The Mirrors Page 3

  She’d never before worked up the moxie to go this far. She didn’t need the cat messing around, distracting her. Truth be told, she didn’t need the cat at all.

  But there he was, legally in her care. Well, maybe not “legally.” It wasn’t like adopting a child or anything. She hated it when the animal shelters called getting an animal “adopting” one. She’d been adopted (not from an animal shelter, but out of a foster home). She didn’t like the comparison.

  But her sponsor had told her that a cat would help, so she got one. Her sponsor had told her to do a bunch of other shit, too. Shit that came out of the big blue book they read out of at meetings. Pray to a god who wasn’t there. Apply the twelve steps to all her affairs. Give up her own will to that of the group. Nope. Nope. Nope. She couldn’t do it. Not any of it.

  Get a cat? Yes. She could do that. Of all her sponsor’s suggestions, taking in a stray made the most sense. It didn’t require her to duck her head in the sand like a faithful, unquestioning ostrich. It required no prayer; the only time she’d have to spend on her knees was in front of the litter box. Better than begging for help from an imaginary friend. Better still than praying to the porcelain god while puking up gin and ramen noodles.

  And for a while it worked. Sure, he got into everything. Jumped all over the place. Knocked over more lamps than she ever did while tipsy. She hated him. But he was warm and fuzzy when she was cold and clammy. He had this endearing, meek meow that sounded like a bird. The good behavior “calming collar” she’d bought for him at the pet store had a pleasant odor. The package said it gave off mother cat pheromones. She didn’t know if that was true or not; to her it just smelled like lavender. Nice to whiff when she cuddled him. She loved him.

  She always hurt those she loved. She hurt the cat by drinking.

  They weren’t all full-fledged benders like this past week; just little slips sometimes. But they never ended well. She’d forget to scoop out the cat poop for a few days, and then the poor thing would resort to shitting in the house. Or she’d forget to feed him, and he’d start to get aggressive. Scratching her. Biting her. Sometimes on the face.

  She had scars from the last time. They were the only thing that cut through the blackout to remind her of what happened. She imagined herself a latter-day Hester Prynne, the scarlet bite mark etched on her forehead stigmatizing her to all feline society as a neglectful owner.

  So her addled brain constructed a new syllogism. She couldn’t stand the guilt after coming to and realizing she’d accidentally starved the cat. If she got drunk, she’d accidentally starve the cat. Therefore, she couldn’t get drunk.

  It worked better in theory than in practice. Her sobriety had been hanging by a thread, then snapped. She gave in to this last surge of cravings because Dan came home from work in a bad mood and started listing his grievances: her reclusiveness, her distance, her frigidness, her letting herself and her housekeeping go. He didn’t care that she was doing the best she could. The place hadn’t been uncluttered (let alone cleaned) in months.

  And then, when she drank, that was the last straw. He said he had to go “clear his head” up at his brother’s house in Muncie. They had no children together (no strings, no one to hurt by separating), so he could do that. After he “cleared his head” for a month, maybe (maybe) he’d be back.

  She looked up at the ceiling for the heavy hook she’d spied earlier, but got distracted by cobwebs. She almost stopped what she was doing to take a dust mop and clear them away. She didn’t like the idea of people coming in and seeing stuff like that. Dirt. Disorganization. Flaws. People would talk if they saw the house in this condition.

  But she couldn’t keep everyone out forever. Not if things went as planned. She’d have to be willing to let go of her need to control everything. In a month, give or take, Dan (or someone) would find her. Then the A.A. people would stand in church parking lots, smoking cigarettes, and gossip about her death. Some of the meaner ones might even pass on rumors about the coffee stains on the counters and the carpet gone too long without vacuuming. So what? She could tolerate being gossip-fodder if it meant an end to the misery.

  The cat rubbed against her leg, forcing her glance downward. He looked up at her with big, yellow-green eyes and let out a timid squeak. He knew her moods. He had to know she wasn’t wanting to cuddle, but tried to suggest snuggle-time anyway.

