Although I had no memory of how I fell into that madness, they told me it had come upon me at a motion-picture set, during a night shoot on location at a turnout on Mulholland Drive, high up on a cliff above Topanga State Park, with the sparkling lights of Los Angeles below us in the distance. The director had given Haley forty-five minutes while they reset the cameras for the next take. She had asked the caterer to grill a swordfish filet for her and a sirloin for her bodyguard. We also had asparagus, Caesar salads, sourdough rolls, and a half bottle of a Paso Robles pinot noir. We had eaten the dinner alone in her trailer, as we sometimes did when she was working and the press wasn’t around.
Again, I had no memory of that night. In fact, I remembered nothing of a space of many days before it, and nothing of the months it took for me to return to sanity, if I had indeed returned. I only knew what the detectives found in their investigation, and what the doctors at Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital told me later, when I finally stopped screaming.
It seems the director had sent his personal assistant over to let Haley know the crew was ready. When nobody answered her knock, the assistant assumed Haley wasn’t in the trailer, so she started back toward the area where the crew was waiting. Then she heard the door swing open and bang against the trailer wall behind her. The director’s assistant turned and saw Haley running across her field of vision from left to right, heading flat out toward the edge of the cliff. Haley wasn’t screaming. The only sound was her feet pounding the earth. As the director’s assistant watched in uncomprehending terror, Haley charged without a pause into thin air and dropped silently from sight.
The director’s assistant later told the police that at first she didn’t believe what she had seen. It took her several seconds to accept it. Only then did she run to the edge of the cliff to look down and call for Haley. But all she saw was darkness in the park below, and beyond, the yellow galaxy of city lights spreading to the horizon. The cliff at that spot was nearly one hundred feet high.
The crew didn’t wait for the police, of course. Everybody scrambled for their vehicles and drove down to the bottom of the cliff on a fire road, where they fanned out with flashlights and began to search. A rigging grip found Haley about an hour later. She had landed among a cluster of small boulders at the base of the cliff, in a position that was hidden from view lower down the hillside. Because the schedule for that night had included some stunt work, there were two paramedics in the crew. One of them checked her body, but it was only a formality. Everyone could see that she was dead.
Due to the time it took to find her in the dark, and the shock, nobody thought to check her trailer until the police finally searched it nearly three hours later. That was when they found me. I had stripped off all my clothing. I was on a settee, trying to push the fingers of my right hand through the wall. I had broken two of my fingers with the effort, but I kept trying. One thing about me: I do persevere.
Soon after that, they found a young woman named Nancy Fleming lying unconscious below some scrub brush on the hill behind the trailer. She worked for the caterer and had been sent over to serve the meal. Once she regained consciousness, she said she remembered walking toward the trailer with our food and then waking up in an ambulance, but nothing in between.
Investigators tested the remains of the meal and the blood from Haley’s body and mine. The lab results showed a cocktail of several kinds of amphetamines and hallucinogenic drugs, including lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. They said it was a massive overdose. One of my doctors said she was surprised when I regained my sanity three months later.
I was still unsure I had returned to sanity, even then. The abject terror of an uncontrollable imagination doesn’t fade easily, or soon. For weeks, which turned into months, psychiatrists worked with me. Eventually I came to understand the challenge. What I had to do was simple: rediscover something I could count on. If the drugs had torn away the calm and distant place that had sheltered me from the fear of combat, something else must take its place. Otherwise, the threat of madness would be ever present.
One day a chaplain from my old unit came to visit. It turned out he had come several times before, but that was the first time I had noticed. Captain Bud Tanner was a good marine. I had first met him at a forward operating base in Afghanistan. He was with the Third Battalion, Fourth Marines at that time, stationed in Delaram, which was just one barricade and some barbed wire away from being overrun by Taliban at all times. My squad and I had been passing through after a pretty tough mission. Word got around about what we had just done, and Bud came over to the hooch to check on us. He and I hit it off, and after his deployment when he ended up at Camp Pendleton, we got to know each other better.
It was Bud who showed me where it says in the Good Book to think about true things. Noble things. Whatever is right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy. It was Bud who told me see that such things were always there, even when I couldn’t think of them. They hadn’t died with Haley, and they had never stopped existing, even while I was lost within the chaos in my skull. And because they were always there, because they were external to me and didn’t rely on me in any way for their existence, I could hold on to them, or the idea of them, and in doing that, regain some sense of stability.
I had my doubts about Bud’s theory. Compared to the enormity of my pain, it seemed like clutching at straws. It wasn’t the dependable, calm and distant place that had sustained me in fearful moments before combat. It wasn’t inside me. It wasn’t part of me. It was no more under my control than the madness was. But it was my only chance, if I wanted to live long enough to avenge my wife.
5
Simon slipped into the guesthouse bedroom carrying a steaming cup of french roast coffee. He served it in an Aynsley china cup and saucer on a mahogany lap tray, one of a set of lap trays made in Charleston, South Carolina, for a planter who had been killed in the 1831 Jamaican Baptist War before the trays could be delivered. I knew this because I had once read a book about the Jamaican Baptist War, and because Simon, who was something of a historian, had once gently corrected my wife when he overheard her tell me that the tray was made in 1832.
As Simon set the coffee on the bedside table and moved to open the curtains at the windows, I remembered the morning when he and Haley and I had discussed the tray. Simon had been serving coffee. Haley and I had been in bed together, the same bed where I now lay alone, in that same room, my bedroom in the guesthouse. It was three hundred and twenty-two steps from her bedroom in a neocolonial Spanish-style mansion overlooking Newport Harbor, built by Howard Hughes during his Jane Russell days, and which Haley had renamed El Nido, the nest.
It was my first thought of Haley for the day, and I had been awake nearly half a minute. Things were improving.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“I believe it is just past one in the afternoon, sir,” replied Simon in his right proper English accent.
“Guess I should get up.”
“If you say so, sir.”
“I do say so. I just don’t want to do it.”
“Should I close the curtains and remove the coffee so you can retire?”
“Do what you want. I didn’t ask you to come in here and open the curtains in the first place.”
“Very good, sir.” Simon left the curtains open and the coffee on the bedside table and moved toward the door.