by Byron Lane
I look out of a window, but all the windows up here are frosted so the people institutionalized can’t see outside to the world, to the life they’re missing. I see only the vague shapes of life—blurs of cars driving by, other buildings, small and distorted shapes of people walking. It’s strange watching a hazy reflection of life before your eyes, forcing guesses and assumptions about what’s really happening all around you.
“Are you Charlie?” a nurse says, rushing into the waiting area, no frills, no time to dally.
I stand. “Yup. Here to see Aurora Borealis,” I say playfully. I gather my jacket and purple leather backpack, cheerfully ready to start the workday.
“She’s not here,” the nurse says, turning immediately to leave.
“What? Where is she?” I ask, stepping forward, closer to the hallway, closer to the nurse, my arms falling uselessly to my sides, my backpack and jacket now touching the dirty floor.
“She checked out this morning,” the nurse says, studying her clipboard.
“What? This morning? She checked out? How can she check out if she’s in a mental hospital?”
The nurse glances up at me. “I’m sorry, I can’t say any more. Have a good day,” she says, looking me over once, trying to check the size, to figure out exactly what’s happening here, namely, who am I, and who am I to Aurora Borealis?
“Wait, wait,” I plead. “Who checked her out, where did she go?”
“Sir—”
“We’re talking about Kathi, right? I’m her assistant. She isn’t supposed to leave.” I’m pacing, my feet out of sync with my body; I’m shifting at the waist and turning back and forth. “She’s not well. She needs help. She’s not here? Are you sure?”
The nurse stares at me with her first hint of kindness, and under the screams and laughter of the other patients, she whispers, solemnity in her eyes, “Hon, she’s not here.”
* * *
That gate.
That mansion.
That bedroom.
And that’s where I find Kathi Kannon, comfortably snuggled with a delightfully snoring Roy, in her own bed, in her own space, inoculated from the real world, real consequences—no nurses, no rules, no frosted glass to separate her from reality. No bottoming out.
I’m barely through the door to her bedroom when I start in on her, air rushing past my ears I’m moving so fast. “Hey!”
“Good morning, Cockring,” she says groggily, Roy perking up beside her, stretching his head into the air.
I half-plop my body at her feet at the end of her bed, one of my legs folded under me, the other dangling off, like someone ready to make a run for it if things go south.
“Kathi, I just came from the hospital.”
“Oh, no,” she says. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” I answer out of reflex, dismissing her joke and pressing on with pressing matters. “Why aren’t you there?”
“I hated that place and I hated all those people and Mommy let me check out,” Kathi says, taking a casual drag from her e-cigarette, but when she exhales, nothing comes out, no vapor, no substance. She shakes the cartridge, the battery—empty, or dead.
“What about your health?” I ask.
“I feel great,” she says, tossing the covers off her body, rolling out of bed, and walking to the desk where she keeps her e-cigarette chargers. Roy watches her go, his ears jutting back and forth as he calculates whether to unbundle from his blankets and go with her, but he then shrugs and nuzzles back into the comforter, even Roy unwilling to commit to this conversation.
“But you don’t feel great,” I argue, swinging my other leg off the bed, both feet now dangling, comfort escaping me, escaping the room.
“You don’t know how I feel, darling,” she says, her back to me as she fumbles with the e-cigarettes.
Darling.
“I know enough,” I say, now standing. “You need to go back.”
“I’m not going back there. Those people are idiots,” she says, as she clips and twists and struggles to electrify her vice.
“Idiots? For what? For wanting you to be healthy?”
“Cockring, please,” she says, clanking around, intensely fumbling with power cords and outlets. “Don’t do this.”
“Was Orion an idiot, too?”
“Sadly, yes,” Kathi says, now turning to face me, to engage. Her face looks softer, less certain than usual.
“And the sober coaches before him? Idiots? And your mother, trying to get you help before that? Idiot? And me, who wants you to live a long life, I’m an idiot, too?”
“Ugh, you’re doing this all wrong,” Kathi says. “It has to be my choice.”
“I don’t trust your choices.”
