“Here you are,” says the elevator man when they surge to a stop and the doors open.
Valentina is barefoot in a long gray Versace dress, cigarette in her mouth as she hugs them, squealing like a pig. “You found-a me! We can start to party. I’ve been waiting all day.”
Matt grins. “Welcome to the penthouse, kids.”
They walk around this aerie of glass and clouds, dreams and money. Darkwood chairs with arms gnarled into swirls and flowers. Threads of gold that shine in the Persian rugs. Oil paintings hang—a still life with a radish and a fish, a portrait of a noblewoman with a grungy face and satin gown.
“We’ve been doing I Ching all day,” Matt (the jet-set outlaw) says to Jamey, showing off. “Smoking weed and reading the future.”
Elise forces a smile. “Cool place.”
“It’s radical, right?” Matt says, and it’s the first time he really speaks to her since New Haven.
In the corner, a Pac-Man makes noise.
“I ordered dinner, okay? Arcadia bring to me. You have to be hungry and eat like crazy!” Valentina twists out her cigarette in a crystal ashtray.
“Jamey, come here,” Matt says, beckoning into a hall. “I got to show you something.”
Jamey lets go of Elise’s hand, looks back as he walks away.
He’s strange tonight, she thinks.
Matt shows him a Picasso in the guest bedroom. “Can you believe this shit? Know what her dad paid for this?”
Valentina drags Elise into the kitchen for a drink, but Elise wants soda.
The phone bring-brings. Porters haul in a silver cart.
Valentina claps. She’s seventeen, indulged and entitled to the point of being mentally ill, with Krug Clos du Mesnil bottles filling the refrigerator, and—in her bedroom—acid tabs between the pages of a Marilyn Monroe biography. (Her childhood was a gold kernel. It was a germ of love. Her family built a wall around her but she scrambled over it, lost her virginity at twelve to her best friend’s uncle in a Mexico City nightclub. Her father was the king of sex and romance in Milan. She has jewels in safe-deposit boxes in countries she’s never visited. She thinks of her toys and silk gowns, the little Ferrari waiting for her in Ibiza, as her “children”; she’ll raise them when she’s ready to be maternal.)
“Let’s eat!” Matt says.
Elise sits down with dread.
Champagne is poured for everyone but Elise. They make small talk—about Whitney Houston, MoMA, old friends of Matt and Jamey’s, Yale gossip, Valentina’s name, rack of lamb—which they’re eating. Elise pushes around her food.
“You like it?” Valentina asks with a face of demented concern.
“Yeah,” Elise says without looking up. “Just not that hungry.”
After dessert—melted îles flottantes—Valentina dramatically pushes plates away to put a mirror on the table where a lazy Susan usually goes. She taps cocaine out of a sterling-silver vial.
“Now it’s time for the really fun,” she says, hitching up her gown and kneeling on her chair to cut lines.
Elise looks at Jamey, then flicks her hooded eyes at the bitch, shakes her head slowly.
Matt watches.
“None for you?” he asks.
“Oh!” Valentina looks up from her work with childish hospitality. “I want you to enjoy.”
“None for me either,” Jamey says.
Valentina laughs with strange intonations. “Wellllllllllll, Jamey, you’re taking acid.”
“I’m sorry?” Jamey says.
“In your Champagne! I put a surprise!”
Jamey looks at his empty flute.
Matt laughs now too. “You did it? I thought you were joking,” he says to Valentina, then looks at Jamey. “Might as well go with it, right? I totally tripped last weekend out in Montauk, and my mind was officially blown.”
“I like what he say!” Valentina says, cutting lines. “Go with it!”
Jamey doesn’t want to trip—or does he?—but he feels the lights go down and the curtain rising.
“I guess you’re right,” Jamey says.
Elise maintains a neutral face, knowing bad energy leads to bad times. “Yeah.”
Valentina makes an exalted ohmygod face and claps. “Yes! Jamey, you’re my hero!”
