“I only have my father left,” Amol gestured to the privacy curtain, “and he is a suicide, which is why we are here only.”
I tapped out a cigarette from the pack on the little table and lit it, sucking in the smoke like a pro.
My mom immediately stopped talking with Amol. “What in the world are you doing?”
I told her that it was no big deal. That this guy was always bringing them by for me, so it wasn’t like I was spending any money or anything.
She explained that I’d been diagnosed with asthma while I was in third grade and had struggled with it my entire life. “We used to send you to asthma camp in the summers,” she said, exasperated. She checked herself. “We’ll talk about it later.”
Jim Henson walked in, along with a very dark man with black hair parted down the middle and spread out like wings. The room was becoming uncomfortable. Jim Henson introduced himself to my parents. Apparently, he had a name, and it was Richard, and the wing-haired man introduced himself as Veda.
Veda came over to me immediately after shaking my father’s hand. “How goes it, Hero?”
“My parents are here,” I told him. “They’re going to take me home.”
“My students will be very upset.” Veda turned to my mother, clasped his hands behind his back, leaned toward her, and said, “Many of my female students are quite taken with David.”
Here was an absence, a complete erasure. I had no idea what he was talking about. I was a teacher? Girls liked me? Each new example of emptiness was like a glass bottle breaking inside me.
On the other side of the room, Richard, Dr. Chandra, and Dr. Pat had cornered my father. Richard had a sheaf of paper stuffed poorly into a folder, and his kurta pocket bulged with two packs of cigarettes. He was in his midfifties, carried a sour smell with him, and talked about his poetry as if it were particle physics. I could see my father squirming away from the man. I recognized that, too: my father not wanting to be in a conversation.
It was a Monday afternoon, and as the call to worship rang out from the tinny speakers of the three mosques surrounding us, the world had come to buzz with concern by my bedside in the asylum. The room hummed with conversation, and all the while each visitor kept one eye on me as I flipped through the pictures: me, the glazed subtext to every conversation. Amol squirreled up next to me on the bed, careful of my IV.
“Who is this?” He pushed his finger on the face of the girl with the great nose. It was a large nose, a nose that dominated her face, but one that lifted all of her features to a pinnacle of beauty. How boring she would have looked without that nose. Just another blandly beautiful woman. That nose, that gap in her teeth marked her as precious. We were in a parking lot. She carried an SLR camera with a huge lens, sunglasses perched on her head, wearing an oversized black sweater. My hands were jammed deep in my pockets in a cool boy pose.
“I don’t know.”
I flipped to another picture. In this one I had my arms around a woman with piercingly blue eyes. She had a pixie haircut and a purple cardigan, and I was acting like I was about to bite her neck.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know,” I repeated.
He asked again and again, each time placing his finger on a face adjacent to mine. Smiling faces. Beautiful faces. Maybe girlfriends, maybe cousins, maybe college roommates.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
It was like he was lancing abscesses in my memory. Each face he poked with his finger caused a pop in my head. Where a memory might then crystallize, there was nothing.
I held up the pictures, interrupting Veda and my mom. “Which one of these is Christina?”
Mom’s face was blank.
“Christina? Or Christine?” I asked.
“I’ve never heard you talk about someone with that name,” my mom answered.
“I think I love her,” I said while flipping through the pictures. “Maybe her name is Geeta.” I didn’t know if I should tell my mom about how Christina and I stayed in terrible apartments and shot drugs right into the veins in our arms. I wasn’t sure how much my mom knew. How much I should spare her.
My mom reached and rubbed my cheek between her thumb and palm. “I know Anne and Sally are both very excited to see you.”
I nodded and said that I was excited to see them as well.
Whoever the hell they were.
My parents came the next day and checked me out of Woodlands Asha Neuropsychiatric Centre. We settled up the itemized bill first. Three days of hospital care: medicines, admission charges, registration fee, bed/room charges, injections, IV fluids, disposables, investigations, treatment charges (counseling charges, nursing charges, consultation fees), food and other charges, and miscellaneous. It all added up to 1,900 rupees even, or about US $40.
