Geist
by
Chandler Kaiden
At first, there
was only numb horror.
He couldn’t
move his arms, couldn’t catch his breath. Everything was
black. The thick stench of mildew, of rust and minerals,
coagulated in his nose and throat. Steaming water spilled
over his forehead, rained into his eyes, seeped between his
lips. Brackish, foul water, full of chemicals.
It seemed to go
on forever.
He tried to move. But he was confined, his limbs pressed
tightly against his body.
When the water
stopped, he heard dull, heavy thumping, like the
machinations of an enormous water-logged engine.
The air was
thick with steam. The foul water collected around his eyes,
spilled into his nostrils, packed his sinuses.
There, in the wet darkness, he tried to drown himself. He
inhaled the water. Tried to hold his breath -- that breath
he’d been instinctively fighting to catch when he came to
-- and found that he could hold it and hold it and hold it,
and nothing happened.
I want to
die.
Of course he
did. He had for years. But dying, as far as he knew, was a
one time thing. Once done, you just had to endure anything
that came after.
#
The
bad-smelling blackness went on and on. The crippled hours
inched by. Ten, it seemed, for every one that passed.
It felt like days before the water came again, spilling
down from above. Cold at first, then near boiling and
stinging with chemicals. Hellish.
With all his will power, he wriggled and squirmed and
fought.
And he noticed, as the water rushed over him, pooled in the
hollows of his ears, as the steam clung to his eyeballs
like a layer of hot dead skin, that a faint, ethereal light
came from above, with the water. He tensed the muscles in
his neck, in his shoulders. He tilted his face upward.
His neck gave just a little, and the blackness spun before
him. Tremendous pain shot through him like claws raking his
bones. It was the most he’d moved since coming to.
The water stopped. There was heavy, scattershot thumping.
The darkness pressed down.
After a while, he tried again to look up.
The pain was milder, this time. Not so much claws raking
his bones as chisels chipping at them. It was still
sickening, but not as bad as before.
#
Nine more times
the water came. The instances were separated by what seemed
like immense spans of time.
Dirty water, and time, and more dirty water, and more time.
It wasn’t so much that he adjusted to it as he had other
things to keep him occupied.
Moving. Or trying to move. That was his primary diversion.
Sometime after the last time the water came -- the
attendant light floating at the edge of his field of vision
like a lonely halo -- he lost consciousness.
The dream he had took him back to his life, the way he’d
known it.
He’d thought it was the most terrible life anyone could
endure. His crushing debt, and his personal failures, and
his depression, and all that. He’d clutch those things to
himself like stuffed toys now, if he could go back.
He couldn’t tell if the dream was really a memory.
It didn’t matter. It seemed real enough.
He was in his house, in the sunken living room. Blair was
in the front hall, at the top of the three steps that led
up. Thunder cracked outside, and she cringed. Laughed. She
pulled her sopping raincoat over her head and shook her
hair out.
When he awoke, he wanted to cry. He wanted to scream and
sob and rage. But he’d left the balm of tears behind him,
with his life.
#
When it came
time for the water again, he was waiting. Waiting, and
looking up.
Before it came, he heard the pounding of the machinery,
like the sound of heavy thumping in a sealed vault. Then,
above him, the circle of light appeared, like a window
superimposed on the darkness.
At first, he couldn’t tell what he was seeing. There were
patterns of white squares. A shining silver obelisk cut
into the top of his screen of vision, and there was a
billowing white curtain, white light coming through it,
washing over the rest of the scene.
He studied it, trying to make sense of it.
Then the curtain billowed, and a pale form stepped through
it. A woman, bright and naked as a Grecian statue.
He groaned, and wanted to cry again.
Blair!
He tried to
call out to her, but his voice was like an old joint,
shrunken and dry.
He realized that he was looking up into the shower in the
master bathroom in his own house.
The curtain was the shower curtain. All that white was
plastic, porcelain, and tile. The silver obelisk above him
was the faucet.
I’m in the
drain, he realized.
Blair stood there a moment, white and shivering. She was
crying, staring down at the sloping side of the tub
opposite the faucet.
Then she turned. Moving very slowly, she turned on the
faucet.
The deluge broke over him, freezing. Then it boiled.
Blinded him.
