Remediation Required

My hangover throbs behind my eyes, and my breath tastes sour. I take a swig of water and collapse on the couch, craving rest and relief. As soon as my eyes close, time and space melt away, and I am falling.

I can’t move, can’t scream, I can only fall and fall until my feet connect hard with the floor of the place I hate most—the room.

I throw out my arms to steady myself.

Shit, not again.

I discovered this horrid, between-consciousness space when I was a kid. It looks almost exactly like my actual living room—the window in the same place in the exposed brick wall, the other walls plastered with the same butter yellow paint. But unlike my normal living room, this place is always in shambles.

Every time I appear here, there seems to be more and more stuff—boxes stacked haphazardly on top of one another, books, loose paper, garbage bags. The putrid rot burns my eyes.

My goal is just to get to the hall. I know if I can get the door open, the me on the couch will be able to move again, will open her eyes.

I try to map my route, but there is no path to the door.

I. Need. To. Get. Out.

My chest constricts. I am lightheaded.

There is a grinding sound, and a blast of fresh spring air wafts in. I whip around. Is there another way out? There is only the door and a window, jammed shut.

But somehow, the window is wide open. I suck in the fresh air and hear the flap of the tarp overhead.

One of the exposed ceiling beams collapsed when I was twelve. For years, there was a gaping hole in the ceiling. But when I came back in my late teens, there was a tarp over the hole. It makes a horrible plastic flapping sound whenever the wind blows. The sound raises goosebumps on my arms—terror.

I glance back towards the window.

That’s when I see her. She wears overalls; her black hair is loose down her back, and she has a tool belt around her waist. She seems to shimmer.

I blink at her.

She smiles and picks up a clipboard.

“Thanks for coming on such short notice,” she says. Her voice sounds like a summer breeze through a wind chime, high and light.

“Corporate did an audit, and they saw you had had no repairs since 2007. They sent me to inspect and,” she flicks her wrist at the surrounding detritus, “well, you and I have a lot of work to do.”

“Who…” I stammer. “How…” I try again. There has never been another person in here before. She seems to misunderstand my question.

“Sheryl was fired for wanton inactivity. She let you accumulate an awful lot of garbage in here.”

Sheryl? Who the fuck is Sheryl? Corporate?

She looks around the room; I follow her gaze. What is she talking about?

I try to force my mouth to make a sentence, but nothing comes out. She continues her chatter.

“How committed are you to this décor?” She has a dusty grey blackout curtain in her hand. “I think we should let in more light and air.”

She stands up on the unsteady boxes, but doesn’t wobble. With a quick yank, she pulls down the curtains. She reaches into her tool belt, produces a trash bag, and shoves them in unceremoniously.

“This is one of the worst cases I have seen,” she gestures at the room. “But I have a plan. I am much more organized than Sheryl.” She holds up her clipboard. On it, I see what looks like hundreds of tiny checkboxes.

She walks atop the wobbling boxes with perfect balance until she is right in front of me.

“I need your signature on page five that you are ready to clean up this mess, then we can get started.”

I take the clipboard. Across the top, it reads Ministry of Mental Health—Remediation Division. The form lists my name: Alexandra Jones, and next to it, Assigned Angel: Jesse.

I try to make sense of what I am reading.

The first four pages are tasks—remove garbage, patch ceiling, repair beam, etc. Page five is a contract: “In signing this document, I agree to allow The Ministry of Mental Health to begin remediation efforts…”

I stop reading, look up.

“I’m sorry…” I start. “But who are you? What is this?” I hold up the clipboard.

The woman, presumably Jesse, looks confused.

“I am your temporary remediation guardian angel. Sheryl should have been filing this stuff away, helping you make meaning of your life experiences. It looks like she never made a system, so you’ve just been chucking stuff into your subconscious here without a way to retrieve it or form reasonable beliefs.”

“Guardian Angel?” My voice cracks.

Jesse checks her watch.

"Yes, like Sheryl." She looked annoyed.

"I've never met Sheryl," I say. Her face softens and she sits down in front of me.

“These boxes,” she taps the one she is sitting on, “are filled with memories, books you’ve read, things you’ve done. Sheryl should have sorted them for easy recall and to prevent damage.”

I must look bewildered because she turns and points to a box labeled Dad. A stain runs across the side of the box, spilling down the sides of the boxes beneath it.

“Something burst in that box and contaminated a bunch of other boxes. That’s the risk of storing hazardous material without a system.”

My skin crawls just looking at it. I tap the pen against the clipboard and press on to prevent her from discussing the dad box any further.

“And when I sign this…?”

“Once you sign, we can get to work cleaning this stuff out. I will need your help, of course. There is a lot of garbage in here, but I am sure some of it is sentimental to you. I’ll need written approval to throw out anything big.”

She points to the leaking box.

“That one would require a separate signature.”

My head swims. The air coming through the window is not enough, I feel like I am choking. I need to get out.

I look at the door. Maybe I can crawl across the top of the boxes?

She must sense my panic because she places a hand on my shoulder.

“Alex, I need the signature. Let’s sort through a few boxes together so I can understand what is important to you, and then you can go. I promise you will feel so much freer, more open, as we get rid of some of this stuff.”

The dust motes swirl around her, looking almost beautiful. I take a shaky breath.

