Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  “You’re angry,” the hag said.

  It was like a seizure, something that swept over me unopposed and turned my blood to venom.

  “Shut up,” I said between clenched teeth. “Just shut up right now or I swear to God I will punch you in the mouth.”

  “Millie, let’s do what we talked about. What number are you at right now?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “If you can do this, it will be easier for me to believe that you are able to manage on your own.”

  Once again I was reminded that Dr. Davis was smarter than I generally gave her credit for. “Eight,” I said.

  “And what word did you assign to eight?”

  It was hard to think through the fog of rage. But I had never been able to resist an urge to prove myself, and I knew she knew it too. “Furious,” I said. “I’m furious.”

  “Can you tell me your ‘up thoughts’? If they are private, you can write them down.”

  Any emotion, good or bad, lasts only a few moments unless we feed it. We are especially good at feeding anger, and Dr. Davis called the bits of kindling we toss onto the fire “anger up thoughts.” We use them without thinking, and it takes practice to pick them out.

  “It’s not that simple,” I said.

  “I know it’s hard to—”

  “I’m doing it!” I snapped. “That was one of them.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I stared at the wall, unable to address the thoughts directly to her, unable to look her in the eye with the full force of my fury, because the better part of me knew she was the only reason I’d made any progress at all.

  “Leave it alone,” I said to the wall, struggling to make words out of the rage-doughnuts I was doing in the parking lot of my mind. “I told you to leave it alone and you ignored me. I’m sick of it. I’m not some poor little lamb with broken legs. Everyone here thinks they know me better than I do. I am not a fucking child.”

  I went on like that for a while; then we sat in silence for half a minute. When a fresh wave of anger hit, it was only a 4. Frustrated, I was able to do some mindfulness exercises, following my breathing in and out of my lungs. My pulse slowed, and my fists loosened. I turned the corners of my mouth up in a slight smile, as I’d been taught, but it felt ridiculous and I stopped.

  “Are you angering down?” she asked.

  “You can’t just verb any noun you want. But yes.”

  “Can you share your ‘down thoughts’?”

  I heaved a sigh and complied. “She didn’t mean it, she doesn’t understand the situation, she means well even if she doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about.”

  I shot her a glance, but if she was hurt, it didn’t show; I imagine therapists get good at that.

  Maybe it was the aftermath of adrenaline; maybe it was a surge of contrition. But something made me blurt out, “Do you know anything about the Arcadia Project?”

  After a moment of incomprehension, Dr. Davis’s face suddenly hardened into an expression I’d never seen. “No,” she said, like a snuffer on a candle. Not the no of ignorance, the no of don’t even think about it.

  “So . . . you have heard of it.”

  “I assume Caryl Vallo came to see you.”

  I blinked. “You know her?” I said instead of, She’s real?

  “Did she claim to be affiliated with the Center?” At the very thought, she seemed to be rapidly approaching anger level six: Incensed.

  “Not at all. She said something about the Department of Mental Health. She didn’t mention this place.”

  Dr. Davis exhaled.

  “Who is she?” I prodded. “Is it some kind of scam?” Icy fingers of disappointment stroked my breastbone at the thought.

  Dr. Davis rubbed the heel of her hand over her forehead. “No, they are state funded, at least in part, they’ve been around for decades, and there has never been any scandal around them that I could find.” She turned doe eyes on me. “But they’ve—they’ve taken people from us in the past, people we could have helped.”

  “Isn’t getting us out of here the general idea?”

  She shook her head, clearly frustrated. “What they offer isn’t healing. They all—they live together; there’s this intense secrecy. The whole operation looks like some sort of cult, but there has never been enough justification to investigate. I can’t be more specific without breaking patient confidentiality, but they’ve interfered before, once with a little girl I had invested a great deal in. I care about you, too, Millie, and I feel you could make real progress here, given enough time.”

  “Speaking of time,” I said, pointing to the clock on the wall. We’d gone ten minutes over, which meant she was keeping someone else waiting. She was paid to say she cared, so I never believed it, but clocks don’t lie, and this one said she was holding on past the point she should have let go. That in and of itself made me feel that I ought to get as far away as possible.

  Dr. Davis sighed and ran her fingers through her hair; it fell back to sleek perfection. “My job is not to tell you what to do,” she said. “My job is to help you find the answers for yourself.”

  “I understand.”

  “Then understand what it costs me to say this: leave the Arcadia Project alone. Please, just leave it be.”

  3

  At eighteen, I drove two thousand miles west toward the siren call of Hollywood, hoping it would drown out the cruel voice in my head that I thought was my father’s. By the time I found out that the cruel voice in my head was my own, my father was two years dead and I’d already let the voice talk me off the roof of Hedrick Hall. Whoops.

  That song had been silent ever since, silent until Caryl brought it back, and I bitterly regretted telling Dr. Davis about her. After a year spent following orders and eating institutional food, a dose of reality was exactly the last thing I needed.

  Don’t get me wrong; neither Davis, dead father, nor demons had the power to talk me out of meeting Caryl Vallo that Tuesday. But they did manage to leach some of the joy out of my first sight of Los Angeles in months.

