charlie.htm

Against Charlie Printer friendly version

My Doctor who would like to think of himself as a kind man, and whose name is Luofas and who I like to call Doofus (not always in my quiet voice the way he prefers) tells me once a week in his patient Doctor voice which he has perfected, that my twin is not really my twin at all but part of my “psyche.” He has unique and entertaining methods of explaining this to me. If nothing else I admire his dedication to his work, whereas Charlie is less than impressed. He fancies words like “psyche” and “disinhibition” and we can see the ways he admires his voice, forgetting we are there for a moment. We are not stupid, we know Charlie is special, but he cannot see it, none of them can. He is no longer interested in my dreams and that is a shame, because I make up the darkest one sometimes just to amuse him, with plenty of sexual fodder to analyze, but he no longer seems pleased, and I have to wonder if I make them up these days to amuse myself and not him at all. We know all about sex and fodder, we live with crazies with nothing better to do but rant and froth at the mouth, and nothing to lose by whispering obscenities in dark corners. He asks me inane questions, as if the answers will make him the savior of this small crowded world, and free his obvious demons he is trying so hard to hide by hanging out with crazy women all day.

Some days I am weary of explaining that Charlie is short for Charlene, and yes, she looks just like me, I mean we are twins after all, and yes, I know the difference between real and make believe. “I am not an idiot mister blister,” I say to him, often followed by a piercing shrill that I am never sure is in my head or out loud. Mother named her, I would insist, because it must be true, even if Mothers lips were locked shut so tight they bled. He asks me if I know how old I am and I respond, “my memory is short, and brain is dry” for him, pleased at how clever I am in comparison. Some days when the anger is very close to the surface and his tone towards us infuriates me I tell him how stupid he is and how he will stay married for years and one day hang himself but not before he tries to write an adventure novel, and he seems sad at these outbursts. Other days when he feels I am regressing, I get sent down to the dark, grey area in the basement. The metal tables are as cold and unfriendly as the grey-faced unsmiling nurses who lurk in every corner, and who seemed to have morphed into their surroundings. They try and shock some sense into my brain, and sometimes this works for a short while. Afterwards they talk in self-assured tones as though I were not even in the room, crazies are deaf they think, of how maybe one day very soon I can get out of there and lead a normal and productive life, and Doctor Doofus seems very pleased with himself yet again.

I am very little and I remember my legs pumping furiously in front of me as I try to inch the swing higher and higher into the clouds. The purple dust storm that had rested quietly inside my head until that moment, suddenly descends from the sky, louder and louder until the roaring is complete and that is when I first saw Charlie as more than a whisper in the center of the storm. When I think of the feeling that Charlie stirs in me I realize there was never a time when Charlie was not right next to me, softly at first like a butterfly tickling my nose, then louder like a secret hiding in my ear, encouraging me to explore, to take the fist step, to pay attention and learn, so we could be stronger. I did not understand then why we had to be stronger, what we were up against, but after the purple dust storm I did. She took me aside, hidden from sight and we explored our sameness. The total sameness, and the purple dust storm rages. I thought Charlie had been hiding, ashamed of being the smaller cloud twin, but she tells me they had hidden her away, the Mother and the Father and we must be very careful.

When Charlie first emerged out of the heart of the purple dust storm with her pain and blood engraved on features that were just like mine, at first I was afraid of what that meant. As time passed and Charlie became stronger and bigger the blood soaked days faded into a memory like birth, and soon they were one in the same.

Some days when my brain is alone and clear because Charlie is resting quietly somewhere, I fill every second with all the small things that Charlie causes me to forget, and worse, not even miss. On those days, those rare occasions, Mother is happy and I can see by the anxious look in her eyes she is hoping they are here to stay, but Charlie always comes back. I never, ever tell her how I had a nice day playing with my dolls or building blocks, or just exploring in the yard, because then she might never trust me alone again. I realize my thoughts are not appropriately child-like most of the time, and I cry at night then when I cannot help myself, while Charlie soothes me with words of travel and leaving the parents, the dead eyed mother and glass eating father, and only having each other.

