The Tiger Catcher Page 16

  He looked away from Weaver’s gaze as he tried to beat the chaos inside his head into shape, make words out of muck, words that would get him the script he needed in the next seventeen minutes before his time was up. Like her time was up. Did she have seventeen minutes before her time was up?

  “I haven’t been on Klonopin for a few months.” He’d been rationing himself, half a pill, a quarter. Like in a war.

  “What have you been taking instead?”

  “Ambien. Xanax. They don’t help. Only Klonopin helps. I have these . . .” Julian broke off.

  The doctor waited. “What?” he said. “Seizures? Visions?”

  “No.”

  “Klonopin is an insanity maker, Mr. Cruz. I don’t prescribe it to my patients unless I’ve tried them on everything else first.”

  “Doctor, but I have”—Julian paused to get his voice less strident—“I have tried everything else first.” Julian didn’t know what else to do, so he told the doctor the truth. He put on truth to see how it fit. “When I take Klonopin, I have a recurring dream of her.”

  “Like a nightmare?”

  “No.” Real life was a nightmare. “Like a . . .” Julian didn’t know what to call it.

  “Is this something you want?”

  “Yes.” More than everything.

  The doctor pushed further. “If you don’t mind me asking, how did she die?”

  Julian’s voice dropped to the back of his throat. He didn’t look up.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Weaver said. “That’s fine. Is that why you left L.A.? A change of scenery? You figured if you were in a new place, the dreams would stop?”

  “No,” said Julian. “Just the opposite.”

  Weaver said something trite, a non-sequitur. “Many grieving people dream about their lost loved ones. It’s very common. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not worried,” Julian said. “But I’m trying to tell you something important, doc, and you’re not . . .”

  “The nightmares will go away. As soon as you wean off Klonopin, they’ll go away for good.”

  Wean off Klonopin? Was Weaver crazy?

  “Here’s what I wonder.” Julian rubbed his hands together, rubbed his knees. “What if what I’m seeing is not a dream but a premonition?”

  “What do you mean, premonition?”

  “Not all dreams are just dreams, right?” Julian said. “I’ve had disturbing dreams before.” Brutally disturbing. But he’d been in a coma at the time so it didn’t count. “But not like this. Isn’t it possible that what I’m having is a”—Julian searched for the right word. He didn’t like the way Weaver was staring at him—“a mystical experience?”

  There was a long pause. “You think you’ve been having a mystical experience on Klonopin?” Weaver couldn’t keep the ridicule out of his voice.

  “Like an out-of-body experience, yes. It’s possible, isn’t it?” Julian became animated, more agitated than he felt in months, more elevated than at any time during the previous hour. “What if I’m having some kind of a transcendental projection? In the next realm, she comes to me, and I’m restored. She is not alive in spirit, doc. She’s alive in flesh! As if I’m actually seeing her. It doesn’t feel like a dream.” Julian’s mouth was dry. “It feels like a curtain is being raised for me on another world.”

  Incredulous silence ticked by.

  Julian swallowed. “Maybe love is a consecrating bridge,” he said. “Maybe that’s what allows the veil to lift and the gaping chasm between life and death to close.”

  Weaver rocked back in his chair. “I don’t know what to say, Mr. Cruz. Honestly. You’ve stumped me.”

  “I’ve never lived anywhere but around L.A.,” Julian said. “I’ve never been outside the U.S. I haven’t personally seen the buildings and streets in my vision. She’s walking down a street I’ve never been on and don’t recognize.” A street I can’t find, though God knows I’ve tried.

  “Well, it is a dream,” Weaver said. Putting emphasis on the word Julian thought at any moment the doctor would start to define for him. You see, young man, a dream is a sequence of mental images during something we human beings like to call sleep. Sometimes these images are bizarre. Like you.

  “You think it’s the drugs?”

  “I don’t think it. I know it.”

