The Blind

by A. F. Brady

  “Shh. Sam, it’s okay. Shh.” David slides out of his desk chair onto the floor next to me. He wraps an arm around me and strokes my shoulder with the other hand. My violent heaves and sniffles are making me shake. David is whispering “shh” into my ear and kissing my hair. He is calming me.

  The tears are falling from my swollen eyes, and the comfort David provides is slowing my breath. My chest begins to rise and fall normally. David and I are on the floor in a pile, his arm is snugly around my shoulder and my sweaty hair is matted to my forehead. He wipes it out of my eyes and looks at me staring forward.

  “David,” I begin calmly, “I have borderline personality disorder. The psych evals confirmed it. I knew I was fucked up, but I didn’t know it was this bad. Rachel asked me to summarize the findings from OMH. I read my evaluation, and it’s true. I have borderline.” I take a deep, shuddering breath and steady myself to continue. “I’ve been meeting with Richard and making progress. He told me about killing his mom, and I told him I have borderline. Then he told me she was borderline, and it all became too much for me. I freaked out. I was just bawling my eyes out in my office in front of him, and I practically kicked him out before coming in here.” I’m rocking back and forth, holding my ankles in my sweaty hands. “And I cheated on Lucas. With AJ. I slept with him a couple times. Every time Lucas fucked up, I ran to AJ. But I broke up with him, almost two weeks ago. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you sooner.”

  David isn’t saying anything back to me. He’s letting me get out what I need to get out, and he’s still stroking my arms and petting my hair. Now and again he nods and says “shh.” I’m still facing forward. The last tears have fallen and my eyes are beginning to sting. “I feel like everything fell down. I used to know who I was, and I knew what I was doing, and then they tell me I have this fucking disease, and everything is different. I wish I never knew.”

  “Stop, Sam. Stop. You can’t sit here and shit on yourself like this. This isn’t your fault. This is a diagnosis. And now you have it, and we will deal with it. This doesn’t define you. How could you say that?” He’s pulling me back to face him as he tells me this. “You would never say that to your patients with BPD; you would never say that. Why the hell are you saying it to yourself?”

  “It’s different when it happens to you.” I can’t look at him.

  “Why didn’t you come to me to talk about this?” he says.

  “I just didn’t know how to tell you. I was afraid if I told you about AJ, you would be mad at me for cheating.” Now I’m looking at him with pleading eyes.

  “Sorry to tell you, but I knew about AJ. But I’m glad that’s over and you broke up with Lucas.”

  I shake my head, knowing David has always been fearful of what will happen with Lucas. “But everyone else thinks he’s so perfect.”

  “I see you every day, Sam. I see the bruises, I see the blood in your hair. I told you, you’re not very discreet.”

  “Do you think everyone knows what’s going on?”

  “No. I don’t think anyone knows. People want to believe that you guys were perfect. They don’t want to know the truth. People like to pretend, because pretending is prettier.” David has a way of making everything understandable.

  “How am I supposed to build this back now? I don’t know how to live like this.”

  “You’re not supposed to build it back.” Now we’re both sitting cross-legged on the floor of his office, facing each other. I’m hunched down with my head in my hands. We hear patients and coworkers walking past the office doors, and we lower our voices.

  “So, what do I do now? Everything I’ve always known is gone. My relationship is over. I don’t have my perfect reputation here, I don’t even have my sanity—I’ve got nothing left,” I whisper.

  “First, you breathe. You need some time to relax and get your bearings. Then we will figure out what’s next.”

  “Are they going to fire me?”

  “Of course they’re not going to fire you. You’re the golden girl; Rachel adores you. This place can’t run without you.” David doesn’t know that I never turned in the summary for my report or filed my own evaluation.

  “But shouldn’t they fire me? I mean, doesn’t this mean I am unfit for this environment?” I still need encouragement, even if I’m not telling him the whole story.

  “No. Sam, you know this. Having BPD doesn’t mean you can’t do your job. You may even be better at your job because of this. Maybe that’s why you’re a better clinician than the rest of us.” I can’t help but laugh at this ridiculous comment. But maybe he’s right; maybe I am so good at my job because I’m the blind leading the blind.

  “Are you mad at me? I know I haven’t been a very good friend to you lately. I just couldn’t handle the thing with Julie.”

  “I’m never mad at you. Just worried.”

  “I’m sorry. I feel like things have to change now. I need to get my life together.”

  “Well, it’s good you broke up with Lucas and that you cut off this thing with AJ. Neither one of those assholes was doing you any favors. Now you just need to stop drinking with patients at work.”

  I sit up ramrod straight. “How the fuck did you know about that?” I demand. My ears start to get hot and sweat begins to bead on my back. The office is growing smaller, and I feel the familiar sense of panic.

  “After you had a session with Richard once, I heard you guys talking in there, and I know he has a reputation for silence. I thought it was strange, so I followed him when he left your office, and I saw him dump some empty airplane bottles into the garbage in the men’s room.”

  “Do you think everyone in the meeting the other day knew that it was me?”

  “No, you did a great job lying your face off.” He smiles at me and hands me a tissue.

