The History of Lila Waters

Lila was the only one dancing, throwing arms and elbows and hips and knees. Her movements were sometimes outdated: the sprinkler, the disco—one finger pointed to the sky then to the club floor. Then they switched to erotic, her ass pushing out and dropping to the ground, slowly pulling up and grinding against an imaginary someone. Then they turned to erratic—headbanging, moshing. Her body couldn’t make up its mind. Her hair flew like a white swan, coming loose from its bobby pins and bright pink scrunchie. 

Silence skittered along the shadows, afraid the music in Lila’s head might leak and shatter its fragile existence. The only sound in the club were her heels clacking against the concrete floor. The entire place was empty. Not a soul at the bar or a lurker near the bathroom or a drag queen on the makeshift stage with its red velvet curtain and antique bronze microphone.

When Lila finally came to rest, her limbs heavy, she settled to the ground. The wind had been ripped from her, and she heaved, her chest an ocean. A smile crested onto her face. She ran her hands through her sweaty hair, and she slumped onto the chilly gritty floor, a laugh tickling in her chest.

***

Lila had been pious in her past lives. All three of them. A good girl. Once Christian, once Jewish, once Muslim. She had been a nun as a Christian, roaming the narrow halls of a nunnery in Scotland. She remembered only flashes of that life as it was the oldest. Red hair tucked into a long braid, tapestries of Jesus and the wisemen and Mary and Joseph, long days tending to the sick and wounded as guns cracked outside the weathered stone walls. She had never quite narrowed down which war she’d been stuck in the middle of. The Glorious Revolution of Scotland? The Jacobite Rebellions? Perhaps even the Third English Civil War? 

When she had been Ashkenazi Jewish, she’d been born in Russia sometime before the Russian Revolution of 1917. She remembered a tad bit more of that life, though all of her past lives felt shrouded in shadow, flashes of it coming to her in dreams and visions. 

She had been the daughter of a grocer, and she had spent the majority of her childhood stocking shelves and handing out coupons on street corners. Her family had been large until a bout of influenza killed off three of her siblings and her mother. Years later, she married a man with one ear. He’d lost the other one in World War I thanks to a landmine. The scar had twisted down his left cheek, crumpling the corner of his dark mischievous eye. She remembered tracing it, the skin rough like sandpaper beneath the pads of her fingers. He died three years after their union of the same wracking cough that had taken her three siblings and mother. She died early of a broken heart.

The next life, she had been born to an Islamic family in early ‘80s New York City, the youngest of three siblings. Up until college, she had been pious, praying five times a day (though not traditionally with a prayer mat at school) and upholding the Five Pillars.

When she attended Columbia University, however, she met a girl with box-dyed black hair that was spiked to the heavens. She ended up doing the same, ditching her hijab much to her parents’ dismay. The girls developed some kind of relationship, staying more-than-friends even through the turmoil of 9/11. Then cancer took Lila swiftly at the tender age of twenty-three, a year after she graduated from college. She had a penchant for dying early, she supposed, so she didn’t expect to live long in this life. However, she was healthy, even though the therapists and care staff at Newman-Heart Psychiatric Center disagreed.

***

“How are you feeling today?” asked Dr. Grape, her blonde hair tied back in a strict ponytail. Her ponytail was at odds with her doughy face, sallow as if it hadn’t been proofed long enough. 

She was about Lila’s age. Well, the age Lila was supposed to be. Somehow, the clock had been rewound, and fifty-year-old Lila Waters had become fifteen-year-old Lillian Herbert. Her father hadn’t believed her, of course, and neither had her younger brother. They’d taken her straight to her old therapist who had suggested intensive in-patient treatment.

So, here Lila was, sitting across from Dr. Grape on a faux-leather couch after group session, one eyebrow raised. “I’m just peachy. How are you?” Lila said, trying to be polite even if Dr. Grape grated on her nerves. 

Dr. Grape looked older than fifty. Her voice was dry and rough like stubbly legs after a couple days of neglecting to shave. She was obviously a smoker. Pretty ironic of a doctor to smoke, Lila thought. 

“How has the aripiprazole been treating you?” Dr. Grape asked. She only spoke in questions, which scraped at Lila’s nerves as well.

