Delirious (11 page)

“I’m screwed,” Charlie said. “Totally screwed.”

Randal let out a sigh. “Your family history isn’t good, Giles. Tell me again what that doctor said.”

“She’s not an M.D., but she’s an expert on mental health, especially schizophrenia,” Charlie said. He couldn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth. How could he, an MIT graduate, a successful entrepreneur, be schizophrenic? It wasn’t fathomable. And yet there was his family history to account for. A father and brother both afflicted with the illness. It was an inescapable truth.

Randal took a healthy sip of his beer and thought a moment.

“At the Bureau I have my fair share of cases involving that disease, Charlie,” he began. “I have to say, I’m no expert, but you’re a bit late in life to be developing symptoms. Mostly it happens in teenagers and young adults.”

Charlie nodded. “I know. That’s what Rachel said as well. She suggested I have an MRI. Maybe there’s some sort of lesion, a tumor, or something on my brain. It could cause similar symptoms. It’s a theory, at least.”

“Any other theories?” Randal asked.

“Sure. Somebody is out to get me,” Charlie said.

“Makes sense,” Randal said.

“It would if paranoia wasn’t a symptom of schizophrenia,” Charlie said.

“Do you think somebody is setting you up?”

“Of course,” Charlie said, almost letting out a smile. “That’s why I’m crazy.”

“Seriously?” Randal asked. His expression was both grave and concerned.

“I don’t know, Randal,” Charlie said. “I wish it was that. I really do. A few days ago I would have said yes, but now I’m not sure. Nothing is adding up. Mac and Leon deny they had anything to do with it. Not that they’d just go and confess. And I don’t know anybody else who would have such a vendetta. And how does it explain everything—Anne Pedersen, the PowerPoint, the e-mail, the notes? It’s too much for even me to believe somebody could pull that off.”

“I don’t know,” was all Randal could think of to say.

“Believe it or not, the espionage is what’s really getting me. I mean, it’s all so unbelievable and out of character for me. You know how strongly I feel about protecting company secrets. You know what I had to do when that trust was broken before.”

“Have you forgiven yourself for that?” Randal asked. “Do you think it’s catching up with you? Maybe this has all been triggered by some suppressed guilt.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Charlie said. “He made his choices. I didn’t make them for him.” Charlie looked away. He had enough on his plate without reliving that nightmare.

“So where does this leave you?” Randal asked. He nursed the few remaining sips of his beer.

“Nowhere, I guess,” Charlie said. “Unemployed. Unemployable. Crazy.”

“Charlie, you know I’m here for you,” Randal said. “Are you telling me everything? I mean, are you in any legal trouble?”

“Not yet. But Mac and Yardley have a case against me for the e-mail to Sony. They may come after me. But they said they wouldn’t. Like I said, I don’t know who to trust anymore.” Charlie picked up his Guinness and downed most of it in one long gulp. His hands shook, while his throat closed and his eyes moistened. He hadn’t felt
that empty pit feeling since he was a kid, but it was a precursor to tears. Charlie looked away, staring out the window.

“Brother, you know I’m here for you. Honest,” Randal said after a moment’s silence. He extended a hand to Charlie, who took it, gave him a firm shake. It was the best he’d felt in days.

Maybe all he needed from Randal was an affirmation of their friendship. For the first time in as long a time as he could remember, Charlie needed to feel close to somebody. He needed someone he could trust.

“I’ll call when I get the MRI results. Okay?”

“I’m expecting to hear from you sooner.”

“Thanks, Randal. I really appreciate it.”

“It’s the least I could do. Have you talked to Joe or your mother about any of this? I’d think if anyone would know something about what might be happening to you, it would be them.”

Charlie shook his head. “I can’t talk to Joe, and I wouldn’t want to worry Mom,” he said. “You know that. You know the history.”

“Yeah. Just a suggestion. Family is always there for you, even when you don’t think they’d be much of a support.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Charlie and Randal stayed in the bar for an hour before Randal looked down at his watch.

“Gotta run, pal,” Randal explained. “I’m dangerously close to a night of warm beer and a cold shoulder.”