  “June gloom” was in full effect, draping the sky in silver mink, but it was early enough in the month that a few lacy blooms lingered on the jacaranda trees. After six months of the Leishman Center’s relentless beige, the violet glow of the petals sang through my every nerve. I kept trying to frame them, to set up a shot in my mind, but I’d been too long without a camera, and the trees slipped by too quickly.

  I felt like a tourist in my own city. The cabdriver took the Fourth Street exit off the 10, and I made a nose print on the window trying to see everything at once. Fourth Street ran parallel to the ocean; at every intersection the western horizon flashed by like chrome.

  A little ways south we entered a residential district, where the streets were lined with pastel stucco apartments. The cab pulled in beside the tiny park where Caryl had arranged to meet me. The inviting patch of green sloped down toward Main Street and the sea.

  I got carefully out of the cab, relying on my hands and my right knee to get me to a standing position, then grabbed my cane off the seat and used it to steady me as I went around the back of the cab. I hadn’t tried using my prosthetic legs on anything but hospital tile, and I didn’t trust my balance.

  The driver pulled my suitcase out of the trunk as I wrangled the folded wheelchair onto the street with excruciating awkwardness and opened it back up. He helped me put the suitcase in the chair, I laid my crutches and cane across the arms behind it, and then I tipped the guy hugely before rolling all my earthly possessions in front of me into the park.

  The sea-kissed breeze, the rustle of leaves over my head, the dappled dance of shadows on the grass: it was all enough to make me giddy. Holding on to the wheelchair made me feel more secure, even though I was supporting it and not the other way around.

  Caryl Vallo sat with
her back to me on a bench in the center of the park. She was nondescript to the point of invisibility; she’d have made a fantastic background actor. She was dressed in neutral shades again, this time a lightweight summery pantsuit in dove gray and cream. She looked over her shoulder as I approached, then hesitated for just a moment before rising and coming around the bench to meet me halfway.

  “Miss Roper,” she said, holding out a hand. Gloved, again, to match her blouse. As she stepped into the shade, her hair appeared coffee black.

  “Millie is fine.” I gripped her hand firmly, then lifted it to our eye level. “Why do you wear these?”

  “I am eccentric.”

  “Fair enough.” I let go of her hand, watching her face. As always, she gave away nothing.

  “Please sit,” she said, gesturing back toward the benches.

  I decided to be cooperative, even though I’d already been sitting for an hour and could have sworn I’d told Caryl I preferred standing. I wheeled my stuff over and sat on a different bench from her; something about her discouraged even the most basic of intimacies.

  To repay her for my discomfort, I started the conversation by saying, “Dr. Davis warned me about you.”

  Dr. Davis had also encouraged me to continue dialectical behavior therapy on an outpatient basis, but I could tell by the doe eyes she’d given me on my way out that she wasn’t holding her breath.

  Caryl offered me a thin smile. “Amanda doesn’t know what she is warning you about, and therein lies the source of her distress. She is not a woman who enjoys being left out of the loop.”

  “You know her that well?”

  “I suspect she knows me better than I know her. I am a ­former patient.”

  That brought me up short. “She—didn’t mention that.” I looked Caryl over, reconsidering the gloves. Obsessive-compulsive?

  “Of course she didn’t mention it,” Caryl said. “Whatever else Amanda may be, she is a consummate professional.”

  “And what else may she be?”

  “Uninspired.”

  It’s funny how your own thoughts sound meaner when they come out of someone else’s mouth. “She’s helped me a lot,” I said.

  “Sometimes after a trauma, mediocrity is exactly what we need. But I think you are past that now.”

  I leaned forward. “Look. I’m going to need some kind of reassurance that this is on the level. You obviously weren’t authorized to recruit at the Center.”

  “No, I was not.”

  “It’s all right, I get it. I was a film student. I’ve faked my way into plenty of parties and offices where I didn’t belong. What I’d like to know is how you disappeared out of my room the second I turned my back—while I was standing in the doorway.”

  Caryl met my eyes evenly. Hers were—hazel? No, gray. Or were they reflecting the sky?

  “Magic,” she said.

  I actually entertained the idea for a minute before concluding that this was her flaccid attempt at sarcasm. But that’s a weird side effect of BPD; your perception of truth shifts so often in the normal course of daily life that crazy talk doesn’t automatically trigger your bullshit reflex.

  “Seriously,” I said. “How did you do it?”

  “The details of the technique are proprietary.”

  “Look,” I said. “I know my employment options are basically this or McDonald’s. But I’m going to need more to go on than some vague references to free housing and industry connections. What is the Arcadia Project? According to Google, it’s either an anthology of postmodern pastoral poetry, a platform for the publication of illustrated environmental histories, or a phenomenology of attentional economics.”

  “A what?”

  “I have no idea; I don’t speak grad-student. But when I mentioned your name to Dr. Davis, she advised Extreme Caution.”

  One of Caryl’s brows lifted about a quarter inch. “I had no idea I’d left such an impression,” she said.

  “Why the secrecy? Aren’t we here to talk details? What exactly is it you’d be hiring me to do?”

