Liquid fear

CHAPTER FOUR

“My psychiatrist is dead.”

As she considered her friend’s words, Wendy Leng sipped her coffee and ducked beneath the thin layer of cigarette smoke that hung about five feet above the waffle-house floor. The coffee tasted as if it had been dipped from the rolling mop bucket that stood in the corner.

Eggs, scrambled, had somehow managed to take on the dirty gray of the gravy. At nearby tables, newspapers flapped, people fidgeted with their cell phones as they ate, and lonely old men gazed out the window in the land of bottomless refills. They’d taken a back booth because of Anita’s sensitivity to light and her aversion to being recognized by adoring fans.

Wendy looked from the congealing grease rimming the plate to her twin reflections in Anita’s sunglasses. “Mind taking those off? I can’t tell when you’re kidding.”

Anita slid the glasses down her nose and peered over the lenses with her stunning blue eyes. “Like you could anyway?”

“The sun’s out, the fluorescents in here are bright enough to fry bacon, and you have absolutely nothing left to hide from me.”

“My eyes are bloodshot.”

“That goes without saying. Thursday is a day that ends in y, isn’t it?”

Anita readjusted her shades and sat back in the vinyl-upholstered booth seat. “You just have this thing about faces. ‘Eyes are the window to the soul,’ and all that jazz.”

“I teach art. If you get the eyes right, the rest is easy.”

“Well, life isn’t art, and doesn’t even imitate it. Especially when your psychiatrist is dead.”

Wendy started to ask the logical and expected follow-up question when the jukebox cut in, drowning out the banging of pots and the clatter of silverware. “Hey, I haven’t heard ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ in nearly a decade,” Anita said, smiling and swaying her head in time to the four-beat twang.

“You always did go for atmosphere.” The room’s cigarette smoke burned Wendy’s nostrils. She’d kicked that habit last year and had become overly sensitive to it ever since. She gave Anita a hurried “bring-it-to-me” motion with her hand.

“About my psychiatrist.”

“Let me guess,” Wendy said. “She couldn’t handle your depressed-bitch act any longer, so she slit her wrists.”

“Wow, that would be poignant.” Anita, who’d had the good sense to order a waffle instead of the Long-Haul Breakfast, pushed syrup around with her fork. “I’m sure if she got you on the couch, Freud would roll over in his grave.”

“Only if I seduced her. Otherwise, Freud would be bored with simple old me.”

“Oh, you’re finally coming around to the Sapphic way, huh? Every intelligent woman visits the island sooner or later.”

“If I was after women, you couldn’t handle the competition, sweetie,” Wendy said, dabbing the endearment with sarcasm as gooey as the waffle-house syrup. “As it is, I don’t need anybody in my life, male or female.”

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Anita said, misquoting Shakespeare. As a catalog model, Anita had quickly learned she was more at home in front of a camera than on a live stage.

Despite the drama of her past, or perhaps because of it, she still clung to a delusion of eventual A-list movie stardom.

One delusion of many, Wendy thought. Hence the psychiatrist.

Wendy jumped in before Anita could harmonize with Billy Ray Cyrus’s addictive yet mind-numbing chorus. “So who killed her?”

Anita forked waffle in her mouth and flashed a wad of soggy dough. She had the appetite of a wrestler, but genetics and an obsessive fitness regimen held her at a firm 118 pounds despite her generous bosom. “Nobody killed her. Cardiac arrest. People die all the time.”

“Then why did you bring it up?”

“Because I figured you’d assume the worst. You’re always assuming the worst.”

“No, I’m not.” She sipped her coffee, confirming it was terrible. “Besides, sometimes the worst blindsides you and you don’t get a chance to assume anything. Take my marriage, for instance.”

“Well, enough about you.” Anita flashed a smile that always earned instant absolution, no matter the degree of rudeness. “Anyway, it took me six months to start trusting her, and then she has the nerve to go and die on me.”

“She died on her other patients, too.”

“And that’s my problem how?”

“Never mind.” Wendy glanced at the clock. Ten was fast approaching, and she had to prep for her nooner. “I’ve got to get to class.”

“Some people never leave college. And at your age-”

“I know, but college was God’s way of bringing us together. The School of Hard Knocks.”

“Or Fuck U. That’s U like in university.”

The sarcasm, like most, contained a good bit of truth. Anita had served as a model in one of Wendy’s graduate studio art classes, stripping off her clothes for a dozen people without batting a luscious eyelash.

After the session, Anita had remarked that Wendy’s rendering, though obviously exaggerated and not all that flattering, had captured her personality better than any of the more technically exact illustrations. Perhaps because Wendy instinctively appreciated the sensual radiance Anita projected.

An uneasy friendship was formed, and it had lasted through a shared apartment, a traumatic clinical trial, different sexual attitudes, and now one hell of a heart-clogging breakfast.

“Don’t you want to hear what my psychiatrist’s psychiatrist told me?” Anita said.

“Shrink a shrink and pretty soon you get down to nothing.” Wendy put her pinky to her lips and thumb to her ear in the international sign language for “Call me.” She reached for the bill, which was stuck to the table by a dot of syrup.

“No, really. I need to say this.”

“Okay. But make it fast. The next generation of Pablo Picassos and Frida Kahlos are waiting.”

“The pills I was on, the samples my psychiatrist gave me for free so the diagnosis would stay off my insurance?”

The topic bugged Wendy, but she couldn’t pinpoint the cause. “Yeah. New class of antidepressants. I thought we’d learned our lesson about untested drugs.”

Anita lowered her voice and became guarded. “We need to talk about that, because I’m starting to remember.”

