by Barbara Hall
“Emily?” I suggest.
“Yes. Where’s Emily?”
“Back home.”
“What do I tell her?”
“Whatever you want.”
“But I don’t know what we’re doing.”
“You’ll know when we’re done.”
“Okay.” He grinds out his cigarette and puts his hands in his pockets and sighs. “It’s pretty here.”
The woman at the desk has almost no reaction to us, a dazed giant and his diminutive companion. In Big Sur, I’m sure we are barely noticeable. She’s a little disturbed that we don’t have a reservation but is happy to tell us there’s a deluxe room available and even happier when my credit card gets approved. We register as Mr. and Mrs. Jack Rabbit and that doesn’t interest her very much, either.
“Thank you, Mrs. Rabbit. Jorge is waiting outside with a cart to take you to your room. Enjoy your stay.”
Willie enjoys the golf cart ride to the room very much. It makes him grin. Jorge is telling us all about the things we are passing but we don’t listen.
Big Sur is not a relaxing beachfront place. It’s an edge-of-the-world beachfront place. Our hotel seems perched on the precipice of sudden understanding. Our front yard is a cliff overlooking crashing waves. It’s like a live action version of the covers of romance novels. All that’s missing is a woman in Victorian garb and a cape whipped by the ruthless wind. And somewhere in the background, a man who has done her wrong in silent pursuit with the devil nipping at his heels.
The sun is going down as we go into our large room with a wood-burning fireplace and a patio and a hammock. Willie lowers himself into the hammock and stares at the ocean until it disappears into blackness.
I sit in front of the fire and stare at it until I begin to feel sleepy, then I call Willie in because the night has gotten cold. He had fallen asleep in the hammock and when he wakes up it takes a long time for him to get his bearings and I have to tell him all over again where we are and why. Then he says, “It’s freezing out here.”
“I made a fire.”
He sinks in the armchair and stares into the fire the way that I was doing and I don’t sit down beside him with a book because I am afraid it will make me feel too much like we’re married and that would confuse him even more. And would confuse me, too. This was my favorite way to spend time with my fiancé when we were together. We lived in England then, the early days. To keep the heating bill down we’d turn it off at night and he would build a fire and we would sit in front of it with our books. Mine usually some turn-of-the-century respectable piece of English or American literature and his some history tome about Nelson or Byron or Bletchley Park. We would sit there with such purpose. Staying warm, broadening our minds, being peaceful, being close. To this day I can’t imagine why that stopped being enough for us. I want to say it was him but I’m sure I started to drift around the time he did. What did we need to replace us? In his case, he needed another woman, a lawyer it turned out, who didn’t read books for pleasure at all, just worked all the time. I can’t let myself think about what he found in her that was missing in me. Back when I had friends, I had this friend named Laurie who used to say, “He didn’t find anything, Sarah, he just moved on to the next warm body when you left.”
I am remembering my friends. This must be some aspect of recovery.
Laurie had shoulder length curly hair and crystal blue eyes. She sang. For a living? No, just for fun. She taught for a living. And then there was Samantha. She had short brown hair, a pixie cut, and saucer eyes. Her smile took up her whole face. She was a dog trainer. Did they have husbands? Did they have children? What did we talk about? I can’t remember those details. I am starting to remember their voices. Chattering, like the heavens chatter, saying things that mattered and didn’t matter and filling up the room like music.
All of my friends were analytical, as I was, and most of them funny, as I was, and everything that happened to us somehow seemed to be occurring in a movie or a play or a respectable turn of the century novel. We had no idea it was all a tawdry pretense, utter, calamitous, chaotic nonsense. We thought we were building something. We thought it was smart.
Maybe it was smart. Maybe we did matter and maybe we were building something. I can’t remember. I feel it tugging at me like some irksome task I need to return to. I shake my head to rid myself of it.
But I can’t rid myself of it. I see Laurie, crying, sitting on the edge of my bed.
“You were always the strong one,” she said.
