by Reiss, CD
It did smell nice.
And the leather seat had a way of hugging me.
He got in, and the dashboard lit up like a woman recognizing a lover. “Comfortable?”
“Sure?”
“The seats adjust.” He showed me the buttons. “You can heat them up too. And this baby goes fast.”
“There’s traffic all the way to Hoboken.”
The engine roared when he started it, and he winked at me because he obviously didn’t give a shit about traffic.
* * *
What do you look like?
The class was a quick introduction. Deep work came later in the process. Veterans sat at long wooden tables with unpainted white masks in front of them. I was a vet, so I got to paint my own. I wasn’t much of an artist, and I didn’t want to paint one, but Jenn had teased me into it.
“Therapists are the absolute worst at getting therapy,” she’d said.
“Fine.”
“Just let it flow. Don’t think too much about it. If y’all stay around a few sessions, you’ll make a really nice one at the end. It’s cathartic.”
“Well, if you’re promising catharsis.”
* * *
Caden’s mask was pretty obvious—initially.
He painted the skin tone the same as his own. He laughed with me when he threatened to turn it into a clown mask and wear it home. He poked gentle fun at the hearts I put on the cheeks of mine; one was pink, and one was blue. With a whisper in my ear, he asked which heart was his and which was the other guy’s.
“You’re the same person, remember?” I whispered back.
For a minute, he worked on the eyebrows. I didn’t see his expression or what he was going through in that time, but something changed while I wasn’t looking.
He dunked his brush in the red paint and drew a fine, straight line down the center of his mask.
I watched through my peripheral vision. He was coping with the disassociation. Obviously.
Then he stopped painting altogether.
I nudged him with my elbow. “You’re either having an epiphany, or you hate painting.”
“I was thinking about the rose petals.”
“The rose petals?” I pretended to pay attention to my work, but his voice had gone a touch deeper, and I listened to that change with my whole heart.
“In Iraq, I promised you a bed of rose petals.”
I smiled so hard I could barely move my lips around words. “I believe you did scatter rose petals all over your bed that one time.”
He held up his red-tipped brush. “I couldn’t find this color.”
“They were beautiful. Everything I wanted.”
He filled in the curves of the line as if precision was important, grabbing my hand under the table and tightening his grip as if he were falling from a precipice and our connection was the only thing saving him from certain death. “When we met, I thought I didn’t have anything of value to give you. You were perfect already.”
“Are you all right?”
“I want everything to be right for you.” He wasn’t whispering. There was nothing soft about his tone, but his quiet words were for me alone. I’d forgotten what Caden sounded like inside the split, but as soon as I heard that voice, I remembered. “You smell like apples. Roses were wrong.”
“Caden, look at me.”
When he turned to dip his brush, I caught his gaze and held it.
He was confident. Arrogant. As sure as shit that he had a place in the world. And under that was the man who needed me to be that place. He was fully himself, but I didn’t know for how long.
“Next time,” he said, “I’m going to get it right. It’s going to be apple blossoms. If I could…” He smiled and shook his head at a silly thought he wanted to dismiss but couldn’t. A contradiction in keeping with the whole man I married. “If I could write my love in the sky, it wouldn’t be big enough. I’d run out of room. I’d fall out of the air trying to say it all.”
“We’re going to beat this,” I said.
“You’re inhumanly strong. If I have to go through this, there’s no one I’d rather do it with. But there’s no one I’d wish it on less.” He swallowed, closed his eyes, taking a long blink. When he opened them, he was the man I used to call Damon. He put his brush on the towel and pushed the mask away. “Let’s open up the car.”
* * *
The New Jersey Turnpike was a thick, gray ribbon in a lifeless landscape. Saturday traffic was nothing to speak of compared to the city, and we were at the on-ramp in twenty minutes.
“Where are we going?” I asked for the third time.
“Driving,” he answered with manic cheer, clicking his signal to get into the left lane.
Traffic was moving at the speed limit, more or less, but as soon as he was in the fast lane, he gunned it. I gripped the sides of my seat. He tailgated the car in front of us until it moved.
“Slow down!”
“What’s the point of a Ferrari if you can’t drive fast?”
“That’s faulty logic!” I had to yell over the roar of the engine.
“It’s fine. Just enjoy it.” He whipped to the right to pass, coming so close I cringed.
“Damon!” I shouted.
“Not my name anymore.”
He looked at me. He was Damon. I was relieved a third personality hadn’t shown up, but my husband didn’t drive like this. He certainly didn’t take his eyes off the road to look at me at ninety mph.
“Are you trying to kill yourself?”
Eyes back on the road, he wove between cars to go five miles faster. “Nope. I’m trying to live.”
I put my left hand against the dash as if that would stop me from dying in a crash. “So you think—”
He hit the gas. The car easily accelerated to one-ten. “There’s nothing fun about this?” He whipped his head around to look over his shoulder and cut right again. “Come on. Let’s unstuff this shirt.”
