Undone by K. Gibson

Act I.

rings my apartment from the street at three o’clock in the morning. I assume it’s a thief, a home invader looking for a sucker. Pulling the kitchen curtain aside reveals a patch of concrete he stumbles on below, walking in circles, untethered. Two months before this I’ve had the second dream in a series of three: we meet on a street where he’s been terribly beaten, a bad bet with a stranger. A crowbar. Mozart’s Idomeneo is on loop through an old-timey gramophone situated on the nearby asphalt. One moment I recognize I’m dreaming and pay careful attention to the words I’ve resolved to finally say, to explain the missteps: my betrayal. I watch my own mouth hinge open soundlessly but I can’t make sense of it.

Miloš Forman’s 1984 film Amadeus portrays Mozart as a womanizing drunk though this characterization is widely disputed. Some speculate Mozart suffered from autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Critics of these reports point to lack of evidence and claim it exaggerated rumor—his eccentricities were misunderstood. Mozart has a hyperactivity diagnosis, one increasing risk of thrill seeking behaviors, alcoholism.

I buzz C. in and meet him in the foyer between our apartments. He says his keys are missing even though his backpack is strapped on. Then I notice the shiner, how half his face is engorged like a pulpy melon. Bloody handprints are smeared onto his pant legs, across his jacket; he doesn’t want to talk about it. That’s when I step closer to look right at his face, at the follicles of his chin hairs and the variegated purple ringing his eye. I ask who the blood belongs to and he says, What? As if he hasn’t even noticed. Like he has no idea the cuffs of his jacket are rimmed in crimson. I’m fascinated with the shape of some spatter along his arm which looks like a seahorse twisted onto a tine of coral. I ask how many drinks he’s had though I realize immediately he’s not in any kind of shape for math. He says he’s unsure, which I recognize as hyperbole. I remind myself I’m awake even though I’m standing in my pajamas.

A willow hoop in my mother’s dream-dictionary encircles an illustrated seahorse brushed over in pumpkin-orange watercolors, its round eyes alert, trained onto some kind of impending danger. Its tail bends into a coil resembling a cinnamon roll, the snout cartoonishly exaggerated to approximate a woodwind instrument—despite the garishness, the suspension in an empty setting evokes a certain kind of heartbreak. The adjacent text explains a seahorse dream marks a spirit’s call to action, an emblem of urgency materializing to interrupt procrastination and avoidance. A seahorse dream aims to signal instincts to acknowledge the thing feared the most—a rare combination of oracle and offer of reformation.

My mother asks once if I think C. drinks too much. If I drink too much. I get defensive, tell her she exaggerates things, but she presses: What exactly then, do I consider problematic behavior to be? To avoid responding and buy time for a better answer, I ask her whether or not she’s being rhetorical and quickly change the subject. How do you ever know if the thing you are seeing is in fact, the thing itself?

The other times have not required blood just panic: bottles of vodka; the illusion he might literally be poisoning himself; boxes jammed full with discs of crushed aluminum beer cans in our apartment building’s recycling bin. What is it called when the dream becomes realized? I can’t claim clairvoyance in a circumstance of inevitability. I wonder what the other neighbors are thinking about him at this time of night. His nail beds are caked under with blood as if he dug his fingers into a strip of earth, and he keeps checking his pockets for keys even though I’ve already let him inside his apartment.

A freshman in college, I heard Idomeneo for the first time in a music theory class. The instructor played part of the first act through the lecture hall speakers and the narrative of betrayal—its desperate, temperamental cadence—sank into my bones, haunted me. I was eighteen, homesick, consumed with guilt for leaving my mother after a difficult summer; no one in my family had ever gone to college, so why did I get to change my life so easily? Many nights with hall mates, I lined up shot glasses stolen from restaurants on my dorm room dresser. We’d stake turns downing rum shots five at a time before running to the end of campus to press our bare feet into beach sand and chase the edges of the water. Dance all night in sweaty bars. Fueled by alcohol, the recklessness in freedom pinched my insides, twisted my stomach into knots. I didn’t think I deserved it. Later, I would listen to Idomeneo when I wanted to punish myself—a reminder that underneath it all, I was really just a turncoat. Some years it would simmer under my consciousness, materialize in my dreams. Times when I felt better, it drifted away and I’d forget the stinging rhythms of its melodies like the frothy water lapping at the sand.

