Frayed Read online

  I opened my eyes. He had a tight white beard, thick square glasses, too much forehead and not enough nose. I couldn’t see how he might possibly kiss a woman without denting her face. He wore a red button-up sweater with brown trousers that were too short. Brown suede shoes but no socks. I found it presumptuous on his part that he believed he could fit into polite society without wearing socks.

  He sat in a leather wing-backed chair that matched the couch. He had his knees crossed and I could see half his pale calves cross-thatched by varicose veins.

  A notepad was open laid out across his upper thigh.

  He smoked a pipe although he clearly didn’t enjoy it.

  Smoke wreathed his cheeks and clung to his mustache. A low rumbling, consistent rasp worked through his smal frame.

  “How do you feel, Eddie?” he repeated. There was a heavy hint of concern in his voice, as if he was afraid of lawsuits and media attention.

  “Like my best friend just went psycho on me. Again.

  Who are you?”

  “I am Dr. Howards. I’m the primary administrative officer and chief of staff at this facility.”

  It always annoyed the hel out of me when people didn’t give me their first names just so they could augment the il usion they were superior and deserving of immediate respect. It was one of the ways certain folks tried to subtly influence themselves upon the rest of humanity.

  I made the effort to sit up again and managed to make it this time. I checked myself over. Someone had done a nice job of taping my battered ribs, and there was a swathe of gauze around my head. I remembered holding Gray’s throat and shoving him off me until a couple of patients pul ed him away. It looked like he hadn’t been able to bite any chunks off me, but I had teeth marks rimming both my hands.

  “Let me understand the situation,” Howards said, and he took a moment to strike a wooden match and light his pipe, even though it was already lit. It was a delaying tactic, a way for him to pause and gather his thoughts and set a dramatic tone. It would’ve worked a lot better if his pipe hadn’t been lit. “You came up to the Clinic to visit Mr. Gray and didn’t bother to checkin with any of the staff or—”

  “Hold it. He invited me.”

  “Mr. Gray invited you?”

  “He said there’d be cake.”

  Howards glowered and let out a lengthy sigh through his nostrils. He wasn’t nearly as adept at it as me. “And you never stopped to consider that since Mr. Gray is in this institution because some months ago he attempted to kil you, perhaps your presence here might only cause him a significant emotional upset? I should think you’d have declined his invitation.”

  “Cake and non-alcoholic beer, doc,” I said. “I’m only human. I couldn’t resist. And he is my friend. And besides, there was nowhere to check in. The guy at the front gate waved me on without even asking my name.”

  “I find that difficult to believe.”

  “Yeah, wel , despite your lack of imagination, it’s the truth. What the hel kind of security do you have around here?”

  “The best,” he said, crossing his knees the other way, and sounding self-assured on the matter. “For the protection of our guests. But we also expect visitors to fol ow a few simple rules.”

  I glared at him. “Then you should make the fuckin’

  visitors aware of that upon their arrival.”

  “We do.”

  I lurched up and made it to my feet by grabbing hold of the arm of the couch. Gray had been a hel of a boxer once and hadn’t lost his touch of unleashing a fierce, concentrated flurry.

  “You can’t leave yet, Eddie. You have several severely bruised ribs and you took a bad knock to the head. You should at least spend the night in our care.

  Or if you prefer, I can cal for an ambulance from the county general, which is some twenty-five minutes away. I’m afraid we’re quite isolated here in Griffinsvil e.”

  “And Gray?” I asked.

  Howards sucked cautiously on the pipe, trying not to hack. “Yes? And Gray...?”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Oh, you mean punishment? No, nothing like that for our guests. He’s back in his cottage.”

  I was beginning to believe that I had been terribly misled by books and drive-in movies al my life. At the very least they should’ve been using fire hoses on him, leaving him naked and shuddering in some windowless cel ar. I was a little disappointed that he’d gotten that chance to beat the shit out of me and hadn’t even received a firm talking to about it.

  “Is it true a teenage girl committed suicide here by eating cigarettes?”

  Howards leaned in a bit, bouncing his knee, the notepad slapping, the overhead light reflecting off the whiteness of the flesh of his leg. “What’s this?”

  “That’s what he told me. That a girl recently kil ed herself here with nicotine poisoning.”

  “No no, that’s quite ridiculous. Of course nothing like that has happened.”

  “He seemed to believe it.”

  “Mr. Gray does occasional y exhibit some delusional characteristics. Your presence at the Clinic appears to have caused him a slight setback.”

  “Yeah, you set him back al the way to his bungalow.”

  Dr. Howards exhibited a quality that I was familiar with and had long ago learned to despise. I could sense that he held some secrets close to him—not his, but someone else’s—and considered it to be a powerful intoxicant to revel in. Gray used to play this game too, in the ring, when he knew he was much better than his opponent and could toy with the guy at wil .

  I waited for whatever Howards had up his sleeve, and he didn’t make me wait for long.

  “Eddie, I have a rather important question.” He paused, expecting me to cut in, but I merely watched him. He sucked the pipe a little more enthusiastical y, but now it had gone out. He’d already played out his dramatic lighting of the match game and didn’t want to reproduce the gesture, so he pretended it was stil lit.

