Little Panic

by Amanda Stern

  The doctors now call him “the Body.” They think because he’s dead he’s no longer human. The Body must be brought downstairs. The Body must be moved. The Body is fifty-nine years old. The Body’s name is Jimmy. I don’t want them to take him away just yet, although I don’t want his body to be my final memory of him. Eddie comes racing in. He was at a concert, and he missed it, too. When he sees Jimmy he bursts into tears, which triggers Mom to wrap herself over the Body again. I find it ironic that it was only in death he was able to reach his goal weight. Though I’ve held his hand in this bed countless times over the past few weeks, now I don’t want to touch him. Though I know better, I still worry, the way I did as a child about Melissa, that his death is contagious somehow.

  It’s November 20, 1992. I’m twenty-two years old. Tomorrow the sky will turn back on, blue or gray as ever; eventually the snow will melt, the grass will grow, a gentle breeze on a hot day will lure me to follow it into the future, into time that won’t stop existing, that exists right now even without Jimmy. Time is my enemy. My resistance to moving forward is telling me something. I know I’m supposed to carry Jimmy with me, into every future stage of my life, but I want to stay stuck in time, and it’s this fact I’m embarrassed to recognize, because I’m not exactly certain what it means.

  Soon the entire country will be celebrating Thanksgiving. Mom is hysterical with grief, collapsing in the bathroom, and waking up four times a night to burst into tears and cry into Nina’s neck, but Nina just goes about her business, unwilling or unable to mourn. The image of my mother thrown over Jimmy’s body, the sound of her keening howls, will not leave my head. She’s fragile. Because she believes she can’t handle the realities the world throws at her, she doesn’t handle them, leaving the reality to Kara. It’s Kara who takes care of Nina, as she once took care of me, and a small part of me feels threatened. We’re keeping Mom propped up, but no one’s keeping the rest of us upright. It feels like there’s no room for anyone else to grieve.

  We all take turns with Nina, but Kara is the designated caretaker. I’ll have to go back to school at some point, but I don’t want to. I want to stay home until I’m old. Nina doesn’t have the same fears I had, but she’s attached to Mom, just the way I was, sleeping in bed with her. But Nina is also more like Mom than I was. Unlike me, she cares how she looks, happy to spend time smoothing ponytail bumps and festooning herself with bows and ribbons. She has temper tantrums, though, interminable ones that strike when she doesn’t get what she wants. We’re all grown and out of the house, so to Nina her siblings are more like parents. It will just be her and Mom in that big house together when we’re gone.

  I call Jonathan to tell him the news of Jimmy’s death, but he doesn’t call me back. I write him a letter, but it goes unanswered. I don’t understand. It’s been three and a half years since I saw or heard from him last, and the only sense I can make of his disappearance is that he changed his mind about having me join him when he got tested because somehow he knew he was positive and he’d feel ashamed or embarrassed in from of me. I miss him.

  Back at school, where no one understands the depths of my pain, I feel out of place. People try to commiserate by telling me about a cat who died or an aunt who passed away. I spend most of my time off-campus, trying to make up the classwork I’ve missed so I can graduate on time. Someone keeps calling and hanging up, somehow knowing to do it always when the sun is setting, kick-starting that fading trigger that has shadowed me for years on the street side of life. I’m sad; I’m depressed. Carl keeps asking if he did something wrong, if I’m mad at him. He doesn’t seem to understand that I can have feelings that have nothing to do with him. If I were with Aram, we’d have long conversations about death, about the term “passing away” versus “died.” He’d give me the space I need. He’d understand about the grieving process. Carl just wants to know if I still love him. I miss Aram. I want to hear his voice.

  The phone calls won’t stop. Outside I always feel like someone is trailing me. Everywhere I am I feel Jimmy’s absence, which makes me feel unsafe, and now, with a stalker, I really am in danger. There’s no one to call: My mother is grieving, my sister is caring for Nina, and my boyfriend feels threatened by my despair. It’s winter, which makes the world feel smaller, and the sun sets earlier. After all these years, no one knows what happened to Etan Patz, only that something horrible happened to him when he was walking down the street, just the way I’m doing now. I begin to skip classes that meet at night. I see friends during the day, or invite them to my house at night, but I try not to go outside.