The opening of Idomeneo begins in the aftermath of the Trojan War with the eponymous king lost at sea. In exchange for rescue from a sinking ship, Neptune demands as a vow of violent sacrifice from Idomeneo, the first mortal he sees on land. Recovered from drowning, the king is relieved; his companions celebrate the sea god from the shore. When he stumbles shipwrecked onto a sandy Cretan beach though, horror replaces relief: his son Idamante is the first man he rests eyes upon.

Act II.

I meet C. over a keg of beer; I’m dating his childhood friend. He’s good-looking and funny; mainly preoccupied with having fun. After college, a few of us move to Los Angeles where he lives. His roommates complain about his incessant television watching of Friends from his living room desk, but I never mind it; I too rely on the comfort of background noise, the distraction from myself. He drinks and locks himself in his bedroom to paint, blares the same songs’ rhythms on repeat for hours. Sometimes he goes quiet, broods about frustrations; I’m fascinated by him, but constantly wonder what he thinks of me. I’m not as pretty or moneyed as the girls he runs with and for months I’m mostly in the background, embarrassed I’m trying too hard to befriend him. Then once, I arrive at a showing in Venice where he’s painted my face onto the concrete wall of an art gallery. I stand self-consciously in front of myself, studying how he’s rendered my hair, the freckles across the bridge of my nose. He holds a beer by its neck, comes from across the room and drapes an arm around my shoulder, asks me what I think of it. I don’t wonder after that.

Time passes. We keep shutting down bars, stagger back to our totems of adulthood transition—discarded pizza boxes, puzzle pieces, bottle caps. They seed us that year. Later, C. leases the apartment across the hall from mine and my boyfriend. He is twenty-four then—the same age as Mozart when he scores Idomeneo. We go to Palm Springs to drink in the sun, get shitfaced at concerts. We watch baseball games at local bars and play slosh-ball in the park. We are careless with aging—for fifteen years guided by reruns and the suspension of time, we agree on never growing up, but others don’t: soon, they start moving on, moving out, moving away. The decade blurs together, an amalgam of these same activities on constant repeat. A bicycle accident and a falling out with my father mark the beginning of series of short, personal unravelings. Idomeneo occasionally stirs before thumping, rears its head during quiet moments when I’m driving myself to work or letting shower water beat against my face. Mostly though, I shut my eyes and work hard to keep it muted.

Seahorse vulnerability is a common misconception. The curiosity and medicinal trades have dramatically depleted populations onto “Red Lists,” a measure marking consideration of risk. This register includes: ‘least concern,’ ‘near threatened,’ ‘critically endangered,’ and, ‘extinct in the wild.’ Seahorses species’ rankings vary widely, and because of their avoidant behaviors, get grouped often as ‘data deficient,’ meaning while concern for sustainability is significant, the likely outcome is difficult to pin down in precise terms.

One day when I’m blow-drying my hair, C. comes to my front door and knocks, offers a grin and exudation of whisky; it’s six o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday. I smile superficially at his wet eyes, tell him I have to go to work. I shut the door before putting the chain back on the lock and that’s when the horn section commences its warm-up inside my chest. Percussion vibrations stir between my ears. There’s a sharp pitch, a pulsating trill. All of the parts inside me start to rattle, a brass quintet assembling in some recess of my head. In a moment I’m not totally in control of, a truth unfastens within the music-murmurings. I brace myself against the door, look through the peephole into the hallway to stay myself but it’s too late—he’s already gone and things change right then: my stomach twists, begins to pinch.

