Heaven in Hell

It may not always happen at the same time, but it always happens in the same way. Sometimes it happens when I go to sleep—sometimes when I’m driving. It’s happened at work before, too. I’ll mindlessly go through my daily tasks, playing nice at the water cooler and waving at the boss whenever I pass by her door. I act as if nothing has changed, as if nothing is wrong, but it’s like I’m sleep walking. I don’t remember any of it.

Instead, the world around me fades away and suddenly I’m in this room. I lie on my back, looking upward at the padded walls looming above me. The gloomy air is heavy with the scent of decay and a sweet coppery aroma that I can’t quite place. I find myself wondering if the reddish-brown stains on the walls are some kind of diseased rot, or if they herald the presence of something far more sinister. As I try to move, I find that I am bound to this filthy cot. I can feel things crawling under my backside, wriggling and writhing against the coarse canvas of the straight jacket that binds my arms to my sides.

And then she’s there, lying next to me. I can hear her sigh as if waking from a deep slumber as she slips her hand along my stomach. “I’ve been waiting,” she says softly in that sensuous voice I know so well. I can feel her oily hair pooling on my chest as she rests her head on my shoulder. “What kept you so long?”

Before I can respond, she levers herself up on the bed, hovering over me in the dim light with her long dark hair still hanging in her face. “Never mind,” she whispers, pressing a wet finger to my lips, “all that matters is you’re here.” She then moves her hand from my belly, pushing her hair to the side to reveal her face in all of its horrific glory.

All that remains of her eyes—those eyes that could captivate my imagination like sparkling sapphire stones—is raw pitted flesh as if someone had scooped them out with a dull spoon. I can see the veins beneath her pale, sunken skin and the blotches of brown and red that spot her ghostly face. As I stare upward in dreadful stupefaction, she smiles, but it’s not the benevolent smirk I used to know so well. Her lips pull back to reveal rows of pointed teeth lining her mouth, and she menacingly runs her glistening tongue over their decaying tips.

I would have thought I’d be used to seeing her like this by now, but each successive time I’m filled with the same senseless horror. It floods my senses, sending every nerve in my body on edge. I can’t think. I can’t speak. I can’t do anything but stare up at her grisly visage with mouth agape. But somewhere in the midst of all that revulsion there is something else. Somehow, she is still beautiful.

She always seems to sense that trepidation in me, and she smiles again as if to assuage my fears. “Don’t worry, I won’t bite,” she whispers, saying the same thing she said to me the first night I saw her. She licks her lips in anticipation, bowing her head toward my neck. And then it begins. I can feel her tongue move along my skin, doing to me things she used to do when we were together. But then there is a twinge of pain that suddenly intensifies ten fold as she sinks her teeth into my flesh, wetting her parched mouth on my lifesblood. Then she moves upward, tracing my jaw line up toward my ear. Her tongue leaves crimson trails along my skin, lighting every nerve she touches on fire with exhilaration and fearful anticipation.

One hand reaches underneath to lovingly cradle my head while the other slips down my waist, sharpened fingernails teasing my abdomen with ghastly tenderness. I can feel the sticky wetness on her hands and the tattered ribbons of flesh on her wrists, a poignant reminder of why I suffer this perpetual torment at my lover’s hands, why she’s dead and I’m here with her once again.

I’m here because I killed her. The detectives ruled it a suicide, but it was my fault—as much my fault as if I had pressed the knife into her hand and guided her fingers as she plunged the blade into her own wrists. I’m not foolhardy enough to believe it was because she couldn’t live without me. I know better than that. It was because of the way I made her feel when she was with me, like a masochistic addiction she could never quite rid herself of. It’s my fault because I could never show her the love she needed. It’s my fault because I could never be the man she deserved. It’s my fault because I kept her hanging on, dangling my affections just out of reach like an apple before a starving mule. She killed herself because it was the only way to rid herself of her addiction, to rid herself of me. I deserve this.

My doctor calls it a “dissociative fugue.” He says it usually happens because of some traumatic incident that a person simply doesn’t want to deal with—some reality of life that they don’t want to acknowledge. He says that’s what happened to me, that when she died I drew up into myself and created another reality in my mind so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the truth. He may be right about some of it. Maybe this is all just an elaborate construct of my depraved mind, but it’s not because I can’t deal with her death. If anything, it’s so that I will have to deal with it more. It forces me to relive the guilt and anguish over and over in a sensory experience a hundred times as intense as reality. He tried to get me to take some kind of medication to relieve the symptoms, but it only made her visits less frequent. It couldn’t totally expunge her memory from my mind. It couldn’t assuage the guilt that tortures my conscience each and every day. So I quit taking it.

Now I almost welcome her arrival. It doesn’t happen every day. Sometimes it’s a week before I can see her again. Other days it happens more than once. But no matter how long it’s been, I always spend my time in the waking world caught up in a whirlwind mixture of dread and excited anticipation. The time I spend with her seems like hours, even days, of perpetual torment, but somehow I always look forward to seeing her again.

Perhaps in some twisted way I really do enjoy it. Her face may be deformed—It may be horrendous to look upon, but it is still hers. She is still beautiful. I want to appreciate that beauty any way I can because I never took the time to do so while she was alive. Within this dingy cell, I can be with her again. With my arms bound to my sides, helpless to whatever torture she may devise, I can find a kind of solace in her touch. Caught between these padded walls, this hell of my own creation, I can find a small measure of heaven.