Empty World Rambling (Dollhouse, Dollhouse)
by Charli J
He picked her because she was naïve and beautiful. Marissa had huge eyes and awkward breaks in her sentences, and she trusted him just because he said she could. Her hair shimmered under the lights, curving behind her neck, and he knew everything about her from the way she set her shoulders.
Oliver picked Marissa because he had said, "Let me guess," and she had stayed long enough to listen.
;;
They run out of gas three hours after the time he has promised to have her back for dinner.
Marissa asks, "Oh, well. What now?"
Oliver reaches for his cell on the dashboard, punches in a few numbers and shakes his head. He turns down the radio, smiling at the knobs and then at Marissa.
He says, "Don't worry about it."
The sun is setting. Marissa picks at the cuffs of her sweater, rubs at her wrist and hums along with the tune spilling lowly from the speakers. Oliver's phone rings and rings. When he finally pulls it away from his ear, he shrugs. He sighs and brushes a swift arm over his head.
"No, it's okay. We'll just walk. Really, we'll find someplace," Marissa says and pops open her door. She closes it and faces the window to grin into the car. Oliver crawls across the passenger seat to get to her.
;;
He ate eggs and cereal interchangeably every morning, sometimes with cheese instead of ham, sometimes Corn Flakes instead of Fruit Loops. A guard dressed in white scrubs watched Oliver take in each bite, appraising Oliver and resting one hand casually on the corner of the table. His nametag read 'Jim.'
Tuesday, a patient across the room threw a tray at the wall. Oliver dropped his fork and smiled amicably.
Scratching his head, he asked, "J -- Jim -- Jimmy. Could you get that for me?"
Jim eyed him, squinted. "Oh, you're paralyzed now?"
His voice rolled and boomed in a crisp, deep bass. Oliver tilted his head, wincing pathetically, and Jim bent down to grab the utensil. He wiped the steel off with a napkin from Oliver's tray and set it aside.
"Thanks. Thank you," Oliver said, nodding. He pushed at his eggs. "My girlfriend. Her father's name is Jimmy, you know."
"You almost finished?" The patient across the room screamed, and two new orderlies ran into the room to restrain her. Jim tapped Oliver on the shoulder briskly.
Oliver frowned. He said, "Sure. No, yeah, I'm through."
;;
He awakes with his jacket bunched under his head and his hair pressed flat against his skull on one side. The light from the bathroom streams into the bedroom, sharper on what parts of white wall he can see and fading in the hazy, pink dawn coming through the windows. He drags his tongue over the roof of his mouth and coughs.
"Marissa," he whispers, meaning to shout. His words fold and soak into the comforter.
At the shifting of the mattress, Oliver twists to gaze behind himself and catches a glimpse of white skirt rolling away. He curls inward, turns his head, and Marissa smiles with her mouth open when he looks at her.
Her hair falls sideways over her eyes. Oliver can see the way her pupils jump behind strands of auburn, searching. She whispers, "Hey."
"Hey." Oliver catches her hand as he slides it along the seam of his pant leg. The fingers bend easily beneath his, and Marissa closes her eyes. Oliver sleeps with their fists resting at his heart.
;;
"Are you sleeping well?"
In his mind, Oliver created an entire existence for Dr. Brogan. A middle-aged man with salt-pepper hair, three kids, and a wife who dyed her own hair black to continue to hide how raising a family has changed her. Oliver scraped at the arm of his chair every other day and planned his new psychiatrist's week. Brogan seemed like the kind of man who would golf Sunday mornings at the country club and drive little Mikey to soccer practice Thursday afternoons.
Two paper cups sat in front of the good doctor's nameplate, one littered with pills, the other half-full with tap water.
Oliver said, "I get enough sleep."
He held onto the edge of the desk and dragged his chair closer, contemplating how long it might be before Brogan realized Oliver was a pathological liar. It had taken his parents fifteen years.
;;
Marissa sits in the corner near the window when she cries, tears black and gray over tanned skin. For a week, Oliver had suggested she stop wearing eyeliner and mascara altogether, but each morning she applied her lipstick and traced her eyes in ink. She had said something about the definition it gave her face -- how it brought out the color of her eyes. Now she cries in smudges, and Oliver always imagines she's being erased.
"Don't you --- don't say that. We can't do that," he says. His hands are sweaty, and his voice slips and fades inside her tiny gasps.
She speaks through her fingers, crying into her palm. "Oliver, take me home. Take me home; I want to go home."
He fists a hand in his hair and pretends he can't hear her.
Again, Marissa says, "Take me back. I shouldn't have left. I made a mistake--"
"Marissa!"
Oliver has the gun under his pillow. He sleeps with it every night, in each motel, like teddy bear to child, but he tries not to think about why he might need that sort of protection.
