You Would Tell Me

CW: Substance abuse, mental health issues

The night was an orphan—a restless orphan. Not the free-spirited kind, but the paranoid kind. It listened to the scrape of rat’s feet on the pavement, the jackhammer cracking concrete in some distant town, the voices of scraping leaves—and it imagined all that was horrible in the voice of the wind.

Jason stood in the woods behind his house smoking a joint, tapping one foot against the ground and looking up at the flat dead sky.

Melanie watched him from beneath the hood of her sweatshirt. The first flakes of an early snow had become crusted in his just-cut hair, like little white thorns. He had been silent for several minutes, but his mouth moved occasionally, forming little words without sound.

“Am I bugging out?” he asked.

“What?”

“Was I just talking out loud?”

“No, Jason. You were just standing there smoking, tapping your foot, looking up at the sky all sad and lost.”

“That’s why I like you, Mel.” He passed her the joint. “Sometimes I think I’m talking out loud, you know? You would tell me if I was bugging, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course.”

She pulled the smoke from her mouth into her nose and let it drift from her lips. Jason watched the leaves. Their dry edges rattled against one another like thousands of tiny tambourines. To Melanie they were leaves. To Jason they were something restless, something making signals above them.

“I knew they were looking for me as soon as I ran away,” he said.

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“No, I don’t.”

“My mother. The cops. Everybody.”

“Why would the cops be looking for you?”

“She called them. That crazy doped-up bitch.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know.”

Melanie had learned there were certain words Jason spoke with a peculiar finality. With Jason, I know did not mean that he had learned something. It meant an idea had gathered so much weight inside him that asking for proof felt insulting.

Everything fit. A car slowing down on Tabernacle Road, a dog barking from a house where no dog usually barked, a porch light going off the moment Jason looked at it. The world was always confessing itself to him. Confirming his suspicions. Voices were always muttering in dark corners. His mind was an antenna for a thousand coincidences that you never even registered. And the scariest part was that, a lot of the time, Jason was right.

“Want to sit in the car and listen to the Dead?” she asked. “I have another joint.”

Jason looked at her. Melanie had thick Sicilian eyebrows and leather-brown eyes, warm and sweet beneath them. The beads around her wrist looked too large for her hand. He reached for it and touched the smallest blue bead with his thumb.

“I want to,” he said. “But they’ll catch us out here.”

“Who is us?”

He smiled. “That’s a good question.”

He walked back down Tabernacle Road alone, past the little church on the corner where the cross stood against the evil-looking sky like a king’s scepter. He passed the lake and the algae clinging to the dam that ran beneath the blacktop into a little stream, all the way down Gravely Hollow toward his house.

Melanie followed slowly in her car.

Jason looked back three times.

She turned off before he reached home, afraid that if he saw her he would think she was following him too.

***

The police had been called.

Melanie learned this the next afternoon when Jason telephoned her from the 7-Eleven. His mother had ordered him out of the house. A patrol car had arrived. Jason had walked through the woods and slept for several hours in somebody’s abandoned deer blind, certain the police were circling the roads.

“They were looking for me,” he said.

“Your mother was worried.”

“That’s not what she told them.”

“What did she tell them?”

“That I was dangerous.”

“Are you?”

Jason laughed, but there was no amusement in it.

“That depends on what they’re planning to do to me.”

Melanie did not know what that meant. She did not ask.

For several weeks, Jason seemed better. Better was the word everyone used when they meant more convenient. He slept in his own bed. He ate dinner with his family. He took Melanie to the diner by the circle and ordered pancakes after midnight. He played with the two dachshunds on the kitchen floor, letting them climb over his chest and lick his face.

He could be funny and gentle. He noticed when Melanie changed the color of her nail polish. He remembered things she had forgotten saying. When one of the beads disappeared from her bracelet, he found a replacement that matched almost perfectly. He gave it to her without explanation, holding it in his palm like a jewel he had carried across the Sahara. And maybe he had.

Nobody had ever paid attention to her with such total concentration.

When Jason looked at Melanie, she became the only object in the world.

This was beautiful until she understood that it was also frightening. That there were things in his awareness so subtle, that would buzz with such significance that they were like black holes of ferocious gravity sucking in the entire universe.

They sat in her car listening to the Dead and smoking, the heater giving off a burnt dusty smell. Jason interrupted the music to ask whether she had noticed the brown sedan pass twice.

“No.”

“You didn’t see it?”

“I saw a car.”

“The same one.”

“There are a lot of brown cars.”

“It has a broken taillight.”

“Lots of people have broken taillights.”

“The driver looked at us.”

“People look.”

“That’s what they count on—that you will disregard it as normal—that you won’t pay attention—that you will be distracted. I can’t take those kinds of risks.”

He smiled when he said it, as if he had caught the world trying to pull some small trick. Then the smile dropped from his face.

