Читать книгу The Resurrection of Joan Ashby - Cherise Wolas - Страница 9

For a month, Owl Man has been saying he will let me out of here if I am honest. Again and again, he says to me, “Just once, I want you to do what I’ve asked. Wake up and write down the thoughts that first assail you.”

“Owl Man, assail is a glorious word,” I say to him five mornings a week when I am hauled in here at ten sharp by colossal black-as-night guards dressed all in white, my scrawny biceps in their paws, my paper-slippered feet dragging behind me. It’s a lesson in geometry, the way they gently unhinge my angles and joints until I am seated in the brown leather chair that faces its mate, where Owl Man sits. The guards always wait until I swallow my pills, and when they leave us, Owl Man says, “Let’s tackle these easy subjects again. What’s your name?”

“Guess,” is my regular opener.

“Can you tell me where are you?”

“The Last Resort.”

Sometimes when I say that, Owl Man smiles.

Today it’s the same routine: Released from my barred and locked room by Jim I and Jim II—my names for them, though the tags on their broad chests say Terrence and Golly V., one American, one clearly Indian-from-India—I’m dragged down a bunch of hallways to Owl Man’s office. Then it’s me in my seat, the cone of water in my hand, the pills down my gullet, the guard’s usual question: “You okay here, Doc, we can stay outside, be available to you?” Terrence does all the talking for he and Golly V., and despite my sustained fury, I think it’s sort of nice how Terrence has Golly V. under his wing, the same way the pills are winging their way into my bloodstream.

This morning, after Owl Man shuts the door, but before he begins the usual grilling, I jump in and say, “Got something for you, Dr. Samuel Swann,” and it’s fun watching his head rear back because I’ve used his real name.

In the beginning, my hands were shackled, bound together with those plastic handcuffs, but today I’ve been delivered with my hands belonging to me. I hold them up now, say, “No weapons, just something I’ve got for you, something that will make you sing and set me free.”

Slowly, so slowly, I reach down into the crevice between breasts once lovingly admired and pull out a sheaf of pages. Already the handwriting looks foreign, shaky and disturbed, not at all the beautiful penmanship that used to win me gold stickers in childhood.

“You want to know the thoughts that assail me when I first wake? Well, here you go. Ten pages of my true beliefs,” and I drop into Owl Man’s flushed palm the whole of my life.

He asks me something real then, his voice nearly tender. “May I read these pages aloud? So we both can hear what you have to say?”

My head is doing the weird pill dance, swinging back and forth like a dying flower in a strong wind, the petals about to fall to earth, to be trampled and turned into crap that sticks, with other crap, to the bottoms of soles. Amidst all the head-bobbing, I say, “Here’s my offer. You find the relevant parts and read them out loud, or I shut this down. I don’t want to hear all of it again, not from start to finish. I’ve lived it once, would rather not return for another visit.”

“Which would you prefer?”

“I don’t know Swann, you’re the doctor. I’m fairly certain that in my real life I own a lovely apartment and have two cats who adore me, and once, not even that long ago, I used to have friends, and a serious profession, and I went to movies, and thought about going to the ballet and the opera, and I took hot baths, and never worried about offing myself, and I had a man who loved me and knew how to make me yell out in delight. So, what will it take to get me out of here and back home? What’s going to have the most ameliorative effect?”

“Ameliorative effect,” Owl Man says. “I like that.”

“Me too,” I say, in a calm voice that surprises us both.

Owl Man begins to read and I am convinced, first, that I am a wizard with words, how I make them arch like green leaves over tiny beauteous flowers, and send them soaring like silvered planes that leave behind fairy dust in the blue firmament, that I am a remarkable talent. Second, that I am shocked by the person I have become. I do not recall writing, just this morning, about my desire to kill everyone I have ever known. All the throat-slitting, the fish-gutting, the stranglings I intend to inflict on the people I thought I still loved.

Swann’s harmonious tone stays even, but I feel a million insects shivering up through my insides, taking up residence in the thin layer of skin that no longer protects me well from the world. When he comes to a stop and looks at me, I pretend I am lamb-calm, whistling through the wind.

“So the gist is, you would like a clean slate, live in a world where you can start fresh, become someone else, have no ties to the past, eliminate everyone currently entwined in your life.”

I don’t answer, just study his hanging diplomas in their fake wooden frames, think about the havoc I would wreak in a second on the supposedly innocent, how I would demonstrate to every one of them, in slow and painful ways, the taint lodged so deep in their hearts—