Behind the tree. Crouched behind the blue pillar-box. Into the windows. Out in the hallway. Behind the shower curtain. Under the kitchen table. The lump in the bedsheets. The other side of the office door. The closet ajar. Miss Wasco so deftly evaded my every attempt, yet what were the meanings of my ‘attempts’? Does she know, clearly, that I don’t want to find her? Her very face would scare me to death. I’ve nearly captured its image dead to rights.
The blinds are down. The door is locked. Perhaps security requires a chair there, jammed up under the knob. The lights are on in every room. The cabinet doors (she can squeeze into the tiniest of spaces) remain opened. The drawers, too. I can’t put anything past her (I know not that she knows that I know what she is capable of - once, for a hair’s breadth of a moment, in the darkness, I had seen her sallow, cavernous head rising from the utensil drawer, and her poor attempt to appear as a vase of roses).
I suppose Miss Wasco (she’s quite brazenly taken to private communication with my psychiatrist) undermines my stealth. Her shadows give her away (even in Dr. McGrath’s office). It is simply why I can not concede to standing still for any length of time. Like a cat, I have to live on my impulsivity. It’s not that I would not deign give her a head start on me out of some whim to embarrass her, though I believe that is how she might see it. My purpose isn’t ignominy. On the contrary, it is that she makes me nervous.
Two days ago, Miss Wasco came this close to achieving her end of killing me. I entered the bathroom and upon flicking on the light, saw that my prescription bottle of nitroglycerin was removed from the mirror cabinet, resting plainly on the sink uncapped (she knows of my weak heart, and this revelation served as one more incentive to frighten me). I took one gulp from the sink to swallow the lump in my throat and then turned on the shower.
At this moment in time, I realized the peril I’d put myself in, and, had been putting myself in this whole time. My shower curtain isn’t diaphanous, but a dark blue and black replica of ‘Starry Night’. The tethers of unbroken streams crashed over me like a wave of ice when the sound of rustling reached out and clawed at my back like icy fingernails. I tried to move, but like a tree in winter my feet were bound to the floor of the tub like deep, frozen roots as, casting my gaze trepidatiously downward, black rills of mascara streamed between my feet and swirled tauntingly around the rim of the drain.
I couldn’t say how long I stood there. Long enough for the steaming water to turn cold as my blood. Straining for the handle, momentarily, my limbs had broken free of the husks that concealed them, and with a screech that certainly had awoken all the tenants of my building (and sent into a flurry all slumbering night birds into the vacuum of day), I shut off the water. God spoke to me. He told me plainly that”the only way to destroy your suffering is to know, to turn around!”
The crumpled indentations along the edge of the curtain in the process of working themselves out (glacially), my heart suddenly turned itself inside-out, setting it beating in reverse, contracting, and, swelling one murmur after the next, a single soaking lock of black hair slithered out from over the edge of the tub like a viper. The hinges of the door squealing, gingerly, and with a very soft sound, the cabinet door opened and closed.
The terror against my legs. Crammed into that cabinet, she continues to torment me, giggling only when the water is running. Tormenting me, forcing down my throat the notion of ‘sublimity’. How spry and nimble to force herself into a tiny square like that. Scratching from the inside only when I cough or sneeze, as is her uncanny ability to predict every piece of me. To muddle and confuse me with wraps against the door. To wake me from peaceful dreams. To leap out of bed and open the door. To know the bathroom is closed off. But to fear that it isn’t. No, this is not so good for my heart. And despite it all, her meddling is what caused me to forget to remove my pills from the sink.
I have yet to get any more word from the home front. The shadows have seemed to have dissipated. Over the last 72 hours, I feel my strength rejuvenated. I’ve opened the blinds. Removed the chair. Made the bed. Spread the closet. Fixed up the kitchen. Gotten dressed. Finally, I can pull a shirt over my face and not tremble at the sensation that once I poke my head out, I won’t see that terrible, sallow, sunken face breathing down my throat, attempting to fool me into believing it a vase of roses.
If I need to use a bathroom, there is always the gas station at the end of the street. And as for my pills….