ART BY BY JOHN J. BIAL

I sit on the toilet with my toes pointed inwards, watching the sink faucet. On the right lever, whose metal is still warm, a droplet of water clings. 

      ~

We met when I was 19, beneath an overhang in Brooklyn. She came over and asked me for a cigarette. I said I would trade her one for her name. “Mary,” she said, “my name is Mary.”’ We chatted between inhales as rain turned to steam on the hot cement around us. Warm fog held us in an alcove of transparent walls. Mary was from “The Desert” and said her insides were cracked like the adobe walls she was raised in. She said that everyone was cracked down there, from the heat or maybe from the fucking boredom.

~

When someone asks me my biggest fear, I usually say death. Because it is human to fear death, and I am trying to trick them. 

~

 Mary moved to New York when she was 16, by herself. All she had was the money she made playing gigs in dusty bars and 100 bucks she stole from her stepdad. Mary was 22 now, but looked much older, and even with her hollowed eyes, she was quite stunning. She couldn’t have been shorter than six feet. Her bleached hair was so grown out that it hung in two stark colors—black from scalp to shoulder and untoned yellow from shoulder to lower back. Her eyes were dark, slanted upward to match her eyebrows, wolflike. She wore what she called her “uniform”: a men’s striped button down, black jeans, and boots with red laces. She said that all of the greats have a uniform, “like Andy Warhol with that stupid fucking wig. Or the Pope.” Mary was a devout Catholic, so she liked to talk about the Pope. She went to church every Sunday and hung a poster of the Virgin Mary next to her bed. Mary didn’t love God in the usual way; she loved him in the way that teenage girls love boy band members. She used to be what she called “a purple-haired, gender goblin, brainwashed atheist,” but that was before she found God and started snorting ketamine. 

~

Many people suffering from mania do not think anything is wrong.

~

Mary and I spent that hot rainy Thursday together. We didn’t really plan to, but when I started walking she just followed, and when she started talking, I started listening and we didn’t stop. It went on like that for a while: I would go to work or school, come home, make dinner. And she would be there. Like a cat that didn’t make much noise, she slinked around doorways and across the tops of couches.

Mary liked to laugh and tell me about how she started doing opioids at 13 and selling them at 14. She’d show me the track marks on her arms like they were gunshot wounds that won her a purple heart. 

Mary was a romantic—when I asked about her goals in life, she said they were to love me and only me. Oh, and to make it up to God. For what, I never asked. She liked to make proclamations of love at random. It would hit her, suddenly, that she loved me. And she would wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me she saw the whole universe in my eyes. She would tell me that her whole existence was just a reflection of me. I would laugh and tell her she was crazy, and she would go back to sleep like nothing happened. 

~

I have never felt a fear like finding a piece of hair in my mouth. If I swallow too many, they will band together in tangles and balls in my bloodstream and intestines, blocking me up from the inside. My biggest fear is not knowing it is coming. 

~

It took a little over a year for Mary to change. She spent hours on the phone everyday, locked in the bathroom. Sometimes it was completely silent, sometimes she would talk in hushed whispers, and other times she would yell. I could never piece together what she was yelling about, her sentences always incoherent.  

Her personality, while always a bit erratic, had become more and more unpredictable. I heard her singing in the living room at two a.m. Some nights, I would go back to sleep, but others I would slip out the doorway and watch her. I watched her spin around like a tornado of limbs. She wouldn’t have stopped for anything; a fire could have burned around her and she would have stayed protected in her spiral of song, till all that was left was ash and a spinning girl. 

    ~

I saw Jesus for the first time in the pool of milk; I spilled it on purpose. He told me that I was a sinner. 

~

I never mentioned my observations of her changes; it was not unlike her to fall into phases of oddity. She always said that is why we belonged together, two halves of a whole. I was like a rock face, so smoothed from the crashing of waves that the water now slid off without harm. Mary was the agitated sea, impossible to tie down, only answering to the cosmic pulls of her own mind. 

~

Mental illness is marked by periods of great excitement or euphoria, delusions and overactivity.

~

I found Mary crumpled in the entryway of our apartment more frequently. I would pull her up with my arms around her waist and half-drag her into the living room, laying her on the couch and taking a wet washcloth to her mascara-caked eyelids and the dried white powder that clung to her nose. I should have been more worried about her.

My friends would ask me if I thought she was seeing someone else on the nights she disappeared. I said she wasn’t, but truthfully, I never really knew, and I guess I never really cared enough to find out. Maybe I found comfort in her adoration, as if the more her insides roared, the harder she clung to my sturdiness. It was powerful to be needed by someone like her, with all of her strength and her spectacle.  

~

When I was six, I cut the nail off of my big toe. I didn’t cry when the blood pooled in rivers around my body. Instead, I felt relieved. When my mother asked me why I had done it I was confused. It was obvious: I could no longer handle the feeling of my toenail pushing into my skin, growing up into my foot; I could feel it pushing through my nerves. 

~

When I got the phone call, I grabbed my purse to leave as if I was going grocery shopping or to lunch. It was impossible—Mary was infallible, unconquerable.

When they brought me to her, there were scrapes along her face and her lips were tinted blue. Her body lay awkwardly, yet it was peaceful, all of the turmoil sucked out. I stared at her fingers, long with chipped red nail polish, thinking about how they used to run over my lips. Her nose, with its dramatic slant, was turned upward toward the white tiled ceiling. Her striped button-down lay slightly undone, allowing the top part of her chest to peek through. I blinked twice at this body in front of me, then walked away. 

The funeral was small. A few of our old friends that we had stopped running into years ago, a priest, and I huddled in a gray cemetery in the outskirts of Brooklyn. I didn’t know where she would have wanted to be buried; she had only ever spent time in two places, and New Mexico had never held any good memories for her. 

I went home that night and all traces of Mary seemed to have disappeared from the small apartment. I was not sure how or when this had occurred. But my smoothed-out surface barely blinked an eye as I curled up in the twin bed in the corner of my room. As sleep threatened me, the hazy images on my covered walls comforted me. They glowed with the hazy yellow light from each cross, and Jesus and Mary watched over me. Nothing had changed. 

~

The droplet of water falls to meet the porcelain sink bowl, holding its shape. I think about waiting to see if it will slide into the drain. I get up and wipe, questioning the way it stuck. I forgot I was thinking of you.