Pissing in a River

by Lorrie Sprecher

  “Oh, go on.” Melissa ejected Horses and slid Radio Ethiopia into the CD player.

  “This might sound totally insane,” I began, thinking, what good can possibly come of a sentence that starts like that? Even though Patti was singing, that Gang of Four song “Damaged Goods” ran quickly through my head. I inhaled deeply then let the air all out in a gush. “I have voices in my head. Or had them. Before I met you and Nick. Now I hear your voices. That’s nuts already, innit? The voices are why I came to England in the first place. I came looking for the women inside my head. And I found you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A long time ago, I started hearing voices in my head.”

  “Did these voices come from inside or outside your head?”

  “Oh, don’t go all medical on me, Melissa. There were two women with British accents talking inside my head. Once when I was seriously suicidal, one of these women sat beside me on the bed and—”

  “Wait. She sat beside you?”

  “I felt that she was sitting beside me,” I said impatiently. “She put her hand on my forehead, and the pain stopped. For several hours. You know that doesn’t just suddenly happen in the middle of a nervous breakdown when your brain chemistry is completely fucked up.”

  “Hang on. She put her hand on your forehead? Was or was not this woman literally in the room with you?”

  “I felt her hand on my forehead.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “I had my eyes closed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I felt her presence on the bed. I felt her weight on the mattress. I don’t know if you could call it literally or not. At first all I knew was that her name was Melissa. I recognized your voice the second I heard you on the telephone.” I was convinced this was true. “And when I saw you, I knew.”

  Melissa stared at me. “You knew what?”

  “That woman was you.”

  “That’s not possible,” Melissa said finally. “Love, I’ve been here the whole time.”

  “Have you never had even an inkling of me?”

  “You said there were two. Who was the other one?”

  “She was younger and had darker hair.” I paused. “I was drawn to Nick the first time I saw her. She looked familiar. I knew she was the second woman. That’s why I was following her that night.”

  Melissa said gently, “What happened to your voices after you were properly medicated?”

  “Nothing. Those voices were real, Melissa. The meds can’t touch them. Please don’t make me see a psychiatrist.”

  “I—” Melissa paused, frowning in thought. “I don’t know how you expect me to respond. You say you don’t hear them anymore?”

  “They stopped when I met you. Now I hear your voice.”

  “That’s either very crazy or very romantic.” She sighed then said hesitantly, “It’s true from the first time we met I felt comfortable around you. I let you spend the night when I’m usually far more cautious about letting someone I don’t know stay in my flat. I even wondered about it at the time. But it seemed natural to take you in because you’d just rescued Nicky. Why wouldn’t I feel that way? I guess it would have been more in character if I’d offered to drive you home or had you admitted to hospital for the night instead. I’m not normally as openly affectionate with people like I was almost immediately with you. It generally takes me a long time to open up to someone. And you know I have feelings for you I haven’t had before. But isn’t that called falling in love? It happens every day.”

  “I used to listen to this album and think of you,” I said as “Pissing in a River” played on the stereo. “For a long time the voices stopped, and I missed you so much. I’d sit with my guitar and play along for hours. This was our special song. It was my way of telling you how I felt about you. That I would do anything to reach you.” I heard Patti Smith sing, “Everything I’ve done I’ve done for you / Oh I give my life for you.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Every move I made I move to you / And I came like a magnet for you now.”

  “There isn’t anything to say. I sound nuts.” I looked at her sympathetically. “I just wanted you to know. I don’t want to have secrets from you.”

  “That’s so intense.”

  I said, “Every move I made, I moved to you.”

  Melissa took off Patti Smith and put on Elvis Costello and the Attractions for “more cynicism and a little less emotion.”

  “I saw Elvis Costello at Exeter University,” I said, to show Melissa I was oriented times three, that I had a sense of who I was, time, and place. “He was ace. He wore a suit.”

  “Who else did you see?”

