Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
My childhood was a blur, as I mentioned before. I could remember it, once upon a time, but not anymore. I remember remembering it, when I was younger, recounting tales of stupid things and playful moments, things that must have awed me and astounded me, but they were all gone, now — nothing but a murky period, sepia-toned, watercoloured and blurred beyond all recognition. Had I lost something? I don’t know. I wasn’t sure. If I couldn’t remember it, then perhaps it wasn’t really worth remembering, anyway.
If there hadn’t been the music, I would have felt the same way about the last year, I’m pretty sure. The music woke me up from the sleep, reminded me that I was alive and that during my slumber I had missed it, been away from it, and so my blood had slowed and hardened in my veins, my heart had stopped moving, my soul had flown out. It was the pure longing for that music that made me so giddy and confused and unhappy, and something had torn me away from it, for twelve months. I wanted to know what, and why, and where I had gone.
And it was all echoed in Killian’s guitar.
Nutmeg had said that I knew him. Killian, I mean. There was a very great possibility that over the Missing Time that I had met him. If I’d been paying the rent, and no one had commented on any mysterious disappearances from my usual excuse for a social life here on the seventh floor, then it was probably safe to surmise that I had been functioning properly — as properly as I get, anyway — and spoken to people. Gone out to get groceries, went down to the lobby to irritate Wender (and pay the rent, I couldn’t seem to do one without the other), hung around in the hall and shared my cigarettes. Nutmeg hadn’t welcomed me the night before as if I’d been missing for a year; she had simply greeted me the way you’d greet anyone you saw on a very regular basis. Hell, for all I knew, I could have seen her that very morning. I couldn’t remember it.
But that wasn’t like my childhood. While I definitely knew that I had been here, at the hotel, living life over the Missing Time, I honestly can’t say the same thing for my childhood. When you’re crazy, you get used to not knowing stuff pretty quickly, and the matter was no exception to the rule. I could remember so little about the time before I turned twelve — or was it thirteen? — that on really bad days, when I would freeze where I was sitting because grey aliens could see into my mind and if I thought the wrong thing they’d come and abduct me and make my nose bleed…on those days, I would wonder if perhaps my parents hadn’t ordered me from some underground cloning facility. Weren’t there supposed to be places like that in China? Or was it Taiwan? I couldn’t remember. But sometimes I felt for sure that was what had happened. One twelve-year-old to order. No need to worry yourself with toilet training, learning to walk and talk, social graces already half-installed. It seemed a pretty ideal age to order a kid. If I was going to order a kid, I’d go for a twelve-year-old. Not that I would ever be fit to have a kid, much less order one. And you can’t have kids on your own.
My parents divorced when I was thirteen, and just getting sick. It was fairly mediocre, as things go — a handful of arguments and a few cases of the cold shoulder. No screaming fights, no trauma, no long-drawn out custody battles for me and my two older sisters. (And now you know why I didn’t understand, at first, why Vincent was so badly off after his divorce.) Mum got half, Dad got half, my sisters and I lived where we so chose. I wasn’t sure if that was how custody was arranged, but my sisters were seventeen and could almost do whatever they wanted anyway, so I just followed them like a slightly dopey butterfly. By the time I started getting sick, our base of operations was Mum and her new boyfriend’s house.
Her new boyfriend didn’t beat me, or rape me, or abuse me in any way. Sometimes he was a jerk, but that was only sometimes. Most of the time he was nice, if a bit shy. My sisters were typical elder sisters, my Dad wasn’t bitter or angry or anything like that.
So, really, there was no reason for me to lose my mind. But I lost it anyway.
I turned fifteen and stopped going to school. That was the first thing. I couldn’t hack it. Suddenly school was worse than the aliens. If they made me go, I’d skip the periods that would scare me the most (phys ed, drama, maths). The next morning in care class my name would be on the school notices the teacher always read out, instructing me to haul myself down to the student service center (at least, I think that’s what it was called) and explain my absences. I never did, I just ignored them. I can’t remember how many of them I racked up, these outstanding SSC appearances. I didn’t appear once. And I kept skipping classes, holing myself up in the girl’s bathroom and drawing in the back of my maths notebook. I hated maths. The more of it I tried to understand, the less sense it made. Which made no sense on its own; I’d been put in advanced maths when I first started high school.
Nothing was making any sense, anymore. One day I’d feel fine. Well, that was kind of a lie. I would feel more than fine. I would feel ready to take over the world. I could carve miracles out of a handful of nothingness and luck, I would dance like a fireball possessed, whirling across my bedroom, through the house, out in the backyard, spinning and shimmying and shaking until the sun sank below the horizon, exhausted from trying to outshine me. I wouldn’t stop dancing until the first stars came out, whereupon I would collapse on the lawn and stare up at the rapidly inking sky. The stars would multiply and spangle across the wide swathe of the heavens. Mosquitoes would feast on me like my blood was sweet wine, cranky green ants crushed below me would bite, and hard, but I barely felt it. The only thing I felt was the sheer wild rushing running joy of being alive, alive, alive, alive and dancing myself into oblivion with the awed stars as my audience.
Then there were the bad days. Sometimes they were brought on by something. More often than not they just turned up for the hell of it, like ill-natured, uninvited guests. They clung to me and polluted my every movement, no matter how slight, dripping from me like tar and cloying like summer humidity. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think. Or I could, but it wasn’t pretty when I did. Suddenly, I changed. If I was goddess on the up, I was one of the very aliens I feared on the downward spiral. I couldn’t understand other people. My sisters…I know they meant well. They’d see the bad days coming, so they’d take me out to the local shopping centre, firm believers in retail therapy. It never worked with me. The centre was filled with people, and they all had teeth and tusks as long as my arm. They never ever looked at me, and yet they would stare and stare and stare. Once, I screamed. Stood deathly still in the middle of the thoroughfare and screamed and screamed and screamed. It was only later, when I was back home with the world rushing around me like cyclonic winds, grey and violent and cold, that I realised I had embarrassed my sisters beyond all telling. They never took me out again, after that.
The bad days were more frequent than the good ones. Things really tore the day that I had the wine bottle. I hadn’t been drinking — I was too young, too frightened, and the sips of what I had sampled, my sisters’ vodka and my mother and stepfather’s liqueurs, tasted like vinegar and fish oil mixed together. The wine bottle was empty, and green as apples, green as clover, greener than envy. What was I doing with it? I can’t remember. All I know is that I was outside on the patio, and suddenly I raised it above my head and hurled it down with all the strength I possessed. It hit the concrete floor and shattered into a million sharp, sparkling pieces of green glass confetti at my feet. According to my mother and my stepfather, I was screaming the same thing over and over again, and didn’t stop until my stepfather slapped me across the face. That awoke me into silence and I regained some semblance of control, blinking about owlishly, staring at the cuts on my feet.
“I can’t do this anymore!” My mother had screamed, that day. “This is ridiculous! None of us can live like this anymore!”
Not long after that, discussions were had, decisions were made, and I came to live at the hotel. There had been a brief spate of hospital stays, psychiatrists, and being medicated to the point where I slept all day and was stoned out of my gourd all night, but things turned, and I came here. Childhood was over, and adulthood began. The hotel may have been run down, disreputable, and mostly just cheap — but I had never burst into a fit of screams once, while I was here.
It had something going for it.