The Normals Read online

  "Is the voice recognizable?"

  "No, it's just a voice."

  Dr. Honeysack reopens the file.

  "Sort of an echo of a voice," Billy explains.

  "And this has been happening recently?"

  "Yeah."

  Dr. Honeysack jots this down with enthusiasm.

  "Is that of interest?"

  "It's all of interest."

  "Everything is of interest?"

  "Absolutely."

  "Have other people complained about voices?" Billy asks.

  "Other people don't matter."

  "So everything about me in particular is of interest."

  "While you're here at least."

  Billy nods his head and says, "I have of late, I know not why, lost all my mirth," hoping Honeysack will recognize the kidding Hamlet reference. But he doesn't.

  "Lost your mirth?" he says.

  "Yes," Billy answers, trapped.

  "Interesting choice of word."

  "Which one?"

  "So before this trial began, you were more mirthful."

  "I suppose," Billy says, wondering if he should come clean with Hamlet.

  "You're feeling depressed," Honeysack clarifies.

  "I hate that word. Maybe I used to be happier. I guess that's what I'm saying, if I'm saying anything. Lately I've become sick of myself. It's like I'm trapped inside my body, not in some transsexual way, but in a claustrophobic way, like my body is this small narrow space I've crawled into and now I'm stuck." Billy wonders how much of what he's saying is true, but Honeysack seems intrigued. "I do all these things, all these physical things, unconscious things, amazing and complicated things, and I'm like, How do I do that? Like walking. Or breathing. Even farting seems like a miracle of biology. I'm like a hermit crab who's found this beautiful intricate shell and hates himself because he knows he's a slimy little shit."

  "A hermit crab?"

  "Maybe that's silly."

  "So feelings of self-loathing—"

  "Not that word, please not that word."

  "Sorry."

  "Write down whatever you want, but not self-loathing."

  "Okay," Honeysack says. "One more question, and you very well might've already answered it, but here it is anyway."

  "Shoot."

  "Would you say you're feeling optimistic or pessimistic?"

  "About what?"

  "Things in general."

  "Since I came here?"

  "Just optimistic or pessimistic at this particular moment in time."

  Billy naturally leans toward pessimism. Always. How could any half-intelligent person be otherwise? Hope in all forms should be distrusted. Hope is dumb breakaway glass shattered on the softest head. Survival maybe, blood and thunder, but not hope. While Billy can appreciate the technology of hope, the well-crafted mechanism of religion, the internal wiring of promise, the silicon of love, he has no idea how the gizmo works. In all likelihood hope would lay in his hands, unresponsive, the On button hidden from sight. He'd end up hammering nails with hope or employing hope as a paperweight, until somebody would finally tell him, "Hey, you're using hope all wrong." Hopelessness is what Billy prefers. It has a simpler design and fewer moving parts.

  "Pessimistic," Billy says.

  "On a scale of one to ten."

  "A scale?"

  "Yes."

  "Let's say five," Billy says. "My pessimism is half-full."

  19

  THAT NIGHT, during dinner, Billy sits with Sameer Sirdesh, Sameer who has brought along an album of photographs which he shares with Billy, the two of them side by side, Sameer occasionally bumping Billy with a wayward elbow, like a sign of boyhood chums if not for the bully of a drug. The album has a single photograph per page, slipped under plastic. All show a beaming Sameer posed near the shoulder of a celebrity—Sameer and Brad Pitt, Sameer and Harvey Keitel, Sameer and Tom Hanks—the movie stars smiling with patience, with the price of fame, with Sameer, who in some cases has managed to slip an arm around unresponsive shoulders. "This is me with Meg Ryan," he tells Billy. "Lovely woman. Great woman. This is me with Jim Carrey. Wonderful man. Very nice. This is me with, uhm, I forgot."

  "Jeff Goldblum," Billy says.

  "A gentleman," Sameer says. "And this is, oh."

  "Meryl Streep."

  "More beautiful in person, I can tell you," Sameer says.

