Gray (22 page)

S
till
in Chicago. I spend my days in my bedroom, squinting my eyes and trying to make the shapes look like Her. It doesn’t work. I spend my nights hoping she’ll come see me, only she never does. I begin to think that maybe she’s waiting for me to come to Her . . . after all, she was on Her way to me when she died. I wonder if killing yourself is the only thing you can control in your entire life, and that’s why it’s a sin. Because you’re beating God at his own game.

I take the bottle of pills off the kitchen counter. Look at Her pack of cigarettes, still sitting there just as she left them. I smoke one in the living room because I don’t care anymore. The sun is just breaking over the city, filling the apartment with soft white light. I take a cab to my parents’ house, sneak my brother’s car out of the garage, and start driving. I pull into an empty parking lot, turn the car off, and sit there for a while. She is in the car with me, I know it. I swallow the entire bottle of pills, sit back, and wait. I wonder what it will feel like. I turn on the radio.
When they find me, I want there to be music, and I want the car battery to be just as dead as I am.

Sometime around eight, things are getting hazy. I am lilting between this world and the next. My breathing is slow. My eyelids are fluttering. It feels like there are insects buzzing through my veins. Eight blue ones will do that to you. Her hand is holding mine, guiding me through to the other side. I am ready. But then, I get scared. I call my mom and mumble something to her. She is asking me where I am, what’s going on, and telling me to drive to the emergency room. Somehow I turn the key, and
somehow
the engine starts, and now I am on the phone with my manager, and then the dangly-earring shrink in California, telling them that I want to die but can’t bring myself to do it. I am crying and swerving all over the road. I love to hate attention. It’s so predictable.

I tumble into the ER and they have me fill out forms. You should see my handwriting. They call my mom and then she is there with me, hugging me and telling me it’s okay, hushing me as I sob. We sit in the waiting room, time dragging on into infinity. My mom laughs nervously. The thing inside my head bothers her far more than it bothers me. A fish tank is on the right side of the room, just between the bleeders. The fish are all a brilliant blue. I am mesmerized.

An old woman with a bandage wrapped around her head stands right in front of me, obscuring my view. She needs them more than I do. They call my name and take me into the next room. A security guard is by the door. He looks at me glumly. They say undress and put on the
gown. I want to call Her up because she knows just how to get me out of my clothes.

“You can’t have those in here,” the guard says, pointing at my shoes. “The laces are considered a suicide risk.”

I take off my shoes. The lights are bright and the door is open—nothing is going on here. I’m not getting away with anything. I ask the guard for a pen and paper because I’m bored and I want to write Her a letter. They are also considered a suicide risk and are denied. They make everything the whitest possible shade of white in the hospital. The lights are so white they burn your skin, or maybe that’s just me imagining things. It makes me feel more alone than I ever have before. I am lying on a gurney that hundreds of people have died on. I lift myself off it quickly so none of their memories seep into me. I look around to make sure that no one saw me do this, no one saw me acting “crazy.” The security guard is staring at me with the just-give-me-a-fucking-reason look, but settles back into the monotony.

•   •   •

The crisis counselor comes into the room and shuts the door, but she asks the guard to open the blinds and watch through the window. Now I am the brilliant-blue fish in the tank. The crisis counselor is a fucking amateur. If she had her shit together, I suppose she’d be in some nice building in the suburbs with a receptionist, not sitting here in a white cell, talking to me. She’s out of her league with me, in too deep. I have read
The Pill Book
from front to back. I could talk my way out of anything. But I’m too
busy swimming for the guard. She asks me why I’m here and if I’ve ever tried anything like this before. I know what
this
means. She jots my answers down on a pad of paper, sighs, and says she won’t admit me to the hospital if I’ll sign a contract saying I won’t hurt myself. I actually laugh out loud at the thought that anyone depressed enough to kill himself would be stopped by a piece of paper. It’s like slitting your wrists over a sink so you won’t make a mess.

“I’m gonna have to go over this with my lawyer. And send back some markups,” I joke. She doesn’t laugh. Eventually she leaves the room and is replaced by a
second
counselor, a touchy-feely guy in a terrible sweater. He asks me the same questions, and it’s getting difficult for me to keep my story straight. I feel myself bending it just to keep things interesting, adding bits about “God talking to me” and the like. He is nodding and taking notes. Then he looks up at me and asks why I wanted to hurt myself, says that someone “in your position” could make a difference. I tell him it makes no difference. I was proud of that one.

He leaves too, and I am alone in the room, the security guard watching me through the glass. I go over to the table and call the one person who matters, tell Her, “The Capulets and Montagues don’t have shit on me and you.” I am pretty sure I got Her voice mail. I call back and apologize for leaving the first message. I am talking into a phone that doesn’t exist to a girl who doesn’t exist anymore.

