Suresh: I think we all have a lot of to take away from this.
Xia: Yeah. Last thing, then—at the end of the day, this is nothing but a story to you. I lived it, sure, but for you, it’s just words on a page. All I’ll say is: if you manage to derive some meaning from it, all the better.
—On Reclaiming Stories:
An Interview With Felicia Xia
Excerpted from Tell Me A Tragedy
For all that Hayden spoke of death, when confronted with the reality of it, he backed down.
For all that I spoke of Hayden’s death, in the end, I couldn’t do it.
But of course I couldn’t. Otherwise you would be reading this testimony while I sat in a prison cell in place of Hayden. Some nights I dream about that, and I don’t know if I am dreaming of what things would be like from his perspective, or if I am dreaming of what things would be like if I had made the fatal shot first.
It took the Elsinore Labs Operating System—Horatio—self-destructing to knock some sense into all of us. In the aftermath, I am certain I intruded upon something too intimate for words.
What Hayden said and did before he gave up his revenge quest is not something anyone needs to know. If you want the whole story, you can ask him. Request an interview, call his lawyer, do what you will. But you will not get the story out of me.
For now, I’m content with saying that he realized the danger of proceeding with his plan.
Hayden swiped at his face, then dropped his gaze down to my hands. The lines around his eyes tightened, drew deeper the purple shadows underneath his eyes. “Please, I’m not… I’ll stop. Just don’t…” He cringed away from the gun I was still holding after the warning shot.
I put it down, numb.
Hayden nearly collapsed in on himself in relief. “Thank you,” he whispered fiercely.
“What would be the point?” I asked, and I hated that he thought I would do it, that I would murder him in cold blood after all the danger was over and done with. But I hated more that he wasn’t entirely wrong, that there was some part of me that wanted it, the catharsis. It would’ve been easier, if Hayden was the sole instigator, the only guilty party, and the thing inside me that thirsted for his blood could be placated.
“I killed your father,” Hayden blurted. He winced, as if realizing how tactless that was, but to my surprise, no more anger flared. I was all burned out.
“Yes,” I said, bowing my head. “But what am I supposed to do about it? I can’t bring him back.”
“You can…”
“Kill you?” I gave him a smile, as small and helpless as I felt. “I won’t say I forgive you,” I say, “but I don’t want to become you, either.”
With that, the weight lifted. The bloodthirsty Felicia snarled in my chest, ferocious and indignant, but I didn’t want to indulge her anymore. After all, she was only afraid, and I didn’t want to be afraid of myself anymore.
I reached out for his lab coat and ripped a piece off the already frayed end. Hayden sat, still and obedient as I took his bleeding hand and started to wrap the raw edge of the wound he’d given himself across his palm. “We can’t bring them back,” I said.
Hayden pursed his lips. “No,” he said. He didn’t look at the tattered remains of the lab coat, forgotten on the ground, so I wrapped it up in my arms. His sweater was a mess of blood and torn threads, ruined beyond repair.
“The doors have to be open now, right?” I asked him.
Briefly, Hayden’s brows touched together. “Yes,” he said. “Everything went offline when Horatio did. So”—he hiccupped, scrubbing a hand over his eyes, broken glasses dangling from a hand—“so the lockdown system should’ve shut down, too. Reset to default security.”
I didn’t ask him about Horatio.
Delirium coloured the world bright. I offered him a hand, and he took it. Wincing, we stood together. Charles was still unconscious at that point, so we maneuvered him into something of a sitting position and I tried to staunch the wound at his leg with what was left of Hayden’s lab coat. For someone who had such tight control over us all that night, Charles was only a man, brows furrowed in unconscious pain.
He still had a pulse, and I felt enough like myself again that I was grateful for it.
“We should hurry,” I said. “He probably needs the hospital.” Then I looked at Hayden—bruised and broken and bloody—and raised my eyebrows. “You probably need a hospital.”
“Yeah,” Hayden said, and managed a laugh.
