by CD Reiss
I kissed him in a typical married-person way. A punctuation between activity. A comma in the day. I didn’t get to the bedroom door before his voice stopped me.
“Greysen.”
“Yeah?”
“I can’t take this back once I say it.”
This couldn’t be good. Anything he might want to take back wouldn’t be a statement to celebrate.
“Okay?”
“You might want to cancel your appointment.”
“Caden. Is everything all right?”
Sucking his lips between his teeth as if he wanted to hold the words back, he tightened his jaw and tilted his head. We were frozen in his moment of decision while the currents of his courage swirled and gathered together.
“I think.” Hands though hair. A pause. I stayed absolutely still. “I think I’m going crazy.”
Part Two
Chapter Twelve
GREYSEN
DECEMBER, 2006
Caden’s hands, what they could do, how careful they were in doing it, were always different in my memory than in real life. I forgot them every time they were out of my sight. They were always wider, more articulated than I remembered. When I saw his wedding ring on the fourth finger, tying him to me, I stood in awe of that single band taming a force so powerful.
“Hey,” he said, meeting me at the desk at the front of the administrative offices of the hospital. He was crisp and showered in a suit with a textured silk tie. He always smelled of alcohol when he got out of surgery. He covered it with cologne and sex, but it was deep in his pores.
When he signed out, his gold ring wiggled with the letters of his name.
“How are you feeling? Since this morning?” I asked, remembering the taste of those fingers.
“If I wasn’t fine, I’d let you know,” he lied.
I let him have that particular deceit because it was to protect me. He was painfully honest in everything else. We started down the hall.
When my heels clacked on the floor, he looked at my feet. “Are you all right in those?”
I turned my calf so he could see the outline of the shoe and the stockings under it. “Do you like them?”
He walked again. “I like them over my shoulders.”
Stating facts. Clear and concise. Cold because he was nervous, not because he was losing his mind. He wasn’t lying about feeling better, only that he’d tell me.
“How’s your thigh?” he asked when we were alone in the elevator.
“Nice contusion.”
“Muscular or dermal?”
“Subcutaneous.”
He nodded, hands folded together in front of him. “I’ll be more careful next time.”
We got out at the doctors’ level of the garage, which was nicer than any of the others, and had valet. His Mercedes was waiting. He let me in.
“Where are we meeting him again?” he asked.
“Gotham.”
“We should have taken a cab.”
The car pulled onto Central Park West. It was the week between Christmas and New Year. Traffic was on a break.
“It was a cutting day,” I said with a playful curl to my question. Surgery left him raw and potent. We usually fucked on cutting days.
“Just a quad. Easy. He was young though. So we had tertiary distress.”
He made a left, crossing hand over hand, his attention always sharp, even when the streets were empty.
“You don’t want to go,” I said.
“To dinner?”
“To dinner with Ronin.”
“I like Ronin.”
“To dinner with Ronin to discuss the new protocol.”
“No.” He faced me when he made the denial, and for a second, I saw his raw power. “I don’t want to go to dinner with Ronin to discuss this at all. Ever.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do, Greysen.”
“You don’t.”
“Yes. I. Do. For you.”
“Don’t lay this on me.”
“Jesus Christ. If I wrote you a check for three hundred bucks, would you listen to me for fifty minutes? We’re married. I do things for you. You do things for me. We make sacrifices.”
Before I could talk about agency, autonomy, and acceptance, he grabbed my hand and squeezed it. For a month, his touch outside our home had gotten rare, and it froze me.
When I squeezed back, he put his hand back on the wheel to pull the car up to the valet. My fingers were left alone to make their own sense of him.
* * *
The hostess led us through the cavernous space. Pillars of changing light held up the thirty-foot ceiling, and the sounds of conversations and music were muffled by careful acoustics. Caden put his hand on my lower back to guide me through, and I kept pace in six-inch heels.
Ronin had finished basic and been stationed in Maryland. He wouldn’t say where, but I knew it was the Aberdeen Proving Ground. He knew I knew and neither confirmed nor denied what he did for a living.
He was alone at a table in the corner, reading a magazine. In the folds, I saw half of President Bush’s face. He stood when we approached.
“Colonel,” Caden said.
“St. John,” he replied, shaking Caden’s hand first.
I envied the public touch, then I gave my own handshake and let Caden pull my seat out for me. We ordered drinks. Wine for me. Whiskey for Ronin. Water for Caden.
Ronin had been a handsome man in basic training, but his eyes had matured from simply piercing to devastating, and his conceit had ripened into confidence.
“We haven’t seen you since the fundraiser,” I said. “Are you still with that girl?”
He leaned back to let the waitress place the glass of whiskey in front of him. “Nah.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Not a big deal. It takes a certain type to deal with me.” His eyes met mine, then Caden’s, and he smirked. He asked about Caden’s residency, my feelings about private practice. Usually we wouldn’t ask about his job, but this time was different.
“I mentioned we wanted to talk to you about something specific,” I started.
