A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  I blinked, waited a few seconds, then blinked again.

  “Did you not know that, Arthur?”

  “No, I mean, yeah, you . . . like you said, she, she told me.”

  “But when I asked you what happened with Kaitlin, you said ‘nothing.’ And when I asked why you were upset, you said ‘it was stupid.’ Do you think your girlfriend admitting to you that she has three secret sexual partners is a stupid reason to be upset?”

  “I just . . . How I handled it was stupid. Getting mad, at her. At the ring. I shouldn’t, I know that I shouldn’t have, have gotten so mad, and I know she, she told them, it was, it was for my own good, because she, she knew I needed—she wanted me to be . . . She said I was difficult. I’m difficult. I’m not a . . . I shouldn’t have punched the wall.”

  She let my mumbling drip into silence. Catholics always said confession made them feel relieved, forgiven, and pure, but I didn’t feel any of that. Talking just reminded me of the moments I hated myself the most.

  “I’m Dr. Patterson.”

  Her hand was extended toward me when I looked up.

  “What?”

  “I just realized I hadn’t introduced myself. I’m Dr. Patterson, on-call specialist for the Chicago Police Department. That’s why we’re talking now.”

  “I’m Arthur.”

  “Arthur Louis Pullman,” she said. “With the famous grandfather.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I never read the book.” She returned to the folder. “There’s a pretty serious search out for you, now, Arthur. Police on the ground looking for you in . . . California, Denver, Omaha, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. And now here you are in Chicago. That’s a pretty wide net.”

  I shifted in my seat.

  “You told the officers that brought you in that you were in Chicago . . . ‘following clues’?” She paused, expecting me to explain, but expecting wrong. “You don’t talk to many people who are looking for clues anymore. What clues?”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “Sure,” she said, shrugging. “Me neither.”

  I watched her for a moment, and she stared back, unflinching, reminding me that answering the questions wasn’t my choice. “My grandfather.”

  She held her stare for a moment, then fell into a laugh. “Fucking writers, right? I married one, terrible mistake. Everything’s gotta have some kind of . . . plot. It’s like the way things are just isn’t enough for these people.” If she expected me to laugh with her, she was wrong. “So . . . he left you clues? When?”

  “He ran away from home.” I shifted in my seat, trying not to think about the timeline or my failure to understand it. “A week before he died.”

  “Right. I remember reading about it. I’m sorry. Dementia can be very, very painful for a family. I’ve seen many, many children, grandchildren, try desperately to interpret . . . I’m sorry you had to go through that. It’s very difficult.”

  I accepted her sympathy by crossing my arms.

  “I’m confused, though,” she continued. “Your grandfather . . . in his final days . . . struggling through what must have been severe Alzheimer’s, was able to leave clues behind for you?”

  I shifted in my seat. “He wrote some journals, and I followed them.”

  She rapped her pen a few times against the folder. “And why did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Follow these clues? What were you looking for?”

  I took a deep breath and focused only on the plant on the table, unflinching, unaffected by our conversation. I didn’t have an answer.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked. “Did it reveal anything about him to you?”

  “When do I get to be done with this?”

  Her expression froze. “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m answering your questions. I’ve proven I’m not dangerous. When do I get to be done?”

  “Arthur, you punched a police officer.” Her lips tightened. “You rioted in a secure building and started shouting at the walls in the lobby. They’re not going to let you high-step out of here. We take this kind of thing seriously.”

  “That was a mistake,” I said, trying not to remember it. “But obviously I’m sane.”

  I felt a confused frustration tingling in my stomach, in my left hand.

  She locked her eyes onto mine. “Arthur, we’re gonna talk about a few weeks ago.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  Her round eyes became slits on her face. It was her turn not to speak.

  “What?” I asked again, more frustration creeping on top of the frustration that was already resting in my stomach.

  She shifted in the almost-comfortable chair, and slowly, she began to nod. “What have you been doing for, I don’t know, three weeks?”

