Disappearing With The Devil

“Let’s take a walk, shall we? And you can tell me why you wanted to disappear.” He offers his arm, like a gallant knight, and inexplicably, Kate takes it, because she doesn’t know what else to do.

The devil doesn’t look like she expected him to. There are no horns, no teeth glistening with drops of blood, no maniacal laughter. True, he is shrouded in black, cloaks and hair and even his very skin seems shadowed. He—Kate is not even sure it is a he—looks more like a middle-aged emo-wanna-be than the devil.

“Tell me,” he urges, and Kate remembers. She thought, when she was swallowing one pill after another, that she would wake up in hell and have a limbo of time when she didn’t know where she was, a literal lost soul. Instead, she falls into step, she seeing her whole life as if on a movie screen. She conjures up her childhood, her young adult years, her grown-up years. Before her flashes depression, failure, her wish to not be alive, all scrambled together. The montage pulls up to slow speed, a train coming into a station, and there she lay.

On the screen and in her mind, Kate could see it. She could feel it and touch it, caress it as if it were a child before her. Pain: what a word for something so vast, so black. She was nothing but a blight—a failed daughter, a faulty wife, a crap doctor. A terrible mother. Drugs were a way to keep going, but they were also a way to write the ending. She knew what to take, and she had been successful, clearly, since here she was. Walking arm in arm with the devil himself.

“I just wanted to…disappear. Everyone was disappointed in me,” Kate says, and more images flicker on the movie screen. Her mother, shaking her head in disgust. Kevin’s broken heart, worn on his face like a sad amulet. The children, nodding with their big trusting eyes as she said, you’re going to stay with Daddy for a while, but Mommy will see you every day! Her voice bright and cheery enough to disguise the blackness that was already encroaching, the wish to be gone. They were young enough. Time would make her a hazy memory; death would erase the bad parts of her and leave only good memories in the wake. It always did.

“Sounds like you made the right choice then,” the devil says, squeezing her closer. Their footsteps fall into sync, and Kate wonders what hell is like. She’d always imagined it would be a conglomeration of everything you’ve hated, and so, for her, that would be this: quiet spaces, where thoughts had nothing to do but bounce and reverberate.

Hell would be husbands who felt that love could not be spread among other things, like careers—even one that funded his comfortable lifestyle, kept him cushioned in paid bills and expensive gym memberships and a shiny silver luxury car. Husbands who felt jealous when all she had left was for her children, and, perhaps, her lover (okay, okay.)

It would have the disappointed looks of parents who’d groomed a highly accredited neurosurgeon and were rewarded with second prize, a not-highly-accredited psychiatrist. The way they sighed heavily, as if the culmination of their life’s work was not rewarded with a spectacular fireworks show, but merely a sparkler.

Hell would be the sorrowful expressions of toddlers who didn’t understand, mommy has to got to go to work. It would be the serrated knife in her gut every time she closed the door behind her.

Hell would even have a lover like Henry, disappointed because adultery and attention were not enough for him. Hotel rooms and tangled sheets and secrets were not enough. He wanted more. They all wanted more from her, hungry beasts sucking the well bone-dry, and when it was, they just dug it deeper.

Hell would be the look on her administrator’s face after she’d cracked Kate’s fail safe way of pilfering the pills she needed, the ones she could crush up and snort and keep herself going while the bottom fell out of everything, trailing behind her like footprints.

“You, Kate?” The administrator's eyes lingering in line with Kate’s for too long. As if she couldn't stand that Kate was human, was fallible, was not the person everyone wanted her to be. She could save suicidal patients from the brink, but she could not mother her children properly, could not satisfy her husband the way he wanted to be. She was not able to grasp the high bar that her parents had set for her, falling face first her entire life. She wasn’t even a very good mistress, either (according to Henry.)

“Its better this way,” Kate nods, coming out of her silence and back to this alternate reality. She's surprised by how benevolent this devil-guy seems. They're walking in the pitch black, and yet she feels she knows the way. To one side, an ocean murmurs, the beat of the surf hitting and receding, a mantra that had a meditative effect on her. She's calm. Ready.

“So what now?” she asks.

She feels him shrug. “You tell me. This night is as long as you want it to be.” And the movie screen is back. Kate sees herself, sees her body in the bed, the blinking machines. Sees Kevin, tearfully holding her hand.

“Oh fuck,” she sighs. “Guess I’m not very good at killing myself, either.”

The devil throws back his head and laughs, and so Kate, wanting to fit in, laughs with him. It becomes funnier and funnier…the ultimate act of shock, and she failed at that too. She had to stop walking, grabbing her stomach as tears poured out, her hysteria unbottled. Her parents were sure to lament to the relatives next Thanksgiving: Well, Kate tried to kill herself, but she screwed it up in the same voice they said, Oh Kate was always going to be a neurosurgeon, but she ended up being a...therapist. Shaking their heads in shame, as if she hadn’t had to sit for boards like every other doctor. As if she hadn’t skimped on every other aspect of life to achieve the title of doctor in front of her name.

