Her mother smiled at me, her teeth stained like shiny rose petals. “Crystal’s father is a wonderful provider. He pays for all of her, you know, work. My god, I’ve lost count of how many nips and tucks our little girl has had.”
“Twenty-three,” Crystal announced proudly, her eyes not leaving the television screen. “And I’m getting my boobs done next month. Daddy said so.”
I opened my mouth to ask about the brother, but before I could get out a word she turned on me, eyes wide with excitement, lips stretched in a wicked smile, teeth bared. “Oh shit!” she screamed, then clutched my shirt in one bony fist and put her other hand over my mouth, as if to keep me from also screaming. “I fucking forgot to tell you! I’m getting new tits!”
Her hand was firm on my mouth and nose, and I shook my head in annoyance. She removed her hands from my shirt and face and placed them on her breasts, gave them a little jostle. “I mean, look at these things. Worthless.”
I turned my head slightly to look askance at her mother, concerned at the reaction she might be having to the bizarre turn in conversation, fearful she’d be shocked at her daughter’s behavior in front of a young man. A guest. But she only nodded and smiled, sipped at her wine, seemingly as comfortable and anticipative of this twenty-fourth surgery as Crystal herself.
As for me, I could do nothing but nod along, dazedly giving my own approval for the latest wave of Crystal’s surgical sea change. “Well, if you want to. I don’t think you need it, personally, but…”
“Bullshit!” she screamed, and slapped me hard across the face.
Her mother immediately started to laugh, cackling so hard it sounded like she was choking on her wine. Crystal also started laughing wildly, eyes too wide, looking from me to her mother and back again. She jabbed a finger into my chest. “You know you love a woman with big honkers!”
I was too stunned to speak. My cheek stung and I guess I was in shock, my brain jammed into neutral, a fit of paralysis that immobilized my ability to process, to react. I stared absently at the television and pretended nothing had happened while my face reddened.
Sensing my disinterest, Crystal shrugged and slumped back into the couch, docile once more. “Whatever, sometimes people are just friends, right?”
I caught a flash of disappointment flicker across the face of her mother, but did not pursue it. Suddenly, despite the medication and the therapy and the booze currently dulling my brain, a very alive part of me was beginning to realize that this situation – this relationship – had become increasingly, maybe dangerously, out of control.
4
LET ME TELL you about the Blue Ward.
Oh, right.
I did say that, didn’t I? About not going back to the Blue Ward in this story. That you’d never see it again.
Sorry. I lied.
Do you still trust me?
The Blue Ward’s accommodations were straight from a Penny Dreadful. A hellish theater. Unlike the hunting lodge comforts of the Green Ward, the Blue Ward was more akin to what you’d expect when you hear the words insane asylum. The floors were smooth concrete. The walls, inexplicably, were constructed of cinderblocks, their rough surfaces glazed over with thick coats of dark gray paint. The lighting was industrial – not the soft whites and bedside lampshade browns of Green Ward, but harsh fluorescents housed in cages strung high overhead. The Blue Ward version of the “rec room” was essentially a cement box lit in dim deep-sea blue, so that all the patients wore a translucent, navy-tinted duotone. An almost ghoulish quality. When they moved, it was like the walls themselves were moving, the floor writhing with their flesh and shadow. It created a sensation not unlike being submerged among slow-waving creatures of the deep. Just as a coral reef is a biological structure, so the patients inside these walls are the room itself – its very existence reliant on the bodies and souls of those trapped inside.
Whenever it was time for the Green Ward to have “outdoor activity,” the patients were led, under guard and single-file, like a line of scuba divers, through the Blue Ward rec room and out onto a sunlit industrial patio where we could wander around in circles, smoke cigarettes, talk amongst ourselves or stare in solitary silence at the traffic jostling along the freeway horizon of the 405…
Or… wait...
The puzzles I put together in the cafeteria were not complex. I mainly competed against an internal clock, trying to create the picture as fast as I could with doped, trembling fingers. Five hundred pieces tops.
The final image was often something I recognized. A place I’d been on a long-ago childhood vacation. Or one of the rooms in the hospital.
Familiar scenes.
5
GIVEN THE INCREASING strangeness of our relationship (and by “our” I mean the one between Crystal, myself and her mother), I should not have been surprised by what happened on the last night I saw either of them, despite her subsequent pleas via messages and ALL CAPS texts, the ones with lots and lots of !!!!!!!!!!!!’s and xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo’s.
I had been at the gym, taking my doctor’s advice to exercise more as a way to clear my head, increase endorphins and thereby, theoretically, reduce the severity of the depression. It never worked, but it did make me feel better to know I was at least trying. So, I guess it did work, just not in the way it had been presented. Regardless, for the first time in a long time, I looked forward to getting home, having a beer and a microwave pizza, watching a movie. The idea of relaxing, so foreign to someone suffering from the anxiety I suffer from, was now so tangent as to be alluring. I had, if nothing else, exercised enough to tire myself out; tire out the black hamsters spinning the wheels in my head, the ones that propelled dark thoughts, created the depressive fog that condensed behind my eyes, poisoned everything and anything that was good.
I hadn’t even made it to the car when my cell phone rang, the screen flashing CRYSTAL at me like an insult. I honestly debated. For the first time in the few months we’d been friends, I considered whether I wanted to answer her call.
Yeah, of course I did.
“Hey.”
She was crying. “Can you please come over? Please?”
I told her I was sweaty, stinking. I needed to change. It was late. I was tired.
“Please? Oh my god, please.” More sobbing. More hysterics.
In the weeks that passed since my stay at the hospital, I had begun to feel more clear-headed, more normal. More like an… “everyday” kind of guy. Therapy and medication and the occasional visit to the gym all combined to grind down the jagged edges of my dark thoughts, smooth them to wrinkles; hiccups versus disease, speedbumps versus walls.
And with a stronger, healthier mind came realization. Clarity.
I began to see Crystal for what she truly was. Not a fun, hot girl with an overly constructed face and a passion for makeup, but a truly disturbed individual. I finally accepted that it wasn’t normal for a girl her age to do to her face, her body, what she had done. The obviously neurotic need for more and more surgeries, fixing and tweaking and moving her features like puzzle pieces. Her mother, too, I now understood, was disturbed in her own right. The way she acted with Crystal. With me. Her strange way of pushing us into each other.
All these thoughts were tinkling like wind chimes on a breezy porch when I saw her name appear on my phone. It was like a door of sanity inside my head shot open and all those coherent pontifications poured into me, a waterfall of understanding that stopped me in my tracks and halted my thumb’s progress over the word ANSWER, the pad hovering above it like a man about to press the big red button that sent nukes trailing sky-wide cottontails to start the end of everything.
