Ordinary Daylight

by Andrew Potok

  “It is simply your black depression, Mr. What-do-you-call-it, which is holding us up. Christ, you must be difficult to live with,” she said. “But I have not failed yet and don’t intend to start with you. So, on we go.”

  I worried all the time now about being kicked out, and as we sat in the middle of her “consulting room,” listening to those dreadful stories of hers, I began to fidget and even rise from my chair before Helga had excused us.

  “You have to stop that, Papa,” Sarah scolded outside. “You’re being mean to her, and she will kick us out if you continue. Don’t be so damned impatient and depressed,” she added angrily.

  One Sunday, we arrived very early in the morning, as requested. Helga let us in and then flitted about nervously, tidying papers, fidgeting around with seldom-touched bric-a-brac in a cupboard. She was breathing quickly and said nothing to Sarah or me, as if the picture were still incomplete and other props and persons still expected. Sarah and I sat self-consciously, looking in her direction, waiting. When the doorbell rang, Helga raced to it, then chirped happily as she escorted a mustachioed young man with curly black hair into the room.

  “How is your charming wife?” she asked, “and your wonderful parents? Your brother, how is your poor brother?” The man seemed cheerful. Before he answered, she said: “This is my dear chappie from Lima . . . and my two Americans . . . Mr. . . . Mr. . . . and his daughter. . . .” We all stood, shook hands, sat again.

  Helga had orchestrated something special. The doorbell rang again, and I heard Tom’s cheery voice. She had put out two more chairs, and we all squeezed into the center of the small room, surrounded by the empty couch, the upholstered easy chairs, as Helga faced us from her customary place.

  “You start,” Helga said, pointing to the Lima chappie. “Tell us how you are seeing.”

  “Better all the time,” he said without hesitation. He had a Latin accent but spoke English well.

  “Better all the time? What does that mean?” she coaxed.

  “For instance, Mrs. Barnes,” he said, moving to the edge of his chair, “my wife drove us into one of those parking garages near Euston Station—”

  “We don’t need to know exactly where,” Helga muttered.

  “—where I usually see absolutely nothing. I might as well have my eyes closed in that darkness. . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” she urged.

  “I saw beautifully,” he said.

  “Beautifully,” she repeated, looking at me.

  “It is such an enormous relief,” he continued.

  “And are you happy, cherub?” she asked.

  “Of course, Mrs. Barnes. I am very happy. No one could do these things except you.”

  Sarah looked interested, understanding her role as appreciative audience. I boiled with rage and humiliation. It was all for me, this show.

  “Where is that bloody Dirkson?” she asked, looking at her watch.

  “And you, you old blighter,” she said to Tom. “How about you?”

  “Well,” he said, looking elfish, “I have some really good news.”

  “Tell it, tell it,” Helga cried.

  “You know how my boss was about to make me a janitor?”

  “Yes, yes, Tom,” she said. “His boss wanted to get rid of him because he couldn’t see.”

  “He is so pleased with my eyes now that he is about to make me a foreman. . . .”

  “Foreman?” Helga was surprised and utterly delighted. “Did you hear? My little long-haired mechanic will be a foreman. And who is responsible for that, I ask you?” Everyone but me smiled for Tom’s good fortune. “Are you paying attention, my American friend? Everyone is improving except you. You have lied to me, I am sure of it. You have probably been filled full of drugs and haven’t told me about it. There is something in your water. . . .”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “I told you about everything. Except for antibiotics and such things, I’ve never been on any drugs. . . .”

  “Papa,” Sarah said softly, “don’t you remember a few years ago you used to drive to Burlington for some drug?” Helga moved up on her seat. Everyone was silent. I blanched. I had forgotten an antidepressant I had taken experimentally.

  “Aha,” Helga bellowed. “His own daughter has found him out! Her father is a liar! You have been caught, my friend. . . .”

  The phone rang in the hall, and Helga went to answer, glaring as she passed. I wilted in my chair. My ears were buzzing loudly. Jorge Salomon, the Lima chappie, leaned over to me across Sarah, who looked flustered, as if she was just now realizing what she’d done.

