Frayed Page 2

  “No, dear, no, not good for my regularity.”

  Gray gave the old woman a smoky glance. “I’l make sure we’re both careful, Nurse Bradley, thank you.” He shot the tiny tablets down without any water and handed the empty cup back to her. She seemed ecstatic that he’d acquiesced so quickly and hadn’t given her any trouble. She gave me a patronizing smile and happily sped off, squee-squonking al the way back down the hal .

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” He put a hand to his chest as if he could already feel the meds working away in there.

  “They told me the first day I was here, but I was so keyed up and disassociated I couldn’t real y hear anybody. Some kind of tranquilizers. They help me accept my present situation.”

  “Al I’ve had today is a whitefish sandwich and a box of fruit punch and I think I could accept this situation.”

  “That’s because it’s not yours. You can leave whenever you like.”

  “Who the hel would want to?”

  “You would.”

  He said it with great conviction, but I wasn’t so sure.

  His writing was going wel , there were ladies in thongs sauntering around, and people were feeding him cake and cookies. It was like some very adolescent version of paradise. A concept I could easily embrace, emotional y stunted as I often felt.

  We took an elevator up to the third floor. Brief as the ride was, there was Muzak accompanying us the ful fifteen seconds. The doors opened into a large communal living area where the hootenanny was in ful swing. There were party hats, blowers, bal oons, and catered foods up against the far wal , folks laughing and dancing, embracing one another. The sheer volume and surge of cheerful energy made me a little depressed.

  “By the way, what’s the party for?” I asked.

  “It’s just a gathering. They do them from time to time.”

  On cue, Trudy took him by the hand and led him into the middle of the room, where they clung close to each other, swooning to the music, doing a lot of chatting. I thought it was a pretty bold move on her part, considering how shy she appeared to be. Only the occasional limb flailed or gyrated between the two of them. Gray had never learned to dance.

  I stood there, the only wal flower surrounded by sixty or so people conversing, laughing, and enjoying themselves. They knew each other wel , and I guessed they were al part of the group therapy clique.

  Either on the same ward or somehow clustered together as a single unit. You don’t know what it feels like to be an outcast until you’re ignored at an insane asylum hootenanny.

  I real y hadn’t eaten anything except a whitefish sandwich and a box of fruit juice for breakfast, almost nine hours ago, so I appreciated the chance to chow down on the pastries, Kaiser rol s, curried shrimp salad, and chicken Parmesan mini-heroes. There were stil no doctors in sight, and no one else I could distinguish as a visiting friend or family member.

  It wasn’t until I’d eaten half my plate that I wondered how many of these folks might be homicidal like Gray.

  Poisoners. The kind of people who mixed ground-up glass in their food. Who tossed in drugs or diseased body fluids.

  But I was hungry.

  Again the sense that the Clinic was actual y some community col ege affirmed itself. The non-alcoholic beer reminded me of the first time I’d tried to go dry. I spent a month swil ing this kind of shit, and as soon as I’d split with Emily, I was back to binging. At least I wasn’t a nasty drunk. I’d suck down as much liquor as I could in half an hour, and spend the rest of the night passed out in a corner. I was doing everybody a favor.

  My few friends general y appreciated it enough to make sure I got home al right.

  Gray and Trudy were so deep in conversation that I started to have misgivings. I’d been curious about what he might be tel ing the doctors in this place, but now I started to get nosy about what he admitted even to his fel ow patients. About me. About our work.

  About how he wound up in here, a borderline psychotic with dried blood under his fingernails.

  I turned around, took a bite out of the chicken Parmesan, and watched the crowd for a minute.

  Someone on the other side of the room was staring at me and our gazes flicked against each other so hard that it brought my chin up. She did a slow walk across the length of the room and kept her eyes so steadily on me that I let out a groan. I real y wanted to finish my mini-sub. I tore off two more bites and swal owed them down as fast as I could while she sinuously moved through the oblivious dancers and sidled towards me.