I remember being in a sandbox at the park and I can still imagine how sand feels cold and warm at the same time. Mother seemed determined to create a play time, some ritual so she can feel like proper Mother, for just a moment. So there we were sitting with the other sandbox kids, as required during the play ritual, and I was trying to ignore Charlie being naughty, throwing sand and spitting at the other kids who were so stupid they could not even talk, whose Mothers would whisk them away and give sidelong apologetic, pitying looks towards my Mother. What puzzled me more was how Mother always seemed to ignore Charlie, even after she came out of hiding. I wanted to pry Mothers mouth open with a blunt instrument and force out words of recognition she kept inside. They hated Charlie therefore they hated me. So I quietly plotted some kind of revenge, some immature undeveloped realization of everything around me. I would make their eyes open. Having done her parental duty, Mother would quietly lead us home to the empty house that no longer held the Father who could not deal with having naughty twins who spoke in rhymes and circles and who glared at him as though he were the enemy. He also ignored Charlie but he was never important to us, he did not let us suckle his breast and his lips were sewn together with twine and he looked as though he were eating glass when he spoke. Good riddance.

We tried to attend public school, but we could not stay awake and the teachers grew frustrated with us and would send us home. At first they sent us off alone to walk the short distance home, just wanting to be rid of us. We walked for miles, wandering through the nearby woods and getting lost. Finally after a long search they found us, sitting on a hill miles away, cold, staring up at the stars, oblivious to anything but the lovely lights in the sky. After that, they started calling Mother to pick us up when we misbehaved or “frightened the other children” which was often I suppose, so soon Mother could not work anymore. When we were safe at home I begged for milk, gulping it down furiously because Charlie said her stomach hurt. Mother continued to ignore Charlie so it was all up to me. I was Mother-Father-Other, and the purple dust storm often raged and I hid until it subsided. Some nights Mother would stroke my hair and say “my poor baby girl” over and over again which confused us. I knew Charlie was naughty and made trouble for us, but she was all I had. I watched her, unable to control her.

Mother got us all the books we wanted from the Library, we loved to read. We dreamed of moving somewhere grand and bleak some day like Russia. Charlie often kept me up all night talking about the writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, and his obsession with death and how when he was so completely disappointment in love, he shot himself with a revolver. We loved his poetry, anything Russian. We would recite loudly to each other caught up in the excitement and I would hear Mother crying in the other room and I knew it must have been because the poetry was lovely and made her sad. Maybe it was because the glass eating Father had left and never returned. “The love boat has crashed against the everyday. You and I, we are quits, and there is no point in listing mutual pains, sorrows, and hurts."

Long ago I had a friend for a short while. I can’t recall her name but I remember yellow hair like the sun and laughter. It took a lot of convincing to let Charlie allow her near; Charlie was not so strong then at the beginning. But still she sometimes shoved past me to get at her and I had to bite my lip so hard it bled. Gradually Charlie sat in the distance and scowled and I took each word out of my brain, carefully and slowly, as to not ruin things. Mother was happy at this change, although she watched carefully waiting for something to happen. One day as we were playing with the Golden Hair and Charlie snuck past me, managing to grab a pair of scissors that were quite old and dull, and plunge them into her leg before I could stop her. The shriek of terror of course brought Mother running, and soon Golden Hair was gathered up and whisked away, and angry grownup words were exchanged and men in uniforms came and not long after that we moved to another city and house, where Mother started to look at us more and more with her dead eyes.

By the time we reached the age of eight, the day trips to the park had become impossible because of Charlie’s glee at startling other children with outbursts of word, and no amount of regular family doctors could figure out what was wrong. Charlie loved the sight of blood no matter how sternly I told her it was wrong, but the pleasure of it was worth any punishment, she told me. It was not anything big anyway we reasoned, the occasional bite, maybe a pin lying around, it was nothing big. Soon we were kept from all other children and seldom left the house. We thought this was a form of reward rather than punishment, and we would smile and laugh at our being secluded from the worm faced idiots we had been forced on. It is no wonder we hurt them. Mother was always taking us to nice Doctors who would ask silly questions and sometimes take pictures of our brain. They would tell Mother to give us pills but we hated pills, they made the purple dust storm hurt our head, and we screamed and kicked and sometime made Mother bleed so finally she stopped trying to force them on us. “She is such an intelligent little girl,” the doctors would tell Mother sadly. The doctor’s visits stopped soon after that. Whispering started. This agitated Charlie more than ever and soon she was plotting against Mother. The whispering became our prison. I never believed Charlie would really hurt Mother beyond the words and claws, but she seemed more determined than ever, and although I sat still swallowing her in she came out like a giant swarm of bats and the purple dust storm protected me.

