Behavioral Health Unit
You called me every night that week, and sometimes in the afternoons. Your voice reminded me of a broken mare—wild pride stolen by the bit—and I’d have asked you to stop taking your pills if I had confidence in the least that you could sleep without them. Every night, and sometimes in the afternoons, I’d read you poems I’d written with a stolen pen on thin napkins, and scribble on the same napkins with the same stolen pen whenever you said something that made me laugh. Laughter was my exercise for that week, and I remember thanking you later for preventing me from getting fat.
Cell phones were strictly prohibited, of course, so on the first day I tipped back in a flimsy folding chair by the fading green and beige wallpaper, receiver pressed between my cheek and shoulder, yellowing cord wrapped around my index finger, and waited. You picked up on the sixth ring, but frantically enough that I knew you’d not meant to keep me waiting. I imagined, in your pause, a pair of big brown eyes smiling—your three-and-a-half feet of bronze hair, marbled with golden streaks, splayed out across your sun-soaked bed. I imagined, by your slight breaths, you’d just been giggling with your roommate Julia about a recent one-night stand of hers, or maybe hitting her bong.
But you croaked, “Hey?” through the handset as if it was a question you were afraid to ask.
We worked from there.
One night I listened to the fascination in your silence as I described to you the wonderful cartoon in which I lived. You couldn’t get enough of Karen, the sweet grandmother of two who cried in the mornings, but didn’t know why, and on Wednesday I recited for you, almost word-for-word, my talk with Shawna, divorced mother of one from Tulsa, Oklahoma, about playing country music at high school parties and getting to see her daughter again soon. I introduced you to my roommate Luke (short for Luqman, a pseudo-prophet from the Qur’an, revered for his wisdom and insight) over the phone, and chuckled in our room as the two of you talked for over an hour. I can only imagine your replies, but he spoke of a grand order of the cosmos and of writing symphonies and of starting an agricultural supply business and of building an “Iron Man” suit.
You later spoke for a while, in a separate room and on a separate phone, with the medical student for whom I was something of a case study. I’d always admired his dispassionate professionalism, but he struggled to mask his concern when finally he opened the door to that separate room. The phone for patients was in the lobby, so I thereafter I whispered into it when I could feel others listening.
On the last day my voice broke slightly as I described to you the embrace Melissa and I shared, in violation of the “No Touching” rule, in the corner of the hallway by the door. She would withdraw from Penn State and return to China upon her discharge, and I doubted that I’d ever speak with her again. You did your utter best to convince me otherwise until the nurse on duty, for the third time and with thinning patience, whispered that it was time for me to go to bed.
Erasure
I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and drove through the night to Philadelphia International Airport, because the only way I could piss you off was to keep you waiting. I ate on the road and pissed in water bottles. Your flight was delayed at L.A.X., and by your ragged breaths over the phone I could tell you’d almost missed your connecting flight in Dallas. Never having dared to imagine you being late for anything, I grinned in anticipation of the vicious torrent of words you were sure to unleash when I saw you, eviscerating the entire airline industry. I sat under glaring fluorescent lights in the waiting area as the breathless pause of an anxious predawn gave way to the sigh of morning, and set about hunting for Terminal D on the first ring of my cell phone.
I’d barely come to a stop by the time you’d hurled your suitcase into the bed of my truck and leaned across the cabin for a kiss. Your lips pulsed, cold and electric, and I doubt I’ll ever forget their strangeness after so many months. And no, I couldn’t help but think about how different that kiss must have been for you, only two weeks after his, but I killed that thought in an instant, for surely it couldn’t have mattered anymore.
Instead we spoke of the summer research program into which you’d just been accepted; I needed to watch you live again with eyes upturned, fists clenched by your ears, smile as wide and voice as high as they would go, if only for a moment.
I drove us to Penn State, at 65 miles per hour, as you insisted, and imagined that the icy mountain roads we traversed were the children of the glaciers which had long ago carved the valley below. They didn’t have such mountains in L.A., but I guess you didn’t want them anyhow. We’d kept a running list for years of things we had in common, as we considered ourselves perfect opposites, and on the way we added, “intense hatred of cold;” it was the fourteenth entry.
We woke the next morning to an empty bottle of champagne and a third of a cold pizza, and stumbled groggily out the door of a one-room cabin—ours for the weekend—to two lawn chairs on a small front porch and the smoldering remains of a fire whose roar had died in the night. The glimmering frost stung our eyes, and we wondered how the cows and corn that surrounded us had survived the biting cold. Soon we retreated under the quilt, perhaps homemade, which smothered our bed, and lay there for the better part of the day, drifting in and out of dreams. You ran your thumbs slowly up and down the ravines—not yet choked by knots of scar tissue—that traced my forearms, trying to erase them, you said.