“I’m not going back, Cockring,” Kathi says. “We’ll be fine.”
“We? What about you?” I ask. “Let’s be really, really real here. What if this happens in London?”
“Well,” she thinks aloud, “I guess I’m gonna need you to research the best psych wards in England, please.” Kathi turns away again, to replace cartridges, replace dead batteries with live ones.
“No.”
No.
This is the first time I’ve ever really said no to Kathi Kannon, with my eyes, my soul, my adult voice. The word feels searing.
Kathi looks at me over her shoulder and over her glasses—double the intensity—staring for a few seconds too long, then resuming her fidgeting with her devices while saying it again, colder, harder, “Cockring, I’m gonna need you to research the best psych wards in England, please.”
“I won’t do it,” I say. “I can’t.”
“Sure you can. It’s not rocket science,” Kathi says. “Just google ‘best psych wards London.’ I did it a couple years ago and found two that have horseback riding. That’ll be fun, no?”
“No! Not fun. And not a solution. I won’t keep checking you into facilities and handing you off to strangers and worrying you’re still going to overdose the next morning or the next week or the next month. How many scares do we have to have? Hospitalization isn’t like taking your car to the shop,” I tell her, my voice shaky and colored with a false confidence she can smell like a shark to blood.
Kathi pauses, slaps the e-cigs and the cartridges and the batteries down, smooshed under her hands, and she stands tall and turns to fully face me. We lock eyes.
“Please don’t overstep,” she says firmly, walking back to the bed. “I don’t need that hospital. I’m really fine. Let’s focus on London, on shooting the new films. It’ll be great for our life.”
“Our life? What about your life?” I ask. “What about my life?” The question draws Kathi’s eye, and I immediately realize my irreversible sin. I’ve pulled back the curtain too far. I’ve separated us, punctured the veil of non-separation, revealed “our life” as two. Perhaps Roger was right: I can’t have it both ways. Perhaps I’m either all in or not at all; we’re either united or nothing. Perhaps if I’m not one life with her, I’m one life against her.
Kathi gets up from the bed again, increasingly restless, turning back to her e-cigarettes, her hands moving quickly, frantically, screwing one into the charger, then another, then another. “These batteries are all dead!” she yells, red lights blinking, seemingly faster and faster, seemingly punctuating our growing problem.
“I’m trying to help you. Not just with travel and chores and whatever but to really help you.”
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” Kathi says. “It hasn’t killed me yet.”
“Yet!” I yell, now my eyes heating, burning, red. I feel the welling, I try to stifle it. “That’s the part I’m worried about.”
“I’m not going back to the hospital,” Kathi says slowly, like she’s speaking a regretful truth. She turns to face me. “And, I guess, if you don’t like it, there’s the door.”
There’s the door.
Like a fool showing my hand, I look over at the door to her bedroom, that familiar wood grain I’ve befriended in the years of
walking in here to wake her up, finding her in all stages of undress and duress, and in the happier recesses of my memory, finding her healthy, joyous, engaged, ready for an adventure somewhere other than so-called Vegas. I look at the stained-glass panel in the door, the glass I’ve studied nearly every day before entering her room with my ear turned slightly toward the threshold, listening for her breath, for whether she’s asleep or awake; that door, the silly barrier between our worlds, it suddenly seems my enemy.
There’s the door.
Kathi watches me as I nod my head, thinking of the similar comment my father used to make to my mother—If you don’t like it, there’s the door—forcing Mom’s hand and all but ushering her out of their relationship. Mom bravely accepted the challenge, taking it as far as she could. And now I find myself facing both of my mother figures: Kathi Kannon, entwined in my emotions, and my real mother, entombed in a locket just a short distance from us in Kathi’s purse, both of these ladies calling on me to make a choice, between the two mothers—one who gave me birth and one who gave me rebirth, one calling on me to shutter my courage and the other reminding me to embrace it.
There’s the door.
I’m thinking, She can’t be serious.
I’m thinking, This is not how I want this to end.
I’m thinking, Maybe there’s a lot I don’t want.
