Don’t Leave Me Now
Photography: RDNE Stock project
Pink Floyd’s ‘Don't Leave Me Now’ floats into her skull along with Chris’s name. Two measures of each bizarre chord progression plod through her head. A song without a key. She stands up, numb, gliding toward the orderly in the doorway. The roots form a pair of tritones. The Devil’s Chord. Slash and lick slash and lick. Greedy! Selfish! Whore fuckslutcumdumpster piece of shit trash—
Sinner… hisses the serpent.
Amelia finds her way to the pay phone attached to the wall in the corridor, closely watched by the orderly. Stab out the eyes. Sew the eyes shut. Sew the eyes OPEN. Watch it. Watch the devil slice you to ribbons and fuck the bloody meat sack that’s left. There is a long pause. Her voice slips between the cracks in the song.
“Hello?”
A cold silence, then, “Hey.”
The song fills in the spaces.
“I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry—”
A flood of sound a thousand miles away comes pouring from his mouth. “You wait until I’m out of town visiting my father who has cancer and you slash your fucking wrists? Something in you thought that would be a good idea; that that would somehow make things easier for me?”
“You know I’ve felt this way for a long time,” she begins as the lyrics beg for forgiveness. “I can’t help it. I told you a thousand times, the music and voices, they won’t stop. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“You couldn’t take what?” He yells, furious. “Having great friends and a great life and a great family? And you wait until now? You’re so fucking selfish it’s ASTOUNDING. This is the last thing I need right now, to deal with your mental problems while my father is dying.”
“I’m sorry!” Roger Waters’s voice cracks under her words. “I’m sorry. I thought I wouldn’t have to explain this; I left a note.”
“Yeah? And what did it say? Did it say, ‘I could have done this at ANY other time. ANY other time and you would have been at my side?’ ‘Sorry I didn’t wait for you to bury your father because I can’t control myself?’ ‘Sorry I grew up with everything I ever wanted and still managed to come out defective’?”
“No, it said I love you and I’m sorry if it causes you any pain to lose me, but I hoped you’d understand that I would finally have peace and silence.” A poor retelling. She spent weeks crafting those letters, writing in her best calligraphy.
He scoffs. “Peace and silence. That’s funny because my dad is on a morphine drip and he has plenty of peace and silence.”
“I wish I DID have cancer so that I could finally die!”
Instant regret.
His anger swells, screaming with the song. “You are so goddamn melodramatic. You have such unearned pain. I don’t get it. If you did it because you liked the attention I could at least understand, but you have this sick hatred of it that is so much worse. You’re spoiled and ungrateful and weak.”
“I’m not weak! I’ve survived this shit for a decade! I ENDURED. But then, I stayed up til four a.m. picking maggots out of our carpet— slimy rice-sized maggots squirming through the carpets in the bedroom —and I drowned them in a plate of pancake syrup. And you know what? In the morning nothing was in the syrup.”
Shock. Vomit. Don’t trust the government.
“That does not, in any way, excuse what you have done.”
“Chris, please!”
“Listen to me you psycho bitch: this is the worst thing you could’ve ever done to me. I will never forgive you for this. I hope I never see your face again.”
“Are you… are you leaving me? We’re supposed to get married in September.”
Burning alive in a wedding dress – Funeral fire – Love pyre.
“How can you possibly expect me to marry you after this? You think I’m just going to pretend this never happened? I’ll never be able to trust you again.” Drums, bass, and guitar all enter. They hit Amelia like a shockwave.
She rushes her words together, fanning the flames, “Please don’t do this. I told you, I tried to tell you that night, that last night together before you left, and I cried and you asked what was wrong. You ASKED and I told you I felt like killing myself and you said—”
“I said what? I said you should see a counselor, like I have a million times before, and—”
“We can’t afford it!” she sobs.
“If I hadn’t bought you that car for your birthday we’d be able to afford it.”
The crow picks at her charred flesh.
“It doesn’t help! I don’t have anything to talk about. It’s like you said, my life is perfect—”
He interrupts her with the skill of a practiced manipulator. “Your life IS perfect, so you are either the most selfish bitch on the planet, or something happened in your childhood that you need to fucking deal with— which means you would be LYING to me. Which is it? Are you lying about wanting to die or lying about your past?”
“You know I’ve told you everything, I had no other choice! There’s no escape, I can’t stand it anymore, I had to make a decision!” Her brain swarms with confusion and noise.
“Yeah, you made a decision. So here’s my decision: I’m not going to forgive you. I’m not going to marry you. In fact, I hope you DO kill yourself and go straight to Hell where you belong. Goodbye.”
Dial tone.
Amelia tunes in to the song in her head. The phone drops from her hand and dangles on its cord.
Click.
Voices.
Click.
Hang yourself with the phone cord.
Clickclick
It’s too short.
Clickclickclickclick—
The sounds of the universe cannot block it out.
Get it out, get it out of my head!
Amelia screams with the song inside her mind.
Radio-Head
Photography: Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz
Amelia lies on her bed with her meager pillow and too-short blanket, Hailey snoring softly a few feet away. She is switching music in her mind, trying to find the right radio station. John Lee Hooker, she orders her brain, and several songs fade in and out but none stick. She tries Led Zeppelin, Massive Attack, Bach, Stephen Sondheim. Nothing but static.
