The Anatomy of Perception

by AJ Rose

  “Go out with me,” I blurted. What?

  “What?” he asked, not raising his head.

  What am I doing? “Have dinner with me,” I said, glad he didn’t see my horrified expression as my mouth took over all brain function and threw my ordered life right off a fucking cliff.

  “Is this a pity date?” He finally raised his head but stayed hunched, so his chin hovered just above the tabletop, his coffee off to the side, untouched.

  “No,” I answered truthfully. “I’ve been intrigued by you since that first run-in. I probably wouldn’t have kept looking for you everywhere I went after the first couple weeks if you hadn’t drawn my face everywhere, but I gotta give you credit; you’re persistent.”

  “I didn’t actually follow you all over the place,” he tried to reassure me. “I found it pretty amazing when I spotted you in that bar by my apartment, and figured that was a sign I should do you again.” I couldn’t help the smile that turned up the corners of my mouth, no matter how hard I tried to suppress it. He groaned and sat up straight, taking a sip of his coffee and watching people pass by outside. “I meant do your face again. God, Craig. Just shut up already.”

  “It’s not a pity date.” I tried to bring the conversation back to my question, though if I could have avoided reminding him I’d asked him out, I might have gotten out of it.

  But I don’t want out of it.

  The realization startled me, and a burst of hope exploded in my chest, slopping over my lungs, making my breath hitch and getting all over my heart. It also made my mouth run.

  “Look, I loved the art, even if I was uncomfortable with my face attracting that much attention. That’s all it was.” It was true. I just didn’t tell him why I was uncomfortable, or that the word uncomfortable was almost a lie for how much it minimized my panic and fear of discovery. But it worked and I went with it. I didn’t spill my guts about my dad, and I didn’t make accusations or try to turn my issues around on him, like I’d done in so many pre-rehearsed speeches while fantasizing about running into him.

  But the reality of him was much less forward and arrogant than I’d suspected, and his humility, as well as the enthusiasm he’d displayed before realizing I wasn’t thrilled with his work, humanized him. How was I supposed to be annoyed with a guy who had been so happy with drawing my portrait, and then had just as quickly offered to remove it despite all his hard work, because he belatedly realized his subject didn’t want to be drawn?

  My words seemed to appease him somewhat, because he finally met my eyes. “You really want to go on a date with me?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t get it, but okay.”

  “How about Saturday?”

  He agreed and we worked out the details. What I didn’t expect was to finish our coffee over the next hour, talking until I had to leave for my next class and having Craig walk me as far as the drawing, promising he’d have it cleaned up before I got done for the day. I left him to it with an ache in my cheeks from smiling, and the revelation that maybe Holly was right. Maybe being out, at least with those in my immediate circle, wouldn’t be so bad if it meant I could have someone like Craig in my life and not have to hide him.

  My palms sweated as I rode the train home, having passed a clean sidewalk on 33rd Street after classes were done. Should I just blurt out to my roommates I’m gay? Should I ease into it and say I had a date, and when they pressed for details—which they were guaranteed to do—be matter of fact that it was with a man? I decided it would be best to tell them before Saturday, because the last thing I wanted was to bring Craig back to my apartment or run into them while we were out and have them react badly. Which meant I had four days to figure it out.

  You’re just racing right along with this coming out idea, aren’t you? Last week, you weren’t even entertaining going on a date, and now you’re going to bring someone home to boink?

  Well, why shouldn’t I be optimistic? The idea was much more appealing than slinking to a club for an anonymous blow job in a bathroom stall or going back to someone else’s place for a quickie after which I always, always left before any sleeping or exchange of numbers. This time, I was surprised to even consider showing my home to someone I was attracted to. I chuckled to myself, earning the stink eye from the tired-looking middle-aged woman sitting next to me. If there had been any open seats, she’d have moved. As it was, there was only standing room.

  “Don’t even think about talking to me,” she muttered.

  “No desire to,” I said with a hint of a grin at her bluntness.

  “Well okay, then,” she agreed, and we spent the rest of the ride pointedly ignoring each other in semi-hostile solidarity as only New Yorkers can.