  “Well, I’ve been on a train—”

  “Before that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it.”

  I thought about it.

  I couldn’t remember much. Every day had been so similar after Kaitlin and I broke up, it was almost like they hadn’t happened at all. I’d gone to the hospital for my hand, and when I returned home, there was nothing I wanted to do. I thought about applying to a few other colleges, but I guess I hadn’t gotten around to that. I watched TV a lot, when I could bring myself to it, but I couldn’t remember watching any more than a couple of episodes of any series on Netflix before giving up. None of them looked good. All I really remembered was spending time on my bed, looking at my hand, showering, eating, and driving.

  But I couldn’t tell Dr. Patterson that. “Well, I had to go in to take care of . . .” I held up my broken hand.

  She nodded but didn’t speak.

  “I guess . . . well, I sat around my house a lot. I couldn’t play tennis or anything, and Kaitlin was—well, you know. So I watched Lost, Game of Thrones, I got some college apps for the spring semester, and . . . I masturbated a lot? Is that the kind of honesty you were looking for?”

  She shrugged.

  “I guess,” I continued, “I guess the only reason I’d really leave my house every day was to go driving.”

  “Driving? Like the dreams?”

  “I mean . . . no. I didn’t crash.”

  “Where would you drive?”

  “Uh, there’s a road near my house, in Portola Valley, with a big hill. I would drive that.”

  “Every day?”

  “Every day.”

  She wrote something down in the folder. “Any particular reason?” she asked.

  “Uh, because I like driving, I guess?”

  “Why?”

  “Why do I like driving?”

  She nodded.

  “I do—I mean, I just like it.”

  “What about it?”

  I felt my face get hot. “I don’t know, like, the thrill of it? I like . . . knowing I’m going faster than humans are supposed to go. The adrenaline. And I guess, when I’m driving, I don’t think about anything else.”

  “And you did that every day?”

  “Every single day.”

  “Up until you left.”

  “Yes,” I said, swelling with discomfort.

  “Nothing else happened, no days you didn’t go driving?”

  I shrugged. “Nope.”

  I was still gazing at the plant. When I looked back at her, she had set the folder on the table and was looking back at me with intense sympathy.

  “Do you know what trauma is, Arthur?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s the way that we respond emotionally to the bad things that happen to us,” she explained. “The most common effect that trauma has is a sort of . . . intentional forgetting. Our brains want to protect us, so they mask the bad experiences by remembering them as different, normal ones. That’s how people are able to forget war, or death, childhood abuse, anything that scars them—they remember it as something else.”

  Irritated, I sat up. “And you’re saying I was traumatized by Kaitlin breaking u
p with me? Because check your math, professor, I punched the wall before we broke up. We were still together. That was part of why she broke up with me at all.”

  Dr. Patterson shook her head. “No, that probably felt like a terrible thing, but it wasn’t trauma. That you remember very clearly.”

  “I remember punching the wall, too!” I protested.

  “I know,” she said, then, more quietly, “I know.”

  I was starting to feel strange, like a sadness was showing up in parts of me that I couldn’t get to. It was familiar, but I couldn’t reach it to understand it; darkness that was too dark to see its source.

  She spoke again. “Do you know what happens to our bodies right before we die? The last chemical we release?”

  I shook my head.

  “Adrenaline.” She made direct eye contact with me. “Fight or flight. When the body thinks it’s going down, it sends every bit of energy it’s got, in the form of adrenaline.”

  “Why—why are you telling me this?” I stuttered. All around my body, I felt tingly, cold water against the back of my neck. The sadness was starting to get overwhelming, an unavoidable gravity pulling me in. I wanted to get rid of it, get away from it, but as I thought about the pain in my hand, everything just got worse. I was back in the world of my dreams, driving my car but having no control over what I was doing. I was in the lake, on the train tracks, with no desire to move, no energy to even lift my hands. “What does this have to do with anything? What are you—”

  “Arthur, three weeks ago, you attempted suicide.”

