The Last Time I Died

by Joe Nelms

  Finally, she backs out but I know she’s already dialing nine, one, and preparing to hit that last one upon the slightest provocation.

  He looks at me like I’m fascinating. I haven’t even thought about checking a mirror lately. I must look like a maniac. Maybe that will work for me. Look at me, Doc! Can’t you see the potential? Think big. Think book deal. Arnold versus the Caveman. It’s got a nice ring to it.

  —Hello, Christian.

  —The other night. I almost died. And as I’m fading out, I saw something. Something important.

  I hold up the sketch. The one with the eyes and the Thank you. It shakes in my hand when I hold it up, but only a little. In the time honored style of Arnold Rosen, I get no response.

  —It’s my father. I told you I couldn’t remember anything before I was nine years old. But I did. This is it. My father’s face. From when I was eight. And I know there’s more in there.

  I’m pointing at my head. In there. That’s where there’s more. In the caveman’s melon.

  Rosen glances at the drawing. He takes his sweet time before he answers.

  —I’m sorry. I was told your employment at Hunter & Partners had been terminated.

  —So?

  —So they pay my fee. I had an arrangement with Harry.

  —I’ll pay.

  —I’m five hundred dollars an hour. Up front. And this type of therapy could take years.

  I’d pay five thousand an hour for this. I wonder how fast I can sell my apartment. Maybe I can sign it over to him. It’s still worth something and I think I made my last mortgage payment. I’ll sleep in the park.

  —I could…

  —Christian, my schedule is already full. And honestly, I was doing Harry a favor.

  Dr. Rosen rubs his neck through the brace. His other hand is under his desk and I wonder if he has a gun. I wonder if he bought a gun because of the quality time we spent together. Is that what you did, Arnold Rosen?

  He smiles a weak smile as he lies to me.

  —Really, I’m sorry.

  As a caveman, I know I have the option of crushing his skull with the oversized ceramic brain paperweight on his desk. That’s what cavemen do when they’re provoked. I have a priority, though, and crushing skulls isn’t it. Neither is getting arrested. So, Arnold Rosen, please wallow in all the snarky, interpersonal one-upmanship you’d like. I fold. My focus is singular and if you’re not going to help me, I’ll move on. Like a caveman.

  I pass a couple of cops on my way out. They give me a quick onceover but then hustle along to the office of a respected psychiatrist whose assistant called a few minutes ago.

  25

  *It’s two years and nine months ago.

  I’m blowing out Lisa’s hair.

  She could get it done by her guy, but she says I’m better. I’m not, but I like doing it.

  She’s fresh out of the shower, wrapped in her robe. No carefully applied makeup. No signature perfume. No tailored clothes. Just Lisa. She smells wonderful. Sitting in front of her mirror. Patiently waiting for me to do what I do. We’ve got plenty of time before we have to be anywhere.

  Things have calmed to a dull predictable roar between the two of us, as I believe they do with most legally committed couples. We wake up together and leave for our jobs and come home around the same time (she works as hard as I do) and might even be enjoying the early grooves of what will hopefully soon be a deep rut.

  I’ve got the top three-quarters of the left side of her mane twisted around and clipped up and I’m working on the bottom quarter. You have to get the bottom straight before you move to the top sections. It’s the foundation. This part usually takes the longest but it’s a good warm up for the finesse involved in the top layers. This is my system. You have to get the foundation straight or you’re wasting your time. A wet foundation will get the hair you’ve dried on top of it damp enough that it will start to wave. So do the foundation first. The foundation is everything.

  I’m transforming her.

  Blowing her hair out takes about a half an hour, but while we’re in the thick of it, time is nonexistent. It could be a minute. It could be a day. The sound of the dryer creates a protective cocoon of sound around us, tells the rest of the world to fuck right off. The heat bouncing back reminds me this is where I should be. Right here.

  Occasionally, she’ll look up from the gossip rag she’s reading and smile. I smile back although I’m so focused I’m sure it looks like a smirk.

  I tend to underestimate the range of my facial expressions. What feels like a broad smile to me looks like a wan grimace to its recipient. Pure shock comes off as mild amusement. Anger as grating irritation. I noticed the tendency when I looked at pictures in which I thought I was perhaps smiling too much. I wasn’t. The interpolation to other expressions wasn’t too tough. I checked in my bathroom mirror to confirm the hypothesis—yes, when I made a super happy face I looked sardonic, when I acted depressed I looked bored. That explained a lot. I was twenty-seven when I figured this out and there was already a mass grave of emotional disasters I could easily attribute to my underperforming face. I decided to do nothing about the issue. What could I do, after all? Overact? Fake emotion? To what end? You get what you get and that’s it.

  Lisa’s expressions are the opposite. Easy. Quick. Transparent. Exactly what she’s feeling. When she’s happy, she looks happy. When she’s sad, she looks sad. I won’t go so far as to say she has a simple interior life because she’s too smart for that. She’s complicated and thoughtful, but has an amazing capacity to leave things in the past. While I will let a grudge echo into other emotions long after its causal event has been forgotten, she releases grievances without a second thought, moving on with zero baggage. It’s admirable.

