Schizo (3 page)

DR. FRANKEL LEANS FORWARD
again, resting his meaty elbows on his short legs.

“Well?” he asks, clapping his hands together. “Are you still fixated on that day at the beach?”

I breathe out long and slow and go on, fighting back the tears.

“I don't know,” I lie. “I guess not.”

“Miles. I can't help you if you don't talk to me. The medication can only do so much.”

He frowns then. The clock tick-ticks on the table next to him.

“I think maybe we should try upping the Abilify then, along with the Zyprexa. Does that sound agreeable to you?”

“Agreeable?” I try to laugh a little, but it doesn't come out right. “Not really—but I'll do it.”

Dr. Frankel picks up the bag of carrots again.

“I promise you, Miles, you don't have to keep blaming yourself for having this disease. It is a disease, after all—completely beyond your control. You understand that, don't you?”

“Yeah. No, of course,” I say.

He smiles. “And no one blames you, either.”

The clock keeps on ticking.

And now all I do is wait.

THE BUS GOING DOWN
Geary toward our little house in Outer Richmond is an express, so it's a pretty quick trip from Laurel Village, where Dr. Frankel's office is located.

I sit on the hard, plastic, orange-painted seat. Everything smells strongly of dried sweat and some kind of hard alcohol from the homeless guy sleeping on one of the front bench seats. He's all sprawled out and drunk, which usually the bus drivers get pissed off about—though I guess they're letting it slide today.

The guy is wearing, like, five different jackets, and his sneakers are wrapped all the way up to his ankles with duct tape. He's completely passed out, his mouth open.

He could just be a regular drunk.

Or even a junkie.

But the chances are, I mean . . .

The chances are . . .

That someone like him . . . is someone like me.

Sick. Schizo. And it really only feels like a matter of time before they find me like that—sleeping in rags, riding the bus all day long 'cause I got nowhere else to go.

Just a matter of time.

I stare out the clouded window at the low-hanging fog and gray sky. We pass the Coronet movie theater and then the Alexandria.

My mom and I—we don't have much to say to each other right now, but that's one thing we still have in common.

We both love movies.

Old movies, new movies, anything, really.

For that little bit of time, I don't have to be in my head.

The only problem is, as the movie's winding down, I always get this feeling of intense sadness and dread, knowing I have to go back to my real life.

I wonder if my mom feels the same way.

In a perfect world I could just stay in bed and watch movies forever.

But I guess in that same perfect world I wouldn't have this goddamn disease in the first place.

All the kids in school wouldn't look at me like I might attack them with my pen or something—even now, two years later.

Not that the episode at the beach that day was my only one.

There was the time—a few months later—I thought Jane was trapped in the cushions of our couch. My parents walked in on me screaming and crying and tearing all the stuffing out trying to find her.

And then, just three weeks after that, at school, no less, when the crows came back, I ran screaming out of algebra class—as they clawed and pecked and tore at the doors and windows.

No one's ever looked at me quite the same since then. Not even Preston and Jackie.

People are scared, I guess.

They're scared of me.

And at home it's not much different.

The bus lurches and comes hissing to a stop as me and these two old ladies with platinum hair, speaking loudly to each other in Russian, get off at the back.

The wind is blowing strong now off the ocean, and the two old women lock arms like a married couple crossing the street together.

I walk down the uneven sidewalk—the crows circling overhead as they always do.

Whether they're real or not—delusion or reality—I have no idea.

I see them most days.

In spite of the medication they are there, among the trees and crooked branches and all along the rooftops. They duck their heads, peering out from behind the sloping rain gutters, the tapestry of telephone wires and power lines and thick, heavy Internet cables and cords connecting satellite dishes.

They live amongst the wires.

The wires that are everywhere.

Like the crows that are watching, spying, jerking their heads back, twitching, the wires are alive. Forever wrapping and tangling and tying.

Forever transmitting.

Forever receiving.

Like the fire lighting up my brain.

It is
all
schizo—the houses with their wires, the downloads and news feeds and pop-up windows.

The crows picking through the discarded waste—tearing out what's left of my, of all of our, humanity.

Everybody on earth is connected to some electronic wireless device that does nothing but create advertising and waste time and make us all ADD and ADHD and manic-depressive, neurotic, obsessive-compulsive, whatever.

