‘I love him,’ she said, in the way only twenty year olds can.
She drove me back to the restaurant, letting me out at the top of the access road.
‘Go find him,’ I said. ‘Get the names of anyone he might have told where he stashed his gear.’
She looked up at me. ‘And then?’
‘And then,’ I said. I tapped the car twice with the flat of my hand, and she drove away.
The front door to the restaurant was open, other front-of-house staff busily arranging chairs out on deck, but I walked around the other way and went in through the portal I'd spent most of the day replacing. I reached out as I walked through, and gave it a shove. It felt very firm.
There's something good about having rebuilt a door. It makes you feel like you've done something. It makes you believe things are fixable, even when you know that generally they are not.
What can you do, when things start to fall apart? Let us count the ways …
Not panic, of course, that's the main thing. Once you start, it's impossible to stop. Panic is immune to debate, to analysis, to earnest and cognitively therapeutic bullet points. Panic isn't listening. Panic has no ears, only a voice. Panic is wildfire in the soul, vaulting the narrow paths of reason in search of fresh wood and brush on the other side, borne into every corner of the mind by the winds of anxiety.
Carol wasn't even sure when it had started, or why. The last couple of months had been good. For the first time she'd started to feel settled. The apartment began to feel like a home. She got a part-time job helping at the library under the dread Miss Williams, tidying chairs and putting up posters and helping organize reading groups. Work more suited to some game oldster or slack-jawed teen, admittedly, but gainful employment all the same. She walked to the library and back and yet still managed to put on a few pounds, having regained something of an appetite. She made acquaintances, even put tentative emotional down-payments on a couple of potential friends, and generally quit acting like someone in a Witness Protection Program.
Sometimes, she even just… forgot. That had been best of all, the times when she suddenly remembered – because it proved there had been a period, however short, when she had not.
At some point in the last few days this had started to change. She woke feeling as if she had sunk a couple of inches into the bed overnight. Instead of vigorously soaping herself in the shower she stood bowed under the water, noticing flecks of mildew between a pair of tiles and wondering how she could have missed them before, and if she'd get around to doing something about it – or if it would just get worse and worse until she was the kind of woman who had grubby tiles and nothing could be done about that or the state of the yard or her clothes or hair. Chaos stalks us all, gaining entrance through cracks in trivial maintenance, the things left undone. As soon as you realize how much there is to do to keep presenting a front, it becomes horribly easy to stop believing, and start counting again instead.
It was better when she got out into the world, but still it felt as if her momentum was faltering. Books slipped from her hands, and she could not find things in stores. A bruise appeared on her hip from some minor collision she couldn't recall. Annoyingly, this reminded her of something her ex-husband used to say: that you can always tell when your mood is failing, because the world of objects turns mutinous, as if the growing storm in your head unsettles the lower ranks outside.
And then, three evenings before, she had found herself returning to the front door after locking it for the night.
She knew it was shut. She could see it was shut, that the bolt was drawn. She remembered doing it, for God's sake, could recall the chill of the chain's metal against her fingertips. That night, these memories were enough. The next, they were not, and she returned twice to make sure.
And last night she'd done it eight times, furiously, eyes wide as she watched herself draw and redraw the chain, turning the key in the lock until it wouldn't turn any further, over and over, before finally withdrawing it. It wouldn't be nine times tonight. That wasn't how counting worked. If it didn't stop now, it would escalate to sets of eight.
Sixteen times, twenty-four …
To understand how much a person can mistrust reality and themselves, you need to stand in a cold hallway, fighting back tears of self-hatred and frustration, as you watch your own hands check a simple bolt over twenty times.
She knew the walls of your skull were not a bastion. That thoughts could get in through the cracks, and did. That, in fact, if you felt in certain ways, it was a pretty sure sign they already had. The more she opened her mind to panic, the more likely she'd start slipping down that road again. So she wasn't going to panic.
Not yet.
These thoughts occupied her most of the way home from the library, under skies that were a smooth and unbroken grey. Once indoors she made a pot of strong coffee. She had an hour before he got back. Once he was home it would be easier. She'd have plenty to keep her mind off things. It also meant she wouldn't actually be able to do anything, however.
For a moment, thinking of Tyler, she felt a little better. Dinner could wait. Neither of them was a fussy eater. She could whip something up later. So …
She fetched her laptop from the living room and brought it to the kitchen table. When her browser was up she hesitated, hands over the keyboard.
She felt driven to do something, but… what?
She had thousands of words saved onto her hard disk, innumerable pdfs, two hundred bookmarked sites. The problem was none of the creators of these sites knew they were relevant. They were like people wandering the streets, blithely observing that portions of the sidewalk seemed to become white once in a while, without having the faintest understanding of snow. You needed to comprehend the system to place these reports in context. She did understand, had glimpsed it, at least. She was smart, too, though it seemed to her now that she'd never really capitalized on this.
There had been times when she'd experienced a glimpse of freedom, especially during the last couple of months. When it had occurred to her that the whole thing could be nonsense, a cloud on her vision that had never been more than a speck of dust in her eye. It didn't matter how many metaphors she conjured, however – and English had been one of her best subjects in high school; in the end, she knew she believed. Her faith was dark and unshakable. The knowledge did not make her feel better, and her faith didn't make her feel anything except afraid.
Faith/afraid: funny how similar the two words are. When we make ourselves believe things, how often is it just an attempt to hold back the fear?
She refocused on the screen, checking the sites with RSS feeds that automatically alerted her to additions, edits, new blog entries. Nothing. So she went for a trawl through some of her other bookmarks instead. Sites on mythology, folklore, local ephemera, anomalies. Still nothing.
Which made perfect sense. Her emotions didn't betoken a disturbance in the ether. She was not the micro-to the world's macrocosm, one half of a pathetic fallacy (God, high school English again!). It was personal. Each time she went looking and found nothing new, it diminished the comfort she'd once found there. What had previously made her feel that she was not alone, now increasingly confirmed
