Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (12 page)

I found my way home, stripped naked, and lay on the bathroom floor, the cool tiles pushing up. Keeping me from falling.

I didn’t know how long the floor would hold me. I prayed Ellen would come home before it gave way. I felt one hot tear leak out of each eye and run down the sides of my face. If they hit the floor they’d dissolve the grout that held the tiles together. I tried to wipe away the tears but I couldn’t lift my arms, couldn’t move at all. Someone must have drugged me. Or poisoned my food. Someone who worked in the law school cafeteria? Someone from my study group? Could it have been Ellen?

I became furious thinking that my wife could betray me like that. Furious and devastated. The grief was overwhelming and I began to sob. I could see my tears fall to the floor and begin to eat through the marble like acid. I heard the hissing and burning of rock turning to ash and I saw light coming through the spaces where gaps had opened up. If I didn’t get control, the whole thing was going to crumble and I was going to slip through one of those gaping holes and fall. And keep falling. There would be nothing and no one to catch me. I would die.

That was exactly what Ellen wanted. Well, fuck her. I stopped crying. I forced myself to stop hyperventilating. I wasn’t going to give that bitch the satisfaction. I counted six long seconds for every inhalation, ten seconds for every exhalation. I was going to get control of this. I don’t know how long I lay there—breathing and counting, breathing and counting, carrying on a running conversation with myself in which I articulated and repeated every thought that entered my mind, every tiny action my body (of its own volition) performed. I was spinning. I was the plastic dial on a game board—rigid, whirling, dizzy, and finally, inevitably, broken. Pointing toward Ellen.

I felt something drip on my forehead. And then on my nose. And on my chin. Drops of water were falling from the ceiling. Rain. It was raining from the bathroom ceiling. And the drops were burning holes in the bathroom floor. I was going to fall through the floor and die and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

“Grey, are you home?”

Thank God, Ellen was home.

No, that was wrong. That was bad. She’d come home early to kill me. She was going to make me drink bleach. No, not bleach. That knife. She was going to skin me alive with the electric carving knife we’d gotten as a wedding gift. It made sense. She was the one who’d wanted it, who had insisted we register for it along with the china and silver and all the other crap, most of which no one bought us. We didn’t have any cereal bowls, but we did have an electric carving knife. And now she was going to use it to kill me. Suddenly I felt horribly nauseous, not just at Ellen’s betrayal, but at my own stupidity. She’d been planning this for over a year. Lying flat on my back, I nearly choked on the bile that rose up into my throat.

“God, I’m sorry about the mess.”

She was in the living room, just outside the door. She wasn’t alone.

“He’s not usually such a slob.”

“Don’t apologize. We’re painting—our place is a disaster.”

It was Larry, our neighbor who lived upstairs with his boyfriend, Ian.

“Help yourself. I’m going to go see if Grey’s taking a nap.”

A minute later the door opened. Larry stood above me with a beer in his hand.

“Oops. Ellen, I found him,” Larry sang over his shoulder. “Sorry, Grey, I didn’t know you were …”

He stopped smiling and knelt down next to me.

“Greyson, are you okay?”

My mouth opened but nothing came out. Larry tossed a towel over my crotch.

“Did you fall? Hit your head?”

I managed a weak, airy “No.”

“Ellen, I think we’ve got a problem.”

“Don’t touch me!” I screamed at Ellen as soon as she appeared over Larry’s shoulder. Suddenly I was able to move and I scrambled backward, wedging myself between the toilet and the bathtub.

“Greyson, what’s wrong?” She was pushing past Larry, moving toward me.

I pleaded with him. “Get her away from me. She’s trying to kill me.”

“What? Greyson, this isn’t funny.”

“I said get the fuck away!”

She reached out to touch me and I slammed the heel of my hand into her chest. She flew backward into Larry and lay on the floor breathless. Ellen lifted her head and looked at me with the stunned, confused eyes of an animal that had been stalked and cornered—like she was looking at a stranger, a predator.

“Don’t. Touch. Me,” I growled. “I know what you did.”

Larry helped her up, never taking his eyes off me.

“Go call the doctor,” he said. “I’ll stay with him.”

