The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

by David Stuart MacLean

  I stood up. “My dad should be back any minute with the prescriptions. Thank you for the tea.” Before Mom had even stood up, I was out the door.

  I wasn’t able to sit and hear the most nightmarish days of my life called a blessing. I lit up a cigarette, which unclenched the knot in my chest.

  We left my flat and locked both the main door and the gate, and I put the keys in a special pocket in my messenger bag and zipped it closed. My mom walked to the edge of the roof and said, “Killer view up here. I love it.”

  I pulled out my camera.

  Snap.

  My dad and I sat at the bar of the Taj. Mom had fallen asleep as soon as we got back to the hotel, so Dad had snapped off the TV in the room and asked me if I’d go on a walk with him, one that wouldn’t involve leaving any air-conditioned areas. We headed down to the lobby and then down some stairs, and there was the Taj bar: a perfect replication of an English pub, with gnarled wood on the walls, burgundy leather stools, and Boddingtons and Guinness on tap. There was also a humidor built into the wall with rows and rows of boxes of cigars.

  The immaculate bartender slid two menus in front of us. They were thick paper ones, the homemade kind of paper where you can see the weave, and they didn’t list any prices. Dad ordered two scotches and two cigars. I found out later that my parents had an agreement: one of them would be up to supervise me at all times, and they would sleep in shifts.

  The scotches came, his with two ice cubes, mine without. Dad did the ordering, so I must have liked mine neat. The cigars came, too. The bartender clipped them for us, dressed the edges, then patiently held matches for us as we puffed away. Once both of our tips were red enough, the bartender slipped out of sight.

  I coughed immediately, having made the cigarette smoker’s mistake of taking the cigar smoke into my lungs.

  I sniffed my glass. It smelled like Band-Aids. I dumped the contents of it into my dad’s glass.

  “There’s a new trick for you,” my dad said, clapping me on my back.

  “It’s all the medicines. I don’t think I should drink on them.”

  He dropped his head. “You’re probably right.”

  “The cigar’s nice, though.” The smoke was a different color than my cigarettes, and it came out of us in clouds. The nicotine came on slower than my cigarettes, too. Smoking a cigar was like having someone else wash your hair. You just gave in to the experience. There was a TV hanging from the ceiling in the corner of the bar. The volume was set too high, as if the machine anticipated a much bigger crowd than the two of us. We asked the bartender if he could turn it down, but he told us he wasn’t allowed to. The TV pattered on in rapid-fire British English about a rugby match.

  If my dad and I talked while he drank his double, I don’t remember what we talked about. We sat in the loud and empty bar, smoking enormous cigars and feigning interest in foreign sports. It was the closest thing I’d had to normal in what felt like light-years. At some point I asked where I lived—was it in New Mexico or Ohio?—and we ended up drawing a map of my life on a bar napkin. My dad explained that I took a year off before college to work in the Honda assembly plant in Marysville, Ohio, and then I did college in Asheville, North Carolina, then a few months in Austin, Texas, and then four months backpacking in Sri Lanka and India, then briefly Raleigh, and then Chapel Hill, North Carolina, working low-wage jobs, and then Las Cruces, New Mexico, for graduate school and where I’d been for a year before I left for India again. The map we ended up with looked like one of the newspapers I’d marked up in the asylum, random arrows chasing each other in an attempt to assert some kind of order.

  I was still catching things in my periphery, little cursive somersaults that disappeared as soon as I turned to face them. The world felt staged, some kind of kidproofed version of reality with all the sharp edges sanded off. After the neon explosions of my hallucinations, I felt like I was living in a consolation prize, a cheap imitation. I could almost hear the stagehands breathing behind the chintzy sets that I moved through. I had downed the Oleanz and Ativan pills as soon as we pulled away from the pharmacy, and they made the world feel shrink-wrapped. The Taj bar was a replica of an English pub, inside of a replica of a nizam’s palace. The world felt facile and contrived, and I felt like I’d lost out. I’d seen a world made entirely of colors and connections, with tiny buzzing threads sewing everything together. I had been inside of a firework perpetually exploding, reaching out pyrotechnic tentacles into the outskirts of the universe, and now I was bolted into a world of satellite TV and drinks that smelled like bandages.

