by Amity Gaige
A week or two at Maynard had gone by before Charlie realized that, sitting as he was, in a crappy, unlikely office at a shared desk, he was there—at the seam. He was there. Shocked by the notion, he tried to shake off his doubt, his tentativeness, and found himself inclining forward on the front legs of his chair. How are you? He began to listen differently, to the shades and underbellies of the answers. He saw that even incoherent exchanges were composed of information. And, like smugglers in prison, these people were trying to give him something to take out with him. They were trying to tell him what it was like. To be crazy. Years of studying at the top of his class and students like Charlie still did not have much of a clue. His preciousness annoyed him. He was there, but could not imagine any further. In realizing this, he kept brushing up against a distrust of sane people such as himself. He remembered his history, his book knowledge: It was sane people who had developed insulin therapy, electroshock. It was sane people who developed surgical lobotomies. (And they actually gave that guy the Nobel Prize.) It was sane people who, upon realizing the insanity of all these procedures, eventually decided to deinstitutionalize people they had ruined, scuttling them into buses with a fifty-dollar bill and a pocket comb apiece. Greyhound Therapy. Reaganomics. (And now the news was out that Reagan himself would die demented, a man who in another circumstance might have been left weeping on this doorstep.) But now, in response to this heartlessness, a new kind of paternalism was growing: some people without a stitch of hands-on experience were calling to create new laws that would make the treatment of insanity completely voluntary. As if a psychotic person could be made free and happy by the simple, lordly permission of the law.
Was that what he could do—listen? He had ears, enormous ears. He would turn his head this way and that in the small hospital bathroom mirror. His assessments took longer than they should have, but he listened. He was good at that. There was something about him. The tearful mother leaned back in her chair. The patient sighed.
One day late that summer, Charlie found himself sitting across from a young man who looked strikingly familiar. The boy was nineteen, with handsome dewy black eyes and the physicality of an athlete, despite the fact that he was emaciated beneath his clothes, sitting upstairs in the medical wing with an IV. Charlie grinned, about to say hello—Hello Mark—but with the boy’s hand in his grip, he shuddered, for his brother Mark lived far away, in Colorado, in memory, and this boy was not he. He was a wrestler, this boy explained, well he used to be. Had Charlie read the boy’s name in the sports section? the boy’s father asked beside him. State champion in his weight last year. Charlie smiled, looking at the boy. Congratulations, he said. Glad to meet you.
The boy told his story. And when his parents left, he told the rest of it. Charlie had a difficult time ending the story of the boy who looked like his brother. He had a hard time turning around and heading back to Admitting, leaving the kid to the other social workers in the psych ward who did not yet know him and to whom he did not look familiar. He did not like the thought of the boy alone at mealtimes. The boy was very real to Charlie. Realer than his brother, finally. Through him, Charlie saw that darkness did not float around hunting for the weak and susceptible, but was there already, on earth, born with each of us, born within the most beautiful of us.
The patient files were right there in the break room, a wall of metal cabinets full of session notes from ward therapy and medical notes. Charlie had seen other people perusing these files. He had seen many other people perusing the files, yet he waited until he was alone to do so himself. Each day, he read approvingly of the wrestler’s progress. He felt consoled that the boy was still telling his story, still talking. He read approvingly of the “strong observing ego,” that self which was born when the firstborn self dies, and which could save a man. If the boy could observe himself, then he could measure himself as sane or insane—he could be like the sundial, which in combination with the sun makes time.
One day after work, Charlie paused at the revolving doors with his car keys in hand. He turned around, climbed the stairs to the third floor and tapped on the glass of the nurse’s station. The charge nurse, beset with adult acne and a crush on Charlie, buzzed him in, and noted him as a visitor, because after all in-take clinicians weren’t known to take such a continued interest in clients on the ward. “He’s in the TV room,” she whispered. When the boy saw him, he smiled his slight, tweaked smile and stood, offering his hand, and Charlie enjoyed watching him move his renewed body, reaching up to the TV to turn on NASCAR. They watched the race and laughed and talked a little.
One day soon after, passing a window that overlooked the parking lot, Charlie saw the boy walk across the parking lot with his gym bag in hand, his father’s hand on his shoulder, get into a long, clean American car, and drive away.
And that was that. And it wasn’t. He could feel these people lodged in his throat, in the shade pools of his heart. He carried them around, knowledge he had swallowed. Yet, with each click of the lock, they kept coming. They did not stop. He wondered if, deep inside, he thought they would stop coming if he was good enough. He sensed that he was rapidly using the store of strength that had been placed in his soul many years ago in Mattoon as in a granary. He only had a little fear about it. He was hoping he would soon learn the more practiced and detached behaviors of the staff at Maynard. Such behaviors were unnatural to him, although he understood them academically and agreed with them.
A woman’s wet hair. What was taken away during the day was given back in the bower of Alice’s crow-black, shower-wet hair. In bed, above him, she bent over his chest like a priestess, endowing a long-dreamed-of feminine absolution. Every domestic hour was a reminder. She was a wellspring of unaffected passion and sympathy. She was spiritually larger than he somehow. Quiet and uncluttered, she was free from the selfish need to fascinate. She was Alice.
