Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (26 page)

If I’d known she was going take my side, I would’ve poured coffee on myself weeks before.

“Ellen, the tremors, the fatigue, most of the side effects will probably dissipate.”

“Probably?” She looked at him incredulously.

“What about my memory?” I asked.

I’d had a reputation, ever since I was an agent, for knowing every deal point word for word after reading through a contract just once. Now every negotiation became another test, another minefield. I was a fraud and it was only a matter of time before I got caught. Last week I’d been heading out to a lunch with the ridiculously large entourage of agents, publicists, and lawyers that represented a young actor with whom I wanted to do business.

“And where do you think you’re going?” Rene asked me.

“Lunch with Giordono’s people at … at … shit, where again?”

Rene looked concerned. “That was pushed to next week. We had a long conversation about it yesterday. You’re having lunch in the commissary with the producers on
Sleepwalkers
.”

It was all news to me.

“Greyson?” Rene felt my forehead. “Maybe you should sit.”

“What? No! I just wrote it in my book wrong. It’s nothing.” I pulled off my tie and changed gears, heading for the commissary.

“
I
wrote it in your book,” I heard Rene say, “—correctly.”

Rene would keep her mouth closed. Out of loyalty. But she knew something was up. One more slip like that and she’d go to Ellen.

“I’m afraid the memory issue will likely stick around,” Taysen said. “It’s hard to know to what degree. Everyone’s different.”

I stood up and walked over to the window. His office overlooked the UCLA campus.

Ellen stared at Taysen, shaking her head. “Jesus, what a fucking nightmare.”

“We’ll monitor the level,” he said. “Keep it as low as we can. But there’s a very fine—”

“Line between the therapeutic dose and the toxic,” Ellen cut him off. “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

“In time, some of these side effects will dissipate or at least become tolerable,” Taysen said.

“So you’re saying they won’t go away,” Ellen said flatly.

“Some might. I don’t know. We just have to wait it out.”

Ellen nodded silently. After a moment she leaned forward toward Taysen. “Dr. Taysen, do you understand what would happen if …”

“If what, Ellen?”

Ellen looked at me like she was asking my permission.

“Go ahead,” I said. “It’s not like we haven’t talked about it. Ad nauseam.” I went back to the window. The grass looked incredibly green and the brick-and-sandstone buildings—many of them domed with gentle curves—were in a way friendlier, more welcoming than their colonial and Gothic Eastern counterparts.

“Well?” She threw up her hands.

“I understand Greyson’s position requires discretion.”

“That’s one way of putting it. Do you understand what would happen if anyone found out? Anyone? They don’t let people with … 
this
run studios.”

“I understand the stigma is … a tremendous burden to bear,” Taysen said. “But the fact is, untreated manic depression gets worse. One in four commit suicide.”

Fourteen floors down, there were coeds biking to class along the wide path that cut through the center of campus.

“So,” Taysen said firmly, “do you want a medicated studio executive with side effects that may or may not go away or do you want a dead studio executive? Because one in four is not a bet I’d be willing to make.”

Still more kids were lying on the green, green grass. Eating pizza. Reading. Playing Frisbee.

I wondered if the windows opened.

Ten days later, on a Monday morning, I was sitting at my desk going over memos for the weekly meeting with my core staff—the six men and two women I’d handpicked to head up the Production divisions, Domestic and International Distribution, Marketing, Accounting, Development, Casting, Postproduction, and In-house Packaging. They were my cabinet advisors. They gathered the intel. I made the decisions.

I willed myself to memorize every tiny detail. Production costs, coverage of the scripts up for discussion, replacement options for an actor whose drug habit might make it necessary to replace him a week before shooting began—I wouldn’t even have to look down or turn a page.

“Meeting in five, Grey,” Rene said, setting a stack of scripts down on my desk. Rene had been with me, or, more accurately, had put up with me, for fourteen years—ever since I first got my own desk at Franklin Morton. At the time she was a single mother in her thirties working a full-time job and taking care of two young children. And me. Now her kids were in college. Now it was just me.

I picked up a yellow legal pad and the Montblanc pen Ellen had given me and walked out of my office.

