“What happens? Something is going on in your head? You try to relax and breathe but you can’t do it. Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Tell me.”
“Okay, well, when I start my breathing techniques the first thing I feel is shame. I feel ashamed right off the bat that I have to practice breathing. Like, you know, like I can’t even do the simplest most fundamental thing right. Like it’s one more thing I’m failing at.”
“Okay,” Alice said. “Go on.”
“And then when I start to do the actual breathing I’ll start worrying that I’m not doing it right, that maybe my breathing is flawed or something. That it’s not perfect. That it’s not the ideal breathing technique, which I don’t even know what that is but I’m sure it exists and if I’m not doing it I feel like I’m failing. And not only failing at breathing but generally failing. Like I’m a failure in life if I can’t do this correctly. And the more I think about how to breathe, the more difficult the breathing becomes, until I feel like, you know, I’m going to hyperventilate or pass out or something.”
Brown wrote this down in his journal: Hyperventilate.
“And then I start thinking about if I do pass out then someone will find me and make a big fuss over it and I’ll have to explain why I spontaneously passed out for no reason at all, which is a stupid thing to have to explain to someone, because they’ll think they were being heroic, saving someone from a serious injury or heart emergency or something, and when they find out the only thing that’s wrong with me is that I freaked myself out breathing they get, well, you know, disappointed. You can see it on their face. They’re like: Oh, that’s it? And then I start freaking out that I did not measure up to their expectations of a quality sick or injured person, that perversely my problems are not bad enough to justify their worry, which they are now full of resentment about. And even if none of this actually happens, I see it all play out in my mind, and I get so anxious about the possibility of it happening that it might as well have happened. I feel like I actually experience it, you know? It’s like something doesn’t have to happen for it to feel real. This probably all sounds insane to you.”
“Keep going.”
“Okay, well, let’s say even if I’m able to achieve some feeling of peace and relaxation by miraculously doing the breathing techniques correctly, I’ll enjoy feeling happy and relaxed for maybe ten seconds before I begin to worry about how long it’s going to last, the good relaxed feeling. I worry that I won’t be able to maintain it long enough.”
“Long enough for what?”
“To, you know, be successful at it. To do it right. And every second I feel objectively happy is a second I’m closer to failing and returning again to being essentially myself. The metaphor I have in my mind of what this feels like is walking on a tightrope that has no ending and no beginning. The longer you stay up there, the more energy it takes not to fall. And eventually you begin to feel this melancholy and doom because no matter how good a tightrope walker you are, you will inevitably fall. It is only a matter of time. It is guaranteed. And so instead of enjoying the happy relaxed feeling while I’m having it, I feel this huge sense of dread about the moment I will no longer feel happy or relaxed. Which of course is the very thing that obliterates the happiness.”
“Holy god.”
“This is all going through my head more or less constantly. So when you say ‘Just breathe,’ I think it means something different to you than it does to me.”
“I know what you need,” Alice said. And she rolled across the bed and opened the bottom drawer of her nightstand and rummaged around what appeared to be several brown paper bags until finding the appropriate one and turning it over and shaking out what looked like two small red pills.
“From my personal inventory,” she said, which Officer Brown considered writing down but ultimately did not write down; he never logged anything she did that might be indictable. “Alice’s pharmacy,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Something to make you relax.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“It’s not dangerous. It simply quiets the head a bit, lowers the inhibitions.”
“I don’t need it.”
“Yes, you do. You’re like the Great Wall of Inhibitions.”
“No thank you.”
What were they, Brown wondered. The pills. Maybe psilocybin, mescaline, morning glory seeds? Maybe methedrine, DMT, STP, some kind of barbiturate?
“Listen,” Alice said, “would you like to have a pleasant evening with Sebastian?”
“Yes, but—”
“And do you think you could do that in your current mental state?”
Faye paused a moment and thought this over. “I could produce the appropriate outward appearance of it. I think Sebastian would think I was having a great time.”
