Knock it off! And BTW it was a delusion. I was stressed out. Elementary, my dear Watson.
But the voice was relentless. Delusion. A delusion that made you vamoose all the way to New York.
I suppressed it, and everything else too. My mental archive, my repository of forbidden thoughts; when the floodgates break, take cover.
I looked at the cat and mumbled, “At least someone around here isn’t afraid of you.”
Nick let out a strained laugh that ended in a sob. But he was through crying, tears all used up. And me, my anger was gone, replaced by uneasiness. With Ramses circling him, Nick started typing:
You’re right to be afraid of me, and you have no idea how much that hurts. Only, I don’t think it was a psychosis. Because what I said isn’t true. Oh God, it isn’t true.
And me, awkward, “Whaddya mean?”
I remember it, Sam. I remember drawing those birds. Only it wasn’t me. Like I was watching myself through a window when I took the roll of steel wire and started wrapping you with it. I didn’t mean to hurt you. But that person on the other side of the window did. And I couldn’t stop him. It’s really hard for me to tell you this, but I have to be honest, or you’ll never trust me again. That person really did want to wind the wire around your neck and pull it till your face went red and your eyes bulged, and I couldn’t control myself, like I was pounding on the window and he didn’t hear me. If it can let me do things like that, if it can let me do such terrible things, where does this end?
I almost asked about Augustin’s photo. Almost posed the question that’d been waiting to be posed for weeks, the core question, the essential one: What did he really do to Augustin?
But I didn’t. His dissociative demeanor was giving me the willies. The warning on Wikipedia was clear-cut. When people with a personality disorder have a psychotic episode, they can be dangerous. To others and to themselves.
An icy hand suddenly clamped my balls.
If I don’t succor him now, he’ll start thinking really black thoughts. Hara-kiri type of black.
“Listen.” I spoke slowly and clearly. “There’s nothing that makes you do things. No possession. No other person. You’re not yourself, that’s all. And you could control yourself, because whatever you were thinking, you didn’t let it come to that. See? You were in control. Like it or not, I’m still here. And I ain’t about to leave.”
Those big red eyes between the bands of gauze, they were clinging to me.
“But we’re gonna make some changes around here, Nick. Your strategy for dealing with this, whatever it was, it obviously isn’t working. We’re going to call your shrink, and you’re going to go there today. The psych unit, if necessary. You’re gonna tell them all that happened, and maybe they can help you.”
If I tell them this, they’ll commit me.
I gazed at him for a long time and decided to risk it. “And is that so bad? Maybe you’ll unwind a little. Jesus, Nick, look at you. You’re a wreck. You need help.”
I know, but I don’t want to be committed, Sam. Please, I’ll accept any help, but please let me stay home. Let me stay with you. It’s all I have left.
“Okay, but things are gonna change,” I snapped. It was the pleading; it got on my nerves. Sorry, pal, plead and you lose my respect. Granted, I’m not much of a psychologist. No Prozac, either.
I said, “No more freaky shit in the cellar. No more smileys. I want you to get a prescription for meds. Lithium, antidepressants, whatever. If they give it to you, you take it. And no more booze. I want you on a normal sleep cycle. Here in bed, next to me. Party’s over. Cold turkey.”
Nick nodded, lowered his eyes. “And I wanna come with, to your therapy. This week. I don’t wanna cramp your style or anything, but I also have the right to know how to deal with you.” I thought, And I want a fucking Frappuccino.
Please don’t be mad at me.
“I’m not mad at you,” I sighed. “But that place, the fucking mountain where it all went down, you’re totally obsessed with it. I saw what you’re doing in the cellar. And look.” I pointed to the walls. “Is that freaky or what? I know what you wrote, Nick. I know what the birds in your story mean.”
Those stops while he typed gave me the jitters. Gave me too much room to let my thoughts run, and lemme tell ya, they were sprinting, beeline to those floodgates, to full-frontal-assault it.
It’s like I never left that place. Sometimes I can still hear the wind wail. In the distance, just beyond the real world. I know that wind. It’s the wind that blasted over the glacier, high above the crevasse we fell in. And above the wind I can hear Augustin laughing, only, after a while he isn’t laughing anymore but screaming. Wherever I go. Here. The cellar. The AMC. It follows me. I can’t shake it.
“No shit,” I said.
That mountain, I thought. It’s got into you. You are the mountain now, only not like you think. That’s the exact definition of obsession.
I said, “Talk about it, Nick. With your shrink, with me, whatever feels right. I’m not gonna force you to take that mask off. You’re gonna have to do that yourself. But that’s the only way you’ll find release. Anyway, time for coffee. But I got one more condition.”
Nick tilted his head.
“I’m gonna a buy a bucket of latex and you’re gonna paint over those walls. Today. I’m not gonna sleep here another night with those creepy things in the walls.”
10
Major fast-forward to the night I sneaked a look under the bandages. This is two weeks later, Nick fast asleep, my heart in my mouth on overdrive and me trying to pinch the elastic bandages apart. The shapes under them strange and foreign like a fossil not yet dug out. And all this without waking him up, of course. Shit-scared, but eventually you hadda look, cuz if you didn’t, you’da gone nuts.
This was the new normal in our world. Me staring at him, me on one elbow on my side of the bed, holding my breath. Ramses vigilant and upright at the foot, staring at us wide-eyed. Nick’s chest rising and falling with a deep, sluggish rumble, a sound he’d never made before. That body, Michelangelo’s David undone, meticulously constructed and deconstructed, crunch by supplement by bench press by skin transplant.
I swallowed. I cleared my throat.
The bandages didn’t give. Too tight.
So there you were. Picking at the strips concealing your BF’s ravaged face. Hoping the two extra oxazepams you spiked his chamomile with were enough to keep him out cold, cuz him OD’ing would be too much of a good thing.