I look at these houses sealed tight in all their wires—the crows waiting to come and eat what's left of our atrophied brains.

People are lighted only by the glow of their televisions or computer screens, watching the lives of other people on reality shows and YouTube videos—resentful that they themselves are not the rich and famous ones, the ones with reality shows of their own. Because somehow, in these houses with all the wires, nothing is actually worth doing unless it is seen by other people.

And so our brains turn slowly into mush.

While the crows peer and perch among the wires—waiting, biding their time 'til they can swoop in and pick clean our remains.

San Francisco is all wires and crows, surrounding me on all sides as I walk the rest of the way home. The wind sounds like someone sucking in air and swishing their tongue around in their mouth at the same time.

I pull the hood from my sweatshirt up over my head and try to protect the record that I bought at Amoeba today during our lunch break. It's an old gospel LP my dad told me about, and I'm excited to listen to it.

My mom and I have old movies. My dad and I have old music.

We both love vinyl—jazz and blues, gospel, swing, early rock and roll.

I shelter the record from the hammering wind.

And I start to run a little down the street.

The sky is nearly dark.

And the cold cuts deep inside.

FOR THE PAST TEN
years we've lived in a three-bedroom house in the Outer Richmond District just across from a crowded Taiwanese market that sells all kinds of cheap electronic equipment and smells of strange herbs and spices. Old women walk, bent, pushing carts, with white handkerchiefs covering their bowed heads. They wear long patchwork jackets and red-and-black sandaled clogs that tap-tap against the sidewalk and echo loudly through the streets. The men smoke brown-tipped cigarettes and shout at one another when they talk and play cards and mah-jongg on makeshift tables set up under the store's awning.

Next to the market is a bakery that makes different pastries filled with mysterious sweet and savory ingredients; my dad likes to take us there in the mornings before school. And then there's the butcher shop with links of sausage and entrails and smoked pigs' heads and whole cured ducks and chickens hanging up on display behind the large plate-glass windows. On the opposite side of the street there is a little grocery store and a Laundromat and then, on the corner, a Vietnamese restaurant, where men sit at the lunch counter eating bowls of steaming noodles and drinking beer in tall glasses. It was Teddy, actually, who liked the Vietnamese food the most. He loved anything spicy, and he'd eat the red chili paste and hot peppers straight out of the bowl, which is crazy because they make me sick as hell.

Our next-door neighbors, the Paganoffs, are an elderly Russian couple, both of them short and squat and balding. The woman wears blond wigs and white powdered makeup, and the man wears suspenders and tight undershirts that roll up at the bottom, exposing his round belly. He sits on the porch in an oversize easy chair smoking black, smelly cigars and watching his own TV through the window with the volume turned up all the way. A lot of times he'll talk to me while I'm out smoking, even though his English is terrible and I have a hard time making out what he's trying to say.

My dad buys my cigarettes for me because he figures, after everything I've been through, I should be able to smoke if I want—especially since I can't smoke pot anymore or drink or whatever 'cause of all the medication. Besides, it's only two more years until I can buy them on my own. And my dad smokes, too, so he understands where I'm coming from.

At the back of our house there is a small yard full of hard-packed dirt and tangled blackberry with nettles and artichoke. The fence is rotted out. My mom used to work out there in the garden for hours, but since that day on the beach, she's left it to grow wild.

The lot behind ours is vacant, and when I was little, I built a fort of found plywood and grocery store pallets in a clearing in the bramble. The fort was packed with sleeping bags and blankets and milk crates and comic books and flashlights. The only time I was ever brave enough to sleep out there was when I was with Eliza Lindberg, who was my best friend besides Preston in seventh and eighth grades. To tell you the truth, I was totally in love with her. I mean, it's no big fucking secret. We used to spend every weekend together, and her family took me on trips to Tahoe and even to Hawaii once.

I fell in love with her the very first time we hung out. We went to a movie after school, and Eliza bought M&M's and poured them into her popcorn, and we ate the M&M's/popcorn mixture as the chocolate melted and our hands touched in the dark.

