by Hugo Wilcken
“Less and less so.”
“Could you sit up now? Good. I’m going to ask you a few questions. First, what is your name?”
“Surely you have all my details already.”
“Just answer the question, please. Your name.”
“David Frederick Manne.”
“Where do you live?”
“353 East Fifty-Sixth Street.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-three.”
“What is your profession?”
“I’m a doctor of medicine, in private practice.”
“What year is it?”
“1949.”
“What month?”
“September I think. No, probably October. To be honest, I’m not sure how long I’ve been here.”
“All right. Thank you.”
Again he stood there in silence for a good moment, as if wondering what to do next. He rummaged about in his pocket. Eventually he drew out a small photograph and showed it to me. “Do you know who this is?”
A young woman, late twenties perhaps. Nothing remarkable about her face, and I certainly didn’t recognize her. Nonetheless there was something odd about the photograph. It was her hairstyle, old-fashioned for a girl her age. It occurred to me that the photograph itself must be fairly old. I shook my head.
“I don’t know who it is.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
The doctor started to leave. “Keep the photograph. Perhaps you’ll remember something about it later on.”
“Wait a minute. You haven’t told me anything. What’s the photograph got to do with me? I want to know how long I’m going to be in here. I want to know how serious my injuries are. I’m a doctor too, you know. You can tell me.”
He had his hand on the door handle; he turned briefly toward me. “Don’t worry. There will be plenty of time for that later.”
Before I had time to protest any further, he was gone. I felt a quick of stab of anger at the peremptory way he’d treated me. What an absurd figure, with his pointed beard, his pocket watch, his superannuated accent, his ponderous manner! But the anger quickly died, leaving behind a residue of disquiet. I struggled to my feet, hobbled to the door. Locked again.
Back on my bed, I closed my eyes and waited for my heartbeat to slow to its normal rhythm. This whole charade with the doctor flagged up a possibility that hadn’t occurred to me. Perhaps the hospital hadn’t known who I was. Perhaps the doctor really had been fishing for answers. If so, I’d set him straight, at least. Now they knew my identity, wheels would surely be set in motion. I opened my eyes again, almost surprised to see the ceiling, the walls, the bedside table. There was something notional about this attenuated existence in a hospital room—a reality my brain didn’t necessarily want to believe in. When the nurse came back, I’d have it out with her. I’d ask about the locked door. I’d ask to see another doctor. I’d need to speak to the police as well, of course. It was quite outrageous. I hadn’t even been told which hospital I was in.
No one came. They seemed so random, the nurse’s visits, I could never tell when they would be, and they always felt like an unexpected interruption. Outside, the light was fading. It would be night soon, and I would sleep, a dreamless sleep as always. Then in the morning, I’d see the woman on the balcony. Unlike the nurse and doctor, she was entirely predictable, always there at the right moment. How did I know that? I had no clock in the room. It might just as well be the nurse’s appearances that were regular, and those of the woman on the balcony were random.
When I did wake up, sometime in what I presumed to be morning, I found myself with a drip in my arm again. I pulled it out and pressed my hand to where the needle had been, to staunch any bleeding, but there didn’t seem to be any. I managed to sit myself up and stared through the tiny window for what felt like hours, but the woman didn’t appear on the balcony. I knew she wouldn’t; I’d missed her. I’d slept right through her.
2
The doctor visited several times over the following days. There were more medical examinations, which became increasingly cursory. Afterward, he’d take out a notebook and ask me questions. Where I was born, where I was educated, where my office was. At some seemingly arbitrary moment, he’d put the notebook away and leave. At first, I’d answered quite passively. The whole setup—the doctor-caricature, the emptiness of the room and its unremitting whiteness—pushed me toward apathy, acquiescence. But on the fourth or fifth visit, I lost my temper. “Enough of the questions,” I said, “I want answers. I want to know where I am, why my door is always locked. I want to know what my prognosis is. I need to see the police.” Suddenly I found myself in a rage, almost screaming. Out of nowhere, a couple of male orderlies appeared. I hadn’t laid a finger on the doctor, had done nothing beyond raising my voice, but they pinned me down on my bed. I felt a prick on my arm, then nothing.
The visits continued. We carried on as if the incident hadn’t happened. In truth, I was embarrassed by it, which in turn made me more compliant. I remembered the infantile outbursts of patients—born of confinement and impotence—from my time as an intern. Almost every long-term patient had them at one point or another. And then afterward, they’d be embarrassed, docile, just as I had been. I remembered, too, the patients’ constant quest for more information, and the doctors’ constant reluctance to part with any, lest it be misconstrued, used against them. I’d spent so many hundreds of hours in hospitals, but never before as a patient. It was unsettling to be on the other side of the equation.
