Leonard looked up at her on the couch. He raised one of his arms, and she could see he was sweating. The wet marks had turned his ordinary shirt a dark, police uniform blue.
Lisa, looking distressed, got up and left the lounge.
“It’s really hot,” Leonard said to Lilly after a few moments of silence.
“Yes,” she said. He made her feel like a small girl. He was six feet four, Lilly calculated now, but despite his well-made looks, Leonard was held in like a celibate priest.
“A lot of it has to do with the building. The engineering system is old,” he went on.
“Yes,” she said again. “I imagine that’s true.”
He went back to his books, but in the next few minutes, he had looked up and smiled at her, and his gray eyes had looked deeper into her.
The lounge emptied slowly that evening. “Have you read Hobbes?” Leonard asked Lilly when they were finally alone. “The pathology of nature? What struck me is his belief in a state of anarchy. It fascinates me.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
“Partly. I’m here for a mind-body problem,” he said.
“Oh.”
“There’s a primitive side to all of us.”
“You’re right,” she said, but only because she was very nervous.
“If you believe in free will, you can’t understand physics. They are incompatible concepts.”
“Why?”
“Because physics tells us there are laws beyond our control, no free will. Free will is an illusion.”
Except for his dress, which looked messier than it might have been if he were on the outside, Leonard seemed to not belong there. The hospital and the ward seemed alien to his whole makeup, just the way it did to Lilly. Sitting near him seemed to bring back the smell of college rooms at Sarah Lawrence, of the library when it was dark outside, and a sweet pain came with remembering all that. She imagined him as a sharp, tall student in the Columbia University halls.
“Hobbes said that anarchy was the true nature of man,” Leonard continued. “We are all by our natures a pathology, and without government of an absolute kind we will resort to our pathology. It’s myself I fear.” He paused. “My older brother Alex killed himself in the woods using a kitchen knife,” he suddenly said now.
She startled. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
He leaned toward her, but he really wasn’t looking at her. It seemed a more tormented state that possessed him. “Maybe I should stay in the cage here. It is sort of like a cage we’re in,” he said. Then, after a long hesitation, Leonard added, “You should know I enjoy our discussions. I have to go back to the court tomorrow, but I enjoyed talking with you.”
Leonard stood up, and Lilly saw again how tall he was. His large hands made her think of the men down below the lounge’s window in the mornings, working on the cable car to Roosevelt Island, giving her a fragile hope.
Alone in her bedroom, Lilly laid on her back on the bedspread, pulling her light blanket over her, still dressed, the sheets untouched. Her hand moved under her jeans, and she let herself feel her skin as a fantasy was taking her. In her fantasy, Leonard pulled her across his clothed corduroy lap. She saw the rips over his knees and he was slapping her, but then he was arched above her in a sudden shift. His beating hand became a penis, sending her into a turbulence of pleasure. She was still warding off the sensations where the bulb lay, or she would travel bodiless through the air, she thought. A pressure in her was exciting her, and like a hand it met her in a passageway between her yearning and her resistance, pulling her into a place where blood began to circulate as mercury inside her. She didn’t know which path to choose for a few moments, losing herself inside the pure chaotic heat of her skin, of her body, breaking apart, giving into a storm within her, or the other—withdrawing, which would return her into a state of psychotic inertia. But fear raised higher the fire inside Lilly; it was engulfing her. She came in a fierce orgasm, a sudden power in this wilderness of being. She awoke from the fantasy in sweat and trembling.
The image of him was dissipating as she regained reality. She felt awfully alone again.
Leonard was gone from the hall the next morning, dressed to appear at his court trial downtown. Lilly saw him in the distance after dinner; he was still in his suit and tie. He went into his room, but he didn’t come out.
That night, a recurring dream began its appearances to Lilly. Its incarnations varied only slightly from night to night as the long days and evenings in the hospital progressed. The first night Lilly was a stowaway who must live with an adopted family. In the dream, all the adopted children are prisoners in their orphanage. Lilly is a skinny, unwanted girl. A brutally sculpted but beautiful man arrives. He is really an escaped convict who is very dangerous. He approaches her and is very attractive, in rough, worn blue jeans. There is anger all around in the orphanage—other prisoners screaming furiously. Lilly imagines herself abducted by him in the dream. The convict takes her by the wrist and pulls her across his knees. He spanks her and an orgasm is about to burst as his hand strikes light blows, thrilling her.
