by Barbara Hall
This might be the first time I’ve fully registered how huge he is. He is a foot taller than I am. He seems completely unaware of this fact. He moves like someone who knows he takes up a lot of space but has no idea what to do about it.
He rubs his head as we approach the clothing-optional pool.
“Man,” he says. “I slept really hard last night.”
“Me, too,” I say, thought I hadn’t slept hard. I had dozed in front of the fire and woke up about once an hour.
“What are we doing now?” he asks.
“We’re visiting the hot tubs.”
“I like hot tubs.”
“Me, too.”
The clothing-optional pool is devoid of customers. We walk through the changing rooms and the sauna area and finally we arrive at the hot tubs. We step into them gingerly. The warm water engulfs us. It feels like being hugged. I sink down to my chin. Willie observes me and sinks down the same way, though he has to collapse his legs to a kneeling position. We exist there for a moment, not looking at each other.
“Where are we?” he asks.
“In Big Sur.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a place in Northern California.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are we here?”
“Well, we needed to get out of town.”
“Okay.”
We float for another minute more. He turns his head and the turning of his head seems to take a great deal of effort. He looks at my face and then he stares at my chest. It is underwater but he can still see. He stares at the top of my cleavage. My chest is mostly covered up by my choice of a professional swimsuit. Yet he still seems to see something.
“I’m not with you, right?” he asks.
“Well, you’re with me but you’re not really with me.”
He thinks about that. He scratches his wild hair.
“Emily,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“Does she know where we are?”
“I’m not entirely sure.”
“We should call her.”
“We will.”
We float in the water for a little while longer. Something corrosive is coursing through my veins. This is how I felt before I accepted the voices. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just bouncing from one opportunity, one series of events to another. I react. I don’t respond. I’m in control of nothing. It generates a feeling of panic in me. I have some distant idea that it was the realization that I was in control of nothing that made me give in to the voices and landed me in Oceanside. But now I feel some kind of willpower returning. I might have the privilege of choice. I might have the burden of choice. I might have to make a decision. I don’t know what to do. I can feel Willie’s eyes burning into some part of my skin. And it reminds me of how I felt right before I committed to the voices. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t stand being vulnerable to the way the world worked. All those base desires and needs and plans and outright evil. The evil of a man crawling through my window to humiliate me. It had unbearable weight. The randomness of it all burned holes in my skin. I wanted to fix it, the demise of the human condition, yet I couldn’t even fix myself. I wasn’t up to the task so I gave up the task. I welcomed the guides.
I am suddenly recalling my time at Oceanside, where I had nothing to do but confess, and after I had confessed, I stared out windows and sometimes I smoked. That seemed enough of a charge. Now I seem to have things to answer for. I might have to answer for bringing Willie here. I might be responsible for him. At Oceanside, I was responsible for nothing. I went from feast to famine. I hated having no influence on the world. I loved having no influence on the world. Here, I am in some kind of purgatory where I have some kind of effect but no kind of effect. I am somewhere between Newtonian physics (cause and effect) and Quantum physics (no kind of effect) and I feel as crazy as I have ever felt.
But I have to hide this from Willie who has developed a weird kind of intense stare as the Lithium wears off. Why had I ever thought he was Bambi? I have no idea what to do with him now.
I find myself missing Dr. David Sutton. I find myself endowing him with all kinds of mystical powers. Like he was a lion tamer. And I am the lion. A lion set loose from its environment. Not sure whether to kill or sleep. Equally interested in both ideas. Not overly invested in either. Something rises in me and it feels like fear and I haven’t felt fear in a long time.
I got here by being sure of something. And the certainty has deserted me. I am a particle cut loose from gravity. Panic sweeps in on me. I am just a woman in a Speedo swimsuit in a hot tub next to an enormous man whose sense of calm is wearing off.
“Did I tell you about Jumbo’s Clown Room?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He nods and stares off, letting his legs float up. He stares at them.
The world feels peaceful but it is not peaceful.
“What did I tell you?” he asks.
“That you went there and you started to feel weird and then you called your wife and then you got shock treatments.”
“Right,” he says. He stares at his legs as if they aren’t a part of him. I stare at them the same way.
What was I thinking?
“Should we get breakfast?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I’m not hungry.”
“Okay.”
We float some more. All I can hear is the sound of the filter in the hot tubs and the sound of the motor churning the bubbles and there’s really nothing natural about this. Panic grips my throat and I don’t understand why and I search for the voices but they are gone.
To replace the sounds I say, “I think I understand. You saw these women. And maybe you wanted these women. But you lost your courage.”
He looks at me as if I’m seriously disturbed. Maybe I am seriously disturbed. But he is, too. Two seriously disturbed people in a hot tub in Big Sur. What to do with that?
