Away From You Read online

  Let me rephrase. Did Diana have a chronic emotional need, an addiction to lure male attention, in a flirtatious seductive way? For a sense of power rather than the excitement of seduction or possibility for romance with another. Did she dress provocatively, flirt outrageously even with men that she wasn’t attracted to. Never mind if she even liked the guy, her objective was grabbing male validation of her being a woman. If she turned heads her self-esteem soared but it always worked the other way. And all this behavior would happen in front of you.

  Yeah, it was like, you’re with me. Why are you paying attention to him to him? She was mess. How does this matter?

  Your attachment style. The way we bond with others is determined by how our brains bonded with our primary caregivers in infancy. We are wired to bond by this default pattern. If we are programmed to attach to insecure relationships then identifying why we choose who we do gives us a choice to reprogram our minds.

  What does changing how I attach to people help me remember or calculate fiscal projections again?

  Storing memories requires emotional responses to be embedded in the data. A secure attachment style is correlated with improved mood which helps brain function, such as higher cognitive processing.

  Circular connectivity.

  Yes. Dr. Vidal’s terms for neural networks. So, tell me how the marriage ending led to depression?

  Diana and I got into a routine. When Sabrina was eight years old we functioned like clockwork. It didn’t feel like a marriage. We were roommates with a kid. That was how it operated until she walked into that Verizon store in Manhattan and hooked up with the store manager. I moved out of old house in Connecticut after Sabrina’s 12th birthday.

  Betrayal triggered it? The first depression episode you experienced as an adult?

  No. I just didn’t think about it after she filed for divorce. The first person I called was Heidi who asked me to move in together in Manhattan. If I felt betrayed at all by Diana, it was the financial betrayal for all the alimony she got from me.

  Why did you call Heidi first? When you received the news?

  I knew Heidi would still be in her office at Deutsche Bank and could quickly get a transaction undetected from my account to Switzerland. She had the right connections who could expedite an out of country bank transfer after 5:00 pm in New York. I also knew Heidi would be happy to hear that Diana had left.

  And Heidi having a personal relationship with you and her own self-interest was insurance that the international transfer would be undetected even if Diana’s divorce lawyer hired a standard private investigator to verify the state of your marital assets and your actual net worth.

  I know I still wanted Sabrina to have a comfortable life. Not to fund Diana’s spending sprees. She maxed her credit out every month because I paid them off.

  Then what happened after you spoke to Heidi? When did you tell Sabrina that her parents were splitting?

  Sabrina was on a school trip. We told her the weekend she was back home. After Heidi called in a favor with her friends in Zurich I drove to her place in Manhattan and brought two suitcases with me. I moved in with Heidi that night and by the morning we were looking at brownstones in Washington Heights.

  No gap between relationships. How much of your life was ruptured? Divorce has been called a kind of emotional death.

  My lifestyle was disrupted. Sold the house. Bought a townhouse. Routines changed. Had to adjust to living with Heidi instead of Diana.

  Heidi and you had been having an affair for two years and Diana never suspected?

  It was never mentioned in divorce court. Her lawyer didn’t even hint at it. So no, Diana never suspected.

  Had Heidi and Diana ever met?

  No. I don’t think they wanted to meet each other. Sabrina met Diana but didn’t like her.

  It sounds like you and Heidi bought a house together. Did she start talking about getting married after the divorce was finalized?

  Yes but Heidi didn’t quite understand the stress associated with an American divorce. I inherited a brownstone in Manhattan before Diana and I were married. That was part of the reason why I was not in a rush to propose after leaving the Navy. My grandfather’s will stipulated that my father and I would jointly inherit that property on my 25th birthday.

  And Diana was unaware of this?

  My parents only talked about it once when my grandfather died. When I was first out of the Navy, the family trustee had us sign paperwork because my 25th birthday was less than six months away after being discharged.

  Was that your choice to not tell Diana about this inheritance? Have her believe that you would use the GI benefits towards a down payment on a co-op in Hartford.

  My brother Jason had been living in my grandfather’s home since he was a freshman at NYU. I didn’t correct Diana’s thinking that Jason was renting it with friends. He was still living there with his wife and kids. Heidi and I needed to get our own place. The home had to stay in the family some way. Otherwise, Diana and her new husband Pablo could have taken it. When Sabrina turned 18 my alimony stopped and for the first time in her life, Diana has a concept of money, and its overwhelming for her apparently.

  Heidi was the woman you worked with at Deutsche Bank before being headhunted by Morgan Stanley.