The hem of Marissa's skirt brushes her toes, her back molding along the crease in the wall. She says, "I need to go back. Oliver, my mother, my father -- what about Ryan --"
"I can't do that. You can't -- I can't," he says, shaking his head and tugging at his hair. He finishes, resolutely, "I can't," Oliver allows his hand to creep underneath the pillow, grazes thick metal. He rubs an edge with his fingers and curls his palm over it thinking about black ink, definition, and removal.
But Marissa whispers, "Okay," and Oliver lets go.
;;
Oliver slept in a single room at the end of the hall because the doctor didn't trust him not to "influence" a roommate. He was kept separate as often as possible at first, until he got certain liberties because of exemplary behavior. Some days he sat with others to watch television, but he wouldn't hold too many conversations because Jim would step closer.
During their session that afternoon, Brogan had said, "You're a very persuasive young man, Oliver."
Female orderlies couldn't work with Oliver at all.
"Deception is a little different from persuasion," he said and took the pills on the desk without resistance.
He slept for twelve hours and dreamt of Marissa and empty streets. He dreamt of Paris, the two of them eating pastries for breakfast in a fancy hotel, freshly showered skin wrapped in thick bathrobes. In his dreams, Marissa always wore the brightest colors and whenever she mentioned Newport, Oliver would wake up.
;;
"We can leave tomorrow," he suggests.
She's taken to smoking cloves, lighting them whenever he decides to start more planning because, she says, they calm her nerves. Traveling -- traveling like this -- makes her anxious.
"I don't," she says and pauses to inhale, "I don't have any clothes."
The curb chills the backs of his hands, Oliver leaning over his own thighs to rub them against the concrete and tap the tips of his finger on the pavement. Music spills from the car, idling in front of them, and the beat is thrown off by the jingling of the bell connected to the Seven-Eleven entrance at their backs.
"I have money," Oliver says. Marissa holds her breath. "And my parents -- you can buy a new wardrobe."
"Do you have any coffee left?" she asks and reaches for the small cup at his side.
He has it mapped out in his mind. They could drive across the country, head to the east coast themselves and fly out from there. Natalie would have any phone calls to the penthouse from his parents forwarded to his cell. No one would know Oliver intended to take them both away until they were already gone.
Marissa finishes his coffee, tosses the unfinished clove to the ground. She says, "I'll have to call my parents; call my dad."
"No." Oliver begins to stand, brushes off the backs of his legs. He gets into the driver's seat of the car and adjusts the mirrors while he waits for Marissa.
"They would want to know," she says. Her hair is a cheap red color these days, and one of the hotels they left has a stained bathtub.
Oliver turns up the radio. "They don't deserve to."
;;
Bernie told Oliver he was hospitalized on Christmas Eve in '97, but after their first conversation, he refused to talk about it. The first time he'd just taken it upon himself to sit across from Oliver during lunch one day, snatching Oliver's orange and gouging the peel with dirty, blunt fingernails. Flicking torn pieces to the floor, Bernie bit into the fruit and sucked juice, staring at Oliver pointedly and waiting.
Eventually, Bernie said, "See, my mother was more fucked up than I am. So I guess it was pretty much my own fault for believing she was taking me to a tree lighting."
At the beginning of the week, Dr. Brogan had reduced Oliver's dosage and two days later Jim started monitoring his meals from across the room instead of right next to the table. Oliver finished his mashed potatoes. He set down the fork, began shredding the chicken wings with his fingers, and Bernie touched his wrist.
Oliver spoke without looking to him. "What are they giving you for talking to me?"
"Privileges," Bernie admitted. He shrugged. "Paint and things. I'm an artist. Or I will be, at least, if I get out of here before I die."
"Or before you kill yourself."
Bernie smiled, stretching his mouth. He had a cut on his bottom lip. Leaning in, he said, "But that's more your speed though, isn't it? Dying for love?"
"Shut up." Oliver pushed away his tray.
Bernie chuckled quietly. "I don't know why they think having me sit here is a test. Girls are your problem, right? You're a nutcase because of chicks."
"Hey--"
"I say get over her. I mean, where do you think she is now? And look at where the fuck you are," Bernie said, opening a hand and glancing around the room.
Seven other patients were in the dining area, one in the rear, drooling on his shirt. The orderly three feet away watched this and frowned. Bernie laughed again. He held the orange over Oliver's tray and squeezed juice onto his peas.
;;
"Is the window open?" Marissa folds her hands over her knees. "Oliver, what if I can't do this?"
Oliver raises the curtains and stabs at the paint along the sill. He pulls up the window finally and the breeze whistles coming through, the winds are so high today. He spins, leans back against the ledge with his hands and tilts his head. Marissa bites her lip and Oliver walks over to kiss her forehead.
