Chapter Eight
EIGHT
Faye awoke to the aroma of something familiar cooking in her apartment. Blinking her eyes open, she tried to place the scent—something like butter and eggs, but also, burning. All at once, she sat up in her bed and threw off her covers, just in time to hear the fire alarm in her upstairs hallway going off. There was no one in the house but Greg...and he was cooking.
She pulled on a robe and, tearing open her bedroom door, raced down the hall to stop him. “Greg,” she shouted. “No. No cooking. We don’t use the stove when we don’t have our memory.”
It was too late. Faye arrived just in time to find a horror show.
Dirty pots and pans littered every corner of her upstairs kitchen. Broken eggs were splattered like modern art all over the floor and counter. She stepped on a shell, feeling the slimy bits wedging between her toes.
Greg searched through the cabinets, pressing his fingers past towels and blankets, ignoring breakfast sitting on the stove. At least, she assumed it was breakfast...because all she could see was salt. An entire container, a mountain of Morton’s, rested in the pan and was fully burning. Dark smoke billowed into the air.
Greg twisted around, totally overwhelmed. Hillel, who had been watching the entire scenario unfold from the windowsill behind the couch, quickly jumped off and ran away.
“Okay!” Faye said, quickly taking charge of the situation. “It’s okay.”
She kept her cool. She turned the stove off, removing the eggs and salt, dumping it in the sink. She grabbed a chair, turning off the smoke detector. She would deal with the cleanup, all the eggs and pots and pans—also calming down Hillel—later. For now, she needed to help Greg.
“It’s okay,” she said, taking his hands in her own. Leading him to the couch, sitting down beside him, she could see he was upset.
Greg couldn’t remember why the room was singing. But he knew that he had messed up. He knew it as soon as he saw Faye racing from her bedroom, her face all contorted with apprehension , before tossing his eggs in the sink.
He felt bad, seeing her so concerned, and that his breakfast was ruined. He was trying to make sense of what had happened—of where he had gone wrong in believing he was the mountain.
“First,” she said, still holding his hands. “Are you okay?”
“Okay,” he confirmed.
She sighed, relieved.
He was grateful for her patience with him, even though he still wasn’t sure where he had gone wrong. He had no trouble the previous evening slicing hard kosher salami. He had successfully handled a knife and helped Faye make dinner. He assumed that making breakfast would be just as easy.
Instead, much like those buttons that gave him and Faye trouble, he had miscalculated the effort required. It turned out that while he remembered some things about making eggs, he had forgotten others. For example, he knew there were eggs in the refrigerator downstairs, but he had forgotten how delicate they were...dropping two, and crushing three more, on the way to the stove upstairs.
He remembered that you scrambled eggs in a pan, but he had forgotten to add butter or oil, and so they started to burn. He was just in the process of attempting to salvage them with the addition of salt when the room began screaming. The sound caused him to jump, and he dropped the canister he was using. Next thing he knew, Faye was there. Breakfast was ruined. And Hillel had run away from them both.
He wanted to explain all that, but he couldn’t form the words.
“Hey,” Faye said sweetly. “It’s okay.”
“Sorry.”
“I just want to double-check,” she said, her eyes scanning his form. “You’re not hurt, are you? Nothing’s broken, bruised, or bleeding?”
“No.”
He was surprised at himself. For the first time since waking up in the hospital, he was answering questions easily. His thoughts shifted from the space in his head to his tongue without a significant pause or delay. It felt good, being able to communicate. He wondered if the book he was reading had helped the connections between his brain and his mouth.
“You were hungry?” Faye asked.
“No.”
He did it again. He told her how he felt. They were simple words, obviously, but he was grateful for them all the same. It felt like the first step in what would eventually grow to be a victory.
“I don’t understand,” Faye said. “If you weren’t hungry, why were you making breakfast?”
“Breakfast...for...you.”
She squinted. “You wanted to make me breakfast?”
“Yes.”
The idea had appeared to him upon waking. After all, he had spent the night at Faye’s. He had seen her in her lingerie. Though it wasn’t in Dr. Richard X Simmons’s self-help book, it felt like making her breakfast was the right thing to do.
“Greg,” Faye said, gently. “That’s really sweet of you. I appreciate you being so thoughtful...but what on Earth made you think you could cook me breakfast?”
Greg reached for his book, You Are the Mountain , and opened it to the page he had bookmarked.
Faye squinted, leaning in. “You were reading this book?”
“Yes.” He pointed to the line he had been reading.
Faye read the sentence aloud. “‘It is important to remember that what you believe will become your reality.’ So, you read this book, and thought...if you believed you could make eggs, you could make them?”
“Yes.” Greg nodded before adding, “Self-help.”
“Self-help?”
“Help me,” Greg explained. “Help...with words.”
“Oh,” she said, her features relaxing. “I understand.”
For all that frustration sitting inside of him, there was one person in the world who could speak his language.
Faye put the book to the side. “The thing is,” she explained, “there’s a lot of good advice in that book. There’s a lot of good advice in many of my books, honestly...but, while we’re still getting you back to some level of health, I think it’s best if you take everything with a grain of salt.”
“Salt?”
“It means...don’t believe everything you read.”
“No...believe?”