She twisted the knob to divert the water to the showerhead,
and he could see her again. Water ran over her body in tiny
streams, clear hot rivers running down the smooth white
mountains of her flesh.
He wanted to reach up, out of the drain, and touch her. Run
his fingers over her ankles, over her calves, up her legs.
Even if he could only touch her toes, it would mean
everything. But his body was paralyzed, worthless. A wormy
deformity.
She stood there for what felt like hours, her skin turning
pink under the hot water.
She faced the opposite wall and cried.
His gaze ran over her body. The bumps of her vertebrae,
leading down her back like a steep staircase. Her rounded
legs, her gentle hips.
She was looking at that spot,
he knew.
When she finally turned, she’d stopped crying.
She washed her hair. Her fingers worked the shampoo into
lather. She held her head under the water, rinsed it away.
When the foamy, chemical-saturated water ran over him, he
welcomed it. It seemed a part of her.
After a long time, she twisted the handles on the faucet.
Reached through the curtain and retrieved a terrycloth
towel, a splotch of bright pink in that screen of white.
She toweled herself dry and disappeared through the
curtain.
The sound of her footsteps thundered in the pipes.
Her
footsteps, the pounding of the wet
machinery.
She shut off
the bathroom light, and he settled into the darkness again.
#
Little by
little, he wriggled his way toward the mouth of the drain.
She came and went, showered and dried. He never tired of
watching her, of loving her, the closeness of her, the
warmth radiating off her body as it steamed under the hot
water. When she wasn’t there, he felt very alone.
#
Once, he
thought she saw him. She’d stepped into the tub, and was
about to turn on the faucet when she knelt, gasped, and
looked at the drain.
More than ever, he wanted to speak. To tell her it was him,
that he was dead but he wasn’t, somehow, and he still loved
her very much.
She stood up quickly, left the shower. Reappeared with a
rolled magazine and swatted the drain.
She reached down and pinched the crushed body of a
silverfish between her fingers, then dropped it down the
drain. It landed between his eyes. He was helpless to brush
it away.
When she turned on the water, its legs became tangled in
his eyelashes and it didn’t wash away.
He spent a long, black time between her showers, the dead
silverfish crusting on his eyelid, before she came back and
it finally washed away.
#
He lost
consciousness again.
When he came to, he knew she’d been there. There was water
around his eyes, a rusty taste in the back of his throat.
He’d missed her.
It didn’t matter. He was close to freeing himself from the
drain.
He writhed in the pipe, twisting his snaky body up, little
by little, toward the opening.
He realized that he could feel his arms again. That he
could differentiate them from the rest of himself.
He wriggled his fingers, catching them on the lime
encrusted sides of the drainpipe, propelling himself
forward until he could see over the lip of the drain’s
mouth across the floor of the bathtub, a vast plastic
landscape dotted by dirt particles and tiny hairs. Over the
course of the long night, he squeezed himself out of the
drain like toothpaste out of a tube.
#
Coiled like a
withered rope of flesh on the floor of the bathtub, he took
stock of his body. He was naked, very white, and very thin.
His skin was transparent, wrinkled, emaciated, and
diseased-looking.
He lay there, exhausted. Instinct told him to pant, but
since he no longer needed oxygen, it didn’t help.
Eventually, he lifted a claw-like hand and curled his
fingers over the side of the tub.
#
His movements
were fueled by will alone. It cost him everything he had to
drag himself into the dank space under the toilet tank,
where he rested.
His body felt painfully dry. What served as his skin was
flaky and pale. His hands, little more than knobby twists
of stiff fingers, hung limp and half-severed from his
wrists. Death had widened the razorblade slices like
thin-lipped smiles. The skin had split cleanly, like a
sausage skin. Like the waxy rind of a fine cheese.
#
Supporting
himself by his frail, trembling arms, he dragged his body,
hand over hand, out from under the toilet, toward the
shower mat. The tiles inched by underneath him, smooth as
glass but hindering his progress like jagged rocks, rough
as sandpaper on his half-dissolved skin.
When the shower water cut off, he let his upper half
collapse to the floor and raised his arm as high as he
could. Reaching. Hoping she’d see him.
She got out of the shower, dried herself, wrapped a towel
around her hair.