  5 THE LOST YEARS

  Was he even real? Did the entire episode exist merely as a waking imagined fantasy? Could it be the musings of Ayahuasca that scrambled her memories of their brief time together? Why did she listen to Pillar and allow herself to be dragged to South America for a ceremony performed by a shaman she never heard of?

  Jakob Fleming. He’s the reason she spent several thousand dollars on an Ayahuasca retreat after second year medical school. It worked. Penelope arrived home in San Francisco three weeks later with no feelings left for Jakob. Years later she heard through a friend that Jakob Fleming had checked into Bellevue back in New York after an extended manic episode with bouts of euphoria that ended with a suicide attempt.

  How did I miss the symptoms? What kind of psychiatrist dates an undiagnosed and untreated mentally ill man?

  No one else in Jakob’s life ever suspected he was crazy. Not even his siblings and parents. This was a slow decline over such a long time. It was subtle. People close to a person are often not objective enough to catch it.

  Was he ever normal?

  No. He probably just managed to disguise it until he was prescribed the wrong medication. The anti-depressant triggered a full blown mania. He was euphoric and reckless for six months.

  How could a physician prescribe an SSRI knowing that the patient had a family history of bipolar illness in his background?

  The doctor didn’t know. Jakob never disclosed it.

  Pride.

  Led directly to his fall. It was never you Penelope. Jakob treated you the way he did because he was afraid of you finding out he was mentally ill. Crazy thinking but it makes sense in a twisted way.

  Maybe.

  Life wasn’t always a spherical reality that revolved around him. Before he was 14, David had friends instead of venture partners or social instruments. He felt emotion versus the opaque sensations of wanting or refusing a person or thing. Until the day he found his best friend Ethan hanging from the top of a soccer goal post, David felt human.

  He heard his own screams but could not feel his mouth or throat making the sounds. It was as if he were apart from his body, floating even, as he ran towards the lifeless body swinging from the pole.

  After Ethan’s suicide, David responded to events not on instincts, but by retrieving an emotional scene from his memory and re-enacting it. David choose whatever emotion would be most to his advantage in the situation. He didn’t care really. Unless there was a leverage to be grabbed by him. The rest of that school year, David felt numb, but no one suspected that something had broken in his mind. He had moved on by mimicking emotional gestures to blend in with social expectations. Life no longer really existed. He just moved through scene afte
r scene with a fixed attention towards taking what he could from the moment.

  Did David miss Ethan?

  No. He blamed him too much to feel pangs of loss for his best friend. Ethan’s sensitivity to the opinions of others drove him to kill himself. Had he seen that people were just chess pieces to manipulate without them knowing it, Ethan would still be here. David found emotions time consuming and inefficient. He felt basic things, like frustration, upset, letdown, but life was complicated by emotions. They were the culprit behind every stupid decision a person made. Like Ethan. Didn’t he realize that people didn’t matter more than you did to yourself?

  David still managed to write and deliver a poignant eulogy to his dead best friend at the funeral. The Catholic school allowed the students to have a day off to attend the service. Behind his back, David heard the teachers and other students say that they wondered if Ethan was in hell for ending his own life. Idiots. Belief in God can hijack common sense. Catholics in their catechism believe suicide is a mortal sin. How can it be true if other denominations fervently believed different?

  6 BRAIN TRAINING

  I’m amazed at the results. His recall, his speed at mathematical equations, everything is back.

  What I don’t like is the shrinking size of the empathy center in his brained. He gained neural connections there before treatment, and the brain tissue is disintegrating to accommodate the regeneration.

  The brain scans are in. Whether or not he is losing activity circuits in his emotional centers is inconclusive.

  Do you see what these images are saying?

  Yes. David Ambrose shows the tell tale signs of a psychopath. He is a walking case study of the kind of personalities the book Snakes in Suits was written about.

  Exactly. No wonder is investment legacy has been protected by Wall Street despite his demise.

  He put the word out to the street about his treatments?

  His old partner did. Despite their differences there is money he wants to recover. He needs to have David return to his old self to recuperate millions of dollars in investor assets. The partner moved to Chicago to get away from him but is willing to engage with David for the sake of money.

  Even at the expense of being responsible for bringing a sociopath back onto the street with his hands in other people’s bank accounts?

  Wall Street was built on criminal financial minds. It’s danced with many devils and used to it.

  Swindlers have been rampant all this time, why put a psychopath back in the game to add more damage to what guys like Madoff have done already? Greed ruins lives.

  “Do you dream Dr. Holloway?”

  “You don’t?”

  “Sleep and I aren’t intimately connected. Sophomore year in high school was the last time.”

  “A by-product of being an overscheduled 16 year old.”

  “Busy. After Ethan died. Less free time than most of my classmates. Grief was too uncomfortable.”

