Folie à Deux
by Miriam Richer
In August I feel dark and stretched and translucent, like a shadow inching across a bedroom floor. I’m living out of a suitcase in a sublet I found on Craigslist: a two-bedroom apartment swirling with Keith Haring squiggles and earth-toned arabesques. It belongs to a Gen X community college instructor—a handsome, Edie Falco-looking woman. Moira, her name is, and she’s subletting the place while she travels to Costa Rica to help build a school. I give her a sanitized version of my breakup, and she shows me how to operate the heat pump and water the plants (“A single ice cube for the orchid,” she says). And then she leaves, and I am all alone.
Captive to my shame, I confine myself to rooms hung with acrylic compositions of goddesses that look birthed from bar paint nights, tribal masks bearing sole witness to my existence as I escape into sword-wielding RPGs, smoke damp joints in the soaker tub, touch myself between a stranger’s sheets. I’ve got lots of free time, time spent brooding over memories, like a child obsessing over a precious rock collection. I hold memory to the light and watch it all unfold again.
A cold spring night, a cavernous dive bar, Eli soft to the touch in thrifted cashmere that matches his moss-green eyes. Together you are bold, mischievous, crackling with energy. You play Kate Bush and 2000s-era Madonna on the jukebox, to the chagrin of the curmudgeonly regulars who mistake you two for something more than friends.
By last call you’re inebriated, possessed by some trickster imp. You lay your cards on the table in a declaration of love. You tell him you’re made for each other, you both know it, so why not take a leap of faith, leave your anemic relationships, run off into the sunset hand in hand? “Why not indeed,” he says, more pensively and less passionately than you’d hoped for.
Sometimes I sift through Moira’s things—a trespass I justify by telling myself I’m already condemned, a transient Lilith exiled from the apartment I shared with my ex-boyfriend Paul—a home turned sepulchral as his control tightened around me like a clenching fist. I find a multicultural tangle of rosaries in Moira’s nightstand drawer—a sign of piety, or just souvenirs? Their pastel beads remind me of candy necklaces.
I snoop out of boredom, or loneliness, or maybe because it’s a salve to imagine being someone other than myself. I run my hand along the bottom of a dresser drawer, searching in vain for something salacious. Moira’s global village coffeehouse aesthetic is cringey, and yet I envy the wholesomeness evident in her humble home. I pride myself on having good taste and good politics, though it’s dawned on me that I’ve aped these attributes from the people around me, and that in my newfound solitude I’ve come unmoored, like a moon out of orbit.
On the second Wednesday of my stay, Moira calls. She asks about the heat pump, the plants, and then she’s quiet for a moment. “Listen,” she says. “I know you’re going through a difficult time.” She tells me about a healing retreat she attended upriver last year. “Sybil’s been to hell and back,” says Moira. “She knows how bad the mind can get. She can meet you on any level of suffering.”
Moira registered again this year, but Costa Rica came up and now she can’t get a refund, she says, so I should go in her place. She texts me an image of the event poster: Papyrus font across a low-res photo of an oceanic sunset. The graphic design is daft, but my isolation is desolate, and I find comfort in the thought of being surrounded by strangers cut from the same empathic cloth as Moira.
#
Days later I’m on Sybil’s sprawling lawn, midway between a Greek Revival house (a mansion, really) and an amphitheatre with a bandshell painted blue and gold. The exurban property spans hundreds of acres, mostly wooded. Like the other twenty-odd retreat guests, I lay on my back in the lush green grass—in corpse pose, as I’ve just learned it’s called—eyes closed, lips stained by the natural wine that flowed so freely over dinner.
In the courtyard, beneath the vine-covered pergola, Sibyl sits on a three-legged stool. She speaks of unconditional presence and vibrational matches. She plucks the strings of a wooden harp with long white fingers, producing a melody like something from the distant past. As she plays, the evening breeze carries the scent of wild roses. I inhale deeply, my body relaxing into the damp grass, my mind traversing space and time.
A lush city park, a bench beside a koi pond. Two weeks have passed since your drunken avowal; enough time for unspoken emotions to ripen or ferment. Your thigh rests against Eli’s, gentle as a butterfly on a leaf, and the gloaming creeps over you, warm and dark and glittering. You watch in silence as bright fish move below ghostly waterlilies, and all the while the tension of thwarted longing hangs in the air, dreadful longing piled like kindling in a fire pit. And when at last he turns to face you, the match is struck.