As she turned to leave the steamy bathroom, she stepped on
his fingers. The pain was blinding. It sent a swarm of
black spots across his vision like evil gnats. His scream
was dry and dead, howling from the twisted, empty husk of
his body like a desert wind. His eyes were dry as shriveled
grapes in the canyons of their sockets. He wasn’t even
allowed the relief of tears.
#
Leaning heavily
on the faux-marble sink, he stared into the mirror. Stared
at the reflection of the Van Gogh print on the opposite
wall, the painting of the wheat field. A gash of yellow
beneath a dark sky, a black crow with a blue halo around
it.
He stared at the reflected wallpaper, the plastic towel
bar. A tiny spider scuttled up the wall.
Even the
spider has a reflection, he thought.
But he didn’t.
It felt like an
insult.
At least
I’m standing now.
He leaned in
close to the mirror. Inhaled, though it took him a moment
to remember how, to feel out that ability. He exhaled a fog
of foul warm breath.
A circle of condensation appeared on the mirror. He felt a
flare of white-hot joy. He lifted one trembling hand, a
weak bouquet of needle-thin fingers, and traced his name in
the fog.
He tried to smile. But his face felt like it was carved in
granite, unalterable and cold.
#
He unraveled
his dry, mortified body across the middle of the bathroom
floor and lay there like a severed tentacle. The house
settled around him. He watched the sunlight, streaming
through windows in other rooms onto the hallway carpet
outside the bathroom, moving in bars as the day advanced.
The bars of light glowed golden, then got fuzzy around the
edges, then faded and vanished. Evening came, then night.
Eventually, he heard her moving around downstairs, talking
on the telephone.
The house grew quiet.
Night passed. He felt like he was lost in a black, endless
field. He wanted to sink into the only kind of sleep he was
allowed, even if his dreams, his memories, were always in
orbit around him, lush and alien planets.
But he couldn’t.
In the morning, she came into the master bathroom to take
her shower.
He’d been saving strength all night for the moment she
turned on the light. When she did, he lifted a feeble arm.
She didn’t even glance at him, but closed the door behind
her, hung her robe on the back of it, and stood at the
sink, brushing her teeth.
Her heel was inches from his face. His fingers tingled, and
he reached out to touch her. Half a centimeter from her
skin, a bolt of agony passed through him in a current, and
he jerked his hand away.
He wanted to scream. Couldn’t.
He lay there silently.
She vanished behind the shower curtain, and he heard her
crying over the sound of the rushing water.
Steam rolled over the cold floor, over his discarded
snakeskin of a body.
She got out of the shower. Dried off. Wrapped a towel
around her head and went to the door for her robe.
As she passed, she stepped on his thin, tube-like torso.
There was a crunch. A scarlet wave of fresh agony crashed
over him.
Pass
out, he begged
silently. Pass out,
pass out, pass out.
But he didn’t.
He twisted and writhed.
Soon he was exhausted. He looked up at her, a towering soft
statue. A look of wonder, of love and fear, had buffed the
pain out of her grief-lined face.
She was staring at the foggy mirror. At his name, like a
photographic negative, traced in the dew of his ghostly
breath just a day -- feels like
weeks -- earlier. In
stark relief, as though chiseled in stone, it seemed to
glow in the condensation.
Blair!
She looked
around the bathroom, her gaze as deliberate and searching
as a periscope.
“Tom?” she whispered.
Blair!
She stood there
a long time, waiting.
He reached out to touch her foot and that unbearable,
vibrating agony coursed through him again. He tried to
endure it, to reach through it. It may as well have been a
steel barrier.
#
When he walked,
it felt like nails were being driven into his heels. He
leaned his full weight against the hallway wall,
progressing an inch at a time. Shuffling, grunting. A
hollow, exhausted horror.
The house was empty. The hours passed, each one like ten to
him.
When he reached the top of the stairs leading to the first
floor, he collapsed.
#
The doorbell
rang. He watched from upstairs as Blair answered the door.
A pretty, dark-haired woman wearing an expensive coat
opened her arms as she stepped in, and Blair hugged her.
They held each other a long moment.
“Hi honey,” said the woman.
A red-headed boy, seven or eight years old, came in behind
the woman.
“Thanks for coming,” said Blair.
“Oh, this’ll be fun. We’ll have fun.”