  “But before I knew what happened to her,” Julian said, “I saw her.” He told Weaver about the apparition on Melrose, outside Coffee Plus Food. “How do you explain that? I wasn’t on Klonopin then, and yet there she was. Walking toward me. Smiling. Alive.” He stared down into the red and black color-block carpet.

  Weaver folded his hands. “So why in the world would you want to continue to relive what sounds like the worst day of your life? You are trying to feel better, aren’t you? To start fresh?”

  “No,” Julian said.

  “Perhaps that’s your problem.”

  “You know what my problem is? She is dead.” Julian couldn’t leave it alone because the lost girl kept calling for him. “And yet she is alive in my dream. Alive in London. As if she has summoned me here to search for her.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you. I’d be out there, looking for her.”

  Weaver spoke slowly and quietly as if to a mental patient with a history of violence. “Dreams are complicated things, Mr. Cruz. In psychotherapy, we are still trying to figure out the mechanism by which we dream, and what those visions mean.”

  “And yet you’re telling me I’m the one without answers?”

  “Clearly you don’t have the answers.”

  “Neither do you. Will you at least allow that what I’m saying is possible?”

  “No,” Weaver said.

  “No? Same moving image over and over, take after take, night after night, unchanging? You don’t think that’s strange?”

  “There are so many things that are strange, I don’t know where to begin. What are you doing in the dream?”

  “Sitting,” Julian replied. “Waiting for her.”

  That he was waiting for her was indisputable. But why?

  Was it to recreate what had already happened?

  Or . . .

  Or was it to create something new?

  Julian couldn’t accept that there was no answer. Why was the doctor not getting it? Almost deliberately. I’m trying to right a wrong, Julian wanted to say but couldn’t confess to a cold face. A horror has happened for which I have only myself to blame. I can’t let it go. And it can’t let go of me.

  “What makes you think it’s London?”

  Julian didn’t want to admit it to the reluctant drug dealer across from him, but when Josephine first started appearing to him in his sleep a few weeks after she died, he had also reacted poorly. He tried talking about it to his family, to Ashton, and then stopped. There was no point. No one got it, not even him.

  Julian stopped talking about it, but he also stopped working. No more hacks, no more newsletters, no more getting up at dawn, no more walking around L.A., searching for funny advice on the easy street of life, no more website, no more Lonely Hearts. He sold his Volvo. He dropped weight—like it was an activity. He went vegetarian, then vegan, then off all food entirely. He stopped leaving his house, let the hair grow wild. He took a razor to it, became bald and bare skinned like a neo-Nazi convict with hollowed-out sockets for eyes and a Frankenstein scar on his head. Everyone panicked. Ashton moved in with him. His mother made the three-hour round trip every day from Simi Valley to bring him homemade food he didn’t eat. Ashton ate it. He gained twenty pounds while Julian remained under a 24-hour suicide watch, five minutes away from being involuntarily institutionalized.

  After weeks went by and he didn’t die, Julian started looking inside the dream for clues. In it, the sidewalk was wet, like it had been raining. Not very L.A. He was waiting for her in a jacket. Perhaps it wasn’t warm. Yet she was in a summer dress. It wasn’t the dress she
had died in. She died in solid yellow. Who knew that yellow was the color of death?

  Julian did. He knew it.

  On her head was the red beret. That’s another reason it seemed more than a memory. Because in the bygone of what happened, the hat had fallen where she had fallen and got kicked away by medics and hysterics. Julian bowed down at the curb to pick it up. It was soaked with her blood. He slept with the beret now, under his pillow.

  “She’s carrying an umbrella,” Julian finally replied to the doctor’s question. “No one carries an umbrella in L.A.”

  “From this you got London? It could be Seattle. You could be in the wrong rainy city.”

  Julian nodded. The doctor was mocking him. Well, Julian could mock right back. He used to be a pro at that, before life sucked all joy out of him. He and Ashton used to be quite a stand-up act, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, two Marx Brothers, loudest and brightest in all the bars, there all week long and twice on Sunday. “Well, doctor,” Julian said. “I’m glad we both agree that I should’ve gone somewhere. So you and I are just arguing whether or not I’m in the right city?”

