Besides, this story is about Crystal, right? Okay, so let’s cut to the part where she entered the cafeteria that evening for dinner, just a few hours after she’d been dragged into Green Ward, screaming and drugged and drooling. She entered the room and it seemed that everyone looked up at her, like she was the guest of honor, or a celebrity. She, in turn, smiled at us. A big, silly smile that radiated… not warmth, but a sort of manic glee. You couldn’t help but smile back, despite whatever psychological impairment you were fighting off at the time. She came straight to my group’s table and sat down, folded her hands in front of her and looked at each of us in turn.
Her hands, I noticed, were bone-white. Her fingers narrow and twiggy. Her exposed wrists and forearms were… rubbery. Freckled. Sickly. She was still wearing the PEACH shirt, and I could see the gray patch above the CH where the drool had stained an amoeba-shaped spot. She sat ramrod straight and her moderate but pointed breasts were pushed out against the tight white fabric. You could tell she was used to thrusting them forward like that, as if she were bellied up to a bar and trying to get the attention of a busy bartender, or a nearby male patron in the hopes of a being offered a free cocktail. My study of her continued to the neck, a goosey stem that was slim and deathly-white as her forearms. Her flesh was… not wrinkled, but sallow. Dry. Like an old person. Or a corpse.
But it was her face that really threw me off.
She’d obviously had some time to apply whatever makeup she’d carried in with her, because her lips were thick and deep-red, her cheeks blushed with some rosy powder, her eyes darkened, her lashes long and stringy as black weeds, her eyebrows drawn-on and arched like highway tunnels. Her hair, that peroxide blonde I mentioned, was dry as a stretched tumbleweed. Frazzled. Also, when you studied the way her face was all… inter-connected, I guess, you could tell she’d had plastic surgery. Lots of it. Her nose was pinched and looked disproportionately small between her cheek bones. Her lips were too full. Her forehead and temples were so tight it reminded me of the woman from the movie Brazil, creating an almost dystopian sense of beauty that was hard to look at for more than a few moments before it became unsettling, like a bout of vertigo.
But it was her eyes – her wide, large, deep brown eyes – that stayed with you, that erased the strangeness of the rest of her. That took you in and held you. They were beautiful and, if we’re being honest, completely mad.
She introduced herself to the group but she and I both knew she was really introducing herself to me, and I, in turn, to her. She was vivacious, energized and hyperactive. I assumed she was bipolar because you can assume things like that when you meet a person in a mental hospital. She was loud and brash and had a wonderfully unhinged laugh that made us the envy of the cafeteria, more than one patient sulking in their suicidal tendencies and wondering how it would feel to experience joy. To laugh, if even for a moment.
Crystal spent a total of three days in the Green Ward, and she and I spent a significant chunk of that time together. At first we’d chat idly over meals, then face each other, cross-legged on the floor, in the rec room. By her second day our shoulders were mashed together on the couch, staring at a black wall where a television would normally sit, making up movies in our heads we couldn’t watch, whispering about our respective suicide attempts and how much we hated the world.
On the day she left she wrote her cell phone number on my hand in red Sharpie, and I promised to call her once released.
And I did.
Dumb, right?
2
WHEN YOU’RE LONELY and socially inept, you don’t choose your friends, you simply glide through life and keep your exterior sticky, hope to hell someone grabs onto you and holds on long enough to eventually discover the real you, the buried you that isn’t so bad, or scary, or insane. Folks like me daydream about this. That someday, just maybe, somebody might really care about you. And wouldn’t that be something?
So while you’re shaking your head and thinking what a terrible idea it was for me to befriend Crystal, my ward-mate, my equal in sickness, my friend in mental disorder, realize that loneliness breeds desperation. Even the deranged need contact with another human or else the illness stays internalized; the delirious voices, the wicked thoughts, the confusion of self, the self-flagellation. It eats you alive.
When I first called her she literally squealed with excitement, which to a guy like me is the most powerful elixir in the world – to know that someone out there is actually excited to hear from you. It’s like no other feeling in the world. The anxiety is blown apart, the social awkwardness releases like a snake uncoiling in your chest and slips away, biding its return. You feel welcomed. Wanted. Maybe not loved… but liked. God damn, it’s beautiful.
We got together that very night and literally did the one thing we were both legally mandated not to do within sixty days of our release from the hospital.
We went out drinking.