She loved stories. Charlie had never met anyone with as great a capacity for hearing and standing stories. And everything would have been all right if he could only tell her the stories that were collecting in his throat and heart. Prepared to repeat each secret, he had turned to her many nights, her face orchid white in the moonlight. But aside from being an amateur’s move, it was actually illegal for him to divulge anything that his patients told him in Admitting. There was a whole department in the hospital devoted to the squeezing out of information, and a law awaiting a vote in the legislature was making it worse, the hospital abuzz with the dread of it. They had temporarily locked the files in the break room. As someone who had always followed rules, Charlie had assumed that the rules were just, rather than seeing that the rules suited him.
But now, for the first time, there were two rules in competition—the rules of the hospital, and the rules of their married world. At work, Charlie sometimes looked around him, suspicious. His fellow clinicians were married. They had friends and mothers and drinking buddies. He thought that surely they must confess it all sometimes. Sometimes they must tell long, indulgent, and completely revealing stories. He straightened. He promised himself that he would speak to his supervisor about this temptation. But his meetings with the famous Stephen Gregorian often took place in hallways and devolved into sports talk and their shared admiration for the Chicago Bulls. Gregorian was intimidating and Charlie wanted to appear special to him. Apparently, the man had simply accepted the rumor that Charlie could handle anything, and oftentimes clapped Charlie on the shoulder when he came down to Admitting, as if Charlie was his right-hand man, not some green recruit straight out of graduate school. He needed help. He did not need help.
At night, for months, at home in that crow’s nest, Charlie attempted to speak to Alice in clinical generalities. But it became too frustrating. For the suffering was not in the generalities. The suffering was in the details. It was in the names. Hal—Hal Kramer. Paula Helen Lucas. Vincent Santopadre. The hometowns—New Bedford, Scituate, Ware. It was in the color of a mother’s dress. The name of a cat or a car or a doll. Ho
lding it in kept it small and tight and unreal. The telling honored it, and turned it into beauty.
There was a young man who had developed the habit of talking to himself. He was a striking young man, with black hair and black eyes, and a closely cropped haircut that showed the form of his well-shaped head. He was a good student and a very good wrestler. His coaches liked his focus, his timing, and his appreciation of obscure rules. He had been accepted at the state university on a full wrestling scholarship for the following September. But first, everyone was counting on him to win the State Championships in his weight.
He was popular in high school. He had girls climbing all over him like ants on a split peach, and he was cordial with them, but not encouraging, which only made them crazier for him, until walking down the halls at school he had acquired an almost mythic glow. As he passed, girls would hush and lean against their lockers thinking, Just one night, Give me just one night of your life. They would have impaled themselves on swords for just one night with him, and you could almost hear all those pieces of sinew that still endeared them to notions of chastity frying up.
This boy had never been a talkative person. He preferred to express himself not through talking but on the mat, or on a field with a ball, and sometimes even with a pencil or a paintbrush. Which was why it was odd when he began talking to himself, that his downfall would be inaugurated by an urge to speak. The first time he experienced it was on that winter, at the end of long practices, Coach hoarse from shouting—a kind of lonely, far away, extra self—
Kramer! Coach would shout. Kramer! You think you can win with escapes? You going to try this horseshit with McMurray at States?
And the self would respond, not with insight, not even with an answer to Coach, but with a breathy, queer, studied commentary: right hand, left hand, your head, mat, space, moving.… This muttering someone was not himself, but was so like himself that he first thought of the presence as Myself. And perhaps because he was so focused, so sure to win, the coaches crowding out the sky even as he dreamt, this narrator of his life lost its ability to recede. Instead, it made itself useful during the day. Walk down the hall, Myself would say to him at school. Open that box. Look inside.
His habit of hearing a separate thinking self within himself was something Hal could hide. States was fast approaching. He had to cut weight. He had to focus. He had to best his best efforts. As he walked down the hallways, those hallways he lit with his own beauty, Hal looked hard into the faces of the other boys, sure that they also harbored secret soul cultures, strange private worlds, intricately folded, each man a beautifully, cruelly folded castle of paper.
Hal’s English teacher was new to the school. He was a young artiste type who spent half the class turned away from the students talking miserably to the window. The young artiste looked out the window with such faithfulness that it seemed his lost future was out there in the parking lot, leering out of a car. The artiste assigned the students a writer called Proust. Proust was not on the Cross High reading list. Proust said a lot of things. Proust went on and on. Pretty much everybody fell asleep. Hal himself didn’t normally listen too hard in English, a subject in which you could sew up a B just for knowing the basic and unchanging rules of grammar, but that semester, when Myself began to whisper, and States was coming, and the world itself was endowed with some astral, kaleidoscopic significance, Hal listened to Proust. One thing Proust said—and this was a line that affected Hal—he said, It’s a wonder we wake up in the morning and remember who we are.
