Chapter Fifteen Blinded by the Sound

Chapter Fifteen
Blinded by the Sound

Back in San Jose again, I found myself reliving simple things: going about chores with Billy, helping him bring in wood, learning to light a fire. Each had brought with them a sense of satisfaction. When I’d ventured outside at night, the northern lights undulating over my head set off a kindred shimmering inside me. The knowledge that beyond the clearing there were miles of wilderness filled with bears and wolves and other creatures brought a thrill and a certainty that this was the natural order of things: wild animals should roam the night and we humans should sit by the fire and be grateful for warmth and shelter. 

The images of Alaska that flashed across my mind now, and which I found so comforting—snow falling in the woods, the glow of lamplight in the window—were not taken from the pages of my grandmother’s journals, but from my own memories. With each day I spent in Eagle, the fewer I spent, in my imagination, on Thimbleberry Island. I had fallen in love with my own Alaska, no longer Smokey’s Alaska. I was in love with a land and a man all my own.

Awake in my bed, I dreamt of lying with Billy’s arm around me—his left arm, with the silver bracelet, framed by the sloping plywood roof, with the camo curtain and the moose antlers visible in the background. I wanted that sight again. And again. Wanted him, again and again. The night before I’d left Eagle, we’d slept little. “I can’t get enough of you,” I sobbed. 

  A few days earlier, while straightening up Billy’s bed, I had discovered he kept a lace camisole of mine—left there on a previous visit—neatly folded under his pillow. (I also found a pistol he kept tucked between the mattress and the headboard.) He told me that after my September trip to see him, he’d found a strand of my hair on his shirt and kept it coiled in a tobacco tin next to his bed. “I didn’t know what to expect when I saw you back then,” he said. “I didn’t know my heart was going to leap out of my chest.” 

Billy’s efforts to say how he felt about me were grasping and tentative. “With you, it’s like a whole new color I’ve never seen before.” The black and white of his endless winter had been transformed into a riot of color, like Dorothy stepping into Oz. 

 “That’s love, Billy. What you are describing is love.”

 “It is?”

 “Yes,” I’d said. “Those are the kind of things people do when they’re in love, the kind of things they feel.”

“Oh,” he said. He thought about this a moment.

 “You just don’t recognize it. You remember what it felt like when you were twenty-four. That was a young man’s love, all fireworks and passion. You’re not a young man anymore.”

 “I’m not?” he laughed.

 “No, you’re not. You forgot what love is. What love feels like, what it acts like. You’ve been carrying around this dead romance for twenty years—this thing for Julia.” 

He had nodded and looked me in the eyes for a long moment, very soberly, his brow knitted, and said, “I believe it now.” But still he did not say, “I love you.”

The new medication still hadn’t kicked in, and I was staying awake for two, often three days at a time. Without Billy’s presence, which had sustained me in Alaska, I felt myself descending into an abyss. I called him every night, and he worried at the sound of my voice, devoid of the joyfulness he’d heard when I was in Eagle—my whispers and excited shouts and laughter. He tried to distract me by telling me about his day, like the time he was mushing to town and didn’t see a soul. When he realized he no longer felt the weight of the pistol on his hip, he looked back and spotted a black shape lying on the road. Stopping the dogs, he jogged back to get it. Along came George, the chief of the Native village, in his big pickup. An empty road, one vehicle, a pistol in the snow.

“What are the chances?” Billy said, “I couldn’t believe it. He ran right over it. It made this horrible crunching sound. My Tokarev.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, knowing the Russian-made pistol was his favorite, but wondering, at that point, why guns mattered to anyone, why anything mattered to anyone.

“No, don’t be. The tire just pressed the gun into the snow. It wasn’t hurt at all!”

He laughed, but I didn’t.

Now that I was back in the city, nothing seemed funny anymore. Nothing seemed real anymore. The world was a mock world, and I was a mock person. As I felt my life start to slip from its moorings, our phone conversations stretched longer and longer into the night. Billy stayed on the phone with me not to share stories anymore, but to listen to my confused outpouring of thoughts, fears, and regrets. On one especially desperate night, our call lasted three-and-a-half hours. I expressed my love for him in so many ways that I ran out of words. Then I burst out, “Here I am, giving you everything I have when I should have been giving it to Thomas all these years. I’ve withheld myself from him, I know I have. It always felt like he would just swallow me up if I let him.”

 Billy said soberly, “I realize every attention you’ve given me is stolen from him. I understand now why they call it ‘cheating.’ When you first came to Eagle, you were delicate and sensitive and emotionally starved. Thomas never gave praise, only criticism. It was always, “Honey, you screwed up again.’ But remember, you are a normal, lovable person. You’re not the wicked witch and he’s not the misunderstood knight.”

I called Thomas, too, and left messages on the voicemail at his office. He still refused to get a phone at home, considering it an unneeded luxury when he had to pay for the mortgage on our Washington home, his credit cards, and Emlyn’s college expenses. The two fellowships I had received theoretically should have been able to keep me afloat, but my phone bill was climbing, as was my credit card debt from my frequent travels. 

