The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes

by Randi Davenport

  “I don’t think he’s going to wake up,” someone said behind me. I turned toward the voice. Sam, the male nurse who was most often with Chase, stood in the doorway, where he watched me watch Chase.

  “He’s been sleeping for a while now,” Sam said. “We had to give him Thorazine this morning, so he’ll stay asleep for some time.” He looked at me with an interested expression. “Maybe now is a good time to talk? There are just some questions, if you could answer—”

  I followed him and we stood under the bright lights of the nurses’ station. “Why Thorazine?” I said.

  “Chase was pretty agitated and he got aggressive with a member of the staff,” said Sam. “Something about Zack? Someone named Zack?”

  “Zack de la Rocha,” I said dully.

  “That’s it,” said Sam. “Who is that, anyhow? Chase talks about him quite a bit.”

  “The lead singer of a band called Rage Against the Machine,” I said. “Chase’s favorite band.”

  “Does he know him? He says he knows him.”

  I shook my head.

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “He was talking about a concert, about how he had to go on stage.” He looked at me and smiled, as if to show that this was nothing to be alarmed about, and shook his head at the wonderment of it all. “Chase is pretty amazing,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, and swallowed.

  “Well, look,” said Sam. He cleared his throat. “We keep noticing that Chase can’t do things like take a shower or brush his teeth. Did he do these things at home without supervision?”

  “He had to be taught how to use the shower. We had a checklist on a laminated card so he’d know what to do first, and second, and third,” I said. “Things like: Turn on the Water. Wet Your Body. Open the Shampoo.”

  Sam’s expression never wavered. Friendly, cheerful, utterly un-readable. He spoke mildly, as if Chase were someone who had passed from this country into some other on an interesting trip. “What kinds of things can we do here?” he asked.

  “I would think the same things would work here.”

  “Huh,” said Sam. He paused. “What about a haircut?” he said. “There’s a guy who works weekend shifts who cuts hair on the side. We don’t have a hospital barber but we thought maybe it’d be good to give Chase a haircut. With your permission.”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  “And his nails?” said Sam. “How does he keep up with his nails?”

  “You have to cut them for him,” I said.

  “We aren’t allowed to keep nail clippers here,” said Sam. “Too dangerous.” He thought for a minute. “If you brought some in, we could do it when you had them with you. And then you could take them away again.”

  I nodded.

  “And maybe,” said Sam, “you could bring some more clothes? Some pants and socks and boxers? He keeps losing his.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But someone needs to help him keep up with his belongings. Otherwise everything will disappear.”

  “We’ve got most of his clothes in a locker now,” said Sam. “He’s just allowed two changes in his dresser drawer. This will probably help him keep track a little better, right?”

  I looked away and then back at Sam. “Chase cannot look after his own belongings,” I said. “He needs help with that. Just like he needs help with the shower and with brushing his teeth. It’s part of the autism,” I said.

  “We don’t see many kids with autism here,” said Sam. He smiled at me, as if to show he meant no malice. “Truthfully,” he said, “we don’t see many kids like Chase here. He’s pretty unique.” He paused and gazed at me, his expression still blank and friendly. “Some of us wonder if Chase is autistic at all.”

  I wanted to say, Join the club. Instead, I watched a boy in the dayroom bent over his knees, a mangled paperback trembling in his hands. “You don’t see many kids like Chase here or you don’t see any kids like Chase here?” I said at last.

  Sam smiled again and then looked a little more serious. “Chase’s symptoms are so severe,” he said. His voice remained surprisingly cheerful even as he shook his head. “He’s not exactly run-of-the-mill,” he said. “But I’m sure they’ve told you that.”

  The first resident assigned to Chase, Dr. Lopez, had rotated off the unit in three weeks. At our last meeting, during the last week of November, she wore tight black trousers and a snug pink wrap-top with a deep neckline; a gold cross nestled in her cleavage. Her breasts erupted from her navy blue lace bra.

  “My plan is for Chase to be home by Christmas,” she said.

