Makayla Danielle Gay

Watching Season

I am in Montenegro. There was $1000 left from my egg donation money after grad school tuition was paid. This is how I want to spend it: I want to end in a place different from where I started.

I have kept track of my movements back and forth between Brooklyn and Manhattan. My eggs swelling bigger and bigger, bouncing together like my pedometer. I have been looking so deeply into every slight movement of my insides that walking across the Balkans feels as small and necessary as a bodega run.

I fly to Dubrovnik, then hitchhike over the border to Herceg Novi. I will continue along the big bay of the country, then I will double back to Croatia.

The Adriatic is not what I expected. Big beach chairs cover up the rock shores. I am tired of being stepped on by Serbian families. I decided to spend money to go to the pool to lie and write, to have an Aperol spritz, to not be stepped over. It’s nice to be somewhere sunny where there are so many people. I can watch them all behind my sunglasses and do not have to answer for it. As I am staring– at boobs, and legs, and forearms, attitudes, and haircuts–I am also being watched.

A man on a lounger is watching from the corner of the beachside pool. I stretch out. I flip over to my stomach to let the Balkan sun cook my back. He thinks he is observing me, but I am performing as the Unknowing Observed. It feels good to be watched by someone I have no way of knowing, in a place where I feel like no one.

I always know when I am being looked at. Sometimes, I like it a great deal because at other times being looked at feels like it will ruin me.

 I have been watched before.

                                                                            *

When I lived in Seattle, I left the Architect because of the windows. He told me we were being watched. He recorded hours of sound on his phone while I was working at a bridal shop. He said he heard the neighbors making fun of him. They were plotting to kill him. Rape me. Then he heard me in the walls with them, laughing and laughing while I was being raped.

I’d come home from work and ask him, “How was your day?”

The day I left for the first time, I stayed in a co-worker's little shack in her godmother’s backyard. The sky was smudged out by smoke from all the wildfires. She brought me French fries, and we talked about the covid vaccine that was about to come out.

Thank god it’s over, she said.

I nod my head.

But ya know, I think it was a test…

“Oh, like to see if we could be good to each other?”

She dipped her fry in her frosty, Like a real test. By some other, higher beings. They sent us the virus.

I agreed with her. Yes, of course, COVID was sent by the aliens. I was used to agreeing with someone else’s reality.

I came back from the godmother shack with the aliens. I tried to help him. He said that leaving while he was sick makes me a bad person. He knows he is sick. He can’t hear the hum of silence, or what we can expect of silence now, muffled proof of living. Machines and electricity, coughs of neighbors, sounds we have become so used to. True silence would kill us. His ability to touch my arm while I lay still in the bed beside him is the only way he knows I’m not in the walls.

I go to therapy with him. Mostly, it is a conversation between two amenable men who have both been to Yale. The therapist isn’t being told everything. I don’t know if therapists know when they are being tricked or if they are only allowed to react to what is brought into the room. On the phone, the therapist explains that amphetamines can unlock a genetic Pandora’s box of schizophrenia and psychosis.  He tells me that the best thing to do is not to tell the architect the voices aren’t real, just ask questions, be empathetic.

*

It hadn’t started with the walls, of course. He had a longer history of drinking. He drank a lot, falling back and forth into patterns of stop and start and I was his chief enabler.

In the pandemic, we were pressed against each other’s ugly needs and personhood. His dominant arm was unusable from the bicycle accident when he was picking up my birthday cake.

He was listless and angry because of the disuse of his dominant arm, now tightly strapped around his waist. He was afraid of drinking again. So he began to dabble in the heavier stuff. The architect had told me that while drinking was something he knew he was good at, he’d really excel in meth. He went on to prove himself right.

 Before the voices began to seep out of the walls like a bad odor, he confessed to me that he had bought meth when what he wanted to do was drink instead. He thought he was making the responsible choice. Then realized the choice ended with him walking away with a baggie of meth. He asked me to flush it down the toilet for him. When I did, I thought (as I had thought, and thought): there, that will be the end of all our problems. 

                                                                           *

I know what addiction is like. To be clear, I don’t know what it’s like to have.

The first time it happened was when we still lived in the one-room cottage on the organic farm with the swinger hippies in Asheville. The dandelions bloomed with everything they had in the sloping front yard that first spring. He took a picture of me in front of the house. I looked at the photo of me in the yard of yellow, the broad white cottage and thought, this is a photo that someone shows their grandkids to prove that they were a person in the present moment and didn’t always live in a past one.

On his first relapse, I hadn’t realized he had been missing for two days. He said he was going to backpack a section of the Appalachian Trail. He never made it to the trailhead. I found his car in the parking lot of a Johnson City Chili's. He, sloped on the curb.

