Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  You get the idea. I said please a lot.

  I begged, I’m ashamed to say.

  I cried, and I begged.

  AND THEN …

  AND THEN:

  Dad literally put his fingers in his ears, like he was a kid and I was saying something he didn’t want to hear. “Don’t, Cass. Don’t make this harder,” he said.

  “I’m not making this hard,” I said, through my sobs. “You’re making this hard.”

  Dad turned to the two guys. “Come on, let’s get this over with,” he said. He was crying. I could see it now, his eyes overflowing. He turned to me. “They’re going to take you someplace you can get some help.”

  In my head I thought, If you see aliens, you get taken away by the men in black; if you hear a voice, you get taken away by the men in green, because one of the things I do is to think of lame jokes in really incredibly serious situations.

  “Please, Dad,” I said, one last time.

  “No.”

  And, oh, what an echo that was, that little exchange.

  The muscle-bound paramedic looked at him. “Let’s be clear here, sir,” he said. “You’re saying she’s a danger to herself?”

  Dad indicated my arms. “What do you think? Plus she had an allergic episode at the library and injected herself with adrenaline, but she didn’t go to the hospital. I don’t even know if she had an episode. Maybe she just injected herself for whatever reason. I don’t know.”

  “And her behavior up till then?”

  “Erratic. Private. She’s been holed up in the apartment above our garage. Her teachers are worried about her. She’s been cutting herself in her room and talking to herself and God knows what else and I just can’t—”

  To my surprise, he burst legitimately into tears.

  He took a breath.

  “She’s been withdrawn since her mom died. But since she found the foot on the beach … ”

  “That was her?” asked the young paramedic, the kid.

  “Yes.”

  The older one nodded slowly. “Okay, sir,” he said. “Sign here.” He held out a clipboard to Dad. Then he and the other guy lifted me up.

  “You going to struggle?” he asked. It was almost kind, his tone.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “But not with you.”

  He looked at me strangely, then shrugged.

  And they took me to the ambulance. They didn’t exactly carry me, but it wasn’t far off. I mean, it was clear I had no choice in the matter.

  On the way, we crossed the yard, and I saw you, just for a second. You were in the space under the stairs where the shared washing machine and dryer are; I guess you were doing laundry.

  You didn’t turn around, thank God.

  But even then, even being escorted to an ambulance, I noted the elegance of your stance, the lines of your shoulders. You were working your way into my heart already, I think. Like people say that splinters do, slowly easing through the bloodstream until they hit the chambers of your—

  Although I think that’s an urban legend, so this is a bad analogy on a number of levels.

  It was just a glimpse, and then you were gone. Or I was gone, more accurately speaking.

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  There’s a whole load of static in my memory after the trip in the ambulance.

  I know I walked into the hospital, and it was raining, a damp warm smell rising from the asphalt. People smudged into ghosts. There was a low glass-walled restaurant taking up a whole city block by the hospital parking lot with the words EARLY BIRD SPECIAL $4.99 5–6 P.M. FILLS YOU UP ALL NITE frosted into the glass.

  I know I was in room 314A on ward PP2. It was small and square, with beige walls, and had a small bathroom adjoining it, with an emergency pull cord, bright red, hanging from the ceiling by the toilet. The bed frame was made of metal, and there is something that immediately sickens the soul about a bed made of metal.

  I remember all of that. But a lot of the sequence isn’t there. It’s like someone took a film and cut it into pieces, then stitched it back together in any order.

  I don’t know how many days I was in that place. That’s because of the sedation. Have you ever been sedated? There are so many things we have never talked about. So many things I still want to learn about you.

  If you will let me.

  The thing about being sedated: You don’t remember what happened when the drugs were in your system. But you remember being conscious. So you knew what was going on; you just can’t recall it.

  It’s really hard to explain.

  Anyway, the reason for the sedation is that apparently when I first arrived I tried to hurt myself quite a lot, I assume because the voice told me to, but like I say, it’s a bit foggy to me.

  So, the first thing that stands out clearly, like an island in the sea, is when I first met Dr. Rezwari. She was the psychiatrist. They must have dialed down my sedatives so that I would be able to talk to her.

  I met her in her office. There was a window that looked out over the ocean, and over the older end of the boardwalk where there aren’t any stands or restaurants or gift shops, just old warped boards with grassy mounds of sand sticking through them. I watched seagulls wheeling in a pale blue sky, puffs of pink cloud scattered across it. From that I figured it was dawn or dusk, the time that Mom always called the gloaming.

  We must have been three stories up. There was a collection of bonsai trees in the corner, like a little bonsai woods.

  Dr. Rezwari saw me looking at them. “Someone gave me one as a gift once,” she said. “Now everyone does it. I don’t even like them. They strike me as unnatural. You know?”

