“Zal, I, too, am human. I don’t know everything — I only have my theories. You are welcome to bring her. I do couples therapy too.”
“We don’t need that.”
“She might need help herself.”
“You don’t think I should have a girlfriend, Rhodes — that’s the bottom line.”
No inhibitions, straightforward anger, Rhodes quickly scribbled. “Zal, I am concerned about you having that particular girlfriend.”
Zal dropped his head in his hands. “I suppose you want me to ask what you would do in my position, like we always do, right, Rhodes?”
“Zal,” he said, pen down again, eyes like lasers. “I would isolate the problem, as we always do. If it were me, I would leave her, for a time, at least. But you are not me.”
Not normal yet, in other words, Zal thought glumly. But he knew he was getting warmer as the troubles, the offenses, the complications, the anxieties were appearing one by one, on top of each other, like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. It was something like he used to imagine life would be.
Their session had ended and picked up the next time with the suggestion Rhodes thought was the antidote to all this: a job. He rationalized that if Zal was ready for a relationship, then certainly he was ready for a job. Now, that is progress towards normalcy, with minimum chance of hurt, he had said.
Hurt. It was a strange sensation, that feeling — a very real feeling. The more normal he became, the more he felt it, as if it were some raw throbbing glistening organ inside him, something between heart and stomach, a type of core, but a vulnerable fragile one that could become easily swollen, irritated, wounded. He felt softer and softer as days went by. Sometimes he found himself uncovering mirrors and really looking at himself and really seeing himself and weeping. Other times, he thought he was so close to smiling, so filled with joy, that he worried the hurricane of happiness inside him would cause his body to shatter, and he wondered if laughter was like that — violent like the worst weather, like the best orgasm, and as brawny and urgent as anger, an eruption that could hurt as well as heal.
And the more Rhodes and Hendricks and even strangers in the street, it seemed, worried about him because of Asiya, the more he felt he loved her. Poor Asiya, who grew less normal by the day, who started to need him far more than he did her.
One sunny September day, a little over 250 days since their meeting on what they affectionately called the Day the World Didn’t End, Asiya woke up screaming. Zal was on the other end of the bed, mummified by her too many sheets, and he quickly embraced her and put his hand over her mouth. Stop, it’s okay, it’s okay, he said, assuming it was a nightmare, one of her many nightmares. But she bit him and got up, naked, pacing, crying.
“Asiya, what’s wrong? Relax!”
“It’s coming, Zal, it’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming.”
She was unstoppable.
She flung her arms wildly, bumping into walls, doors, looking like she needed to jump out of her own skin. Once, in Hendricks’s home, to Zal’s horror, a bird had become trapped inside — confused, crazed, directionless, like the subject of his old nightmares. Asiya’s wildness resembled that bird’s.
She fell to the floor, foaming.
Zal gathered her as she struggled against him. She felt very hot, and her eyes were rolling wildly.
Nine-one-one, she started hissing, through all the froth in her mouth.
It was different from the other times, worse than the last worst time. Something was happening to her. Zal suddenly worried she was actually going to die, or kill herself, with all that frenzy.
He dialed 911. When the operator asked him what was wrong, he said, “I’m not sure. Something is happening to my girlfriend. She might be very sick, I just don’t know.”
He ran to Willa’s room, woke her up, and told her what was happening. Willa sighed, “Zal, do you think it’s really anything? It’s not just. . the usual?”
Zal shrugged. “I’ve got to go be with her. It may be worse. She looks worse, at least.”
When the paramedics came, they had to pry her out of the tight ball she had rolled herself into.
“Any medications?” one of them asked Zal.
“No.”
“History of mental illness?”
Zal paused. “Hard to say. Not that I know.”
“Boyfriend doesn’t know,” the paramedic scrawled, muttering the words out loud, as if to shame him, as if the paramedic could possibly know them well enough to ridicule their misery, Zal thought bitterly.
They took her to Lenox Hill Hospital. Zal sat in the waiting room for what felt like days. He forgot himself completely and, with that, anything but total love for Asiya.
A nurse finally called him in. “Mr. Hendricks, we think it’s best she stay here.”
Zal nodded, mortified. It was that bad. What if the whole time he had been ignoring the signs, and she had been that bad? “What’s wrong with her? I mean, I know what’s wrong with her—”
“You do?” the nurse looked skeptical. “Mr. Hendricks, the initial write-up — panic attack, nervous breakdown — is not why we’re keeping her here.”
“What is it?” My God, Zal thought, something big was wrong.
“Mr. Hendricks, do you know what anorexia nervosa is?”
Zal felt a mixture of relief and frustration. That of all things? The most obvious? “Kind of. Eating problem?”
“That’s it. Mr. Hendricks, have you noted your girlfriend’s dramatic weight loss?”
Zal nodded, then shook his head. Boyfriend doesn’t know echoed through his head. “Well, she’s always been very thin.”
“Mr. Hendricks, she is beyond thin. She’s on IV. We’re keeping her here until we know she’s not malnourished. I need you to sign here.”
“But what about everything else she was saying? Did that come from her being thin?”
“Chicken or the egg, Mr. Hendricks — hard to say at this point. You can call Dr. Gould at this number.”
He went back to the waiting room until they let him see her.
When he finally saw her, indeed looking dangerously little in her paper nightgown, stick arms attached to clear tubes, attached to clear bags of fluid, he felt that urge to cry again, to cry in a way that he might never recover from. So many troubles now. In some ways, he wished he’d never met her; in others, he felt like he would die if he lost her.
“Asiya, are you okay?” he whispered.
Her already whispery voice was a dead husk. “I’m okay now, Zal. I think it’s safe here.”
“It is.”
“They think I’m starving.”
“You might be, Asiya.”
“Zal, you know that’s not why I am here.”
“Why don’t you eat more, Asiya? What if I snuck you those chocolate grasshoppers you were eating so happily that one time—”
“You know that’s not it.”
He could feel frustration take over his insides, callusing what just a minute ago was impossibly soft. “What is it then, Asiya? Tell me what it is.”
“You know,” she said, as if in accusation, except her voice was as weak as broth and her smile strong — the wildest smile he’d ever seen on her, a look that made him, for the first time, for just a second, ally himself with the two men in his life, the men and all their reservations about her, his life. And then she added the words, the ones he had heard all too many times but that still managed to confirm the worst for him: “It’s coming, Zal. It’s coming for all of us.”
PART VI
How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?