The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes

by Randi Davenport

  Outside, early darkness had begun to fall, a winter dark peculiar to upstate New York, a big darkness that left one with the sense of being in a vault of a place, the sky high and the stars far away.

  “What are your plans?” I said. I picked at the button on my shirt and didn’t look at Zip. For reasons that I could not explain, I took his quitting school hard, as if it had something to do with me.

  “I’ve got a job, if that’s what you mean,” he said.

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I’m not going back,” he said. His face went still and quiet. I could see that the subject was closed. “Let’s talk about something else,” he said. “I’m sure we can talk about something else.”

  I MOVED TO NEW YORK after I graduated. I found a temporary position at a film animation studio and I stayed with my college boyfriend and his roommate in the down-at-the-heels place they’d rented on the Upper West Side; I went to work in the mornings and my boyfriend stayed in our room and worked on his first novel. At night I would lie across the mattress on the floor and listen to people throw glass bottles down into the courtyard. Later, after I went to work for an ad agency, I took an apartment on East Twenty-fifth Street, between Second and Third. It had one large room, one brick wall, a tiny kitchen, a bath, and a view of the Empire State Building if you stood in exactly the right spot and craned your neck exactly the right way. I showed it off whenever anyone came by. I could walk to work from there and walk home in the evenings, picking up groceries at D’Agostino’s or talking with the Korean grocer or stopping in at the bodega to buy something and say hello to Abdul. After work, I wrote and eventually finished a novel that was so bad it took my breath away.

  On nights when I did not write, I went to clubs—Mudd and the original Ritz on Eleventh Street and CBGB’s and the Peppermint Lounge and places whose names I no longer remember. I began to wear black clothes exclusively and subscribed to Diana Vreeland’s mantra, Elegance is refusal. My name started appearing on the lists for promotional parties at the clubs. Every year, at Christmastime, I went to parties thrown by filmmakers and commercial directors at places like Roseland Ballroom. This was the early eighties, so everywhere I went, someone had coke. I began to visit a diet doctor who kept an office on Beekman Place; like my colleagues, I followed his diet, which was essentially a schedule of amphetamines and Quaaludes. On several occasions I fell in clubs and felt strangers lift me up from the floor.

  My college boyfriend asked me to marry him. But when he asked, he hedged his bets and asked if he were to ask me to marry him, would I say yes? I stared at him.

  “Is that a proposal?” I said.

  “That depends,” he said. “If it is, what would you say?”

  “For chrissakes,” I said. “I can’t answer that unless I know what you’re asking.”

  He smirked at me. “Isn’t that your answer?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What was the question?”

  He looked away. “If I asked you to marry me, would you say yes?”

  I kept my gaze level. “No,” I said. “Not if you asked me that way.”

  We passed the winter and the question did not come up again. In the spring, I discovered that he had been having a three-year affair with my best friend and I decided I’d be better off without both of them.

  At night, I lay awake in my apartment and listened to the sounds of my building; one night, these included the sound of police with dogs on the roof because a man with a gun had been seen going that way. They brought him down and passed by my door on the way to the elevator, his wrists knotted into handcuffs behind his back like a bunch of strange grapes.

  I had no idea what I was doing. I had come to New York to marry my college boyfriend and become a famous writer but, after five years, I was alone, trapped in a job I disliked, in a place that scared me. I couldn’t see anything in front of me but more of the same.

  Zip called me in December and said he was in Connecticut to visit his parents for the holidays and did I want to get together? I gave him directions to my apartment and he was late and then he got lost. When he was almost an hour overdue, I gave up on him and took the elevator in my building down to the lobby and pushed through the front door and crossed from one dark side of Twenty-fifth Street to the other dark side, digging my hands deeper into my pockets, and walking sharply on high-heeled boots with my shoulders back and my head high, so I wouldn’t look like a potential crime victim. I saw him standing on the corner, a dark form in a pool of cool yellow light, his dark hair tucked into his dark coat, the tip of his cigarette burning red as he blew streams of smoke out over Third Avenue. He told me that he was late because he’d been stopped and detained by the Port Authority police, who felt that he looked like a member of the FALN, a Puerto Rican terrorist group prone to making bomb threats all over the city. He must have guessed my disbelief because he made two fists and crossed his wrists and twisted his fingers together behind his back to show how he’d been handcuffed and taken away.

  “Just for getting off the bus?” I said incredulously.

  “This is the kind of thing that happens to me all the time,” he said. “You know that.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I didn’t have your phone number. And then I had the directions written down but you told me a building with a doorman—”

  “I told you a building next to a building with a doorman,” I interrupted. “I told you 209 East Twenty-fifth. Next to the building with the doorman.”

  “I knew I’d get here eventually,” he said.

  IN JANUARY THERE WERE long phone calls back and forth and in February I took a bus back through the frozen fields of up-state to visit him; in March he pinned a silver eagle to my sweater. He said it had been his father’s when his father served in World War II.

