She wouldn’t know how to find the moon here. It seemed to always be vanishing into the unsettled nights when she looked for it outside her hospital window.
“Louise, what were the results of your beautician test?” Lilly heard Lisa and Louise, and she listened now to them instead. Her private thoughts were growing more unfocused and scattered.
“Haven’t gotten them back yet, cupcake,” Louise was answering Lisa. “I’m not going to think about it. I’m bad at tests, you know. I have massive ‘deficit of concentration.’ Even Dr. Leach says so.”
“Anyone can take tests. But who can design hair like you?” Lisa said, and Lilly looked at her. Despite her petulance, Lisa had a warm heart, Lilly thought.
“You’re a real artist, Louise,” Lisa was saying.
Louise cleared her throat, uplifted by Lisa’s warmth. “These are all my children, you know,” Louise said, addressing both Lilly and Lisa now. “Well, they’re not my actual children, but I call them my children. All my kids on this psycho floor. I love them all so much. I want them to know that someone loves them and accepts them for exactly who they are. All my life I just want them to know that someone who isn’t like them can still love and accept them. That is a lot of the reason I am so open to everyone, anyone, here on the floor, and in life. When I meet someone and I like them, I like them for themselves. The rest of that stuff is just… cosmetic… I mean.” Louise paused and then Lisa was nodding approvingly at her, and she went on: “Whoever you are, however you ID yourself, if I like you I like you. It makes me angry and sad and sick that there are people out there going through exactly what my Uncle Keith did to me.”
“What did he do?” Lisa asked, concerned now. “Did Uncle Keith take advantage of you? I mean… did he molest you, Louise? Oh, Louise I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.”
“No, no!” Louise cried. “Uncle Keith made me come to the hospital. He made me become a mental patient! He’s the one who put me in here! I feel for all the people who are told they are crazy. They’re being told by the people that are supposed to love them that there is something wrong with them, that they are incomplete or flawed somehow. I want to take them in my arms and hug them long and deep and tell them that there is nothing wrong with them. Whatever you are it’s okay. It’s okay with me. I don’t want there to be anyone out there who doesn’t have someone who says, ‘I love you for who you are. I see you. So please have a good night, my kitten.’ I want a good night for all my pets. I want them to feel warm, soft kisses, too.”
As Louise finished, breathless, she reached to touch Lilly. Her right hand softly rubbed and stroked Lilly’s arm. “Honey, you’re so beautiful and sensitive, you’re like a Russian princess, I swear…,” she said.
Lilly tugged hard against Louise’s hold, trying hard not to reveal her panic. Then Lilly’s head was spinning, as if it were filling with some intoxicant that had penetrated her.
“Jesus Christ, Louise,” Lisa said. “You’re scaring her.”
“I just touched her!” Louise said, quickly withdrawing her hand from Lilly’s arm. “I’m sorry, Lilly, don’t be scared. I should get my hairstyling equipment for you, Lilly. Should I get my salon out, Lisa? I used to do Marie’s hair all the time. Lilly’s a little taller than Marie, but don’t they look alike? That dark look, very chic, sexy. You have no reason in the world to feel bad about yourself, Lilly,” Louise said, louder, as if calling Lilly back to her from faraway. “You’ll see. Believe me, your ‘condition’ will make nice lines on your face, you will be so intriguing. Play it up, darling. You will always be mysterious. Maybe I should try a mod style, short cut with bangs on Lilly, too, Lisa. Remember that was the style I used on Marie?”
“I told you about Marie,” Lisa said to Lilly now. “You remind me of her, too, Lilly.”
“You’re thinking of Marie and her files because you know Wendy Wilson’s leaving tomorrow,” Louise said to Lisa.
“No, I wasn’t,” Lisa answered. “I don’t think about Marie anymore. I found one of her old files in my room, and I thought Lilly would like it.”
“Wendy Wilson’s leaving tomorrow,” Louise said. “She didn’t give anyone her home phone number either. Just like Marie.”
Lilly was able to nod back now, relieved that they were finally thinking of someone else, the focus of all their energy shifting to a departed patient named Marie. It happened a lot on the ward, the sudden ghosts reappearing through the likenesses between patient and patient. Lisa had started to tell Lilly about Marie last week when they were watching the late-night news. Lilly knew nothing more about Marie than that she had been discharged in March, she hadn’t phoned the ward, she had vanished into her outside life.
“There’s a game, Lilly,” Lisa began explaining now to Lilly. “It’s called alternative files. I played it a lot with Marie. See, I have Marie’s alternative files. I gave them to you, didn’t I? Where’d you put them?”
“There,” Lilly said, turning her head toward the window.
“I miss Marie, too, Lisa,” Louise said as Lilly remembered the folder she had placed on the sill. “I used to do Marie’s hair nice and firm for her,” Louise said. “Lilly, I have those big curlers, you know the old-fashioned kind? No-nonsense curlers, I mean, the kind you can definitely rely on.”
