“Would you be able to sleep if you stopped your medications until tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah. Of course. I mean, I’m not dependent or anything. I don’t take them every day.” Just on a bad day. Like a day in which I’ve seen a bush full of scalped heads.
Just thinking about it made me crave an Auracel with a Seconal chaser.
I made an appointment to return at seven a.m., an ungodly hour, but since I wasn’t likely to sleep and couldn’t eat, it was probably for the best.
“About the sleeping,” I said, wondering if I could get my hands on some barbiturates legally. “If you knew of something that could take the edge off -- maybe you could write....”
“We’ll see after your blood work comes back. Good night, detective.”
Was it night? I checked my watch. Quarter past seven. I wanted to be home. I wished I’d been born with the ability to teleport instead of hearing the dead. And I wondered if Roger’d bought another cup of coffee for me while he was waiting.
I opened the door to the lobby and nearly bought the idea that my desire to teleport had made it happen; Jacob stared at me from a seat directly across from the door. He had on a pair of jeans, one of his incredibly form-fitting black T-shirts, and a plain leather jacket. He was on his feet and halfway across the room before I even cleared the doorway. “What happened?” he asked me.
I blinked and looked around. A yellow streetlight shone through the thick safety glass on the door. The receptionist’s window was dark and he was gone for the night. We were alone -- except for the surveillance camera that was trained on us. They don’t take any chances at modern psych facilities.
I shook my head. “I dunno. They’re doing some tests.” I took Jacob by the elbow and steered him toward the door. Despite the fact that there were no faces swarming in the popcorn texture of the walls, no spirits popping out of the philodendrons, I really, really wanted to be home.
Jacob’s car was parked in a handicapped slot next to the front door. He opened the passenger door for me and it felt like we were going to the prom. I wondered if anyone was watching. “How’d you end up here?” I asked him. “Did Roger call you?”
Jacob closed my door and got in the driver’s side. “Maurice did.”
My struggle to figure out how Maurice figured into everything must have shown on my face. “Maurice is your emergency contact,” Jacob told me.
“Oh,” I said, because that was true. I wondered how Maurice knew to tell Jacob -- and then I realized the whole “I’m gay” conversation wasn't going to be necessary at all. “Oh.”
Chapter Five
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the emergency room?” Jacob asked me for the third time. He was driving with both hands on the wheel and he looked like he’d be happy to run down anyone unlucky enough to get in his way.
“I don’t go to hospitals,” I said. “I can’t. Not without something to block out the ghosts.”
Jacob pressed his lips together in a grim line and glared through the windshield.
“This is the same clinic I go to for everything except dental and vision, Jacob. It’s fine. It’s...it’s more than fine. It’s the only place qualified to deal with Psychs, and besides that, it’s state of the art.”
He didn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride home, and I was worried he was pissed off at me. I almost apologized to him, except that he was the type of guy who’d probably ask me what I was sorry about, and I wouldn’t be able to answer him.
I left Jacob in the kitchen while I flipped on all the lights in the apartment and checked the closet for spectral heads. All clear.
I turned around and found Jacob blocking my way out of the closet. I wondered if he’d appreciate the irony. He stood with his arms crossed, biceps bulging. It was a pose he’d struck when I’d first met him, in which he’d looked all buff and sexy. Now he looked mostly mad.
“Any idea why Lisa called me from Santa Barbara and told me to leave?”
I eased forward, and Jacob reluctantly allowed me into the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to remember if the message I’d left for Lisa was anything that should’ve sent her into a tailspin, but I didn’t think it had been, even if I had just seen a bunch of submerged heads right before I’d called her.
“No.”
Jacob sat down beside me and the bed creaked. He let his breath out slowly. And when he spoke his voice was soft, as if he’d just let all the anger out of himself, too. “I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to tell me, and on top of that she was whispering so that I could barely hear. She said you were in danger. From the living and the dead.”
Lisa. Did she know how to leave a melodramatic message, or what? Not that I didn’t believe her -- which is saying a lot, since she was off consorting with the Moonies of her own free will. But until she could give me some specifics, there really wasn’t much I could do.
I could feel Jacob staring at me from the side. “That’s why I’m worried about that clinic,” he said. “What if they don’t have your best interests at heart?”
I laughed before I could even control it, an ugly little bark that was too loud and sudden in my stark bedroom. “Christ, Jacob. I’d lay money on it that they don’t. The force, the government, whoever...they want a medium. A class five. Can I expect them to keep me comfy and cozy and safe? No. But I can count on them to do what it takes to keep me upright and babbling.”
“...and that partner of yours?”
“Roger? You think I need to worry about a guy who buys me Starbucks?”
“Look,” said Jacob. “Here’s what you should do. Take your cash card, and mine, and withdraw the maximum amount from each account. Then go to the train station and buy a ticket with cash....”
“What? Why should I go anywhere? I don’t even know what this supposed danger is. And where would you be in all of this?”
Jacob stared at the side of my cheap white laminated dresser. “Here. Figuring out what’s going on.”
“You expect me to go somewhere without you?”
