White Fur
Page 28
“Shouldn’t he be okay by now?” she asks.
“Well, many patients would be done with the crisis. But there are cases where the patient doesn’t emerge for forty-eight hours, say.”
“I want it on record he can’t be moved anywhere.”
“We would never do that.”
“He was moved from Lenox Hill without them asking me.”
“Be glad he was moved from Lenox Hill.”
“I never had a say is my point.”
The doctor smiles tightly. “I’ll make an addendum to his file.”
“And can I please, please see him?”
“You can’t go into the room.”
“Can I please just look in the door?”
A nurse takes her to the third floor. The nurse opens the door and Elise looks at Jamey, supported on pillows, sleeping, his face melted and insulted by the sedative, his body strewn in the bed.
A bruise like a dark flower fills his eye socket.
“What’s he on?” Elise asks.
“Three milligrams of etizolam, it’s a tranquilizer, for severe anxiety.”
“What’s gonna happen?” Elise says, sounding younger than she is.
“You know, when patients come in here experiencing a psychedelic crisis, they usually get out in one to three days. Usually the acute anxiety subsides, and we talk them through the experience, decide if they’ll have lingering psychotic feelings or not. And eventually they’re discharged. That make sense, honey?”
Elise nods. Looks one more time. There is nothing repulsive about this vision, but Elise walks away breathless, as if she’d just seen his stomach cut open and his guts hanging out and he was leering at her.
At home she lets Buck into bed, and sleeps with him, his heat passing into her bones.
When she wakes up, she peels off the white dress, showers, scrubs herself of Valentina’s apartment, of the Trump Tower lobby, of the ambulance, of the hospital waiting room. She has to use Vaseline to take off her eye makeup, which has stained her skin.
Eating buttered toast, her eyes tear up, certain that she made all this happen. She chased his ass in New Haven, she loved him first.
Dr. Brandywine asks her to his office, where a plaster model of a human brain is labeled in a rainbow of words.
“I’d love to be blunt, here, Alissa.”
“Elise.”
“His family says you all have been using drugs.”
“We do not, except this one time when he took acid.”
“You’ve never used drugs at all?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“But you have not used drugs, is your wording.”
“We never used drugs together.”
“Look, Lisa—”
“Elise. Elise Hyde.”
“The truth is, I don’t care really about your drug use. What I need to know is what drugs Jamey’s using.”
“Jamey don’t even really drink. He never does drugs.”
“Except when he does LSD.”
“Once. That girl made him.”
“Heroin? Cocaine?”
Elise stands. “Do you have a hearing problem?”
Dr. Brandywine pushes a button on his phone without taking his eyes off her.
An assistant enters the room.
“I’m leaving!” Elise says. To Brandywine: “You suck.”
She makes it to the turquoise couches before sobbing.
A nurse sits next to Elise, says: “You’re okay, love, you’re gonna be fine.”
Jolie’s hips are almost busted like an overripe tomato. She’s maidenly, an artist of tenderness.
Elise cries on her shoulder, wetting her scrubs.
“I hate that doctor—”
“I understand,” Jolie soothes her. She unwraps a mint for Elise and unwraps one for herself. “I’m gonna put a word in.”
Elise hiccups, and nods.
A bouquet of a hundred white roses gets delivered by a Jamaican man with a handcart.
The note from Tory Boyd Mankoff: I so wish I could be there. Thinking of you!
Elise tells the nurses they can redistribute the flowers; he wouldn’t want them in the room.
Finally, Alex shows up. No one has been allowed to sit with Jamey yet, but Alex and Brandywine have a closed-door conversation. The doctor makes an allowance for this suffering father, who is gracious, as Hydes are known to be.
Once they’re alone, Alex pulls a chair to Jamey’s bed, livid he has to sit in this melodramatic configuration of furniture and bodies. He rubs the bridge of his nose, displacing his glasses.
“James. Why are you doing this?”