It turns out that I couldn’t even kill myself the right
way. The medication takes time to get out of my system, so there is nothing else for me to do but sleep. My dreams are sterile and uninfected. I can’t control the inside of my head right now. I feel paralyzed. My blood cells are pixilated. My pupils dilated. But I am alive. Alive and unwell. After three days, my parents come to take me home. No one talks in the car. My dad clears his throat. I sit in the backseat and stare out the window, at the last few moments of summer. Nothing will ever be the same again.

I float through a week at my parents’ house like a ghost. My mom won’t let me out of her sight. If I am in the bathroom for longer than five minutes, she knocks on the door and asks me if I’m all right. She doesn’t understand that I’ll never be all right, that it’s beyond my control. She doesn’t understand that I’m broken. A second week rolls in like fog. I go to visit Her grave. I stare at Her name carved in the granite, at the date of Her death. I don’t want to leave Her but it’s getting dark. I tell Her I’ll see Her again, but I don’t know when that will be. I want to die but just can’t do it, no matter how hard I try. On the way back home, I call our manager and tell him I’m ready to tour again. I’m not sure why.

We have meetings. The guys are concerned. It’s only been two weeks, after all. I tell them I’m fine, joke that I didn’t even punch a mirror this time. I tell them that I need this, that I am drowning in
Chicago and want to get back on the road. I am lying but they believe me, and the tour is scheduled to resume in a week’s time. A doctor will be traveling on the road with us, “just in case.” I leave Chicago and fly to Philadelphia, pick up where I left off. The first few shows, I am tired and weak, and the guys have to carry me through the set. Kids hold up signs with my name on them. I tell them that I love them all.

The tour heads south, through Jersey, into DC. The shows aren’t getting any better. I can’t be bothered to try any harder than I already am. Everyone knows this is a mistake, but they’re all afraid to tell me. I’m too fragile. They are finishing this tour
in spite
of me. At night I lie in my bunk and wonder if tonight will be the night I get to see Her again, but she never visits. She probably can’t forgive me. I am so tired but I can’t fall asleep, so the doctor teaches me an old trick—try to be perfectly still, close your eyes, and attempt to locate the sound of your pulse. It may take a few minutes, but you’ll hear it, it will be there. It will grow stronger. It will envelop you. You will eventually fall asleep. Sometimes it actually works.

Maryland rolls by, Virgina, the Carolinas. Such great sadness. Cities stop mattering. They are just names on a spreadsheet. I check them off one at a time. We head through Georgia, and I begin taking girls back to my hotel rooms. Meaningless sex to fill the void. We shoot down I-95 to the Disaster’s hometown of Jacksonville. His parents and brothers come to the show that night. They all look like fatter versions of him. He is beaming and showing them around backstage, pointing out all the guitars that he’s in charge of, picking them up and tuning them as they watch in rapt silence. It makes me think of that show back in Chicago, when I grabbed Her and frightened Her.
I want to go back to Her grave and apologize. But there’s no time. There never will be.

We cut across I-10, long stretches of swamp and nothingness. Alligator farms and air force bases. Through the great, sweaty South—Interstate 10 is a dire road. Show in Mobile, along the Gulf of Mexico. It never ends. I miss Her and she is never coming home again. It is beyond my control, and I have resigned myself to that. Someday my number will be called, and all I can do is hope she’ll wait for me up there until it is. I am not optimistic about my chances.

We leave Mobile in the middle of the night, bound for New Orleans, on the brown banks of Lake Pontchartrain. The guys are screwing around in the front of the bus. I am in my bunk, trying to sleep. I press my head against the pillow, close my eyes, and listen for my pulse, but the engine is too loud. We barrel through the darkness. The road hums beneath my head. The wind whistles against the window. Eventually, my heart stops racing and I drift away.

Somewhere in Mississippi, I can feel Her floating above me. I open my eyes and she is there, inches from my face yet still miles away. Infinite space and time are between us. Her hair is long now, the color of honey, and slowly waving in the night air. Her eyes are greener than they’ve ever been before, like pastures after a rain, and Her skin is the purest white. She glows softly in the dark, magical and ethereal, like lightning bugs in a jar. Just out of reach. She is the first ghost I’ve ever seen, but
I am not afraid. I want to feel Her on my fingertips one more time. I want to tell Her that I love Her. But I am afraid to move or make a sound because I don’t want to frighten Her away, so I just lie there. She understands, and she smiles down upon me. Everything else falls away. I close my eyes and mouth the words I can’t bring myself to say. She can read my lips. We head toward the sunrise, together.

This book and much of my (in)sanity would not be possible without: My dad for inspiring me to follow my own course in life, my mom, brother and sister: Andrew and Hilary, the tireless believer in me and single greatest supporter of
Gray
: Bob McLynn, Jonathan Daniels, Lauren McKenna, Ryan Harbage, James Montgomery for making sense of me when even I couldn’t and getting it right—for bringing this book back to life multiple times. Leslie Simon, CRUSH, Simon and Schuster, my friends in Chicago and around the world, my brothers in the band, and to the single greatest journey of my life: Bronx Mowgli Wentz.