Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
Amaranth’s apartment was 7B, located between Jeremy’s and Killian’s. I walked down the hall with something of a skip colouring my steps.
I wasn’t sure what brought on this idea that Amaranth would understand what had happened to me, but like a lot of my ideas, it grabbed me by the back of the neck and I fixated. There had to be an answer, because I thought there would be. Amaranth would know, because she was the first thing that came to mind. Logic? Logic, when you’re mad, is a variable thing.
Like truth, I thought.
Outside the window opposite the stairwell, pallid light was somehow worming its way inside. A steely sky threatened rain, and in November, that was never a threat to be taken too lightly. It cast a sickish pallor throughout the hall, it made my skin look strange as I stretched my hand out, knocking on Amaranth’s door.
Moments passed with no sound except the murmuring of the wind outside. I knocked again.
More silence thundered through the hall.
“Amaranth?” I called, knocking yet again. “Amaranth…it’s Elouise. I just need to ask you some…”
The door swung inward, and I jumped in surprise. I don’t know why, as it was the done thing for us here in the hotel – or at least us on the seventh floor – to leave our doors unlocked. Sure, the crazies might get us. Except that we were the crazies. We were already got.
I stepped into the apartment gingerly, hoping I wasn’t awakening Amaranth from a nap.
I wasn’t.
The apartment was empty.
I don’t mean that Amaranth wasn’t in there, although she wasn’t. I mean the entire apartment was empty, void of all furniture and signs of life. Empty. Nothing.
“Wh…wh…what…what the…” I whispered, frozen in the doorway, shocked into stillness. I shook my head, giddiness threatening to overtake me. Some of the paralysis wore off, and I stumbled further into Amaranth’s empty apartment.
Nothing. Nothing to show that once a woman had lived here, a woman who wore skinny jeans with pretty blouses, who dyed her hair as black as Mephisto’s, who couldn’t sleep at nights until she’d hurled her ghetto blaster out her window and watched it shatter against the pavement.
She moved out…? She moved away, while I was asleep? But how…
“Elouise?”
I whirled around at the sound of my name, spoken as softly and falling as gently as a handful of desert dust. Summertime sprang to mind. Killian. Of course it was Killian, standing there in the doorway, sky-eyed perihelion with the face of sin itself, looking at me warily. Strands of hair were again escaping the ponytail he’d tied at the nape of his neck, hanging in his face. My confusion over Amaranth’s disappearance and my sudden desperate longing to fling myself into his arms crashed together and created a storm that sat uncomfortably in the foremost of my mind, thundering and disorienting me.
“Summer,” I blurted out.
“What are you doing in here?” Killian asked. I then noticed that what I had taken as a wary look was actually one of concern. It tore me up. Here was a boy who knew me, and liked me well enough to be worried about me, who played songs that turned me into music myself, and yet I barely knew him. All because I hadn’t been here, and I didn’t know why. And it seemed that Amaranth had moved away, as well.
“The…the door was unlocked, it just opened on its own,” I replied. I felt sick and sad.
“Wender mustn’t have locked it,” Killian murmured. He moved into the empty apartment and stood next to me, surveying the open space with a sigh. “Typical.”
“When did she move out, again?” I asked.
Killian turned and looked at me with a puzzled little frown. “What do you mean?”
“Amaranth. I can’t remember when she moved out.” So that was a lie, but I don’t think anyone would have minded.
“Elouise…” the blue-eyed boy’s expression was utterly unreadable to me, and the emotions flowing through him were so harsh and turbulent that I pulled back. “What do you mean by…?”
“I forget things,” I said, in a rush. “You know…you know how I am. Sometimes.” That was only a guess; I had no idea if he had any idea of how I was, but going by the way he spoke to me, the ease of familiarity between him and myself…
“Amaranth didn’t move out, Elouise. I thought that you’d never…” he shook his head. “Sorry. That was almost a jackassy thing to say, wasn’t it? But you never seem to forget about people, so I…assumed, I guess–”
A needle of ice was dragged up my spine. My stomach roiled and the nausea turned into pure seasickness.
“Where is Amaranth?” I’d meant for the statement to be strong, but it fell past my lips as a hoarse, injured whisper.
The look on Killian’s face broke my heart.
“Elouise…Amaranth died. Three months ago. You…you do remember that, don’t you?”