“What’s to fear but fear itself?” Jamey asks, like an actor in a western.
The first hour is spent giggling at the table, the three of them shy as if flirting with the drug, courting it. Elise watches with forced benevolence.
Then Jamey notices that everything—furniture, faces—are coated in Plexiglas. Everything gleams, protected.
“You feel it.” Matt grins.
“You feel it first,” Valentina says to Jamey, “I given you Elise’s tab, bonus!”
Jamey nods, laughing. “Great!” he says.
He hears offshoots of noise, like a purring, after words.
Latin translations appear above Elise’s head when she talks.
“What?” she asks, smiling back, keeping her commitment.
“Latin,” he says. A long silken trail of glitter follows words out of his mouth.
Valentina and Matt sneak away, made innocent by their high, and curiously investigate objects in the bathroom, turning over a toothbrush and tittering, hunched down.
Elise is left with Jamey, who is extremely occupied.
“My God on Earth,” he says, burdened by awareness.
There’s a movie happening on the black windows. The images shuffle so fast and he realizes they’re memories, and moments from the future. His brain is transmitting these pictures to be felt more than seen. There’s a leg with black stitches, then wild roses in Rhode Island, and a white Jaguar. But he just feels the air displaced by them, or he almost tastes them—they’re not visible.
He watches lights change in the chandelier, the glass tubes like ice pops in cherry and lime and orange flavors. He tries to stand on the dining table to make the chandelier move, but Elise holds his hand and says something to him.
Her face morphs into an albino doe’s head. She blinks the big eyes.
She lets him feel her face and shoulders like a blind man trying to understand what she is. He looks at her with trepidation.
“Everything is good, Jamey,” she says, like telling him the time. “I love you.”
He takes his hands off her quickly, as if she just barked.
Four hours later.
“I’m freezing.” He looks at Elise like a child in the snow.
She rubs his arms briskly. “We’ll warm you up.”
“I’m so cold,” he says pathetically.
Elise sighs. “Do you want a blanket?”
He drawls like a dandy: “I want your fur coat. Can I have it?”
“It might not fit.”
He looks like he might cry.
“I’ll get it, I’ll get it,” she says.
When he puts it on, they hear a seam break like ice cracking beneath their feet. He looks ridiculous.
“I’m warmer already.”
At the window, he slow dances like a charmed snake. He watches himself in the glass.
This lasts a long time.
Then he looks at her with dead certainty. “I need to go outside.”
Elise squirms. She got bored and lax while he danced, thinking maybe there would be an end to this. But his face is even more altered. He’s puffy, his face muscles operating in a foreign way, clenching and relaxing.
His eyes syrupy with light.
“Well,” she says, reasoning with a toddler, “maybe in like a little bit, we’ll go out.”
“I need to go now.”
“Jamey, I don’t think this is the best idea you ever had.”
Matt and Valentina are making sculptures with salt and butter, still giggling, and Elise suspects they’re coming down from their one tab each, and can’t let go. She doesn’t want their help but is sick of babysitting, and she blames them.
“Hey,” she says. “Jamey wants to go ou
tside. Can you help explain why we shouldn’t do that?”
Valentina purses her mouth. “Why not we go outside?”
“Hey, James,” Matt says. “Maybe we’ll go for a walk in a little bit? Want to come over here and give us a hand?”
Jamey stands at the window, looking left out. “I want. To leave,” he manages to say, his mouth dry.
Elise looks at Matt, suddenly an ally.
“Why don’t we go out in like five minutes?” Elise asks, planning to manipulate Jamey’s sense of time.
Jamey looks down, then bolts for the door.
Matt and Elise get him before he opens it.
They instinctively know not to be too physical, but just pulling his hand from the doorknob makes Jamey jump like they hurt him.
“Maybe we can have a little quiet time, Jamey, and just calm down,” Matt tries.
“Let’s sit on the floor together!” Elise proposes, like it would be fun.
“No,” Jamey finally whispers.
