The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  The clinician, Melissa, smiled warmly. “Tell us more about it,” she said. I closed my eyes.

  “Shiny black like what you see under your eyelids when you’re trying to fall asleep but you can’t,” I said. “It sits in the pit of my stomach, and its edges are cutting me from the inside.”

  I belong here, I thought. I’m really good at this. Maybe better at this than I’ve ever been at anything before.

  That thought troubled me.

  “I wanna get high,” I said. “I wanna get fucked up.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I have too many feelings and they’re all too much for me all the time and drugs take them away so I don’t have to feel anything,” I said. “Why do I have to feel so many things?”

  And then the med nurse gave me an Ativan and I couldn’t remember anything after that.

  Joni pressed her palm against the top of Angela’s head. Joni was a shaman and her hand was noiselessly vacuuming up the pain, through the top of Angela’s skull and upward, away. Angela rocked back and forth. She moaned.

  “Angela,” I said. “Name your addictive behaviors.”

  Angela stopped scratching. Her arms were slung in repose. A vermilion lattice of blood was sketched on her arms, shining. “Um. Prescription drug abuse. Unmanaged dissociation. Self-mutilation. Euphoric recall. Suicidal ideation. I can’t remember any more.”

  Joni looked at me. “What do we do?”

  I shrugged and wiggled my toes in my slip-ons. I had bought those in Nashville, too. My father had dropped me off at the nurse’s station with my suitcase and sped off into the bayou, just disappeared like a ghost. They took all the shoes that had laces. They took my mouthwash, my cologne. A sweatshirt with the elastic cord in my hood. Risperdal, administered orally, dissolved into a grainy mash of periwinkle sleep under my tongue.

  Later, we were out on the terrace smoking. Joni and Angela and me. A clinician stood by the door with a cigarette lighter; we weren’t allowed to have those, either. I was smoking menthols because everyone there smoked menthols. It was all women at that hospital. I was the only man in the program, which wasn’t unusual for sexual trauma and compulsion units, they told me.

  Women get raped and go to psych hospitals; men rape and go to jail. That was the best-case scenario, anyway.

  It was late summer, and New Orleans was so muggy I could choke.

  “Why are you here, Angela?” I asked.

  “Courts said I had to come ’cause of the dissociative identity disorder, but it ain’t me who needs the help,” Angela said. “It’s one of my alters. She’s the one who fucked Kenny up in the first place.” She took a long pull of her cigarette. The clock ticked overhead.

  I closed my eyes and tried to become someone else.

  I closed my eyes and tried to become normal.

  Inside, on the television in the common room, several women sat on the floor, gazing up at the screen. Sandra Bullock was crying. Her pain was her streaked mascara. I couldn’t see my pain.

  My pain is a set of marbles that I keep on rotating in the palm of my hand.

  “What about you?” Angela said. “Fuck are you doing here?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t know anymore,” I said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  She looked at me funny.

  “This really, really, really wasn’t supposed to be my life,” I said.

  We were sitting in a circle and a woman named Pat was talking about her childhood. Her mother had joined a satanic cult, she said.

  “My little sister. They killed her. They killed her and they made me carry the body. I watched as they raped her. Her lifeless body. They made me carry it.”

  She broke down in heavy sobs.

  I wrote down everything she said in my journal, incredulous.

  “Satanic cults aren’t real,” I wrote.

  There had been that scandal when I was a kid—I remembered it from the news—accusations of satanic ritual abuse that turned out to be false memories implanted by faulty hypnosis. I wanted to shout, She’s making it all up!

  But what if she wasn’t? What if it had happened?

  “I watched as they raped her,” Pat said again. She sounded convincing. I didn’t feel anything beyond a low-level horror.

  Rape and rape and rape. We all talked about rape.

  “We are all survivors,” Melissa said.

  After four days, I cracked. I called my mother.

  “I can’t be here anymore,” I sobbed into the phone. “This is worse than being out there. This is worse than anything.”

