Keepers (6 page)

Beth shook her head, her eyes suddenly bright. She looked angry, and sad, and…something else that I couldn’t pin down.
Ashamed?

“Come on, Gil, we’ll find our own way back.”

So we left the orderly to his monkeys and whatever else was back there.

She did not hold my hand.

At the breathtaking windows, neither of us spoke.

The same in the elevator.

In the tunnels, not even the ghosts said a word.

Once or twice I sneaked a look at Beth, who seemed to be trying not to cry in front of me. I wished she would so I could hold her hand again. It would make me feel better and maybe her, too.

I looked at the tube from my IV.

I thought of the girl I’d seen and the way she’d screamed as she knelt by the body.

I thought of the cats and how they wanted to talk to us but couldn’t.

The wires.

The charts.

The dog shaking its head
No.

Back on the ward, the lunch trays were just arriving, and the aroma of Sloppy Joe, my favorite, bestest, yummiest lunchtime food ever, filled the halls. I had no appetite. When a nurse asked where we’d been, Beth replied that we’d gone outside for some fresh air because this place smelled like a hospital, and did the nurse have a problem with that because if she did Beth would be more than happy to step outside with
her
.

All I could do was stand there, looking at the floor, feeling sick and thinking about the way that dog had shaken its head at me
.
Sooner or later we all have to learn the words with which to name our own private losses and shames, and it would be years before those words became part of my emotional vocabulary.

Dad Used To Laugh

She will not go with you
....

—grabbing my shirt through the bars of the cage and pulling me toward him, blood seeping into the cotton of my shirt as I lifted the derby and showed him that it was undamaged, looking into my eyes, lips squirming in a mockery of communication because his vocal cords had been cut out long ago, sounds that were a burlesque of language, but there was something there, something that drew him to me or me to him, and he turned his head ever so slightly to the right and pulled me closer to the bars—

—I shook my head and pulled away from the wall. Though I hadn’t actually been asleep, my body displayed all the tell-tale signs of waking from an intense dream: a thin layer of perspiration covered my face, neck, chest, and hands; my arms were shaking; and for a moment I feared I was going to vomit. This last, at least, proved to be a false alarm.

Pressing a hand against the front door, I eased myself onto my sponge-like feet and dragged in a few deep breaths to steady my nerves and my balance.
Grabbing my shirt through the bars of the cage
? Where the hell had
that
come from? I never get my memories mixed up in that way, one bleeding into the other until the seams disappeared.

Rubbing my eyes, I made my way into the downstairs guest bedroom before I even knew where I was going or why. Ever notice how there are times when your body’s memory and will operate independently from your own? Synapses take a detour and you’re left wondering,
Why am I here?/Doing this?/Looking for
...
what
?

I reached for the light switch but at the last moment my body’s will took over again and wouldn’t let me turn it on. This room had to remain dark; I’d have to rely on the light spilling in from the other room to see things.

I moved the bed several feet to the right, then yanked away the cheap throw-rug that lay underneath to reveal the area of flooring that had been torn up and then replaced with a 3 x 3 trap door—an addition the plumbers suggested in the event that the new pipes running underneath needed to be accessed during an emergency. A recessed padlock held the door firmly closed. Crouching down and moving slowly like some character in a cliché-riddled spy film, I didn’t so much slink through the house as I did crab-crawl, much to the irritation of my knees that became immediately sore and stiff. I nearly fell on my face twice as I moved along, doing my best to not be seen by the gathering figures in the street. I retrieved my keys from their hook by the front door and flipped through until I found the one for the padlock, crab-crawled my way back to the trap door, opened the lock, but did not pull up the door. Not yet.

I made my way through the downstairs, turning off a few more lights but not enough to slide everything into darkness; the light over the sink in the kitchen, the table lamp in the living room, and my desk lamp remained on. They would give me plenty of light for what I needed to do.

I went into the linen closet for the second time that day, pulling out the hand towels and wash rags on the top shelf, then reaching back and flopping my hand around until I felt the curved brass handle on a wooden box. Pulling it out and setting it on the floor of the closet, I turned the dials on the combination lock until the lid popped up with a soft click. I hadn’t opened this thing in years, hadn’t really wanted to, but now I had to. My body’s will commanded me.

The 7.65mm
Deutsche Werk
semiautomatic pistol looked just as it had when Mom gave it to me after Dad’s funeral, along with his medals. He’d taken this gun from a dead SS officer in Austria near the end of World War Two. He’d kept it cleaned and oiled and had insisted on firing it at least once a year to make sure it was still in good working order. When I was much younger and still thought of guns as something powerful and romantically alien, Dad would sometimes let me fire it in the air at midnight on New Year’s Eve. The gun was small but its recoil packed a wallop. Dad used to laugh every year when the thing would knock me on my ass after I fired.

I jacked back the slide to make sure it was empty, then loaded the magazine, chambered a round, set the safety, and shoved it into the back of my pants. ( I’ve always hated movies where some guy shoves a gun into the front of his pants to hold it in place; sneeze, trip, or bump into something and it’s hi-diddle-dee-dee, the eunuch’s life for me. I hadn’t been with a woman for a very long time, but it seemed a good idea to keep the package attached, just in case. It’s the little fantasies that keep us going.)

Hey, Pal – got any idea why you’re doing this?

“Shut up,” I whispered.

I’m telling you, pal, if you’d just stop fighting it and let yourself remember, this would all go a lot easier….

I didn’t feel like arguing.

It’s not that I “hear voices” or anything dramatic like that. No formless demon from New Jersey tells me that God wishes I’d grind up my neighbors into dog food because they haven’t accepted Abe Vigoda as their Lord and Savior or anything like that. I live with—or
try
to live with, anyway—a condition that some doctors and psychologists call “minimization,” a fancy term that means (as far as I understand it) you’re constantly talking yourself out of something you remember. Think of it as denial’s more vicious and immovable first cousin.