Charlie thanked his friend, and the two exchanged a quick hug good-bye. One of the best traits about Monte was that he wouldn’t care when Charlie got home, just that he did. Besides his furry little friend, the only thing waiting for Charlie back home had a thin neck, six strings, and spoke only when his fingers did the talking. At that moment a warm body would have felt a lot better than another drink. He thought about Gwen. That she came to mind, given that they hadn’t spoken since he left California, was more than a little surprising. Briefly, Charlie flirted with the idea of calling her but resisted the impulse. Gwen’s number in his BlackBerry might have changed, and he wasn’t in the mood to explain the real reason behind the call if it hadn’t.

Charlie opted to stay in the bar. He’d parked in a garage. He already
had too much of a buzz to drive home. He’d rather pay Brenda double her standard rate to take Monte for an evening walk than go home to his empty apartment. He pulled out his cell phone to call his dog walker—making another resolve that he wouldn’t break down and dial Gwen, anyway.

He noticed that he had missed a call and saw that he had a voice mail waiting for him. The number from the missed caller came up as restricted. Charlie dialed his voice mail and then entered his code. The message was marked urgent, and voice mail said it had arrived this morning. Charlie didn’t know how he’d missed the call. His blood turned icy cold when the caller’s message played.

“Charlie, it’s me, Joe,” his brother said, speaking with quick, breathless urgency. “You have to come to Mount Auburn soon as you get this. Mom’s had a stroke, and I don’t know how long she can hold on.”

J
oe Giles sat by his mother’s bedside. His eyes were fixed to the floor; his chin was resting on the knuckles of his hands. To the nurse standing behind him, he appeared merely deep in thought, but his insides were roiling from the private war he waged. Though Joe could not see his enemy, he could readily sense its dark presence. His adversary was as merciless as it was shapeless, relentless as it was cunning. Blessedly, years of treatment had made it possible to detect his foe’s advancement. Early detection—that was the preferred weapon Joe had learned to wield; it was the key to defeating this scourge before it could consume him.

Inside his mother’s equipment-jammed hospital room, Joe felt the enemy creeping steadily forward, searching for holes in his defenses to exploit. Stress and fear were fuel for this adversary. With his mother comatose, both emotions were in ready supply. If he was less vigilant, cracks in his barricade would widen, allowing the enemy to push deeper within. He had to stay mindful of its presence. For his mother’s sake, he had to stay sane.

Joe looked to fortify his defenses with a sound—some specific noise in the room that he could focus on. It would help, he knew, to ground him in the reality of his mother’s condition, painful as that reality was to face. In the early years after the onset of his disorder, Joe’s hallucinations were a constant threat. To combat them required not only increasingly high doses of antipsychotic drugs but also constant engagement and stimulation. An idle mind was an invitation for his adversary to enter his house and tear apart reality with the thoroughness of a demolition team. Thanks to Walderman, Joe was learning
new ways to stay episode free. Right now he needed every trick in the book.

It took a moment for Joe to lock onto a useful sound, but it was there, a soft, rhythmic rise and fall of a machine breathing steadily in the stillness of the room like a sleeping animal. The ventilator that kept his mother alive could help keep Joe present with her as well. He concentrated on each mechanical breath as though it were his own.

The nurse tending to his mother’s needs touched Joe’s broad, muscled shoulders with a practiced tenderness. Her touch surprised Joe, and for a moment he let his concentration wane. Joe clenched his eyes tighter, demanding more of himself in the process.

Focus!

Focus!
he commanded himself again.

It was too late. Soon as he unclenched his eyes, he saw that his mother had miraculously shifted position. It was a startling sight, because he knew it was an impossible one as well. She had turned her head and was now facing him. Her eyes, shuttered before, were open wide and golden yellow, like those of a wolf. He could smell her, too, a sharp and pungent odor, as though she had been bathed in some medicinal antiseptic. The stench filled his nostrils and made him gag. The noise of her ventilator rose, too, in a crescendo so deafening Joe had to cover his ears.

His mother’s mouth, framed by thin lips that were cracked and raw, somehow had been freed from the repressive oxygen mask. As she began to speak, all color in the room faded to shades of gray, except for her eyes, which stayed that disturbing yellow.