“Did I say that out loud?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

He kissed her, resting one hand against the side of her neck. Melanie tasted cigarettes and winter air on his mouth. She wanted to believe that telling him what was real would be this simple. Yes, you said that. No, the car means nothing. Yes, I am here.

Reality seemed like a country with guarded borders, and Melanie imagined she could stand at the checkpoint and tell Jason which things were permitted to enter. But to do that would be like snuffing out the light of every star in the heavens.

***

By July, better was no longer a word that people were using to describe Jason’s condition. John called Melanie three days before the concert.

John called her three days before the concert.

“He hasn’t been sleeping,” he said.

“He calls me before he goes to bed.”

“He stays up listening to entire albums on repeat, goes to the refrigerator two dozen times, paints several paintings, starts playing the guitar. Watches television until early morning, and comes down to walk the dogs.”

“It isn’t like he’s out committing crimes.”

“No. He’s just spiraling. Rapidly.”

Melanie stood in her bedroom with the telephone cord circling her wrist. Her mother moved around downstairs, putting dishes into cabinets. Melanie could hear each plate settling against the next.

“He thinks your mother is calling the police on him,” she said.

“She has called the police on him.”

“So, he’s not wrong.”

“Did he tell you he thinks Nazis are following him? That he’s started sleeping with nunchucks under his pillow because he says he needs to protect himself?”

John explained that their mother wanted Jason evaluated again. Jason had stopped going to appointments. He was smoking every day and sometimes disappeared into the woods. He believed people were entering his room and moving his things. He was threatening her for touching his belongings.

“Is she going through his stuff?”

“My mother goes through everybody’s things.”

“So, again, he’s not wrong.”

John was quiet.

“You see the problem,” Melanie said.

“I see about twelve problems. Not all of them are Jason’s either.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing. Come to the concert. Stay with him. If he starts getting worked up, come get me.”

“Worked up how?”

“You know how.”

Melanie hated that phrase. You know how. It took everything particular about Jason and turned it into an understood category, an item that could be checked off on a form.

“He trusts you,” John said.

She held onto it. It was something. Something no one else in the world could claim but her.

***

The concert parking lot glowed beneath the deep summer sun. The cement radiated heat through the thin soles of Melanie’s shoes, and the raised windows and windshields threw hard blades of light into her eyes.

Concertgoers formed a Where’s Waldo board of carnival aberrations. Two men adorned in boots and chains kicked a hacky sack while smoking cigarettes. Nearby, two middle-aged men sat in lawn chairs facing a grill, taking their time drinking Budweisers and paying unusual attention to two slabs of meat.

Teenage girls with dyed hair sat in the open trunk of a Honda smoking from a bubbler. A boy had pushed the passenger seat all the way back and watched them with glassy eyes. The skin beneath them was red and tender, like twin welts.

The Camden police drove back and forth in their jeeps like big dumb animals scared of the people they were meant to contain.

Jason smoked a cigarette and accidentally ashed on his Grateful Dead shirt. He brushed at the little burning fleck until it left a black mark over the dancing bears.

“What else you got in there?” he asked John.

“You feel like a Sierra Nevada?”

“Sure. I gotta walk around though. Look for some stuff.”

“Just get back before the show,” John said. “Be careful. Don’t misbehave.”

He sounded like their father.

Jason’s face changed slightly.

Melanie saw it. John did not.

“What does that mean?” Jason asked.

“What does what mean?”

“Don’t misbehave.”

“It means don’t get arrested buying some shit from a cop.”

“Who said I was buying anything?”

“You just said you were looking for stuff.”

John opened his mouth, but Melanie touched his arm.

“Bring me something cold,” she said to Jason. “Anything. It feels like the sun is sitting on my head.”

Jason smiled at her. For one moment everything was fine.

Then he left, walking through the crowd; a lost note forgotten in the haste of the chorus, moving into the chaos of the verse trying to find his place.

“You see?” John said.

“See what?”

“He’s paranoid. Delusional.”

“He’s observant. You are all watching him like a science experiment. You are making him take fucking Lithium for God’s sake. And you wonder why he’s keeping track of your behavior?”

“Well. He kind of is a science experiment right now. And not a good one.”

A tank of nitrous hissed nearby. Balloons expanded, red and green and yellow, oversized fruit growing from the hands of boys in baseball caps. One of them inhaled from a balloon and collapsed laughing against the wheel of a car.

John was looking through the crowd for Jason.

Melanie realized she was doing the same.

“Don’t make it obvious,” she said.

“Make what obvious?”

“That we’re watching him.”

“We are watching him.”

“I know.”

John looked at her.

She wondered whether he heard the problem.

Jason returned twenty minutes later without a drink. Sweat had soaked through the collar and armpits of his shirt. His pupils were large, but Melanie could not tell whether this meant anything. Everyone’s pupils looked large here. Everyone was smoking, drinking, taking nitrous, blinking through the heat.

