2020-02-07 - Memories of the Madhouse

Roxy isn't too hard to find. She mentioned owning Dance Evolution, and when she hears from Joe, she asks if he would meet her to talk at the Cracker Barrel just outside of town for breakfast. Most people hit the Waffle Shop or Grizzly Den for morning food, or Espresso Yourself for coffee, so they aren't likely to be overheard by anyone at the chain restaurant.

The woman he knew as Riika, just a teenager at the time, sits at a corner table in the back, where she can make sure no one is taken overly much interest in her or her associate's conversation. You never know who is working for Them, and seeing someone else who was at the Asylum has lit a spark of paranoia in the eternal optimist.

A cup of coffee sits in front of her, along with one of the little wooden triangle peg games on every table. She hasn't ordered food yet, waiting for him to arrive. She's dressed somewhat different than her usual 40s and 50s dresses, instead in cigarette pants in black, a white silk camisole, and a pale green cardigan sweater with black ballet flats on her feet. She has a matching green headband on.

He agreed to the meeting without hesitation - it's actually perfect, because he has a Southerner's weakness for biscuits and gravy, and where else is he likely to find them, out here in the coniferous wilds of the Pacific Northwest?

Joe comes rolling in a little after she's seated, dressed in his cold weather uniform of navy greatcoat, white silk scarf, and jeans. Stiff, at least a little, but the blue eyes are bright. It's a far cry from the man she remembers in the Asylum, with the new, raw scars of attempted suicide livid ridges of tissue on his arms, and a look in his eyes as if he were light-years away, viewing all of this from the wrong end of a telescope. A far more vivid spirit....and while he doesn't quite smile when he spots her, there's a suggestion of it in the lines around his eyes. "Not late, am I?" As if they were old friends just catching up.

Roxy looks up from the puzzle in front of her, and blue meets blue. Hard to miss either of them, with eyes that vivid. She's changed a great deal as well. Older, both in physical body and her spirit. Those eyes of hers hold the wisdom of several lifetimes worth of suffering in that young face. Most surprising, though, is that she chopped her hair so short and straightened it. It was a wild mane of night-black curls that fell to the small of her back like it had a mind of its own.

She's filled out considerably from when she'd first arrived at the Asylum as Riika Korhonen, the broken ballerina. She'd been maybe 80 pounds soaking wet then, but the departure from her strict diet and grueling training schedule finally allowed puberty to kick in. She's still on the thin side, but the former stick figure has a woman's curves now.

"No, you are not late Joseph. I only arrived a few minutes ago myself." She looks nervous, but also hopeful. She was always hopeful in that place, no matter what they did to her, at least as far as memory can tell her. And memory of that place is spotty and dark, warped and inconsistent. "Please, sit, I didn't order yet."

He was so much older than most of them, silver threads already in the dark gold of his hair. Lines on his face, moving like his joints were made of glass, abstracted, bemused, as if he were never quite sure how he'd gotten there. Time in solitary for him so often.

He shrugs out of coat and scarf, hangs them up on a hook on the wall by their table. Only in jeans and t-shirt now, the latter a plain dark green. There are the scars, faded somewhat to a dull pink. "Riika, yes? Though you go by something else, now?" he asks, as he settles in to the chair, hitches it closer.

Roxy watches him take the coat off, not lustfully, but searchingly and yes, there they are. She remembers the scars, remembers holding onto one of those lined hands while she sat beside his bed, where he was strapped in, reading to him in the dead of night. She snuck in there. She was supposed to be in her own room, her own bed. But she did this for many new arrivals, she thinks. It feels like she did. Like she tried to ease the suffering of those who had been suddenly thrown into the otherworldly place of pain and torment.

"I was Riika, yes. I go by Roxy now, Roxanne Kivela. I could not use my old name. They had me declared dead so they could get to the money. My parents," she explains with a grimace. "I am free now though, free of them and their constant pushing of my career. They sold me to that place, to get rid of me. When I was released, I had nothing left to me of who I had been before." Her words are the too-precise, contraction-less speech of a non-native speaker. She was definitely educated in proper English, not spoken English. Her Finnish accent still clings to every word.

"When did you get out?" she asks, curiously, before waving the waitress over for their orders.

Bandages, at the very first, hands limp on the starchy white of the bedclothes - long fingers, fading calluses. He hadn't spoken at all for the first couple of weeks, not before her, either. The very first night, he hadn't acknowledged her presence at all, not even a cut of his eyes to her, as if her voice were just the drone of the air conditioner. Another sound to be filtered out and disregarded. But it changed, slowly. The next time, he looked at her, even if expressionlessly, for a moment. Longer and longer each time, until he lay there gazing at her as she read, limp in the bonds. Until the night she came in with a battered copy of 'Treasure Island'....and in a voice gone rusty with disuse, recited the opening lines in time with her, as she read.

