• Previous part (6)
• Next part (8)

I took an unhurried sip of my decaf, then settled back into the narrative. Its point-of-view character got dressed and left the house—perched near a craggy coastline—in pursuit of a woman named Siobhan. The narrator trudged through the windswept landscape, rain lashing their face, as the sea thrashed the cliffs’ serrated rocks in an echoing rumble. A cherry-red hood and windbreaker flashed sharply against the leaden sky, like a drop of blood: Siobhan standing at the edge of a cliff. As the narrator approached, she turned her head, that freckled and pale canvas. Her gaze locked onto theirs cold and unflinching, as though scanning a face she’d never seen. The narrator sat beside her. Roaring, white-capped waves crashed against the jagged shoreline below, bursting into plumes of salty spray. The narrator hesitated, then asked Siobhan what was she doing there. Siobhan said that she was mustering the courage to throw herself off, hoping the rocks would crack her skull open.

My gaze flicked up from the page to Elena, who was leaning back in her chair. One side of her ivory face lay in shadow—a counterpoint to the almond-blonde cascade of her hair—while the afternoon light traced white highlights along her nose and the arch of her upper lip. Her right-hand fingers rested lightly against her chest, cradling the pendant suspended from a thin silver chain. She had taken shelter in a cocoon of introspection. Her cool, crystalline irises were locked on a remote point beyond the coffee shop, past Irún. I would have gladly paid any price to accompany Elena’s mind as it meandered through unseen corridors of thought. Instead, I had to coax from her the elusive translations of her inner world, using tools as clumsy as words.

I lowered my gaze and resumed reading. The narrator, in response to Siobhan’s suicidal impulse, begged her not to jump. She argued that she knew she was crazy. Her senses distorted the world, making everything around her seem unnervingly artificial, and her thoughts twisted it further. She felt that she belonged to some remote place that didn’t exist. Instead of slogging through such a nightmare with a shattered mind, she’d rather die. The narrator replied that she’d get used to it, that she’d learn to live with the madness. Siobhan shook her head slowly. She said the world had always seemed absurd and alien to her, and now even painting, her refuge and salvation, had ceased to mask its rottenness. With every breath, she inhaled the rot as if the air itself was tainted. Darkness filled her stomach and lungs; when she gasped for fresh air, more blackness poured in.

Elena’s gaze lingered on my face as though she could see past the skin and bones to the neurons firing. Her lips were pressed thin around the tip of her thumb while she gnawed on the nail. Elena removed her thumb from her mouth to speak.

“Had enough yet?”

“No, but maybe I needed a breather. Intriguing so far: a stormy morning, the narrator trying to prevent their lover from jumping off a cliff because she believes herself to be insane… Atmospheric and urgent.”

“I’ll never get used to someone sitting in front of me and dissecting my darkness like it’s a normal way to spend an afternoon. Siobhan is his girlfriend, by the way.”

“Okay, so the narrator is a dude.”

“Although none of that matters when you’ve decided to become one with the rocks below. Please continue. I want to watch your reactions as you read. I’m sure the waiter will be back soon with overpriced coffee to wash down all this existential dread. Oh, as if summoned…”

The waiter reappeared by our side. He placed a glass of ink-dark coffee before Elena, then slipped away. The scent of roasted, earthy beans rose along with delicate curls of steam.

“They really take their time here to serve you a simple coffee,” Elena said.

She wrapped her slim hands around the warm glass, lifted it and blew on the coffee, sending ripples through its black surface. When it stilled, the steam washed over Elena’s lips, framing them in wispy vapors. Her eyes narrowed in a squint as she took a tentative sip, then a longer gulp.

I flipped to the next page and plunged back into Elena’s story. The narrator begged Siobhan to tell him what he needed to do to bring his girlfriend back home. One of her slippers, its sole mud-caked, hung limply from her toe, teetering over the abyss. Siobhan told the narrator to join her in death. If he loved her, he wouldn’t want to live after she jumped. Besides, they owed it to each other for the pain they’d caused through countless compromises.

