Page 16 of Splintered
He sat beside Evan, not certain where to put his hands. In his lap felt too deferential, but dangling over the side of the chair made him feel adrift. Evan wasn’t holding out his hand for Ben to hold.
His wrist ached, too, poked and prodded by the doctor before his x-rays and now wrapped in a plaster cast up to his elbow. Impact fracture, they’d said.
He settled for crossing his arms as if he could ward off the coming storm, somehow protect himself from whatever Evan was about to say.What if this isn’t about last night at all? What if this is all about us?
“Evan, I’m so glad you called this morning,” Dr. Kao said. Her voice was soothing, years of experience and care layered in the simple greeting. She smiled at them both. “Ben, I’m glad you came here with your partner. I want to hear about what’s been going on from both of you.”
“I don’t know anything,” Ben blurted out. “I just found out last night there evenwassomething going on.”
Evan flinched. He hunched in his seat. Stared at the carpet.
Dr. Kao nodded. There was something soothing about her, her nod understanding instead of patronizing. “Last night must have been extremely intense for both of you. Ben, how is your arm? Evan said you fell down the stairs.”
He shifted. Stared at a corner of the rug beneath Dr. Kao’s lacquered high heels. “I didn’t know what was happening. All of a sudden, there was this screaming, the loudest, most horrible noise I’d ever heard. I panicked, just ran blind, trying to find him. He… he wasn’t in bed with me.” Ben slid his fingers under his cast, tried to scratch at an itch he couldn’t reach. “I fell, yeah.”
“Frightening things happening to our loved ones can put the deepest, rawest fear inside of us.”
“I’m still scared,” Ben whispered. “I don’t know what happened to him.”
“Evan, let’s talk about what happened from your perspective.” Dr. Kao turned her attention to Evan, grabbing a pen and notepad from a table beside her. “When you’re ready.”
Traffic hummed somewhere on Ygnacio Valley Road. A bird twittered outside the office’s window. Finally, Evan swallowed. “I got home late and I didn’t want to wake Ben up.”
Ben’s gaze burned into the carpet corner as if he could set it on fire.He left out where he was. Or why he was late.
“I needed to think and I wasn’t feeling well. I haven’t been feeling well for a while. I wanted to… just sit and think, try to wrap my mind around everything. So I stayed downstairs. Eventually I decided to just sleep in the living room. And then—” His hands clasped between his knees, the knuckles going white.
Dr. Kao waited. The silence bloomed, gas filling the room, waiting for a match to strike.
“I’ve been hearing these things,” Evan whispered. “Sounds. Humming. Static. Tapping inside my skull. Sometimes voices. And I’ve been… missing time.”
Dr. Kao’s pen scratched across her notepad. “Missing time? What do you mean?”
“There are blanks in my memory. I do things but I don’t know what they are. Or why. And I can’t remember whatever it was I did.”
“When was the last time this happened?”
“Flying home from New York.” Evan’s gaze darted to Ben. “I remember texting Ben after I landed. Getting off the plane. I remember looking for the signs at the airport, which way to go to the parking garage. And then—” He shook his head, his whole body squirming like he wanted to escape something touching him. “And then it was four hours later and I was standing in the dark inside Ohlone Park. I freaked out. I didn’t know where I was. My cell phone was in my pocket, nearly dead, but there was enough battery to use the GPS to get out of there. My car was in the parking lot, still running. I don’t know how I got there. I don’t know why I was there.”
Ben stared. His jaw hung open. Ohlone Park, the wilderness area, was almost an hour south of their home.
“Any other times?” Dr. Kao’s pen scratched again.
“At work,” Evan admitted. “Sometimes there would be hours that I missed. I’d blink, and suddenly, it was five hours later and I was at my desk still. But I had no idea what happened in between.”
“Did anyone ever tell you what you had been doing during these periods you can’t remember?”
Evan glanced at him.
This was why he was fired. All those things his boss said he did… He did them.
Evan stumbled through the story of his firing, the way his boss—his mentor, his friend—had shouted at him and confronted him about his behavior, the things Evan couldn’t remember doing, the emails he couldn’t remember sending. His firing. Another lost period when security arrived to escort him out. Ben arriving.
“And have you been hearing the voices before and after these periods of missing time?”
Evan nodded. “Sometimes more than others. Sometimes less. Last night it was the worst. I had a headache and it kept getting worse. And the sounds, the… voices kept getting louder. I tried to block them out, but they just wouldn’t stop.”
“How do you block them out?”
