hang me out to dry, a Romance fanfic

hang me up to dry

12.5.06

“i’ve got one friend laying across from me
i did not choose him, he did not choose me
we’ve got no chance of recovery”

cold war kids, “hospital beds”

The difference between them was that Travis knew he was crazy and Nathan kept insisting he was not. Travis knew that something was wrong with him, he didn’t know what it was but he knew there was something wrong; his brain was wired in knotted string and dental floss and thin strips of tinfoil instead of the orderly coils of wire in the minds of most people. He lost track of what he was saying if he paused for more than a split second. He spoke slowly and his mind raced to keep up. He would think for hours so that he could say one sentence perfectly, and he would forget it once he was halfway through. Sometimes he would forget pieces of words, he would know them but the middle syllable would be trapped somewhere in a ball of string in the lobe of his brain behind his left ear, he could feel it there and it wouldn’t come unstuck. His parents were very wealthy and this was very humiliating.

There were two homes that he remembered and they were both very large and very brick except one of them smelled like a hospital and the other like apple cider. For eight years he had been wearing slippers all day and playing solitaire alone in a room with a caged radiator and two plastic beds with no sharp angles. There were no sharp angles anywhere.

Nathan was a twelve-times-diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. His parents had taken him to ten doctors and three mental health specialists before they finally admitted to themselves that something was wrong with their son. He had still refused to accept it. When Travis met him he was numb, dull, eyes heavy-lidded and glazed from the assorted drugs that had probably just worn off minutes ago. There was no color in his face. Outside it was hot and sunny, September. Outside the obsessive-compulsives frolicked on the dry lawn.

One of the nurses said, “This is Travis, Travis this is Nathan.” There was a suitcase that she dropped on the floor. “They’re bringing another dresser tomorrow.” She left in a hurry. Her clothes were yellow and purple and a size too small.

“I’ve never had a – um, a –”

“A roommate.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not crazy. You’re probably insane. I’m probably going to be stabbed in my sleep tonight. Fuck fuck fuck.” His voice was tired and slow. He sat down on the bed. His face went into his hands as if magnetized. He still wore jeans and a sweater. They looked soft.

“There isn’t anything to stab you with.”

“You could still strangle me. Or something. I don’t know.” He pulled off his shoes with some difficulty and laid down on the bed. His knees went up to his chest and he hugged them. “What are you supposed to be? Autistic. Cyclothymic. Kleptomanic. Pyromanic. Just tell me so I know how you’re going to kill me in my sleep.”

“What are you?”

“I’m nothing. I’m not crazy, I told you I wasn’t crazy. I am here because I have delusions.” He made quotation marks with his fingers. “And hallucinations. They’re not delusions and hallucinations if they’re real.”

Travis chuckled at this and Nathan glared.

“I’m serious. I am one-hundred-percent motherfucking serious. You’ll see, you’ll see, I promise.”

“What are they.”

“What are what.” Nathan’s voice was something between a snap and a groan.

“Your delusions.” Travis picked up his solitaire and rolled the cards around in his hands. “Tell me what they are.”

“My delusions are like the delusions of everyone else on the entire planet. Number one, everyone is going to die, number two, one of those people is going to be me, number three, chemical warfare, number four, neo-Nazis who are going to lock me up and cut open my brain, number five, crazy people like yourself, number six, Arab terrorists, number seven, aliens, et cetera.”

“I never think about those things.”

“That’s because you are in a mental hospital and you don’t watch CNN at night and you don’t know what crop circles are and you probably have never read National Geographic or Time or heard of the phrases subjective doubles or reduplicative paramnesia.”

Travis nodded because he did watch CNN and he did know what crop circles were and he did read National Geographic and Time and he had heard of the phrase subjective doubles.

“I bet you’re a compulsive liar. I bet that’s your mental disorder. I bet you’re compulsively optimistic. What do they call that, there’s a name for it.”

“Hypo – um, hypo-something.”

“Hypomania.”

“Yeah. I don’t have that.”