  Dad finished his drink and signaled for the bill. It was 4,200 rupees, about $85. Two drinks and two cigars. My rent in Hyderabad was half that much. When my dad tells the story of traveling to India to pick up his amnesiac son from the mental institution, this bill is his punch line. It’s one thing to have your son go crazy in a third-world country, but it’s another thing entirely to spend $85 on two drinks and a couple of cigars.

  We made the return trip up the stairs, the AC wrapping around us. Dad weaved a little. His jet lag combined with two scotches and a cigar was too much for him. We went and sat in two chairs outside by the pool. The air was hot and close, and I smoked cigarettes one after another. I relished the feel of the smoke in my lungs, the nicotine tickle that creeped up my skull. Dad dozed off in the chair, and I walked the lip of the pool, balancing on the edge, one foot in front of the other. The embers from my cigarette fell as I tapped it; they died with tiny sighs on the surface of the water.

  The bed was strange. The comforter stiff and scratchy. The air unfamiliar. None of the shapes of the furniture in the dark matched up with anything I knew. Cold. I was melting in the coldness. My thoughts were pouring out of me and flooding the room. I was the end table. I was the cushioned chair. I was the telephone. I was the television. I had nerve endings sprayed throughout the room, and I wasn’t sure how I could handle all of the data that was pouring in. My thoughts were puddling in the carpet near the doorway and sloshing down the hall. I was filling the entire building with myself and bursting the doors and coursing out into the street. I was the concentric circles of the gathering storm clouds. I was the pavement and the flower in the grass. I was the grass. I was the billboard and the black bird perched on it. I swallowed them both up before launching into the cosmos. The world in four dimensions had infected my synapses. I was drowning in the sensations of the entire universe.

  I was one with everything, and I was terrified.

  I screamed.

  It wasn’t much of a scream. It was enough, though, to wake up my mom and to get my dad sorting through the brown paper envelope with my pills. I was wet with sweat and breathing heavily, my asthmatic’s rasp audible on the ends of each inhale. Mom held me tight and smoothed my hair as she shushed me into longer breaths. Dad slid the Oleanz and the Ativan into my mouth and coaxed a plastic bottle of water into my lips.

  I was twenty-eight years old, a sweating man held intact in a hotel room by his mom and dad.

  The next day we packed our things and left the hotel. Richard had come in the lobby just as we were leaving. He explained that he had been in the area while he shoved a packet of poems at me as my dad pushed past him. Richard really wanted to talk to me, to make sure I was coming back, and to give me some tips to guide my reading of his poems, but my dad held me close and dragged me past the man. It was like being famous.

  Dr. Pat showed up as well. In the parking lot, she asked my parents to donate to her charity. She said that she’d been happy to help with my hospitalization and that she hoped my parents would be just as happy to help out those less fortunate. My dad gruffly said that we had a flight to catch and shoved our bags into the cab.

  This was how I left India, with giant sunglasses covering half my face, huddled against my father, while a stranger who had appeared as God in my hallucinations shoved a ream of poetry under my arm. We were harried and hectic, Mom and Dad were arguing, and I was drugged to a calflike docilit
y.

  My father hated everything he saw in India. He was impatient and brusque with each person he met. It was hot. He hated the food. He hated Richard, who had visited me in the asylum and supplied me with cigarettes. To Dad, even Richard’s poetry was guilty. He needed to reestablish a perimeter of safety to hold his son within. He would protect me this time. He was going to get me out of India. First he got me out of Woodlands, then he got me out of my flat, now he was getting me out of the hotel, and then he’d get me out of the cab, get me out of Hyderabad Begumpet Airport, get me out of the plane, get me out of the Mumbai domestic terminal, and get me out of the Mumbai airport. His trip was a list of places to unshackle me from. As we lifted off the tarmac in Mumbai and up the thirty thousand feet of airspace, heading north, he relaxed. He’d done his job. We were en route to Ohio. He’d saved his son.

