Crack-Up (10 page)

Paranoid, Argus Ward
!
 
Plain paranoid
!

I laughed out loud at myself—even though by this time I was riding on the elevator with two other hotel guests.
 
The funniest thing of all was, I still believed my gut!

I didn’t have any luggage, so the first thing I did inside my room was kick off my stiff new Bruno Magli shoes.
 
Through room service, I ordered dinner—a rare tenderloin with bordelaise sauce, as I recall—and then I opened the mini-bar.
 
I’m not supposed to drink a lot at one time, because alcohol interacts with my anti-psychotic medication in funny—and not so funny—ways, so I focused on a row of tiny liquor bottles sitting atop the refrigerator.
 
One or two bottles, I decided, would be just right for me.
 
I grabbed the Kahlua bottle, gave it a hard twist open, and slugged down the contents in one or two gulps.

Then I threw open a window to let the stuffiness out.
 
My room overlooked the
Potomac River
and a fleet of yachts anchored near the boardwalk.
 
The wind was kicking up outside.
 
My skin tingled with wicked pleasure as I realized that not a soul in the world—not a soul I knew, anyway—knew of my own whereabouts.

An instant later, though, the tingle was gone.
 
Another thought had chased it away.
 
I was less than a thirty minute drive from my home in
Georgetown
, yet Sarah and Ellie and Duke might as well have been on planet Jupiter.

I turned from the window and stared inside the room.
 
That big mahogany four poster bed was draped in red and gold canopy, as always.
 
I thought,
I can’t go home again until—or unless—I can trust myself.
 
Because what if I’m really losing it
?

What if that disembodied Darth Vader-like voice I used to hear coming from the ceiling, or a drainpipe, suddenly returned?
 
Spouting all those dire—yet lavishly senseless—warnings it somehow sold me every time
?

I wrenched my body to face the river once more.
 
I had to squint in the face of a sudden gust of wind.
 
My body shuddered, head to toe.
 
I couldn’t bear the thought of what I might do upon hearing that Darth Vader-like voice tell me Sarah’s cooking was poisoning me, slowly poisoning me.
 
Or that my four year-old was plotting to poke my eyes out with the kitchen scissors.

Tears seeped from my tightly closed eyelids.
 
Some cry struggled to come out, but I pressed it down inside me, pressed it down, pressed it down, grimacing from the strain.

“Don’t lose control!” I told myself.
 
“Don’t!
 
Figure out what’s going on.
 
And for God’s sake, figure out what to do!”

Chapter 9

On the
Old
Town
boardwalk after dark I strolled alone along the waterfront, hands in my pockets, eyes at my feet, or following the lights aboard slow-moving ships on the
Potomac River
—all the while remembering my father.
 
The man’s behavior had always been erratic, even from a loving child’s point of view.

My father would disappear for days at a time.
 
And he’d usually return disheveled, reeking of body odor and booze, warning us that the communists were coming, or warning of other strange and fearful things.
 
One day he'd disappeared altogether.

It wasn’t until years later, after my own diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, that I finally understood him.
 
The disease had gripped my father too.
 
It'd seized me through him.

When a child’s parent has schizophrenia that child has a fifteen percent chance of suffering from the same disease.
 
Children who don’t have a schizophrenic parent have only a one percent chance.
 
And that disparity in odds was the main reason why I’d become a dad at a relatively old age.
 
It’d been a tough decision making Ellie.
 
And her sibling to be.

My father must be dead
, I thought.
 
He surely must be dead by now.
 
Or institutionalized somewhere
.

I felt ashamed that I hadn’t found out, one way or another, long ago, what had become of my old man.
 
I’d always been afraid of what I might find, afraid to learn what my own fate might be.

If my father is alive
, I reasoned,
then the old man just might’ve seen me on television, seen some old interview I did about the assassination attempt on President Cooper—the History Channel shows a documentary every year—and then, somehow, some way, he might’ve learned enough about me to make that phone call
.

Perhaps.
 
But if my father is so addle-brained as to suggest that his son kill John Helms, then how did he manage to obtain my private cell phone number
?

Given my own psychiatric history, and the remarkable week I’d been having, I knew it was far more likely that the phone call—and the warning I’d received—had originated in my own, sickening mind.
 
Yet I strained my cerebrum for alternative explanations.

Could some strange person—sane or insane—have made the call?
 
Claiming to be my long-lost father
?

If sane, why
?

If insane, why not
?

I was still debating whether I’d really talked to my father—or a man claiming to be him—when a new idea panicked me.