His lips tighten at that. "I'm sorry," he says, softly. "My family sent me there, too. Not to get at my money, they're richer than I'll ever be. Mine....meant well." A hell of good intentions, dismissed with a banal phrase. "I hope you're doing well?" Still trite, but sincere - she's getting a searching look in turn.

Roxy gives the waitress a warm smile. "I would like the eggs-in-the-basket breakfast, please. Hashbrown casserole and bacon for the options." The greatest joy to offset the pain of no longer being a renowned ballerina? Being able to eat whatever the fuck she wants. And she wants everything.

When the waitress departs she looks back at him. She only remembers bits and pieces, but he had been so wounded, in his soul far more than his body, and she had shed a few tears while reading to him the first few times, worried he was beyond reaching.

They'd all had their own coping mechanisms in that place. She'd started smoking, something she only now recalls seeing him in the light of day. She remembers checking his face over and over, through the haze of her smoky exhales, dashing the ash off the tip of the cigarettes into an unused metal bedpan because screw those orderlies. Oddly, she hasn't had a single puff since she got out, as if it was just gone from her memory and her body's memory of it. Wasn't it supposed to be terribly addictive?

"I am doing much better. It was difficult at first. I woke up in a bus station in Portland, and had a painful need to make it to this place, this Gray Harbor. It took me two years to get here. No identification, no papers, I was here illegally. I had to find work in unpleasant places to get by. But now I have solid papers, and own a dance studio."

Another sip of coffee as she watches him over the rim. "And you? How are you Joseph Cavanaugh? I think I worried a lot about you there. I think. I...cannot remember much."

Wounded down to death, the soul slowly detaching from the body. She got the blank profile so often at first, his gaze on the worn pattern of the ceiling tiles. Thin almost to gauntness, then.

Now there's something raw again, there, the - well, it isn't a facade, it's genuine enough - expression of gentle concern replaced by even more genuine fear. "Be very careful of trying to remember anything there. As far as I can tell, from what I've seen and things I've heard, trying to remember it clearly, bring it into focus....it costs. It corrodes other memories, and those not ones you want to lose." He's entirely in earnest, gazing beseechingly into her face. A gesture with a long hand. "I'm better than I was. I sailed here, in fact. I have my own little boat, the Surprise."

"Yes, I think I have lost some good memories. I think what little I recall of that place cost me dearly. But I refuse to give in to despair. That is what They want, is it not? To eat our suffering?" She looks at him plainly, meeting his eyes with her own. She is not afraid. "I fought it. I still fight it. They tried to make me prey. But instead, I have worked on learning to defend myself." Joey Kelly has taught her to fight. De la Vega has taught her to fire a gun. She has clawed her way up from being a stripper into being a business owner. She refuses to be destroyed by Them. Defiance in such a fragile package.

"You were an astronaut. That is what made the connection for me. I think you told me about space, in that place, in those days after you came up from being buried so deep inside yourself."

It's like Rosencrantz - this defiance. Against an enemy he can see no material means of fighting. He cocks his head at her, that funny, bird-like gesture. "Yes," he says, "They do. They did." They'd succeeded so well with him. The first time she'd heard his voice, she didn't know it was him. A man's voice raised in screams that were all but animal in their loss. "How do we fight it? How do we fight Them, other than by refusal to give in?"

She'd seen the tattoo - one night, when she crept in, they'd put him in a tank top, not a t-shirt, and there it was on the deltoid, the winged profile of the Shuttle orbiter, with her banner: Ad Astra Per Aspera. And asked....and she'd seen something in him thaw, the first fissure in the glacial weight of despair.

"I do my best to find the joy in every thing in my life. I try to help others find joy. I was an exotic dancer for a long while. It's not the purest form of joy to invoke, but it was something. Now I teach dance, and I hope, hope dearly, it helps battle them. Bring light into the darkness, Joseph. I think that is how we fight. That is what I tried to do in that place."

The food is delivered and Roxy immediately digs into it. There is no shy eating in this one. She is voracious. "I have heard you also write? This is good too."

"Desire, even commodified, is a force to be reckoned with," Joe's voice is gentle. "And not to be dismissed." Then he smiles, more brightly. "Do you now? I think I remember hearing that in the bar. I'm glad. And you did. You helped me a lot, that I do remember....and am grateful for."

