by Grimes, Tom
So when a Manhattan apartment with a monthly rent of $225 became available, I set the cottage’s thermostat to sixty-five degrees to keep the water pipes from bursting if the temperature fell below freezing, mailed the landlord a letter that said I would no longer be paying rent, and didn’t tell him where he could find me.
Shortly after I vanished, two men tracked me to the restaurant where I’d last worked. They asked the waiters, fry cooks, and dishwashers where I’d gone. A waitress said, “To California,” although she knew I’d moved to Manhattan. The pair then traced me to the Queens house I used to occupy and quizzed the new tenants, who told them I’d been gone for two years. Someone called my parents’ house and my mother said I’d disappeared. In Connecticut, my brother went to his power company’s office to have his electricity turned on. The clerk checked the debtor list, noticed that my brother’s surname matched mine, and summoned a manager. When the man asked my brother where I was, my brother told him we weren’t even related.
After I’d lived for a year in Manhattan without being found, my fear subsided. But when it returned in the dream that woke me in Frank’s bed, it left me drenched and trembling. The following day, rain fell. And, despite it being early August, Iowa City’s temperature dropped into the upper fifties. Wearing an old, camouflage army jacket, my hands stuffed inside its pockets, my face angled downward as if a boulder had been dropped onto the base of my neck and forced me to stare at the floor, I trudged through the house. Pressure around my temples threatened to crush my forehead. My jaw ached. My teeth ground against one another. And, that evening, when I drank several shots of bourbon, my mood sunk, rather than lifted. Hours later, I staggered to bed.
Then the voices started. Internally, I heard mostly gibberish. Conversations overlapped conversations until they became incomprehensible. My brain seemed to be hosting a noisy, endless cocktail party. But a vivid and relentless paranoia I’d never experienced before focused my guilt, and provided its narrative. I’d been found; and now, for breaking a lease, I’d be imprisoned. Intellectually, I understood this was idiotic; emotionally, the prospect terrified me.
By late August, when Jody and I left Iowa and returned to Texas, my depression had escalated into a state of manic anxiety I could barely control. Whenever I taught, I expected FBI agents to burst into the classroom and lead me away in handcuffs. As always, I faced my students; but, with one eye, I monitored the door, waiting for it to fly open. My mind split, like the brain’s twin hemispheres: one half interacted with people; the other half battled my delusions.
Each evening, I drank until I passed out. Otherwise, I couldn’t sleep. Once the alcohol wore off several hours later, I’d wake, wander through the house and, in the dark, I’d lean against the wall beside a window so I couldn’t be seen through its partially open blinds and watch for approaching headlights. When two appeared, I was sure the vehicle had come for me, and I would quake until it passed.
Then I did something unfathomable. I told Frank I couldn’t meet him for dinner. He had flown to Austin to visit James Michener, the wealthy, eighty-eight-year-old writer whose endowment provided fellowships for workshop graduates. Mr. Michener lay in bed, attached to the dialysis machine that kept him alive, but he had agreed to meet Frank. A week before his arrival, Frank called and we planned to have dinner. But as I believed Frank would think less of me if I acknowledged my paranoia, I remained silent about it, rather than requesting his help. I didn’t know he’d experienced a similar “breakdown” until we discussed it several years later. So I seemingly had no reason for canceling dinner when I called his hotel room two hours beforehand. True, a fine drizzle had slickened the oil-stained streets, and the thought of driving in the dark frightened me. Yet how could I say I was afraid to leave the house without offering an explanation? Also, I wanted to see him, and I knew I’d feel like I’d been impolite and ungrateful if I didn’t. But when my hand tremors convinced me that I couldn’t make the twenty-five-mile drive, I said, quite simply, “I don’t feel well.”