Maybe it was someone else entirely who’d called me on that plane today—Wasn’t Keisha supposed to call?—and I’d simply imagined it to be my father, imagined the entire conversation
!

My steps halted.
 
My chest heaved as if zapped by cardiac paddles.
 
I don’t know what’s real anymore!
 
And what’s not
!

I’ve got to call Keisha
!

I whipped out my cell phone, pushed her speed dial button, and listened to the ringing on the other end of the phone line, recalling for the first time in over two decades how tremendously exhausting it is to keep one’s grip on reality when it’s fast slipping away . . .

“Keisha,” I said when she answered.
 
“What’s new?”

“Argus!” she said.
 
“Say, Mister President and CEO, what’s the big idea turning your cell phone off?”

“Got a problem,” I said.
 
“It’s personal.”

“Called your house.
 
Jack Nicholson?”

“Never mind about that, Keisha.
 
Let me ask you a question.
 
Did we . . . this’ll sound strange, but did we talk on the phone earlier this evening?
 
About
six PM
?”

“What?
 
What kind of question is that?
 
No, we didn’t talk.
 
Or else I’d already have all my questions answered concerning the
Bangkok
trip.
 
I’ve got to do the staffing soon and—”

“Spare me, Keisha, spare me.
 
Like I said, I’ve got a personal problem.
 
I’m going to be . . . I'm going to be incommunicado for the rest of the week.”

“Rest of the week!”

“Maybe longer.”

“Argus, you can’t!
 
Not now!”

“Spread the word around.
 
Have Frannie reschedule my appointments.
 
I’ll try to be back in the office by Monday.”

“Hey, Argus,” she said after a long pause, her voice suddenly low and mellow.
 
“You okay?”

“I don’t know, Keisha.
 
I honestly don’t know.”

“You want to talk about it?
 
Over a drink?”

“Sorry, can’t.”

“You worry me, Argus.
 
You don’t sound like yourself.”

“Bye, Keisha.”
 
I hung up.

Moments later, I realized it could’ve been any one of a number of people who’d called me besides Keisha.
 
I really hadn’t learned a thing.
 
I started back toward my hotel room.

At the entrance to the lobby I halted briefly to allow a crowd of people in formal dress to pass by me on their way out.
 
One in this group, or at least straggling behind it, was a matronly, cigarette swinging lady in a gold evening gown, who whispered in my ear as she passed by.

“Don’t call Doctor Shields, honey, he’ll lock you up.”

I froze.
 
Then I swiveled around.
 
She was walking away as if she hadn’t said a thing to me.
 
“Ma’am!” I said.
 
“Ma’am!”

Her high heels came to a sudden stop.
 
She peered coldly over her shoulder.
 
“Do I know you?”

“I’ve never seen you before in my life.
 
But you whispered to me just now . . .”

“I did?”
 
Amused, she faced me.
 
“What did I say?”

“Something . . . something you couldn’t possibly have said.”

“Sounds like me, all right!”
 
She cackled a few times, like she was drowning in phlegm.
 
“But you’ve got me mixed up with someone else, honey.”
 
She winked, turned, and strode away.

I watched her go, puffing warped circles of smoke into the night air.
 
I saw her veer off from the large group, heading toward
Mount Vernon Avenue
alone.
 
The woman certainly showed a lot of bare back for a sixty year-old.

I found myself spurred by this strange encounter to proceed directly to the hotel piano bar.
 
On my way, I ran through the entire incident with that woman, from the beginning . . .

I didn’t mix her up with anyone else, did I?
 
No.
 
That voice!
 
I can still hear her throaty whisper in my ear
.
 
“Don’t call Doctor Shields, honey, he’ll lock you up.”
 
How could she have said that to me?
 
How in the world
?

I decided I must’ve misinterpreted some words.
 
Yeah, that’s it.
 
The ear can play tricks.
 
That woman, who’d seemed a little tipsy, come to think of it, had probably let something slip out in a whisper—something risqué, no doubt, something that, on second thought, she had not wished to repeat, especially not aloud.
 
And whatever it was, I’d heard it wrong.
 
I’d heard it all wrong.
 
The ear can play tricks
.

Sitting down on a barstool near the piano, I recalled being in
Shanghai
,
China
on a business trip three years earlier and overhearing a short gentleman on a cell phone speaking loudly in Chinese.
 
I don’t know a word of that language, it all sounds like gibberish to me, but suddenly and inexplicably a string of his Chinese words struck my ear as English words.
 
I thought I heard the man say: “You have to see my hot ass!”