Hamlet’s face was pinking, but he listened to the rest.
“You know this is common. All living things must die. Ashes to ashes and all that,” she said.
“Yes, it is
common
,” he fumed.
I had the feeling that he didn’t mean only the death of his father, but that he referred to her, as well. She seemed to sense his insult and walked away irritated, though she had enough presence of mind to glance at Claudius, who stepped forward. It was clear that they had planned this verbal attack.
“It is sweet and commendable, Hamlet, to mourn for your father. But you know that
your
father lost a father, and
that
father lost his. Each of them mourned for a suitable amount of time. But to carry on like this… it is a sign of, well, stubbornness. And, frankly, it’s unmanly.”
I sucked in my breath, and Hamlet muttered, “Son of a bitch.”
Claudius heard what he said but simply narrowed his eyes and said in forced sincerity, “I love you, Hamlet, and I hope you can think of me as a father.”
Hamlet yanked me out of the room at this point. I don’t know what possessed Claudius to keep speaking, but he yelled, “We hope you will stay with us and not go back to college!”
Hamlet’s gait caught, but then he continued on.
Gertrude chased after us and begged, “Please do this for us… for me. Stay with us. Do not go back to Wittenberg.”
He would not look up but mumbled, “I’ll think about it.”
She couldn’t feel his sweating palms or see the pinched pain on his face, but I could, and his agony made me snap. I turned on her. “Gertrude,” I said, but paused to keep myself from telling her how much I hated her and wished her husband—her first husband—were there to scold her. “Don’t you see you’re messing with his head? First you told him to go, now you want him to stay.”
“I love my son.”
“So do I, which is why I think you should leave him alone. Can’t you see he’s upset?”
“We are all upset,” she said slowly, carefully.
With condescension that would have killed my father, I asked, “Are you?”
If she were a cobra, this would have been the moment when those weird flaps would have popped out of the sides of her head and her fangs would have spewed poison. She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, the elevator arrived and Hamlet snatched me away from her.
As soon as the doors separated us from them, he said, “You’re crazy to talk to her like that.”
I shrugged and gritted my teeth. “Aren’t you always telling me to stand up to her?”
“Yeah, but wow. Hell of a way to start.”
“It’s not the first time,” I said with a sigh, and leaned my head against the metal elevator wall, wondering what the exchange with his mother would cost me. “I used to hold back, but since your dad… it’s been harder for me to keep quiet. Especially when she treats you like a pet or a little boy.”
His face darkened and he kicked the wall, making the elevator shake. “God, why? Why did my father have to die? Why did she marry Claudius? Why so soon?” In what had recently become a common gesture, he ran his fingers roughly through his hair, making it stand up in every direction. “Everything just seems so… wrong. I have no use for them… or for anything.”
“Not even me, sweet prince?” I asked, not at all hurt, but looking for a way to distract him. His eyes met mine, and it seemed to pull him out of his head. I pressed, hoping for a smile if not a laugh, “What, no sex joke? No, ‘But I have a lot of
uses
for you, wink, wink’?”
He stared at me for a moment and added coolly, “I never say ‘wink wink.’ ”
“Maybe not, but you’re not even going to make a snide remark? You’re slipping.”
He gave an exaggerated wink and said suggestively, “I could use a little slipping.”
I clasped my hands in a mock prayer of thanks. “And he’s back.”
I didn’t feel much like kidding around, to tell the truth, but I knew Hamlet needed it. I found everything Claudius and Gertrude had said to him distasteful and disturbing. What was their rush? They had obviously moved on, but most of us hadn’t, and certainly not Hamlet. It had been merely two months since the king had died, and they wanted life to return to normal. For Hamlet, there would never be a “normal” again, and the fact that Gertrude, especially, didn’t see it was shocking. I hoped he would go back to school, and fast. In truth, I was not sure how many more of those conversations he could take, nor could I imagine the consequences if his mother and uncle (for I would never call him Hamlet’s father, or even stepfather) did not let up. With dread I wondered if the “bad thing” Hamlet had spoken of might involve them.
