Chapter Thirty-Six: Return to Normality
Reilly's heart is ticking fast in his throat, and he doesn't believe what this woman has just told him -- this woman with the carefully styled hair.
He has a mental disorder, she tells him. This isn't just a normal variation in mood. He is not a normal man who occasionally has low periods.
He has paranoid bipolar disorder, she tells him, the words slipping from her tongue like snakes -- and time is sliding sideways away from him, a kid with new shoes on a hardwood floor.
But Reilly holds his sense of time jealously in hands that are shaking, and listens to what she has to say:
He's lucky. (She pats him on the hand.) He'll be on medication for the rest of his life, have to see a therapist at the same time. (For the rest of his life. She makes it sound so cheerful and small a thing.)
She's talking about his life. Doesn't she understand that? Reilly's only twenty-four.
That's not old enough to be like this.
He presses his hands against his eyes, shutting out the light, not-thinking-about-that.
Then he thinks something that makes a warm feeling wash through him:
Jeb was diagnosed when he was in his twenties, too.
And he doesn't feel so alone -- it's as if he has a hand to hold while she outlines what his life will be like. Someone else is building the framework of Reilly's future life, and he doesn't care as much as he should, because it's just like when he was in college, and the dark was all around: Jeb is there for him, in his heart, where it counts -- between Reilly and despair.
Except it's better than it was then, because now Jeb is only a breath away from him. They're friends.
He thanks her for her time and walks out, not really knowing where he's going, but feeling -- feeling OK, nonetheless.
He goes back to Kyle first, seeking him out from some remaining instinct, some shred of thought that's left in his head: Find Kyle.
Kyle's waiting for him, trying to look relaxed.
"You waited for me," Reilly says before he can stop himself.
"Duh," Kyle says. "I knew you weren't going to take that long."
Then Kyle hugs him, and says, "You do realize that people actually care about you, right?"
"Right," Reilly mutters, and doesn't want to let go of Kyle.
"Good." They untangle themselves from each other.
Reilly smiles at Kyle tentatively. "I need to go into town. She's put me on meds."
"Fucking fantastic, man," Kyle says. "I'll take you. C'mon."
Reilly remembers not to be surprised that Kyle has a car -- after all, Kyle came here well after Reilly did, and has more reason to leave.
Reilly's the one who should have a reason to stay.
Kyle doesn't drive like a maniac anymore (but Reilly still holds his fragile sense of time in a death grip). And he's quiet, not chatty like he usually is.
Reilly looks out the window, rather than talk (he can't -- something is still in him that will not say a word). The sky is brilliantly blue, and a hot Santa Ana wind rushes in through the window he's rolled down.
He closes his eyes, and doesn't have to make an effort not to think. But this isn't the blanked-out despair not-thinking he's somehow gotten used to -- it's the blissful, immersed-in-the-moment not-thinking he remembers.
The memory of blanking out brushes across his conscious mind, and he opens his eyes, thinking about the digits on his clock changing without continuity, hours disappearing.
"How long?" he asks, breaking the silence.
"Huh?" Kyle glances over at him. He's not wearing sunglasses (he refuses to, for whatever reason), and Reilly is, for once, grateful for this (rather than annoyed that Kyle is killing his vision with the glare), because it lets him see the expression in Kyle's eyes: he does care. "How long what?"
"I think I lost time," Reilly says, building the words together carefully, still feeling like he's not getting the point across. "How long's it been since..."
He's hard-pressed to remember the last time he spoke to Kyle before Kyle rescued him.
Were things that bad?
Kyle's eyes are on the road, but Reilly can read his expression nonetheless -- he's thinking, trying to remember. "Dr. Batchelder was in to see you a while ago, I think. Saw Dr. ter Borcht dragging him over that way, anyway."
"How many days ago was that?" Reilly remembers that, faintly, speaking to Jeb -- but he's getting impatient. He wants to know how many days have been stolen from him. (Does that mean he's coming out of it? He doesn't really want to know.)
"Oh, not as long as it could have been. Sometime last week..." Kyle stops talking for a moment, adds, "It's Tuesday, by the way."
"Great." Reilly leans on the window for support. "I never got the hang of Tuesdays."
"Me either." Kyle falls silent, doing some sort of mental calculations, figuring the math of the time Reilly's lost to himself.
Did he really not notice? Reilly thinks.
Kyle seems to hear him, because he says absently, "I got caught up in some stuff for work. Lost track of time, you know? And I never had the best sense of time anyway."
Reilly keeps an eye on the mountains in the distance, says nothing.
"Christ," Kyle says finally. "A week, I guess."
Not as bad as it could have been.
"A week."
"Yeah."
Reilly nods. "All right, then. A week."
He's faintly unsurprised that it doesn't hurt to think.
Time has already slipped from his hands -- like cold stream water, running through his fingers.
It won't take long for the prescription to come in, the pharmacist tells Reilly. A few days.
"All right," Reilly tells her, and he leaves with Kyle. They'll come back.
Until then, Reilly will make it. He always does, doesn't he?
Reilly knocks on the door to Jeb's lab, feeling cheerful, feeling great, really himself.
"Come in," calls Jeb's voice, and Reilly steps inside.
Jeb's tinkering with some sort of experiment that looks delicate, but he stops when he sees it's Reilly.
"Hello," he says, and sets the test tube he's holding back in the rack.
Reilly's been thinking about what he's going to say, and he chooses the simplest words.
"I'm back," he says.
"Great." Jeb smiles. "It's nice to have you back."
"Just wanted you to know," Reilly says, already moving towards the door.
He almost misses it when Jeb says:
"We worried about you."
We?
Oh. We.
But he finds himself not caring, because Jeb does something Reilly doesn't expect:
He steps forward and hugs Reilly -- briefly, yes, but still enough to surprise him. Because Jeb isn't a very "touchy" person. He doesn't like to touch other people. He doesn't like to be touched.
(Reilly can smell his aftershave.)
"Take care of yourself," Jeb says.
"Thank you," Reilly says, and "Goodbye", and on his way out of the lab
time snapped back into place.
He felt linear again. The world felt rational.
And it happened all of a sudden.
Thank you, he thought but didn't say (only crazy people talk to themselves, after all -- and he was no longer crazy). Because it was Jeb's fault that he was himself again.
He felt alive.