Charisma: A Novel

by Barbara Hall

  “Well,” Emily says, “I don’t care that much about her. Honestly, Harry Potter could have kidnapped my husband in his current state.”

  “What is his current state?”

  “He is undergoing treatment. Shock treatment. It’s extreme, I know. But you know why you take extreme measures? For extreme conditions.”

  David feels his head swimming from the scotch. A fog is moving in.

  Emily leans across the table.

  “My husband is dangerous,” she says.

  “Dangerous,” David repeats. Most people talk about danger as if they know anything about it. They mostly don’t. People mostly aren’t dangerous, in his experience, the way others talk about it. Others are mostly talking about sarin gas in the subway or pipe bombs in high school. That happens rarely. Most people are only dangerous to themselves, which is a certain kind of danger, but the lesser kind.

  Emily says, “Look, do you think I would have agreed to give my husband shock treatments if he were just kinda sad? What kind of person do I look like to you?”

  She looks like a very nice, very controlled, very optimistic kind of person.

  “Shock treatments?” David repeats.

  “ECT.”

  “He is getting ECT treatments?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he requested them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was sick of his head. I was sick of it, too. We tried every other thing.”

  David lets that information land though he has no idea what to do with it. He decides to return to the situation at hand.

  “What makes you think he is dangerous?” he asks.

  Emily takes a deep breath. She says, “I picked him up from the strip club that night. Jumbo’s Clown Room. We sat in the car for a long time, talking about how he felt.”

  “Okay.”

  She leans over the table. There is some kind of disco music thumping from somewhere. Emily seems separate from it somehow, and yet distantly connected, as if it’s a soundtrack to their conversation.

  She says, “I’m sure he didn’t mean to do what he did. It’s not like him.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He choked me. I don’t think he knew he was doing it.”

  David wants to have a big reaction but he doesn’t. His scientific brain has kicked in. He tries to keep a neutral expression. Her eyes are racing across the tabletop as if she’s reading it. He knows she’s remembering.

  “What stopped him?” David asks.

  She shrugs. “He just suddenly stopped. It was like he came out of a trance. I don’t know how to say this. I’ll just say it. It was like he was possessed.”

  David nods.

  “And then?”

  She shrugs again. “I drove him to the hospital and here we are.”

  David has his drink in front of him now and he’s happy to concentrate on it.

  “Did you ever think of leaving him?” he asks.

  She looks at him, confused. “Why?”

  “He was violent toward you.”

  “I told you, it wasn’t really him.”

  “You don’t actually believe in possession.”

  “No.”

  “So it was him.”

  “It was his disease.”

  “Do we know what that is exactly?”

  “Bipolar Type II.”

  “Okay.”

  “Look, I am not happy being married to a crazy person. But I took a vow. And this woman who has him now? No vow. She has no idea what she’s up against.”

  “Up against?”

  “I have no idea what he’s going to be like when the meds wear off. She might be in danger from me when we find her.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “She stole my mentally ill husband.”

  “She’s mentally ill as well, Emily. I know it’s hard but you have to show her the same compassion you do your husband.”

  He is disturbed by the way his heart is hammering, the way he can feel his face flushing. The need to defend Sarah is more than he can comprehend. And he is sure that it is showing on his face and that Emily is reading it. But she’s not. She is staring beyond him, toward an impulse to cry.

  He wants to tell her he will fix it. He wants to say he will make it all right. For the first time in his professional career he wants to go beyond what science is telling him. Science is telling him this is a big, dangerous mess. But he ignores that data for the sake of the woman sitting next to him and, in some regard, for the sake of himself.

  “We are going to find them,” he says. “It’s going to be all right.”

  Emily leans against his shoulder. And now he knows he is in it.

  Chapter 25

  I take a walk among the giant trees in the gloaming. They are imposing, like bullies. I feel dwarfed and a little imprisoned by them. I feel like a character in a Grimm’s fairy tale. I don’t know why people find this atmosphere relaxing. But really it’s just my state of mind. I appreciate the sounds of the space, a fluttering and a dripping and a silence so profound it sounds like a voice. It’s that silence I want to be with. Because the silence is a voice. That’s where God is. I have lost Him. I have lost the guides. I am the one who moved away and I don’t know how I did that.

  I sit on a bench. I have to think. No, I have to stop thinking. I have to listen. I have to wait.

  Nothing fills the void.

  I can’t help thinking.

  Joan of Arc. She stopped hearing the voices, too. Few people know this about the story. After she crowned the Dauphine, which was her original and only task, she continued to fight. She led her army into another village to eradicate the presence of the British. No one asked her to do that. It was her own plan. She was getting ahead of God. She decided she could take it from there. And this was why she was captured. If she had finished her task and gone home or waited for her next task, it might have gone differently. She wasn’t executed for hearing voices or even going into battle. She was executed for wearing men’s clothing. If she had agreed to stop they would have let her go. She died over wardrobe issues.

