by Barbara Hall
He has not had time to process the fact that Sarah is gone, traveling the dark highways in a stolen truck with some mental patient. He has not had time to process that he has failed her. Most of all, he has not had time to process that he will miss her and that on some level he feels he has been rejected and abandoned, like some high-school boy with a dangerous crush.
Chapter 19
Here’s how it started.
I watched the space where they were sitting from the common room for a long time, watching the rain wash away their phantom images, and then the rain finally stopped and a rainbow came out over a corner of the ocean. I could see it from the common room but I wanted to see it better. I went out into the garden and stood and smoked, looking at the ocean, which unfolded beyond an expanse of grass on the Malibu hill.
So I was smoking and staring at the rainbow when a door burst open and Emily rushed into the courtyard, pacing and breathing, mumbling to herself. She didn’t see me at first and when she did, her whole demeanor changed. Gone was her slightly unhinged affect, and in its place was a strong, stable woman struggling to overcome a moment of weakness.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay.”
“I just need a little air before I go home.”
“Sure,” I said. “Did you see the rainbow?”
She looked in that direction and her breath caught. She put a hand to her chest. “Oh. That’s so cool.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You must think I’m crazy.”
I laughed.
She recovered quickly. “No, I don’t mean crazy. Just unstable.”
“I barely notice that kind of thing around here.”
She looked around her as if she had lost something tangible.
“I need to sit,” she said, but all the benches were wet.
I whipped off a scarf I was wearing and said, “Here.”
“Oh, no, don’t.”
But it was too late. I had wiped down the garden bench. She thanked me and sat.
I sat next to her.
“I was visiting my husband,” she said.
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Willie. We’re in sewing class together.”
“Oh,” she said, momentarily cheered. And then her face dropped a little and she was worried. “Sewing?”
“Well, he treats it like art.”
She nodded. “He’s an artist.”
“Was?”
“No, is. Is. Just because he’s going through something doesn’t mean his whole identity is wiped out.”
“Yeah, I get that. I’ve seen his work. It’s actual art. The rest of us are just fucking around.”
She nodded, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her jacket.
She looked at me. “What do you do?”
“Do?”
“I mean, yeah.”
“I was an artist, too.”
“Really?”
“No, not really. Not like Willie. I write some. I do graphic design. Well, that’s what I did. Right now I’m busy being crazy.”
“Tell me about it,” she said.
I knew I didn’t have to tell her about it. We sat in silence and then I lit another cigarette. I offered her one but she shook her head.
“You’re so pretty,” she said.
“Well, thanks. You’re pretty cute yourself.”
“Oh. Well. I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not gay.”
“I wasn’t worried about that.”
“I’m not even crazy.”
She smiled. “I guess no one in here thinks they are crazy.”
“Except Willie,” I said. “He seems pretty reconciled to being crazy.”
“No, he’s really not. He was fairly stable for a long time. I mean, sure, he’s bipolar. Manic depressive. Or something. We’ve always known that.”
“Always?”
“Well, I knew it when I married him.”
“When was that?”
“When we were twenty.”
“Geez.”
“I know, right? Who gets married that young?”
“When did you meet?”
“In college. At the University of Chicago. I was in business. He was an artist.”
“Okay.”
“But this was after he got out of the Navy.”
“He was in the Navy?”
She nodded. “He was a Navy Seal. He had to drop out because of an injury. But he wanted to be an underwater mine specialist.”
“What is that?”
“Someone who defuses mines. Underwater.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
She nodded. “He likes danger.”
“He doesn’t seem to like danger anymore.”
“He’s different now.”
“Since the shock treatments?”
She looked at me as if I had seen into her soul. I was not trying to see into her soul.
“He told you that?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“He’s not supposed to talk about it. That was the agreement when we decided to do it. That he wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Yeah, but he forgot about the agreement?”
She nodded. “They told us there would be memory loss. But until that happens, you don’t know what it means. I thought, oh, he’ll forget our anniversary but he does that anyway. No one tells you how deep it goes. And no one tells you how much of your life together is actually based on memory. They keep saying it’ll get better.”
“But it’s not better?”
She shook her head and stared at the ground.
After a moment she said, “It’s sad. It’s pathetic. But what else could we do?”
“I don’t know. What else did you think about doing?”
She raised her eyes to me. She said, “I lived with this for years. We moved to L.A. so he could be a director. Or a photographer. Something with art. And he had some success. But every time he had success he would get depressed like this. He would talk about suicide. What was I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then one night he called me from the parking lot of a strip club.”
“Jumbo’s Clown Room. It’s burlesque, not strip.”
She smiled. “He told you that?”
“Yes.”