  Caryl leaned back, resting her elbows on the back of her bench. Not dirt-phobic then, or at least not concerned about her jacket.

  “To begin with, there would be a trial period; you would stay as our guest and assist in some minor errands for the Project.”

  “What sort of errands?”

  “They will vary from day to day. Deliveries, filing, finding things. If it works out, I can offer you a key set production assistant position that DreamWorks has earmarked for one of ours in September.”

  “Key set PA.” My negotiation skills were rusty, but I tried to apply some grease. “You know I was in the running for Best New Director at the Seattle Film Festival, right? The Stone Guest? That was mine.”

  Caryl gave me a mild look, so long I felt my ears go hot. Even before she spoke, a dagger of shame centered itself above my gut, and her next words drove it home.

  “The Arcadia Project is here to reopen a door that you closed,” she said. “But we only open it. You will have to be the one to shoulder your way through it past the crowd of people in your way.”

  “I know how Hollywood works,” I said, shifting my weight. “But let’s not ignore the fact that you said ‘creative positions’ before I packed up everything I own and came out here. I worry what else you’re going to shame me into accepting further down the road.”

  “If you are looking for guarantees,” Caryl said in a bored tone, “you are in the wrong business and quite possibly in the wrong city.” She turned her head to study a smudge on the heel of her glove. “I saw The Stone Guest,” she added, seemingly as an afterthought.

  A flush of a different kind stole over my face. “What did you think?”

  “I trespassed on private property to recruit you.”

  My tongue felt thick, and I looked away, studying the abstract statue at the edge of the park. When I looked back at Caryl, I couldn’t remember what we’d been saying. The human brain holds a grudge about being bounced around in the skull, even after thirteen months.

  “So what’s next?” I bluffed, lobbing the ball into her court.

  She caught it smoothly. “If you are not averse to riding in my car, I will take you to the place where you would be staying, so you can see for yourself if it would be agreeable to you.”

  I considered. Though unsettling, Caryl didn’t seem dangerous, and on a good day when I’m not “splitting” people into angels and demons, I’m actually a pretty excellent judge of character.

  “All right,” I said. “But I may need your help getting my stuff into your car.”

  For someone who apparently made her living placing the mentally ill into part-time jobs, Caryl had a really nice SUV. The smell of sun-warmed leather made me drunk and drowsy. As Caryl drove, I found myself picturing a close tracking shot: Caryl’s gloved hand moving from the steering wheel to settle on my left knee. Since it was fantasy, I still had a left knee.

  I forced myself to sit up straight and look out the passenger-­side window. Dr. Davis and I had talked about my history of using sex as a painkiller. Combine that with the lack of attractive staff at the Leishman Center, and apparently now I would project sexuality onto a stack of cinder blocks.

  It was eerily silent in the car: no radio, no chatter, no GPS. The farther east we drove on the 10, the more uneasy I became. “Where are we going exactly?”

  “The North University Park district, near USC.”

  An instinctive sense of rivalry flared up before I remembered I no longer gave a damn about UCLA. They’d washed their hands of me the moment I’d bloodied up the pavement under Hedrick Hall, and I guess I’d washed my hands of them a few miserable weeks before that.

  We exited the freeway at Hoover, and as someone who had always clung to the Westside, I found myself bemused by our surroundings. It looked as tho
ugh a ghetto and a college town had been shaken together in a bag and dumped out in no particular order. North University Park itself served to further confuse my sense of atmosphere; a handful of residential streets were lined with Victorian-era houses in Easter egg shades, most of them lovingly restored.

  Caryl hung a right just past Adams and drove by several picturesque residences before making another right into the shaded driveway of a sprawling Queen Anne. At the sight of it I had the sudden certainty that I’d just exchanged one loony bin for another.

  4

  Next to its neighbors, this house looked like a cat lady at a PTA meeting. It was painted a deep teal green and crowded by thuggish trees that seemed intent on intimidating if not outright crushing it. At the far right was an emphatic octagonal turret that looked likely to tip over the entire house.

  I took only my cane with me, figuring I could get help with the rest later. We left the car and crunched our way through a mulch of leaves to the front porch, which was adorned with three mismatched rocking chairs and a wicker love seat with traces of mildew on the cushions. Caryl didn’t help me on the porch steps, which were the first real-world stairs I’d encountered in more than a year.

  “I’m completely fine here,” I said to her back. “Don’t mind me.” Since my left knee was prosthetic, it was impossible to climb step-over-step; I had to lead with my right knee. Having carbon feet made it tricky to get a sense of where the steps began and ended, but I got to the top more easily than I’d expected and felt a little smug about it.

  Caryl pulled out a key from an inside pocket of her jacket and gave it a few savage thrusts and twists in the lock.

  I could smell garlic even before the door opened with a muffled moan into a cavernous living area. The hardwood floor was magnificent where it could be seen; rugs were thrown about with no obvious design. Placed with equal randomness were two couches that faced each other, a small trampoline, assorted bookcases, a hydroponic garden, a springy toy horse, and a black grand piano that looked like a cougar had used it as a scratching post. I heard sizzling sounds and muffled conversation from somewhere behind the wall that faced the front door.