Crack-Up (8 page)
Authors: Eric Christopherson
Four old phone messages were stored in the machine’s memory.
One was from Jeremy’s ex-wife, I guessed, informing Jeremy in a bitchy way that he’d forgotten his daughter’s birthday.
Two other calls were from electronic-voiced phone solicitors, selling what—I don't remember.
The last call was anybody’s guess.
“What are you waiting for, Jeremy?” said an unidentified caller, a male with a tinny, accusing voice.
“You know what has to happen.
Do it!
Just do it!
Get it over with!”
Click
.
“Could be something there,”
Huntington
said.
“Play it again.”
This time, she transcribed the call in her notepad.
Upstairs, we found Jeremy’s home office.
We were both staring at a white flat-screen computer monitor when
Huntington
said, “Can't.
Need a warrant first.”
On the desktop by the monitor sat a little tin full of gray pumice stones.
“Look at those,” she said, pointing.
“That’s kind of queer.”
“Not at all.
Computer jocks spend so much time at their keyboards, they get calluses on their fingertips, which slows up their keying, so they use pumice to sand them down.”
Inside the master bedroom, I told the officer I had to use the toilet.
But my true purpose was to peek inside Jeremy’s medicine cabinet without waiting for the cops to obtain a warrant.
Any health problems, I was thinking, might help explain Jeremy’s sudden disappearance.
Quietly, I opened the mirrored door to Jeremy’s medicine cabinet.
There was a stack of Nexium pill packages, which meant that Jeremy had a stomach problem, acid reflux, and I thought maybe a weak stomach had spurred his interest in cooking and food irradiation.
I picked up a medium-size bottle of tablets.
It was prescription medicine called Olanzapine.
I knew that to be the brand name for the drug, Zxprexa, and I knew all about the drug’s medical uses, and this knowledge left me feeling suspicious and uneasy all evening and once again questioning my own sanity.
I had dinner that night at Sally Anne Bilchik’s former place of employment,
Treviso
’s Italian restaurant in
Georgetown
.
I arrived to find Keisha Fallon waiting for me in a secluded booth near the back wall.
She was nibbling at a plate of antipasto and drinking from a carafe of rosé.
The alcohol meant that Keisha had completed her interviews with Sally Anne’s co-workers.
The interviews were standard procedure.
I studied the disturbed individuals who threatened my clients.
Over the years, I’d collected thousands of their written letters, the contents of their mailed packages, photographs and videos of their various crimes and obsessions, and records of the bizarre things they’d said or done.
It was all shipped to a warehouse in
Rockville
,
Maryland
, sorted in file cabinets, put on display shelves, hung on the walls, and analyzed.
I’d taken Sarah there one day.
She’d suggested I rent the space out for Halloween parties.
I ordered the meat lasagna, as I recall.
After Keisha ordered and the waiter left, I summarized my search for Jeremy Crane, finishing with the medicine cabinet’s contents.
“The drug I found is used to treat a range of psychotic mental disorders, so we can’t be sure that Jeremy is schizophrenic, but most people who take Olanzapine are.”
Keisha nibbled on a breadstick.
“Strange coincidence, huh?
First Sally, now Jeremy.”
She didn’t know about me, of course, or the possibility a man with a feverish mind had beheld nothing more in Jeremy Crane’s medicine cabinet than a bottle of aspirin.
“It’s nothing, Keisha.
One in every hundred people is schizophrenic.
That’s a lot, if you think about it.
If you live in a city, you pass by them every day, on the street, though you probably don’t know it.
If you work for a large company, you’ll have co-workers who are schizophrenic.
Take a crowded commercial jetliner, there will be schizophrenics aboard.
Take a train, or a subway, and every second or third time, at least, you’re sharing the compartment with a schizophrenic.”
“Guess you’re right,” she said, toothpicking an olive.
“Of course I am.
But it doesn’t matter.
Anytime some coincidence twists my intestines into balloon animals, I’ve got to check into it.
Tomorrow, I’m going to see Sally Anne Bilchik.
Now tell me what you’ve just learned about her.”
Chapter 7
That evening, on my drive home, I obsessed over my new habit of confronting fellow schizophrenics.
Again, I tried telling myself it was all merely coincidence.
But I couldn’t help considering whether I’d slipped free of my sanity altogether, whether in fact I’d been committed to some mental institution some time ago, my plight, my world, nothing but unbroken delirium, a waking dream.
It wasn’t until I arrived home and kissed Sarah and swept Ellie up into my arms and felt Duke’s jealous paw scratching my crotch that I was cured of such morbid thinking.