  I still didn’t have an answer to my dilemma as I clomped wearily to my apartment and up the brownstone’s steps. Stalling, I checked the mail even though Braden usually got it since he was home earlier. Braden’s classes were configured differently because he was in the four-year program, while Neil and I were fast-tracked into three years, so he had an hour or two at home by himself.

  Realizing I was exhausted and not up for human interaction, I was more careful on the steps to the second floor so no one would hear me coming and I might get to slip unnoticed into my room. Then again, maybe I should tell Braden first, so if he was okay with the revelation, he could help me figure out how to approach Neil. Remembering how my anxiety had eased that morning when my classmate, whose name turned out to be Aaron, hadn’t cared if a guy was interested in me, I decided to divide and conquer my roommates in the hopes that at least Braden would accept sharing space with a gay guy.

  Giggling reached my ears from the downstairs neighbor’s TV as I unlocked the door and went inside, though it wasn’t loud enough to be disturbing. I dumped my schoolbooks in my room, smiling as I saw the half-finished scarf sitting on my bedside table. It would be good to tell Holly what I was doing before I did it. Set up the backup plan in case this went sour. I swiped the screen on my phone to life and called up a text to her, only sort of hearing the giggling from downstairs morph into a moan. I briefly wondered if the girl who lived there was getting lucky and it wasn’t the TV I was hearing. Hopefully she wouldn’t be the only one this week.

  Holls, I’m telling Braden as soon as I get up the nerve. Please be on standby if I have to clear out, since this was your idea.

  Hitting send, I sat on my bed to conjure the right words before knocking on Braden’s door. I hoped he wasn’t sleeping. He often studied late into the night, claiming that’s when his brain works best, and he was training his body to function on little sleep, so he would nap at odd times, including early evening. Silly, since we had years yet before we’d be working odd hours, but to each their own. The only sound was the neighbor getting busy and the electronic beep of a phone, hers or Braden’s I couldn’t be sure.

  Okay, no point now in stalling. His reaction will be what it will be.

  Shuffling into the hall, I tentatively knocked on Braden’s door, not wanting to wake him if he was indeed napping, and heard a bedspring shift.

  Oh, good. He’s up.

  I opened the door and poked my head in, only to stop in my tracks.

  “Dane!” Holly cried, frantically groping for the bed sheets to cover her nakedness as she lay on top of my roommate, who let out a string of curses.

  “Braden?” I asked Holly, incredulous. My heart hammered in my ears as if I’d had the world’s worst startle in a darkened theater during a horror film.

  “Dude, you should knock,” Braden said, thinking I was talking to him.

  “I did knock on your unlocked door,” I snapped, barely looking at him. It was Holly who held my avid attention. “It was Braden you were talking about this weekend?”

  Her face, and even her shoulders—oh god, I didn’t need that detail—flushed with embarrassment.

  “So what if it was, Dane?” Braden challenged, regaining his composure first.

  “One of you could have told me. This
isn’t an awkward way to find out or anything,” I said, gesturing between them with a finger. Many things fell in place from Holly’s words a few days prior, and I studied them openly, assessing.

  This isn’t as bad as you think.

  “I need to talk to you, Braden,” I said, purposefully leaving my tone flat and unaffected. If he believed he was in hot water, maybe his reaction to my revelation would be relief, not shock or disgust. “Unless you were planning to, erm, finish, can you come by my room for a few minutes?” Braden’s eyes widened marginally, unsure if I was teasing him or if I was building up a head of steam. I shifted my gaze to Holly and pointed at her. “And you. You owe me a drink, at minimum, so figure out where you’re taking me.” Heh. Good. I’d get the chance to tell her what happened earlier in the day, too. Suddenly, our skirmish this weekend was water under the bridge, and after I backed out of Braden’s doorway, I sucked in a deep breath that reached the bottom of my lungs for the first time in days.

  A few minutes later, Braden made a point of knocking on my open door but waiting until I gestured him, and Holly behind him, into my room. He took my desk chair and Holly perched one ass cheek—covered in clothes now, thankfully—on the edge of the desk. They both looked contrite, which was a good start, and I debated punishing them for the fun of it until I realized that wouldn’t exactly help my cause if Braden were to take this badly. Not to mention, it would be mean.

