The Nix(154)

“And you’re assuming I’m an expert on this subject why?”

Brown smiled at this. She was such a tease, his hippie girl.

“Oh,” Faye said, her face falling. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

“Jesus, lighten up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s your problem. You want advice? You have to relax.”

“I’m not sure I know how to do that. Relax.”

“Just, you know, relax. Just breathe.”

“It’s not that easy. I had some doctors try to show me certain breathing techniques once, but sometimes I get really nervous and I can’t do it.”

“You can’t breathe?”

“Not correctly.”

“What happens? Something is going on in your head? You try to relax and breathe but you can’t do it. Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Tell me.”

“Okay, well, when I start my breathing techniques the first thing I feel is shame. I feel ashamed right off the bat that I have to practice breathing. Like, you know, like I can’t even do the simplest most fundamental thing right. Like it’s one more thing I’m failing at.”

“Okay,” Alice said. “Go on.”

“And then when I start to do the actual breathing I’ll start worrying that I’m not doing it right, that maybe my breathing is flawed or something. That it’s not perfect. That it’s not the ideal breathing technique, which I don’t even know what that is but I’m sure it exists and if I’m not doing it I feel like I’m failing. And not only failing at breathing but generally failing. Like I’m a failure in life if I can’t do this correctly. And the more I think about how to breathe, the more difficult the breathing becomes, until I feel like, you know, I’m going to hyperventilate or pass out or something.”

Brown wrote this down in his journal: Hyperventilate.

“And then I start thinking about if I do pass out then someone will find me and make a big fuss over it and I’ll have to explain why I spontaneously passed out for no reason at all, which is a stupid thing to have to explain to someone, because they’ll think they were being heroic, saving someone from a serious injury or heart emergency or something, and when they find out the only thing that’s wrong with me is that I freaked myself out breathing they get, well, you know, disappointed. You can see it on their face. They’re like: Oh, that’s it? And then I start freaking out that I did not measure up to their expectations of a quality sick or injured person, that perversely my problems are not bad enough to justify their worry, which they are now full of resentment about. And even if none of this actually happens, I see it all play out in my mind, and I get so anxious about the possibility of it happening that it might as well have happened. I feel like I actually experience it, you know? It’s like something doesn’t have to happen for it to feel real. This probably all sounds insane to you.”

“Keep going.”

“Okay, well, let’s say even if I’m able to achieve some feeling of peace and relaxation by miraculously doing the breathing techniques correctly, I’ll enjoy feeling happy and relaxed for maybe ten seconds before I begin to worry about how long it’s going to last, the good relaxed feeling. I worry that I won’t be able to maintain it long enough.”

“Long enough for what?”

“To, you know, be successful at it. To do it right. And every second I feel objectively happy is a second I’m closer to failing and returning again to being essentially myself. The metaphor I have in my mind of what this feels like is walking on a tightrope that has no ending and no beginning. The longer you stay up there, the more energy it takes not to fall. And eventually you begin to feel this melancholy and doom because no matter how good a tightrope walker you are, you will inevitably fall. It is only a matter of time. It is guaranteed. And so instead of enjoying the happy relaxed feeling while I’m having it, I feel this huge sense of dread about the moment I will no longer feel happy or relaxed. Which of course is the very thing that obliterates the happiness.”

“Holy god.”

“This is all going through my head more or less constantly. So when you say ‘Just breathe,’ I think it means something different to you than it does to me.”

“I know what you need,” Alice said. And she rolled across the bed and opened the bottom drawer of her nightstand and rummaged around what appeared to be several brown paper bags until finding the appropriate one and turning it over and shaking out what looked like two small red pills.

“From my personal inventory,” she said, which Officer Brown considered writing down but ultimately did not write down; he never logged anything she did that might be indictable. “Alice’s pharmacy,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Something to make you relax.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s not dangerous. It simply quiets the head a bit, lowers the inhibitions.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Yes, you do. You’re like the Great Wall of Inhibitions.”

“No thank you.”

What were they, Brown wondered. The pills. Maybe psilocybin, mescaline, morning glory seeds? Maybe methedrine, DMT, STP, some kind of barbiturate?