When the laughter subsides and the movie screen fades, they walk on and the somber reasons of her desire to disappear are swimming all around her, like little lies she can’t help but believe. She sees them in front of her, words in a cursive script.

No one loves me.

I’ll never be good enough.

No one will miss me. Its better if I just disappear.

“Do you really believe all that?” the devil says, and she guesses he can see her words too. “Sounds so cliché. No one will miss you? Boo hoo hoo.”

“Really, I’m not good enough for any of them,” Kate says, “So why would they?”

And now the screen is back. Now its not just Kevin, but there sits her mother, astonishingly, with tear streaks and a fabric handkerchief in her hand and lines on her face that Kate knows were not there before. Has she done this to her, whittled her down to this sniveling, broken old woman?

“I don’t think it’s you that’s not good enough,” the devil muses. “But this. Well, this is certainly an issue.” They watch the screen, the silent movements of the doctor’s mouth, the alternating flashes of hope and terror that warp her mother’s face. Kevin’s face. Kate cannot take it anymore.

“Just take me! Chain me and burn me. Make me a slave. I don’t care. Take me!” she yells, pointing to the screen. “Make me disappear.”

The devil sighs, and she can see the night is beginning to fade. She doesn’t know what that means: is this limbo up? Is she going to survive, go back to that wretched existence of never being good enough? Of stealing drugs, cheating on her husband, lying to them all? Or is she about to be plunged to an underworld? Suddenly, she is afraid. She doesn’t want to be either place.

“Where do you want to be, then?” the devil asks, reading her mind. Over the water, which she can now see as hazy gray shapes, the colors of night and day starting to merge, she stares. The sun begins to rise itself, a ball of orange fire that pushes every color out of the sky, leaving only blue.

Here, Kate thinks, and she turns to ask the devil but he has changed, she has changed. The cloaks of black are now white, and the shadowed figure who is coming alive before her is pure light, long cornsilk hair and the palest blue eyes Kate has ever seen. They are the sky and the water and tranquility and peace. Everything feels ethereal, sacred.

“Is this a trick?” she wants to know, suddenly convinced the devil is playing games with her.

“You’re the one who wanted to be here, Kate. You’re the one who swallowed a handful of pills like candy,” the devil reminds her. “Why would I trick you?”

The screen changes again, and they watch together, the devil’s hand on her shoulder, clasped tightly, as if he knows she will collapse at this one. There sit her children, their eyes transfixed on their own screen, their short legs straight out on the faded red couch of her childhood home. Next to them sits her father, and they all stare blankly ahead. They all have forlorn eyes, watery and hollow. They are broken, and it is she who shattered them.

“Oh, no,” says Kate. Suddenly the idea that they would all get over her suicide seems moronic. That her children wouldn’t be altered forever. She hadn’t considered the steps in between. She hadn’t considered the grief she would cause, the black cloak she would shroud them all in. Motherless. Daughterless. Widowed.

Kate turns to beg off, to plead to go back, but the devil is already wrapping himself around her. He encases her sobs, but even in that she realizes she feels no pain. In fact, she feels the best she’s ever felt. She feels like its the first day of summer and her birthday and she's eating her favorite foods. It's the way she feels when one of her kids lays their head in the crook of her shoulder. It's Kevin’s hand in hers on the day they were married. Its an afternoon nap and decadent chocolate and yes, even the liaisons with Henry. Its everything that’s ever made her feel whole wrapped in one moment.

Kate peels back. The devil smiles, kindly.

“You’re not the devil,” Kate says. It it not a question. “You’re God.”

“Of course I am,” says God, slightly offended. “Why would you assume I was the devil?”

“Because I killed myself. Because I’m a terrible person—a bad daughter, mother, wife, lover. Doctor. We went over this…” Kate is distracted by the images from the screen in her peripheral vision. Now, they are just core memories. Gazing up at her father when she was small, his big hand over hers, her adoration full. Her mother singing songs to her as she snuggled her deep into her bed, so warm and safe it was nearly a womb.

God shrugs. “Oh well, you made some mistakes. No biggie.”

Kate hangs her head, humbled. “I feel so stupid though. I offed myself for what? Because I feel like a failure?”

God lifts her face up, chin cupped lovingly. “Humans fail. It’s the nature of the game.”

“So I’m not going to hell?”

God laughs, head thrown back, tendrils of hair lifted by the gentle breeze. He flicks his wrist as if hell is an annoying fly buzzing around. “Such a silly concept.”

