orpheus ascending

April 13, 2005 – 6:55 am

Roger walked into the living room just as a plume of flame shot out of the television and engulfed Shirley, his wife. He stood absolutely still for a moment, digging his way through the utter shock of it, and finally fell to his knees and started screaming. His wife, now blackened, sizzling and covered with sheets of blue and orange flame, sat perfectly, horribly upright, in a posture of shock herself. Then she tilted her head inquisitively, and asked, “Roger? Are you alright?”

From the back rooms of the house came the wail of a baby. Roger was sitting on the floor now, gasping and choking with surprise, tears standing in his eyes, occasionally shaking his head and sobbing. “Roger!” His wife was standing over him now, beautiful, conflagrant, terrible. He looked up at her and started to hiccup. She turned and headed for the nursery and the crying baby. Roger stared blindly at the floor, and muttered, “I’m ok. Everything is ok.” But of course it wasn’t. When Shirley returned with Courtney, their eleven month old daughter, Roger couldn’t look at them. He saw the flickering shadows of the floor lamp thrown against the wall, and he could feel the heat of his wife’s fire, although she was ten feet away.

“Roger, what’s wrong?”

“I’m hallucinating.”

Shirley was confused, and began to be a little afraid. “What do you mean? I’m right here, Roger, what’s the matter?”

Roger got up, and made his way into the kitchen, clutching the bar as he walked around it. He desperately wanted to be busy at some trivial task, but he couldn’t even think of one to do. He stared at the bottom of the sink, as dark blue oxygen-deprived flames rippled around the garbage disposal. He stood still for a minute, breathing slowly. He looked up at Shirley. She was blonde, tanned, healthy, and cool as a cucumber, but concerned. Courtney’s eyes were getting bleary the way sleepy babies’ eyes do, and she leaned her forehead against Shirley’s face.

“Should I call Jeff?”

“I don’t think I need a doctor right now. I will go and see a shrink tomorrow if I can get an appointment.”

“What happened?”

“I’ll be ok.”

~ ~ ~

Roger’s shrink liked to take walks, especially if he had patients who seemed restless, as Roger did today. His offices looked out into an indoor terrarium of glass and steel above an upscale shopping mall. They were on the second level of the mall, because it was quieter.

“Have you ever experimented with hallucinogenic drugs?”

“Some LSD in college.”

“How long ago was that?”

“About 15 years.”

“Anything more recent?”

“No.”

“How frequently did you take LSD?”

“I only did it about a half a dozen times.”

“Anything else?”

“Pot, of course.”

“Alcohol?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else? Mushrooms? Cocaine?”

“No. I only did LSD a few times and then I quit.”

“Did you have a bad experience?”

“Nothing too crazy. It just started getting out of hand, and I didn’t like it, so I quit taking it.”

“What do you mean by ‘out of hand’?”

“It just gave me a bad feeling. I felt like I was not in control of my environment.”

“Have you made any recent changes in your lifestyle, such as diet or physical activity?”

“I just started eating vegetarian about 2 weeks ago.”

“Ah. So, no meat. Do you eat poultry, fish or eggs?”

“Well, I’m not against eating meat or anything. But for the last couple of weeks, no. Mostly I’ve been eating salads, and fresh juice from fruits and vegetables. Most of what I’ve been eating is raw.”

“Have you lost any weight?”

“Actually, yes. I’ve lost about 25 pounds in the last couple of months.”

“I see.”

~ ~ ~

“Where’s Courtney?”

“She’s at your parents’.” Shirley set down the colander of steaming pasta, walked over to Roger, and hugged him for a moment. Her pasta sauce started to bubble and splatter, so she hung from his neck and leaned over to turn down the heat. She turned back to look up at him. “So what did the shrink say?”

Roger tore his gaze away from the blue gas flame on the stove, and squinted at her. A wry half-smile teased the corner of his mouth. “Plum loco.”

She smiled back, her eyes laughing. “We already knew that.”

He kissed her on the forehead, and moved toward the fridge. “He said it’s most likely a cleansing reaction brought on by all this crazy raw-food stuff you’ve gotten me into.”

“Aha. So this is all just a scheme to get out of eating your vegetables!”

“Seriously. Sometimes drugs get stored in fat cells. Losing weight from a diet consisting largely of this junk,” he rummaged between bags of celery, and carrots, looking for a diet cola, “can result in further effects from those drugs as they leave your system.”

“Drugs? What drugs have you got socked away in your fat cells?”

“Maybe the LSD I took in college.”

His grad-school paramour was squinting skeptically at him, fighting off her own smile. “Really, Mr. Hamilton, I had no idea you were such a party animal.”

“Sure,” he backed out of the fridge with a carton of orange juice. “It makes coed nude mud rugby so much more interesting.”

Shirley laughed that laugh that he liked so well as she turned back to her pasta sauce. It was a monosyllabic squawk that somehow conveyed humor and intelligence both at once. “Well, you’ve been doing a terrific job on this new diet. So, tonight’s spaghetti.” She turned and presented him a wooden spoon of sauce to taste.

~ ~ ~

It was a gorgeous autumn day, and Roger, in his corner office, found he couldn’t concentrate on the brief in front of him. The beautiful 100 foot tall maple outside his windows had turned a brilliant ruby red. And he had discovered that he could set it on fire. It was incredible fire, never consuming the tree. He could turn it on, and he could turn it off. He could shape it, color it, or vary its intensity.

It still bothered him when Shirley or Courtney caught fire, but he was learning to cope with it. His shrink was a little surprised it hadn’t cleared up by now, and Shirley was more than a little worried about it. Roger found he mostly didn’t want to think about it. He was learning to work his way around it, and to enjoy the moments between the unpleasant spots.

