Detour from Normal (20 page)

I desperately needed some quality sleep, so I came up with a plan. I drove a short distance from the dealership to a hotel. I asked the desk clerk for a room that was dark and quiet, one that would be shielded from road noise and the morning sun so I might finally get some decent sleep. They found a perfect room for me. It was cool, quiet, and pitch-black with the lights off. I wouldn't hear or see anything of the outside world. Beth's credit card cancellations had not yet gone into effect, and my card was accepted. After getting the room, I realized that I hadn't thought ahead enough to pack a bag. I drove home to collect some things.

In the short time I'd been away, the Army for Ken had grown and planted a trap for me. The first clue I had that something was amiss was that there was no place to park in my driveway or the street near my home—there were cars parked everywhere. I was wary, but since there wasn't a fire truck, I entered my home anyway.

As soon as I walked in the front door, I was surrounded. There were people on the stairs, in the living room, and in the hallway. Some of them were family, others were friends, and a few I'd never seen before. It appeared that I'd walked straight into my own intervention.

Everyone began speaking at once. One woman I'd never met explained that she'd had an adverse drug reaction once and my interest spiked, thinking that perhaps she had a solution to my sleep problems. But when she described it, it wasn't anything like what I was experiencing. Others professed that I needed help but neglected to elaborate on what kind of help I should get. Still others seemed to favor a "shock and awe" approach, hoping that if they repeated things loud and long enough, something in my brain would switch and I'd snap back into reality.

Regardless of what people were trying to tell me, I
felt
perfectly fine, and I didn't want to be told what to do by a truckload of people,
especially with memories of Pinecrest and Scottsdale Samaritan still fresh in my mind. I had no desire whatsoever for any more testing or treatment. As I glanced around at the jabbering crowd, I noticed my haggard wife standing quietly in the background. My heart sank. It was clear to me that of the two of us, she was the one who needed help the most at that particular moment. She looked more beaten down with each passing day and was the worst I'd ever seen her. I tried to convince everyone that Beth needed help. I emphasized how run down and gaunt she looked, but they would have nothing to do with it, believing I was trying to deceive them. The more I begged them to help her, the more it seemed to enrage them.

I was simply throwing gasoline on fire. It infuriated them that I wouldn't see the light. In the movies or on television, when someone has lost his mind, a slap in the face brings him right out of it. In real life, if someone is mentally ill and you slap him, he'll most likely remain mentally ill. The verbal battle continued until finally the gal who had suffered the adverse drug reaction agreed to help Beth.

That was a big turning point for me. I was overjoyed at the possibility that Beth might stop her downward spiral and return to her normal self. Everyone settled down after that. They convinced me to stay home instead of going back to the hotel and said they'd take Beth to her friend Caroline's home, which was just around the block, so I could get some decent sleep. In the morning they'd take her to get help.

My brother then drove with me to the hotel. He asked me to stay in the car while he worked on getting my money back for the room. I didn't know what his plan was, but I imagined he must have tried to convince the desk clerk that I was mentally ill and that he should give me a refund. When he came out, to my amazement, he claimed he had taken care of it.

Dana then took me home. Just after we arrived, I asked him if I could see Beth so I could show my support and wish her luck the next morning. He walked with me around the block to my neighbor Caroline's home, rang the doorbell, then turned and asked me if I'd wait outside while he talked with everyone. The door opened and Dana walked in. He was inside a long time. When he finally came out, he said it wouldn't be a good idea for me to see Beth just then, so we turned around and walked back home. Dana and I talked briefly in the quiet house after that, and then he went to bed early.

On a whim I decided to give my close-knit dog pack a test by taking them for a walk without leashes, something I'd never done before. I wanted to see if their "stick tight" attitudes were for real. Sure enough, as we walked they kept a close eye on me and never got more than a few feet away. We walked like that for a quarter of a mile before I began to feel concern for their safety. I'd never seen them behave that way. I felt as if the whole arrangement was destined to self-destruct at any moment if I continued, and one of my friends would separate from the pack and be hit by a car, or they'd all disperse and I'd be unable to round them up. That was the only time the dogs strayed a little farther—when I turned around to walk home. They had a look in their eyes that said, "You've got to be kidding." Annabelle cocked her head, Kobee perked her ears, and Washington looked over his shoulder; then they fell back in around me, and we walked as a unit back home. Once there, I opened the door and the dogs filed in one by one and sat, calmly waiting for me in the entryway. I followed them in, shut the door, and locked it.

If I had known better, I would have recognized the warning flags that were popping up that evening. My two days without sleep were turning into three, and my mind was reaching the point where it could
no longer compensate. It narrowed my brain function and heightened my senses even more. My mind was so narrow and my senses so heightened that the world was on the edge of looking magical.