Glancing at me, then my ring, he smiled. He slammed on the gas and cut left to avoid a Toyota, climbing to one-thirty. Traffic was getting heavier. What was going on in this man’s mind? Who was he trying to kill, and who did I have to convince to stop?
Maybe both of them.
“You’re going to kill someone!” I said to Damon. “And you’re going to kill me!” I added for Caden.
The response was immediate.
He tapped the brakes.
One-twenty.
Swerved to avoid someone.
One hundred.
Slowed down again to pull into the right lane as the speedometer dropped to eighty-five.
Panting like a runner after a sprint, I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself, focusing on my breath. The adrenaline flowed away, leaving me to release the tension in my shoulders and legs.
The car stopped. I opened my eyes. We were at a light at an off-ramp, then pulling into a gas station. He put the car in park.
“What. The hell. Was that?”
“That was me trying to live while I could.”
I didn’t ask what he meant. I was tired of asking how he was and what he was feeling.
“I’m sorry.” He played with my emerald, brushing my hand in that casual way only he could.
“Speed limit on the way home, okay?”
“Sure.”
But he didn’t start the car. He just pushed the ring side to side. “You should take this off.”
“Why?”
Our eyes met over the distance of the car, and it was miles and miles connected by the glass-blue ceiling of the sky.
“I can’t hold it anymore. I’m not strong enough. He’s coming back, and he’s pissed.”
* * *
I drove home. The man next to me was more or less silent. His fingers brushed mine gently, carelessly, doing nothing but feeling the nerve endings of our joined skin vibrate together.
Dissociative disorders had patterns but no lines, and Caden’s was as blurry as they got. His secondary personality was st
ill a heteronormative cisgender male of the same race, age, and nationality. The amnesia extended to events before his awakening but not general, objective knowledge. And the secondary, Damon, stuck around.
But just as Caden had felt himself disintegrating before Damon showed up, I could see it happening again.
He walked home in silence and up the stairs listlessly, like a man with the flu, and dropped himself on the bed with his arms out. I pulled off his shoes, his socks, unbuttoned his pants.
“Grey,” he said at the ceiling.
“Yes?”
He didn’t say anything right away. I slid off his pants, revealing a half-mast erection.
“I thought I loved you, back in the darkness.”
I came around the bed, intending to swing his legs around, but in addition to being naked, he was fully erect now, and I was only human. He looked like the man I loved. He smelled like him. Spoke with the same voice. He was a part of him, and the fact was, I liked him.
I may have even loved him.
“Really?” I got behind him and pulled his shirt over his head.
“But I was wrong,” he said to the ceiling. “I didn’t love you then.” He picked his head up so he could see me. “I love you now.”
Gathering my shirt at the hem, I twisted it off and removed my bra. “I know.”
He watched me lower my pants until I stood before him naked.
“And I want you to know that I love you.” I took the emerald off my finger and put it into the night table drawer. I leaned over him and took his cock in my fist. A perfect glistening drop sat on the tip. I licked it off. “I love you.”
I licked circles around his head and under it. I took the length of him down my throat, and he groaned, his fingers gently threaded through my hair. I sucked him on my way out, leaving him slick enough for my hand to slide over. I worked him with my mouth and my hands until I felt a pulse from the base of his cock against my bottom lip, and I swallowed every drop of him.
I crawled over him and kissed his lips.
“If you’re ever in the darkness again,” I said, “don’t ever doubt that I love you.”
Even if I make you stay there.
Part Two
Wartime
Chapter Eight
caden
I could have made a list of things about this shithole, drawn up a few examples of what it was like. I wasn’t much of a metaphor guy, but I could have made some about it. It was like being in wet concrete but also glue. It was like having my thoughts popped apart at the joints. It was like a chest spreader for the consciousness used so it could be filled with crude oil.
But the worst of the worst was being unable to sense her.
When we were separated by a few thousand miles, I could place her in my mind. Call up her scent or her voice. But after I let the Thing take over, I was cut off in a way I couldn’t bear.
I pushed, but I could only move him when he was weak or with his permission.
I caused him pain, but I couldn’t get through.
There wasn’t a depressive bone in my body, but now that my bones weren’t my own, it was getting to me. Darkness pressed around me. It wasn’t black. Not the absence of light. Darkness was the absence of anything at all. You’d have thought things and sounds and lights would press up against you, but no. Not like this. This emptiness had its own mass and density. It pushed me away and pulled me into it at the same time. Like being crushed under a black hole’s gravity, I didn’t know if it would compress me into a white dwarf or blow me into a million stars.
Greyson’s voice sometimes came through the nothingness. Not a word or even a syllable. I couldn’t detect a mood or tone. Vowels skipped and repeated. Letter sets ran backward and over each other, but it was her. I clung to it when I heard it, pointed my attention at it and let it take me into its meaningless sense, twist, change, swirl around in a space that didn’t exist into the cries of my mother in the dark.
That time.
When I’d hidden her in the bottle room with me.
The floor was sticky and warm.
The smell of copper was everywhere.
And it was my fault.