When we got back to the cottage, he drank his handle with a measured certainty, stomping through the dandelions. The whole time, I couldn’t wait for the architect to get home. He’d know what to do. And the two people became very different in my mind. So I can sympathize with believing in a person who isn’t there. I have sat for hours waiting for someone to come home while they snored beside me.

*

It didn’t come on as quickly as it feels to remember it did.

The Architect’s friend came to visit. He asked her to be quiet and listen to the walls. He tells her what he hears.

His friend waited for me at the door when I got home from work,

How could you let him be like this? Why aren’t you telling him none of this is real?

“Well,” I said, “have you?”

*

Friends, family, even my own, are more inclined to believe that there’s some element of truth in all this. This is easier to deal with. How could you deal with it otherwise? To know that a person’s mind can just seemingly change like that.

The only person who listened to me was the Architect.

Every phone call, every text message, every scribble in my journal. He finds them all to prove I’m complicit with the voices, that there’s truth to what he’s been hearing.

Eventually, he stopped sleeping. One night, I woke up to him having conversations in the living room. The voices had come out of the walls. He was on the ground, kneeling, his hands behind his head as he pleaded for his life.

Please, please. Don’t kill me. Don’t hurt her.

I held him.

“None of it is real. None of it is real.”

This made him weep.

*

I woke one night to him sitting beside the bed with a kitchen knife. That was not the last night I stayed with him. There were weeks more. How I ended up leaving was speaking to him in a moment of lucidity, late morning on the couch:

“You know, I think we are growing apart… I am about to begin grad school across the country. I can’t ask you to change your life for me…”

                                                                          *

He still comes. In letters to my family. Anonymous messages. Complaints filed with the police. He is still trying to get me out of his wall. Sometimes I’ll bring guests. I get little reports of what I am doing in there, who I’m with. There may as well be a smaller me living between the sheetrock and plaster of a wet Seattle apartment. I would like to think that this is happening to someone else.

When someone sees these texts or letters they ask How could he imagine such a thing? It’s not true is it? Someone can’t just think this stuff out of nowhere…

Police departments from two different states call me.

Are you uh…in the wall of 1142 Boren Place?

No, sir. No, ma’am. I explained to them what happened. They are apologetic. Maybe someone will check up on him. But the calls and messages still come.      

*

I have to confirm my own reality, my own life.

*

The last time I was in Croatia, I decided that I needed to move my life away from his. I was lying in the basement apartment of the retired drummer of Deep Purple. The Architect had flown out to the Czech Republic, where I was miserably teaching the present perfect in a rural town. We were to spend two weeks driving through Eastern Europe. The trip quickly turned to a bender and I was unwilling to let go. I was afraid that if I left, I would essentially kill him. Also, I didn’t know how to drive the stick shift of the car we rented. So, I spent days sitting in a rest area along the road between Slovenia and Croatia, waiting for him to sleep off the vodka. There were too many times when I should have turned around, but I didn’t.

In Zagreb, I had taken his wallet and hid in the closet so he wouldn’t go out to buy more alcohol. He had nearly beaten the door down before passing out in front of it, trapping me. While I was sitting among the retired drummer’s ironing board and Christmas decorations, I emailed my college writing professors to ask for a letter of recommendation.

*

My favorite thing to do is circle. To take non-sequential events and mash them into a line that connects everything. Recovery is a circle. I have been told many times to get to the point. The point being very well a place that could be real, but is so distant it may as well be made up, like the Bermuda Triangle.

I have nearly ruined my life by believing in things having an End, that we all proceed together in a straight line.

*

I haven’t told people about this for a while because each time I do I am pressing a very real, and at this moment, still alive person between two heavy glass plates. Each time I write about the architect, he becomes pressed further behind the glass, flatter, more of a specimen, but at the same time, it means he can’t hurt me anymore.

This is an untrue thing to say. People can still hurt you even if they are not around. This is why I can look back and feel sympathetic to both him and the voices that were in the walls. I know what it is like to always feel like someone is waiting in the next room over, who will try to take over your life again.

The fact is, I very deeply loved this person and cannot turn him into something small, powdery, and pinned because it would help me think about all this in the flat terms of monster and shadows. That is not honest for anybody.  It is important I keep myself an honest witness to my own life. I can hold it all in my hands now, so I won’t press down further because I don’t want to let this person disappear.

                                                                         *

The evening is cooling off. The pool staff are rearranging empty beach chairs to turn the  pool into a club for the Russians who own the mega yachts in the harbor. I jump into the water, knowing I will be followed.

I am still; sun-warmed and a bit buzzed. Because I have stopped moving and stopped carrying purpose for the moment of a holiday, I can feel these thoughts creep back. I’ve been listening for them, the particular creak these memories make on the stairs, just as I remember the feeling, not the sound, of the architect coming down the apartment hall.

It is the man from the beach lounger who swam up to me to offer a drink.

Are you on holiday?