  On the plane, my parents kept at it: one watching over me while the other slept. I had the middle seat between them. One of their hands was always on me. Dad had brought a CD and a portable player for me. Apparently, I had hosted a classic country radio show on New Mexico State University’s student station. It was called the Baby Tyger Tri-Hour, and I played a lot of Dolly Parton (when she was still with Porter Wagoner), Merle Haggard, George Jones, Hank Williams, Bob Wills, Buck Owens, Jimmie Rodgers, and Loretta Lynn. My on-air persona was intense. I opened with a fast-talking countrified accent and thanked people for tuning in so darned early in the morning, saying that I knew they had things to do, and I was there to put music on for them to do them things to. I told people I knew they were just cleaning the muck out of their eyes, buttering toast, walking the dog, getting out of the shower . . . and here I got really quiet and told people that if they were getting out of the shower, they should step up right next to their speakers. I told them that they should drop their towels and lean in close, and I would talk them dry, letting the vibrations of their speakers do the work.

  Then I played a Conway Twitty song.

  I was starting to learn who I was. There was a crazy person bellowing and talking nonsense between the songs. It was this person who was supposed to be me. I sat between my parents with my headphones on, listening. I knew that what I was listening to was at least a partial truth about myself. The person who was talking between the songs was me, but me while I was performing a part. The me who was on the plane listening to the me who was barking in the headphones decided that I needed to start acting like that DJ guy. I figured I’d try to understand the actor by performing one of his roles.

  If I ever felt the jarring thwock of returning memories, it was sitting in that plane singing along to Loretta Lynn’s “Rated X.” I found out that I knew all the lyrics to every song that was played, but the lyrics didn’t return in a flash; instead I knew them a half second before I was supposed to sing them.

  The song lyrics I somehow knew, but I was still relying on what others told me about who I was. And the guy coming on in between songs, blathering nonsense about alien gods having scooped up the infant George Jones and touched his throat with their golden antennae—that guy wasn’t helping at all.

  On a stopover in Paris, I was presented to a Delta ticketing agent. There was a question about my return flight to India. Everything was booked from the week before Thanksgiving until mid-January. There were so many Indian students at universities in the United States, and they booked well in advance around the winter break, filling up every available flight.

  Mom unzipped her leatherette datebook and flopped it open on the agent’s desk. January stared me straight in the face. That meant the rest of October, then November, then December, then three weeks of January all in a town I had grown up in and didn’t seem to have spent much time in since. Mom dragged her thumb across a row of boxes toward the end of the month and asked me to choose.

  I reached up to the datebook and started flipping pages.

  “When’s the latest I can go back before the flights are all booked up?” I asked.

  I was told November 18. My mom rubbed my neck and told me that I’d need more time than that.

  “I’m just worried that they’re going to pull my funding if I sit out too long,” I told her. “It’s competitive, right? There’s probably a waiting list, and if I stay in the States until January, they’ll give my money to someone else.”

  My mom told me that I should take this slowly, that I had been through a lot of trauma recently and that I’d need time to heal, that I should think in terms of injury, that I had been severely injured and needed time to let myself knit back together.

  “But if it was the drugs that I was taking for malaria and those drugs are now out of my system, then I’m fine, right? It’s not an injury, more like an allergy.” Only hours before, I had been listening to the person purported to be me rave about how Wanda Jackson was a saint sent from Atlantis to salvage the aquariumed souls of the proletariat. Was it really the medication that sent me off the deep end, or had I always been standing a little too close to the edge?

  What I did know for sure was that I was being handled gently. And I resented it. I fought against it. I was basically daring my mom to tell me that the Lariam was just a theory.

  My mom relented and let me book the flight, with the proviso that I would need to be checked out by doctors and psychiatrists before I could return. Dad was out walking the terminal and was thus prevented from voicing any objections.