What did she mean? Was it a criticism? Was it some kind of plea?
“I can’t stand this,” Samantha said.
Why did she say that?
I see myself lying in a bed, the two of them sitting on the edge of it, crying. Am I in the hospital?
Yes, it is a memory, and I am in the hospital and my two friends are trying to talk to me. I have just come back from the dead and I’m trying to focus on my life now that I’m back in it. I see the way my two friends are looking at me. Relieved that I’m back from the dead but at the same time, afraid of me. Disgusted by me? Feeling like I’m somehow altered? Dirty and broken? Maybe I’m imagining that.
And then I see myself walking around my apartment, my phone in my hand, wondering whom to call. Then I hear the voices. Not in my head, in the room. Someone talking to me. Not Samantha, not Laurie. Disconnected voices.
Yes, they left me. My friends left me. They tried to hang around for a while but then they left and then the radio started playing in my head. Then I dropped to my knees and demanded the disconnected voices identify themselves.
This story, the way I used to tell it, always felt purposeful and heavenly. Now it’s coming back to me and I’m looking at it as if I’m behind a tattered curtain and I’m starting to see a hurt and frightened girl, alone with her injuries, replacing lost voices with imagined voices.
But I couldn’t have imagined those voices. My imagination is not that good.
Suddenly I am back in the room in Big Sur. I can smell the smell of the fireplace.
Instead of sitting next to Willie I go into the bathroom and draw a bath and I sit in that and am very happy. They don’t let us take baths at Oceanside. Maybe the addicts can but I think with the crazies, there’s too long of an association with baths and suicide. I don’t know why they think we can’t kill ourselves in a shower. As I’m thinking of this, I realize I have to correct my tense because I am not in Oceanside anymore and I have no idea if I’m ever going back.
Even though I’m happy about my bath and satisfied with my mission, I am starting to feel a little unsafe and riled up. I try to push that feeling down but it won’t push. Then I try to pretend it’s about something else, like a difficult trip and tiredness and being out of my element or even thinking about my fiancé and my friends and my old life. But I know what it is.
The voices have gone.
Not fluctuating the way they did before, which was really more like getting louder and fainter, but even when I couldn’t hear them I could feel them. Since we left Oceanside, though, I can’t even feel them. I am starting to feel the way I did in my old life. Grounded. Sensible. Sure. Mean. Frustrated. I know what Dr. David Sutton would call this feeling. He would call it cured.
Chapter 22
Jen has found a doctor who has put her on antianxiety meds and now she is less loud but still anxious. Only a few days have passed since the incident but David can see that the drugs have taken an edge off the meanness. Now the meanness is less interesting, less entertaining. Or maybe he is making it that way because he is wedded to his antimedication philosophy. Doctors become so invested in their methodologies, to abandon them is like a divorce and he doesn’t want to get a divorce or even a separation. With his girlfriend drifting away from him and his most important patient on the run, David is thrashing around for any port in the storm.
He is finding it difficult to anchor himself to his anorexics and bulimics and he wonders why his practice has turn
ed into this. For a long time he was the go-to guy for serious disorders. He was on a steady diet of severe phobics, PTSDs, OCDs, suicidal ideations, drug-resistant bipolars, a few delusionals, and one schizophrenic. Now he finds himself listening to young adults talking about the circumstances that cause them to abuse food, sex, substances, and sharp objects. They’ve drifted to him under the umbrella of PTSD but their disturbances really have little to do with trauma. What they are labeling trauma is often just discordance. Assholes for parents. Vampires for friends. Lazy demi-gods for teachers. He knows how to help someone step through the aftermath of genuine trauma—a violent crime, a debilitating accident of some kind. But he feels entirely unqualified to guide someone through the basic machinations of life. He doesn’t have a clue about why it all unfolds as it does. He understands hate and despair and bullying and free-ranging rage. He understands them as energies that everyone taps into from time to time. He just doesn’t understand them as a dedicated path, a system, a way of moving in the world.
