Whisper to Me (11 page)

Dr. Rezwari frowned. “Are you well?” she asked. “Is the voice talking to you now? Does it want you to hurt me?”

“PUT YOUR HANDS AROUND THAT ******* ******’S NECK AND CHOKE HER. DO IT NOW. KILL HER BEFORE—”

“Drugs,” I said quietly, as loudly as I could manage.

“I’m sorry?”

“Drugs,” I said. “Please. Now.”

They started giving me risperidone.

This is the good thing about risperidone: it stops you hearing voices, most of the time.

This is the bad thing about risperidone: everything else.

You start sleeping all the time, you can’t remember things, the walls of your mind become slippery as if oiled. You feel tired every second of every day, perceive the world through frosted glass.

Anyway, I was outside looking at the roses—because what else is there to do when you’re in a mental institution—when I felt the presence of someone behind me. I turned around and there was this preposterously beautiful girl standing there. She sort of flicked a cigarette into her mouth from a packet of Lucky Strikes in a move that seemed almost magical, and lit it with a match. She took a deep drag and blew smoke over the roses.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

I blinked at her.

She gestured at the walls of the hospital encircling us. She was too thin—her wrists were rails—and she had dark bags under her eyes, but those eyes were fat almonds and her lips were a bow. She looked like a model doing an old-school heroin-chic photo shoot.

“Not a talker, huh?” she said. She was maybe five years older than me, twenty-two, something like that. She blew a perfect ring of smoke that rippled over a red rose.

I shrugged.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I talk enough for two anyways.” She stuck out her hand to shake mine, like a businesswoman or something. I was surprised so I took it without thinking.

“My name’s Paris,” she said as she pumped my hand up and down. “But really I’m more of a Delaware. An Atlantic City at best.”

“What?” I said. I couldn’t help it. I was living in a fog, but this girl was like a wind machine; she blew the fog away. I don’t know, she just had this energy. You wanted her attention on you as soon as you met her; it was like sunshine. Which was surprising because everything about her was dark—black hair, almost-black eyes, black clothes.

She smiled, and I realized there had been a thin cloud over the sun all that time; now she was blasting rays at me, beaming, in the real sense of the word, and it was like being floodlit. “A lame joke,” she said. “Commenting wryly on the hyperbolic romanticism of my name. And shit.”

I laughed. I didn’t know anyone who used words like “hyperbolic.” “Cassie,” I said. “Short for Cassandra. My parents weren’t romantics. Or big readers of Greek myth, evidently.”

“Ha,” she said. “Cassandra of the disbelieved prophecies. Okay. You predict ending up in here?”

“No,” I said.

“Figures. What’s the deal? Depression? Self harm?”

“I don’t know. Psychotic dissociation. Schizophrenia, maybe.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Impressive.”

“You?” I asked.

“Bipolar. A bunch of shit.”

“Bipolar?”

“It’s what they used to call manic depression. Doesn’t matter. Just know that it sucks. Well, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you feel great. That’s kind of the whole entire problem.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Not your fault,” she said with perfect equanimity.

“Of course,” I said. “We’re always alone with our inner voices, we Cassandras.”

Paris laughed and stubbed out her cigarette on a low wooden wall that was holding in the earth and the roses. “You’re cool,” she said. “Most people in here can only talk about the Kardashians and
Jersey Shore.
Hopefully I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You too.”

She turned and started to walk away. Then she stopped. She came back to me, hugged me tight, and automatically I hugged her back, as if someone putting their arms around you is a switch that flicks you into doing the same thing; she felt delicate under my hands, like she might float away, like she had the bones of a bird.

She pulled back and out of the hug.

I stared at her. Not offended, just surprised.

“Sorry,” she said. “I have boundary issues. Apparently.”

Then she really did walk away. Her jeans were designer, I noticed, and she was wearing the kind of jewelry that you just know isn’t fake. Rich dad, I figured. I was right about that, as it turned out. But I was wrong about where the expensive jewelry came from.

With her going, the fog rushed back in, and I was enveloped in grayness again. I did a couple more laps of the rose garden, but my eyelids were drooping and pretty soon I went back in to lie motionless on my bed.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Weird thing though:

Often, when I was looking at the blank white ceiling of my hospital room, one of those ceilings made of square panels of thin board, as if the whole building was made to be disassembled quickly if necessary, often, at those times, counting the white panels or watching a fly buzzing across them, what I would be thinking about was …

You.

You, climbing the stairs to the apartment. You, smiling.

I didn’t really get it at the time, though I let it happen because when I was seeing you, strangely, I tended to feel calmer, more in control, more like some hand wasn’t going to reach down and take apart all those panels and the bricks of the walls, like children’s building blocks, and leave me defenseless on a bed propped up only by air and teetering scaffolding.

It puzzled me though, because, like I said, you didn’t make a big impression on me when we met.

Yeah. Right.

Dad visited, a couple of days later, and I couldn’t even muster the energy to speak to him at first. He sat in the plastic chair in the corner of my room. There was a copy of a Graham Greene novel on my bed. Dr. Rezwari had given it to me, but even though I didn’t hear the voice anymore, I didn’t have the energy to read it.

I was lying on my bed, which was what I did much of the time. There wasn’t even a view of the ocean out my window—just a redbrick wall.

Dad handed me a local newspaper, like, I don’t know, he thought I had been really missing out on all the news about traffic zoning and the plan to build more community housing in Linklater Heights, and really needed to stock up on coupons for
99¢ BURGERS.

“I’ll read it later,” I said.

“The regulars have been asking about you,” said Dad. “Fat Joe. The Greek. Marty. They send their regards.”

There was not even an echo of a thought in my mind about this information. Fat Joe, who liked to sit at the bar by the wood-fired oven of the restaurant and drink grappa, was no longer a part of my world.

