“What?”
“Can you honestly tell me that your parents would ever be able to get over it if you took your own life?”
I close my eyes and open them.
My words come out all stuttered.
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m not serious. But, Janey . . . she needs our mom and dad way more than I do. They—”
He cuts me off. “And what about you, huh? Doesn’t your sister need you, too?”
I laugh again, but not ’cause anything’s funny.
“She’d be better off without me. They all would. Besides, you think my parents will ever forgive me?”
He sits forward, so his face is up closer to mine.
“What do you mean? Forgive you for what?”
I feel a burning suddenly behind my eyes.
“You know. For what happened.”
Dr. Frankel nods very slowly, and I can hear him sucking in air through his wide nose.
“You don’t remember what we talked about?”
When I try to answer, the words don’t come.
My throat swells.
I don’t want to cry.
I don’t want to fucking cry.
3.
THE SUN BURNED HOT and bright so the sweat ran into our eyes.
School was out.
We went to the beach—my mom, my dad, my little brother and sister, and me.
To Ocean Beach.
The sand was littered with trash and fallen trees and driftwood and broken-apart fishing boats, but still, the beach was pretty that day. The sky was clear blue, almost transparent so you could see the round perfect moon white in the midday sky.
The cliffs stretched up on either side.
There was no wind.
A group of surfers paddled out past the breakers—the swells forming neat, perfect lines nearly a mile out from shore.
The ocean reflecting the sky.
The ocean like a fire.
People watching the ocean like that, lying on their beach towels.
Teddy was seven then.
He was small—frail—with a whole mess of freckles and red, curly hair.
We went out wading in the water, which was cold and burned like a fire would. But the more we ran, the less it burned. And so we ran, chasing each other until I had to pee and so I went back over to my dad and Jane, who is two years older than Teddy. They were throwing a Nerf football back and forth on the hot sand—Janey with her long white-blond hair and my dad with his shirt off and his big belly hanging out over the waistband of his shorts.
When I reached the place where they’d set up camp my mom waved me over, but I ignored her and continued on toward the public bathrooms. I ran through the sand and climbed the crumbling concrete steps, up the breaker wall where a bunch of kids I recognized from my school were standing around. They were older, though, like, juniors or something—three boys and two girls. And they were smoking a blunt.
I’d smoked weed a few times before, and so I went over and they thought it was cool—some incoming freshman wanting to smoke pot with them.
The one girl, Angela, she had long dreads tucked away in a knit Rastafarian-looking hat. And then there was Pierre, who was short and a little heavy, and then Heroji, whose father was a famous Black Panther. I’d actually met them before at the end-of-the-year picnic; they’d all been playing in the Stanyan Hill funk band, and I’d been hoping to try to audition on guitar for them once I started in the upper school.
Heroji was the one who passed me the blunt. I inhaled it deep in my lungs and held it in and then exhaled.
At the time, it really didn’t seem like a big deal. I mean, like I said, I’d smoked pot before, and it wasn’t like my parents would be able to see me, since we were well hidden—and the spot where they’d set up camp was a good quarter mile down the beach.
So I hit the blunt again and exhaled and I passed it back, thanking all three of them. Heroji and I did a sort of slap, snap, handshake thing, and then I ran across the parking lot to the bathroom.
I peed for a long time facing the dull-colored wall.
And then . . .
It was as though someone was there, next to me, speaking, almost whispering in my ear.
The voice was like my voice, but deeper, more grown-up sounding.
It was like my adult voice, telling me not to go back outside.
“Don’t go, Miles. It’s not safe. They’re coming. Don’t go!”
I laughed at that.
I laughed and wondered how those couple of hits could’ve gotten me so goddamn high.
I walked to the door of the bathroom.
Reaching out for the handle, I tried to turn the lock, but it was like my hand couldn’t quite grab hold of it.
I turned, and everything—the door, the walls, the scratched mirror, the sink, the urinals—was all covered in some kind of thick grease—like congealed fat, like wax, like Vaseline—pooling sweat, and beading in the heat of the tiny bathroom. I grabbed the handle, and my hand slipped. I called for help, but the voice was there again, telling me not to go out.
“They’re coming for you, Miles. You can’t go out there.”
But I had to.
I had to get out.
I pounded on the door.
I screamed and screamed.
“HELP! PLEASE! HELP ME!”
But no one came.
There was only the voice.
And that’s when I saw them: the crows—black, fat, grotesque, the biggest I’d ever seen—trying to break in from all sides through the sealed plastic windows and vent openings. They cawed and cackled, and I knew that the voice was right. I couldn’t leave. I had to stay locked inside or the crows . . . they were going to tear me apart.
I lay on the ground and held the palms of my hands pressed against my ears. I screamed and screamed as they clawed and cawed and fought to get in.