She loved movies like I did and music and we used to talk really intensely for hours on the phone all about our families and everything. I think we were both able to tell each other things that we couldn't tell anyone else. She trusted me to keep her secrets, and for the most part, I trusted her to keep mine. She would talk to me about her dad, who was this celebrity chef, being gone all the time and her mom's drinking. And I'd tell her about my mom's crazy up-and-down moods and how I felt so different from all the kids my age—including Preston—like this alien dropped off on the planet by mistake. Not that I wasn't friends with the other kids in my class; I was. But that feeling of otherness never left me, like I could never let anyone know who I really was.

Until I met Eliza.

Because she was like an alien, too, dropped on Earth from whatever planet it was that I came from.

She was
like
me.

And we listened to music together and watched movies and slept out in that fort at night talking about school and our dreams and everything, really.

We relied on each other.

At least, we did when we were together after school. Around the other kids in our class, she would ignore me or even make fun of me sometimes. Maybe she was embarrassed because of the stuff she told me. I never could figure it out. I just had to content myself with knowing that, when we were alone together, she understood me and I understood her.

She remained my closest friend for all of seventh and eighth grades.

But then I ruined everything.

I mean, everything.

And still I can't help thinking about her—pretty near every day.

As I climb the white painted wooden steps to our house, I wonder if maybe I should take that fort apart. But I know that's stupid. I'd just go on thinking about her whether the fort was there or not.

Across the low picket fence I see Mr. Paganoff, the Russian man next door, sitting in his easy chair, wrapped in a heavy coat against the cold. I wave to him, and he smiles very wide.

“Miles!” he announces proudly, as if maybe he'd been struggling to remember my name.

The shops across the street are all shut down for the night and there are no cars driving past, so there is only the noise from Mr. Paganoff's TV blaring as I unlock the door.

Inside there is a fire going, and one of my dad's old jazz LPs is playing on the record player.

I put my stuff down by the front door and Jane comes running over.

Jane's hair is darker now, like mine, and she wears it long and messy just like I do. Actually, I'd say of my whole family, it's Jane and I who look the most alike. Though, luckily for her, she's a whole lot prettier than I am.

“MILES!!!” she yells.

I bend down and kiss the top of her head. “What's up, little frog?”

She laughs at that. “We're making brownies.”

I notice the chocolate smeared across her face. “I see that. Can I help?”

She smiles and nods. “Of course.”

“Hey, I almost forgot,” I tell her. “I got a new record from Amoeba. You wanna listen?”

Again she nods. “What is it?”

I grab the record from off the floor next to my bag. “Some guy Dad told me about. He's, like, an early twenties Christian gospel blues singer. He played this weird instrument called a phonoharp, I think.”

She crinkles her nose. “A phonoharp?”

“That's what it says.”

She takes my hand in hers. “You know, you are seriously a weirdo.”

And then, when I don't answer right away, she adds, “I mean that in a good way.”

“Well, thanks. And you . . .” I pause. “Are very, very normal.”

She laughs some more.

Because the house is small, pretty much everything is in the front room by the fireplace. The couch is relatively new, some cheap thing my dad and I had to put together from Ikea, considering I massacred the last one. And there's a big La-Z-Boy. The floors are all hardwood and uneven, like you're walking on a ship, and the walls are painted a dull yellow color. There's a crack running jaggedly across the ceiling starting from the front door that lets in water when it rains. One of my dad's buddies came by a couple years ago with some plaster sealant, but, for whatever reason, it didn't work. Every winter the crack just grows a little deeper. There's a rust-colored stain bleeding out from the center. Even now I can see condensation forming there from the fog coming in.

It's one of those things we don't like to talk about, though. My mom gets upset whenever she sees it or thinks about it, and then she'll start picking at my dad about why he hasn't fixed it, and he'll take it and take it until he snaps back and then they have a huge fight.

When that happens it's my job to take Jane into my room and read—usually from this collection of stories we've always loved called
Nathaniel and Isabel.
They're these books that I think are French, but translated into English, about two children who've run away from an orphanage and this evil governess lady who's always after them. The stories are all pretty much the same, with the two little orphans always escaping just at the last second. But I was obsessed with those books when I was a kid. Whenever I was scared at night, I'd get up and read them to myself until I could fall back asleep.

I used to read them to Teddy, too, and Jane—and I still read them to her when our parents fight.

Which really isn't all that much, honestly. It's just that crack in the ceiling that sets my mom off. So we live beneath it without ever looking up at it.

