Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  “Whenever I get the chance, I make one,” she said. “Should hit a thousand in … I don’t know. A year, maybe?”

  “Serious commitment.”

  “I know. Worthy of an Austen heroine, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  I imagined a thousand cranes, in all colors, filling the room. It was going to be beautiful. I could understand why someone would want to do that.

  She picked up a small white crane and pressed it into my hands. “This was the first one I made,” she said. “See how it’s not folded so crisply?”

  I looked down at it. I nodded. It was a little misshapen.

  She took it back and put it down, gently, on the bookshelf where it had been.

  “What will you do with your wish?” I asked.

  “If I said, it wouldn’t come true,” she said seriously.

  “Oh. Yeah, of course.”

  She smiled, and for a second I was dazzled by her smile: it was so warm, so beautiful, so totally unguarded, as if it for no single second occurred to her to think about what anyone else thought of her; very few people smile like that. “A lot of people would have laughed at me there. Probably even Julie, even though she would feel bad about it afterward. But not you.”

  “Why would I laugh?”

  “Because it’s stupid, believing in wishes. Childish. Crazy, even.”

  “I hear a voice that isn’t there,” I said.

  She laughed. “Touché.”

  A pause.

  “Are you okay, Cassie?”

  “Huh?” I said. I felt like the world had blinked—a fraction of a second gone, some gap in the film, a shudder. It was disconcerting. I was leaning against the wall of the room now, and I felt light-headed. What happened?

  “You look pale,” said Paris.

  I closed my eyes. And when I did I saw a bowling alley, a bowling alley of my imagination, yawning open in front of me, front wall peeling up, to reveal the lanes stretching back like tongues into darkness, the pins standing up like teeth.

  “Uh … I think I’m just nervous,” I said, when I opened my eyes. “About the … you know. The meeting.” My heart was beating wildly.

  Her eyes grew.

  I mean, of course they didn’t grow. But they seemed to. “Oh, ****,” she said. “Of course you are.” She reached into a cupboard and took out a bottle with a white label—vodka. She handed it to me. “Here. Take a gulp of that. Liquid courage.”

  I held the bottle in my hand. “I can’t. I don’t—”

  “You’re worried about the risperidone? Because—”

  “No. I’m just … well. Underage.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Drink. You need to calm down a little.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” said the voice. “I will make you whine like a dog.”

  I hesitated.

  “Yes. Give it back,” said the voice. “And then go home. Or you will pay.”

  Oh, **** it, I thought. I’m going to pay anyway, for going to this group thing.

  I tilted the bottle back; swallowed. It was like swallowing fire: it seared down my throat and warmed my stomach. A beeping came from the kitchen.

  “Time is up for you, *****,” said the voice. “I swear I’m going to—”

  “Ah!” said Paris. “Cookies.”

  Paris put the vodka back in the cupboard, took my hand, and dragged me back to the kitchen. She opened the oven, slipped on a flowery mitt that I never would have pictured in her apartment, and took out a tray of huge chocolate cookies, perfectly browned.

  “Ta-da!” she said.

  I mimed clapping.

  Paris expertly slid the cookies onto a plate and then led the way back into the living room. She indicated for me to sit down again.

  Right. The moment I’d been putting off. The awkwardness.

  “Eat,” said Paris. She pushed the plate at me. They looked good—soft in the middle, the chocolate still molten.

  I swallowed. “Um. Sorry … I should have said before … I’m allergic,” I said. “Peanuts. I’m really sorry. They look amazing.”

  “No peanuts in these.”

  I gave a half smile, embarrassed. I hated this, I always had. “It’s more complicated than that. What about the flour?”

  “What about it?”

  “Is it made in a facility that handles nuts? The chocolate?”

  Her eyes widened. “Really? It’s that serious?”

  “Yep.” I held up the bag I always carried with me, the one my mother had embroidered my name onto, and showed her the two EpiPens inside, the bronchodilating inhaler. “The smallest trace, and I could die.”

  She went to the kitchen and came back with a bag of chocolate chips. I turned it over, showed her the label: MAY CONTAIN NUTS.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Don’t be. Next time I’ll get the right stuff. Can’t have you dying on me.”