I can hear the bedside lamp buzzing; I can hear the fountain outside on the back patio; I can hear the second hand of the wall clock moving, the gears turning; I can hear Kathi breathing heavier and heavier; I can feel Roy’s now-tense gaze. I can smell the stink of the position I’m in, having to navigate these waters, having to convince a certain someone to take care of herself, that her life matters.
“I won’t be an enabler,” I say, with a hint of overdone pride. “I won’t be, like, your baby, nursing at the Shine.”
“But, darling, you already are.”
I stand and begin to protest. “No—”
“Oh, don’t pretend,” Kathi says. “You’ve known what I buy with vegetable money. You’ve known Vegas wasn’t just me going to buy you a new sweater. You’ve been by my side on airplanes and in hotel rooms, and what lie are you telling yourself? Do you think I tried to run into traffic because of a vitamin C deficiency? Do you think I sleep all day because my blood sugar is low? What lies do you tell yourself so you can keep bragging to your friends that you work for old, cranky, crazy Priestess Talara?”
“That’s not how I see it,” I say meekly, now tugging at my sweater, now weighted down by it, by some truth in her words.
“You said it,” Kathi says, shrugging. “Let’s be really, really real here. Fine. We make a good team, Cockring. Some things come with the territory. Calm down. Before you know it, your name will be in the credits of a Nova Quest film, darling.”
I stop breathing. Now my hands are those of a nervous soldier, flexing in and out of fists.
I say, “No, Kathi…”
Hey, Siri, I’m seeing her manic in the driveway and trying to swim into traffic.
I say, “I won’t calm down…”
Hey, Siri, I’m seeing her secret stashes of pills tucked in purses and pockets.
I say, “I’m frustrated and scared…”
Hey, Siri, I’m seeing her body looking cold and lifeless in Seattle.
I say, “I’m overwhelmed and lost…”
Hey, Siri, I’m seeing her collapse into a heap onstage in front of an audience of iPhones and ill wishes in waters off Bermuda.
I say, “I’m bored.”
And it’s like a bomb drops.
I say it quickly, flatly, bluntly, louder than I expected. Even Roy looks up at me. My eyes on Kathi are hard with truth and disappointment and realization.
A sadness rinses my veins, stronger and stronger, just like the silence in the room. I watch the blinking red lights of her cigarette chargers, blood rushing to my head, my limbs growing cold and numb. I feel the unthinkable revelation. I’m suddenly raw and spinning. I’m longing for the hospital for myself, for the frosted glass and electric locks keeping truth and reality at bay. I don’t want to see this job for what it is, and I don’t want to see this job for what it could be forever—her in constant danger, and me believing I can help her, and I can’t.
Kathi sucks on an e-cigarette, inhaling and inhaling, then blowing out, and again, her breath is invisible, no electronic vapor in her lungs, no charge held from the cartridge. “NOTHING WORKS ANYMORE!!!” Kathi screams, now her tears beginning as she pulls it from her mouth and jams it into a charger in an unholy fit. She measures her temper, tempers her feelings—whatever they are: Anger? Hurt? Love? She pulls a new e-cigarette from its charger and pops it into her mouth. She sucks on the device, long and hard, and finally, her eyes closed, she exhales vapor, filling the room like it’s on fire, like it’s all burning down.
I say to Kathi Kannon, film icon, “If you don’t go back to the hospital, I’m going to leave.”
As I look at Kathi, dressed in her tattered black T-shirt and long cardigan, similar to what she was wearing at my job interview all those years ago, my life—my lifestyle—flashes before my eyes: me wide-eyed and eagerly parked outside her front gate for the first time, my hopeful walk up to her front door, our optimistic interview, meeting Mateo the Moose, the passion in these wild fireplaces, the living leather royalty of Emperor Yi, the trips, the great aurora, the cursed cruise, the perfection that is Roy—who’s in this strained moment staring up at me with his unending unconditional love, questioning, no doubt, where all this is going, where I’m maybe going, whether I’m indeed going. It seems Kathi is considering, too.
