He went. And they dug.
Time was gentle. The weeks softly piled up into months. And he began to find things in the dirt.
For the first time ever, he took all his scattered memories and impressions and lined them up into a wobbly narrative of not just the shooting, but the events leading up to it. He began with James, how he had come to Lancaster and rearranged the elements. Margaret’s dog tags and the penny. Powaqqatsi. The stolen condoms and the affair with Will.
The telling was strange. Erik found he could narrate the events of the fall semester, but his memory seemed to cave in after December. He hopped from one isolated recollection to another, bobbing like buoys in a choppy ocean. January and February were murky and muddled. March was filled with alarming sinkholes. April disappeared entirely. He could pick up the thread again, shakily, when James stepped onto the stage. And he could go forward from there.
“Why did you even come out of the booth?” Diane asked. Her voice didn’t dip out of its professional neutrality but it seemed her eyes were pressing him hard. He wondered for a moment if she had children. A son of her own who was capable of such a reckless move. “Why didn’t you stay down and covered?”
“I can’t tell you what my thought process was that day, I don’t remember. All I know is he shot Daisy.” He held out his hands to indicate it was reason enough. “I had to get to her.”
“You could have been killed.” She turned her lips in as soon as the words were out. He guessed she had just crossed a line. She was here to listen, not judge. He decided to step across as well.
“Do you have a son?” he asked.
Diane nodded, and he smiled briefly at her. “I know,” he said. “It was an insanely stupid thing to do. My mother… Before she hugged me, she shook me. Like she didn’t know whether to kiss me or kill me. A thousand people have asked me what I was thinking. And I feel like anything I try to describe, any way I try to tell the story, I’m making half of it up. I don’t know what I was thinking in the moment, Diane. I don’t.”
“How about what you were feeling?”
“Feeling? I was scared shitless.”
“What else?”
His shoulders inched up to his ears, silently indicating he could not remember. The “I don’t know” was poised in his mouth, all made, not yet spoken. He kept it back. Closed his eyes. He let the words go unsaid, let his shoulders fall again. He relaxed into the silence, and followed his mind. Let it take him by the hand and go for a walk.
“Where are you,” Diane said, after a minute.
“I had to get past him,” Erik said. “I had to get to the stage. If I snuck by James, he’d shoot me. But if I talked to him. If I asked him… I don’t know.”
“Let it spill out,” Diane murmured. “Don’t be articulate. We can explore it afterward.”
“I spoke to him,” Erik said, trying to let go. “I called him by name and said ‘you don’t have to do this.’ I thought I could calm him down. If anyone could, I could. I was the alpha male. Human valium.”
“Tell me more.”
“I calm everyone down. David said so. I started believing it was true. I could talk James down. He trusted me. He trusted me with the story about his sister. He gave me the penny. I had him in my pocket.”
He looked up at Diane, who stared unblinking back at him. “Were you angry with him?” she asked.
“Angry?” he said, startled. “Right there and then?”
“Or right now.”
“Sure. I mean, Jesus, he was fucked-up and depressed, maybe he was heartbroken over Will. But so what? A million people are fucked-up, depressed and heartbroken. Including yours truly. You don’t see me going into Geneseo playhouse with a gun. Who thinks like that? I don’t know why I bothered trying to sympathize. Fuck him. He blew the back of his head off and I got up and left him in the aisle. I didn’t even look back. It’s not the defining moment of the day. I got nothing for him.” He slumped back in the couch unclenched the fingers he had been holding in fists during the rant. “There you go, Doc, there’s anger. I got anger for him. What a breakthrough.”
Diane shifted in her chair, her fingers playing with her earring. “What was the defining moment of the day, I wonder?”
Erik hesitated, then reached in his pocket. He took the penny out and gave it to Diane. “Maybe that is,” he said, watching her examine it. “I’ve carried it with me every day since the shooting. I had it in my pocket when I was at the funerals of the people he killed. I hate his guts but I keep it with me all the time. I wish I knew why.”
Diane turned the flattened coin over and over in her fingers. “Often the victims of violence make their assailant into a monster. Something less than human. They refuse to call them by name. Acknowledge their pasts or their families.” She handed the pendant back to him. “You chose to keep this. And to keep his humanity.”
“He trusted me,” Erik said.
Diane nodded.
A long aching silence passed. Erik put the penny back in his pocket. “I just need to keep it.”
“It doesn’t mean you’re a horrible person,” Diane said. “It just means you’re a person.”
“I wish he’d never given it to me. I don’t want to define that day, Diane, and I don’t want that damn day defining me. It was an incident, not my life. If I could, I’d go back to the theater and throw the stupid penny on the floor. Leave it in the aisle. Leave it dead there with the rest of—”
They died, only you are left.
“Where were you going just then?” she asked.
Haltingly, he told her.
“You pictured them dead?”
“It made it so much easier. But then Will would call, or Daisy would write, or my heart would just laugh at me and the whole illusion would crumble. So I stopped killing them off but I still kept telling myself to feel nothing.”
He felt terrible after the session. Physically awful. Weak and anxious. His chest wide open and wailing. He felt perpetually on the verge of tears, his throat seized up.
