Every little detail reminds me of some mistake I made once: the flowers planted too closely together by the sidewalk, choking each other spindly. The tiny edge of wallpaper over the counter I accidentally left unglued, catching on everything that passes. Steven’s unmatched socks in the drawer I’ve made single somehow in the laundry. It’s inevitable that I notice, that my mind won’t leave these things alone.
Out of all the things to pay attention to in the world, there are so many little mistakes, insignificant by themselves, that taken together might be disastrous. The crew who cleans an airliner might tape shut some vital sensor and forget to remove the tape. The pilot doesn’t notice. Then, in flight, the system meant to replace this instrument in such cases fails, maybe for some stupid reason like that the quality control person at the airplane factory was hung over that day. Just like that, 235 people heading to Atlanta on a sunny day get killed, all because of a few dumb little errors. Maybe that’s why my attention goes straight to all my minor slip-ups. Because maybe somewhere in amongst the carelessly hung blinds slanting just enough to annoy, glasses broken for being left in a chair, and hastily uttered words regretted later, is that one last mistake that would make all the other ones matter.
Steven is writing in his journal and I am half-reading Art in America. It’s mid-May and so unseasonably hot we’ve almost resorted to turning on the air conditioner, but not quite yet. So, every window in the house is open to the night breezes that flap the curtains and carry the exotic smell of cut grass. The big fan is on, but I can still see sweat beading up on his forehead as he rocks a little, leaning over his notebook. Steven’s new therapist Laurie told him to start writing in a journal. Most nights he writes for an hour or more, and tonight I watch him again, carefully considering each word and scratching it in his tiny scrawl. I drowse as I watch him.
I open my eyes, suddenly realize I’ve fallen asleep on the couch. I don’t see Steven in the room, although the lights are still on; my body automatically stiffens.
“Steven,” I get up and I walk down the hall to our bedroom. I pass the bathroom: empty. I hear windows shutting in the bedroom. I see his tall skinny form in the dark going from window to window.
“What are you doing, Steve?” I ask into the dark.
“I’m locking up the house,” comes his throaty voice.
“It’s too hot to close the windows, don’t you think?”
“But someone could get in if I leave them open,” he sounds helpless. “You know what I mean, Julie. Course, it doesn’t really matter, they can get in anyway,” He lets out a harsh laugh, but his voice has an edge, as if from a recent cry. My own throat tightens, and I shiver despite the oppressive heat.
“Steven,” I say, suddenly about to cry myself, “You know damn well no one’s coming in here to get you.” I try to sound as confident as I’m supposed to. I fear the worst: another surge of his “symptoms”, which consist mainly of a belief in a government-borne plot against him, elaborately constructed and carried out in the form of classified-level high technology. Sometimes I’ll find him on the phone at night, whispering to someone who isn’t there. A year ago July, he nailed all the doors and windows shut and tore apart almost every wall in the house, looking for “nanotech listening devices” while I was at work. He’d been in the hospital several weeks that time. I repeat, “Steven, you know that!”
My eyes get used to the dark. I can see two black places in Steven’s face where, somewhere, his gray-blue eyes watch. I know he can see me, but he doesn’t say anything. The bedroom is so still. Sweat suddenly prickles my entire body. Steven lets out a long sigh. “Oh Julie.” And then he turns around to open a window. I walk over and help him to get them all open again.
Later, in bed, he holds me so tightly I have to push him off after he falls asleep so I can get some rest.
I wake up with thunder splitting my ears. The trees thrash in the yard while lightning flashes illuminate everything eerily for disorienting moments. Our bedroom curtains whip around, almost horizontal; rain flies in through the screens. In a lightning flash, I catch a glimpse of Steve, sprawled in our tangled bedsheets. His eyes move beneath his eyelids, as if he’s dreaming.
I get up and walk to the nearest window, shutting it most of the way. The floor near the window is slick with rain. I do the same to the other bedroom windows as a steady rain begins in a rush of white noise. I look again at Steven, who hasn’t moved at all but who now snores faintly. I feel a sudden surge of love for him, old and familiar, like a hunger pang in its urgency. I think again about the desperate quality of his voice earlier, and fear tugs at my edges. There is no way I can go back to sleep now. I sigh, and head for the living room.
The air coming in through the windows smells so sharp and sweet. The thunder is softer now, a low rolling boom, and thunder comes only about once a minute through the background music of rain. In the dark, I walk straight to the front door and unlock it, exit to the front porch, which is mostly dry. The cool, moist air is a relief.
I look out into the night and think about Steven when we met, in undergraduate school. He was another art major always joyfully covered in smears of paint. I remember noticing him right away, first because of his tiny, incredible paintings, and next because of how I felt when he was around. He was painting miniatures when all the rest of us were flamboyantly washing six-foot canvases with four-inch brushes. That in itself intrigued me. His intensely colored eight-by-six-inch landscapes were at once realistic and fantastic, often hiding a pixie or a two-headed snake amongst the trees.
Late one night I was in the student painting studio reworking a nude for an assignment due the next day, and he came in. I didn’t really know him very well (yet), but everyone talked about his remarkable paintings, whether they liked them or not. Their detail and whimsy fascinated me, as (secretly) did Steven, with his almost awkward height and his own pale colors.
I leaned out from my canvas when I saw him walk in. “Hi,” I said, smiling.
“Oh, hi,” he said, startled. “I didn’t think anyone else would be here.”
I looked up at him, “Well, Davis wants this assignment done for our nine-o’clock class,” and caught his eye for the first time. A beautiful sky color with milky lashes. I felt that old, sweet pain down in my belly as we looked at each other like that. It surprised me.
