“I’m so tired,” I whisper, and I don’t know if I’m telling this to Amy or my mother or both or no one.
Bobby can’t stop laughing. Like, laughing so hard he can barely breathe. Snot shakes from his nose and spills into his mouth and still he laughs. “What’s so funny, baby?” Mom asks, concerned. We’re all concerned. “Why are you laughing like that?”
“I don’t know hahaha,” Bobby manages to shout through laughter, “I don’t know I don’t know hahaha I don’t know.”
“Well, stop. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
“I can’t help it,” he shouts, almost crying now, and doubles over.
Behind us, Dad starts laughing too, almost just as hard.
“What is your problem?” Mom asks him, and he shakes his head.
“I… hahaha oh god hahaha oh fuck… I don’t know!” Dad throws up his hands, at a loss, and keeps laughing.
Mom shakes her head, confused, then bursts out into a similar fit, and I’m in the bathtub, watching all three of them lose their shit for absolutely no reason.
Drenched with sweat, pale, malnourished, laughing, laughing, laughing.
I open my mouth to tell them to stop it, but instead I start laughing too.
And goddammit, I can’t stop.
Oh my god.
I can’t.
I really can’t.
Sometimes I can’t decide what would be worse: if we died from starvation or if we never died.
“Have we always been here?” I ask the room. Anyone who’s listening. It doesn’t matter who answers.
“What?” Dad says. I don’t know where he or anyone else is. I’m flat on my back in the tub, staring at the ceiling.
“You can tell me the truth. It’s okay. I can handle it.”
“What are you talking about, honey?” Mom asks.
“Have we always been here?”
“What… what do you mean?”
“Was I born here? Was Bobby born here? Were we all born here?”
“In… the bathroom?”
“Yes.”
“No, honey.”
I sit up in the tub and glare at my mother, who’s standing against the wall clutching her stomach. “You’re lying. You’re a liar.”
“Mel, you’re not making any sense.”
“We’ve always been here and you’re just playing a trick on us,” I tell her. “Admit it. There’s nothing outside that door. There’s nothing, there’s nothing, there’s—”
“Hey,” Dad says, sternly. I meet his eyes. He’s sitting on the toilet again. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop talking like a fucking whackjob.”
“I’m not talking like a—”
“Yes you are,” he says. “You’re talking like a fucking whackjob and I want you to stop it right now.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, Sis,” Bobby says in the tub next to me. “Stop acting like a fucking whackjob.”
But Bobby can’t possibly be talking, because Bobby’s dead. He’s a corpse. He reeks of decay. It’s just the three of us now. Bobby died. Bobby died and he’s not coming back.
No.
That can’t be right.
Why would Bobby be dead?
Where am I right now?
“Whackjob,” Bobby says again, laughing, “whackjob whackjob whackjob you’re a great big fucking whackjob.”
I punch him in the arm and tell him he can’t use that kind of word and he grins like he’s up to no good and, before I can say anything else, he lets rip an epic fart that sends me gagging out of the bathtub.
“Smell it, Sis!” he shouts, intoxicated with evil glee. “Smell my butt! It is your new king! Now worship it, Sis! Worship King Butt! Bow to your fart master!”
Bobby is alive. Of course he’s alive.
But am I?
Amy’s in the tub next to me, between my legs, back against my breasts. The rest of my family are passed out on the floor. Outside the wind howls like it’s alive. I wrap my arms around Amy and she holds my wrists together, sometimes giving them soft kisses, sometimes only caressing them. She’s telling me how she used to be dead.
Most people are, she tells me, they just don’t realize it.
“What do you mean?” I ask her, keeping my voice low to avoid waking my family.
“They said I was crazy,” she explains, matching my whisper, “that I was delusional. I never saw anyone, like, professional. My parents thought I was just acting out. Trying to get attention. I googled what I was feeling. You ever hear of Cotard delusion?”
“What?” The word’s foreign to my ears. I lean closer against her back and she smells so good. This is before everything happens. We’re in the bathtub but she’s not here, not really, she can’t be. This conversation, it’s in the past.
“Cotard delusion,” she repeats. “Walking corpse syndrome.”
“I don’t…”
“It’s like a mental illness, I guess. People become convinced that they’re actually really dead.”
“But they’re still alive?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Like… what, like zombies?”
Amy giggles and it’s the most beautiful sound in the world. “Think of it like this. A long time ago, something happened to me. Something killed me. Now inside my body everything’s rotting. Well, they were rotting, but things are different now. I’m better.”
“How were they rotting?”
“I could smell them. Decomposing from the inside out. Nobody believed me.”
“So that’s why you cut yourself?”
“I guess, maybe, I don’t know, thinking back on it, it’s all so blurry, you know? If I could still bleed, then I could remind myself that it wasn’t real, that I was still alive.”
“Did you want to be?”
She stops rubbing my wrists. Her body tightens. “What?”
“When you would cut yourself, what were you hoping to see? Blood or no blood?”
But she doesn’t have an answer to that question.
Dad digs out the empty bottle of mouthwash from the trash can and holds it over his mouth, begging for another drop to somehow generate onto his tongue, so desperate he’s crying, shaking, crumpling apart before our eyes. “Please god please god please please please god just one more sip one more sip I swear to Christ all I need is one more sip oh god god oh god please I’ll do anything anything you want just one more sip please god please.” Nobody answers his prayers. He throws the bottle against the wall and pounds his fists against the sides of his head. “Don’t look at me like that,” he sobs at us, snot and tears spilling down his face, “don’t look at me like that don’t look at me like that don’t look at me like that don’t look—”
Dark. Middle of the night. Something’s outside the door. Something inside the house. Inside my parent’s bedroom. Bobby’s the first one to hear it. “What’s that? What’s that?” he whispers, frantic, shaking the rest of us awake. Even he knows to be quiet right now. That whatever’s on the other side of the door, it might not be friendly.
We can’t see a thing. Communication is translated through hushed monosyllables and shoulder taps. Light footsteps get louder, then stop directly on the opposite side of the door. I can’t remember if we left it open before going to sleep. A chilled draft confirms it can’t be shut. The unknown being sniffs at the door, smelling us, analyzing our scents. Not a human. It can’t be a human. An animal then. Nothing too big. Its footsteps aren’t heavy enough to justify a deer.