  I smiled.

  She started carrying the plate of cookies back to the kitchen.

  “You’re not having one?” I asked.

  “Carbs? Are you kidding me?”

  I frowned. “But you baked them.”

  “Yeah. I like the distraction. It’s therapeutic.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Paris was wearing a long bodycon dress with vivid neon flowers all over it. Her hair was piled up, secured with chopsticks. She looked much better than she had at the hospital. She threw herself down on the chair opposite me, splayed herself—she had a way of sitting down like a cat; her limbs didn’t seem to have the same bones as most people.

  “Your condo is beautiful,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Is it … um … do you …”

  “Do I pay for it with the ill-gotten gains from taking my clothes off on a webcam?”

  THE VOICE: ******* slut whore.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Partly. But my dad pays too. Sends a check in the mail. His signature on those checks is pretty much the only communication I ever have from him.”

  “You’re not close?”

  She smiled. “You could say that.”

  “Does he live in Oakwood?”

  She shook her head. “New York. Mom too. But, I mean, in separate apartments. They can’t stand each other. I went to high school there, but as soon as I could I got out.”

  “Headed to the glamorous Jersey Shore,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Paris, grinning. “But with the checks from my dad, and my work too, I got this sweet pad. So I’m happy.”

  “Do your parents know about … you know. The cam stuff?”

  “No, thank God. They don’t check up on me, which is good, because they have some serious problems with my lifestyle choices as it is. We are, what would you say? We are somewhat estranged.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Sorry what?”

  “That you’re, I don’t know, estranged.”

  She waved this away. “Only one of my many issues.”

  “How does it work?” I asked. “The modeling. I mean … do you have, like, an agency?”

  Paris laughed. “Cass! It’s the twenty-first century. I have Instagram for promotion, and then I have a website. People subscribe, and they can watch me when I decide to stream a video. Or book me for an event or whatever.”

  “People? You mean men?”

  “Well, yeah. I guess.”

  I remembered her card. “And the bachelor parties?”

  “Stripping, basically,” she said. “Private parties. Way more lucrative than the clubs. Five hundred bucks a pop. Julie hates it.”

  “Because …”

  “Because she thinks it’s not safe. But these are birthday parties, you know? College graduations, bachelor parties.”

  “But … what about … safety? Don’t you get scared?”

  “I have a no-touching policy,” said Paris. “That puts off the worst creeps, I figure. And Julie drives me if I go to a party. Plus, there’s kind of a network, you know? Someon
e gets a bit rough, one of the other girls will e-mail about it. Post it on one of the forums—his e-mail address, that kind of thing. We watch out for one another.”

  “Wow.” I seemed to keep saying that.

  She looked at her watch. It was a men’s Rolex—I recognized it because it was like the one my dad got from the Navy stores, but much newer. A black-bezeled Submariner. A diving watch.

  “You dive?” I asked.

  “What?”

  I pointed at her watch. She laughed again. “No. I just like shiny things. Like a magpie.” That was Paris—always a bird. Light bones, mind flitting from place to place, acquiring things. Something tailored from wind, unanchored in the sky. She walked over to a big flat-screen TV. “Anyway, we have forty minutes. Just enough time for Project Runway before we go. I DVRed it.”

  We walked to the bowling alley. The place was kind of run-down. There was an empty lot next to it, full of weeds, cordoned off by a wire fence. I guessed it had been built when Oakwood was still a tourism boomtown, before people started flying to Mexico. A long, flat edifice, warehouse-like, squat.

  There was a neon sign out front, still lit, one of those ones with three images kind of overlapping so it looks animated—a guy holding up a ball, then kneeling, then releasing it. Except the third batch of tubes was busted, so the guy was just standing and then kneeling, standing and then kneeling, like he was proposing or something.

  Or having a stroke.

  Inside, we walked past an empty reception area. The place was closed; I mean, it was closed for bowling. Behind the desks were rows of compartments holding white-soled sneakers in different sizes. We cut right and went past the lanes; the lights above them were off, but screen savers cycled on the computers above them, showing cartoons of shocked-looking pins tumbling end over end, creating flickering shadows. It felt like an introductory scene in a horror movie.