“I wish I had that,” said Nathan. He didn’t say anything else. When Travis got up to make sure he hadn’t died or something Nathan’s eyes were closed and he was breathing slowly and softly and he looked perfectly sane and perfectly happy, but Travis knew his blood was fifty percent Thorazine and when he woke up he would theorize more on how he wished he was a nymphomaniac.

They were eating lunch. “I wish I was a nymphomaniac,” said Nathan.

“They don’t call it that anymore,” said Travis. It was Thanksgiving and raining. Neither of them were hungry. Nathan picked at his gravy-smothered stuffing with a plastic spork. “I think they call it hyper – hyper-something.”

Next to them one of the dissociative identities was telling his mashed potatoes to shut up. Travis flattened his with the butter knife.

“Hypersexuality. I wish I had that.”

“Everyone wishes they have that. I think once you have it… I think once you have it you, um…”

“Wish you didn’t have it. True. Are there any of them here? Nymphomaniacs. Hypersexuals. Whatever.”

“They’re probably in the violent ward or something. They probably don’t want them, uh –”

“Raping the pathological gamblers. Yeah. I know.”

For a week before Christmas Nathan was in isolation after a session with his therapist during which he had apparently acted out and Travis was alone in the room with the two beds and the heater in the cage. Nathan came back on Christmas Eve with the circles under his eyes blacker than usual. A nurse pushed him through the door and closed it behind him. He leaned against the wall.

“Hi,” he said. “Mad Thorazine. I need to go to bed.”

“I missed you,” said Travis from the floor, halfway through a game of solitaire.

“Me too,” said Nathan. He took three stumbles forward and sat on his bed and fell over toward the foot side. His eyes closed and he mumbled, “Imissedyoualot. I’msotiredIdon’tremembermylastname.”

“It’s Adbury.” Travis got up and took Nathan’s shoes off and sat him up and let him fall over to the other side. “Are you cold?” he asked, but Nathan was asleep and he wouldn’t wake up for about eighteen hours and when he woke up he would be a mess, skin peeling off bones, the angles of his body curves, pale and numb and colorless, and it was only when Travis threw blankets over him and sat back down on the floor with his solitaire that he realized that he had remembered Nathan’s last name.

On Christmas they sat down on the floor and opened presents. There were chocolates from the nurses which Nathan chewed soberly, eyes locked on a place behind Travis’s head. There were Burberry slippers from Travis’s parents which Nathan laughed at weakly. He kicked a Hershey wrapper across the floor and it skittered underneath the caged heater.

Nathan said, “I feel like I have been run over by a bus.” He held both hands in the air like a football goalpost and made the motion of one hitting the other.

“A bus called Thorazine,” said Travis, who had gotten it once and only once when he was thirteen.

“My head is – it’s separate from my body. Is that normal?”

“Yes.” Travis put on his Burberry slippers.

“Straight off the runway,” said Nathan. He crumpled up wrapping paper and laid on the floor with it as a pillow. “The best present I could give you is a big hug and I think I would fall on you. Or something. And you’d suffocate.”

Nathan fell asleep at three, lying on wrapping paper on the floor. At midnight three nurses came in and shoved food down his throat and put him in his bed and left. Nathan coughed for a while, kneeling in his bed with sheets wrapped around his ankles, moonlight dusted over him like a soft white blanket, and he said, “Travis.”

“What.”

“Merry Christmas.”

It snowed the next day and Travis took a long walk around the grounds as the orderlies supervised snowball fights and fort building in the center common between the rec hall and the violent ward. White faces pressed to the barred windows, watching. There was an eighty year old woman in there who had strangled one of the nurses with a bedsheet. He came back in with cold feet anxiously awaiting Burberry slippers.

Nathan was sitting in his bed reading an upside-down Time magazine. Travis sat down beside him.

“I feel lobotomized,” said Nathan.

“It’s called a chemical lobotomy,” said Travis, peeling off his gloves and squeezing his white fingers. “I think it’s making you crazier. How many shots did they – how many – um, help me.”

“Three,” said Nathan. “I think. They all blurred together. Huge needle.” There were two band-aids in the crease of his arm; Nathan showed them to Travis like a heroin addict showing off track marks.

