Tragedy Plus Time

by Adam Cayton-Holland

  I was encouraged when I came back to the hospital later that day to pick her up. She signed a few pieces of paper and they returned to her a Ziploc freezer bag full of prescriptions that we had taken from her medicine cabinet, a desperate attempt to arm the doctors with as much information as possible when we rushed her to the ER. I took the bag from the clerk before Lydia could.

  “We should probably throw these away, right Lee?”

  She agreed. We tossed them in a trash can in the hallway of the hospital. Her lip was quivering. I hugged her.

  “This happens, Lydia,” I said. “You’re gonna get better.”

  “I know,” she said. “I will.”

  I believed it. I wonder if Lydia did too. Or was she so talented an actress she could just lie in such a moment? Right to my stupid, tear-streaked face.

  We walked home through the neighborhood and I saw her back into her house. We hung out for a few hours, watched a movie, and when I left I made her promise not to do anything rash, to call us if she needed anything, or if she was feeling upset or depressed. Then I said goodbye. It was a long, scary night but she was there the next morning, and the one after that. Then the next few. She started playing the piano again. She started doing more yoga. Started looking for new shrinks, got off the meds. She seemed down but not out. She was trying to get back to being herself. She was funny and caustic. A number of guys had reached out to her to hang out in the wake of her hospital stint. I don’t know if one was related to the other but I encouraged her to go out with them. I wanted to steer her away from that other relationship, which seemed increasingly manipulative and fucked up. I teased her about all the attention she was receiving. She pondered the situation for a moment.

  “Yeah,” she concluded. “I think I’m just strange-enough-looking that pseudointellectuals are proud of themselves for finding someone like me attractive.”

  Her wit was intact. She was still depressed and morbid, but seemingly less so. I texted her every night.

  You okay?

  Yeah. Just sad.

  Sad normal, or sad bad?

  Sad normal. Just want to sleep.

  Sleep normal? Like with no pills?

  Sleep normal. No pills.

  K. You nice.

  You nicer.

  She was doing the best she knew how, trying to focus on things that made her happy. Our cousin Griffin came to visit and she made us all go see The Avengers, Joss Whedon her most current obsession célèbre. As we drove out to a mammoth movie theater in the suburbs, Lydia fangirled the entire way. She had already seen the movie twice and wanted to make sure we knew exactly what we should be looking for as we watched for the first time. She was so quintessentially herself. So geeky and obsessive and normal. There she is, I thought. There’s my little sister. For the first time in a long while I thought she was going to beat this thing.

  Meanwhile the cosmos kept throwing curveballs.

  “What the fuck is wrong with Colorado?” read the text on my phone when I awoke.

  It was from an old friend, a college buddy. Others began pouring in.

  You okay?

  You alive?

  Were you at the premiere?

  I wasn’t. But many others were. Gathered with excitement in a suburban movie theater just like the one where we watched The Avengers at mere days before. But this wasn’t Marvel. This was DC. The Dark Night Rises. On that horrible night in Aurora. You know the story. Some nut job in a long string of Colorado nut jobs attacked the movie theater with guns and smoke bombs and high-caliber weaponry and all the other internet-acquired accoutrement of the modern, twenty-first-century psychopath. It was like some Columbine acid flashback. And the death toll rose to sickening amounts, men, women, and children, all attended to by devastated and shell-shocked emergency services teams. The community was traumatized. It was shocking, and heartbreaking. Obama came out again. His second emergency trip to Colorado that summer.

  The darkness seemed relentless.

  What was happening? Why could we not pull out of this nosedive? The police raiding my house, the murder in the park, the fires, Lydia, now this? When was this going to end? Or at least relent? I needed a break from it all. I needed to not feel like everything was falling apart, like the ground beneath me was crumbling.

  Then I got the news that I had been accepted into the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival as a New Face. And the clouds momentarily lifted.

  NEW FACES

  “In my hand right now I’m holding more filmmaking technology than Orson Welles had when he filmed Citizen Kane.”