After locking the door, I turned and the family portrait on the wall caught my eye—there was something odd about it. I approached and studied it. It seemed more vivid than I remembered, but there was something else. Upon closer scrutiny I noticed that the kids looked no different, but both Beth and I looked younger, and in particular I was thinner and my hair was darker. There was another portrait below it from a few years earlier. The natural desert backdrop of that portrait was lusher, and Beth and I looked the picture of health and years younger. Not believing what I was seeing, I removed the portraits from the wall and took them into the nearby laundry room where the light was brighter. In that light Beth and I looked as we did when we first met. In disbelief I lay the portraits down on top of the washer and dryer and started examining other objects in the house.

I walked to the family room and picked up a photo of Beth's parents from the entertainment center. I noticed that their wrinkles were gone and that her father had more hair. As I continued my investigation, it became more and more apparent that everything in my home, to one extent or another, had become a perfected version of its former self. The things I saw brought tears to my eyes. How could I be seeing this? It was as if I was awake but dreaming at the same time. Everything was where it should be, but all of it was different in unexpected ways. I removed an antique saltshaker from a cupboard and examined it closely. The previously random scratches in its finish were now evenly and symmetrically dispersed, and the blotched and faded paint was instead uniformly aged.

I walked into my garage, turned on the outside light, and then continued through the side door. There, on a concrete pad, sat my latest
project: a 1954 Plymouth Belvedere that I hoped to restore. The car lay under a nylon cover and a large tarp. When I'd purchased the car, it hadn't run in thirty years. It was all original, complete with scratched, dull paint and a stained, torn, and faded interior. I opened the gate to my yard, removed the cover and tarp, and threw them in the front yard. The paint had the same symmetric scratches as the saltshaker, but they seemed prismatic and suspended in a thick layer of clear gloss that protected the like-new color of what until then had been a fifty-six-year-old factory paint job. When I peered through the driver's window, there was still a tear in the driver's seat, but instead of a jagged and frayed tear with chunks of discolored foam missing, there was a smooth and beautifully shaped tear encircling fresh foam, and the stains in the fabric had vanished. In addition, the aged gray headliner had transformed into the rich pastel blue it had been from the factory. In excited anticipation I attempted to raise the hood to see what wonders might await in the untouched, original engine compartment, but oddly, the hood latch, which had worked perfectly until then, refused to budge. I wondered if perhaps, unlike the objects inside my home, it was not finished perfecting, and that treasure would have to wait until later.

I continued next to the pool, uncertain what to expect. I turned on the pool light and pump, and waited for the sheer-descent waterfall to pour out its thin sheet of water, believing that somehow it was going to be "the big show." As I waited for the pump to fill the plumbing, I casually observed the water jets along the side of the pool about a foot below the water surface streaming bubbles as the plumbing filled with water. In stark contrast to the blur I was used to, I instead could see each individual bubble as it slowly danced and undulated on its way toward the surface as if it was moving through mineral oil. Some of the smaller
bubbles merged together on the underside of the water surface to create flat, pancake-like bubbles. I didn't understand why those looked so strange but then realized why they weren't the same dome shape of the other surface bubbles—they were upside down. Apparently the surface tension of the water was high enough that the air was trapped below the water surface. Those bubbles must have always been present, but they were so short lived and lost in the blur that I had never been able to see them before. As I puzzled over why I was able to see any of that, I realized that my brain was apparently processing things much faster. It was like watching a slowed-down, high-speed video—only this was real time.

I've since re-created this event and photographed these unique bubbles with a high-speed digital SLR camera. The bubbles formed by the jets are indeed different than those of the sheer descent or any other bubbles we typically see. Amazingly, though most of the other experiences of that evening remain a mystery, the unusual bubbles were in fact real.

I shut the pump off to save what air remained in the plumbing and ran in to get my brother, unsure if he would see anything or not. Surprisingly, his door was locked. No light showed from under it, and I detected snoring from inside. With nothing else to do, I decided to explore my
neighborhood. When I stepped out the front door, the miracles continued. A warm, inviting glow from the streetlamps showed the world in a new light. The street looked the same from a distance, but once I approached it, I noticed the jagged cracks were gone and the asphalt looked as if it had been freshly laid by a road-paving machine—I could almost smell the smoking tar and feel the heat rising from it. The sky was as black as coal on a moonless night. Each star was the brightest of bright, and there seemed a billion more than usual. The temperature felt neutral, neither too hot nor too cold, and a steady breeze was blowing. The fronds of a nearby date palm rustled in the breeze. Its majestic trunk was lit in its entirety by a single ornamental spotlight at its base. When I gazed up the trunk, I could see the shadows of cut marks from years of trimming. Instead of being rough and irregular, they were so uniform that they looked like screw threads that had been meticulously turned on a lathe. A car drove by, its tires completely silent on the new blacktop. It glided at an ideal speed, and its engine purred like a newborn kitten. Every object I encountered displayed its own magic, and the surprises were never ending. My walk took me by my neighbor's home where Beth was staying. I rang the doorbell, hoping to see her. No one answered, so I rang again. The house remained silent, and I noticed that all the lights were off. I left and continued to explore the neighborhood.