“He had gone there with some guys. I try to give him a wide berth, you know? But he called me from there and said he wanted to jump off a bridge. I came and got him and then we ended up at County and then they sent us to Irvine to this doctor who was a big believer in ECT. It’ll be bad for a while, he said, but then his brain will be reset and he’ll be as good as new.”
“That hasn’t happened?”
She shook her head. “That hasn’t happened yet.”
The rainbow had disappeared and a voice came on the intercom calling all us crazies to our rooms.
“You should go, I guess,” she said.
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me what you think went wrong in Jumbo’s Clown room?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to know. My job is to take care of him. That’s my job. I married him knowing how he was. Some people have houses and children. I have him.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “You’re a numbers person?”
She straightened up, swimming out of her emotional pool.
“I’m a financial analyst,” she said. “For a software company.”
“So you like numbers.”
“I guess,” she said.
“Numbers make sense.”
She stared at me for a while. Finally she stood.
“I’ve taken up too much of your time,” she said. “Thank you.”
And then she walked with fixity of purpose to the door that took her away from all of us and back to the world that added up.
I thought on all of that for a long while, in my room, in the common room, in arts and crafts, at mealtime, wandering around in the garden. And I was
formulating a theory as I strolled. Sometimes I could see Willie when I was making my rounds and sometimes I couldn’t. The voices tried to pitch in but I shut them down.
All of this was happening to me, in real time, the way things happen to real people in the linear world. Events adding up, like numbers in a column, creating sums, making sense. The past influencing the present, the present making sense of the past, the future spreading out like the bricks and mortar of a new building waiting to take shape and all we had to do was the work.
What was reverberating in my brain, though, was that ridiculous passage that Dr. Sutton had read to me during our last session. The thing that Joseph Campbell had said. About artists being true revolutionaries. About how their jobs were to penetrate the social mask. About how they had to overcome the lower impulse of others to spill blood on the pavement to create yet another false mask. Or something like that.
And then he related it to my coming back from the other side. To do something like that. I had never asked myself that question but suddenly I was asking it and answering it at the same time. I had come back to recognize that impulse in others. To rescue it. To set loose the revolutionary whose job it was to save us from the false mask. This is why I found myself in such an unlikely place. This is why I met Willie when I did, in sewing class, witnessing him trying to create art. And he was being restrained and subdued because he was trying to demolish the social mask.
I knew what had occurred in the parking lot of Jumbo’s Clown Room. Discharged from the Navy, married too young, art abandoned, looked after by his numbers-conscious wife, suddenly thrust into a room of thumping music and half-naked girls, it had occurred to him. He had lost his courage.
As if I needed another sign, the truck had been sitting there, keys in the ignition.
“So where are we going again?” Willie asked.
He let himself be led. He watched as I loaded his belongings on the floorboard around his feet.
“North.”
“North of what?” he asked.
“North of here.”
“Cool,” he said.
Now he asks again. “Where are we going?”
“North,” I tell him again. We are several hours into North. I wonder if anyone has missed us. I check the mirrors for lights or suspicious vehicles but don’t see any.
“Cool,” he says again.
Chapter 20
David hears nothing more from Oceanside. That night he’s worried enough to call his lawyer, Gerald Reigert, another friend from his days at Loyola. Gerald does whatever he wants for free because David didn’t turn him in for cheating on a final exam there. Gerald is a very successful corporate attorney with an office in Beverly Hills but he still feels somehow that David could derail his whole life by posting a blog about Gerald’s unsanctioned cheat sheet during senior physics.
“I owe you, man,” Gerald says every time he picks up the phone.
“You don’t owe me, Gerald,” David says every time in response.
“No, listen, I know about paying the piper.”
“You’re not even Catholic,” David reminds him on occasion.
“My mother is but what’s your point? I’m a Jewish guy who went to Catholic school? That makes me doubly guilty.”
On this occasion, David decides not to look a gift horse in the mouth. He listens to Gerald’s counsel, not worrying about the bill.
“Dude, they got nothing on you,” Gerald says. “Shrinks are so protected. You could practically kidnap someone yourself and I would take your case pro bono.”
“Well, I don’t want you to do that. I just want to be sure I’m okay.”
“You’re okay. Although, I have to tell you, lately? The medical world? You guys are superexposed. Shrinks are still pretty safe but everybody else? Give one guy a bottle of Valium and he hits somebody on the freeway and boom! You’re on the stand.”
“I try not to prescribe drugs.”
“Yeah, but that’s a whole other ball of wax. You don’t prescribe drugs and the guy takes a shotgun to the shopping mall? Boom. On the stand.”
“I thought you said I was okay.”
“Oh, yeah, in this one you’re okay. Just be careful.”
He hangs up and calls Melinda Frankenheimer again.
He says, “I was just thinking. Willie Cranston’s wife. Do you have a number for her?”