I was given a pillowcase full of the possessions I’d had with me. My parents had swung by my flat and picked up a change of clothes and my digital camera. As we left the asylum, I started taking pictures of everything: the helter-skelter patternless tiled floor; the cream-colored spiral walkway around the courtyard with its broken fountain; the patients in the courtyard, divided—the insane men on one side, insane women on the other—the gates; the rickshaw we climbed into. I soaked the camera in images. If I lost everything again, I’d be up-to-date.
The three of us squeezed into the tiny black and yellow rickshaw, me in between the two of them. My father was clenched tight. Mom, on the other hand, was overly chatty. As we circled the ring road that surrounded the town lake, dodging bicyclists, cars, pedestrians, trucks, mopeds, motorcycles—the whole gamut of weekday traffic—she told me that I wasn’t a drug addict, that I hadn’t been out of contact with them for years, that I really didn’t need to keep apologizing.
She told me that I was in India because of a fellowship from the US government, that the doctors she’d talked to back in Ohio thought that what had happened was likely the result of an antimalarial drug I was taking. My brain took in this information like a cruise ship effecting a U-turn. I wasn’t to blame? It was impossible. My mom must have been lying to me, doing what the doctors were doing, protecting me from the truth.
“What did I get a fellowship for?” I asked.
“You’re a writer.”
It was news to me, but it now made sense that Richard had always been at my bedside wanting to talk about poetry. “I must be pretty good,” I said, “if the government paid me to come over here.”
My mom grabbed my knee. “Don’t be too flattered. This is the same government that pays $600 for a toilet seat and pays farmers to not grow crops.”
And we laughed. She and I laughed together. At me. I recognized it. The banter had a kind of music to it. We kept at it, making jokes as the rickshaw flew into the oncoming lane of traffic and Dad nearly snapped the handle off his side.
There’s a giant statue of Buddha in the center of the lake. He stands ten meters tall, with his palm outstretched in a gesture of peace. When the statue was first being installed, it had capsized the boat that was carrying it and killed three men before sinking to the bottom of the lake. During the recovery effort for it two years later, another two men were killed. I’d learn all of this history later. At that moment, with my father about to grind his teeth down to the nerves and my mother and I laughing away, I saw the stone Buddha with his palm stretched out. He was giant and heavy and real and seemed the epitome of peace. While our rickshaw ricocheted through the pinball maze of traffic, I, nestled between my parents, my brain full of warring chemicals, felt, for the first time, safe.
We arrived at an apartment building. I had thought we were going to their hotel, but my mom reminded me that we were going to pack up my stuff. The building we pulled up to was unfamiliar. Part of me still held on to the belief that my real apartment was across from Mrs. Lee’s guesthouse, that all of this—the rickshaw ride, this apartment building—was part of an elaborate ruse that had been prescribed by the doct
ors to keep me from knowing the real truth of my life. Wasn’t the fact that nothing was familiar proof of this?
As we stepped out of the rickshaw, a scruffy man jumped up, buttoned his blue shirt, and opened the gate for us. He called me “Mr. Dah-wid.” I shook his hand, and he gave me a key. We got into the elevator, which was barely big enough for the three of us, and ascended to the top floor. From there, I followed my parents as they walked up a flight of stairs. This, then, was my flat. The city rose up on all sides of us, giant rocky ridges to the east of us and buildings clustered everywhere the eye roamed. The city was enormous. My flat was at the center of the roof behind a wrought-iron portico—sad and small, as if all it could do was imagine how much bigger it could’ve been had someone given it the proper materials. My dad unlocked the portico gate and then the flat’s door, and . . . still nothing. I faked a little dumb show of recognition for my parents. I worried that if I didn’t start showing some progress they’d throw me back into the asylum.
