, huh?” Her face went red like the eastern sky and I could count each of her teeth.
“I know.”
“Oh, you know, do you? You know what it was like for me—for us while you were in there?”
“I know.”
“With the fucking cuts, Oliver? Christ, suddenly I didn’t have a doctor, she, our baby, didn’t have a—”
“We still don’t, Maggie. No one does.”
She opened her mouth but closed it again before she could speak. I watched her eyes well over like a picked scab, and a tear trickled over before she smeared it into her skin and turned away.
The corridor the woman leads me through isn’t as polished as the waiting room where I completed my waiver.
In the unlikeley event of Participant’s demise, whether by unforseen circumstance, or causes yet to be determined, Red Door Rebirth assumes no liability.
The words cycle through my head like a whirring blade, digging into my soft faculties, and in trying to walk as straight and with as much confidence as a man in my state can muster, my knees buckle and I slide down against the wall.
The floor is filthy, I can feel its debris and gluey tack browning my palms when the secretary, whoever she is, bends down and meets me face to face. I want to look away. The red orchid is like the prison tattoos I had burned away, and she is smiling but it doesn't crease her eyes as she reminds me of the success rate.
How many people Red Door Rebirth has saved.
I am forced to smile back because part of the contract includes that I do not back out. That I cannot back out. My head is throbbing and my mouth feels like a damp sock. Everything I look at is growing fur. I am sober and my hands have been shaking since I woke.
When I came to, I thought I was blind. The memory was broken into exponentially worse fragments. Splintered with broken sobs, and impaled on the dying screams of some strange girl. Her face came into vision after I blinked enough blood away.
I climbed over her, stepping on her lap as she squirmed and raked at my legs, to get to the hole in the windshield so I could breathe. Black smoke ripped at my lung tissues and the things I hacked up were red and gray.
Who she was, I would never know. That part of that night has been washed away in the rain. Like the burnt oil spill and the charred bark where the tree caught after my twisted car, like the vomit in the dirt at the shoulder as I watched my car and my transgressions burn.
Maggie didn’t know until the trial.
I owe her this. I owe our girl. Little Bug is six and all the spitting image of her mother with the rampant unaccountability of me. As I am brought into the prepping area, her little hands are all I can think about.
My fingers find the places her’s had clutched before I parted from her in the driveway. The nagging tug, how I wish I could feel it always. Despite the cloying terror, the clipping, razor-wire questions worming through my head, will it hurt, will I die, will it work, it almost eclipses all that I can envision when this is said and done.
The prospect of bedtimes remembered, and when she asks, “Tell me the story you told me last night, Daddy,” the hope that I can recall just what it had been about.
As the woman watches me undress and donn the gown pristinely folded on the bench, I want to ask her how it works.
The bloodletting, there must be a science behind it. Despite the barbarism of its provocative manner, if its efficacy is unquestionable, it was odd for it to be popular just now; surely it had been tried before.
As if she can read my mind, the woman who has no nametag and has never offered, she asks, “Are you nervous.”
I lie to her.
“You shouldn’t be,” she says anyway. “It’s entirely safe.”
I was drunk when I called the girl’s family.
I tried to make a go at it for long enough, but I could not do it. Post Acute Withdrawals, for the second time after prison, if I even made it that far into recovery. It did not matter, for that is what I told Mag.
I do not remember what I said, but I was in jail again after I had called. I talked to my dead, unnamed lover’s father I think, but I am certain it started nice.
The most sober I had ever been was when I watched his daughter burn alive. Maybe that is where it went bad—him hearing the slur in my voice. The only other time he had heard me speak was when I begged for forgiveness at the trial. Begged and promised—swore on my life to never touch another drop.
I want to ask her if the straps are really necessary as she buckles me in. I read the pamphlet, however, and this woman, I am sure will remind me of such. The table is cool on my back where the gown splits as I try to settle against it.
The sedative I was given is minimal. My hangover courses through my system, still, making me more excited to have annoyances such bled out of me than any other demons I may have burrowed within.
Wheels squeak somewhere off to my right, and metal objects rattle together like chittering spiders. My heartbeat whooshes in my head, undulating waves, like I have been swept underwater, deep, rolling along the bottom of the tide. A surgical table is stopped at my side.
Sweat rolls down my temples, then my jaw where it collects in my collarbone. My eyes. My mouth is closed but my breath whooshes through my nose like a panting dog.
“Good luck.”
I lurch at her voice, the velcro straps at my wrist protesting with a fruitless tear. Her heels click off into the distance, and over my nose, I see the top of the OR doors swing open.
The woman with the orchid whispers to a man like a swarm of flies, the voices mere buzzing annoyances as my sedative deepens, and then she is gone, walking away like a pounding clock.
Part of me is drifting somewhere else, watching parts of lives I missed. Memories bloom in the clarity of the operating room air—this crisp, cleansing chill that sinks deep into my chest and cools all the embers that insist on starting fires.
I hear gloves snap and look over to find the surgeon peering down at me, and when he smiles, it calms me to see that wrinkles touch his eyes. Something about them is familiar, common to me like I’ve dreamt of them before.
“Oliver Scott.”
I nod, yes, yes that’s me. I hear him tinkering with things, breathing into a blue mask that covers his face.
“Bloodletting,” he says. “Your sedative is minimal. Part of the Rebirth is pain.”
His words wash over me and the calmness I had felt seconds ago subside ever slightly. I am aware, I remember, that pain is a player here. I can only trust the woman with the orchid and the promises she cosigned.
I nod.
I feel a sharp tear begin in my forearm that rips through my senses where I swear it nests at the back of my eye. I try to scream, but my throat is full of sand. Warmth washes over my wrist, my hand, and down each of my fingers until I hear it drip, dribble then pour into an echoing tinny bucket.
I feel vomit climb my throat, but there is nothing there to spit.
“Oliver Scott,” the surgeon says, and I’m nodding. Furiously, I’m nodding, tears squeezing out of my eyes, pouring down to match the sweat as it drips, as it puddles, as it pours over.
My arm is a lake of burning oil.
The room swims, folding over on itself like my eyes are full of glass again—black smoke, and blood. I swear I can taste it, and I can feel too much. I know the pain, I know the pain is supposed to be there, is supposed to be part of the healing, but this is not what was described.
Little bug, I see her when I close my eyes, and the surgeon, again, he says, “Oliver Scott,” and I’m nodding, yes, yes motherfucker, why do you keep saying that, and he says, “Oliver Scott, inmate D487331,” and I’m nodding, YES, how long is this going to hurt.
And now it’s quiet. There is something wrapped around my arm, tamping off the bleeding, and I’m thanking God that it’s over, Little Bug Little Bug, am I cured?
The surgeon leans over, his capped head eclipsing the light, and he pulls down his blue mask as his smile wrinkles at his eyes.
His face is covered in tattoos, thin and fading, the kind I got in—
“I fuckin’ thought that was you, bitch.”
His gloved hand is over my mouth before I can scream.
Jesus, that is was a trip. I had to go back to piece it together for myself but very good brutal stuff.
THE ENDING OH MY GOD