As a patient of the Green Ward I was regularly taken to a conference room full of doctors, who questioned me. During one of these sessions I completely lost my cool and I screamed at them and slammed my hands into the smooth reflective surface of the brown table again and again and again.
SLAM!
SLAM!
SLAM!
SLAM!
I would be sobbing during all of this which they noted.
I PICKED HER up at her house and she bounced out like a kid on their way to Disneyland. She jumped into the car, banged the door shut and gave another little squeal before pulling me toward her into a tight hug. When she pushed back I could see her face – her real face, her true mask – for the first time since the hospital.
The first thing I noticed was that the makeup job she’d done in the Green Ward was nothing but a whisper of the whole works that screamed across her skull that night. Her ghostly pale skin was blotted with blood lips and blackened eyes. Her lashes so long and thick I immediately thought of Venus Flytraps every time she batted them open and closed. Her hair had been sorta puffed-out, blow-dried to enhance the body of the bleach-white cornucopia that lifted up from her forehead and bowed away and down the back of her neck. She wore jeans that glittered and looked sprayed-on to her stick-thin legs and an equally tight black T-shirt. I checked her feet and saw bright red heels, three inches high at a minimum. I almost felt underdressed, even if we were just going to a sports bar near her house to watch the Kings game (she was a rabid hockey fan, if that helps complete the picture here), but she assured me I looked “darling.”
I smiled sickly and tried not to recoil when I noticed that, astonishingly, she’d had another surgery done in the couple weeks since I’d last seen her. Her big brown eyes were still as glorious as ever and glowing with that bright inner-light, but now one seemed, uh, lower than the other. I stared at her flesh, tried to understand what had been done and why. It was not unlike attempting to solve an unfinished puzzle, not unlike the ones I did in the cafeteria of Green Ward to pass the time, to ease my anxiety.
She kissed my cheek and the spell was broken. While I drove us to the bar she put a cold hand over mine, and a shudder went through me at the skeletal feel of her clutching fingers, the chilled pad of her palm. But amidst all that revulsion huddled a satisfied pleasure. An elation. Despite it all – and as insane and poorly constructed as this idea was and as mildly deranged and physically unsettling as Crystal appeared to be – I was happy.
I’d made a friend.
3
I DON’T KNOW how or why the sleepovers started.
The first one occurred a couple weeks into our new friendship. We’d been hanging out a few nights a week, neither of us having jobs and both of us in need of companionship. One of those nights, after a movie I think, she asked me in for a drink. I accepted, and we hung out in her living room watching television and splitting a pitcher of margaritas she’d…
No. Wait.
That was the night I met her mother.
It was her mother who made the margaritas. The mother is important, so keep her in mind as we go. If it helps, I’ll tell you that there was nothing extraordinary about her. She was smallish and drab. Wispy. Borderline translucent. I’d wager you could spend hours in the same room with her and never even know she was there. Mrs. Cellophane, you know? Her wardrobe consisted of gray knit sweaters, generic black slacks, tired sneakers. She wore little or no makeup and was always extremely happy to see me. You’d think, knowing full well where her daughter and I had met, that she might be cautious. Wary. But she embraced me that first night, insisted I take off my shoes and get comfortable. She suggested we take the couch, Crystal and I, and then offered to make the margaritas.
While Crystal and I shoulder-snuggled on the puffy leather couch, a position I was quite familiar with from our mental hospital days, her mother made the drinks. She brought out glasses, crackers and bland cheese. A perspiring pitcher. She handed Crystal the remote control and said, “I’ll be in my room. You two have fun.” Adding: “I won’t be able to hear anything.”
Crystal had giggled and dug her shoulder playfully into mine, like a hairless cat burrowing in for a comfortable spot on a quilt. I found the whole thing a little strange, and having the pale-skinned, misshapen girl rubbing against me did nothing to assuage the feeling of discomfort. If anything, the creepiness of the situation enhanced. I felt as if the older woman not only expected us to fool around while watching the late-night talk shows, but was endorsing the idea.
But since I had nothing else to do, nowhere else to go (the idea of drowning in the dark thoughts waiting at my apartment was terrifying), and no one else to hang out with, I convinced myself that this was all very nice, and that her mother was very nice, and that Crystal herself was extremely nice. Nothing to see here, folks. We’re all good.
Or so I thought. Or so I hoped.
