Liar

by Rob Roberge

  You think: I am going to a faculty meeting. I’m supposed to be a responsible person and I am the same fuckup I was. When the traffic thins, you seriously consider making a hard right into the guardrail, wondering if that would be enough to kill you. And then you shit yourself.

  Five years ago, you were teacher of the year and now this.

  All this would be fine—well, not exactly fine but manageable—if you were not due at this faculty meeting in half an hour. You look at the other drivers—some passing you, and some you are passing. You look at their faces and wonder how great the gap is between who they are and who they know they could be. You’re on Interstate 10. The I-10 is known to locals, depending on your direction, as the San Bernardino Freeway or the Santa Monica Freeway. Freeways here, true to the romantic nature of the West and its ever-hopeful revision of the life that came before, are made for movement and the future and they’re named for where you’re going—not where you’ve been.

  The past, well, that’s for when you turn around. Where you’ve been is only important in the context of where you are. And if where you are this moment is good, the past makes sense and every moment of horror and dread seems worth it. If where you are is terrible, the past just seems like an accumulation of data that confirm you were on this path all along.

  How things end up matters.

  EARLY 2007: You call your hometown police department’s hall of records and try to get paperwork on Nicole’s murder. You have grown more obsessed with it over the years and have lately been waking up, your blankets kicked off the bed by your restless legs, seeing her bloodied and on the ground, not only in a dream but when you wake up too.

  At first the cops are friendly with you. Then you let it slip that you’re a writer, and they won’t say another word. You are shut out.

  —

  2011: Your cousin kills himself by jumping off a bridge in Connecticut. It happens between Christmas and New Year’s. You mother calls and tells you about it.

  Two days later your parents call to wish you a happy new year.

  You father says, “How you doing?”

  “Not so great,” you say.

  He sounds genuinely confused. “Why?”

  You pause. “Because my cousin killed himself.”

  He takes a deep breath and lets it out angrily. It’s a sound you know well, one you’ve hated your whole life, one you catch yourself making when you’re short-tempered and pissed off at the world, and you hate yourself when you hear it coming from you.

  “Oh, that,” he says.

  And you want to shout, Yeah. That! It’s been three days. All your father had to say on the subject was, “That was great of him to fuck the holidays for his wife and kids for the rest of their lives.”

  In his own way, he’s right, of course. But it’s easy for you to see your cousin’s side of things. You only have reports from his brother. That he’d been checked into the psych ward for serious depression and psychotic episodes. That he told his brother the doctors and nurses were spying on him from the mirror and the walls and the electrical lines. He destroyed chairs. When the doctors interviewed him, he was smart enough to say he just missed his kids and he hated being locked up. He wasn’t having any break with reality. He was fine.

  And they let him go. And he killed himself.

  And now a doctor is saying he could have been one of the oldest people on record to have their first schizophrenic symptoms. Through his twenties and thirties he had been diagnosed as severely depressed. But not schizophrenic. Now he’s gone. You feel for him. And you are scared for yourself. Not for any late-onset schizophrenia. Just for any bridge that might someday look the same to you as it looked to him.

  You say to your father, “Yeah. I’m still pretty messed up by this.”

  He says, “Let me get your mother.”

  —

  2013: You publish a novel in which the protagonist’s mother commits suicide. You borrow the events and the timing of your cousin’s suicide nearly detail for detail. The time of year. The fact that he left his car running on the other side of the traffic, pointed the wrong direction. That it was seven degrees. That the water was well below freezing and he was not found by the search party and would be officially missing until they found him in the spring, like most winter bridge suicides in Connecticut. That there was no note. You use your father’s line about the holidays being fucked for the rest of the family. You use every fact you know.

  You were selfish to use it in the book—more loyal to the book than to how your family might feel about you using your cousin’s death as something so trivial as “material.” You wonder about subjectivity and who owns someone’s grief and about your own ethics, and you find yourself feeling awful at times about what you’ve done. But it doesn’t stop you from doing it.

  —

  2012: You have trouble sleeping. You write Gina e-mails late at night when you can’t sleep. Sometimes you aren’t really in an episode, but you’ve been up for days and are no longer lucid, and no matter how much you want to communicate, you can’t. Historically, when you’re like this, Gayle has taken your phone so you can’t send any embarrassing e-mails or texts or make calls you will be horrified by the next day. But now you are often up for days on end, and Gayle’s sick and frequently asleep much of the day. You are frequently alone when your swings come on.

  You send Gina this e-mail:

  “I’m up COUSIN IS aka in the, it’s out . WW siciarehbbgg What happen last nigh the point to WHAR GOIN G, just say get Guns. hope your not going crazy with this…you seen before golf all asleep at the a report. But at

  so much white green)?.58”9!?355? sell in my dory…So try hit to push THST hard. I’m skiff arts (kerchief I cease he’s ahead of me.

  Um sooty it was a main night…/ -and, I didn’t try TI semi it in you I hope you’re had jadecsnl”

  She immediately responds, urging you to go to bed and not write anyone else.