  I meet with a university administrator and tell her the situation. She says she’ll speak to the boy and get back to me. While I wait, new fears invade my ability to function. When I was small, I was afraid that when I woke up my whole family would be dead. Now, though, I simply fear I won’t wake up myself. What if I die in my sleep like Melissa? I stay sitting up all night, and when I do fall asleep, I jolt myself awake, relieved that I’m not dead.

  Carl works a block away from my apartment. One night, I’m supposed to go meet him there, but the minute I reach the sidewalk I’m gripped by a premonition that if I take one more step I am going to be killed. I dash back and lock myself in my apartment, call Carl, and tell him I can’t come, I can’t go outside. He doesn’t understand. What’s the big deal? It’s night, same as ever. But nothing’s the same as it was. It’s dangerous, and unhinged, like after Etan disappeared. Reality has ripped one of our players off the board, yet it expects us to continue on as though that didn’t change the game. To child-me, night became less scary when Jimmy moved in, because the worry of protecting everyone myself was alleviated, but now night is my responsibility again, and Jimmy isn’t here.

  The paranoia gets worse and I make an appointment with a therapist. He was supposed to be a campus therapist, but it turns out his office is off-campus, and I’ll have to take a bus to see him. Each time I do, I am a lost sixth grader once again, terrified I will be raped and killed. Each time, I am grateful to the driver for letting me live.

  The therapist is a student, inexperienced and not entirely helpful, but he listens to me and says soothing things that make me feel understood. He’s easy to talk to, and before I know it, I feel attached to him and look forward to the days I’m in his office, so I can explain my crazy feelings and he can nod and not ask me to reassure him or tell me my feelings are too dark to deal with. I keep asking him what I have, what’s wrong with me. I am still searching for a name for these feelings that have been plaguing me since childhood. They left when I took drugs with Taylor and trickled in and out after that, but now they’re back and worse, more feral than ever.

  “If you had to diagnose me,” I push again, a few weeks in, “what would you say I had?”

  “Well, I’d probably say you had mixed personality disorder.”

  “What? Are you serious? Like Sybil?” I ask. How could I have been so duped by this guy?

  “It’s just a guess.”

  “Well, that guess sucked.”

  I might not have the right answer, but I do know he’s wrong, and that all my teachers were wrong, and my mom was wrong. I don’t think I’m learning disabled, and I don’t think I have “alters.” I keep seeing him, though I no longer trust him. I badly need someone to talk to. Sometimes I am tempted to wrongly diagnose him, just to show him how it feels.

  Carl is useless, too. What he’s always been best at is letting me care for him, but when it’s my turn, he’s lost, a little boy constantly asking me what I want him to do. When I’m silent because my fear won’t allow me to open my mouth, he’ll ask if I’m mad at him, or if he did something wrong. He’ll ask if I love him. Yes, I nod. As soon as he’s reassured, he falls asleep.

  One morning I’m called back for a meeting with the school administrator. She’s met with my stalker, she says with a smile. She was charmed. “It’s a cultural thing.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “He’s Dutch.
He’s just showing his affection like a European. It’s sweet.”

  “He called and told me he was going to rape me.”

  “He said that wasn’t him.”

  “So you’re not going to do anything?”

  “I can ask him to write you a letter of apology, if that’s what you really want. But I think you should give him a chance. He’s charming.”

  I leave the office, feeling more naked than infuriated. He’s standing outside the office; he’s followed me here. I’m stopped in my tracks, and he comes close to my face and slowly blows on it, then walks away. I have nowhere to run, and no one to take care of me. I am crying and hyperventilating on the steps of the administration building. No one can help me. Not even my own self. I’m the last person I’d put in charge of me.