Honestly, I’m not sure how long I stayed there curled up on the cold gray concrete floor, or who first heard me screaming in terror, but no one could get the door open, so the fire department had to come and break through the lock with an ax.
Of course, I thought the firemen were the crows coming to take me, so I screamed even louder when I saw them and tried to run and I had to be tied down and then sedated.
It was an entire day later that I came to in the hospital.
I woke up and the doctor explained my diagnosis—starting me on my first round of medications.
They kept me on lockdown for another seventy-two hours, until finally my mom and dad brought me home.
And it was only then, over four days later, that I found out about Teddy.
No one had been watching him while I was screaming for help locked in the bathroom.
No one had been watching . . . and no one knew what happened.
When the police arrived, they found a witness who told them she’d seen a boy fitting Teddy’s description getting into a Ford Explorer with a middle-aged white man—tall and thin and balding. An Amber Alert was immediately issued. They posted flyers and ran advertisements.
A few other people came forward as witnesses, too.
And there were many false leads.
But no real evidence ever surfaced as to Teddy’s whereabouts.
He had disappeared.
But, of course, there was also the other possibility.
I mean, I hated to even let myself think about it, but the fact remained that the witness could have been wrong.
Maybe the boy she saw was not Teddy.
After all, Teddy had been out playing in the ocean by himself. The undertow, combined with a heavy riptide, could’ve easily been too strong for him.
He could have been pulled out to sea.
But I refuse to believe that.
After all, h
is body was never found.
And the cops and Coast Guard agreed it should have washed up on shore by now.
Teddy had to be out there.
Somewhere.
He’d be nine years old now.
It wasn’t completely unheard of. Just look at that Elizabeth Smart girl. She was missing almost ten months before they rescued her.
Teddy could’ve been taken like that.
I have this sense that he’s alive somehow. I’m not sure how to explain it. I just feel him—like he’s not that far away at all.
Even if everyone else has given up hope.
My mom, my dad, the police, the private investigator—they’ve all stopped looking for him. They assume he died that day, I guess, or has died since.
But me? I can’t stop looking; I can’t give up hope.
Because it was my fault.
It was all . . .
All of it . . .
My fault.
So what fucking choice do I have?
4.
DR. FRANKEL LEANS FORWARD again, resting his meaty elbows on his short legs.
“Well?” he asks, clapping his hands together. “Are you still fixated on that day at the beach?”
I breathe out long and slow and go on, fighting back the tears.
“I don’t know,” I lie. “I guess not.”
“Miles. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me. The medication can only do so much.”
He frowns then. The clock tick-ticks on the table next to him.
“I think maybe we should try upping the Abilify then, along with the Zyprexa. Does that sound agreeable to you?”
“Agreeable?” I try to laugh a little, but it doesn’t come out right. “Not really—but I’ll do it.”
Dr. Frankel picks up the bag of carrots again.
“I promise you, Miles, you don’t have to keep blaming yourself for having this disease. It is a disease, after all—completely beyond your control. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yeah. No, of course,” I say.
He smiles. “And no one blames you, either.”
The clock keeps on ticking.
And now all I do is wait.
5.
THE BUS GOING DOWN Geary toward our little house in Outer Richmond is an express, so it’s a pretty quick trip from Laurel Village, where Dr. Frankel’s office is located.
I sit on the hard, plastic, orange-painted seat. Everything smells strongly of dried sweat and some kind of hard alcohol from the homeless guy sleeping on one of the front bench seats. He’s all sprawled out and drunk, which usually the bus drivers get pissed off about—though I guess they’re letting it slide today.
The guy is wearing, like, five different jackets, and his sneakers are wrapped all the way up to his ankles with duct tape. He’s completely passed out, his mouth open.
He could just be a regular drunk.
Or even a junkie.
But the chances are, I mean . . .
The chances are . . .
That someone like him . . . is someone like me.
Sick. Schizo. And it really only feels like a matter of time before they find me like that—sleeping in rags, riding the bus all day long ’cause I got nowhere else to go.
Just a matter of time.
I stare out the clouded window at the low-hanging fog and gray sky. We pass the Coronet movie theater and then the Alexandria.
My mom and I—we don’t have much to say to each other right now, but that’s one thing we still have in common.
We both love movies.
Old movies, new movies, anything, really.
For that little bit of time, I don’t have to be in my head.
The only problem is, as the movie’s winding down, I always get this feeling of intense sadness and dread, knowing I have to go back to my real life.
I wonder if my mom feels the same way.
In a perfect world I could just stay in bed and watch movies forever.
But I guess in that same perfect world I wouldn’t have this goddamn disease in the first place.
All the kids in school wouldn’t look at me like I might attack them with my pen or something—even now, two years later.
Not that the episode at the beach that day was my only one.