“It’s easy,” Lisa said, cutting Louise off. “Look, they’re in there writing up all sorts of conspirational theories in the nursing station. The hall nurses I mean. We’re the people who always get written about but Marie kept her own files, on herself and all the patients. She said people should know who they aren’t nothing, what they are is different. Which means they are something and not what the staff say they are. We called them the alternative files. She kept them, lie a journal so the staff wouldn’t know she had them. She left them for me to keep when she left.”
“She gave them to you, Lisa?” Louise asked. “She gave them away?”
Lilly now took the “file” from the sill. Lisa’s fingers were gentle, pulling it from Lilly’s anxious hands.
“Marie was brilliant, “Lisa said to Lilly, continuing to ignore Louise. “She had the IQ of a frightening genius, but she was schizophrenic. I loved the way she said things but you had to listen hard to what she said, she jumbled her words sometimes.”
Lisa settled the folder calmly on her lap. “Look, go to the nursing station when Dina is there, Lilly.” Lisa explained now. “She’s the little nurse, the one with the great legs; tiny, petite. You’ll see all the nurses in there writing notes on us. Take a peek. They sit in the nursing station eating lunch and do it. They have the air-conditioner on already, and they wear sweaters which makes little sense. I think it’s not to show their potential mates—all those young residents they hope to marry—too much of their bare skin, like those Jewish women at the wailing wall who cover themselves with shawls.”
“But the sweaters sure show their breasts.” Louise interjected. “How do you know what they write about us anyway? Maybe they’re writing reports about how special and divine we are?”
“Who is not going to see you as a nothing on the outside?” Lisa’s voice was strident. “Once a mental patient, always a mental patient. All the people you meet once you’re out of here will tell you that you were just being lazy and self-indulgent, unless they think you are really crazy like Spia. It is a hopeless hell, like you’re being cremated alive because you become an idea someone else has about what it means to be a mental patient instead of a real person. And then you have to cope with your own self-respect.”
“God, that’s awful,” Louise said now.
Lilly pulled her knees up to her chin, sitting up on the couch and imagining herself stiff and still as a building, vanishing into an invisible dimension in space. Was this what Lisa meant? she wondered. She didn’t understand what Lisa meant, yet she felt it completely. It was some self-consuming, emotionally bottomless place of identity where one was only a vacuum; she knew this place— where one is only a receiver for unspecified signals and
transmissions in the air. Being a nothing was a treacherous existence.
After a few minutes, Lisa was silent, too, as if contemplating the greater depths of the situation.
Then Louise leaned closer toward Lilly. “Lilly, let me tell you something,” she said. Her eyes seemed to jiggle in their sockets. “Every suffering person has been assigned someone, by God, to save them.”
“Lilly’s Jewish,” Lisa said.
“It’s not about religion, Lisa. It’s about karma,” Louise said.
“I’m half-Jewish,” Lisa said to Lilly. “But I love Mass.”
“I’ve never been to a Mass,” Lilly said, talking at the same time she wanted to disappear.
“We have one in Westport. Christmas morning I attend St. Bartholomew’s near the Westport Country Club for Mass.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
“My parents live there. I grew up there,” Lisa responded.
“Doesn’t Paul Newman live there?” Louise asked.
“Oh, Louise,” Lisa smiled more patiently now. “What are we going to do with you, Louise? Tell me. What are we going to do?”
“You can love me,” Louise said. “Love and acceptance are all I want from anyone.”
Now it felt uncomfortable in the room again, and Lilly shifted on the couch. She thought of walking away like Frank, into her room. Maybe she could try to write again in the notebook, she thought.
But then Lisa opened the manila file and pulled out the newspaper clipping, unfolding it. Lilly saw it was titled “Leonard.” It was filled with Marie’s illegible notes along with a clipping from the New York Times.
“Leonard is the son of a very renowned chemist and engineer, you know. His father helped discover the transistor for Bell Laboratories.” Lisa’s like a cup of unskimmed information, Lilly thought, something wildly stirred so that filmy layers settled on top, and unknown particles, curdled and scattered, swam around in the skim.
Lilly looked down at the clipping as Lisa continued talking.
The black-and-white photo in the newspaper portrayed white flames. Blurry images of people as they ran, scattering all over the Grand Central stairway. Soft-focused faces. Lilly could almost hear their screams, but could not make out individuals.
The caption under the photo read, “Fire trucks and ambulances on the scene inside Grand Central Station where a Kodak picture exploded. A gunman was apprehended as hundreds fled.”
“Leonard was different,” Lisa was saying. “He’s pretty much a straight, handsome man if you look at him. He can’t handle his feelings, and he can’t deal with anyone or anything except flat abstract theories. One day Leonard takes some acid another Columbia student gives him. So he gets a gun,” Lisa was continuing. “A rifle from a friend’s hunting case, and goes to Grand Central Station and Bang! Bang! Bang! He fires at a twenty-by-twenty-foot photograph behind a glass shield. I think it was a blown-up ‘Kodak moment’ of a picture-perfect family lying in a hammock somewhere, on vacation in the Caribbean, but with all these wires and electric circuits behind it to light it up over the station. Leonard’s lawyers have made him plead ‘temporary insanity’ and ‘under the influence of drugs,’ but he is a lost soul, you know.”