  Her voice was soothing. “Okay, honey,” she said. “We’ll bring you home.”

  I flew back to Portland, dazed from the things I’d heard and seen at River Oaks. I didn’t say much about it. It was too strange—a fever dream I’d had in the summer swamp.

  Now that I was out, it seemed absurd that I would go to Vassar and equally absurd that I would not. I was almost eighteen, a high school graduate; there was nothing for me to do in Portland, and my father had moved into Jennifer’s one-bedroom, where there wasn’t enough room for me to live. I hadn’t gotten sober, but I wasn’t sure I absolutely needed to, either; I couldn’t possibly do more treatment after spending time in three programs over the course of one long summer.

  But that was what my mother suggested, pleading with me over dinner one evening. “You can stay here,” she said. “I’ll help you. Maybe you can do an intensive outpatient program. Get a part-time job. Work retail.”

  I grimaced. That wasn’t in the cards. And the more I thought about it, the more college seemed like a better idea than it had at any point over the last year. I would be away from my parents, independent. I could make new friends. Get a fresh start. Vassar. It sounded glamorous; it was one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country.

  I told my father that was my plan. He sounded frustrated.

  “I’ll pay the equivalent of state-school tuition,” he said. “That’s as much as I can invest in this.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take out loans for the rest.” I had no idea how I would do this, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

  My last weekend in Portland before returning to New York, I drove out to Mount Saint Helens with two girlfriends. We roasted marshmallows over a fire and slept together in sleeping bags in an oversize tent. We swam in a lake, laughing, dunking one another under the water. I showed them how to make a fire with my bow drill, and we smoked pot out of a beat-up old pipe, blowing rings and watching the stars.

  On the second day, we ate psychedelic mushrooms and hiked through the woods to a site nearby where there were caves.

  “Is it a good idea to go spelunking when we’re tripping?” my friend giggled.

  “Definitely not,” I said, and we erupted into peals of laughter.

  Everything was green and gold, the light in the trees making shadows on the ground.

  How could I give this up? I thought wondrously. Drugs are so special, so beautiful.

  I stumbled upon a perfectly cylindrical hole in the ground, about six feet deep—the perfect size for me. Resting one hand in the soil, pinching it between my fingers, bending my knees, I jumped down into it.

  It was dark and cool. I lit a cigarette. I looked up at the girls, who looked down at me, marveling. I heard a click as one of them snapped a picture.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this hole I’m in,” I said. Suddenly, I was weeping. “I feel like I’ve been here forever.”

  Landing back at the airport in New York, I caught a taxi to Manhattan. It felt strange to get in, as I had so many times, and tell the driver to take me to Jennifer’s apartment rather than my father’s.

  The doorman stopped me as I entered her building. I gave my father’s name, then Jennifer’s. He called up, looking at me suspiciously. The lobby of her building was grand and old-fashioned, a relic from an old New York that didn’t exist anymore, crown molding and a vaguely mus
ty odor.

  “You can go up,” he said. I rolled my eyes, irritated.

  Upstairs, my father greeted me warmly. I once-overed Jennifer’s apartment: it hadn’t fully registered that this was the place to which I’d be returning. In the corner of the living room was a large golden birdcage, its door ominously opened. A tan sofa had a pair of sheets and a faded quilt folded on its cushions. The bathroom was through the bedroom; I’d have to pass by their bed anytime I had to use it, I realized. Almost immediately, I felt claustrophobic. Then, I heard the beating of wings as Jennifer’s bird torpedoed through the air toward me, swerving just to avoid crashing into my head.

  “Fucking bird,” I muttered.

  I went to dinner with Daphne and a large group of friends at a trendy sushi restaurant. It felt so odd to be back in the same places with the same people: I hadn’t been back in New York since those men had pulled me out of bed in the middle of the night.

  A mutual friend from wilderness had told me that Laurel had been working for an escort service in north Newark, turning tricks again. I texted her: “I’m back in the city.”

