Forever Yours

by Daniel Glattauer

  “A jumble of voices. I see,” Reimann said, unimpressed. “What then?” Judith: “Then I panicked and took your pills.” Reimann: “Excuse me, but they’re not my pills. I’m just dependent on them, I’m sorry to say. I can’t get by without them. Which is what I have in common with most of my patients, by the way. So what did the tablets do to you?” Judith: “They took effect.” Reimann: “Well, yes, but how exactly?” Judith: “I was all fuzzy-headed and started to see ghosts. The family photos on my wall suddenly came to life. It was as if my brother Ali were really there in front of me. It was like a dream from the past, but very real.” Reimann: “Where did this dream take place?” Judith: “In my head.” Reimann: “There, too, but also out on the street, unfortunately, where you shared it with quite a number of passers-by.” Judith: “I don’t remember any of that. My memory conked out on the other side of the front door.” Reimann: “Where did it get going again?” Judith: “In hospital.” Reimann: “That’s late!” Judith: “Early enough, I reckon.” “True again. It’s fun having you as a patient,” Reimann concluded. “For me, too,” Judith replied. Both of them really meant it.

  The doctor stood up, put her hands on Judith’s shoulders, took a deep breath, like a gymnast about to perform on the asymmetric bars, and began her summing up: “You are an atypical patient, because you’re capable of being ironic about yourself in your situation. That doesn’t fit with the picture of someone who’s sick. And you’re a headstrong patient; you don’t like being helped. You’ve got a complicated knot in your head, but it seems as if nobody else is allowed near it. At the very least I’d like to offer you a simple piece of advice to take with you: seek out the beginning! Go back to where your problem started. My highly esteemed colleagues in psychotherapy will be happy to help you. You see, I’m not going to let you out without any assistance.” Judith nodded, as she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “And please, please, please!” Reimann called after her, “After they let you out, take your pills. Not mine, but yours, every day and exactly in the dose that’s been prescribed. Otherwise part three of your remote-controlled adventures will soon follow.”

  3

  Ever since he’d sat with Mum by her hospital bed, she wasn’t afraid of him anymore. But she was afraid of herself, which was no less unpleasant. Hannes was merely a screen on which to project her sick thoughts, and even though he’d vanished for good there was probably a worthy successor skulking around the corner. The “worm” in her head had evidently knotted into a large clump which tightened by the night. How could she get back to the root of her troubles, the beginning of the thread with which she had lost her way?

  She always felt at her best when resignation at the state she was in turned to apathy, for which the staff here fortunately had every means at their disposal. The more that doctors and nurses cared for the miserable course of her illness, the calmer she became. For it meant that she could stay on the ward for longer. She knew of no better protection against herself.

  After a few days she also started receiving visitors again in her tiny white apartment, whose austere interior was watched over by a starved philodendron. Gerd and all the others who were firmly banking on the resurrection of their old Judith. Or at the very least they were playing their roles more professionally each time, and the patient thanked them with a smile which she hoped looked less tortured than it felt.

  Nights in the clinic passed unspectacularly, even though when she awoke her deep sleep seemed a little contrived in retrospect. All the same, this prescription had fully silenced the voices. The crystal chandelier was the only thing which sometimes entered her head. And at some point she also remembered the name of the customer who had seized this treasure of hers: Isabella Permason. Why did she imagine she’d heard the name before or seen it written down? As this was the latest puzzle in her life she was happy to turn her mind to it. Afterwards there was always a part of her that was pleased she hadn’t yet solved the mystery. For in her short phases of thinking about Isabella Permason, she felt that at least something in her head was functioning. Most of the rest was low-level intellectual decommissioning, no higher than the mattress of her institutional bed which, if she had her way, she’d never ever leave.

  4

  The first colourful ray of hope to pierce the cloudiness of her in-patient existence was Bianca. “Bianca, you are life in all its radiance,” Judith croaked like a great-grandmother on her deathbed. “No offence,” Bianca replied, “but I can’t say the same about you. You look absolutely shattered. As I see it, what you need is a good dose of fresh air and a trip down the hairdresser’s.”