  With that Patton Oswalt held up his cell phone for all of us gathered there in that Montreal Hyatt conference room to see: the young comics, the vets, the industry, and anyone else lucky enough to score a ticket to his State of Comedy keynote address.

  “I’m holding the same amount of cinematography, postediting, sound editing, and broadcast capabilities as you have at your TV network,” he said. “In a couple of years, it’s going to be fucking equal. I see what’s fucking coming. This isn’t a threat; this is an offer. We like to create. We’re the ones who love to make shit all the time. You’re the ones who like to discover it and patronize it and support it and nurture it and broadcast it. Just get out of our way when we do it.”

  I felt as if he were speaking directly to me. And I needed to hear it. Right then. Right there.

  My head was already swimming, as any newbie comic at Just For Laughs would be. I had auditioned twice in the previous two years and not been accepted to Montreal. Third time was the charm. One great set in Hollywood had sealed the deal. Twenty “New Faces” from across North America had been selected to come to Montreal, and I was one of them. Congratulations, kid. Welcome to the big leagues. I was on my way to perform for the entire industry as someone anointed by the comedy gods on high, someone worth watching, perhaps even signing! Me! Adam Cayton-Holland! I was a funny, shiny, brand-spanking-new face!

  Gather round ye Hollywood agents and managers and lawyers! There’s fresh fish to be raped!

  Upon landing in Montreal I checked my phone and learned that I had been named one of the Top Twenty-Five Comics to Watch by Esquire. A few hours later an article appeared in Wired in which I had done an interview about what it meant to be selected as a New Face. Arguably the two biggest pieces of press I’d ever gotten, in the course of a few hours of being in Canada! They were clickbait articles deliberately timed to harness the full hype of the festival, but the effect was immediate. Like that I was one of the buzz-worthy new comics. My phone blew up. Friends from all over congratulating me. My manager telling me so-and-so wanted to grab lunch or coffee while we were here in Montreal. I hadn’t even performed yet.

  Lydia texted me every half hour for updates. I called her often. She was the only one I could properly gush to without feeling gauche. She was the only person on the planet as absolutely thrilled as I was. She wanted to experience it vicariously. She was so proud of me. She wasn’t broken or depressed in those exchanges, she was elated. All the conversations we had about comedy, all those day-after breakfasts tagging jokes, all those shows, it felt like it was beginning to pay off. Who knew what this was the start of? We practically squealed.

  The room was packed for my first set at Place des Arts. Capacity. The festival gives each New Face comic three spots, but people really only come out for that first set. Montreal is a buyer’s game: big agencies looking to sign young new talent. That first set becomes the snap judgment that all of the industry makes about you. No one comes to that second or third New Faces showcase. It’s one and done. And I could feel the pressure. It felt like all of Hollywood was watching. But I was ready for it. And I crushed. It was arguably the set of the night. Everyone wanted a piece of me after that. My days quickly filled with meetings, a baptism by fire on the nature of schmoozy LA bullshittery. I soaked it up. Who doesn’t like free meals and being told how great they are? And when I wasn’t doing that I was being added to shows left and right, both by the festiva
l and by friends I had met over the years performing in Denver and around the country.

  Adam, you’re up here?! Want to hop on my show?

  I did. And when I wasn’t performing comedy, I was watching my favorite comics perform. Then partying with them at the lobby bar until dawn. Like I was one of them. The Just for Laughs festival was all that the comedy prophets had foretold. It was head-swelling stuff. A comic and a comedy nerd’s wet dream. My hotel bedside table was filling up with business cards of agents and managers and producers, all of whom asked about the script I had written with the Grawlix, Those Who Can’t. They also kept asking when I was going to “make the move.” I had heard the words “Los Angeles” so many times I was on the verge of typing it instinctually every time I visited a travel website. I had been all about Denver for so long, had climbed to what I figured was the top, it seemed like now was the time to make the leap. My family would understand. My city would understand. Career opportunity and all that. Big fish, little pond. Time to grow into a shark. I was thinking big. Comedy, television, movies, it all seemed possible, right at my fingertips, if only I made the move to sunny Los Angeles!