I tilted my head. I was still concerned. After the haze of righteous anger had passed, I realized I still held a core of affection for Hayden. Maybe I’d carry that with me forever, a first love I could never scrub away. But that was okay. I could learn how to care about Hayden without letting him consume me. “Are you going to be okay?” I asked.
“Are you?”
I didn’t comment on him avoiding the question. “Eventually, maybe.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and for now, that was enough.
“I know.” I shrugged deeper into my jacket. “So you won’t make a run for it, when I open those doors?”
A grimace broke over Hayden’s face.
Outside, it must’ve been daytime. I barely remembered what sunlight looked like anymore, but both Hayden and I knew there needed to be a reckoning, a balancing of the scales.
“No,” Hayden finally said, and it was both reluctant and certain. Which was good enough for me.
I took a step toward the door, and then another, and then he started trailing after me. “After,” I said. “We’ll open the doors, clean up this mess, and then we can think about after.”
“Okay,” he echoed. “After.”
I remember it like a painting, the view of the harbour when the doors opened. In my memories, it unfolds slowly, stroke by stroke, like this: there is no sound, though I know there must’ve been sirens. There is a soft sea breeze, though scrolling through the Helsingør Dagblad newsfeed that day, photos show it was overcast and mild40. There are no other people, only their hazy, smudging outlines, crowding around the beacon of a lab as though to fill in the space, to make the harbour look busy and newsworthy.
Only the two of us were left, as coloured splashes against the dull waters, vibrant and alive.
Light smeared across the water. It glimmered off the waves. Looking back, it must’ve been sharp—it was morning, after all, and the light had that quality of the sun piercing through freshly parted clouds, stark and brilliant. But compared to the harsh fluorescence of Elsinore, it was practically tender. Hayden and I stood buffeted by the wind, caught in that warm glow.
Behind us, Elsinore was being taken apart.
Piece by piece, they removed the carnage. First Charles, loaded up in an ambulance and spirited away. Next, the bodies.
The building looked like just a building from the outside. Grey-walled and blocky. I looked at it and I knew it would never be the same, that something less physical had evacuated its halls and made a ghost of it.
They hadn’t come for Hayden yet. I hadn’t said anything yet.
“I shouldn’t want to see you again,” I murmured, but there was no heat in it. The ocean had wiped away my anger, filled me up instead with a quiet peace. I thought of that summer three years ago, something like this same scene except with the lights inverted, and held onto that image of Hayden, in place of the desperate, terrible person I’d gotten to know.
“I suppose that’s fair.” Out here, he looked younger, too, the sharp angles of his face smoothed over by the natural lighting.
“But I do.”
To his credit, all he did was smile, small and shy.
The sun warmed my face. Sea salt lingered on my tongue. The ocean waters washed up against the pier, leaving behind smears of black and grey on the wood. I tightened my hand around Hayden’s. Outside the lab was another world. More people than ever, the buzzing of newsdrones surrounding us both, but I felt quieter inside, then, than I had all night.
Hayden looked down at me through his mess of a fringe. There was a bruise, high on his cheek. The corner of his mouth was mottled purple. His fingers were slippery with sweat, and I already knew I could never feel anything for him without complication.
“I’m—”
“Don’t tell me you’re sorry,” I said. “I don’t want to have to answer that.”
He clamped his mouth shut.
“Say you’ll remember all of it,” I said. “Tell me it wasn’t for nothing.”
“Wouldn’t you rather forget?”
“No!” I blurted. “No, never.”
The wind whipped between us.
“I need to make it mean something,” I whispered.
Hayden’s smile cracked, his chapped lips pulling up so tight they could split at any second. He pulled at the stained hem of his sweater, bunched the sleeves up. His arms were dotted with pink and purple, bruises and scars, the grisly truth of him laid bare in the sunlight. Our feet were lined up next to the boardwalk. One tip, and we’d both fall in the water.
“Help me remember it, then,” Hayden said. “I don’t want to forget either.”
To his credit, he didn’t ask me what it meant to me.
I wouldn’t have had an answer for him. I still don’t. That night broke my life open, cracked something inside me and released my ghosts. By all rights, I should hate Hayden for the rest of my life.
