Turtles All the Way Down

  It's not over.

  You lie there, not even thinking really, except to try to consider how to describe the hurt, as if finding the language for it might bring it up out of you. If you can make something real, if you can see it and smell it and touch it, then you can kill it.

  You think, it's like a brain fire. Like a rodent gnawing at you from the inside. A knife in your gut. A spiral. Whirlpool. Black hole.

  The words used to describe it--despair, fear, anxiety, obsession--do so little to communicate it. Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain. Maybe we needed to give shape to the opaque, deep-down pain that evades both sense and senses.

  For a moment, you think you're better. You've just had a successful train of thought, with an engine and a caboose and everything. Your thoughts. Authored by you. And then you feel a wave of nausea, a fist clenching from within your rib cage, cold sweat hot forehead you've got it it's already inside of you crowding out everything else taking you over and it's going to kill you and eat its way out of you and then in a small voice, half strangled by the ineffable horror, you barely squeeze out the words you need to say. "I'm in trouble, Mom. Big trouble."

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE ARC OF THE STORY GOES LIKE THIS: Having descended into proper madness, I begin to make the connections that crack open the long-dormant case of Russell Pickett's disappearance. My dogged obsessiveness leads me to ignore all manner of threats, and the risk to the fortune Daisy and I have stumbled into. I focus only on the mystery, and embrace the belief that solving it is the ultimate Good, that declarative sentences are inherently better than interrogative ones, and in finding the answer despite my madness, I simultaneously find a way to live with the madness. I become a great detective, not in spite of my brain circuitry, but because of it.

  I'm not sure who I walk into the sunset with in the proper story, Davis or Daisy, but I walk into it. You see me backlit, an eclipse silhouetted by the eight-minute-old light of our home star, holding hands with somebody.

  And along the way, I realize that I have agency over myself, that my thoughts are--as Dr. Singh liked to say--only thoughts. I realize that my life is a story that I'm telling, and I'm free and empowered and the captain of my consciousness and yeah, no. That's not how it went down.

  I did not become dogged or declarative, nor did I walk off into the sunset--in fact, for a while there, I saw hardly any natural light at all.

  What happened was relentlessly and excruciatingly dull: I lay in a hospital bed and hurt. My ribs hurt, my brain hurt, my thoughts hurt, and they did not let me go home for eight days.

  At first, they figured me for an alcoholic--that I'd gone for the hand sanitizer because I was so desperate for a drink. The truth was so much weirder and less rational that nobody really seemed to buy it until they contacted Dr. Singh. When she arrived at the hospital, she pulled a chair up to the edge of my bed. "Two things happened," she said. "First, you're not taking your medication as prescribed."

  I told her I'd taken it almost every day, which felt true, but wasn't. "I felt like it was making me worse," I eventually confessed.

  "Aza, you're an intelligent young woman. Surely you don't think drinking hand sanitizer while hospitalized for a lacerated liver marks forward progress in your mental health journey." I just stared at her. "As I'm sure they explained to you, drinking hand sanitizer is dangerous--not only because of the alcohol, but because it contains chemicals that when ingested can kill you. So we're not moving forward with the idea that the medicine you stopped taking was making you worse." She said it all so forcefully that I just nodded.

  "And the second thing that happened is that you experienced in the accident a serious trauma, and this would be challenging for anyone." I kept staring. "We need to get you on a different medication, one that works better for you, that you can tolerate, and that you'll take."

  "None of them work."

  "None of them have worked yet," she corrected.

  --

  Dr. Singh came by each morning, and then in the afternoon another doctor visited to assess my liver situation. Both were a relief if for no other reason than my omnipresent mother was forced to leave the room briefly.

  On the last day, Dr. Singh sat down next to the side of my bed and placed a hand on my shoulder. She'd never touched me before. "I recognize that a hospital setting has probably not been great for your anxiety."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Do you feel you are a threat to yourself?"

