Did he just call me Ms. Fitch? “Do I know you, sir?”
He smiles sadly. “So down you are.”
“Down, down, down,” the man to my right mumbles. Behind his hands, the fat man whines.
“So dead inside.”
“Dead, dead, dead.”
“So lost and drifting in the benzo sea.”
“In the black waves.”
“How do you know all this?” I ask. “Are you… do you have issues too… are you in the field?”
“The field,” repeats the fat man.
The third man snickers.
Behind his hands, the fat man begins to laugh hysterically. His huge body shakes with it.
The middling man stares at me, dead serious. “I’m a fellow sufferer, Ms. Fitch. I’m just like you.” He pulls a handkerchief from the inside of his suit. Dark red. Silky-looking. I didn’t even think people had handkerchiefs like that anymore.
He hands it to me. “There, there,” he says.
I shake my head, but he insists. Waving it in my face. Surrender, surrender. Under his gaze, I take the handkerchief, dab politely at the corners of my eyes. The silk feels cool and watery on my skin.
“Thank you,” I say. I look at the fat man sitting beside him. He’s now completely slumped over onto the bar. His red, pained face is buried in the crook of his arm, his other hand gripping a drink. “Is he all right?”
“Him? He’s wonderful. He’s in the prime of his life.”
A small chuckle from the third man. Leaning casually with his back against the bar. I still can’t see his face.
The middling man raises his glass to me. What’s in it looks golden to my eye. Beautiful.
“The golden remedy,” he says.
The bartender refills my glass with the same golden drink.
The middling man looks at me so intently, I can’t bear it. His murky gaze all over my face. His bemused smile as though I’m a funny dream. He raises his glass higher and mutters something I don’t understand. Something that sounds almost like backward English.
We drink with our eyes on each other, while the fat man slumps and the third man glows in the corner of my eye.
Drink it all down. Everything. To the last drop. Drown. Gold fire. Drown in gold fire. Now walk whistling along a golden shore.
“Better?” he asks me.
“Yes,” I say. And it’s true. The music has switched to “Blue Skies.” And I feel as though there is a blue sky inside me. Cerulean. Bones I don’t feel. Blood light as air for once. I think I’m going to cry again, but instead I smile.
“Of course, it’s just a temporary fix. You know what they say, don’t you, Ms. Fitch?”
How the fuck do you know my name? I want to ask. My lips stay closed and curve into their wide smile. I shake my head slowly at the middling man. He’s still a fuzzy blur even though I’ve wiped my eyes. The skin around my eyes is cool. So cool it almost feels like it’s dewy, glowing.
“No. I have no idea what they say.”
He puts his hand on mine.
“？‘Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven.’？”
Act One, Scene One. Lines 218–219 from Helen’s soliloquy. The first time she turns toward the audience and bares her soul. The line Briana murders every time she opens her mouth. The line I whisper along with her in the dark wings of the auditorium. Tears in my eyes then as there are now. Thinking of my Helen. I played her as she was meant to be played, as an enigma of a girl. You should have seen me. My voice was low but deep. I was desperate but calm too, as Helen is. Knowing what I had to do in the face of great adversity, my face said so. Knowing I had to take things into my own hands, I had no choice. I looked right into the eyes of the audience when I spoke. They were bewitched. I was bewitching.
I look at the middling man.
How does he know this play of all plays? Why would he quote these lines to me? Am I dreaming him? Am I lying on my back in bed? My eyelids fluttering in the dark?
But instead of asking I say, “Are you in theater?”
First the fat man, who I thought was dead, laughs again. Bangs his fist upon the table. Then the soft, low laughter of the man to my right, the one I can and can’t see. Whom I can only see with the eye of my mind.
The middling man just looks at me. “Aren’t we all?”
CHAPTER 4
“I THINK IT’S worse,” I tell Mark. We’re in a treatment room, which is essentially just a white cell with a medical table, a couple of hard chairs, and a diagram of a skinned human on the wall. Mark looks at me, confused. Of course he does. I watch as a furrow creases his brow. He folds his muscled arms defensively.