  Sitting in that Montreal Hyatt conference hall listening to Patton Oswalt tell industry and comics alike that the system as they knew it was dead and gone, I made up my mind that I would not be moving. That speech gut-checked me in the best way possible. I was going to stay the course. I was going to keep making videos with my buddies in the Grawlix. I was going to keep contributing to a flourishing Denver comedy scene that was gaining a national reputation, and I was going to make it on my own terms. The way I wanted to make it. Surrounded by the Magnificent Cayton-Hollands in the city that I loved. Fuck this Hollywood bullshit. That wasn’t me. I was going to keep doing things the only way I knew how, outside the established system.

  I flew back to Denver inspired and determined. I could see my future laid out in front of me. I had a plan.

  How’s that saying go again?

  Want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.

  LOVE YOU ALL

  My mom picked me up at the airport. I was exhausted from Montreal. I had been up all night partying. I’d gotten maybe three hours of sleep. We had breakfast at a diner on Tower Road and I caught her up. She wanted to know everything, all the gossip. I told her all about the festival and let her know that I didn’t want to move to LA, not now, probably not ever. She seemed relieved. She didn’t say anything to that effect, she would never put that pressure on me, but I could feel it; she liked having her kids around her. We made her laugh.

  I asked her how Lydia was doing.

  “You know,” she said. “The same.”

  When I got home my friend Andrew from the Grawlix called. I figured he wanted to hear about Montreal, see if there had been any movement on our Those Who Can’t script. I let it go to voicemail. I’d catch him up later. For now, I needed to nap. But I checked his message before I climbed into bed. His voice sounded agitated, embarrassed. Like he didn’t want to have to tell me what he was about to tell me. Lydia had made a scene at the bar the night before, the shitty vegan restaurant where her boyfriend worked as a DJ and where a bunch of comics liked to hang out. There had been screaming and yelling and they had kicked her out of the place. Andrew apologized for having to be the bearer of this disturbing news but he figured I’d want to know.

  I dialed Lydia up and called her out. She immediately became hysterical. I told her to come over so we could talk in person. She was there in minutes and she broke down on my living room floor, wailing about how she couldn’t stand that I would get a voicemail like that, that people would perceive her as crazy. She found her own behavior pathetic. She said that she was disgusted with herself.

  Litost.

  I picked her up, dusted her off, took her for some waffles at her favorite new place, the only place she had eaten in weeks. Belgian waffles with Nutella. I tried to calm her down the best I could and then I drove her home. I couldn’t do it anymore. Couldn’t cheer her up or be responsible for her right in that moment. I was too tired. I called the family to report her most recent breakdown. I handed off the baton of monitoring to another Magnificent Cayton-Holland and went back home to go to sleep.

  We were all so over it. It was constant vigilance and it was trying. That’s the thing no one tells you about depression. How exhausting it is to those around the person suffering. How all-consuming it is, and how selfish. There’s not a lot of “how are you doing” coming out of someone who is truly depressed. Their gloom is the focus. Their misery is all that gets discussed. And you get sick of it. There’s only so much of someone else’s despair you can take.

  Sorry to hear it, Lee. You’ll get through it. You always do, right?

  The next day we received an e-mail from Lydia at 9:50 a.m.

  “Love you all.”

  That’s it. That was the entire message.

  Anna called me immediately. Did I get that e-mail? I did. It was probably nothing, we agreed. A welcome, chipper departure from somewhere within her seemingly ceaseless depression. Still, I should go check on Lydia, we concluded. She wasn’t answering her phone. My house was the closest. It made sense I would be the one to go.

  I drove over and let myself in with the key Lydia had given me. The dogs were in the backyard. That was odd. Usually when she slept in they’d be up in the bedroom with her, whining to go out. Instead I could hear them barking in the backyard, but the house itself seemed still and silent. Something was wrong. I knew it immediately. And yet I just kept going. I couldn’t stop.