  But not really. Really she died because she had fallen in love with her identity and could not give it up. She was brave and boisterous in her trials. She was sarcastic. She didn’t bat an eye. It was an authority to whom she did not answer. She was convinced she was going to be released. By now she was having her visions again, though they didn’t speak, just showed up to comfort her. They never told her she was going to be released but she assumed this. And when the trial kept going and her prospects looked bleak she began to panic and she railed against God. She attempted to escape by jumping out a window. She was slightly injured and recaptured.

  The last few days before she was convicted, the visions came more consistently. And there’s some indication that they told her to accept her fate. By the time they put her in the fire, she had surrendered to them and to her death, and there are reports that she was ecstatic in the fire. She was seeing Heaven.

  I don’t know how we can know these things. Some of it is from the trial transcript but most is from oral history. It makes a lovely story that she was ecstatic in the fire but believers, or even good storytellers, would have made her that way.

  The part I understand is where she stopped listening and took things into her own hands. Because I am doing that now. I got ahead of God. I am sitting here in the redwood prison waiting for him to catch up.

  I hear a sound that is not a forest sound. Or maybe it is. Sounds mix together here. Birdsong mixed with the snapping of twigs mixed with external danger mixed with internal peace. But this is a strange shuffling, like an animal engaged in a hunt. I look up and see Willie looming in the fog and the fractured light.

  Chapter 26

  David doesn’t want to admit why he is sitting in the waiting room of Dr. Heather Hensen. He is telling himself that it is a desperate attempt to find Sarah, based on what Emily has told him. A woman in a fragile
state, a former patient, is wandering around in the world with a dangerous man in an even more unstable condition. He has to know that he tried. He has to make a move, even one as unlikely as this.

  But there’s something else to it. There is a feeling. He can’t describe it. It’s more like a compulsion and David Sutton does not get compelled. He has often felt so in charge of his impulses that he has had to reach to understand his patients with chemical dependencies and other kinds of compulsions. He has to meet them on a logical terrain, a landscape of scientific evidence. It is his own version of a leap of faith since he can’t experience it. But now he is experiencing it. He had to come here. His attempts to argue with himself were futile. He applies no credence to what Heather Hensen does and he knows she won’t be able to help him break down the puzzle of where Sarah has gone but it doesn’t seem to matter.

  He’s terrified that he might confess some of this to Heather Hensen. He’s terrified that this will turn into some kind of therapy session for him. He feels sick when he imagines himself opening up to her and making himself vulnerable to someone he considers a charlatan at best, a self-deceived mental case at worst. His stomach is roiling and he is thinking of leaving when the door opens and there she is.

  “Dr. Sutton. I had a feeling I was going to hear from you again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’ve been on my mind.”

  “Why?”

  She smiles that guileless smile that employs her whole being. Her gray-blonde hair is swept back into a ponytail and her eyes are green, like sea glass, and for the first time it hits him that she looks very much like Sarah Lange. They have the same features but their demeanors differ greatly. Sarah seems more grounded, more serious, with a penetrating gaze and an unnerving calm. Heather seems like she might float away and take you with her. David doesn’t know where these kinds of thoughts are coming from. They are new to him.

  “Maybe we can go into my office before we begin the debate?” Heather asks.

  He stands and tucks his head and walks past her without looking at her.

  Once he’s in the calm room with the soft light and the trickling water, he feels even less himself. Something is blooming inside of him, a strange sense of calm mixed with excitement mixed with dread, all fighting to take charge. He feels as if something is awakening in him that he hasn’t known since childhood. He cannot name it. He does not want to name it.

  “Let’s start from the beginning,” she says, sitting across from him. She is wearing perky athletic clothes, like last time. Why does this irritate him? Or is that irritation? He can’t name the feeling, like all the other feelings warring it out inside him.

  Mad, sad, glad, afraid. These are the options they sometimes boil it down to for their patients. To help them narrow the field. But why those, he wonders. And why only one positive option? There are so many more emotions and he suddenly finds he can’t identify his own and he also suddenly realizes that emotions are forces, like energies, that invade and take over. Not just a wiring in the brain, a conversation between neurotransmitters. It feels like something greater than that. It feels. That is the point.

  “The beginning?” he asks her, finally raising his eyes to hers.

  “Yes. How are you?”

  “Oh. I’m…”

  He can’t finish the sentence. She lets him off the hook. “How is Sarah?”

  “She has disappeared. She ran away from the facility with another patient.”

  “Yes, I heard. But I assumed you’d found her.”

  “Why would I find her?”

  “Well, I mean the police. Someone.”

  “No. No one has found her. But it’s a difficult situation and I was hoping you could help.”

  She cocks her head. Her smile disappears but her face is still open and welcoming. Her resting expression is one of grace. This is the best word he can find.

  “How can I help?” she asks.