He devotes himself to his plate for a little, eating quickly, eagerly. A glance up at that. "I do! I wrote a couple of memoirs about my career....and a novel. Working on short stories, now. I..." There's a light of shy pride in his face. "They're excerpting one of the memoirs for a Library of America anthology about space flight, that's the most recent thing."

Roxy beams at him. "That is wonderful! Spreading the wonder of space travel can only do good. I do admit though, that not everything has been simple or easy since getting out. I did not have a proper childhood or youth before I was put in there. I spent fourteen hours a day in training or learning choreography. I was tutored. I did not have friends, only competitors. I did not have, ah, what do they call them here? Boyfriends? Because that was forbidden in the dance companies. It was pure focus."

She pauses to ponder a moment with a sip of coffee. "So I have not had any relationships outside of the few tentative friends I have made in this town. It is hard to trust, after something like that place."

There's that wonder there, still, as there was then. Shining in his face - it takes years off of him, shows traces of the boy he was. Only to fall into pity, at that. "It's a hard field. One of the hardest there is," he says, about that history. "I know a little of what you mean. There were things I couldn't pursue with my old job, but now I am my own master." A glance down at his plate, his appetite dimmed, before he looks up again. "It is. The betrayals you suffered, after all that sacrifice....I hope you don't let it make you bitter. You deserve your own happiness there."

"I try not to, but some days are harder than others," Roxy admits, poking at her food a little bit. "Were you drawn here as well? It was like a string, connected to my core, pulling me here. Resisting it became more and more unpleasant. I would feel ill, I would feel anxious and jittery."

She looks over at him with a furrowed brow. "The betrayals are the worst part. Family is supposed to love and support you, not send you to be tortured. I am sorry your family didn't understand just what circle of hell they were sending you to."

Joe wraps long fingers around the glass of water. His gaze goes a little vague, unfocussed. Not looking at her, but past her, somehow. "Yes," he says. "Mine had done something like that before. As if....I weren't a grown man to be trusted with my own choices." A sardonic tilt to one brow, the curl of his lip. "Even if the US government trusted me with millions of dollars' worth of taxpayer money. I came to realize how conditional that love was, how dependent on my being their golden boy......"

Then he doubles back to the first question. "Yes. I set out from Savannah, nineteen months ago. It was like a compass needle, pointing the way. I could feel it, waking, sleeping, leading me on."

"I think there are others here too, from There. I have seen vague advertisements on the Friendzone about meeting. I am not sure gathering all of us in one place is wise. But at the same time, we do need to piece together what happened to all of us." Roxy frowns and drums her fingers on the tabletop in a staccato rhythm, to music only she hears, as if she should be dancing at all times, like one of those little plastic ballerinas inside a music box.

"I think we were different, you and I. Most of the people in that place got out at the age I entered. And you were far older than the rest of us. At least from what I remember, which we both know is circumspect."

"I know there are," he replies, without hesitation. "I've met a few. I really talk to one. And even people who weren't....patients, inmates? Investigate. Alexander Clayton, Yule Duchannes are among those I know. I need to make more of an effort to help in that weaving together of pieces. I'll pass on your info, if you wish."

He lifts a hand, wobbles it from side to side, like an airplane saluting the ground with a wing-waggle. "I think you're right. I don't remember any other patients that weren't young enough to be my children. But children and youth are pliable, full of potential, easier to control. An adult knows who he is, if he's been paying attention at all. They got me when I was very, very vulnerable, though. They burned me out."

"You do not have to answer me, but I feel I should ask," Roxy says tentatively, reaching across the table to touch one of his scars. "Why? Why did you wish to end your life?" Has she had moments of darkness like that? Ones that she pulled herself out of before she reached Gray Harbor?

"You may pass on my information to those you are sure will not abuse it. I shall do the same with yours if you wish?"

He doesn't flinch away, doesn't withdraw his arm from her touch. They're soft ridges of proud flesh. "I was....in pain and lost. I'd traded so much for my career, and then to have that taken from me. To be left crippled..." It's an absurd thing to have brighten the eyes of a man leaving middle age, those unshed tears - sitting here in a kitschy chain restaurant, thousands of miles from home. "I was going to be part of the moon missions. Artemis. We knew, even then, that they were coming..."

Then he cuffs briskly at his eyes with the back of his wrist. "They'd found me in the hospital, when I was recovering, in rehab. Been working on me...." Joe coughs, takes a sip of water, and then says, "You've got my permission. And I'll do the same for you."

