Chapter Thirty-Three
Bellcolor
I feel the nearing sunrise even before the light pierces the room. I couldn’t fall asleep for a moment. Maybe I should’ve swallowed the sleeping pill Dr. Abano prescribed for me after all, the staff makes sure I take them every evening. But I hate the pills. They dull my senses and thoughts. They make me fade.
While I do manage to sleep when I take them, because the demons finally fall asleep too, I also lose my appetite, and then the staff’s hawklike eyes pick up that I’m not eating. And when I don’t eat, the real mess starts. It’s an endless cycle of destruction.
So I decided to play the game, the same game Valentina taught me to master well: to open my mouth and stick my tongue out as proof I’ve swallowed the pills, then immediately spitting them out as soon as they leave, swallowing down the bitterness they bring up in me and keeping the pills for when I want to get high and disconnect a bit from my ugly reality.
The laws of the game are simple and there are no winners, only losers. The only question is what its players lose.
If I choose to keep them for myself, I lose myself.
It’s been years since the day I sought death through pills, and every time I swallow a fistful of pills I’m thrown back to that hellish night. Since then I’ve been reliving it over and over for a few moments at a time, the pain, the sounds, my weakness, and if I’ve managed to survive, I encounter a serpent of light within the clear waters of the Kinneret that coils around me and grants me its peace, its forgiveness.
I never shared with Dr. Abano that this is the only place I meet Him , because I know it’s not real. Just like the words I write, the worlds I create. How can I explain to him that I found His place without giving away the fact that I’m deceiving them? How can I explain that to find Him I have to swallow an amount of pills that flirt with danger just to encounter him there?
And why does He only meet me when Death is whispering at the back of my neck?
And yet the other side of the game is far more upsetting. When I chose to trade with the other patients, a routine matter when you’re out for favors, I lost my soul.
It happened when three patients I was trading with for a long time took their own lives using the pills I’d provided them.
Evan, Liam and Tyra. Those were their names, but we’d all called them ‘the trio’, even though they weren’t related. I never knew whether they’d chosen to isolate themselves or whether the other patients had isolated them. Even among the damned they were unusual. Quite a twisted accomplishment. They refused to be parted, making a pact and swearing a blood oath that they’d go free together. When they realized Liam’s condition was deteriorating and he’d never be eligible for release, they decided to free themselves from this world. Together.
There was an in-depth investigation to determine how they’d gotten their hands on the pills, but my cowardice won out and I was silent. I knew that if I confessed to trading, I’d be confessing to murder as well. But I never forgot that their blood was on my hands. The shame and guilt soon followed, and they were unbearably heavy, drowning me. After their deaths, the demons that had held them clung to me, filling my heart with corruption I can never get rid of.
I never forgot their true faces, even though all the media coverage called them ‘the three fallen angels’. People tend to do that, lying and erasing their sins towards the dead, renouncing their part in what led them to plummet into oblivion. There are those who can do so, and there are the damned like me.
With every angel who fell, I again proved I deserve the curse I bear, which excites the demon within me, dancing in their blood in an intoxicated frenzy. I understood that the depths of grief you’ll experience depends on the depth of guilt gnawing its way into your souls.
And mine?
My soul was already forfeit anyway, but after learning of the death of the three patients, I realized I’d never find my way out.
The terrible consequences of my actions led me to realize that it was time for Lilith to submit. I know Dr. Abano won’t be pleased with the last chapter I wrote, especially since he’s unwilling to accept her surrender, but I’m not writing this to please him, not even to please myself. He asked me to write my truth, and that’s what I did, even when the truth is ugly. And the truth is, despite my heart’s desire, she’ll never be strong enough to deal with Libretto. I hoped my crimes against myself would be worthy of God’s forgiveness but now I know that if I can’t forgive the crimes I’ve visited on others, I don’t deserve His forgiveness.
My heart’s wishes are empty, just like the prayers I’m forced to mumble during Sunday masses under the scrutiny of the administrator.