The Delphi Room (23 page)

V: That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever expressed to me. Not that I deserve it, in all my flawed glory.

B: I love your flaws. The outtakes are always the best part of the movie.

V: Nothing like a good blooper reel.

B: People should give what they most need.

V: Were you an undiscovered cinephile saint, hidden on a Toronto porch?

B: No saints here. Only the scars from a mother who looked like a movie star, and a love who actually is a movie star. But everything falls away except pain and a few truths.

V: This place has made me less interested in philosophy.

B: I don’t think more punishment awaits us. I am suddenly feeling quite sure of that.

V: I think we’d both fallen for a cartoon concept of Hell. What makes you so sure we’re out of the woods?

B: I crawled out from under my bed to look out my window and all white is gone. Colours everywhere—liquid flowers, gossamer stars, an explosion of sunset.

V: Panic—I have no colours. All white.

B: I have a strange feeling—just below my bellybutton. Not an itch, not a tingle, not a rumble, not a ripple—but all of those.

V: A good feeling? Sounds like the beginning of an orgasm. Where’s mine? (Even in this place, I’m still asking that same question.)

B: Yes, good, quite faint, like the kernel of something warm.

V: See—if those colours are a preview, you will be welcomed.

B: Welcomed where? True, I never imagined Hell would resemble the aurora borealis, but—

V: There is no denying it. Something is happening in your room. Something good. Nothing is happening in mine, save for my gruesome double in the mirror.

B: I have already said that I will not leave you. We both know that I have no power to keep that promise, but I have all the power necessary to mean it.

I always wondered if our dreams were our real existence, enclosed in a real world, and the lives we remember, the people, the jobs, the hours, were only the black wraith of that, a waiting in line to get back inside.

V: If truth is so subject to interpretation, what is the difference between truth and a lie? Intention, I suppose. Things, important things, must happen of which you have no memory, while some of the mind’s clear photographs of events must in fact be spectres of wishful thinking, or suggestion.

B: One thing is for certain: there is no clear divide between fact and fiction, reality and memory, event and imagination. Clara told me that once. The smell of vomit is making me sick all over again. I left my hiding spot under the bed and searched for some disinfectant, wet wipes, etc. No luck. Laughable, I suppose. Why do we do things we know will be fruitless? My reward: I vomited again. My mother is there, the eye of all, an endless stream of bloody tears. Funny that I can throw up, since it was a lifetime ago that I ate something. The nature of: I suppose we can regurgitate
ad infinitum
. The feeling in my stomach is getting stronger—if I go, you know everything. The sound of
Crime and Punishment
is soothing to me. The woman’s voice is sweet. She draws out the words as though she likes the feel of them in her mouth. Quieter now. Some of the words I am losing.

V: Say nothing of leaving. Don’t mention it again.

Voices still buzzed in my room, low and hazy, like flies drunk on summer. No one reading literature, though. I rolled half out from under the bed, as if maybe it was the dust ruffle that separated me from
Crime and Punishment
. Nothing. Wriggled right out into the open, awaited the aural Dostoevsky bullet. Words ordinary filled the room:
good weather, traffic, coffee, lunch.
None meshed and contorted to form a Russian’s literary zenith. An odd flare lit my stomach, sent tingles of tightness into my chest. Inventory: glad, mad, sad? No: jealous. Because my neighbour in
The Delphi Room
, or who-knows-where, gets to listen to a literary classic and I don’t. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. Until: a voice clear and strong filled the room.

Dr. Bell to Cardiology, please, Dr. Bell to Cardiology.

I made no abrupt movement of surprise. Rather the floor seemed to give way, taking several of my internal organs with it. I lay very still, the moment that held the voice running up ahead of me, my mind with its two left feet staggering to catch up.

And then—

Velvet. Velvet, come back to me.

My mother. My mother. My mother. My mother. My mother. My mother.

Now I sat up. I could see the knife, slicing three words into the skin of my mind:

WE’RE NOT DEAD

V: We’re not dead!!!

B: What?

V: I just heard my mother’s voice as clear as if she was standing in my room. And she is—my hospital room! Right before she spoke I heard someone paging a Dr. Bell to Cardiology. We’re alive! We’re not trapped in Hell—we’re trapped in a coma!