Moving his lips to her ear, he whispers, "Forget them."
;;
Dr. Brogan drank from his glass of water. He tapped a pen on his desk methodically and scratched his nose quickly. "And you're still sleeping well?"
"Why do you keep asking me that?" Oliver asked. He rubbed the heels of his hand into his eyes and opened them wide. The coolness of the air-conditioning chilled his eyeballs.
"The orderlies tell me you've been awake during each check."
"Well, if you know, then why do you ask everyday?"
Brogan has dark rings around his own eyes. A problem with the missus, Oliver thought. Maybe young Mikey had been suspended from the soccer team. "I just want to know how you're doing."
Every night Oliver dreams about Marissa and Newport. He dreams about Ryan and the others, and every night Oliver ends up here. "When can I go home?"
Brogan scratches his nose again and his eyes soften. He says, "We just need to know you'll be okay," and Oliver figures Brogan's wife has been making him sleep on the couch.
;;
Silences filter between them, tense and swollen. Oliver contemplates humming whenever it gets quiet, singing under his breath or at the top of his lungs so that he doesn't have to hear Marissa breathe. He imagines he hears her thoughts sometimes, moments before he falls asleep, and in his mind she's thinking about everyone but him.
On the highway, he says, "I'm glad you're here. I'm glad we're here -- together."
Marissa wears a yellow flower in her hair. She turns her face away from the window to smile. Oliver hopes she'll say something but she speaks less and less. Lately, Oliver tends to say things only to provoke Marissa's answers and knows each time that she won't.
Between states the radio buzzes and screams. Marissa reaches for the volume once static consumes all the melodies. Oliver stops her hand in mid-air and asks her to leave it.
;;
The doses added up in their absence. Oliver would let them sit under his tongue instead of swallowing, heading to his room in silence. He put them in his pocket, then, and flushed them after dinner when he went to use the bathroom. When a letter arrived from M. Cooper, Oliver shredded the mail and dropped the shredded strips into a toilet as well. He slept less and ate less and everyday woke up sweating.
;;
The scent of her perfume lingers faintly on the sheets. The digital clock above the television reveals the early morning has reached five-fifty, sun barely climbing the clouds outside. Their flight is set for later that afternoon, when the airport will be busy and their faces can melt into the crowds. A swarm of people leaving and arriving, and no one should notice two fleeing teenagers on the verge of evaporation.
Before he slept, Oliver had kissed Marissa's shoulder. Said, "Tomorrow. Tomorrow and then we'll be fine."
He opens his eyes now, alone.
His eyelashes flutter against his palm and she still isn't next to him, breathing in sleep-slow puffs of air. The metal under his pillowcase is warm under his hand, Oliver sliding out of bed and shaking a little in the room's pre-dawn chill. The bathroom light floods the carpeting and Oliver waits to hear movement before he walks over to find empty space.
The car keys are still on the table in the corner, but any other traces of her have gone. He waits on the floor, hyperventilating until he can't smell Marissa in the room anymore and lifts his arm. Barrel solid between his teeth, Oliver cocks the hammer and counts backwards from one hundred.
;;
He had stolen the letter opener during therapy while Dr. Brogan refilled his water glass, and didn't know what he planned to do with it even as he pulled it from his waistband during the final meal of the evening. Oliver had accidentally sliced Jim's bicep trying get the opener angled at his own throat, pressing the traces of blood to his skin tripping back over his chair. Bernie had hopped onto a tabletop and cheered.
Long after the commotion, Dr. Brogan tapped on the door. He asked, "What happened in there, Oliver?" through the thin slot.
Swirling his tongue around inside his mouth, Oliver swallowed his own blood. He twisted his face, wrinkled his nose and the cuts on his skin stung. He said nothing.
They had dragged him into solitary and the needle jabbed into his side knocked him out for hours. The row of tiny barred windows near the ceiling gave enough light for him to know the sun had set, and Oliver lied in the middle of the floor with his arms and legs spread.
"What do we do from here?" Brogan asked. Oliver ignored him until the doctor's footsteps faded away. He hummed to himself weakly, watched the sky, and anticipated airplanes.
;;
By thirteen, Marissa kneels on the floor in front of him and cries until his fingers numb and fall.
She rubs two fingers across his forehead, smoothing the beads of sweat in streaks traverse heated skin. Her touches are light and gentle and quiet. Music from the other room pulses lowly in his ears, and Oliver opens his eyes to study the way her mouth curves when she swears not to leave again.
"Promise," he whispers, covering her knee with his hand.
She parts her lips to oblige, and he feels the words shatter in his chest. They resonate like a thousand tiny fires, luminous memories etched into pores. She speaks and he never hears her voice but shakes from a thousand tiny pledges of forever, forever and tomorrow.