We didn’t have a doctor. Ellen and I were healthy twenty-year-old newlyweds. We didn’t get sick. Ellen went to student health for her birth control pills, so she called them. The physician in charge didn’t seem all that surprised. Stanford was a pressure cooker. It wasn’t uncommon for a couple of students to crack every semester. The previous year, a med student had dissected his own neck the night before his anatomy practical.

I was doing my final year of college and my first year of law school at the same time. On top of that, my mother had just died. As far as the doctor was concerned, I was textbook. He told Ellen that I was suffering from sleep deprivation and academic burnout, that I needed to be sedated and brought in to the university hospital to rest for a few days, that he would send a nurse right away.

Our apartment was small. I could hear Ellen hang up the phone and start to cry. It stopped me for a moment, hearing that—hearing my wife cry. I’d known her long enough to be able to recognize that this was the sound of her crying with her mouth closed, of her trying to contain and extinguish her sobs, of her trying not to cry. I knew this was the sound of Ellen crying out of pain, not out of anger or frustration. Because I knew what that sounded like too. What I heard sounded familiar. Intimately, painfully familiar. And very far away.

“Ellen,” Larry called into the living room. “Not right now if you can help it.”

“I’m sorry, I just—”

“I know, sweetie,” he said, studying me, “but I think it might upset … the situation even more.”

I heard her pull two tissues out of the box and blow her nose.

“Okay, I’m fine,” she said.

Ellen left my favorite jeans—a soft, faded pair of Levi’s I’d had since high school—and a Stanford Law School sweatshirt just outside the bathroom door and Larry tried to get me dressed. But I refused to put on any of my own clothes. I was convinced that Ellen had saturated them with something—rat poison, cyanide, battery acid, cholera, polio, smallpox, oven cleaner, the possibilities were endless—that would seep into my skin and kill me. I was naked, covered in sweat, and shaking. Larry was very patient.

“Okay, Greyson, I … understand your concern—not that I agree, but I understand.”

“You do?”

“Sure. So let’s put our heads together and come up with a solution to this.”

“W-w-why?” I asked, my teeth chattering.

“Why? Because (a) you can’t spend the rest of your life in this bathroom and (b) you’re freezing your dick off.”

I looked down at my dick. “Oh, okay.”

“Good,” Larry said. “Now we’re on the same page. How about this … how about you wear my clothes?”

I was six foot two, 180 pounds. Larry was five foot eight, 170 pounds.

“Okay.”

Larry stripped off his purple paisley bell-bottoms and canary-yellow guayabera. My hands were shaking, so he buttoned me into his shirt and zipped me into his pants. He patted me gently on the ass and sighed.

“I’ve always thought Ellen was a lucky woman, Greyson, but I have to say, sweetheart, you’re making me reevaluate.”

When the doorbell rang, I was fully, if absurdly, dressed. Larry was wearing nothing but his black bikini underwear and turquoise socks. It had taken the nurse two hours to get from student health to our apartment located less than a mile off campus. Then again, it had taken Larry almost that long to get me dressed. I’d been in the bathroom for nearly four hours.

The nurse from student health had not come alone.

“Hi, hon,” she whined. “I’m Nurse Warren.” Her voice was brimming with insincere sympathy and trumped-up compassion.

I looked at Larry, panicked. “Who’s here?”

“Uh … just some friends.”

“What friends? I don’t want to see anyone.”

“And this young man is Mr. Terrell, my work-study student.”

“Come in, I’m Greyson’s wife.”

Mr. Terrell was Lester Terrell, a linebacker on the Stanford football team.

I was confused. “Am I on the football team?”

“No, sweetheart,” Larry said gently.

“Then why—”

“I’ll explain later. You mind?” he asked, picking up the pants I refused to wear.

“Don’t!” I screamed.

“Could you please hurry? He’s in the bathroom,” Ellen said from the living room.

“It’s okay,” Larry said soothingly. “I’m … I’m willing to bet you Sunday brunch at the Bay Street Café that there’s nothing wrong with these clothes.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

Larry was struggling to close the buttons on my Levi’s.

“Because I know Ellen loves you and would never hurt you.”

He put my sweatshirt on and his hands disappeared into the dangling sleeves.

“Bullshit!”

“Could we get a little help in here?” Larry called over his shoulder.

