Epiphany Jones (2 page)

I
grab my venti double latte and the
Sun-Times
and take a seat by the window. Today’s headlines:

And just as I begin to feel better about my own life, I catch something from the corner of my eye: the girl with the mutilated ear. The older, beautiful, terrifying version of her. She’s standing on the sidewalk, just on the other side of the glass door.

But I blink and when I open my eyes again, she’s gone.

And I guess this is as good a time as any to explain something to you. What I just saw, the girl from my dream, the one from the silverware factory, the one standing right outside the door just now? She wasn’t real. She’s just another figment of my imagination.

Look, to me this feels so long ago, and I still don’t even remember half of it, but I’ll tell you about it anyway. This was way back years ago when I was seventeen. This was the night my father and I were in the Explorer. But this was still five years after Emma died. Five years after I began to zone out on TV and movies. Five years of my mom and dad
seemingly forgetting how to say her name. Five years of referring to her death only as ‘
What Happened
’. I mean, why talk about my little sister when you could just pretend she never existed?

Back then my dad was one of the most powerful public relations people in Hollywood. And on this night Dad and I were driving to one of his Hollywood studio parties. A wrap party for some forgettable film called … well, I forget. Dad said he wanted me to meet ‘the gang’. I think he just wanted to impress me. He knew how many movies and television shows I watched and wanted to show me that he was part of that world. Or maybe he was just trying to make up for not being around much. He and Mom didn’t talk much after
What Happened
.

Most of the people at the party were behind-the-scenes guys: producers, executives, distributors. His group, the PR people, was there too, including an underling who worked for my father for years and who I’d never met. I can’t even remember his name. And, of course, Roland, shaved arms and all, was also there – but back then he called himself ‘Rolin’. He was the PR photographer at the time and believed that all photographers had to have cool names if they wanted the celebrities to trust them. In Hollywood it’s not what you create that matters, it’s the image you portray, and ‘Rolin’ with tattoos conveyed
serious artistic talent
levels of magnitude greater than ‘Roland’ from the Midwest.

‘Hey, come here,’ Rolin called over to my father and I when we arrived. He rolled up his sleeve. ‘Check this out. My latest. Cool, huh?’ It was da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on his inner forearm. He looked like he was skinned alive. Rolin’s blood dribbled through where the ink had been injected earlier in the day.

I don’t remember much else about the party, but my shrink says that’s normal. He says, given after what happened next, it’s reasonable for my brain to try to block memories from that night. It’s my mind trying to save me from more hurt.

But I do remember what I wish my mind would let me forget. After the party, driving home through our subdivision, the Orange County air was warm and smooth as it flowed in the car windows. My dad
seemed lost in thought, so I just listened to the crickets as they creaked and watched the curbs slide past, dipping and breaking every time there was a driveway. Suddenly there was a sharp swerve and a pop. I was jerked forward and the seatbelt snapped something in my chest as our vehicle stopped cold. I looked over at my father. The way the windshield was embedded in his skin, thousands and thousands of little shards of glass, his face sparkled like a mask of diamonds. I had never seen anything so magnificent. Then blackness crept in.

I woke to the horn. The windshield was gone. The steering wheel was in my father’s chest. I remember trying to scream, but couldn’t. Nothing was coming out. Someone was by the car. Blackness again.

‘It doesn’t look good,’ a voice said when I woke at the hospital. I thought they were talking about me, but they meant my father.

Our car hit a large maple. The impact was so forceful part of the engine ended up in the back seat. I was the lucky one. Broken collarbone. Bruised arm. Three weeks of physical therapy. The next day, when I woke, my father was dead.

Maybe I looked like an asshole to all the doctors in the hospital because I wasn’t all torn up and crying about things. But after Emma I had learned how to compartmentalise my hurt so well that I no longer remembered how I should feel when someone else close to me died. So I just lay in my hospital bed and held my mother’s hand as she shuddered and cried.

The funeral came and went. I was given my father’s gold watch to remember him by. It felt more like a retirement gift.
Thanks for your service, son
.

A few weeks later I met a girl. It was when, as usual, I went to a movie by myself. As fate would have it, Rachel chose to catch a flick on her own that day too. She was seventeen and had just moved to LA for a modelling contract with
Cosmo
. We hit it off right away, and though her work kept her busy, we were soon seeing each other. She was gorgeous: slim body, perky tits, anime-red hair and green eyes that would have matched the Van Gogh’s eyes perfectly, now that I think about it.

One night Rachel stopped by while my mom was out grocery
shopping. I brought her up to my room and started to undress her. Truth be told, it was the first time I had ever seen a girl naked.

I can still feel how hard her nipples were, how soft her cheeks felt. Her hair smelled like Snuggles Fabric Softener.

I laid Rachel back on my bed and kissed her belly. She slowly arched her hips as I peeled off her mauve lace panties. I slipped a condom on and clumsily began thrusting.

She was so beautiful. Her little moans so comforting. Her breath on my neck so warm. She was perfect. Barely a minute had passed and I already wanted to cum. In her, on her – it didn’t matter.

That’s when Mom walked in.

‘Mom!’ I screamed.

‘Jerry, what is this?’ Mom yelped, her jaw long and her eyes wide in mortification.