“Therapy doesn’t seem to be good for my health.”
“How so?”
“I mean I don’t feel better. I just feel like shit. Shittier.”
“Because you’re feeling.”
He closed his eyes. “Meaning what?”
“Erik, you cannot selectively shut down. You can’t cherry-pick the feelings you want to suppress. The limbic system is not a sophisticated switchboard. It’s just one primitive switch. On or off. You mute one feeling, and you mute them all. And now, if you start digging into one feeling…”
“I wake up all of them and now I’m fucked,” he said, exhaling wearily.
Diane interlaced her fingers around a knee. “We’ve discussed before going on antidepressants.”
He dropped his head back, squirming against the notion. “I don’t really want to.”
“Why not?”
“It just makes me feel weak.”
“You’re in a weak place right now.”
He put his head in his hands, trying to dig for the words to articulate this fierce aversion. “I don’t want to be that kind of person. I don’t want to need a pharmaceutical crutch the rest of my life. It makes me feel… I don’t know. Weak.”
“Let me tell you what meds won’t do,” Diane said. “They won’t make it all go away. They won’t numb you, they won’t fix you. If you keep coming to see me, you are going to keep feeling, Erik, and feeling bad and feeling hard. But with the proper medication, we can slice off the extreme end of the spectrum, those horrible episodes of depression and anxiety keeping you from making progress with me. Meds can hold the floor under your feet while we rebuild some of your walls.”
He chewed on her metaphor, allowing himself to entertain the idea. “I guess so.”
“And the goal here, Erik, my goal, is to get you off the meds. I certainly don’t want you on them for the rest of your life if it’s not necessary. And honestly, I don’t think you will be.”
With her
declaring she had a goal for him, his trust in her deepened. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “All right,” he whispered. “All right, I’ll try.”
Deeper
He saw a doctor, who tried several medications before finding one that got the floor under his feet without giving him nauseating headaches or killing his appetite. He also got a prescription for Klonopin, to use as needed for anxiety. It was the closest thing to a wolf-killer he could imagine. Half a tablet took the edge off a panic attack but still let him go about daily business. If the pack came at night to get him, he took a full tablet and so long, suckers.
He was starting to sleep again. And as Diane had foreseen, the drugs did dull the razor-sharp edge to the depression. Which he appreciated. But they also sliced off the other end of the spectrum, and he noticed nothing particularly excited him, either.
Which he could handle.
He and Diane kept digging.
“God, the blood,” he said. “I hate blood. I couldn’t get it off me. Everything was just soaked with it.”
“Whose blood?”
“Everyone’s.”
Daisy’s blood caked in the hair of his forearms. Outlining his fingernails and crusted in his eyebrows.
Lucky’s blood on the bathroom floor.
David’s blood on the kitchen wall.
“My dreams were filled with blood,” he said. “It’s all over some of my memories. I’m not exaggerating when I say I think back to some of those times and it’s—” He made a throwing motion with both hands, an imaginary bucket of blood. “It’s splashed there.”
“Your loved ones were shot,” Diane said, and began to raise her fingers, one at a time. “A boy committed suicide in front of your eyes. Your girlfriend’s leg had to be sliced open. You held a girl having a miscarriage. You beat up a friend who betrayed you.” She was out of fingers. Her hand curled into a fist and dropped on the arm of the chair. “These are horrible experiences, Erik. Spaced over the course of a lifetime you wouldn’t just blithely get over them. They all happened to you in a single year.”
Erik stared past her, open-mouthed. “It was bad,” he said. He admitted it. Declared it. His mind flipped up an unexpected image of himself as a small boy, in his parents’ bedroom door.
I had a bad dream.
Standing at the foot of their bed with an affronted attitude. A sense of entitlement.
I had a bad dream. Something terrible happened. Look at me. Agree.
“It was horrible,” he said.
Diane nodded.
* * *
Deeper.
“Can you tell me about David?”
He spoke of coming into the hall at the top of the stairs, seeing David’s bedroom door open. Peering into the dimness to discover David had a girl in bed.
“I was about to leave. Turn around and tactfully get the hell out of there.”
“Why were you there in the first place?”
He blew his breath out. “That,” he said, “is not one of my finer moments.”
Diane sat still.
“I went over there to see if David had any coke.”
“I take it you don’t mean the beverage.”
“No.”
“Were you doing cocaine often in college?”
“I’d never touched it before senior year. But after the shooting I started doing it. We all did. Coke and ecstasy.”
“Daisy too?”
“Yes. Her and I. Will and Lucky. We got it from David. We were getting high all the time.”
Diane’s chin rose and fell. “I see. Let’s table that for another day. Right now I’m just confused about the situation. You went to his apartment looking to score.”
“Fine, put it that way. Yes.”
“Why did you go upstairs? To his bedroom?”
“Because,” Erik said. “I got to his apartment and the door was open. And he did have coke that day. It was left on the coffee table. It was just out, in the middle of the living room. And I immediately thought something was wrong. David would never… He was reckless but he wasn’t stupid. I put some magazines over the mirror to hide it. I tied up the baggie and went upstairs with it. I thought something had happened to him.”