  She barely tipped 5’1” but had the compact frame of a gymnast, and she exuded strength and an assertive bearing. Short black hair framed a heart-shaped face, with the olive hue of someone with Mediterranean blood. The same as me.

  I couldn’t help wondering what she was doing here in the ward, what problems she might have, what needs weren’t met, which men holding razors lived under her bed. What had she suffered at the hands of a loved one? What closets held her childhood secrets?

  I had plenty of troubles, and one of the worst was an intense desire to save beautiful women from the world. I was compel ed to take on quests I could only fail at.

  She brought her own atmosphere with her, one separate from the rest of the throng. It clung to her in a luscious cloud and thickened around me as she stepped up.

  I had my own weaknesses. Some of them I could put a name to but there were many that I couldn’t. I wondered which one this was going to be in the end.

  “Hi, are you new here?”she asked.

  “I’m a guest.”

  “We’re al guests. They don’t say patient here.

  We’re guests.”

  “I’m a guest of a guest then.”

  “What?”

  “Uh, yeah, I’m new.”

  She squinted at me like she’d seen me on a street corner somewhere, real y attempting to take stock of me. She got up close, doing a slow once-over of my features, taking in every angle and plane, every scar and hair. It was off-putting, but it gave me a chance to see her own beautiful face in close-up. I felt another barely containable urge to let out a sigh.

  “Oh, you’re not new here. You’re Gray’s friend, aren’t you? The other writer?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “He told us last week in group that you were coming.”

  That stopped me. The back of neck felt suddenly cool, as if a lover had eased her lips against me there. He’d only asked me to visit this morning. At least we were both sure of ourselves, in our knowledge of one another.

  “I’m Eddie Cane.”

  “Cheyenne Califa.” She took my hand and squeezed it with a strength that was part disdain and part passion, an ambivalent fusion I could see in her gold-flecked, intensely dark eyes. I watched her wavering between the two forces trapped inside her.

  She stood her ground for another instant and then she flowed away with whatever current was trying to draw her off. Her eyes clouded.

  “Are you the one who helped him kil the angel?”

  I couldn’t have reacted worse if she’d stabbed me in the bel y with a steak knife. I recoiled into the table behind me and knocked about a dozen drinks to the floor. The noise was very loud to me but it didn’t seem to bother anyone else.

  A violent flush heated up my throat. This is why we are so sensitive—we move from ice to fire in the span of a few words. Cheyenne took my hand and pul ed me forward where she buttressed me with her own body. It took another second to realize my knees were quivering and I would’ve fal en if she wasn’t there to hold me up.

  So much for keeping secrets.

  So much for repressing the dark memories that make you what you are. That give the final borders of definition to your pain and craft.

  “He kil ed it,” I told her. “I only helped him to bury it.”

  3

  WHAT YOU FIND ON THE GROUND

  TO PUT IN YOUR MOUTH,

  NEW TEETH LAUNCHING FORWARD

&nb
sp; Gray and Trudy finished dancing and parted. She looked over his shoulder as he approached but didn’t move to fol ow him. He had the corner of his mouth cocked, but when he saw Cheyenne with me a flash of anger crossed his face. He knew that I knew he’d been tel ing our tale. It made me even more curious about what else he’d revealed in here, what truths and lies he was spil ing to his new unbalanced covenant.

  Cheyenne froze in my arms until we’d switched roles, and I was propping her up. She trembled and I could see she understood the kind of fury that lived inside Gray. The chaos that swel ed so close to the surface of his agreeable disposition. He hadn’t fooled everyone.

  Maybe it was a touch too dramatic, but I found myself actual y inching out in front of her, as if to shield her. Why the hel not, you do this sort of thing when the moment strikes you as right. We have so few chances to even be pretend heroes. Everybody had to take what he could get.

  He said, “Hel o, Cheyenne.”

  “Hi,” she murmured.