Alex stares at his son.
Jamey smiles for the first time.
“This isn’t funny. Everything is pretty damn stressful as it is right now. Cecily is buried in work for the Sloan-Kettering Ball, you know she’s on the board this year. You know what that means. I’ve got my hands full with Daley-Cray in London. I’m not even supposed to be in New York, for godssake. And I know you don’t want people talking, but the longer you’re in here, the worse it looks.”
Alex paces in topsiders.
Jamey’s eyes follow his father in his spearmint-green Polo shirt.
“You’ve put me in this position. I don’t want to lie to our friends, but I can’t tell them what’s going on. Not a one is going to understand how a kid with everything just up and throws it away. Jamey—you were given the world. Your grandparents are too horrified to visit, and I wasn’t even going to tell you that, but I had to. They’re disgusted.”
Alex stands squarely in front of his son, looks at his watch, then: “What do you have to say?”
Jamey stares at his dad.
“I’m going to count to ten, Jamey.”
Jamey shakily puts his legs over the side of the bed for the first time.
He holds the IV pole, and slides off the mattress—slowly—till he’s standing.
Alex, hands on hips, nods with triumph. “There you go, son,” he says.
Jamey squats, eyes closed, and Alex starts to wonder.
Jamey grunts, and a huge coil of shit hangs from his buttocks, and it peacefully finds the faux-granite vinyl floor.
Cecily and Elise sit in the waiting room without talking, staring at a watercolor of a robin in a blooming apple tree on the wall.
The kids read books on the carpet.
Then Samantha sweetly asks Elise: “How come your hair’s like that?”
“Sam,” Cecily says, face reddening.
The girl asks Elise: “Are you black?” in an angel voice.
Elise laughs. “I am black.”
Cecily gathers her daughter onto her lap, says “Well, then,” to Elise, meaning: No you’re not, and stop talking like a fool.
Alex storms through the doors.
He glares at Elise, and gathers his family, and leaves.
Elise goes to work, somehow putting on lipstick and finding her way to the site, picking up a bagel on the way but she doesn’t remember where.
“It was a little stroke,” she says, without meeting their eyes.
“That happened to my brudda,” Salvatore says.
“It’ll happen to you if you don’t stop with them cheeseburgers and sundaes,” Tommy says to Salvatore. “Elise, where’s he at?”
“Um, Lenox.”
“Oh yeah? I spent a lot of time there with my ma. Which wing?”
“Let’s see, not sure what the name is.”
“Well, we’re all rootin’ for him to get out soon. He’s gotta take care of the mother of his babe.”
She knows they know he’s not at Lenox when Tommy slips her an envelope of cash the next day, from the boys. They smell a rat—they think it’s drugs too. They just want her safe.
She works, she walks Buck, she takes deep breaths like Jolie said, and she can visit Jamey now—even though he’s either asleep or propped up with eyes open, but never awake.
He won’t speak. Day after day.
&nb
sp; She puts his hand on her tummy. “Feel that?”
One evening, he blinks when she takes his hand to her belly.
She tells Jolie, who writes it on the chart. “That’s great.”
“Soon? It’s been two weeks. He’ll pull out of it?”
Jolie chews gum and shrugs. “I hope so, love. You should just try to trust what’s happening. He apparently needed to be like—removed from reality right now. He’ll come back when he can. That’s sometimes how psychotic breaks function.”
Brandywine strokes his own beard; he smells of red wine and garlic from lunch.
“He won’t talk still, I see,” the doctor admits, “but let’s get his vitals.”
He takes the stethoscope from around his neck and listens to Jamey’s heart:
Remember little child of God what this is. It’s a drag show. It’s fake. It’s a snow globe. Golden cigarettes and little kittens. Someone keeps setting fire to blanket like sparkler. It’s a TV show, the blocks of primary color signify God the father. You’re in this kaleidoscope. It’s a play your mom made in third grade. Esoteric and out-there, man. For children. Those kids of God were killed. Black dresses. A tiger in a dormitory. A rich girl who ate arsenic. This is a terrarium. This is joyful.
