Lust & Wonder

by Augusten Burroughs

  Here, under the heading “Suspicious Activity,” I noticed a number of curious entries.

  The first stated, “Four individuals inside copy center turned out to be employees.” To make sure I’d read it correctly, I read it again.

  Exactly what were they implying?

  Wasn’t it likely that if there were four people inside a copy shop, at least some of them would work there? Also, they still had copy shops?

  The next item on the list was worse. “People in white van turned out to be waiting for man walking dog.”

  Dennis was in the bathroom washing his hands, and I called him over.

  “You gotta take a look at this!” I hollered.

  He came over to the bed drying his hands on a bleach-scented towel. I turned the laptop around so the screen faced him.

  “Check it out. Second line from the top. Or fuck it, read the top one, too.”

  I watched him scan the page and saw his eyebrows pop up in recognition. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. They’re hunting down people who are out walking their dogs now?”

  “That is a little weird, isn’t it?” I said.

  I was a little worried about this. Maybe more than a little worried. After all, we might be staying in a motel now, guests of the town, but in just a few days, we’d be living here. This would be our hometown.

  If they were going after copy shop employees for just being copy shop employees, I would for sure be put behind bars.

  If you can think of a suspicious activity, chances are good it’s something I engage in unwittingly every day. Nearly everything about me is suspicious: I twitch my shoulders when I walk (plastic explosives strapped to my body?), I check my pockets constantly (carrying concealed weapon?), I tend to stare into people’s windows when I walk past their houses (sexual predator?).

  At this rate, we wouldn’t be settled a week before my face would be plastered on the front of the local newspaper under the headline NEW AMHERST RESIDENT NABBED IN PIZZA SLICE INCIDENT.

  Dennis saw another one. “Look here. It says, ‘Man reported standing near bushes no longer there when police arrive.’ Did you get that? Somebody reported a man standing near bushes.”

  I could see the scene in my mind: a forty-seven-year-old professor of semiotics at Amherst College, standing just off the town common near a bush. He’s thinking, Wait a minute. What did Ann want me to pick up on the way home? Apple cider donuts? So he’s standing there, and then one of the intolerant Amherst locals, clearly brainwashed by the local law enforcement agency, saw this and panicked. “Who is that man? Why is he standing there? Who just stands in place without moving? Maybe that goes over okay in Sherman Oaks, California, but it’s sure not okay here. I’m calling nine-one-one.”

  Dennis and I looked at each other. “This isn’t good,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of suspicious activity on this page, and none of it looks very suspicious to me.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. “We’re moving into a police state. This is like an Eastern Bloc country in World War II.” How long, I could only wonder, would it be before a bronze statue of Stalin was erected on the town commons, directly opposite the Lord Jeffery Inn? And didn’t some of the older UMASS dorms look very much like upscale New England concentration camp buildings? Surely, they would be easy to retrofit. Perhaps a plan was already in place. And who’d be the first inside the gas chambers? Absolutely, the insufferable gay guys from New York.

  I couldn’t continue thinking this way. I had to see the flip side. I said to Dennis, “But the great thing is that there’s just not much crime here. Just students screwing off. Maybe they have a couple of robberies now and then, but that’s it.”

  “Well, yeah,” Dennis said. “Of course there’s no crime. The citizens are too terrified to make a move. I bet three-quarters of the population don’t leave their houses. I mean, look at this log.” He pointed to another entry. “Says here that police approached a man on a path. And it turned out the man was waiting for his friend.” He was crazed. “This is just unbelievable. They’re nabbing friends. On paths.”

  One would think they’d have better things to do. But then, maybe these are the better things, and they’re doing them. Maybe now, you do have to stop the mom in the minivan and the man on the path waiting for his friend. I expect you do. The alternative—an “Anything goes!” police department—would not do.

  In the city now, you had to expect the plane to fly into the building, the subway to explode. But in the country, you didn’t have to expect this yet.