  You remember writing this and trying very hard to make sense and get through to her. You believed you had something urgent to say. The e-mail you sent took nearly an hour to write. You couldn’t stop yourself. Whatever was in your head seemed enormously important.

  You stop trying to get this important message through to Gina. And you don’t e-mail anyone else. You listen to her. Explaining this to anyone but your best friend would be humiliating. And she knows this, which is why, no matter how far gone you are, you have trained yourself to listen when she says not to write anymore. You don’t always go to bed, because bed can be horrific when you’re this wired and awake. But you try very hard to stop sending messages. To stop trying to say whatever it is you so urgently want to say.

  —

  1972: You are six years old and you can never fall asleep. You sleep a lot at school and get in trouble, but you are somehow very frightened to sleep in your own room. Once you are put to bed at eight o’clock, you stare at the ceiling. On good nights, you listen to Knicks games on the transistor radio you keep under your pillow. On bad nights, there are no games, so you wait until around midnight, when your parents are asleep, and then you take back to your room every clock in the house that sits on a table or comes off the wall, and you spend from midnight until six taking them apart and putting them back together again.

  You know you will be in major trouble if anyone notices a clock or two not working, so you are meticulous. At first, you can take seven clocks apart and put them together by six thirty. A year later you can do it by four o’clock. But that leaves more time to be awake with nothing to do, so you take a couple of them apart again and put them back together.

  When your father gets a digital clock for his garage, you try to fix it and you can’t. You just put it back together as best you can and when your father sees it while he’s working on a car in the garage, he shakes it. Bangs it a couple of times. Then says, “Piece of motherfucking shit,” and throws it against the wall, smashing it. You don’t mention that you had anything to do with it.
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  The digital clocks have gotten too sophisticated for you. You realize that you can’t fix everything.

  Instead, you start memorizing basketball and baseball statistics and counting playing cards. You know Walt Frazier’s totals for every year of his career, to the point, rebound, and assist. You know what the last card in any deck is nine times out of ten. This keeps your brain busy. It’s not as good as drinking your parents’ liquor after their parties, but it helps quiet your mind.

  Your dad isn’t much for working his brain for fun, though he is one of the smartest people you will ever know. He has—before his stroke—a memory that might be even better than yours, before you spent years fucking yours up. He could’ve counted cards too. But your dad also does stuff, you realize later, to turn off his brain in some ways. He fixes and rebuilds cars. He tries to teach you, but it seems too complex and you don’t react well to his anger. The sound of a wrench being thrown on concrete can still make you jump forty years later.

  He tells you it’s not complex at all and that you’re just not paying attention. That you do more complicated things all the time. He says that only three things can ever go wrong with an engine. Three F’s: fuel, fire, and some other F you forget immediately. He says that once you know everything that can go wrong, you can fix anything.

  You and your father see life differently even then. Before you can articulate it, you know there is no way to tally the enormous number of things that can go wrong, and that too many of them can never be fixed.

  But, you suppose now, he knew that, too.

  Which is probably why he liked working on engines, where only three things could go wrong and they could always be fixed.

  —

  2005: Hunter S. Thompson kills himself with a gunshot to the head. His suicide note reads:

  No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax—This won’t hurt

  —

  2012: You accidentally take your antidepressants twice in one day. You are on the highest allowable dosage already, and you take your morning dose and then, later in the day you think you forgot to take it, so you take it again. You don’t realize what you’ve done until you are writing an e-mail to Gina and your eyes start to lose their focus. Then, squinting, you try to edit a line in the e-mail. The next thing you realize is that it has taken you ten minutes to write one sentence and your hands are shaking. You tell her this. That your brain feels wrong. She tells you to lie down. You do your best to sign off in a coherent way. It takes another ten minutes to write another sentence.

  You lie down on the couch and soon you can’t move. And then the hallucinations start. You keep seeing the women you love dying—Gayle, your mother, your sister, your niece, Gina—over and over. You can’t stop it. You try to think of something, anything else, but the images of dying women keep coming at you. Gayle is upstairs in her office and you try to call up to her that something’s very wrong, but you can’t speak. In the rare moments when you are not hallucinating, you try to regain control of your brain, but you can’t. You can barely hold on to any single thought, except for one that keeps coming back. You think it’s finally happening. That your brain is broken beyond all repair. That maybe you are finally going truly crazy and you will always be like this. You’re terrified, and you still can’t call out for help. The images keep coming. Violent deaths. Murders, car accidents, drownings. They won’t stop.

  You end up helpless on the couch for more than an hour before you are finally able to call upstairs to Gayle. She comes down, totally unaware of what’s been happening. As best you can, you tell her that you think you took too much of your Wellbutrin and you are not in control of your brain. She asks if you want to go to the hospital and you say you don’t know. You’re scared to go to a hospital like this. They might keep you there. But maybe you really need a hospital. Nothing this frightening has ever happened. It’s worse than any episode. You are swollen with dread that it’s actually happened: You’ve gone insane.