  “No, no,” Weaver said hastily. “That’s not what I meant.”

  Julian choked down his aggravation. “Look, since I’m in this city, can we accept that I’ve already solved the geographic conundrum. Harrod’s green bag. A red bus. A black cab. The most important part of what I’m telling you is that I’ve never been to London and neither had she. So—here I am.”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing for a year and a half?” Weaver said with concern in his voice. “Wandering around London, looking for this . . . café?” Spoken in a tone of someone who thought Julian was searching for a blessing of unicorns.

  “No.” Julian was defiant. Good thing he knew not to fidget. For many years he had cultivated an image of himself as a casual man, slightly bored with life, barely paying attention, a thin polite smile on his face, ready to make some jokey aside. Ashton used to tease him for this; he said content would soon follow form. Ashton was right. Content did follow form. Julian didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything anymore. Except Klonopin. Except the dream.

  “Here’s what I need you to explain to me,” Weaver said. “Let’s say you’re right and this dream does take place in London. So what?”

  “Maybe she’s trying to tell me something.”

  “Yes—to get on with your life.”

  How banal.

  “Does she ever get to your table?” Weaver asked.

  Julian shook his head. “But it feels as if she’s hurrying because she can’t wait to get to me.”

  “That’s terrible.” Weaver leaned forward. “I mean that sincerely. It’s terrible what you’ve been through. But drugs are not the answer. Let me help you—”

  “Yes, by giving me Klonopin.”

  “Klonopin is what’s wrong with you.”

  “When, on this stream of darkened love, once more the light shall gleam?” Julian said, quoting he didn’t know who or what.

  The doctor stared—puzzled? Troubled? And Julian glared back at him like the doctor was the one who was nuts. “When?” Weaver repeated, frowning. “Never, Mr. Cruz. That’s when. Never. Your fiancée is gone. Not gone to another country, like England, or another city, like London. Gone, like dead and gone.”

  “So explain the dream to me.”

  “It’s a dream!” Weaver yelled. Nice. Julian had managed to provoke the licensed professional into acting irrationally. Beautiful. “People dream all kinds of crazy things,” the doctor continued in a (slightly) lower voice.

  “Are you calling me crazy, Dr. Weaver?”

  “I misspoke. Do you know what’s not a dream? The reality of your present existence.”

  “I’m dreaming of her in London,” Julian said, “and you are talking to me about reality? Are you listening to yourself?”

  “Are you listening to yourself? So what if it’s London?” Weaver was deeply agitated. He was fidgeting! “You saw the street set in a movie. You used to live and work in the capital of the entertainment industry. You must’ve been entertained by one or two films set in London, no?”

  Julian gave the anger right back. “What else do you do if not interpret dreams and write drug scripts? If you can’t do one of those two things, what good are you and your fancy degrees on the wall?”

  “Julian, listen to me. Clonazepam has harmed your brain’s neuroreceptors. It has given you deep and troubling hallucinations. Stop the drug and you will feel better. It’s that simple.”

  “It’s simple, is it?”

  “Like child’s play. Cause and effect. In your present state, do you even know the difference between dream and reality? I suspect you do not.”

  “Do you?”

  “This isn’t about me!”

  “Here’s what I can’t seem to make you understand,” Julian said, his fists clenched to his chest, his elbows out. “I came to London because of this dream. I’m only here in front of you, which I assume you think is reality, because of this dream. I had one life, I met her, she died, I came here. It’s not a correlation or a coincidence. It’s cause and effect. You were just talking about it as if you knew what it was. A consequence. An action and reaction. I came to London to find her.” Julian rocked back.

  “Find her?” Weaver exhaled in disbelief. “But she’s dead, Julian.”

  “Then explain why she keeps appearing to me entirely alive.”

  Doc pummeled into silence. Bout to Julian.