  “Did you notice experiencing nightmares after Ethan died?”

  “No. Only that I went from needing almost 10 hours of sleep a night to only 4 or 5. Tried to get more rest but then I would wake up feeling sleep drunk.”

  Transcript: Interview with Caroline Abrose, David’s sister in New York City (via Skype) on March 17

  How old were you when David lost his best friend Ethan?

  16 or 17. Ethan died during my junior year in High School.

  Did you notice any changes in David’s personality after Ethan died? Anything you remember within the first year after the event?

  Ethan was a good kid. I can’t imagine how his classmates were so hell bent on tormenting him. David’s friendship with Ethan was like a project. Like he was practicing how to have a friend that was his age. David treated Ethan as the person he was. When Ethan died, David seemed displaced, like he was left hanging with unfinished lessons left in the art of friendship. He was sincerely upset about the suicide. I believe David was shocked. He mourned differently from how a typical teenager would if their best and only friend died suddenly under tragic circumstances.

  Could you please describe for me how David acted that has you say that?

  Grief was like friendship. Something for him to practice. He did all the social etiquette expected of him. David didn’t just go through the motions of dealing with loss. I saw sadness in him. Yet there was a kind of opaque quality to his feelings. David was precise in how long he experienced each stage of grieving. Looking back, it was as if he read the book on the stages of loss, and implemented it because responding to death and sorrow wasn’t innate for him. David understands emotion first in his mind. Then he figures out how emotions operate in a sensory way. Without studying how to feel and manage feelings, David is inanimate emotionally. Like a frozen mannequin without an ounce of empathy.

  You thought this as a teenager about your younger brother?

  Not in these words. I just noticed from the time we were small children how much David wasn’t instinctive. He was objective towards everything. In pre-school his teachers described him as very observant and well behaved. They called his facial expressions as ‘the look of wonder’ and considered it adorable.

  What did you mean when you said he wasn’t instinctive?

  One time another kid just took his toy and pushed his bowl of cereal so it spilled onto the floor. The other child giggled out loud. David stared at the kid for almost a minute before he picked up the bowl and threw it at him. There was barely any emotion. Maybe David glared at the other child. He was mostly stoic during that incident. Emotions were obsolete for him. Maybe it’s his temperament. Our parents assumed he got that way because he inherited the German personality of their grandparents. All intellect and no emotion.

  Are other family members similar to David in that respect?

  Not really. Some are more serious than others but David is the only one who has this way about him. This stone like emotional state that needs to study and practice how to feel and figure out why he should feel something in a situation.

  Do you think that is why David sought out Ethan? Because he found someone his age who was sensitive and whom he could learn about emotional states from?

  Yes. Ethan was the perfect specimen. David’s experiment of sorts.

  Could you honestly say that your brother cared about his classmate?

  I do think he did. In the end.

  Did David talk a lot about another classmate at the time. A boy named Jason who was very popular and led the rest of the school in a bully campaign against

  A little bit. Jason was the school ringleader. He took advantage of it like most kids in that position do. I didn’t realize how bad it was until David was interviewed by the police after Ethan’s suicide.

  What exactly did David say to the police? Was there any noticeable change in how he handled his emotions in the months following all this tragedy?

  David became a busy body. He was never an idle person. We just never saw much of him. Our parents never pressured him to be involved in so many extra-curricular activities. It was his own choice to fill his social calendar like a CEO at 16. David never had time to sleep. I suspect he didn’t want to relax because emotions were foreign to him and he must have felt very intense feelings during that time.

  Did the lack of sleep take its toll on his health or grades?

  No. Not surprisingly he had such an active fast mind no one suspected he was sleep deprived.

  That is rare for a teenager. The majority needs a lot of sleep. So could you give me a free style description of how you would summarize David as he was growing up? How might you paint a picture of his personality to someone who is a complete stranger about him? What kind of child or adolescent would they have met if meeting David back then?

  David and I are only 18 months apart. Our parents were still newlyweds when they discovered my mother was expecting me. We already had the first family home in Rockaway, in Queens, by the time I was born. Before my first birthday, my mother was pregnan
t with David. Three years later our sister Daphne arrived and around my 10th birthday, my parents had the youngest of us four, Jason.

  So the entire family resided in Rockaway all your life?

  Yes. My parents home now, has been in the family since Jason was a baby. They have no intention of giving it up.

  I certainly would hold on to any property I owned in the New York area. Real estate is a rare asset there. Just like San Francisco. A piece of paper if it were a plot of land is worth $100,000 if its within the city limits.

  Outrageous isn’t it!

  So tell me again what kind of kid was David?