Whisper to Me (16 page)

Someone help me someone make the earth rise up and swallow me
. “I did,” I said. It was all I could say, it was like there was a rock on my tongue, like I had forgotten how to speak to someone.

“O … kay … then,” you said, drawing it out, like, why is this girl so weird, and honestly I was impressed you had even tried again given my TOTAL LACK OF CONVERSATIONAL SKILLS OR EVEN BASIC TOOL KIT OF SPOKEN POLITENESS.

So again, for your benefit now:

WHAT I MEANT:
I used to swim, with my dad, who after all is a Navy SEAL, so actually swimming has always been a major part of my life, or always was up to a certain point anyway, and that’s so cool that we have something that we share, because, yes, being in the ocean, held up by it, my strong arms knifing through it, I love that.

You pulled up to the house. The windows were still dark. “There you go,” you said. “I mean, me too, of course.” Because, as you said, OF COURSE you had to live in the apartment above our garage, just in case the whole thing wasn’t awkward enough.

I got out without saying anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say, even though I knew, of course I knew, that it was rude. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in that situation.

Behind me I heard the engine cut out. Heard the truck door slam, and then your steps on the stairs up to the apartment.

I kept walking and didn’t turn.

Well, I’m telling you stuff now.

Maybe too much stuff.

Only time will tell.

Even writing this is making me cringe.

You must have thought I was
such
a weirdo.

Okay, I’m not going to finish this in time if I don’t start summarizing.

I went to the group the next week, and the week after that. I barely saw you; you were always working. Probably you didn’t have any interest in seeing me anyway. You were probably hurt by how I totally failed to talk to you in any meaningful way. At group, I listened to people talking about their voices. There was a woman named Marie, who heard a devil and an angel, or that was what she called them. The devil told her to hurt herself, like my voice, called her names. The angel would help her, though—tell her where she had left her keys, stuff like that.

There was a guy called Rasheed who had what he called the Red Voice and the White Voice. The Red Voice sounded terrifying. Way more extreme than mine. Rasheed said the Red Voice was the voice of a guy who had tortured him in Syria. He lifted his shirt once and—

It was bad.

Dwight turned out to be a cop. His voice was his father’s, he thought. It would punish him. Shout at him. In real life, his father had beaten him “like a dog” since he was a toddler. When he was three, his dad threw him down the stairs and he broke fourteen bones. His dad said it was an accident, and the paramedics believed him.

Dwight told a psychiatrist about this when he was a teenager, and the psychiatrist told him he had invented the memories. Dwight gripped the sides of his chair, hard, when he told us that.

But.

But the Doc was
helping
all these people. They’d all gotten to the point where they rarely heard their voices anymore, where they had it under control. The only bummer for me was that he said it took months or years, in most cases, to get to that point.

What I’m going to do is, I’m going to give you what the Doc told me, over the next weeks, as if it was all one thing, okay? Just to save time.

This was what the Doc taught, or
recommended
is maybe a better word. I mean, he kept stressing how these weren’t “rules”; they were just “guidelines,” and it was about finding what worked for each individual and yadda yadda yadda. Anyway these were basically the steps. The group’s philosophy, their approach to hearing voices:

        1.    SAFETY. Ensure that your psychiatrist and the people close to you know what you’re doing. Continue to follow your doctor’s instructions in addition to pursuing the following precepts. Notice that I had already failed at this.

        2.    ACCEPTANCE. Acknowledge your voice as real, both a real part of yourself and a manifestation of your feelings about yourself.

        3.    DIALOGUE AND CONCILIATION. Welcome the voice, instead of ignoring it or telling it to shut up. Encourage more positive interaction and negotiation.

        4.    SCHEDULE. Allot a regular time at which the voice can speak to you. Refuse to engage if the voice tries to speak at any other time.

        5.    FREEDOM. Challenge the power of the voice and establish dominance over it.

Looks simple like that, doesn’t it?

Of course, an easier philosophy, an easier alternative plan, would have been:

        1.    Spend all my time with you.

Since you always silenced the voice, always muted it, just by being around. But that would not have been realistic then. And is most likely not realistic now.

