Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
I would lie awake for days, sometimes. It was like the sleeping plague in the book that Book had loaned me, that had become my favourite – One Hundred Years of Solitude. I didn’t sleep because I didn’t need sleep, not for a time, anyway. Then the crash would come, hurtling down from a hundred stories high in the stratosphere of sleeplessness, onto solid ground, where the Earth existed by sleeping. Fall down so tired that even lifting your eyelids was torture.
That was what I felt like now, although I had gotten two perfectly decent nights of sleep, even if they had been interrupted by nightmares. The no-faces, who were gradually gaining their faces…and the person who wasn’t me, but had inhabited my body and my mind like it was a form-fitting dress custom-made for her, something she wore with power and style and black combat boots. She would have destroyed all of them, easily, if Mephisto hadn’t woken me up.
And then I turned into a song.
I had no reason to disbelieve Mephisto…because, firstly, I thought he was right. Secondly, he hadn’t lied to me yet. When you’re crazy, you get used to people lying to you, all the time. It’s one of the first things you become accustomed to. What’s sadder is that ninety per cent of the liars don’t even mean it maliciously, not in the slightest. Something alters their thinking, and turns them into liars. ‘Something’ being your own madness. They surmise that just because you’re crazy, you can’t handle or would never understand the truth.
But maybe…just maybe…maybe it’s them. Maybe they’re the ones who can’t handle the truth, maybe crazies are the only people who really see the truth, and sanity is just an overrated lie, a glitteringly neat delusion shared by the majority of the population. I wouldn’t be the first person to think that…but I don’t even know if that’s the truth. There are so many crazy people, more than anyone would really know. So many of them look and act ‘normal’, like everyone else. According to the status quo, I mean. They’re not all shirtless or shoeless, wandering down Queen Street at three in the morning singing about satellites or falling off the floor. Some of them are just like me…just young women in studio apartments on the bad side of the city. And then there are the perfectly sane people who are homeless and hungry, living in cardboard boxes and talking to stray cats because if they don’t, their hearts will shatter from loneliness.
Definitions are so perfectly screwed up. When you’re crazy, funnily enough, that’s the first thing you learn. And it’s the first thing you stop fighting.
I stopped fighting them…I stopped fighting everything. Not just madness itself, like I said before, but everything that came with it; that’s how I got through life. When you feel the fear coming on, you let it be. When you feel insomnia clawing at the backs of your eyes, you don’t slam your head down on the pillow and force yourself into sleep. You let it flow through you, past you. You’re not a rock or an island, true. Some might call you weak, but…you’re not destroyed by the tides, either. Strength seems to be just another word for destroying yourself.
I don’t understand it. But then, lately…I haven’t really been understanding much at all.
But maybe that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“What are you thinking?” Mephisto asked me, very gently.
“Everything. Sort of.”
I had turned into a song, had I?
I suppose the chief reason I believed that, was because inside, a small, sparking, ice-cracking voice, very far away, was telling me, you know you did.
Turn me into a song…turn into a song…a song…to become a song…
“Amaranth!” I said, suddenly.
Mephisto blinked at me. “Excuse me?”
“You said I turned into a song. That’s what, Amaranth is, she would cry because she couldn’t…” I trailed off, looking at Mephisto’s bewildered face, and blushed. “Let me…let me try again. Amaranth is one of the residents. Here, at the hotel, I mean. She can’t listen to music, because…I don’t really know precisely why. But if she listens to it she just cries and cries, for hours. She never stops, it seems.”
“When she listens to music?” The demon raised an eyebrow. “That’s…rather odd.”
“I know. But, but that’s not the important thing. When she trips – Lucy in the sky, if you know what I mean –” Mephisto chuckled at that “–she always says that she goes to a place where she does turn into a song, and everything is right.”
“And?”
“Don’t you get it, devil man! She turns into a song when she’s high! Like I just did!”
“Hm,” Mephisto murmured. “And the sensation you felt…resembled that of being out of your pretty skull on hallucinogenic substances, my dear? And before you insult my intelligence by insisting you have never been in such a state, please. I am a demon.”
I flushed again, but grinned sheepishly all the same. “Maybe once or twice.”
“Just for research purposes, of course?”
“That’s exactly right. How’d you know?”
“I am an extremely talented person,” Mephisto purred, and again, I was reminded sharply, like a drop of hot wax falling onto my wrist, that I was female. If I had been standing up, I’m pretty sure my knees would have given way. “But…back to Amaranth. What about her?”
“She’d know why!” I nodded, glad to recover my composure and move on to a somewhat safer subject. (Like any subject was safe with Mephisto around.) “She would know. I just…I’m pretty sure she would. People thought she was crazy for saying she wanted to turn into a song, and I just did. So. I’m going to ask her.”
Mephisto tilted his head as he smiled at me, astonishingly and hedonistically beautiful.
“And what exactly will you ask her, my dear?”
“Things. About songs. Being songs. Stuff like that.” I realised I was making very little sense, lapsing back into rambling mode, but I didn’t care. I got up off the bed and moved to the door. “You stay here,” I added, as an afterthought. “Amaranth is kinda…she might see you. You know?”
“I know,” Mephisto replied, amusement hiding in the corners of his lips. “I’ll behave myself and stay here.”
“You’ll stay here, at least,” I replied, and Mephisto chuckled.
“Touche, you of song. Touche.”