Irenosen Okojie - Butterfly Fish

“I’m sorry,” I croaked pathetically. I wanted to say I didn’t know what I was doing but that would have been a lie. Can’t you see I’m being punished enough ?

“It’s okay,” he replied. “The important thing is that you’re alright. We’ll have to talk about it at some point though. You’re very lucky to be alive. Do you remember what happened?”

I looked up at the faint shadows on the ceiling crossing white space. “I don’t remember the moments before it happened. I think I was sleepwalking.”

Thoughts of Rangi’s elegant butcher’s hands cutting, slicing, and choking during sex, of the purple sheet slipping down his hips, the exposure of skin, the feeling of coming up for air after being choked and how my arms flailing felt familiar.

Dr Krull brought his chair closer. His hair was ruffled, giving him a more boyish look.

“Try to remember,” he urged. “Don’t you think it’s odd that your mother’s been dead for months but we haven’t talked about her? It’s important you remember.”

I remained silent and dry mouthed, wreckage in an uncomfortable, adjustable bed.

Dr Krull continued to speak in his calm, measured way. Half of him morphed into the debris of my life.

Mervyn came to the hospital, cut a weary and forlorn figure at my bedside. His grey, pinstriped suit was rumpled. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. His large hands trembled as he held my face, pressed a kiss on my forehead, smelling of alcohol mixed with aftershave.

“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” he offered attempting to steady his succession of facial expressions: concern, pity and guilt. I looked away; I couldn’t bear the pitiful looks thrown my way.

“How did this happen?” he asked.

“They didn’t tell you?” I croaked, clutching the soft bedding in my sweaty palm. The skin of a day old banana on the dresser was now partially black with spots of new darkness crawling upwards. There was a beauty in the way things decayed, nature taking its course. “They said I sleepwalked right onto the train tracks.” I thought for a while. “Why would I do that? What’s wrong with me?”

“Oh God!” he answered, pacing back and forth. “I could throttle your mother. You’ve forgotten you did that as a child for a bit, right after-”

“Right after what?” I hoisted my body up slowly, sinking into the pillows.

“It’s nothing, it can wait.” His eyes glistened; shoulders sagged in some kind of small relief. For a while, we occupied positions at either end of a silence. Weakened from medication and the bleakness of my future, I lay there wrapped in blackening banana skin trying to hold onto a bomb.

When the nurses came to administer my afternoon meds, I willed myself to disappear under the bed, dragging my body on the floor towards the sound of wheels. Blood seeped through my bandages and into the nearest corners. The patient in the bed next to me had changed. I fell asleep to the feel of my camera in my hands. The lens whirred filling up with water, my hand caught in a flash mimicking fast moonlight. I thought about Mervyn and the anxiety he’d displayed. He was keeping something from me. I knew it. Why did it feel like everybody in my life had something to hide? Why would I have blocked out the memory of sleepwalking as a child when that was connected to losing my arm?

Then there was Anon holding the brass head from the ambulance bed. Where had she been going with it? Questions swirled in my head. The sound of stones infiltrated the lens; running water pulled the camera down. The stones rumbled in the slipstream. I tried to hold the boxy camera steady but couldn’t. It flashed uncontrollably, blindingly, hiding those earlier images of the night in some grainy purgatory.

Days passed. A bright green apple replaced the black banana on my dresser. A small patch of brown, crinkly skin like a pockmark had began to spread on its otherwise pristine surface. I waited for the slow erosion to come. The routine continued. My bed sheets were newly changed: crisp and white. I listened to the daughter of a patient read her To Kill a Mockingbird . Her wrinkly, spotted arm trembled in delight. I was at my wit’s end between the boredom and the pain. I woke up wanting to go back to sleep and went to sleep not wanting to wake up.

By the time Rangi arrived, the small TV set borrowed from another ward had begun to flicker and he looked as if he’d stepped right out of the black and white movie wearing clothes from the wrong era. There was a weight on my lids, a hovering shape I’d turned into. It was dark, past visiting hours. I didn’t ask how he’d slipped in. Instead, I lifted my body up awkwardly, slowly. Still tasting sleep in my mouth. My left arm ached from lying on it for too long. I could hear the hum of the fridge tucked behind the ward reception and stray heartbeats in stethoscopes tapping against glass mouths.

I wanted to tell him I’d been waiting, that sometimes I could taste him in the small hours before dawn. Pain in my head had created a path littered with shattered reflections. My brain had landed on black tracks, then separated into frantic, blue-eyed gulls on plumped, white pillows, scraped with thin, sharp instruments. Sickness and excitement rose in my stomach as he approached. The air between us crackled with haphazard electricity. I recognised the distance in his eyes, watermarks from rain leaping off rough surfaces. I stretched my hand out to know it again, to rub my fingers in its spotted areas. My body throbbed. Then, he was beside me. How was it possible I could hear stones rolling down an echo, Anon’s heartbeats between clock hands, small versions of her breathing against the hemlines of nurses’ uniforms, yet Rangi’s feet barely made a sound? He drew the curtains around us carefully, leaving a tiny crack. His breath on my face was warm and alcoholic. Red scratches on his right cheek were rough. I pressed my mouth on them. His hands flew to my neck, holding it tenderly. I cried into silent footsteps as he undid his zipper urgently. And those creatures of dawn, carrying gutted spaces we drank from surrounded us like quiet grenades waiting for the pull of our fingers.

He was heavy against me afterwards. He hoisted himself up, careful not to make too much noise. My nostrils were clogged with his smell of faint cologne, weed and sweat. The taste of sweat lingered longest in my mouth. He sat down gingerly, took my hand, releasing a slow breath as though tension had left his body.

“What happened to your face?” I asked. Footsteps in the hallway petered off, made me more alert.

Rangi rubbed his face, threw a worried look my way. “You don’t remember this?” He pointed at the scratches, fixed me with an intense, loaded gaze.

I shook my head, closed my eyes. Tiny nuclei of colour slid beneath my lids, split then disappeared.

His eyes went to my stump. “I’m sorry Joy. That night… we argued. You weren’t yourself. You were wild. I’ve never seen you that way. You hit me with that ornament, that brass head your mother left you.”

My eyes flew open. “No, I’m sorry. Of the two of us, I think you got the better deal.” A slight resentment slipped into my tone.

A throbbing in my head began to spread, till I felt like a big, pathetic ball of nerves and anxiety. “What are you saying?” I asked, my voice tiny in the dark.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he rubbed a finger up and down the back of my hand slowly.

Outside, fireworks cracked and popped in the night skyline. Somehow, Rangi had slipped one into my hold. Bits of sky attached to it were gaps we could fall into. It sparkled against my fingers. And between his gestures of consolation, I wondered why he came to the hospital already smelling of sex and why this only registered with me later. I waited for the firework to go off, toppling the dangling ceiling above our heads.