“Hey!” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Stay home. It’s crummy out.” Then he lowered his voice to convey the grotesque nature of his trip. “And let’s not kid ourselves, I’m not here for fun. This is me on my knees at the old man’s bedside, holding his hand.” He laughed softly, and with remorse, the way you’d laugh at a joke made about someone who’d just died. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “I don’t look forward to requesting money.” But, as the workshop’s director, Frank’s duties included begging ill tycoons and dying heiresses to leave behind millions for student scholarships. “The depths to which one sinks for literature,” he said. Then he added, “Listen, take care of yourself. You sound a little rattled.” We didn’t speak again until spring.
Jody had to live with my illness, and Charlie knew about it. His youngest brother had committed suicide, another was schizophrenic, and Charlie took an antidepressant. So we spoke a common language, and he understood my insanity. In fact, he was surprised I hadn’t cracked sooner. “I thought you would have been on meds years ago,” he said, at one point. Otherwise, no one suspected my “inner turmoil,” as Frank later described it, referring to himself. My colleagues had no reason to believe anything was wrong with me. I never missed a class, and I never missed a basketball game.
I’d begun to play three days a week in the university’s gym. On weekends, I played outdoors with kids twenty years younger than me. I’d become addicted to the game’s constant movement, which left me no time to be paranoid. While my thoughts followed the ball, nothing else mattered. But the instant I had to stand on the sidelines, my prison fantasies returned. I imagined that, in order to earn the respect of hard-core cons, I’d play hoops with them. One day, they’d discover I was a writer and I would organize a fiction workshop. Fondly, they’d call me “Teach.” Other inmates would ask me to help them write their appeals. Finally, over a dinner of cornbread and lukewarm beans, someone would say, “Hey, Teach. What are you doing time for?” And I’d answer, “Breaking a lease.” Then they would stare at me in slack-jawed silence.
But if I could mask my emotional wreckage, I couldn’t hide my slow, physical decay. First, I developed a scalp rash. Then I lost hair. Purplish bruises shaped like quarter moons hung beneath each eye from sleeplessness. And, every few minutes, a rib-crunching cough forced me to spit out a gob of green or yellow phlegm.
Each week, I injected myself with a serum that contained a distillate of every allergen that made me sneeze, held an ice pack to my throbbing brow, or slept half the day. One afternoon, toward the end of the semester, I stopped by Dr. Cobb’s office to collect a new vial containing a stronger dose of the serum. When he noticed me he pointed to an examination room and said, “Tom, get in here.” Illuminating each orifice with his penlight, he gazed into my ears, nose, and mouth. Then he pressed a stethoscope to my chest and said, “Inhale.” When he removed the scope’s earpiece he said, “Do you know you have pneumonia?” I shook my head. He slipped a thermometer beneath my tongue. Then he held my wrist and tracked the passing seconds on his digital watch. When he released my hand, he checked the thermometer before he looked at me. “Your skin’s pale. You have a 101-degree fever. And your heartbeat’s elevated. What the hell’s going on with you?”
“I haven’t been sleeping much.”
“Why not?”
Dr. Cobb was gray-bearded, gruff, and built like a college wrestler. But I needed to confess my crime to someone and I knew he’d listen. “I’m wanted by the FBI,” I said. “In 1979 I broke a lease and—”
He raised one hand and said, “Stop.”
“Do you think I’ll go to jail?”
He placed one hand on my arm to stop it from quivering. Then he said, “First of all, they don’t put guys who write books in jail. Second, you need to see a psychiatrist. Forget the FBI. The FBI has no interest in you whatsoever. Are we clear on this?”
I nodded.
“I’m going to write you a prescription for antibiotics,
and you’re going to make an appointment to see a psychiatrist. Are we on the same page?”
I nodded again.
“Good. Now get outta here. And when I see you again, you’d better be healthy.”
But I didn’t make an appointment with a psychiatrist. I made one with my regular physician and described my symptoms, although I pretended to be unaware of their cause. After listening to me for sixty seconds, he said, “Let’s start you on Prozac.”