  Judith did not, however, envy her apprentice, for in her absence Mum was looking after the shop. “Is she quite hard work?” Judith asked. “No, not at all,” Bianca said. “In many respects your mum’s totally like you.” Judith: “One more compliment like that and you can go.”

  Later the conversation turned to Hannes. “Basti and I found out something,” Bianca said. “No, Bianca,” Judith replied. “I don’t want you to do that anymore. Please stop spying on him, it’s really quite unfair.” Judith told her how it was Hannes who’d found and taken her to hospital, and that he’d been the one at her bedside when she awoke. “Yeah, I know. Your mum told me,” Bianca said. “She won’t stop raving about him. I think she’s a bit gone on him herself, but then, why not? I mean, it’s a bit funny given the age difference, but so what? Look at Madonna and Demi Moore…” “He doesn’t frighten me anymore, and in my condition that’s the most important thing,” Judith said. Bianca asked: “Can I at least tell you what Basti found out? I’m so proud of him, he’ll make a proper detective some day, then he might star in a T.V. series.” There followed Bianca’s highly intricate discourse on luminous squares: “In the evening, when it’s already dark, Basti says, whenever anybody goes into the building where your Hannes, or should I say ex-Hannes lives, five squares light up, one above the other. Those are the lights in the stairwell, Basti says. You wait a while and then another square lights up somewhere else. If it’s a long wait, Basti says, a square at the top lights up, on the fifth floor, let’s say. If it lights up on the ground floor or maybe the first floor, Basti says, it’s only a short wait. ’Cause everyone who lives in the building’s got a window overlooking the road. Sometimes it’s bright, which is the light they turn on when they come in their front door, near the window. And sometimes the light’s dimmer, which means the window is further from the door, Basti says. But all of them light up in some way or another. And after that, other squares beside these ones light up too, maybe the kitchen or the sitting room or the bedroom where someone’s switched the light on. But one square at least has to light up when someone comes home. Basti says. Unless it was already on, in which case someone else was already at home. Perfectly logical so far, isn’t it?” Judith: “Perfectly.”

  Bianca: “Now, Hannes, our object, has his squares on the fourth floor, squares seven and eight, Basti worked it all out to the last detail. So listen to this: whenever our Hannes comes home at night, the five squares above one another light up, as they do with anyone else – all perfectly normal. Then Basti looks at squares seven and eight on the fourth floor. He waits ten seconds, thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes – nothing. Five minutes – still nothing. Ten minutes – still nothing. Fifteen minutes…” “Still nothing,” Judith murmured.

  Bianca: “Exactly! Basti’s like, he can wait until kingdom come, squares seven and eight on the fourth floor never light up. That’s what he observed. Interesting, eh? So what this means is that Hannes doesn’t turn on any lights when he goes into his flat, and he doesn’t turn them on later, either. You see, he never turns them on. He’s practically in the dark the whole time. Fascinating, eh?” Judith: “Indeed.” Bianca: “’Cause he does turn on the stairwell lights. So he’s not afraid of the light, only in his own flat, he keeps that nice and dark. Do you understand that, Judith?” “No,” Judith replied, although she neglected to say that she didn’
t want to understand either, and if she did, then the solution was bound to be awfully banal: maybe the bulbs had gone in Hannes’ flat.

  “I take my hat off to Basti, his detective work is excellent,” she said. “But let’s stop now and leave Hannes in peace, O.K.?” “O.K.,” Bianca said. “Pity, though, ’cause I’m sure there are more secrets to uncover. But if you’re not afraid of him anymore and he’s not bothering you anymore, then of course it’s pointless.”

  5

  After two weeks they said she could leave the clinic because in theory her episode ought to have long passed, and in practice it was the medicines which mattered most. In truth they probably needed to free up beds for new psychos; traditionally it got pretty crowded on the acute wards around All Saints’ Day. Judith wanted to lodge a protest against her eviction with Jessica Reimann, but she had gone to a psychiatry conference in the Alps. It wasn’t just the patients who needed the occasional dose of mountain air.