The last harp note dies on the perfumed country air. The group migrates towards the amphitheatre where unseen hands have set the bandshell stage: a mound of cushions whose raw silk covers catch the light of burning pillar candles. My mind and body buzz with the sum of food, drink, music, and fresh air as I fumble towards the rows of benches in the growing darkness.
Sybil ascends the stairs and lowers herself onto a cushion, her gray satin dress fanning around her like an autumn pool. “Let’s get to the heart of the matter,” she says. “We’re in an emotional dark age. We’ve been sleepwalking for too long. It’s time to wake up and face the truth.” Her pale blue eyes brim with candlelight. “On a night like tonight, the veil between this world and the next is thin.”
A poplar tree rustles in the wind, the downy undersides of its leaves flashing silver against the indigo sky. On the periphery of my vision this movement is excessively vivid, almost haptic. A strange feeling is taking hold.
“We’re going to play a game,” she says. “Let’s pretend the people who haunt you, dead or alive, are here among us. One at a time, I want you to join me onstage.” Her gaze wanders across the audience until the strong beam of her attention comes to rest on me. I feel its heat.
“You.” She pats the cushion beside her. “Yes, you. In the red shirt.”
The middle-aged woman to my left squeezes my shoulder, her countenance owl-like in ornate and vaguely steampunk glasses, irises engulfed by inky pupils. “You’re first,” she whispers, with a hint of zeal.
Cold dew pricks the soles of my bare feet as I approach the stage. Beneath the bandshell Sybil’s voice surrounds me, ringing in my ears like a bell. “Think of me as a mirror,” she says. Her lacquered crimson nails sparkle in the candlelight. “Use me to channel your ghost. Who haunts you?”
Eli’s face ripples on the surface of my mind. But where are the words? I can barely make sense of the events inside my mind—this tangled garden of clashing subjectivities, this uncharted territory of undefined affect, of untold emotions—let alone utter it aloud.
“Open up,” says Sybil. “Unleash. This is your exorcism.”
Beyond the amphitheatre stage, the night spreads out before me with all the beauty and eeriness of a Symbolist painting: luminous faces, a backdrop of trees, and beyond that an opaque darkness. Sibyl’s brow furrows at my reticence; her disappointment reverberates deep inside me, striking the chord of my need to please, and I am flooded with a familiar out-of-body feeling. My therapist, I protest, has cautioned me against speaking while in a state of dissociation. I can hear myself sounding meek and small.
“And how much have you shelled out for therapy? What has it done for you?” Sybil’s shadow stutters against the bandshell wall, looming above my head. “Your life is a pile of ashes. Mainstream psychology would have us believe that the problem is inside us, but really it’s out there.” She points a lacquered crimson finger towards the city I’ve left behind to be here. “We’re cast in roles and then condemned for playing them. Now go on—speak.”
Eli leads you from the park to his apartment, where he unwraps you like a piece of candy on his bed. The sex is a mental gap, a dim blur of skin and sighs, and the next thing you know he’s staring down at you, sweat beading on his high forehead, his face askew with unease. “Where did you go,” he whispers. “You were like, gone. It was creepy. I looked into your eyes and you weren’t there—weren’t you. It was like making love to—to nobody.”
Try as you might, you cannot put the pieces back together. First Paul finds out, then news of your betrayal spreads like wildfire. No one acknowledges it outright, but your texts to mutual friends go unanswered. As for Eli? He’s decided to work it out with Claire, at the expense of your friendship. And so you find yourself alone, on an ever-shrinking island.
“Very good. Now look into my eyes.”
I gaze into Sybil’s immense black pupils. Though I’ve returned to my body, I’m left with the uncanny sensation of levitation, as if I’ve been subjected to a slumber party parlour trick (light as a feather, stiff as a board). The scene around me swirls, my vision doubles, and everything fades to black.
#
Morning sunlight seeps into the guest room and spreads across a Persian rug. I’ve been roused by a humming—a sound like a finger circling the rim of a crystal glass—a ringing that echoes in my ears, and yet now in my wakened state there is only silence, and I wonder if it ever existed at all.