In my case—if the doctors are to be believed—I have spent decades convincing myself that one particular memory is of something that never happened and in the process have forced myself to forget it.

The only problem with minimization is, if you’re successful at it for long enough, you unconsciously begin questioning the validity and even the reality of other memories.

I thought it was all so much bullshit until about five years ago, when I began getting these physical jolts for no reason. I’d be sitting in a chair reading a book, and the next thing I know my whole body has just sort of snapped forward like a rubber band and the book’s on the floor and I’ve knocked over the glass on the side table and I’m shaking like I’ve got the DTs.

Nerves
, I told myself.
Just nerves.

Then I started talking to myself internally, in two different voices; one of them my own (or what I imagine it sounds like to other peoples’ ears), the other belonging to the smartass me of eighteen.

And I began having these monstrous dreams, filled with violence and death.

Each of them separately was worrisome enough, but then they began clustering: the jolts, the voices, the dreams.

I honestly thought I had a brain tumor for a while, but a series of tests ruled out anything physiological.

So I began seeing doctors, most of whom went right for the SSRI’s—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors—like Lexapro, Paxil, even good old Prozac. Each helped for a while, but the jolts and dreams always came back. My current doctor, whose offices are in Columbus, is the leading psychopharmacologist in the state. She determined that the reason none of the SSRI’s were having their desire effect was that they needed to be “accentuated” (the word she used, hand to God) with a mood stabilizer such as Lemictol, and it took us about six months but we finally hit on the right combination: Seroquil at night, Lemictol and Lexapro in the morning. For the past three years that combo had been doing the trick.

Until the last couple of weeks, when she started talking about trying anti-psychotics.

Maybe you should listen to her, Pal. Because it sure as shit doesn’t seem like pulling a Charles Whitman is the first step on the road to better mental hygiene.

Ignoring you.

From inside the lid of the box I removed the serrated SS dagger in its ankle-sheath and strapped it on. After double checking to make sure it was securely in place, I reached under the closet’s lower shelf, shoved aside a few mid-sized storage boxes, and pulled out the one weapon that hadn’t come from my father: a Mossberg 500 pistol-grip, pump-action, twelve-gauge shotgun. I took down the box of shells and fed the Mossberg until it was full, pumped a load into the chamber, stood up, and kicked the closet door closed behind me. I still wasn’t sure why I felt compelled to arm myself like a road-company Robert DeNiro in the penultimate reel of
Taxi Driver
, but my body told me I’d know soon enough.

A few moments later I was back at the front door, peering through the window.

Magritte-Man was back with at least two others of his ilk. The three of them stood, all derbies and dapperness, on the sidewalk, night goggles at the ready. I stood up straight and looked right at them. I wasn’t sure they’d seen me, so I waved at them.

Magritte-Man returned the gesture, but neither he nor the others made a move toward the house. At least there wouldn’t have to be any sneaking around now, dim light or no.

They might
—mark that—might
know about the crawlspace, but not the trap door
.

I started toward the guest bedroom, moving the shotgun from one hand to the other and shaking each hand in turn because my fingers had gone numb.

Not you,
I thought, hoping some small part of the universe would scatter the thought Magritte-Man’s way.
She will not go with you
.

I will not allow that
.

I will bury her here
.

You won’t get your hands on her, not you, not you, not you
....

I’d kill all of us before I let that happen.

Dinner With The Its

“
Because nobody else wants them
...”

Beth was released from the hospital five days before I was, but she made it a point to visit me every day after school. Even then I noticed how some of her sparkle seemed to fade once she was back in the world. It was nothing dramatic—her sprit hadn’t been broken in one brutal blow—but even a kid can recognize a soul that’s starting to bleed to death from thousands of tiny scratches.

Still, she was upbeat and affectionate, bringing me comic books, or telling me about this groovy new song she’d heard on the radio, or regaling me with gossip gathered during lunch or study hall. She sat on the edge of my bed and held my hand and made me feel like I was the most important thing in the world. I had never received such unselfish attention from a person before, nor have I since.

“I’ve been driving for a month now,” she said, “and my aunt is
finally
trusting me to use the car when she’s not with me. I haven’t had any passengers yet—” she winked at me and smiled one of those delicious I’ve-got-a-surprise smiles—“but that’s gonna change on Friday.”

“What’s Friday?”

She lightly smacked my hand. “Friday,
dummy
, is when you get released. Doctor said you’ll be well enough to go home, and
I
am going to pick you up.”

“But Mom and Dad—”

“I already asked your mom and she said it was fine.”

I blinked. It had never occurred to me that Mom wouldn’t want to pick me up, but just as unsettling was the idea that she had given Beth—who was little more than a stranger to her—permission to take me. “Did you ask her when she was here?”

“Huh-uh. I called your house.”

We were unlisted. “How’d you get our phone number?”

Another patented Beth wink. “Vee haf vays of gazzering zee information.”

“Huh?”

“Someday you’ll understand. Care enough about someone, and you’ll find a way to help them, no matter what.”

I didn’t understand what she meant by that, but it seemed like this was something she wanted to do because she liked me. I had to keep reminding myself that this great girl with the long hair and love beads and hip-huggers and gold flecks in her light brown eyes
liked
me. A lot, it seemed.

“Hey, here’s an idea—how about after I pick you up, we go out for some ice cream cones?”

“Sure!”

“Then maybe you can come over and eat dinner with the family.”

“Oh—did your mom come home?”

A brief, wistful shadow crossed over her face and then was gone, replaced by a bright smile that seemed a little false. “No, it’s just me and my aunt and the Its.”

“‘Its?”