“ARTHUR PULLMAN?”
“Mmm.”
“You’re Arthur Pullman?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m here to inform you that your father has requested that, in lieu of further time in holding, you complete a psychiatric evaluation, upon which the terms of your release will be conditioned. Now, seeing as you are eighteen, you do have the right to refuse his suggestion and remain in the cell, but—and I’m speaking of my own volition here—I’d strongly suggest that you do as he requested and complete the evaluation.”
“Why?”
The uniformed officer standing in the cell door in front of me shrugged. “Chairs are more comfortable in there.”
I followed. I’d never been in a police station before, let alone a cell. They were terrible, built to convince you of your guilt. He led me down a series of hallways, through an oak door, to a room with two high-backed chairs, an oriental rug, and a coffee table with a plastic green plant. The illusion of comfort, rule number one in the Book of Therapeutic Bullshit.
I couldn’t feel anything. It wasn’t a temporary flash of numbness, or an overwhelming light, or a moment of my body taking control and operating on instinct; it was a complete and total nothing. No want, no fear, no purpose, no hope, no sadness, no happiness, nowhere to go and no reason to be there, no desperate truth or longing for answers; just a plain white emptiness where everything else used to be. I tested myself.
Arthur, your hand is healed! UCLA wants you to start practice Monday! “I guess that’s fine.”
Arthur, your grandfather is actually alive, he’s waiting to talk to you. “That’s very interesting.”
Arthur, Kaitlin fucked Mason again. “Huh . . . huh.”
I had become a plastic human being.
The door opened and a copy of Dr. Sandoval, this one female, and black, came through the door and sat in the chair adjacent to mine. She opened a folder on her lap and read silently. If I cared, I’d have read it upside down. Instead, I stared at the plant.
“Arthur Pullman,” she announced.
Our eyes met, and I noticed another similarity with Dr. Sandoval, maybe the most noticeable—inhuman detachment in her eyes. I’d imagine it was the kind of look that only developed after years and years of looking too closely at people. It would be hard to still have faith in the species.
She leaned forward, looking me up and down, like she was checking to see if there was anything about me that wasn’t in the folder. She must have decided there wasn’t. “Tell me about your dreams.”
“My dreams?”
She nodded.
“What about them?”
She reopened the folder. “Your therapist at home, Dr. Sandoval, said you described them as ‘driving your car off a cliff, crashing into the water, and drowning.’ Is that right?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want her to know anything. I couldn’t let her have that power over me. I knew how she would use it.
“What about your hand?” she asked.
“What about it?
“You’re wearing a cast.”
“I broke it.”
“How?”
“By breaking it.”
“Yeah, I got that part, and I’m asking how?”
After a moment of silence, she began speaking quickly. “A psychiatric evaluation such as this exists for me to make a determination, on behalf of the state, as to whether or not I believe that you can be released from the jail here without further risk of violence, either to yourself or to others. I make this determination based solely on what I observe. There is no second opinion, there is no appeals process, and, at this point, you’ve consented, so bail doesn’t really do anything for you unless I say you’re ready to leave.” She slapped the folder. “You’re not hiding anything from anyone here. This thing tells me everything I need to know. So tell me, Arthur Louis Pullman, how is it that you broke your hand?”
“I thought you had, you said you already, already had all of the answers in your, your little . . . folder.” My voice was dry.
“I want you to tell me. Unless, of course”—she found a section in the folder with her finger—“‘Arthur broke his hand punching a wall forcefully. The punch was thrown at Kaitlin Lewis, his girlfriend at the time.’” She looked up. “Is that really all there is to it?”
I sat still, feeling none of it. “I guess that’s all.”
“Why were you mad?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“It was stupid. Sometimes I get mad.” I quickly added, “Back then. But not anymore.”
She leaned toward me and said, as if she understood, “Is that why you tried to hit her?”
I didn’t respond.
“What’s that on your finger?” She noticed my thumb was twisting around my ring finger. “Let me see it.”
Reluctantly, I set the ring on the table in front of us.
“A ring, huh?” She picked it up and rubbed the silver in front of me, smoothed over from having spun on my finger so many times. “It’s nice,” she observed, checking back on my face for a reaction but logging zero results.
“You know . . .” She set it back on the table. “I handle a lot of domestic violence cases in here,” she said. “It’s the most common kind of case I’m called in for. You start to recognize patterns, between these guys, and the most noticeable one is that they never seem to get why what they did might not be okay. It’s always like they had to do it, like they were provoked, or they were just doing what anybody would’ve done. Some of them, they go so far as to think they’re doing her a favor. ‘At least now she knows not to be such a bitch,’ that kind of thing.”
“So?”
“So, none of those guys would blame it on themselves getting mad,” she said, leaning in. “So I guess my question is, why hit the wall?”
“I guess I was mad.”
“Takes a lot of force to break your hand. I’m going to bet,” she said, nodding to the ring, “it wasn’t your hand you were trying to break.”
My eyes found the ring, still perfectly intact on the table in front of me and in every dream.
