Mania

 

I met Juliana less than a year ago, yet it felt as if I had known her my whole life. I had been, before I met her, in one of the darker periods of my life and it had taken her the bring me out of it, at least part-way. It was just while I was moving my stuff into her apartment that she found the box I had hidden away for years. It's contents were both beautiful and meaningful however they were something I feared, things that I refrained from looking at when I was cloaked in darkness. She saw only their beauty.

 

She walked into the half bare living room holding one of the more elaborate watercolor drawings.

 

“Who did these? They're amazing, I get the feeling that the artist is famous, someone I'm familiar with, but I just can't put my finger on who.”

 

I looked upon the paper she held with horror. “Put it back in the box.” My tone was flat and demanding which seemed to push his curiosity even further.

 

“But who did them?”

 

“I did, now will you put it back in the box?”

 

She was quite shocked. “You?” Her face gleamed with sarcastic amazement, as if she didn't believe what I was saying was true.

 

“Yes, me. Now, please, put it away.” She still looked shocked, in fact now she looked even more so. Clearly she believed me now.

 

“Can I hang them up?”

 

“No. Put it back in the damn box.”

 

Juliana's face was now twisted in horror. I had never spoken this harshly to her, and she was faced with the additional shock of realizing that the breathtaking work before her was mine. But most of all she was in disbelief that a work so beautiful could scare me so. She left the room, presumably to return the piece to it's hiding place in my inconspicuous cardboard box. She came back into the room with a confused look present on her soft face.

 

“Why?” She asked.

 

“I don't like to look at them.”

 

“But you made them, you must've looked at them at some point.”

 

“True, but that was... a different time. I can't stand to look at them now.”

 

“But...” Her words stopped there, sensing this was a sore topic for me. In our time together she had learned to dodge these verbal landmines, as the shrapnel seemed to affect all those around at the time they went off. Like a landmine most of the damage was to the one standing on it, which would always be me.

 

Wasn't this the story of my life? A soldier doomed to stand on an activated landmine until I fall from exhaustion and am blown to pieces. Until then I had no choice but to stand, waiting for my inevitable demise.

 

“You never told me you went to art school too?”

 

“That's because I didn't.”

 

“How? I've never seen anything like... that.”

 

“Sometimes I can just... do it. Can we just drop it please?”

 

“One condition.”

 

“And that is?”

 

“You draw me.”

 

“I can't.”

 

“But if you made those you must have talent, so why won't you? Is it me?”

 

“No, it's just that... there are certain times when I can do it. Other times I can't draw a straight line to save my life.”

 

“How do you ever know if you don't draw?”

 

“Let's just say it's a mood. I just know.”

 

“Then will you tell me if you even get one of these... moods? I want to see how beautiful you can make me, like you made... those.”

 

“'Of course I will, but I doubt I can make you any more beautiful than you already are.”

 

 

 

Almost three months passed before I broke my cycle of unhappiness and found myself able to draw once again. Unfortunately, Juliana was in New York doing research for her new book at the time. I hadn't been able to go with her because I couldn't get enough time off work. So what could I do but call her, after all I had promised to let her know if I was ever able to draw her again. My dilemma was this: do I interrupt her little vacation to bring her back here to draw her or do I wait three days until she returns.

 

The second option was almost completely out of the question as I never knew how long these moods would last, it could be days, weeks, or only hours. On the other hand it would be wrong to spoil her vacation. After hours of listening to the television and radio blast I felt the need to tell her, to talk to her, anyone, just to escape the silence. I wanted to let it go, just let her enjoy her vacation, but the thoughts of how easily the opportunity could pass wouldn't leave my mind.

 

I hardly remember picking up the phone, nor do I remember dialing the number she had scribbled on a napkin just before she left. What I do remember is how excited she was when I told her the good news and her saying she would catch the next plane back into North Carolina. Later she called me back, still quite excited, and told me her plane would land in Raleigh sometime tomorrow afternoon.

 

I also remember being to excited to sleep. Around six in the morning I could wait no longer and I began to work on a sketch of her from my memory. In the sketch she was laying on her left side, naked, with her head on a pillow looking toward me with the seductive gaze she often gave me after we made love. I could almost feel the burning intensity of the desire in her eyes, taste her sweat on the tip of my tongue.

 

My god was she beautiful. I just couldn't get over how lucky I was to have met her.