  “Do you think that’s possible?” I said.

  She nodded vigorously and her glittering curls bounced on her shoulders. “I don’t see any reason why Chase won’t be ready to go home by the holidays,” she said brightly. “And even if he isn’t ready to go home to stay, maybe he can go home just for the day. You could pick him up on a pass and then bring him back that night.”

  She’d borrowed the social worker’s office so we could meet off the unit. For the two weeks prior to this meeting, Chase had been insisting that his real mother had been kidnapped by terrorists and was being held hostage and that’s why she never came to visit. He had been demanding that I be arrested. He’d kick me if he could, or hit me, although the staff usually stopped him in time.

  “We’ll have to see,” I said slowly. “If he still thinks I’m not his mother, it might be hard.”

  “Isn’t that getting better?” she said. She looked at her notes and then back at me. “I thought I heard that was getting better.”

  After Dr. Lopez rotated out, Chase’s second resident was a tall, earnest young woman who wore plaid skirts under her long white coat, and nylons, and flat shoes. She gave me the name for Chase’s conviction that an imposter had replaced his mother.

  “It’s called Capgras syndrome,” she explained. “You commonly see it in psychotic patients. It usually happens with someone close, like a spouse, but it can also be a parent, or a brother or a sister.”

  “Will he ever recognize me?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “That depends on how severely psychotic he is. If he stays psychotic, he might not.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “I think his prognosis is very, very poor.” The excitement in her voice gave emphasis to the second very and she paused to find a more neutral tone. “He’s been acutely psychotic for quite a while now and his psychosis is very severe. He isn’t responding to the drugs. In patients like these, recovery is very rare.”

  As the weeks passed, I found that the residents were, without exception, young, green, callow, unformed. In studiedly neutral voices, they eagerly painted the bleakest possible picture of the outcome. I’m sure they only meant to tell me the truth. I’m sure that they did not intend to drain hope. But I grew tired of young doctors who, in their enthusiasms and interests, wanted to be the first to let me in on their opinion of this very interesting case. By the time the third resident appeared, I called Dr. B, the attending, and asked if I might, from that point forward, speak only to him.

  AT CHRISTMAS, I BROUGHT Chase a shopping bag full of gifts: a chocolate Santa, a Rage Against the Machine CD, two comic books, and three long-sleeved shirts that I picked out for him because he looked thin and cold. His hands shook as he opened the gifts. He undid the paper and it fell to the floor by his feet and he lay the box on the table in front of him until I said, “Look, let’s open it,” and then he struggled to pry it open and I said, “Let me help you.” He stared at the white tissue paper and I lifted the shirt out and showed it to him. He looked away. Pam came over and looked at the things I’d brought and told me that he could keep the shirts but everything else had to go back home. He looked on without expression as I gathered his things and re-packed them in the shopping bag. His face darkened. I wondered if he thought I had just given him presents only to take them away again and I explained again that I’d bring chocolate every time I visited and his other things would be waiting for him at
home. He looked at me and said, “Is my room still there?”

  “Of course your room is still there,” I said. “All of your things are there. Just like before.”

  He stood up and swung his arms and swung his arms and I gave the nurses the three shirts so they could inventory them and told Chase he’d be able to wear one in just a minute, if he wanted, one of his new shirts, wouldn’t that be cool. I told him how much we missed him at home and that things just weren’t the same without him and he stood before me and didn’t speak except to the space beside him, in a tone so low I could not make out what he was saying. He walked away from me but at the last minute turned his sad face toward me as I walked out the door with the bag.

