The Beast and I

I call him the beast but he is no fanged, hairy monster, no hissing creature who lurks in dark corners. He is a roué, world-weary and wicked, weather-beaten-handsome, fascinating and utterly seductive. I have known him almost all my life. I remember his company even as a child, on cool winter evenings when the sky was grape-purple and patchy clouds wandered overhead, shrouding the stars and then the moon.

I recognize his voice in every conversation, for he has spoiled me for all others. When I talk someone else, it is his cynical, mocking voice I hear in my ears. When I look into another person’s eyes, I peer instead into the center of his soul, glimpsing uncharted, thrilling vistas and promises that excite and repel me.

One thing I know. We are going to be together for a long time, perhaps forever. Even as I try to escape his lure, I know that I cannot live without him. And he? He definitely cannot live without me. He cannot exist if I do not.

***

"How many have you taken? Which ones? Tell me. Please tell me." Ishan’s voice trails off, half pleading, all-sad, all frightened, tears seeping between the words like sheets of rain.

"I don…don’t know…I don’t know what you’re talking about." My words rush out. They seem to come at me from a distance, heard through a waterfall, or is it over a rushing freight train? I am getting tired now though, and sleepy. It would be nice to sleep for a long time. For a long, long time. Nice.

The beast’s voice flows inside me like running water. The sound of it soothes me, stills me, makes me want to drift away. "Sleep," he says, "just give in. Soon, you will feel no pain inside you, no deadness. Relax! Give in." Calmness flowers inside me and then the world comes crashing back into me.

Why is the door to the apartment open? Ishan is nowhere around. I can’t see him. Where is he? Who is he talking to? Whose footsteps are those? I stand up to see and sway like a rag doll before crashing back down. With a thump, I sit back on the couch where Ishan made me sit.

Their uniforms are blue, round decals sewn on the sleeves. I can’t focus on the words embroidered in the decals. They are swimming inside my head, disassociated letters that cannot converge to form meaning.

"Sorry. Nice to meet you. Gotta sleep," I say to the men.

"Ma’am…ma’am…you have got to stay awake and tell us what you took."
My will is leaking away. Maybe if I answer them I can go back to sleep. I am too tired to argue.

The beast orders me not to speak but I do. I sense his anger, his mocking, cynical anger, which makes me shrivel at my own cowardice.

"Ty…tylenol, Nyquil, Aspirin, Nytol. How many? Ca…can’t remember. Half a bottle each?"

One of the paramedics, the bald, older one, rushes into the bathroom to pick up the bottles. The other swaddles my arm in a blood pressure cuff. It tightens uncomfortably making me wince and come alert for a second. My eyes meet Ishan’s. Why is he crying? Why does he look so mad? So sad? I did this for him because I love him. So he could be free. Doesn’t he know that? Why doesn’t he know that? I hold on to his gaze and he deliberately drops mine to look at the floor. He is leaning against the wall as if, if he moved away he might collapse.

"B.p. 80/55. We’ve got to move fast. Glendale?" one asks the other.

I lie down on the narrow gurney and sink into a place where people and their voices drift around me like smoke.

"Well, young lady," the bald one says. What happened to ’ma’am,’ I wonder? The beast whispers seductions in my ears as I wander away. Then I drift back and listen to the paramedic’s words again.

"…the damage to your liver this can cause? It can kill you. In a very uncomfortable and painful way."

"That was the point," I manage to say, with a wry, detached smile, as they lift the gurney. All three men ignore me.

There are people in the hallway, watching. In the courtyard where the pool glints like a giant, shimmering, aquamarine jewel, where the steam rises gently from the hot tubs and merges with the heat shimmers of the day, there are people watching, looking, staring, pointing.

I close my eyes. Where is Ishan? Oh God, where is he?

"Where is…?"

"You don’t worry about anything else right now, young lady."

My face is wet. When did I start crying? Crying? In front of strangers? Unthinkable. Unstoppable. The bald paramedic, the one who looks annoyed and irritated, goes away. The younger one hooks up several connections, turning me into a multi-tentacled creature. Then he pats my hand. "They’ll make you feel better at the hospital."

