A Level of Non-Reality

A Level of Non-Reality

Tatiana Fox, Feb 2021

“He told me it’s Schizophrenia,” she said, leaning over the small, wooden table across from her brother. She ran her finger around the rim of a plain, white ceramic mug. Empty. It had taken her an hour to summon the ability to speak the words while she had quietly nursed a double cappuccino. She didn’t want to admit to him the night terrors had never stopped. That she wakes up screaming and feeling like she’s covered in blood at least twice per week. She hadn’t wanted to tell him about the waking episodes at all. They started last year. In the beginning, it was easier for her to determine that no, there was not, in fact, a dead woman stood against the cafe wall at 10 AM on a Tuesday. But as time moved forward it seemed as though so did the episodes. They twisted and grew and multiplied. They became so integrated into her days that between the things that haunted her nights and the things that followed her into the daylight, her sense of reality vs non-reality began to erode. Maybe there was a decaying woman standing across the cafe at 10 AM on a Tuesday. Maybe she was here. Maybe she was nowhere at all.

“The last one said it was just PTSD. What do you mean, Schizophrenia? This doctor doesn’t even know you. You’re not crazy. Is he gonna do anything to actually help you this time?” He was always so concerned. Always looking at the rope scars around her neck and the old stains deep burns had left up and down her arms. To him, he felt as if he might have drawn those awful marks on her himself. He took too long to get her out and now it seemed she barely existed at all. She was always lost in a space with no door, in a room that existed outside of time.

She looked up from the table and into his eyes. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

“Listen, Ash, what happened last week was.... Scary. Disturbing even. I’ve never seen you like that before. But it’s not like you don’t have reason to be upset and scared for a decade or two, maybe your whole life. I mean, I hope not, but…” He lost his words, so he reached across the table and put his hand over hers in support. He was always trying to hold her up.

“Sometimes it seems like they’re not really gone. Sometimes a locked door takes me back to that awful room and it’s like I can feel that cord around my neck again. I thought you made sure they were gone, I-” but he shushed her, aggressively, and clamped his hand around hers.

“Don’t. We said we’d never speak of it. What we did was right. They were the monsters, Ash, not us.”

“It’s been ten years, four months and five nights. No one knows. Why are you worried?”

“Because, the new chief of police is reopening cold cases. The ones that headlined TV news all over the country. And we were kids then. But we’re not now. We’re the first people they’ll look at. There’s no way our DNA wasn’t all over that scene.” He was whispering now, and behind him stood a man, soaked in blood, a kitchen knife stuck through his left eye, mouthing the words I’m going to kill you at her while her brother spoke. She shuddered.

“What, Ash? What are you looking at?” He turned around to follow her line of sight, but all he saw were other tables and people sat on their laptops.

“Nothing,” she said as she tried to focus on her brother. But the marks on her arms felt like they had just seen the iron fire pokers, and she thought she smelled burnt skin and hair. “Anyway,” she continued, “they’re putting me on anti-psychotics, so hopefully that will at least help me sleep more.” The dark rings around her eyes, made of terror and sleeplessness, guilt and shame, had been a permanent feature of her face since that day over ten years ago.

“Shit, sorry Ash, I gotta go. I have a meeting in five.” He stood up from the table and put his arms back through his jacket. “Please, please call me if you need anything. You’re all I have in this world. I love you.” He put a hand on her face before turning and walking out of the cafe. And as she watched him run across the street and back to his office, she could have sworn she saw the woman with the cloudy eyes- for a moment, stood in the middle of the street, and then in another moment, swept away by a bus.

As she walked the 7 blocks back to her apartment, she tried to avoid looking up from her feet. If she didn’t look around then she didn’t have to see them- on a stoop, in the road, down an alley, sat in a car. She couldn’t help but feel as if she had been in purgatory her whole life. The day they died was supposed to have set her free. But it had only allowed them to torture her in new ways- ways that, still, no one could see. And here she was, a decade later, one nervous breakdown away from a lengthy stay in a psych ward. It wasn’t fair. What was it that was so wrong about her? What was it they so badly needed that they spent their lives and afterlives trying to destroy her?

When she finally returned to her apartment after walking 7 blocks that had seemed to become 60, she locked and deadbolted the door behind her before walking to the kitchen to boil some water for tea. He can’t be right about this. He can’t, she thought as she poured boiling water over a small paper bag filled with leaves. She carried her tea to the living room, sat down crossed-legged on her sofa and clicked the TV on. The local news affiliate was re-airing a press conference from earlier this morning. She saw the podium and the uniforms and the badges. Her heart sank and her stomach turned. She set her tea down on the coffee table and turned up the volume-

…. that during my first year as this city’s police chief, it is my goal to reopen, solve and close as many of this city’s cold cases as this department is possible capable of. You need closure as much as we do for the violence committed here over the years. We all need answers. The law is above all. Seeking justice for victims and their families is of the utmost importance to me. 