“Then why would you let me struggle? Why would you give me such pain...I know it seems dumb…but I do the things I do because I just…hurt, you know?”

“You don’t have to justify pain to me, Kate,” God says. “But I didn’t give it to you. We all have pain, I’m afraid. I’m just here to catch you when you fall.”

“Then why…” But Kate cannot stop looking over the waves. The ebb and flow of the foamy surf, sunlight glinting like diamonds on the water.

“This will always be here. So, stay if you want. But that,” God nods towards the screen, “Is not here.”

And then the screen is another montage, and it is falling in love, it is fat drops of spring rain on skin, it is her children’s chubby cheeks as they run down the stairs on Christmas morning, it is a different beach than this one, a less perfect one of rougher ground and gray seas, but one in which her family piles mounds of sand to make a city of castles, and core memories become locked in the hearts of her children. In this montage she, Kate, is heavily flawed, and she can see herself wanting a pick-me-up, fantasizing about Henry even though Kevin is right there.

“I’m going to have a big mess when I get back,” she says, and God nods.

“Yep.” He counts on his fingers. “Your medical license. Your drug addiction. Your marriage. Your poor mental health. Yikes.”

“Its going to be so hard,” Kate laments. She is overwhelmed thinking of how she can possibly fix this life, her life. The ocean sends a silky, salty breeze before her, tantalizing her with the option. To stay here. To die. To disappear.

“It will be a hard life,” God says softly. “But you’ll be there. Its messy, but you’ll figure it out. And they need you.”

Kate breathes deeply. “So I can retract my wish? I can un-disappear?”

“Sure,” God says with a wink and smile, fingertips gracing her face, lovingly and kindly. And suddenly it all comes crashing back, and she is plunged back to life.

Life. Oh, fuck, this hurts, a wound gouged open and full of salt. Now its not just her heart and her mind but her body too. Kate opens her eyes like peeling skin from bone, and her lips, when she moves them, crack. She feels as ill as one can possibly feel, her whole being a bruise from violent stomach pumping, from CPR, from being manhandled off the floor of her bedroom to the stretcher to the ambulance to the bed. She had no idea how much time has passed, but she can tell by Kevin’s beard that its been at least a handful of days. Her seconds with God took days…but God begins to fade as Kate wakes up.

Kevin, when he sees her eyes opening, jumps to alert someone, but Kate manages a word: no. He sits again, and his own words come out, but she doesn’t hear them, can’t articulate the sound, only the intentions. She moves her hand towards his, and he takes it gingerly. She remembers the things she loves about him only: how he has no qualms about being a stay-at-home-dad—and what a great one he is at that. How he makes the coffee and cooks her eggs in the morning, even when her guilt is pulsing like a neon light that she’s sure he can see. How he stuffs her phone charger in her bag almost every day, knowing she usually forgets it. The way he looked at her when he first met her, their eyes crossing paths over a smoky bar, something clicking into place.

“I’m so sorry,” she croaks, and the rough terrain of her throat tells her that there was a tube, at one point. But Kevin only shakes his head, as if her transgressions can be wafted away in the wind. They can’t be, she knows this. But Kevin: Kevin is grateful she’s here.

“Kids?” she says, her voice all about spent.

“Kids are great, they’re just fine, don’t worry about them at all. I’m going to call for the nurse, and I have to text your parents and all,” Kevin hits the call button and simultaneously pulls out his phone.

“What did you tell them?” these are the last words she can manage, but she has to know. In her mind’s eye, she can see their precious little faces, the morose gaze, a look she’s never seen before but knows happened.

Kevin puts down his phone. “We only told them you were sick…they’re so little. We didn’t want them to worry but we didn’t want it to be a shock if…you know…” And then, tears come again. Kevin comes closer to her, now gripping her hand with the force of all his anguish. A thousand volts of pain shoot through them—everything hurts.

“We almost lost you, Kate,” he says, emphatically through his swallowed sobs.

We almost lost you.

Kate nods and squeezes back as hard as she can, which is barely a whisper, but he feels it. She mouths, I love you, and Kevin says it back, blowing out a shaky breath, picking up his phone again as the nurses engulf her, their faces pleased, their hands maternal.

Kate closes her eyes, and she knows she’s going to fall asleep again, her exhaustion and pain overtaking everything. She’s internally cringing as it comes rushing back…her affair with Henry. Her administrator putting her on immediate leave. The pills she threw back like a savage, her wish to disappear.

But something feels different, and as Kate slips into a merciful state of unconsciousness, she feels like she dreamt of a beach. Of blue skies and salty water, of love. She feels that, maybe, she can make things okay again. She won’t be able to fix everything. She might lose Kevin. She’s definitely lost her job.

But you’re still here, a voice echoes as the last grips of consciousness fade away, and white light floods through Kate.

She is still here.