Jacob’s jaw worked for a moment, and then he put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. “You’ve got to get away from me. Lisa said....”
“Lisa said? You told me you couldn’t even understand her!”
“She said I brought it.”
I stared. I tried to piece something into that phrase that would make sense of it. What did he bring me? A stomach virus? What about something more insidious...like hope?
I really, really wanted a Seconal.
“Look,” I said, doing my best to put on a voice that was incredibly reasonable sounding. I did a pretty good job. “She didn’t give you a full message, so we can’t act on it. I don’t know what she meant. Do you?”
Jacob looked at me sideways.
“That’s what’s wrong with Psychs,” I said. “The sixth sense doesn’t match up with the other senses, so anything we describe comes out flawed. It’s like trying to describe how purple smells, or what pain sounds like.”
Jacob stared at my knee as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to look me in the eye. “But we can’t just sit back and do nothing,” he said. He’d quieted down, but his voice still held a clipped urgency. “You didn’t hear how panicked she sounded.”
Good thing. I’d already thrown up and sort of fainted. I didn’t need something else to worry about. “It’s not going to help for me to go running off,” I told Jacob. “If the clinic, or whoever, is as dangerous as all that, they’ve probably got some kind of chip in me already.”
Jacob finally did look me in the eye, and his face went ashen.
I shrugged. I’d been on a short leash ever since I can remember. That's how I’ve turned out to be such a liar. “Lisa did her job,” I went on, trying to calm Jacob down. “She warned us. Now we know to look out.”
“Look out for what?”
I sank back onto my bed and stared up at the ceiling. “Who knows? But if we just play dumb and keep our eyes open, we’ll find out.”
***
Jacob made me some eggs and toast and I ate it, and washed it down with orange juice. Breakfast at eleven thirty p.m., since I wasn’t supposed to eat after midnight. We curled up on the couch together and watched an old rerun of Ghostbusters. It probably shouldn’t have struck me funny, the idea of green, gooey ectoplasm and a bad guy made of marshmallow, but it did.
And the next thing I knew, Jacob was shaking me. And not very gently, either.
“Say something,” he said.
“What?” I mumbled, struggling to orient myself. “What?”
“Can you hear me? What day is it? Who’s the president?”
“Yes, I don’t know, and a horse’s ass.”
Jacob let go of me. We were on the living room futon with all the lights on and a re-run of Three’s Company on TV. Dark showed through a gap in the miniblinds. The VCR blinked 12:00 -- no help there -- but I couldn’t have been asleep for long. My heart fluttered in that nervous rhythm it gets when I’m ripped out of the early stages of sleep.
“Were you having a nightmare?” Jacob asked.
If I was, it hadn’t been very impressive. I actually didn’t have many nightmares. My waking life probably gave my subconscious an inferiority complex. “Uh-uh. Why? Was I talking in my sleep?”
“No. You scratched me.”
I gave Jacob a look like I couldn’t believe he’d be such a sissy over a scratch, when he turned toward me and I saw the arm of his T-shirt hanging off, a line of bright blood slipping down his arm. “Holy shit! I did that?”
Jacob wadded the remains of his sleeve against his biceps. “You’re awake now?” he said, standing cautiously. “I don’t want to get blood on your white couch.”
“Fuck the couch,” I said, jumping up. “Let me see.”
He shook me off and went into the bathroom, where I crowded in behind him. “How bad is it?”
“You’re blocking the light,” he said. He sounded too calm for someone who was bleeding.
I reached up and flicked on the fluorescent bar over the mirror. It hummed a little, but was good enough to shave by. “C’mon,” I said. “Show me.”
Talking to Jacob was like talking to a brick wall. He turned on the cold water tap and then tore his bloody sleeve the rest of the way off. Although he didn’t turn so I could see the cut, I got a good look at it in the mirror despite him. It wasn’t just one scratch, it was two. They almost looked like a sloppy, upside down “T”.
“Shit.”
Jacob splashed some water on it and took a look at it in the mirror. It showed up plain for a moment, and then more blood oozed out of it, mixing with the water and running in a rivulet down his arm.
“What did I do that with?” I demanded, wondering how I could’ve possibly been asleep while something like that was happening. “Was I sleepwalking?”
Jacob sighed, splashed the cut again, then pulled a big handful of toilet paper off the roll to blot it with. “You weren’t sleepwalking. I thought you were...you know...just putting your arms around me in your sleep. And then you scratched me.”
“What -- with my nails?”
Jacob didn’t answer.
He had to be wrong. Not that he’d lie about something like that, but I was sure he’d been mistaken. I must’ve had something sharp in my hand that I’d dropped while he was shaking me. My fingernails weren’t capable of inflicting that kind of damage. I looked down at them with the intention of saying so, and saw they were caked with blood.
I spun out of the bathroom and into the kitchen. I wrenched the kitchen faucet on and thrust my hands beneath it. My vision started tunneling like I was going to have another fucking fainting spell, and I gulped air to keep myself standing. I told myself it was just some congealed blood and not a shred of skin I was pushing out from under my fingernail as I tried to scrub away what I’d done.