At first, somehow, it’s as if she is waking from some terrible, terrible dream.
Yes, like a dream, a nightmare, a series of hellish visions that have assaulted every sense and feeling, every thought and emotion, and left her in rags, in tatters, in pieces, as if she is a fragile thing of no real consequence, as if she has been dropped from some appreciable height, and—even now—is lying in scattered disarray on the ground.
It is like this.
She feels such pain, and it is not only the pain in her heart and mind, but in her hands, her chest, her throat, her head.
Oh, the pain in her head is immeasurable, and it is as if every ounce of blood she possesses is trying to escape through the top of her skull, an effort to relieve the dreadful, dreadful pressure that she feels.
For some seconds she cannot even think of her name.
She does not know where she is, or why, or how she came to be here, and as she tries to turn she understands that she is on her back, and that the floor above her is actually the ceiling, and then she is aware of the light burning bright in the center of that ceiling, and she tries to close her eyes against the light, but even lowering her lids takes more strength than she possesses, but she does manage it, or—rather—gravity and natural reflex close them as she neither possesses the will nor the ability to consciously control any part of her physical self.
I am dead.
This is limbo.
This is purgatory.
I have been hit by a car perhaps.
I have been hit by a car and my body is dead and now I am waiting here, and I can hear my own voice inside my mind, but there is so much pain, and someone is going to come soon and I will be told my name and my circumstances, and it will all be explained, and I will feel better—
Oh God, please let me feel better—
A handful of minutes pass, but she is not aware of the passage of time in any real and practical sense. Her perceptions are twisted off-kilter, and whatever was up is down, and whatever was left is right, and north is south and east is west, and she still cannot even find her own name within all of this, and this—perhaps more than anything—troubles her most.
What kind of person cannot remember their own name?
A crazy person?
Have I gone mad?
Have I lost it completely, and I am in some kind of hospital or asylum or something, and they have given me drugs and that’s why I feel like this?
But somehow she knows she is not in a hospital. There is something about all of this that seems . . . seems familiar, like an old song unheard for decades, like a pair of shoes forgotten and found once again, shoes that have somehow preserved the shape of your feet in their being, or like recognizing the face of a child, but she is now an adult, and in looking into her eyes you see the child that she once was, and memories come back of barefoot summers and sand between your toes—
And she can feel herself breathing.
If I was dead, I would not be breathing.
If I was crazy, I would not be aware of being aware, would I?
How much of what is happening here is it possible to understand?
Anything?
Then it feels like the lights go dim, and her eyelids close tighter, and she lies there for a while longer until she becomes aware of the solidity of the floor beneath her, and she realizes that she is—in fact—lying down, and she is not floating, and she is not suspended somewhere, and the surface beneath her splayed fingers possesses a familiar texture, and she is even cognizant of the impression of a pattern in the rug, and then she tries to move sideways, and that’s when she swallows, and in swallowing she feels such a sensation of sharpness and tearing that it brings tears to her eyes, and she grimaces in pain.
And then it comes to her.
It comes in slow motion, and with each image there is the sound of a camera shutter, or she at least imagines she can hear a camera shutter, and the images play out before her like a movie theater presentation, and those images come—at first—in monochrome, and they are grainy, and with little sound at all, and yet gradually they grow, and there is texture and quality to the images, and then there is sound, and she can see his face, and she can feel his hands around her throat, and she sees the face of the man at the museum, and she can hear his voice as well, and then there is a waitress, and then there is the barkeep at The Blue Parrot, and she can smell the guy that hurt her, she can smell him in the room, on her clothes, on her skin, on her—
She starts to cry.
She understands what has happened.
She is lying on the floor of her own sitting room. She is lying on the floor, and she feels such pain and distress, and the reason she feels such pain and distress comes to her like the slowly dawning remembrance of a nightmare.
He hurt her.
He tried to hurt her . . . to kill her?
His name—
Eugene.