Valentina traipses over. She puts her bony, diamond-braceleted arms around everyone. “We go out! It’s no problem. Come on. We have fun.”
She slips into her coat, her own face smeared by the trip, still beautiful.
Elise’s stomach flips.
“Jamey, we do what you want,” Valentina says, and presses for the elevator, jangling her keys.
“Do you want to wear that coat out?” Elise asks him carefully.
Jamey nods, his hair standing up like a gutter punk.
Matt puts on Jamey’s camel-hair coat, and Valentina hands Elise a yellow Moncler jacket.
And they get into the elevator and the elevator man presses the button for the ground floor and they all look at their feet.
In summary, on April 6, 1987, at approximately 0313 hours, officers were dispatched, along with EMS, to the Trump Towers building lobby at 725 Fifth Avenue, after being notified by Central Dispatch of an incident in progress.
Upon arrival, Officer in Charge noticed the offender, James Balthazar Hyde, walking in agitated circles and cursing. Officers Drake and Tomlinson announced office and proceeded to inquire whether Hyde was able to talk with them. Hyde stated, “I will not need you.”
Then Hyde pointed to his friend Matthew Danning, going up the escalator, and he began to hyperventilate. Hyde’s extreme distress seemed to be triggered by/fixed on Danning.
At that time, Hyde began to run up the “down” escalator, shouting unintelligible words. His wife, later identified as Elise Hyde, and Danning and Valentina Corsicona (family is Tenant at Trump Tower), shouted to stop, that police officers needed to speak to him. Hyde responded: “You don’t matter!” Officers gave multiple verbal commands for Hyde to get off the escalator. Hyde took the escalator to ground level, but instead of allowing Officers to cuff him, he proceeded to skip around the lobby, frightening residents trying to exit. “That’s it!” he was heard to say.
Officers showed weapons, at which point Elise Hyde became hysterical and begged the offender to stop running. He refused all verbal commands, and proceeded to give chase around the lobby, eventually speeding up as Officers closed in, tripping and skidding, breaking the glass wall of a boutique.
Officers at that time used necessary force; the Trump Security Guard was required to help, as offender was extremely aggressive. Officer Drake was injured on the left side of his face, and Hyde was injured in multiple places, including the forehead, mouth, teeth, left rib cage, and left leg. Central Dispatch had already sent EMS to the location, and the EMS attendants Jackson and Gertz spoke with Danning, who explained Hyde was under the influence of LSD. Officers agreed Hyde should be taken to the hospital, and at approximately 0422 hours, Hyde was given temporary sedative by injection, strapped into a gurney, and transported by ambulance to Lenox Hill ER. End of Report.
Jamey is wheeled into triage while Elise answers questions from someone with a clipboard.
Elise cannot believe this is happening.
When she hesitates with details, the EMS guy shakes his head. “They got to know, for his safety. This is not no bad thing, okay?”
“He took one hit”—she holds up a fingernail—“no, two hits, of LSD, of acid. He’s never taken it before, he doesn’t do drugs at all. This bitch made him do it.”
“Is he on other substances tonight?”
“No. Champagne.”
“How much?”
“Like, four glasses?”
“Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, PCP, pills?”
“Nothing.”
“Any prescribed medication?”
“No.”
“Has he had an episode like this before?”
“No!” Elise says, offended for him. “He didn’t even want to do it!”
“He was forced?”
“He was tricked.”
“By a stranger?”
“We were at a dinner party, with his friend.”
“You can press charges if you want, but it’s gonna be a he-said she-said.”
“Just make him better,” Elise says desperately.
Elise sits by Jamey’s stretcher, where he’s hooked to an IV, the orbs of his eyes moving but not seeing, hair drenched in sweat. A nurse touches Jamey’s wrist, counting, and says the doctor will be here soon.
“Hang tight,” she says.
Elise smells lemonish bleach and urine. Blood travels the threads of Jamey’s arm bandage.
Suddenly another team busts in, talking to each other, and injecting him again.