When we got back to my apartment, my father came out of his office. “Why are you back? Didn’t your mother want you home?”
Hamlet kept walking, so I explained, “They had a fight. Can he just stay a little while, Dad?”
My father chewed his lip and watched Hamlet’s slumped figure pass down the hallway to my room. Reluctantly, he nodded and said he’d be working from home for a while and that Hamlet had to leave before dinner.
When I got to my room, Hamlet was sitting at the foot of my bed with my sketch pad in his hands. He didn’t even look up, so I sat at my desk and started doing homework. After I finished analyzing a poem, I tossed the textbook aside and slid onto the floor next to him.
He was scrawling “To Be” and “Not to Be” over and over.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That is the question.”
I studied the scribbled page and tried to figure out what he meant.
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, his voice distant. “Is it better to suffer through life, to deal with all the crap thrown at you, or to fight against your problems by
ending
your life? To die is to sleep. That’s all. And by sleeping, we escape everything that tortures us. That’s the dream, then, isn’t it? The perfection of nothingness.”
A chill ran through me. It sounded like he was talking about suicide. Was he just thinking aloud, or was he formulating a plan? If I came at it headlong, I thought he might freeze up, so I tried to follow his logic and keep him talking. I suggested, “When you sleep, it’s not nothingness. You dream.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. “There’s the catch, huh? When you die, who knows what dreams might come? What’s in the afterlife—if there is one? That’s the scary part. That’s what keeps us living out our long, painful lives. Who would put up with the heartache and the injustice of life when one could just get a knife and end it… except for the fear of what comes next? Fear of something worse makes us too scared to do anything.”
My own fear bubbled over. “To do what, Hamlet? What are you thinking of doing?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” When he didn’t answer, I started to get up. “I’m going to get my dad.”
“Don’t,” he begged, grabbing my arm and pulling me down again. When I stiffened under his grip, he let go and leaned back. “I was just talking, Phee,” he said, pushing a smile into the corners of his lips. But his eyes were dead. He took the page, ripped it out of my sketch pad, crumpled it, and tossed it aside.
It rolled under my bed, but I didn’t get it. Instead I took his face in my hands and pleaded with him, “Please, Hamlet, tell me what you’re thinking of doing. I can’t lose you, too. I can’t.”
He rose, and my hands fell pointlessly into my lap. “You won’t, Phee. Everything’s gonna be fine. You’ll see.” Then he zipped up his sweatshirt and walked out.
Francisco:
So Hamlet considered suicide.
Ophelia:
I don’t know.
Barnardo:
You were his girlfriend. How can you not know?
Francisco:
Ophelia? He asked a question. (pause) He never spoke about it?
Ophelia:
Well… yeah, he talked about it, but not in a real way.
Barnardo:
Not in a real way? What does that mean?
Ophelia:
Hamlet talked about a lot of things. He said he was going to climb Mount Everest one day. Maybe you should haul in some Sherpas and find out if they knew about that plan.
Francisco:
Don’t be smart.
Barnardo:
No risk of that with her.
“So if Hamlet wasn’t crazy, was it an act?”
Ophelia purses her lips. “No one is that good an actor.”
Zara raises her eyebrows. “Are you admitting to all of us that he
was
crazy?”
Ophelia looks up at the stage lights and sighs. “I don’t know what to tell you. Truly. He was troubled.”
Zara leans forward and touches Ophelia’s knee. “Both your personal life and school life were unraveling because of the attention you paid to Hamlet. Was it worth the sacrifice?”
Ophelia pulls at her sweater. “I did what I thought was right at the time.”