“Grey,” Rene said, rushing up behind me and handing me a file, “the meeting memos. Your notes.”

“Don’t need ’em,” I said, waving her off. “But I’d love another cup of coffee.”

“Good morning,” I said cheerily as I made my entrance into the conference room where my staff was already assembled. I took my seat at the head of the table. “Okay, we’ve got a lot to get through,” I said, writing the date in the upper left corner of my blank yellow pad. “Shall we get started?”

I looked up at the people seated around the table and froze. I couldn’t remember a single one of their names. I began to perspire and suddenly it was as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I had to get out. I smiled weakly at the group of familiar-looking strangers, stood up, and immediately fell onto the floor.

The studio publicist called it food poisoning and managed to keep it out of
Variety
.

That night, I cut my dose in half. After a week, most of the side effects were gone. Ellen and I celebrated having dodged a disastrous bullet.

After that, every night before my monthly blood test, I would simply triple my dose. Taysen and I celebrated my miraculous progress. And everybody was happy.

Even the studio.

New York, 1994
. It is difficult, I am finding, to make friends on the psych ward. Certainly we all have something in common. But usually, I find, it’s just the one thing. And mutual insanity is not a good foundation for a friendship. Or maybe I’m overly demanding. But I am more delighted than a grown man should be when I discover that the beautiful and maniacal Glenda loves movies almost as much as I do—that she can quote dialogue from
The Maltese Falcon, North by Northwest, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Last Tango in Paris
. The difference between us is that, for the time being anyway, I have a grasp on where the movie ends and reality begins. But no one is perfect. Glenda may be certifiable but she knows her cinema and she has earned my respect. And so we have become friends. And then some.

The then some really started because of
Basic Instinct
.

Glenda is not the only patient with issues that might induce the staff to monitor our viewing a little more closely. But despite the various pathologies wandering the ward, they let us watch virtually anything on TV—sex, violence, the abuse of small animals—particularly on the weekends, when group activities are pared down to a minimum and the depressive doldrums kick in.

And so, one bleak Saturday afternoon, eight or ten of us—patients and staff members alike—found ourselves watching
Basic Instinct
, a film which Glenda has seen thirteen times.

“I fucked Michael Douglas,” she blurted out at one point. “But he disrespected me so I broke it off.”

Five minutes went by.

“He begged me to take him back. Practically stalked me.”

“Shut up, Glenda. You’re full of shit and we’re trying to watch,” said Esther, an Orthodox ECT patient who, on top of everything else, had to suffer the indignity of wearing a bad wig. I wondered, though, if for Esther watching movies like
Basic Instinct
was the next best thing to eating lobster.

“I don’t appreciate that coarse language, Esther,” Glenda said, twisting her long, wild, dark hair into a bun. “And I’m not full of shit. I had to get a restraining order against Mr. Michael Douglas.”

“
SSSSHHHHHHHHHH
.” Eight people simultaneously shut Glenda down. I smiled at her.

“Are you laughing at me?”

“Not at all,” I said, “I believe you. One hundred percent. I’ve worked with Douglas. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

She dragged her folding chair so that she sat directly across from me. “You have?”

“It was years ago.”

By the time Catherine Tramell was getting interrogated by Detective Nick Curran, Glenda had slipped off her underwear. Using a crayon as a cigarette and reciting Sharon Stone’s dialogue word for word, inflection for inflection, she let her hospital gown ride up and her paper-white thighs fall apart until I was staring directly into her pussy.

She left her mark on the vinyl-covered chair. After that, the ball was in my court. But it is not easy to have an affair on a psych ward. It may be even harder than killing yourself.

ELEVENTH

I can’t help wanting to fight back when they try to put me under. Because as much as I want to padlock what is left, I know I can’t. I know they will creep in and steal more. What I ate for dinner last night, the name of the first girl I kissed. And I do not know how much is left. What I remember now mostly are words—the ones they say endlessly, the ones that make me want to do something that would get me thrown in the Quiet Room: “Most likely,” “Eventually,” “We don’t know,” “Wish we knew more,” “Wait and see.” Failed attempts at reassurance, they are empty, meaningless, insubstantial, placeholders for what is missing
.