There is a loud CLICK and the internal radio turns off.
The crow scratches at her eyeballs with its claws.
Silence invades Amelia’s mind like mustard gas.
She closes her eyes and it’s there: a rabbit wrapped in electrical tape, dripping with tar. Backlit by an open doorway, it stares at her without eyes. Six huge, curved talons flick out from its right hand. Its left hand is a powerful black paw with short, strong fingers – Only five – Like a hand without an opposable thumb.
She opens her eyes to escape the vision.
The clock is ticking.
Why can’t I think of a fucking All around the mulberry bush No fuck you, NO, a SONG.
She closes her eyes.
Another creature is in the monster’s room. The tar rabbit stares at the knotted child-shaped tree, ever silent. ::flickflickflick:: Tick. Tick. Tick. The tree-child's arms are crossed over its chest, molded into the bark like the woven branches of a ficus. Tick. Tick. Tick. Without warning, the rabbit attacks, rakes its claws along the tree-child’s scalp then viciously slashes at its shoulders from behind. The bark heals when the talons retract, leaving behind a light-green cicatrix. It is growing imperceptibly.
There is no rabbit.
::flick::
Tick.
Full-out war.
The monster attacks, the tree heals. The rabbit opens its huge maw and gouges the serenely closed eyes of the tree-child, ripping out chunks with its fangs. The shredded eye sockets heal into knots, and now they are both blind. The rabbit’s plastic-constricted chest heaves with satisfaction. Tick. ::flick:: Tick. ::flick:: Tick. ::flick:: In another flash, it stabs its six long claws straight into the tree-child’s face and yanks upwards, splitting the head into seven splinters.
::flickflickflick::
Amelia opens her eyes.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Pink Floyd conjures more clocks, intensifying the urgency. With each second, the ticking seems louder and louder until it is intolerable. Eyes closed, the back of her eyelids burst with geometric patterns when ‘Time’ erupts in her eardrums.
The dissonant clangor ringing in her head propels her out of bed. She runs through the door to the side of the nurses’ station, reaches up, and pulls the clock off the wall. It makes an audible ripping sound – Attached by Velcro. Shit! Someone’s coming. As quickly as possible, Amelia removes the batteries from the clock and throws them in the trash. ::silence:: The tiny muscles between her ribs and breastbone relax, and she breathes in the unblemished acoustics. Then, an ancient voice yells from several doors down.
“I need to wash my vagina!” It echoes down the hallway. What the fuck was that? “My vagina is so dirty! It’s so dirty it needs to be washed NOW! NOW! NOW NOW NOW!”
A plump, black orderly scurries toward Amelia, who rushes to put the clock back into place. She’s going to chart me for leaving my room, she thinks, but the orderly only passes her with a warning.
“Back into bed, please. This is only gonna escalate.”
The senescent voice screeches again. “I’m going in the shower right now, whether you’re here or not! I might slip and fall and break my hip, and then I’m gonna sue the shit out of this place!” Amelia slips back into her room but the old woman’s voice is barely muffled by the door. “Not you, you fucking nigger!” Ooooooo… chorus the kindergarteners.
The orderly speaks from five doors away. “Rosemary, I’m here to help—”
“You just want to see my vagina! You’re a dyke,” she jeers. “You want to see it because all you’ve seen is nigger pussy!” Curling into a fetal position on her bed, Amelia does her best to block out the conversation.
“It’s time to go to sleep. You should have showered before lights out.”
“I heard it’s purple,” Rosemary goads her. “Is nigger pussy really purple?” Amelia pulls her short blanket up over her ears, which exposes her feet.
“Please don’t say that word. It’s not the kind of thing you say to people.”
“What? Nigger or pussy? Nigger nigger nigger nigger pussy pussy pussy!” Amelia’s brain has been shocked into silence. “You WANT to see my vagina! You WANT to wash it!”
A voice calls out, “Ain’t nobody want to see your wrinkly-ass nasty ass vagina!” and suddenly the whole ward is awake. Lucia begins wailing prayers in Spanish. Maxwell is yelling from the men’s hall on the other side of the nurses’ station, demanding to know whether or not black women have purple vaginas. The silent roommate rolls over to face the wall. Amelia puts her pillow and blanket around her ears and turns her internal radio back on, finally finding peace in Tool.
I enjoy that I read just fast enough for the writing to match the music. It oddly feels like your brain makes your life cinematic.
“I’m not weak! I’ve survived this shit for a decade! I ENDURED.
But then, I stayed up til four a.m. picking maggots out of our carpet— slimy rice-sized maggots squirming through the carpets in the bedroom —and I drowned them in a plate of pancake syrup.
And you know what? In the morning nothing was in the syrup.”
I’m grateful that you’ve endured, and survived, and that you’re strong enough to share (& thereby help others).
But I wish I’d read this yesterday… I could have invited you to join my family in our inaugural Maple Syrup* Tuesday: neither the Church nor NOLA/US drunkards hold sway over us.
You’ve gotta go for the pure stuff, straight from 🇨🇦’s strategic reserve of unadulterated distilled sunlight.