* * *
Would you rather be at the top of the Washington Monument with no way down or at the bottom of a narrow hundred-foot hole with no way up?
What if it was raining in DC and the marble was slippery?
What if someone was shoveling dirt into the hole?
* * *
Darkness and I had a history. The bottle room was just another part of the house. I’d followed Dad down there to get wine or wandered in while Mom or Clarita, the nanny, did the laundry. The door looked heavy, but it wasn’t. A five-year-old could swing it shut really easily. The light switch was on the outside, and when Clarita shut it off to go upstairs, the darkness had a physical thickness that pushed all the oxygen to the edges of the room. It was hard to breathe deeply enough to scream. But I did, and Clarita came right away to wipe my tears. She showed me how to open the door from the inside. As long as it wasn’t locked, I had control.
I wasn’t alone in the dark for more than two minutes. The story told over dinner was charming and forgettable. After that, I’d tested myself by going in there and shutting the light and the door to see how long I could last cut off from everything.
Pretty long, as it turned out.
I went to med school right out of college to prove to my father that I was smart enough, careful enough, precise enough to do what he did.
I joined the army to prove to him that I loved him even though he’d fallen from the North Tower and disintegrated on impact.
I deployed a second time to prove to my mother that I could last in a dark room as long as I had to even though she’d jumped with him.
When I climbed into that medevac, it was at the end of a series of choices meant to prove to Greyson I was worthy of her. I could go over the wire into a war zone. I was at least as much of a soldier as Ronin, her old fuck who she kept as a friend and who looked at her with more than friendship on his mind.
After eight days in surgery with her watching my mental state like a mother hawk, I’d taken her to bed. I knew with the same conviction that the sun rose and set that I loved her. But the bond was new, and I couldn’t measure the length of the tether that tied us.
When I walked out to the airfield, the Blackhawk’s rotors thupped in the night. Once I was up, they wouldn’t go back just because I didn’t belong there.
The pilot shouted code and swung back to look at me. “You the doc?”
“Yes.” I put on the headphones.
The bay doors were open as we took off into the star-splashed sky. Shit. A person could fall out and drop into the darkness at the acceleration of gravity.
“Convoy hit an IED,” the copilot said into my headset. “Full bird from the CSH is down. Medics won’t move him without a field surgeon.”
Spine injury probably.
“I’m not a 62B,” I said.
The pilot let out a cuss of frustration, and the copilot spun around to face me. Taunting them kept me from imagining the minutes I’d spend falling before I disintegrated.
“We can’t go back!”
“I’m a GS.” I smiled, coding that I was overqualified, not underqualified. “61J.”
“Shit.”
“Shiiiit,” the pilot agreed.
“You better take care of yourself, buddy. You don’t belong outside the wire.”
I gave him a thumbs-up. If I survived the helicopter ride, I had this. Save the colonel. Easy. I’d saved dozens of men. One more in slightly more inconvenient circumstances wouldn’t be difficult.
* * *
If I could just get out of the house, Mom and Dad would be happy.
I was sure of it.
If I went to school far away, my parents would stop fighting. I saw them kissing and laughing all the time. At least, when they didn’t know I was there. They had a sweet banter full of dumb jokes, puns, and shared expe
rience.
Mom kept telling me I was a good kid, but it was hard to believe that when I couldn’t do anything right. I never lined up my shoes in front. I left crumbs on the counter. I didn’t close the milk when I put it away. Little things. Simple things. Anyone should have been able to do this stuff, but I forgot.
My dad was overworked. In the 1980s, there weren’t many heart surgeons who could do what every second-year med student knew how to do in 2003. People came from all over the country for bypasses under the great Dr. St. John, and he didn’t refuse anyone. He was tall, six foot three, with slicked back hair that tucked neatly into a surgeon’s cap, smooth cheeks he shaved twice a day, and thin fingers you wouldn’t think could land a punch.
When he’d point at something like the crumbs on the counter, we had a fifty-fifty chance of getting through to dinner. I’d closed the milk and put it away. Tightly wrapped the bag inside the cookie box, tabbed the slot, and put it exactly where it went. But I’d forgotten about the crumbs. It was always something. There seemed to be a hundred things to remember, and I always forgot one. Sometimes I was the one who discovered the unwrapped bag or the open milk, but the crumbs were hard to hide.
Mom would rush over and clean them, apologizing for being such a slob when she ate cookies. Mom never ate cookies. She bought them for me even though I left crumbs on the counter.
That’s love.
I swear, she’d have eaten dinner for me if she thought she could take the blame for not putting my napkin on my lap or taking more food than I could finish.
Once, I heard them talking about how small I was. I was eight, and he was worried the kids at school would rough me up for my smart mouth. I think, actually, I wasn’t big enough for him to rough up, and he was waiting.
But when the milk was open, he’d slap it on the counter. If it was full enough, it splashed everywhere. “How hard is it—?”
“Oh, that was me.” She snapped a towel off the roll.
“—to remember—” He slapped it again. More splashing.
