The Hollow City (14 page)

“I do have a penthouse in the middle of downtown.”

“Because I imagined it for you! Because I’m such a lonely, pathetic loser that I made myself the most perfect girlfriend I could think of.”

“Listen, Michael, I can help you.”

“Go away!”

“If I’m really inside your head, and I really can remember things you don’t, maybe I can remember other things too.”

I turn to the wall. “Just leave me alone—”

“Dr. Vanek said your hallucinations might be based on real experiences that you can’t remember because you can’t get inside your own head.” She pushes herself in front of me, and I turn away again. “Michael, I’m already inside of your head. If they’re in here, maybe I can find them!”

“Dammit, Lucy, you’re not real!”

“Of course I’m real!” she shouts. “I don’t exist for anyone else but I exist for you. I can think, right? Therefore I am.”

“You think what I tell you to think—you have no will of your own.”

“Is that your perfect girlfriend?”

“What?” I look at her again and her eyes glisten with tears, soft and sad and deep as endless holes.

“If this is true,” she says, “if you created your perfect girlfriend, would you really make her that weak? Would she really have no will? No power? No thoughts of her own?”

I feel my heart breaking again. “Of course not.”

“I love you,” she says. “Who tells you to stick with your job every time you want to quit? Who convinced you to join that reading skills class? I have my own will because you know you couldn’t love me without one—because you understand that love is not about accepting people, it’s about making them better. We make each other better, Michael.” Tears form in her eyes—tiny drops of water, glistening like diamonds. “At least let me try.”

“Michael, you okay in here?”

I look up, over Lucy’s shoulder, and I see the night guard coming in. “I heard shouting,” he says. “You all right, buddy?” He steps forward, directly toward Lucy, and she steps out of his way.

“Why did you step out of his way?” I ask, ignoring the guard and staring her down. “If you’re just a hallucination, you could just stand there and he could walk right through you.”

“Who are you talking to?” the guard asks.

“Your brain won’t let me do anything it considers impossible,” says Lucy, shrugging. “Technically, I shouldn’t even be here with him, because it will only underline the fact that he can’t see me.”

“Can you see her?” I ask, looking at the guard.

He answers without looking. “There’s no one here but you and me, Michael.”

“She’s standing right there, can you see her?” He doesn’t move. “Can you just turn and look?”

“He thinks you’re trying to trick him,” says Lucy, walking behind him. “You’re not the only schizophrenic in lockdown, you know—he’s seen this trick a hundred times.”

“Hit him,” I tell her.

“Just calm down,” says the guard, holding up his hand.

“Come on,” I say, “you’re right behind him—hit him! We can run, and the janitor can let us out like he promised, and we can be together again, forever.”

“I’m not real, Michael.”

“Yes you are! Hit him!”

“Easy, there, Michael,” says the guard, putting a hand on my shoulder. I shrug him off violently and he pops like a spring, grabbing me in a tight wrestling hold so suddenly I barely even see him move. “Easy, Michael,” he says again, “just calm down. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Help me!”

She waves, a tear rolling down her cheek, and then she’s gone. I struggle against the guard but he holds me tightly in place, calling for the nurse. I try to kick him and suddenly we’re down on the floor and he has my whole body pinned.

“Lucy!”

There is no answer.

THIRTEEN

IN THE MORNING
they raise my dose of Seroquel, and a few days later they raise it again. Dr. Little says my confrontation with Lucy was a good thing—that even though I still saw her, my knowledge that she wasn’t real was a big step forward. It means the drugs are working. Bit by bit, the glass is becoming clearer.

Dr. Vanek comes to visit on the weekend, shooing off a handful of other patients to clear us a private space in the corner of the commons room. I ignore him.

“Michael,” he says, lowering himself into a chair. “You become more and more interesting almost every day, don’t you?”

“I don’t want to talk.” My head nods, all by itself. Did he see that?

“Why?” he asks. “Because your girlfriend’s not real? You’re not the only man in the world with a fake girlfriend, I assure you. Look at our beauty industry—it’s amazing anyone’s satisfied with real women anymore.”

“I said I don’t want to talk.”