“Fine. I still don’t understand why I have to take it. I’ve been on it for two weeks now, and I still believe what I know is true,” Lila said. Her foot began to tap on the floor softly. A nervous tic she’d developed since being in here.

“Have you been taking it?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Dr. Grape shuffled in her chair and cleared her throat. Tapped her pen against her notepad. “How are your dreams?” 

“My dreams are fine,” Lila snapped. Anger pulsed below her skin, crawling like a million tiny bugs along her veins. She wanted them off. She wanted out of here, but no one would release her even though she could describe the future perfectly well. She had kept her past lives a secret only because she couldn’t quite pinpoint all the details. They would never believe her about that if they didn’t believe her about this. 

“Any more about your club?”

“Yes,” said Lila before she could think better of it. She knew she should just lie, say no, but she couldn’t. Not when it came to this. 

Dr. Grape smiled. It felt patronizing, and Lila sat up straighter on the couch. “Have you really been taking your medicine?” Dr. Grape asked again.

“Why wouldn’t I be? They fucking check your goddamn mouth,” Lila snarled. She was lying though. She was switching pills with a depressed girl named Jasmine because Jasmine just didn’t give a single shit anymore. Lila kind of liked Jasmine.

“Hmm,” said Dr. Grape, shifting in her chair again, uncrossing and re-crossing her legs. “Someone told me they saw you switching pills with Jasmine. Is that true?”

“Who told you that?” 

“I won’t relay that information to you. Have you been switching pills with Jasmine?”

Silence laid heavy between them. The anger boiling in Lila spilled into her mouth like poison, and she had the urge to spit in Dr. Grape’s eye. “No,” Lila said. “I haven’t been switching pills with Jasmine, whoever that is.”

***

The sun was hot on her face. Though the curtains were drawn, they were so thin that it didn’t matter, and she groaned, pressing her face into the pillow.

“Damn,” she muttered before sitting up. The sheets were twisted around her, and she had the strangest sensation she was back home, waking up from a nap that had broken a flu fever.

She took a deep breath and ran a hand through her hair. She couldn’t remember any of her dreams. Flashes, sort of. Something about an octopus learning to read but all of his tentacles were made out of different things like a toothbrush or a rotating saw. Definitely not the types of dreams she had been having recently.

Grief swallowed her suddenly, and she pressed a hand to her face to stifle the sobs. She didn’t want to wake her roommate who slept in the other bed. Maybe it wasn’t real, all those lives and all that time travel. Was she really just fucking crazy? How could someone make up something so insane, and where the hell had it come from? It felt like the psychosis had come on without warning, a tsunami shredding everything in its wake. There had to be some grain of truth to it, didn’t there? She couldn’t have made it all up.

Maybe just the past lives, she thought. That’s it. Maybe the past lives are real. I couldn’t remember them even in psychosis, so maybe… maybe psycho-Lilly was onto something.

Lilly sighed softly, rubbing her forehead. It had been a week since they separated her from everyone else and watched her as she took the antipsychotic. She’d had clearer days, days where she had doubted that she really was Lila Waters, but nothing like this. Like clarity.

She wanted to tell Dr. Grape. Maybe not the part about believing in past lives but the rest of it. The way her body, which had felt foreign and gangly as if she hadn’t properly grown into it, was now her again. Not a puppet she was inhabiting. The loss still ached inside her. Lila had been her own person, a fully-fleshed personality, and now she was gone. Replaced. Like in some sci-fi movie. 

Shivers cascaded down Lilly’s spine. She wondered how she would feel learning she was only a figment of someone’s imagination. The grief yawned open, capturing her tears as they fell. Why was she crying? Why did she care? She could go home now. She could go home now.

But something didn’t feel right, leaving Lila Waters in limbo. Perhaps, one day, Lilly would become a badass fifty-year-old woman running a gay nightclub.

The smile on her face was watery, curbed with free-falling tears. Lila Waters wasn’t real. But Lillian Herbert was. She was a Brooklyn-born girl with a penchant for astrology and girls who crinkled their noses. It didn’t matter whether any of that psychosis shit had been real, not really. What mattered now was getting dressed and taking her pills and getting out of here. She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t damaged (well, maybe a little, but that was neither here nor there). She was Lillian Herbert, but Lila Waters’ spirit could be alive and well in her sobbing body.