“Be right there, just as soon as Mrs. Todd fills out these forms.”

Larry rolled his eyes. “You have got to be kidding me.” He turned, threw open the bathroom door and stormed into the living room. “Sweet-Mary-Mother-of-God! First it takes you over two hours to respond to an emergency
—an emergency
—and now you want her to waste more time filling out paperwork while you sit here with your thumb up your ass instead of doing something to help that boy?”

It was very, very silent after that. Eventually Warren spoke up. “University policy,” she said flatly, no longer pretending to care. “Be sure to sign all three copies of the liability waiver.”

After that everything started to sound as if it were being filtered through cottony, cloudy marshmallows. The adrenaline had finally receded and a fuzzy kind of exhaustion was taking its place. It was like all the sharp edges had been filed off my panic. It wasn’t that I thought I wasn’t going to die, just that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Obviously, I fell asleep, because when I opened my eyes Lester Terrell was sitting on me and Nurse Warren was yanking Larry’s pants halfway down my ass. Instantly I started thrashing. Instantly it became clear how well suited Lester was to this particular work-study assignment. I felt a sharp pinch in my hip followed by a painful burning sensation. Warren stood up and I saw the empty syringe in her hand.

After that I didn’t even try to resist. It was over. I’d been had. By Ellen, by Larry, by Lester Terrell. Ellen stood in the doorway with tears running down her cheeks. Her shoulders were shaking. One hand covered her mouth; she was hugging her middle with the other.

I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.

The first time I woke up in my room at the Stanford University Hospital, Ellen was sitting at my side holding my hand. Bad call on her part. I was drugged, but I had not forgotten. I was out of bed and screaming within five seconds.

“How did you find me?” I screamed at her, frantically scanning the room for the exit. Ellen jumped out of her chair.

“Calm down, Greyson. You’re safe. You’re at the hospital.”

Fuck, Ellen was standing in front of the door. “They said they could protect me!” I screamed.

“Who? Protect you from what? I’m your wife. I love you. I would never hurt you.”

“Liar! You’re lying!” I picked up the chair she’d been sitting in, lifted it over my head, and hurled it at her. My aim was rotten and I missed her by at least a couple of feet, but she was shocked enough to make her way back to my bed and pull the patient panic cord.

Almost immediately, two orderlies and a doctor, having already heard the screaming and furniture rearranging, burst through the door ready for battle. The doctor was carrying a loaded syringe, and the orderlies—a tall gangly kid with an Afro and a pink-faced giant with a crew cut and yellow teeth—each carried a pair of leather straps. The big one tackled me and I felt the familiar pinch of the needle and heard Ellen cry out before I even hit the floor.

The next time I woke up, things were very different. Looked different. This wasn’t student health. Also, I was tied to my bed by those leather restraints. Hannah was there. And Ben and Jake. And, of course, Ellen. But I was so drugged—on something worlds away from what they’d been giving me—that I hardly recognized my siblings or cared that I couldn’t move.

Eventually I figured out I had been transferred to the university hospital psychiatric ward. After ten days spent mostly asleep as a result of the drugs they were pumping into me almost hourly, my psychosis seemed to be clearing up on its own. There was still no diagnosis. The doctors threw around “schizophrenia”—which often manifested around my age—or maybe it was some rare form of epilepsy, or perhaps a brain tumor. In other words, they had no idea. And I was so drugged I could not be very helpful about what led up to the “episode.” Not that I really knew.

On day eight, Jason Randall from my study group came by to visit. Randall had miraculously gotten into Stanford Law after spending four years surfing his way through UC Santa Barbara. He knew his was probably the last acceptance letter to go out, that he was one lucky son of a bitch, so he worked twice as hard as the rest of us just to keep up. He was an excellent note-taker and he brought the beer to every study meeting.

“Grey, look who came to visit,” Ellen said much too enthusiastically.

He came in with some wilted carnations and pulled a chair up next to my bed.

“I’m going to try to find a vase for these and leave you two to talk,” she said, kissing me on the forehead like I was a fucking five-year-old home from school with the flu.

When she was gone, Jason leaned in conspiratorially. “You know,” he said, like he was about to tell me he’d just gotten laid, “some people are saying this was a genius move, Todd, fuckin’ genius.”