The Other Side (7 page)

From the window in the living room I see The Man I Live With walking to the dumpster, carrying something dark and limp in a blue plastic shopping bag. He comes back inside and I ask what he has done. He walks into the kitchen in silence and leaves the apartment with a knife.
Still breathing
, he says, and walks out the door.

I tell people we have put the cat to sleep. I leave a short message on My Older Sister's machine. I call my parents and they say it is for the best. For years I also say this. But, sitting with My Good Friend in her living room, I can't remember how and when I came to believe that lie. I can go back to that dark bedroom. I can close the door and turn out the lights. I can swaddle myself in layers and layers of wrinkled sheets.

My love for the man requires the cat to be living. My fear of him requires the cat to be dead. Each needs and negates the other: the dark bedroom, the warm black dirt in my hands.

[four]

THE THERAPIST'S OFFICE
reminds me of an attic in the way the ceiling near the window slants upward, the two sides joining like an A. She keeps a rug on the floor and the overhead lights turned off. A lamp in the corner lights one half of the room, the other half lit by the lamp on her desk, or by the light coming in from the window, depending on the time of day.
Two armless chairs face one another in the middle of the room. Like a Beckett play. Behind one chair, her chair, is the desk. Real plants with long, broad-striped leaves fill one corner; in another, an empty birdcage. The Therapist has seen the news. She knows
what happened
. She asks me, in a very quiet voice, to tell her the story again. I tell the story again. At the end of the session, she schedules our next appointment and sends me to the psychiatrist at the student health center. She says she'll call ahead. He'll be expecting me.

The Psychiatrist in the student health center downstairs also asks me to tell the story. He listens without blinking, sitting with his legs crossed at the knees in a chair that could swivel but doesn't. He does not write or move or look away.
I look away. I look away from his thick glasses and look instead at the floor and at my fingers, twisting and picking and scratching at the tips of one another in my lap, and at my feet, which do not sit flat on the floor but dangle off the couch, very far away.
I'm not usually this short
, I say. The fluorescent lights turn my skin green. He asks a few questions: my health, my habits, my dreams. He wants to know whether I use illegal drugs. I lie.
I only remove my head on Tuesdays
. He looks at me over the top of his glasses in a way that waits for me to change my answer.

I tell him almost the whole truth about a set of disturbing dreams. He calls them unconscious ruminations.
Ruminations?
He writes three prescriptions: one for an antiepileptic, which prevents dreams. He does not want me to dream these disturbing dreams. Another prescription for an antidepressant. He explains the mechanisms of serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
He wants me to achieve
mental balance
. I laugh out loud. He looks at me again over his glasses. The third prescription is for a very very small dose—he pinches the first finger and thumb of his left hand together—of a different antidepressant, which, when taken in very small doses, also happens to increase appetite. He wants me to eat more. I have to stop losing this weight. He says that while this medication tends to increase an appetite for food it may increase other kinds of physical appetites as well.

He says
other appetites
in a way that winks, though I do not actually see him wink.

The Psychiatrist tells me to take the blue pill for depression and anxiety and the white pill for lack of appetite. The yellow pill is for forgetting: it puts me to sleep so long without dreaming I forget to wake up. I forget what my name is. I forget where I live.

I know it's the blue pill that makes all the feeling go away because I start taking it first. Or if it is not the blue pill that makes the feeling go away, the feeling goes away around the same time I start taking the blue pill. And by feeling, I mean
feel-like:
I do not feel like getting out of bed. Or like getting dressed, or drinking water, or eating food. I can't keep food down anyway. I do not feel like puking my guts out so I do not eat. I do not feel like going to work. Or like walking alone from my car, across the parking lot, now or ever again. The editor at the literary magazine where I am an intern calls and wants to know where the banner ad is and I say
I'm sorry; I'm a little behind on that. I've had some personal issues lately
. The editor says,
Your issues are not my issues. Get it done today
. Maybe he thinks I'm faking it. Am I faking it? I do not feel like asking this question. Or like being awake. I do not feel like watching television or reading a book. I do not feel like watching the sun come through the blinds. I would rather feel nothing all day.