No one notices Elise. “What’s going on?” she asks.
“You are?” asks a woman in pink scrubs whose black hair is oiled into twists on her head.
“Jamey’s wife.”
“Oh, okay. We’re taking Jamey to Gracie Square Hospital, toots. You wanna ride with us?”
“Why’s he going to a different hospital?”
They all look at each other. “His family want him there.”
“How do they know he’s here?”
The woman shakes her head. The hair doesn’t move. It’s like hard plastic.
As they ride in a van tricked out like a luxury ambulance, Elise realizes Matt called Jamey’s parents.
Jamey’s maneuvered into the new hospital under a royal-blue awning.
“I’m Jamey Hyde’s wife,” Elise says to the front desk.
The lady looks meaningfully at her. “We’re all set, dear.”
“Okay,” Elise says slowly. “Where should I go?”
“You can wait here, if you like,” the woman gestures at a couch. “They’ll call if they need you.”
Dr. Brandywine comes out to tell Elise that Jamey will be asleep for the next eight hours. He’s got both hands in his white coat pockets, as if to show he’s not combative.
“I’ll stay anyway,” she says, her feet reddened in the high heels, mascara blurred.
“Well, that’s not necessary,” he says, looking her up and down.
“I want to.”
“The Hyde family asked me to make sure you don’t talk about what’s happening to anyone.”
“Why would I talk?”
“It’s for Jamey, the privacy,” he continues, as if he had to finish the paragraph before being done with his task. “He doesn’t need attention for an accident like this.”
“Do I look like I’m arguing?” she says, head starting to cobra-snake.
“Easy now. I’m just stating the obvious. We’re here if you need anything.”
“I need to know when he wakes up.”
“We’ll be sure to let you know as soon as he wakes up.”
She sits primly in the waiting room, bare thighs in the short white dress sticking to the pleather couch. Even though the family knows he’s here, no one shows up. A soda machine vaguely surges with light, and she reads pamphlets written in periwinkle.
Gracie Square provides an individualized treatment plan based on a complete evaluation. They give medical, neurological and psychological consultations, perform detoxification,
assess and treat psychiatric symptoms, offer education programs, hold daily group therapy, along with nightly twelve-step meetings where patients share experiences while focusing on abstinence and recovery. They’ve got a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week internist and psychiatrist, progressive discharge planning, and weekend support groups for family.
She falls asleep on the couch, drooling.
Morning. Private room on the third floor. Scrubbed and glistening. He’s propped in bed.
Light comes through the window in clear blue waves, and terror is clamping its teeth on his brain.
There will be no rationale, no logic, no emotions—just terror.
Like trying to get comfortable in a scalding bath.
A doctor. Jamey can’t open his mouth to answer. He can’t hear the questions, that’s part of the problem. He can’t use his hands because he has to clutch the mattress on each side.
He can only make it from second to second, sustaining a minor consciousness—he’d rather be unconscious but can’t do the work of getting there.
Terror has taken his system and all he can do is feel it.
It is his one activity.
A nurse checks his temperature and pulse, he’s injected with a sedative, his eyes close.
Elise buys a vending-machine doughnut and weak coffee. She eats in the waiting room, and it comes roaring through her intestines and she barely makes it to the bathroom.
She calls in to work, and Mrs. Gorowski walks Buck.
Elise’s story is that Jamey collapsed in the subway—it might have been a mild heart attack, they don’t know yet. Everyone is oohing and ahhing, asking to help.
Elise just wants him home. She leafs through a battered Time magazine.
The longer this goes on, the less likely it ends well.
Her panic is animalistic—Get him away from here. Get it done. Run.
Dr. Brandywine comes out to say Jamey is sedated again all day.
“You’ll be doing yourself and Jamey a favor by getting him books, taking a nap, eating something. I’ve seen couples go through this many, many times, Elise. Come back when you’re ready.”
She looks at his white beard and lumpy face. Breath so bad, something’s fundamentally wrong with him.
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