Crack-Up (28 page)

“And you answered?”

“Immediately,” Bernard said.
 
“Completely, thoroughly.
 
And I haven’t been bothered since.”

“What about the woman?”

“What woman?”

“At Randolph House,” I said.
 
“She was in her early sixties?
 
Wearing a gold dress?
 
She had a raspy voice?”

“Oh, dear me,” Bernard had responded.
 
“There was another?”

Oh, yes, there had been another.
 
“Don’t call Doctor Shields,” she’d told me.
 
“He’ll lock you up.”

Her job—whoever she was—had been to alienate me from the psychiatric help I’d so desperately needed at the time, to keep my budding paranoia blooming.

Hideo dropped me off at a curb outside the Rosslyn metro stop.
 
I had a fresh notion to investigate, but I didn’t share it with Hideo, or reveal what I’d planned for the afternoon, other than to say I was “playing a hunch.”

It wasn’t that I still worried about trusting Hideo.
 
It was just that my fresh notion sounded foolish even to myself.
 
But I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Chapter 29

My first, and only previous, psychotic break had come as a young man of twenty-one.
 
I’d been a mere six months shy of graduation from
West Point
Military
Academy
.
 
I remember very clearly how it all began.
 
With an auditory hallucination.
 
A low whisper out of nowhere in the street.

“Starlight.”

I’d been in town late one afternoon to buy medicine for a mild head cold.
 
Gripping my purchase, I’d been walking alone down a shoveled sidewalk, a light snow falling languidly in fat flakes, when the whisper startled me.

“Starlight.”

I’d stopped cold.
 
I’d turned.
 
Turned in a complete circle.
 
Only to find myself alone—separated from other pedestrians by forty paces or more in either direction.

I’d found no one hiding beneath the awning in the well of the stoop a few paces from me, and no car coasting by me with a passenger leaning out the window, whispering, “Starlight.”
 
Then I heard it again—and again—and by the time I’d walked back to my dormitory, what had begun as the soft whisper of one voice, one male’s voice, I believed, had become a whispering chorus.

“Starlight.
 
Starlight.
 
Starlight.”

And the whispers delivered themselves faster and faster.
 
“Starlight, starlight, starlight, starlight, starlight . . .”

And the voices grew louder until they were not whispers at all, but booming chants.
 
“Starlight!
 
Starlight!
 
Starlight!”

The chanting grew deeper in tone and more ominous, reminding me at one point of those spell-bound guards from The Wizard of Oz, the ones protecting the witch’s castle.
 
Powerful, sinister voices.
 
“Starlight!
 
Starlight!
 
Starlight!”

The voices, they were trying to frighten me, I decided.
 
Then I thought,
No, I’m wrong!
 
They’re sending me a message of some kind!
 
A coded message!
 
Some vital signal or warning
!

“Starlight!”
 
What could it mean?
 
What could it mean?

I locked myself in my room, and I threw myself on my bunkbed, and I held my head in my hands, and I tried to decode this simple, cryptic message.
 
But I got nowhere.

“Give me more clues!” I shouted.

But all I kept hearing was, “Starlight!”

The chorus grew louder, then louder still, ear-bleeding loud, and the chanting rushed at me quicker and quicker, and the sound grated on me and grated on me and grated until at last it lost its last touch of humanity, or mammal kinship, and that word, that awful, fucking word—“Starlight!”—sprung as if from the collision of machinery metal, as if from two flat planes of steel, spinning at the speed of planets, colliding again and again and again.

“Starlight!
 
Starlight!
 
Starlight!”
 
I had to scream a mighty scream to make it stop.
 
But it did stop.
 
It finally did.

Yet the very next day, “Starlight!” came roaring back.
 
Right during the middle of my Trigonometry class.

The visual hallucinations arrived much later, weeks later, shortly after I’d been expelled from
West Point
for misconduct and insubordination, or about a month before my diagnosis.

That’s the typical pattern among paranoid schizophrenics, I’d learned from my own shrink, Doctor Shields.
 
The auditory hallucinations come first.

And yet my more recent bout of mental illness had begun with a visual hallucination.
 
Which was why, I assured myself, I wasn’t out of my mind for pulling up behind the woman I’d been searching for so arduously—with the aid of Keisha Fallon’s fast detective work—inside Reagan National Airport, a slender blonde flight attendant, fresh off a plane from Philadelphia, pulling a tote bag on wheels behind her through the concourse.

I followed her outside the airport, into overcast, muggy weather, and onto a crowded metro train.
 
She found a seat in the way pretty women attained such things, with little or no effort, thanks to the aid of instant admirers.