Thomas finally told me to stop phoning him; it just made him miss me more. The separation was taking its toll on him and he tried to distance himself from thoughts of me. If I needed to contact him, he said, I could email him.

“I feel like you’re dead. I’m getting used to it,” he said flatly.

He said other things. “I love you.” “I miss you.” “I’m looking forward to showing you the northern lights.” “I can’t wait for us to begin our new life here together.” But what I heard reverberating in my head were the words. “I feel like you’re dead. I’m getting used to it.” It deeply hurt that my husband could imagine me right out of his life, when I could not imagine him out of mine.

I printed out one of my email exchanges with Thomas to show Jill the kind of things he said to me, and how I always seemed to reply in a way that made things worse. 

She read it and said, “Regardless of how you two got to this hellish state of marriage and who did what to whom, another person should never, ever treat a partner as venomously as Thomas has. I honestly can’t say I hold out much hope for your relationship.”

I respected Jill’s opinion but I stubbornly refused to believe my marriage was doomed. I still held onto a slim measure of hope. But that fragile belief that things would work out between us often vanished during my sleepless nights. My loneliness knew no bounds. I lay face down on my Turkish prayer rug aching for Billy and listening over and over to the WWI-era song, “Pokarekare,” the melody flowing pure and effortless as an island breeze from the mouths of a Maori girls’ choir. It was a melancholy tune, and the words, which I could not understand, seemed to speak of release and of crossing the boundless water. It was only later I found out the words meant, “I could die of love for you.”

Taking a walk in the pleasant neighborhood full of bungalows, I turned a corner and saw the sun slanting low from the west, lighting up a new lawn like green fire. Behind the house there were dry, brown hills. In the time it took to take another step, my mind slipped gears. I didn’t know they had hills that high in central Illinois, I thought. I took several more steps before realizing that I was not in Illinois going to graduate school. Then where was I? I walked on, considering possibilities. This wasn’t eastern Washington where the combines would be crawling over the hills, harvesting wheat. Halfway down the block, I remembered: California. San Jose. The fellowship. During those few minutes when I didn’t know where I was, I felt an odd, floating sense of detachment. If I wasn’t anywhere—not there, not here—then maybe I was gone, in another world entirely. It was only afterward, standing on the solid sidewalk as I picked a lemon from a tree, that I became scared. What was happening to me?

I recalled something I had been pushing from my mind for a long time—my inexplicable behavior in Sitka almost a year earlier. I thought of that strange midnight trek through the forest—stark naked—and my constant coloring all during that residency. If that was when my mind first started to go, I did not know. Now I was having trouble figuring out the bus schedule to get to my therapist and calculating the correct change needed to make the round trip. My short-term memory was shot. I couldn’t remember a phone number, or even the last four digits, long enough to dial it. Words on the page had become devoid of meaning. The words came apart into individual letters and wandered off the page, like letters slipping off a sheet of erasable typewriter paper. I couldn’t remember how to use an ATM or how to check how many cell phone minutes I’d used. My phone bill mounted into hundreds of dollars. Bills piled up, unpaid. 

I was alone in a strange city and I was losing my mind. When my father’s liver failed and he was near death, he’d said calmly, wonderingly, “I feel everything shutting down,” as if to say: “So this is what the end is like.” I’d thought going insane might be a similarly painless process, each memory-filled room being boarded up, shut one by one, consciousness winking out as the last board went over the last door, the body continuing on out of some stubborn animal instinct. So I was unprepared for the pain. The low-level ache that had been with me for months, which had become a part of me as much as my children, my books, my home back in Washington, began to grow. Day by day it increased until it took my breath away, took away even my tears, and I cried dry-eyed, open-mouthed, gasping for air. I was consumed by an agony that flared out of my body like flames shooting out the windows of a burning building. I stood back from other people for fear the flames would ignite their hair. Their voices were barely distinguishable over the roaring of the fire racing up the empty column of air inside me.

          My mind became a city in ruins, the loyal gatekeeper reduced to a small pile of bones, the gates, unguarded, askew on their hinges. Wild things crept in and even wilder things crept out; the tame bred with the untamed, yielding strange crossbreeds of thought. I started hearing and seeing things, like those early harbingers of madness—the plague of spiders I’d seen out of the corners of my eyes that summer. Now I saw a gargoyle clinging like a bat to the curtain rod in my bedroom. An invisible, terrifying frog-like creature landed with a sploosh on the pillow next to my head. 

The link between my eyes and my mind had been broken, and the eyes went wandering, viewing the world as a stream of untranslatable images. They passed unfiltered into some deeper level of the brain where sights and sounds and smells registered not as having come through separate senses but jumbled together. I was seeing voices and smelling colors. Passing a homeless person, I could not so much smell as taste him—the unwashed clothes, the greasy skin, leaving a waxy feel on the roof of my mouth. I was deafened by the sight of five girls with short skirts and tall heels being shepherded across the square by their pimp. I was blinded by the humid exhalations from a laundromat, the feel of the warm air on my skin making everything go black for one step, two steps, three steps until I was past it and the city came back into focus.