I struggle to recall the night’s events. I don’t remember how I came to be in this room, on this carved four-poster bed. On the nightstand sits a sepia-toned photo, a young woman with short-cropped hair in a flapper dress. One arm is wrapped around a cello, the other poises a bow. The Art Deco backdrop tips me off: she’s on the bandshell stage.
I feel lighter, different—as if something of myself has been subtracted or supplanted. Viewed coldly from outside, last night was a regression (the mental echo of my therapist: avoid dissociation at all costs). But who wants to view things coldly, from outside? Two years of biweekly sessions in a sterile mid-century modern office, talking in circles. Sybil’s right, therapy has been a net negative.
I descend the lacquered mahogany stairs, fingering the long iron room key in my pocket, an object like something from a pantomime. On the main floor I find the French doors flung wide open, voile curtains fluttering in the breeze like ghostly figures. I walk outside, into warm air shot through with faint laughter.
I round the side of the house and come upon Sybil with a young woman beneath the courtyard pergola. As my shadow falls across the flagstones, their mirth cuts off. The stranger busies herself with the contents of a punch bowl while Sybil greets me. She kisses my cheeks and I glance at the sundial, whose gnomon’s shadow falls across X: the roman numeral for ten. I’ve always been an early riser; I’m surprised at the late hour.
“Everyone else is still out cold,” says the stranger. Her fine red hair falls across her freckled face as she concentrates on denuding a sprig of lavender. “Nice to see you again.” She lifts her head and smiles at me, flashing a set of small white teeth.
But we haven’t met, I say.
“Ah, right—you don’t remember. Most don’t. It’s normal—to forget your first time. It’s nothing to worry about,” she says. “You were compelling to watch. Your pain—it’s palpable.” Ice cubes clatter as she stirs her infusion. “When I met Sybil, the scales fell from my eyes. It was like—like Alice in Wonderland, when Alice is like, ‘they’re all just cards,’ and then the queen’s guards fall to the ground.” Her brown eyes shine fervently. “It’s an illusion—this world, this life. I’ve seen my next life, and—”
Sybil draws her hand across her neck in a slicing motion; a frown flickers across her face, but her smile doesn’t falter. “Alannah’s my assistant,” she says. “She’s been with me through thick and thin. And she’s embarking on a journey today. Aren’t you, Alannah?”
I join them at a long wooden table piled with food: fruit beaded with condensation, cured meats, a dozen cheeses. Alannah ladles her concoction into a gimlet glass and passes it to me before serving Sybil and herself the same.
“Hair of the dog?” Sybil says, winking coyly. The women lift their glasses to their lips, and I glimpse scars on their inner wrists—raised, representational patterns too faint to make out. I take a sip of a cocktail that smells like almonds and tastes like herbs, smoke, and something bitter.
“It’s devastating, isn’t it?” Alannah’s pupils are massive wells despite the sun’s glare. “To have found yourself branded, like in The Scarlet Letter.”
Sybil selects an olive from an earthenware bowl and pops it into her mouth, chewing contemplatively. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” she says. She spits the pit into the palm of her ring-laden hand. “The self is an illusion.” This elliptical rhetoric might prove alarming in a more prosaic setting, but out here—where timothy grass infuses the air, where wood sorrel carpets the earth—her words flow like honey into my ears. “There’s hope for you yet.”
#
After breakfast, Sybil leads us past the amphitheatre and into the trees, over moss-covered boulders and fallen trunks in varied stages of decomposition. “I’ve been coming to these woods since I was a kid,” she says. “I know them like the back of my hand.” Her grandfather, she says, was a movie producer who left Hollywood and purchased this estate towards the end of his life. Her grandmother was an actress, a musician, and a model. “A triple threat,” she says. Theirs was a troubling love; their children cowered beneath the storm clouds of their tempestuous relationship. “It was a tense household to grow up in,” says Sybil, gazing at some unknown point in the distance. “Lots of family secrets. And now they’ve all passed on—I’m all that’s left. As for my real family,” she says, squeezing Alannah’s shoulder. “That’s you folks.”
A strange tingle is setting in behind my navel; my surroundings take on a hyperreal shimmer. The saturated hue of the greenery exceeds the bounds of what seems natural.