He says, “I feel like my thinking is coming back to me.”
“That’s good. Right?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think my thinking is so good.”
“Thinking is just thinking. It’s not action.”
“But thinking leads to action. Doesn’t it? That’s what the doctors say.”
I don’t answer. I look at my feet. They look old. I thought I was young. It’s a lot of information at once.
He says, “Let me tell you what I was thinking in the parking lot of Jumbo’s Clown Room.”
“Okay.”
“I was watching these women dancing. And did I want them? Yes, I wanted them. But that’s not a big deal. Men just go around wanting other women. Women don’t do that. Once they find a man, they just want that man.”
“Often,” I say.
“Why is that?” he asks.
“I guess it’s DNA. It’s caveman logic. And women in caveman times were just getting raped and beaten up all the time. Then we realized if we allied with one man, he would protect us. Women originally wanted one man so they could stop feeling threatened. But things have changed. We can buy weapons. But there is something in our cells that still makes us desire men for protection.”
Willie digests this and asks, “What about love?”
“I guess on a cellular level we love you for protecting us.”
Willie struggles to process this. Finally he says, “I was looking at those women and I started to feel mean.”
“Okay.”
“Not just mean.”
“Okay.”
“Dangerous,” he says evenly.
“Dangerous how?”
He shrugs. The water lifts and gulps as his body moves.
“I wanted to kill them,” he says simply.
“Oh,” I say.
But I don’t feel “oh.” I feel panic sweeping over me. What am I doing? Why am I in a hot tub with this enormous man, whose hold on his darker side is diminishing the longer I keep him out of his protected environment. It
’s as if I’m with a tiger who has been tranquilized and the tranquilizer is wearing off.
“I really wanted to kill them,” he repeats.
“Okay.”
“I had visions of taking them, one by one, and choking them to death.”
I don’t know what to say. My skin is starting to wrinkle. I am feeling light-headed. I am hungry. I am suspended in this moment.
The sounds of the hot tub fill in some blanks but then the sounds of the motors drift away and I can hear the trees bowing in the wind and the ocean somewhere in the distance. We are in the wild. No one knows we are here.
He says, “Do you want to know why I wanted to kill them?”
“Sure.”
I don’t want to know why. I am unprepared to know why.
He says, “Because they are so simple. They think they are so simple. But they have this power. They know what they are doing. They are teasing us. They are mocking us. We are so much…I don’t know how to describe it…we are so much less. I was a Navy Seal. I know how to kill a person with a punch to the throat. But killing a person is nothing. The strippers, they know how to torture a person. They know how to take that thing inside of you, that thing that haunts your sleep, that has the power to undo you, and they know how to use it against you, and make it come awake and deplete you.”
“I’ve never heard you talk this much, Willie,” I say, stalling for time.
“I can’t remember talking this much. This is how I used to feel.”
“How does it feel now?” My hands are shaking.
“It feels like real life.”
“Does Emily know you feel this way?”
His face goes blank. He stares at the middle distance, his face stalled.
“Emily?” he asks.
“Your wife.”
He turns his head to me and his eyes land on me and they are a little dead but much less dead.
“What does she have to do with this?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Did you tell her any of this?”
He shrugs and the water burps again. “I can’t really remember my life with her.”
“Really.”
“Yeah,” he says. “The drugs do that. They make me forget my middle life. I remember everything before and everything after.”
“We should probably get something to eat.”
I start climbing the stairs out of the pool. He grabs my arm. It hurts but I trust he doesn’t mean it to hurt. Men don’t know their strength. Men don’t know how fragile we are.
“Why are you walking out on me?” he demands.
“I’m not. I’m really not. But it’s late morning and we’re probably hungry.”
“I don’t want food.”
“We forget to eat. Remember that from Oceanside? We forget to eat. That’s why they put us on a schedule.”
“What is Oceanside?”
“Let’s go.”
“What schedule? Where are we?”
“Never mind. We have to get out of the pool. We need to eat some protein.”
I am afraid. His grip on my arm is hard. I feel the circulation cutting off.
“I didn’t kill them, did I? The girls at Jumbo’s. Did I kill them?” he asks.
“As far as I know, you’ve never killed anyone,” I say.
He puts his face in his watery hands. He cries but it’s a dramatic cry. I have no idea what I’ve taken on.
He finally looks up at me and his eyes are red from the chlorine.
He says, “On my father’s farm. In Oregon. He took me out to shoot a cow. I was thirteen. He made me shoot the cow. I fired the gun and the cow fell. It didn’t yell or make a sound. It just fell. One minute it was a cow and then it was nothing. I cried for three days.”
