WHO STOLE MY TIPPERARIES!
Her identity will be hard to hide.
Amy is in top form today and indifferent to the proximity of the actress. She marches around the lounge, round and round. She starts over and over again, arms pumping as if holding a baton:
“WHO STOLE MY TIPPERARIES!” Stomp, stomp. “WHO STOLE MY TIPPERARIES!”
She laughs so hard, committed to her tribute, stomping and pumping, stomping and pumping.
Queen B sticks a foot out to trip her, but Amy marches over it.
The next time Amy comes around, I rush her, tackle her over the back of the nearest couch onto the cushions. Amy still laughs, still shouts, though slightly muffled now. I heft up her body and start dragging it back to her room. I feel like my mom must have when I was little and in the midst of a tantrum. The two of us stumble on each other’s feet, a couple of drunks.
“Sometimes you feel like a nut…,” Queen B deadpans as I haul Amy out.
Still oblivious, Amy continues to holler.
I kick the door shut, throw Amy on her bed, and talk her down until the nurse relieves me.
At night, the voices return to present evidence against me. Guilty on all counts, accused of showing no remorse. But I am remorseful. I have regrets going all the way back to the age of three. I believe what they say, they are quite convincing, but I’d do anything to make them stop, to get them off my back. They win. I punish myself. I shrink away, further inside myself.
Silence is compliance or so it would seem.
My uncle once told me that when he first met me I was three years old, and when he looked into my eyes all he saw was fathomless sadness, and he knew I didn’t belong to this world. I think back as close to that time as possible and realize I’d always known.
The voices in my head are temporarily quieted and replaced. I fall asleep to the sound in the halls and in the walls, and the gentle whispers in the water…
three…three…three…
TWO
They say I’m a two now.
Two tickets to paradise. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Two can play at that game. Double standard. Double exposure. Double-cross. Two birds with one stone. Two peas in a pod. Put two and two together. The lesser of two evils. Stand on your own two feet.
“Twos go outside, but only with a staff member. It’s not much but it’ll make the day pass a lot easier.”
“All I want is to go for a walk.”
I toss Queen B a pack of cigarettes. We are alone in the lounge. Everyone else is waiting in line to eat. She takes one and I light it for her.
We smoke silently, a momentary truce.
Her eyes on me.
A payphone rings. Two other girls rush to answer it. One pushes the other out of the way and grabs it on the second ring.
“Who? I don’t know no one by that name.”
Irritated, the girl repeats the name out loud, glancing around the room half-heartedly.
“Not here. Wanna leave a message?”
Queen B reaches with her tread and gives my knee a push.
“Isn’t that you?”
I get up, ease through the food line (no cuts, no cutting), toward the bank of phones. The handset is slammed in place just as I get there. The girl doesn’t waste any time. There is already a message on the whiteboard: Cassie, Call MOTHER.
Is that sarcasm or a taunt meant for me?
I head into the cafeteria and grab a tray just as the teens start to line up at the door. They have to wait until my unit has gone through the line. First thing, coffee. Load it up with powdered creamer, a pack of sweetener (pink bad, blue good). Napkin. Utensils (blunt). I sip coffee and walk the line of hair nets and chafing dishes. My stomach rumbles.
I sit at a table in the far corner.
The teens file in and I can’t help but look for her.
The hand tremors are worse and I struggle to get a sporkful of scrambled eggs into my mouth. They tumble back to the plate. After my second failure, I grip my wrist with my other hand for support, steadying the spork as I guide it to my mouth. It takes two fucking hands to eat scrambled eggs now.
A timid little kitten of a voice asks to sit down. I nod, still concentrating on my food.
“You got ’em, too.”
“Huh?” I look up and see myself twenty years ago.
“The shakes.” She cups a coffee mug in two cotton-gloved hands.
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”
I study the girl’s face as she shrinks away, trying to crawl inside her cup and take a sip at the same time. Spots of acne sores dot her chin.
The resemblance is eerie.
“What’s your name?”
“Alexandra,” she says, almost a question.
“Cassie.”
Her eyes glance up at me timidly as she nods acceptance. Heart-stopping deep wells of jade with dark rust rings around them.
I quit the eggs and start on the bacon, a little easier to navigate.
“What are the gloves for?” I ask.
“My hands.”
Breakfast finished in amicable silence.
Two new people sitting on the couch smoking, though they’re not really new at all. They’ve been sequestered away in private rooms, detoxing for the past two weeks.
I wonder if there are more of them, tucked away, shaking and sweating it out.
These two stick together, heroin the glue that binds them. They swap war stories, compare needle tracks, yearning for their drug.
All this talk of heroin ignites music in my head. “Horses” stampede through my consciousness; “Poppies” swirl in mellow, barely coherent. I long to swim in the waters of oblivion.
My thoughts are no longer my own. I am certain of it. Someone is listening in. More incidents over time, more frequent. Too many to be coincidences. As soon as I have a thought, it is repeated. In a book, on the TV, or from someone else’s mouth. There is no alone.