“But really, on the inside?”
“Dread and panic that feels just barely bottled up.”
“Yeah, you need these. If you have any interest in having a sincerely good time. Not for him but for you.”
“What do they feel like?”
“Like a sunny day. Like you’re strolling along on a sunny day without a care in the world.”
“I have literally never felt like that.”
“Side effects are they make your mouth gluey. Also weird dreams. Mild hallucinations, but that’s really rare. You want to take them with food. Let’s go.”
Alice took Faye’s hand and they left the room, presumably down to the cafeteria, which would be mostly empty this time of night. The only available food would be breakfast cereal, probably, or the refrigerated leftovers of that day’s dinner. Meat loaf. Brown’s research was narrow but exhaustive. He knew the routines of this dorm as well as he knew those at his own house, where his wife would be waking up in about six hours to a slathering of kisses and compliments from their child. He wondered how much of her was able to sincerely enjoy these compliments, knowing she got them by intimidation and blackmail. He guessed nine-tenths. Almost all of her. But that other bit, he thought, would be throbbing.
He hoped, down in the cafeteria right now, that the girls were talking about him. He hoped Alice would reveal her burgeoning relationship with this cop and how, despite herself, she was falling for him. One of the more depressing things about his nightly surveillance was realizing how little she talked about him or even seemed to think about him when they were not together. Actually never, it would be more accurate to say. She never talked about him. Not once. Even after one of their encounters she’d usually come back and shower and if she did talk to anyone it was about mundane things: school, the protest, girl stuff. Lately the primary topic was the all-female march Alice was organizing for Friday—they planned to parade down Lake Shore Drive with no permit or anything, to stop traffic and walk as they pleased. Alice talked about this endlessly. Not once had she mentioned him. When he wasn’t around it was like he didn’t exist for her, which was painful because he thought about her almost all the time. When he shopped for clothes he wondered how to impress Alice. When he sat through daily Red Squad briefings he waited to hear anything that might involve her. When he watched the TV news with his wife, he imagined it was Alice there with him instead. He was a compass needle always pointed toward her.
He looked out past the dorm to the lights of the lakeshore, the vast gray expanse of Lake Michigan beyond them, a shimmering hot emptiness. The dots in the sky were planes coming into Midway, many of them now containing the advance teams for senators and ambassadors, various chairmen of boards, industry lobbyists, Democratic insiders, pollsters, judges, the vice president, whose itinerary was a secret the White House wouldn’t share even with the police.
He sat on the bed and waited. He risked some light to read the newspaper, the entire front page of which was devoted to either the convention or the protest of the convention. He poured himself a whiskey from the small bar knowing the hotel would provide it gratis, just like all the city diners provided cops with free coffee. This job had its perks.
He must have fallen asleep there because he woke up to the sound of laughter. Girls laughing. His face rested on the crinkled newspaper, his mouth was sticky. He clicked off the small reading light and lumbered over to his position behind the telescope, moving lopsidedly, his arms swinging, his feet scraping along the carpeted floor. He sat and shook his head a few times and tried to blink the sleep away. He had to rub his eyes roughly before he could see anything through the telescope. His stomach felt sour and empty. These night shifts were killing him.
The girls had returned. They were both on the bed, facing each other. They were laughing at something. There were sleep crumbs in his eyes that he had to pick out. The image through the telescope was out of focus, weirdly, as if while he slept their two buildings had crept slowly apart. He fiddled with the knobs. The picture of the girls bounced and bobbed as he did this, triggering a very mild kind of motion sickness that reminded him of sitting in the backseat of a car trying to read.
“There’s so much inside you,” Alice said, recovered now from the laughing fit. She lightly stroked Faye’s hair. “So much happiness.”
Faye was still giggling, softly. “No there’s not,” she said, batting at Alice’s hand. “This isn’t real.”
“You’re wrong. This is more real. You should remember this. This is the real you.”
