Song, Unheard

15. A Child, Remembered

It had been fast, mercifully and damnably so. The suddenness had spared them the torture of expectation and slow decline, yet it had starved them of even the briefest of farewells.

Likely congenital, they had been told. Some malformation of the blood vessels that had lain concealed and unnoticed within her until it had finally hemorrhaged, silently and catastrophically within her tiny skull.

In light of the devastation that had been unleashed internally, the external evidence had been contrastingly subtle. She had turned from the cartoons on the television, looking to them both to share her laughter at some joke or other, and as she turned there had been a sudden shift in her features. The smile had gone slack, the eyes had widened. She had tried to speak but she was unable, tiny lips moving soundlessly. One delicate blue eye had turned inward and she had slumped on the floor, the sound of her skull upon the wood reverberating in the room as she fell eternally limp.

Five years were gone in the duration of a moment. Every experience and emotion and learned thing had been cruelly vaporized and replaced by only their own suffocating physical and emotional pain and the unbearable weight of utter futility. What had been the point of it all? And now, what was the point in anything that remained?

Her grief had been violent, a frightening thing to observe. The physical and mental devastation created a noxious aura that seemed to threaten infectiousness. Even close friends retreated from her. He wanted to blame them for their actions but he could not. There was something about the luminescent blackness that became her eyes and the change that spread outward across her face in the network of fine wrinkles. It was a look of undistilled madness that affected observers on a wholly involuntary level. It made flesh spasm in much the same way a bulbous and stubbled spider might as it crept across the tender flesh of parted lips.

The prescribed sedation was heavy. She whispered to herself throughout the funeral, drew nervous glances from owners who mistakenly believed themselves unseen. The days beyond felt like the air had been sucked out of the world and replaced with something heavier. Time and movement felt decelerated. Sound seemed dampened.

The stream of concerned visitors became a trickle and then no more. The intermittently ringing telephone that had transmitted the voices of well-wishers became silent. It was just he and the bedridden she, with her pharmaceutically slackened features and dull eyes and that terrible heavy, absorptive air that filled the house. Her whispering persisted at a near constant level. The physician said it would pass, that her mind would rebound when it had processed events, and on the third day following the funeral, she had begun to speak.

Her transition between states had been sudden and jarring to witness. At once, the weighty and oppressive silence was banished by a manic shift in her personality, as despondence turned to exhilaration and silence became the sound of celebration. He had climbed the stairs in a state of confusion and panic birthed by the sheer alien nature of the sounds above him. He had peered around the door, still under the effects pure adrenaline, having formed no coherent thought of what to expect. Coherence of thought would escape him for some time after he witnessed the change that had occurred within the room.

The curtains that had been closed now stood open, the window ajar and the scent of her, bedridden body being displaced by the fresh air from beyond. The pills that had lain about the bedside had returned to their bottle. She had rushed about the room tidying bed sheets and haphazardly discarded garments. And she had spoken aloud. Had spoken in full blown and enthusiastic conversation with persons unseen. It was only some minutes after he had sunk to the floor, unseen in the cool of the hallway, toiling to bring his breathing and heart-rate to normalcy that recognition of the nature of her monologue had crashed over him as a wave upon some poisoned sea. Who else could have restored her vitality so quickly? Who else would she stoop and hold to her breast and weep over? What other conversant would she admonish for having hidden from her for three days, while she had taken to her bed sick with worry?

Her mind had broken, the deep fissures formed by its shearing now filled by the powerful and palpable delusion of the child's return in a living form. She seemed oblivious to the memory of the child's demise and yet her actions portrayed the presence of a muted child with impaired eye, both realities that had only come to bear on the child as results of the insidious defect that had hidden within her and then stolen her. And so, the house had once more come alive with sound, whilst he felt he had only begun to perish more quickly.

Was it grief - that freshly penetrant blade whose presence he had not yet had opportunity to acknowledge or tend to - that had driven him into the comforting arms of the whisky? Was it the sight of her madness? Or the manner in which friends had allowed their eyes to squirm about in their sockets as they watched her decline? Was it equally the jovial and dismissive tones of the doctor who had prescribed patience in hand with sedation? Regardless, he had needed help and the instant effects of the searing drink had answered.

Just as she had adapted through obliviousness and delusion, he had learned to persevere with ever steadier infusions of alcohol and nicotine and willing ignorance. And so things had continued for a while, them each shut away and concealed from the wider world. And as abnormal increasingly became normal, he came close to believing that a workable balance may have entered their lives. What emotions was he washing away with the booze? And were they in fact washed away or was the numbness he achieved only by through their temporary submersion? As they lived out their days in seclusion, each surviving with the support of their own unique crutch, he increasingly questioned the nature of his own thinking as well as hers.

With his mind deadened and numbed he discovered a certain admiration for the disease that had gestated within her. Like some advanced lifeform, it had inserted itself into her mind and taken control of every component of it. It retained the memories that suited her new reality and seemed to erase those that might contradict it. It integrated her personality completely. Just as fully, it retained her affection for the child, perhaps even distilled that emotion. It retained her sharpness of mind, for the interactions she imagined were structured and flowed like reality. They were a script that ran seamlessly and ceaselessly.

Each day she took the same clothes from the wardrobe, each day she believed the child to wear them, and each day's end she returned them to their drawers and hangers, unworn and unsoiled. Every untouched plate of food went unrecognized. Every interaction or conversation he avoided was either unnoticed or attributed to his mood. If the reality were not so horrible, he might have found himself in pure wonder of the spectacle before him. It was as if she had fallen under the control of a powerful ongoing hypnosis for which no wake command existed.

And so, life continued, free-fall toward surface unseen.

Until he remembered his promise.