  “Okay,” I began. “I want to know how long this has been going on, but first… Braden. I’m gay. Do you have a problem with that?”

  Both their heads snapped up, twin gazes locked on my face in astonishment. Braden cleared his throat while I waited expectantly for an answer.

  “Uh….”

  Holly crossed her arms and stared her boyfriend down. He was not a stupid man. He knew the consequences of his next words.

  “I have zero problem with that, dude,” he said, finally finding his tongue. And using it for something other than shoving it down Holly’s throat.

  Ugh, gross. Focus, Dane.

  “You sure?” I pressed.

  He nodded, his shoulders relaxing a little as he realized perhaps I wasn’t going to bite his head off for defiling my best friend.

  “Okay, good.” I let out my own breath of relief. “I’m in no position to yell at you for keeping a secret from me when I’ve been keeping a secret from you too, Braden.” More than one, but I didn’t see the need to spill all my innards at his feet. “I won’t even ask for no more secrets between us, because some things are sacred and should stay that way.” I eyed Holly meaningfully, hoping she knew better than to tell him the story of how she’d lost her v-card. “But can I ask how long? And how serious it is?”

  “Oh please, Dane. Stop with the big brother bit. We’ve been dating for three months, ever since the night I got tipsy at the bowling alley, when Prince Charming decided to draw you on the sidewalk.”

  “Prince Charming?” Braden’s eyes bulged. “Your artist is a guy?”

  I grimaced. “Yeah. Thanks, Holls. I could have sort of broken that news gently.”

  “I think gentle news breaking is out the window now that you now know I get my girl bits waxed.”

  “Oh my god, just stop,” Braden said to her, incredulous. Then he turned to me. “Okay, for real. Are you mad?”

  I pursed my lips and let a slow grin take over. “Less at you than at her, considering the ultimatum she gave me this weekend,” I said the last bit through gritted teeth. “But I will say if you hurt her, just remember I know from watching gay porn how to shove my foot quite literally up your ass.” An exaggeration. I never clicked through on those links.

  Braden swallowed with a grimace. “Okay. Subject change. Does anyone else know? Other than Holly, obviously.”

  I shook my head. “Well, I have a date on Saturday with this really talented street artist I ran into last fall.”

  “Noooo!” Holly drew out the word. “You found him? What’s his name? What did he say?”

  For as quickly as Braden had accepted my news, he still couldn’t quite turn off the slightly uncomfortable look at the knowledge of me dating a guy, so I stood and cut Holly off.

  “You’re buying me a drink. I will tell you what you want to know as soon as we get to a bar, so get your shoes on. Chop chop.” I turned to wink at Braden with a promise to return her when we were through, but thought better of it, considering he might need to digest that I wasn’t hitting on him.

  “So bossy,” Holly grumbled, leaving to go find her shoes by the front door. When she was gone, I leaned close to Braden as he passed by me to follow.

  “Seriously, are you okay with me liking guys?”

  “Seriously, yes, as long as you’re not going to hurt me for dating your twin sister.”

  I held out my hand, which he immediately grasped, then bumped his shoulder into mine.

  “Then we’re good,” I said. He nodded, and that was that. Until we had to tell Neil.

  Present Day

  The few days after revealing my past to Craig, I tried to lose myself in work without much success. I had to take care not to overwork myself, though I did try to make up for some of the days that conquered me and I had to leave early. There were still patients, recovering from surgeries and injuries, who needed to be taught exercises and helped to their feet for the first time since going under the knife. But Craig was never far from my thoughts. Once a patient’s treatment plan was explained and implemented, he crowded my brain again, the pained look on his face as he walked away burned into my memory like an afterimage. I must have chewed over so many different ways I could have explained about my dad, how if I’d changed this word or that phrase, maybe he wouldn’t have been as knocked for a loop. Or perhaps I hadn’t made him aware enough of the devastation my dad had wrought. After all, I hadn’t gotten to what happened to Dylan.

  No, he was too overwhelmed by then to listen to more.

