“Self-negating.”
“We’ll keep trying different meds. I’m going to double the Haldol.”
“Is that…does that have side effects?”
Dr. Lessing looks at her raisin pudding as she says: “Oh no, not really.”
Elise curls up on his bed, lying across Jamey’s shins. “You’re Cotarded.”
“What?”
“You’re alive, you do realize.”
He seems exhausted by her argument. “Don’t you think I would know if I’m alive?”
Elise pops her gum, staring. “That’s what I would think.”
“You think I’m lying?” he asks, trying to muster up anger.
Elise makes thin bubbles with her gum, then snaps them.
“They said you didn’t sleep last night,” Elise says.
“I don’t need to sleep anymore.”
“Can you do me a favor and fucking go to sleep tonight?”
A blade of sadness steers him away, like a centerboard on a sailboat that lost its rudder, and he can’t get any more words out.
You go through life thinking there’s a secret to life.
And the secret to life is there is no secret to life.
There is just the palest blue light seeping through the curtain, there is Elise’s long hand, there is just this kiss, this cathedral of a moment when she presses her mouth to his, her eyes brimming with crystals.
The hospital gift shop is small, banked with cards, travel-sized toiletries and romance books with embossed covers. Thousands of people have stood here, selves unsheathed, picking up key chains and deodorant and putting them down and picking them up.
Why, Elise thinks, is this happening?
Thousands of people have wondered that too.
He hasn’t been eating, so Elise buys him a box of chocolates.
But when she poises a bonbon at his mouth, he shakes his head.
“Please just eat one,” she says.
“You eat one.”
“Is that how this is going to be? Fine. I’ll eat chocolates for you,” she says sadly.
The May sky is so bright that people look past the skyscrapers and actually notice. Everywhere, at bus stops and crosswalks, heads tilt back, eyes shielded.
Elise connives a service-dog pass and brings Buck upstairs.
Buck sniffs, starry-eyed, at everyone.
But he whimpers when he sees Jamey, and he crouches low, his bushy tail between his haunches.
“Hey there,” Jamey says softly to the dog, like a scientist watching a laboratory mouse.
Elise wonders, despite all her protests, if Jamey could actually be dead.
A celebrity is carried into a private wing like a queen in a palanquin. Her bodyguard’s gold chains rustle as he works a walkie-talkie.
In Jamey’s group meeting, they go around the circle, and everyone has to say: Today I feel…and pick an adjective from the blackboard.
“I feel…amazed,” he says when it’s his turn.
“Do you want to tell us more about that?” says the therapist.
Jamey shakes his head. “No.”
He likes the sterility of his room, after so much grubbiness in life. There had been beetles in his head, bugs crawling on glistening pink matter. He’d been infested with acquaintances and small talk and manners.
He loves his white gown! His body is lost, scattered in this place, eyes exploding with galaxies of revelations. Then his head lies deep in the pillow, face turned to the ceiling, his mouth curved the way coroners know, even though his chest rises and falls.
A white stuffed rabbit, with a red ribbon and black glass eyes, is delivered with this note:
Dear Jamey Hyde,
I feel like a stupid girl. My father and me, we talked about this whole thing that happened, and I decide that I miss you.
I can’t understand what you are thinking now. Jamey, you’re alive! How can it be possible for you to not know this?
That was a made-up dream about you on the escalator. We need to go back and remove this dream, this fantasy. It was Matt wearing your coat!
You’re not dead.
Love, Valentina
P.S. You were the only one who had trouble with what we did, but still, I’m sorry.
Jamey spends time on the dayroom’s orange sofa, watching patients solve jigsaw puzzles.
One person on this floor never wakes.
Someone else walks the halls day and night, never sleeps.
A nurse tells Jamey he has a visitor.
“Hey there, brother!” Matt says in a jovial way he’d been practicing in the mirror.
“Hi,” Jamey says eventually.
“How ya doin’?”
Jamey doesn’t answer.
