Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  That was that for now. I reported the sprain. Wilhelmina asked how I’d injured myself, and I told her I’d slipped in the shower. She tsked as she took me off the schedule and joked that I should sue. Someone would be put out, but no one would be dead.

  I had two weeks to fix this mess but no clue how to do it.

  Mental brute force didn’t work. Switching between who I really was and Damon—who I wasn’t—was going to kill my career. Even if I got the position in thoracic, I’d need to remember case details if I wanted to advise correctly.

  With an hour before my Blackthorne appointment, I walked to clear my head.

  I had two things.

  Greysen and surgery.

  He threatened both.

  This Thing could ruin me.

  But Greysen had been right. She’d said it before, but I’d gotten more analytical in my approach and I was ready to hear the truth. He was me. The illusion that the Thing was a separate entity in the corners and white noise was gone. It was me. My mind. I’d cracked and split. I couldn’t battle a man named Damon any more than I could wage war against myself and win.

  Why hadn’t I admitted it before?

  I stopped at a store window on Fifth Avenue to consider a necklace for Greysen. It would drop between her tits just so. I could engrave it with my name. It would mark her as mine.

  In the reflection, behind my face, stood St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  We’d never had a real wedding. We’d run to San Diego, taken our vows in her parents’ yard, had a party, and gone back to Balad. We went back to our lives as if the wedding was a private affair.

  I knew Damon was the same person I was. The fact that I was crazy didn’t mean I didn’t have common sense. Yet I wanted to publicly take her as mine, not his, even if he was me.

  Walking again, I tried to piece together a strategy. My sense of self was crashing around me. I should have been depressed. Despairing. My fundamental realities should have been shaken to the core.

  I felt nothing but a need to solve the problem.

  And when my mind made the words “I feel nothing,” I meant it literally.

  Besides a need to own my wife, a sharp pain in my wrist, and a motivation to fix what was broken, I felt nothing.

  * * *

  The Blackthorne appointments went like this:

  The elevator took me up to the forty-fourth floor, where double glass doors led to a carpeted reception area. They’d decorated it in light wood and alabaster tile. I never waited. A receptionist, sometimes male, sometimes female, always young, led me through a door with a code into a room with tiles and furniture that was slightly darker. Everyone wore strict business attire. The next door used retinal ID scans on both of us and unlocked to a dim hallway with dark brown paneling. Anyone walking around wore a lab coat. The incongruity of the coats against the hotel-like hallway was mitigated by the person I was passed off to, who usually wore something more formal.

  I was led to a different office by a different person every time. They asked about my week. They asked about any illnesses or injuries. Travel. Medications. I mentioned the wrist and the antibiotics. I got a shot they identified as cyanocobalamin. A.k.a. B12. Improves mental state, concentration, nerve cell health.

  They never asked about my mental state except to ask if I was improving. There was no follow-up when I said I wasn’t. Those questions came in the form of a post-session questionnaire that I usually finished quickly.

  “This isn’t helping,” I said in the black room as someone whose name was irrelevant took the sensors off my head. “It’s actually a waste of time.”

  “Your scans are improving,” she said.

  “I want to see the scans.”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was convinced they’d show my brain bifurcated as the solution to the problem.

  * * *

  I checked my watch. I’d been in the dark room for an hour. It had felt like five minutes. The exercises were getting longer, and my perception of them was getting shorter. Maybe I was achieving a facility with them, or maybe I was getting muscled out by a little wife-fucking worm.

  We were intercepted by a tall blonde in a business suit. “Dr. St. John,” she said, turning to the tech once we stopped. “I have it from here.”

  The tech nodded and went through a nondescript door.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Our director would like a moment.”

  “Do I know them? I’ve never seen the same person twice.”

  From her deliberate nod, I knew that was by design. “I believe you’ve met Mr. Stevens.”

  * * *

  Ronin sat across from me in the same spot as our first and only meeting. A manila file sat on the table between us. I flexed and released my hand to work out the pain. Closer inspection revealed abrasions as if I’d punched a wall.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Fine, thank you.” I didn’t want to talk to Ronin about my problems now any more than I had when I let Greysen talk me into meeting him for dinner.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “Fell on it.”

  A woman came in with a pitcher of water and lemon and left without a word.

  “I’m told you want to see your scans?”

  “I do,” I said.

  He nodded and poured water into two tumblers. A lemon wedge blocked the pinch in the lip before tilting and landing in my glass with a splash. “Well, here’s the problem: your scans are classified.”

  “My scans are…? It’s my brain. How can the scans be classified?”

  “All materials from this project are classified.”

  “What are you doing here, Ronin? Building some kind of super soldier or something?”

  “There was a movie about that.” He smiled. “It sucked because it wasn’t believable.”

  “That would explain why this shit isn’t working.”

  “How do you know it’s not working?” he asked.

  “The problem we came to you with isn’t fixed.”

  He took a sip of water. I left mine alone. I didn’t need the dramatic pause.

