Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
Hae Plaza wasn’t a bad place. Well, perhaps that was a lie — it probably was. Any place that could let studio apartments in the middle of this city for $80 a week to crazy people like me was probably not likely to be the home of anyone rich, famous, or generally sane. It probably was ‘bad’. But my family needed to get rid of me, desperately, and the hotel was there for the taking. Those with certificates and meagre pensions couldn’t usually afford to move out of home, but the hotel let them. It let me, at least. So it became my home. I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it. Well, maybe I loved it a little, in my own fragmented way. It was hard to tell. Maybe I hated it, too.
When I realised that I was effectively being ousted from the home I did some of my growing up in, I was in a pretty high mood, so I didn’t get offended and it wasn’t a shock, either. What actually surprised that they’d left it so long. Living with someone like me probably wasn’t fun, exactly, especially towards the end of my time there, wherein I just…stopped fighting, I guess you could say.
See, that’s the thing. Society expects you to fight your own nature, if you’re insane. They make a lot of noise about being non-discriminatory and making allowances for crazy people, but in the end, they’re expecting you to magically become sane overnight because they do so. People get mad when you don’t show any signs of not “returning” to the status quo, mentally. (Because everyone started there, apparently. I don’t know about that, personally.) You have to try hard to fit in and react the right way and not feel when it’s inappropriate to have emotions and to deal with all sorts of things. I did that, as best I could. I could have passed as normal…until I snapped. I snapped, and suddenly, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t stop twitching when I got on the bus, I couldn’t walk in public without wrapping my arms around myself like a shield, I couldn’t restrain myself from whirling around and snarling at someone who bumped into me without even apologising. Social contact became a chore and then an exercise in torture. I had no idea what to say, so I stopped saying anything, stopped reminding myself when to laugh or nod seriously, to say thank you and please and feel. I couldn’t.
The world rushed against me like a dammed river someone had opened the floodgates to. I could have crouched and whimpered and let it batter me until I was nothing but a walking bruise, but I was so tired. I just let go, and let it wash me along with it. On some level, I probably knew that would spell the beginning of the end, for me — that I’d never pass for normal if I let it. But I was exhausted, and unhappy, sick and lonely and dancing with razorblades too often. So I severed the guy-wires that kept me suspended and swayed in the wind.
The funny thing was, according to the doctors and my parents and other completely random people, I was certainly damaged, after I’d done so. I was ‘troubled’, they said. But I wasn’t, really. I knew I was mad, and I knew people snickered, but I felt almost joyous. Free. It wasn’t that I wasn’t lucid — I was — I just saw the world from a different state of lucidity. The moods still buffeted against me, and I took from them…perhaps that was why my family put their feet down, decided that I needed to gain some semblance of independence.
It seems kind of weird that I had to let myself go completely mad before they’d let me have that.
Like I said, Hae Plaza wasn’t as bad as it probably could have been. The bathrooms were old and Wender never fixed anything, and the halls smelled of second-hand smoke, and the elevators were so clunky they scared me, and the air conditioner made a noise akin to a Mack truck about to run out of fuel, but it was better than a hospital. There were arguments over how to pronounce ‘Hae’ between us residents. ‘High-ay’ and ‘Hay’ seemed to be the most popular, and were used interchangeably, when they were used it all. It was just “the hotel” most of the time. As if we’d all only be there for a little while. I didn’t understand that — the only other place I could go other than the hotel was back to my family’s house, and that wasn’t exactly an option. The hotel became home, my apartment became my castle. I decorated. I invited my family over for dinner, very occasionally. I sometimes even made friends, or people who put up with me, at least. Nutmeg was one such.
Nutmeg lived next door to me, on the left. Apartment 7G. I don’t think her real name was Nutmeg, but even Wender called her Nutmeg. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life, with huge dark blue eyes, waving gold hair, and a savage, emotional face that could have been carved out of crystal. There was something wrong with her, of course — there was something wrong with most of us here. Divorcees, runaways, mental patients, junkies, dole bludgers, abused children, illegal immigrants. Too many eyes closed by bruises, too many lovely crazy people that made me look completely sane, but nowhere near as creative and alive.
Wender told me to shut up when I first asked about Nutmeg, then he told me she was a sociopath, which is why someone who was so well-spoken and impeccably groomed was here in the hotel. I suppose I should have been frightened, but I wasn’t — not of the possibility of her being a sociopath, at least. I’d summoned my courage and knocked on her door the next week, with a gift of caramel rolls. (They looked a bit sad, but tasted pretty good. I’m an excellent cook, as long as I’m judged solely on taste and not on presentation.) She’d invited me in, we’d talked somewhat…she didn’t seem sociopathic in the least, not to me. She did seem sadder than anyone else I’d ever known, though. There was a photograph of a redhead on her coffee table, a tall young man who couldn’t have been all that much older than me. I saw her glance at it, that first time we met, and the sadness sliced through her heart like a diamond-bladed knife — it slid through her so quickly it was almost like it hadn’t happened, but she was bleeding inside from it. (That’s another reason why they sent me to the hotel, I think — my family got sick of me knowing how they felt, or sick of me saying so. People aren’t supposed to do that.) I wanted to ask her about him, but her wound was deep enough without me probing at it.