“When’d she give this to you?”
I swallowed. “Two years ago.”
“And then she cheated on you.”
I didn’t say anything for a long moment.
She held up the folder. “She admitted to you that she had three other active sexual partners. One of them was your best friend, Mason Cromwell.” I could still feel her watching my face. “Three active sexual partners is a lot for a girl with a boyfriend. Did you not know that?”
I blinked, waited a few seconds, then blinked again.
“Did you not know that, Arthur?”
“No, I mean, yeah, you . . . like you said, she, she told me.”
“But when I asked you what happened with Kaitlin, you said ‘nothing.’ And when I asked why you were upset, you said ‘it was stupid.’ Do you think your girlfriend admitting to you that she has three secret sexual partners is a stupid reason to be upset?”
“I just . . . How I handled it was stupid. Getting mad, at her. At the ring. I shouldn’t, I know that I shouldn’t have, have gotten so mad, and I know she, she told them, it was, it was for my own good, because she, she knew I needed—she wanted me to be . . . She said I was difficult. I’m difficult. I’m not a . . . I shouldn’t have punched the wall.”
She let my mumbling drip into silence. Catholics always said confession made them feel relieved, forgiven, and pure, but I didn’t feel any of that. Talking just reminded me of the moments I hated myself the most.
“I’m Dr. Patterson.”
Her hand was extended toward me when I looked up.
“What?”
“I just realized I hadn’t introduced myself. I’m Dr. Patterson, on-call specialist for the Chicago Police Department. That’s why we’re talking now.”
“I’m Arthur.”
“Arthur Louis Pullman,” she said. “With the famous grandfather.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I never read the book.” She returned to the folder. “There’s a pretty serious search out for you, now, Arthur. Police on the ground looking for you in . . . California, Denver, Omaha, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. And now here you are in Chicago. That’s a pretty wide net.”
I shifted in my seat.
“You told the officers that brought you in that you were in Chicago . . . ‘following clues’?” She paused, expecting me to explain, but expecting wrong. “You don’t talk to many people who are looking for clues anymore. What clues?”
“I’m not crazy.”
“Sure,” she said, shrugging. “Me neither.”
I watched her for a moment, and she stared back, unflinching, reminding me that answering the questions wasn’t my choice. “My grandfather.”
She held her stare for a moment, then fell into a laugh. “Fucking writers, right? I married one, terrible mistake. Everything’s gotta have some kind of . . . plot. It’s like the way things are just isn’t enough for these people.” If she expected me to laugh with her, she was wrong. “So . . . he left you clues? When?”
“He ran away from home.” I shifted in my seat, trying not to think about the timeline or my failure to understand it. “A week before he died.”
“Right. I remember reading about it. I’m sorry. Dementia can be very, very painful for a family. I’ve seen many, many children, grandchildren, try desperately to interpret . . . I’m sorry you had to go through that. It’s very difficult.”
I accepted her sympathy by crossing my arms.
“I’m confused, though,” she continued. “Your grandfather . . . in his final days . . . struggling through what must have been severe Alzheimer’s, was able to leave clues behind for you?”
I shifted in my seat. “He wrote some journals, and I followed them.”
She rapped her pen a few times against the folder. “And why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Follow these clues? What were you looking for?”
I took a deep breath and focused only on the plant on the table, unflinching, unaffected by our conversation. I didn’t have an answer.
“Did you find anything?” she asked. “Did it reveal anything about him to you?”
“When do I get to be done with this?”
Her expression froze. “I’m sorry?”
“I’m answering your questions. I’ve proven I’m not dangerous. When do I get to be done?”
“Arthur, you punched a police officer.” Her lips tightened. “You rioted in a secure building and started shouting at the walls in the lobby. They’re not going to let you high-step out of here. We take this kind of thing seriously.”
“That was a mistake,” I said, trying not to remember it. “But obviously I’m sane.”
I felt a confused frustration tingling in my stomach, in my left hand.
She locked her eyes onto mine. “Arthur, we’re gonna talk about a few weeks ago.”
“Okay. Why?”
Her round eyes became slits on her face. It was her turn not to speak.
“What?” I asked again, more frustration creeping on top of the frustration that was already resting in my stomach.
She shifted in the almost-comfortable chair, and slowly, she began to nod. “What have you been doing for, I don’t know, three weeks?”
“Well, I’ve been on a train—”
“Before that.”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it.”
I thought about it.
I couldn’t remember much. Every day had been so similar after Kaitlin and I broke up, it was almost like they hadn’t happened at all. I’d gone to the hospital for my hand, and when I returned home, there was nothing I wanted to do. I thought about applying to a few other colleges, but I guess I hadn’t gotten around to that. I watched TV a lot, when I could bring myself to it, but I couldn’t remember watching any more than a couple of episodes of any series on Netflix before giving up. None of them looked good. All I really remembered was spending time on my bed, looking at my hand, showering, eating, and driving.
But I couldn’t tell Dr. Patterson that. “Well, I had to go in to take care of . . .” I held up my broken hand.
