All's Well(14)

A small chuckle from the third man. Leaning casually with his back against the bar. I still can’t see his face.

The middling man raises his glass to me. What’s in it looks golden to my eye. Beautiful.

“The golden remedy,” he says.

The bartender refills my glass with the same golden drink.

The middling man looks at me so intently, I can’t bear it. His murky gaze all over my face. His bemused smile as though I’m a funny dream. He raises his glass higher and mutters something I don’t understand. Something that sounds almost like backward English.

We drink with our eyes on each other, while the fat man slumps and the third man glows in the corner of my eye.

Drink it all down. Everything. To the last drop. Drown. Gold fire. Drown in gold fire. Now walk whistling along a golden shore.

“Better?” he asks me.

“Yes,” I say. And it’s true. The music has switched to “Blue Skies.” And I feel as though there is a blue sky inside me. Cerulean. Bones I don’t feel. Blood light as air for once. I think I’m going to cry again, but instead I smile.

“Of course, it’s just a temporary fix. You know what they say, don’t you, Ms. Fitch?”

How the fuck do you know my name? I want to ask. My lips stay closed and curve into their wide smile. I shake my head slowly at the middling man. He’s still a fuzzy blur even though I’ve wiped my eyes. The skin around my eyes is cool. So cool it almost feels like it’s dewy, glowing.

“No. I have no idea what they say.”

He puts his hand on mine.

“?‘Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven.’?”

Act One, Scene One. Lines 218–219 from Helen’s soliloquy. The first time she turns toward the audience and bares her soul. The line Briana murders every time she opens her mouth. The line I whisper along with her in the dark wings of the auditorium. Tears in my eyes then as there are now. Thinking of my Helen. I played her as she was meant to be played, as an enigma of a girl. You should have seen me. My voice was low but deep. I was desperate but calm too, as Helen is. Knowing what I had to do in the face of great adversity, my face said so. Knowing I had to take things into my own hands, I had no choice. I looked right into the eyes of the audience when I spoke. They were bewitched. I was bewitching.

I look at the middling man.

How does he know this play of all plays? Why would he quote these lines to me? Am I dreaming him? Am I lying on my back in bed? My eyelids fluttering in the dark?

But instead of asking I say, “Are you in theater?”

First the fat man, who I thought was dead, laughs again. Bangs his fist upon the table. Then the soft, low laughter of the man to my right, the one I can and can’t see. Whom I can only see with the eye of my mind.

The middling man just looks at me. “Aren’t we all?”





CHAPTER 4


“I THINK IT’S worse,” I tell Mark. We’re in a treatment room, which is essentially just a white cell with a medical table, a couple of hard chairs, and a diagram of a skinned human on the wall. Mark looks at me, confused. Of course he does. I watch as a furrow creases his brow. He folds his muscled arms defensively.

“Worse?” he repeats.

I nod. I think of the brief relief I felt last night after that drink. How I sailed home from the bar as if on air and slept, then woke up to the familiar pain.

“Much worse.” I sound apologetic. Or do I sound challenging? Maybe both.

He gently shuts the door to the treatment room. Lest I infect the other patients in the gym beyond with my lack of faith. My misgivings.

He leans back against the medical table where I will soon be positioned flat on my stomach, my face pressed tightly into the too-small doughnut hole, leaving a crease on each side for the rest of the day. Meanwhile Mark will prod at my back with a surgically gloved finger. He’ll roughly scrape the skin with a cold metal instrument. He’ll knock on the knobs of my spine like they are doors leading to potentially interesting rooms.

Now he crosses his legs like we have all the time in the world even though we have only thirty minutes. Twenty-three, really, because Mark was late again. He’s always late these days.

“Tell me,” Mark says. “Talk to me.” He says it kindly, gently, as if he actually wants me to tell him the truth of how I feel. Like we’re about to have a serious heart-to-heart.

I look at Mark patiently waiting for me to speak. The soul patch under his lower lip. His freshly buzzed crew cut. A yin-yang pendant hanging from his neck on a corded rope, the features of his handsome bro face arranged in an I’m listening expression.

But this is a lie. Does he really want me to talk to him? Surely our relationship couldn’t bear such honesty. Surely he couldn’t.

I open my mouth to tell him the words and phrases that I have been practicing all the way over here. In my car to the streaked windshield, to the empty passenger seat at stoplights. In the waiting room, where I stared at the covers of dated, heavily-thumbed-through fitness magazines until my eyes watered, the pages wavy as though they’d been dragged through water and then dried out, greasy with the fingerprints of a thousand injured wrecks. Enumerating my points on my fingers. Typing notes into my phone so I wouldn’t forget. All the parts of my body that had not been improved by our year together. All the exercises that hurt to perform—that felt like I might be doing actual damage to myself. That I felt like we didn’t really have a plan anymore, Mark and I. That we were just in a weird rehab limbo now. No destination. No goals.