I was very tired the day Charlie hurt Mother; she had been keeping me up, plotting and whispering, bringing me to her when I stopped paying attention, chastising me with kisses and harsh words. Mother avoided us for the most part these days, feeding and clothing us of course, as she must, since no one came anymore to see her, no more tea in the kitchen. She sat vacantly watching TV most of the time, her favorite show “Queen for a Day” echoing loudly through the house as though it were filled with empty rooms. Today the maniacal shouts of " Do YOU want to be...QUEEN...FOR...A...DAY?" Five happy leaping middle aged housewives ready to be interviewed, the finalists, who until that moment had not even been living. Charlie sat glaring as though her head would explode, the words shooting like shards out of her eyes, her hands over her ears, rocking back and forth. The TV noise always bothered her, and as of late was deafening like thunder. Suddenly we were downstairs watching and it was Mothers’ turn. She started shouting out her misfortunes to the rapt audience. “I have a crazy daughter!!” she screamed, and the audience roared. “My husband left, and I had to raise the crazy daughter alone!!” and now the applause was a stampede. “She likes blood, she hates pills, she begs for milk!!” More happy horns and maddening applause from the audience and the applause meter explodes and Mother has won. She is crowned “Queen For A Day.” We were trapped in the applause and the wide grinned faces leered at us, hands reaching out to gather us in, and I saw Mother happily shouting, her dead eyes finally awake, a bright orange scarf tied around her newly coifed hair. She was jumping up and down, clapping her hands, up and down, up and down, the orange scarf bouncing happily. I can feel the heat but I am trapped and cannot move. She was then draped in a sable-trimmed red velvet robe and a jeweled crown and now the crown was orange just like her scarf, the bright sun licking upwards into sharp tips of yellow and Mother was running around faster and faster trying to get ahead of the hot orange so she could win her free dishwasher and a bike for her crazy daughter. I felt myself being dragged by the hair, the orange trying to catch me.

After the fire Charlie was quiet for a while. Even remorseful. But no one would listen to us anymore. Shortly after that, after a week of silence and tortured stares, Mother took us on a day trip in the country, letting us bring books, and pictures we had collected of our favorite Russian poets and even some clothes and I thought what a splendid trip this must be. After driving for hours we stopped and had lunch in a picturesque park by a stream, and for a moment I was contented and I forgot about Charlie wandering off until I remembered she could not swim, and found myself screaming the words “people sniff - there's a smell of burnt flesh!” over and over in my head until I realized it was not in my head anymore and Mother gathered me into her arms to quiet me. I had allowed the purple dust storm to escape in all its fury this time, and I was truly scared, but then I thought fine, now they cannot keep ignoring us.

This is our home, and has been for ten years now, this place with no color, save the occasional crazy flush of a mad cheek or the flower that found its way into crazy Ruby’s grey hair on visiting day. We know from the old radio in the common area that the year is 1953 but we cannot listen very often as it puts us in mood seeing hearing about things we do not understand. At least we have our own room now, where we can hide and be alone, Charlie and I hated sharing and when it became very apparent we would make the lives of all potential roommates a living hell, we were finally allowed solitude. We almost drove one to commit suicide, she was a non-hair brushing crazy and it did not take much effort. She tried to hang herself from the shower railing but it broke, and after we untied her I laughed into my arms for thirty minutes before we went and got help and by then she was cowering in the corner and my face was swollen with amusement. That was around the same time Mother stopped bringing her clenched wordless mouth for visits, which were so seldom now we stopped thinking of her as Mother. She was as silent as the walls here, she did not bend or change, she was long ago dead.

There are no days here, each are the same but one, and that is the day we have to go visit Doctor Doofus. Some days I go alone, Charlie has never been comfortable around him and often his questions cause the words to come out of hiding. The look on his face assures me these are nasty words but the purple dust storm rushing in my head makes them seem like a hum to me. I hear through the train noises Charlie yelling right in his face, “it makes my blood boil a nest of rats such as your face squirming vermin gnash their teeth roundworms slide down pale false skin flaps in the breeze” she shouts and I feel my lips curling into laughter. Even though Doctor Doofus seems disturbed I am sure I also see that gleeful part of him hiding close to the surface, what is a proper Doctor without proper a crazy to tend to? We are expected to shock and so we do, otherwise we are impostors and we would not last a day here. Still we wash our face and brush our hair every single day, even though the shocking in the grey room makes our brain stop craving neatness and words and even blood for a short while.

The windows all have bars, they are rusty and old as though this place has been here since the beginning of time, and we wonder if the bars are to keep people in or to keep people out. Charlie and I have had many a late night debate about that. I think we have more reason to fear people on the outside, with their obvious self-loathing. Some of the crazies chew on the bars in the day room, like wild animals trying to dull their teeth, their saliva running brown down their chins, so we stay away from the bar chewers. We like to look out the window when the snow falls. We both agree the white of winter makes the grey of this place brighter, and we imagine the taste of it again on our tongue, our body deep in it like some memory we have not lost. The snow is falling on a brown dogs back and we laugh at how happy the dog seems, its tongue lolling, its fur wet. We try to imagine what a wet dog may smell like and fall asleep pressed against the bars, the cold steel making lines in my face that take forever to fade.