  He leafs through page after page, Sameer always looking the same, always with a wide warm smile like the day is his, like the sun is his alone, like the American dream is under his arm and it is polite and gracious and much thinner than you'd think. "I have many more back home," he tells Billy. "This is just one book."

  "Impressive," Billy says.

  "Every night I'm looking for them."

  "Must be exhausting."

  "Oh no," Sameer says.

  "Hey, Judi Dench."

  "Who?"

  "That woman there."

  "Oh yes. Very wonderful, lovely woman," Sameer says, never noticing the tremble in his hands, the dozen missed attempts of fork landing in mouth. He continues showing Billy his full-moon orbit of stars, Billy drifting away from Gwyneth, Julia, toward his fellow normals, toward Ossap, who, while busing his tray, jerks and crashes plates to the ground, toward Stan Shackler, mystery Ph.D. who reads Baudelaire and Baudril-lard in unison, toward all of these superficially afflicted souls who report to work not with a thermos and lunch pail but with whatever ails them. Billy wonders if he's finally feeling something. Small hallucinations seem to have made an appearance. Peripheral vision contains the creepy-crawlies of the woods, where phantom moths flitter near ears and field mouse shadows quicken corners. Freckles and moles resemble blood-sucking ticks—after an hour of contemplation, they pulse ever so slightly. Eyelids, when half-closed, divulge amoebalike forms living inside the lashes. Yes, Billy thinks, maybe something.

  "Garth Brooks, very nice, stood for two pictures," Sameer says.

  From the table behind Billy overhears a triumvirate of nameless complaint.

  A: "Anybody freaked about their nose."

  B: "What about your nose?"

  A: "Well, like I feel like my nose is in the way. Wherever I look, there's my nose. It's like I'm like a prisoner to my fucking nose,like my nose has eaten my face. Driving me nuts, not least of all making me all cross-eyed."

  Sameer alights on Kevin Spacey. "This man, very charming," he tells Billy.

  B: "I've been tasting my tongue."

  A: "Tasting your tongue?"

  B: "Have you been getting that?"

  A: "No, just the nose thing."

  B: "I swear to God I'm tasting my tongue, and it's making me sick. Even now, talking is like talking with my mouth full, like I have this slab of raw meat in my mouth. And the texture, it's nasty. It might be the worst thing I've ever put in my mouth."

  C: "What's it taste like?"

  B: "Postage stamps."

  A: "Ugh."

  B: "But I can't stop tasting it."

  "Mary Poppins," Sameer says ofJulie Andrews. "Delightful and kind to me."

  C: "You know what I'm getting?"

  A: "Is it your nose?"

  B: "Your tongue?"

  C: "No, but if I tell you, don't think I'm weird?"

  A: "Please, it's the drug."

  B: "Yeah, the drug's the rucking weirdo."

  C: "I've been getting a taste in my mouth, but it's not my tongue, it's my breath. It has this freaky taste, almost like an aftertaste."

  B: "What?"

  C: "I'm not queer, okay, but I've been getting a taste of semen in my mouth. I don't why. I don't even know what semen tastes like. I don't. I mean, I know what it smells like—"

  B: "Maybe you should just stop talking."

  C: "No, seriously, I have an idea of its taste, you know, kind of salty, right, and that's the taste I have in my mouth. It has a definite comey quality. I can't explain it, it's just there all the time."

  A: "I can't smell it."

  C: "I'm brushi
ng my teeth all the time."

  B: "Maybe your roommates are doing awful things to you while you sleep."

  C: "Here, smell my breath."

  B: "No fucking chance."

  Sameer Sirdesh arrives upon the last photo, him with a smirking Harrison Ford. "He was very difficult," he tells Billy. "Five different times I tried, always no or nothing, just kept walking, but he's a busy man. Then this night, a beautiful night, he said yes. See, his arm is around me. He even asked my name. 'Sameer,' he said, 'you are one persistent bastard.' And I said, 'Yes, Mr. Ford, I must be persistent for a person of your stature.' " Sameer beams on the beaming Sameer in the photograph, beam on beam, beaming and twitching upon the slightly crooked composition, Billy realizing Sameer must've held the camera himself, pointing and shooting from the crane of an outstretched arm, Sameer now lowering his head for a closer view of Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Sameer clicking his eyes as if recapturing the image in the palsied fist of his face—Sameer on a magical night in Manhattan, when Harrison Ford finally relented and gave him the minimum of his embrace, which must've been everything.