But I don’t.
All I can hate him for is being foolish, for taking away any future we could’ve shared together, whether as friends or colleagues or whatever else.
I suppose that makes me a hateful person, too.
The snarling monster of a girl hiding in my chest, the one who wanted to shoot Hayden and blame Charles for it, she still exists inside me. Some days, she comes out, angry for no reason, hating the people she’s supposed to love.
I want to smother her, but that only gives her more fuel, makes the tangled mess thicker and more snarled, until I can’t figure out where I end and where she begins. Or maybe there was never a division in the first place. Maybe I’m only deluding myself further.
This is what Elsinore means to me: a mirror, black as obsidian, reflecting my own face. I don’t know if I made it this way, or if this is what my reflection has always looked like. I don’t know if Elsinore broke something inside me, rearranged my insides so that I wake up with my hands in claws, wondering if I should’ve strangled Hayden when I had the chance. Or if Elsinore only broke open what was already there.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Eventually, Art ran into the harbour, and I pulled myself away from Hayden. I felt regret, but I couldn’t let my brother see any of it.
Instead, I let Art envelop me in a hug, and I let him numb my conflicted heart. Words spilled out of me, unhindered. I don’t remember what I said. I wish I did—it would’ve made writing this testimony so much easier—but whatever it was, it sent him into a towering rage. What I do remember is my brother standing over me, glowering and vengeful, but holding me like he used to when we were younger.
I am not ashamed to say that was when I dissolved into tears.
When the dust settled, and I saw the news, and the police dutifully knocked at my door to ask my side of the story, the strings at my heart tightened, brought my sympathy so close to Hayden I had to excuse myself for nearly an hour to silently cry in the bathroom. Before you pity me, I still wouldn’t cut those strings even if I could. Before you hate me, I did testify against him.
This is where I run out of answers.
After all this time, recounting is simple. The events of that night transpired; I cannot deny it that. What happens afterwards is still up in the air, and, again, I come to a realization that brings me that much closer to Hayden, gives me a clearer look into his heart and binds us closer together: that I have no more answers left, that I am afraid of the future, that I can see nothing but darkness ahead and it terrifies me. But if I have learned anything from Hayden’s mistakes, it is that I cannot let this consume me.
This is where I say: tell me a tragedy. I have reopened all my stitches. I have let my wounds weep onto the ground. I have told myself this story ten thousand times, looking for the cracks, where brightness can come streaming in. This is the culmination of it, I suppose. A retelling, something written of the layers and layers of whispers clouding my brain. I tell myself that if I tread these tracks over and over, I will see where the hinges fray, I will see where the foundation is weakest, I will see how this tragedy could have been worse—and where it could have been better41.
A small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.
I visit Hayden as often as I can. House arrest seems a dreary thing, only an extension of the lockdown we’d all endured that night, but extended, indefinite. I think it would drive me to madness. I don’t envy him. The glass that separates us is thick, and his face grows thinner every time I come. But every time I want to shatter every barrier between us, every time I hate him for not saving himself, I retrace these steps, see every corner where death haunted him—where death haunted us both—and I sit back down.
“What’s wrong?” Hayden inevitably asks me.
I’m glad you’re alive, I want to say. But that feels too heavy to bear even though it’s true.
So I smile, and shake my head, and some days, when the light tilts right through the window, it glints off the glass and I can imagine that sunrise we watched that morning on the docks, untouched for the last time.
40 The headline image of this story that day does feature a photo remarkably similar to what Felicia Xia describes: two blurry figures, presumably Felicia and Hayden themselves, standing in the morning sun, Elsinore surrounded with police cars behind them. It is very likely she was drawing on memory of this specific image rather than happenstance.
41 Here I will take another liberty. Upon my first read of Felicia Xia’s article, when I reached her final conclusion, I had a strange experience that has stayed with me—enough so that I feel it is pertinent to point out now. Felicia Xia considers her recount of the story recursive, something made valuable through reiteration; it is the same sentiment that initially spurred me on during those lonely undergraduate research days, to pursue this project in the first place.