  “I’m not sure yet. I thought we might start with her favorite places. Retreats. Anywhere she liked to go back when you knew her. Did that ever come up?”

  “Sure. She did like to go away to write and work. She had a handful of favorite spots.”

  “Do you remember?”

  “New York was her favorite.”

  David shakes his head. “I don’t think she went to New York. It has to be driving distance.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’ve checked with the airlines.”

  “Have the cops followed her credit card transactions?”

  “No. The cops aren’t really interested anymore. It takes resources to follow up and this one isn’t high priority.”

  Heather barely moves. She watches him for a long moment, then recrosses her legs in a manner that is meant to signify nothing.

  “Well, she likes the desert. She sometimes went to Palm Springs, Ojai. Sometimes drove up the coast to Big Sur or Carmel.”

  “How far north did she go?”

  Heather shrugs. “She never mentioned anything beyond Carmel.”

  “Carmel,” he says. “Was that a favorite spot?”

  “She didn’t really have a favorite spot.”

  David sighs and looks at his hands. Heather leans forward in her chair. “Why are you taking this on yourself?” she asks.

  David feels exposed and blames himself for feeling that way. He avoids her eyes.

  “Look, I know,” he says, trying to locate his professional voice. “I know her whereabouts are not really my responsibility.”

  “And yet,” Heather says.

  “And yet it feels like my responsibility.”

  “Because?”

  “Stop,” he says. “I didn’t come here for a session.”

  Heather leans back in her chair.

  “What did you come here for then?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. To try. To do something. To help. I don’t know.”

  She waits. David thrashes around in his own brain.

  “I was looking for…I don’t know…I had questions. The two of you seemed to have a common language”

  “Really.”

  “Yes.”

  Heather shifts in her chair and addresses her ponytail and takes a sip of water and stares at him.

  “Do you have a romantic interest in her?”

  “No, this isn’t about sex.”

  “I didn’t say sex. I said romance.”

  He actually rolls his eyes but it doesn’t faze her.

  “Are you making an ideal out of her, Dr. Sutton? Damsel in distress, dragon in the cave, that kind of thing?”

  “No. I don’t do that.”

  She smiles and crosses her arms and he has a bizarre impulse to shake her. He doesn’t understand this effect she is having on him. She is pushing buttons that have never been pushed. He has to look away from her and he knows she is noticing that, too.

  “Look,” she says, “Sarah is a magnet.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “She is magnetic. It’s inside her. She is inner lit. People gravitate to her. Especially broken people.”

  “I’m not broken. I’m her doctor.”

  “I didn’t say you.”

  “And she’s not magical.”

  “I didn’t say that. But she has had a metaphysical experience. She has glimpsed something. She knows something.”

  “She is certifiably insane.”

  “When I worked with her she was not.”

  “Was she talking to guides then?”

  Heather stares at him as she processes her thoughts and chooses her words carefully.

  “That is more common than you’d imagine,” she says.

  “Really.”

  “Because a lot of people tap into a strong inner guidance. They have prophetic dreams or they see a dead loved one or hear a detached voice. Most people, I’d say, have had some kind of experience like that.”

  “I disagree.”

  “We are like radios, Dr. Sutton, and sometimes
the lower and higher frequencies break through. Some people are more sensitive than others to those frequencies. Machines are made in our image. How could they be otherwise? How could you think that particles and waves and electrical impulses bounce all around you and operate or affect your machinery but not you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Heather leans forward. “What if Sarah’s not crazy?”

  “She’s suicidal.”

  “What if she’s suicidal because people keep telling her she’s crazy?”

  “She’s homesick for Heaven.”

  “Maybe that’s just her language for ‘exhausted.’ Maybe she’s a poet.”

  David looks at her. “I had a thought like that.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. I had a thought that maybe she abandoned her purpose.”

  “Purpose? You believe in something like that?”

  He thinks of Joe and his talk of charisms. He feels confused and out of sorts. Heather is not helping matters, the way her stare is bearing down on him.

  He shakes his head. He feels her watching him. “You know what they tell us, in the earliest stages of our profession.”

  “They tell us a lot of things,” she says.

  “People would rather die than change,” he says.

  She nods, pressing her fingers to her lips. Something about this motion encourages him.

  “But maybe it’s not that people would rather die than change. Maybe people would rather die than…” His voice trails off.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Than step into themselves.”

  His voice doesn’t even sound like his. But the way her eyes light up makes him want to own that voice and that thought.

  “People would rather die,” she says, “than be free?”

  He shakes his head vigorously. “No,” he says. “Than belong.”

  She thinks about it. He can’t bear the weight of her thinking about it.

  He sighs and begins gathering his things.

  “Doesn’t your struggle ever wear you out, Dr. Sutton?”

  “Of course. Doesn’t yours?”

  “Yes, but I know how to step out of it.”

  “That must be fun for you.”

  “And I’m not in charge of it.”

  “So you’re at the mercy of it?”