        
1.    SAFETY. Ensure that your psychiatrist and the people close to you know what you’re doing.

I did not do this.

There is no simpler way of putting it.

I don’t even know why, really. I think it was the drugs. It’s like … You know when you’re walking in a swimming pool? And in some sense it’s analogous to walking on normal ground, the same motions are involved, the same mechanics, but you’re slower; the resistance is higher.

With the drugs I was on, it was the same. It was as if all the air in the world had been substituted with water, making every movement harder. I hated the drugs, and I didn’t want to take them. And I knew that Dr. Rezwari would tell me to take them, so I just … didn’t say anything to her.

I started stacking the unopened blister packs in my nightstand, piles of them. When I saw the doctor, I told her how much better I was feeling, how I never heard the voice anymore.

Which was a lie.

When the drugs went, the voice came back. It wasn’t there all the time, but enough, and louder now—telling me to run up and down the stairs, to keep my head down when passing anyone in the street, to clean my teeth fifteen times before bed, to slap myself, all kinds of things. But the voice was better than the walking in water.

Meanwhile, Dad started coming home early from the restaurant.

“You could come over to Donato’s, you know,” he said. “It’s still nut free.” Dad had eliminated nuts from the restaurant after my anaphylaxis at school. They weren’t allowed in the kitchen—the staff wasn’t even allowed to bring snacks with nuts in them to work.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Figures,” said Dad.

Instead, he would come back at seven o’clock and we’d eat together. Dad was a pretty good cook. I don’t think he was really interested in it, but he was a smart guy, and he’d spent the last decade running a restaurant. He’d make penne amatriciana, gnocchi con panna e prosciutto, veal marinara, prawns with garlic.

“****************. ******** stupid ******** ***** of a *****.”

That was Dad, working in the kitchen. He made good food, but he was always cutting himself and burning himself. His hands were covered in Band-Aids and scars, like he lived with a tiger cub.

After dinner, we would sit and talk. Dad didn’t know how to talk about feelings, that kind of thing. So he would tell the funny stuff that had happened at the restaurant. The lady who kept asking for more garlic bread, which is free, and they realized she was putting it in her purse, stashing it, to take home. The guy who didn’t realize the chili oil had chili in it, and covered his pizza with it.

“Your father is very boring, isn’t he?” said the voice. “I see where you get it from.”

“Shut up,” I said, under my breath.

“Honey?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

Dad nodded, nervously. “You know I’m here if you want to, ah, talk.”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

But of course he wasn’t; he just wanted to be.

There’s a gulf between those two things.

Then there was you. I barely saw you at all, except from a distance. We did cross each other once in the yard. You were getting even more muscles. Plush toys don’t sound heavy, but I guess when they’re in big bags and you’re throwing them up, I don’t know, ten feet onto a pier, they’re heavy enough.

Anyway, you were in your short-sleeved work shirt with the logo on it and I could see the new angles in your arms. You were tan, your skin full of sunshine, walking to your truck. In one hand was a book, I couldn’t see what it was, and the bend in your elbow and the outline of your bicep were the most incidental details on one sunny day in New Jersey, couldn’t matter to anyone ever, but also seemed to me like the fulcrum on which all existence was balanced.

“Hey,” you said.

“Hey.”

SHAKESPEARE WOULD HAVE BEEN PROUD.

“How are the stuffed toys?” I asked.

“Plentiful,” you said, shrugging. We walked together to the truck; I was heading to the library, I imagine.

“Well,” I said.

“Well,” you said. “Hey, listen, I dreamed about you the other night. The weirdest thing.”

I thought:
He’s dreaming about me?

I was staring at you blankly, and you looked uncomfortable. “Yeah,” you said. “I was in the yard here, and you were at your window, watching me. Or … waiting for me, I guess. Like, beckoning me. But there was no door into the house; it was all bricked up. So I knew I had to climb up to the window. Except there were no handholds, nothing. And then my mom showed up with a ladder, which is weird because my mom hasn’t been around for … Well. Anyway. I put the ladder up against the wall and started climbing and … that was it. I woke up.”