  One April morning, while I lay half asleep in his bed, Zip sat down next to me and picked up my hand. The window was open and a breeze moved in the sheers and the curtain strings rattled a little against the window frame. He held my hand. He leaned over me. He asked me to marry him. I didn’t say yes that day but when I left town and went back to New York, he called every day and asked the same thing, again and again, until I gave in. He had a ring made for me and he asked if men got rings on their engagement, too. When I told him no, he seemed so disappointed that I gave him the Hopi ring I bought when I was a girl.

  But his question stopped me cold, as other things should have but until that day had not. It was the question of a person who lived outside of the regular customs and beliefs of our society, who drew a blank when confronted with actions based on ordinary social behaviors and expectations; he was genuinely puzzled and wanted to do the right thing but he had no idea what the right thing might be. I decided to overlook it. I was very lonely and a new life with Zip offered me a way out of the mess I’d made of my life in Manhattan. He told me when I came to live with him there would be no drugs and I would learn to rest and I would have to eat and I was only to think about what I needed to do in order to write. He was in a band and I was going to be a writer and it was all going to work out fine, provided I just trusted him and trusted us. He promised to buy me a big house where we could have kids and dogs and I could write and he’d have a music room. He convinced me that the world was wide open to us, and we could be artists together forever.

  I took up my place in the story that he told himself about us and I set my hand to a contract that said love meant that we would both believe this forever. His world, the one he proposed, the one he offered, was far better than the world I saw myself, where I was every day miserable and afraid. And his view matched my dreams and I thought that all we needed to do was work hard and we could make all these things come true.

  FOUR

  Neurosciences was but one part of UNC Memorial Hospital and had six floors and a Medivac heliport on the roof. The ER was in the basement. While I waited for the elevator, a man carrying a small suitcase walked up behind me, and
then a man with a tool belt strapped around his waist, and then a woman with thin gray curls, and another woman who had two small girls with her, one in each hand. We rode up together.

  I turned left out of the elevator and walked through a lobby to a hallway hung with a single small sign: CHILDREN’S UNIT FIVE NORTH/ADOLESCENT UNIT FIVE SOUTH. Arrows pointed in the appropriate directions. I turned right and then left and walked down a long hallway to a set of double doors. On the wall to the immediate right of the doors, a buzzer flanked a small glass window covered by a blind. I pressed and heard something buzz inside the door. After a minute, a tiny woman lifted the blind and looked at me and said, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Chase’s mom,” I said, and she flipped through the pages on her clipboard and made a check next to something she found written there and looked back at me.

  “Just a minute,” she said. “I’ll come around and let you in.”

  I waited. There was a sign on the door announcing that escape precautions were in place and advising me of visiting hours, the appropriate times to bring food, and the likelihood of patients being involved in therapy groups if I arrived at certain times of the day. The door opened and she waved me inside. She closed the door behind me and turned the key in the lock and then turned to look at me. She gestured at the duffle bag. “We’ll have to go through that,” she said.

  I looked at the bag and then at her. “It’s just clothing,” I said. “His teddy bear.”

  She nodded. “It’s policy,” she said. “We have to remove anything that might be used to cause a patient harm: strings from sweatshirts and sweatpants, belts, shoelaces, jewelry, pens, pencils, razors of any description, metal utensils for eating.”

  I held the bag. “All of Chase’s pants have drawstrings in the waist,” I said. “He can’t do zippers.”

  She frowned. “We’ll have to take a look at that. Maybe you can bring him some jeans from home?”

  “He can’t do zippers,” I said. “He has to wear pants with elastic waists, the kind that tie in front.”

  She took the bag from me. “We’ll have to see,” she said. “Maybe if we can pull the strings out, it will be okay.” She pulled Chase’s bear out of the bag. “I think you can have this,” she said. Then she pointed at a room across from the nurse’s station and told me he was just through there. A sign had been taped to the doorframe that told us in big letters that the person inside that room was on Seizure Precautions and Fall Precautions.

  The unit could house ten adolescents at a time. The nurses’ station was in the center and faced the dayroom, where patients ate their meals, watched TV at prescribed times, and occasionally tackled one of the jigsaw puzzles piled on a window ledge. To the left of the nurses’ station, the unit hallway led to a set of double doors, closed and locked, which connected Five South to Five North; just inside those double doors was the Snoozlin’ Room with lava lamps and murals of life under the sea and black lights and beanbag chairs that patients could earn the right to retreat to if they managed their unit responsibilities well. Between the Snoozlin’ Room and the unit’s main entrance, the room where Chase and I sat for the intake interview also housed a small library of books on adolescent depression and related disorders, which the staff encouraged parents to borrow and read. They’d also loan you CDs with titles like You and Your Adolescent. I was attracted to these in the way of a teenager who constantly revisits the scene of a car wreck he’s caused, but I never borrowed them. I was pretty sure they were going to be more about “You” than about “Your Adolescent”: a whole litany of charges about what a terrible parent I must have been for my child to wind up here.

  An enclosed terrace with chairs, a Ping-Pong table, and a foos-ball table ran the length of the dayroom; on days when the weather was fine, you could stand outside and look out through the mesh screens to the street and parking lot below. Facing this was a short hallway with a classroom where group therapy sessions were held and where families could meet in privacy. Across the way, a music and movement room held a treadmill and an electronic keyboard. There were two isolation rooms where patients could be held if they became hard to handle.