  “Are you and Julie going to go out now?” I’m laying all my cards on the table. I’m getting out every question and every concern.

  “No, Sam,” he says firmly. “I know you think that, but I am not dating Julie, or anyone else for that matter. I’ve already told you this. She only approached me because she wants to get close to you.”

  “You know that’s bullshit, don’t you? She wanted to go out with you. I was just the excuse she used.”

  “I know you hate her, but, like I’ve told you, she’s harmless. I’m sorry it upset you when you heard her in my office, but I promise you, there’s nothing going on.” He is sternly telling me this, forcing me to believe him.

  “Someone should really fix these walls,” I say. “It’s really fucked up that you and I can hear through them.”

  He looks at me with concern. “Are you going to be okay?”

  I chuckle nervously into my chest, uncomfortable that I have created another scene and come to David searching for salvation and absolution. “I think so. I have a lot to figure out. And, David, you cannot tell anyone what I told you. No one knows about this.” I hold out my pinkie. “Okay?”

  “No one except Richard,” David reminds me, hooking his pinkie in mine.

  PART THREE

  FEBRUARY 21ST, 10:57 A.M.

  I didn’t eat breakfast, so I have a pile of offerings from the vending machine in front of me. I figure Cheez-Its and peanut M&M’s are sort of real food. I’m constantly craving sugar because I’m not drinking, my body is in withdrawal. Richard is in my office, ready to keep moving forward, so I jump right in where we left off.

  “What happened at the trial?”

  “The trial still seems like a blur to me. I never told anyone what really happened. I never told my lawyer, I never told the judge, I never told the cops or anyone. The story they had was the story they pieced together from the evidence at the scene, and whatever Mrs. Choi told them.” He reaches over and takes one of my Cheez-Its and pops it into his mouth. “Remember I told you the story of the blackout when I got arrested for looting?”

  “Yeah, you and Jesse. They let you go, I remember.”

  “Well, remember they di
dn’t book me under my real name because I didn’t tell them my name?”

  “Right.” I offer him another one, but he turns it down.

  “Originally, I was booked under John Doe. Then I was Williams Boy—Frances’s last name was Williams. Then some cop found my fingerprints in the system and I was Henry James. Eventually, I told them my name was Richard McHugh. No one cares what your name is. My name was Defendant. My name was Murderer. That was my identity.

  “There were no medical records of my broken arms because we never went to the hospital. There was nothing to say that my bruises and burns, the scars—there was nothing to prove that those were from Frances. Those could have been from a teenage boy roughhousing and acting a fool. From school-yard fights. They could have been from sports or self-inflicted. Without any story or testimony from me, they had nothing to go on. They painted me a monster. An abuser. A bad seed. They said the bruises came from Frances trying to defend herself. They said all the evidence of abuse they found on her, the marks from the boyfriend hitting her—they said those were from me. I never knew his name, so I couldn’t even blame him.”

  It’s just like the women in the survivor’s group were saying—the authorities would never believe the victims.

  “They said that I murdered my mother. You hear something enough times, you begin to believe it yourself. I had heard so many times that I was worthless, that I was bad and wrong…” His misty eyes are going far away and I wonder if he still believes it, even to this day.

  “What was it like in prison?” I’ve got my elbows on the desk and my fists tucked underneath my chin like a child waiting to hear a ghost story.

  “What was it like? Jeez. It was so many different things. There was a sense of solitude that I liked. No one bothered me. If you keep to yourself, they’ll usually leave you alone. I started at Green Haven but I wasn’t there long. I was transferred to a medium-security prison two and half years into my sentence. My lawyer explained about overcrowding and first-time offenses and whatnot. I was happy to go somewhere that had a bit more freedom.” He wipes his salty fingers on a tissue and tucks it into his pocket.

  “Where did they take you?”

  “Ogdensburg.”

  “Really? I thought that was for sex offenders mostly. We’ve had a lot of patients come here after being released from Ogdensburg.”

  “Yup, filled with sex offenders. They’re not all bad. My time at Ogden was tough. After getting out of Green Haven, I started to get a better sense of what was happening to me. Most prisoners don’t get transferred—they don’t get a change of scenery or a change of security. I started to understand the reality of the situation, and I started to think about time. I was twenty-one years old, and I would be in there for longer than I had been alive. I thought about what I remembered from being a baby, and how long ago it felt. And I thought, for all the memories I have from my life, all of them will be replaced with memories from there. Memories from prison. The outside world would fade, and by the time I got released, I would have spent more of my life incarcerated than free. And that started to scare me.”

  “Fuuuck.” I drag the word out like it’s four syllables long. “You still had twenty years.” I shake my head in disbelief. I was just getting out of high school twenty years ago. And in twenty years from now, I’ll be nearly sixty.

  “I started to get depressed. I stopped eating. I wasn’t trying to starve myself or anything, I just stopped because I didn’t get anything out of it anymore—no pleasure, no satisfaction. It never bothered me to be hungry, and I didn’t like the food there anyway. So, I started to lose weight, and it was hard to sleep, so I would stay up at night. I wanted to be alone as much as I could, so I kept to my cell, and sat by myself in the mess, and I guess some admins started to notice.