  I blinked several times.

  “You sat in your garage, in the front seat of your Camaro, you turned on the gas, and your father discovered you just in time to get you to the hospital.” She paused. “You tried to kill yourself.”

  I stared at the plastic plant as it sat on the table.

  “You haven’t been able to remember it because your brain registered the adrenaline and decided you were driving. Do you remember it now?”

  I didn’t move.

  “Think of your dreams, Arthur. Put yourself in the car.”

  I remembered a day, waking up and getting in my car to go drive to Portola Valley, not wanting to come back, not wanting to feel anything other than the blinding speed-high of racing down the dive.

  I remembered a moment, sitting there, watching trickles of smoke starting to rush into the car like water.

  I remembered a seat belt, one that felt like five, pulling impossibly tighter and choking the air out of me.

  I remembered a beeping warning light on the dash, the screaming of my father behind me.

  I remembered a blurring, blinding fading of everything I was feeling into nothing, the roaring silence, like adrenaline, like pain, like bright, bright light, too bright to see its source, so concentrated and overwhelming that I didn’t have to think about waking up without her.

  I remembered needing to move, needing to fight my way out, and deciding not to.

  “Do you remember, Arthur?”

  The sadness I had been searching for finally found me, and I remembered.

  I began to cry. Heavy, wet, rapid tears, huge, heaving sobs, right in the police room’s comfortable chair.

  “Why—” I tried to ask but my throat was closed, swelled from the foreign activity. I was all feeling, nothing but the salt water leaking out of my eyes. For what could have been minutes or hours, I sobbed. When I could chance a full sentence, I sniveled and nearly shouted, “Why—why did you”—the words were muted, watery themselves— “why did you tell me?”

  Dr. Patterson waited a moment before answering. “Because you’re not the person you were three weeks ago.” She paused. “It’s time to remember now.”

  8.

  MY MOUTH WAS dry and lifeless. The rest of my body felt the same.

  Dr. Patterson let me sit, and left the room when I wouldn’t answer questions. It wasn’t that I wanted to be silent; I just couldn’t will myself to speak.

  The further inside myself I looked, the worse it got. It was like my brain was at the center of a hundred wrestling matches, nerve endings having it out over what I remembered and didn’t remember, believed and didn’t believe.

  The dominant parts felt cheated and unsure of who to blame—Dr. Sandoval, or Dr. Patterson, or my dad, or Kaitlin, or Mason, or my grandpa, or myself. The weaker parts wondered if anything had actually happened—the clues, or the Great Purpose, or Mara—or if the entire last week had actually been just a vividly convoluted dream, too perfect for reality, a story I played out behind my eyelids while sitting in the front seat of the Camaro, slowly waiting for all of the thoughts to stop.

  All of it looked broken. The past was a dull and fractured kaleidoscope, constantly shifting, out of focus, black and gray images. It wasn’t that I wanted to be unsure, I just couldn’t will myself to understand.

  So I sat, the room getting darker as the sun disappeared. I could hear voices talking about me in the hallway.

  “—just a confused kid, didn’t mean any—”

  “—stations all over the country are still getting calls—”

  “—keep him here that long? We’d be—”

  “—all the way to Chicago, but he insisted—”

  Occasionally I’d shoot a glance across the room where I could see parts of my face in the small mirror, but the person looking back was a stranger. My hair was wild and unwashed, and my face was covered in someone else’s bruises. I couldn’t look for long without wanting to smash it, so I collapsed back into my hands, unmoving, wanting to be as far from myself as I possibly could.

  I felt a soft hand on my shoulder, Dr. Patterson, likely to tell me it was back to the cell until they could figure out a punishment for me. Community service, jail time, thousands of dollars in fines . . . it all sounded like the same thing.