“You had me at ‘secret.’”
The waitress came and took our order. It took forever to hear the specials. I didn’t have much of an appetite, even though I hadn’t eaten all day. I needed the feeling of being at a peak of tolerance.
“To old friends,” Ronin held up his drink, and we clicked.
Caden looked as if he’d rather be cut into small pieces than sit at that table.
“So,” I said, “I’ll get right to the point.”
“Please,” Caden said.
I leaned toward Ronin. “I hear Aberdeen was working on a heightened sensory perception protocol?”
Ronin made no sign he was surprised. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“To increase the accuracy of scopaesthesia. The feeling you’re being watched.”
“He knows what scopaesthesia is.”
I ignored my husband. “For troops on the front line. If they can perceive when they’re being watched, they can kill first.”
Ronin leaned back, crossing his legs while he fingered his glass. “And this is interesting to you because?”
I looked at Caden, and he looked at me. This was the moment we broke the shell we’d grown around ourselves. For me. For us.
“Caden has a persistent condition.”
Back to Caden. He wasn’t looking at me. He was touching his water glass with his left hand, and that ring, those fingers, the way the index finger tapped once.
“He thinks someone’s watching him.”
“Not watching,” Caden cuts in. “It’s not malicious.”
“It’s trying to get inside him.”
Ronin uncrossed his legs. “That sounds pretty malicious.”
“It’s—”
Caden put his cold fingers on my arm, and I stopped. “It wants to join with me. I don’t have a feeling it wants to hu
rt me. It is, just so you know, crazy. It’s not normal. It’s fucking insane crazy talk and I’m embarrassed to be sitting here telling you about it.”
“Having a wife will do that to you.”
They shared a male moment and I let it slide.
“So,” Ronin continued, “you’ve checked environmental causes?”
“Had the house checked for carbon monoxide,” he said.
“And you’ve considered PTSD? I mean, your wife’s a card-carrying expert.”
“It’s not PTSD,” I interjected.
“Really? You were in Fallujah. Anyone who didn’t go crazy already was.”
We sat in a triangle of silence with our own memories of the blood, the screaming, the smell of gunpowder and meat. The food came. I was sure it smelled great to a person who was interested in eating. None of us were. When the waitress asked if we wanted anything else, no one answered.
I broke the silence. “It’s not PTSD. No flashbacks. No disrupted sleep. No emotional outbursts.”
No emotion at all. I didn’t say that. It wasn’t relevant, and it wasn’t one hundred percent true.
“It’s a nascent dissociative disorder,” I continued.
“Wait, wait, wait…” Ronin threw up his hands.
“It’s not—” Caden tried to get a word in.
“Have you tried antipsychotics even?”
“Yes,” I said. “We’ve tried everything. But every few weeks, the feeling comes back. We get it under control, but it’s been every week, and now it’s every five days or so. It used to be every few months, but last time, we had a four-day spread.”
Ronin looked from me to Caden, then back to me, twisting his hands out to show us his palms. “You do what to get it under control?”
I couldn’t answer, and Caden wouldn’t. Instead he said, “I need this protocol. We do. We need it now.”
“What. Do. You. Do?” Ronin planted his flag in the ground.
Caden plucked it out by putting his elbows on the table and locking his gaze on our friend. “I fuck Greysen so hard I hurt her.”
“Jesus.” Ronin drained his whiskey.
“I gain control of her body and all of it goes away.”
“Is this a control thing or a sadism thing?”
Trust Ronin to get right to the point.
“I don’t know. But one day, I’m going to really injure her.”
“No, you’re not,” I insisted, but I was background noise. It was all Caden now.
“Whatever this is,” he continued, “it’s not telling me to kill the neighbor’s dog. It’s not a schizoid hallucination channeling my id. It’s a separate thing. It’s not just distracting, it’s overwhelming, and you know me. Right? You know I don’t spook.”
Ronin nodded. He’d been with us in Fallujah. He knew what Caden could do in the face of death. He’d seen how, when necessary, ice water flowed through my husband’s veins.
“You do not spook,” he confirmed.
“We need this,” I said.
“I’m not saying I know what you’re talking about, but let’s say I did. Let’s say I knew a way to heighten your feelings, including feelings of being watched. What then? It’ll only make it worse.”
“Only if it’s real,” I replied. “It heightens the feeling of real eyes. A real enemy. Caden isn’t on the battlefield. There’s no enemy. This could shake the entire thing loose. Ronin.” I put my hand over his. “Please. Send me the efficacy report and I’ll look at it with an open mind. If I think it won’t help, I’ll drop it.”
He took his hand away and used it to hold up his empty whiskey glass for the server. He snapped his napkin open and draped it over his lap, then slid his fork off the table. “Ten bucks says this isn’t even pink inside.”
Caden picked up his steak knife. “You wouldn’t know pink if you had your face in it.”
I wasn’t finished with the conversation, but they were. I picked up my fork and poked at my salad. I felt as if I’d gone to battle and suddenly, without reason, everyone had laid down arms and gone home for lunch with the wounded still bleeding into the mud.
