Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
I lived in 7F. My apartment was about seven metres by nine metres, on the seventh floor. Seven of ten floors. The less money you had, the further they put you up. I’m not sure how that works — maybe views of the city aren’t the same as views of the ocean, or something like that? Shrinivas Sugandhalaya’s Nag Champa incense was extremely cheap and didn’t give me a headache, so that’s what I burned. It also stunk of cigarettes (although I had no problem with the smell, when my mother visited — I can’t remember when that was, but it was surely after I’d turned eighteen and was allowed to smoke — she wrinkled her nose and looked as if I’d made the place smell that way solely to offend her). That’s because we weren’t allowed to smoke in our rooms, or in the apartment complex at all, to be perfectly honest, but there were no smoke alarms in the halls, so people lit up while going outside to leave quite frequently. Sometimes I smoked while leaning halfway out the window, but only when I felt really good, on the days when I didn’t believe that just by standing near the window would make the hotel suddenly crumble and fall to the ground, taking me with it for daring to thumb my nose at heights. Heights are one of the things I’m afraid of — sometimes.
Anyway, the cigarette smell came from the Marlboro smoke that permeated through my clothes. I used to smoke lights, but once I accidentally asked for Reds and that was it, I loved them. They made my head hurt if I smoked on an empty stomach, but if I put them together with milky cold coffee and music it was better even than drugs. And the drugs had been pretty good.
I read somewhere that burning Nag Champa was supposed to stimulate creativity. In those days it was synapses shorting out and not communicating or something that mostly stimulated creativity, although the Nag Champa was nice enough. It helped me sleep when the city air got too heavy and crept in through the windows at night. It was just too hot to shut them. Wender had warned me that someone would crawl in through my open window and rape me, but…
I can’t really remember what I replied. But I didn’t start closing my window at all. And Wender had been absolutely furious with me for about a week afterwards. But Wender’s not much better off than me, when it comes to stable moods and all that.
My room was a collection of…I don’t even know if there was a set theme at all. It was just my stuff. My mother had put me and everything I owned into boxes and shuffled me off to the Hae Plaza Apartment Complex — which we all called ‘the hotel’, for some reason, even though I don’t think it was…I’m not sure, maybe they did the whole overnight stays thing, I can’t remember. I don’t think it matters, because my story mostly figures around permanent residents. Everyone I could talk to was a permanent resident.
People would come into my apartment and tell me how pretty it was, gush over the strings of peace cranes, my bottles of lucky paper stars, the glitter butterflies I’d stuck around, the pink wall clock, two calendars, pillar candles, books — eight shelves of them, the Nag Champa scent and the secret whisper of Marlboro. I had a television, but I didn’t watch it — it served as a makeshift shelf for some more of my stuff.
The thing is, though, most of that stuff that’s cramming up my apartment — particularly anything origami — is a result of my being crazy. I’ve even got a certificate from the government that says that under the diagnosis of some chick down at Centrelink a number of years ago, I was officially classified as disabled. I think, before I ended up here at the hotel, I had been a campaigner for disabled rights, something like that. But eventually I stopped. I would get sneered at and belittled because my body was in one hundred per cent working order, and that I was never in any physical pain, apparently. I guess I wasn’t disabled enough for people? But that was before, when I could at least function, remember stuff, things like that. When I wasn’t here at the hotel.
But the origami. It’s because I’m crazy. Some days I can’t do anything, nothing at all. I’ll crawl out of bed and try and fix my hair and still it’ll be like someone’s closed a door behind my eyes. Those days, I look like a junkie, although I move like a slug. Those are the days I sit down and fold crane after crane, or millions and millions of stars. Just fold, fold, fold…until sleep comes. Sometimes I’m lucky, I’ll fall asleep and wake up, and not even remember the way I felt the day before. When I became conscious that I was doing that, I was sort of frightened, as if knowing I did it would render me unable to do it anymore. What’s the word? Psychosomatic. But no matter how aware of it I am, I still have evenings where sleep will finally overtake me and grant me some respite from my own insanity, and then I wake up and feel fine.
I can’t work my brain out. I should probably give up, but…lately I can’t quit anything. Eating bad food, smoking, wanting to figure things out, spending money I don’t really have. Everything has its cycle, true enough. But the cycles are circles and come around and around again. Nothing’s ever really abandoned with me, not usually.
Which is why it was so funny when I woke up that morning and realised that, for the past twelve or so months, I had scarcely any memory of what the hell I’d been doing. It was like I’d fallen asleep for a year and only just now woken up.
I lay in bed for about half an hour before getting up, just moving my fingers and toes, making sure I was in my body and not somewhere else, making sure I wasn’t dreaming. I have a lot of lucid dreams, which is fun, but a lot confusing, sometimes. Back when I was still trying to complete my degree, I’d had a lucid dream concerning university…and completely skipped three tutorials and a lecture, thinking I’d already been. After a while I kind of got the idea that crazy people really shouldn’t be going to university, but I didn’t drop out. I waited until they kicked me out, for having too low a grade point average. I suppose they had reason.
I glanced at the digital clock on my nightstand, which proclaimed it was about seven o’clock…in the evening. When had I gone to bed? Had I talked myself into another all-nighter, and sent my sleeping schedule topsy-turvy once again? I tried to remember, but panic took root and blossomed wildly throughout my stomach when I realised that I couldn’t.
I swung my feet around and sat on the edge of the bed, gazing out the window. Same as always, out there — nearly-summer night creeping up the sky slowly, indigo and stained orange glow towards the bottom of the horizon. Outside, more apartment complexes, none of them quite as weary as the hotel was — some lights on, some lights off. The traffic was a constant noise that I had to really make myself notice, after four years of living here.
Five, I realised, and the panic grew wider, stretched out lissome limbs and snaked around my fingers like fine cord. I’ve been here five years. I know that. I do. So why can’t I remember…?
I got to my feet, and stumbled around the studio, not really knowing why. The fluorescent light above the kitchen area was still flickering minutely, as it had been doing for the past two years — I’d lost count of the amount of times I told Wender I needed it fixed, but he never got around to it, and in the end I decided to fix it on my own…but never got around to it, either. Good going, I know. The fridge was still obnoxiously loud. My keys were still thrown down next to the much-beleaguered kettle. I poked my head into the bathroom-cum-laundry, and that was still the same. Not enough room to swing a cat, just as normal.
What happened? What was the last thing I remembered?
I tried to pinpoint a specific date, but came up with nothing but a murky kind of…feeling, that perhaps it had been the end of the last year — December, November, perhaps even October at the earliest.
I remembered the music.
Yes, the music. The guitars that gleamed like a sunburst and the voice…
The voice? Whose voice was that?
What was I remembering?
“The music,” I whispered to the empty space, which swallowed my words like a needle slipping into a vein.