  On the flight over, listening to myself blather on the CD, I had figured out that the quickest way back to mental health was to appear sane. If I labored hard enough at the performance of sanity, my insides would eventually come to reflect my exterior. Faking sanity isn’t as hard as it might seem.

  You just have to shut up.

  Our layover in Paris wasn’t long enough for us to leave the airport, so with my dad trailing me, I wandered the duty-free shops. In a drawer in my apartment, I had found a wad of US dollars and stuffed them into my wallet before we left. Now I spent them freely, buying a carton of Gaulouises; a three-CD compendium of early US country music, its liner notes all written in French; and a duty-free hip-pocket-sized bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. I wandered into a café and bought a ham and cheese croissant and a cup of wine. I sat down at a tiny table and listened to the first CD. Milton Brown, Al Dexter, and the Carter Family. I knew none of these songs. I sniffed at the wine. It smelled like cigarettes and grease. I dumped it in the trash. The wood-glue feeling was sluicing back.

  The airport waiting area had fluorescent light, which divided everyone into slices of gray flesh and fabric. The light was like a test tube over each individual. Even when people touched each other, I could tell they weren’t really touching, that there were microns of distance between them. Each person was isolated, and they didn’t even know it. The sadness of a life spent not knowing how alone you were broke open inside me. I picked at the seal of the carton of Gaulouises and searched for a smoking lounge.

  Once we were airborne, my parents immediately went to sleep, despite their earlier efforts to sleep in shifts. They had endured the flight to India once already within the last four days, and before they could even deal with their jet lag, here they were again. The third leg of our trip was from Paris to New York. The inside of the plane was bleached with high-altitude sunshine, and the in-flight movie was too pretty and sad; I couldn’t stomach gorgeous people crying. I unbuckled myself quietly, so as not to wake my parents, and walked to the back of the plane. The floor trembled with each step, and through it I could feel the tens of thousands of feet of pure nothingness between me and the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I got to the back, interrupted the flight attendants, and peeled off a five-dollar bill for a tiny bottle of scotch and a cup of ice cubes. I poured the scotch over the cubes before I remembered that I didn’t like it that way. I stood next to the plastic swoop of the wide rear door. Its half-yard metal bar was exposed, begging to be yanked open. Through its window, the size of a salad plate, I watched the clouds slide underneath us. The ocean looked like skin. I
sniffed the scotch, and I smelled the plastic cup more than the alcohol. I took a careful sip. It had the cold metal taste of a watch battery. The movie must have ended because people were sliding the accordion doors of the bathrooms open and closed. I peeked down the aisle, and it was full of people stretching and shifting from foot to foot, all of them glassy-eyed and staring in my direction. I ducked back to my place next to the door and sipped at my drink, then crunched the ice, fixated by the clouds, the most ephemeral landscape, each moment an entirely new geography.

  Ten minutes later, I chucked my plastic cup into the trash and made my way back to my seat. I was at the very back row when it happened again. The membrane between myself and the outside world dissolved, and I began to leak out. I grabbed an empty seat back to steady myself. My soul was quicksilver and sliding out through my feet. The trembling of the floor, the vibrations of the engine, the sunlight stabbing at me through the windows: I was being shaken loose of my body. Anyone who saw me probably thought I was drunk. And maybe I was. Scotch and Ativan is not a wise combination under any circumstances, and I was fresh from the asylum. I took some deep breaths, closed my eyes, and let the moment pass. The world reassembled itself, pieces falling into place inside me like a Tetris game. I opened my eyes and looked out on a world safe and separate from myself.

  I made my way back to my seat and slid in between my sleeping parents, buckling my lap belt and placing my mother’s hand back on my forearm.

  Our next flight, from New York to Columbus, was a smear of turbulence. I held my dad’s hand as the flight bucked up and down, trying hard not to imagine what was going on outside. The invisible wind currents that were buffeting us were dangerously close to my hallucinations, a world full of hidden forces and embedded codes that directed all of our activity. Somehow, everyone else was at peace with the notion of choppy air.