Poison

by Galt Niederhoffer

  The car is silent as they drive home, away from the city of Portland, over Back Cove and Tukey’s Bridge, into the dewy suburbs. The only sound is Ryan’s breath. In. Out. In. Out. A request and a rejection. A threat and a promise. A death threat or a diabolical joke. A mind game or a confession? Cass watches the light recede as they approach Cumberland, holding the light in her gaze as though the city is safety and every mile she drives away, she is farther from it.

  * * *

  Cass knows about liars. She has read up on the subject. She grew up in a home where lies were just as likely as truthful statements. Liars like to brag. Liars love attention. Liars have a love-hate relationship with the people who catch their falsehoods. Liars rely on their listeners, both to suspend their belief and to validate their triumphs. Cass is a veritable expert on the subject because she has spent her life calling out her father’s.

  Cass understands liars’ inherent paradox. As much as they want to obscure their lies, liars want to broadcast. It is for this reason that so many lies end up with a confession—because, as much as they love to succeed, they hate just as much to get away with their lies in private, without the thrill of an audience. Cass has read all the research, presented by the experts. Liars give themselves away with their satisfaction, a smile at the corner of their lips, the unmistakable flash of pleasure. Storytelling is no fun without someone to listen. Knowing this, the deceived are armed with one surefire mode of detection: liars eventually betray themselves. To a liar, deception without exhibition didn’t really happen. It, just like a lie, could be a feat of the imagination.

  Liars are storytellers first and foremost, and a story without an audience is a tree falling in a forest. Liars, like the rest of us, answer to compulsion. All human beings narrate life and share their tales with others. And so liars can be waited out. Liars can be baited. A liar will eventually hang himself on his own need for confession.

  * * *

  The feelings begin later that night with maddening vagueness. It is like the beginning of being high but without the euphoria component. Her hands twitch ever so slightly, but her hands sometimes do this when she is nervous. And she can’t tell if they are twitching now—these electroform movements that make her fingers look like jellyfish in a tank—because her brain is making them twitch, because the nerves that control them are dying, or because she is freaking herself the fuck out about something that is not happening, and her body is short-circuiting from the anxiety.

  It must be around midnight now. It may be six in the morning. Time feels subjective, tangential, like the ever-changing color of the sky in Sam’s drawings.

  “I have to go to the ER,” she tells Ryan.

  “Don’t be dramatic,” he tells her.

  “That’s what you say to your wife after you try to kill her.”

  He snorts in the way he did before when he was laughing, then rolls over and falls asleep so fast that Cass can no longer tell if he was laughing or snoring.

  “I need to go to an ER,” she says, now louder.

  “You’re freaking yourself out,” he says. “Stop with the drama. Why would I tell you I wanted to kill you if I was actually going to do it?”

  “You were wasted at the time.”

  “Go,” he says. “By all means. I’m not trying to stop you. I’m just trying to save us money. They’ll keep you there all night, tell you it’s nothing, then charge you a thousand bucks for the trouble.” He closes his eyes, then opens them again. “Besides, if I were going to kill you, I wouldn’t use poison,” he says. “Too easy to find in an autopsy.”

  Cass is perturbed, not comforted by this statement. He has given this too much thought—both the method and the alibi. And the more he tries to quell her fears, the more he sounds guilty.

  Now, the physical sensations are growing more certain. The brown medallions on her sheets—sheets she usually finds soothing—are making her dizzy. The dim light coming from the hall is harsh to the point of blinding. Nausea has taken up residence in her throat and stomach. She crosses the room and walks down the stairs, clutching the railing. She opens her bag and rummages through. Her keys and her wallet are missing.

  “Where is my wallet?” she calls out.

  But all she hears now is the sound of his breathing. How can she hear it downstairs? Is this a hallucination?

  By morning—it must be five by now—Cass is throwing up in the toilet. The feelings are more specific: overwhelming nausea, nausea that drags her to the ground as though a magnet at the center of the earth is drawing the iron in her blood to be its companion. Vomit that starts as chunks of food, recognizable items. The leafy green remnants of lettuce. A pasty white mass of chicken. Followed by a pinkish-brownish substance that looks like an internal organ. She is hunched now on the floor, throwing up on the cold tiles. She tries to rise from the ground and throws up into the bathtub. The vomit is followed by a pain that emanates from her center. Burning in the throat. Dizziness that won’t be quelled by stillness. Nausea that does not lessen after she vomits. Pain that has no onset and no end. Pain that has no locus. Pain that is not something she feels but rather something that controls her. She is the pain’s puppet. Pain is her God, her master, and her organs are its disciples.

  “I need help,” she tells Ryan. The irony of this statement is not lost on her, its inconvenient object. But there is no one else to tell. She doesn’t want to call Nora with this crisis. Her family is over three hundred miles away. Her friends are scattered across the country.