  Later that afternoon, Haley and I drove to a friend’s house for dinner. Black pines lined the road on both sides, with even darker forest behind. Haley rode beside me and the car felt empty with just the two of us. I hadn’t expected this. I hadn’t known that Chase would go into the hospital and not get better. Before this, I had understood in the way of someone taking in news from afar that there were limits to the things that medicine can offer; I had not yet understood that in the way that one does when medicine begins to fail someone you love. I drove and longed for snow and for all the Christmases of years past, when Chase had been the first one down the stairs on Christmas morning, when it had been cold and Zip and I had bundled Chase and Haley into their snowsuits and boots and walked them along snowy streets on Christmas Eve to tire them out before bed, when Chase had stayed awake for a long time listening for the bells of Santa’s sleigh and he and Haley had lain in their beds and talked to one another through the heating vents until they fell asleep. Now Haley rode quietly beside me, her small face turned toward the dark trees.

  WE RODE THE HOSPITAL shuttle from the parking deck to Neurosciences and my sister held a Christmas present for Chase in her lap. She told me about a friend of hers, a woman who was a pediatric psych nurse, who told her that Chase would definitely get better, that the new medicines were miracle workers, that there was hope to be had. I nodded and led her through Neurosciences to the elevators, and then up to Five South. When we came through the door, Chase was pacing up and down in the dayroom next to the artificial Christmas tree. He turned toward us just as he turned toward anyone who came through the front door and he scowled when he saw me and then walked up to me and tried to kick me. Pam told him to stop and suggested we visit in the classroom, where Chase sat at the long table in the middle of the room and stared at us without speaking or spoke only in the words he made under his breath and tapped his leg and tapped his leg and tapped his leg. When we left the unit after the visit, my sister said nothing, and we rode the shuttle back to the car in silence.

  THE FIRST MEDICATION didn’t work. It seemed to make him worse and worse again, as if whatever hold he had on this place, on us, on himself, loosened and dislodged and came away, like a ship breaking its lines in a swift storm. He told me his name was Zack. He told me his name was David. He told me his name was God. He told me he was the Grim Reaper. He paced for hours, from his room to the front door, back and forth, although his fear of the profilers, the nailers, the executioner, the giant insects landing on the roof of the hospital upstairs, the concentration camps, the death cells, would drive him back to his room. He spoke darkly of the FBI and of his own death. I stopped at the nurses’ station when I came in and asked how he was doing. Pam or Judy or Sam always spoke in careful tones. He’s had a bad morning. He’s had a rough day. He says he lives in the white circle of executioners in the sky. Where does he get this religious imagery? Did you teach him hellfire and brimstone? He never stops talking about the angel of death.

  HE BEGAN TO TIME TRAVEL. He told me that he was twenty-nine years old, that he grew up a long time ago. I asked him if he remembered our house, with its purple door and the lilies he’d picked out to plant under the crepe myrtle when we made the garden out front.

  “It burned down,” he said.

  “No, Chase,” I said. “That’s not true. Our house is still there. I was there this morning.”

  “That’s a past life,” he said. “I live in the future now.”

  He leaned away from me and his mouth moved and moved and moved, but no words came out. His left hand tapped his thigh in complicated syncopation, a beat only he could understand.

  AT LUNCHTIME, I OFFERED to open his Boost for him.

  “No!” he screamed and kicked hard at the table and then kicked harder until he’d kicked me. “You get out!” he screamed. “You get out!”

  “Chase,” said Pam. “Don’t do that, Chase. That’s not nice.”

  I stood up. “It’s okay,” I said. I looked around, shocked by the strength with which Chase had lashed out.

  “Maybe it’d be better to come back tomorrow,” Pam said. “He’s had a rough morning.”

  I walked past the nurses’ station. One of them tried to comfort me. “It’s the illness that makes him do that,” she said. “He doesn’t really want to kick you. You understand.”

  SEVEN

  It’s only when I looked back on it that I saw things you might call identifiable signs. Instead of choosing someone, I let someone who loved me choose me. When Zip talked about me, he lingered over the details from the years we were friends: the way I looked one night at a party, dressed in a long, slinky, black halter dress with my shoulders bare and my dark hair framing my face. He told me that during the years we were apart, he used to look up at the moon and remember that I was under the same moon, that we were still connected because the moon shed its light on both of us. He wrote songs for me and when he played those songs, no matter where he was, he played them to me. Even when the band had fallen apart and the Trapdoors were playing cover tunes at some dive bar, I’d walk in the room and he would begin to sing “I Saw Her Standing There” and wink at me from the stage.