 

I redrew the sketch using a charcoal pencil. The charcoal gave ever more intensity to the shadows that danced across the magnificent curves of her body in the dim overhead lighting of our bedroom. However, in this drawing you couldn't feel her post-climactic bliss, instead her face felt more lonesome, as if she was wanting me to join her in bed. Looking at the sketch I decided to make love to her as soon as she crossed our apartment's threshold.

 

Decidedly done with the two preliminary sketches I hung them on the wall with double sided tape, knowing she would notice them as soon as she came in.

 

Happy with my work I laid on the couch reminiscing, but after a minute of doing so I decided to change the radio station and turn on the all day news channel on the television. After watching the same stories over again for a second time I glanced at the clock. Still only one thirty. I walked to the bedroom to catch up on missed sleep but quickly decided it was too damned quiet. I grabbed a random book from the bookcase beside the bed and returned to the living room.

 

As fate would have it the book I picked was none other than “The Scarlet Rosebush,” one of Juliana's earlier novels and the book that earned her her first real glint of respect in the writing community. I had read the book twice in the year before I met her, in fact I met her at a book-signing for the sequel, “Death by Desire”. At the time I had been deeply drawn into the visionary world she had set forth in the novel, a love story set in the 1920's about a police officer and a mob bosses daughter. It was almost a Romeo and Juliet-esque story except that the police officer didn't actually die until the second book. I remember reading the book for the first time and falling ever so slightly in love with Juliana as the pages turned. One who could write of love so passionately must be a passionate lover, I had mused. And passion was something my life had desperately needed at the time.

 

So when I heard she was doing a book-signing in Raleigh I knew I had to go and meet her. We chatted a bit as she signed my copy of Death by Desire and I found her to be every bit as lovely as I had been making her out to be as I read her books and perhaps even more so. I worked up the nerve to return the next day with my copy of The Scarlet Rosebush and after she finished signing it I asked her out for a cup of coffee when she was done in the bookstore. Much to my relief she gladly accepted.

Thinking back on her enthusiasm in the bookstore I decided it was quite like the enthusiasm she had shown on the phone the day before when I had told her I would draw her.

 

In the time after we had our first date in the coffee shop around the corner from the bookstore I traveled with her as a loving companion for the rest of the tour, and we dated for another three months after before I proposed we move in together.

 

And now here we are, I thought as I finished the book. I stared at the ceiling with calm satisfaction. Slowly my eyes moved to the two sketches I had done earlier in the day. They made up my mind for me, after I finished drawing her I would ask her to marry me. There was simply no way I could allow the rest of my life to be without her beautiful and loving presence.

 

I looked at the clock. Three fifty-seven. There's still time, I thought. I grabbed my cell phone and stuck it in the pocket of my drab overcoat as I headed out into the weakly snow covered roads.

 

The jewelry store was less than a mile from my house and the walk was almost pleasant. As I walked I listened to the hushed hustle of passing cars all trying to be where they need to be with too little time on their hands to be everywhere at once. “Thank god for city life.” I said to myself as I approached the store. I thought of the job I had gotten here to support Juliana and I while she wrote her books. I had never imagined myself as a butcher, oh well, not much I can do, at least I have a happy home. Then, just before I could enter the store something stopped me dead in my tracks, and as quickly as I had stopped, it slipped out of my mind and I entered the store unfettered.

 

After nearly thirty minutes of searching I found her the perfect ring, fitting in beauty for a woman so elegant. I nearly maxed out two credit cards buying it. “But it's worth it,” I told myself.

 

It was nearly five o' clock when I got home and deciding I still had time to kill I sat down on the couch and re-read Death by Desire, silently rooting for Daniel, the vigilante cop, who slowly worked out his revenge on the mob goons who had tried to kill him in the earlier novel.

 

In The Scarlet Rosebush his murder went wrong when Maria, Daniel's lover and daughter of the same mob boss who had ordered the hit, leapt in front of the bullets thus saving her lover's life. One of the hit men died there by Daniel's gun. The second fled only to be tortured and killed by Maria's father in the opening of the second book. Even then, Daniel still longed from revenge and stealthily hunted down and murdered all of the men connected to the hit. The book closes with Daniel diving off the Brooklyn Bridge to escape his fellow policemen.

 

It was getting close to seven when I finished the book and Juliana still hadn't called. Delays, I figured and decided to see if anything new had happened in the world of news since morning. And indeed something had.

 

A plane to Raleigh had gone down in West Virginia at a little after four. The reporter said there was no news yet as to whether or not it was a mechanical failure or if there was a bomb to blame. Either way I wasn't worried, Raleigh saw a number of flights come in every day, and I had the gut feeling that she was alright. The feeling that nothing could possibly harm my beloved. Yet the news bothered me, even if it wasn't her flight it could easily be the future wife of someone who feels just as I feel about Juliana.