There was the time—a few months later—I thought Jane was trapped in the cushions of our couch. My parents walked in on me screaming and crying and tearing all the stuffing out trying to find her.
And then, just three weeks after that, at school, no less, when the crows came back, I ran screaming out of algebra class—as they clawed and pecked and tore at the doors and windows.
No one’s ever looked at me quite the same since then. Not even Preston and Jackie.
People are scared, I guess.
They’re scared of me.
And at home it’s not much different.
The bus lurches and comes hissing to a stop as me and these two old ladies with platinum hair, speaking loudly to each other in Russian, get off at the back.
The wind is blowing strong now off the ocean, and the two old women lock arms like a married couple crossing the street together.
I walk down the uneven sidewalk—the crows circling overhead as they always do.
Whether they’re real or not—delusion or reality—I have no idea.
I see them most days.
In spite of the medication they are there, among the trees and crooked branches and all along the rooftops. They duck their heads, peering out from behind the sloping rain gutters, the tapestry of telephone wires and power lines and thick, heavy Internet cables and cords connecting satellite dishes.
They live amongst the wires.
The wires that are everywhere.
Like the crows that are watching, spying, jerking their heads back, twitching, the wires are alive. Forever wrapping and tangling and tying.
Forever transmitting.
Forever receiving.
Like the fire lighting up my brain.
It is all schizo—the houses with their wires, the downloads and news feeds and pop-up windows.
The crows picking through the discarded waste—tearing out what’s left of my, of all of our, humanity.
Everybody on earth is connected to some electronic wireless device that does nothing but create advertising and waste time and make us all ADD and ADHD and manic-depressive, neurotic, obsessive-compulsive, whatever.
I look at these houses sealed tight in all their wires—the crows waiting to come and eat what’s left of our atrophied brains.
People are lighted only by the glow of their televisions or computer screens, watching the lives of other people on reality shows and YouTube videos—resentful that they themselves are not the rich and famous ones, the ones with reality shows of their own. Because somehow, in these houses with all the wires, nothing is actually worth doing unless it is seen by other people.
And so our brains turn slowly into mush.
While the crows peer and perch among the wires—waiting, biding their time ’til they can swoop in and pick clean our remains.
San Francisco is all wires and crows, surrounding me on all sides as I walk the rest of the way home. The wind sounds like someone sucking in air and swishing their tongue around in their mouth at the same time.
I pull the hood from my sweatshirt up over my head and try to protect the record that I bought at Amoeba today during our lunch break. It’s an old gospel LP my dad told me about, and I’m excited to listen to it.
My mom and I have old movies. My dad and I have old music.
We both love vinyl—jazz and blues, gospel, swing, early rock and roll.
I shelter the record from the hammering wind.
And I start to run a little down the street.
&
nbsp; The sky is nearly dark.
And the cold cuts deep inside.
6.
FOR THE PAST TEN years we’ve lived in a three-bedroom house in the Outer Richmond District just across from a crowded Taiwanese market that sells all kinds of cheap electronic equipment and smells of strange herbs and spices. Old women walk, bent, pushing carts, with white handkerchiefs covering their bowed heads. They wear long patchwork jackets and red-and-black sandaled clogs that tap-tap against the sidewalk and echo loudly through the streets. The men smoke brown-tipped cigarettes and shout at one another when they talk and play cards and mah-jongg on makeshift tables set up under the store’s awning.
Next to the market is a bakery that makes different pastries filled with mysterious sweet and savory ingredients; my dad likes to take us there in the mornings before school. And then there’s the butcher shop with links of sausage and entrails and smoked pigs’ heads and whole cured ducks and chickens hanging up on display behind the large plate-glass windows. On the opposite side of the street there is a little grocery store and a Laundromat and then, on the corner, a Vietnamese restaurant, where men sit at the lunch counter eating bowls of steaming noodles and drinking beer in tall glasses. It was Teddy, actually, who liked the Vietnamese food the most. He loved anything spicy, and he’d eat the red chili paste and hot peppers straight out of the bowl, which is crazy because they make me sick as hell.
Our next-door neighbors, the Paganoffs, are an elderly Russian couple, both of them short and squat and balding. The woman wears blond wigs and white powdered makeup, and the man wears suspenders and tight undershirts that roll up at the bottom, exposing his round belly. He sits on the porch in an oversize easy chair smoking black, smelly cigars and watching his own TV through the window with the volume turned up all the way. A lot of times he’ll talk to me while I’m out smoking, even though his English is terrible and I have a hard time making out what he’s trying to say.
My dad buys my cigarettes for me because he figures, after everything I’ve been through, I should be able to smoke if I want—especially since I can’t smoke pot anymore or drink or whatever ’cause of all the medication. Besides, it’s only two more years until I can buy them on my own. And my dad smokes, too, so he understands where I’m coming from.