Roxy reaches for his hand to squeeze it at his admission. "Your abilities woke up, didn't they? Drove you mad? That is what happened to me. Suddenly everything I touched I could read things from. All the hatred of my parents, all the disdain of my colleagues, all the jealousy and rage of the other dancers who wanted my parts in the dances." She shakes her head a little, eyes too shiny for a moment.

"And I could feel the emotions, my parents, they held no love for me, just desire for what I could give them. My worth in money. The company director had told them I would never be a Prima, and they were plotting to have me killed. My breakdown just gave them a different way to get rid of me."

His hand is warm and dry, sinewy and very callused. He may write, but it's the boat who's left her marks on his hands. His grip is gentle, but firm. "Exactly," he says. "Only, mine was physical. I was knocking things over in the hospital somehow. They thought I was having seizures, blackouts....which, to some extent, I was. I had a lotta brain damage." A wince in sympathy, baring his teeth. "God, that's a hell of a thing to learn. I'm glad you got away. I....if there's anything I can do to help you, just say..."

Roxy gives him a wan smile. "I wonder if it damages us, these gifts. Or was it something else that hurt your brain?" Sometimes, she struggles to find proper words in this ugly language. "We are both Survivors, Joseph. Having someone around who understands, who remembers some of what happened there, it helps. It reminds me to fight. I am in the Broadleaf Apartments on Sycamore, or can be found at Dance Evolution most days. Any time you wish to talk, please feel free, my door is always open for you. I still have a copy of the book. I bought it at Powell's the day I was released, because it was one thing I remembered. Treasure Island," she muses.

There's a little snort of laughter, at that. "Oh, the brain damage was from a physical accident. A near-crash ended my career. But I'm damned sure They didn't help. Suffering is Their bread and butter, after all." He squeezes her hand again, and then withdraws it, the better to pick at the remains of the biscuit.

More cheerfully, he continues, "I'm at Bayside. 303, and being retired, I'm there a lot. Sometimes at the Surprise, down on the dock. And did you? It's still a favorite of mine," he confesses. "Always has been. I loved that Silver got away, the old villain...."

Roxy smiles more warmly, the caul of sorrow being draw away from her expression. She looks like a living incarnation of Snow White. In the Magic Mirror's words, "hair as black as ebony, lips as red as the rose, skin as white as snow." Too innocent for having been a stripper for two years.

"I loved that he got away too. He had such charisma, and I think, deep down, he was not truly a bad man. Not to Jim anyway."

"Right?" he says, laughing softly. "Exactly. A villain too charismatic, too sympathetic, for us to really want him taken down. Those're the best, I think. He wasn't just a cardboard cut out...."

Alive, free, and relatively healthy, Joe's a very different animal from the fading patient. Even the winter's weak sunlight hasn't wholly faded the weathering from a year and a half at sea. No wonder he has such sympathy for the old pirate.

Roxy ponders. "I have never been on a boat. Would you be kind enough to take me sailing sometime, when the weather is better?" Because right now the Harbor is a choppy angry mess of winter ick. "I imagine there is a sense of freedom on the water. Of being able to outrace a storm?"

The light only brightens, at that. Another of his loves, and this one still within his reach, even if the stars are forever beyond his grasp. "I'd like that," he says. "Yeah, when spring comes, it'll be better. The northern Pacific now....nowhere you wanna be, in a little boat. She is little. Do you know if you get motion sick? If you do, there're medications and stuff we can do to help, it doesn't have to ruin things."

"Joseph," Roxy says in amusement. "I can do twenty-three consecutive pirouettes. I do not believe motion sickness is something that can possibly affect me. Also, I am a lifeguard." She chuckles. "I look forward to Spring then." She pulls a card out of her purse with her Dance Studio number on it, and her cell jotted on the back. "Just give me a call any time. I feel comfortable speaking with you, and that has not been my general experience in Gray Harbor."

He laughs at that, softly amused, no hint of mockery. "I should've known," he says, making a little gesture from his heart out, like a fencer conceding a touch. Then he's fishing out a phone in a battered blue case, to do the necessary programming of contacts, and tucking the card away in his wallet

"We'll meet again," he says. "I'll come by your studio. I look forward to seeing it, I do. And in the better weather, you can see my little boat."

"That sounds wonderful. For now though, I have a beginner ballet class to teach in a little bit, so I should head out." She puts payment on the table to cover her portion of the meal. "Thank you for meeting with me, Joseph. It means a lot to confirm some of those hazy things in my head. There was good in that place, in defiance of everything They tried to do to us."

Roxy gets up and gives him a kiss on the cheek if he allows. "Be well." Then she departs.