  “When I stopped eating, one of the admins had me see a psychiatrist. He said that I would benefit from talking to someone. I hadn’t talked to anyone in years, and I didn’t think I could. He told me to try it anyway and set up some appointments with this prison shrink, and gave me these pamphlets about group therapy. I went to some of the groups and my meetings with the docs; I was young and just did what I was told to do.”

  “Did you tell any of the doctors what really happened with your mom?”

  He looks at me, wounded. “You know I didn’t.”

  “What stopped you? It seems like that would have been the opportunity to work through your feelings about what happened with Frances.”

  “I had never admitted to anyone that it happened at all. I never told my friends growing up that Frances was the way she was. I never even told my girlfriend—all I said to her was that Frances had bad migraines and needed me to stay home. She always understood. And I loved her, my girlfriend. She was almost as crazy as Frances, but she would always understand when I had to stay home. If I couldn’t tell her the truth, then I couldn’t tell anyone.”

  “I want to hear more about the girlfriend.” I gather the empty vending-machine bags and toss them into the garbage can.

  “My girlfriend? I thought you wanted to know about prison?”

  “I do, but next time I want you to tell me about her.”

  “Huh,” he scoffs. “Okay.”

  “Keep going with the psych stuff. What were the sessions with the counselors like?”

  “Not like these.” He gives me an animated smile. “I had this one doc, a man. He was only a little bit older than me at the time, maybe thirty years old. He was always asking me what really happened. He didn’t believe what the lawyers said and what the record said. He didn’t think I was violent. He would ask me all these questions, and I never answered any of them. I stayed in his chair and I listened to him ask me, and I wasn’t rude, but I just didn’t answer him. I wouldn’t ignore him or read the paper or anything, I just never answered.”

  “You were dead silent? You sat there without saying a single word? Not even hello?”

  “I didn’t say a single word for almost six years.”

  “What? Six years? I didn’t think you meant that literally. I thought you meant you hadn’t discussed your mother, or the trial, or the accident, or, or… I didn’t know you went completely silent.”

  “I guess I just didn’t have anything to say.” Richard doesn’t seem troubled by this at all.

  “When did it start? When did you stop talking?”

  “Around the time I started to get sick. I didn’t say much of anything since the accident, but I answered when I had to and followed the directions of the judge and the legal folks, but beyond that, nah. I didn’t have anything to say.”

  “That’s unreal. I can’t imagine not talking.” His reputation for silence clearly followed him from prison.

  “This doc that I’m telling you about, he was the only one who didn’t try to get me to talk. A lot of people would get frustrated with me, start yelling. Some would get scared and just stay away from me. One inmate thought my tongue had been cut out, so he spent a couple weeks following me and telling everyone I had my tongue cut out for being a snitch. He told people I was the best person to be around because I could never tell anyone anything again. He would whisper secrets in my ear just to see if I would say something. His name was Victor. He molested two of his nephews and said he would do it again if they ever let him out.” I cringe, pull my hands into my lap.

  “But back to this doctor. He did what you did a little bit, had me come in for meetings in his office. He would ask me all kinds of questions, never really expecting an answer. Asked about what it was like for me in prison, day to day. Asked about what it was like at the trial, in jail, what it was like before the accident. He called it ‘the precipitating event.’ I guess he must have been a really good shrink, or I must have been answering him with my eyes or something, but he started to put together some kind of understanding. He figured that there was something wrong in my relationship with Frances.

  “One day, he asked if I would be okay with getting a physical evaluation. I had never had a
real one as an adult, not since I left St. Teresa’s, so I guess I nodded, or shrugged, but he set me up to have one. He took me to the medical unit, and another doc came with us, and he set me up with the whole shebang. I had the blood tests and the X-rays, and the lung what-have-yous and everything.”

  “He was checking his theories, huh? He thought he knew something and wanted to see if he could find any evidence?”

  “Bingo. He saw the breaks in my arms from the X-rays. He saw the cigarette burns and the scars on my back and my legs. I guess he got the picture, so he started asking me about it. I still never answered him. But he just knew.”

  “He just knew? He just figured it out?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. He started bringing me books, too. Books about what he thought may be wrong with me. He brought me books on depression, books about what Frances was like, and shell shock, PT-whatever-you-call-it.”

  “PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Similar symptoms used to be referred to as ‘shell shock.’”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  “You’re welcome, patient.”

  “He gave me something on this thing called Stockholm syndrome. You know about this? Those hostages at the bank in Sweden?”

  “Yeah, I know all about it. This doctor thought you were expressing similarities to Stockholm syndrome, just from looking at your X-rays and talking at you? Huh, traumatic bonding. That’s incredible.”

  “He said he thought that might be why I didn’t stand up in my own defense. He said if the bone breaks and the scars were from Frances, then it makes sense.”

  “It does make sense; it makes perfect sense.” I sigh.

  “So, he started to wonder what was going on with Frances. That’s when I learned about borderline.”

  “This guy is amazing. What’s his name? Whatever happened to him?” It’s all becoming clear why Richard would need to get this off his chest. Why he sits in my office every Tuesday and tells me his story.