I feel the pinch of the first needle. Pot roast, I think, and tuck the memory away in a dark corner. I hide Emily Sachs away someplace I’m sure they’ll never look. I won’t know for sure until I wake up. But for now it’s the best I can do
.

New York, 1992
. “Sir?” I open my eyes and see the Pakistani cabbie looking at me in the rearview mirror.

“Where we going this evening?” he asks in English so heavily accented I can just barely understand him.

Shit. I hadn’t really thought about it.

“You pick,” I say. His brow knits into a perfect V.

“Sir?”

“Central Park South. The Sherry-Netherland.” It’s what I always said when I got into a cab at JFK.

The drive from the airport along the Van Wyck and the BQE is one continuous stretch of drab—Woodhaven, Kew Gardens, Rego Park. I stare out the window straining to catch a glimpse of a garden or a park. Anything that could even in the broadest sense be construed as haven-like. But there is nothing. I’ve seen third-world countries make more hospitable first impressions. I close my eyes.

“Wake me up as soon as you can see the skyline.”

“Oh, yes sir,” he says enthusiastically. “You don’t want to be missing that. Very beautiful, very dramatic. Just like it looks in the movies.” His accent has a singsong quality to it which, after a while, I find oddly soothing.

I wonder what it means that I have just had the same thought as my Pakistani cabbie. Perhaps nothing more than that we are both cinephiles. He could in fact be the next Satyajit Ray. Or Quentin Tarantino. I lean forward and take a good look at his taxi operator’s license. Savijii Sengupta. Eventually Savijii’s going to have to lose the turban. Eventually he’ll have to water down everything that drew Hollywood to him in the first place. And he’ll do it. Give in. Sell out. What choice does he have? Like he’s going to spend the rest of his life driving this fucking cab. Not when all he has to do is lose the turban.

But I digress. I was thinking about the Manhattan skyline. About the fact that there is something deeply, fundamentally satisfying—inspiring, exciting, and at the same time comforting—about reencountering that view. Because it doesn’t matter what season it is or whether I’m sneaking in at dawn after taking the red-eye or how many years I’ve stayed away; everything is where I left it.

The Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Twin Towers—always there waiting for me. Faithfully. Watching for me. Standing tall. Like the proud, lonely, loyal wives of sea captains.

L.A. has no skyline—no elegant bridges or buildings that soar toward the clouds. Shopping centers, nondescript office buildings, and citywide, event-themed decor (The Olympics! The King Tut Exhibit!) go up and down like sets on a soundstage. Nothing lasts. From one trip to the next. One day to the next, L.A.’s slapdash, easily impressionable landscape changes as hastily as the events on its civic social calendar.

Most of the time, you drive by without even noticing there’s nothing to look at. Unless you’re in one of the canyons or out at the beach. But L.A. can’t really take credit for that. The Pacific Ocean, Topanga Canyon—that kind of thing is just dumb luck. A gift. It’s only a matter of time before the well-intentioned people of Los Angeles fuck it up.

“Sir?”

“Mmmm.”

“Sir.”

I open my eyes and the drab is gone. We are crossing the Triborough Bridge and the sun is glinting off the swells in the East River. And suddenly I am seeing my little yellow taxicab from above. I am seeing the opening credits roll. I am orchestrating the establishing shot. Not as gritty as
The Asphalt Jungle
, not as gauzy as
Manhattan
. I am still deciding. But it is the same landscape, the same city.

When we get to the hotel, I realize I have only Kenyan money in my wallet. Now my cabbie is not so cheerful.

“Keep the meter running,” I say. “I’ll go to the currency exchange inside.”

I turn toward the hotel.

“Wait,” he calls out his window. “Leave your bags in the trunk.”

The bellhop—a man of about sixty, wearing a maroon tux and tails with brass buttons down the front, white gloves, and a little hat held on with elastic that cuts into the pillow of fat under his neck—has just finished loading my luggage onto a cart. Three heavy suitcases, a guitar I had custom-made for me in Brazil for $30,000 (I don’t play), a rug stitched from the skins of African water buffalo, a set of two-dozen hand-carved ivory chopsticks, and a giant brass Tibetan gong.