  “I see you’ve met my friend Eddie.”

  “Yes.”

  “The two of you seem to be getting along quite wel .”

  “He’s nice.”

  “Yes, he is. What have you been talking about?”

  Like this, with no effort at al , Gray had the ability to turn the situation to his own ends. To make himself known, though not his motive. What a skil he had.

  I unwrapped myself from her and gave her a nudge away. She took the hint and wandered off back to the others. I watched her go, feeling a bit like I did the day when I saw my wife Emily careful y packing up my suitcases the day I got the boot. As if there was at least one major, important, perhaps even life-changing conversation left that had somehow gone unsaid.

  “Don’t get involved with her,” Gray told me.

  “Involved? I met her three minutes ago. And she’s a mental patient.”

  “Stil —”

  We didn’t have to look into each other’s eyes to look into each other’s eyes. We were doing it right now, even though we stood there glancing around at nothing. I sipped my non-alcoholic beer, and the more I drank of it, the more I wanted real liquor. I was starting to sweat, the tension between us growing in silence.

  I broke it by asking, “How many of these folks are guests of the Clinic and how many are friends of the guests?”

  “You’re the only non-resident today.”

  “But where is the staff? The orderlies? The doctors?”

  “This is a very self-sustained facility. The patients are considered no immediate threat to themselves or one another. At least fifty percent are here on a voluntary basis.”

  “And the other half have been committed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus Christ.” I scanned the area and saw the chicks in bikinis now wrapped in sarongs mingling among the others. “But these folks—” I wasn’t sure how to say it.

  “Yes?” he prodded.

  “Wel , no one seems to be in a state of particularly extreme emotional duress.”

  “There are plenty of schizoids, paranoids, catatonics, spiraling obsessives, extreme bipolars, and dissociative identity and dementia praecox cases in your presence.”

  The show off. “Wel , they throw a fun party. Is the therapy real y that good or is it just the little green pil s?”

  “A combination of both, but some guests have their setbacks. A teenage girl committed suicide two days ago. After four weeks of intense therapy, antidepressants

  and

  mood

  suppressants

  the

  psychiatrist in charge of her case felt she was stabilized enough to go for a walk around the grounds.”

  I knew the story was going to be very ugly because Gray was relating it without any outward emotion at al . But the corner of his mouth was turning up even higher into the twisted angling of an anguished smile.

  It was his tel . You looked for that little tweak of a grin, and if you saw it you understood that he was ripping himself up deep inside. His frenzy never stayed there for long though.

  “Gray, why did you mention Jazrael?”

  He either didn’t hear me or he chose to disregard me. His fingers flexed repeatedly. “She scoured the compounds for cigarettes and butts and burned-out filters. She col ected quite a number apparently, even though a slim girl would only have to eat as few as a dozen to go into a seizure from nicotine poisoning. On average it takes sixty to ninety minutes before symptoms begin.” His lip kept curling until the entirety of one incisor loomed into view. “Can you imagine the wil it must take to sit and swal ow forty or fifty half-smoked cigarettes stamped under shoe heels covered in mud and dog shit?”

  “Gray—”

  “Can you imagine? The fortitude it would take to chew them down and wait alone for an hour and a half before the nausea and dizziness gave you fits extreme enough to crack your vertebrae?”

  On bad days I could visualize it perfectly, and he knew it. He looked into my face and I realized it wasn’t the dead girl or troubles at home or the angel with her burning wings buried on the Isle of Dogs that was bending him out of shape. It was me. It was always me. He glared with a kind of dignified hatred.

  Endlessly destructive but also narcissistic.

  There are very few things that can stop your pain, and one of them is your lifetime rage. There is no sadness in al -consuming hate.

  Your crosshairs focused perfectly on the one target that lay half-hidden in the distance, or might be standing right up in front of you holding a non-alcoholic beer.