My memories are secondhand. If someone is not reading my mind, then I must be reading theirs.
After dinner, sitting in the lounge, I zone out. The chatter of conversation around me is calm and quiet. Someone is telling a story. The punch line is delivered and the lounge erupts with exaggerated laughter.
The feeling that someone is in my head, tracking my thoughts, reinforces itself and sets me on edge. The canned laughter is absolutely chilling.
My first instinct is to flee to my room, but the fear of being alone overrides it. I clutch my robe tight around my body, smoking one after another. The aura of panic running through me is palpable.
A small group forms, patients heading out to the CD unit for a twelve-step meeting. The majority of them are lounge lizards.
I am terrified of being alone, me and my cigarettes.
I’m a two.
I orbit around the cluster of bodies, keeping them between me and the front desk staff, until we are out of the building.
I follow the addicts into the open air as they walk leisurely through a grove of trees. It is impossible, but in the distance I hear waves crashing on wet sand and frothy water flooding empty tide pools.
This walk is a nightly ritual for them. The conversation is different here, lacking urgency. No more war stories. No more posturing. Experiment suspended.
A breathless murmur of confidence emerges as they near the center of the grove, as if some power is being exerted on them. The pace slows, allowing them every second of every possible moment before reaching their destination.
They ask for a timekeeper. By giving the timekeeper their trust, they are allowed the deception of false freedom, without the consequence of losing privileges.
“I’ll do it,” I say.
They look behind them and only then do they see I have followed. In quick time they assess the risk.
The risk is worth it.
They put their faith in me.
In this short interval, they are no longer patients. Without endless cigarettes wielded as props, the veil of smoke dissipate
s, a rent in the cocoon is made, self-actualization achieved. They take control of their own destinies, walking through the trees as twilight descends. They hold the stars in the sky, freezing them in place as if their lives depend on it.
Dina—anorexia, booze—grasps a tree trunk, and swings around it, carefree, swooping down then up in a well-executed arc. Delight slips from her mouth, a giggle so sweet, and I realize it is the first time I have heard her voice. As she swings up, Marvin—detox, booze, depression—snatches the knit cap from her head and she chases him through the trees. Frolicking in and out, side and back, any way but forward. Not yet.
They all linger around the middle of the grove. Rain drops sprinkle down through the barren canopy of early winter. Faces turn to the sky and are cleansed.
Off to the side, a couple embraces, whispering to each other in an illusion of privacy.
“Two minutes,” I call out, thinking I’m doing them a favor.
All eyes on me.
I guess the timekeeper calls time once and only once.
A little tension starts to break up the calm. They don’t know what to do with themselves, with this knowledge that they only have two minutes. Now only one and thirty.
Dina’s face becomes drawn, contemplating the time, counting down in her head. The couple, walking hand in hand, release their hold and part. Everyone else looks at the ground, kicking at the dirt.
The two-minute warning was damaging. I had no idea. I am new to the ritual. I want to put an end to their indecision, their misery. I abort the dis-ease, calling time thirty seconds early:
“Last call.” It was out of my mouth before I could stop it.
Someone laughs, appreciating the irony.
I have failed as timekeeper.
Dina puts her cap back on, tucking loose strands of hair beneath it as she walks toward the center. The group, now absent of mirth, reunites and continues on to the other side of the grove.
Once again I fall behind.
The rest of the group is now silent, rosy cheeks stained with drops of rain. Each of them retreats, a moment of solitude before reprising their roles as patients and addicts. They had shed their skin on the way into the woods. Now their skin thickens as they cross through to the other side.
Layer by layer.
Each role so convincingly played. Except, I notice, for her. The saddest of them all, like a child lost and afraid. The actress.
A clipboard is passed around for each of us to sign while we wait for the meeting to begin. It reaches me. I never signed out, so I don’t sign in. I am not here. I resist the temptation to tear off the sheet and pocket it for the actress’s autograph.
At the sound of the gavel from inside the meeting room, cigarettes in all stages of smoking drop to the sidewalk, ground out by careless feet.
Everyone wanders in. The room is almost full. Must be the only thing going on in town. I take a seat in the back.
The room is dark except for the lectern at the front, which has a small lamp attached to it. A speaker stands there, gavel in hand, waiting for everyone to take their seats. Two spotlights shine down on him from behind. The yellow glow of the lamp and the strange pattern of shadows cast across his face make him look gaunt and jaundiced.
He welcomes everyone, especially the new people. He introduces Carter who will be talking about his eighth and ninth steps.
I listen to Carter share his story. He talks about his acts of contrition. I feel like I am in temple listening to the sermon on Yom Kippur and close my eyes. I think about people I have wronged. I never needed an addiction to do that. My mind is in a constant state of regret. I think about Yom Kippur and am hungry and repentant.
Drama therapy today. The session is combined, adults and teens. I look for my young friend. I see her sitting on the floor, Indian style. The hood of a sweatshirt shrouds her face, but she catches my eye as I enter the room.
She was looking for me, too.
The therapist explains how drama therapy works. A single patient, a life-altering event re-enacted.