So I take the white pill, which is supposed to make me hungry again. Mom comes to town to drive me to The
Psychiatrist and spends the whole time worrying that I've gotten too skinny. She cleans my kitchen while I get dressed and after the appointment with The Psychiatrist, where I weigh in at 105 pounds, she drives me to the vitamin store to buy a giant bottle of protein shake mix, and then she takes me to the grocery store to buy whole milk and a bunch of yellow bananas and a big bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a loaf of bread.

Maybe it is not the white pill, but at the same time I start taking the white pill, I start to
feel-like
. At night I feel like dressing in skimpy clothes—
Look at how skinny I am!
—and I feel like putting on dark eye makeup, so I tell My Good Friend I feel like going dancing. At the club a man comes up behind me and grinds his pelvis against my ass and puts his hand on my stomach and says
This muscle—this one right here—is so sexy
. I push away from him, from his erect penis, and grab My Good Friend and we go running out the door laughing. I feel like spending the night at her boyfriend's house and I feel like sleeping in her boyfriend's roommate's bed. I feel like putting on the roommate's clean running clothes because I don't have any pajamas and I feel like he should fuck me but he just lies very very still.

In the morning there is a message on my voice mail: I've been fired from a job at a veterinary hospital I forgot I had. I pay the electric bill with my credit card and buy groceries with the credit card and when my landlord shows up at the
door looking for the rent I get a cash advance from the credit card. I pay the credit card bill with another credit card.

When I start fucking the man who will become My First Husband I tell The Therapist that
things are going very wonderfully
and
I feel all better now, thankyouverymuch
, and I tell The Psychiatrist that I don't need to meet with him anymore,
I'm doing very wonderfully now, thankyouverymuch
, and he smiles and claps his hands together and says
This is wonderful! Just wonderful!
and I laugh out loud because I can't tell if I'm thrilled or terrified by this.

One afternoon the apartment phone rings and I wake up from a yellow-pill sleep to answer it.
Lacy, it's me
. Which me? The voice starts explaining how I need to drop the charges.
Sodomy? I didn't fuck you in the ass
, he says.
I know
, I say, the room coming slowly into focus,
but that's what they call it
. He offers to pay my court fees if I withdraw my statement.
The worst that can happen is you'll get in trouble for lying to the police
, he says. Dust motes swirl,
the sunlight lynched in the blinds. I wonder how he got this number. It should be unlisted. The bile in my stomach also swirls.

After he tells me he loves me, that he's been shot, that he's lost weight, that he's a new man, he hangs up the phone. I throw up in the toilet and then call The Detective. Within
minutes uniformed officers knock on my door. One explains there will be an emergency strap put on my phone, which can be done remotely. No one will be listening in on my conversations, but they'll be able to trace any call I receive. I thank the officers and close the door. I swallow one of the yellow pills before I unplug the apartment phone and drift back to sleep.

I am like Superman
, he tells me in an e-mail. A reverse search of the
IP
address confirms that this e-mail, like all the others before it, has come from Venezuela, where he also holds citizenship. The Detective stands behind me, careful not to touch, looking over my shoulder into the computer monitor. He isn't hopeful that the Venezuelan government will cooperate with the extradition, but speaks encouraging words into my ear while I type:
That's it. That will really get him. That's the trick
. In my e-mails back to Venezuela, I play the victim. In my e-mails, The Detective has bullied me into pressing charges against the man I love.
It's the detective's idea
, I write.
He thinks this could be a big case. It might mean a promotion
. In these e-mails, I write that I wish we could still be together. I beg him to come back to rescue me. The police have charged him with kidnapping, felonious restraint, sodomy, and rape. They have frozen his credit cards and his bank accounts. They have flagged his passport, notified the
FBI
and
Interpol. In these e-mails, we're trying to lure him back into the country so he can be arrested and brought to trial. We're setting a trap: I am the bait.

Later, back in my new apartment, sitting at the dining table I salvaged from the curb, on a chair I pulled from a dumpster, I hack into his e-mail account. I see all of the e-mails I've sent. He's forwarded every one to his attorney. I see he's applying for jobs in Caracas, and has been corresponding with a South American publisher about a potential memoir deal. One chapter in the proposal is titled “Leather and Lacy”—it's the only chapter in which I will appear.