His name is Eugene, and he tried to kill her?
Really?
Carole Shaw lies there for a good while longer. She does not know how long. It could have been a minute, an hour, a day, but she finally opens her eyes and looks at the ceiling again. Tears well up and blur her vision, and the incessant thundering pain in her head is almost too great to bear and it grows more fierce and unkind with each passing moment, and she knows she will have to move, but she does not know how to, and she hates herself for being so vulnerable and afraid and hopeless.
Did I bring this on myself?
What happened?
We were having such a good time. It was a good day, a nice day, and we were at the museum, and then we had lunch, and did I drink too much again?
Eugene Wood . . . Woodward . . . Woodroffe.
Eugene Woodroffe.
She can see his face, even though her eyes are filled with tears, and she wonders what she did to cause him to inflict such violence on her.
And then she feels once more what it was like to have his hands around her neck, and she starts to cry, and the need to cry comes from somewhere deep and low in her body, beneath her chest, beneath her stomach, somewhere deeper, somewhere beyond physical.
She is crying from her soul.
She lies there on her sitting room floor, and she cries until the pain in her head stops her, and then she tries to roll onto her side, and her arm swings wide, and she catches the telephone cable and the phone crashes off the table and lands on the floor, and the noise is deafening.
But she is on her side, at least partially, and thus she knows she can move.
It takes a long time. Had she watched the clock she would have seen eight minutes elapse between the moment she first moved her arm and sent the telephone across the floor, and the point at which she finally, awkwardly dragged herself to her hands and knees.
She can hear the burring of the telephone line.
It is so loud.
It sounds like a plane flying overhead.
Even then—in pain, disorientated, the feeling in her head like a blunt hammer, her throat tortured and twisted and agonizingly sore—she kneels for a further three minutes before reaching out and using the edge of the table to maintain her balance so she can rock back onto her haunches.
Now she is kneeling. She is facing the bedroom door. To her right is the kitchen, to her left the front window of her apartment, and she knows that she has to call someone, she has to tell someone, she has to get next door and speak to her friend and get him to help her.
Eugene Woodroffe choked her half to death. Carole Shaw doesn’t even know what to think about that, let alone what to do.
Someone will know what to do.
But right now, first things first, she has to get to her feet. She has to do something about the pain she is feeling. She has to get a glass of water to help soothe her throat.
She reaches sideways, drags a chair toward her from the table, holds onto the backrest and uses it as leverage to bring herself to her feet. Each time she moves it hurts, but it gets easier, no less painful, but easier, and at last she is standing.
She stands for a while—a minute or two—and she just breathes as best she can. Her neck feels twice its normal size, swollen and raw and tight. Her throat feels like someone has raked the inside with a wire brush.
She uses the chair like a crutch, inching it forward, leaning on it with her full weight, taking half a step, moving ever so slowly towards the bathroom. Finally she can lift the chair no longer. She wants to scream. She leans against the doorframe, and she just lets her heart settle a little. Her pulse thunders in her temples, behind her eyes, in her ears. It rages furiously, like a storm battering through her, and she prays that it will stop soon.
Eventually she moves again, her hands on the wall, her steps still faltering but steadier, and she finds the handle of the bathroom door, grips it, and turns it.
It is dark inside, and she appreciates the relief this gives her eyes. It is a small room, narrow, just a bath, a toilet, a sink, above the sink a medicine cabinet within which there are painkillers. She needs them, three or four of them at least, and she opens that cabinet and finds the bottle, and unscrews the lid, and shakes those tablets out into her hand, and then puts the bottle back in the cabinet.
She looks for the water glass but it is not there.
Where is the damned water glass?
She cannot remember. Maybe she washed it. Maybe she took a drink of water to bed and left it there on the nightstand.
She turns around and goes back the way she came, turning left once outside the bathroom and heading for the kitchen.
She reaches the sink, sets those tablets down on the countertop. She takes a glass, half fills it with water, and then she raises it to her lips and tries to drink.