“It’s confidential.”
“You were all too ready to surrender my confidential files.”
“Don’t be that way, David.”
“Don’t you think it might help to call her?”
“We’ve spoken with her, believe me.”
“I mean, if I called her.”
“Why you?”
“Because Sarah is my patient.”
“I don’t understand. What would you possibly say to her?”
“I’d just let her know that I’m concerned and I’m in the fight.”
“The fight?”
“To get him back. To get both of them back.”
“I don’t know. Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.”
“Actually, I think not reaching out would be more of a lawsuit.”
There’s a long silence and finally Melinda gives him the number.
“David, be careful. You were not exactly a silver-tongued devil with Detective Jackson.”
“He’s an authoritarian prick.”
“Well, don’t mince your words.”
“Sarah is not a criminal. She’s sick. The guy lacks compassion and what’s more, I don’t think he really cares about finding them. It was all for show. You probably won’t hear from him again.”
She sighs. “Well, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. For all of this to go away. I’ll buy the gardener a new truck. And I’m sure we’ll have to give a little compensation to Mrs. Cranston. You said Sarah Lange doesn’t have any family?”
David breathes against his anger.
“I’m sure the blowback is your domain, Dr. Frankenheimer. Mine is caring for patients. So I’ll do my part and you do yours.”
“I envy you,” she says. “I remember when that was all I had to do.”
He hangs up on her. It’s a luxury of the cell-phone age, never having to answer for a hang-up. Cut off. Lost service. In the old days, hanging up was a profound form of communication, hitting someone without making physical contact. He misses it.
He sits looking at Emily’s number for a long time. Finally he dials it, thinking he has the option to hang up as soon as he hears her voice. But he immediately reaches voice mail. She sounds cheerful and high functioning. Her message says, “Hi, it’s Emily, leave a message, thanks.”
He doesn’t leave a message.
Chapter 21
The Ventana Inn is a hotel on the side of a cliff in Big Sur. Everything in Big Sur is on the side of a cliff. It is a cliff town. The drive up the narrow winding roads are harrowing at the best of times and downright nerve-racking in an old truck with a guy on Lithium driving. But it was something he needed to do. It’s all part of the plan. Not my plan, either. I look out the window at the wild ocean, which looks anything but Pacific, and I have visions of plummeting and the vision doesn’t disturb me but I also know this is not what’s going to happen.
Big Sur has long been a siren call for dropouts, the most famous here being Henry Miller for which a library and museum is named. It is near Esalen, the cliffside self-enlightenment mecca that drew (ironically) Joseph Campbell every year on his birthday along with anyone with even a passing interest in hallucinogens. I had visited once many years ago. I signed up for a yoga retreat and had to sleep in a room with other yogis and work in the garden and basically be peaceful and contributing and I lasted three days. It was part of my plan to like people more. I didn’t care much for them back in the day because I didn’t understand that I was different; I thought they were all being recalcitrant and ignorant. I didn’t understand they were doing their part. They were listening to their own voices. An
d I needed to listen to mine.
So I really didn’t get yoga the first time around and I had fantasies of driving stakes into people’s hearts whenever they said namaste and I was quite a nasty little intellectual before that nice young man killed me. My fiancé and I were already broken up then but we never would have survived my conversion. He is still a nasty little intellectual. Cranky, road raging, ranting, sour in his affect, glaring at the news of the world. Of course I don’t know this but I know this. I don’t astrally visit him or anything so this is more of an assumption than a vision. Sometimes you just know how people are without knowing how people are. We call it something else. We call it, “I know what I know.”
Willie does not seem afraid to be driving up the winding road and in fact seems comforted by the fact that he has but one thing to think about. When we make it to the top he doesn’t seem surprised or impressed with himself. That might be because he’s not a hundred percent sure of where he is or what he is doing or even who I am. I don’t talk to him at all until it’s time to turn into the Ventura Inn and then I only say, “Turn here.” And he does.
Once we’re in the parking lot I wait while he smokes a cigarette and gets his bearings.
“This is cool,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Big trees.”
“Yes.”
“Reminds me of Oregon.”
“You’ve been to Oregon?”
“I’m from there. I grew up on a farm.”
“You remember that.”
“Sure. It’s mostly short-term stuff that I have trouble with.”
“Right.”
“Like…where are we?”
“In Big Sur.”
“Did I know that before?”
“I mentioned it when we left.”
“Wait, we left?”
“Yes, we left the hospital.”
“I was in a hospital?”
This news seems to alarm him the most.
“Well, no, it’s really a rehab center.”
He has no idea what to make of that. I wait and his eyes scan the ground and then he lifts his head and says, “Oh, yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Now I can see another question tumbling in his brain but it’s having trouble getting out.