  “You must never lie to Mrs. Barnes,” Jorge Salomon said to me, and I just barely controlled my right hand, which had formed into a fist. I turned away from him and looked at Sarah. I didn’t know what to say.

  Helga returned. Her cause was reinforced by unexpected allies, and she swaggered, in her glory.

  “Ha!” she roared. “I knew it, I knew it! It is always the filthy patient who ruins the cure. The bees are only bees; they do what bees do. But you! If I had known, I would not have taken you in the first place.”

  I felt that even Jorge Salomon and Tom were sorry for their part in the melodrama.

  “We all make mistakes sometimes,” Helga said unexpectedly. “Still, I believe you lied deliberately.”

  “I didn’t, Mrs. Barnes. The drug was so unimportant that I forgot to mention it.”

  “A likely story,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I’m going to give you another chance. I can no longer guarantee a cure, certainly not a complete one. But now that I know something about the drugs and the depression, I will simply have to work harder to help you at all. And don’t you dare lie to me again.”

  Sarah apologized on the way home. “I said it because I thought it might be helpful. I thought if she knew, she might figure out how to treat you better.”

  We met Sta at the cafeteria in Kenwood, inside the Heath. We carried our tea and scones to a round white table on the terrace where Sarah joined Sta in trying to console me. Little birds chirped all around us and even descended onto our table to eat crumbs from our hands. I swept them off with my arm, and they squawked in the trees above us. “Goddamn trusting English birds,” I murmured. Sta and Sarah both turned away.

  MAY 21

  . . . Sarah excused herself immediately after dinner at Edith’s, and after slamming the door, she disappeared down the street. She is impossible! I sulked and bitched with Edith and Sta, until they finally drove me home. Sarah still not back as I tape this. What started out as a honeymoon has turned into a nightmare.

  (From Sarah’s journal) MAY 21

  I had six stings today, three in my hair, two in front of my left ear, one in front of the right. They hurt terribly, and maybe I’ll get so sick I won’t have to go tomorrow. Papa is depressed and restless, anxious about everything. I can’t stand him anymore! On top of it, I’m getting depressed, and Papa is not helpful! Dinner at Edith’s. Wasn’t hungry but forced myself to eat so I wouldn’t have to answer questions about why I wasn’t eating. I have to repeat everything at least twice for Sta. I left early, walked around, took the laundry to the laundromat, came home at two, killed a giant cockroach, and went to bed.

  When we walked together, Sarah began to lag behind a few steps, until, one day on Rosslyn Hill, heading for the deli, I pivoted around furiously and told her that she should go to live with Edith or Vera, that this couldn’t go on. She ran off, and I heard her return very late that night. The next morning I found a note, written in large print, covering several sheets of paper. “Papa,” it said,

  I’m sorry. We have both been just awful toward each other. It’s horrible to bear all this together. I hate the bees. I hate Helga. I hate all the pain. I feel lonely and helpless. I guess I want you to be my Papa, to take care of me, to bear my pain as well as yours. I can’t bear your being dishy and sexy, not yet. But you probably are, and I will understand. I can’t bear your needing help from me or anyone else. I st
ill want you to be the biggest, strongest Papa in the world. I’m sorry. I am growing up. I love you. Sarah.

  I felt immensely proud of my daughter. She had come through. She had disentangled us with her love and understanding. I felt ashamed of my unbounded egocentricity.

  I wondered why my stories of improvement weren’t as convincing to Helga as the Lima chappie’s. His sounded as insubstantial as mine, and yet she liked him and mistrusted me. I had always been able to charm my friends’ mothers in school. I charmed my mother’s customers. I charmed ladies everywhere, but not Helga anymore. Sometimes I thought that she was a Zen master who knew precisely what she was doing. In some strange way, she was, perhaps, teaching me about myself.