“It’s just two. Were they full?”

“Almost.” Nathan set down the magazine. He grazed hot fingers over Travis’s collarbone. “I think I’m having delusions of grandeur,” he said. His eyes probed into Travis’s ear. “I think I’m having dreams about you.”

“Probably dying,” Travis said, increasingly uncomfortable. “Probably bombs falling on my head.”

“No,” said Nathan. “No, no no no no. I wish your name was Heywood Jablome, because then I’d have an excuse.”

Travis took a second to compute this then stood up very quickly. The tinfoil and string in his head whirred in an attempt to keep up. “Is it just me or is the heater – is the heater…”

“Face it,” said Nathan, “you’re in a mental institution. I am your paranoid schizophrenic roommate. I’m stronger than you when not pumped full of sedatives and I’m very attracted to you perhaps as a result of my erotomanic delusions. I find myself jealous of my own self whenever you talk to me. I am crazier than you and somehow the fact that you’re less crazy than me is – frankly, it does wonders for the libido. And the heater isn’t broken but you’re wearing a jacket and a scarf and a sweater and blushing insanely so I suppose that’s your problem right there.”

“How um, how – fuck. I am forgetting all of my words.”

“How much, how long?”

“How l – the second one.”

“Thanksgiving. Maybe earlier.”

“I feel like throwing up.”

“You remembered those words.”

“You shouldn’t have told me.”

“You remembered those ones too.”

“I’d take this better if – fuck. I’d take this – oh my God. I wish I – how – fuck.”

“Try it again.”

“I’d take this better if I’d seen it was coming.”

“Good job,” said Nathan, voice edged with sarcasm and something Travis didn’t recognize.

“Don’t do this to me. Don’t do this. Please. I am wired for solitaire and not for apologies.”

Nathan was standing up all of a sudden and without shoes he was as tall as Travis. He was infinitely threatening in cotton pajamas. “Don’t do this to me. Last time I checked I am twenty percent Thorazine with what looks like track marks on my arm and you – you – Jesus, Travis.”

“You’re forgetting words now, see?”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you back.”

“I never should’ve –”

“That’s right. That’s right. You never should’ve –”

There were not words for what Nathan’s mouth tasted like. He tasted like orange juice and the applesauce they gave him his pills in. His hands were hot and damp and he peeled off Travis’s coat and Travis let him because he tasted good and he smelled good and his brain had departed as if he were as heavily drugged as Nathan. The heater was definitely broken. The closest bed was Travis’s.

“You can’t do this,” said Travis. Nathan’s fingers shook on the buttons of his sweater. “You cannot do this. We have checks in twenty minutes. They are going to give us both insane amounts of Thorazine and we’ll never see each other ever again and I can’t play solitaire every day for the rest of my life, I won’t play solitaire every day for the rest of my life.”

“Watch me,” said Nathan.

“We can still be friends,” Travis offered. “I can forget all about this. I forget all about everything. I sometimes forget my own middle name.”

Nathan’s fingers extended to the buttons of Travis’s pants. “Too late. And it’s James."

When the nurse came for checks Nathan was reading Time magazine upside down and Travis was asleep in his bed, turned on one side, shirt on the floor. She said to Nathan, “Would you tell him to pick that up?”

Nathan nodded, absorbed in an upside-down graph.

“Good,” she said. “I’ll be back in a half hour.” She closed the door and Nathan placed the magazine down on the floor. He sat up and glanced at the door and slowly counted to ten. Slowly his eyes turned to Travis’s back.

editedddd as of 12.7.

found a better epigraph by the same band, listen to them
thorazine is a sedative that they don't use anymore.
erotomania is a delusion wherein you believe that someone (usually of higher social status) is in love with you.
dissociative identity is the double personality disorder... not schizophrenia
i like this version a little better because the end is cleaner. and yes this is the end. there is no more.
inspired by: 12 monkeys, cold war kids, opacity dot us (website... go there now. you will be glued to your computer for like 5 hours)

again i am sorrryyyy if i used any of the disorders wrong, and i'm sorry if i offended anyone in the healthcare field.

xxxxxx