  “Oh, everyone who was around. The Tourists. Echo and the Bunnymen. The Second Stiffs Live Tour. Nick Lowe. Blurt. Ian Dury. The Jam. Any Trouble. Midnight and the Lemon Boys. I bought a badge off Glenn Tilbrook from Squeeze after they played.”

  “Midnight and the Lemon Boys?” Melissa asked distractedly.

  “A punk band from Brighton.” I still had my little black-and-yellow Midnight and the Lemon Boys badge and fond memories of dancing to them in the pub with my Exeter mates.

  “Look,” Melissa said, “for my own sanity, I’ve got to ask—are you sure it’s not your OCD? You still have symptoms.”

  “This is totally different, Melissa. And I didn’t just hear you. I saw you. I know how it sounds, but I thought I could tell you anything.”

  “You can tell me anything.”

  “All I know is I came looking for you, and here you are.” I crossed my arms sulkily.

  “Why didn’t I know about you then?”

  “Maybe you were busy,” I snapped.

  “Suspending disbelief for a moment—” Melissa began, and I glared at her, “do you think we knew each other in a past life or something?”

  “Do I know?” I asked, exasperated. “How would I know? It feels spiritual. I don’t know. Maybe I had a strong idea in my head of how things should be. Besides, you know if we understood absolutely everything, it would extinguish all hope. People need hope.”

  Melissa went silent, considering me, then finally said, “It doesn’t matter how you got here. You arrived like a gift.”

  “I thought I was out on my arse,” I said, relieved.

  “Well, sanity’s got a lot to answer for.” Melissa ran a hand lightly over my face. “Love, I don’t care if you’re a nutter.”

  “Those are the nicest words I ever heard,” I said.

  TRACK 38 Precious

  I felt better after telling Melissa my deepest secret. When she came home from work, I practically jumped on her, pushing her back against the door. She dropped her keys and her medical bag and put her arms around me. Shrugging off her coat, she led me upstairs.

  Melissa lay on the bed and kicked off her shoes, revealing bright green-and-pink argyle socks. She caressed my face, the cuffs of her shirt undone and brushing against my cheeks. I took off my leopard punk bracelet and threw it on the floor, not wanting to impale her on the spikes. We kissed for hours then went downstairs and had our tea. Afterward, I cuddled up next to her on the couch, leaning my head against the soft black, pink, and yellow flannel of her shirt. We were watching Maurice, the film that had been made out of the E.M. Forster novel. He was my favorite novelist, and Howard’s End was my favorite novel. I’d taken a tutorial on him at Exeter and kept all his books on the shelf of my residence-hall room. With limited space and in an uncharitable mood, however, I’d tossed Dickens’ Little Dorrit out my window, and it lay all winter up against the base of the apple tree.

  I was still only partially moved out of my bedsit when I got a severe flu, which I tried my best to ignore. Melissa told me to stay in bed, but after she went to work, I took the tube to Hackney. I wanted to surprise her by collecting t
he rest of my belongings. Slowly I rolled the pint glasses and ashtrays I’d thrown out of Exeter pub windows and collected later—having brought them all the way back from the States—into T-shirts and put them in my rucksack.

  I started taking down the pictures I’d tacked to the walls of guitars I someday wanted to own—mostly printed out from eBay on Melissa’s computer—but got so woozy I thought I was going to pass out. I ended up exhausted and nauseous on the unmade single bed, surrounded by photos of pink-paisley Stratocasters, blue-floral Telecasters, vintage Lake Placid and Daphne blue Strats, Jaguars and Jazzmasters with some Gibsons, Epiphones, Rickenbackers, and a few Mosrites thrown in. I rang up Melissa on her mobile and asked about the possibility of a home visit.

  Melissa came to get me when the office closed. “How bad do you feel?” She put her hand on my forehead. “You’ve got fever.” She looked around at the scattered photographs. “Is there anything else here you need right now except for your centerfolds?” She peered into the bathroom. “Don’t tell me. I never noticed it before, but you don’t own a hairbrush.”