  After a few moments, Weaver took out his prescription pad. His fingers trembled. “I’m going to recommend a convalescent facility,” he said in a flat voice. “It’s in North London. Hampstead Heath. It’s a wonderful place. I send many of my patients there. Patients like you.”

  “Oh, now you have many patients like me,” Julian said. “A minute ago, you said you’d never seen my symptoms.”

  Weaver shook his head. And shook it and shook it. “So many like you. People who can’t cope. Your reality has been distorted by the drug. One of the most serious side effects of Klonopin is that it stops you from going through the five stages of grief. Which means it stops you from getting better. You feel nothing, yes, but when you stop taking it, it’s as if you’ve been thrown into a time warp. Emotionally you’re back at ground zero—as if she died just yesterday. The whole process of healing must begin anew. If that’s not hell,” Weaver said with a shudder, “hell has no meaning.”

  Julian shuddered himself. “So why would I ever want to stop taking it?”

  “Because you can’t be on it forever.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you will die.”

  Julian laughed, a shrill mirthless cackle.

  Weaver struggled for words. “I know it doesn’t seem like it now, uh, but you still have a lot to live for. Hampstead Heath—”

  “What’s your looney bin going to do for me?” Julian said. “The girl I was going to marry was murdered the day before our wedding. Not was killed. Not died. Was murdered.” Julian groaned in agony. In the middle of her life. In the middle of mine. “Is it going to help me with that?”

  To his small credit, Weaver tripped on his words. “Yes—uh—yes, it will teach you to move on.”

  “As if something could.”

  “You have a psychoactive disorder that has gravely impaired your functioning.”

  “Psychoactive disorder meaning grief?”

  “Meaning addiction to a controlled substance. You’re in withdrawal. You haven’t gotten anywhere near grief yet.”

  “You think I haven’t gotten anywhere near grief?” Julian said in a low voice.

  “Why did you stop going to Dr. Fenton? He’s a very good doctor.”

  “How do you know?” Both Julian and Weaver fell silent. “Do you know him?” The doctor didn’t reply. “After I made the appointment this morning, did you call him? Did you . . . talk to him about me?”

  “Yes, but—wait!”

  Julian bolted from th
e couch, Weaver from his chair.

  “Julian, please. You are ill. You have pathological delusions of a deeply disturbing nature. This is not something that will go away on its own.”

  “You are some piece of work,” Julian said, heading for the door.

  “Did you want me to condescend to you by pretending your delusions are real?”

  “What, you think you haven’t been condescending?”

  “I can’t give you addictive and brain-altering medication to humor you.”

  “Before I stepped into your second-rate office, you had already made up your mind about me,” Julian said. “You’re a charlatan. You know nothing except names of the drugs you refuse to prescribe. You can’t do a single fucking thing to help a single fucking human being.”

  “I can’t give you Klonopin, no matter what words you use,” Weaver said. “You’re fragile and unstable. You’ve been sitting in front of me desperately trying to control your neuroleptically induced involuntary motility. You only think you’ve been motionless. You haven’t stopped banging your knees and tapping your feet and rocking from side to side. Your hands haven’t stopped twitching, especially your right. You’re also presenting certain signs of abnormal posturing, which signals to me a possible brain trauma. I’m very concerned for you. You can’t wean off the drug on your own. You need to be under strict supervision. My job is to keep you safe.”

  There was a moment—after the first moment Julian saw her dead but before the rest of his life—when there was nothing but deafening silence around him. In theatre they called the mute pantomime a dumbshow. It was as if he’d fallen into a black hole and kept falling. He could hear nothing. He didn’t know what was happening to him, barely knew what had happened to her, but when the sound returned, he was being dragged away, his body was being dragged away, his legs folding under him, the shoes scuffling against the asphalt, the shirt yanked out of his pants, his fingers clutching her bloodied beret. But Julian hadn’t been in his body when it was happening. He was outside, looking uselessly in.