“Any questions before we begin?” She pauses, hands clasped in front of her, and looks around the silent room. “Well, then, let’s get started.”
She calls on the patient to join her at the center of the stage.
Alexandra.
“The sun is hot, it’s beating down on me. I hear the ocean and the sound of the wind as it sends my hair in every direction. I run toward it, then stop and turn around for a brief second. I smile and wave at Jake sitting there on the sand watching me go. I turn back around and continue running. I run, kicking up sand in my tracks… I run across the wet sand, hard and packed…I run into the water, leaping over the waves going deeper, trying to get past them…I swim out until I can no longer touch the ground.
“I’m treading water.”
Alexandra sounds winded, then takes a deep breath.
“I point my legs straight down, and my arms straight up, and like a torpedo I go down…deep, deep down in the water…into the sea…farther down…I keep going. I see fish and the rocky bottom of the ocean. Glittering sand swirls up around me and I see a light in the distance. And now I’m swimming toward it.”
Alexandra smiles as she says this.
A look of confusion and concern passes across the therapist’s face, and she starts trying to talk Alexandra back.
“No. No, I don’t want to go yet.” Panic creeps into her voice. “No! Bubbles, coming from my mouth. Someone’s pulling me up toward the surface. I go up…up. No, I don’t want to. The sun burns through the water, and I know soon I will break the surface. No. Please…don’t make me go.”
As she comes around to the present, to this room, I see through tears of my own a blurred double image of her and she is crying.
My psychologist told me she takes a particular interest in Jung. I lie in bed, willing myself to dream up a doozy for her to analyze, hopefully remembering it by our next meeting. I feel the voices in my head trying to take hold. I feel the rush of fear.
I can’t bear another night of this. Like all the previous sleepless nights I’ve had since my arrival, I am once again back at the nurse’s station. The nurse on duty looks me over, recognizes that I am troubled. She hands me a tiny accordion paper cup that holds my sleeping pill and a second one empty for water. She asks if I’d feel better sleeping on the couch tonight, at least for a little while. I follow her eyes. I hadn’t noticed this couch before. It is in the center of the big room, neither here nor there, creating a space of its own between the craft tables and reception. I nod my head.
At the water cooler I place the empty cup over my mouth and blow hard. It crackles and puffs out like a miniature Chinese lantern. A nifty trick to increase the volume of water it will hold.
I take my pill and return to the couch where the nurse is making a bed. Sheet, blanket, pillow which she even fluffs up for me. No Nurse Ratched she.
I lie down and get comfortable. The nurse returns to her station and turns off the fluorescents directly above me.
But here they come, the inner voices that go for the slow kill.
Stupid. Mean. Bad.
No matter which memory they torment me with, it slips off into the atmosphere somewhere, entering a loop of time and space.
But it was twenty-two years ago. Twenty-two.
The voices are immune to my rationalizations until the pill finally begins to snuff them out…
two…two…two…
ONE
I’m a one.
As I head for breakfast, a nurse calls me over to the nurse’s station to tell me this. She delivers the good news as if bestowing upon me a Young Reader Medal. She is genuine and, I believe, truly pleased for me.
One day at a time. One good turn deserves another. One step ahead. One-track mind. One more shot. Looking out for number one. Love at first sight. First come, first served. One for the road. One foot in the grave. Back to square one.
Ones can go outside without a staff escort.
&nb
sp; I am surprised because of the bad nights I’ve been having, but I guess they measure it by risk factor. Whether it’s the actual escape or the potential liability that concerns them, I honestly don’t know.
I expected I would feel good about this relative freedom, but now all I really want is the comfort of this shelter to which I have become accustomed.
I take a seat in the lounge. The doors to the cafeteria have yet to open. The line to breakfast has formed, the patrons are antsy. I wait it out, smoking until the line has waned. Queen B sits across from me.
“Did I hear right? You’re a one? That means— ”
“I know what that means.”
After lunch I sit waiting in the gazebo with my book. It is filled with short vignettes, giving me lots of easy stopping points. Even so, I find myself glancing up every couple of sentences, distracted, wondering if she’ll show. The prospect of reading abandoned, I walk along the edge of the low shrubbery, protecting me from the cliff’s edge and the long drop below. The pungent aroma of sagebrush, mint, and white sage combined clears my sinuses. I could stand here forever, breathing it all in, lost in its heady haze.
A shadow bleeds in from behind, rousing in me an instant of fear that I am about to go over the edge. I turn on instinct to face my attacker and there is Alexandra, farther off than I expected, behind all that hair, sheepskin boots trudging up the gentle slope of grass, hands deep in the pockets of her shorts.
“Smells good, huh?” She stands next to me and we look out over the sea.
I nod and feel her slip her gloved hand in mine. We stand there for a moment, silent, feeling the sun and the breeze, watching the waves tumble, tasting the salt in the air. It sparks a memory that comforts, taking me back on some strange trip through the past to a time I can’t quite pinpoint.
She leads me to a boulder balancing on the precipice, and releases my hand to climb atop it.
Death by Water Page 53