I think we are grown now, we have breasts and hair all over like Mother used to, but there are no mirrors because crazies love to eat glass to try and slash out their demons from the inside, or worse cut their bodies to forget, so there are no mirrors, just the reflection in the steel grey tables in the basement and Doctor Doofus’ eye glasses. We agree we still feel like the same children the last day with Mother by the river, nothing has happened to change that except for the blood and Charlie ineptly tries to tell me the why and how of that, as if I did not know. Sometimes she acts superior. She is convinced Doctor Doofus would stick his thing in us if he could, so we carefully watch him when we are alone even though neither of us are sure what his thing looks like or what it could do to us. Charlie claims to have heard about this from one of the crazies who constantly talked about a thing called sex and how she was waiting for sexual redemption from Christ, and how Doctor Doofus was soon to be that very Christ and how she must stay pure for him.

Ruby is wandering through the Corridor sporting a pink carnation her sister has given her on visiting day and she is smiling and drooling as she comes at me, a staggering, drunk lunatic who never washes her face or brushes her hair. We want to yell “what the fuck are you looking at ” but suppress the urge because there are far too many nurses around and the blue pill upsets Charlie’s stomach. Ruby brushes against us and we can hear her muttering “the way out is not clearly marked” over and over again, which surprises us because she usually does little else but grin stupidly. We understand because only lunatics know for certain about such things. We heard from one of the gossipy nurses that Ruby was married once and has a teenage daughter, and that she went crazy after giving birth and something went wrong with her treatment and now she is fat and only lives for the small dabs of color her sister brings. Today it is pink.

Doctor Doofus wants to discuss again today how I alone, and not Charlie, can be whole and healthy and some day leave this place, and I look at Charlie and we laugh and laugh and laugh until snot runs down my nose, and I tell him he needs to go see a shrink himself. As if I would ever leave Charlie and besides this was our home, what was there before this? What is there after this? The thought of being out among the glass eaters and false faces makes Charlie very upset. Then this monster inside me lunges at him and I can hear the howl it makes and it scares the crap out of me so I start humming to make it stop, but it does not. The foul words are pouring out of my mouth now and in his eyeglasses I see this crazy woman and I wonder who she is.

Suddenly I feel myself being dragged down to the grey room even though my inside voice is humming as loudly as it can and I am humming “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”. No one seems amused anymore and Dr. Doofus is yelling commands at the grey faced zombies and for the first time ever when I pass the metal tables I do not see Charlie’s reflection. I am suddenly terrified. Where has she gone? Traitor !!! Bitch!!! Whore!!! I scream until the darkness envelopes me.

Something clicked in my brain after that day like the little ping of an elevator, first floor, please get off. I had forgotten something important, somewhere in the darkness that enveloped me in that grey room, something beyond the shocking, something I cannot recall anymore. I can see shadows in the dark room but nothing is clear anymore. I still have the words and the wanting but I no longer have the energy. I sleep a lot at first and I do not wash my face or brush my hair. I have a faint sing-song in my head about how I would always wash my face and brush my hair no matter what, but what? It hurts me to think. I dream about being awake but I am not sure for the longest while exactly where I am. One day something inside me finally awakens a little. Enough to find a fragment of a poem, a fragrance I cradle and rock to sleep in the dark. I find my hands reaching out in the darkness often, to ward off the noise the silence brings. I know there is something missing because I keep looking for it, but it is difficult to find when I cannot recall what it is or what it looks like, so I grow tired of looking. It is just a feeling as if I am missing an arm, but I can see my arm so I stop wondering.

Doctor Luofas is a nice doctor, he certainly likes to scribble and listen intently but he seems so far away as though he is afraid to get close to me. He hides the fear behind a mask that I recognize but I do not want to tell him. He seems content with what I am doing and saying and strangely I want to make him happy today, I enjoy the smiling face reflected in his eyeglasses. Inside I am thinking, “He doesn't know who I am and he doesn't give a damn about me.” I tell him I feel like I have potatoes in my mouth and I don’t feel like talking, and he says that is fine, I can go get my blue pill and go back to my room, and I am happy to just be alone. There is something nagging me about the blue pill … the blue pill … the blue pill … but I just cannot recall what it is.

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