“But you recognize your illness now,” he says, leaning in. “You’ve admitted that you see hallucinations, which puts you in that glorious middle ground where we can really get some work done: you’re crazy enough to see them, but sane enough to discuss them openly. I hate trying to psychoanalyze by memory.”

I turn on him angrily. “It’s not about being crazy, it’s about being alone. What good does it do me to get better now that I don’t have anyone to be better with? I was going to get out—I was going to get better and get out and live in a great big house in the country with…” I turn away.

“Are you content, then, simply to play with your imaginary friends?”

“Shut up.” My arm twitches, but I hold it still.

“Don’t get angry with me,” he says, “you’re the one acting like a child. Besides, if you didn’t want to get better you wouldn’t be talking to Dr. Jones.”

“Dr. Jones?”

“Linda,” he says with distaste, as if the name itself is unpleasant in his mouth. “She’s the queen of the psychiatric hippies and a purveyor of feel-good claptrap, but she’s apparently been having some success with you. Regular sessions, individual and group, where you’ve apparently delved quite deep into your hopeless Freudian wasteland.”

“She’s helping me.”

“Helping you what? Kill your girlfriend?”

“Shut up!”

“Do you want to lose her or not? Have I misunderstood our entire conversation up to this point?”

“Look,” I say, turning to face him and locking his eyes in a murderous gaze. “Lucy was one of the only things I loved in this entire world, and now she’s gone, and I think I have the right to be sad about that. But losing her is the price I pay for losing a whole horde of monsters and aliens and God only knows what else I have crawling around in my head. I’ve been running away from a worldwide conspiracy of omnipotent Faceless Men for almost a year, and now for the first time I can stop running because I know there’s nothing to run from. No Faceless Men, no giant maggots, no phantom noises in the hall. For the … I can’t even watch TV, Vanek. I could barely stand to ride in a car, for fear that the stereo was trying to read my mind. It breaks my heart to lose Lucy, but if that’s the trade-off—if I get to have a real life now, with a real job and maybe even, someday, a real girlfriend—then who are you to accuse me of anything?” I sit back and turn away, nodding, and when he starts to speak again I dive straight back into my rant. “If you’d been half the psychiatrist Linda Jones is, I might have gotten to this point years ago and saved myself a lot of trouble.”

I stare at him, breathing heavily, daring him to speak. I’m so tired—worn out and beat up and full of rusted holes, like an old car in a junkyard. The light hurts my eyes and the sound hurts my ears and every movement makes my muscles burn—the dull, lactic acid smolder of fatigue and hard exercise. My Seroquel dose is almost maxed out, and my body can’t take much more.

Dr. Vanek watches me calmly, saying nothing, until finally I turn away in exhaustion.

“You’re going to go to prison,” he says. “As soon as you’re better. They’re curing you so they can put you on trial.”

I keep my eyes on the floor.

“Every word you say convinces them you’re a killer. You fit the profile too perfectly: an angry young man, friendless and with no family to speak of; paranoid and persecuted; convinced that the source of your troubles is a band of nameless, faceless men who haunt your every move. Who are the victims, Michael? Neighbors who teased you? Teachers who got in your way? How easy it must have been to convince yourself they were part of this “plan” to destroy you, and how easy then, their humanity erased, to take their lives and cut off their faces and show the world what they really were.”

“It’s not true.”

“I know it’s not true!” he shouts, shocking me with his anger, “but what are you doing to prove it? Where were you when you lost your memory?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You have to remember! You have to give them an alibi or they’ll lock you away for the rest of your life. Or they might just kill you: we do have the death penalty in this state, you know.”

“I don’t remember anything,” I say, “just patches, maybe, that might not even be real—I was at home, I was at work, I was … I was somewhere empty.”

“‘Empty?’”

“Just houses with nobody in them, a whole city of them.”

He pauses. “Tell me more.”

“I don’t know any more!” People are starting to look at us now. “I remember waking up in the hospital, and everything before that is a blur, like a big black hole in my head. I already told you, it was the MRI that did it—they got in and screwed up my whole head—”

“Who got in, Michael, if the Faceless Men are a delusion?”