  Waited My Whole Life to Be Normal

  The school therapist wrapped things up with me abruptly, eager, it seemed, to report to his superiors he’d completed this assignment and was ready to move on. Though I couldn’t bring myself to respect him, I still was not ready to move on.

  “What am I going to do now?” I asked him.

  “Look in the Yellow Pages,” he said.

  “I’m not looking for car parts,” I told him.

  He shrugged. “You’ll find someone.”

  After graduation, dread follows me back to New York and turns back into the dread of my childhood, only worse. Carl and I live together with Tatum, whom I’ve kept in touch with all this time, in a small railroad apartment on Thompson Street in SoHo, not far from my MacDougal Street home. Around the corner is the lumber store where people claimed to see Etan Patz the day he disappeared, and a handful of blocks away is his parents’ apartment, and the bus stop where he never arrived.

  Buses, ironically, become my default source of transportation. Subways are impossible. The second I descend the stairs, I become convinced the entire system will crumble and I’ll be buried underneath. I try cabs, but that’s worse. The second I close the door, the driver sinks the locks down, my heart starts pounding, and I become convinced I’m in the process of being kidnapped. All that’s left is walking, but even that fails, because everyone who walks behind me is going to cut my throat, and everyone walking toward me is obviously going to stab me. Buses, then, are how I roll.

  For a while I decide this way of living is doable, and it doesn’t hamper my lifestyle much. But soon it’s not just transportation that sets me off, it’s being around other people. It’s going to parties, or bars. I can’t even take cabs with other people, or get into friends’ cars. Before long I’m making excuses to get myself out of everything, and Carl is annoyed. He’s been playing music all around town, and I can’t get through an entire set without having to leave. There are always too many people, and they are breathing in all the air, not leaving any for me.

  Then a friend of ours from college comes to stay with us for the weekend. As Lori is on her way up the stairs to our apartment, I begin to panic. I prop our apartment door open so more air will get in, but it doesn’t work, and overcome by nausea, I speed to our bathroom to throw up. Carl isn’t helpful. When I’m upset or overwhelmed I become mute, or monosyllabic at best, and he takes this as a sign that I’m angry with him, and I wind up having to reassure him for days when I’m the one who needs calming.

  Given my freak-out, instead of staying at the apartment, Carl and Lori and I walk to Scratcher, Carl’s favorite bar in the East Village. I have trouble keeping up my end of the conversation, busy trying to talk myself out of whatever it is I’ve fallen into. I use the technique of my childhood and try to distract myself with mundane thoughts: Think about things that are dull, things that are orange, things that are clothes, things to do with my hair; but I can’t shake the reality that we’re walking toward a crowded, enclosed place with only one very narrow door from which to escape. What kind of twenty-four-year-old is scared of going to a bar? But I can’t help it—I need to leave soon after we arrive. I leave Carl and Lori inside, pleading sickness, and the second I’m outside I feel much better.

  On the walk home, alone, I’m free of social obligation, the pressure relieved. When I’m with other people, I seem unable to function, but when I’m alone, I can. It has begun to feel as if triggers are everywhere, even places they shouldn’t be, like at my mom’s house, where I can’t stay for long without feeling sick. All the places I once relied upon to guard me have been reversed; now, being alone, hiding from everyone and everything, feels safest.

  Soon I simply stop going anywhere, refusing to venture out of the apartment. I turn down a job because it’s in an office, and just hearing the offer turns off my breathing valve. I think Carl is erasing me. I miss Aram. I made a mistake. I never should have left him. Why did I do that?

  Before long, though, there is no more me. I don’t feel anything resembling a self; the only thing I feel is despair and claustrophobia. Is this what Melissa felt when she was dying? Did she really die in her sleep and feel no pain? I want to talk to Jonathan. I don’t understand where everyone went. Did I help kill Jimmy because I knew he ate steak in secret and I promised I wouldn’t tell Mom? I am responsible for his death because I should have told Mom, and I am responsible for Melissa’s and Baba’s deaths because I left home when I should have stayed, and Etan Patz because I failed to find him. What if, in the moment I pretended to find him, I took the police away from actually finding him? Maybe he was walking by just as I was dragging the cop away? How many people are left in my life? Will I meet more people I’ll come to love and then kill without meaning to? Every day I feel the world shrinking.