  I decided it was good that the area was so heavily policed. I wasn’t planning on ever leaving the house, anyway, since I hated small towns and nature and political correctness and pretty much everything that existed outside of New York City where, it was beginning to sink in, I actually no longer lived.

  * * *

  Dennis continued to drive into Manhattan on a regular basis to see his therapist, and Wednesday was the night Dennis’s therapist decided would be our scheduled sex night. Because if we didn’t agree on a time and make a firm commitment, things would continue as they were, meaning no sex ever. I actually would have preferred this but of course couldn’t feel that way, so I said I thought that Wednesday sex was a good idea, very smart.

  “We don’t have to come or get hard, either. But we have to try,” he said.

  Which was like the captain of the swim team saying, “Just don’t drown and you’ll be a winner!” The therapist had set our bar extremely low, and still, I wasn’t sure I could meet it.

  I had been trying. I had a shelf of mortifying sexual-health books to prove it. One, Anal Pleasures, grossed me out so much I had to keep it turned around so the spine faced the wall. And other books, mostly on the subject of childhood sexual assault.

  So we were about to have sex, but it felt like I was about to have some sort of oral surgery where I would not be allowed to go under general anesthesia and must also watch the procedure—which would certainly involve long needles and a great amount of blood—on video screens installed in the ceiling.

  I’d known all day that we would have sex that night, and I had been dreading the prospect.

  * * *

  He was closing the shades. I was glad for this. I didn’t want the neighbors to witness the spectacle of my own miserable failure.

  It was time.

  We stood facing each other and kissed. His hand went to my cool, soft cock, and mine went to his.

  “I want you to be turned on,” he said.

  With a chill, I recalled that Mitch had spoken almost exactly these same words to me so many years ago. I was living my life adhering to the exact definition of insanity: when a behavior failed, I just kept doing it over and over, expecting a different result.

  Dennis wanted me to be turned on, and I couldn’t tell him that was not going to happen, because I refused to believe this myself.

  We moved to the bed. I wanted nothing more than to turn onto my side and curl up.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I said, “Yeah.”

  I was not okay. The mere touch of his hand filled me with unaccountable fury instead of passion. I felt like, I don’t belong here.

  A small and unfamiliar voice, a psychological interloper told me, This is called instinct. You should trust this.

  Naturally, I ignored the voice. Because I did not recognize it as instinct but rather assumed it was my unhealthy inner addict. My drinking voice. I cannot trust any voice inside my head unless I am wearing earbuds.

  We were a couple.

  Why could we not be lovers?

  I was so frustrated and confused. I knew Dennis was, too. I thought, This cannot be because I was molested as a boy. What was it? Why was I so disconnected when we tried to have sex? I then thought, I wish I could call Christopher and ask his advice.

  The thought stunned me.

  I should not be thinking about my literary agent on the one night during the week Dennis’s therapist said we should be practicing hav
ing sex.

  And in an instant, I saw the problem: I loved somebody else.

  * * *

  My life was crumbling away from me, like I forgot to mix the glue in with the substrate. Hour by literal hour, Dennis and I disengaged. We had managed to create two separate rooms on two separate floors within the space of one queen-sized bed. I found I couldn’t fall asleep until he was snoring. Only then was sleep possible, but it only arrived after a great deal of ceiling-watching. I started sleeping on top of the covers, almost like I was expecting to flee in the middle of the night.

  But I do fall asleep, and there he is yet again: the Jeep Guy. Only, where’s the Jeep? This time, we’re together in a low-riding motorboat of some primitive kind, crawling through a flooded bayou of Louisiana. I am terrifyingly aware that we have one skimpy outboard motor and a very thin wall of aluminum between us and whatever is down there knocking and sliding around the bottom of the boat. The recurring dream has brought a sense of foreboding with it this time.

  But my dusty-armed lifeguard of a guy is up front, and he’s navigating, and he is so not worried at all.