I move my hand to grasp his. I know I am sobbing now, not caring about my puffy eyes, pink nose, the snot mingling with the tears and running down my face, soaking the sheets. I am trying to ask him a question. I start many times but I can’t complete the sentence. He understands anyway. He has hazel eyes. I remember that. Hazel eyes looking into mine, looking at me as a person.

"Your husband? We’ve told him where we’re taking you. He will drive there. Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of you." He disentangles his hand from mine, pats it once again and leaves.

The beast roars within me, chastising me for my weakness, mocking my tears. He is furious and I am helpless against his anger. I try to think of other things, focusing on anything except his voice.

I always thought ambulances moved fast but this one seems to be moving slowly. I can’t hear the sirens. It is scarily quiet in here and I realize I have no control. I don’t know where they are taking me. Suddenly it becomes important to know who these two men are, but I can’t remember the names on their tags. Don and John? Dan and Joe? Something like that.

From the two windows at the top of the closed doors, I can see the tops of buildings and slices of blue sky, gently moving fronds of trees. It is a beautiful day. A beautiful day to die. The perfect day to drift away, like a leaf from a tree in autumn, to sink into the rich earth and not feel anything any more. Ever.

What have I done?

The beast smiles.

***

The young, blonde doctor looks furious. She shows me a tube, cylindrical, flexible and slender.

"Now listen here, you have to swallow this tube, through your nose and on down to your stomach, you understand?" She speaks loudly as if I am deaf or stupid or both and laughs without mirth, "now that will make you wish you had died. Oh yeah, swallowing this tube will really give you something to cry about." She leaves, jerking back the curtains abruptly.

The nurse is middle-aged, her hair is rough, reddish-brown and it doesn’t move. She smiles at me and pats my head. "She’s a bitch. Just ignore her. You’re in a world of hurt, aren’t you honey?"

I nod and feel the tears again, cascading down my face. The brine is making my face sting, as if my skin has a thousand microscopic cuts. She sprays the inside of my nose with some numbing liquid and then feeds the tube down my nostrils and to my throat. It burns as it tears past soft tissue and I gag, retching and convulsing. The nurse continues to whisper encouragement to me and I feel the painful rasp of the tube as it goes down, down my throat before reaching my stomach. The bitch doctor had been right. I do wish I had died.

"Yes, yes, of course you do. But you can never do it right, can you? You disgust me." His voice falls upon me like million soft curses. I feel him within me, cutting through me with acid.

Where the tube emerges from my left nostril, the nurse screws on a plastic junction, to which are attached two, smooth, slender, plastic tubes. "One to pour things in, the other to flush things out," the nurse tells me in a normal, conversational tone.

Black charcoal is fed down the upper tube. "To absorb the toxins," the nurse informs me. Water rushes in after the charcoal. I feel the coolness of the liquid but not its wetness. My stomach feels queasy as the encased water swooshes in with force and swirls around inside me. I can see the remnant of the pills rushing out of the lower tube, white powder, little bits of green, undigested plastic, unidentifiable debris. They flow into a receptacle where they will be monitored, examined and categorized. The nurse pats my upper arm in silence.

***

I am trying to make it through this one day. One more day, I tell myself, one more day in which I will remain alive. I will live this one day. Then tomorrow I can kill myself. The thought is comforting, it lets me sleep at night. I know that I hold the trump card, that if I continue the way I am another day, I can remove myself from…myself. From the nameless aches and numbing pains that have no real basis within my body.

I feel as if I am living--as if I had always lived--with my face pressed against a cold glass pane, watching people go about their lives. They experience love and joy and loss, their petty and large issues. All I can feel, however, is the hard, smooth, cold surface of the glass. I am always outside. Alone in crowds, lonely by myself. Alone, except for the beast who lives within me.

I can’t read any more. There was a time when I could devour books, obsessed, greedily unable to put them down until I had discovered the contents of all the pages. Until I had transferred the words and the images and the meanings into my brain, trapping them to process and savor at leisure. Now when I try, I read the same word over and over again, unable to grasp meaning, unable to make sense of information, unable to transform words into images.

For a long time I was able to hide it, this beast that lives within me that stretches itself with languor and reminds me of its presence, even during my good days.

"I am here, never forget," he says, like an obsessed stalker.

