A Love Story

            by Zoe Richards

 

            Lydia looked at her reflection.  Standing motionless, angling her upper body away from the shatterproof glass, she absorbed her worn appearance.  Her body looked paler than she had expected, even her nipples had lost most of their color, and her irregular sleep was not as obvious in her face as she felt it should be.  She had lost all of the curves she had ever had, and her bones seemed to protrude naggingly.

            “Lydia dear!”  It must be lunch time.  “I hope you’re decent!”  This nurse was always yelling, and it annoyed Lydia.  She hear the metal door knob click and scrambled to throw on her gown.

            That night Lydia dreamt of a man, and woke up wet.  In her dream she was watching his form on its side, a very delicate, refined form.  He was sleeping, and the rhythmic flow of air down into his belly and out his soft nostrils settled her thoughts.  Slowly, she climbed into bed with him, slipping her feet down into the snowy sheets.  Her arm extended, and Lydia allowed her middle finger to trace the lines of his powerful back.  She breathed him in, sucked jealously all she could from this man.  The smell of fresh clothes, the cool comfort of his skin.  Everything was lighter here, with him.  An air of passion circled the bed, streaking silver in the moonlight.  Suddenly the world was dancing for her, and there was no more rush or bitterness. 

            Once again, Lydia woke up bare-assed and scrawny.  All the warmth of her dream was whipped away by the sterile room.  A headache  caused by the shock of change promptly overtook her.  Lydia consciously let the ache spread, knowing that overwhelming pain was better than consuming cold and isolation.  She tried not to think of anything. 

            After the pain restored her sense, she pulled herself up and collected her tangled hair into a thin braid.  Her fingers ran over her body, making sure nothing was missing or awry.  Lydia looked both ways before acting, and then left the four-walled room, heading right down an obscenely straight hallway. She seemed to keep time with her small steps.  There were cameras in the hall that captured Lydia’s actions.  They looked like little black blemishes, scarring the smoothed white ceiling.

            At 2:00 Lydia was escorted to the Jewish-looking woman doctor, the one who always offered candy.  On her way there Lydia watched the nurse’s belt of inoculations come unhooked and drop.  The nurse struggled to overcome her fatty rolls, and muttered as she bent over to pick up her accessory.   She made some comment as she was righting herself about how nothing had worked since the Hospital switched medical suppliers.

            Inside the office, green dominated.  During her first session, Lydia had tried to count how many objects weren’t of the same coloration and came up with fourteen, including the doctor herself.

            “Lydia…Lydia?”  Lydia glazed her eyes at the shelves of books.  “Lydia, honestly, don’t be so puerile,” the doctor turned her head away from her patient.  “You’re making both of our lives much harder than they need to be.”  Lydia sat on her dry palms.  “Can you even see how self destructive you’re being?”

            Without shifting her position Lydia said “Yes.”  She paused to watch the tumbling fall of an oak leaf.  “Can you tell me about the man?”

            The doctor sighed, an irritated, convincingly.  “You’re aware I’m not a dream interpreter, Lydia.  You’ve literally forced me to make up numerous ridiculous hypotheses about this ‘dream man’: it’s time to stop fooling yourself.  This man is irrelevant to your recovery, he is nothing; he is simply a manifestation of some unsatisfied lust you’ve been holding within you.   If you take control of your own lust, your head will be free and you will dream peacefully.  Go to your room now.”

            Lydia’s throat had lost all its moisture, and her eyelids began to tremble.  She pushed hard against her temples, fighting fear and frustration. Eyes closed, she whispered something almost inaudible, “you’re lying.”  The doctor flared her nostrils with a deep breath, but before she could deliver her clinical response Lydia let her thought flow out of her through her voice.  “In my dreams I am whole.  Everything is simple.  The world is different when I’m-“

            “Lydia!  Stop that, you must let go of this impossible sexual attachment.  You must trust me.  I have seen so many women fall victim to their repressed desires here, and it leads to nothing except confusion and impairment.”  Realizing she must have been too unsympathetic to be convincing, the doctor added “Sweetie, I know it’s difficult, but you must look at this whole dream mess realistically.  You have been here for a while now, with no man, and obviously it’s going to have some effect.  Be reasonable.  Take your dream man for what he really is. Now, go to your room and take control of your sexual drive.  Really, Lydia, it’s in your best interest.”