  Judith was allowed to enjoy institutional board and lodging over the weekend until Monday, when Mum came to take her home. Hadn’t there once been an American girl who tried to justify a killing spree by saying she didn’t like Mondays? Fortunately, the strong pills – including a new white one for depression – were so effective that they blunted and fogged the experience of her mother, muffling the tone of suffering and pity.

  Back home, in these anything-but-homely rooms with their nests of voices and noises, Judith crept straight under the throw on the sofa. Mum spent a while vacuuming, wiping and churning up dust, brought her daughter a cup of unsweetened herbal tea – as a signal to Judith of just what a bad state she was in – and then posed the entirely valid question of what was going to happen now. Judith: “No idea, Mum. I’m just very tired.” Mum: “There’s no way you can be left alone in this state.” Judith: “Yes, I can, it’s O.K., I just want to sleep.” Mum: “I’m going to move in with you.” Judith: “Don’t say things like that. You know how mentally fragile I am.” Mum: “I’ll stay tonight and we’ll talk about it again tomorrow.” Judith: “O.K., Mum, goodnight!” Mum: “But it’s four o’clock in the afternoon!”

  PHASE THIRTEEN

  1

  Work was out of the question for the next few weeks. In fact, pretty much everything was out of the question. Thanks to her friends who stood in as carers, Mum, Western medicine, and herself a little bit too, all Judith had to do was take her psychotropic drugs. She got into the habit of taking more of the white pills than prescribed, first because they really were tiny, and second because they made her flabby brain cells feel as if they were cooling in a mountain stream on a day of forty-degree heat.

  This sensible spell of inactivity at home included three hours a week with Arthur Schweighofer, an extremely likeable, quite good-looking, casually dressed and, moreover, single psychotherapist, who Gerd had found for her. The patience he displayed in talking about everything, not only about her and her problems, which nobody could quite get to the bottom of anyway, was impressive. If the knot in her head were ever to loosen, or even untangle altogether – a fairly unlikely prospect – how she would love to embark on a little circumnavigation of the globe with Arthur! One could tell from listening to him that he was a true adventurer. And listening was what she liked doing best, often for hours on end.

  So that she could survive staying at home, someone had to be there with her by dusk at the latest. To begin with her friends took turns. Tuesdays were good for Lara, for example, because that was Valentin’s bowling night. She couldn’t stand the stench of schnapps-infused beer-breath in bed after midnight, so she’d sleep at Judith’s, watching over her voices, without knowing it, of course.

  Mum was there throughout the weekends, which triggered an automatic increase in Judith’s consumption of the tiny white pills. Although Mum tried to make out as if every day spent with her beloved daughter was like a holiday, the contortions of her mouth and the exclamation mark furrowed on her brow suggested an admission that she’d failed in her bringing up of Judith, and bitter regret that instead of enjoying a well-deserved retirement she now had to look after a desolate lighting shop and a crazy adult daughter.

  Only for a few minutes each day did Judith succeed in putting her brain into gear and addressing her situation. She fixed on Jessica Reimann’s instruction to get to the root of her trouble; to undo the knot she had to find the beginning of the cord. But she rapidly became entangled in a web of childhood memories and flashbacks from her adolescence, and when the search caused her brain cells to overheat, she’d take another dip in the mountain stream.

  2

  The oft-mentioned leap in her relationship with Hannes had finally taken place. Now he was unequivocally on her side. He’d made a few timid approaches via text message, offering help. And no, Judith didn’t object to his paying regular visits. She basically didn’t object to anything these days, but more importantly he preferred coming at weekends when Mum was there, and he was brilliant at neutralising her. But most importantly of all, like a form of alternative medicine his presence did her the world of good.