Nestled close to you for warmth and comfort, I read aloud a drunken poem I’d snuck off to scribble down the night before. I craned my neck over your shoulder to read the barely-legible scrawls I held behind your back. The poem was about you. “A playful shove, a gentle nudge/ Should we, will we go further love?…” Words were never your forte, but still tattooed on my mind are the five simple ones you whispered as once again you settled into sleep:
“My heart is so full…”
Departure
I’d never seen tears make a puddle before. I’m sure Brett, my roommate, hadn’t either. To be fair, a good deal of that puddle was composed of snot, which at this point dripped in inches, and not millimeters, from my nose; occasionally I’d tear it away with a paper bag I’d found in a pile on my desk. I’d not left my chair in three hours by the time Brett called you and you called my brother, who called my mother, who emailed my therapist—like crows that sensed a threat. The police arrived within 45 minutes. My ass was numb when I met them at the door with tissues in my nostrils. They asked if I’d thought about it. I told them I’d not thought about it. They gave me a card with a number to call. I already had a number to call, but didn’t. For you were in God-knows-where L.A., and damned busy not giving a damn, or so I wanted to imagine. In truth, it was significantly more complicated than that. In truth, you were in your bed trying to sleep before the thoughts came. I thought we were doing fine since we’d broken it off, but you said you hadn’t slept in quite some time. You said you were failing your chemistry class. You said you’d run out of your pills. You said you had to rebuild yourself before you tried to rebuild me. And then you said goodbye. You said it right there in the screen of my dying phone. I told you I needed you, or something like that—some lifeline soaked in futility and flung into the open sea.
“No you don’t,” the screen read, and proceeded to rattle off a list of people I talked to at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and sometimes over Spring Break—supposedly other people I could decide to need instead.
“And even if you did, I couldn’t handle that kind of pressure.”
I asked Brett to rid my room of things related to you while I was in class the next day, and returned to white cinderblock walls and an empty desk.
The Absolute Value of Fuck You
On the day that marked the beginning of our last summer together before college, and as we always did, at hellos and goodbyes, we held up three fingers to each other—the index, middle, and ring fingers of my right hand and your left—and then you climbed into my truck. It was Sunday, so we cruised through the afternoon spotting yard sale signs and doing our damnedest to follow their directions. I blared Red Dirt Country, a subgenre of country music that originated in Texas, too loud for you to protest, and laughed as I swatted your hands away from the radio dial.
We talked for a while about the unusual heat of that particular summer to a woman selling produce under a tent in a Park-n’-Ride while I bought a bundle of sunflowers from her, and joked that I would keep them for myself when you presumed I would present them to you. We joked, also, that you were a sunflower—bright and cheery on the outside, and dark as a new moon on the inside—and you forbade me to tell anyone of your secret love of flowers. As I recall, the sunflower is now your favorite. We then went for ice cream and tried to keep it from melting in our hands as we drove down to our spot on the Patuxent River. It wasn’t an easy place to reach; we walked about a half mile to the bonfire pit, strewn with empty beer cans and cigarette butts, that overlooked the reeds, and descended a small cliff to a clearing by the water. I waded in, and you refused. You told me horror stories of flesh-eating bacteria, and I bent down and flung a handful of brown liquid in your direction. Then we sat on a beached log and watched the sun begin to bleed into the clouds, the placid river a perfect imposter of it all.
We spoke for a while of nothing in particular, and ended up in chemistry class, junior year of high school. We spoke of you doing my chemistry homework while I edited your college essays, and of trying to stifle our ferocious giggles when targeted by Mrs. Clites’ stern glare. We traced our memories, searching for origins; neither of us could recall how we’d met, but the closest we came was the inception of our iconic three-fingered salute. I used to tease you incessantly, though I was shy about it when your boyfriend Peter was around, and one day we ended up flipping each other the bird. For whatever reason, though, you’d forgotten about two of your fingers, and, the math enthusiast that you were, decided that the other two digits were, in fact, absolute value signs (rendering the intended “fuck you” extremely positive rather than extremely negative). I thought it was cute, though I didn’t say so at the time, and by the end of that semester it wasn’t even embarrassing. We agreed immediately that it ought to be our customary greeting, as you weren’t much for uncertainty. And watching the sun flake out on the first day of what would be our last summer together, neither was I.
Much later, in desperation, I’d sign my last letter to your address in L.A.:
“|F.U.|,
Will”
This piece was a winner of the 2018 Edward J. Nichols Memorial Award for Nonfiction and originally published in Kalliope 2018.
For more information on the author, Will Carpenter, check out our feature on him here.