But the shoes don’t come off, won’t come off, they’re fused to my feet flesh. I think he’s going to flip out about this. Instead he just picks me up like a literal feather. Carries me down. I’m in his arms that are like a drug, and we’re going down and down. I’m smiling into his neck though I’m afraid. Shouldn’t be. Just my final treatment. This man’s accompanying me. Who are you? is still a bubble of a question, iridescent and floating around in the dark of my mind. I know the answer to it somewhere. Somewhere deep under everything—all my words and thoughts.
We pass through the red waiting room of mirrors with the white screaming faces on the wall, empty but for a pale, glowing woman reading a red magazine in the dark. I’ve seen her here before. She doesn’t smile at us as we pass. Just watches us, a little afraid-seeming. To her, we’re a strange ship in the night.
He carries me into a half-lit room full of fog. Lowers me onto a table in the center. The Treatment Room, of course. My final treatment tonight, that’s right. Very exciting. The ceiling of glass is exposed, and I see we’re under the Depths, blue-green as the eyes of the man in the black-horned mask. A sky of water shimmers above us like the northern lights. Red jellyfish swim over us like so many strange moons. The man stands over me as I sit on the table. Normally a woman comes in at this point, doesn’t she? Tells me to strip and I do. Lie down and I do. Breathe, and she breathes with me. Then a cold white paste on my face while I drift. But no woman comes. Just me and the man in the fog.
He walks over to a small aquarium tank on the other end of the table. Inside floats a single red jellyfish. Mine. My red jellyfish that started off so small and white. That I first pulled out of the black pool, held in my palm, where it glowed like a whisper of a wish. It’s grown so much bigger and redder since last time. The man in the mask is staring at it. “Beautiful,” he says, “isn’t it, Belle?”
“Beautiful,” I agree, looking from the man to the creature. Though I don’t know that it is anymore. It looks scary to me. Hideous. But the man in the mask doesn’t seem to think so. He’s lost in looking at it, like it’s a dream.
“Is it really so beautiful?” I ask him, jealous maybe. “Just a jellyfish.”
“Oh, it’s more,” he says, still smiling softly like it’s telling him a secret. “It’s something else now, thanks to the treatments. Can you guess?”
I stare at the creature. Its red bell pulsing like a strange heart. The hairy tentacles undulating. I shake my head. The man smiles his smile of long white teeth. His smile is a constellation. His smile is a movie and I’m in the dark, dreaming. Gently now, he takes my hand. “It’s the story of you and me.”
Inside the tank, the red thing begins to pulse more quickly.
“You and me,” I repeat. There’s a shiver in my voice now. The touch of his hand is making me cold. Something black and closed and buried deep in me opens. “What story?”
I look at the jellyfish, a pattern like roses on her back. Her eyes, I see she has eyes, translucent and red like her body, are wide and afraid. What story? But somewhere inside me knows. Knows exactly. I feel the knowledge pulsing just like the red thing in the water.
“What story? Oh Belle, Belle, now you’re hurting my feelings. Now you’re wounding me.” He presses his gloved hand to his chest like I stabbed him there. But he’s still smiling like the movies. His eyes in the mask flash from blue-green to red to blue-green. He brushes my hair away from my face, and I shiver.
“It started the day you found me in Mother’s closet, remember? Beastly little thing in Mother’s lipstick and cheap sex heels. Dreaming of another self, a princess self, in a castle by the sea. Dreaming of me. And I heard you. Dreaming on the other side of the glass.”
He squeezes my hand, that cold, slightly sticking touch that dives me in dark water. He’s standing over me now as I sit hunched on the table, cold coursing through my body.
“You heard me,” I say, and I’m shivering, shivering.
“But the story’s not over.”
“It isn’t?” I say. I’m so very cold. He lifts up my chin with a hand of ice, so I’m looking right into his flashing eyes. Still smiling that smile that burns me.
“Let’s finish it together, shall we?”
* * *
We’re lying together now on the table, he and I, and in the glass, the jellyfish is beating wildly like my own heart, like the black buried thing inside me. He’s taken his mask off so I see his face. His face lights up the architecture of me, my cage of bones brightening. Not just his smile, but his whole face is the movies. As beautiful and unreal as a dream, but somehow right here with me. I must have watched those movies a thousand times in the dark, on dusty TV screens. I’ve seen him on another kind of screen too, a screen of glass. Smiling like he is right now.