Wendy squeezed her fork until the metal cut into her palm. “That was a different lifetime, Nita. That wasn’t us. That couldn’t have been us.”

“I know we’re supposed to remember it that one way, but what if it happened the other way?”

“It could have happened a million ways,” Wendy said. “The lesson is not to play around with drugs.”

“Oh, so now we get all moral?”

Wendy was about to explode, to tell Anita to shut the hell up, and the rage was a warning sign. You could bury the past, but the stench had a way of rising through the cracks. But the best way to forget was to change the subject. “So tell me about this new drug they gave you.”

Anita nodded. “Supposed to treat my stress, anxiety, depression, and all the rest of it. I’ve been on it for two weeks.”

“And it seems to be working.” Wendy eyed the half-full cup of coffee and weighed the need for an extra boost of caffeine against the additional destruction of taste buds.

“Sure. I’ve even gained a few pounds.” Anita slapped at her lean thighs under the table. “But dig this-my new psychiatrist said she can’t find any record of a written prescription. She has no idea what it is.”

Billy Ray Cyrus’s cornfield yodel faded and the late breakfast crowd filled the void with chatter and rattling tableware. “Maybe it’s a generic,” Wendy said, alarm bells clanging in her head. “Drug companies sometimes give their cheaper versions names that make them sound fancy. I’ll bet the records just got screwed up.”

With the volume in the room dropping, Anita hunched forward and lowered her voice. “The pills may not be legit.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the Monkey House trials.” Wendy used the term despite her promise to never utter it again, upon pain of death or madness. “So stop getting paranoid. Briggs is finished and none of that ever happened.”

“I know.” Anita chopped at her waffle, scooting piles of limp whipped cream and strawberry sauce across the grid. “Well, anyway, the new shrink told me to stop taking them and to bring her a sample so she could turn it in to the authorities.”

“Yeah, like we could ever trust ‘authority’ again.”

“I told her I’d run out the day my shrink died. Seemed sort of fitting.”

“So you have some left?”

“Sure. Six pills.”

“A shrink was giving you illegal drugs?”

“Well, she’d been acting weird for the last few weeks. A couple of times she said stuff that sounded fatalistic. You know, like, ‘Live in the moment, because the past lives forever.’”

It sounded like the kind of crap Briggs used to say. “Sounds like generic shop talk to me. If a shrink can’t dish out the feel-good platitudes, then who can?”

Anita looked around the restaurant. Her sunglasses flashed in the greasy fluorescent light. The entire breakfast, Anita had been acting shifty, as if fearing someone would approach her table and ask for an autograph.

Not that the consumers of her films would have much chance of recognizing her. Her hair was now its natural light brown instead of blonde, and she’d had her boobs deflated down a cup size from their heyday.

Besides, Chapel Hill was a sophisticated university town, not a place where people expected to encounter a porn queen in a bacon-and-eggs joint.

Wendy followed Anita’s gaze. An unkempt man sat at the counter near the register, talking loudly to himself while the wait staff aggressively ignored him.

“I’m kind of worried,” Anita said. “The pills worked great, but I stopped them. They reminded me of the stuff we took during the trials.”

“Did the new psychiatrist give you something else?”

“Effexor. Started Saturday. She said it might take a month before the effect kicks in. I could go nuts before then.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Wendy’s eyelid twitched. A dark shadow crept from the corner of her memory, but it vanished when she turned her mind’s eye toward it.

“We talked about it yesterday.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“You don’t remember?” Anita’s grin was frozen in the mask of one who wasn’t sure if she was the butt of a joke. “Jeez, maybe you’re the one who needs drugs. You’re getting senile.”

“I plead post-traumatic stress disorder,” Wendy said, disturbed by Anita’s delusions.

“Well, I get crazy when I don’t take it. Almost like the monsters are waiting in the dark, and when the medicine goes away, they all come crawling out of their holes.”

Wendy noted a crease had formed in Anita’s forehead, the only vivid mark of time or distress on her perfect skin. Wendy had first drawn Anita’s caricature after the long-ago modeling session, when the two had roomed together for a semester.

Anita Molkesky, or “Anita Mann” as she had been known in the trade, had experienced little change to her most prominent facial features. The full lips, rounded chin, and thin nose made her face bottom-heavy, and though she was attractive in every measure, Wendy’s exaggerating black marker had helped shape Anita’s self-image, and she was forever complaining about her “micro-nose.”

“You’re not going to take my advice anyway,” Wendy said.

“Sure I will, if I happen to agree with it.”

Sassy country rock erupted, Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” Wendy tested the coffee once more. Still awful. “Okay, then-”

“Holy fucking salami,” Anita said, staring through the plate-glass window.

While mired in the lurid straight-to-video world of Los Angeles, Anita claimed to have seen everything twice, including midgets copulating with canines. But the shock in her voice was enough to cause Wendy to follow her friend’s gaze.

A blue sedan streaked toward the restaurant across the parking lot as if shot from a monstrous cannon, tires throwing smoke. Its roaring engine and squealing wheels drowned out the jukebox, and conversation in the waffle house died except for the monologue of the self-absorbed schizophrenic.

The sedan was gathering speed, aimed straight for the front window. It miraculously dodged a parked SUV and closed the gap, now less than thirty feet away.

Someone screamed, and Wendy grabbed Anita’s buckskin jacket by its elbow fringe and pulled her from the booth.

Their waitress, a mousy-looking chain-smoker, screamed out, “Bobby!”

The cook came bounding over the counter, his mottled apron flapping across the schizophrenic’s face. Anita’s retreat splashed cold coffee on Wendy’s leg.

She wondered which of her fellow instructors would cover her noon class, because she had a feeling she was going to be late. Then the plate glass exploded.