It seemed, lately, that Courtney was always on fire when she cried. He had almost lost his sanity the first time he had gone to comfort her after the onset of his hallucinations. He could still see, in his mind’s eye, his screaming infant child engulfed in vicious, searing fire. When he lifted her, the pain was almost unbearable. He wanted to throw her into her crib and flee, but he steeled himself, and changed her diaper. He calmly and carefully applied ointment for the rash he couldn’t see for all of the scorched and burning skin. It had made him want to mourn, as if she were gone, as if he would never see her again. He laid his whimpering daughter back in her crib, forcing himself to move slowly and carefully. He wound up the antique music box Shirley had found at some flea market, and as the delicate, chiming melody started, the room went strangely silent. He looked down at Courtney, and she was whole, healthy, pink and quiescent. He bent to kiss the thin fuzz of her blonde head, and paused there, breathing in the smell of her infant skin.

But such moments were becoming rare; the problem seemed to be getting worse. He had long since abandoned the diet which his shrink believed may have brought the problem on. Shirley didn’t believe this was the right thing to do, and at first he agreed with her. If his body was purging out remnants of the drugs he had taken in younger days, better to just have them out and be done with it. But that was a week ago. Now he just wanted it to stop. He wanted Shirley to stop asking him about it. He wanted things to go back to the way they were before.

~ ~ ~

“Roger, what did you say the name of your shrink was?”

“What?” Roger seemed startled, looking up from the legal pad he had brought home with him from work. He thought for a moment. “Peterson.”

He looked up at Shirley as she crossed the room to sit on the arm of the sofa. He noticed that she was trembling, and that she clasped her hands, clamped them between her knees, and stared at the floor. “There’s no psychologist with offices at the mall.”

Roger paused for a second, and cleared his throat. “You checked?” He sounded hurt. When she finally looked up at him, he saw that she had started to cry. “Which mall did you check?”

“You said Eastgate.”

He got up and moved toward her around the coffee table. “No, no, honey,” he put his arms around her. “I’m sorry if I said that. It’s downtown.”

He held her for a moment, both disturbed by her weeping, and thrilled by the smell of her hair. “Are you worried that I’m losing it?”

She looked miserable, and couldn’t look at him. “I don’t know what to think. I know you’re suffering, but Roger, this is hurting me too.”

“I know, baby. I’m sorry.” He kissed the top of her head and held her closer. “Maybe you should come with me to my next appointment. Peterson might be able to give both of us some pointers on how to deal with this.” Roger saw that she was growing calmer. “I’m so sorry, honey. I know this is really hard.”

She reached for a kleenex, dried her eyes, and peeked him a shy sidelong smile. “Yeah,” she said, as smoke started to coil, serpent-like, from her clothing, “after all, I’m the one on fire.” This bit of levity didn’t have the effect she intended. Roger’s eyes started to fill up, and he pressed his thumb and forefinger against them, as if to staunch the flow. He willed himself to continue to hold his wife, even as her flames surrounded him.

~ ~ ~

“Roger, you still haven’t told me about the fire.”

Roger opened his eyes, started, and looked around him. He realized he must have drifted off. Very strange, he thought, to have dozed off in the middle of a session with the shrink.

Shirley sat next to him, on the edge of the bed. Bed? How odd to be in bed at the shrink’s office. But he liked the feeling of her there, the pressure of the blanket squeezing his thigh because she was sitting so close.

“Roger.” The psychiatrist paused, waiting for his attention. “Perhaps you could tell me about the fire.”

“The fire?” He was bewildered. That’s not Peterson. “Where’s Peterson?”

“Peterson?” the psychiatrist asked.

Shirley said nothing, but just gave him a sympathetic look, and slightly shook her head no. No what? No Peterson? Could I have hallucinated Peterson?

“Roger,” the psychiatrist who was not Peterson was talking again, “You are really making some great progress here. Would you like to talk about the fire?”

“The hallucinations,” Roger said, somehow knowing it was the wrong answer even as he said it. Shirley confirmed this by shaking her head again.

“There was no fire.” Roger felt panic rising in him. There was something about this situation, this conversation, which seemed all wrong. Something was out of place, and he didn’t like it.

The psychiatrist waited patiently. “Roger,” Shirley finally spoke up, “I think it’s time for you to talk about the real fire.”

Suddenly the room blurred and his eyes burned, and he was crying. He fought back massive sobs so that they surfaced only as glottal grunts. “Roger,” Shirley said, “everything is going to be ok. But you need to talk about it. Courtney needs you.”

“No!” Roger lashed his head his head to the side, sucking air through his teeth. He breathed heavily for almost a minute. Gradually he became quieter; not calmer, but simply tired. He began to sense a terrific pain somewhere inside of him, like a weight on his chest. “Everything is not ok.”

“What happened in the real fire?” The psychiatrist pulled his glasses from the front pocket of the white coat he wore, and put them on.

“There was a fire,” Roger said, barely able to steady his voice. Shirley gave him a beatific smile, rose and kissed his face, right below his left eye. “There was a fire,” he repeated, gazing at her.

The psychiatrist sat still, listening.

“My wife…there was a fire, and my, my wife…”

The doctor was silent for several minutes. Roger did not speak, but looked up at the ceiling. Suddenly he grimaced, and then silently wept.

“Roger, I’m so sorry about what happened to your wife. I know it’s painful.”

“And Courtney.” Roger inflected this somewhere between a statement and a question.

“Courtney is ok. She’s been staying with your parents. In fact, today is her birthday. She is a year old today.”

Shirley smiled at him, picked up her purse from the foot of the bed, and walked toward the door. She opened it, and then turned back to look at him. I love you, she mouthed, and then she was gone.