After, I hear him in the hallway many nights fishing for keys, working hard to let himself into his apartment. After, the embarrassment starts: first for his fumbling messiness, his loose drunk mouth. I put the pillow over my head to muffle his noise, Mozart’s rustlings. I do this for years.

Over time he becomes argumentative and easy to perturb. At a house party he confronts another artist about a painting hanging in the hosts’ living room. He tells the man his depiction of an elephant is shit. Mutual friends start expressing concern. He orders meals and drinks two at a time, tells me to cool it when I note his aggression. I pull back terrified to disrupt this thing we’ve built and resolve to drink less. I wait for things to change. They don’t.

I tell a mutual friend I sometimes stand in the hallway and listen for his breathing through front door in the morning before I leave for work; he snores like a steamboat when he’s been drinking. She says it’s inappropriate but I explain I do it because at least it’s something. I know he’s made it back.

Midway through Idomeneo’s construction, Mozart becomes enraged; he fights about the opera with the producers, unexpectedly makes huge cuts to the score. I wonder if the dismay of the narrative troubled him—the near drowning, Electra’s tormenting Furies. The psychological demands of forcibly killing one’s own son to level the score. My professor’s interpretation focused on the fallout of conflict, about making bad decisions, but I see more when the dreams about C. start: ostensible devotion, sacrificial loyalty, complete and utter betrayal. I’d like to ask Mozart whether contemplating the consequence counts. If literal confrontation is the only way to absolve oneself from wrongdoing, or if the haunting of deliberation is worth something in the end. In other words: where is the line of my connivance in this? Is there a problem or am I manufacturing tragedy?

Seahorses are masters of disguise. Special pigment in cells change color at the slightest indication of danger, concealing them into adjacent settings. They grow long appendages on their skin to blend in better with algae, so other organisms can burrow onto their porous backs. They are shape-shifters retreating at confrontation, sometimes virtually impossible to distinguish from one another. Constantly befuddled by their markings, experts are sometimes unable to classify samples by species-type. One has to ask oneself when looking then, if what they believe they are seeing is in fact, the thing itself.

The first dream comes in Texas on the eve of a mutual friend’s wedding day. Before the plane lands, four empty penny-colored bottles of Makers Mark rattle on the surface of C.’s plastic foldup seat tray. Between the time we land and nightfall, I note the drink tally near thirty drinks. A tornado due the next morning provokes local news outlets to call for board-ups, huddling in bathtubs. While he wanders through cowboy bars, I secure the windows of our shared weekend rental, fall asleep on a downstairs mattress awoken by a nightmare of him carried in by twisting winds, his face pounded, his trousers and button-down soaked through with rain. When he does actually make it back, he vomits three times in the shared toilet, then hefts himself up the staircase to the room above mine. In the morning I try to warn about the tornado, but can’t wake him. He blames his upset stomach and dizziness on a bad roast beef sandwich though he spends the entirety of the day still visibly impaired. When I suggest alcohol poisoning he brushes me off, tells me I’m being dramatic. We were neighbors that weekend as usual, but we were also friends. I laid awake each night weighing the difference  and the reality of my complicity.

During this period, I spend a considerable amount of time contemplating a particular episode of Friends. Season one introduces Fun-Bobby, a reoccurring character who first emerges at a dinner party with the gang. Though enchanting, his penchant for drinking reveals itself as the episode’s main conflict—the friends calculate he’s consumed at least three bottles of wine in one evening. Soon after on the velvet sofa at Central Perk, Monica confronts him. I rewind the scene repeatedly, study her lack of hesitation, her unwavering confidence. She doesn’t agonize over losing him, about their mutual shame. She doesn’t worry that she was there drinking sometimes too. Instead she does what any real friend would do—she looks him in the eyes and tells him the truth. At Monica’s behest of course, he quits cold turkey that day.