Now, since Teddy's disappearance, we mostly just eat dinner on our laps watching TV or whatever, but tonight, for some reason, my dad's decided to cook something nice—roast pork and Brussels sprouts (which, maybe surprisingly, I love)—so he wants us all to eat at the actual dining room table.

I go over and change the record on the turntable.

All the nice stuff we have is from back when my dad still had his staff job at the
Chronicle.
The record player, the speakers, the TV, the PlayStation, the DVD player, our cell phones, the computer, even the art and photographs. It's like the whole house is frozen in some sort of time warp.

Like we're still living in 2010.

The record crackles loudly as it finds its rhythm, and a man starts in, talking.

“What are they doing in heaven today? I don't know, boy, but it's my business to stay here and sing about it.”

And then he does, his voice coming through clear and pained and beautiful. Just his voice and that strange instrument, sounding like a child's toy.

“This is awesome,” Janey says.

We pour the brownie mixture into a pan and then take turns licking chocolate batter off the long metal spoon.

“What is this terribly depressing music?” My mom comes out of her room wearing a plush-looking bathrobe over her loose-fitting striped pajamas. “Is this yours, Miles? Go turn that off right now.”

Jane looks up proudly. “It's a phonoharp.”

My mom remains unconvinced.

“I mean it, Miles. Turn it off. It's too depressing.”

“Okay, okay,” I say, going over to turn the record off.

She stands there for a moment, breathing.

“I'm sorry,” she finally says. “I didn't mean to snap at you. I've just been so . . .” She trails off.

“It's okay,” I tell her. “I get it.”

She goes to take Dad's roast out of the oven, replacing it with the pan of brownie batter. She puts the roast on the stovetop and turns toward me. Her hair has gone almost completely white since Teddy's disappearance. And, while she's always been very thin, now it's like she's almost sickly. Her hands are knotted and arthritic-looking. There are lines and creases around the corners of her mouth and eyes. I don't say that to be cruel. I know it's my fault. I've made her this way.

“Hey, Mie,” she starts, somewhat abruptly. “Was everything okay today? I didn't see you at lunch.”

My mom works as the librarian at my high school, and ever since I got sick, I'm supposed to check in at least once a day to make her feel better. But I realize now that somehow, today, I totally forgot.

“Well, I . . . I . . .”

“He went to buy that record,” Jane says.

I smile down at her. “That's right, I went to buy that record.”

My mom shakes her head. “You know you're only supposed to spend your money on your cell phone . . . and to help out with your medicine now that the insurance has run out.”

“That's all I do,” I tell her. There's a pressure building steadily on either side of my forehead, like the veins at my temples are filling with blood and starting to squeeze my brain underneath. “It was Dad who told me to buy the record.”

“Well, he shouldn't have done that,” she says. “I'll talk to your father about that later.”

I close my eyes tight, and it's like there's a strobe light flashing in the darkness. My teeth grit together. The medication I'm on always gives me these terrible headaches, but somehow this feels even worse than normal.

And then I hear my dad shouting from their room.

“Talk to me about what?”

I open my eyes to see him walk out wearing pajama bottoms and a San Francisco Giants T-shirt that's a little too small for his big belly.

He looks over in my direction. “Miles. What's up, buddy?”

He comes over and messes my hair; he smells like soap and laundry detergent. His hulking frame looms over me, considering he weighs a good seventy pounds more than I do. Plus he's, like, six foot three, so he's got me beat by at least four inches. There's something comforting about his size, though, making me feel so small like it does.

“Hey, Dad,” I say.

My mom tells him to sit down. “Sam, come on, dinner's ready.”

Sam is my dad's name. My mom's name is Audrey. Sam and Audrey Cole. I think they were happy once.

My dad goes over to wrap his arms around her, but she pulls herself free, turning to face him.

“Did you really tell Miles he could buy a record today?”

My dad makes a face over at us, clenching his teeth together and dropping his head down so it looks like he has about five chins. Then he turns back to Mom and kisses her on the cheek, grabbing her around the waist again and shouting out, “Guilty!”

She doesn't smile. “We talked about this.”

“Oh, honey, come on. He works hard for that money. Anyway, it was probably just . . .” He glances back at me. “Miles, how much did that record cost?”