The place was painted pool-bottom blue. Oscillating desk fans were bolted to the walls, only three fans for the entire apartment, and the thick humid air barely stirred with all of them on high. Dad went around opening windows and then checked the small fridge for something to drink. There was a tiny desk and a thin tiny bed. Everything was so small.
There was a small kitchen, a small bathroom, and a small bedroom, all radiating off a normal-sized living room. There was a single chair, which my mom immediately sat down in. The chair was in front of a small desk, which held an open laptop. Bookshelves with sliding-glass fronts were inset into one wall and housed a row of books. Dostoyevsky, Thom Jones, Denis Johnson, a fat orange collected Cheever, Deborah Eisenberg, Alice Munro, Salman Rushdie, Barry Hannah, and William Dalrymple. All paperbacks, some with broken spines. Some creaked when I opened them. Some had writing in the margins, manic cramped scrawls with arrows and exclamation points that I recognized as my own, emphatically annotated appositives, ecstatic appreciations, careful observations. A copy of The Great Gatsby seemed especially attacked by the person who I had been. There didn’t seem to be a line in the book that didn’t have some kind of notation. The front pages, the ones that are normally left blank by the publisher, were crawling with quotes from the book pulled from their contexts and rewritten by me, or a me, maybe even the me. The one everyone kept expecting me to be again. Or was everyone trying to keep me from being that person again? I was getting everything mixed up. Were they upset that I wasn’t who I had been? Or were they trying to prevent me from turning into that person again? The drug user. The one who ran around and did drugs with Christina.
The books sparked nothing, but I recognized the scrawling mess of my writing from my fever dreams with a ballpoint pen and the asylum’s newspapers. It appeared that I was always trying to decipher something, even before I was insane. I slid the glass doors of the bookshelves closed.
A whining noise started, a metal-on-metal, crunching, high-vibrating E sharp. The room was full of it, like a mosquito with a megaphone. I checked my parents and was relieved to see that they were hearing it, too. Clasping my hands over my ears, I shouted, “What the hell is that?”
My mom tried to speak but held her mouth open until the noise stopped. “You wrote us about this. I think it’s the elevator. The engine for it is mounted on top of the building.” She rubbed the back of her neck as if she were trying to massage the sound out of her. “You found out about it after you signed the lease.”
In the bedroom, I started loading my backpack, but I stopped almost immediately. I poked my head out into the living room.
“How long am I going to be with you all for? In Ohio.”
My mom had been flipping through a magazine. “You’re coming home, David.”
I nodded. “I know I’m coming home. But how long did the doctors say I’d have to be there?”
“I think you should stay at home as long as you want,” Mom said.
“But will I lose my funding? This grant that I have, will they yank my funding for this?”
“We’re not having this conversation, are we?” My father leaned against the fridge. “Pack everything, David. You’re not coming back.”
My mom shot Dad a look, then turned to me. “We think you should stay at home and recuperate for as long as it takes to get this stuff out of your system.”
“You’re not coming back. What you just went through?” My dad was wearing a yellow polo shirt with a red gryphon on it and The MacLean Group written in script underneath. His eyes were granite obstructions. I took a picture.
“The cab’s waiting. Pack everything. Let’s go,” he said.
“It’s called a rickshaw,” I corrected.
“Why is it waiting?” my mom asked.
“I didn’t know if we could get another one, Sue.” My dad’s voice was becoming strained, yet it remained insistently calm.
“They’re all over the place,” Mom jabbed. “There were five just on this street.”
“Our guy knows where we’re going. And we have to get his prescriptions filled.”
While my parents argued, I shoved a third of my things into the green backpack, folded up my laptop, and tucked it into a padded slot in the messenger bag lying next to the desk. I opened the tiny drawer in the desk and found my passport and some rupees, along with a Leatherman and a picture of a woman who hadn’t been in any of the pictures Betsy had sent me. This woman had curly hair, plump lips, and wide-set eyes that nearly vanished with her broad smile. I tucked her picture into the messenger bag.