And to Rachel, I yelled, ‘Cover yourself up!’ But she just lay there: legs spread wide, a perfect grin on her perfect face.

That’s one thing about being a supermodel: you know you’re so beautiful it just doesn’t bother you if total strangers see you naked – even your boyfriend’s mother.

‘Oh, Jerry, oh Jerry,’ Mom kept saying. ‘What are you doing?’

To Mom I yelled, ‘I didn’t think you were home!’

And to the pillows on the bed I yelled, ‘Rachel, get dressed!’

But that’s one thing about being a bunch of pillows: they don’t have to do what anyone tells them.

And just before I blacked out, Mom asked, ‘Who’s Rachel?’

R
achel, it turned out, was a figment of my imagination. That’s the name my psychiatrist gave it: a ‘figment’. A hallucination, a symptom of psychotic depression, maybe as a result of my father’s unexpected death. Or maybe, my father’s death, coming right after Emma’s, was the thing that made me snap. Who knows?

Mom told the shrink how I had stacked the pillows like they were a person. Two duck-feather ones for the torso, decorative pillows from the couch for arms, a couple of body pillows for the legs. My mom feared the worst. But my shrink stressed that I wasn’t schizophrenic. ‘Psychotic depressives invent people to fill voids,’ the shrink said.

What void? My mom didn’t dare ask.

‘Psychotic depression and schizophrenia are two different things,’ the shrink told us. He said schizophrenia is a slow road into hell. It’s not reversible. Psychotic depression is. ‘With regular counselling from a mental-health professional and some Zyprexa we can rid Jerry of these figments,’ he explained in his
Harvard Medical Journal
voice from behind a large oak desk. ‘Your son will be good as new in no time.’

Mom looked like she really didn’t believe it.

‘Are you sure the medicine will make him OK?’ she asked.

‘If not, there’s always electroshock therapy. That can help.’

‘My poor baby,’ my mom said, like the treatment was inevitable. Me, I was reading between the lines. I wasn’t going to get laid by a supermodel any longer.

‘And what other things should we keep an eye out for? Besides the seeing people?’

‘As long as he stays on his meds, nothing major,’ my shrink told her, like I wasn’t in the room. ‘Maybe some disassociation. Some minor anti-social behaviour. Perhaps a small inclination – less than one percent of psychotic depressives get this – but perhaps a small inclination to other rare disorders.’

‘Such as?’

‘Really rare stuff. An inclination towards things like Stockholm syndrome.’

My mom whimpered.

‘Relax,’ my shrink tried to reassure her. ‘Just make sure he’s never kidnapped and he’ll be fine,’ he winked. And to me he said, ‘But seriously, be sure to stay on the medication or the figments could come back. And you don’t want us to have to treat this with shock therapy.’

I took my meds religiously and saw the shrink once a month. I saw
Rachel less and less. Another difference between being a schizo and being psychotically depressed: you know your hallucinations aren’t real once someone points the first one out. It makes them a lot easier to ignore. And though the medicine seemed to be working, my imaginary supermodel began to be replaced by very real stomach cramps.

‘I want to try a new medication,’ my shrink said the next time I saw him. ‘It’s off-label for this condition, but there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that it’s helpful for treating it. It might even eliminate your hallucinations with little or no side-effects.’

Sounds great, Doc. What is it?

‘Mifepristone.’

Aka RU-486.

Aka the abortion pill.

Don’t ask me how the pharmaceutical companies figured that one out. Maybe some psychotic depressive was convinced she was pregnant, popped a 486, and suddenly realised not only was she never pregnant but that the father of her child never existed.

However they figured it out, they were right: the abortion pill not only kills babies, it kills imaginary friends as well. I never saw Rachel again.

A year after the accident my mom packed us up and moved to a teaching job at DePaul University. Her friends thought she was running from the memories of her husband, but Mom wasn’t running away from anything. She hated Hollywood life. She was running towards the life she had always wanted. Sometimes we can only be free when the people we love are gone.

One day I came home to our new Chicago house to find Roland in our kitchen. His shirt was a hideous blue-and-orange Hawaiian theme and his goatee had started to sprout grey. Roland had left the studio and moved to Chicago to take a position at the Art Institute. Mom said he wanted to offer help in getting me a job at the museum.

‘We have lots of computers,’ he said to me, like I was some delicate flower.

Mom had told him everything.

‘It’ll be nice to get out of your bedroom, won’t it, honey? Maybe get your own place with all the money you’ll be earning?’

‘Trust me,’ Roland said, ‘you’re going to love the museum.’

I
fucking hate the museum and I need to be back there in ten minutes – barely time to finish the paper. Like anyone else, the amount of love I possess for my lunch break is directly proportional to the amount of hate I possess for my job. I cherish this time. But just as I turn to the Celebrity & Lifestyle section he comes in.

The bum.

Besides his torn clothes and his dirt-marked face, he looks like an old version of Ernest Hemingway – or the Gorton’s Fisherman. Silver hair peeks from the bottom of his knit cap, grey whiskers give him a rugged look, but it’s his cool blue eyes that are the most striking.

Every once in a while he’ll burst through the doors screaming about religion or philosophy, before someone offers him coffee to calm him down. I guess the regulars have found it’s quicker than waiting for the Chicago PD to show up. Today he’s unusually frantic.