The pen shakes in my hand. I try not to taste the rot in the air. The door is so close and yet unreachable. I want to be back at home so badly.

My signature comes out jagged. I shove the clipboard back at Jesse.

“Great!” she says, jumping up. “Let’s start with something low stakes.”

She is walking on the boxes again; they shift and slide under her, but they don’t have room to topple. God, it’s cramped in here.

“Do you have any big feelings about basketball camp?” she asks, flipping open a box. “It doesn’t have much in it. This might be part of the problem in here—a lot of big boxes without a lot of stuff.”

“That makes sense. I went to camp for only a few years. No big feelings.” I hope my voice sounds steady.

She picks up the box and carries it to me.

“Don’t tell my boss I lifted the box like that,” she says with a wink. “OSHA’s been on us.”

She drops the box in front of me.

I pull back the flaps and peer inside—basketball shoes, a deflated ball, some photos. There is something almost holographic in the box’s corner. I reach for it and am surprised to find it solid under my fingers. I hold it up to the light.

It is a memory. I watch it. My stepmom is helping me sort my outfits into piles and putting them into gallon Ziploc bags so I can match each day.

I hadn’t noticed Jesse hovering over my shoulder.

“That’s a nice memory,” she says. “Keep that one.” She looks at the other contents of the box. “Looks like the rest can go, though.”

I hand Jesse the memory for safekeeping, then shove the box of garbage in the other direction.

“See? Not so hard!” She beams at me.

I take a breath. She’s right; that wasn’t too bad.

She looks at the box she is sitting on. That box reads, Childhood poems.

She hands me an X-acto knife, and I split the tape. Loose-leaf paper covered in my childish scrawl fills the box.

“Careful, I think the bottom gave out on that one. That’s where a lot of the random paper came from.”

As if on cue, the wind blows and paper tumbles around the room. A receipt for an oil change I got in 2017 skitters towards us. Jesse crumples it up and lobs it into the trash box.

“The coupon on that receipt expired a while ago.” She’s trying to make me laugh, but I am too jumpy. I don’t return her smile.

Instead, I pick up the first poem. Garbage. Grab the next one; also garbage. After riffling through for a minute and not finding a single good poem, I dump the contents of the box into the trash.

“Why did I keep this shit?”

She shrugs, mumbles Sheryl’s name, and busies herself taping the bottom of the emptied poetry box. On the side, she writes To Keep-Miscellaneous Childhood. I drop the memory and photos into it.

“Once we get the garbage out, we will come up with a filing system for these things—scrapbooks, folders, something, but we cannot do anything until we know what you want to keep.”

Jesse is looking for our next box while I try to decide when she will let me go home. I hear her make a little yelp and turn to see her wobbling under the weight of a box.

I watch in horror as the side splits. The sounds of my childhood fill the room—shouting, the crack of belts, crying.

I worry I might vomit. I wrap my arms around myself, trying not to taste the metallic tang in my mouth.

Jesse scoops the spilled things up and shoves them into the busted box, taping the sides and shoving it aside. Though silence falls over the room, the sounds continue to ricochet throughout my body.

My teeth grind together, and I clench my fists. If I could move my feet, I would be racing for the door, but I am frozen, rocking in place, eyes clenched shut.

Then, Jesse is in front of me, arms around my shoulders. She is talking, but I cannot concentrate on her voice.

“Alex, Alex, listen to me, Alex. It is all put away. Come back to me.”

Her hands are warm as they cup my cheeks. I can smell her lavender scent. She is cuing my breath.

“I know,” she says. Her voice filters through my panic.

“I know that was scary. I know you avoid this room because there is a lot of stuff like that in here. This won’t happen again. I will sort those and put them all aside to go through when you are more ready. ”

Tears are dripping down my face. Oh God, I never cry in front of anyone.

My voice cracks when I speak.

“I need to go home now,” I tell her.

She nods. Then my hand is in hers, and she is hauling me up onto the boxes. She walks across them gracefully, carrying the box of garbage and bag with the curtains in it, but their shifting scares me and I have to drop onto my hands and knees to crawl.

It takes several yanks to open the door just enough for me to slip through. As I go to shimmy out, one foot in the hall, she speaks again. I pause and stare at her, impatient.

“I will keep moving stuff around and sifting in here. That might cause some weird dreams for you,” she starts. Her voice is apologetic.

“I know it’s uncomfortable, Alex, but it will all be better in…” She rushes across the room to grab her clipboard and rushes back to my side. She holds up a timeline. I cannot focus my eyes enough to take it in.

Everything in my body is screaming at me to step into the hall.

“Seven to ten years!” she calls, a triumphant smile on her face.

My breath catches. I cannot wait that long.

I shimmy through the door and into the hall. As soon as the door snaps behind me, I am falling again. Then I feel the softness of the couch underneath me; I hear the traffic flowing outside the apartment. The crush of my hangover returns.

I leap to my feet.

“Did she say she was my guardian angel?”

I need to get that room, those sounds out of my head.

The clock on the stove reads 10:05 am, but I grab a beer, anyway. I alternate between sipping the beer and pressing the cold can to my temple.

I want to reject her help, but somewhere in my chest, something feels a little more open, a little freer. “Seven to ten years,” I mutter, looking out the window.

I open another beer. I hear the echo of tape being ripped off a box.

“Seven to ten years.”