"You are mine," he whispers like a tender lover in my ear, just as I, uncaring of his presence for once, throw back my head to laugh at something.

I have tried to kill him many times. Chemicals to correct the imbalance. They worked for some time, that and the incessant talking. The childhood slights and trauma, the messed up family relationships, the ISSUES.

Everyone has them. Talking about them tires me. It is tedious, this touchy-feely delving into the past. I know my issues. I face mine and live with them every day. Just as everyone else in the world does. Who has no issues? Mine are no greater and no smaller than anyone else’s. "Give me a magic pill," I say, "a wand to wave. Give me a new personality, a new way of looking at and experiencing life. Give me a new me."

The magic pills worked for some time. Then the beast grew stronger or I gave up. Or life happened. Whatever. Here I am. Back to my original solution for killing the beast. An elegantly simple solution. If the beast no longer has my sentient body to inhabit, how can he live?

***

I have tried many times. The slashed wrists: I didn’t cut deep enough and I had taken my clues from bad cinema, apparently. Any self-respecting suicide-lover knows you have to cut vertically and deep. I tried that too, but couldn’t cut deep enough. That troublesome, buried, human instinct that hates inflicting pain on one’s own body, made me cut shallow and then fling away the blade I had clutched in my trembling hand.

The blood runs in thin ribbons, down my arms and drips on to the tan, patterned, linoleum floor in the bathroom. The beast tastes it, licks it, savors the flavor and smiles.

"Soon you will not falter," he says soothingly. "Soon you will be strong enough. Soon you will succeed."

A half bottle of ouzo and some sleeping pills: the pills were over- the-counter and I didn’t down enough of them. I just slept for a long time. Not smart enough, not well informed enough, not strong enough to do this. I am a failure. Even at this.

"You will succeed. I will help you," the beast says. He comforts me when I need him most.

The beast grows stronger. I watch what he and I are doing to Ishan. Ishan, the ray of sunlight in my life, my best friend, my lover, my husband, my everything. I know from the way his key rattles in the door when he comes home that he is dreading entering the apartment. How will he find me today? Smiling at him, food cooked and ready to eat? Bubbling with conversation? Or morose? Moody? In tears? Will he find the woman he insists he loves, inhabited by something, possessed by someone else?

Will he find blood splatters in the bathroom today, where I gouged my skin and fell asleep before cleaning up? Will I accuse him of not loving me enough? Will I threaten to disappear one day, someplace where he cannot find me? I will leave, I tell him, so he won’t be able to leave me. I will be in charge of my feelings and my destiny. I will do the leaving. I know that I am not the one he fell in love with, the one he married. I want him to have that woman back again. The sometime me.

***

From behind the wisps of fog in my mind I can remember other times. Penniless, without a car, on a date, we shared an orange popsicle bought from the local gas station.

Walking back from the library, falling down laughing, tumbling onto the freshly manicured lawn of a stranger’s house as I mimicked the librarian who sounded like Marge Simpson. I can still smell the green scent of cut grass. Those first kisses, the tentative building of combined dreams.
Those long nights, lying on our backs on the lawn of our first apartment building, looking at the stars on a clear night.

Reading Shelley to each other by the fireplace of the tiny one-bedroom:

"I fall upon the thorns of life.
I bleed."

Driving on the rural Kentucky back roads, watching the crimson sun slide down the horizon, trying to describe the moment with one analogy each, until we were plunged into darkness.

Playing Scrabble.
Laughing.

The beast was sleeping…dormant, perhaps in a charitable mood, perhaps just tricking me into believing he was gone.

Which peal of laughter, which drop of happiness roused him? One morning I woke up and he was there.

"Remember me?" he asked and I began to cry.

"You can’t be here. You can’t," I manage to say. I hear only his satisfied laughter. He is glad to be back and he is strong, stronger than I remember him being.

***

At first, when Ishan is at work I try not to be alone at home. No knives or pills outside. I walk the streets, eat sandwiches in the park and talk to the homeless woman on her good days. Her name is Ilene and she doesn’t remember where she is from. "I don’t know either. Not really," I tell her. We watch the fat pigeons walk around, picking up stray bits of food from the ground. They look like officious judges.