  “Well.” I shrugged.

  “I asked you not to tell me,” Melissa laughed. “What do you do if you get a tangle?”

  “I’m not going to tell you,” I said as firmly as possible given my indisposition.

  “Oh, please tell me,” Melissa begged. “I’m sure it’s charming.”

  “I use a fork,” I said.

  Melissa collapsed across my bed in hysterics and said to the ceiling, “Bless ’er.”

  “Or I use yours,” I said crankily. “You know I do.”

  “I just wanted to make sure that you flew across the ocean to start a new life without a hairbrush.”

  “It’s not like I couldn’t get one here. You do have hairbrushes in England, you know. I only took what I needed.”

  “And a hairbrush takes up the space of what, two, maybe three CDs or an effects pedal? I think you’re lovely.”

  “Are we going or not? Or are you gonna stay here laughing all day?”

  We drove out of Hackney with the Kinks playing “I’m Not Like Everybody Else.” Melissa shifted gears and put her hand on mine. When the song ended, she asked me to slip Between the Buttons, my favorite Rolling Stones CD, into the car stereo. “I prefer old Rolling Stones when Brian Jones was in the band,” she said.

  “Me, too.” I leaned back against the worn, comfortable seat. When the song “Miss Amanda Jones” came on, I murmured, “Amanda Jones. That’ll be my name when we get married.”

  Melissa laughed, parking in an assigned space near her flat. She installed me upstairs in what she insisted on calling “our” bedroom, asking if she could do anything for me.

  “I could murder a cup of tea.”

  Melissa came back upstairs, handing me a cuppa. “I put honey in it.” She pressed her lips to my forehead to see if I’d got any hotter. “Poor thing. You are sick.”

  “I feel very sorry for myself,” I warned her, “and very pathetic.”

  She went into the bathroom and came back with a white wafer of flu medication dissolving in a glass of water. “Take this. It’s Co-codamol.”

  The wafer bubbled, spitting water out of the glass. It had an off-putting smell. I made a face. “What is it?”

  “In your day it was called Paracodol.” Melissa took the tea. “Drink it.” I drank it as dramatically as possible and leaned against the pillows, gagging. She sat next to me. “Just relax. It’ll make you drowsy.” She massaged my head with her fingers.

  I closed my eyes. “I’m cold,” I murmured, leaning against her.

  Melissa climbed over me and got under the covers, holding me against her stripey brown-and-blue shirt.

  “Sometimes I get weird when I’m sick,” I said.

  “How will I notice?”

  “Cheers, very funny. My defenses go down, and my OCD runs rampant. The intrusive thoughts and prayers for protection become so incessant they drown me.”

  “You have to tell me about that in more detail,” Melissa said, becoming medical.

  I ignored her. “And I have a jukebox going in my head twenty-four hours a day. With all the music I listen to, you’d think it would play something nice. But when I’m not paying attention, it turns demented and plays the most horribly annoying songs.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, childhood songs, patriotic songs, Christmas songs. Anything that’ll irritate me the most.”

  “What’s your mental jukebox playing now?”

  I paused. “‘Close to You’ by the Carpenters.”

  Melissa laughed and said, “Sorry. I know that’s awful.”

  “Now it’s singing ‘America the Beautiful.’ You have to move fast to keep up with it.” I started singing the United States Marines song, “‘From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, / we will fight our country’s battles on the land and from the sea.’”

  “Ouch.”

  “Plus, half the time it gets the lyrics wrong. One of its favorites is from the film The Wizard of Oz, which traumatized me as a child. ‘We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz.’ Except my mind says gizzard, ‘We’re off to see the gizzard, the wonderful gizzard of Oz.’ It’s maddening. ‘Joy to the world, the Lord is come. / Let earth receive her King!’”

  “But you’re Jewish.”

  “Of course I am. That only makes the Christmas songs more disturbing. If I opened my mouth and sang everything that popped into my head, you’d go spare.”

