SIN EATER

by

MADELEINE ROUX

We stood outside the darkened storefront while Taffy double checked our reservation on her phone. I stared at the mural beneath our feet: a twee giraffe with red eyes and a big open wound in its chest with the words ST. VINCENT painted across a banner across its exposed heart. Scuffing the toe of my shoe, I outlined the ragged edge of the wound with my sneaker. Waiting. Waiting.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked. My voice was muffled beneath the plastic ventilator. A little tumbleweed of candy wrappers and flyers brushed against my ankle, then rolled down the street toward a cluster of chairs and tables outside a café.

“Yeah, this is the place. Just be patient for five seconds, Jem.”

“I’m just nervous,” I replied, still staring down at the lifelike heart beneath us. Three teenagers wandered by, two boys and a girl, career school-skippers judging by how bored they looked. They all wore varying shades of peach and tan. They were young enough not to look stupid in the latest trends, the baggy, beige, haute naturel clothes hung from their narrow frames like faded sails. No piercings, no tattoos, no hair dye, they were the picture of modern, unmodified cool. The boy lifted up his mask to vape, a cloud of bubblegum scented breath blew in our faces as they passed.

I waved it off, annoyed and sweating, feeling like every second we stood in the alley was ticking down to a sharp shock. Never liked the doctor or the dentist, but this seemed worse. No, it was worse. What if they took all of him away? What if it wasn’t just the bad, but the good, too?

“Stay in school, you fucking clowns,” Taffy muttered. I thought I heard the girl on the right snickered. While they melded into the shadows off to our left, Taffy tapped her phone with her thumb then stuffed it into her pocket. “Little shits dress like my grandmother…”

“So is this the right place?” I asked again, hopping from foot to foot.

“Yes. Look.” With a sleek purple bob and matching purple eyebrows tattooed in perfect crescents over her dark eyes, Taffy was not about the haute naturel life. She stepped behind me and held her hands over my shoulders, the sun through the smog flashed off of her purple talon nails. My aesthetic lay somewhere between the truant beige kids and Taffy -- shaggy black hair, gray v-neck for each day of the week, enough tattoos to legally be a resident of Los Angeles, and a lip piercing that gave me more and more geriatric ennui with each passing year. 

Probably time to take that one out and accept the scar.

The sign on the store read EOSIN EATERY until Taffy and her purple claws carefully covered up the beginning and end for me, framing the real name.

SIN EATER

“Not ominous at all,” I murmured.

“Come on,” Taffy said, taking me by the elbow and pulling. “We’re already late.”

She pulled me toward the pink and brown gingerbread confection of a shop. Fifty years ago it was all sandwich joints, cramped delis and slices of Americana dressed up in quaint, Bavarian froufrou. Now St. Vincent Court was drenched in neon, pastel ombré storefronts obscuring what was really within. A cupcake filled with razor blades. It was the best kept little secret just west of the Toy District and Skid Row. Very little. The whole court stretched just less than three city blocks, crouched in the alley behind a gutted coat store. A free clinic was going up inside, but the clinic we entered was anything but free.

Two grand. Psychiatrists could prescribe a version of the treatment that fell under insurance. I had tried for months to go that route. The trauma wasn’t enough, they told me, I was high functioning. High functioning? Hilarious. No prescription? No insurance? Two grand at a shady Barbie dream house downtown. Two grand. That was what it would cost to take Tate from me.

Not all of him, Jem. Just the bad part. Just the end.

The interior matched the exterior. Two women in matching pink baby doll frocks stood behind a white filigree counter with neon letters glowing faintly across it. The phrase thoughts are free pulsed softly in the dim, cocktail club lighting. The waiting area held a few upholstered benches covered in ivory pleather and a few neat stacks of vintage magazines shellacked together to support the weight of a glass coffee table top. Velvet drapes covered the windows while golden cherubs decorated the corners. 

There were no other visitors there waiting. An atomizer on the counter pumped out eucalyptus densely enough to double as a fog machine. I coughed lightly under my clear mask while one of the women came around the corner to take it from me.

“I’m here for the two thirty slot,” I said. My hands had squeezed into tight fists after she had taken the mask and put it behind the desk.

The woman that was still behind the desk didn’t have a name tag, but she looked like a Heidi. She was blonde and slim, skin glowing through minimal makeup, her yellow hair coiled into a braid on top of her head. “Jemini Lyle?”

“That’s me,” I said, laughing nervously. “My parents did a lot of drugs. Too many, probably.”

She grinned and shook her head. “Mine named me Kendrix. It happens.”

My condolences.

“Now, you’re getting the modified tea service, right? The six hour package?” Kendrix asked, typing on an unseen keyboard into an unseen computer behind the ridge of the desk. I wasn’t there for tea, but we all knew that.