The pain of swallowing is excruciating, almost too great to bear, but she manages a small sip.
The agony in her head is greater, far greater, and she knows that all she needs is some relief from that pain, and then she will able to call someone, or go next door to her neighbor, and then she can get some help.
Someone will know what to do.
Someone will be able to help me.
She does not understand what happened. She cannot place what has happened in any context. Nothing like this has ever occurred before, and she has never heard of anything like this. Yes, of course, in the papers, but not to anyone she knows. Not to anyone real.
People get hurt by other people, and there are always reasons, always explanations, some that make sense and some that do not. But not herself, not people she knows.
This doesn’t happen to people like us.
She takes the first tablet and places it on her tongue. She takes another sip of water and tries to swallow. She cannot. It is just too difficult.
She stands there for a moment, and she feels the tablet starting to dissolve.
This will work. She will just get the tablets on her tongue and they will dissolve, and the taste will be awful, but anything will be better than the screaming pain that is pushing out of her skull every which way.
She picks up the other three tablets, puts them in her mouth, and she stands there for a minute or so.
Is it easing? Is the pain in her head decreasing?
The taste is dreadful—just the bitterest thing ever—and she knows she has to try and swallow them. If she swallows them they will dissolve faster, and the sooner they dissolve the more relief she will get from the terrible lightning in her head.
She takes another sip of water, and another, and she can manage it, she can actually drink some water, and she feels those tablets dislodge slightly and start to slide off her tongue.
One more sip of water and they all move.
She feels one catch at the back of her tongue, and she coughs.
The pain lances right through her throat like a knife.
Then they all go, bunching together as one, sticking there at the back of her tongue, and then gradually filling her throat.
She tries to take another sip of water but her hands are wet, and the glass seems to just slide in slow motion through her fingers.
It lands in the sink with a crash. It breaks into four or five pieces, and even as she watches the water drain away she can feel the tablets constricting her throat.
She feels dizzy, and the same strange sense of disorientation overtakes her sense, and she doesn’t know what she is thinking, doesn’t know what she is feeling, and all she can hear is the burr of the telephone on the floor of the sitting room, and she tries to turn, and somehow she misses her grip on the edge of the sink and she moves awkwardly.
She loses her balance, and even as she feels herself falling backwards she is aware of everything slowing down.
Where am I?
What’s happening to me?
Maryanne. Where is Maryanne? Maryanne would know what to do. Maryanne is practical and straightforward, and though she doesn’t really know how to have any fun, she is so cool in an emergency, like when I cut my hand . . . and that was a broken glass as well . . . and there was blood everywhere . . . and she just dealt with it so quickly, and she didn’t even bat an eyelid . . .
Carole Shaw falls backward, and she is not in slow motion, and there is nothing to break her fall, and even if there was something to hold onto she wouldn’t have possessed the strength to defy gravity and the weight of her own body.
She hits the floor, and the back of her head bounces off the linoleum with a clearly audible thump.
The tablets lodge together at the back of her throat, and if she had been conscious she would have felt them constricting her breathing. But she was not conscious. She was out cold.
Later, within an hour, perhaps two, they will slowly dissolve, and there will be nothing but the slightest trace of them remaining.
What little life Carole still possessed lasted for less than two minutes, and then she was dead, and yet she wasn’t even really aware that she was dead.
There was just a sense of quiet, and then a feeling of weightlessness, and somewhere behind those eyelids was a vague memory of her sister’s face, and a vague recollection of one summer in Belvidere, Boone County, Illinois when she and Maryanne had gone to see a B-movie about a pianist who had lost his hands, and then a time when they laughed themselves silly thinking about how it would have been if Maryanne had kept their mother’s maiden name—
I’m sorry, did you say your name was Marilyn Monroe?
And then there was almost silence.
The sound of the telephone line continued, but there was no one there to hear it.