When Idamante and Idomeneo meet on the Cretan beach, the audience realizes time has made them unrecognizable to one another. I wonder before Neptune arrived in the salty Grecian sea, what Idomeneo saw down there at the bottom of it all. Did visions of his life reflect on the glassy wave tops? Were pearled oyster shells buried in the ocean bed to represent his every betrayal? Or maybe it was all ocean creatures and dark waters, seahorses drifting in search of a blade of sea grass to bind themselves to. Did he really not recognize his Idamante because of time, or was it because those moments on the water had changed everything there was inside him?

To avoid sacrifice, Idomeneo banishes Idamante from his life and sends him into exile. Grief-stricken by this mysterious rejection, a storm breaks out before Idamante can flee, revealing a sea serpent in the water—Neptune’s messenger, hungry for remittance. Despite the hungry god’s desires for the son, as the monster destroys Crete, Idomeneo hides the truth from Idamante and instead offers his own life as sacrifice.

Act III.

This night opening C.’s apartment door with the spare key I keep nestled in the kitchen junk drawer offers a peculiar moment of irony: it’s threaded onto a brass keychain that doubles as a bottle opener. He checks all the rooms like he anticipates someone is hiding waiting for a hit, then makes a small circle in the living room like the one on the street, orbiting a square of hardwood floor as if he’s trying to figure out where to attach himself. Then I see his face from a different angle. The swelling is so disfiguring, he might as well be someone else. A shape-shifter. A camouflager. No music plays inside his living room when we go in, but the way he sways back and forth indicates synchronicity to a familiar kind of musical rhythm that twists my insides into such tangled knots, I wonder if he can hear the instrumental overtures beating against the pit of my stomach.

Friends’ Matthew Perry was treated for substance abuse in 1997 and again in 2001 during the airing of season seven; in between he loses an alarming amount of weight. I consider the possibility of a Jennifer Aniston/Matt LeBlanc sit down, hours of debate about how to move forward with support and the philosophical ideas of portrayal—does pretending to be a friend actually engender some kind of responsibility? And what if they have it wrong—what if he is only having fun? I spend hours researching online, accumulate rhetorical questions about celebrity relationships, but the cast and crew are notoriously supportive and tight-lipped—I learn only he donated his home in Malibu as a treatment center for men. In one recent post-Friends interview, he wears designer metal eyeglass frames and grey beard stubble signals the passing of time. I watch for indications, but he appears to have no recollection of the Fun-Bobby plotline, as if the episode never even presses against his conscience, like he doesn’t understand its significance.

The friendship of a seahorse is superlative. They find one another, dance and attach—but I wonder: how do they know when change is due? Does turbulence in the water signal trouble, time for color-shifting? Do they look at each other across the vibrations to remind themselves it’s all for love? And what about afterwards—how do they find each other to show what they’ve become, prove they survived it, keep going again? I push the most likely answer away from my mind of course—that perhaps when the thing you knew has quite literally become something different, there is no way of ever getting back to recognition.

I would bet good money no seahorse has ever videotaped another crapulent off cheap bear, barely able to parse words together during a Catchphrase game for their own amusement. I doubt they have purchased beer hats for the other as a birthday gag; a clear display of humiliation masked as a joke. I try researching if they’re even capable of inter-species entertainment, but can’t find evidence for that either.

