Gray (7 page)

He motions to me with his hands, opens them flat, palms toward the ceiling. I hate when he does this because it’s his way of trying to
draw
something out of me, when we both know that I’m just here for the drugs. But I oblige him because at least he’s been paying attention. Taking notes even.

“Well, I—” is what comes out, followed by “No, I don’t think that.”

“I didn’t ask what you
think
about it, I asked how you
feel
. There’s a difference between the two.” He scratches at his turtleneck with his pen. “I’m asking because I’m concerned that perhaps you have a challenge, and we all have challenges”—he never says
problems
—“but I’m concerned
your
issue is that you don’t trust people. You
mistrust,
and in doing so, you create, uh,
challenges
for yourself . . . you feel like you must control every aspect of everything, you must try to keep things perfect at all times.

“And we both know that nothing is ever going to be perfect,” he continues, downshifting his tone to Sympathetic Light. “We both know that we can’t do everything alone, and that it’s okay to
let people in
. Or, at least, we should know that. So, do you feel like you can’t let Her in, because that would be giving up some of that control?”

“Yeah. I guess that’s it.”

“Well, that must be exhausting,” he adds, ladling on the sympathy now. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

I’ll bet he is. We both sit there for what feels like ten minutes, just looking at each other. Then he does that motion with his hands again, and I officially mail it in. I’m not even listening to what I’m saying now, but if it’s any consolation to him, I now actually feel
worse
than I did before. I believe this is what’s known in the industry as “tearing down to build up.” Psychiatry is a waste of time.

But at this exact moment, I can also feel my mind making a U-turn. Maybe this guy was right . . . maybe I do mistrust people. Maybe I am denying myself happiness and true love because of it. Maybe life
isn’t
stacked against me, and everything can be okay if I’m willing to just
let
it be.

Mercifully, he glances down at his gold watch, sighs, “Well, our time is up for today,” and is showing me the door before I even know what hit me. I don’t even get a new prescription because he says the one he wrote me a week ago should be enough to get me through until the next time we talk. There’s
always
a next time because psychiatry never fixes anything. It always needs a next time.

I walk back out into the waiting room, and sure
enough, some kid is sitting on the leather couch. We don’t make eye contact at all. I grab my coat off the rack and bolt for the door. Soon, I am sitting behind the wheel of my car in a half-empty parking garage. I think about running a hose from the exhaust pipe. Then I reach into my coat pocket and shake out a couple of Ativans, the ones that look like Superman’s logo, and I laugh for a second thinking of a dosed-up superhero (“Captain Lorazepam!”). I swallow them down and start the car. This time, there won’t
be
a next time. The train is gathering steam, it’s itching to leave the station. Next stop: Madison. Or madness. Whichever comes first.

I
don’t
tell Her I’ve left. I’m not sure why. My phone vibrates every half hour or so, Her name flashing on the screen, but I let it go straight to voice mail. I listen to Her messages in the bathroom of the studio, away from the other guys, the tap running while I swallow my pills. As Her voice spills into my ear (“Hey . . . it’s me . . . where
are
you?”), I stare at myself in the mirror and realize that I am nothing more than a smile with a heartbeat attached to it . . . skeletal, muscular, and circulatory systems, all color coded. Major veins and arteries. Major organs, easily removed. I am a living version of the Visible Man. You can see directly into me. I place an Ativan on my tongue, gulp it down with water from the tap. Watch now as it makes its way to my stomach. Follow it into my bloodstream. See it attach itself to the receptors in my brain. I’m here for your education.

After the first dozen messages, the
Hey
s get more panicked, and the
I love you
s become less frequent. She’s worried about me, she says, and for whatever reason I don’t
seem to mind. I’m teaching Her a lesson . . . don’t believe in me, and this is what you get. But then the Ativan rolls in over me like a warm fog, and my eyelids start to get heavy, and I start to feel
bad
for Her, so I decide it’s time to return Her calls. She answers, and Her voice is filled with genuine relief (“Oh, thank
God
!”), but that quickly fades when I tell Her where I am. She asks me why I didn’t call, and maybe it’s the Ativan, but I tell Her the truth: I say I’m not really sure why.