Lisa was finished. She moved to the set of armchairs by the TV. The news was on by then, and some cartoons on other channels, and she seemed spent, having finally told Lilly the whole story of Leonard.
Louise stood up. She began stretching out in a series of arm lifts and knee bends.
Lilly twisted around on the couch. She looked at the seat where Leonard sat last evening. The rain was still splashing, and it made the sky prematurely dark when Lilly looked back outside. The long evening had already begun.
After dinner, Lilly was back on the couch, looking down at the rushing FDR Drive in the night. The lounge was quiet and still. Frank didn’t come back to the table where two other patients had started the nightly back-gammon tournament now. Lisa and Louise told Lilly over the meal—Hawaiian pineapple chicken and green beans—that they would join her again in the lounge.
Her dreams might be better tonight, Lilly was thinking. And she was so tired now, she would sleep easily.
But by midnight Lilly heard a harrowing wail down the corridor. She rushed and looked out the door, expecting something terrible might have happened. Down the corridor it was Louise banging at the north side’s phone booth with her fist, then kicking at the phone booth’s door. A posse of staff raced for the corridor.
“You know who you are, Uncle Keith!” Louise was screaming into the phone. “FUCK YOU. I hope to God I never see you. I understand why you did what you did, but this is a violation of my life. FUCK YOU a thousand times over. I hope you’re proud of yourself. It’s gotta feel pretty good, fucking up the life of someone you don’t even FUCKING KNOW.” She was screaming as if she were getting choked, and soon the staff was hanging up the phone for her, telling her in firm voices, “You’re here to get control….”
Lilly heard the now-familiar struggle as they dragged Louise through to the quiet room. Then the quiet door slammed. The noise was shut out. But by then another patient had a fit and had kicked a floor lamp to the floor and busted its glass bulb. Lilly could see it glistening in the distance. In a few minutes, a staff member hurriedly came to retrieve the shatters, unplugged the lamp, and left it there for the custodian to pick up in the morning. And the corridor’s floor was a vacant strip again—desolate and deserted.
“What are your plans to do to me?” Lilly asked Dr. Burkert the next morning. She was sitting opposite him inside his office at the south corridor. A clear blue morning was approaching, and the light was warm. The air was still stuffy, slightly dusty hospital air, but it contained the faint scent of the tulips and spruce trees outside in the hedges and flower beds. Lilly thought she heard a gardener’s hose below the window.
“Is that what you think? That we make plans ‘to do’ to people here?” There were only folders and loose pinkish forms on Dr. Burkert’s desk. Nothing personal of his was in the room at all, neither on the windowsill nor on the desk. There were no houseplants nor family photos. The sparseness of the office made it feel more like a shaft. The drawers were dented, aluminum, and plain. “Plans for discharge are something we decide together,” he said.
Dr. Burkert’s a disciplined man, Lilly thought, as his neatness and sandy hair showed. He now seemed dangerous, not the same as he had in her room the first days, his foreign accent not a link to Helen, but an echo from the photographs in her mother’s old albums to classify along with the invisible persecutors and phantoms, the British Tommies. He isn’t very warm, she thought, despite the meaning of his words. And now he seemed always impatient, different from the first night he saw her. His tone was too careful. She had to leave behind everything solid, bleeding, and carnal in her dreams or writing, in her own country, she thought, like Helen once had to. Lilly, the person, was now devoid of passion, a thing being blown through the dust.
Caroline had called into her room to tell her she was ready for her first real session in Dr. Burkert’s office. Caroline had said Lilly was to go herself without an escort this morning, directly after breakfast. Now Lilly checked herself again. Dr. Burkert was pulling her into some trap, making her think of her mother. Nothing could make her trust him or believe he wasn’t there to judge and look down on her.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Burkert asked her.
Lilly turned in the old chair to face him square on. She firmed her shoes on the floor but said nothing.
“You’re very guarded, you know,” Dr. Burkert said. “Like now, for example. Are you afraid to tell me what you are feeling?”
“This office is cold,” she said. “And you don’t care what I feel.”
“So I’m cold, too?” Dr. Burkert said.
“I would like to know how long you’re going to keep me here.”
“As short as possible. I understand that it’s hard to be in the hospital.”
“Perhap
s,” Lilly said but then stopped, aware of the sweat that was just beginning to coat her neck and her legs. She fidgeted for a few seconds, picking at loose threads on the belt strap of her jeans. She made herself swallow so that the knot that was burning in her stomach would be cooled and unwind. Then she imagined herself out of the room. She was a vaporous entity streaming invisibly past him and out through a small crack under the window into the spring sunlight.
“Are you feeling the discomfort now? The nurses tell me you seem very uncomfortable, you look frightened.”
“No,” she lied.
“I’m sorry you feel you can’t tell me what you feel,” he said.
Lilly tore at a cuticle on her thumb. “Well, I can’t,” she said.
“I see.”
“Good.”
“Your mother called the ward. She would like to come to the hospital. Would you be willing to talk to me about your mother? She keeps calling us.”
“What?” Lilly startled, alarmed. “What did she tell you?”
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