Brandywine shines a light into Jamey’s eyes:
It’s powder. A fine dust from heaven. You could lie outside and slowly get buried. It’s gold flake blanched into meaningless drift. It’s a black sky somehow made darker by white fluff. Everyone knows how to make an angel. You get up without wrecking the print you made and everyone does a shadow.
He presses the gauge against his Velcroed arm:
Blackberry like the eye of a fly. Cut the liver out of the clock, wrap in wax paper and write a number in grease pencil. Do what they say and survive. Cut flowers for the table. Tell no one what day it is. Sleepwalk instead of dream. Run don’t walk. Go to town on Thursday—buy gingham and salt. Forget the dead. Keep singing if you forget the words. Love the ferns.
Dr. Brandywine avoids eye contact with Elise. “We’re going to keep him under observation,” he mumbles. “Patience.”
In the smoking room, which she’s gotten to know well, Elise has just lit another menthol, exhaling out the cracked but chained window.
“He said your name!” Jolie exclaims.
Elise clutches pack and lighter. “He did?”
She runs through the hall, sneakers squeaking, and pushes into the room where Jamey looks out the window.
She falls onto him, and he almost laughs.
“Hi,” he says, in a new voice, his bruised eye lavender now.
“Oh my fucking Jesus Christ.”
He runs a hand over her hair, breathes her in, kisses her cheek.
Something moves at the base of her spine—a worm of truth. “Are you okay?” she says quietly.
He tries to smile. “I have questions,” he says.
She smiles uncertainly. “Ask,” she prompts.
He bites his lip. “How long have I been dead?”
There’s silence.
“Like, how long you haven’t been communicating with anybody?” she asks.
He tries to understand her. “No, dead.”
She laughs. “You’re fucking with me!”
He grins, polite, unsure. “Is this purgatory?”
“This is a treatment center,” she says, firmly, still smiling. “In Midtown Manhattan.”
“Actual Manhattan?”
She glares. “I don’t think this is fucking funny. If you don’t—”
Jolie walks in with Dr. Eva Lessing, a very tall woman with a jet-black bob.
“This is Dr. Lessing. She’ll be taking over, okay?” says Jolie.
“Great,” Elise stumbles, in shock.
“How you feeling, Jamey?” Dr. Lessing asks.
He turns away.
Dr. Lessing asks Elise if he spoke.
“He did, actually,” she says. “He wanted to know where he is, stuff like that.”
The two women look at Elise.
“Anything else?” says Lessing.
Elise shrugs and tries to smile and forces her dry mouth to say: “I wish.”
MAY 1987
Sunshine bores into the apartment, and dust hangs in chutes of light.
It’s been five days since talking to Jamey about his death, and she hasn’t been to the hospital once. She’s abandoned him.
Elise called in sick to work this morning, planning to get it together, and she just lies in bed with Buck. Never in her life has she been paralyzed like this. Every time she gets up to brush her teeth, or put on shoes so she can go back, she starts crying so hard she can only stumble into bed.
“I hate you, Jamey!” she calls out, like a kid.
But in the darkness of the bedroom, Buck’s garnet eyes gleam.
“I know,” she finally admits to him, whose tail thumps once.
Elise drags on sweatpants, a jean jacket, the Yankees hat. Gold earrings.
“I’m going,” she tells the dog.
At Gracie Square, Elise finds Dr. Lessing’s office. Calligraphied degrees on the wall, lilacs in a Japanese vase. The window is dirty.
It’s confession time.
“He hasn’t said a word since you left,” Lessing muses.
“Really?”
“Really.”
They watch each other across the desk.
Elise says: “I should…tell you something.”
The doctor tilts her head. “Shoot.”
“He asked me…”—Elise fiddles with her earring—“how long he’s been dead.”