“I…” I stare at him, not knowing what to say. There are no Faceless Men, no mysterious Plan, no one controlling my thoughts through every passing cell phone. If electronics are safe then the MRI is safe. I can’t answer my problems with a conspiracy anymore.

“Michael?”

“What if you’re right?” I whisper. “What if I am the Red Line Killer?”

“You’re not.”

“You don’t know that.” I look around, suddenly worried that someone is listening. A few patients are watching us, but they’re all on the far side of the room; the space around us is clear. I lean in closer. “I do fit the profile, like you said, and I have two weeks I can’t account for. Maybe more. If I’m capable of schizophrenia, who knows what I’m capable of?”

“Schizophrenia isn’t something you’re ‘capable of,’” he says, “it’s a disease. You don’t commit it, it happens to you. Now try to think back to those weeks you lost—”

“I’m twenty years old,” I say, cutting him off. “It’s not just two weeks. Can I account for all that time? Can you account for every moment of the last twenty years?”

“I think you’d remember killing someone and flaying his face.”

“Maybe I would, or maybe I’d block it out—selective memory…” I struggle for the word. “Repressed memory…”

“Dissociative amnesia,” says Vanek. “You’re suggesting that the act of killing was so traumatic that your mind repressed the memories to save you from them.”

“It’s possible.”

“It’s idiotic. Repressed memory, as a neurological function, is designed to protect you from things that happen to you; things you do willingly are, by nature, not foreign enough to shock your psyche that profoundly.”

Foreign enough to shock you … Something about his words remind me of Lucy, and the last thing she said: that my brain wouldn’t allow her to do anything impossible, like pass through a security guard. Once the mind creates an illusion, it won’t let itself be shocked by anything that might break it. But there is a gap in the system, a gray area where an illusion can progress to the point where reality can’t help but intrude. Like when Lucy broke in, and our inability to break back out brought the whole charade crashing down.

“What if,” I say slowly, “I thought that the killing was a good thing—maybe even a moral thing—and only realized the mistake when the deed was done?”

Vanek raises an eyebrow. “You’re determined to incriminate yourself in this.”

“I don’t want to be a killer, but think about it. What if my brain, thinking the Faceless Men were real, decided that it was my responsibility to save the world by stamping them out. So I’d go out and do it, and then when I tried to unmask them I realized it was all false, and the illusion shattered and the trauma forced the memory to repress.”

“And this happened twelve separate times?”

“It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“It’s scientifically possible that I could burst into flame at any moment, but it’s not exactly probable. Nor is it believably probable that your messed-up psychology managed to turn you into a first-time serial killer on twelve separate occasions. When I scared you with that bit about being the Red Line Killer, Michael, I was trying to force you into some semblance of self-preservation—to make you come up with an alibi. I need you to remember where you were in those lost weeks, but now you’re desperate to prove yourself guilty.”

“I’m just trying to follow the facts.”

“Then follow them down reasonable pathways. Your obsession with the Red Line victims is just one more example of your delusional narcissism—that if there’s a mystery somewhere in the world, you must be at the heart of it.”

Click click click click.

Vanek frowns. “Is that what I think it is?”

Dammit. “What?”

“You were clicking your teeth again,” says Vanek.

“On purpose.” It’s all I can do to keep them from clicking again.

“Then do it again.”

“What?”

“If you were clicking your teeth on purpose, do it again. I want to hear it.”

“No.”

“Should I call Dr. Little, then? Or Dr. Jones—you’d do it for her, I bet.”

“Fine.” Click. Click. Click. Click. I can’t do it as fast on purpose; can he tell the difference?

He pauses, thinking silently.

“It’s nothing,” I say again. “It’s not the drugs.”

“Tardive dyskinesia is very serious,” he says. “If it goes too far it can be irreversible, even without the drugs.”

“Why do you care so much all of a sudden?”

“Because you’re … you’re an interesting puzzle, and I don’t want you broken before you’re solved.”

“You’re as loving as ever.”

He stands up. “I’m serious, Michael. You have to break through to your lost memories—it could be crucial to the case as well as to your own mental health.”

“But the case comes first.”