  I blinked at her.

  She smiled. She had long eyelashes and black hair and the grayest eyes I had ever seen. Aqueous, like looking into a stream running over pebbles. Her face was small and delicate. Her desk was immaculate: some sort of antique, I thought, like something you would have seen in a lawyer’s office in the nineteenth century. There was a single pad of paper on it and an expensive-looking pen next to the pad. No computer—just a single silver plaque on a little wooden stand.

  Not much stuff in the room in fact—no certificates on the wall, no photos, no personal effects that I could see. It was less like a doctor’s office and more like some person’s memory of a doctor’s office, the details elided by time.

  The only exception, the only sign of personality at all, was a whole wall lined with books on shelves, behind me.

  Out of habit, I turned and glanced at them. I was surprised to see that they weren’t textbooks, not psychiatric journals or whatever. They were nearly all fiction—Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Alice Munro story collections, a set of Dickenses, Mark Helprin—

  “You like reading?” asked Dr. Rezwari. Her voice was soft.

  Alm
ost reflexively, the voice said,

  “Speak and I remove your feet.”

  So I didn’t say anything.

  Instead I looked at the plaque on the desk. On it was written: A CLUTTERED DESK IS A SIGN OF GENIUS.

  I did not know what to make of it. I looked at the desk. It literally could not have been tidier. There were only three objects on it, not counting Dr. Rezwari’s elbows, which were propped there, her hands under her chin.

  Was it a joke? Was it supposed to be ironic? Or was the desk usually a mess, and so someone had gotten her the plaque, and then she cleaned it? It bothered me and so I opened my mouth to ask—

  “Your feet,” said the voice. “And your father goes under a bus.”

  So I closed my mouth again.

  Dr. Rezwari was studying me, but she made it seem friendly and curious, not detached and scientific. She picked up the pen and spun it around her thumb. That surprised me. It’s usually guys who do that.

  “I like reading,” she said. “I think Middlemarch is my favorite novel. Don’t you just love it? It’s like she created a whole world, totally real and believable. I don’t think I have ever loved fictional characters more.”

  I very much wanted to reply to this. I wanted to say that Middlemarch was my favorite novel too, but I couldn’t. Dr. Rezwari must have seen something in my eyes though, because she smiled.

  “Of course I love Stephen King too,” she said. “I’m not snobbish. Bag of Bones, that’s an amazing book.”

  YES! said my mind.

  My mouth said: .

  She kept spinning the pen. “Your father seems to think you have been speaking to people who aren’t there.” It was a statement, not a question.

  She waited, then when I didn’t say anything, nodded.

  “I’m here to help, you know,” she said. “I would dearly like to help you. I can see that you have been through some very traumatic times. You must borrow any of my books, anytime you like. I know from your father that reading is a great hobby of yours.”

  She paused. Then she said something totally unconnected—I learned that this was one of her tricks. “Tell me, Cassandra, do you ever hear voices?” she asked.

  The voice said,

  “I’m warning you. Do not speak to her about me. I will make sure you burn in hell.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “You can answer yes or no, Cassandra,” said Dr. Rezwari. “You can even just nod or shake your head. I’m only trying to ascertain what we’re dealing with here. But we’re good, and we have good drugs. I’m good. I can help you. It occurs to me, from things your father has said, that perhaps you may be afflicted by this voice-hearing, which is what we call it.”

  I wasn’t listening now, I was focusing on those words: NOD OR SHAKE YOUR HEAD. I opened my eyes again.

  Did the voice have access to my thoughts? Would it know if I tried to use this loophole?

  I waited. Nothing from the voice. I remembered how I had waved at Jane, and the voice had not punished me. Perhaps it only knew what I said and did, not what I was thinking?

  Dr. Rezwari just went on spinning that pen. “Sometimes,” she said, as if it was a passing thing that had come into her mind, “sometimes, people hear voices that tell them to hurt themselves. It’s important to know that these voices are not real. They don’t exist. They are fictions, created by the mind. Of course this may not apply to you. Although you could nod if it does. We would protect you. We would not let anyone hurt you. Or anything.”

  I was trembling with fear and hope. I wanted to nod, I so desperately wanted to nod, but I was terrified of what the voice might do to me. Truly, I don’t know when I have ever been more scared. I felt as though my heart might burst and splatter Dr. Rezwari with blood and fragments of rib.

  Please let this be over, I thought.

  “These drugs,” said Dr. Rezwari in that way of hers, that way she would go silent for ages and then say something as if it were some incidental piece of information she was passing on because it might, just might, be of interest. “They make the voices go away. Always. I can guarantee that.”

  I looked at her. The twirling of her pen seemed to slow, the room seemed suspended in time, as if we were held in an invisible, viscous fluid.