“That’s right,” Taffy answered for me. Of course she did, she could probably sense that I was ten seconds away from bolting out the door. She nudged me forward.

“It won’t take everything about him away, right?” I asked, licking my lips. The survey Taffy had sent me online had taken almost four hours to complete. It was exhaustive. Terrifying. “Just…Just those six hours?”

“Of course,” Kendrix replied. The other woman was arranging a row of small vials on a metal tray, each one filled with silver liquid that shined like mercury under the neon.

“Because that’s all I want gone,” I hurried on. “My friend who got it done here says it takes away the residual memories, too. Anything connected to the event, is that true?”

Kendrix typed faster and harder. “Yes.”

“But there’s no real brain damage?”

“The process, by definition, is a kind of brain damage,” Kendrix bit out. Her big blue eyes slid up toward Taffy. “Your friend asks a lot of questions.”

“She’s like this a lot,” Taffy said with a quick laugh. She rubbed my back which only made me want to curl up in a ball. “Hoping you all can fix that today.”

“Of course, our clients experience a wide range of benefits, easing anxiety is one of them,” Kendrix said more gently. Her tight smile relaxed, and for a second I almost felt relieved. “It’s going to be just fine,” she assured me. “After all, what’s better therapy than therapy?”

I didn’t realize she was actually waiting for me to answer.

The other woman shifted the tray across the counter toward me and nodded. It was time. I glanced at Taffy who picked up one of the little plastic cups and pushed it into my hand. “No more panic attacks, Jem. No more late night phone calls. You can get back to work. Back to life. Sleep. You can be you again.”

The cup felt warm in my hand, alive.

“Your friend is right,” Kendrix said cheerfully. I could see the chip on one of her front teeth when she smiled. “What’s better therapy than therapy?” she asked again. This time she gave me the answer. “Forgetting. Oblivion. Annihilation.”

#

The backroom was quiet and mostly empty, spare and black. Everything black. I walked into it expecting to fall, like I was going to be sucked into a sink hole. I almost couldn’t make out the single chair in the middle of the room. Dense, blocky foam covered the walls, I assumed it was to muffle sound. Nobody walked me through any of it. That’s what two grand got you, not exactly the VIP experience.

The medicine I had swallowed immediately opened up a sour pit in my stomach. Shaking and glassy-eyed, I stumbled toward the chair. My foot brushed against something soft and spongy, a tube. I tried to follow it, but it was also painted black. The tube snaked away from the chair and toward the far wall, bunching up before disappearing through a jagged hole. A fabric curtain hung there, swaying from the air conditioning. Two young women wearing rubber gloves--different from the front desk ladies--sat me down in the chair and smiled with the mild, detached comfort of those who had done this before a thousand times. One carefully slid a needle into each of my arms while the other stroked my hand.

“You’re doing great. It’s going to be fine,” I heard.

It’s going to be fine, I silently repeated to myself. They would take my bad memories away.

“Taffy never told me how this actually works,” I slurred. The needles in my arms pinched. “Like, the science of it? I…I think I read an article once, but now I can’t really remember it…”

“Just relax,” one of them said. It was getting hard to keep my eyes open. “Can I put these headphones on you?”

“Sure,” I told her. To say that word I had to construct it letter by letter, the alphabet slippery in my head. The headphones were cool and dry, noise-canceling. They plunged me into the black hole of the room even further. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open and staring at the walls, or if I was seeing the darkness behind my lids.

Suddenly, I was alone. Soft, thumping drum music drifted out of the headphones. It remained quiet, unobtrusive, just a coercive throb that never changed or grew louder. I had no idea how long the drumming went on, but it was long enough for my pulse to match it. Long enough for me to become aware of the pain in my arms from the needles, and for me to feel the tenderness of my flesh as I sat pierced and still. I was pinned by the drugs and the tubes that fell out of me. They disappeared along that black floor and under that black curtain. I didn’t know if something was pumping into me or something was being taken out, it began to feel like both.

“Your six hours begins now,” a voice told me, sweet and whispering, so as not to disturb. Even so, I jumped. “Take yourself back. No need to rush. Take yourself back. Take your time. Remember. Remember. Take yourself back…”

Would Taffy wait for all six hours? Had we discussed this? Surely we had discussed this, but I couldn’t remember anything.

Cold sweat plastered my shirt to my chest. I thought of the giraffe mural outside, exposed heart and red eyes. I felt as though I could burst like that. The medicine, the drums, the darkness, the memories… I was going to rip right open, and maybe it would be a blessing--you always held your breath during fireworks, and the sigh after the eruption seemed like joy. Like an exultation.