“No.”
I barked the word instinctively, worried that—in addition to my mental and physical deterioration—Prozac would transform me into a zombie the way various medications had reduced my sister to a catatonic. After her second suicide attempt, my sister left her husband. And fearing that she might unintentionally hurt her two sons, she left them, too. She moved in with our mother. Several years later, they left New York and bought a small condominium in Florida. Whenever I visited them my sister would stare at me without blinking, her eyes as motionless as the eyes of a corpse. I didn’t want to risk descending to the depths of her inanimate madness. I would be fine, I believed, if I could sleep. I simply needed a drug to turn off my nerves the way one turns off an electric razor. I also needed the buzzing that radiated from my skull to my fingertips to cease because my paranoia had enlarged its narrative. I’d no longer only broken a lease. I’d left the heat on, the furnace had exploded, and the resulting fire had incinerated the cottage. Worse, the two women who lived on the other side of the thin, Sheetrock wall had died of smoke inhalation in their beds, before their bodies melted like candle wax.
“All I need is a tranquilizer,” I said.
Momentarily, my physician resisted. Then he wrote a script for Xanax.
“Ten pills? That’s it?”
He emphasized the drug’s addictive power. He also didn’t want me swallowing thirty tablets at once, and his suspicions weren’t baseless. But when I realized I could avoid imprisonment by committing suicide, I felt liberated. As long as I didn’t mind dying, I had absolute freedom.
But I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to take Prozac, so I spent several afternoons per week in the university’s library, researching arson’s statute of limitations. I read legal precedents and weighed the distinction between criminal intent and criminal negligence. In an imaginary, never-ending trial, I defended my actions to a fictitious judge. “Your Honor, I never intended to blow up the furnace. I intended to keep the water pipes from freezing.” The fact that I hadn’t been near the cottage for fifteen years, had a valid driver’s license, paid my taxes, and maintained a listed telephone number, which meant that any FBI agent who looked me up in the white pages could find me, did not diminish my delusions; it reinforced them.
At one point, I considered flying to Boston, renting a car, driving to the Cape, and turning left onto the dead-end street where I’d once lived. But I couldn’t go alone. Jody would have to make the trip with me, rent a car, and book our hotel room using her license and credit card because I couldn’t risk using mine. I also had to disguise myself. Of course, I’d aged. But paranoia alters time. To me, fifteen years ago and fifteen seconds ago were indistinguishable. I was being pursued in the present; yet, paradoxically, I was living in the past. I no longer wore an earring; my hair had thinned and been cut short; and my formerly brown beard had faded to gray. Still, I worried about being recognized, and whenever I imagined driving down that street my hands quaked. What if my landlord was waiting for me in the front yard? Or what if the cottages no longer existed? Then, at the local police station, Jody would have to ask the desk sergeant if he had any record of them being burned down while I hid in the car, my face partially obscured by a Red Sox cap. Ultimately, I was too frightened to return. In my imagination, the cottages, driveways, pine needles, the black Camaro, and the dogs remained unchanged and terrifying.
Finally, my madness paralyzed me. I’d promised myself to search for a teaching job if I sold City of God. With my experience and a forthcoming novel, my chances for finding a position were good, perhaps as good as they ever would be—because if City of God failed critically, my authorial value would dwindle to zero. I would be in my early forties, artistically undistinguished, and close to receiving tenure. Then Texas would own me. So I updated my vita, skimmed the creative writing job list, circled every position I wanted, typed twenty application letters, and slipped each one into a nine-by-twelve-inch envelope. Only, once the letters were prepared, I couldn’t risk mailing the envelopes. A postal employee might recognize my name and address, and then tell the FBI where to find me. Like all paranoids, at this stage of my illness, I wasn’t simply irrational; I was narcissistic, and phenomenally deluded. I thought the FBI’s sole task was to pursue and incarcerate me. At 3:00 AM, I not only believed this was possible; I also believed it was probable. For several days, I considered supplying no name, only my address, but this might make the envelopes seem suspect. If anyone opened one en route to its destination, he or she would discover my name. So the envelopes sat on my desk. Secretly, I wished that while I was out of the house Jody would address and mail them. But after weeks of me explaining, in precise detail, the perils this involved, she didn’t.