“What was your answer?”
“I explained he wasn’t dead.”
“Of course. And then?”
“The way he looked at me, he knows he’s dead. Like, I can’t tell him otherwise.”
“Gotcha.” Lessing suddenly smiles widely. “People think all kinds of things, don’t they?”
Elise is taken aback by this breeziness. “Yeah?”
“Look. I’ve seen stranger stuff. We’ll get him sorted.”
One little flower-bell falls from the lilac head, unprovoked.
This is a sickness that doesn’t start or end in the bowels, in measles, in a high temperature or a tin pan of vomit. It’s all light and darkness, creeping through his cells, staining the molecules of his soul one by one. It’s the photosynthesis of ideas and memories, impressions, dreams. The body actually likes to host sickness, courting this rash or feeding that tumor, letting those chemicals glitter and shimmer through the blood. There’s a way to resolve chaos and that’s to finish what was started, and every organism knows this emergency plan without being told.
He’s thankful the curtains remain closed in this room. He doesn’t have to see humanity. Little kids always peering into the window, runny noses pressed to glass, eyes flickering over him. Keep them away.
He tries to figure out what his “body” is made of now. It seems to be bleached or processed or desiccated wood—like toy airplane wings—balsam, he thinks—is that correct? He gently mauls his “flesh” and decides this is right—it’s turned into something airy, light, but not too fragile. So interesting!
Morning light burns through the shade, and Jamey gets meds with red punch. A nurse stands by while he showers.
When Elise and Lessing arrive, Jamey’s back in bed, hair side-parted by someone else.
“I don’t bite, promise,” Dr. Lessing says, sitting in the chair.
Jamey shoots daggers at Elise for bringing in this stranger.
“How old are you, Jamey?” Lessing says, scanning a sheet.
Jamey hesitates. “Do you mean—how old was I when I died?”
Elise smirks because he sounds stupid, fiddles with her earring.
“Sure,” Lessing says.
“Twenty-one.”
Dr. Lessing ponders his demeanor. “You seem…calm for someone who’s dead.”
“I’ve never felt this calm.”
Elise drums her nails
on the meal tray.
“Jamey, any brain injury in the last year or two?” Lessing asks. “Concussions? Any little car accidents?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“Are you on meds?”
“Just the ones you make me take,” he says.
“Have you been depressed this past year?”
Now he rubs the long scab on his chest, thoughtful. “I’ve always been depressed, maybe.”
“Have you been suicidal in the past?”
“Not literally.”
“Do you have thoughts of suicide now?”
Jamey smiles with condescending amusement. “That would be superfluous.”
“Is there mental illness in your family?”
“Just profound unhappiness on both sides.”
“Substance abuse history?”
“None.”
Lessing leans back, hands clasping one knee. “Do you want to tell me what happened that night?”
“I watched my soul go up the escalator to the next world,” he says.
Elise says: “That was Matt, in your coat.”
Lessing assures him: “It’s okay if you were confused, if you thought that was you.”
Jamey evaluates her for a moment. “I know you’re testing me, and I don’t appreciate it.”
Elise stands up, infuriated. “Wow. You’re being crazy,” she says, her voice shaking. “You better quit this right now because you’re pissing me off—”
Lessing escorts her out, soothing her as they walk down the corridor, where wheelchairs have left black stripes on the walls.
Elise and Lessing eat albino lettuce and sludgy carrots in the cafeteria.
“People who have psychedelic breakdowns do occasionally think they’re dead. But the delusion is persistent while under the influence, and then they come back to reality.”
“Yeah, he needs to come on back.”
“A French doctor, Jules Cotard, called it délires des négations. A delirium of negation.”
Elise eats her Jell-O.
“Something is breaking the circuitry. Either in the amygdala, the part of the brain that recognizes human beings as human, or the fusiform face area, the visual system that recognizes faces.” Lessing tosses a vanilla wafer into her mouth. “He’s self-negating.”