  I was growing even more skeptical of psychiatry as a valid science.

  We are al imprisoned by our own inertia. The longer I stood there, hunched and gritting my teeth against the pain, waiting for this guy, these people, to get around to asking pointed questions about Jazrael, she who takes vengeance on the world of the luminaries, and what we did on the Isle of Dogs with her, and to her, the more I felt like it was me actual y trapped in this crackpot palace.

  My thoughts twisted along to every movie I’d ever seen where the split personality only imagines he has a best friend, while everybody else in the story played along, so goddamn certain that they were more clearheaded than the poor schmuck talking in two voices, wearing his two faces.

  When you got down to it, you could never be sure of your own sanity. You just had to guess at it. You had to hope that you were never the craziest fuck in the room.

  So I waited. Howards shifted his little body in his chair and said, “Please explain the event.”

  “What event?”

  “The act of violence that led Mr. Gray into our care.”

  “There was no event. He attacked me and tried to strangle me. At first with his hands and then with his belt.”

  “Why?”

  Boredom can only ful y be shattered by violence.

  Nothing else wil quite get the job done. Our sedentary lifestyles turned us into masonry. The only way to get moving was to sometimes throw a punch.

  But Howards wouldn’t understand any of that. I said,

  “He does things like that on occasion.”

  He wanted to ask why again but thought better of it.

  “And what happened?”

  “I fought him off and I stopped him. His landlord cal ed the cops and he was arrested. While in jail he tried to hang himself with his belt. They don’t real y take it away like you see in the movies.”

  Another misleading bit of information from Tinseltown. Maybe I should stop taking b-flicks so seriously.

  “What is the Isle of Dogs, Eddie?” />
  I told the truth, but not the truth he wanted to hear. It was funny how that worked sometimes. “A place where Gray and I used to go camping and fishing when we were kids. A spit of land out on one of the state parks of Long Island.”

  “Why is it cal ed that? The Isle of Dogs?”

  “In the summers visitors would bring their pets with them, and the dogs would run out there at low tide and get stuck when the water came in.”

  He seemed a tad surprised that I’d answered so easily and honestly. “And what happened there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was there ever an incident that took place there?”

  Again with the serene posing. I could just imagine what his circles of conversation must’ve been like back in his col ege weed-smoking days, passing the bong around.

  “You mean besides camping and fishing? No.”

  Howards pursed his lips, flipped open his little notebook and started jotting notes. He gazed distantly formulating his notes, using his left hand to move the pipe through the air. I got the distinct impression that I was not being believed.

  “How old were the two of you?”

  “Thirteen or fourteen. We used to take the train out of Penn Station. We went for a couple of years.”

  “Why did you stop going?”

  “We both got jobs early.”

  “Have you noticed that you’ve grown exceedingly tense since I posed my question?”

  “It’s only moderately tense, and I’m always like this.”

  I did however wonder why the hel I was subjecting myself to this. Instead of this line of interrogation and cross-examination, he should be asking me why I had such a masochistic streak. That was something I’d be interested in learning.

  “Did the two of you engage in sodomy while on these ‘camping trips’?”

  Jesus Christ, the pervie bastard. He had his pen poised over his little book, his hand trembling slightly.

  I checked out his eyes until he dropped his gaze, and I thought, okay, Dr. Howards did have a few secrets of his own. But everyone does. “Doc, if I didn’t have a busted rib, I might have to take a swing at you. What did Gray say happened there?”

  “I’d rather not divulge that at this time.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  He started writing even more quickly, with a real exhilaration now, noting how I’d threatened him, how I had dark, naughty proclivities, how repressed I was about my adolescent yanking sessions, and making al kinds of connotations on what might have happened between two boys on a track of wetland where dogs ran wild.

  A knot of suspicion thickened at the base of my spine when I thought about how Gray had probably set this up. Toying with Howards and laying the groundwork for al these garbled and mistaken diagnoses, just so I’d be made uncomfortable in this hot seat someday.

  Gray had foresight, and if it’s one thing he knew how to do wel , it was predicting which way I’d jump.

  I started for the door. Howards almost dropped his pipe. We were just getting to the good stuff.

  He licked his obscenely red lips and I told him, “I have a novel to work on.”

  “Yes, you’re a writer. Is this the ‘book’ you can’t finish, yes? Another dark ‘fantasy,’ like those of Mr.

  Gray’s?”

  How subtle. At least he didn’t actual y do the quotation marks in the air with his fingers.

  “Similar,” I told him. “Except mine are published.

  Most of them anyway.”

  He perked up so much that the pipe stem clacked off his bottom teeth and made his eyes twitch. “I would very much like to read some of these books. One of these fantasies.”

  “Al you’ve got to do is walk into a bookstore and pluck them off the shelf. Wel , some might be special orders.” They al were now, mostly backstock stuck in warehouses in the publishers’ basements.

  Stil , a sale was a sale.

  Smoothing his beard, Howards started writing in the air with his pipe stem again, formulating his dirty thoughts. The word fantasy clearly excited him. He stared at me but the pen was now moving along the pad, like he was trying to mesmerize me into not noticing.

