“You know my history,” I said to Langdon. “You know I was taking an antipsychotic, antidepressant cocktail, not to mention what they gave me to sleep.”
“I know, with the whole suite of side effects-sedation, blunted awareness and feeling, inability to feel pleasure, asexuality,” he said, bored. “They really fucked with your brain chemistry. They’re still fucking with it.”
“So they are.”
I was deeply screwed up and had been for as long as I could remember.
“So how do you even know who you are or what you want? You can’t want her.” He glanced toward Beck’s motionless form.
“Maybe I don’t.”
I saw his expression change, and somewhere inside I smiled. I was a fuckup, to be sure, but I was also extremely smart. Did I know what I was and what I wanted? I wasn’t gay. I understood that now. My feelings of affection, my closeness to Langdon… I think, looking back now, I saw him as a father figure-someone to advise me and direct me, someone I could trust. And I had become so divorced from my feelings, had so little idea of what good, healthy feelings were, that I confused my feelings for something else. Maybe he’d picked up on my confusion and mistaken it for repressed desire.
He moved a step closer to me. I lifted up my wrists. “Untie me,” I said softly. “This is crazy.”
I realized then how little I knew about Langdon. He’d been my professor and adviser since my freshman year. We’d arrived at Sacred Heart College at almost the same time, but all we ever talked about was me. He’d never told me anything much about himself, just that he’d grown up in the Northeast. His parents were both dead; he had a married sister in Poughkeepsie, two nieces. I only knew that because he kept their picture on his desk. Who was he? What had formed him? What were his appetites?
He moved closer to me, seemed to consider me a moment, and then he undid my bindings. Everything in my body wanted to run to the grave. Was Beck dead? Could I still help her?
“Anhedonia,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked, even though I already knew.
“It’s the inability to feel pleasure,” he said. “It’s a common side effect of antipsychotic drugs.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You didn’t seem to be experiencing that with her,” he said, nodding toward Beck. There was anger, bitterness in his tone, and I found myself repulsed by him. But I held my ground as he moved closer.
“So you wrote that last poem?” I asked.
He nodded.
“And the one before it?”
“I wrote them all.”
“You used him?” I asked. He had access to Luke at Fieldcrest. He’d pulled that ad from the board and handed it right to me. “You used Luke to get to me?”
“He was easy to use,” he said. He offered a slow shrug. “The kid’s a wreck. So desperate for male attention, he’ll do just about anything.”
I felt a deep twist inside-sadness and sorrow for Luke. We pick our own predators. The flower gives off the scent that attracts the insect that nature designed specifically for the task. Had he picked Langdon? Had I? We draw them to us, sending out messages we often don’t even know we’re sending. Luke and I were both easy victims. In other circumstances, we might have been the predators, especially Luke, if he were older. Instead we were prey.
He took a step closer, approaching me tentatively. He’d only undone the bindings on my wrists. My legs were still tied. He didn’t want me to run. I tried to smile, but it felt tight and insincere on my face. My hand was itching to reach into my pocket. But still I held my ground.
“Just let her go,” I said.
It was a mistake. His face became a cold, hard mask. He reached for me, and as he did I shoved my hand deep in my pocket and brought out the tube, spraying.
He roared, stumbling, clawing at his eyes. And I dove my way out of his path. As he doubled over, screaming, I quickly undid my bindings and bolted for the grave where he’d dumped Beck. He was after me, but slowly-one hand rubbing at his eyes, one arm outstretched, feeling his way.
I jumped down, and landed beside her, nearly on top of her. Then I bent and lifted her shoulders, and nearly died with relief when she lolled her head and opened her eyes. They were glassy, and staring. She was heavily drugged. Shit. She was heavy. How was I going to get her out of this place? I had jumped into the grave without any notion of how to get us out.
“You left me,” she said. Her words were slurred and slow. “You asshole. You left me.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. Beck, I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you, Lane.” She reached up to hit me, but her arm fell heavily on my shoulder.
“Okay,” I said. Yes, that was my name: Lane. My real name. “Fine. We’ll fight about it later.”
That’s when Langdon started raining dirt down on the grave we were sharing.
29
For all the talk in our culture about how important it is to find ourselves, we don’t have a lot of patience for the task, do we? It’s kind of a joke, a mode of light derision, to say that someone is still finding himself. Most people, it seems, have a pretty good idea of who they are. At least that’s how it appears to someone as lost as I have been. The big things usually seem to be in line for other people anyway, like gender for example.
We have more patience for girls who act like boys than boys who act like girls. A tomboy is considered cute. One day she’ll shuck her muddy jeans and put on a dress, and everyone will gasp at her beauty. They’ll all laugh about her tree-climbing, frog-catching days.
But there’s no such tolerance for the boy who puts on a dress, who wants a toy kitchen or a baby doll to love. Jung would say that this is because, even culturally, our anima is repressed, hated, derided. We hate our female selves. A boyish girl is perfectly acceptable. A girlish boy? Not so much. In certain places, you’d get your ass kicked, find yourself “gay-bashed.” You might even get yourself killed. That’s how much we hate our anima.
Beck was fully unconscious, and I was trying to keep the falling dirt off her face, away from her nose and mouth.
“Why are you doing this?” I yelled at Langdon.
He walked to the rim of the grave.
“Why?” he asked. He seemed incredulous, as if he couldn’t believe I’d ask such a stupid question. I could see the sweat pouring down his flushed face in spite of the cold. The walls around me seemed high, but they were crumbling and I started clawing at them, trying to create a foothold to lift myself out.
“I came here for you,” he said. He swept an arm to the trees. “I followed you to this dump in the middle of nowhere.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. He must have seen it on my face.
“Don’t you know me?” he asked.
Now he looked hurt, as though I’d let him down terribly. He was a different person than the man I’d known all these years. There was nothing of the mellow, kindhearted adviser and professor that I had grown to rely upon.
“Dr. Chang was my mentor,” he said.
It took a few seconds for the name to register. I thought about those years so little. The space between then and now was a dark and chaotic parade of horrible events. I didn’t think about Dr. Chang and his crazy school, even though I suppose I owed him a debt of gratitude.
It had been a place much like Fieldcrest. But my memories of my old school, my teachers, the day-to-day, were somewhat fuzzy and vague. Did I remember Langdon? It would have been more than ten years ago. He would have been one of the young doctors that rotated through for a semester.
For a medicated, mentally ill person such as myself, ten years might as well have been a million years. I could hardly remember my mother’s face, if I closed my eyes. She’d been slipping further and further away from me.
What should I do? I thought. Pretend that I remember him? Tell him the truth? Instead, I did what I always did, stared blankly at him, trying to figure out what he wanted.