Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

So I was at LaGuardia. I had just left my boyfriend in Oregon and was returning to my not-boyfriend in New Hampshire. The heavens protested. They heaved a lot of lightning around. My flight was canceled. This tart would be spending the night in the airport, forced to confront her deceitful ways until dawn.

The best way to pass an overnight in an airport is with a junky book. I’d buy a mystery before the newsstand closed. That was my plan, but then I saw a copy of Wasted: The Preppie Murder by Linda Wolfe, the true crime account of Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin. I’d heard about this book. I’d been dying to read this book. (Published in 1989, it has a goodreads ranking. One woman gave it three stars and wrote, “Very interesting true story but the ending is a letdown.”)

I bought it. I started reading. I thought I knew everything about Robert Chambers, but it turned out I didn’t. He’d been a drug addict and needle user. He’d been possibly bisexual in New York City in the ’80s. Had I known these things I might have practiced safe sex for once in my life. My three-fucks-away-from-Robert-Chambers status initiated a long night of death worry. I could have AIDS! Heritage AIDS! I decided I couldn’t stay in the airport, or I’d drive myself crazy, reading Wasted: The Preppie Murder by the half-light of the closed concessions, anxiously obsessing about my death, and also the death of my boyfriend (whom I would have basically killed with my dishonesty), and how, if my boyfriend didn’t break up with me for cheating on him and giving him AIDS, we’d have to forgo living in South America and instead spend our final days at an experimental treatment facility in Mexico, where we could still get married, and after our wedding, I would ideally die first, because I had, as a kid, read Love Story by Erich Segal upward of fifty-nine times, and I wanted my husband/boyfriend to be able to say at my funeral, “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?” and (even though I had given him AIDS), “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

I made calls from a payphone using a credit card I’d failed to make any payments on for months, but which, by some glitch, worked. It was a Saturday night, but I found some friends at home. I took a cab to their apartment. We went to an Irish bar and got drunk. I slept on their couch. By the next morning, I was cured of my worry. I continued to sleep with the three-fucks-away guy for the rest of the summer and fall. This didn’t make sense to me then. It doesn’t make sense to me now. Despite what I learned in the airport, I didn’t get tested for AIDS for another three years. When I did, I was not positive.

Today I realized that I am not in a bad mood. I am something else. I am someone else. This happens to me as it happens to everyone. You are not you for months at a time. When you become you again, you can actually greet yourself. You can welcome yourself back.

In my mind my life was ending in small and big ways. I wasn’t despondent over these endings; instead I was energized by them. Because of the joke I made about three-way sex in class yesterday, I was going to lose my job, and so I must start thinking of a new career. Because I am not myself, my husband would leave me in search of a woman who more closely resembled the one he married. Because my babysitter and I parted on strange terms, and because she still has the house keys, she was going to enter the apartment at night and kill our children as we slept, so I needed to protect them. When I told my husband why I was sleeping with our children and not with him, I expected him to understand my reasoning and appreciate my prudence. Because he is an incredible human, he did.

What is interesting about these alternate states of being, however, is that they never seem crazy once exited and viewed from a more sober location. Even when I return from wherever I’ve been, I understand why, when not myself, I do what I do and believe what I believe. I consider myself highly sane and competent for exhuming the possibility that my children might be killed from the lulling blandness of everyday life. I congratulate myself for my foresight. I think: I want that person on my team . She has all the angles covered. In her brain she runs a computer program to evade dooms no one has even considered. There’s nothing she hasn’t thought of, and thought of and thought of, poor woman.

Today I was seated at a dinner beside the sister-in-law of a friend. We talked about self-destructive New Age healers and whether or not old Hasidic men in Brooklyn speak to you only if they think you’re a Polish prostitute, and she showed me pictures of her dog before she showed me pictures of her baby. Then we discussed the bath salts epidemic in Maine. My husband and I first learned about the bath salts epidemic through a local newspaper we’d purchased for the purpose of starting a fire in our woodstove. My husband held up a front page with a photograph of a distraught woman and the headline, “Husband Hasn’t Been the Same Since He Started Doing Them.” “Guess what he’s been doing?” my husband asked. I guessed coffee liqueur. I guessed Sudoku. “Bath salts,” he said. Bath salts? We imagined a man lying in a tub filled with scented water, unable to get out. Within a week he’d have lost his job, and his wife would be despairing. She’d cry at the foot of the tub in which he floated, serenely pink, as the house was repossessed and the children taken by social services.

The article did nothing to correct this assumption of ours. (We eventually learned that bath salts are typically snorted, that the high is a cross between meth and acid, that they can inspire people to eat the faces off of other people.) For days we believed that poverty-stricken people in Maine would get into a warm bath one day and never get out. Did this seem so implausible? It didn’t to me. Bath salts are a dangerous temptation in our household. My husband and I take turns before dinner disappearing into a salted bath. There is never a compelling reason to get out, not for the first forty-five minutes at least, until the water starts to cool and you’re vaguely reminded that you like the life you’ve built with your spouse, at which point you consider the possibility that it might be worth leaving the tub in order to maintain it. But if your life sucks and you hate your spouse? Yes, I can see a bathtub being a perfect place never to leave.

So this woman and I talked about the local bath salts epidemic. I didn’t know anyone who did them, but I’d once given a ride to a woman who’d been on them, I told her. She wanted to know the story of this woman. It was late at night, I said. My husband and I were returning from a dinner party and realized we were out of gas. We stopped at the automated pumps where there is always classic rock playing, where the lighting is always blue and bright, where it is always like an underage nightclub. On this night the pumps were playing Fleetwood Mac. I noticed another car parked just outside the illuminated area. One back door was open. The car appeared to have been abandoned, until, when I looked up again, I saw a lone woman zombie-shuffling toward the pump island.

“Help me,” she said. She spoke from beyond the grave. “Help me.”

I asked: How could we help her?

“Help me ,” she said.

My husband and I exchanged a confused look.

“Can we call anyone to help you?” he said.

This time she heard us. She freaked out. Her face spasmed.

“My dad will kill me if he finds out,” she said. “He will fucking kill me .”

(I told the woman with whom I was having dinner: “Mind you, this woman was easily forty years old.”)