  “You’ve noticed we don’t ask you deep questions about your life.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s by design. We’re observing changes in the way the brain works so they can treat PTSD without therapeutic interference. It’s quicker and more effective.”

  “And has mine been changing?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s getting worse,” I said.

  “How do you mean? Your questionnaires are vague.”

  I never knew if he was reading the post-treatment surveys, but I had been vague on the off chance he did. Good choice. “I mean there’s no change. I’m learning to live with it. That’s all.”

  “Your last two sessions were different apparently.”

  “When was that again?”

  I earned his suspicious look. I was fishing, and he knew it.

  “Last two Thursdays. You were more forthcoming than usual.”

  “I wasn’t feeling well.” I held my hand out for the file even though I could reach the file myself. “Let me see it. It’ll refresh my memory.”

  Ronin handed it to me. “I hear you had reservist training this past weekend.”

  “Yes.” I opened the folder. The standard pages were there but filled with my handwriting. Flipping to the previous session, I recognized the one-sentence answers.

  “How was that?”

  “Uneventful.”

  Back to the previous week, with Damon’s puling and complaining. Jesus Christ. You’d have thought the flu was going to kill him. And he went on and on about the effects of the breathing. How he’d felt happy.

  Happy.

  If feeling like the king of the world with all the uplift of power and weight of responsibility was happy, then I knew less about him than I thought.

  He is you.

  He reported a marked improvement in the feeling of being watched and com
plimented the treatment as if he’d been delivered an unexpectedly delicious meal.

  He wants out of the sessions.

  With every passing answer, his desire to stop coming to Blackthorne became clear.

  At least to me.

  Because he’s you.

  Why did he want to stop? Was he afraid of losing? Was he running scared? Or was he sure that he’d won already?

  I had a flash of… I couldn’t call it a thought. A flash of a thought process that was unlike anything I was capable of. The process was nuanced in webbed layers of connections. It was like seeing the fourth dimension. It did not have a decision at its end, only a path that wound between who I was and who Damon was.

  The course of it was a series of questions and unactionable conclusions.

  You invented Damon.

  You are not you.

  Don’t hide.

  You have a problem.

  You didn’t know she was pregnant.

  I’m not hiding anymore.

  I closed the file.

  The enemy is you.

  “Thanks. I think I was running a fever.”

  You’re crazy. Shitbird crazy.

  That awareness, like the ones before it, opened up to new paths where emotion crisscrossed sense, sending my thoughts in a direction before I could identify which one I was on.

  Greysen deserves better than crazy.

  And with that, a cluster of thoughts between the two personalities, all shaped like fear.

  “Our team would like to do another assessment,” Ronin said. “Like the one you did before we started. To measure against the benchmark.”

  The nuanced, complex thought process shut down steadily, strand by strand, until everything aligned into tight, sane little rows.

  “Not today.”

  “You can set up an appointment for whenever you’d like.”

  “Fine,” I said. “That’s fine.”

  We shook on it.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  GREYSEN

  After I finished my last session, I could have stayed home and cooked dinner. I could have waited for my husband just to see who showed up.

  Instead, I called Colin. He wasn’t around. I left a message and made plans to meet Jenn. As a result, I wound up at Jenn’s place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, waiting for Colin to show. She had a loft on the second floor of a brick townhouse. The only things that made it a loft were an open floor plan, high windows and ceilings, and concrete pillars where walls used to be. She shared it with two active-duty nurses who were on short deployments and had it all to herself for the time being.

  “Who did this?” I pointed at a huge canvas above the low bookcase. It was an abstract with a yellow chevron pattern exploding inward on a blue sky cracked with blood red.

  “Me.”

  “Wow.”

  “You like it?”

  “It’s really powerful. I can feel it shaking.”

  “It’s me after the mortar hit.”

  My silver scar ached as if it had been called out from oblivion. I touched my chest as if that might soothe the memory of the blast, the dead silence after the shattering explosion, the intense ringing in my ears as Caden carried me to the hospital, the pain in my chest with every step as the shard of metal got closer to my heart, piercing my lung, leaving me gurgling blood.

  “That was bad,” I said.

  “It was nothing compared to what the medevacs were bringing in,” she replied. “I felt guilty for having PTSD over it.”

  “The mind does what’s necessary for survival.”

  “Ain’t it the truth.”

  There was a knock at the door. I went to the stove to stir the pasta while Jenn answered it. The penne had floated to the top of the water like soap suds, crowding together in a herringbone. I stuck the spoon in and stirred, forcing them to swim to the bottom before they fought their way back up.

  The mind did what was necessary for survival.

  A boy locked in a concrete box underground might invent a story of his own strength and detachment, which he has to believe in order to survive.

  A war might break that detachment, or it might drive the wedge deeper.

  Pushing the spoon down, I drove the penne to the bottom only to watch them pop stubbornly back to the top. Every one a survivor.

  And what had happened the day Caden went outside the wire? Why had he returned so soaked with blood I’d thought he was shot? Had that broken him? Was there an instant before and a life after?