The interrogations, too, continued. Perplexed, at a loss as to how to respond, I figured I’d simply bide my time, until the shape of my circumstances became clearer. By now, we’d exhausted the simple facts of my life. We’d moved on to the minutiae. What subjects I’d enjoyed at school, who my friends were, where I went on vacation, what I did with my spare time. My professional life; my sexual life. The experience of being relentlessly questioned was mesmerizing. It was boring, and yet unsettling. The doctor was coming every day now, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. Each time he stayed longer. We were down to novels I liked, cars I’d driven, the layout of my apartment. Occasionally the doctor would press me for more detail on a particular subject, for no apparent reason: I’d start to approximate, to fabricate. Then after he’d gone, the bits and pieces of our conversation would filter back through my mind, blend together, distort, like fragments of a dream that lingered well into the waking hours.
Could this banal accumulation of facts really be a life, my life? If so, it seemed a poor thing, lacking all imagination. The interrogations had left me feeling alienated from my past, as though it were in fact someone else’s. One of my patients’, perhaps. Indeed, it had occurred to me that my interrogator was much more of a psychiatrist than a hospital doctor. And why ever not? I looked at myself in the compact mirror that the nurse had left me. I’d changed, certainly. From a reasonably attractive man to an odd-looking one. From an active professional, to an invalid, confined to bed. Each change had closed doors to myriad futures that would now never be. I picked up the photograph the doctor had left me, of the young woman. I’d worked it out now, of course. It had been in the wallet that I’d taken from the man in my apartment, and stuffed in my pocket. They’d found it on me.
Biographical detail was the glinting, hard surface, reflecting meaning away from the subject. It said nothing of a life, the inner life, the real life. I remembered sifting through the jumble of papers my parents had left behind after they’d died—my aunt and uncle had ceremoniously handed me the box on my eighteenth birthday. Birth certificates; old passports; train tickets; receipts for important purchases; worthless bonds; ancient photos of people I couldn’t identify; letters from relatives I didn’t know, replete with references to events of great significance at the time, now sunk into obscurity. I’d been too young to remember my parents when they were alive, and they’d rarely been alluded to as I was growing up. An
outline of their lives might be surmised from this detritus, but I would never have a feeling for who they’d been.
I looked out into the courtyard and the building opposite. I could often sense when the woman on the balcony was about to appear, and sure enough, a few moments later, there she was. Shaking her head of black hair, reaching for the packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her housecoat. Staring out once again into the void. Other people’s lives were impossibly mysterious, when one knew nothing of them. She looked European to me, but since I could make out so little of her, this could only be whimsy. Nevertheless, on this slender thread I’d begun to construct a story, one that became increasingly embellished each time I saw her. She was a war refugee. Perhaps her husband had been killed in action. Or executed for treason. Or for resistance activities. She’d somehow managed to escape, to make it to New York, where she knew nobody. An immigrant with little English, and a child to care for, she’d had few options but to find herself a new husband, which eventually she did. A kindly, older man, prepared not only to marry her but provide for a child that was not his own. The woman had grown fond of her husband, but she could never bring herself to love him. The ghost of her former husband was there, although in what form I didn’t yet know … I would lose myself in this invention for minutes at a time. Of course, I could always pull back when I wanted to. I knew well enough that the intensity of this vision—its sheer realness—was illusory. I knew that when I finally left the hospital, if I went knocking on her door, I’d find someone quite different, just an ordinary-looking Manhattan housewife, no tragic past, not elegantly blowing smoke into the emptiness of the city.
“Now, tell me about your wife.”
The words shook me. My marriage had barely been mentioned in conversations with the doctor until now, even though I’d talked in some detail about my occasional affairs since the divorce. I couldn’t even remember if I’d told him that Abby was dead. An image of her floated into my mind, somewhere in the mental distance.
“What’s there to say? I was married once. But only briefly. A long time ago.”
“What was she like? Describe her to me.”
“Tall. Brunette. She was an actress. Always looked very self-assured. Confident on stage.
“But elsewhere?”
“In other ways she could be less assured.”
“How?”
“She was the one who’d wanted to get married. We were much too young. Anyone could have seen we weren’t right for each other. But I was infatuated. And she’d needed that anchor, for a time.”
“Do you attach any importance to the fact that she was an actress?”
“How do you mean?”
The doctor didn’t elaborate. Sometimes he’d leave these silences, and I’d feel forced to fill them.
“She was an actress, it was what she did. In the same way that practicing medicine is what you do. That’s all.”
What was he driving at? It felt like we were engaged in a game. The subject at hand—whether it be Abby or anything else—was of no importance. Only rules and tactics mattered. When the routine of his questioning set in, when I felt that I knew exactly what he was going to ask, that was the moment he’d stump me. I tried to imagine what kind of inner life the doctor might have, but I couldn’t easily. No doubt he had a wife, children, and all the usual cares and worries. But to me, he existed merely as a foil.
He straightened his things, made as if to leave. Before doing so, he took a notepad from his briefcase and handed it to me, along with a pencil. “Here, have this. I want you to write down whatever comes to your mind about your wife—your former wife. All right?”
“All right.”
