Believe Me

by JP Delaney

  Images whirl through my head on an endless loop, over and over.

  RICK

  If you don’t mind my saying so, Claire, you don’t seem the type.

  ME

  Before I realized there are more enjoyable ways to pay the rent.

  PRODUCER

  This isn’t strictly a callback, Claire. I’m currently casting for a range of projects.

  FRANK

  Most of our work has focused on one individual.

  KATHRYN

  The suspect would be enticed to reveal various aspects of her personality, which could then be compared with my profile of the killer.

  ME

  “It’s a necropolis; a grave in which the dead,

  The bodies I once loved, are tumbled willy-nilly…”

  KATHRYN

  Let’s see what the Wechsler tells us.

  PATRICK

  I think I’m falling in love with you.

  PATRICK

  I think I’m falling in love with you.

  PATRICK

  I think I’m falling in love with you.

  I get through most of the bottle before I realize Jess must be away. And eventually there’s nowhere else to go but back to the place Frank and Kathryn put me in, the apartment full of cameras and microphones and lies.

  There’s no one there either. But I know they’ll find me eventually. I wreck the place, ripping the wires from their hiding places, yanking the miniature cameras from behind the mirrors, trashing the West Elm furniture and the Georgia O’Keeffe art books. Deliberately, I raise my foot over the glass coffee table and stamp down, hard. The first time, it clouds with a snowflake of cracks. The second, there’s a satisfying explosion of glass.

  And then—nothing. Just blank, numb despair. I’m going to be arrested, I think. No more Patrick. No more acting classes.

  It’s like Tumult all over again. No, worse. I slump down into the mess, exhausted.

  At best, I’ll be deported. Back to England. My dream—my second chance—is over.

  I pick up a shard of glass.

  I’d wanted to show him it hadn’t just been acting.

  I touch the glass to my wrist. Hello, old friend.

  The sting is exhilarating. It says: You were right. Not them, you. You were brilliant. You were real.

  I pull it across my wrist, as easy as ripping open a packet of nuts. For a heartbeat, nothing. Then the blood comes eagerly, gushing and pumping. Euphoria and terror crash together in my brain.

  Perhaps now they’ll realize what they did.

  And if they don’t, who cares?

  Fuck them.

  I pull again, dragging the sharp edge across my arm, like a violinist drawing out a note.

  My final bow. Thank you and good night.

  Show’s over, folks. It was great while it lasted.

  One final slicing motion with the shard. My vision fades, like a tunnel rushing toward me, like a spotlight dimming, and my head slumps down onto my chest.

  Cue curtain. Cue applause.

  Cue oblivion.

  Fade out.

  49

  INT. CLAIRE’S APARTMENT—NIGHT

  The cat picks its way through broken glass, mewing plaintively.

  There’s a crash as someone outside kicks at the door. It quivers and reverberates under the force of the blows. At the fifth kick, it comes right off its hinges.

  Frank Durban rushes in.

  FRANK

  Jesus!

  Claire lies unconscious in a pool of blood. He runs over—

  FRANK

  Claire! Claire, wake up! Shit!

  Pulling out his radio, he frantically thumbs the button.

  50

  “It wasn’t life threatening,” Kathryn says dismissively. “She only cut one wrist. A typically melodramatic gesture.”

  “She’d have died if no one found her,” Frank says sharply. “She’s still in the emergency department.” He turns to Patrick Fogler. “We’ll send someone to take down the remaining cameras.”

  Patrick looks around his apartment. “All of them? You mean—that’s it? It’s over? Will she be charged?”

  Frank shakes his head. “Without a confession, there’s nothing that could justify pressing charges. I’m sorry, Patrick.”

  “But she’ll be assessed in a secure psychiatric facility,” Kathryn adds. “It’s likely they’ll be able to keep her there until Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrange to return her to the UK.”

  Patrick nods. “And what do you think? Honestly? Did she murder Stella?”

  There’s a long silence.

  “Honestly,” Kathryn admits, “I think we’ll never know. And I’m not sure we ever would have known, however long we’d watched her. I think that for Claire Wright, reality is whatever she wants it to be.”

  51

  Greenridge. A residential psychiatric center twenty miles upstate. During my ten months in America, I’ve barely been out of Manhattan. Nothing in my experience of this country has prepared me for the squalor of its public-access health institutions.

  The ward I’m on is protected by electronic locks. In theory, we’re being kept secure while we’re assessed. In practice, we’re prisoners. There was some kind of legal hearing, but I was judged unfit to attend and my state-appointed lawyer simply filled in a form saying I was a danger to myself and possibly others. That’s par for the course, apparently. One patient, a massive black man the orderlies call Meathead, is cuffed to his bed twenty-four hours a day. The others are mobile, after a fashion, though even they shuffle up and down the polished corridors as if hobbled by invisible leg irons, muttering in an urban patois I don’t understand. All seem permanently stunned by whatever meds they’re on.

