Dr. Clark counseled against it, but I kept a calendar on my wall and put an X through each day that passed—at a minute past midnight, if I was awake. I moved through time with constant terror. It moved too swiftly, separating me from my life; it barely moved at all, keeping me distant from the day of my release. In that way, each day was a victory and a humiliation. Yet a part of me refused to live inside of time at all; something of myself remained distant from those nervous skirmishes with the passing days. I thought of this part as my best and most secret self and I would not submit it to my losing war with time, just as no sane nation sends its finest tacticians and most lyrical poets to the front lines of a raging battle. Throughout my stay in Rockville, half of me remained sheltered in the lead-lined bunker of eternity.
As it turned out, my preserving half my heart in eternity contributed to my undoing in Rockville. It meant that I’d make virtually no friends and that I was more isolated than I ought to have been, more sequestered than I wanted—the loneliness was crushing, for the most part. In a community almost exclusively inhabited by perceptive people, my decision to reserve a part of myself from the reality of our shared circumstances was noticed constantly—causing me to be shunned, attacked, razzed, ignored, or, worse, much worse, wooed, drawn out, seduced, challenged, conned. My own doctor folded his arms and shook his head when he listened to me, and more often than I care to remember said “ho-hum, David” when I offered my careful, tidy descriptions of my feelings. “What’s your favorite color?” he once asked me. “Blue,” I answered, thinking of Jade, her Oxford cloth shirt, the shade of the ink in her last letter to me. Dr. Clark leaned forward and moved his small face closer to mine—a vein the width of a child’s finger beat in his high ivory forehead, as if his heart and brain were joined like Siamese twins. “Blue?” he said, and I avoided his eyes and nodded. “I don’t believe you,” he said. He slapped his knees and stood up. His hands were on my shoulders now and I squirmed away from him. “I don’t believe your favorite color is blue. You can’t even tell the truth about that. Do you know how to tell the truth, David?”
Of course I knew how to tell the truth. But the truth of the matter was I couldn’t. I wasn’t there in the same way as the others. I wasn’t an acid casualty or a compulsive eater or someone who believed that the lawn wept at night because I had walked over it. For all the encouragement I was given to whirl freely through my feelings, to become whole again by expressing everything that was inside of me, I hadn’t in fact been placed in Rockville to discover my true unbroken self. I was there on court order and I was there to change. And I was willing to change. But I knew there were things I could not say—not if I wanted Clark to report that I was ready to go home. I could not say that I wrote secret letters to Jade. I could not say that all that “getting well” really meant to me was the chance to find Jade, to find Ann, Hugh, Sammy, Keith—but most of all Jade, to find Jade, to hold her again and make her understand, as I did, that nothing had changed. I was willing to talk about anything else, but not once did I confess that the part of me I’d been sentenced to transform was as alive and unreasonable as ever.