  But there were signs. His misunderstanding about the engagement ring was the misunderstanding of someone who’d arrived on this planet from the moon. When the utility company turned the electricity off in his apartment for nonpayment of the bill, instead of having the lights turned back on, he said he refused to play their game, that they just wanted to see how much they could rip him off, and he lived in the dark and called himself an Urban Camper. He told me the reason he’d quit school was that there was no more money: his father had taken out student loans in his name to sink into the family business and refused to repay them and there was nothing left. He growled at me when I suggested talking to the financial-aid office about other things that could be done. When he moved out of his Keuka Street apartment into our new place, I found a letter written two years before but never sent. Addressed to his mother, it described how he had just met the girl he was going to marry. It wasn’t me.

  At that moment I could have understood that Zip wanted someone to marry and it didn’t have anything to do with me but I was a sleepwalker in my own life when we courted, and I wanted someone to marry me as much as Zip wanted to marry someone. I set the letter down and walked into the kitchen, where Zip sat at the table, leafing through a pile of his drawings. There were beautifully rendered portraits of people he knew and he stopped at one and lifted it out and turned it around and said, “Look. This is the one I did of you.” He’d used my photograph in my college yearbook as his model and when I saw the drawing, I saw myself, only now I was beautiful.

  When we moved in together, he began to use the name Art Byrd, casually at first, and then with some regularity. Mail came addressed to Art Byrd. He used the name Art Byrd when he talked to the people at the record company. We had silly nicknames for each other, the way people in love always do, Bunny and Bird, and he left little cartoons of the adventures of Bunny and Bird on the kitchen table for me in place of grocery lists or notes about where he’d gone when he went out. When I asked him about Art Byrd, Zip said it just made sense to him to append Art to Bird—he was an artist, after all, wasn’t he?—and then change the spelling so Byrd looked more
like a name. He told me it didn’t mean anything, but there were just some people he preferred never learn where he was. He cast it as a matter of privacy so I didn’t recognize the fluttering wing of paranoia. Still, something in me closed a little whenever I saw that name, as if I knew something wasn’t right.

  He told me that when he was growing up, he felt like an alien left in the wrong family. He told me that when he was little, his parents could not keep up with him or catch him and that’s how he ended up being hit by a bus. He rode his tricycle down a flight of stairs. When he said what he felt like saying, and his mother washed his mouth out with soap, he let her and just when she had the bar of soap to his lips, he bit the soap in half and tried to eat it instead. He told me his parents were endlessly frustrated with him, and that he learned things he liked and ignored things he didn’t. His report cards were a punch-work of A’s and F’s. He told me he could fix any engine on earth. He told me that he’d spent a year or two in high school racing at some backwoods Jersey track and practically the first car he bought was a white Aston Martin, a convertible, and he used to race that car whenever he had a chance. He’d had to learn how to fix engines because of the racing. When I bought my first car, an old Buick, he popped the hood and stared down at the coils and carburetor and plugs and pins and belts and said that some newfangled mechanics must have come up with this engine and he preferred not to touch it—he didn’t have a clue how it worked.

  He wanted less and less to do with people and began to ask me to turn down invitations to parties. When he refused to go out at night and sat silently reading the same book over and over again, he told me it was because he was around people and on his feet all day and just didn’t want to do anything when he got home. I began to plan activities for us so I wouldn’t be cooped up all the time, drives around the lake, trips to junk shops to buy furniture I’d remake into something we could use, walks in the woods to look for birds. We could drive to Montezuma Wildlife Refuge easily from where we lived and walk a three-mile trail through the open pasture and forest and then ease the car slowly along the road on the embankment above the wetlands, watching great blue herons and vast flocks of Brant geese during the flyway months. I kept a list of all the birds we saw and Zip walked with me and made sure I checked things off: the American bittern, the green heron, the night heron, the common yellowthroat.