  “Doc, you’ve got a hard-on. Bad form in front of the guests, you know?”

  He looked down into his lap. Then his eyes nearly backflipped in his skul because I’d actual y mentioned his erection, and that gave him a whole new bevy of twisted, lurid imaginings and psychoses to consider.

  I wobbled out into the corridor and unraveled the bandage from my head.

  Orderlies and guards were al over the grounds.

  Guys in blue uniforms, white uniforms. There was a team of landscapers out even though it was dark.

  They were working like hel beneath the huge security lights. Picking up cigarette butts with great overwhelming care and precision of form.

  5

  THE LOVE OF SAD MOTEL ROOMS,

  VALIDATION OF PARANOIA,

  (LYING) ON THE BED

  I drove over to the motel Gray had mentioned and got a room with a window that faced the little town of Griffinsvil e. He was right. Three stop lights and lots of antique shops. A breakfast diner at one end of the main strip, and a supper diner at the other. If there were any tourists in town, I couldn’t spot them. Of course, except for the motel manager and the occasional pickup truck and eighteen-wheeler that went by, I didn’t see anybody. Gray had told the truth.

  No other friend or family member of the guests of the Clinic had come in for the hootenanny. The lure of cake and non-alcoholic beer didn’t prove to be the irresistible bait for others as it was for me.

  But I liked motels. They had a built-in sleaze factor that intrigued my underdeveloped, repressed pervie nature, and they also had a Middle America milieu that appealed to my white bread, vanil a disposition.

  Disco was dead by the time I was old enough to ask a girl to a middle school dance. By the mid-80s, sex and cocaine and the New York notorious night club scene had given birth to a new brand of prestige.

  A hundred centuries of our Italian heritage and traditions couldn’t stand before the glitter bands and vapid slickness of Miami Vice. And just when my generation was about to break across the wal of adolescence, AIDS tore down al the hot spots and guiltless screwing in dark corners and motels that charged by the hour.

  So maybe Howards wasn’t so wrong to focus his attentions on his patients’ use of their pee-pees. But it stil didn’t mean I had to put up with that shit.

  I spent the afternoon in a woozy semi-conscious state, nursing my bruised ribs, watching shitty cable, and peeking out the window at the town where farmers and rural workers didn’t live half as nicely as the nutjobs in their little cottages. I was surprised the local community hadn’t risen en masse and stormed the Clinic, burning the bungalows and running off with the chicken parm heroes.

  A knock at the door made me snap up so hard in the bed that I had to suppress a cry.

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

  I answered the door. It was Trudy, the girl from the cabana next door to Gray’s, who’d asked about the oatmeal raisin cookies but had instead brought brownies to the hootenanny. I was stil struggling with my sense of betrayal over that.

  There was a clear and distinctly cold manner about her now. Gone were the eager eyes and the cautious smile. She carried a new air, one of refined control.

  Unlike before, she now met my gaze dead-on. Al the heartfelt imagery of the two of us waving to neighbors and drinking lemonade with our kids Sarah and Mortimer went straight to hel .

  “Trudy,” I said.

  “Please cal me Doctor Ferrara, Eddie.”

  Another one who wanted to put me in my place. I held the door wide and she slipped inside like every married woman entering into a doomed affair that I’d ever written about.

  “Sorry I can’t offer you anything. No beer or wine here. Not even a soda. Certainly no apple fritters, brownies, or oatmeal ra
isin cookies.”

  She simply stared at me with an academic frown, trying to unwrap each layer of skin until she was down in my blood. We waited like that for a while. I lay back on the bed and she sat in the only chair in the room. I swore that if she took out a pipe or a little pad, I’d jump out the window and run shrieking over the highway. She did neither, and merely continued to look at me without expression.

  “So, there was more staff around than Gray thought,” I said. “Posing as patients. I suspected that when I saw you on the phone at the dance.”

  “The administration feels it’s better that way,” she told me. “Our guests respond more natural y and we can help guide them back to recovery with a minimum of additional emotional intrusion.”

  For some reason that struck me so funny that I burst out laughing. At the back of my mind I knew that I real y shouldn’t be doing that sort of thing in front of a psychiatrist, but I couldn’t help myself. “Al it proves is that the paranoids aren’t nearly paranoid enough.”

  “It’s an advanced form of experimental therapy which has thus far gotten extremely beneficial results.”

  “From Gray?”

  “Yes.”

  Things started clicking into place. “That’s why you showed up at the cottage. Because you heard he and I starting to argue.”

  “Yes. He was obviously becoming agitated. I attempted to ease the situation.”

  “But you’re not supposed to interfere with animals in the wild.”

  “Excuse me?” she said, trying to look pissy about my comment, but not quite able to pul it off.

  “Nothing. Hey, tel me, the girls in the bikinis—?”

  “They’re graduate students doing their internships at the Clinic.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “It’s one of the strategies I like least about this form of therapy, but our male guests respond very positively to it.”

  “No shit!”

  She huffed. “Real y, Eddie, it’s extremely therapeutic. Surrounding one with such beauty. It’s no different than artistic remedy. The staff itself can also act as treatment by their very character.”