Sylvia’s Hell

The streetlights of hell light Sylvia’s face as her head leans against the door post. This odd portion of the sedan is not engineered for the comfort of the human skull. It is formed in odd ridges meant to serve the tripartite functions of holding the passenger-side window glass, supporting the shape and weight of the door, and meeting smoothly with the body of the car. It is painted maroon just like the sedan’s exterior. A quarter-sized portion of Sylvia’s skull is cold and numb where it has pressed and rocked against those hard, maroon ridges.

The yellow-orange of a sodium lamp illuminates her face. First it gives her features a soft, otherworldly, subtly changing glow. Then, as the car passes the stationary lamp, her face is briefly, fiercely lit in ghastly tones. The car keeps rolling and the backlight of the lamp moves shadows across her face and leaves her in darkness, gone as insubstantially as it was present. That light is replaced by the flicker and jump of bright white fluorescents lighting a gas station, pounding her eyelids but gone a second later and then the very red of the red light and the flash into green and the movement pulls her back into the seat.

Her children are talking in the back seat. —No, that’s my bunny. —Is not! You gave it to me yesterday. —Look, there’s kids in the McDonalds can we stop Dad?

The sounds of their normal conversation are a weight in Sylvia’s mind which combines with the weight of the hospital bill they cannot pay and the dishes she has not done and the fight she had with her mother when she was 13 and her mother 43. All those things clamor for equal attention in a brain which is dedicated to a panicky guilt which will not allow Sylvia purchase on life.

She cannot lift her eyelids to look at the world. She doesn’t want to lift her eyelids. Just this movement of the car, its forward progress, its existence in the nothing world of the main drag is Sylvia’s only comfort. It is comfort enough because it must be. A moment of fugue into the flashing orange and yellow neon of a liquor store sign—buy forgetfulness/buy a sleep in which you drool but don’t cry—and she wonders who has died.

And then remembers. No one. No one has died. It is just her.

Her husband doesn’t touch her. He knows better than to offer her comfort. That message from the land of the living only penetrates hell in waves of pain, the shatterment of her illusion that she is hurting no one and needed by nothing. But he does have to ask.

“Is it kicking in yet?”

She breathes the answer out, a negative, on her next regular breath, slipping it past her teeth and numb lips and pushing it with reluctant tongue into the air of the vehicle. Loyalty to him has forced her to this display of volition. She pays with a wave of self-loathing and the bitter taste of ashes on her tongue.

A dark stretch of San Tomas Expressway, an avenue which bloated and became four-lane and divided and then grew more lanes, turning lanes, and carpool lanes, and bus lanes and bicycle lanes and special lanes no one but Sylvia can see. The only light is that of the sodium lamps, posted inside the high cinder wall which serves as a pitiful sound barrier. Beyond that gritty, pale tan block wall are the residences of normal San Jose residents. Normal. They live in houses with their backs to the San Tomas Expressway. Sylvia knows that despite the orientation of the houses they are homes without cats because the expressway is a monster which eats cats.

In Sylvia’s mind the lights make a noise like a percussionist on barbiturates. The slow brightening of the doomed lights makes a burr like the slide of one of those deceptive sticks which are tipped with little furry wires—they look like they should be soft but they’re sharp, instead. The stick brushes across the burnished metal of a cymbal and then, flick, the light pops strong up directly through the side window, right on her face, a tap of the stick against the rim of the bass drum, and then fades behind her with a percussionist’s sigh.

Burrrr, tap, sigh. Burrr, tap, sigh. A metallic taste on her tongue and a sudden thirst accompany the comfort of repetition.

Sylvia remembers she can breathe more deeply than she has been doing and the feeling of air slipping into her chest, expanding into her sweetly is the feeling of hope.

“Now,” she tells her husband, and tastes metal on her tongue.

He reaches a tentative hand across the gear shift and places it on her knee. The children have all fallen asleep in their car seats.

Her knee is warm under his hand where before her flesh crawled with horror at his worrying touch.

Sylvia opens her eyes. A soft California winter rain has just trickled to an end and the smog has all been washed away and the bushes on the center divider glow a clean glow. Not even the millions of lights can dim Canis Major up above them.

“Ah, lithium,” Sylvia says. She is rueful and smiles with lips cracked from the heat of hell. Her husband’s smile welcomes her back.