Once he’d gone, I could feel myself passing through the now-familiar sequence of emotional states: anger, disquiet, anxiety, puzzlement, contemplation. And then finally, a profound introspection. The outside world had its borders and demarcations, but this interior one was boundless. One could always go further and further inside, the retreat could never be complete. I stared at the pencil in my hand for minutes on end, as if it were an alien object. I remembered hospitals where I’d worked, and how when patients asked for something to write with, they were always given pencils and not pens. Why? Because pens were more messy? Because they might conceivably be used as weapons? Some department had probably issued a directive about it last century, I mused, setting in stone a practice that would remain for decades to come, simply because there was no particular reason to change it. How much of life was like that?
I wondered why the doctor had suddenly brought up the subject of Abby. From my experience as a psychiatrist, what mattered most in any patient’s narrative were the things left out. When these things were eventually mentioned—by the doctor or the patient—it was an attempt to inoculate the story against them. I looked down at the blank pages of the notepad. There was no reason why I should obey the doctor and write anything about Abby, but I felt somehow compelled to do so.
I see you now. You’re clearer than ever to me, even as I become obscure to myself. Our decade-long estrangement has made you more vivid, not less.
You once told me that at the age of sixteen, you’d felt halfway through life, regardless of when you might die. It turns out you were literally correct. Your premonition haunts me. Your early death casts a black light over the landscape. Every memory of you has to be reconsidered, revised, under that light. An old man on his deathbed is the finished work of his past, but you, in dying young, remain a hypothesis. You are the years never lived.
You died childless. You told me that you wanted children, when you were older, when you’d made your mark in the theater. Instead, a tumor grew in you, and expanded until it took your life. Sixty years from now, who will think of you, who will talk about you? We are truly dead when there is no one left to remember us, when our children and grandchildren are gone as well. We who are childless die sooner than the others.
You had a best friend when you were ten or eleven. Her name was Susan. You’d become friends at school when you’d discovered that you were born on the same day. For a few months, you’d done everything together. You used to pretend you were twins. Then summer came, and your friend’s family went upstate on vacation. They rented a house on a lake. You were going to join them in the second week. But before you could get there, your friend had gone out on the lake in a canoe, without telling anyone. The canoe had overturned and your friend had drowned. You only told me this story once. It was when you were about to visit her parents. They’d never gotten over the death of their daughter. You visited them out of pity, but only infrequently. They saw you as a continuation of their daughter, which made you uncomfortable. Once, her father had even accidently called you Susan, which had spooked you. You’d felt like a ghost, you’d said.
It had all come out in an easy flow, when normally writing was a stuttering, painful business. I stopped suddenly. It struck me that I was writing in the second person, and I wondered why. The thought interrupted my flow, and I knew I’d never get it back again. I looked up from the notepad. The woman was on the balcony. She was smoking, as usual, but instead of staring out into the city, she was looking in my direction. She’d been watching me writing. I felt transfixed as my eyes locked into her gaze. Eventually she brought a hand up to her forehead, as if to brush something away, or pat down her hair. She turned, momentarily contemplated a streetscape I couldn’t see from my angle, then went back inside. It had all taken place in the space of thirty seconds at most.
I waited for my muscles to relax again. I continued to stare through the window. She’d left the door onto the balcony slightly ajar, even though it must be chilly outside now, with fall well underway; it felt like a strange sort of invitation. The moment was barely over, but I was already reliving it in my mind. My looking up to see her eyes, boring into mine. I wondered whether perhaps I served the same function in her life that she served in mine. Was it me she came out on the balcony to see? Was she making up stories about me? She sees
a youngish man lying on a hospital bed, half of his face bandaged, always staring out the window. He’s there, day and night, always gazing out. It would be natural to wonder what had brought him there, wouldn’t it? It would be a mystery, perfect material for fantasy.
The next day, the doctor was back as usual. I handed him the pages I’d written about Abby. He looked over them briefly, not long enough to read them properly, then gave them back to me. Whatever the purpose of getting me to write something, it patently wasn’t so that he could read it. He leaned over, gently unwrapped the bandage on my head, examined the wound.
“The staples will have to come out. I’ll get someone to see you about that.”
“Okay.”
“Do you remember how you got it, this wound? Do you remember anything?”
I’d seen it coming, this discussion about my injury and the “accident,” as I termed it in my mind, even though it had been no accident at all. I knew that broaching the subject of Abby had been a harbinger, clearing the way.
“Yes, I do remember. I was on the subway platform. The station was …”
“Lexington and Fifty-Ninth.”
“That’s right. It was morning, peak hour. Very crowded. As I was going down the stairs, I noticed someone. I’d seen him before. He’d been following me, at least I thought so. Then I was down on the platform. The train was coming. I could see it down the tunnel. I felt someone prod me from behind. Tentative at first. I turned around. I thought it might be a friend or something. Or did I? I can’t remember. No, I don’t think I turned around. There was this prod, then an almighty shove. I lost my balance, fell onto the track. That’s all I remember.”
“You blacked out.”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember any more. I guess the train hit me.”