  She bent at the waist and scowled. “Am I going to have to put you in your cage?” It wasn’t an idle threat. There was, in fact, a cage (big enough for the cat to jump up on plastic ledges and play with catnip-laced toys; big enough for his bowls and his litter box). But, facing facts, it was still a cage.

  Dan didn’t like calling it a cage. He called it the “kitty condo.” He was always sugarcoating shit (“just a month away to clear my head”).

  The cat flinched and went back to playing with the extension cord.

  She let him do that, for now. It would keep him busy while she got the ladder. It didn’t weigh much, but its bulk made it hard to maneuver while she was still hungover and clumsy. It lurched too far to the right, knocking over a heap of mail that had accumulated on the coffee table. She didn’t bother cleaning it up. It didn’t matter anymore.

  Nothing would matter, soon.

  She spread the ladder’s legs and tightened the hinges to keep it in place. Then she turned to get the cord.

  The cat looked over his shoulder, caught in the act as he bit and clawed at the cord for all he was worth. She sighed and lurched toward him.

  He ran, taking the cord with him down the hallway, into the kitchen, dragging it against the linoleum.

  “Get back here!”

  He scattered four paws on the floor in quick bursts of energy, slipping and sliding. But the heavy cord weighed him down. He could drag it away, but only so far. She caught up with him, grabbed him, but he twisted in her grasp. She didn’t mean to shake him, but in her haste that’s just what she did. He swiped his paw against her cheek. Another scratch.

  “That’s it. I’m done.”

  She picked him up. More scratches and bites as she trucked him to the unused dining room—the room he had all but taken over. Stray litter and crumbs of cat food were scattered over the hardwood. She winced and threw him in the cage. Home incarceration in the kitty condo. She closed the latch, locking him in for good measure, and retrieved the cord.

  She went back to work, trying to remember what the website said about making the noose. In the end, she did the best she could. Improvising, as she always had. Throwing something together and hoping it worked. She climbed the ladder and placed the noose on the hook where the planter had hung before she’d killed the fern. She experimented with it to see if it might bear her weight. It seemed sturdy.

  It took some doing to get the knot tied so that it would actually stay tied. The noose wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to be. It just needed to do the job. She placed it around her neck and, for some reason she wasn’t sure of, started sobbing.

  The cat let out a squeaking, brittle meow. She looked down from her perch and saw him in the next room, his eyes and voice coordinated in a campaign for release. Let me out and I will love you, he seemed to be promising.

  But no one had kept their promises. Her mom hadn’t when she chose crack over groceries. Dan hadn’t when he left. The cat hadn’t when he scratched.

  She inhaled, took one last look at the mess her house had become (the mess her life had become), and kicked the ladder out from under her, falling a short distance before catching. The drywall cracked, sprinkling dust into her eyes, but the ceiling held. The noose tightened, crushing the breath out of her, swelling her throat.

  But she didn’t die. Not right away.

  Her heart raced and she’d wished she’d gotten drunk before she’d tried this, but she knew she would have fucked up even more if she’d been totally trashed. The cord burnt and her lungs wanted to breathe even if she didn’t and her chest felt as if it would burst from the blossoming ache,
but it didn’t. Not yet. She felt herself flush and she just wanted it over. And it would be, soon but not soon enough.

  The cat spied her swaying and made shadow-boxing motions, as though she was just a big toy teasing him into pouncing. Only he couldn’t, not after she’d locked him up.

  Then (only then) as she swung from the noose did she look down into the cage with bulging, teary eyes, and see his empty bowl.

  The Orchard of Hanging Trees

  It’s another cool April morning in Hell, and the hanging trees (just saplings, really) are starting to sprout fleshy, strangled buds that look and sound like choking fetuses caught up in tiny umbilical nooses.

  Their embryonic faces haven’t yet developed features, but I know that as the days get longer their lips will grow into a grimace; their eyes will ooze agony. I have already been warned that their first cries (when they can utter them) will be those of breathless suffering. Their first words, pleas for help. The curses will follow shortly thereafter.