The world turned itself upside down, tore itself into pieces, and tried to right itself.
“How…how…how…?”
“Elouise…”
“Tell me how! Why!”
“She jumped. Tenth story. Elouise, I thought you–”
“No. No, I didn’t…I couldn’t…why did…” The world kept trying to right itself, and kept failing miserably. My eyes were filled with shards of glass, Killian blurred and then came into focus, over and over.
Suddenly, warmth around me, a comforting scent. Killian. He was holding me tightly. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Conflicting emotions chewed my brain up and spat it out unceremoniously.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he murmured, in a voice thick with sorrow. “But Elouise, I never thought you’d forget…this. I don’t know. Maybe it happens a lot here, but Amaranth was–”
I wrenched myself out of his arms, a movement so suddenly violent that he stumbled backwards. Without looking, I tore out of the empty apartment where Amaranth’s ghost was howling at me in anguish over forgetting – not remembering – never knowing – something so damned important, something that we had all danced with at some point or another, suicide could be a temptress and also a healer, or so it seemed–
I bolted down the hall, slammed the door to my apartment, and leaned against it, gasping for breath.
“Elouise?” Mephisto’s voice. I was pretty sure I was staring at him like a cornered animal, but my brain didn’t seem to be registering it. Oh, I was so sick of hearing my own stupid name.
“She’s dead, Amaranth’s dead,” I gabbled. “She went aerial. Three months ago. I wasn’t there but I was, Killian said I was upset, Killian said, why Amaranth, she was fucked up but we’re all fucked up and I never thought, I thought she’d turn into a song one day – thought for sure that she’d, that she’d–”
“Elouise, I had–”
“It doesn’t happen! He’s wrong! It doesn’t happen a lot here! Not here, not with us! We’re crazy but it’s okay, we can be as crazy as we like! Here at the hotel. Stupid hotel. Stupid tenth floor, I thought that you’d have to go higher, to die, to kill yourself–”
“Elouise–”
“Who told me that?! Who would talk about something like that?! What’s wrong with this place? Why Amaranth?! She got rid of the music, so she wouldn’t have to, wouldn’t have to, couldn’t have–”
“Elouise!” Mephisto’s voice was suddenly all in the air, like thunder and electricity, booming, expanding, swallowing my unhinged ranting whole.
Despite what the other morning would have had you believed, crying was a very rare thing for me. What happened after I clawed my way to wakefulness from the first dream of the no-faces wasn’t my emotions getting the better of me, or out of any terror or fear, it was simply my brain expelling pent-up energy in the only way it judged was correct given the situation. It wasn’t like real weeping, it was more like sneezing or hiccuping.
Truly crying, actually weeping, heartsick and weary…I couldn’t remember when I had last done so. There was just never any reason. Life went along as it did, at the hotel. Days to weeks to months. Years. Four or five years. A missing year. Since I’d come here, there had been no real reason to cry. Or if there had been, I’d forgotten.
So the sickened moaning and the tears streaming down my cheeks that I experienced then was almost a new sensation entirely, or at least, it would have been if I had been able to bring myself out of my own sorrow. But at that moment, I couldn’t have done so to save my life.
“Baby child,” Mephisto murmured, and pulled me in close to him, his arms winding tight around my back. Warmth radiated out from him, and I could smell his scent – not the summertime, not like Killian. Mephisto smelled of things I’d never experienced, yet I knew precisely what they were – the heavier tobacco weight of cigars, thick nightsky liqueur, sweat rolling along icy skin, the musty scent of money and power, and underneath it all, faintly, the metallic viper scent of fresh blood. I suppose it should have repulsed me, but it didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t. I pressed my face into his shoulder, yet again, fisting my hands in the lapels of his ridiculous, elegant suit, and cried and cried.
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “It’s all right, all right.”
“It…it…isn’t…” I somehow got out through the spaces between my sadness and mortification trying to choke me. “It isn’t. It isn’t. You know it! You of…of…a-all…people!”
“Yes,” he sighed, pressing his lips to the crown of my head, running his hand down my hair. “Yes, I suppose that I do.”
A wave of sorrow had crashed over my head, something snapped, and I couldn’t bear it away, nor hold on. But I think, for the moment, it was all right, because Mephisto was doing so for me.
Funny how these things work out.