  The rest of the day proceeds in flashes, moments out of order—or at least, that is how she remembers it, or remembers remembering it, or reminds herself to remember it later. Time is moving up and down, backward and forward, around and behind her. Time is marked, not by moments but by sounds and sensations, not like beads on a necklace after the clasp has broken but like beads in a tower, piling up, then scattering. It is unlike anything she has known. It defies description, like the time she smoked pot in college with the girl who used a briefcase as a backpack who told her she had “the good shit” from “the gold coast” and promised “it will just relax you” and the two of them ended up seven hours later, in adjacent beds in University Health Services, trying to get the nurse to understand that the athletes in the next room, icing their swollen ankles were, in fact, the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Needless to say, after this, she swore off marijuana forever.

  Now they are riding bicycles together as a family on the path that hugs the bay with all the happy people. The trees move past them in a haze of green and golden flickers. The wind sifts through their hair like a thousand tiny fingers. The sunshine is warm on their shoulders. Every shoulder feels this sunshine. The raindrops that fell on the roof last night. Everyone in this family heard these raindrops. Everyone in this family is connected by these memories and the feelings that follow. Cass cannot tell if she is happy or high or dizzy. Everything is blurry. Everyone is dizzy. Everything is dizzy and everyone is blurry.

  Now she feels clear and light again as they round the bend of the bay, as they slow down and park their bikes in a clump of spokes and metal. They are dashing through the woods like a litter of puppies, a group linked by one soul, bound by a psychic connection, in other words, a family. As they frolic in the park, Cass stomachs a new conviction. Ryan has staged this winning performance for public consumption, as an alibi, a witnessed family portrait, with scads of people to view his upstanding citizen act, the doting husband and father. And still, even as she clocks this version of the day’s events, she is equally unsure if they have left the house yet, if any of this has occurred on Casco Bay or in a hallucination.

  It is nearing noon, and Cass needs a second opinion. The kids are watching a movie in her bedroom. The sounds of canned joy from a cartoon punctuate the silence. The kids are safe and settled for now, and she needs another person, both to provide a reality check, to dispel or validate her symptoms, and, if the latter, to help her get out of the house intact with all the children.r />
  She fumbles for her phone and calls the most recent number.

  “Even if it were a joke,” says Nora, “nothing about this is normal. And given the way you sound right now, I think you should call the cops, and an ambulance.”

  “Nora, I need your help,” she says. Her voice is distant, foreign. “I need you to come and watch the kids while I go to the hospital.”

  * * *

  It’s later again. Minutes have passed or hours. Cass is standing on the stairs, confronting her husband. But she’s not just accusing him of fucking someone. She’s accusing him of attempted murder.

  “You’re not just a cheater. You’re a killer,” she says.

  Does she say this or imagine it?

  “I’m done living with you,” he says. “Done living with your sickness.”

  He pauses, unsure where to go, walks into their bedroom, then turns and sprints upstairs. Heavy objects fall to the ground as he rummages through a closet—a basketball, a suitcase, golf clubs. He hurries back, carrying a large gray box, and pauses in the bedroom, as though weighing his options; then he seems to make a decision and marches down the stairs and out the front door with the kids trailing behind him. Shoes are shoved on. Jacket grabbed. The coat hook nearly dislodges. He bursts out the front door and heads to the car, scored by the children’s crying.

  “I’m sorry,” he says as he starts the car. “Your mother is not well.” He has the panicked look of a man jumping off a capsized boat, pity for those he leaves behind and terror for himself. Cass is struck by the most incongruous memory at this moment. Ryan is underwater, hair floating above him like a halo. He is deep-sea diving with sharks, weaving between pink and orange fish, mermaids in the shadows.

  Time accelerates again as Ryan turns the ignition. He yanks his wedding ring off his hand and throws it across the driveway. The spectacle is incongruous in the quiet town of Cumberland. The car lurches forward across the driveway, and the kids follow it up the hill until it turns the corner. Cass crouches to the ground and weeds Ryan’s wedding band out of the grass. It is one task she can complete in a world that defies comprehension.

  She unclasps the necklace on her neck, takes the wedding band that she is still clutching, and laces it onto the chain next to her heart-shaped locket. The ring lands just outside the heart, like a ring around a planet, just like any other fool, both trapped and protected.

  She sits and tries to soothe the kids and regain composure.

  “You are safe,” she tells the kids. “It’s going to be all right now.” She wants them to believe this. Would that she could also.

  Part II

  ELEVEN

  The hospital is blue, blue in every direction. The color is adding to Cass’s sense that she is swimming against a current. The night has not brought clarity to the prior day’s confusion. The uncertain feelings in her head have grown more certain. She is wholly overcome by a feeling that defies description. Colors in the waiting room have the deepest saturation. The blue is the blue of nightmares, a photograph submitted to the strongest filter. The beige of the walls is the brown of mud. The sickly green stripe on the walls is the uniform color painted in hospitals around the world, as though to immortalize the color of bile in the patients. Sounds are loud and then very soft, muffled and then echoic.

  Time has totally changed its ways. It no longer moves in predictable chunks, marked by seconds and minutes, but unpredictably, like a child who is walking a long distance, sometimes exhausted, sometimes energetic. People’s faces morph without rhyme or reason, their smiles curling up in the corners, their eyes bulging as they move from the periphery into sharp focus. All these things amount to a vaguely surreal world, as though its contents—human beings, nature, and inanimate objects—have changed their genetic makeup like a frog with a mutation, too subtle to notice at first until the webbing reveals a fifth finger. At the moment, the metal handrails of the stretcher parked in the corner appear to be respiring while the man asleep on top seems to have lost the same power.