“I see. And you went upstairs and you saw he was in bed.”
He saw the bared upper half of David’s body emerging from the sheets, his arms and back tensed and ropy with muscle. The unmistakable rhythm and groove of his hips. A girl’s hand at the back of his head, pale against his dark hair
“Funny,” Erik said absently. “When I was about six, I got up in the middle of one night and walked in on my parents having sex.” He trailed off, staring at the wall. “I don’t know why that just popped into my head.”
“Push it a little,” Diane murmured.
“I guess,” he said, both pushing and pulling at the two unrelated images. “There’s watching porn, and seeing sex in the movies, but when you actually see it in front of your face, you walk in on the human, unstaged act of…” He laughed a little. “When you’re a kid it’s sort of horrifying. When you’re an adult, there’s something ridiculous about it. When I saw David banging this chick, I almost laughed. But in a friendly, almost affectionate way. I could tease him about it later. Nicely done, Dave, perfect ten for technique.”
“But it wasn’t some chick.”
“He was on top of her. I didn’t see who it was. But then…”
David had rolled, tumbling to his back, pulling the girl on top of him. He had been smiling. Erik saw the flash of his teeth in the dimness. An open-mouthed grin of gasping delight. David was happy, which was such a rare thing to witness. The girl’s body glided on top of his and her eyes slid past the door, then doubled back. She pushed the tangle of hair out of her face.
And then the slow-motion nuclear explosion, a mushroom cloud of disbelief, and the skies opening up to rain down death. Because it was Daisy in David’s bed. Daisy sliding on top of David, making him smile like that. Naked, tousled Daisy staring at Erik, who stared back. The staring. Their way of drawing together into a private universe. Now they stared as their universe blew itself to smithereens.
“Do you think it had been going on for some time?” Diane asked.
Erik shook his head, mouth open. “I never saw it coming. I had no suspicions. None. She and I were barely having any sex but we were still so close… I never imagined she would go sleep with someone else.”
“The shock must have been indescribable.”
“David,” he said, spitting the name on the rug. “I knew I couldn’t trust him, I knew he would fuck me over in the end. Son of a bitch only wanted what he couldn’t have and if he couldn’t have it, he’d steal it.”
“You assume he stole her?”
Erik looked at her. “What?”
“You seem convinced he seduced Daisy. Not the other way around.”
He closed his eyes. “It doesn’t matter who seduced whom,” he whispered. “She had my heart. I gave her my soul. I helped her after she was shot. I held her head when she was throwing up. I helped her to the bathroom, in and out of the shower. I was there when she woke up screaming. I gave her every single thing in me and then she fucked David and don’t ask me how it felt, Diane. I know you’re going to. Just don’t.”
Diane was silent.
Erik opened his eyes. “She ruined everything.”
Diane glanced at her watch. “We have to stop now.”
“Yes,” Erik said. “We do.”
* * *
One night he dreamed of his father, and called him by name.
Byron.
Erik was out in a golden boat on a lake, reeling in fish after golden fish. Calling out Byron with every catch, calling to his father, who stood on the shore, waving. Erik let go his rod and reel, cupped hands and yelled over the water, Who do I look like?
And his father called back, You look like me.
Erik woke up. Calmly came out of sleep. The dream had been gentle. Uncomplicated. He lay in be
d, his fingers tracing his collarbone where the chain had once hung. Staring into the dark corner of his little room, his mind was far away, walking the galleries of his life’s museum, where he touched memories long abandoned.
They were there.
They were delicate, light things, like feathers, wafting away if he grabbed too hard at them. But they were there. Sensory and tactile. Blocks of scrap wood to play with. The rhythm and ring of hammers. The smoky whine of the power saw. The smell of sawdust and paint as a forest playground emerged in Erik and Peter’s bedroom.
“He was a set designer,” Daisy had said after Erik described the loft beds, the trees, swing and hammock.
“Maybe it’s why I was drawn to technical theater,” Erik said to Diane at his next session. “The smell and sound of the workshop reminded me of him.”
“Could be,” Diane said. “Or it could just be what you love. Not everything has to be a thing, you know.”
He glanced at her. “You learn that line in school?”
“No, from my mother,” she said, one of her rare, personalized engagements.
More feathers, piling up in his hands, drifting around his ankles. If he sat still, if he put aside the customary armor of anger and pride, they came to him. He made his breath hover above the snowy heaps, leaned into their silence.
“Where are you now,” she said.
“With him,” he whispered. A lap, and a gold necklace to play with. Strong arms lifting him up to sink a basketball. A broad back beneath his stomach, on top of a sled in winter. Gentle hands steadying the seat of his bicycle. Prosit when he sneezed. Skål for a toast.
He remembered when they were a family.
And he remembered when they weren’t anymore.
After their father was gone, he and Pete wouldn’t sleep among the trees of their bedroom. They didn’t want the swings and the hammock. They recoiled from the lingering smell of wet paint. Defiantly they dragged sleeping bags to Christine’s bedroom and slept on her floor until she sold their house and they moved away from the past. Tried to start again.
The Man I Love Page 28