  I even started to believe her claptrap about seeing drug remains, from years back, “in the water.” Sarah and I scoured the libraries for information on the subject. I felt like old blind Milton slave-driving his daughters for the sake of . . . poetry? . . . truth? . . . beauty? . . . no, for the mysteries of piss. Mostly we found standard explanations of the use of urine for analysis. The sediments found there could not, as far as we could determine, reveal much of anything farther back than twenty-four hours. Then we found some fascinating material.

  There was an eighteenth-century cult called “the pissprophets” who claimed to diagnose disease by observing urine samples. “Whoever hangs out a piss-pot for his standard,” a contemporary critic wrote, “pretends upon sight of your water to tell your infirmities and directs medicine without seeing the sick person, believe them not! They are cheats not only for the sixpence or shilling for what they call casting your urine (which much better would be cast in their faces), but for drawing you in with some fearful story of your danger and making you take a packet with you of their stuff.”

  In place of the urine of a middle-aged man, a flask of cow’s piss was once sent to a German quack named Meterbach. “Too great a pleasure in women,” read the diagnosis. There is even a modern story of a farmer sending to his vet a well-known beer instead of the animal’s urine. “This horse is unfit for work and should be slaughtered immediately” was the reply.

  As for me, I went out drinking one night with a friend and polished off, much to my amazement, a half bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. The next morning I remembered that Helga wanted “the first morning water.” She and I had discussed the evils of alcohol, and she told me stories of patients she had chucked out when she found “a pint of whiskey in their water.” I thought that now surely the jig would be up, as a good pint should have filtered down, and I imagined that a chemist should have been able to trace the various blends to their rivers of origin. But Helga found the water “wonderfully clear” and that day prophesied another improvement.

  I put the “water question” aside as pure foolishness, but still I wondered why others were being helped by venom and I was only desultorily touched by it. I became obsessed for a while with the notion that an undiagnosed cancer lurked somewhere inside me and the venom was being depleted in curing it. Edith, in whose house I took refuge from time to time, thought that in my efforts not to be swayed by suggestion I might be physically rejecting improvement, erring on the side of negativism. “Stop evaluating everything, Andy darling,” she said. “Relax and let the improvement come.”

  I began to feel that the more bees Helga put on my neck, the better my chances for exorcising all the things I now imagined to be wrong with me. She started using twelve bees at a time, and I hoped that the number would increase. But as she laid six in my hair one day, calling them “six of my best,” I found myself cheering them on as they stung ferociously. Digging my fingernails into my thigh, I tried to will the poison into every area of my body, every distant tissue in dire need of relief and regeneration. There seemed to be something noble about one’s tolerance for poison and pain, and I wanted to be able to absorb more than anyone had ever done before me. “Sting, you sons of bitches,” I chanted deep inside myself. “Fill me with poison, move my viscous fluids, cleanse the lifelong accumulation of civilization’s muck.”

  In spite of my decision not to do so any longer, I fretted constantly about the approaching Armageddon. I tried now to keep these preoccupations from Sarah, but I fretted about my single acid trip of years before and the two on mescaline, about smallpox inoculations and a childhood allergy to sulfa. On one such sulking afternoon, Ben Berman of the Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation called. He had called once before to express his interest in what I was doing. Though he felt committed to orthodox medical research, his two young daughters were going blind and he dismissed nothing out of hand.

  “We’re proud of you,” Ben said. “We think you’re pretty goddamn brave to be doing this.” His voice seemed to ride the crests of waves through which it traveled.

  “Jesus, Ben, I need a pep talk. We’re pretty depressed.”

  “It’s true, Andy,” he drawled in his Baltimore twang, which sounded more exotic than ever. “Listen, we want you to make lists of all her patients. Names, addresses, phone numbers, so we can contact them all if things get better for you and Sarah.”

  “That’ll be easy enough,” I said. “I’ll start right away. But my days may be numbered here, Ben. She is threatening to kick me out. . . .”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “It’s hard to explain. She doesn’t trust me. . . .”

  “For Christ’s sake, why?”