  A smal growl came up from the back of his throat, and another one from mine. How easy it is to fal back to your weakest state. The one you try to deny with your intel ect and your reason and al your measured propriety. But when you got down to it, it didn’t take much to snap you back into being the worst person you’d ever been and ever could be.

  I scanned the room, wondering if I should make a break for it. If I could run away from the fight that was coming. I saw Trudy talking animatedly on a black wal phone.

  “Gray, stop. Quit it!”

  “Ninety minutes of the most intense loneliness you’ve ever felt, waiting to die in the dark? Like an animal. Can you imagine? The will, and the amount of self-hatred?”

  I moved, dodging to the left but knowing it wasn’t going to be enough. I braced myself as Gray swung his fist around, powered by a dozen agonies I knew of and more I could only guess at.

  It was foolish to shout. He couldn’t hear anything anymore but the thrashing of his own mind. Even his own thoughts would dim before the torrent of his memories, the crushing burden of his outrage. He would be blind too, with black lights dancing along the edges of his vision, a bril iant but obscuring haze. And in the darkness there, inches out of sight, would be al his despair and the tender traps of his madness.

  I knew because I was the same. I saw that heinous smile smeared across his face, the one that told me I wasn’t as hard as him anymore, or as strong, or as ful of fury, although I could be, at any second of the day. It would just take the smal est prod to send me back to being what he was now.

  It was an oddly appealing thought. A growl I recognized broke from his throat. I pivoted and tried to duck but he was already working my ribs. I let go of the beer bottle instead of smashing it over his head. It was stupid to hold back. Civility might be the death of me.

  Several short jabs slammed into my bel y as he worked my midsection in a matter of seconds. He’d been primed to go from the first minute. Al the rest of it—the apparent calm, the tan, the leisurely repose—

  had just been an act he hadn’t even been aware of performing.

  But of course I had known that from the moment I’d answered the phone, and stil I showed up. I wanted to be here.

  Perhaps I wanted to die beneath his hand. Or murder him with my own. Maybe I wanted to see if he could return me back to the voices of thunder, where a servant of heaven rotted in the sand and weeds.

  Gray swung har
d at my temple twice, opened his mouth, and came at me with his teeth.

  4

  WHEN THEY DO NOT BELIEVE

  WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY

  AND NEITHER DO YOU

  “She who takes vengeance on the world of the luminaries—”

  “— who is set over mankind and over chaos and over spirits, queen of paradise, ruler over serpents and cherubim.”

  “Who

  is responsible for overseeing the repentance of sinners and the growth of boys into men.”

  “She who is the shining light laid over the eyes of children.”

  I snapped awake with my hands reaching for the nearest throat.

  Maybe it was my own. My neck hurt like hel and I hacked for a minute, trying to get rid of the furry pain there. A glass of water was pressed to my lips. I sipped and sputtered.

  The weight of the past sat heavily in my chest.

  History had moved forward to find me again, and the world was tinged red and black.

  world was tinged red and black.

  “How do you feel?” someone asked.

  My vision focused. I was in an office, lying on a firm leather couch. I could discern the subtle impressions of the hundreds of people who’d lain on it before me.

  For a moment their troubles and frustrations, like smal fists, pushed out against my back. Gray had lain here many times before, and I could sense his hang-ups by the remaining indentations in the leather. I eased my body down harder and the tension drifted off.

  I found myself staring at a grandfatherly type who was smiling with bad dentures and trying to appear pleasant, winsome, and disarming. It made me very nervous.

  I tried to sit up but the pain had broken over me in an awful torrent, and I let out a grunting squeal that sounded worse than my struggling transmission. Gray always did like to work the body. A heavy hand on my forehead pushed me against the cushions. “Relax. Lie stil .” Then after a moment. “Eddie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Of course, or I wouldn’t have said yeah, right?”

  “Certainly.”

  He let out a chuckle that didn’t sound much different from a kid torturing a toad. I wasn’t going to like this guy and there wasn’t much I could do about it.