She nodded but didn’t speak.
“I guess . . . well, I sat around my house a lot. I couldn’t play tennis or anything, and Kaitlin was—well, you know. So I watched Lost, Game of Thrones, I got some college apps for the spring semester, and . . . I masturbated a lot? Is that the kind of honesty you were looking for?”
She shrugged.
“I guess,” I continued, “I guess the only reason I’d really leave my house every day was to go driving.”
“Driving? Like the dreams?”
“I mean . . . no. I didn’t crash.”
“Where would you drive?”
“Uh, there’s a road near my house, in Portola Valley, with a big hill. I would drive that.”
“Every day?”
“Every day.”
She wrote something down in the folder. “Any particular reason?” she asked.
“Uh, because I like driving, I guess?”
“Why?”
“Why do I like driving?”
She nodded.
“I do—I mean, I just like it.”
“What about it?”
I felt my face get hot. “I don’t know, like, the thrill of it? I like . . . knowing I’m going faster than humans are supposed to go. The adrenaline. And I guess, when I’m driving, I don’t think about anything else.”
“And you did that every day?”
“Every single day.”
“Up until you left.”
“Yes,” I said, swelling with discomfort.
“Nothing else happened, no days you didn’t go driving?”
I shrugged. “Nope.”
I was still gazing at the plant. When I looked back at her, she had set the folder on the table and was looking back at me with intense sympathy.
“Do you know what trauma is, Arthur?”
I shrugged.
“It’s the way that we respond emotionally to the bad things that happen to us,” she explained. “The most common effect that trauma has is a sort of . . . intentional forgetting. Our brains want to protect us, so they mask the bad experiences by remembering them as different, normal ones. That’s how people are able to forget war, or death, childhood abuse, anything that scars them—they remember it as something else.”
Irritated, I sat up. “And you’re saying I was traumatized by Kaitlin breaking up with me? Because check your math, professor, I punched the wall before we broke up. We were still together. That was part of why she broke up with me at all.”
Dr. Patterson shook her head. “No, that probably felt like a terrible thing, but it wasn’t trauma. That you remember very clearly.”
“I remember punching the wall, too!” I protested.
“I know,” she said, then, more quietly, “I know.”
I was starting to feel strange, like a sadness was showing up in parts of me that I couldn’t get to. It was familiar, but I couldn’t reach it to understand it; darkness that was too dark to see its source.
She spoke again. “Do you know what happens to our bodies right before we die? The last chemical we release?”
I shook my head.
“Adrenaline.” She made direct eye contact with me. “Fight or flight. When the body thinks it’s going down, it sends every bit of energy it’s got, in the form of adrenaline.”
“Why—why are you telling me this?” I stuttered. All around my body, I felt tingly, cold water against the back of my neck. The sadness was starting to get overwhelming, an unavoidable gravity pulling me in. I wanted to get rid of it, get away from it, but as I thought about the pain in my hand, everything just got worse. I was back in the world of my dreams, driving my car but having no control over what I was doing. I was in the lake, on the train tracks, with no desire to move, no energy to even lift my hands. “What does this have to do with anything? What are you—”
“Arthur, three weeks ago, you attempted suicide.”
I blinked several times.
“You sat in your garage, in the front seat of your Camaro, you turned on the gas, and your father discovered you just in time to get you to the hospital.” She paused. “You tried to kill yourself.”
I stared at the plastic plant as it sat on the table.
“You haven’t been able to remember it because your brain registered the adrenaline and decided you were driving. Do you remember it now?”
I didn’t move.
“Think of your dreams, Arthur. Put yourself in the car.”
I remembered a day, waking up and getting in my car to go drive to Portola Valley, not wanting to come back, not wanting to feel anything other than the blinding speed-high of racing down the dive.
I remembered a moment, sitting there, watching trickles of smoke starting to rush into the car like water.
I remembered a seat belt, one that felt like five, pulling impossibly tighter and choking the air out of me.
I remembered a beeping warning light on the dash, the screaming of my father behind me.
I remembered a blurring, blinding fading of everything I was feeling into nothing, the roaring silence, like adrenaline, like pain, like bright, bright light, too bright to see its source, so concentrated and overwhelming that I didn’t have to think about waking up without her.
I remembered needing to move, needing to fight my way out, and deciding not to.
“Do you remember, Arthur?”
The sadness I had been searching for finally found me, and I remembered.
I began to cry. Heavy, wet, rapid tears, huge, heaving sobs, right in the police room’s comfortable chair.
“Why—” I tried to ask but my throat was closed, swelled from the foreign activity. I was all feeling, nothing but the salt water leaking out of my eyes. For what could have been minutes or hours, I sobbed. When I could chance a full sentence, I sniveled and nearly shouted, “Why—why did you”—the words were muted, watery themselves— “why did you tell me?”
Dr. Patterson waited a moment before answering. “Because you’re not the person you were three weeks ago.” She paused. “It’s time to remember now.”