She became afraid. For a moment, an aggressive ringing in her ears caused her to miss part of the statement. She shook her head to try to come back down from what was about to become a panic spiral-

…. these atrocities that occured right on our doorstep, in the middle of our neighborhood. Yes, I have chosen this cold case as my first endeavor because it was by far the most high profile case this city has ever seen. Yes, I have chosen it because of its absolutely horrific and violent nature. But more importantly, I have chosen this case because it ripped apart a family and took parents away from their children. Children who now, as adults, still live here and still don’t have closure. Whoever did this took everything away from this brother and sister, and it is about time we find out exactly what happened.

She gasped, audibly, into her empty living room and looked around frantically. She ran to the street-facing window and looked down to the sidewalk. Were they watching her? Did they know? No, she tried to calm herself, he said we are the victims. And we were. It’s okay. Breathe. Breathe.

She walked to her bedroom, closed the door and all the curtains so that she was in the dark again, like the room she was kept in for so long. She popped a pill and crawled under the covers, and for just a moment, before she forced herself to try to sleep away this burgeoning panic attack, she thought she smelled blood and piss coming off the carpet.

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Three days later, she had not left the room or turned on a single light. She couldn’t handle the screaming, the spectres, the echo of that press conference or the worried look her brother had had at the cafe. And then her buzzer rang. She got up, walked to her door and held down the button-

“Yes, who is it?”

“Hello, ma’am, is this the residence of Asha Siang?” 

She held down the button again. “Yes, who is this?”

“Detectives Stevens and Berns from the city police department. Do you mind if we come up and have a word?”

She swallowed hard and tried not to panic. Of course they would come ask her questions. The two people dead at the scene of this cold case had been her parents. “Yes, please come up; I’ll put some tea on,” and she buzzed them in. 

A few moments later, a knock.

A few more moments later, two detectives sitting across from her, sat at her kitchen table.

She tried to remain present as they asked questions and she answered, but behind them, in the reflection of the china cabinet glass, stood the ghosts of her captors. Her torturers. Her rapists. Her parents. Smiling truly evil smiles.

“Miss Siang? Are you with us?” One of the detectives waved his hand in front of her face.

“I’m sorry,” she shook her head. “Listen,” she said, “I’ve told you everything I know. Ten years ago and today. This is something I try not to remember. I try not to talk about. So, if that’s all you have, I would really appreciate it if you left me in peace.”

All she could hear was the ringing in her ears as they thanked her for the tea and made their exit, reminding her to get in touch with them if she happened to remember anything else. When she closed the door after them, she locked and deadbolted it before turning to lean her back against it and sliding to the ground. She brought her knees to her chest and put her head down. She remembered the moment ten years ago that her brother had kicked in the door to her room. He had stood there, covered from head to toe in blood. And as she had tried to focus on him while adjusting to the abrupt change in light, she remembered him saying, It’s over. Come help me clean up. Those words, she remembered those words so clearly. She remembered the smell of wet blood mixing with the smell of squalor and unbathed skin that filled her room as the door came down. She remembered the look in her brother’s eyes as he took her hand and led her out into the hallway, leaving red footprints all over the carpets. She remembered glancing into their bedroom to see two people reduced to tissue and viscera as her brother hurried her past the open doorway. He told her what to say before he called 911. Everything after he dialed the phone became blurry. But those things, those things she remembered.

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Another two days passed in her bedroom. In the dark. She missed work. She didn’t eat.

And then there were sirens. No buzz this time, no request for entry. They kicked down her doors- to the apartment, to the bedroom, and they swept her away in handcuffs. She was dragged, confused and only half-present, down the stairs and outside the building. After she felt a hand on her head pushing her into a squad car, she dissociated. The whole world was just that incessant and overwhelming ringing in her ears until she found herself in an interrogation room at the police station, sat across from one of the detectives from the other day. He looked at her like she was an anathema. It was a look she had come to know well in her childhood.

“I’m gonna be straight with you,” he said. “We know what you did. We know you were the one who murdered them. We know you broke out of your room that night and stabbed them to death in their sleep. We know it was you who staged the crime scene and you who came up with the lies to tell us. And we know about your history of violent mental illness.”

“Wait, what?” She couldn’t understand what was happening or how they had created this detailed and mistaken version of events, or how they felt they knew anything at all.

The detective never broke eye contact with her as he watched her become absolutely terrified. His response was the last thing she heard before she fell apart-

“Your brother told us everything.”