Elise and Lessing eat albino lettuce and sludgy carrots in the cafeteria.
“People who have psychedelic breakdowns do occasionally think they’re dead. But the delusion is persistent while under the influence, and then they come back to reality.”
“Yeah, he needs to come on back.”
“A French doctor, Jules Cotard, called it délires des négations. A delirium of negation.”
Elise eats her Jell-O.
“Something is breaking the circuitry. Either in the amygdala, the part of the brain that recognizes human beings as human, or the fusiform face area, the visual system that recognizes faces.” Lessing tosses a vanilla wafer into her mouth. “He’s self-negating.”
“Self-negating.”
“We’ll keep trying different meds. I’m going to double the Haldol.”
“Is that…does that have side effects?”
Dr. Lessing looks at her raisin pudding as she says: “Oh no, not really.”
Elise curls up on his bed, lying across Jamey’s shins. “You’re Cotarded.”
“What?”
“You’re alive, you do realize.”
He seems exhausted by her argument. “Don’t you think I would know if I’m alive?”
Elise pops her gum, staring. “That’s what I would think.”
“You think I’m lying?” he asks, trying to muster up anger.
Elise makes thin bubbles with her gum, then snaps them.
“They said you didn’t sleep last night,” Elise says.
“I don’t need to sleep anymore.”
“Can you do me a favor and fucking go to sleep tonight?”
A blade of sadness steers him away, like a centerboard on a sailboat that lost its rudder, and he can’t get any more words out.
You go through life thinking there’s a secret to life.
And the secret to life is there is no secret to life.
There is just the palest blue light seeping through the curtain, there is Elise’s long hand, there is just this kiss, this cathedral of a moment when she presses her mouth to his, her eyes brimming with crystals.
The hospital gift shop is small, banked with cards, travel-sized toiletries and romance books with embossed covers. Thousands of people have stood here, selves unsheathed, picking up key chains and deodorant and putting them down and picking them up.
Why, Elise thinks, is this happening?
Thousands of people have wondered that too.
He hasn’t been eating, so Elise buys him a box of chocolates.
But when she poises a bonbon at his mouth, he shakes his head.
“Please just eat one,” she says.
“You eat one.”
“Is that how this is going to be? Fine. I’ll eat chocolates for you,” she says sadly.
The May sky is so bright that people look past the skyscrapers and actually notice. Everywhere, at bus stops and crosswalks, heads tilt back, eyes shielded.
Elise connives a service-dog pass and brings Buck upstairs.
Buck sniffs, starry-eyed, at everyone.
But he whimpers when he sees Jamey, and he crouches low, his bushy tail between his haunches.
“Hey there,” Jamey says softly to the dog, like a scientist watching a laboratory mouse.
Elise wonders, despite all her protests, if Jamey could actually be dead.
A celebrity is carried into a private wing like a queen in a palanquin. Her bodyguard’s gold chains rustle as he works a walkie-talkie.
In Jamey’s group meeting, they go around the circle, and everyone has to say: Today I feel…and pick an adjective from the blackboard.
“I feel…amazed,” he says when it’s his turn.
“Do you want to tell us more about that?” says the therapist.
Jamey shakes his head. “No.”
He likes the sterility of his room, after so much grubbiness in life. There had been beetles in his head, bugs crawling on glistening pink matter. He’d been infested with acquaintances and small talk and manners.
He loves his white gown! His body is lost, scattered in this place, eyes exploding with galaxies of revelations. Then his head lies deep in the pillow, face turned to the ceiling, his mouth curved the way coroners know, even though his chest rises and falls.
A white stuffed rabbit, with a red ribbon and black glass eyes, is delivered with this note:
Dear Jamey Hyde,
I feel like a stupid girl. My father and me, we talked about this whole thing that happened, and I decide that I miss you.
I can’t understand what you are thinking now. Jamey, you’re alive! How can it be possible for you to not know this?
That was a made-up dream about you on the escalator. We need to go back and remove this dream, this fantasy. It was Matt wearing your coat!
You’re not dead.
Love, Valentina
P.S. You were the only one who had trouble with what we did, but still, I’m sorry.
Jamey spends time on the dayroom’s orange sofa, watching patients solve jigsaw puzzles.
One person on this floor never wakes.
Someone else walks the halls day and night, never sleeps.
A nurse tells Jamey he has a visitor.
“Hey there, brother!” Matt says in a jovial way he’d been practicing in the mirror.
“Hi,” Jamey says eventually.
“How ya doin’?”
Jamey doesn’t answer.
Sent by the Hydes, Matt was almost psyched to tell his buddies about his trip to the insane asylum, but already he wants to leave—the odor, the monotonous cursing down the hall, and—Jamey. “The doc said we should take a look at old photos, man, stir up some memories.”
When he gets no reaction, Matt opens an envelope of deckle-edged photos.
Two boys in sport coats with baskets of pastel eggs. The year they both had braces, eating lobster and corn at a clambake on the beach. Madras shorts and glowing red eyes. A blurry shot in their first tuxedos at the Gold & Silver Ball. Jamey as a baby, wrapped in white, in a cradle.
“I know these guys,” Jamey says.
“Right,” Matt says, collecting the pictures but avoiding Jamey’s eyes. He can’t tell if Jamey’s kidding.
Matt launches into some disorganized news, pulling his windbreaker, playing with the brim of his Drexel Burnham hat. He looks at his watch. “Shoot, you know what, I gotta run. I’ll be back soon though.”
Matt looks at Jamey sipping juice through a straw, lashes blinking, his cheeks hollow and lips chalky at the edges.
“Do you…want to hang on to these?” Matt asks, holding out the envelope.
“No thanks,” Jamey gently declines.
The four-point cuffing system. Hourly blood-pressure tests. Ten-minute phone calls. Thorazine. Decks of cards. These are the rules of this holding station.
One day, he tells nurses his organs are rotting, he can’t eat, it’s time to let the flesh starve itself clean for the hereafter. Dr. Lessing orders a nasogastric tube through his nose.