 

I switched the channel to boxing but I found it was every bit as boring and repetitive as the news. Before I knew it I drifted off to sleep. And when my eyes next opened they were fixed on the drawings on the wall. And I decided to do another, and this time I went back into the drawing with emerald watercolors. Her breasts were glistening jade pillows, with white charcoal accents instead of shadows, and as odd as I thought it would look when I started I found myself pleased with the resulting work of art. Somehow the addition of color made her features even more shockingly real. It was almost as if she could climb out of the painting and walk right up to me, but just as I got that far into the fantasy I realized that woman walking up to me was painted in green and white and decidedly not real. None the less she was magnificent.

 

Where was she? I must've missed her call while I was asleep, what time is it anyway? Nine o' clock, still dark out. Damn, that means I'd been asleep a whole day. But I was wide awake now and where did I put my phone? Overcoat, I went through the pockets, there it is. No missed calls. What? It'd been a whole day. Wait, the 20th? It was still today, so I'd been asleep less than an hour. No wonder she hadn't called, but it was nine wasn't she supposed to be here by now, she should've called. Plane delays, maybe. Or maybe she had caught a cab and got stuck in traffic, maybe she was going to surprise me, pop in unannounced. Big hug, big kiss, everything would be fine. She should know by now I'm not a big fan of surprises.

 

I'll call the airport, that's it. They can tell me why I haven't heard from her yet. The receptionist sounded teary when she answered the phone.

 

“Yes sir, how may I help you today.” You could almost hear the crackling of dried tears. Hear the tears dropping from her chin and pooling on the desk in front of her.

 

“My girlfriend,” she started to sob more openly as I spoke, “she was on flight 741, was there a delay, shouldn't she have landed around six?”

 

At this point she was straight out bawling, “I can't do this, d****t, I've been stuck answering these calls all day. Juliette...” I heard the phone drop and skitter across the table before coming to a stop on the counter. The woman who answered the phone argued with Juliette for another thirty seconds, and then, right there, quit on the spot and stormed out of the room.

 

Juliette picked up the phone. “I'm so sorry, I don't know, flight 741, it's, down, went down in West Virginia. I'm so damn sorry, what can I say, she might be, I don't know, still, there.”

 

“741 was the one that went down?”

 

“I'm so sorry, sir.” The phone slipped from my hands, crashing onto the floor, “Sir, sir?” The phone snapped closed, backing of the phone sliding across the floor.

 

I fell limply onto the couch, she went down in the flight over West Virginia, she's gone. She's so damn beautiful. Looking at the three pieces of art on the wall. She's so damn beautiful.

 

The next day I got a call from a hospital in West Virginia, they confirmed the airport receptionist's fears, Juliana had been among the forty-eight who had died instantly in the plane crash. “However,” he told me, “she died with a smile on her face.” As if that would be any consolation to me. But oddly I was not sad, though I often wished I could be over the next few days. I started to become worried that I had never loved her at all. If I had I would surely be sad for her loss.

 

I didn't cry for three days. Somehow I wanted to, but I couldn't. I was to excited, not like a happy excited but more of a hyper excited. I just couldn't keep still for two days.

 

Then I found my tears, all the tears I had wished I could've cried over the last two days hit me more than tenfold. I walked into the living room from bed and ripped the three drawings off the wall and for the first time in four days I turned down the radio and turned off the television altogether, I couldn't stand hearing about the plane crash, whether or not it was a bomb, whether or not some obscure terrorist organization from the middle east was involved.

 

It was all the newscasters could talk about. It's the early 1990's and we've just come out of the Cold War as a nation and all they can talk about on the news is some new threat, some new set of psychos hoping to crush the American Dream. If it weren't for a bunch of crazies trying to blow up America would there even be an America to speak of? Hell, the last time we didn't have some threat of global war in the last eighty years, we hit the great depression until Hitler threatened to take over the world, and wouldn't you know it, the economy started right back up again.

 

I was becoming repulsed by the way our country needed some threat to make our little American world go round. The way the newscasters were stuffing their pockets with money made from my pain. Exploitation, that's what is was.

 

And then it dawned on me, if I hadn't called her so selfishly so that I could draw her then she would've come home safely two days ago.