“You know what he says, knowing when to stop is as important as anything else you do,” he said. I still held my paintbrush, and I looked back at my painting. He quickly added, “Oh, I didn’t mean you should stop. Of course, I’m here to rework one of my paintings for the assignment too,” with a little laugh. He walked over to the racks and pulled out one of his miniatures.
I put my brush into my jar of mineral spirits. “Can I look?” I wiped my hands on a rag.
“Sure,” Steven turned the painting around in his hands. Vibrant with purple, a mound of dark leaves tinged with green on the edges, it flowed from the middle of the canvas like a fountain. A rim of bright blue sky shimmered at the very top of the little painting. And in the middle of the plant a tiny woman, peeking out from between leaves and stems, with hair very dark, long and straight like mine, and orange tiger’s eyes. I stopped myself before I could even think about how this outdid anything I’d ever painted in my muddy, sloppy style. But I couldn’t help but say, “This is perfect, I think you should stop.”
Our talk about perfection and self-criticism that came next is vague in my memory. But the feeling I had as I walked back from the art building to my dorm has stayed with me all these years. This boy with albino hair, big bony hands, and otherworldly paintings had completely captivated me, and I knew it already, and he always has since. While at college together, we grew into each other, becoming inseparable, paying attention only to each other and this love we had found, magical as a dragon’s egg. Both of us, I think, were daily surprised by the amount and intensity of our love for each other. There was never a question how lucky we were. Since then, there has been no one else for either of us.
Steven has grown now to capture all my attention. I’m convinced at times, beyond reason really, that he will be all right if I just think it hard enough. He is okay. He isn’t sick anymore. Really, Julie. Even other thoughts are Steven-colored; his bright hair and pale eyes shine at me wherever I am. The air around me is alive with him, with his potential, with who he might be someday, or who he was before he started getting sick.
When we met at seventeen and eighteen, he was still four years away from his first “psychotic break.” At our wedding, he was still a year away from it. When it happened, he had been acting kind of strange for a few weeks, but I just blamed it on his anxieties over grad school. Then late one night, I awakened for no reason, but with a bad feeling inside. Steven wasn’t in bed; the house was totally silent. As soon as I turned on the lights, I saw the blood. More blood than you can imagine someone losing and still living trailed through the house in bright pools. My heart leaped double-time at all that red. He was in the kitchen. Later, in the hospital, he said he had to get the microchip out of his arm. I threw my wallpaper knife away.
Since then, he’s gone off his medication twice, almost to the grave on both occasions, and back to the hospital too many times. I almost forget, but I never do. Even when he is “stable”, I just can’t shake that feeling that his life is in my hands.
Sometimes I wonder where exactly I have gone. Where is my life? Everything is about Steven, for Steven, with Steven. Am I even here, or am I him too? Once the world was only itself and I was there, entirely me. I didn’t have to keep anyone alive by worrying about him, or know his exact whereabouts for his own good. Or not be able to help it because if he didn’t exist, then neither did I.
There is no thunder or lightning anymore, just a deepening breeze and torrents of cool rain. I hug myself hard. The wooden porch floor feels damp to my bare feet. My eyes begin to hurt. Maybe fatigue will conquer the fear after all. He has a psychiatrist’s appointment tomorrow, I tell myself. Maybe Dr. Flory will up his dosage when I tell him about tonight. Tired now, I go inside, lock the door.
The rain is still steady and hard. I switch on the lamp on the desk. There is Steven’s journal, open to the page he’d written today. Even though I promised I wouldn’t, I can’t help it. I read:
“What I feel when I look in your eyes is that emptiness inside, where my soul used to be. I stand on the edge and feel warm winds pulling me down. Somehow it’s so much bigger than my soul was, before it was stolen. Your eyes offer me what I can never have. I can only have this hole inside me, that makes me disappear. I can walk around, but I’m paralyzed. I can smile, but there’s a hole in my heart. I talk like everyone else does but I’m not there only they don’t notice. How can they see me when I’m gone? She doesn’t know that here, there’s a beautiful field that never grew but was hit by bombs instead. There will never be any rain to wash me and make me alive. The sun will just burn and burn like it always has. How can I tell her? There’s never a night to hide in no place to get away I won’t ever exist except to be a robot. She thinks I’m alive. There has never been me, only that place with the stabbing rocks, just ripped up earth and scorching sunshine. Nothing can live there but I’m there, and this awful virus. There only words that I speak are all programmed. They talk to my eyes but behind them is nothing.”
I scrunch the front of my nightgown in both hands, but tears still come squeezing from my eyes. As I walk into the kitchen, I already know what I’ll find. I turn on the light and open the cupboard where Steven keeps his meds. Last fall, after several monstrous arguments, we’d agreed that I wouldn’t dispense the pills anymore. He was thirty-five, and he was capable of taking his meds himself. I wasn’t his mother. Fine. I begin picking up bottles, which I already know are full, heavy with pills he has skipped. This month’s bottle. Last month’s bottle. He might have taken half of last month’s supply, which means that he quit at least six weeks ago.
I shut off the light and walk back to the bedroom. I feel like I’m floating. As I get into bed with Steven, the rain begins to taper off. He’s curled into a fetal position now, wound up in the sheet. I stretch my arms as far as I can around him, lay my face in his hair. The tears dry, the breathing deepens.
I wish I could sleep forever, but when I do sleep, I dream of standing on the edge of that void inside Steven. I can see how eternal and awful it is; I can feel it. The warm winds flowing through my hair smell putrid, like something long dead from burning. Somehow, Steven is there with me, bright, glowing with a beautiful smile. I look into his eyes again, and we jump together, falling and falling forever into the hole.