Raindrops needled Siobhan’s eyes as she stared at the clouds. A lightning flash illuminated the contours of her forehead, nose, and lips. Calmly, she told her boyfriend not to stare at her like that, because she couldn’t be saved.

The narrator stood up and stepped back lest a dizzy spell cause him to stumble off the cliff. In one swift motion, he slipped his hands under Siobhan’s armpits and pulled. A startled whimper escaped her. As he dragged his girlfriend away from the ledge, Siobhan wriggled free, rose, and lunged at him to shove him, but he overpowered her, pinning her onto the muddy grass. He rolled up the sleeves of her cherry-red windbreaker and seized her wrists. Despite the burning ache in his lungs, the narrator continued hauling her toward their home while rain pelted them. Siobhan, after bucking and kicking and writhing for a while, went limp, leaving him burdened by her dead weight. Her bare heels carved furrows in the mud.

Once they arrived home, Siobhan let the narrator assist her up the stairs. In their bedroom, he removed her windbreaker and peeled off the wrinkled, mud-stained, foul-smelling dress. Her body a sculpture of freckled flesh and goosebumps. The narrator dried his girlfriend’s hair and wiped the grime off her skin with towels, then carefully placed her in bed. He tucked the blanket up to her neck. Siobhan’s forehead burned. He examined the yellowing bruises on her wrists.

Siobhan tracked her boyfriend’s every move with eyes wide and feral, like a wild animal that has found itself trapped. In a cracked tone, she asked if he planned to guard her around the clock. The narrator replied that once the fever subsided, she would come to realize her malaise had clouded her judgment. Before long she would return to painting, and this suicide attempt would be reduced to a painful memory neither of them ever wished to discuss. Siobhan scoffed and suggested that maybe she would eventually forget why she had rushed toward the cliff, and how she had found her way back home.

A dizzy spell sent the narrator reeling backward until he hit the wall, after which he slid onto the floor. He wrapped his arms around his legs and pressed his forehead against his knees. Siobhan declared, her tone suddenly laced with realization, that this storm would never end. The excerpt ended there.

I laid the stapled papers on the table and reached for my decaf. I swirled the beverage around, then took a long gulp as the excerpt’s words sent ripples through me like those of a stone thrown into a lake.

“You look constipated, Jon,” Elena said. “Did you cringe at my awful writing?”

Her pale blues were trained on me like sniper sights, unblinking, unwavering, as though waiting for a clear shot to the head.

“Quite the opposite,” I replied. “It felt intimate and raw, like I’d invaded someone’s private world.”

“As though you’ve entered someone else’s consciousness and noticed the seams and patches, the voids, the unhealed cracks, and the darkness that bleeds from them?”

I nodded.

“Your prose made me feel chilly. I mean, the way the narrator had to drag his girlfriend, Siobhan, from the cliff’s edge… And her trying to make him realize the pointlessness of preventing her suicide, given that she intends to escape and throw herself off the moment her caretaker falls asleep.”

“If the world is a lie and her mind a warped lens, then the only truth is her suffering.”

“You chose this particular excerpt. Care to talk about why?”

Elena picked at the fraying denim across her right knee, her head lowered, eyes veiled by her lashes.

“Why I chose it, or why I chose the others for that matter? Hard to put into words something that hasn’t been decided through words. First of all, I need to make sure you aren’t a tourist, that your soul has a similar stench to mine. Second, I want you to comprehend that when you’re trapped inside your broken mind… well, those rocks at the bottom of the cliff can start looking awfully tempting. But more than that, think about the futility of trying to save someone who’s determined to self-destruct. The narrator, well, he’s in love, and that means he’s a fucking idiot. Or perhaps he’s in love with the idea of loving her. He may believe he’s doing the right thing, dragging Siobhan back from the cliff’s edge, but in reality he’s just prolonging her agony because he can’t handle the truth of what she’s become.” Elena took a sip of her coffee. A faint, dark mustache stained her upper lip. Her tongue flicked across the smudge, erasing it. “I couldn’t write a happy ending for that one. Then again, I don’t know how to write happy stories. Or how to live them.”

---

Author’s note: today’s song is “Teardrop” by Massive Attack.