I’m laid up with the flu on the sofa in the upstairs office of my empty new house, a quilt draped over my legs. The fever broke around noon and now the chills are slowly ebbing. I’m watching the Rangers lose in extra innings of the season home opener when I fall asleep. Then the phone rings. The clock reads 12:20 A.M. The caller I.D. reads HOUSTON P.D. After a foggy initial exchange, a Houston paramedic asks if I know a woman by the name of Lucille.
The sense of déjà vu is caught up in my vague, flu-fueled dreams. As I slowly come to, the first impulse is to instruct the paramedic to send Lucille home, for her husband needs her back. Heartsickness has translated into long-standing physical illness. Then the anger arrives, surprisingly close at hand.
“The last time I saw her,” I groan, “she was bent over a lavatory with a pile of meth in her face and a hyena on her tail.”
The puzzled voice turns adamant and stern. He would appreciate it if I would come extract my estranged wife from a rather fantastic situation.
“What’s the situation?” I inquire.
“Four hours ago the police found her walking down the middle of a street here in Rice Village. Stuttering and seeing snakes and UFOs everywhere. Obviously tweaking. Wouldn’t give her name, didn’t have a purse or I.D. A few minutes ago she jotted down her name and this number.”
“Where is she now?”
“The E.R. at Ben Taub.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“You can talk to her all you want when you get here.”
The hospital hallways are crowded with the sick and dying among Houston’s indigent huddled masses. Gunshot wounds, drug overdoses, and a diabetic rummy with a gangrenous foot lie scattered on the floor and on gurneys. Deep within the hospital’s lighted caverns, I find Lucille sitting in a chair looking like a duck that’s been struck on the head. Perhaps it’s a distortion of my fever-addled brain, but her attenuated neck seems impossibly long, her eyes skullishly round and wide. Every small sound draws her attention; her head reacts in panicked jerks. The moment she sees me she appears outraged, betrayed by the strangers who brought her here.
“What happened, Lucille?” I say as I approach.
“I was drugged,” she whispers. “Somebody drugged me.”
“Hope one of these cops doesn’t find out you’ve violated the conditions of your probation.”
She says nothing; merely stares, crazy as a loon. When I finally unlock my eyes from hers, I see a doctor hurriedly approaching.
“We have twenty-four hours to do the swab test,” he says, not bothering to introduce himself.
“What’s the swab test for?” I ask.
“Collection of DNA.”
“For a drug overdose?”
He turns to Lucille confidentially.
“We can either do it now or you can come back in the morning.”
I turn to Lucille.
“What’s he talking about?”
Lucille shrugs.
“Were you drugged or what?” I ask.
I follow her roving eyes as a cop walks by the foot of the bed. She says nothing. Even in her deluded state Lucille knows it’s better not to commit to any specific story.
“You need to make a decision about the test by morning,” the doctor says.
“Would it be all right if we stepped outside for a cigarette?” I ask.
“Just see that you talk to me before you go.”
With that he walks off to his next case, disappearing into the crowd.
I take a step back from Lucille, watch her as she sits all alone on this gurney in the midst of this hospital bustle. A few hours ago, I remind myself, she was seeing snakes, and now she’s shrewdly plotting diversionary tactics. In an emancipating moment of clarity she saw a way to make the police officers go away, to have them replaced by hospital staff. It’s all quite simple. Instead of the abuser, she would become the abused.
“S-somebody at a party put something in my drink,” she says as another cop walks by. “Can we sort this out at home?”
“You moved out, so to speak, two weeks ago.”
“Just take me home.”
I reach for her clipboard hanging from the bedstead, yank away the case sheet, and together we weave through the maze of doctors and nurses, patients and cops. As we come out into the cold evening air, I say, “So where have you been?”
She mumbles something. When I press her for an answer, she instructs me to be quiet; she is scanning the night skies for microwave signals of extraterrestrial origin. We climb into the car I came in, and then head into the heart of Rice Village in the vicinity of the neighborhood that Lucille left the Jaguar. After cruising the streets for an hour, we come upon a dark shape pulled high up onto the curb. I step out and see the keys are in the ignition, Lucille’s purse on the floor. The car and everything in it is just as she abandoned it hours earlier.