  “Spooky, isn’t it?” said Paris.

  “Uh-huh.”

  The balls gleamed in their racks. Green and blue and black and red, the colors pearlescent, swirling like gasoline in a puddle. They gave me a sick feeling. They reminded me of bruises. I could smell stale popcorn.

  “In here,” said Paris. She opened a utilitarian fire door with a letter-sized piece of paper taped to it, saying PRIVATE MEETING IN SESSION VSG SOUTH JERSEY BRANCH.

  I followed her in. There was an oldish-looking guy sitting on a cheap plastic chair with steel legs; ten or so empty chairs were arranged in a circle in front of him. The room was bare—against one wall was a table with a paper cloth over it, and a coffeepot and cups.

  “I’m hoping someone’s going to bring cookies,” he said. He had gray hair, twinkling eyes. Kind of handsome, in a scruffy, old-guy kind of way. He was wearing Nike sneakers with jeans and a polo shirt. He looked like the antidoctor. He looked like, I don’t know, an advertising executive or something. Not that I know what an advertising executive looks like.

  “****,” said Paris. “I baked some. I swear. Then we were watching Project Runway.”

  “A valuable use of your time, no doubt,” said the old guy. But he was smiling as he said it. He turned to me. “Dr. Lewis,” he said. “But you can call me Mike. And you must be … what do you prefer? Cassandra? Cass? Cassie?”

  I shrugged. “Whatever.”

  The voice said,

  “Manners, Cass. For ****’s sake.”

  “I mean, I don’t mind,” I said. This was weird. The voice wanted me to be polite to this guy? Suddenly I felt scared. I mean, this was the thing that had made me slap myself and inject myself with epinephrine, and it wanted me to play nice with the doctor?

  Anything the voice wanted had to be bad, didn’t it?

  But I squashed this thought down, jumped on it, like Daffy Duck jumping on Bugs Bunny when he’s trying to get out of his hole. I didn’t want to be taking the drugs either; I didn’t want to be a zombie all my life.

  “Cass?” said Paris. “Earth to Cass?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m here.”

  “That you are,” said Dr. Lewis. Mike. “And it’s an important first step. So. Why don’t you take a seat and tell me about it. Paris, you mind giving us the room?”

  A nervous voice inside me spoke up then, not the voice, but an instinct voice. It said,

  You want to be alone in here with this guy you don’t know?

  Then the actual voice said,

  “Shut the **** up, *****. Stop being so pathetic.” It was quiet from the risperidone, but it was still pretty forceful.

  I closed my eyes as my inner voices argued. “Can she … can she stay?” I said.

  Paris looked at the doctor.

  “Why don’t we leave the door open?” he said. “Paris can wait in the main hall. She could even bowl a few rounds.”

  “Bowl?” said Paris, like he was suggesting necrophilia or something.

  He shrugged. “The balls are there. Might as well use them.”

  Paris smiled. “The philosophy of every male,” she said. “Okay, fine. You need me, Cass, you call for me.”

  And then she swept out the room, long legs tick-tocking. I watched her go, amazed as I always was by her, by her self-possession and her grace, despite her illness. She was like a machine in tight-fitting clothes, engineered to hold the eye, but she had charisma too, blazing out of every pore.

  “She shines like a star, doesn’t she?” said Dr. Lewis, more succinctly. “I just hope she doesn’t turn out to be meteor.”

  “Why?” I said.

  He looked sad all of a sudden, thoughtful. “Because they fall to the earth. And they burn.”

  DR. LEWIS: Take a seat. Sorry about the plastic chairs.

  ME: That’s okay.

  DR. LEWIS: Paris has told me a little about you. But why don’t you tell me something.

  ME: Like what?

  DR. LEWIS: I don’t know. How about your favorite music.

  ME: Oh. Uh, I used to like hip-hop stuff. But now I mostly listen to, I don’t know what you would call it; electronica. Stuff without voices. Just … beats and bass, you know?