  But right now, as fetus-flowers, they only emit shrill, eerie mews. Even this meager vocalization makes me shudder. I lower my glance from the entire orchard, feeling disgust for the day ahead. I whistle a tune to distract myself from the noise of thousands of semi-sentients who exist in a state of more or less continuous suffocation. Those to whom full sentience will bring only misery.

  I am not, after all, a monster—even if I am in the employ of Hell. Even if (as my fellow laborers predict) some of the fruit will grow up to call me “demon,” this is an absurd epithet. I do not want to be in this position. But my cares, my wants, my sense of being an individual with free will—these are things of the past. Shams more easily harbored during a lifetime marinated in a sweet sauce of ignorance.

  “Stop the whistling. I’m onto you!” the foreman shouts. “You have to listen to them. The ones that aren’t yet whining are the ones that need watering.” He looks a little like me, only older. Some of my fellow laborers call the foreman an “arch-demon,” but I say that is as absurd as the fruit calling us “demons.”

  Still, he knows too much about this place. I suspect some force (perhaps a spell cast by the Devil himself) skews perception here. Maybe the Devil wove skewed perception into the fabric of Hell’s reality. I conjecture that the foreman may be a member of some species far older than humanity, one that knows more about this place than humanity ever will. He certainly seems to know more about me than he should, if he was (as he pretends to be) just a strange human soul that I’d never met before coming here.

  “You ignored the suffering of your fellow men easily enough in life. That’s why the Devil recruited you for this position. It takes a strong stomach. It’s not for lightweights.”

  How can I argue with that? He’s right. Perhaps he even means it as a backhanded compliment, but I suspect he means it only in a way that’s intended to increase my suffering. Those of us who watched people hurt in life and did nothing to lessen that hurt are doomed to do the same after death. We are doomed to labor in the orchard of hanging trees.

  I spoke earlier of the delusion of free will. Sham enough, to be sure. But the chief delusion afflicting humanity is this: the conceit that death is content to remain a dot on the horizon. That it won’t come soon or that it happens to someone else. The delusion that death is not here and not now. Anyone with a shred of wisdom will tell you that the hand that holds the reaper rules the world. But wisdom is a commodity in short supply on Earth. Ignorance is far more adaptive; ignorance of suffering (the ability to completely look the other way) the most adaptive variety of ignorance around. Bliss beyond bliss; the sort of ignorance that I hope to possess someday.

  I can’t remember how I died any more than I can remember how I lived. The foreman gives me insights into the latter, if only to justify why I must do what I must do.

  I can half remember my entrance into Hell. I recall waking up in the middle of the orchard, as if from a fitful sleep. An onyx slab towered over me, on which was written The Great Commandment. At least, that’s what the foreman told me it said when he found me there and translated it. He said it was engraved with an inscription, but all I saw were claw marks.

  “Your job is to tend to the trees and their fruit,” the foreman said, gesturing toward the monolith, reading off of it.

  “You are not to pick the fruit. You are not to release the fruit from their nooses to end their torments. If you try, you will be cast out of Hell and into The Dark.” He then pointed a knotty, crooked finger at a gaping black blur suspended just above the ground, outside the orchard’s gate.

  “What’s that?”

  “A door to where space, time, matter, and energy do not exist. Here in Hell, you may suffer vicariously by seeing others suffer, but at least you will be. You will have consciousness. The ‘real you’—for lack of a better phrase—lives on. There, however, you die. I mean, really die. All that is you will cease to exist. Here, you can get by the way that you did in life, by doing your job and looking the other way. But the moment you enter The Dark, you die. And you can never come back.”

