The Delphi Room (4 page)

But now that I know you are there, so close, I do not know what to think. Please tell me your thoughts.

Yours very truly,

Brinkley

So my neighbour, apparently, was just as clueless as I was. (Tell him my thoughts?
Help me! Somebody help me!
) I lay under the bed, head poked into the light, tracing his handwriting with my eyes. The pieces of the jigsaw that I thought I had pushed together promptly broke apart. If he was telling the truth, and why hold back, he wasn’t a suicide, and he hadn’t murdered anyone with a blunt instrument. He was the victim of a harried morning commuter. So why was he trapped next to me? The hair-on-fire evangelist that I had watched on TV once at age nine said that even small, unrepented sins would land you in the Pit. Remembering this, Mandarin-nailed fingers started to drum in my chest. I refused to believe he was right.

The light in the room (where was it coming from? There weren’t any lamps) glared like sun off glass, and my eyes ached. I retracted my head into the dusky under-bed cave, called up my head’s Greek senate to debate what to write next. I didn’t want to keep Brinkley waiting long—I knew well the horror of being on hold. My mind was chattering its loquacious best. The sweetish lavender scent of the carpet strengthened, an olfactory knockout punch. My feet were numb, and the weighty deadness of my legs frightened me. I lifted my calves, shook them and let them drop, then kicked furiously to dash paralysis fears. To the desk, but first: the mirror. It had the look of a liquid transparency, so clean and clear was the glass. Staring at it, I almost expected it to ripple, or splash like dropped mercury. My haunted face in the water of it recalled Plath’s fear of the terrible fish. Wrinkled, bloodstained dress, hollowed-out collarbone, bruised face and hedgeclippered hair. But my eyes, always black-coffee, had begun to glow blue around the edge of the iris. Electric, wild stare. Microwaved. I stood, blinking slowly, wondering if the passing over of my eyelid would erase the line. It stayed fixed: hard lapis.

At the desk I sat trembling and trying to pull out my eyelashes, though I had already done a thorough job of that. I poked at my morphing eyes. Their changing colours, the doom marks on my irises, had not altered my vision at all. My Hell still looked the same.

Dear Brinkley,

I must say I was thrown by your description of the circumstances that landed you here. Because of my own story, I was convinced that this was a place for suicides and axe murderers, and those who have otherwise botched their karma. But you were an innocent victim; in fact, you can’t even quite remember what happened to you. So that detonates my theory and I’m—if it’s possible—even more confused. You said that there were things you might have done to deserve this. Such as?

Like you, I was sure that this is Hell, but now that I know you’re next door, and we’re able to communicate, I’m wavering. Have we found a cosmic loophole? Is this really what it’s like to be dead? Perhaps there’s no use mowing this grass anymore, since neither of us has any idea and until something comes along to rattle our cages, we will remain among the clueless.

So you’re a banker. I relied on my Snoopy calculator for everything. I was one of the kids that took dummy math in high school—I knew the mathematics of putting together a great outfit though, which frankly helps when your teacher’s a lech and you’re trying to pass the course. I worked as a waitress at a Thai café on Commercial Drive—I lived just off of there. You’d think I would’ve picked up a few tricks of the trade, absorbed some culinary skill through osmosis, but instead I was just the café’s best customer. I really can’t cook at all. I once cooked spaghetti for my friend Davie and he had heartburn for three days, and even my Bisquick pancakes turned green. Eating was by far my most successful relationship to food.

As for my name, my mother called me Velvet. The first time she felt me kick she was hanging velvet drapes. And yes, I suffered for it. The kids at school called me Velveeta.

Maybe we’re now film stars playing out some warped chucklefest on the Devil’s movie screen. We still haven’t seen the Devil, which makes everything more terrifying. I’d take a pitchfork over nebulous evil any day. The Devil must find Kafka hysterically funny.

I wonder if there’s anyone else trapped in adjacent rooms. I keep thinking of the actor George Sanders, whose suicide note read: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.”

We could be in the presence of a celebrity.

Sincerely, Velvet

P.S. My eyes appear to be turning from blackish to blue. Are you experiencing any changes in your appearance?

The pocket of dim under the bed started to suffocate, the smell of lavender beginning to take on aerosol room spray intensity. I poked my head out from under the dust ruffle. The closet door still stood wide open, the lone hanger’s single talon gripping its perch. The sight of the empty shelves and naked bars made me think of moving day. Bereft closets have always made me feel sad. I pulled my head back to the darker side of the dust ruffle, holding my breath, and felt around the grate for a letter. My fingers moved over it compulsively, up and down, even though I knew that Brinkley wouldn’t have finished his letter yet. Or so I guessed. Without Time, it was impossible to calculate. In a Black Hole,
when?
is not a relevant question.

I cupped the sides of my face and brought an eye to the grate, feeling my lashes swish against metal. The bars were fitted tightly together and I strained to see through the slivers of space between them. My eye bulged with effort, searching for a glimmer of light, a moving shadow. But everything was black. Pain fireworked behind my eyes, from staring at nothing.

Rushed my head out into the light. For a moment the room was tulle-ed in a vertiginous blur. I shook my head and slithered the rest of me out from under.

I crawled to the closet. It was deep and large, made all the more so by its emptiness. The hanger twisted right and then left, over and over, almost imperceptibly, as though creating a rhythm to make up for the motionless clock. I crawled inside, ran the blade of one hand up and down the right angle of a corner. Turned and sat, hanger an overhead beacon. I thought of my red dress.

The gilt angels ’round the mirror stared at me with looks of dumb love and unhelpful innocence. Purity can be a real bitch.

The sound of the glass shattering, and the blood on my hands: these were the things that my senses remembered, not the intricacies of each moment’s memory. Screams pealed at the walls: they must have been my own, unless the Devil has my voice. On my knees on the carpet, bloody hands and burning tears, and a buzzing fog that obscured the far-off flashing lights. I touched the blood to my lips, tasted the metal. My insides were easily swallowed, their taste evoking some forgotten hunger.

Face to the carpet and fingers in ears, my dress twisted and bunched ’round my torso. When my eyes opened, they remained naïve for several moments to the rough expanse before them. The room swelled and shifted like a mirage in the desert sun as I sat up, haloed with glitter. My dress was splotched with wrung bloodstains, a horror movie tie-dyed affair. The dyeing instruments, though, were much restored: the cuts on my hands had healed to mere hairline fractures. I wiped my mouth and took a big, slow breath, trying to fashion the unreality of the room and the unreality of my memories into a wearable idea, a plausible truth, if not a pound of real flesh, then a paper doll. There was no glass on the carpet. The mirror hung whole and perfect on the wall.