I hear Her light up a cigarette on the other end of the phone, breathe out smoke with a gust. There’s silence for a minute, then she asks when I’m coming home, and I say I don’t know. A few weeks maybe. She asks me what I’m going to do about my medication, or my psychiatrist, and I tell Her I haven’t thought about either of them. And that I don’t care. She asks what’s
wrong
with me, why am I acting like this, and I say I’m not sure. Then she says she has to go to class, and there’s another minute of silence. I tell Her I’m sorry, but she just says, “Yeah,” and hangs up. There’s no
I love you,
just dead silence. I turn the tap off and walk back into the studio. I leave my phone sitting on the edge of the sink.

Here’s how the next few weeks go: We start working on the album. We learn that while Nirvana recorded a bunch of songs for
Nevermind
in the studio we’re in, just one actually ended up on the album (“Polly,” in case you were wondering). We are bummed out by this. We take breaks from recording and walk down to Lake Monona, which is still frozen solid. We step out onto the surface,
like little kids, and try to slide all the way to downtown. We attempt ice fishing, with little success.

We learn that Madison is a great town, especially if you like aging hippies and date-rapist/frat-guy types. The Animal tries to fight a group of the latter down on State Street. He punches one of them in the eye and it makes a sound like a water balloon bursting. There’s blood on the icy sidewalk. He says the power of Dave Grohl compelled him to do it. We disappear into the night before the cops can show up.

We sleep on some chick’s floor in the University of Wisconsin dorms. We have no money, so we survive on Fritos and Mountain Dew. But none of that matters. The album is humming along—for the first time, I’m getting my lyrics in the songs—and the music sounds big and shiny . . . like the way a
real
album should sound. We are becoming a
real
band. It doesn’t matter that the temperature is in the single digits during the day, or that we are surrounded by burned-out professors and drunken bullies. In fact, that makes everything even
better
. We’re a band of brothers . . . and we’re out here alone, behind enemy lines. We know no one and don’t need to apologize for our actions. We are fighting, we are laughing, we are alive again. Or at least I am.

Because the songs I’m writing now aren’t love songs. They’re
hate
songs. And they’re all about Her. I want to punish Her for not believing in me or my band, I want Her to know that she hurt me. So I write songs—fantasies, I suppose—that put Her in the worst situations
imaginable. I reveal high school shames and pull skeletons out of the closet. I spill secrets she told me in confidence. My pen is a weapon, and I use it to humiliate Her, to extract a measure of revenge. I don’t use Her name at all, but when she hears these songs, she’ll know
exactly
who they’re about. It’s awful, writing such terrible things about the person you love, but I’ll take a pen and paper over a psychiatrist’s chair any day of the week. This is my therapy. This has been building in me for a while.

•   •   •

One night, we’re bored and decide to drive back to Chicago on a whim. Our producer doesn’t think that’s a particularly good idea, especially since it is around 2:00 a.m. and the dead of February in Wisconsin, but we keep pestering him, tell him we need to get a particular guitar, this one with great tone and so on and so on, and eventually he relents. We pile into his Mustang (an ironic one) because we had for some reason decided that our van wouldn’t make it all the way down to Chicago. This was probably not exactly true, but, hey, we were rolling. We shoot our way down dark country roads, snow piled up high on either side of us, light posts whizzing by the headlights. We open the windows and feel the roar of the icy, black Wisconsin air; it stings our cheeks and makes our eyes water. The Mustang is slaloming down the roads now, slipping from side to side, the wheels frantically searching for traction. We latch onto the interstate in some place called Janesville, and the snow is starting to fall now, and everything is dark and quiet, except for when we overtake
the occasional eighteen-wheeler, and we roar past its tires and you can hear the wet road passing beneath them with a hiss. It’s slightly scary, to be honest: just one turn of the wheel . . . just one errant ice patch . . .