  “Where are you?” Laurel wrote back. “I want to see you.”

  “Dinner,” I wrote. Then she called. I picked up at the table, to my friends’ annoyance.

  “Laurel?” I said.

  “I’ll get in a taxi right now,” she said. “Just tell me where you are.”

  “You’re taking a cab from Jersey?” I said.

  “I can’t wait to see you,” she said.

  I hung up the phone.

  “Laurel has a lot of problems,” I said to the group.

  “No wonder you’re friends,” Daphne said.

  She arrived halfway through dinner, exiting a cab in a revealing top, carrying a cheap black patent leather purse. She stood on the street looking lost. I watched her for a moment through the window, then went to bring her inside. She was stretched thin. Her features were collapsing into one another, like she was a watercolor painting. She ordered more sake for the table and pulled a wad of crumpled twenties from her purse.

  “I have money,” she slurred.

  “We don’t pay yet,” Daphne said.

  After dinner, we went out on the street to smoke. Laurel leaned on the hood of a parked car, clutching her stomach, sick from something.

  Daphne kissed me on the cheek as she got in a cab heading uptown.

  “You need to get sober, Sam,” she said. “This is getting ridiculous. What the fuck are you doing with these people?”

  “I’m fucking seventeen, Daphne,” I said. “So is she. We’re just—we’re going through it right now. You know?”

  She shrugged and got in the cab. Laurel sidled up next to me and whispered in my ear.

  “Let’s get some coke and go to a hotel,” she said. “I wanna party.”

  In bed that night, Laurel lay next to me, her body pushed up close against mine. I could feel her chest rise and fall as she breathed. The drugs still pumped through me. I felt strong.

  Inexplicably, I had an erection.

  She turned to face me and I stiffened against her. I kissed her and began to unbutton her pants.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “I’ve never done it with a woman,” I said. I hadn’t.

  Once I was inside her, it started to feel instinctively wrong. She moaned theatrically. I came quickly, feeling grateful that I would never have to do it again.

  Then, immediately, a wave of sickening regret surged through me, regret for treating someone as damaged as Laurel like a piece of meat. For doing to her what so many men with hungry eyes and wedding bands whom I’d met at gay bars in Chelsea all through high school had done to me. That cotton-mouthed hangover feeling to which I’d grown so accustomed, waking up next to a stranger at a midtown hotel, knowing perfectly well that I was an experiment he’d rather soon forget.

  The next morning, we went out to breakfast at the diner on the corner. She ordered eggs, and we didn’t talk about the night before. I paid the tab.

  “It’s the least I can do,” I said.

  She called a car service to take her back to New Jersey, and as she got into the town car, she looked at me.

  “I’m so happy,” she said. “I’m so happy this happened.” Her face split into a smile. “I’ll see you really soon, okay?”

  That night I sent messages to a guy I’d met the previous spring: a Broadway producer with a spacious apartment on Central Park West. He was silver-haired and a little portly. I had felt terrified walking through his lobby, I remembered, because a friend from school lived in that same building—what if she saw me and asked what I was doing there? But I didn’t care anymore. I could hardly remember the person to whom things like that had mattered.

  He invited me over, so I went, already drunk, getting nauseated in the backseat of a taxi. When he opened the apartment door, I could already hear the groans of pornography. He shut the door behind me. A pile of cocaine sat on a silver mirror.

  “Have some candy,” he said.

  I did a line.

  “More,” he said.

  I did another.

  He kissed me on the mouth, biting my lip. “Good job, baby.”

  I followed him into his bedroom. There were two boys already there, lying on his bed: naked and hairless. Porn was playing on the television there, too. It was too much visual data, too much sex to take in at once.

  One of the boys, I realized suddenly, was in the video playing on the television; I followed the tattoo on his hip from the screen to the bed and back again.

  “Why are you still wearing clothes?” the producer said. He sounded exasperated. “Strip.” He wiped his gums.