Then, going out becomes too much effort. So, I stay in bed and turn on the television, a window into lives not my own. I am addicted to Jerry Springer. People with stories worse than mine, with actual tragedies, who have the guts to spill it all on national TV. Spandex and bad teeth, trauma and histories and Jerry’s condescending smugness. Later I find out many of these episodes were fake; staged scenarios and hired actors. I feel betrayed, crushed somehow.

I talk about the day’s show to Ishan the minute he gets home. I watch him watch me sadly. I know he is wondering where his wife is. He wants the woman who read Garcia Marquez and Rushdie and Plath. He wonders where Ghalib, Meer, Keats and Shelley have gone. Who is this Springer-obsessed stranger? He strokes my hair and kisses me and forces me to reminisce about other times. I try, but my mind is a slippery fish that cannot focus on anything substantive.

Soon even turning on the television becomes too much effort. Ishan leaves for work and I savor the taste of his kiss until the sensation fades away. Then the beast snuggles next to me. Together, we sleep all day. I feel too weak to get out of bed. He, however, is growing stronger, feeding on me, undaunted by the experimental chemical assaults that are trying to attack him in his lair inside my brain, unhurt by the cuts of the blade.

I have a moment of crystal lucidity. I am killing Ishan. I am killing the man I had fallen in love with. He needs the woman I was, not the woman I am. Perhaps, she lives somewhere else. How will he find her though, when he is tied to me? What am I doing to him? I will make sure he will find her, the one meant for him. I make my decision. It mixes with satisfaction, sadness and tears.

The beast smiles tenderly and says he understands.

The bathroom has no windows and the fluorescent lighting bleaches my skin of color. I have hidden away a treasure trove--my insurance policy--in a shoebox, wrapped in a shawl in the little, hard-to-get-to cabinet behind the toilet bowl. I have been collecting these pills, one bottle at a time, for months and now it is time to use them. Now! Before Ishan comes home. He will be sad of course, devastated. How can I inflict this guilt-inducing trauma on him? Even if it is for his own good he has to know I love him. Yes, I love him even more than the beast. He has to know that he could have done nothing different. He has to know this is for him. I am being cruel to be kind.

The beast stays silent as I write Ishan a letter. He waits for me by the bathroom sink, where on the counter, the tiny tablets and capsules and caplets glow like jeweled candy under the harsh lights.

***

I am unutterably exhausted when they finally let Ishan in to see me. I feel as if I had held up the earth for an eternity, as if I had felt all the emotions there are in the world, in one instant. Ishan had found me in enough time to call the paramedics. He had reacted just right. He had saved my life. In his hands he carries the letter I had written him. It is crumpled, wet and tearing in places.

He looks at me with hurt, anger and sadness. I look at the top of his head as he hugs me tightly, as if he will never let me go. I know he wants to ask me, above all, one question. "Why?" But he does not know if he is ready to hear the response. I do not know if I can put my answer in words.

I stroke his hair, feeling the silky, alive vitality of it. My voice is hoarse, scratched by the tube that had snaked down my throat. It hurts to speak.

"I…I…am sorry." The words are inadequate, paltry, weak. I don’t know if I am apologizing for trying this thing or for not succeeding.

"What would I have done," he asks, "without you? You may not believe me but I love you." He shakes me gently, with barely-suppressed fury. We will deal with this emotional fall-out for a long time.

We cry together then, and I feel his warmth, his relief and the mingled sadness of our tears. I know that I have to make at least one more attempt at living. One more try for a life together with Ishan, a life that approximates normalcy. One more combination of medications. Perhaps the newest one on the market will work. One more time for his sake and mine. For our sake. He tears up the letter and throws it in the trash.

Why should the beast win? Why must I always give in? I feel myself stir into defiance.

I can tell the beast is startled by these rebellious thought of mine. This, he was not ready for.

I tell Ishan that I want to fight this battle again, together, with him by my side, as we walk to the car. He drives me home in the night that is just beginning to fully spread its wings. I promise him I will never put him through this again. That I will never do this again. It is the hardest promise I have ever made in my life and it comes out sounding like a challenge.

The beast accepts the challenge and his laughter rings in my ears as the street lights come ablaze suddenly, illuminating the darkness.