* * *
After seeing Ronin at Gotham, Caden and I were under the sheets in a warm bed, watching the shadows of leaves dance on the ceiling. I knew he wasn’t sleeping, and he had to be aware that I was awake.
“Was it hard to tell Ronin?” I asked finally.
“Yes.”
“We have to try everything at this point.”
“I know. But I don’t have to like it.”
I turned my body toward his and draped my arm over his chest. “One day, we’ll look back on this and say it was the greatest adventure of our lives.”
“We’re not making happy memories.”
“They’ll be different when they’re in the rearview.”
He turned to face me. His nose was a quarter inch from mine, and he might as well have been in a different room. “This won’t. Not for me.”
“Let’s see. Give it time.”
“I’m not even in my own skin. Do you know what it’s like to have a brain that’s not doing what it’s supposed to do?”
“No.”
“I’m a stranger to myself. It’s torture. It’s like I’m broken. Ripped up. And I can’t find the wound to stitch up. When I hurt you, it’s like I find it for a little while, but a new one opens. I’ve never been afraid before. Not really. But when it gets bad and I feel it coming, I don’t know what I’m going to do to stop it, or what’s going to happen if it takes me over.”
I kissed him. “It won’t. We have everything we need to figure it out.”
“You’ve been saying that for months.”
“It’s still true. I don’t give up.”
“Don’t give up on me, Major One More.”
“Never. I’ll never give up on you.”
We shifted like tectonic plates, fitting the muscles and bones of our bodies together until we found comfort in the way our shapes clicked and fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Chapter Thirteen
CADEN
SEPTEMBER, 2001
I was at a prestigious residency at NYU Medical Center, learning under the best heart surgeon on the planet. Roberto García had performed over two thousand open heart procedures, and he’d taken me under his wing. Everything was going fine.
On September 11th, 2001, that all fell apart.
I was on the morning shift when I was called down to emergency. Caked in filth, encased in equipment, burned, screaming, the horror of it all revealed in bones and blood. I wasn’t training as an ER surgeon, but they needed me, so I became one. The nurses were spectacular. They helped me get a handle on the sudden situation. I locked off any feelings about what was happening while I did the job.
Between crises, I tried to call my parents. The cellular lines were jammed. No one was getting through. There was talk of other cities. Other planes. The entire system was shut down. Nothing flying. Nothing landing.
The world was chaos, but inside myself, I did what I had to. I cut. I sewed. I made decisions. For twenty-four insane hours, I was order inside madness.
A nurse named Lola dumped a bag of ice into the metal sink and turned on the water.
“Thank you,” I said, but she was already gone.
The parade of casualties had slowed, but no one had time for niceties when the world was falling apart. My eyes were burning. My knees were painfully swollen. When the sink was full, I stuck my head in it. The cold shocked my mind clear.
When I pulled my head out of the ice water, someone put a towel in my hands. I assumed it was Lola, but then he spoke with his deep Mexican accent.
“Stay still.”
Fingers on the inside of my wrist.
“I’m fine, Roberto.”
He didn’t answer while he counted. The bright fluorescents had a density all their own, and the sage green of the tile walls was loud against the soft blues of the linoleum floor. Outside the scrub room, staff ran past the windows. I n
eeded to help them.
“You’re tachy,” he said, letting go of my wrist. “But better than I expected.”
I ran the towel through my hair. Dr. García was five foot five with a head of thick black hair. He had the wide cheeks and full lips of his Mixtec ancestors.
“I’m fine. How many are in triage?”
“You need to rest.”
“I told you I was fine.”
“No one bathes in ice water when they’re fine.” I was about to argue, but he cut me off. “Go take a nap before I write you up. And then we’re going to talk about your future.”
He had the power to fail me out. He wouldn’t, but I was tired and my face must have registered shock or disappointment, because he responded.
“You’re too good at this, St. John. Cardiac surgery is a waste of your talent.”
“What? Wait.”
My beeper went off, startling me. I tilted it to see the grey-and-black screen. It was my parents’ house, but not the code they used for emergencies.
“My mother.”
“We can talk next week.” García said, snapping the towel out of my hands. He tossed the towel into the hamper on his way out.
I flipped open my phone and called her. For the first time in dozens of tries, it connected.
“Caden.”
It wasn’t my mother.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Kent. I’m your father’s financial advisor twenty years now.”
I scanned my memory. I’d met him. Business dinners at the house. Holiday cocktails. He’d tried to get me to buy term life insurance. “Why are you in my parents’ house?”
“I have all the keys…”
“Where’s my mother?” I recognized the hum of the refrigerator in the background, but only when it clicked off.
“I called from my number, but you weren’t picking up.” Kent Whoever had a desperate edge to his voice.
“I asked you a question. Where’s my mother?”
Someone else murmured in my kitchen.
“We don’t know,” Kent said. “We were wondering if you’d seen them.”