She handed a video to Blair, who read the title on the box
and laughed.
The woman said, “Josh has got books, his video game, action
figures. He can play in the dining room?”
“Oh, sure, of course,” said Blair. “I set up a TV in there.
And the beanbag chair.”
“Sorry I couldn’t get a babysitter.”
The little boy stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking
up.
“Come on, honey, Mrs. D. said you can play in the other
room.”
The dark-haired woman took the boy by the hand and pulled
him toward the dining room. He lingered, staring up, and
then capitulated, letting the woman drag him away.
#
Much later, the
sounds of the comedy the women were watching floated
upstairs, buoyed by the current of their wine-soaked
voices.
The boy appeared at the bottom of the stairs again. The
sight of the boy terrified him. The boy stood there a long
time, looking up.
Then, as though stepping on something dangerous, the boy
gingerly placed his foot on the first stair. Stepped up.
Placed his other foot on the second stair and stepped up,
and kept coming.
When the boy was five steps from the top, he froze,
staring. Then he turned and bolted back downstairs.
The video cut off, and he heard their voices. “Josh, I told
you to stay in the dining room. What were you doing up
there?”
“I needed to use... the bathroom.”
“What’s the matter?”
“A man’s up there.”
“Oh stop it.”
“Who’s up there?” Blair asked.
“A man,” Josh said. “A scary man is upstairs.”
“Just stop it,” his mother said. “Go back and play your
video game.”
They argued some more. Eventually, the little boy passed
the stairs alone. He didn’t look up. Near the front door,
he broke into a run and ran all the way to the dining room.
Blair and her friend talked softly below. Blair was crying.
He couldn’t understand most of what they said, but he heard
a snatch:
“...think Tom might still be in the house...”
More quiet crying.
The movie came back on.
#
Why did I
start in the drain? The question
came to him a hundred times an hour, begging for an answer.
He decided he’d probably started there because that’s where
the last of his life had flowed, red and thin.
It was a terrible place to start.
#
Once, he
managed to knock the telephone handset off the cradle when
she was sitting on the couch.
She picked it up and listened, as though waiting to hear a
voice. To receive a message he desperately wanted to give
her, but couldn’t.
#
He wanted to
attach himself to her when she went to work, when he missed
her most. But the thought of it terrified him. What if they
became separated? It took him hours to move across one
room. Outside, he could be lost forever.
#
It seemed the
only way he could have physical contact with her was if her
touch brought him pain. If she stepped on him, kicked him
across the floor, or walked into him and tore his skin with
her toenails, then he felt her, even though she couldn’t
feel him. If he sat next to her when she was on the couch,
staring at her, thinking her name, and she moved absently
and came close to him, he’d be shocked by that deep red
pain.
#
It scared him,
watching her.
She wasn’t moving on. Wasn’t getting better. Every night,
the television blared louder, the wine flowed earlier, and
she cried longer.
It became too exhausting following her between rooms,
watching her deteriorate. So he returned to the master
bathroom permanently, to be with her where she cried the
most. He spent his time behind the toilet, or in the corner
behind the door.
Once, he pulled himself up by the marble surface of the
sink so he was standing in front of the mirror again. He
breathed onto the glass, lifted his hand.
But he was afraid to write a word.
#
In his dream,
they were in a bus together. They were very young. Eighteen
and sixteen, maybe. Still in high school, where they’d met.
They were traveling through bleak, snowy, open country,
fields flying by in the freezing night.
He was wearing his heavy cashmere coat, the nicest item of
clothing he owned. Her head rested on his shoulder, and she
was asleep.
The bus bounced over a pothole. She stirred, looked up at
him. Took his hand.
#
When he came
to, the bathroom light was on. The door was open, too, and
the hall was very dark.
It’s not
morning.
Blair never
deviated from her routine.
He lifted his head off the tile floor and saw her. She lay
in the steaming tub, slumped against the sloping side
opposite the faucet, her head rolling on the white wall.
She was crying, and there was a long, sharp blade in her
hand.
If she cuts
her wrists, she’ll be like me.
The realization
fired in him an all-consuming compulsion to save her. If it
meant he never saw her again, even in death, he couldn’t
let her follow him that way.