 

After that I stayed in bed for two days. I only got one phone call, it was from my boss at the butchers shop, he said I hadn't been to work in over a week. I hadn't even thought of work in days. I guess it hadn't been at the top of my list of priorities at the time. Boss said I was fired, but it was the least of my worries and I rolled over and went back to sleep.

 

When I finally got out of bed I decided I was in too deep and I needed some help. This was nothing like all the other times I had been real down before and now that I knew I wouldn't have Juliana to help me get through it I was sure it was either get help or die.

 

 

The shrink's name was Dr. Bedford. The first thing I asked him was why I had felt so excited and why I couldn't cry or even feel the least bit sad for the two days after I found out she was dead. His answer was that it was part of the process of dealing with loss and I was just having an extended denial period. At least that's what he said until I started to discuss the events leading up to it and general details of my five day artistic period. He began to refer to it as a “manic period”. He also said that he wanted to see me a few times a week, and when I mentioned my job situation he said he would see me for free until I got something worked out.

 

And things did work out, I explained that my fiancée had died in the plane crash, and my boss, apprehensively, and with a touch of disbelief, rehired me. I started to save up my extra money in an account, for a trip I had planned for the future.

 

And I kept seeing Dr. Bedford, twice a week after work. And after he had heard a significant portion of my life story, he diagnosed me, he finally told me what had been wrong with me during that week, and what had been wrong with me my whole life.

 

“After having known you and speaking with you for three months I'm reasonably sure I know what's wrong with you. Mr. Benson, you have what's called bipolar disorder.”

 

“Never heard of it. What is it?”

 

“Well, until just recently it was called manic-depression. Like the Jimi Hendrix song. Have you heard of it under that name?”

 

I told him I had and he went through what it meant to me to have bipolar disorder and what the symptoms were and just how we would treat them. He told me that heightened creativity was a common symptom of a manic episode.

 

As far as treatment I would take anti-depressants and mood stabilizers for the depression, and for mania I would take anti-psychotics. Somehow, he said, between the two courses of treatment I would begin to feel normal.

 

Normal.

 

I could hardly believe it. I hadn't felt normal since I was seven years old. And I'm not even sure I felt normal then, maybe I only felt normal in retrospect.

 

It was more wonderful than I had imagined it would be. It was like meeting Juliana all over again. It was that kind of relief, that kind of happiness.

 

 

It's been five months since Juliana died and I'm thankfully doing alright. I'm currently in a manic episode and I'm taking the appropriate medications to control it. And I'm finally taking that trip I had wanted to take a little ways back. In fact I'm in New York right now. Ever since I read The Scarlet Rosebush and Death by Desire I have wanted to visit New York to see the place she had so eloquently described in her elegant storytelling.

 

And it is very beautiful. Riding the cab over the Brooklyn Bridge late at night I feel a wave of nostalgia washing over me. As if I had been here before, and I guess in a way I have, in her books. The details were so clear that reading the book I felt as if I had actually stepped onto a plane and landed in New York. I started to remember her wondrous descriptions of other places she had been. My god did she have a way with words.

 

As the taxi stopped in a traffic jam in the middle of the bridge I was whisked back into the final climactic scenes of Death by Desire with tears in my eyes. I had read the book on the plane ride over. Suddenly I had the urge to feel the story. The urge to replay the scene in reality.

 

I climbed out of the cab into the frigid New York night and walked to the edge of the bridge. The cab driver started yelling about his fare and I, in response, threw a wad of cash in his general direction. Walking along the bridge, passing lines of cars in standstill I remembered Daniel, surrounded be police cars, old friends screaming at him that there was nowhere to go, that he was cornered. But he knew that he was not cornered at all, he had one place left to go. I had felt cornered since Juliana had died, it had always been there, in the back of my mind, masked by medication. But there was no medication to mask it now.

 

I thought of how Juliana described Daniel's feelings of freedom as he climbed over the edge and dropped into the waters below. How he knew he would meet Maria in whatever was beyond this world. I knew I would see Juliana again, and just before I hit the water I saw her face.

 

My god was she beautiful.

Reviews

[Jamie Fantasy]

Wow. What a sad story. Very impressive descriptions and character building. I'm impressed! :)

[Jacqueline]

I'm almost speechless! I don't know which contest this was placed in, but this was a winning story! My God, I felt so much for the guy; I could imagine his remorse about not letting Juliana see his drawings and it was just so heartbreaking about the tragedy. This was a good story.

[Chloe..Across the Unive..]

What a wonderful and such a different story.. i loved it, good writing ..

Chloe
xoxo