This statement made Hal feel better about waking up in the morning and not remembering who he was. It was hard to be precise. Because soon, the pressure inside him, having nowhere to go, started to spin, in a circular, downward, centrifugal motion, the energy inside him growing, becoming bolder, more quixotic, and less reliable, sometimes making grunting or crying noises instead of its normal, objective commentaries: Ram. Crush. Rush. Faster. Faster! Cockroach! On the mat, where he had normally felt most like himself, Hal now felt his pupils loosen, his mind expand like a lung. Across from him, his practice partner’s eyes glowed like tropical fishes. The pipe-woven gymnasium ceiling had no end.
On good days, he believed himself endowed with a special power, as if he had forced his hand into the core of meaning and turned it inside out like a shirt. Endless thoughts filled the increasingly formless hours of his day. He felt himself becoming—despite his fruitlessness—a kind of intellectual. He had always liked the dampered quiet of libraries, but now he sought them out, shouldering his backpack, removing books between which he saw a very private connection. His English teacher, the miserable artiste, had noticed him hanging around after class and encouraged his reading, and Hal found that reading and then drawing little pictures of clouds comforted him more than wrestling, and so once or twice he stayed home from practice in order to read and draw pictures. When his coaches became angry, which normally would have worked with a boy as mannerly as Hal, he snapped back at them, wiping the spit from his lips and checking to make sure it was spit and not blood, such was the feeling of rupture or deflowerment by the anger coming up his throat.
After all, one could only go so long without screaming. On bad days, he felt that someone had raped him and impregnated him with spider babies. He did not want to be abandoned and left to raise a thousand babies. Soon he found he was no longer able to read Proust (for the sentences kept dropping into the binding), so he went to the library where he found an abridged version of certain Greek mythologies with pictures, pictures that depicted birthing of whole adult beings from the heads and knees of other adults. He was only slightly relieved to find a precedent for such phenomena. He was equally distressed to discover that he had begun to talk in ways few people could understand, using all those wasted literary allusions, and he came to see that knowledge might comfort a person personally but it alienates him socially.
As when, on a date with the butterscotch-haired Miranda R___, the finest of a young group of pretty and lustful sophomores, Hal tried to explain the story of the swan raping Leda. They had gone to Friendly’s for dinner and then driven to an overlook where they were greeted by a cold ocular moon, the sort of moon that made people prone to telling strange stories. Looking out the windshield, Hal began telling the story of Leda and the swan, but Myself must have finished it, telling it edgewise and slantwise, and adding some things he’d been keeping to Himself, because there was something about Miranda, maybe, that was possibly sympathetic. But by the time he thought to look over at Miranda, she was crying. She was weakly trying to scratch her way out of the locked car. Instead of feeling sorry, Hal sat there and watched her, patient, surprised, as she ripped up her fingernails over nothing, over a story.
Miranda. Miranda, he said gently.
But she wouldn’t listen.
Miranda, are you crying because you think that a swan is going to rape you? Listen, a swan is not going to rape you. Miranda. You should get more used to hearing crazy stuff. Crazy stuff won’t hurt you because you’re still so young and pretty and your hair—he reached over and touched it fondly, paternally—your hair is like spiderwebs
He said this all very softly.
He said this all very softly but Miranda continued to sob. She was trying to pinch up the door lock, but it kept slipping out from between her fingers.
Hal leaned his head backward against the glass, watching her. With some sympathy, he saw that Miranda was infinite Mirandas. She herself was split and refracted and folded, one moment leaning against her locker with hawk eyes and the next moment blubbering senselessly. Maybe, he thought, everyone had a Myself, and a person was not one person but a conversation, and that maybe love and human friendship with others was not possible because how could you share that conversation, and maybe even the ultimate love was the love between you and yourself, no matter how sick and dark and suffocating, like Proust in his padded rooms with his book and his nosebleeds and his happiness.
Relax, Miranda, he said. Hey. It’s all ri
ght. Just concentrate on your objective and imagine success. Demonstratively, he shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and her screams became softer in his head. Self-control, he sighed, Self-control, focus. Determination. He thought about the ancient Greeks and he heard the knuckle cracking and throat clearing of a very bored crowd waiting for him and how of course he would never win with escapes, but then he spread his arms, he pictured himself as the falcon, calling, called to, approaching.
And that’s when Miranda raked him with her fingernails.
Instinctively, the pain caused Hal to perform a takedown. He pinned Miranda against the passenger door by both wrists, her hair pressed in wavy golden trees against the wet window. She stared up at him, frozen. They had one another’s attention. Hal was attentive to the difference between the feel of her body and the body of a man; he had yet to make love to anybody; he suddenly felt enlightened by the body of a woman; he was pierced by the awful possibility that he could share his conversation, that probably anyone could. His eyes filled with vinegar. His arm throbbed. Miranda appeared to be holding her breath. He could not tell if she was there with him or not. He felt nauseous, imagining her there. He had her pinned, but he was the loser, awfully; the lights of the distant rowhouses glimmering below spelled out the word SHIT. Of course he was going to let her go. Of course he was. It was only that he lingered one moment too long watching her and imagining her, not him inside her but her inside him, before he looked up and saw, through the steamed window, the horrified faces of a couple of kids from school who had come when they heard the screaming.