I stood three feet away, pressed into a rugby scrum, it seemed, gripping the chrome rail overhead and sneaking peeks at the flight attendant’s heart-shaped face, her Dutch boy haircut, and her big, blue eyes, which were downcast and work-weary and telling of the toll exacted on the body from a long hurl through the sky.
 
When I closed my eyes, if only for a second, I could see her supple, nude form again.
 
Her flesh was—and still is—ingrained in my mind in the way terrifying memories usually are.

We rode the metro for a few stops, changed trains at Rosslyn station, and rode the orange line, disembarking at the Courthouse metro stop.
 
I fell in behind her on the escalator leading to the surface, one empty steel step between us.

For the first time, I noticed her wedding ring.
 
It was a nice rock, and I wondered what her husband did for a living.
 
I toyed, anxiously, with my own, ring-less wedding finger.

The escalator spit us out on a sidewalk in view of the
Arlington
County
jail.
 
The street was full of sheriff’s cruisers.
 
Deputies on foot traveled between the jail and the courthouse and the local eateries.
 
At the base of a canyon of high-rise buildings stood a movie theater and an eclectic group of restaurants and small shops.
 
The flight attendant disappeared into a mini-market.
 
I waited outside, seated along the edge of a pink granite fountain.
 
Every time a deputy walked by, I lowered the brim of my Redskins cap a bit more.

The flight attendant zipped away from the mini-market and climbed the outdoor stairs behind the fountain that led inside a towering condo.
 
I approached her at a fast clip.
 
She stuck a key card into a slot to unlock the entrance door.
 
I had to lunge to catch the door before it locked behind her.

The lobby was ornate: crystal chandeliers and gilt-edged mirrors and a marble and limestone checkerboard floor.
 
Passing the front desk, I scurried so as to place the flight attendant between myself and the security guard.
 
She, like the guard, was oblivious to me.

We rode a slow elevator together, along with six or seven other people.
 
I was the only one dressed in casual attire, the only one not work worn, not lugging something.
 
She stepped off the elevator on the twenty-seventh floor, and I followed.

We were alone now, in a thick-carpeted corridor, decorated in ersatz antique mahogany.
 
The wallpaper’s muted blue patterns on a white background reminded me of antique china.
 
The smell of Indian cooking behind one of the closed doors was savory.

I padded silently behind the flight attendant and her wheeled tote bag.
 
She stopped in front of the door marked, 2710, and fished for her keys.
 
I pulled up behind her.

“You’ve got a great ass, honey.”

She whirled toward me.
 
“I beg your pardon!”

“Believe me, I know.
 
I had myself a wonderful look on that flight from
Bangkok
last month.”

Her mouth dropped open, but she closed it quickly, so quickly I wondered if I’d imagined it.
 
“What on earth are you talking about?
 
Who are you?
 
What do you—”

The door to 2710 swung open.
 
A huge slab of husband—as it turned out—filled up the doorway.
 
He wore a
West Side
Story-era crew-cut, filthy blue jeans, and a gut-flaunting white tee shirt, soiled with dirt and grease and pizza-size pit stains.
 
He gripped a tall-boy can of Miller beer.

“What’s going on out here?
 
Who’s this?”

“No idea,” she said.
 
“But I think he’s a stalker.
 
I think he followed me home from the airport.
 
Get rid of him, Ned.”

She slipped behind her man and disappeared into the apartment.
 
Ned scowled at me with a bully’s pleasure.

“You heard her.
 
Get lost, you creep.
 
Or else, I’m gonna—”

“Ned, I’m going to have to insist—”

Ned’s free hand reached out to shove me.
 
I reacted with a Judo move, known as a
Falling Drop
, which landed Ned—though not his beer—gently on the floor.
 
Suds soaked into the hall carpet.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Ned.”

From his sitting position on the floor, Ned scrambled to his feet and exploded at me, attempting a mid-waist tackle.
 
I broke his momentum—and his nose too, I think—with a karate chop.

Ned fell to the floor.
 
I stepped into the apartment.
 
The flight attendant I found lifting an infant from a play pen in the living room.
 
She saw me, yelped in panic, and raced with the baby toward a telephone on the kitchen wall.

She was cradling the receiver atop her free shoulder and punching in numbers when I ripped the phone out of the wall and smashed it against the floor.
 
The noise sent the infant wailing.

“Sit down,” I said.
 
“In there.”
 
I pointed to the living room.
 
Without hesitation, she obeyed.
 
I followed behind.

Ned stumbled in through the front door, holding his nose with both hands.
 
His well-soiled tee shirt, with the added blood and beer, had turned into some kind of Rorschach nightmare.