  Huddled in bed, Do no longer reads comics but his Bible instead. Billy is always amazed by people who casually read the Bible, on subways or airplanes, like the Bible is the latest thriller. He's curious if they read the book through and through and then over again, if they have favorite parts, applicable sections, assignments for the day. What do the words do for them? Or is their presence alone enough, like a sense of security, a gas mask of devotion? Billy finds their belief admirable, even comforting—piety as trickle-down theory—but he can't help an aside of condescension, a patronizing Oh, one of those, that he despises in himself. After all, faith is a beautiful thing. And he's glad his roommate has something to fall back on since, by all appearances, his spirits need bolstering. Do is tucked within a sarcophagus of sheets.

  Billy watches him flip through his Bible and check pages like an accountant. Do glances up, examines the clock, then glances back down. Every minute another glance up, his finger tracing down the page, eleven minutes in all before Billy asks what's up.

  "Nothing," Do says.

  "You seem to be timing yourself."

  "I just noticed something."

  "What's that?"

  "The Gospel of Luke has twenty-four chapters."

  "So?"

  "Well, the clock kind of gives you chapter and verse. I've never noticed that before. And just when I noticed it, it was three-oh-seven in the afternoon, or fifteen-oh-seven, which in Luke is: 'Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.' Interesting, huh?"

  "I guess."

  "And right now is: 'And the son said to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son."

  "So," Billy says.

  "Time is telling us something."

  "Does every chapter have sixty verses?" Billy asks.

  "No."

  "So how about all that other time where there is no corresponding verse?"

  "Silence can say something, too," Do says.

  Stage left, Lannigan storms into the room. He's pleased with himself.

  He's just met with Honeysack and he's convinced the man that his teeth were feeling wobbly. "You should have seen me," he tells them, wired with performance. "It was genius. I played it very subtle, like I wasn't really sure but I thought they were loose, like I could pull them from their roots. 'Gums bleeding?' he asked, and I said yep, though I wish I had flossed beforehand because then they would've been bleeding for real. Maybe next time. But he was interested. Oh, man. The teeth thing was new to him." Lannigan taps his incisors like a wolf checking for tone. "I told him I was scared to bite into a grape, that I was convinced I was going to wake up choking on my own teeth. I totally sold the side effect. I was Brando on Novocain. Almost convinced myself, which can happen when you're immersed in a role, when you're emotionally dedicated. He was writing down everything. I told him how I was nervous because being an actor my smile is everything and he seemed concerned. I almost started crying."

  "I told the doctor the truth," Do says.

  "What?" Lannigan says. "That you've developed an irrational fear of showers."

  "Give it a break," Billy says.

  "I'll shower soon," Do promises.

  Lannigan opens the bathroom door. "How about now?"

  The bedsheet coffin remains sealed. "Now is not the time, but soon."

  "Isn't the Bible filled with hygiene tips? Thou shalt bathe regularly."

  "Shut up," Billy says.

  "Sor-ry." Lannigan shadowboxes. It's obvious he's never boxed before; he's a dance-floor pugilist. "Oh man, I was on fuego with Honeysack. for the good doctor. I can cry on cue like nobody's business. It's one of my greatest strengths as an actor, turning on the old waterworks. My specialty ever since I was a kid on the monkey bars. I'd fake fall, cry cry cry, and everyone would hover over me and think about taking me to the hospital. At that point I'd hop up on my feet and laugh and go on playing. Ouchie, they called me. I don't need glycerin drops or a sliced onion or any sense memory. No Stanislavski, Meisner, Strasberg for me. I can just cry, anytime, anywhere. I mean gut-wrenching stuff. Oscar caliber. And I can cry any style. I can give you the welling up, the single tear, the uncontrollable sob, the joyous dissolve, the angry howl, whatever you might want. I tell you, if the movie business had body doubles for crying, I'd be a rich man, because I can cry perfect tits and tight little asses." Lannigan points to his forehead, where a farmer will shoot a pig. "It's a breeze. All I need to do is flex this muscle right here, and tense my jaw so my ears pop, and this feeling of sadness comes over me. It's almost like a yawn, a stifled yawn that builds and builds behind my eyes, not because I'm thinking about my dead sister or my dead cat or all my dead friends, but because I'm stretching my face into a weepy position."