So Nutmeg probably had something wrong with her, but wasn’t a sociopath. She had more likely ran afoul of Wender, somehow. It wasn’t hard. Wender would pant after anything with breasts, and Nutmeg was as well-endowed as she was spoken. She had an edge to her tongue, though, which she probably gave Wender a taste of. I figured all that out pretty quickly. Perhaps I’m not as crazy as I think I am. Or maybe I’m crazier. Who knows.
So it was Nutmeg’s door I knocked on when I finally gathered enough momentum to stumble out of my own apartment, wondering where time had gone. Or more appropriately, where I had gone while time was being typical time. I rapped against the green door three times, feeling like someone had thrown me into a pool of calm, warm water, surrounding me and cradling me and making me dizzy all at the same time.
“Elouise?” Nutmeg’s surprised face appeared behind her chained door, blinking at me. Suddenly, I had no idea why I’d come to her. How was I supposed to explain that I had some kind of amnesia? That everything that happened for the last year had definitely happened, but it was like it happened to some other girl? There was crazy and then there was really, really crazy. “Are you all right?”
“Y…yes,” I managed, somehow. I watched as Nutmeg’s elegant fingers unchained the door and her danger-tinted sapphire eyes took me in, scanning me like a computer, knowing something wasn’t right, but what exactly, she didn’t know. I must have looked as pale and bewildered as I felt, because she frowned.
“Are you all right, Elouise? You look…”
“I’m…I’m sorry,” I replied, suddenly feeling even giddier than I had previously. “I just…thought that…that’s…it’s just that I…”
Nutmeg’s frown became even more puzzled, and I shook my head. It made my temples throb painlessly, though unpleasantly. I wasn’t sure if I was going to throw up or not. I certainly wouldn’t have been the only person who had thrown up in the halls of the hotel, but it wasn’t a distinction I was gunning for in particular. Vomiting all over Nutmeg was even further down the list of things I wanted to do.
“I…just felt a little…giddy. Shaky.” I waved my hand in a seasickening motion, back-forth sway sway. “And, uh…I don’t have any painkillers. So, could I borrow a card of Panadol?” This was a complete lie, but I had to think of something. Most of the residents knew about me, about what happened when I accidentally disconnected from real life and began operating in an underwater fashion. Sometimes it just involved someone talking to me in a gentle voice, but once it had involved hospitalisation, so I had been extremely careful since then. I had to stay lucid enough for them to believe I actually was lucid.
The worry vanished from Nutmeg’s fair face and she smiled sympathetically. “Of course,” she replied. “Stay right there and I’ll grab them for you. There’s been something going around, according to those in the know.” I suppose, by the slight curl of contempt around the vowels in that sentence, she meant Wender.
As she vanished back into her own apartment, I noticed she was wearing her black and burgundy silk dressing gown with the golden butterflies screened on it. Nutmeg was an insomniac, and I had often seen her walking, almost gliding, through the seventh floor’s hall at ridiculous hours of the night, even by my standards. She was always clad in that terribly elegant robe. It must have been later than I thought — she didn’t usually don the dressing gown until well after ten. How long did I daze around in my apartment, wondering where time had gone? I’d completely lost track. This was all too bizarre for words.
There couldn’t have been a chance that I slept for nigh on twelve months, surely. Someone would have noticed. Wender would have raised hell about me not paying the rent, for one thing.
Nutmeg reappeared in a swirl of jet and maroon and pressed half a card of Panadol into my hands with one of her gentler smiles. “Here you are. Take two of them and get an early night for once, all right?”
I nodded, curling my fingers around the plastic card. I still couldn’t quite look her in the eyes, but I said, “Okay. Thank you, Nutmeg.”
“It’s not a problem,” she replied, and she moved to close the door. I turned away.
It was then that the music came back.
Just an acoustic guitar, being played like drops of sunlight from the strings. A tune that glittered and sank into my ears and nerves and soul like a balm or like a beam of sunlight across the crest of a wave. I staggered backwards, my balance shot. I remembered that sound.
“Elouise?!” Nutmeg had rushed forward when I’d tottered backward, and had her hands on my shoulders. “Are you all right?!”
The strains kept melting into my ears and my heart. I was suddenly filled with an aching so vast that I was afraid I couldn’t contain it a moment longer. Were my hands shaking? I couldn’t tell.
“Elouise!” I turned around unsteadily to face her.
“Do you hear that?” I whispered hoarsely, not focusing on her face. “Can you….can you hear that…?”
“That?”
“The music! Can you hear it?”
Nutmeg looked baffled. “What about it?”
“You can hear it?!”
“Of course I can hear it! It’s just Killian playing his guitar again. What’s the matter with that? It’s not too loud, is it?”
I stared at her blankly. “Who?”
“Killian. Killian Lanois? He’s been here a whole year…he lives right across the hall from us.” She raised a perfect blonde eyebrow, pointing to Apartment 7C’s closed door. “You know Killian, Elouise.”
I swallowed hard. “Nn. Oh. Of course. Silly me. I’m sorry. It’s one of those weeks, you know. Brain. Working is optional, it seems.”
“Tcha. Sweet pea.” Her smile was tired, but affectionate. She patted my cheek with her soft hand. “What are we going to do with you?”
We said our goodnights once again, and I turned as if to walk back to my apartment. But when I heard the chain slide into place on Nutmeg’s door, I whirled around and stared owlishly at the door to Apartment 7C, where the sundrop swirls of guitar were still spilling out from behind the door.
The truth of the matter was that I had no earthly idea who Killian was, and no memory of him moving in whatsoever.