  It’s a warm May morning in Hell. Sunrise; and the hanging fruit are children now—actual fruit, not just flowers— with thin rope around their necks. They dangle from branches in a coughing chorus. The trees themselves have grown to nearly one hundred feet tall. Some of the fruit (a minority, those who appear to have a glimmer of intelligence in their eyes) have made the connection between the rope around their necks and the suffocation they suffer. These ones struggle against the noose, trying to pry a space, however small, between it and their neck with soft, doughy fingers that are not up to the job. A few of them succeed, if only for a few seconds. Just enough time to get out a few sobs. Or, rarer still, a few words. “Save us. Save us!”

  Today I’m assigned to prune branches. “Let the sun shine in,” the foreman says. “Some of these fruit are awfully small. The Devil doesn’t want duds.” He gives me a hand pruning saw, a rare privilege here. A tool that looks as if it could easily cut the rope that strangles the fruit. This must mean that he trusts me. Or perhaps he is testing me. Or maybe he just really wants to torment me further by giving me the means to end the fruit’s suffering, after giving me The Great Commandment forbidding me from doing so.

  I can only speculate, and speculation only increases my discomfort. So I stop speculating and just do what I’m told. It’s easier that way; and one should accept any ease offered in Hell.

  I tell a co-worker to help me carry the ladder toward the trunk of one of the trees. He looks into my hands, sees the saw, and defers to the newfound authority it confers on me. I like seeing him obey my command with alacrity.

  He helps get the ladder into place. I instruct him to wait at the bottom and secure it with his own weight. I climb until I reach a sturdy branch upon which to make an excursion. I pass hanging fruit on my way.

  It makes no sense that they know the saw can save them. They’ve spent their whole life being strangled. They can’t know anything different. But somehow they have an awareness of their torture, and I hear them whimper and see them fling themselves around like fish fallen on land. As if they’re begging for help. I bite my lip for a moment, then grit my teeth. Yes, I can help them. But that is not my job. I have been entrusted by the foreman with an important duty, one that I will not shirk out of a personal whim to assist fruit be something other than fruit.

  Hell is bigger than any one soul’s whims. Just as my coworker had to bend to my will, I must bend to the foreman’s. The foreman must bend to the Devil. And the Devil must bend to God, if there is one. That’s the only way to remain sane here. One must go along with the chain of command, to get along. If you think about it too much, if you question it, you lose one of the few things you have left. You lose yourself. You end up being cast out into The Dark.

  I do not want to be cast out into The Dark.

  So I ignore the cries of the hanging children and take my saw to stray branches. I apply the teeth of the saw to the trunk, and in a
matter of moments the stray branch—a branch that has yet to find its use—falls to the ground. Say what you will, I at least have purpose. My actions matter.

  I begin to take the saw to yet another branch. A dark one, emerging from a lush flurry of leaves, but itself leafless. Bare and bearing no fruit. I put the saw’s teeth to it, about to start in, when it twists around and bares its teeth.

  “You damned soul!” he hisses. “How dare you take so crude an implement to the hide of—”

  I shudder at the sight of the snake. I lose balance. The creature coils its tail around the entire trunk of the hanging tree and lurches its thick, muscled body forward to break my fall.

  “Y-you! The serpent! I know you.”

  I hear my fellow laborer shout from the ground. I can’t understand what he’s saying. But he sounds concerned. I don’t yell back. Not yet, at least.

  As I regain my balance, the serpent rears its head up to look at me once again. It places its nose close up to mine and flicks its tongue, getting the scent of me. “I do not know you, in particular. Just your kind,” the serpent says. “I am long acquainted with the tribe of men, but have not—to the best of my recollection—come across you before. And I have a very good memory. I can not see how you could have come to know me.”

  I strain my memory. This serpent appears to belong, in some way, to the world I knew before Hell. But I cannot imagine how, unless a character from some old story matched his description. But this memory seems even older than that. This serpent seems older, somehow, than stories themselves.

  “I don’t know how,” I say. I feel foolish.

  “I suspect I am correct and you are not. In any event, you have come at an opportune time. I am about to feed on the fruit of a hanging tree. The leaves and branches whisper to me that it is a grand spectacle!”

  I brandish my pruning saw. “You will do no such thing! The fruit of this orchard are under my protection!”