  “And this is going on all the time?”

  “You’re not going to run off to get your notepad and start writing this down, are you?”

  “It’s a bit important,” Melissa teased me, “but I shall memorize it. And on top of this are the intrusive thoughts?”

  “On top, around and underneath. And prayers for protection.”

  “Who are you protecting?”

  “Everyone. Especially you.”

  “Ta.” Melissa smiled. “What if I told you, as a medical doctor, that these thoughts have nothing to do with anyone’s physical reality? Would you believe me?”

  “Sure,” I said, “but I’d keep having them anyway. We only use a tiny percentage of our brains. How can you know my brain isn’t connected to everything in the universe?”

  Melissa said, “I need to think about this more. But for now, you’ve done everything you need to do, and you can rest.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “My OCD and I thank you. My OCD is a delicious combination of low self-esteem and megalomania.”

  “What does it feel like?” Melissa asked.

  “Very I’m-trapped-in-my-head-and-I-can’t-get-out-ish,” I said.

  “It sounds frustrating and painful.”

  “It could be worse,” I mumbled, dozing off. “It was worse. This is like heaven.”

  “I’m glad. I’m sorry you still have symptoms that bother you. I wish I could do more.”

  “But you do. You make the mechanisms in my brain slow down. When I’m with you, I’m not tormented.”

  “What a lovely thing to say,” Melissa said, tucking the covers in around me. “I’m all goosepimply.”

  TRACK 39 Brimful of Asha

  When I was well enough, we brought over the rest of my things, and I said goodbye to my bedsit. One late afternoon, I bunged my boxing gear into my white-and-green Exeter University bag and came downstairs in baggy silver boxing trunks. Melissa looked up from the book she was reading. Tagada Jones, a hardcore French band she liked, was playing on the stereo. “Well, don’t you look scrummy?” She laughed as I blushed.

  At boxing, I pretended the heavy bag was the president’s face. Then I imagined Dick “my-daughter-is-a-lesbian-and-I’m-still-a-fucking-Republican” Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. I unwound my au
bergine handwraps, wiped down my sweaty hair with them, and tossed them in my bag. I packed up my vinyl, hot-pink boxing gloves, and put on the fluorescent mint-green sweatshirt on which I’d stenciled “The President’s Brain Is Missing.” When I’d been at Exeter, there had been a television program I liked called Spitting Image, which featured big-headed puppets of Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher and included a regular segment called “The President’s Brain Is Missing.”

  When I got home Dodgy, a Britpop band Melissa liked, was playing on the stereo. I referred to them as “Oasis lite” just to tease her, which really wasn’t fair because I liked them and they had some great tunes like “Staying Out for the Summer.” As I turned down the music to call for Melissa, I heard water running in the upstairs bathroom. I got down the box of PG Tips and made two cups of tea. I tapped on the door and asked Melissa if I could come in. “I made you a cuppa.” I put hers on the closed toilet lid.

  Melissa was taking a shower. “Ta, Amanda.” She sounded like she’d been crying.

  “Melissa?” I listened to the water splash. “What’s the matter?”

  “Leave it, will you?” She tried to sound annoyed, but her voice broke.

  “You’re not alright, are you? Can I come in?”

  “Do what? Oh buggery, bloody hell. Yes, come in. Why not? Bugger it.”

  I put my tea next to hers, swished open the shower curtain and stepped into the tub, still fully clothed in tracky bottoms, sweatshirt, and trainers.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, standing in front of her with the hot water beating on the back of my sweatshirt. She was so gorgeous I didn’t think I could stand it.

  Melissa started laughing and crying at the same time. “What the bloody hell are you thinking?”

  I sloshed a little closer in my drowning white Chuck Taylors and put my arms around her slender, naked body. “Come on an’ tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I was thinking about you and me and how we haven’t—you know, haven’t. I shouldn’t make remarks, like telling you you’re scrummy, if I can’t deliver.”