  There’s a heat wave, and the windows don’t open. The male patients go around bare-chested, and even the staff wear nothing under their scrubs. At night, men and women are separated by nothing more than a corridor. My first night, I heard screams as a woman along the hall was attacked. The staff pulled the man off, but two hours later he was back in her cubicle again.

  * * *

  —

  The psychiatrist responsible for me is named Dr. Andrew Banner. He’s young, with the bad skin of the chronically overworked. The first time I see him, he spends a long time tapping my reflex points.

  “Are you suffering from any physical stress or trauma?” he wants to know.

  “I already told you what happened.” For some reason my teeth are chattering. “It was a police operation—I was working with the police. They took me to this apartment that was filled with cameras. But they didn’t tell me there were cameras everywhere else as well. Because really it was me they were watching.” I stop, aware how agitated my voice sounds.

  “Nothing like a car crash? Or a mugging?” Banner peers into my eyes with a little flashlight.

  “Nothing.” I bite down on my teeth to keep them still.

  “Any nervous conditions? Epilepsy? Hypoglycemic attacks? Manic episodes? Depression, thoughts of violence?”

  “No.” I look at my arm, bandaged now. “Apart from this, I mean.”

  “Ever hear voices you aren’t sure are really there?”

  “Not really.”

  He snaps off the flashlight. “Not really?”

  “Sometimes I imagine I’m in a sort of movie. Watching myself perform.”

  He makes a note. “Have you taken any nonprescription drugs in the last twelve months?”

  “Just Ecstasy. But not very often.”

  “Ah.” Another note.

  “Look,” I say, for what seems like the fifth time. “It was to do with the Stella Fogler murder, the one that happened back in February. The police used a trick to get me in front of a shri
nk so she could give me all these tests.”

  “What tests?”

  I try to remember, but the drugs they’ve given me are clouding my memory. “We talked, mostly. About having foster parents. I think that must have been part of her profile, somehow. The whole Daddy Bear–Mummy Bear–Goldilocks dynamic they set up.”

  He writes that down too.

  “Do you believe me?” I can hear the desperation in my voice.

  “Of course.”

  “Really?” I’m relieved. “Thank you. For a moment there it even sounded crazy to me.”

  Still writing, he says, “I had a patient here recently who thought he had a tree growing in his stomach. He remembered eating an apple core, and he thought the seeds must have germinated inside him. He was suffering from agonizing stomach cramps. Once we’d given him medication, he stopped getting the cramps. He convinced himself the meds were poison, you see, and that the tree had died.”

  “But he was still insane,” I say, not understanding.

  “That’s not a word we like to use much in here, Claire. We all inhabit our own reality.” Dr. Banner’s eyes go to his laptop. “A bit like a computer network. Different machines on the network run different software. Sometimes there are little glitches. Compatibility problems, as it were. Then they have to be fixed by tech support. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “Not really.”

  “Let me put it this way. There are some chemical imbalances in your system that need to be tweaked.”

  “What do you mean, tweaked?”

  It turns out he means what he calls attack levels of pimozide, Proverin, and Iclymitol, drugs he assures me have few side effects but which I can feel blunting my thought processes, coating my mind in a gluey syrup of medication. They make me constantly hungry. I spend my days in the television room, waiting lethargically for the orderlies to come around with yet another tray of carb-heavy food. At one consultation I make the mistake of telling Dr. Banner that fear of the other patients is disturbing my sleep, so in addition to all the other drugs I’m given sleeping pills. Like all meds here, once prescribed they’re not optional. The orderlies stand over you to make sure you’ve swallowed. Just like Girl, Interrupted, only without Whoopi Goldberg.

  It seems ironic Banner’s so obsessed with medication, since it’s clearly drug abuse that fried most of his patients’ brains in the first place. They compare prescriptions with all the savvy of gourmets—“You got meth? Fucking A, all the man gave me were two frickin’ tueys and a script for some Susie-Q”—and tell anyone who’ll listen about the higher reality they’ve experienced on angel dust and crack. I don’t feel safe lapsing into a drugged coma every night, particularly as I’m sure the sharper-eyed among them know exactly what I’ve been given. But there’s no choice.

  After a week or so Dr. Banner produces, with something of a fanfare, my diagnosis. I am suffering from a paranoid delusional episode. When I protest that it all really happened, that the police operation was as real as this hospital, Dr. Banner waves my objections away. The facts are not important, he insists. What matters is my response to them. I have been experiencing dissociation—an internal separation of different parts of my personality. There is an element of psychosis, of not being able to separate perception from reality. He believes these are symptoms linked to an underlying Histrionic Personality Disorder, their appearance triggered by intense stress.

  For all of these, the treatment is the same: increased dosages of the same medications.

  Slowly, slowly, whether as a result of the drugs or just the passing of time, my agitation subsides. I no longer jump out of my skin, startled, at every noise, or jolt awake with panic-induced vomit in my mouth. The torrent of fragmented images in my head slows to a trickle. The looping spiral of film slows, then stutters to a halt.