  "No," I said. "I'm just really scared and having a lot of invasives."

  "Did you consume hand sanitizer yesterday?"

  "No."

  "I'm not here to judge you, Aza. But I can only help if you're being honest."

  "I am being honest. I haven't." For one thing, they'd taken the wall-mounted sanitizer station out of my room.

  "Have you thought about it?"

  "Yeah."

  "You don't have to be afraid of that thought. Thought is not action."

  "I can't stop thinking about getting C. diff. I just want to be sure that I'm not . . ."

  "Drinking hand sanitizer won't help."

  "But what will help?"

  "Time. Treatment. Taking your meds."

  "I feel like a noose is tightening around me and I want out, but struggling only cinches the knot. The spiral just keeps tightening, you know?"

  She looked me dead in the eye. I thought she might cry or something, the way she was looking at me. "Aza, you're going to survive this."

  --

  Even after they let me go home, Dr. Singh still came to my house twice a week to check on my progress. I had switched to a different medication, which Mom made sure I took every morning, and I wasn't allowed to get up except to go to the bathroom lest I re-lacerate my liver.

  I was out of school for two weeks. Fourteen days of my life reduced to one sentence, because I can't describe anything that happened during those days. It hurt, all the time, in a way language could not touch. It was boring. It was predictable. Like walking a maze you know has no solution. It's easy enough to say what it was like, but impossible to say what it was.

  Daisy and Davis both tried to visit, but I wanted to be alone, in bed. I didn't read or watch TV; neither could adequately distract me. I just lay there, almost catatonic, as my mother hovered, perpetually near, breaking the silence every few minutes with a question-phrased-as-a-statement. Each day is a little better? You're feeling okay? You're improving? The inquisition of declarations.

  I didn't even turn on my phone for a while, a decision endorsed by Dr. Singh. When I finally did power it up, I felt an insoluble fear. I both wanted to find a lot of text messages and didn't.

  Turns out I had over thirty messages--not just from Daisy and Davis, although they had written, but also from Mychal and other friends, and even some teachers.

  --

  I returned to school on a Monday morning in early December. I wasn't sure if the new medication was working, but I also wasn't wondering whether to take it. I felt ready, like I had returned to the world--not my old self, but myself nonetheless.

  Mom drove me to school. Harold had been totaled, and anyway, I was too scared of driving.

  "Excited or nervous?" Mom asked me. She drove with both hands on the steering wheel, ten and two o'clock.

  "Nervous," I said.

  "Your teachers, your friends, they all understand, Aza. They just want you well and will support you one hundred percent, and if they don't, I will crush them."

  I smiled a little. "Everyone knows, is all. That I went crazy or whatever."

  "Oh, sweetie," she said. "You didn't go crazy. You've always been crazy." Now I laughed, and she reached over to squeeze my wrist.

  Daisy was waiting on the front steps. Mom stopped the car, and I got out, the weight of the backpack still tender against my ribs. It was a cold day, but the sun was bright even though it had just risen, and I kept blinking away the light. It had been a while since I'd spent much time outside.


  Daisy looked different. Her face brighter somehow. It took me a second to realize she'd gotten a haircut, a just-under-the-chin bob that looked really good.

  "Can I hug you without lacerating your liver?"

  "I like the new hairstyle," I said as we hugged.

  "You're sweet, but we both know it's a disaster."

  "Listen," I said. "I'm really sorry."

  "Me too, but we have forgiven each other and now we will live happily ever after."

  "Seriously, though," I said. "I feel terrible about--"

  "I do, too," she said. "You gotta read my new story, man. It's a fifteen-thousand-word apology set on postapocalyptic Jedha. What I want to say to you, Holmesy, is that yes, you are exhausting, and yes, being your friend is work. But you are also the most fascinating person I have ever known, and you are not like mustard. You are like pizza, which is the highest compliment I can pay a person."