  There was a time when Lisa thought my smirk was adorable.

  I finish with the foundation of her hair and release one of the top quarters from its clip. You have to work fast here, as you don’t want the damp hair corrupting your foundation. You want to build on top of what you have so as to create a seamless configuration. And that means pulling smaller sections tight with your rounded brush, quickly heating them straight and moving on. Confident baby steps.

  Earlier she asked how my day was and I told her it was fine. I told her some of the boring details and she reciprocated with stories equally forgettable. I helped with some mundane negotiation. She started a new line. I had lunch with a potential client. She hired a new assistant. We’re weaving our lives together with the fine threads of everyday existence.

  This blow out should last until at least Friday. After that, it’s done. Disposable. And I’ll start all over again.

  26

  The sun fries my face like an egg.

  It’s four or five in the afternoon. I’ve been passed out for at least twelve hours. My boxers are soaked with urine. My eyes are still puffy from the crying. I sort of remember sobbing loudly. The empty gallon bottle of vodka lies on its side next to my head. Not sure how much I drank and how much spilled out. Probably a lot of both. The self-hypnosis book I stole from the discount bookstore sits on the floor in front of me. Ineffective even with the booze greasing the wheels.

  I strip naked and stick my open mouth under the faucet in the kitchen for a good two minutes. So dehydrated when I woke up. And now I’m bloated. Gluttonous no matter what I’m doing. It physically hurts to hear things like traffic and wind and my own footsteps. I can feel my eardrums. I remind myself to boost some Pedialyte today.

  The hypnosis book is open to chapter five. I remember reading the first two chapters and thinking I understood the basic concepts, but like so many past pursuits, I’m sure I gained just enough knowledge to be dangerous and jumped in head first. I bet I skimmed three and four and read the title of five before I tried the technique on myself.

  My pores are leaking vodka. I’m sweating 100-proof potato water.

  The plan was to force myself to become relaxed enough to tap into those long-lost memories that I now
know are there. Billions of them. I wish I had a power drill to put a nice tight hole in my head to relieve the pressure in there by letting all the missing sights and sounds of my childhood out one by one. I’d put the hole right between my eyes so I could watch them fly free.

  My logic was that if I got drunk fast enough I’d find that sweet spot of inhibition in which this hypnosis nonsense would work. I could trick myself. I know before I pick up the drawings I made last night that I failed.

  They’re garbage. Artistic ramblings hoping to spark memory. No new memories. No new insights. No epiphanies.

  I remember sitting at the table, reading. Focused. Waking up forgotten mental muscles. At one time in my life I was a good student. A great student, in fact. For seven years I managed to channel my unrecognized anger into studying. Graduated college like a rap star finishing a concert. I knew I had killed it and if there was a mic to go along with my diploma I would have slammed it to the ground. Law school was harder but I only took that as a challenge. I was impudent with my intelligence. Willful in my determination.

  Fuck you if you think you can stump me.

  Hell yes I want the extra-credit assignment.

  Move out of my way and let me answer in your place, you simp.

  I remember fondly when my rage was a highly refined tool. There was even a trickle-down effect to my work style.

  Damn right, I’ll work late.

  Sure I thought of that thing you’d need but didn’t realize you would need it so soon.

  Yes, I saw the hesitation in your eyes and moved in before you could.

  At one point, I had a very dangerous mind.

  Last night I succeeded in doing nothing but getting drunk.

  I pick up my earlier drawing of my father and stare at his eyes like he’s going to tell me something. Get yourself together. Keep going. Stop. Fuck you.

  Like I said, I can’t do it alone.

  27

  If you were only three when all that shit went down, you probably turned out okay.

  Who remembers anything from when they were three? Your first thirty-six to forty-eight months on Earth all fade into gauzy clouds of cerebral detritus before you’re ten, more feelings than recollections. Familiar neural connections rather than logical storylines and clear pictures. Fluff.

  When you’re that young, your brain is terribly impressionable. Neuroscientists use the term ‘plastic.’ At that time your cerebral cortex had well over a hundred trillion synapses. Gray matter galore. Far more than you knew what to do with. You probably stored the memories of that one night in pristine HD and surround sound. For a while, anyway. Oh, the machinations of your little three-year-old brain, whirling away as it tried to figure out the whys and wherefores of exactly what happened. Holy cats. The hours you must have wasted replaying the scene.

  But here’s the thing. You spent the following years reducing your overall number of synaptic connections to a more manageable amount. That’s a process called pruning. You cut out the stuff you don’t need to make room for the stuff you do. Your body went to work like a sculptor, taking a good look at the raw material in its workspace and cutting out anything unnecessary. This went on until you were around eight. At that point you had the brain structure you were going to have into adulthood. Yes, you continued to fill it with whatever information was around or was force-fed to you by the public school system and prime time television, but the mechanics of how your brain worked and what activities it was optimized for were firmly established.

  If you were only three, there’s a chance that your brain was smart enough to prune out the memories of your mother’s screams and your father’s rage or the time you were left alone for thirty-two hours. Wiped them out in favor of something like mathematical aptitude or spatial relations or a sense of humor. Things you might actually need.