            Lydia dreamt of the man again that night.  He was standing, still, with the sunset and waterfront to his left.  His skin was so smooth, so light in the fading sun that she couldn’t resist.  Lydia ran towards him, accelerated by his gravity.  She collided with him and let her body be captured by his solid form.  The momentum from her run made them spin, and Lydia’s sunny skirt puffed full of air and danced about them.  The perfect warmth from his smile rested between her shoulders and obliterated all sense of time, all memory of a beginning, and all fear of an end.  Lydia tossed her head back, liberated.  Laughter and chocolate locks bounced with the two lovers in time.  She looked up at the man’s definite jaw and, suddenly overwhelmingly confident, sunk her body into his.  As the lovers moved weightlessly through cold air, Lydia unbound her spirit from her body and let it float between her and the man, dancing with them to the inaudible music.

            Lydia awoke alone.  Sealed inside the white walls she lay flat on her back and locked her knuckles together over her uterus.  The passing of time exhausted her and so she stayed there, in the exact middle of her hospital bed, with eyes that were open and awake.  Her two big toes were crossed.

            Lydia’s thoughts were limited to what used to be common, constant parts of her daily life, what she had taken for granted.  She thought of her column, and her sandy dog.  She wondered how she would be received upon her return.  If retuned.  Lydia considered the possible reactions that her parents could have had at the news of her illness.  Her mother would have asked the uniformed messenger to repeat himself, and her father surely would’ve lit a cigarette.  How many messengers had there been at her door?  Had her parents wept?  What had they even been told?  Lydia herself didn’t remember being admitted, and therefore had forgotten the reason for her admittance.  All she knew now was that she had apparently agreed it was all in her best interest.  It seemed all her own memories of Chestnut Lodge were confused, or disorienting, and filled with deflected questions. 

            Lydia flipped to her side and pushed her flat palms into the firm pillow.  Her head was heavy.  What she really wanted was a novel and a cigarette, but smoke and fiction weren’t permitted. 

            She went to the window and gazed longingly at the people in the courtyard who weren’t in hospital gowns.  It must be visitors’ hour.  Lydia scanned the grass and paused on a young man who was sitting alone, and looking confused.  He had an unlit cigarette in his pale left hand, and a newspaper in front of him.  Maybe he was really just an old child.  Lydia forced the thick plastic window up and called through the wire to him.

            “Pshhhhh! Hey, hey.”  The man hadn’t herd her.  He twitched twice as he brought a golden lighter to the cigarette that was now perched carefully between his thin lips.  “Hey!”  He darted his head away from the paper Lydia guessed he wasn’t even reading.  “Over here!”  She waved her hand and smiled.

            The man rose from his awkward seat on the lawn and stumbled toward her.

            “Hello, I’m Lydia.  What’s your name?”  The man stared uneasily at her gown.

            “Uh….I’m Andrew Fielding.  Do you, um, live here?”

            “Right now, yes, but I’m not quite sure why.  I haven’t been here long, and I think it’s because I don’t remember two or three days.”  The man still seemed unconvinced.  “They think I had a hemorrhage in my brain or something, and want to study my memory.”  Lydia excused the lie, she was desperate.  “You know, they have a very prestigious memory rehabilitation program here.”

            “Oh!”  All the discomfort she’d noticed in the young man melted.  “I thought you were a loony!  Haha, I knew you were too pretty to be held up in a place like this.  You know I have to come here every damned month to see my nut job of a father who doesn’t even recognize me and...”

            “Bad deal, hey listen, the nurse in coming soon and we aren’t allowed to smoke in here.  Do you think I could have a drag off your cigarette?”

            “Oh sure, heh, I know how it is.  Once I was in the hospital for a month with pneumonia.   Here.”  He pressed the cigarette to her lips, which Lydia felt was unnecessary.

            “Thanks,” she said while exhaling a quiet puff of smoke.  “Hey, Andrew, I really have to go, but do you think I could have your paper?”

            Andrew looked down at his right hand, once again full of unease.

“I’m just dying to see if my girlfriend got hitched and they don’t allow papers in this place either.  Come on, I wouldn’t bite you.”