B: Are you sure? Hallucination?

V: We’re alive!!! I’m not hallucinating. I know my mother’s voice. She was calling me back to her—loud and clear. And the doctor. Why would I hallucinate a doctor being paged? All of the voices and sounds we’ve heard—hospital noise.
Crime and Punishment
is not a precursor to Hellfire—someone is reading to you at your bedside. We will see each other after all—we just have to wake up! When I do, I’ll take the train. I’ll come to Toronto and find you. We’re only trapped in our minds.

B: If we are trapped in our minds, then how is it that we can write to each other?

V: The body is a trap—but I guess the spirit can travel. Just like Clara can time travel.

B: How do we wake up? We’ve thrown ourselves against walls, screamed, cried. What next?

V: I don’t know. Hold on—I’m going to try the door again.

An unrecorded feat of record-breaking speed—out from under the bed to the door, my heart gorging on blood. Then—a scene from the past unfolded again: me yanking on the doorknob, twisting the skin on my hands in all directions, sliding down the door still clutching the knob, the bilious taste of disappointment stinging my tongue.

V: Door’s still locked. But if we’re trapped in our minds then it stands to reason that we can think our way out of this! Since we exist in a state of timelessness (read: coma) then the past, present and future are one. The future already exists, has already passed—we’re already free! We must believe this, and it’ll happen.

B: Our thoughts are that powerful?

V: Yes—all thought must manifest somewhere, right? Thoughts are nonperishable items, like canned foods or Kraft Dinner.

B: I dislike Kraft Dinner.

V: Fuck, you’re missing the point.

B: Sorry.

V: We have to focus!

B: I am trying, but the exquisite colours at my window are distracting me.

V: Forget about the damn rainbow for a minute. We’ve got to think our way out of here.

B: If you are correct, then we’re in Hell because we believed it was so? If thoughts are things, dreams—and nightmares—can be realities. How do we keep our thought-forms from eating us? The creation kills the artist?

V: Yes, we are in a Hell—of sorts. Which can exist anywhere. But the fiery Hell we were afraid of must simply be a garbage dump of imaginings. So we’re bound only by a coma—not by any red-deviled daydreams. There must be a way we can untwist our wires.

B: The colours outside my window are more dazzling than ever. They pulse and vibrate—they are living, breathing hearts—sublime, shimmering wings. We don’t speak a language that could ever express what I see. Something is happening to me—a spiral tube has appeared, a tube with many twisting offshoots, superimposed over the colours like a strange, diaphanous flower. All voices are gone.

V: If you concentrate maybe you can erase all that. We can think ourselves free!

B: Impossible to erase it. And I don’t want to. I can’t turn away.

V: What are you saying?

B: I have no power to decide my fate.

V: Please don’t go. Return to Toronto. Let me find you!

B: I am not going back to my old life. So this is what it feels like to die. Happy.

V: I want to die too. But for a different reason than before.

V: Brinkley?

V: Brinkley—answer me!

Hand to the grate, felt for a poke of paper. A blast of cold air, real or imagined, ordered up a side of goosebumps. Into the light, faced my mirror. There I hung. And then disappeared, leaving the closet reflected behind me. My changed appearance had been shocking, should, I thought, still be. But it wasn’t. Breastless, hairless, with little fat, except around strangely chubby wrists and ankles, no biceps. Aqua crystal eyes. And shorter, I was sure of it. An alien child.

Me. I see me.

My heart, my eyes—both lived in the room next door. Outside my window—no sign of Brinkley’s rainbow.

To the desk, the legal pad—one page left. There remained some torn-up pieces of paper under the bed, but that was all. I stared at that last page, eye to a gun barrel, waiting for the trigger pull.

If someone is in the next room, but they stop writing notes to you, do they still exist? Do you?

A chorus of angels spoke their harmonies ever louder:
Velvet, open your eyes
(my mother),
Good morning, how are you today? And how are you, Velvet?
(a male voice),
Isn’t the sunshine gorgeous?
(a female voice). There was no static, only clear bell tones. A turned-up radio dial: the volume surged to the level of reverberating eardrums. I thought of what my neighbour had written: all the voices in his room were gone. I wished for silence, the quiet that might mean a chaise lounge in the Elysian Fields next to Brinkley.