  Several teenagers in the dayroom watched me as I walked toward Chase’s room. Chase had his back to me but turned when I said his name. I held his bear out in front of me and he took it and hugged it and put the snout in his mouth and stared at me.

  “How was your night?” I said. “Did you sleep?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s not so bad here, is it?”

  He didn’t reply.

  I crossed the room and sat on the desk. Patients who’d been in this room before had scratched encouraging remarks into the surface, mostly things like, Die you mother fuckers die or just brief bleats, like Fuck you!!!

  “You’ll be home before you know it,” I said. “A few days. Maybe a week. It won’t take long.”

  He nodded and took the bear out of his mouth. “I don’t like hospitals,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “But this won’t be like those other times. This will be pretty quick.”

  “I want to go home,” he said. “I don’t like it here.”

  “I know,” I said. “But the doctors need to fix your medicine.”

  “And I’m not going to have surgery?”

  “No,” I said. “No surgery.”

  He crossed the room to look out the window. “The nailers were outside last night,” he said. “I could see them. They were right here.”

  “That’s what everyone’s worried about,” I said. “The nailers.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Can you tell me who they are?” I asked. “What they are like?”

  “They come up to you and they kidnap you and they hold you down and nail you to a chair,” he said. He began to weep.

  “They’re not real,” I began, but he shook his head.

  “They were outside, Mom. Right outside last night.”

  I found some toilet paper in the bathroom. “Can I help you wipe your face?” I said. He stood still and held his face still and I gently wiped his tears and then held the toilet paper in front of his nose and told him to blow.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said. “It’s going to be okay.”

  He didn’t answer but looked at me with haunted eyes. Then he took two steps back. I turned and looked. A doctor in a long white coat stood in the doorway; his medical students crowded the doorway behind him. He said he was from Neurology. He wanted to know if they could come in. I nodded.

  “They tell me that Chase is having problems with delusional material,” he said to me. “How do you see that?”

  “He sees things that aren’t there, he’s afraid the FBI is out to get him, he thinks the executioner is going to kill him, he stays up at night because he’s afraid of the nailers. He wants me to kill him,” I said.

  The doctor didn’t look at me. He watched his hand as he wrote notes in the chart. “We’re just going to do a brief exam,” he said, glancing up. “Sometimes the kinds of things you’re describing can be related to seizure activity and we want to see if that’s what’s happening here. He’s had generalized absence seizures, tonic-clonic seizures, complex partial seizures?”

  I nodded.

  “All right,” he said and wrote something in his notes. “Do you happen to recall if there was ever any part of the brain that seemed to have more seizure activity than the rest? Or were they all generalized?” He paused. “What I mean is that sometimes the tests will show seizure activity in one part of the brain but not in the whole brain.”

  “There’s an EEG that shows activity in his left temporal lobe,” I said. “I can’t remember when that was.”

  He made a note and then looked up at Chase. “Hey big buddy!” he said. “Wow, you’re a tall guy! How tall are you? Hey! Give me five! Can you do something for me? Can you follow my finger? Don’t turn your head, just follow my finger with your eyes. Good. Now the other side. Good. Can you look straight at me and touch your
finger to your nose? No, look straight at me and then touch your finger to your nose. There you go. Good. Now hold your hands out, like this. No, like this. There. Okay, you can relax. I’m going to hold my hand up and I want you to push as hard as you can against my hand with your hand. Just like that. Good. Now the other side.”

  Chase’s hands shook as he tried to do what the neurologist asked him to do. The tremors made it impossible for him to hold his palms flat. He tried to touch his nose with his finger and missed, nearly poking himself in the eye.

  After a while, the neurologist asked Chase to sit in a chair and hold a paper bag over his mouth and nose. “Breathe really fast into the bag until I tell you to stop,” he said. Chase held the bag flat against his face and weakly blew in and out.

  “No, no,” said the doctor. “You need to open the bag up, here, like this.” He took the bag from Chase and opened it and held it up. “Now,” he said, “put the open bag over your mouth and nose”—he guided Chase’s hands up to his face—“and keep it there while you blow. Go ahead, now. Blow.”

  We stood in an earnest half moon around Chase—the neurologist, the neurology students, and me—and watched Chase blow into the bag. He looked out at us as we watched him.

  “You’re going to have to go a lot faster than that,” said the neurologist. “Go faster. Big breaths. You can do it.”

  Chase blew a little faster.

  “Keep it up. Don’t stop until I tell you to stop. Wait, what are you doing? Are you stopping? Do it again! Keep going! Way to go!” He smiled at Chase in an encouraging way. “Attaboy!”

  Chase blew halfheartedly into the bag. The neurologist kept an eye on his wristwatch. When five minutes had passed, he told Chase to stop.

  “Great job,” he said. “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

  Chase looked pale and sat with his hands limp in his lap.

  “I guess we’d better get an EEG,” the doctor said and made another note. “We’ll do that in the next day or so,” he said and glanced at me. “Someone will let you know the results.”