  I peeled off my shirt, then pants, then underwear. He looked at me appraisingly, as though I were a show horse. “You’re cuter than the last time,” he said.

  Both of the boys on the bed laughed. “That’s a shitty compliment, Richard,” one of them said, sniffling. I felt vivid—like I had been living in monochrome and suddenly found myself in color. Richard. That was his name.

  “Richard,” I said. He turned to face me. I whispered in his ear. “I want five hundred for the night.”

  “My boys get whatever they want,” he said. He shoved my head down. “So do I.”

  Nine

  While I’d been in Portland, I’d been invited to join an online group of incoming Vassar freshmen; I had traded a series of flip messages with a girl named Annalise von Tegerfelden. Her photo showed her in a leotard, posing in a spectacular arabesque. She’d written that her interests were “ballet and Klonopin,” which I loved.

  “Write me when you’re back in the city,” she said. “We’ll have drinks.” When I did, she extended a prompt invitation.

  “I’m so bored tonight,” she said, as familiar as if we had been friends for years. “Just come over.”

  Her family’s apartment was in a town house in the East Seventies, near Lexington, luxuriously grubby—shelves crowded with old books, a velvet sofa. Annalise wore a little black dress, her long dark hair pooling on her shoulders. She was sharp-featured and tiny, with a ballerina’s build—she had spent two postgrad years dancing in a Parisian ballet company, she said. She was already a little tipsy, an opened bottle of red wine on a chest in the living room. “Mother and Father are at the house in the country,” she said, a high-pitched bubble of a laugh erupting from her chest. She told me about her weekend—a threesome with two male models she’d met at a club downtown. Annalise specialized in male models, specifically European ones; later, she would take to sending me emails with the subject line, “This is what I’ve been doing all day,” with a photo of a bare torso attached.

  I told her about backpacking through Utah, the rehab in Tennessee, the psych ward in New Orleans.

  “And when was all this?” she asked, pouring herself more wine. She had the rarefied delivery of someone much older, a Park Avenue divorcée in training, with a high, brittle voice and a laugh that continued past the po
int when everyone else had stopped laughing. (She was, in fact, already nearly twenty-one—old for a freshman—compounded by a worldliness that I assumed was born simply of being a Swiss banking heiress and a pedigreed party girl, as she was.)

  “I just got out a week ago,” I said.

  She clutched her chest in a performance of dismay. “Darling! You must be wound so tight,” she said. “Do you want a Klonopin?” She nodded, reinforcing her own ingenuity. “You should take a Klonopin.”

  “That sounds right,” I said. She retrieved a prescription bottle from her purse and handed me a tablet.

  The room shifted out of focus, then back into high-definition. She poured more wine, then put an old record on vinyl, a warm crackling, and we danced through the apartment.

  “What do you think Vassar is going to be like?” I asked.

  “Probably dreadful,” she laughed. “Lots of kids from suburbs who are, like, so excited to be out on their own for the first time.” I loved the implication—that we were different, that we were special.

  “Let’s try to have a good time,” I said. “We can come back to the city as much as we want.”

  “Thank God for that.” She sniffed. “There’s a party at Marquee next weekend that I don’t intend to miss.”

  “You’re fabulous, Annalise von Tegerfelden,” I burbled at the end of the night. “You’re so fabulous.”

  She kissed me on both cheeks and put me in a cab.

  That weekend, I met Annalise at her parents’ apartment once more and followed her to Lexington, where we hailed a taxi.

  In the cab, Annalise retrieved a water bottle full of vodka from her purse. “We’re going to want to be drunk for this, right?” she said, releasing that high, peculiar laugh.

  “Yeah,” I said, taking a swig. We were headed to an apartment in Tribeca that had been rented out for a reception to welcome New York City–area incoming freshmen to the college. We got out on Washington, wandering the quiet cobblestoned streets.

  “Where are we?” Annalise asked.