It was such a strange concept. What was the point of books, of words, of having and using a whole big and beautiful language, if not to express something important? But maybe he just hadn’t come to that shelf of ideas yet. Maybe some books were simply stories.
“No...understand,” Greg said.
“Like the flyers.”
“Flyers?”
Faye got up from the couch and went to her bedroom. When she returned, she was holding a small white paper, folded up and crumpled, more words—but this time, also images—splattered across the front. “These flyers,” she said, sitting back down next to Greg. “They’re not true. In fact, they say all sorts of horrible things about the Jewish people.”
“Jewish people?”
“About me,” she said, meeting his eyes directly. “They put my name, address, and photograph on that flyer. They put the names of my friends on that flyer...and then, they spread these untrue stories all over town, trying to hurt us.”
He remembered Faye and her friends talking about it a little last night before dinner. He remembered Faye asking him about it in the hospital, too. And those words, the ones that were too long and confusing to utter aloud, reappeared inside his mind... justice, justice .
The whisper was getting louder.
He took the flyer from her hands. He inspected the pages, reading the words— these untruths —for himself. A rumbling appeared from the depths of his belly, a quake forming beneath the mountain.
Faye was so good. She had been so good to him, taking him home, speaking his language. He liked her friends, too. Shulamit had talked to him like a person, filling him up with stories. Nelly had brought him over clothes, and toiletries. And Miranda...well, he understood the instinct to protect her friend. He felt protective of Faye, too. His curiosity morphed into anger.
“These people...bad.”
“Yes,” Faye confirmed. “They’re bad.”
“Where?” He rose from his spot.
“Where are they?” she repeated, before sighing heavily. “Well, that is apparently the question of the hour.”
“No understand.”
“They hide,” she explained. “Kind of like cockroaches...in dark places, undercover. They do these things anonymously, so that they can’t get caught. So that they can continue to spread their lies and propaganda about Jews.”
“No understand!”
His anger morphed into rage. It wasn’t right. These people, just going around town, spreading lies and untruths about Jews. About Faye. She deserved better.
“I don’t want you to be upset,” she said.
“Ang...ry.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “I’m angry, too. But I don’t want you to worry, Greg. I have an alarm on my business. I once took a Krav Maga class in college. And our police, along with the FBI, are working very hard to find the people who are responsible for these flyers. In fact, my very dear friend Eric is the chief of police in Woodstock. So, you see...we have nothing to worry about. You’re perfectly safe here.”
He wasn’t worried about himself. He was worried for Faye. It was her face, and name, and address on the flyer. And though there were no direct threats on the paper, he felt for certain that it was one all the same. Insidious. That was the word that popped into his brain. The people who left these flyers knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t just use language to make erroneous claims. They twisted it into something ugly and maniacal.
“Sorry,” Greg said.
“No.” Faye shook her head. She was very adamant. “You have nothing to apologize for, okay? You didn’t make the flyers, and it’s not your fault what happened with breakfast. It’s my fault. I should have gotten up earlier. I should have made sure you were safe. But going forward, how about you and I make a deal?”
“Deal?”
“A promise to each other,” she explained. “It means that the words we say, the meaning we give them, have power. When we both agree to something, we don’t backtrack or change our minds later. We do what we say. Always.”
Greg considered her proposition thoughtfully. “Okay,” he agreed. “We promise.”
She shifted closer to him on the couch, and the rage he had felt dissipated into the warmth of her presence. He liked how it felt to be close to her. He liked how she looked, too. The messy hair. The wrinkled lingerie peeking out from beneath her robe. He would promise Faye anything...if it meant she would stay.
“So how about we promise,” Faye continued, “that for the time being, when you read a book, before attempting anything you find there...you come and talk to me first. If it’s something new you want to try, like cooking a meal or whatever, we’ll figure it out together, okay?”
“Promise,” Greg said, gripping her hands tighter, feeling the tether between them—between their two worlds—strengthening like a cord. “No cook. Take books...mound...”
“Grain,” she corrected him. “I think you mean grain.”
He looked towards the sink, where breakfast was now drowning in a tub of water.
“Mound,” he said, succinctly. Clearly.
“Guh-raaaaaaa—” She moved to help him, mimicking the word for him in her own mouth, but then, she stopped. Her eyes drifted towards the sink, where a mountain of salt— not a grain —was waiting to be cleaned up.
“Wait,” she said, her chin cocking. “Did you just make a joke?”
Greg smiled, but did not use his words. It seemed more fitting just to raise an eyebrow.
For the next week, Faye kept Greg close to her. Both physically and spiritually, she tethered him to her hip, creating an invisible cord between them, binding them together.
She gave him simple tasks throughout the day to aid in his coordination—closing boxes, sweeping the front foyer. During meals, and through the daytime hours at Magic Mud Pottery, they practiced speaking together. She set up appointments with a neurologist and speech therapist, even though, despite her best efforts to get Greg in sooner, it would be three months before their first appointment.
From there, she supplemented traditional healing methods with alternative ones. She made him magical teas and baladur cakes meant to aid his memory. She placed crystals under his pillows and left rosemary in his pockets. And every night, after she made up his makeshift bed on the couch and retired to her own bedroom, locking the door behind her, Greg read a book. He read and read with a passion that impressed her...but also, periodically, made her think back to that golem doll.