Dusk now fell earlier; the autumn afternoons ended abruptly; and often, after I left campus, streetlights illuminated my walk home. Soon, it would be Thanksgiving. As the application deadlines approached, I thought it might be safe to mail envelopes to universities located in the Midwest, Southwest, and along the Pacific coast. But mailing any to the Northeast was inconceivable.
After the semester ended, an early December freeze made our lawn glisten like polished silver. And on the date by which all application envelopes had to be postmarked, I stood over the kitchen’s wastebasket and tore each envelope in half, and then in half again, to make its contents difficult to reassemble.
A week later, Jody and I drove to Key West. We’d rented a larger house with a wooden deck and an unheated, thirty-foot-long lap pool. Unable to concentrate, I paced beside it for hours. The evenings were chilly and, occasionally, I had to turn on the heat. But I was afraid to touch the living room’s thermostat, which resembled the cottage’s thermostat. So I would walk toward it, close my eyes, and then place my thumb beneath its small, red lever to raise the temperature. At midnight, I snapped my tranquilizer in two and swallowed a tiny, white crumb of Xanax. The drug soothed my nerves’ ragged edges, although I didn’t sleep. And I didn’t stop asking Jody if I had accidentally committed arson. Once every hour, she assured me that I hadn’t. And I believed her—as long as she continued talking. Because once she stopped, her assurances became meaningless, and I made her repeat them, which, generously, she did. Until one peerlessly beautiful morning, while she sat at the poolside table, reading the newspaper and sipping Cuban coffee. Seated opposite her, I uttered the phrase, “But what if.” Then, without lowering her newspaper, she said, “If you don’t shut up, I will throw you in that pool and drown you. Do you understand me?”
Feeling like a chastised schoolboy, I waited, hoping for a reprieve. When it became clear that one wasn’t imminent, I said, softly, “Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“Good. Now go call Bill and leave me alone.”
Bill Lashner was a lawyer, a novelist, and a friend I’d made at Iowa. When he answered his phone and heard my voice he shouted, “Tommie!” (Bill’s one of the few people who calls me that.) We chatted about the holidays. Then I said, “Can I ask you for some legal advice?”
Perhaps he detected my desperation because he hesitated before he said, “Okay.”
“I think I may be wanted for breaking a lease.”
He paused. “When was this?”
“1979.”
“You broke a lease fifteen years ago.”
“Yeah. I also may have accidentally burned down the cottage.”
Patiently, he said, “And you’re wanted by?”
“The FBI.”
After a mom
ent’s silence, Bill said, “Tom, I don’t want to play dime-store psychologist. But you don’t have a legal problem. You have a psychological problem.”
I said I’d broken the lease because I’d been robbed, twice.
“Then you had a legal right to leave,” he said. “It’s called ‘constructive abandonment.’ But seriously, Tommie, you need to see a psychiatrist.”
And, after being insane for six months, once we returned to Texas, I did.
He was a short, pudgy, cherubic man who wore a gray suit and shiny, black penny loafers. Separated by a coffee table on which he kept a box of Kleenex tissues, I explained what I’d done and why I was wanted. Then I listed my symptoms. When I finished, he smiled and said, “You have major depression with an obsessive feature.”
Next, I described a dream. In it, I stood at the front of a classroom. But as I tried to speak, tiny globs of shit, rather than words, spewed out of my mouth and dappled the students’ faces like rain-drops.
“Feces and depressive guilt are commonly connected,” he said. Then he studied me and asked, “Who are you?”
I said I didn’t understand his question.