So what can he say to these children? How can he tell them it is going to get better when, in his experience, it doesn’t? Bullies become psychopaths who just put on suits and develop a more personable demeanor. The needy just glamorize their need, call it seduction and romance. The outcasts find each other and develop a lair of alienation, sometimes turning it into art, more often turning it into bitterness or violence. The world, he wants to tell his children, does not get better, it just gets bigger. You will find others like yourself. You will have a band, a gang, a klatch. But your band or gang or klatch will still be poised to do battle against your tormentors. The brave ones will take that on. The gentler ones will retreat and stay in the shadows together.
The world is brutal, children. The mode is brutality. The commonwealth is a smoke screen. Underneath the advertisement, a festering war.
Dear God, who is having these thoughts? It can’t be him. Something is possessing him.
He is sitting in front of the small fireplace in his study, even though it is a very warm evening, because he wants to look into the fire, because he feels something in common with combustion right now.
It’s not that he hasn’t always seen the darker side of human nature. But he used to have a clearer view of the other side of that. He felt balance, even if the scale more often tipped against the light. But he never felt these things with any degree of passion. It’s the volume of his thoughts that disturb him more than their content.
He has never sought passion. He has always felt grateful for the lack of it. He is an epicurean by nature. Contrary to common mythology, an epicurean is one who takes moderate pleasure in all things. Epicurus was not a binger. He was a taster. And that’s how he always saw himself, as one who could and did take moderate bites of the good and the bad, never letting any of them race out of control. Now he is being swept away with strong notions. A passion is forming. A devotion is pulling ahead and dragging him with it.
And it isn’t just a concept. It’s a feeling in his body. His stomach churns. He is light-headed. His heart races then slows to what feels like a stop. He fears he is becoming a crusader but he doesn’t have a crusade. He doesn’t know what he is for. He only knows what he is against and that has just started to come into focus. He would never be able to put it down as a dissertation. It’s just a vague idea that the world is out of joint. As a scientist he has struggled all his life against positionality. Now it is creeping up on him like an infection invading his body.
“What are you doing?”
It is Jen’s even but stern voice. He jumps.
“Nothing. Thinking.”
“It’s a million degrees. A fire? Really?”
“Do you need something?”
She hands him his phone. “It’s been ringing a lot. Are you on call?”
“No.”
“I didn’t mean to pry. I didn’t recognize the name.”
He takes the phone and looks at the voice mail. Three calls from Emily Cranston.
His heart lurches. “Oh.”
“Who is Emily Cranston?”
“She’s the wife of a patient.”
Jen lifts her hands in surrender. “Never mind.”
“It’s complicated.”
“It sounds that way.”
“Jen.”
“It’s okay. I have to get back to work.”
She walks away. This is how she is now. Quietly judgmental. There is an evenness to her disdain.
David’s hand shakes a little as he calls Emily back. She doesn’t pick up. While he is stumbling over a message, a call from her comes in. He answers it.
“Sorry,” she says, “I just missed the call. I was in a loud place. I’m okay now.”
His head is spinning. “Yes, I…”
“Sorry about the last message. I was just getting a little worked up.”
“I actually didn’t listen to your messages. I was eager to get in touch with you.”
“You didn’t seem eager to get in touch with me. You called me once and didn’t leave a message.”
“How did you…”
“I saw the number on my phone and dialed it. I heard your message, I Googled you, I called Oceanside and I found out you were treating that psychopath who kidnapped my husband.”
“Yes. I was treating her. We had only had a few sessions.”
“What is wrong with her?”
“I hadn’t gotten to the bottom of that. And even if I had…”
“I know, you can’t tell me. I have a crazy husband. I know how you people work.”
“Have you heard from him?”
“No.”
“Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”
“I don’t think he’s the one planning the vacation.”
“But let’s just say that he is part of it somehow.”
“Dr. Sutton, my husband can barely decide what to have for breakfast. If you had known him, you’d be aware that there is no way he could have schemed anything. Besides, I talked to her so I know how she is.”