Sent by the Hydes, Matt was almost psyched to tell his buddies about his trip to the insane asylum, but already he wants to leave—the odor, the monotonous cursing down the hall, and—Jamey. “The doc said we should take a look at old photos, man, stir up some memories.”
When he gets no reaction, Matt opens an envelope of deckle-edged photos.
Two boys in sport coats with baskets of pastel eggs. The year they both had braces, eating lobster and corn at a clambake on the beach. Madras shorts and glowing red eyes. A blurry shot in their first tuxedos at the Gold & Silver Ball. Jamey as a baby, wrapped in white, in a cradle.
“I know these guys,” Jamey says.
“Right,” Matt says, collecting the pictures but avoiding Jamey’s eyes. He can’t tell if Jamey’s kidding.
Matt launches into some disorganized news, pulling his windbreaker, playing with the brim of his Drexel Burnham hat. He looks at his watch. “Shoot, you know what, I gotta run. I’ll be back soon though.”
Matt looks at Jamey sipping juice through a straw, lashes blinking, his cheeks hollow and lips chalky at the edges.
“Do you…want to hang on to these?” Matt asks, holding out the envelope.
“No thanks,” Jamey gently declines.
The four-point cuffing system. Hourly blood-pressure tests. Ten-minute phone calls. Thorazine. Decks of cards. These are the rules of this holding station.
One day, he tells nurses his organs are rotting, he can’t eat, it’s time to let the flesh starve itself clean for the hereafter. Dr. Lessing orders a nasogastric tube through his nose.
He does have clarity sometimes, and realizes that everything is a test to pass out of purgatory. But he can’t tell, no matter what anyone says, if this hospital or that person or the city itself is real or a semblance. He stops asking, frustrated.
He does for a moment doubt it all—that Elise exists, that he actually met and fell in love with her, that he left school, and cut off his family. He seriously wonders if he died a year and a half ago, and this has been a long dream.
Then he thinks—Jamey, you’re being fucking crazy. You just died a month ago.
In the art therapy room, Jamey sits next to a barefoot woman.
“I’m Kim-Ly,” she says, her red-lipstick mouth amused.
“Jamey.”
The woman laughs. “My real name is Lan. I trick you.”
This Vietnamese girl cut quarter-inch bangs with the same scissors she then dragged down her wrists. The bandages on her wrists are fresh.
“You have lots of flowers in your room,” Jamey says, able to talk to her in a way he can’t with others. “I’ve walked by.”
“Yah! My motherfuck husband send every day.”
“Oh.”
“Yah, I meditate in cafeteria this morning. They say to me I meditate in wrong room. No such thing, wrong room.”
Kim-Ly/Lan gawks at the paintings on the walls. Stick figures spew blood out of heads. Dinosaurs eat cars. A demon with pretty blue eyes. A house fire.
“This shit crazy,” she muses.
With markers they draw a yellow elephant, palm trees full of coconuts about to fall, boom boxes pouring out music notes, a cake, an orchid, a lion.
They fill notebooks with block-letter poems. Lan a
nd Jamey see their selves, as the afternoon dims, in the window. They cut shapes out of colored paper. The scraps fall onto the floor. These hours are snips and shreds of indigo and lime-green. No one knows they’re here. They’re lost. He feels an almost sexual pull to her, they’re orphans, both isolated in nowhere land.
It’s a confection of a sickness, a pink sugar nest of problems, an airy whipped cream of illness. The caramel is burned, gives off a nasty ash. Sickness is sweet in bed, in life, the goopy cherry flavor of medicines and ideas if one is willing to be sick. They bring you balloons and flowers, and news from outside, the crime rate, the president’s plan for the underclass, record highs at a Sotheby’s auction, the military budget, and you—you just lie there in folds of white taffy sheets, your mind a sea of honey.
Elise brings him The Call of the Wild, The Catcher in the Rye, and the New York Times Magazine. He doesn’t touch them.