“Okay.”
“My father beat me. He called me weak.”
“Okay.”
“Taking a life. Any kind of life. You will never know.”
“Okay.”
Willie stares at the trees for a long moment. Finally he says, “Killing an animal is cowardly. Killing a cow is nothing. But killing a human? Courage has to be tested.”
“Okay.”
He grips my hand. “I have no courage.”
“You’re just repeating what I said.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Maybe you have a different kind.”
“Don’t split words.”
“I’m not. I’m hungry. Aren’t you hungry?”
He looks at the bubbling water.
“I suddenly feel very heavy. Do you ever feel that way?”
“Half the time,” I say.
“And the other half?”
“The other half? I feel fine.”
I stand there in my point of crisis. I have no idea where I am or what I am doing. I have no idea how to proceed in the absence of the voices. And in the absence of them, I feel like a fraud and a failure. I blame them for not talking. I blame myself for not listening. Mostly I feel stranded in this terrible place of real life, where I have choice and logic and all that horrible stuff at my disposal.
“Let’s go get breakfast,” I say again.
He stares at me for what seems like a long time and finally he stands and the water comes up to his waist and he runs his hands through his hair.
“Okay, I could eat,” he admits.
Chapter 24
Emily is sitting in a corner booth. She is wearing a cream-colored hoodie and she is staring at the drink in front of her—some kind of cocktail on ice—and she is uninterested in the stimuli around her. When David walks in she looks up and waves her chin at him, as if they are old friends. David moves toward her. He feels out of his element but he is aware that he feels out of his element anytime he leaves his comfortable surroundings. It’s not as if he never visits Hollywood. But he usually does so in an entirely protected way. He visits Hollywood on professional consultations, sometimes with the Hollywood Free Clinic, sometimes on house calls to fancy hotels. The point is, he never enters Hollywood just as a person who lives in Los Angeles, and this is how he feels now. He has no real credentials as he enters the restaurant at the Standard Hotel. He feels like a fan, a tourist, someone who is scamming.
He immediately knows Emily. He recognizes her face from hearing her voice. She looks like someone who mostly smiles, but the smile has been ironed out of her skin. She is someone who is eternally optimistic but she has had the optimism temporarily knocked out of her. As he looks at her, he sees a kind of mask, a kind of provisional countenance. Jen would say she has positive energy. He tries not to think of Jen but as he looks at Emily, he feels the truth of this concept. There’s an energy to Emily. It’s impossible to deny it.
Emily doesn’t stand or wave but she guides him to her table with her chin. Her arms remain crossed. As he approaches her, she half stands and they shake and he sits across from her.
“Do you want a drink?” she asks immediately.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I’m having a martini on the rocks,” she says.
“Okay. I can have a scotch, I guess.”
He seems to keep talking but she ignores him and waves down the waiter and he orders a scotch on the rocks and then he is looking at her again.
There is something about her. She is angry and happy and churned up and at peace all at once. He doesn’t know what to make of her. He tries to analyze her. He can’t. He is overwhelmed by her disparate energies.
“Okay, let’s get to it,” she says.
“Get to what?”
“Do you know where my husband is?” she asks.
“No. Of course I don’t.”
She looks at her lap. He takes a breath.
“Maybe we should start again,” he says.
She leans over the table, folding her hands. “This isn’t a Hollywood opening or a garden party. My husband is missing with a patient of yours. He’s in danger. She’s in danger. We have to figure this out.”
“How are they in danger?”
Emily rolls her eyes. “I don’t know about your patient. All I know about her is that she kidnapped my husband. But I will tell you this. He is dangerous.”
“How so?”
Emily smiles and shakes her shiny brown hair away from her face.
“What do you people do? Do you really bother to get to know your patients?”
David clears his throat. “Your husband was not my patient. I don’t know the first thing about him. My patient, Sarah Lange, is not dangerous.”
“Except when she’s kidnapping people.”
“We don’t have proof that she kidnapped him.”
Emily waves his comment away. She stares into her drink, looks out the window, then looks back at him.
“Okay, lookit. I know Will. I’ve been married to him since I was twenty. I’m not twenty anymore, you might have guessed.”
Emily is one of those ageless women. Her face is thirty and her demeanor is fifty and her age could be anywhere in between.
She says, “Look, I don’t have kids. And my career isn’t really a career. It’s just a job. I support my husband. I knew he was disturbed when I married him. So his condition, for lack of a better word, is my child. I take care of him. That’s what I do.”
“Okay.”
“But now your client has taken him away. Why?”
“All right, listen. Just because she’s my client…patient…it doesn’t mean she’s an appendage of me. I don’t understand her all that well. We were engaged in a process.”