“Help me,” his mother wheezed in a breathy whisper. “Pleeaassse, Joe. Help me.”

His mother’s bony, veined hand reached out from her hospital bed and touched Joe on the leg. He leapt to his feet, startling the nurse standing behind him, who in turn cried out in fright. With a shake of his head, Joe made a furtive glance about the room, relieved but also saddened to see his mother’s gaze as it had been before, fixed to the ceiling, her eyes again closed, the oxygen mask back in place.

It was a dream perhaps, he thought. Maybe he had fallen asleep and had a dream, nothing more. But it could be more. It could be the
enemy, the schizophrenia that had plagued his adult years creeping up on him, craftily beating back the drugs, which formed only part of his defenses.

Schizophrenia.

Joe settled himself back onto the vinyl-covered armchair. His breathing grew shallower and more rapid. The nurse came around to face him. She kneeled low, perhaps to make her presence less threatening.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

She touched him on his knee, and this time Joe did not flinch. He nodded that he was fine, but did not feel ready to speak.

“You gave me quite a fright,” the nurse said.

Joe knew better than to ask if she had seen his mother open her eyes or heard her speak to him. Whether it was a dream or a waking nightmare, the moment was his alone to experience. If it was the schizophrenia baring its teeth, Joe reminded himself that it was simply a chemical reaction in his brain, something to do with too much dopamine in the nerve cell synapses and D2 receptors, or so he’d been told.

Despite the nurse’s continued attempts to reassure him, Joe still felt ill at ease. He wasn’t sure if he had been dreaming or not, and decided the experience might make for an interesting post on his blog, the aptly titled Divided Mind, taken from the Greek roots of
schizophrenia.
Comparing dreams to a schizophrenic episode would get his readers chatting, Joe suspected.

Over the years Joe’s blog had garnered a loyal readership, and its popularity had been growing steadily among mental health patients and professionals alike. There was a powerful sense of community that Joe had unwittingly tapped into with his entertaining, often self-deprecating prose. Heartrending comments from readers claiming their lives had been changed in positive ways because of Joe’s informal community motivated him to keep updating the blog regularly. It was as healing for Joe to write and interact with his virtual friends as it was for them to read and interact with each other. He felt he needed them now more than ever.

“When will she wake up?” Joe asked the nurse.

“I don’t know,” the nurse replied. “You must be tired.”

“A little. I’m more afraid of what will happen to Mom.”

“Of course you are. I understand.”

No, you don’t understand,
Joe wanted to say.
I need her more than you can imagine.
Instead, he kept silent.

“Would you like me to get you a drink of water?”

“That would be nice,” Joe said.

After she left the room, Joe reached out to take hold of his mother’s limp hand. Intellectually, he knew her hand was cold and clammy to the touch, but at that moment it felt as warm as an August sun.

T
he automatic doors to the main lobby of Mount Auburn Hospital opened the moment Charlie stepped in front of the sensor.

Inside, he took one short breath of the antiseptic hospital smell and shuddered. He found it strange that a smell, so innocuous at that, could trigger such powerful memories. But hard as he tried, those times were not easily forgotten. When he was a boy, just turned seven, his father had driven the family station wagon through the storefront window of a popular boutique clothing store in downtown Belmont. Charlie didn’t know it at the time, but the explanation he gave to the arresting officer was that the mannequins were looking at him funny. From that moment on hospitals became Charlie’s second home—a blur of lockdown floors in the mental health ward, inpatient treatment centers, and emergency rooms. He’d first visited his father, then soon after his brother, too. He’d spent so many hours breathing in the ammonium vapors of hospital antiseptic that the smell alone was like a return trip into a nightmare.

Awash in the sickly glow of the overhead fluorescents, Charlie walked down the long corridors to the elevators that would take him to Ellision 5, the hospital’s critical care floor.

Inside the crowded elevator, Charlie waited with the others. He positioned himself in a spot toward the back right corner. He found the cramped quarters of an elevator bad enough under normal circumstances, but in a hospital, jammed together with the sick, it was almost unbearably claustrophobic. Doctors and nurses were mixed
in with patients and visitors. Charlie wondered if any of them were tending to his mother.