Then her well-dressed adopted sister who looks like Lisa, the patient, shows Lilly thick scars on her buttocks and back and tells Lilly the same convict had beaten Lisa almost to death. The convict who claims to be her lover will beat her almost to death, and Lilly becomes panicked, terrified. She cannot control her attraction to him, though she will be destroyed and the spanking-producing orgasms will become a fierce, homicidal beating.
The recurring dream paid its unwanted visits in her sleep, and the sudden snaps of orgasm woke and humiliated her. She couldn’t control them.
After she jolted awake, she lay still in her bed. But a soreness was everywhere, as if she had been pulled to the floor, pummeled, her buttocks bruised and torn by imagined hands.
Lilly tried to stay awake all night, to not sleep and dream. Something invisible in the air was intoxicating and dangerous. She felt a trembling inside her head; an earthquake was down below. She couldn’t tell what was inside her or what was outside.
It was as if parts of herself were swimming into one another.
Two days passed. Leonard left in the mornings for court, returning in time for dinner, and she could have moved toward him, but then she thought she might have imagined anything between them at all, that he had noticed her at all. He most likely thought she was pathetic, in her hospital pallor and her overly pleasing eagerness, she decided. She could have asked him about his hours in court and he would have been polite, she thought, but nothing more.
Chapter Eight
“Any mail today, Lilly?” Lisa asked, interrupting Louise. It was late afternoon, around 4:30, the start of Lilly’s third week in the hospital. A soft rain was falling outside, and the afternoon outing to the Central Park zoo had been cancelled. The three women—Lilly, Lisa, and Louise—had been sitting for a long hour together. Louise was on the couch, next to Lilly. Lisa had settled into an armchair facing both of them. Leonard was always at court now, in the mornings until dinnertime, and Lilly was getting used to seeing his usual chair in the lounge empty.
Patty Hearst was on the front page of all the hall newspapers this week, too. Lilly was wondering again, staring into the newspaper pictures, about the puzzling transformation of the young Patty, whether her lanky, coffee-colored Symbionese lover in his cape and silver belt buckle of a seven-headed cobra was kind to her, if in the photos she was carrying the memory of his love. In the new photos, Patty was dressed as one of the Symbionese bank robbers with a loaded machine gun slung across her shoulder; her transformation showed her willowy, vulnerable form cloaked in a black Symbionese Liberation Army overcoat just like the other members of his gang, her fine hair tucked under an Afro wig.
“My gun was loaded. I am a soldier of the people’s army now,” Patty said into a tape recording for the public days later.
Something had happened to Patty in the labile moments between her fragmentation and self-re-creation,
Lilly thought yesterday when she saw the pictures. She wondered if her kidnapper drew out Patty’s pleasure, and Patty was hooked, brainwashed by orgasms.
The patients returned to the hall after activities. After lunch, the hall became a community of disparate groups, congregating in the lounges, their private rooms, the hall lounges.
Only one other patient, Frank, was in the lounge with the three women now. Frank was seated a distance away in an armchair studying the backgammon board he had laid out on a table, trying to think out his afternoon game with some of the other men.
“I was talking to Lilly,” Louise said to Lisa now. “You’re interrupting me, Lisa.”
“Well, were you really saying anything, Louise?” Lisa asked. The track of scars on the inside of Lisa’s left arm began to blaze up in the sunlight from the lounge window—a long, furrowed line seamed into her flesh. Lisa had opened her veins with a razor blade in her suicide attempt at her parents’ home a few months ago, Lilly had learned eventually from other patients. Lisa never talked about it, and Lilly didn’t ask her to. She had studied piano at Barnard before she was hospitalized, she was telling Lilly this morning, and now she had decided not to go back to the music department. Earlier, too, Lisa had given Lilly a manila folder marked “Alternative Files.” Lisa had told Lilly that she would enjoy reading what was inside it. But Lilly hadn’t opened it yet. Instead, she had set it aside on the windowsill when Louise started talking to her.