I pull the car off the curb, park it, grab Lucille’s purse and lock everything up. When I come back Lucille’s eyes are open, but her head gently bobs against the seatbelt harness as though she were asleep.
“You need to get back into rehab,” I say, tossing her purse into her lap. Seeing it, she instantly plunges a hand into the cluster of effects. A moment later she produces a tremendous baggie, an inch or so deep, of crystal. I snatch it from her, lower my window, and toss it.
She slowly turns to look me in the eyes.
“I do not know who you are,” she says mystically.
“I’m the guy who put Clyde out of business.”
“Clyde,” she mutters to herself, again and again. In time “Clyde” becomes “Co-llide.”
“You’re in Crazy Town, Lucille.”
She freezes. “Who told you about Crazy Town?”
“Colette, your boyfriend’s wife.”
Her eyes slowly grow wide. In her world Crazy Town is really a place, and I am an interloper who is not to be trusted.
And so I learn to recognize patterns as they emerge from the chaos. Spaceships hover in the near darkness. Cops supplant the threat of snakes. She was drugged, she was raped. Hence, reality is discernible to Lucille, but hangs impaled upon the hallucination. In her current state of mind reality is an infinitely malleable thing. Such insanity used to make sense only to Lucille. Now it makes sense to me.
When we arrive at the house Lucille has to be coaxed out of the car, as she thinks the driveway has turned into grape Jello. If she steps on it she will sink and drown. I don’t try very hard to get her inside, and that seems to convince her all is safe. Of her own wit and volition she points out that I am not sinking. “A sound observation,” I remark.
Inside, I set her down before the television where she sits erect, studying a Tom and Jerry episode on Cartoon Network. Within minutes she’s asleep. She stays asleep through what remains of the night. In the morning I’m well enough to go to work, but when I come home she’s still unconscious. And then comes the mystery. Sometime deep in the night, long after I’m lost in sleep, I sense a shift in my dreams – like a buckle in a summer breeze that portends the approach of weather. A warm pressure descends and enters the world of indistinct dreams but tugs at that outer world. The mist of illusion fades, and Lucille becomes present, her hair tumbling down over my head. I need you, she whispers. Release follows an exquisite moment of tension. Her weight lifts from the bed, and slips away like a spectral form.
In the morning, Lucille lies burrowed face down in a fetal position on the sofa, just as I’d initially left her two nights ago. When I return in the evening she is again asleep, although there is evidence that she’s been awake. That night as I lie in bed, I hear her moving about the kitchen. The refrigerator crushes some ice, a toilet flushes. The microwave beeps. I come downstairs, only to find her again asleep. Never awake. A rectangle of macaroni and cheese teeters on the edge of the coffee table. As I step out of the shower at dawn the next morning I hear her on the phone. A few seconds later the back door opens and closes. From the upstairs window I see her walking down the sidewalk, her mop of black hair blowing in the light breeze. Clyde’s pickup pulls alongside the curb. She gets in and away she goes in a violent roar.
Later that morning I see a sticky note on the kitchen counter marked in Lucille’s swooping schoolgirl script. Perhaps a word on where I can reach her. Goodbye, maybe. On it are scrawled three lines: “Feeling better now. Thanks for being there, xo L.”
So Lucille becomes a ghost in my life. For a full six weeks I neither see nor hear from her, and I come to wonder whether or not the last strange night ever happened at all. And then that suddenly changes when I come home from work one evening that spring.
I don’t notice it at first. Fifteen solid hours of arcane problem solving have numbed my brain. But as I sit in the silence of the living room, staring straight ahead at the kitchen, I see a bright square note against the dark cherry wood of the cabinet, and recognize at once that Lucille has been here. I thrust myself to my feet and come into the kitchen. But it takes a moment in my present state to apprehend the full gravity of what the note says. And yet it is quite simple. “Think I might be pregnant, L.”