  If you were only three, then you wouldn’t have gone to the same therapist as your older brother who was already eight and who’s brain was done pruning and was so very active and so very fertile and could understand the physics of how guns worked and how people didn’t once they were shot in the head. No, you would have had a very different experience that didn’t include a low-rent public servant who decided to go into social work when his substitute teacher gig didn’t work out. You would have been watched, of course. Monitored. Conversations would have been had with your foster parents (at least with the half who did the actual fostering) to see if there were any red flags The City should be aware of. But eventually, the questions and the monitoring would stop because if anything drastic were going to manifest, it would have done so already. Or so the thinking went back then.

  Certainly you must have enjoyed the sensations of undying love for your parents no matter how unpredictable or unreliable the two of them were. That’s what three-year-olds do. But that phase of your life ended early enough that it was still possible to reduce those feelings to a vague little sigh of memory or perhaps even wipe them out completely. Not suppress them, mind you. Suppression would have involved a lot more work and years and years of effort and behind-the-scenes psychological strain to make sure nothing ever leaked out. Suppression would have meant other things had to be sacrificed—like empathy or vulnerability or self-esteem or the ability to commit—to make room for all those horrible memories you would be keeping locked so deep in your head. Thankfully, the mental tool of suppression wasn’t in your brain’s skill set yet.

  If you were only three when your mother died a horrible senseless death while you cried and no one stopped it, there’s still a good chance that you grew up to be a relatively healthy thirty-three-year-old living out on the island with an understanding husband who works as a sports agent and is a pretty good father to your young children, one of whom happens to be around three herself right now. Chances are your children have given you a lot to think about as they passed this benchmark (for you) age and you have wondered how they would have reacted to the loss of a parent at the hands of another parent. It must be heartbreaking to picture it happening to your children even though you never seem to think of yourself as damaged goods. But you’re tougher than them, no? Tougher or angrier? You probably don’t know how bad other people think your temper is. Or maybe you do but you figure this is simply the disposition you were born with and there is nothing to be done about it. Could be.

  You’re probably still in touch with your brother thirty years later although it’s a good bet you choose to keep him at arm’s length now that he’s become so morose and self-destructive. That’s called compassion fatigue. You get the same thing when you watch too much cable news coverage of whatever big world disaster happens to catch our collective attention. After a while you want whoever it is that’s afflicted with this ungodly pain to shut the fuck up and move on. Sound familiar? Sorry about the whole Tsunami/Earthquake/Survivor Guilt thing, but I’ve got shit to do.

  In all probability, you’d rather your brother was one of the guys and came out to watch the game with your husband and ate wings and drank beer and acted like the fun uncle you always hoped he’d be. Can’t he keep his compulsive behavior and panic attacks to himself like everyone else? But dollars to donuts you also understand that’s never going to happen, as his experience was quite different than yours and that made him a different person although how he let his marriage fall apart like that you’ll never get.

  Statistically speaking, you’re likely to be relatively healthy mentally and what you know of that one dark night comes only from the police reports you tracked down once you accepted that your father was never going to talk about it no matter how many times you visited him and begged. Oh, and from the newspaper articles that are now conveniently online and so very available for your review after your husband goes to sleep. But that’s really it. All you know is what some strangers wrote down. Because you don’t remember anything. You were only three.

  Lucky you.

  28

  (Well, well, well.)

  The old boy is reaching out for some
much needed hand holding from a loved one. Maturity or foolhardiness? Hard to say for certain, but let’s adopt a positive outlook and call it progress. A nice first step, yes?

  Do attempt to ignore the sullen face our man has adorned himself with as he stares out the window of the train. Surely, it’s more unguarded passion than intentional pose. Most likely, he’s steeling himself for his impending visit with his estranged sibling. Unpleasant doesn’t begin to describe what he anticipates might happen.

  One would hope that his attitude has nothing to do with his resentment of the perfection his sister appears to have attained in her personal life. Based on the landscaping of her front lawn alone, it would be easy to presume a world of personal contentment and happiness punctuated by warm hugs from her children and meaningful winks from her handsome husband. As an outsider you could easily be forgiven for thinking that, as a wife and a mother, she has transcended.

  You wouldn’t be wrong. Superficially, anyway. Ella’s children kiss her hello and goodbye without prodding. Her husband brings home flowers at random intervals, making sure she knows that the motivation behind them is none other than his undying love for the woman he married so long ago. It is a world she has cultivated as carefully as her gardener weeds her rose garden.

  But this is not to say there isn’t a crackling underlying current of anxiety. Pay close attention to her hands when the phone rings. They tense quickly as if any call could be the one that turns her life upside down. Watch her eyes as she scans her own quiet suburban street while she washes the dinner dishes. She’s not enjoying the view. She’s keeping an eye out. Visit her bedroom before the dawn breaks and you’ll find she has no need for an alarm clock. She is awake, thinking thoughts she will never share even with the man sleeping next to her. The condition has worsened over the recent months, although subtly enough that Ella herself is not aware of her own increased level of agita.