  When did a man break?

  Why did I insist there was a single moment?

  How did I not know better already?

  “Oh, Caden,” I said into the hot steam. “I’m failing you.”

  The tears came hot and fast, salty as the water I stirred, lost in the scalding vapor. He needed me, and I’d failed him over and over, treating him like an adversary instead of a human soul who needed my unconditional love.

  “Grey.” Colin’s voice came from behind me. “Grey!” Closer now.

  I wiped my cheeks but not in time.

  He leaned over the counter to face me. “Why are you crying?”

  * * *

  We’d pushed the half-full plates to the center of the kitchen island long ago so we could take the wine more seriously. I’d lost my appetite completely once Colin sat me down. Once I was outed as crying, I buried my face in his coat, blubbering like a fucking baby. He didn’t complain about the streak of snot I left on it. He was a good brother.

  “Right before my eyes,” I said as Jenn filled my glass again. “He changed standing there, staring at me. No trigger. Nothing happened. Just bam.” I snapped my fingers. “Like that. Then we had dinner with the board.”

  “Did you get the job?”

  “The what?”

  “The Gibson Unit?”

  “If I’m reading the tea leaves…” I put my glass in front of my face to hide my smile. “It looks like I got it.”

  “All right!” Colin cheered. “Took long enough.”

  We all clinked to my future, which was unsure at best but looking up at worst.

  Jenn leaned over Colin to fill his glass, and when he turned his head to thank her, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes a second longer than a blink.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She looked down and smiled. You couldn’t see a blush on skin as dark as hers, but the way she tried to not look at him too long but couldn’t help herself at the same time? Well, I’d seen that before.

  “And after dinner?” Colin asked, tapping his fingers together as if he was counting something.

  “Same until the next morning.” I didn’t tell them about the tone of the sex or how hot it was for me.

  “Then he was cold Caden?”

  “Yes. Ever since he got back from reserves, he’s been switching.”

  I didn’t tell them about the name Damon either. I didn’t want either of them to slip in front of him.

  “So.” Jenn sat when her glass was full and the last drops had spilled out of the bottle. “Cold Caden is demanding, possessive, competent, and precise.”

  “Dutiful. Honorable. Confident,” I added one for each finger. Naming their traits had been soothing. It forced me to face the differences between the two personalities and hold them both in my mind.

  “Warm Caden is emotional, romantic, devoted?” Jenn wasn’t holding a pencil, but I knew she was taking mental notes. “Impulsive.”

  “And manipulative,” I added.

  “Sounds like him,” Colin said.

  “Which one?”

  “Both,” Jenn and Colin said at the same time.

  I sipped my wine. “I feel like shit for telling you this.”

  “You weren’t doing yourself any good holding it in,” Jenn said. “I mean, come on, how many studies do you need? How many ways do you have to hear getting it out is better than keeping it in?”

  “You’re a psychiatrist, for fuck’s sake,” Colin mumbled.

  “Oh,
fuck off.” I kicked him. “I was trying to protect someone I love.”

  “And killing yourself in the meantime.” Jenn reached across the island and squeezed my arm. “If it was just about him, I’d say you need to shush it, but it’s eating you alive.”

  “It is.” I put my head against the cool stone of the counter. The room was spinning, and my thoughts were butter-thick. “I don’t know what I’m going home to.”

  “Depends what time you go home,” Colin said.

  I picked up my head too quickly and braced myself against the edge of the island. “What do you mean?”

  “It sounds to me, if I heard you right, that he changes at sunup and sundown. Cold Caden is awake in the day. Warm Caden is awake at night. Your dinner probably started just as the sun set.”

  “Oh, my God.” I stood. Stumbled.

  “He’s a vampire,” Colin added glibly.

  “This is not funny!” I shouted, thrusting every ounce of sobriety I had left in his direction. “I’m not living in some movie. This is not a book. This is not a teenage fantasy. This is my life, and it’s not funny. My husband, who I love more than anything… who I gave up everything…” I couldn’t finish the stupid, selfish thought. “He’s not a pop culture monster. He’s sick. And I have to help him.”

  I laid my hands on the counter to steady myself, but the counter moved. Jenn got under me before I fell.

  * * *

  There was a headache, and the headache was the alpha and omega. It hurt when I moved, breathed, or had a thought. I hadn’t had that kind of headache since the morning I left for basic training. My friends had taken me out to a goth club and tried to talk me out of enlisting, but it had already been too late. I was committed, and there was no going back. But I drank to their efforts and went to Fort Jackson with a knockout of a migraine.

  I had a bottle of water lodged under me and a bottle of Advil in the hand that fell over the side of the couch onto the hardwood.

  I wanted to know what time it was, but more importantly, I had to get the Advil bottle open.

  The arrow on the top and the arrow on the rim were already lined up. I popped it off with my thumb then wiggled the bottle from between the cushions and my rib cage. The seal had been cracked.