  She didn’t understand much about homeopathy, but wasn’t it about making you better with small doses of exactly what had made you ill? Hannes was equipped with the same voice as that surreal night-time apparition which had repeatedly driven Judith to madness. Whenever she heard the real Hannes talking to Mum in the kitchen about spatial planning, statics, construction materials and the design of coffee machines, Judith’s ghosts were expelled and to some extent things slotted back into their rightful order. What’s more, the real Hannes had a richer vocabulary than his ghostlike counterpart, which had only ever hammered three or four phrases into her mind.

  Of all her friends and visitors, Hannes was by far the most adroit and easy-going in his dealings with her, the patient. He was in a consistently good mood and could effortlessly adapt himself to her complicated psyche, the erratic shifts between highs and lows, lethargy and alertness. His voice never resonated with the slightest hint of reproach, no matter how miserable the state she was in, how hard it was to get close to her, or how little she gave of herself.

  While Gerd and the others struggled to hide their despair at Judith’s apathy, and often failed to do so, for Hannes it seemed the most natural thing in the world. He took Judith as she was – how could she be anything other than “herself”? She wasn’t ashamed of her illness in his presence, nor did she have a bad conscience about being reliant on someone else’s help. When he was there she gradually became reconciled to her lot; in fact, she was warming to it by the day.

  3

  Soon he started showing up at her flat more frequently, on weekdays too. He would offer to stand in for friends who began to announce they were tied up with other things; already in mid-November they were citing pre-Christmas stress as an excuse for their less regular visits. In all likelihood they were disappointed, even irritated that Judith’s mind wasn’t showing any inclination to become more lucid, that they couldn’t have a conversation with her anymore, and that she’d often spend hours staring at the walls without so much as opening her mouth. But what should she talk to them about? She was living out empty days and vacant nights. None of them could imagine what a strain that was. And she was supposed to talk about it as well?

  Hannes was different. He didn’t demand anything of her, but went about his own business. He decorated tables and rearranged shelves, cleaned the kitchen (especially when it was already clean), listened to music, whistled earworms which she recognised from her schooldays, surfed T.V. channels looking for serious news programmes, leafed through books or – more often – her photograph albums, made notes and sketches, drew up small designs. All this without letting Judith out of his sight. He always stayed in close proximity, giving her endless winks of encouragement, forever smiling at her. But, and this is where he differed so gratifyingly from all the others, he rarely said a word, thus also sparing her the burden of having to reply to that question of how she was feeling. He clearly
knew better than she did herself.

  When he stayed the night, she didn’t notice. Presumably he slept on the sofa. At any rate, he was always up before her, the smell of coffee wafting from the kitchen. All traces of his overnight presence had vanished.

  *

  Things only got out of control on one of those November nights when her mind was shrouded in thick fog. She may have forgotten to take one of her medicines the night before, or swallowed a double dose by mistake. Perhaps Judith had drifted into a nightmare, which had wrenched her from her cotton-wool half-consciousness and awakened in her the old fears that she was being persecuted and driven out onto the street by voices and noises. She thought she could already hear the peculiar resonance of the metal sheets and the strange jangling of the crystals on her Spanish chandelier. But before the voice that imitated Hannes could say “Such a scrum”, the noises fell silent. The bedside light went on. Judith felt a large, cool hand touch her feverishly hot forehead. Then he bent over her and whispered: “Calm down, Darling. Everything’s O.K. I’m here. Nothing’s going to happen to you.” “Did you hear it too?” she asked, shaking with fear. “No,” he replied. “I didn’t hear anything. You probably had a bad dream.” Judith: “Will you stay here with me until it gets light?” Hannes: “Is that what you’d like?” Judith: “Yes, please stay. Just till the sun comes up.”

  4

  Her next appointment with Jessica Reimann, which she’d been anticipating with some trepidation, took place at the end of November. Mum went with her, but even that couldn’t make the situation any worse. Judith had packed a wash bag, cosmetics, a few nighties and some T-shirts. She reckoned she’d be admitted into hospital on the spot. In any event she had no desire to appear better than she was, even if Reimann deserved to see a more improved picture than the one that was on offer.