Just like when we were driving on the beach, I literally couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I was thinking,
I’m in his dreams?
What does that mean? And I was so much in my head and not in the actual yard with you that the moment stretched and stretched, like taffy.

AWKWARD.

“Well I guess I’ll …” Your voice trailed off as you turned and walked to the truck. I half followed you, half walked with you. I needed to get to the street anyhow.

“
Beckoning
?” I said eventually.

You flushed. “Uh … yeah.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that word out loud before,” I said.

You said nothing.

DOUBLE AWKWARD.

What I meant, of course, given the pretty obvious hint you had just dropped was:
What happened to your mom? Oh God, I’m so sorry. I lost mine too. I’m so, so sorry.

I didn’t mean to come across like such an *******.

We were standing by the pickup now, not precisely standing together and not precisely separate either; the sun was bright in my eyes. I was conscious of your chest under your shirt. You rocked on your heels. Your eyes caught the sun and flashed. “I should—” you started.

“How did you get that job anyway?” I blurted out.

“Excuse me?”

“The plush. How come you’re not gutting shrimp?” I knew that my dad had not been kidding about that.

You raised your hands in a
beats me
gesture and leaned against the pickup. “Guy named Bill does the orientation,” you said. “He took us down under the shrimp restaurant, in among the pillars of the pier. He explained the job—said it was ten hours a day, in a kitchen topping out at eighty degrees, literally just pulling **** out of prawns all day long. Maybe a short break to fry them, then back to it. He said we were going to be sweating, that we’d lose twenty pounds easy over the summer.”

“Sounds great.”

“Yeah. Then he said: put your hands up if you don’t think that sounds like fun. If you’d rather do something else.”

“And you did?”

“I did. After a moment anyway. The others, I think they figured it was a trick question, like they’d get fired. I thought that was a possibility too, but I came here to work the boardwalk, not broil in a kitchen. I thought,
What do I have to lose?
So I put my hand up and Bill said—he’s a really big guy, Bill, a bull of a guy, but kind—anyway, Bill said, ‘Can you drive a car? Have you got your license?’ ” You indicated the pickup. “And I said yes, and here I am.”

“Delivering stuffed toys.”

“Beats unstuffing prawns.”

“True.”

Another pause.

“You should come see the warehouse sometime,” you said. “It’s crazy. Plush animals stacked to the ceiling.”

“Hmm,” I said, in that polite way people do when they know it’s not a real offer. I was trying to work out if you were flirting with me. I didn’t have a lot of experience with boys. Still don’t. Maybe you were wondering the same thing; I have no idea.

But you were not to be deterred. “No, really,” you said. “I’ll drive you one day. When I’m off. Monday?”

“Um. Okay.”

You smiled and beamed out some of the sunshine that had gotten trapped in your skin. “You look good,” you said. Then you blushed, your cheeks going red. I thought that was awesome. I don’t think I had ever seen anyone blush before. “I mean … you look better.” You closed your eyes and sighed. “God, that’s worse.”

“It’s okay.”

“What I mean is, you looked kind of sick before. Now you look better.” You clapped a hand to your head. “Ugh. Now it’s like I’m prying. I mean, I don’t know what the deal was with you and it doesn’t matter. I’m going, before I screw anything else up.”

You unlocked the pickup and started to open the door.

“Thanks,” I said. “Really.”

You stopped, and smiled. “You’re welcome.”

“What’s the book?”

“
Metamorphoses
,” you said. “Ovid.” You held it up—an old Penguin classic.

“Ah. ‘My mind is moved to sing of forms changed into new bodies. ’ ”

You nodded. “I was … this is going to sound so lame.”

“Try me.”

“I was getting kind of into the metaphysical poets, you know? Donne, Marvell. Then Jane at the library said I should read Ovid, that it was sort of the source of so much stuff. The metaphysicals, Shakespeare.”

“T.S. Eliot.”

“Yes! Totally.”

Your smile lifted the dimples to your cheeks, but I frowned. It was your mentioning Jane, and the memory of how she had sold me out, ratted on me to my dad, and started all the trouble. “You know Jane?” I asked.