  My legs stretch out in front of me as I hold on to the outboard motor stick steering thing. I peer over the right side, horrified to see that the copperhead- and alligator-infested water is just inches below the rim of the boat. I feel the sort of panic that stretches out in dreams, a suffocating sense of impossibility. But Jeep Guy is smiling and pointing to a red neon sign along the shore with a dock and slips for boats.

  “That’s the place,” he says, nodding in the direction of the sign. “This is where it ends.”

  Good, I think, finally. Then in a bloom of panic: Wait. Where what ends?

  The aroma of french fries and vinegar reaches me, and my relief is instantaneous. Next comes the awareness that nothing has ever gone wrong with this rugged guy, and in fact, he is the star of my best dreams, the only ones I could ever remember long enough to tell someone about. But the mountain is gone, and he’s leading me through a swamp that smells like french fries and feels like the end. In the boat, I am afraid to love because the water level is so high that I know we’ll sink. We don’t. But I was sure we would.

  In my other Jeep Guy dreams, the only thing I’d ever been sure of was him. And I didn’t even know his name. More worrisome, I didn’t even know if he thought I was attractive.

  When I awoke, it felt like my private dream life had been savagely violated and destroyed. I had now real doubts. Jeep Guy had never said he loved me. Dennis said he loved me only when I pestered him, and after he said it, I suspected him of lying.

  I had a heartbreaking sense that there would be no more Jeep Guy dreams.

  * * *

  My doctor called me. He and I had become friends. I called him by his first name, he showed me his vacation shots, and we talked about his love life. If he didn’t actually wear one of those starched white jackets, I might have forgotten he was even a physician, let alone mine. We’d moved beyond the strict “doctor/patient” relationship. I introduced him to range-finder photography, and he introduced me to methamphetamine.

  Oddly enough, it did seem like we were both better off.

  Peter had gotten to know me. I had long ago stopped playing Happy and Well-Adjusted Guy with him. So he’d witnessed firsthand the authentic bus out of control that is me, the frantic-with-stress, prone-to-fury, swinging-instantly-into-grief me.

  Nine months after he became my doctor, he called. “Do you have a minute?”

  Obviously, when your doctor phones in the middle of an afternoon and asks if you have a minute, pretty much the next thing you need to do is go casket shopping.

  “Yeah, what’s going on?”

  He said, “I have suspected this from the beginning, but I really needed to know you better before I was sure. I really think you have ADD—or ADHD, as it’s called now.” He added, “But without the hyperactivity component.”

  “Isn’t that a kid thing?” I asked. I associated ADD with preposterously annoying, constantly shrieking and clawing children running around loose in stores. The kids who streak past you screaming gibberish, smearing themselves all over the world, and all you can think is, Just die.

  “Adults can have it, too,” he said. “And you need meds.”

  So he put me on Adderall. Which is the sleek, postmodern name for basically the same pills those girls were taking in Valley of the Dolls.

  After listing all the reasons why I needed to be medicated, not the least of which was the fact that I asked him questions like “Wait, what were we just talking about?” he wrote a prescription and told me he wanted to hear from me frequently. He said it could take time to settle on the right dose, so he was going to start me low.

  As I swallowed the first pill, I thought, I can’t believe I have a mental condition that has to be treated with fucking dolls.

  I didn’t notice much of a change the first day, because an hour after taking the first pill, I could barely keep my eyes open. College students took this shit to help them study? It made me feel like I had been born in California and homeschooled by a stoner mom and a surfer dad.

  I was in bed by nine.

  On the second day, I noticed a change. My sense of smell had been activated beyond all reason or belief. Everything was overwhelming. The stink of paper. The fumes from an orange. And oh my fucking God, I very nearly began to cry when out of sheer olfactory exhaustion I collapsed on the bed and buried my face in the pillows. My down pillows that were handmade by factory-working moms in Minnesota? They stank like decomposing ducks, as if I went out in the middle of the night looking for the foulest fowl I could find by the side of the road and then scraped it up and laid my head on it.