  "I'm just really sorry, Daisy, for not being--"

  "Jesus Christ, Holmesy, you can sure hold a grudge against yourself. You are my favorite person. I want to be buried next to you. We'll have a shared tombstone. It'll read, 'Holmesy and Daisy: They did everything together, except the nasty.' Anyway, how are you?" I shrugged. "Want me to keep talking?" I nodded. "You know how sometimes people will say, like, oh, she really loves the sound of her voice? I do seriously love the sound of my voice. I've got a voice for radio." She turned and started walking up the stairs to get in line for the metal detectors. "So I know what you're wondering: Daisy, are you still dating Mychal? Where's your car? What happened to your hair? The answers are no, sold, and a cut became necessary after Elena intentionally put three pieces of chewed bubble gum in my hair while I was sleeping. It's been a long two weeks, Holmesy. Should I elaborate?"

  I nodded.

  "With pleasure," she answered as we cleared the metal detectors. "So with Mychal it really boiled down to my need to be young and wild and free--like, I had this near-death experience and then thought, Do I really want to waste my youth in a capital-R Relationship? And so I was, like, 'Let's see other people,' and he was, like, 'No,' and I was, like, 'Please,' and he was, like, 'I want to be in a monogamous relationship,' and I was, like, 'I just don't want the weight of this, like, Thing dominating my life,' and he was, like, 'I'm not a thing,' and then we broke up. I think technically he dumped me in the end, but it was one of those things where you'd need, like, a three-judge panel to determine who was technically at fault.

  "Anyway, then with the car, it turns out that cars are expensive to own and also it turns out that they can hurt you, so I got a refund because I had it less than sixty days, and now I'm just going to Uber everywhere for the rest of my life, because then it's kind of like I have every car, and also as a rich person I deserve to be chauffeured. Should I keep going?"

  We'd reached my locker now, and I was surprised to find that I remembered the combination. There were so many human bodies around me. I kind of couldn't believe it. I pulled my locker open. I hadn't done any homework. I was behind on everything. The hallway was so loud, so crowded. "Yeah," I said.

  "No problem. I can do this all day. This is another reason we're destined to be together--you're so good at not talking. So, with Elena, she put gum in my hair on purpose while I was sleeping, and the next morning I was, like, 'Why is there chewed gum in my hair?' and she was, like, 'Ha-ha!' I was, like, 'Elena, you have no understanding of humor. It isn't funny just to make someone's life worse. Like, if I broke your leg, would that be funny?' And she was, like, 'Ha-ha!' So I got this fancy haircut, and believe you me, I paid for it out of Elena's college fund. My parents made me set up a college fund for Elena, BTW.

  "In other news, the whole Mychal thing has made our lunch table a little awkward, so we're going to have a two-person picnic outside. I know it's slightly cold, but trust me, sitting next to Mychal in the cafeteria is far colder. Are you so ready to go to biology right now and just absolutely murder it? Like, in forty-seven minutes, the dead and bloodless carcass of honors biology will be laid before your feet. God, a lot happened since you lost your mind. Is that rude to say?"

  "Actually, the problem is that I can't lose my mind," I said. "It's inescapable."

  "That is precisely how I feel about my virginity," Daisy said. "Another reason Mychal and I were doomed--he doesn't want to have sex unless he's in love, and yes, I know that virginity is a misogynistic and oppressive social construct, but I still want to lose it, and meanwhile I've got this boy hemming and hawing like we're in a Jane Austen novel. I wish boys didn't have all these feelings I have to manage like a fucking psychiatrist." Daisy walked me to the door of my classroom, opened it, and then walked me to my desk. I sat down. "You know I love you, right?" I nodded. "My whole life I thought I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along. I gotta go to calc. Good to see you, Holmesy."

  --

  Daisy had brought leftover pizza for our picnic, and we sat underneath our school's one big oak tree, halfway to the football field. It was frigid, and both of us were bundled into our winter coats, hoods up, my jeans stiff on the frozen ground.