            Andrew seemed reassured, and his melted form gracefully carried the paper to the largest opening in the wires.  Lydia snatched it, a little too hastily, and gave Andrew back his discomfort, but she didn’t care now.   She had succeeded. 

            Lydia sat knees to her chest in the only corner of the room invisible from the little window installed in the door.  First she turned to her urban design column. 

            “Ballbreaker!” She exclaimed at the sight of Donna Cleminshaw’s blaringly bright teeth and name at the top of her work.  Lydia devoured every word of the Seattle Post Intelligencer.   Every fluff article, even the men’s suits advertisements couldn’t quench her hunger for print.  She even reread the article about an escaped lynx that was on the brink of death two months ago, but had escaped the zoo, and was now surviving wonderfully in the wild.

            The last page of the newspaper was filled with letters to the editor.  She had resolved not to read them simply because they were dreck, but before she could flip back to the beginning, a specific letter caught her eye.  It had her name in the middle of a paragraph full of exclamation marks. 

            “I, personally, am still terribly outraged that you allowed such a sexual deviant to represent the SPI, let alone authorized the pervert as a responsible source of advice!  In times like these it’s important to set standards…the whole world is going to hell…disgusting…I Pity that Lydia Steering…delusional: in love with a mannequin? Ha!”

            Lydia was entirely still, even her eyes remained motionless, stuck to the newsprint.  She couldn’t move; her mind was incapable of handling anything other than the information she had just encountered.  Was it really true?  Lydia quickly analyzed the probability of a set-up of some kind, but couldn’t commit herself to it.  It was all so alarming, so disturbing, so…logical.  It would perfectly explain everything about her current situation, but it couldn’t.  Perhaps, no, or maybe it was another, but no it couldn’t have been.  It was her, Lydia Steering, writer and owner of a powder blue Mustang.  Lydia cringed.  How?

            Amidst a churning combing of thoughts, the woman doctor’s promise came back to her. Your head will be free.  Her hand seemed foreign and stiff as it reached down, past her belly button.  It clamped down between her legs suddenly, and reminded Lydia of the game with the crane in which you snatch the toys below after setting up the position.  She shuddered.  The hand started to move, rubbing against grey cotton underwear.  A familiar wave of heat propagated through her and her eyes closed, but something less superficial, something deeper inside of her, was off.  She dismissed it, clinging desperately to the possibility of clear thoughts, and forged ahead.  A tremendous heat rose inside of her, and she could hear her heart hammering away at her chest.  She arched her back and fantasized about an unburdened mind.  Abruptly, Lydia found she could no longer breathe.  She screamed frantically, but no sound left her.  She forced her eyelids up but saw nothing.  Something very dark, black, was enveloping her body, and all she could think of was the end of her life.  She tried to halt her arm’s feverish movement but it kept working away, fighting against her.  The darkness forced itself in deeper, now moving quickly and with vengeance through her veins, closing in on her poor, defenseless heart.  Lydia tried to have a seizure, just to snap the horror from her, but failed.  She was stuck, forced to witness the life leave her own body.  Two tears snuck out of her tightly shut eyes and stung her boiling cheeks.  Everything she had never done came to her all at once.  She could no longer feel the bed beneath her.  Lydia was a fish drowning in the air, crumpling in on herself.  In her mind she was plunging.  She was suffocating.  And then, her whole body went rigid.  She gasped a gasp that caused her whole torso to lift, and was loud enough for the nurse to finally take notice.  Then Lydia sank down, and continued to sink until everything was quiet and white, and there was no more confusion.

 

            The man was sitting cross-legged in the night sky.  With bright stars behind him Lydia noticed that he was just hanging there, resting on nothing, and that there was what appeared to be a lynx at his side. She looked down at her own body, and felt damp, loose ground beneath her toes.  She was standing on a cliff, one thats edge looked as if it extended infinitely.  For a moment, she simply stood, and watched the man stroke the calm animal fondly.  The soft beast was staring at Lydia, and Lydia was now clearly staring into the eyes of the lynx, and still neither was looking at the other. Lydia angled her body forward to make sure she was seeing correctly, and confirmed that it was indeed a lynx, and that in the very center of the dark pools of eyes the lynx possessed was her own image, the first thing she’d recognized in a while.  Lydia took her first step off the cliff without hesitation, and then with a little laugh, left the ground completely, and headed toward the wild lynx and her mannequin.