We limp into Chicago at around five, the sun not even a fully formed thought on the horizon, the city streets muffled by the snow. Our producer keeps the Mustang running as we trudge up to our practice space, our feet crunching beneath us, and grab the guitar (or
any
guitar). We all stand around in the room for a few extra minutes, partially because we’re frozen from the cold—not to mention a little dazed from the trip down—but also because we want to make it seem like this trip was actually worth it. To further that cause, we decide that we should probably get something to eat, so we make the producer drive us over to the place down on Clark Street, where we pack ourselves into a corner booth, order coffees, and plow through tofu scrambles. The light outside is turning soft and purple; the occasional apartment window glows gauzy and incandescent. The city is coming to life.

Across the room is the booth where we shot the cover to our first album. It’s empty now, but a year ago, we were packed in tight, Her on the other side of the table, looking at everyone but really only at me. We were just kids then. We’re basically still kids now. Only I feel older somehow, more hollowed out. I didn’t even call Her and tell Her we were coming back into town for the night. She’s probably waking up right now, actually, thinking about some exam she’s got today, or maybe kicking some
stranger out of Her bed. I don’t know why that thought entered my head, but it did.

We head back to Madison just as the sun is turning the skyline red, and no one is the wiser. The Mustang slides onto the interstate, the tires spinning through the melting ice. The sun rises red over our shoulders. It is quiet now, just the wind brushing by the windows and the hum of the engine. Everyone is tired, staring out at the rapidly widening horizons, the cities and smokestacks and scrap heaps giving way to barren, windswept fields, bales of hay wrapped in tarps, distant farmhouses, roofs frosted with snow. The sunlight is warm against our faces, our eyelids are heavy but happy. Good songs are on the radio. We sing along and pound the roof of the car with our fists. It’s like a movie scene. Right now, she’s probably walking out of Her apartment, sitting in Her car while the engine runs, blowing on Her hands. Unaware that I was in our city tonight, or that I made our producer drive by Her apartment as we left town. I’m pretty sure the other guys noticed.

When we arrive back in Madison, we sleep until late afternoon on the dorm-room floor, waking up when we hear the chick return from her classes. We walk down to the studio and get a crash course in business when we find out that our label has talked a major into giving us an advance to make our album. That gave the major the rights to first refusal, which was something none of us understood until later, when I called my dad and he told me that it meant that our album might actually come out
on
the major. That freaked us out until we realized we could
probably use some of the advance to eat a little better, so almost immediately we start going out for proper meals. We ring up a bill fitting of major-label artists-in-waiting.

A week later, the recording is done and we pack up to head home. For the first time in forever, I’m not anxious to return. Her and I haven’t been speaking all that much, and when we do, there’s nothing to say. I don’t know what will happen when I show up on Her doorstep tomorrow morning. I’m not sure who will answer the door. I sift through the pocket of my coat to find my Ativan. I fill my hands with water from the tap in the bathroom and swallow the pill. I feel the benzos enter my bloodstream, like tiny psychoactive snow flurries. I turn off the tap and shut off the bathroom light. This time, I take my phone with me, but I’m not really sure why.

E
xpect
the unexpected. We jump right back into bed, we don’t skip a beat. We make loud love while the sun rises on Chicago; we wake up Her roommate with the noise. When we’re done, she falls asleep with Her body wrapped around me, and I listen to Her breathing, rhythmic and shallow. I feel Her body go still around mine. I let my eyes drift around the room: our clothes, tangled on the floor like the skins of ghosts; Her books, stacked on the desk—
Cognitive Psychiatry, Blackwater
by Kerstin Ekman (“one of Sweden’s most prominent novelists”),
The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde,
bound in bright blue—proof of a life that continues on without me; an open pack of Marlboros, an overflowing ashtray, evidence of Her growing imperfections. The radiator hums away in the corner, and the midmorning light spills in around the curtain, casting the walls in a dull, white hue. Tibetan prayer flags hang from the light on the ceiling, fluttering slightly in the heat. It’s like a photograph of a crime scene . . .
What went on here? Who where these people?