  And only rarely do I have glimpses of myself as a performer, striding through the movie of my life.

  The ache in my heart, the ache for Patrick Fogler, takes longer to subside. I realize now how stupid it was to let myself fall in love with him. Only the second time in my life I’ve been in love, and the second time I’ve fallen for something that wasn’t real.

  But that doesn’t mean what I feel isn’t real.

  It’s my precious secret, the one bit of myself I don’t confess to Banner or his team of therapists. I’m scared that if I tell them, they’ll find a way to make it go away. And it’s all I’ve got to hang on to. The only part of Patrick I have left.

  As for Frank and Kathryn, I don’t hate them. I don’t feel anything for them. Even when I thought she was on the same side as me, I knew I was never more than a chess piece to Kathryn. I never liked or trusted her and now I know those instincts were correct.

  The days go on forever. Boredom and ennui

  Are in themselves a kind of immortality…

  At first I wait apprehensively for the police or the Immigration people to come and deal with me. But as the weeks go by, I have to face a different possibility. The system has simply dumped me here and forgotten about me. Until Dr. Banner decides I’m cured, there’s no reason why anyone should ever want me to leave.

  52

  “I think I’m better now,” I say tentatively. “Really, I feel fine.”

  The look Dr. Banner gives me is almost pitying. “Unfortunately, one of the hallmarks of Cluster B personality disorders is that the sufferer has a distorted self-image. Often, they falsely value exactly those qualities about themselves that cause distress to others and undermine their own personal relationships.”

  I frown. “You mean, I won’t be better until I think I’m ill? That’s a bit One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, isn’t it?”

  “I’m saying your own judgments about how well you are might not be as reliable as those of myself and my medical team.”

  “What about Dr. Latham? What does she say?”

  “I haven’t been able to track down your Dr. Latham, Claire.”

  Something about that your makes me look at him sharply. “You think I made her up?”

  “I didn’t say that. And in any case the facts—”

  “Aren’t important. I know. But she is a shrink. And she ran all those tests on me. That’s data you should have.”

  “If it exists,” Banner replies carefully, “it would certainly be useful. But I can assure you, there’s no Kathryn Latham registered with the American Board of Forensic Psychology. I checked.”

  “I could take you to her office—”

  “That won’t be possible, Claire.”

  “Why not? It would only take a couple of hours. And then maybe you’d believe me,” I say desperately. I think Banner likes me: I’m just about the only one of his patients he can have a rational conversation with, and I’ve noticed I get far more consultation time than the brain-fried junkies do. “Maybe I’d believe myself. Instead of worrying if all that shit was just inside my own head.” To my humiliation, I start to cry.

  Banner watches me for a few moments. “All right,” he says at last. “If you really feel it would help, Claire. I’ll organize a transport.”

  * * *

  —

  We go next day in the center’s minibus. Dr. Banner, me, and a muscular male orderly named Anton, who’s clearly only there in case I make a run for it. When we get to Union City, I start to panic because I can’t find the right block. “It’s around here somewhere,” I say, dashing from side to side of the minibus. “I’m sure of it.”

  Dr. Banner is noting down everything I say, so after a while I force myself to shut up and sit on my hands to stop from waving them around. Then we turn a corner and, to my relief, there it is—the familiar row of half-empty parking lots and ugly low-rise industrial buildings.

  “That one!” I exclaim, pointing. “See, I told you. Pull up.”

  We get out. The building looks half derelict. “Don’
t worry, it always looked like this,” I say reassuringly.

  I go to the front doors and pull. They won’t open. I peer inside. There’s no one at the reception desk. Just a sign saying these vacant premises are patrolled by a security company with dogs. And a realtor’s sign.

  “There’s no one here, Claire,” Dr. Banner says, stating the obvious.

  “Wait,” I say desperately. “Let me show you the apartment. The one where they filmed everything. It’s just across the river.”

  Even before we get there, though, I’ve guessed what we’re going to find.

  A woman with a South African accent answers the door. She rented the place on Airbnb, she says. It’s got great reviews.

  Same with the apartment below, the one where Frank Durban was.

  Dr. Banner’s careful not to meet my eye, but I notice Anton sticks very close.

  “Can I use your phone?” I say frantically to Dr. Banner.

  “Who do you want to call, Claire?”

  “Frank—Detective Durban. He’ll be able to tell you where Dr. Latham is.”

  Banner hesitates. “I’ll try him for you. And then we really must get back.” Pulling out his phone, he punches in a number and asks for the New York Police Department.

  I wait while he gets transferred. He repeats several times that he’s trying to reach Detective Frank Durban. Eventually he puts the phone down, his face neutral.

  “Well? What did he say?” My heart is in my mouth.

  “Detective Durban has been on sick leave for the past three months.”

  “But that can’t be right,” I say helplessly. “He was following me around. Watching out for me. I even had a safe word, for chrissake—”