  Adding to these bizarre qualities is the way they defy description. When the things of the world change the way they impact the senses, and the senses themselves seem to be broken or altered in their essence, perception changes meaning, not only the things that Cass sees but the notion that she is perceiving. It feels more like she is the witness of someone else’s perceptions, a fiber in the optic nerve of a much larger being. It is as though a circuit has shorted in the brain’s translation system, connecting nerves in the eyes and hands, and the nerves in the brain to which they report their observations. The glitch reveals her tininess, her relative insignificance, and also a glimpse at her role in a much larger system. It all amounts to the sense that Cass is not Cass anymore, that her senses are not her senses, that her soul has vacated her body as though evacuating a smoking building.

  “State your name and date of birth.”

  Cass Phillips Connor.

  “Your address, please?”

  This is harder. She states it in reverse or hears it backward while stating it correctly. Hard to tell the difference.

  “Do you know what year it is?”

  She does, and she declares it. “Can we move past the small talk?” she says. “My husband tried to poison me. I need you to test my blood before it leaves my system.”

  The nurse who is asking the questions turns and looks to a different nurse who is sitting at a computer. They exchange a loaded look, a look that means something specific. Cass assumes it is disdain for her tone, or the clothes she is wearing—leggings, and the fraying oxford shirt that she wears on the weekends, a shirt that once belonged to her husband. It occurs to her that her style of dress, typical of the busy working mothers in Cumberland, may not extend past county lines and that she looks, to these nurses, decidedly disheveled.

  “How do you know he tried to poison you?” asks the nurse. This is the one sitting at the computer.

  “He told me,” Cass says. She nods and raises her eyebrows, as though to say gotcha.

  “Why would he tell you what he was going to do, if he was trying to kill ya?”

  “Apparently, homicidal people all have a moment where they state their intention. It’s called having a plan. That’s why ERs and shrinks are required to ask a patient if they intend to hurt themselves or another person. Turns out it’s a pretty good indication. So part of it was probably that he wanted to brag. Liars love to broadcast. Or he thought I’d soon be dead and wouldn’t live to tell it. Like he said, he already had an alibi: to make it look like a suicide and convince people that I was crazy. Also, he was drunk at the time. And, as the saying goes, there are three things that never lie: drunk people, children, and leggings.” She laughs at her joke, waits for the nurses to share their appreciation.

  “Why would he think you’re crazy?” asks the nurse sitting at the computer.

  “Oh, he doesn’t really. He just says that to kick up dust when I accuse him of some fucked-up thing he’s done in order to throw me off the scent and win an argument. His first defense is turning the tables. He always says that. You know that saying: deny, deny, deny. He takes it a step further: deny, deny, deny, then shift the blame to the accuser.”

  “Gotcha,” says the nurse sitting at the computer.

  “How would he convince people?” says the one asking questions.

  “Excuse me?” says Cass.

  “You said he was going to convince people you were crazy. How would he do that?” she says.

  “Oh, easily,” says Cass.

  “Easily?” says the nurse.

  “By acting like I’m paranoid every time I clue into some new lie, every time I discover some new underlying connection.”

  “I see,” says the other nurse. They exchange another look. The look is no longer suggestive. It has become more certain. But Cass just thinks they are a little thick and confused by the situation. She does not see this connection until they have asked her to stand and follow them out of triage, to walk down a long bl
ank hall to a room that is near the waiting area, but not in it, until she hears the door of this room close and lock behind her, until she is seated in a chair in a row of seats in pinkish-brown pleather. A receptionist sits behind a glass window, her long gray hair in a ponytail that falls on either side of her neck. The sound of ranting pierces the quiet, occasionally growing so loud as to vibrate the glass partition.

  “Where are we?” Cass asks.

  “You’re in Mercy Hospital in Portland, Maine.”

  “Yes, I know that,” Cass says. “But where are we inside it?”

  “You’re in the psych ward of Mercy Hospital. You called 9-1-1, and an ambulance brought you here. We’re just going to do a quick evaluation.”

  “But I just went through triage,” she says. “I came here voluntarily. I need you to test my blood for poison,” she continues. “I need to get proof of my husband’s crime, and, depending on the amount, I probably need to get it out of my system.”

  “Right,” says the nurse. “We will do that if we feel it is merited, but first you’re going to go through a psychiatric evaluation.”

  There is a new nurse now, a man wearing a white jacket. “Don’t worry, we’re going to draw your blood, but first we’re going to ask you a few questions. Please give us your belongings and cell phone, and we’ll return these to you when we determine it’s safe to do so.”

  Cass looks down at her bag, the cell phone she is clutching. This is not good. Not good what is happening. She leans down and releases her bag. She does this slowly. This is an important maneuver, she knows, in which there is the possibility for terrible misunderstanding. Now she must release her phone, her access to the world she knows, to someone who can vouch for her, to state the facts of a sensible world, access to her children. Before she must release her phone, she sends an SOS to Nora.