Kathi takes a deep breath, the kind in movies when the hero is wounded. It’s the awkward moment in film when the music stops and we hear the slow ringing in the ears. It’s the moment when all seems lost. And the audience gets it. And the hero gets it. And right now, Kathi Kannon gets it.
“I thought we were friends,” Kathi says, crying softly.
“This is what a friend should have done a long time ago.”
Kathi and I stand in limbo for a while, time seeming so silly, words seeming so pointless.
I close my eyes tightly, so tight I feel muscles I never knew existed, and I step forward in her bedroom to a familiar imaginary mark, and in an instant I see myself holding an imaginary award, blinded by imaginary lights and cameras. I’m emotional—not from victory but something else. I say into the imaginary microphone, to the imaginary auditorium, “Is this thing on?”
Kathi turns from me, dissolving into the ocean of imaginary people, the same imaginary audience from when I first met her so many moons ago, back when I was a different person. I wonder if they recognize me? I wonder if they’ve seen me grow and change and arrive at this very moment.
I take a deep breath; the same oxygen-rich blood vessels gush inside me as if from the first day I saw Kathi Kannon give her imaginary awards speech. God, it’s so real. The metal award, though only in my mind, still feels very solid, very cold in my hands. “I don’t deserve an award,” I say.
I hear Kathi putting down her cigarettes, her feet shuffling. I feel her face me.
And in my mind, I think I spot her in the dark, imaginary theater, behind the lights and cameras and faceless people, and I crane my neck to see her, to speak to her. “If I’m getting an award, it’s only because of one person, a woman who gave me life, who gifted me light from darkness, who helped me see a living world behind black corners. I’d like to thank Kathi Kannon for loving me.”
I feel a tear drop from my eye, moisture clearing my vision, transporting me back to her bedroom, back to standing alone with her and Roy. I stare at her, moved and moving, slowly, her hands twitching slightly.
And here we are, separated now by more than words and more than space and time. Here we stand, finally, in the home where we birthed our awards-acceptance speeches, where we now concede defeat and disconnection.
Kathi’s shoulders slump forward, impossibly
low, the crown of her head dipping and dipping and the arch of her back now heaving, dreariness upon her as upon me, the two of us, standing a few feet apart and not touching at all, sipping our sovereignty, trying it on, the itchy loneliness of it, for perhaps the first time since we met.
I don’t turn away from her. She turns away from me, back to her e-cigarettes, her friends, a world that’s all vapor.
I reach over to her bed and gently touch Roy on the head. His ears collapse faithfully under my hand and I rub the loose skin that sits over his adoring brain. I whisper to him, “I’m sorry, buddy.” Another traitorous tear slips from my eye, betraying my attempt to show strength, courage, professionalism—perhaps it’s too late for any of that.
I pull my hand from a grateful Roy, turn from him and Kathi, my blood swirling inside my body from the rush of the motion, the rush of the moment. I feel my heart beating in my chest, I can hear the thumping in my ears, I can see it—the pulsing of little halos in my vision, slowly trying to close in on me, like the onset of a migraine or a heart attack or a heartbreak.
I feel every muscle in my body moving as I start to leave her. I feel her turn, I feel her eyes following my every independent motion, seeing me maybe for the first time as an autonomous being, some creature who crawled into her open door at night and now crawls away at first light. I take a step, and another, and another out of that bedroom, so eerily aware of every centimeter of my being, so self-conscious I feel like I’m watching myself from out of body. From above, I see myself leaving, and as I approach the bedroom door, I see myself pause, wondering if she will come after me. But Priestess Talara, now older and rattled, now revealed as Kathi Kannon, mortal human being, doesn’t come after me.
I don’t feel my legs as I glide out of Kathi Kannon’s bedroom. My body moves me clinically, cold and steady, my neck not bending, my head not leaning down at the floor but straight ahead, with purpose, seemingly, for the first time, surprisingly without regard for what’s behind me, my boss, my friend. Is she watching me go? Is she in need of comfort? Am I the thing they talk about—the interventionist, the one finally drawing a line in the sand? Am I the sad, good example? Or am I just sad?