“Here, remember this?” she prompts, handing him the Polaroid of a white flower between her legs.
He stares at it.
“And this one?” she says, watching his reactions suspiciously.
The tiger fish at the sushi place.
He looks at it solemnly.
“Answer me,” she says in a low voice.
His eyes take her in, looking at her from a long distance.
“Jamey, I’m right here,” she says.
She pulls his hand to her face, then to her breast, then between her legs. He looks at his hand, and back to her face. She starts crying, eyeliner running like turquoise ink down her cheeks. “I really hate you,” she sobs.
That night, around four a.m., he has a seizure or fit—no one is very clear about what happened.
She finds out about it the next morning when she brings him a doughnut covered in pink icing and sees restraint marks on his wrists. His medication has been increased again, and they added Phenobarbital to the mix, and he stares at her, squinting, as if looking through smoke.
He lies there, just one of the patients in this bleached labyrinth: no different from the woman talking to Steve McQueen on an invisible telephone, or the shaved-head girl who carries around her empty suitcase, or the man who keeps exposing a rosy, flaccid penis.
“Do you feel like harming yourself today?” they ask at room check.
He shakes his head. They give him more Seroquel anyway.
He bends over the butterfly coloring book but doesn’t color.
He listens to the echo chamber of midnight.
The furniture is heavy so it can’t be thrown, and he wouldn’t throw it anyway.
He occasionally talks to Rodrigo, a slim male nurse—built like a dancer—with a tongue ring, who is captivated by Jamey and seems to believe anything Jamey says about purgatory.
Tania, another RN, with a Filipino accent, just sighs checking his IV, feeding him red pills in a pleated paper cup. Sigh. Sigh. He sometimes mimics her but not cruelly.
The days break down into building blocks.
Dumbbells.
Candy Land.
Treadmill.
Snack time.
One evening, Elise brusquely hands him his apple juice. “Do you understand I’m knocked up?” she asks. “That we—you and me—are having a kid?”
He looks away.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” she says.
He doesn’t answer.
Later, Elise walks slowly home, unaware of hawthorns blooming in the night, her footsteps preoccupied on the greasy sidewalk. When she unlocks the building door, at the bottom of the stairs is a lumpy manila package with a New York Police Department label.
Addressed to James Balthazar Hyde.
In the kitchen, she cuts it open.
It’s her jacket, the fur and metallic-almond lining stained with blood.
JUNE 1987
Jamey opens the curtain. The city is ablaze, constructions go on and on. Stars are dulled by the flaming city. Planes cross the sky, passengers gazing onto sleepless chaos, the FDR clotted with red dots and white dots, pools shimmering darkly on roofs, smoke chuffing from pipes.
What a planet.
Contraptions and structures, inhabited and driven by animals.
Dr. Lessing comes into the room, studying her clipboard, and doesn’t look Elise in the eye.
“Change in the program,” Dr. Lessing says. “Looks like Jamey’s family wants ECT.”
“I’m his family,” Elise says.
“They’ve started some paperwork.”
“What’s ECT?”
“Electroconvulsive therapy.”
Elise actually grabs Lessing’s arm. “No way.”
“Elise.” Lessing looks at Elise’s hand until it’s removed.
A patient hangs himself, and dawn’s pink fire finds the body.
Cary Naughton was a short, zitty army brat with impossible skateboarding stories. In group, Jamey wondered how Cary could be so diabolically insecure, twirling his bleach-blond rat tail, jiggling his knee. The kid’s eyes rested on every person, trying to get attention, by love or hate. And then he figured out the best way to do that.
Elise sits with Jamey while staff tends to the tragedy. He has a window of semi-lucidity because the nurse forgot his round of meds this morning.
On his tray: clam chowder and translucent balls of melon.
“I’ll do anything I can for you,” he says to her.
“Really?” she asks.
He nods.
On the subway home, she touches her belly. She’s constantly scared this stress is bad for the baby, but then being scared adds to the stress, so she tries to calm down.