“Lisa, could you let me finish talking to Lilly, puhleeze?” Louise said now. “I wanted to tell Lilly that she looks ravishing today.”
Lilly blushed and blinked at Louise’s words as if a flake of dust were tickling her eyelashes. “When you first came with those scary eyes, I thought you looked like Patty Hearst on a starvation diet,” Louise said to her. “I love your eyes, honey.”
“Thank you. I appreciate your comments,” Lilly said to Louise stiffly. But she felt herself pulled in. Among them, it seemed, was a place like a station platform, where they all were held indefinitely, waiting in anticipation, in case one of them might suddenly understand something that would help the others move on. Sitting in this web of strange women this afternoon, Lilly wasn’t thinking about the recurring spanking dream with the criminal who had become nameless, unidentifiable. By repetition, the dream had taken on a kind of grandeur. Maybe she should stay up tonight, Lilly was thinking now, watch the late news with Lisa, and keep avoiding sleep. She let herself sit in the lounge and talk with the women these days until the night nurse came to chase them all back to their rooms by midnight. She hoped the women would be there tonight again, too—when the recurring dream threatened. Lilly did not have to get too close to them or be afraid of them, as they didn’t ask too much of her.
Louise was questioning Lilly now, “Are you all right, cupcake?”
“Yes,” Lilly said. “I’m just thinking.” She let go of a breath. There would be talk, and the television repairman came in this morning, she thought; the Magnavox had been on the blink for days, but now it was fixed.
“You think too much, Lilly,” Louise went on. “You’d be a lot better if you didn’t talk like a book.”
“Lilly and I talk a lot,” Lisa said to Louise.
“I never hear Lilly talk to anyone,” Louise said.
“She comes alive at night,” Lisa replied.
“I thought when you first came in you were just snotty because you talked like a book,” Louise continued. “I’m not trying to say I don’t like snotty people. Those people in their shell, I mean. But some of those college chicks make fun of me. The ones you probably hang out with. I’m not trying to judge you.”
“I’m sorry, Louise,” Lilly said. “I think you are mistaken. I don’t hang around with people like that.”
“Lilly doesn’t look like Patty Hearst,” Lisa interceded now. “Are you insane, Louise?” Lisa started flapping a New York Times she had whisked off the lounge table. “Patty Hearst loves fascists,” Lisa muttered now. “Patty Hearst is sick.”
“Do you know this for sure, Lisa?” Louise asked her.
“Yes,” Lisa said. “The system is fascistic. And so is he.”
“Who?” Louise asked.
“The criminal who kidnapped her. The Symbionese guy. Listen to this bullshit: ‘Today, Patty Hearst read a tape-recorded plea to the public. She has joined the Symbionese Liberation Army,’” Lisa read from the newspaper. “She’s holding a machine gun, for Chrissake.”
“So, big deal,” the patient named Frank suddenly exclaimed from his distant seat. “She’s a dyke. She dresses up like a man. Then she thinks she’s black, so she gets an Afro wig. What’s the big deal? The woman is a cunt.”
“No, she isn’t. That isn’t true, Frank,” Louise said, angering.
Frank stood up from the backgammon table. “Yes, she is,” he said. His belly was large, and his bathrobe was disheveled and unbuttoned, his large stomach spilling out like a huge bag of groceries stuffed behind his undershirt. “And anyway, I don’t give a good goddamn about Patty Hearst. You ladies are too much for a man. A man needs his rest.” He stared into the backgammon board and then tucked in his shirt.
The women looked up at him blankly as he stashed the cigarette pack he had put on the backgammon table into his pants pocket, preparing for one of them to respond to him.
“I’m feeling anxious,” he said to them. “I need to talk to someone. I had a rough day yesterday. My wife came to visit. I need support. You know, to get things off my mind.”
He moved closer to the women, his mouth opening, expecting he would tell them whatever it was that deserved their attention. But when none of the women responded to him still, he angrily turned and stormed away down the corridor.
“Patty Hearst showed them!” Louise shouted at his vanishing form, her eyes blazing. “Good for you, Patty! Now you’re talking, Patty Hearst. Don’t let people take their shit out on you! You exist, too, Patty Hearst!” Finished, Louise turned to Lisa and Lilly again and smiled, satisfied. “Patty screwed that Symbionese guy,” she said. “Pardon my French.”