I squatted between my parents and told them my plan. “If this grant thing is as competitive as you guys say it is, then I don’t want to screw it up. I’m going to leave the bulk of my stuff here.”
My father came toward where I was squatted. He looked like he was ready to take a swing at me.
“Dave, you’ve been through so damn much.” It was at this moment that I noticed that his eyes were red, and only then did I start to realize just how much my parents had been through because of me. And here I was squatting like a camp counselor, explaining to them that I was going to do it all over again. My dad would rather punch me dead in the face than let me out of his sight again.
“It’ll be okay, Dad. I’m on the proper medications now. I’ve gotten so much better in such a short time. I’ll be back to normal very soon.”
If this was all a ruse they were plotting to keep me from finding out my real life, I was going to play chicken with them. I’d tell them I was all right, that I was perfectly fine, and force them to tell me that I wasn’t.
Mom sent Dad out with my prescriptions to find a pharmacy and to let him cool off for a bit. She and I went downstairs to see a neighbor who supposedly had visited me in the hospital, though I didn’t remember him. Mom told me that he had been the one who had locked my apartment after the night watchman found my apartment wide open.
We took our shoes off and sat in a dark marble-tiled living room drinking sweet tea as the air was efficiently circulated by this man’s giant ceiling fan. I could feel the cool air tickle the sweat on the underside of my arms. The man was a professor of history at the university down the block. His students called him Dr. ZoomZoom because he rode an old scooter to class.
My eyes wandered around his living room as Dr. ZoomZoom told my mother and me about the night I disappeared. I couldn’t stop wondering if I’d been here before. Had he and I had tea in his cooled apartment before? Had I seen that picture, the one on the side table, of him with his arm around his teenaged daughter before? Did I know it was his daughter?
“So it was quite late, about ten only, when the watchman came and knocked on my door. I was in bed. I was afraid that there had been a break-in or some such trouble. The watchman said that Mr. David’s door was wide open and there was music playing and the computer was on. He wanted to know if I knew where Mr. David was.”
Dr. ZoomZoom was a thin gray-haired man with coarse black hair that grew out of his ears. He was cl
ean-shaven except for a shadow of blue stubble on his neck.
“The watchman informed me that he had seen you leave the building at four p.m., and he mentioned that you had not been walking properly. He asked me if you had maybe some drinks now and then. I immediately told him that this was not the case and asked the watchman to take me up to your flat. I closed your laptop and unplugged it. The power surges quite frequently here. Turned off your lights and locked your door and placed one of my own padlocks on your gate. I gave the keys to the watchman and told him to alert me as soon as you came home. The next morning, when you had still not returned, I contacted Veda and Dr. Ramakrishnan, who I knew had been working as your advisor.”
Dr. ZoomZoom took a sip of his tea before he continued. “Then the next I had heard of it was that USEFI had contacted Veda directly and let him know that you were in hospital, suffering from an allergic reaction. Veda then rounded up every American he knew to visit you. Even foreigners. He didn’t want you to feel solely surrounded by Hyderabadis. This Richard chap nearly lived at your bedside. Veda found him in a library, believe it or not.” He laughed and finished off his tea. “What was it, some malaria remedy or some such?”
“That’s what the doctors think,” my mom answered. “Lariam is what he was taking.”
“What an awful thing. Does this kind of thing happen often?”
“It’s rare,” my mom said. “But the more we read about it, the worse it seems.”
“They have these rings that you can burn at night, and they keep the mosquitoes away,” Dr. ZoomZoom said. “Impregnated with some poison or some such, but better poison than what happened to you. All the thrashing you were doing. It was terrible.”
“Thank you for visiting,” I said, gritting my teeth.
“And with your memory loss. Think of it as a blessing. There are many things that I’d like to forget in my life.”
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me Page 5