“I never take sedatives.”
“It won’t hurt you this once. It’s the kind I take all the time. You have the most fantastic ideas about what’s harmful.”
Lila went to the dressing table again, where she brushed her hair a few strokes and restored the luxurious, dark bun. Then she fixed her face and moved on into the bathroom. Ivy got into bed, sitting erect with her back against the headboard. She heard water running, and the brittle sound of glass against glass. Lila returned with a crystal tumbler half full of a deep pink liquid.
“Here you are,” Lila said. “It will be a little bitter, but not too bad. Just drink it quickly.”
Ivy drank the liquid and slipped down under the covers with her head on her pillow. The bed and the pillow were wonderfully soft, and it would be, she thought, a kind of minor and healing miracle if she could only sleep deeply and quietly through the night, as Lila had promised, without dreams.
“Will you be late?” she said.
“Probably. I may not be back until morning.”
“If I’m asleep when you come, wake me up.”
“We’ll see. Don’t worry about it.”
Lila got her fur coat from the closet and turned off the light above the mirror. In the total darkness that followed for a few seconds the extinction of the light, she spoke again.
“I’ll put some records on the phonograph in the living room.”
“It doesn’t matter. You needn’t bother with it.”
“No. I’ll put them on. I know you’re indifferent to music, but it will soothe you and help you get to sleep sooner. The phonograph will shut itself off when the records are finished.”
She went past the foot of the bed and across the room in the darkness. In the living room, she turned on a table lamp, and the light of the lamp approached the door between the rooms and entered a little way into the darkness. The phonograph began to play softly, the hall door opened and closed, and Ivy, lying alone and sedated in the suddenly enormous apartment, did not know what the music was, its name or its composer, but she knew that it lifted on strings a little of the weight of the night and what the night held, and that Lila, who had been cruel, had in the end been kind.
She lay utterly motionless, except as she moved to breathe, listening to muted strings from one record to another, and the strings no longer seemed to be in the living room, where they had been in the beginning, but above her in the darkness near the ceiling, and they seemed to keep rising and rising, or she kept sinking and sinking, the distance between her and the receding strings becoming vast and incalculable, like the distance to a star, and then all of a sudden the sound of the strings was gone entirely, leaving a profound and terrifying silence, and someone leaned over the foot of her bed in the darkness and silence and terror and said quite clearly: You would, I think, be better off dead.
Lila had said that. She had said it with calm, unequivocal cruelty, and later she had become inexplicably kind and had mixed a sedative, which Ivy had drunk, and had gone away casually to meet a man for dinner so that Ivy could go quietly to sleep and die sleeping quietly. It was revealed to Ivy in a blinding flash of insight a sudden rising into consciousness of a pattern of truth that had formed and cohered without conscious thinking in a deep and primitive part of her brain. In the morning, after enough time had lapsed, Lila would return and find her dead, or nearly dead, and Lila would tell how she had been depressed, had talked of suicide, and it would all be very logical and acceptable, and there were certain people who would receive the news with relief and thankfulness.
The bottle of sedative was in the bathroom, in the little medicine cabinet above the lavatory. Or the bottle in which the sedative had been. Ivy had seen it there only today, when she had found the initiative, somehow, to go and brush her teeth, and she had noticed specifically that the bottle was nearly full, and had wondered vaguely why Lila used the sedative in liquid form when it would have been so much simpler to take as capsules. Anyhow, it was now imperative to go and look at the bottle, to see if it was still nearly full or not, and Ivy swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. The darkness shifted and swayed treacherously, but at the same time was a kind of fluid and tangible mass that pressed upon her and served to hold her erect. Walking very carefully, with one arm stretched ahead of her to feel the way, she went into the bathroom and turned on the light above the little mirror which was also the door of the medicine cabinet, and the bottle was in the cabinet, and it was empty.
There, there, there. That was the proof of it. She had taken enough of the sedative to kill her, and if she did not wish to die it was necessary to take some kind of action against it. Her mind, for some reason, in spite of the sedative and unreasonable fear of death, was working quits well. It would never do to call a doctor, and it would do even less to call the police. It would not even do to go for help to another inhabitant of the building. It was perfectly clear, if she was to be helped at all, that she must help herself, and the first thing that must clearly be done was to get rid of the sedative inside her. She had no idea how fast it might work, how quickly be absorbed into her blood where it could not be retrieved, but it was certain that it would work more quickly as a liquid than as a capsule, and even now it might be too late. She went over to the commode and got down onto her knees in front of it and gagged herself with the first two fingers of her right hand, and quite a lot of bitter pink fluid came up through her throat and out her mouth to stain the clear water in the porcelain bowl. She knelt there for two or three minutes, retching, and then she stood up and pressed the fingers of her hands against her temples and tried to think what she should do next, if there was anything at all to be done.
But of course there was. It was imperative to keep moving. She had read or heard that somewhere. It was imperative to fight off sleep with physical action, and it would help, also, if the air was clear and cold and not smotheringly warm, as the air in the apartment was. Her stomach settled, she went back into the bedroom aid stripped and began to dress for the street in the first necessary articles of clothing that came to hand. Finally dressed after what seemed an interminable time, although it was no more than a few minutes, she went out of the apartment and down by the stairs to the street, and she was feeling oddly remote and detached from all things around her, which had no shape or character, as if she were floating just out of contact, or were, perhaps, simply going to sleep on her feet.
She began walking the streets without conscious direction, and she did not know how long she walked, or how far, except that it was a great distance and a long time. In the beginning the streets seemed to be broad and brightly lighted with many people on them, but later they became narrow and dark with hardly any people at all. Fragments stuck in her mind, places she had been and things she had seen, and she especially remembered afterward a very tall man in a blue and red uniform outside a swinging door, a bridge lighted at intervals by yellow bulbs above a giant whispering of black water, a stone bench in front of a cast-statue where she wished to sit and rest for a while but is not because she did not dare. And finally, after ages, she was on a narrow street outside an all-night diner, and she was absolutely too exhausted to walk any farther, and she desperately wanted something hot to drink.
There was a dark, fat man behind the counter in the diner. He looked like a Greek, she thought. He put a cup of coffee in front of her and walked away down the counter, where he stood idly, and after a while a young man came in and sat down and began to talk with the Greek. She had finished her coffee by this time and was thinking that she would have to go, although she didn’t know where, and then, for the first time, she realized that she had no money, not even enough to pay for the coffee she had drunk, no money at all. Oddly enough, considering what had happened to her and what might yet happen, her inability to pay for the coffee assumed the dimensions of an enormous problem. It was somehow essential for the coffee to be paid for, and perhaps it was because she must demonstrate that she was clever enough to take care of herself after all, in spite of what Lila had said. She looked from the corners of her eyes at the young man sitting on the stool down the counter. He was a shaggy, unkempt young man, his black hair growing on his neck, but there was a lost and dogged quality in his rather gaunt face that seemed to suggest his own aberrations at odds with the world, and she had the strangest and most incredible feeling that it might be possible to be his friend.