  I took a deep breath.

  And I nodded.

  Dr. Rezwari took a breath too. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, thank you. That is helpful. We will start you on risperidone right away, while we try to establish a diagnosis. I am thinking psychotic dissociation, perhaps brought on by … what happened with your mother. But this is not a worry. You will be fine, we will help you. And you must borrow any book you like.”

  “What did you do?” said the voice.

  I sat there, a mouse between two cats. “What did you do? She will take me away. She will take me away, and you will be defenseless. You know how ****** pathetic you are. You ****** idiot. Take it back. Take it back and I won’t rip out your nails; take it back, you ******* *********** ************** ************** ************** **** ******* ***** ******.”

  I put my hands over my ears, but it didn’t stop. The language—I have never heard anything like it, before or since. There was something strange, though: the voice sounded afraid.

  Dr. Rezwari frowned. “Are you well?” she asked. “Is the voice talking to you now? Does it want you to hurt me?”

  “PUT YOUR HANDS AROUND THAT ******* ******’S NECK AND CHOKE HER. DO IT NOW. KILL HER BEFORE—”

  “Drugs,” I said quietly, as loudly as I could manage.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Drugs,” I said. “Please. Now.”

  They started giving me risperidone.

  This is the good thing about risperidone: it stops you hearing voices, most of the time.

  This is the bad thing about risperidone: everything else.

  You start sleeping all the time, you can’t remember things, the walls of your mind become slippery as if oiled. You feel tired every second of every day, perceive the world through frosted glass.

  Anyway, I was outside looking at the roses—because what else is there to do when you’re in a mental institution—when I felt the presence of someone behind me. I turned around and there was this preposterously beautiful girl standing there. She sort of flicked a cigarette into her mouth from a packet of Lucky Strikes in a move that seemed almost magical, and lit it with a match. She took a deep drag and blew smoke over the roses.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  I blinked at her.

  She gestured at the walls of the hospital encircling us. She was too thin—her wrists were rails—and she had dark bags under her eyes, but those eyes were fat almonds and her lips were a bow. She looked like a model doing an old-school heroin-chic photo shoot.

  “Not a talker, huh?” she said. She was maybe five years older than me, twenty-two, something like that. She blew a perfect ring of smoke that rippled over a red rose.

  I shrugged.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I talk enough for two anyways.” She stuck out her hand to shake mine, like a businesswoman or something. I was surprised so I took it without thinking.

  “My name’s Paris,” she said as she pumped my hand up and down. “But really I’m more of a Delaware. An Atlantic City at best.”

  “What?” I said. I couldn’t help it. I was living in a fog, but this girl was like a wind machine; she blew the fog away. I don’t know, she just had this energy. You wanted her attention on you as soon as you met her; it was like sunshine. Which was surprising because everything about her was dark—black hair, almost-black eyes, black clothes.

  She smiled, and I realized there had been a thin cloud over the sun all that time; now she was blasting rays at me, beaming, in the real sense of the word, and it was like being floodlit. “A lame joke,” she said. “Commenting wryly on the hyperbolic romanticism of my name. And shit.”

  I laughed. I didn’t know anyone who used words like “hyperbolic.” “Cassie,” I said.
“Short for Cassandra. My parents weren’t romantics. Or big readers of Greek myth, evidently.”

  “Ha,” she said. “Cassandra of the disbelieved prophecies. Okay. You predict ending up in here?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Figures. What’s the deal? Depression? Self harm?”

  “I don’t know. Psychotic dissociation. Schizophrenia, maybe.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Impressive.”

  “You?” I asked.

  “Bipolar. A bunch of shit.”

  “Bipolar?”

  “It’s what they used to call manic depression. Doesn’t matter. Just know that it sucks. Well, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you feel great. That’s kind of the whole entire problem.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Not your fault,” she said with perfect equanimity.

  “Of course,” I said. “We’re always alone with our inner voices, we Cassandras.”

  Paris laughed and stubbed out her cigarette on a low wooden wall that was holding in the earth and the roses. “You’re cool,” she said. “Most people in here can only talk about the Kardashians and Jersey Shore. Hopefully I’ll see you around.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You too.”

  She turned and started to walk away. Then she stopped. She came back to me, hugged me tight, and automatically I hugged her back, as if someone putting their arms around you is a switch that flicks you into doing the same thing; she felt delicate under my hands, like she might float away, like she had the bones of a bird.

  She pulled back and out of the hug.

  I stared at her. Not offended, just surprised.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I have boundary issues. Apparently.”

  Then she really did walk away. Her jeans were designer, I noticed, and she was wearing the kind of jewelry that you just know isn’t fake. Rich dad, I figured. I was right about that, as it turned out. But I was wrong about where the expensive jewelry came from.