But it would not stay in focus. It zoomed in and out, zooming in on the spittle on the sidewalk and zooming out until I looked down on the city streets from high overhead. My life became a documentary filmed without sound, as if I’d finally gone deaf from all the noise. The buses shuddered soundlessly to a stop at the curb. A sidewalk preacher harangued passersby silently, like a goldfish behind glass. And the small figure in the long coat, hat pulled low over her face, hurrying to get back to the apartment before she fell apart—she I did not recognize. The self I knew was disintegrating, my mind dissolving in some great vat of acid. I could feel my memories liquefying and draining away.

I could no longer tell what was inside and outside, what was me and not me. If I was not this, then how did I know I was not that? I could be the blind woman who bumbled out into the center of a busy intersection, cane tapping, as cars raced by just inches away. I could be the woman in the wheelchair, spotless tennis shoes propped on the footrests, who cried when others grumbled that she was allowed to board the bus first. “Would they trade places with me?” she asked. “I haven’t run, I haven’t danced in twenty-seven years.”  I could be the man with the enormous tumor on his head, who stood helpless and confused on the corner. I could be any sick or crazy person on the street. I, too, was loosely tethered to this world. And I picked and picked at the tiny French knot that still connected me, a slim thread of sanity that someday soon I would work loose and then I would sail away, free as the Red Balloon.

I stopped leaving the apartment. I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror and wondered at my overly bright, feverish eyes, the whites showing all around the iris. My hair was falling out in clumps, and when I brushed my teeth, I spat blood into the sink. It felt like my heart was bleeding up my throat and emerging through my mouth. When I was able to sleep, I startled awake with an overpowering feeling of dread sitting like a dead weight on my chest. Maybe an incubus was after me. At other times my heart pounded like a caught thing, as if it would claw its way out of the cage that was my ribs and lie sobbing and exhausted on my chest.

I was coloring again, filling in geometric patterns, snowflakes, prisms with vivid blues and pinks. It had been so long since I could write smoothly, effortlessly, with a sense of accomplishment and gratification, that I could barely remember what it was like. If I could not write, who was I? I had identified myself as a writer for thirty years. Without writing, I was nothing. My emptied-out mind had disappeared into some vast chasm, an eternity of darkness and silence, and in that soundless dark I saw the possibility of relief.

The thought came over me suddenly. I would kill myself. Of course. It seemed obvious. The only solution. If this is what being bipolar was like, I wanted no part of it. I had no faith the medications would ever work. If this was what being in love was like, I wanted no part of it. I couldn’t live the rest of my life this way, crazy and going back and forth between two men. I couldn’t just choose Billy. He would not say he loved me and didn’t believe it; yet he acted like he did. And Thomas—he said he loved me but didn’t behave like it. Alaska, too, seemed ever more remote, maybe just a dream. Perhaps that’s what it had always been. The far north had been beckoning me my whole life, and what if it turned out to be just another place on a map—the answer to nothing?

It was a Tuesday when I decided to kill myself. Jill had been phoning every day to check on me. She called that morning but I made no mention of my plan.

I called Thomas to say goodbye. I told him straight out what I was going to do. He said, dismissively, “You say that all the time when you’re depressed.”

“No, I used to say, ‘I wish I were dead.’ There’s a big difference. I would have never actually done it.”

“Tell me won’t you kill yourself,” he said, still sounding like he didn’t really take my words seriously.

“I can’t promise you that.”

“Then promise me you won’t do it in the next twenty-four hours. And call me tonight.”

I agreed. There were still things left on my to-do list: destroy Billy’s letters, wrap Christmas presents for the kids, write a suicide note. 

I called Billy and said what I had to say. He pleaded with me not to go through with it. I told him the deal I’d made with Thomas and he, too, asked me call him that night.

I called neither my husband nor my lover that evening. I was busy writing a final letter to Billy and making a few phone calls. I finally listened to my voicemail messages. Thomas’s said abruptly, “I’m disappointed you didn’t call. Call me in the morning.” Billy had left message after message, each longer and more pleading than the last.

“Please, oh please do not take my friend from me. Call me. Call me. Call me.”

Thomas did nothing. Frantic, Billy called the San Jose Police Department, told them I was suicidal, and asked them to send a police officer to check on me.

After gargoyles and invisible frogs, it didn’t seem extraordinary at all to have a couple of cops standing in my living room politely commenting on the Alaska décor. They looked around the apartment, fascinated by the memorabilia in my study, especially the lynx pelt Billy had given me.

“What’s that?” asked the younger of the two cops, pointing at an object on my desk with the kind of revulsion he probably never would’ve allowed himself to show at a crime scene.

“It’s a bear skull.” I’d never cleaned the skull Billy had given me, preferring to keep it as it was, its grisly appearance—with bits of fur and flesh clinging to it—a natural memento mori.

The older cop checked the bathroom, looking for empty pill bottles. I thought of my stash in the bedroom of many years’ worth of sleeping pills of all kinds, which I’d accumulated in my ongoing battle with insomnia. I felt a kind of fondness for them, my secret friends. I had kept them with just this possible end in mind. But killing myself had never been a real option. I needed to be there for my boys. Now, I could not think of my children. I couldn’t think of anything except alleviating my pain. The pain was everything. I was nothing. And that was all there was to it.