His thin, white fingers bent back against the hard floor
and snapped, sending jets of molten pain through his arms
as he clawed at the smooth tile, scrabbled over the floor
towards her. Can’t let
her do it, can’t let her do it, can’t let her do it.
#
A year before
he found himself in the drain, he’d started visiting a
psychiatrist once a week. She was a fifty-something woman
with bugged eyes and a haircut twenty years out of style.
She told him to keep a journal, and to write in it
regularly.
Once, he’d written that he was often kept awake at night by
the thought of dying.
“Why are you afraid of dying?” the doctor asked.
“Because I don’t understand it,” he said. “Because nobody
does. It’s non-existence.”
“You don’t believe in an afterlife?”
“Not really.”
“Are you afraid of how
you’ll die?”
“No, I already know that.”
“How do you believe you will die?”
“I’m going to kill myself.” He said it simply,
matter-of-factly.
“You think the pressures of your life will drive you to
suicide?”
“No,” he said. “I think that eventually I’ll feel like
doing it, and I’ll just do it.”
“Do you have a plan for doing it?”
He didn’t answer, but thought a moment.
“Do you have a plan, Tom?”
“Not a specific one. I’ve just... I don’t know. I’ve always
known I’m going to kill myself. Since I was a teenager.
Maybe earlier.”
“And what do you think will happen after you do?”
“Non-existence.”
“What do you think that will be like?”
He thought again.
“Restful,” he said.
#
He clung to the
edge of the tub, looking into her beautiful, makeup
streaked face.
With one arm, he batted at the knife she held. His other
arm couldn’t support him alone, and he fell to the tile. He
reached up again, for the knife. Touched her hand instead,
and agonizing spasms roared through him.
He lay beside the tub in a puddle of soapy water,
shivering, staring up at her, willing her to put the knife
down.
She turned her hand over and stared at the white, soft
underside of her wrist. She touched the blade of the knife
to the skin there. Pressed down on the back of the blade,
pulled it away.
A fresh crop of tears sprang up in her eyes, fell into the
bathwater.
Tremors wracked his spiny, worthless rail of a body. Her
calm, her focus,
scared him. He knew that pleasured look. He understood the
emotion behind it. He’d looked that way himself, once.
Propping himself up on one bony elbow, he reached for her
again. Strained, until his insides crackled and burned. He
forced himself to sit up. He swatted at the knife, his
fingers connecting with her wrist instead.
Electrical pain knocked him flat on his back. She pressed
the blade against her wrist again, the hand gripping the
handle shaky and white-knuckled.
Don’t,
Blair.
He imagined
having to crawl over the side of the tub after somebody
found her, after they hauled her body away and drained the
pink water.
Imagined peering into the drain. Seeing her eye in there,
staring up at him. Pulling out her dry, empty form.
Watching her drag herself over the dirty tiles. Clawing
over the floors of the empty house with him, inch by inch,
hour by hour, day by day. Frail, helpless, unable to even
speak.
He shoved hard against the ground, propelling himself up.
He reached out again, struck the knife with the tips of his
thin broken fingers, and knocked it out of her hands and
into the water. It landed on the bottom of the tub with a
heavy thunk.
There was that look on her face again, same as when she
found his name written on the mirror, when she held the
handset he’d knocked off the cradle to her ear and
listened.
He was exhausted. He lay next to the tub, trembling.
She looked around the room. Her eyes were bright, wet and
penetrating, peeling the visible layers off everything.
Trying to see beneath what was there.
Eventually she stood, stepped out of the water and onto the
bathmat. Dried off. Wrapped a towel around her hair and
tied her robe around her.
#
After the house
sold, Blair’s dark-haired friend with the little boy packed
up Blair’s toiletries so she didn’t have to go back into
the master bathroom.
He considered following Blair. Crawling into one of the
moving boxes, emerging in her new home.
But if he did that, she’d wind up in another bathtub
somewhere, another knife to her wrist. Remembering the
little signs she’d seen, the evidence of him around her.
Things falling, words written on the mirrors. Probably
thinking that a few good slashes were all that separated
them.
So he let her go.
Alone in the empty house, he pulled himself over the side
of the tub, and crawled back into the long-dry drain. It
was the place where he’d started, the place that had
birthed him into his afterlife, and he felt close to her
there.
Copyright
2008 by Chandler Kaiden