  The second-guessing led to insecurity, and I recognized the spiraling effects of my anxiety. After a successful consult with Dr. Zeller about the PT schedule for a patient who’d had rotator cuff surgery, I took myself to the quiet of one of the on-call rooms, where doctors on marathon thirty-six- to forty-eight-hour shifts could catch a nap. Leaving the light off, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed a number I had memorized long ago, leaving a message requesting immediate call back. While I waited, I parked myself on the bottom of the bunk bed in the walk-in-closet-sized room.

  My phone rang a few minutes later. “Dane, is everything okay?”

  Dr. Rosa Rodriguez was my therapist, and just hearing her concerned voice told me I’d done the right thing. She was a woman of short stature, but to me she was larger than life, capable of great compassion and stubborn persistence when hammering down my walls. She’d taken my hand and had guided me through the minefield of my diagnoses, not just the words and their definitions, but recognizing the feelings associated with them, helping me acclimate to the medications controlling them and ultimately stand on my own two feet. I couldn’t lie to her any more than I could fly.

  “Things aren’t perfect, but I’m not in danger,” I said, answering her question immediately to allay her fears. “I was wondering if I could come in for an extra session this week?” Thankfully, Dr. Rodriguez kept emergency appointment times for patients in immediate need.

  “I can see you at six this evening. That work?”

  My shift ended at four, so I quickly agreed, tension bleeding from my shoulders in a rush and leaving me wrung out and spent.

  “Or,” she went on, reading something in my voice as she had become so adept at doing. “I have a few moments now, if you want to discuss it over the phone.”

  I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. “I talked to Craig.”

  “Good,” she said encouragingly, and I pictured her smiling, her trademark dark red lipstick perfectly in place, as always, and her long black hair likely pulled back in a severe ponytail. Obviously I wasn’t psychic, but that
was how she’d looked the first time I’d seen her, and it had stuck. I hadn’t known at the time that image—her sitting with me, wearing a white coat and a burgundy smile—would become something of a talisman for me. “What did he say?”

  “At first he was hostile and impatient.”

  “We knew he would be, given how much he probably hurt from the way you ended things.”

  “Then he was curious, and that turned to outrage at my father the more of my story he heard.”

  “Normal human reactions, I’d say. How did the conversation end?”

  I picked at the cuticle on my middle finger, dried out from so much antibacterial soap. “I begged him to see things from my position and told him I still love him. He let me hug him, but it was awkward and stiff. He didn’t say anything else, just walked away when words seemed to fail him.”

  “And how do you feel now?”

  I wanted to laugh, grumble about the typical shrink question, but it would do me no good to stall. I’d called her, after all.

  “Like shit. Like I pushed too hard, or not hard enough. Like I haven’t hit on the right combination of words to make him understand. I’m desperate to find the right words, and the edges of instability are lurking. I’m coping, but I’m definitely not comfortable. And I’ve had a couple hypervigilant episodes. Had to leave work early yesterday to get out of one.”

  Hypervigilant episodes were the biggest sign all was not well in my world. My head would constantly swivel, my eyes tracking every move around me as though I expected my father to walk around the next corner. Every muscle would tense, and I’d begin to sweat. Adrenaline dumped in large quantities, and a sense of impending doom settled heavily, causing my anxiety to spike to uncontrollable levels. Everyone around me became a potential threat. It took a Herculean effort to get myself out of such a state, and sometimes the only way out was a change of scenery. At first, fleeing felt like letting my demons win, but after time in Dr. Rodriguez’s care, I began to realize it was just another part of my mental illness, a genuine problem and not cowardice. It was about knowing when to stand my ground and when to retreat to fight another day. If Holly or Braden were with me, they’d put a hand on my shoulder or stand behind me, letting me feel their solidity and warmth at my back, murmuring in my ear, reassuring me I wasn’t alone, they were with me the whole way, and I was safe. My dad couldn’t contact me, and I had no reason to suspect anyone else of wanting to harm me. Sometimes talking me down worked, but Braden and Holly weren’t always around to help. Dr. Zeller and Chief Noble were the only two people at work I trusted enough to listen to in the midst of an episode, and as was perfectly understandable, they couldn’t always stop what they were doing to help me. Retreat was often the only remaining choice.