“Dad,” I managed. “I just want to sleep.”

He nodded. It looked like there were more lines around his eyes and mouth than I remembered. “Okay, honey,” he said. “Okay.” He came over and lifted the sheets at the bottom of the bed and laid them over me, like I was a little kid. Then he reached out his hand to stroke my hair.

“I’m sorry, Cass,” he said.

“Sorry for what?”

“I don’t know. For whatever I did wrong. For whatever … has made you like this.”

“Nothing made me like this,” I said.

Silence.

“I just …” He paused. “You’re my life. I would sell my soul if it would make you better.”

A wheel came off the mechanism of my breathing; it rasped and scraped in my chest, loose, broken. I hugged myself.

I wanted to cry, but the risperidone wouldn’t let me.

Okay, so that’s basically the bad stuff out of the way. I mean, apart from me trampling all over your heart but … Okay, that’s not all the bad stuff out of the way.

I mean more: that’s the important bad stuff from
before
you. And I’m going to have to start summarizing a bit now; otherwise I’m never going to get this finished before Wednesday, and I figure I have to give you two days to read it. Your dad said you were going to college Saturday, so Friday is my last chance.

So …

Hmm …

JUST SKIP TO WHEN YOU WENT HOME, CASSIE.

That was the voice, speaking to me right at this moment, as I type this. I hear the voice again these days, but she’s my friend now. I know, I know. I’ll explain. Honestly, this will all make sense.

Anyway, she’s right.

So:

I went home from the hospital some number of days later. Maybe ten days. I had a prescription for risperidone and another for paroxetine, which is an antidepressant that has a super-high incidence of suicide in those trying to come off it—a fun little fact the doctor didn’t tell me at the time. You can just assume that I met with Dr. Rezwari quite a few times when I was in the hospital but we didn’t really talk about anything. She just gave me risperidone and referred me to a counselor in the town to talk about my mother, when I was ready to.

And that was it. They discharged me.

Luckily, when I came back from the hospital, you and Shane weren’t there. It would have been amazingly awkward if you had been. You were out somewhere, working on the piers, I guess. I don’t know what my dad told you about where I had been; maybe he didn’t tell you anything, I mean, it’s not like he is accountable to the people he rents the apartment to.

Anyway, I was glad you weren’t there.

No offense.

From the side window in my room, I could see a small corner of the beach. Just a sliver—between the roofs of two houses, crisscrossed by telephone wires. A V-shaped fragment of ocean. I sometimes used to focus on it and pretend I was on a ship floating over an endless ocean. It was something Mom taught me to do, when I was worried about something.

I tried it, that first day home, but I didn’t have the energy.

That day and the next, I just lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. I also tried reading—there was no voice to tell me not to, or at least the voice was quiet now; muffled—but I couldn’t get past page one of any book I tried.

I heard Shane come home at sunset. Dad was still at Donato’s. I looked out the front window of my room. Shane set himself up in the yard—he unfolded a lawn chair, sat down, and cracked open a beer. There was a six-pack by his feet. He didn’t do anything; he didn’t read or listen to music or call anyone. He just sat there and slowly drank the beers. Shane has the kind of mind that people who have had a mental illness envy.

A couple of hours later, a white Ford F-150 with the Piers branding on it pulled up to the sidewalk. I saw you get out of it and walk over to Shane. He stood up, walked over to the pickup, and spoke to you for a bit. Then he gave you a high five. You joined him—he pulled up another lawn chair—and he handed you a beer. You were wearing a Piers uniform—khaki chinos, a pale denim shirt with the logo showing the two piers on the pocket. A CB radio was clipped to your collar.

He’s not gutting shrimp
, I thought. Because you wouldn’t have been driving that branded pickup truck if you were. I wondered what job you had gotten at the piers. I was interested. I watched you and Shane, drinking your beers, chatting. It was calming, somehow. But then you saw me at the window, and I ducked down, ashamed.

You must have thought I was such a weirdo.

The next morning I had my first outpatient appointment at the hospital. Dad was coming back from the restaurant to drive me at eleven. I went downstairs and out onto the porch. Five minutes later, I got a call from Dad on my cell. He’d insisted on getting me a new one to make sure he could contact me when he needed to. I didn’t mind so much—I wasn’t hearing the voice as often since taking the drugs, so the idea of invisible people speaking in my ear wasn’t as scary as it had been. It was a cheap cell; it didn’t even have the Internet. But I didn’t care.

I pressed the Answer button.

“Honey,” said Dad. “Chef has cut himself bad. There’s no one else here; I’ve got to take him to get it sutured.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, sorry. Can you ride the bus?”

I closed my eyes. “Um, yes. I guess.”

“There’s five dollars on the hall table. Sorry again, honey.”

“He hates you,” said the voice, matter-of-factly. It was quiet now, the voice, and I hardly ever heard it, but occasionally I would get these bursts, like a radio catching fragments of speech from the ether. “He wishes you were dead, like your mother.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Huh?” said Dad.

“Nothing, Dad. Nothing.”

I hung up. Then I started walking to the street. I’d have to take two buses, I thought. The 9 and the 3. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make my appointment at eleven thirty.

I turned left on the sidewalk and walked to the bus shelter. I leaned against it to wait. No one else was there. I could see joggers and Roller Bladers passing, one block closer to the ocean, but here in the residential layer, layer three, nothing moved. There was a time I would have listened to music or something, but I didn’t. It was weird: there were moments, like then, when I almost missed the voice talking to me. I mean, it had made me do terrible things, mostly to myself. But it had been company, you know?

Now I had no one, and I was living in permanent mist, obscuring everything, making it woolly and still.