  What is wrong with me? Things aren’t good, and they’re not right. I’m worried I am going crazy; maybe I’ve always been crazy and no one told me. That’s why no one would ever give me a diagnosis—because how do you tell a kid she’s nuts? But what kind of nuts am I? Right from the start of life I was scared, and I know that it’s not about intelligence but psychology, and my psychology feels abnormal.

  Carl suggests smoking pot as a way to calm down. I haven’t smoked pot since high school, but who knows, maybe it’ll work. We don’t smoke much, or maybe we smoke too much, it’s hard to say, but all of a sudden, I am terrified of Carl. I need to get out of our apartment. I don’t want him to come near me or touch me. When I get outside, he yells down to me from the fire escape, and I start running up Sixth Avenue to my sister’s house. I have to get there before I die. My entire body is closing in on me. I’m being murdered from the inside; my own body is doing it, and I don’t think that’s even suicide. I can’t tell whether I’m out of breath from running or from dying, and I slow down and get to her building and wave to the doorman, who knows me, and it isn’t until the elevator door closes on me that I realize what a massive mistake it was to get on an elevator. I breathe as slowly and evenly as I can, and seven years later it opens on Kara’s floor; I stumble to her apartment and let myself in. I find her in her bedroom reading. Her husband is in the kitchen. As soon as she sees me she realizes something is wrong, but I can’t hear anything she says.

  “I’m dying. I can’t breathe. I’m dying,” I say.

  She shuts her book. “You’re not dying. You’re freaking out, but you’re not dying.”

  “I think I’m having a heart attack. My breath is trying to stop.”

  “I don’t think you’re having a heart attack,” she says.

  “How do you know? What if you’re wrong and we don’t go to the hospital and then I die? You’ll have to live with that for the rest of your life.”

  “You’re not having a heart attack.”

  “I’m crazy, aren’t I?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can tell me the truth. I must be crazy and it’s like some big family secret that no one will tell me, but I need to know. I know you know.”

  “You’re not crazy,” my sister says.

  I’m frustrated. Kara is the only one I can trust to tell me the truth, but she’s refusing.

  “I swea
r I can handle it. There’s no other reason for the way I am.”

  “I promise you, you’re not crazy. There is no secret we’re keeping. I think maybe you’re a little stoned and having a freak-out,” she says. “That happens to people all the time.”

  “It does?”

  She nods. “Sure. You’re not crazy. You’re just having a bad reaction to pot. Let’s lie down and read until you feel better.” It works.

  A few hours later, I can go back home. But it doesn’t stay better for very long. Maybe Kara doesn’t know. Maybe Mom never told her I’m crazy.

  Carl starts going out without me. I am glad not to have to entertain anyone or deal with visiting friends using up my allotment of air. I used to keep the windows open when people came over, but now that no one does, I keep them closed and locked. I don’t want anyone creeping in. I refuse all invitations, even dinner at my mom’s house just blocks away. I can’t even go to Kara’s house. I wish everyone would leave me alone.

  Soon even the thought of going anywhere makes me scuttle to the bathroom and vomit. I’m crying all the time, too, and can’t get out of bed. I’m depressed and scared and I know that something’s very wrong with me, but I also know that no one will be able to figure it out because me is the problem, and that can’t be changed.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been crying. I have to cut my skin to make sure I still feel things, but I don’t, so I have to cut myself a bit deeper, and now I’m afraid that I’m actually dead but stuck among the living. The whole world is in on the secret that’s being kept from me: My family, my friends, every doctor, every tutor, all my past teachers, even that bad free therapist was in on it. My mom must have called him. Called them all. Told them my sickness needs to be hidden from me because I am weak. My poor mom, to have a daughter so crazy everyone has to keep it from her. I’m crying so hard now, crying for my family who’s had to bear this secret about me and treat me normal at the same time. I call my mom. I don’t check the time.