“No, no, Louise,” Lisa said now. “It wasn’t like that. He locked her in a closet and used her body. It’s so clear how he brainwashed her. She was taken away and exploited.”
“I thought you said she was sick!”
“Sick people are always exploited, don’t you know that? Because they feel like nothing.”
“Maybe Patty Hearst just wanted to be a bank robber, Lisa,” Louise said. “Maybe she wanted to be a soldier like him. You don’t know what really happened. Maybe she wanted to get screwed by him.”
“This is a pointless discussion,” Lisa said, exasperated.
Then there was a silence between them.
When the air still did not clear between Louise and Lisa, Louise finally turned to Lilly. “I know that feeling,” Louise said to Lilly.
“What feeling?” Lisa asked.
“I’m talking to Lilly,” Louise said. “Lilly, I understand why you are the way you are,” she said. “I feel that way lots of times. You’re with people and they don’t see you. You try to connect and find love, but you can’t because people don’t see you there. You don’t exist. You feel it’s just awful to be you. It’s not because you’re sick, but because you don’t connect with anybody.”
“I was just watching the rain,” Lilly said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“I know that feeling, too, Louise,” Lisa said now, softly. “I do, Louise.”
“I have ago-ra-phobia, Lilly,” Louise suddenly blurted. “It’s my ago-ra-phobia that got me here. Lisa knows about it, don’t you, Lisa?”
Lisa nodded, looking relieved. Louise was including her again.
“I stayed in my apartment all day,” Louise went on. “I couldn’t connect with anybody. I got fat, too.” She stopped, but only for a short breath. “Did you know that a certain famous West Village painter used to come to paint my portrait in my apartment? I modeled all the time for him. I wa
s thinking of being a real model. Until I got ago-raphobia. I was sure I would get treated for it here, but when they give me passes, I get as far as the hospital basement cafeteria before I can’t face going out of the building. I found the candy machines down in the basement last week when I was there. They are the best candy machines in the whole city, including movie theaters and train stations.”
“Are you finished?” Lisa quipped, irritated at Louise again. “Oh, God, what more could you possibly have to add about some candy machines in the basement cafeteria, Louise?”
“I just wanted to tell Lilly I hope she gets passes soon,” Louise said defensively. “And, well, oh… that kind of vending machine is becoming a thing of the past. This discussion makes me sad. I miss those old candy machines they used to have. Remember Mallomars?”
“I think that’s a cookie, not a candy, Louise,” Lisa said.
Lilly listened to the light fall of rain outside the window as Lilly and Louise bickered again. She imagined the mesmerizing hands of Patty Hearst’s abductor, his criminal cock stealing into her sex with the force of a beating hand. He was fierce and seductive in the pictures, like the cobra on his leather belt. She felt the dread of the sleepless night in front of her. The recurring dream of her own faceless criminal When he possessed her, her orgasms were humiliating, mortifying, but she filled, and her nightmares of large, remonstrating women annihilated, destroyed her. She was with Lisa and Louise now, she thought, and even as they continued to argue, she felt safer. She could stay up again tonight, wait for morning when they would all come back to the lounge and sit together. She listened harder to the rain, losing herself to its soft patter as it fell on the trees below them. Spring was almost over whenever she heard the sound of a hard rain, she thought. The fiercer rainfall always signaled the end of spring and its drizzles, that the weather would be heating up. It was summer’s approaching warning, making those whooshing, drumming sounds. Soon the sun would be burning down every day, she was thinking, and a more serious heat would come with the more serious rain. The water from the sky would get even heavier, pouring onto the city rooftops, cascading and growing into streams that looked like clear and translucent snakes slivering down gutters. She remembered the damp heat of Bedford, how different it had been from the city. When the spring rain came, it melted the snow, and water started flowing drip by drip, running together and forming rivulets, then rivulets ran into wider streams, and the water leapt joyously down the forest paths. Then Lilly remembered the moon outside her window in Bedford, the sight of the floating white moon disc in the pink Westchester clouds.
Hystera Page 10