“There’s a guy following me,” Jason said.

John looked away too quickly.

Melanie felt the first coldness of evening move through the heat.

“What guy?” she asked.

“Blue windbreaker. Who wears a windbreaker in July?”

“Maybe he’s selling something.”

“He isn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“He doesn’t talk to anybody. He just watches.”

John opened the cooler and moved bottles around in the ice.

“You saw him?” Jason asked.

“No.”

“You didn’t see him talking to that cop?”

“There are cops everywhere,” John said.

“But you saw him, right? You saw him too?”

Melanie reached for Jason’s hand. It was wet and hot. His fingers closed around hers so quickly that it hurt.

“You talked to John,” he said.

“What?”

“Before today.”

“We all talked about coming here.”

“Not about that.”

Melanie looked at John.

Jason laughed once.

“There. That. You did it again.”

“Did what?”

“That look.”

“What look?”

“The look where you are thinking something but not saying it. You are literally standing there thinking about how nuts I am and then fucking with me like I am some fucking retard. You are literally standing there fucking plotting shit behind my back and acting like I am the one who is fucked up. You are so fucked, man, such a fucking piece of dogshit. It’s sickening.”

“Jason—”

“I knew it. Mel. I fucking knew you were in on this shit. Un-fucking-believable Mel.”

He released her hand.

The band started somewhere beyond the gate, the gentle twang of guitars cloaking the air in a mysterious distant song, echoed by the wind and made more secret by the growing shade. People began moving toward the entrance. Bodies pressed together, each person pulled by the same sound, until the crowd seemed less like separate people than one animal with ten thousand legs.

Jason backed away.

“Where are you going?” Melanie asked.

“You know.”

“No. I don’t.”

“You do. That’s the whole thing. Everybody knows except me. You all have a playbook on everything I do. You call the cops. Jason’s taking ecstasy… he’s on his way to Melanie’s house… Jason went to 7-11. Why don’t you narcs figure it out and find a fucking cop and tell them on me. There are only about 2,000 cops here right-fucking-now.”

And he was gone.

***

She found him beyond the concert gate, past the aquarium and the benches off Martin Luther King Boulevard, where the Ben Franklin Bridge cut a schism of lights through the choppy water.

Over Jason’s shoulder, Melanie saw John coming along the promenade. Two officers followed several paces behind him. John met her eyes. She could have warned Jason. Instead, she took his hand.

The river moved below him, black and muscled, pulling the reflections of the boats into long trembling lines.

“Jason, come over here,” Melanie said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re too close.”

“I’m not going to jump.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You thought it.”

“I’m scared.”

“That’s what you all seem to fail to understand. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You just need to look around and pay attention.”

The bridge towered above them—a steel weapon aimed into the sky. The patriotic lights pulsed red, white and blue against the thick cables. The lights made Jason’s face change colors.

“Are there cops behind me?”

“Nobody is going to hurt you.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“Jason—”

The officers were close enough now for Melanie to hear the leather of their belts, the little mechanical sounds of the radios and handcuffs. Everything they carried had a purpose. Everything announced itself.

“Nobody is going to hurt you.”

“You would tell me.”

“Yes.”

“You would tell me if I was bugging out.”

“Yes.”

“Am I?”

Melanie tightened her hand around his.

“Yes,” she said.

Jason looked at her harshly. There was no madness in his expression, nothing she could point to and show another person. There was only the small inward movement of someone understanding that the last door had been locked.

“All right,” he said.

She led him from the edge.

One officer asked, “Everything all right here?” The second moved behind him and caught his left arm. Jason did not strike them. He pulled away once, startled by the touch, and they turned him toward the ground.

“You said they wouldn’t hurt me,” he shouted.

“They aren’t hurting you.”

“You lied.”

The music continued behind them. The crowd cheered at something none of them could see.

***

They put Jason in the ambulance because nobody knew where else to put him.

He sat on the narrow bench with his hands resting on his knees. Without the crowd around him, without the lights and police and river, he looked young. His hair was damp and disordered, his Grateful Dead shirt darkened with sweat.

Melanie stood outside the open doors.

“Did you see the man that was following me?” he asked.

“No,” the officer said.

“Figures you would have missed him. Some cops you are.”

Near the benches, a man in a blue windbreaker stood smoking. He appeared to be looking toward the ambulance, although from this distance Melanie could not see his eyes. She did not tell Jason.

John stood ten feet away. Two Camden officers waited beside their jeep. The ambulance attendants watched Jason through the open doors. Melanie remained where he could see her.

The EMT stepped down from the ambulance. “He denies wanting to hurt himself or anybody else. We can’t transport him against his will. He can leave with his brother.”

“I’ve been telling everyone all day that I’m being followed,” Jason said, shaking his head. “And you all think I am the one who’s nuts.”

By then, five people had been following him for nearly an hour.