  DR. LEWIS: (Rolls up his sleeve. There is a tattoo reading COME AS YOU ARE in gothic script down his forearm and an anarchy symbol.) I listen to a whole load of stuff. When Kurt Cobain died, that was the day I decided to be a psychologist. Sounds stupid, but it’s completely true. I was, what, seventeen?

  ME: (inside my head) Oh, he’s not as old as I thought. It’s the gray hair, I guess.

  DR. LEWIS: I just thought, what a waste, you know? I thought if I could stop one person from doing what he did, then my life would be worthwhile. It’s like … a world ending, every time. Do you know what I mean?

  ME: (thinking of my mother, her likes and dislikes, her opinions, her favorite foods and movies and her jokes and smiles and angry days, the songs she liked to sing, reduced to a red puddle of blood on a tiled floor) Yes.

  DR. LEWIS: The loud music helps?

  ME: With?

  DR. LEWIS: Your voice.

  ME: Oh. Yes. It does.

  DR. LEWIS: This voice, do you have any idea who it might be?

  ME: (puzzled) I don’t … I don’t think I …

  DR. LEWIS: I mean, is it someone you know? Someone you knew?

  ME: It’s a voice. It’s not real.

  DR. LEWIS: The shrinks told you that, right?

  ME: (nods)

  DR. LEWIS: (sighs) The voice is real to you, is it not? I mean, you hear it, like any other voice? With your ears?

  ME: Uh, yes.

  DR. LEWIS: So it’s real. It’s a real phenomenon. It doesn’t matter if you can see it or not. It’s real to you.

  ME: I guess.

  DR. LEWIS: It’s possible to do scans, you know. Functional MRI. Electrical signals. What we know is that a person who hears voices, when they do hear them, the exact same brain areas light up as when they hear real speech. It is, for the purposes of the brain, exactly the same experience as hearing an actual person speaking.

 
ME: Okay.

  DR. LEWIS: Anyway. Your voice, it isn’t someone you know.

  ME: (suddenly too hot, suddenly itchy all over) I don’t think so.

  DR. LEWIS: History of mental illness? Other hallucinations?

  ME: No.

  DR. LEWIS: And what does it say, the voice?

  ME: Horrible things.

  DR. LEWIS: Like?

  ME: To hurt myself. To not talk to people or it will punish me. Stuff like that. But not so much now.

  DR. LEWIS: Drugs?

  ME: Yes.

  DR. LEWIS: Hmm. And when did the voice first speak to you?

  ME: The police precinct. I’d just found a foot on the beach.

  DR. LEWIS: That was you?

  ME: Yes.

  DR. LEWIS: Wow. And what precise words did it use?

  ME: I think … it said, “You’re disgusting.” I think.

  DR. LEWIS: Interesting. Did you agree?

  ME: Um, with what?

  DR. LEWIS: Did you agree with the voice that you were disgusting?

  ME: (Thinking how weird this is, how Dr. Rezwari never wanted to know anything about what the voice said. Only that it threatened stuff, and that meant it had to be stopped.) Um. Yeah. I guess so.

  DR. LEWIS: Gender? Age?

  ME: The voice?

  DR. LEWIS: Yes.

  ME: A woman. I don’t know how old. Forty? Not young.

  DR. LEWIS: Hmm.

  ME: Does that mean anything?

  DR. LEWIS: Do you think it means anything?

  ME: I thought … it’s dumb, but I thought maybe the voice was a ghost. Of one of the dead prostitutes, you know? And that it wanted me to solve the murder.

  DR. LEWIS: Imaginative. But I doubt it.

  ME: You said the voice was real.

  DR. LEWIS: Real to you. Because it is you. On some level. Often, the people I talk to, their voices say things that deep down they think about themselves. The voice says they’re dressed like ****, or whatever, and the person looks in the mirror and thinks, yeah, I’ve become a bit of a slob. Or the voice bans contact with other people, but actually the sufferer really, unconsciously maybe, believes that they don’t deserve contact with other people.

  ME: (blank mind)

  DR. LEWIS: It’s a lot to deal with. We have to take it step-by-step.