“It doesn’t feel like the real me.”
“You’re encountering your true self for the first time. It’s bound to be foreign.”
“I’m tired,” Faye said.
“You should remember this feeling and find your way back when you’re sober. This is a map for you. You’re so happy right now. Why aren’t you happy like this all the time?”
Faye stared at the ceiling. “Because I’m haunted,” she said.
Alice laughed.
“I’m serious,” Faye said. She sat up and hugged her knees. “There was a ghost that lived in our basement. A house spirit. I offended it. Now I’m haunted.”
She turned to measure Alice’s reaction.
“I’ve never told anyone that,” Faye said. “You probably don’t believe me.”
“I’m just listening.”
“The ghost came with my father from Norway. It used to be his ghost, but now it’s mine.”
“You should take it back.”
“Back where?”
“Back where it came from. That’s the way to get rid of a ghost. You take it back home.”
“I’m really, really tired,” Faye said.
“Okay, here, I’ll help.”
Faye spread herself drunkenly across the bed. Alice removed her glasses and set them carefully on the nightstand. She walked to the foot of the bed and unlaced Faye’s sneakers and pulled at them lightly until they slipped off. Took off Faye’s socks and balled them up and put them inside the shoes, which she arranged toes-out by the front door. She retrieved a thin blanket from under the bed and covered Faye with it, tucking the edges under her. She took off her own shoes and socks and pants and lay next to Faye, snuggled up against her, stroking her hair. It was the most gentle he’d ever seen Alice act. Certainly more gentle than she’d ever been with him. This was an entirely new side of her.
“D’you have a boyfriend?” Faye said. Her words were slurring together now—she was stoned or on the verge of sleep or both.
“I don’t want to talk about boys,” Alice said. “I want to talk about you.”
“You’re too cool t’have a boyfriend. You’d never do something as square as have a boyfriend.”
Alice laughed. “I do,” she said, and two thousand meters away Officer Brown let out an excited squeak. “Sort of. I have a gentleman friend I’m consistently intimate with, is how I’d describe him.”
“Why not just say boyfriend?”
“I prefer not to name things,” Alice said. “As soon as you name and explain and rationalize your desire, you lose it, you know? As soon as you try to pin down your desire, you’re limited by it. I think it’s better to be free and open. Act on any desire you feel, without thinking or judging.”
“That sounds fun right now, but probably ’cuz of those red pills.”
“Go with it,” Alice said. “That’s what I do. Like, for example, take this guy? My gentleman friend? I don’t feel anything particularly special for him. I have no commitment to him. I’ll use him until I no longer find him interesting. Simple as that.”
And across the street Brown felt his insides plunge.
“I’m always on the lookout for someone who’s more interesting,” Alice said. “Maybe it’s you?”
Faye grunted a kind of sleepy reply: “Mm-hm.”
Alice reached over Faye and clicked off the light. “All your worries and secrets,” she said. “I could do a number on you. You’d love it.”
The bed squeaked as one or both of them stretched into it.
“You know you’re beautiful?” Alice said into the darkness. “So beautiful and you don’t even know it.”
Officer Brown turned up the sound on the speakers. He got into bed and wrapped his arms around a pillow. He concentrated on her voice. He’d been having new and terrifying thoughts lately, daydreams of leaving his wife and convincing Alice to run away with him. They could start a new life in Milwaukee, say, or Cleveland, or Tucson, or wherever she wanted. Crazy new daydreams that left him feeling both guilty and exhilarated. At home his wife and daughter would be asleep in the same bed. They would be doing this for years to come.
“Please stay here,” Alice said. “Everything will be fine.”
Before Alice came along, Brown wasn’t even aware he lacked an essential part of his life, not until he suddenly had it. And now that he had it, there was no way he was letting it go.
“Stay as long as you like,” he heard Alice say, and he tried real hard to pretend she wasn’t talking to Faye. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay right next to you.”
He tried to pretend she was talking to him.