  “I’m not improving, she says, as fast as she is used to. She’s looking for excuses to get rid of me so I don’t join a list of her failures.”

  “Are there failures too?” Ben asked.

  “I’m only guessing. But there’s something vague about her so-called successes. I don’t know.”

  “Listen, Andy, the other thing is that we’re in contact with a beekeeper in Vermont who wants to work with us. If she kicks you out, you can come back here and we can continue the experiment.”

  “That’s wonderful, but she claims her bees are unique, Ben. That no one else knows how to feed them or breed them for RP.”

  “Our man in Vermont says that’s bullshit. All bees eat the same stuff.”

  “That’s great, Ben,” I yelled. “That means if bees are the answer, it’s all bees. Right?”

  “Right. And listen,” he continued. “I want you to find out all you can about the cure. Is there anything you can think of to do? Is there an assistant, a secretary, a nurse?”

  “She suspects everyone and employs no one. Some patients volunteer, and they’re all terrified of her.”

  “Where does she keep her bees?”

  “I don’t know. But she says they’re not at her house. She goes somewhere twice a week, I think, to pick up bees.”

  “Can you follow her?”

  “I can’t see. . . .”

  “Right. Can you hire someone?”

  “I don’t know. Let me think about it. . . .”

  “Never mind. Don’t do anything that makes her suspicious. But if something positive happens, we’ll come over to talk with her. . . .”

  “She’ll suspect you. She won’t talk to you. She’s already mentioned the Foundation as a bunch of crooks.”

  “Never mind, Andy. When we’re ready to talk, she’ll talk. Everyone has his price. And listen, as soon as she says she’s finished with Sarah, we want to bring her back to Boston to have Eliot look for clinical changes.”

  The conversation gave me new life. I felt buoyant. If Helga booted me out, a friendly beekeeper in Vermont would take over. Bees ate only honey, he said, not the rhubarb, dried eggs, whiskeys, fermented yeasts, cereals, or other garbage that Helga said she fed them. There are different strains of bees, Ben was told, but the chemistry of their venom remains the same within the entire species.

  Once, in my innocence, I had asked Helga how bees are made to eat these strange diets, and she had said: “You know, cherub, how a dog can be made to eat even when he’s full. All you need is another dog nearby. Well, it is the same with bees. I hold a box full of buzzing bees near my no
neaters. They will eat whatever there is, don’t you worry.”

  I was comforted by the Foundation’s support. I felt they were absolutely correct in not dismissing anyone’s claims without careful consideration.

  The Foundation was less than five years old. Prior to its existence, practically no work had been done on the retinal degenerations, a whole series of diseases that had thoroughly stumped researchers. The Foundation was born of American outrage that a blight such as RP was allowed to thrive in the land of the Big Vaccine. Mix equal amounts of American money and American science, they reasoned, and we’ll bomb RP right back to the Stone Age. Local chapters from coast to coast were formed to sell buttons and trinkets, to run raffles, rummage sales, and auctions. They solicited money from industry, they infiltrated service organizations, they found friends on Capitol Hill. And right within the mecca of Harvard’s Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, they installed a laboratory, the first of its kind, whose sole purpose was the study of retinitis pigmentosa and allied retinal degenerations.

  On the November afternoon that the lab was inaugurated, there wasn’t a dry eye on Charles Street. In a large auditorium, filled with well-wishers, Charlotte and I held hands as we listened to speaker after speaker predict victory over RP. “We are finally on our way,” they all said as I looked at a fragment of Charlotte through a mist of retina and tears.

  We toured the new laboratory, bristling with the pride of ownership. We were investing our brightest hopes in those few pristine rooms, and as I walked through, I touched the instruments, all the shiny new metal, the plastic, the titanium heads of the ultracentrifuges, the diamond-cutting knives of the microtomes that would slice donor eyes into minute layers to be examined under the electron microscope. Awed and hopeful, I peered at that enormous device, through which, someone was saying, they would focus easily on the outer segment of a single rod or cone.