  Gayle gets online and checks for the symptoms of a Wellbutrin overdose. Some of the first symptoms are hallucinations and loss of consciousness. A third of the people go into seizures. After that, the next two on the list are coma and, finally, death. You’re still incredibly shaky, but you can talk again. You’re still having hallucinations, but you can control them a little better. You haven’t lost consciousness. You tell Gayle that you seem to be getting a little better. That you don’t want to go to the hospital. You’re worried they might keep you there for at least seventy-two hours.

  You tell Gayle you want to lie down in bed, and she helps you upstairs. After a couple more minutes of hallucinations, you ask her to turn on the TV, thinking maybe focusing on something else will help. She flips through the channels while you tell her which ones make your head hurt and which ones feel better. Finally she finds a show that seems to slow down your brain—a show about, of all things, fashion and dressmaking. She stays with you as you stare at the TV, waiting for the symptoms to fade, which, after about thirty minutes or an hour, they do. Now you just feel exhausted and a little paranoid, but you can think again. You are in control of your head.

  After a while, you realize you should e-mail Gina and tell her you’re all right. You do that, and then you go back upstairs and get in bed. It’s about two days before you feel anything resembling normal again.

  —

  1984–2013: You have a lot of trouble sleeping through a night unless you’re in bed with a woman. Actually, it’s only with women who seem to want to take care of you, even if you’ve just met. You bring this out in women. Everyone you’ve ever dated has held her hand out at crosswalks to stop you from running into traffic, like you were a seven-year-old. A friend you sleep with jokes that you are addicted to every slutty punk-rock girl with a Florence Nightingale complex.

  When you’re alone, you wake up frightened and sweaty and breathing hard. You see Nicole bloody and dead. You see your college friend Jim fall off the balcony and die on the pavement three stories below. You see Melissa, raped and killed and left in some alley in Los Angeles. All on a tape loop, over and over. Sometimes, you have anxiety attacks for no apparent reason. The first time you have one, in your twenties, you go to an urgent care clinic, thinking you are dying. You can’t breathe and think it is a heart attack. You learn what anxiety attacks are. When they hit, you take as many Valium or Klonopin or lorazepam as you think will put you to sleep but not overdose you. By early 1993, you don’t care if you OD and haven’t cared for years. By late 1993, you are clean and sober and living with the woman who will become your wife. The panic attacks come more frequently for a couple of years, and then start to slow down to a couple a month. There are eventually stretches of time—a few months, maybe as many as four—where you don’t have any and you think they may have ended. They come back and seem to change in frequency for no apparent reason.

  —

  1995: After years without any psychotic episodes, a doctor changes your diagnosis from bipolar to chemical depression. The diagnosis, it turns out, is wrong, but you go three years on only antidepressants and you don’t have a single episode. You think it’s over and you’re somehow better, but then they return.

  Later, you are rediagnosed as bipolar when you see another psychiatrist and tell him about the manic episodes that accompany your depression. He says he is stunned anyone has ever given you a different diagnosis. “You’re textbook,” he tells you.

  —

  2007: The Urinals are playing a gig at some LA dive and the load-in is in the alley behind the club. It hits you—as it does whenever you are in some Los Angeles alley—that this is where Melissa could have been raped and killed. Probably not, of course. There are more alleys behind dive bars in LA than you can count. But, like it does so many other times, as you grab your amp and guitar out of the
trunk, it hits you: This could be the place where it happened.

  —

  1988: You are waiting tables at the Marriott in Copley Square. You are a terrible waiter. You can’t stand the job and you might be bad enough to get fired, but you are sleeping with the manager, Kendra, which gives you some job security. She is the first woman you ever hear utter the phrase “thread count” when talking about sheets. She is also the first woman you have met who owns $200 underwear. And she tends to pay for your dinners and drinks. Though she thinks you drink too much and mentions it pretty often and it’s getting old.

  She’s six foot three. You are five eight. You need a pair of phone books if you want to fuck her doggie-style. She has a three-inch scar at the base of her spine from surgery a year ago. You think it’s beautiful. She hates it.

  Kendra is the straightest woman you have ever slept with. She’s so normal, she seems like a freak. You are twenty and she is twenty-five and she has, to your horror and dismay, a retirement plan.

  “Really?” you say. “You’re planning on retiring?”

  “I’m not planning on retiring,” she says. “I’m planning for retirement.”

  You just look at her. She looks like Julie Christie.

  “There’s a difference,” she says. “You might want to think about your future a little more than you do.”

  “I’m not a big planner,” you say and she gives you a pissed-off look.

  One day at work, a homeless woman comes in and sits in your section. You know her. You let her sit in your section and she buys a coffee and you look the other way while she goes to the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet. The other servers know her too, and no one gives a shit that she steals food from the buffet. She needs food more than anyone who’s ever walked into the restaurant. Besides, they throw away buckets full of food at the end of every lunch.