  I made my way up the staircase. The staircase is huge in my memory, steep and dark, with walls that loom. The Haunted Mansion. Finally, I reached the top. I stood there on the landing for a moment. I took a breath. Then I opened her bedroom door.

  She was there, in the bed, perfectly still. A small gun in her hand. A trickle of blood down her blue lips. It wasn’t messy, not what you would expect. It was almost serene. Calm. There lies Lydia, in her final resting place.

  They say you go out of your body at the sight of such trauma. That it’s too much for you to process in your actual skin and bones and so you depart from yourself at that moment and everything seems fake, not real.

  That didn’t happen to me. I felt everything. A battering ram slammed into my chest. I felt a force unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. I screamed. I fell to the floor. I still shake when I think about it. It wasn’t out-of-body. It was visceral, tangible. That I can remember, can still feel, can never forget.

  Then immediately after, it all became false. Like a switch was flipped. Like it wasn’t even her anymore. Or me. That’s when I went out of my body. I drifted above myself and watched, as though I were witnessing a scene from a play or a movie. Harold and Maude. A hoax.

  This blood is just makeup! This has to be makeup. This gun in her hand—this fucking gun in her hand?! This is a prop. We hate guns. Our parents wouldn’t even let us have water guns because they were too violent. We had animal-shaped toys in the bathtub that would squirt water out their mouths for Christ’s sake! Lydia doesn’t have a gun! This has to be a prop. What an elaborate scene you’ve created, dark little Lee! You do fucked-up more beautifully than anyone ever did fucked-up. You’re an Edward Gorey character. L is for Lydia who Lied about Living.

  I couldn’t escape this morbid playact. I was trapped in this fucked-up scene, one of two characters: one living, one deceased. I can see myself calling Anna and weeping what happened to her over the phone. And I can see myself trying to process as I stayed on the line while Anna sobbed into her office phone and called the police. I can see me checking Lydia’s pulse. And screaming because there’s no pulse. I rifled through her closet and I found a pillowcase. I covered her face. I had to cover her face. I shut the door and went downstairs. I let the dogs in the house and I sat on the couch, like an automaton. The dogs licked my face, nervously, they didn’t know what was happening. Their kisses snapped me out of it. Another flipped
switch. I came rushing back to reality, back to feeling every painful nanosecond. I was no longer a character. I was me again. This was no hoax. No play. This was fucking happening.

  I felt like I was losing my mind.

  I wailed so loudly the dogs started howling. I began hyperventilating. I couldn’t breathe. It was all happening so fast. There was a pounding on the door and police and firefighters and EMTs spilled in. I just sat there silently, pointed them upstairs. Then Anna was there, devastated. My mother arrived soon after, driven by our family friends Joel and Debbie, the same friends who kept me and Lydia when Wade died and we were too young to go to his funeral. They were there for us again. In this our worst hour. My mother looked so scared. So lost. Like a kid. That’s the only way to describe the look on her face: uncomprehending, like a terrified child. Like we must have looked all those times growing up when we were so devastated by life.

  Is this the world? This can’t be the world. Please tell me this is not the world!

  Those moments were child’s play compared to this.

  Neighbors began milling around Lydia’s house, wondering what was going on. We retreated inside. We couldn’t talk about it, not now. A detective showed up and headed up the staircase. After a while he came back down and confirmed what we already knew. Yes. She is actually dead. Looks like a suicide. They’ll do an investigation of course, but . . . he didn’t even finish his sentence. Just handed us his card and left. I started hyperventilating again. Everyone said I was in shock. My family wanted me to go to the hospital, to hop in the ambulance with the EMTs, but I managed to calm my breathing. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was staying right where I was, for every single step of this. One by one people started leaving. There would be paperwork and investigations and whatever else they told us but for now, they would leave us alone. In our grief. In our destroyed, shitty new world.