We travel to Japan together and for ten days and C. drinks through Tokyo and Kyoto, buying beers from the street vending machines with a pocketful of small silver coins. I tell him to take it easy one evening after a dinner of gyoza and seaweed salad and he tells me he’s on vacation, he can do whatever the hell he wants. He downed thimbles of sake all day, chugged four teeming mugs of beer in a row at a bar set to look like an Irish pub. He has lost control of his body, his words. A British doctor sitting adjacent to us interrupts our conversation to introduce himself. He’s been watching and thinks C. might need help. C. laughs in his face then bizarrely attempts a high-five. He won’t remember this event the next day when we say goodbye at the airport before boarding separate planes, but I will—I can’t really ever seem to shake the indignity of it away. How easily a stranger confronted my best friend, an inebriated tourist. I check into my flight and buy a pack of gum and souvenir from a kiosk next to a noodle house. Walking back along the promenade to my gate he staggers towards me, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled down over his forehead, shitfaced in the terminal on Japanese whisky before an eleven-hour flight. I wave to him, call his name before he pauses to consider me, looks me right in the eye, then walks on as if I were a stranger instead of a friend. I wonder if the latter is even true anymore. Back in the U.S., I write him a letter. I lie saying I’m not sure he has a problem, but maybe he ought to think about it. I am careful not to use these words: help, rehabilitation, alcoholism. Another friend calls, he’s worried about him too. I never send the letter.

C. won’t notice tonight someone has been in his apartment. Tomorrow he will discover two missing guitars, a laptop, designer shoes. A kitchen cabinet is ajar, its contents spilled out: cracked Tupperware and a salad spinner askance on the linoleum floor. The police are befuddled by the events. How was he was attacked downtown as he claims, but that his midtown apartment was also burgled? How is it that across the hall from his apartment, I heard no indication of forced entry? They pull me aside to inquire about his level of inebriation and call again later to clarify. My palms sweat as I struggle to find words not to say he wasn’t, but also not to say he was. There is an ambulance ride to the hospital—a fractured cheekbone, a concussion, more bruising. C. is quiet coming home other than to insist he was sober. He’ll say I’m exaggerating things and at first I dispute him, but then stop altogether. Maybe he is right. We try filling a prescription at the pharmacy and he walks through the aisles still wearing his blood-stained jeans from the night before, drifting in his own dream-state where seahorses swim invisibly around him. Friends will call me, I talk to his siblings: What happened? Was he drinking? What now? Unsure how to respond, I convince myself they are being rhetorical and then change the subject.

The last dream comes just two nights before his beating. He is at the door casually sizing up the cuticles of his fingernails asking me why it’s the case that once again, I’ve done nothing to help. I watch carefully to learn how I respond, but just as soon as I open my mouth to reply, I wake up to searing trombones, a chorus of violent music: I never get to hear the right answer.

Typically, linearity dominates my Idomeneo episodes: I am the king lost at sea, my psyche Neptune, sacrificing my compulsive behaviors of self-doubt, insecurity, regret. Eventually Ilia arrives when I get on my mettle, and the pulse of the music stops knocking against the insides of my head and heart. I am the hero and the monster and the oblation all at once, but now the roles are muddled. Who is Idomeneo and who is the beast? Which of us is to blame for the upending, the sweeping wave crashing against the sand? Is there even an upsurge? For weeks the opera torments me while I perseverate on the ending: when Idomeneo raises the axe to Idamante’s neck, his lover Ilia arrives offering her own life in his place. Moved by this act of self-sacrifice, Neptune spares them all, forcing Idomeneo to abdicate the throne and in the end, all is forgiven: a total of three self-slaughters offered in the name of devotion. It’s tidy, it’s just right, the rewards are in the risks.

In C.’s apartment tonight, I remind myself premonition and prediction are mutually exclusive events. I debate calling an ambulance but it’s too late now— he’s onto me, pushing me back into the hallway towards my own apartment. Before he closes the door in my face, he fastens his hand to my shoulder, looks me in the eye, says he loves me—and that’s when I decide. I go home and cover my ears, press my eyes together to keep the libretto out; I rehearse my apology to him, determine how to use all the words I’m afraid of. I practice telling C. I haven’t loved him enough; that I’m selfish, shit, a complete traitor.

 Before that though in the hallway, I look down at the sleeve of his arm and make out more shapes from the blood: a long velvet ribbon, the seal of a bourbon bottle. Other things conjoined, eventually inclined to come apart.

K. Gibson lives in California where she is currently working on an essay collection about animals, fear and music.