He does have clarity sometimes, and realizes that everything is a test to pass out of purgatory. But he can’t tell, no matter what anyone says, if this hospital or that person or the city itself is real or a semblance. He stops asking, frustrated.
He does for a moment doubt it all—that Elise exists, that he actually met and fell in love with her, that he left school, and cut off his family. He seriously wonders if he died a year and a half ago, and this has been a long dream.
Then he thinks—Jamey, you’re being fucking crazy. You just died a month ago.
In the art therapy room, Jamey sits next to a barefoot woman.
“I’m Kim-Ly,” she says, her red-lipstick mouth amused.
“Jamey.”
The woman laughs. “My real name is Lan. I trick you.”
This Vietnamese girl cut quarter-inch bangs with the same scissors she then dragged down her wrists. The bandages on her wrists are fresh.
“You have lots of flowers in your room,” Jamey says, able to talk to her in a way he can’t with others. “I’ve walked by.”
“Yah! My motherfuck husband send every day.”
“Oh.”
“Yah, I meditate in cafeteria this morning. They say to me I meditate in wrong room. No such thing, wrong room.”
Kim-Ly/Lan gawks at the paintings on the walls. Stick figures spew blood out of heads. Dinosaurs eat cars. A demon with pretty blue eyes. A house fire.
“This shit crazy,” she muses.
With markers they draw a yellow elephant, palm trees full of coconuts about to fall, boom boxes pouring out music notes, a cake, an orchid, a lion.
They fill notebooks with block-letter poems. Lan and Jamey see their selves, as the afternoon dims, in the window. They cut shapes out of colored paper. The scraps fall onto the floor. These hours are snips and shreds of indigo and lime-green. No one knows they’re here. They’re lost. He feels an almost sexual pull to her, they’re orphans, both isolated in nowhere land.
It’s a confection of a sickness, a pink sugar nest of problems, an airy whipped cream of illness. The caramel is burned, gives off a nasty ash. Sickness is sweet in bed, in life, the goopy cherry flavor of medicines and ideas if one is willing to be sick. They bring you balloons and flowers, and news from outside, the crime rate, the president’s plan for the underclass, record highs at a Sotheby’s auction, the military budget, and you—you just lie there in folds of white taffy sheets, your mind a sea of honey.
Elise brings him The Call of the Wild, The Catcher in the Rye, and the New York Times Magazine. He doesn’t touch them.
“Here, remember this?” she prompts, handing him the Polaroid of a white flower between her legs.
He stares at it.
“And this one?” she says, watching his reactions suspiciously.
The tiger fish at the sushi place.
He looks at it solemnly.
“Answer me,” she says in a low voice.
His eyes take her in, looking at her from a long distance.
“Jamey, I’m right here,” she says.
She pulls his hand to her face, then to her breast, then between her legs. He looks at his hand, and back to her face. She starts crying, eyeliner running like turquoise ink down her cheeks. “I really hate you,” she sobs.
That night, around four a.m., he has a seizure or fit—no one is very clear about what happened.
She finds out about it the next morning when she brings him a doughnut covered in pink icing and sees restraint marks on his wrists. His medication has been increased again, and they added Phenobarbital to the mix, and he stares at her, squinting, as if looking through smoke.
He lies there, just one of the patients in this bleached labyrinth: no different from the woman talking to Steve McQueen on an invisible telephone, or the shaved-head girl who carries around her empty suitcase, or the man who keeps exposing a rosy, flaccid penis.
“Do you feel like harming yourself today?” they ask at room check.
He shakes his head. They give him more Seroquel anyway.
He bends over the butterfly coloring book but doesn’t color.
He listens to the echo chamber of midnight.
The furniture is heavy so it can’t be thrown, and he wouldn’t throw it anyway.
He occasionally talks to Rodrigo, a slim male nurse—built like a dancer—with a tongue ring, who is captivated by Jamey and seems to believe anything Jamey says about purgatory.
Tania, another RN, with a Filipino accent, just sighs checking his IV, feeding him red pills in a pleated paper cup. Sigh. Sigh. He sometimes mimics her but not cruelly.
The days break down into building blocks.
Dumbbells.
Candy Land.
Treadmill.
Snack time.
One evening, Elise brusquely hands him his apple juice. “Do you understand I’m knocked up?” she asks. “That we—you and me—are having a kid?”
He looks away.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” she says.
He doesn’t answer.
Later, Elise walks slowly home, unaware of hawthorns blooming in the night, her footsteps preoccupied on the greasy sidewalk. When she unlocks the building door, at the bottom of the stairs is a lumpy manila package with a New York Police Department label.
Addressed to James Balthazar Hyde.
In the kitchen, she cuts it open.
It’s her jacket, the fur and metallic-almond lining stained with blood.
JUNE 1987
Jamey opens the curtain. The city is ablaze, constructions go on and on. Stars are dulled by the flaming city. Planes cross the sky, passengers gazing onto sleepless chaos, the FDR clotted with red dots and white dots, pools shimmering darkly on roofs, smoke chuffing from pipes.
What a planet.
Contraptions and structures, inhabited and driven by animals.
Dr. Lessing comes into the room, studying her clipboard, and doesn’t look Elise in the eye.
“Change in the program,” Dr. Lessing says. “Looks like Jamey’s family wants ECT.”
“I’m his family,” Elise says.
“They’ve started some paperwork.”
“What’s ECT?”
“Electroconvulsive therapy.”
Elise actually grabs Lessing’s arm. “No way.”
“Elise.” Lessing looks at Elise’s hand until it’s removed.
A patient hangs himself, and dawn’s pink fire finds the body.
Cary Naughton was a short, zitty army brat with impossible skateboarding stories. In group, Jamey wondered how Cary could be so diabolically insecure, twirling his bleach-blond rat tail, jiggling his knee. The kid’s eyes rested on every person, trying to get attention, by love or hate. And then he figured out the best way to do that.
Elise sits with Jamey while staff tends to the tragedy. He has a window of semi-lucidity because the nurse forgot his round of meds this morning.
On his tray: clam chowder and translucent balls of melon.
“I’ll do anything I can for you,” he says to her.
“Really?” she asks.
He nods.
On the subway home, she touches her belly. She’s constantly scared this stress is bad for the baby, but then being scared adds to the stress, so she tries to calm down.
The next day, Elise corners Jolie in the cafeteria. “Can I ask a favor?”
Jolie sips a pebbled-plastic cup of grape juice. “You can ask.”