“And how is that?”
“She was getting information from me. She tricked me.”
“What kind of information?”
“She got me to open up about Willie’s situation. I told her stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Just how it happened and how I felt about it.”
“How what happened?”
“The breakdown. Should we really try to accomplish this on the phone?”
“No, of course not. We can meet.”
“I’m in Hollywood.”
“I’m in Venice. But I’ll come to you.”
“Meet me at the Standard Hotel. Do you know where that is?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, a shrink with a secret clubbing life.”
He laughs. “Hey, hipsters go crazy, too.”
“Good point.”
He tells Jen he is leaving. She has a simmering reaction.
“You’re going to meet your patient’s wife?”
“He’s not actually a patient. It’s a long story.”
“You’re going to meet some woman somewhere right now? I was going to make dinner.”
He inhales deeply and looks at his watch.
“You heard about the kidnapping at Oceanside? That was my patient, Sarah Lange. This is the wife of the guy she kidnapped.”
Jen stares at him as if the whole story is too much for her drug-quieted mind. Her old mind would have had torrents of opinions on this. But now she just blinks at him. Then she gives a dismissive wave.
“Fine.”
“I don’t know how late…”
“Fine.”
He means to walk out but finds he can’t. “Jen, do you think the drugs are really helping?”
“Is this the start of an antidrug campaign?”
“No, it’s a real question.”
She stares at the fire and thinks.
“How do I know if they’re helping?” she asks. “My d
octor will tell me if they’re helping.”
“But how do you feel?”
She stares at the fire again.
“I feel like every ounce of energy in me is being used to hang on.”
“Hang on to what?”
“I don’t know.”
The answer defuses his impulse to go deeper. What he was cooking up was petty and strange. He wants to take her on. He wants to argue about commitment and love. He wants to ask what they are doing. He wants to dismantle the whole thing right here and now. But he knows that it is avoidance, that the real conflict is waiting for him at the Standard Hotel and parts unknown.
“Will you be all right if I leave?” he asks.
“No less all right than when you’re here,” she says.
He lets her have the last word.
Chapter 23
The Ventana Inn has a clothing-optional as well as a clothing-required pool area. They both include hot tubs and the ones in clothing optional are much nicer so it’s clear which way they want you to go. It is too cold for swimming but I think it might be good for us to sit in the hot tubs and we might as well use the nice ones; I just have to pray that no naked girls decide to join us because I’m not sure how Willie will respond to that. Given that the last time he saw nearly naked girls who weren’t his wife he ended up driving himself to shock treatments.
We walk down to the clothing-optional pools, wearing bathrobes over our institutional swimwear. Mine is a Speedo one-piece and I’m not sure what Willie’s is. I just told him to put on a bathing suit and he came out of the bathroom in a robe and slippers. I slept the night in a chair in front of the fire and Willie took over the bed. Before he went to sleep, he constructed an elaborate village of pillows. When I saw his sleep environment in the morning I said, “Does NASA know about this? Because I think you could sell it to them.”
He just blinked at me and said, “I have back issues.”
He didn’t ask me about where we were or what were doing. He just followed orders and now he is following me down the winding path to the clothing-optional pool. We are surrounded by exaggerated trees. We are in a kind of fort. I act like I know what I’m doing. But now that the voices have stopped, I have no idea what I am doing. I am trying to cling to a sense of purpose. I know that Willie was dying a slow death at Oceanside and I am somehow rescuing him. But I also know that by doing so, I have catapulted us into some kind of outlaw status. People might be looking for us. We might be hiding. I might be in trouble of some kind. When I made this decision, I was very sure of myself. Now I feel cut loose from that. I am trying to devise a plan. I am dancing as fast as I can. I have two problems now. I am divorced from my guidance and I am in charge of a man who is hardly there. I can see him coming back a little. He has been off the Lithium for a day. I expect he will emerge as a person a little over time. I don’t exactly know what I’ll do with him when he fully lands. Right now he is still shuffling, waiting to be led.