Six hours. I always had a sharp memory for the bad stuff. Birthday parties and graduations and weddings? Forget it. But insults from a friend I could recall in perfect detail, or when during a particularly vicious fight I told my mother that she was “unlovable.” Bad stuck to my insides, like that old kid’s story about swallowing chewing gum--it never went away, just sat there hardening in your gut, nodules piling up…

Six hours. We were at the cabin in Tahoe. Tate had to get out of the city for a while, the smog was killing his allergies and the meds weren’t doing it for him anymore. His wife Daiyo had asked for a divorce. I knew he was taking it hard, but I thought we were getting away because of his wheezing fits. A brother-sister weekend--visible stars, clean breathing, a perfect lake of blue glass and enough vodka to pickle two adult livers. I liked Daiyo, but I could pretend to hate her if it made him feel better.

The drums continued, the voice, hypnotic, reminded me that I just had to go back to those six hours. One more visit to those six hours, and then they would be gone forever.

“I’m sorry,” I wanted to say. “I’m sorry, Tate, I can’t carry this around anymore. I thought we were going to Tahoe to breathe a little easier, and now I’m just fucking choking all the time.”

Sunday morning came and Tate was nowhere to be found. Hungover, I figured. It wasn’t a big cabin, and there wasn’t much to search. The drums… They were as urgent as my footsteps. Was this a prank? I had slept until noon. Shit. I was starving, but maybe Tate would want eggs, too. My little brother. He couldn’t cook for shit. He would complain about the food, too. Poke, poke, poke… The needles in my arms felt like they were swelling, rupturing my veins with their eagerness to pour in or rip out…

Rip it out. Tate. Outside the sun glared off the lake and blinded me when I kicked open the front door. Of course, Tate was a swimmer. I shuffled down the dew-slicked lawn toward the edge of the lake, and noticed deep welts in the grass. Weird. I remembered his last words before we had both passed out the night before.

“Daiyo says the world is going to end soon,” Tate had been five vodkas deep. His black hair was like mine, but he had our father’s sad greyhound eyes. “She says it can’t keep going like this, like we’re gathering speed, spinning out, it can’t be this much all the time.”

“It’s always been this much,” I remembered saying.

“I don’t know…”

“You’ll find better allergy meds, Tate,” I said.

“That’s not it.”

I could make out his head just above the water. He was facing away from me, toward the sun. It was in both of our eyes. Now it’s too much, I thought. I knew he was dead, knew that it was his wet hair shining above the surface of the water. Now it’s all too much.

Later, the social worker would tell me that Tate, my genius engineer brother, had slid the picnic table down the slope into the water and tied his ankles to the base. He had let the tide come in. That was part of the six hours. That would be gone, too.

When I found him, I had thought…

I had thought…

It was already slipping away, carried out of me. Stupidly, I hadn’t thought it would really work. Some things, I had told myself on the ride to St. Vincent Court, lived deeper than memory. Some things lived in the bones. But bones could be dust. It could all be taken away. I scrambled to pick up the shreds I still remembered--his slick black hair, the harsh sun, the eggs that would never get made and insulted. His slick black hair, the sun, the…drums, I could only hear the drums. Now the voice telling me to go back only made me furious. I couldn’t go back.

The ride over to the appointment with Taffy. I could remember that. What had I told her? I could feel my thoughts pressing against the membrane of forgetfulness, pushing until it tore.

“You know how when you squeeze out a blackhead, it’s good at first, right?” I had asked while she narrowed her eyes. “First you only see the dirt, but once it’s out, you only see the hole.”

I lurched out of the chair, yanking the needles until they sprang free from my veins. They burned, and the liquid coming out of the tubes sprayed across my sweat-damp shirt. I didn’t feel the floor hit me, but there was something soft and squishy under my body. The cords running from me to…the curtain. I crawled toward it, moaning. I felt the headphones topple off and slide against my shoulder. A space had opened up in my head and it wanted to be filled. I had to know--where had it gone? Where had they put him?

He had died, hadn’t he? Where had he gone?

Tate, Tate, Tate, I had to remember, had to keep him near, hold him to me like a talisman. I heard concerned voices through the door. They were going to try and stop me. I cried and crawled faster, the rough carpet scratching my elbows as I felt for the bottom of the curtain with my trembling fingers and yanked.

I expected machines. It was a person there, withered and blue, curled up behind the thick, black curtain. They were hooked up to the other ends of those needles, taking something from me, giving me something. Their fine white hair had fallen out except for a few strands. Man or woman, I couldn’t tell. Young or old? Young or old… I blinked, hard, fast, afraid and ensnared and slimy with tears. Their hands were shriveled, their head oddly large, and they lay on a big, beautiful bed. But their lips had shrunken to nothingness around the ragged hole of their mouth.

“Give it back,” I said, reaching toward them, sure that it was already gone. “Give him back.”

“Oh,” it said, maybe, or, “No.”

It gummed the air, feeding.