  As Lannigan talks, he begins tearing up. His throat smothers speech. Words seek breath through the nose. "I get into this spot and my eyes follow suit." His vocal cords tighten. "And I'm crying for no reason, and whatever I say sounds like it's coming from the bottom of my heart." He's keening now, high-pitched and awful, chest wracked with hyperventilation, like his lungs can only stand small sips of air. He presses his palms into his temple, rocks back and forth. Tears choke him. Even his snot seems poignant. All the energy in the room gravitates toward Lannigan. He's magnetized with grief.

  Billy would rather see him having sex or being ripped apart by bullets.

  "Whatever I say," Lannigan continues, composure recovering, "sounds so real, so weighted because my tears are a hundred percent true. This is where my acting becomes untouchable. If only they made movies or plays where the lead is constantly crying." He wipes his eyes, pinches his nose clean, takes a deep shaky breath. "Sometimes I cry in public and wait for somebody to come and comfort me, which they always do."

  "How charming," Billy says.

  "My family is not big into crying," Do says, more to the ceiling than to Lannigan or Billy. "I saw my father cry once. It was when my grandfather died. Not like my father was so crazy about my grandfather, not like any of us really liked him. My grandfather would slap us hello thinking it funny. He'd slap my cheek, not hard but hard enough, and he'd laugh and say, 'Try convincing me you deserved otherwise.' I think he thought my father was soft on me or something, on all of his sons, which is a joke if you knew my father. He could get into the most Incredible Hulk-like rages. But I guess my grandfather only saw that Bruce Banner side. He never hit us, my father. He'd come close but he always stopped, at that last second, stopped"—Do imitates a hand frozen in midair—"and we'd wait for the follow-through. I swear you could see him considering one little smack, like what's the big deal, and just when you were ready for it, thinking this is it, today is the day he's going to hit me, he'd pull back and smash up something in the house. It was like, I don't know, like he was battling his . . . insti
nct." Do's mouth makes instinct sound deceitful, as if lips should be wary of teeth.

  "You're losing me," Lannigan says, playing a movie executive hearing a pitch.

  "What?"

  "Your little story about papa crying."

  Billy wishes Do would give up on the story, wishes Do would shut up for his own sake. There is danger in such sincerity, especially with Lannigan in the audience. Keep this to yourself, Billy thinks, do not reveal yourself to the likes of us.

  But Do is unaffected by the interruption. He seems determined to tell the story, like the ceiling might tumble from above if the words fail. "When my father cried, we were coming back from my grandfather's funeral. I was the only son joining him because my brothers were working and whatnot, and being older they already had their fights with dad and they were no longer talking to him. It was just me and him. I was twelve, maybe, and we were driving home from the cemetery on the outskirts of where my father grew up about forty miles from where I grew up. I guess he was feeling nostalgic or something because he was talking more than he ever talked, normally being a pretty quiet guy. He was also dying, not that he knew it then, not that any of us knew it, but he had cancer in the pancreas, and he must've been feeling pretty lousy because in less than six months he was dead, and I remember him driving like every bump scraped his knees. Most of the people at the funeral probably figured he was hungover, which he probably was, because he was a fierce drinker, but I think it was the cancer that was making him look so bad."

  "The fucking pancreas," Lannigan mutters. "What does it do anyway but get cancer? You go through your whole life never hearing about your pancreas until the doctor mentions it one day and tells you, oh, by the way, it's going to kill you."