  “Can we call someone for you, Arthur?” she asked.

  I shook my head once.

  “Okay.” Dr. Patterson inhaled. “You don’t have to, but we strongly suggest it. In moments like this, it helps to talk to someone who . . . who’ll be honest with you.”

  I thought for a long moment. Kaitlin was illegal. Mason might betray me again. Mara would be angry. My auntie and uncle would keep panicking.

  “You can do it, Arthur,” she said. “You can talk to someone.”

  I sighed. “My dad,” I heard myself say. “I’ll talk to my dad.”

  Dr. Patterson moved slowly back toward the door and disappeared, leaving me alone again with the plant.

  When it reopened, my father stood in her place.

  “Hey, buddy.” He looked exhausted and unsettled, inching toward me. He sat hesitantly in the doctor’s chair. “I heard you wanted to talk to me.”

  “You’re here.”

  “I had to be. We didn’t know where you were, and when they called . . .” He shifted in his seat. “They thought you were in Albuquerque,” he told the ring, still on the table. “Denver, Omaha, Minneapolis, Kansas . . . someone called from Miami, thought they saw you there, driving a sports car. Karen’s been a mess, all of us have been. You wouldn’t believe these last few days, Arthur. It’s been terrible.” He ran a hand through his hair. It looked like it had been just as long since he’d showered, maybe longer since he’d slept. “And all I had from you was that phone call about your grandfather? This fight to remember of you?”

  “I know,” I breathed. “I know.”

  I closed my eyes and there it was: the guilt. My father, my family were waiting for me, waiting for answers. They weren’t pretending to be grieving, they were actually grieving—the real and familiar dread of losing a family member—and it was all my fault. When I opened my eyes, my dad was still looking at me.

  “So?”

  The lights in the room were off, and as the sun continued to disappear, it was getting difficult to see detail around the room.

  I took a deep breath. “I fucked everything up.” I exhaled, and took another enormous breath. “I, I rui
ned it. I ruined all of it. I don’t know, I don’t know what happened.” My breathing scattered, fighting the words, fighting my throat. “I’m sorry. I’m so . . .” He didn’t interrupt me and I felt more tears form under my eyes. “I thought I knew what I was doing. I, I thought I was figuring things out, and it was all gonna be okay, but . . . but it wasn’t. I wasn’t.” And suddenly, I couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out now. “I was so . . . so sure, about everything . . . and I came all the way out here, and lied, and . . . but it was wrong. I was so wrong. I don’t even know what I was looking for. I don’t even know . . .”

  He let my sentence dissolve into wet nothing. The clock in the room ticked slowly; the sun fell farther outside the window.

  “That’s nothing,” my dad said finally. His voice was barely loud enough to hear. “One time I almost bought a plane ticket to Australia, because I thought I heard my dad say something about Melbourne.” I heard him smile. “But, of course, that didn’t make sense. None of it ever did. Just got worse the harder I tried.”

  For the first time, I tried looking up into his eyes. They weren’t frustrated or judgmental. They were just looking for me.

  “What’d you find?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I told him, my voice beginning to dry.

  “You came all the way to Chicago for nothing?”

  “I was just wrong about it. All of it.”

  “What happened?”

  I sighed. “‘Just got worse the harder I tried.’”

  He smiled. “Well, what got you out here?”

  An image of my first night at my auntie and uncle’s clicked into the kaleidoscope. “He left a little journal, on a page about western tanagers in a book in Tim’s attic, so I figured it must have been a clue or something. He must have known I’d be the one to find it. But it was stupid.”

  He looked confused.

  “Because he always had that story, about the tanager?”

  He shook his head.

  I sighed again. “The old Native American story or something he used to tell me, about this village that was in a drought, and they needed to get to this weird, magical river to keep them alive. But the river was through a wood, with all of these—you know, you don’t realize how stupid stories like this are until you’re trying to retell them when you’re older.”