  I didn't have gloves, so I tucked my fists into the coat. It was no weather for a picnic.

  "I've been thinking a lot about Pickett," Daisy said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah, just--while you were gone, I kept thinking about how weird it is to leave your kids like that, without even saying good-bye. I almost feel bad for him, to be honest. Like, what has to be wrong with him that he doesn't at least buy a burner phone somewhere and text his kids and tell them he's okay?"

  I felt worse for the thirteen-year-old who wakes up every morning thinking that maybe today is the day. And then he plays video games every night to distract from the dull ache of knowing your father doesn't trust or love you enough to be in contact, your father who privileged a tuatara over you in his estate plans. "I feel worse for Noah than for Pickett," I said.

  "You've always empathized with that kid," she said. "Even when you can't with your best friend." I shot her a glance and she laughed it off, but I knew she wasn't kidding.

  "So, what do your parents do?" I asked.

  Daisy laughed again. "My dad works at the State Museum. He's a security guard there. He likes it, because he's really into Indiana history, but mostly he just makes sure nobody touches the mastodon bones or whatever. My mom works at a dry cleaners in Broad Ripple."

  "Have you told them about the money yet?"

  "Yeah. That's how Elena got that college fund. They made me put ten grand in it. My dad was, like, 'Elena would do the same for you if she came into some money.' Like hell she would."

  "They weren't mad?"

  "That I came home one day with fifty thousand dollars? No, Holmesy, they weren't mad."

  Inside the arm of my coat, I could feel something seeping from my middle fingertip. I'd have to change the Band-Aid before history, have to go through the whole annoying ritual of it. But for now, I liked being next to Daisy. I liked watching my warm breath in the cold.

  "How's Davis?" she asked.

  "Haven't talked to him," I said. "I haven't talked to anyone."

  "So it was pretty bad."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "I'm sorry."

  "Yeah, it's not your fault."

  "Did you . . . do you think about killing yourself?"

  "I thought about not wanting to be that way anymore."

  "Are you still . . ."

  "I don't know." I let out a long, slow breath, and watched the steam of it disappear in the winter air. "I think maybe I'm like the White River. Non-navigable."

  "But that's not the point of the story, Holmesy. The point of the story is they built the city anyway, you know? You work with what you have. They had this shit river, and they managed to build an okay city around it. Not a great city, maybe. But not bad. You're not the river. You're the city."

  "So, I'm not bad?"

  "Correct. You're a soli
d B-plus. If you can build a B-plus city with C-minus geography, that's pretty great."

  I laughed. Beside me, Daisy lay down and motioned for me to lie next to her. We were looking up, our heads near the trunk of that lone oak tree, the sky smoke-gray above us past our fogged breath, the leafless branches intersecting overhead.

  I don't know if I'd ever told Daisy about that--if she lay down at precisely that moment because she knew how much I loved seeing the sky cut up. I thought about how branches far from one another could still intersect in my line of vision, like how the stars of Cassiopeia were far from one another, but somehow near to me.

  "I wish I understood it," she said.

  "It's okay," I said. "Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We're all stuck inside ourselves."

  "You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?"

  "There's no self to hate. It's like, when I look into myself, there's no actual me--just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don't feel like they're mine. They're not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It's like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there's a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it's solid all the way through. But with me, I don't think there is one that's solid. They just keep getting smaller."

  "That reminds me of a story my mom tells," Daisy said.

  "What story?"

  I could hear her teeth chattering when she talked but neither of us wanted to stop looking up at the latticed sky. "Okay, so there's this scientist, and he's giving a lecture to a huge audience about the history of the earth, and he explains that the earth was formed billions of years ago from a cloud of cosmic dust, and then for a while the earth was very hot, but then it cooled enough for oceans to form. And single-celled life emerged in the oceans, and then over billions of years, life got more abundant and complex, until two hundred fifty thousand or so years ago, humans evolved, and we started using more advanced tools, and then eventually built spaceships and everything.