The next week, Horatio came home for Christmas. He canceled his trip to meet Kim’s parents, saying that I sounded tired, and after the weird messages he was getting from Hamlet, he thought he ought to return. Horatio and Hamlet spent most of their time together and, though I never told either of them, it was a relief to be alone. Knowing Horatio was taking care of Hamlet, I let go a little and was able to sleep and paint, and painting helped me to stop thinking. I didn’t check e-mail or call anyone. I ignored my texts. I painted until my hands were as colorful as a garden and I’d filled paper after paper with images that had nothing to do with Hamlet or the king or the castle.
Finally I showered and changed, and when I went into the sitting room, I found a message from my dad that the boys wanted to go out for a movie and it was fine with him if I went. I headed up to Hamlet’s room, where I found him completely engrossed in something he was reading on the Internet and Horatio looking annoyed.
We waited for over an hour for Hamlet to log off, and I knew if we didn’t leave the castle soon, we would never make the movie. Of course we could have mentioned any film to the social secretary and it would have been played for us in-house, but there was something so much better about being in an actual theater with regular people, especially for a comedy. As long as the guards were in plainclothes and Hamlet kept his sunglasses on or his hood up and his head down, no one bothered us, at least most of the time. We got the occasional tween girls screaming or hugging him without permission, but more often than not he went undetected, or people just whispered as he passed. It made their months that they could go around telling everyone they’d been in the same place as the prince, and it made us feel better for having done something together that was normal. And if Hamlet couldn’t stop fixating on his computer, we were going to lose out on our last chance for normal that night, and we all needed a laugh.
Horatio and I had been trying to entertain ourselves as best we could, but Horatio was getting impatient and my worries were starting to creep back. He signaled to me that it was my turn to try, so I walked up behind Hamlet, put my arms around him, and kissed him on the head. He didn’t look up, just patted my hands. I started massaging his shoulders and said, “You shouldn’t be reading those message boards. They’ll drive you nuts.”
Horatio jumped in with, “Some of the things people say are so ignorant.”
“You don’t believe this junk?” I asked, hoping that leaning in front of the screen might work.
Hamlet just leaned the other way and kept reading.
I continued, “Conspiracy theorists, crackpots. Come on, Hamlet, let’s just go.”
Ignoring us, he frowned and read. “Listen to this: Someone claiming to be a servant here says he saw Claudius putting poison in my father’s ear.”
“His ear?” Horatio laughed. “How the hell would Claudius get poison in an ear?”
“My dad was probably asleep. He loved to nap in the conservatory. Said the flowers soothed him.”
“Fine,” said Horatio, “but why not just poison his drink or something?”
Hamlet scrolled down and said, “Because my uncle’s a sneaky piece of crap, and I bet it’d be harder to notice.”
“Wouldn’t poison have showed up in an autopsy?” Horatio asked.
“My mother rushed that whole thing, remember?” Hamlet rubbed at his temples.
Horatio shook his head and walked over to the computer. “If what that person says is true, why has no one else mentioned it? Publicly, that is? It would have to have been an incredibly elaborate cover-up. I mean, not a peep anywhere else? These things never stay quiet. Not for long, anyway.”
“Exactly,” I added. “And I didn’t see anyone there besides Claudius.”
“Wait, what?” asked Hamlet, finally turning to face me.
“In the conservatory that morning. When I got there, Claudius was leaving.” I felt a little shocked as the words left my mouth. It was the first time I had mentioned it to anyone. The first time I had actually thought about it since that day. It sounded suddenly important, and yet it had been nothing more than a fleeting vision of Claudius with… a bottle in his hand.
“You saw Claudius?” Horatio asked. His large brown eyes widened, and my stomach flipped.
“Yes,” I said, trying to act very casual, “but he wasn’t acting suspiciously. If he had just murdered his brother, don’t you think he would have been running or something?”
“No,” Hamlet replied quickly.
“Hamlet, like I said, I was there. No one else was. Not a guard. Not a servant. Just me and the flowers.”
“And my dad.”
“I didn’t even know he was there. He must have been tucked in that back corner.”
“The only place with no cameras…” Hamlet’s voice trailed off.
“I was certainly caught on video. If anyone was suspicious, don’t you think I would have been questioned?”