We reach the mouth of a cave, where we follow Sybil down a makeshift stone staircase into darkness. Inside, Alannah places red candles on the damp floor. She drags a match across a rock, and the scent of sulphur mixes with the air’s mineral dampness. The flame throws my surroundings into relief: childlike hieroglyphs along the cave’s far wall—flowers, peace signs, stick men—along with Sybil and Julia, scrawled in girlish cursive.
“My aunt,” Sybil says as she traces the looping J with her index finger. “The only ally I had in that grim house—two years my senior, and every part my kindred spirit. She’s in a better place now.” She turns her attention to a coin-sized hole in the centre of the floor. “This cave is a chakra of the earth. The earth gives, and the earth takes.” She withdraws a small drawstring bag from her pocket and pours salt in a wide circle around the hole, around us. Beyond her, framed through the cavernous opening, a spire of mist rises from a patch of sun-warmed grass.
Alannah takes out a long white piece of cloth and places it across my eyes, tugging it into a taut bow at the nape of my neck. Up close, she smells of rosemary and peppermint. She applies pressure to my shoulders, and I kneel.
“Let’s talk about Eli,” Sybil says. “He’s caused you a lot of pain. Hasn’t he?”
I nod.
“You saw yourself in him. He made you whole. Didn’t he?”
I nod.
“You were drawn to him like a moth to a flame.” Her voice bounces off the cave walls, echoing in my ears like a thousand bells. “And sometimes flames hurt. Sometimes, when you play with fire, you get burned.”
She’s silent for a moment. The soft sound of trickling water emanates from the cave’s depths.
“Have you ever heard of twin flames?”
I shake my head.
“Your other half—your mirror soul. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of connection. You were lucky to meet yours, but the timing was wrong. And now you’re paying the price.”
Something cold and heavy is placed in my lap. I feel its contours blindly: it’s a dagger.
“Wouldn’t it feel good to make him experience all the pain he’s inflicted?”
No. Maybe. Yes. I clasp the weapon and feel the rattle of something coiled in its hilt.
“Now raise the blade above your head.”
What is this feeling? Like stepping into a fairy ring, like falling under the thrall of something far bigger than me. I do the voice’s bidding.
“Now drive it into the earth.”
I bring the blade down. I hear a sharp exhale of breath, like the sound of blowing out candles, or of a soul leaving a body. A grotesque sensation creeps up my arm, a vibration in my bones like nails on a chalkboard. I struggle with my blindfold, removing it to find myself immersed in darkness.
A sunbeam cuts through the cave’s gloom, illuminating a chiaroscuro scene: a naked figure, red hair fanning out like a halo on the ground where she lies in front of me.
“It’s not real.” Sybil’s voice, but I can’t see her for the darkness. “The knife. It’s a stage prop.”
I ask if she’s okay.
“Is who okay?” Sibyl emerges into the beam of light. Her belted dress has come loose, exposing a rosy nipple. She looks magnificent and insane. “The self is an illusion,” she says. “Alannah will return, and when she does, she’ll be entirely different. You’ve participated in her rebirth.”
I stumble backwards out of the cave, into broad and disorienting daylight, where my ears are filled with the scream of cicadas. Sybil follows behind me, arms outstretched to catch me as I plummet into darkness.
#
A mistake can take a moment to make and a lifetime to pay for. The echo resonates long after its originating sound ceases to exist. Maybe you drop a stitch, and then everything afterwards comes out wrong.
You dream often, and deeply. Sometimes you dream of a blood-slicked body splayed out on a supposed chakra of the earth. Other times it’s a trompe l’oeil—the glint of sunlight falling on sweat-sheened skin, on flecks of mirror-like mica. Sometimes you dream that you and Eli are still friends, that no threshold was crossed, that everything was the same as always. But then you wake up, and you’re all alone.
What if you were offered a second chance?
Would you take it?
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Miriam Richer was born in California and has spent most of her life in Eastern Canada. Her writing has appeared in Plenitude, The Sappy Post, and elsewhere. She was a 2022 finalist for the Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for Fiction. She is currently working on an ArtsNB-funded novel called Earth Mysteries. She will be pursuing a Masters of English (Creative Writing) at the University of New Brunswick this fall. @meer_bb on Twitter. miriamricher.com