The next morning, I phoned a staff physician at the
District of Columbia
’s Maximum-Security Psychiatric Unit, who informed me that Sally Anne Bilchik was in no condition to receive visitors, and wouldn’t be for another day or two.
By early afternoon I was in
Charlottesville
, my hometown.
Normally, I would fly out there twice a month to visit my mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.
The city is also where my psychiatrist back then was located.
An out-of-town shrink was an added—yes, paranoid—precaution for keeping my illness a secret.
“Got a little broth in my beard,” Doctor Shields said to me faster than most people could think it.
The man’s words always went off like a string of Chinese firecrackers.
“Just had soup at my desk for lunch, Campbell’s chicken vegetable, have a seat, I’ll be right back, you look good, have a mint.”
I knew that
nerdism
wasn’t a clinical term for the doctor’s own condition.
I wondered what was—and whether Shields knew he suffered from it—as I sank into one end of an over-stuffed sofa, beside his cherrywood rocking chair.
The office didn’t fit the man.
It was more like his grandmother’s parlor, all potted plants and flowers in vases.
Embroidered artwork hung on the walls.
Ceramic knick-knacks of cute animals, including penguins and bear cubs, populated the window sills.
The window curtains, thick as tapestry, sported daffodils and tassels.
The smell of potpourri was strong.
The doc, I’d decided, had read in some scholarly journal that such an environment put people at ease.
Maybe it did, but it also made me hungry for milk and cookies.
I thought I might even sew a stitch, given a pair of needles and some yarn.
“Now,” he said, returning, wiping his chin with a paper towel, taking his seat.
“What’s the emergency?
Why is it I had to see you right away?
Something about a naked stewardess?”
“They’re called, ‘flight attendants’ now.”
“Oh, yes, quite right.”
He put his rocking chair in motion.
He rocked as fast as he talked.
I began telling him about the plane flight, moment by moment.
Doctor Shields listened intently and with a steady curtain fire of nods.
He was dressed in a tan linen suit, but it wasn’t custom fitted.
The collar was too big.
His scrawny neck looked as thin as a well-sucked candy cane.
I kept wishing the doctor would stop tapping his teeth with his fingernail.
“Unusual,” he said when I was through.
“Highly unusual.”
Tap, tap, tap.
“That episode should’ve been preceded by milder symptoms—yes, yes, yes—especially given your personal history with schizophrenia.
Tell me, are you hearing any voices?”
“I hear yours.
And mine.”
“No strange or unidentified voices inside your head?”
“No.”
“No voices coming from unusual places?
Your toaster, for example?
Or your microwave oven?”
“No, in fact, all my household appliances have been mum.
And, don’t bother asking, I’m not getting any telepathic messages either.
Just the usual phone calls, faxes, letters, and email.”
“Besides the naked stewardess,
ur
, flight attendant, has anything else fantastic happened to you recently?
Meet a ghost?
Uncover a plot to assassinate the president?”
I flashed back to the boardwalk outside my office, only one day before.
No ghosts
, I told myself,
just some farmer
.
“You’re hesitating,” Dr. Shields said.
“Just thinking.
Something else fantastic?
Well, last week, my scratch and play card at McDonalds won me a free soda.”
Doctor Shields reared his head back and laughed.
“Argh, argh, argh, argh, argh.”
With the slightest spark of mirth, the doctor’s top front teeth would jut out, quivering like a beaver’s.
Yet he’d turn serious in a flash.
“So what you’re telling me is it’s just this naked flight attendant . . . ”
“That’s right.”
It was the only thing I felt certain had been truly out-of-this-world.
With a quick nod, he said, “First thing we’ll do is take a
“Yes, let’s,” I said, my pulse spiking at a fresh worry.
“And we’ll up your daily Risperdal dosage by two milligrams.”
“I’ll need a new prescription.
The pills I have now—”
“Are five milligrams each, I know.”
Tap, tap, tap on the teeth.
“Argus, I want you to go back into psychotherapy, as a precaution, I have someone in mind for you.”
I started shaking my head before the doctor finished.
“I don’t have time for that.
I never got a lot out of it, anyway.”
“No time, no time, no time.
Hmm, hmm, hmm.”
The doctor’s hands and fingers formed a church steeple that he soon lodged under his chin.
“We haven’t discussed your workload in quite awhile.
How’s business?”
“Booming,” I said.
“Longer hours than usual?”
“I’m not stressed out, if that’s what you’re getting at.”