The next day, Elise corners Jolie in the cafeteria. “Can I ask a favor?”
Jolie sips a pebbled-plastic cup of grape juice. “You can ask.”
“Three blocks away is this ice-cream shop—”
Jolie’s eyes darken. “He’s not on the list to leave premises.”
Elise rolls her eyes. “But maybe he’ll, like, come to, without ECT.”
“I can’t.”
“I would love you forever,” Elise says, rubbing her belly.
Jolie blows her bangs up like: Are you really gonna push it? Then she looks away for a long moment. “Goddammit. It has to be quick. Tomorrow, during my lunch shift.”
That night, Elise asks the Gorowskis to take Buck for a few days.
“Thank you so much,” Elise says evenly.
She drops him off with food and a leash. Mrs. Gorowski loves Buck like a grandmother loves a gangster grandson, and she pets him awkwardly, giggling.
Buck knows. He can’t stop moving, pacing and whimpering.
Elise holds his face. Her fingers tremble.
“You such a good boy,” she says in a baby voice that isn’t steady.
He looks with big amber eyes, inquiring, frightened.
Oh, how he wagged his tail like a maniac every time she walked in the door—he’d jump vertically, then squiggle around at her knees, in love, forever grateful he’d been taken in when he was ugly and sharp-ribbed and he had no home, and he and Elise walked those New Haven streets, both lost but finding their way, block by block, together. Bucky Buck, the big boy, my Buck, she called him, and he came to her every time, head down and eyes up, used to being beaten but knowing she would never. Shadowing her around rooms, watching to see what she’ll do on any given day, trotting up and hanging his head so she can click on the leash to walk. How can this be goodbye? How can she leave him? He looks to his leash, as if asking: Don’t you want to snap it on right now, take me with you, do anything but leave me here? Please?
She walks out of the apartment without him, bites the heel of her hand until she gets upstairs and then bawls into a pillow. She hits the mattress, over and over, her face red, until she’s exhausted, hiccupping from crying.
The next morning, she shows up at the hospital, face bloated.
“What’s wrong?” Jamey asks with half-lidded eyes.
“It’s a surprise,” Elise tells
him nonsensically.
Jolie shows up. “Ready?”
They tiptoe down the emergency stairs without talking.
The sun floods Jamey’s brain the second he walks out the door, almost getting through to him. He holds out his hands like it’s rain.
They walk down bright and bustling blocks to the ice-cream shop with the yellow awning on Seventy-First Street. Jamey orders mint, and Elise gets strawberry, even though she can’t imagine eating.
“Jolie, come on, get something,” she says in forced cheerfulness.
The nurse orders vanilla with rainbow sprinkles.
Elise devours hers, hands tremulous, and throws out her napkin. Jamey has pale green cream on his lip and is taking his time.
“You done?” she asks Jamey meaningfully.
“I guess,” he says unsurely.
Elise takes his hand and stands up.
Jolie looks at them, stops licking sprinkles off her hand, stricken. “You’re not going to do this.”
“I’m sorry, Jolie.”
Elise puts her switchblade on the table.
Jamey watches.
“Is this a joke?” Jolie asks, looking at the knife.
“You can say we made you,” Elise says apologetically. “I dropped the knife and ran.”
Elise marches Jamey down the street to the Korean nail salon where she paid twenty bucks to store their backpacks. The owner twirls a pink telephone cord around her finger, and nods You’re welcome without breaking her conversation in another language.
“We got to hurry,” Elise says, forcing him to run.
Tokens into the turnstile, they take the C train to the A train to Port Authority, heads tucked.
At Port Authority, hands reach up from the floor like monsters out of a swamp. A woman approaches, in slippers and bathrobe, with no teeth, holding out a claw. A man hollers at everyone, shit staining his sweatpants. A suburban kid with a Hello Kitty backpack moves through the crowd, doomed. Elise and Jamey scan the departures board, numbers and letters flipping, while hustlers scrutinize newcomers.
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