  The only mental effect I had observed was the sensation, however vague, that somebody had actually reached gloved fingers into my skull and was gripping my brain and rearranging it. Just a little. When I stood up, the world appeared somewhat lopsided. When I sat down to write a note to myself, I stared at the blinking cursor and thought, Wait, is that what music is?

  On the one hand, I was happy to have a proper diagnosis. Aside from a trust fund and a royal title, that was really the only thing I’d ever wanted in life. On the other hand, I was offended to learn that my brain was defective. Or, I suppose I should say, “differently abled.”

  One thing I was not was surprised. Four generations of manic depression on my mother’s side of the family. Three of autism on my father’s. Drug addict uncles, a pyromaniac cousin, a couple of schizophrenics and suicides, several flesh-and-blood geniuses, and a pecan farmer. You just cannot mix those raw ingredients together and then stick them inside my mother to simmer for nine months and expect something normal to come out. It’s a wonder I wasn’t born with a set of horns.

  What did kind of amaze me, though, was that there was a pill. All through life, everybody was always telling me, “Don’t just think your problems can be solved by popping a pill.” But according to my doctor, mine would be. I read the clinical presentation of ADHD in the Physicians’ Desk Reference, a list of symptoms that read like the “About the Author” page on the back of my book. I actually copied and pasted the whole thing into an e-mail and sent it to Christopher. He wrote back, “Wow. Did you write this yourself?”

  * * *

  By the second week, I was still living in the 3-D World of Smell Molecules. And because Adderall truly did enable me to focus on one thing only, I could think of absolutely nothing else. My doctor promised that this was just a side effect that would pass. But every few hours, I would think, I am seriously not going to make it. I don’t think I can have a fixed brain if it comes with a bionic nose.

  My diet ginger ale also tasted like cheap chemicals. It was just … junky. Of course, that’s exactly what diet ginger ale is: cheap, junky chemicals in a polyethylene terephthalate container with a screw top. Seeing the truth about something, even though it’s stinky and unpleasant, can hardly be considered a side effect.

  For as long as I co
uld remember, the first thing I felt when I woke up in the morning was panic. This was followed by dread. When I was little, the dread was related to school. As an adult, the dread was of the free-agent variety. It showed up whenever and wherever and was not particularly attached to anything specific.

  The other thing about my brain was that there had always been something circular and repetitive about it. From compulsive tics to endless cycles of worry, worry, worry. I’d always been able to do a great many things, but most of them were missing large chunks and had unfinished edges. It was not just a difficulty in completing tasks but a difficulty in knowing which tasks to even begin.

  The drug was doing something not just to my brain but to my mind. I was beginning to have a sensation or emotion I had never felt before. Yet the newness of it made it difficult for me to name.

  I sat on the leather chair at my desk, which stank furiously like a dead cow, and considered this feeling. I finally arrived at this: I felt okay. Not a feeling of general well-being. Not a boost in my mood and not any kind of euphoria, like I’d experienced before with painkillers like Vicodin, which was just a delightful pill. What I felt wasn’t so much an addition as a subtraction. There was a sense of relief. Not numb, like a zombie. But like “things” had stopped trying to swarm and gather around me and press against me.

  I felt less like my mind was spraying out in all directions at once.

  * * *

  After three weeks, I wanted to take a shish kebab skewer and punch it through my nose and into my brain to pop my olfactory nerve. It was as if my brain was breaking down life’s aromas into their individual scent components.

  I could smell something sour and musky in rubber, also something oily. My belt smelled like spoiled meat, and I wondered how anybody could even wear one and if I’d ever be able to again. From the bedroom on the third floor of our house, I could smell the reeking chemical stink of a volleyball on a shelf in a distant corner of the basement.