“It’s fine if you’d like us to keep your mother from visiting. This is your time to sort out things. I want you to feel safe.” Dr. Burkert’s formal eyes softened on Lilly as he spoke carefully.
Lilly didn’t understand his kindness or his tenderness. It pulled at her as if she had her head against his shoulder, and his arms were around her and they were falling asleep together, ready to share some terrible night dream. In the hospital, intimacy came fast as a train. It was like being in a passenger compartment traveling at a deafening speed. Everything passed by rapidly, too, but from out the window as if she were seated in the compartment, only watching. Her thoughts were racing away from him, trying to tug away from his grasp.
“I want to know if there wouldn’t be any more examinations,” she found herself saying. “They took me up from the emergency room that first night and the nurse violated me.”
“Are you sure that’s what happened?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you remember why I ordered the physical exam for you?”
“My mother is always out of control like that,” she said, struggling against the momentum she could not stop, but failing. “My mother can’t be trusted to tell you the truth. She has hysteria.”
“I see.”
“She’s hysterical all the time. She’s really very ill and dangerous.”
“I think you mean she is dangerous to you,” he said.
The thought sent her into spinning confusion. Meanwhile, a chaos of trampling feet were lining up, waiting for the dining room door to open for lunch. Voices were yammering louder and louder that things were disappearing from their rooms; a thief was in the hall, taking things in their drawers. Lisa was demanding a thorough search of all the patients’ rooms. Then a shriek sliced the air, belonging to a female whose voice Lilly didn’t recognize and who was screaming, “I want to die! I’m not safe here!”
Dr. Burkert stood from his desk. “Please excuse me. I need to check on this.” He circled her chair, and she watched him as he went out into the hall to see what was happening.
Alone in the office, released from having to talk, Lilly felt grateful to whoever might be the thief for sparing her, giving her the time now to collect herself. She straightened in her chair, angry with herself. She would have to be more constantly diligent, she told herself. If she weren’t more careful, she could be turned into fluid parts. She was telling Dr. Burkert too much. He could disassemble her.
Then Helen moved through her thoughts like the faint slap of a hand and Lilly was shaking, guilty for what she said about Helen. Dr. Burkert couldn’t understand, but Lilly didn’t understand either, she thought now. It was as if something were following her and took Helen’s form, like a threat wrapping around her.
“I’m so sorry,” Dr. Burkert said, reentering the room minutes later. “I had to take care of that disturbance on the hall. This was a lot for one session, I think, so why don’t we stop for today and pick this up tomorrow?”
But Lilly was already caving in. She couldn’t hold on; it was as if he had undone some secret hinge inside her.
That evening in her room, too tired to think anymore, Lilly stood at the secured window, wanting to lean out, to sip in the after-rain night air. Two orderlies were carrying a body on a stretcher toward the emergency room inside the medical hospital, a distance away. A sick man, the first one Lilly saw these long weeks. She watched his body struggling on the stretcher, as if he were keeping some fight alive to explain who he was against the engulfment of his illness. She saw him moving on the stretcher, lugged farther off into darkness, then vanishing down the ramp that led to the emergency room entrance.
Lilly listened for some hall sounds, but the whole place was so quiet.
Suddenly, Lilly was thinking of Jane, her roommate, and a wave of anguish flowed through her. They used to be able to talk for hours, pass wordless feelings to one another. Even when Lilly was afraid of talking. Jane would always contribute the striking presence of her corn-colored hair, the graceful manners she had as she sat cross-legged on the rod-iron divan in their Little Italy apartment, patiently saying “Uh-huh” as they talked so that Lilly believed Jane understood Lilly’s exasperation about everything.
Just thinking about Jane, she could get away from Dr. Burkert and his intrusive questions with their threat of disintegrating her. Lilly wondered what it would feel like to walk in their apartment now, how it would feel. She wondered if it could ever be the same, if she could fit back in anywhere, even with Jane. Outside the hospital room’s window, the city seemed like a hazy country floating in some intangible interval between then and now.
Maybe her life before the hospital had been a dream of sorts, she thought. It seemed so far away now, like someone else’s life. Everything was changed. Everything that existed on the other side of the window—Jane, Helen, her father, college, thoughts of the past—now seemed insubstantial, leaving a hole deep inside her where emptiness crept in. If she went out into the city streets, she thought, she would be faced with millions of people wanting nothing to do with her anymore.
She stayed by the window, squinting, though there was no moonlight nor streetlights. And she wondered if she were any different from the body on the stretcher she’d just seen carried in the night.
When Lilly fell asleep in her hospital bed that night, she dreamed she was home in Little Italy, and Jane was reading a phone book to her. They were trying to look up numbers to call because they had killed a rat, but maybe it was a man, and they had to get rid of the corpse.
She awoke to the lonely shock of her hospital room.
That morning at 6 a.m., Lilly was already up, washing her face in the tiny sink. She was in her nightgown, and she pulled her blue jeans and T-shirt on rapidly as she heard the footsteps outside her door—patients racing from their rooms, down the corridor.
Flashing red lights and shouting filled the halls. Lilly let the door to her room shut behind her as she scrambled with the crowd to the window in the center lounge. A group of staff were policing the area, pushing through to get closer to the shattered glass.
Lilly had heard nothing in her room of the glass breaking.
Patients were kneeling on the leather couch, but staff members were shouting at them to clear off it. Dangerous broken glass from the window was all over the couch which lay directly under its sill, and in the windless morning, shards with knifelike edges and some small glittering particles, too, made the whole couch seem lighted.
“Please get away from the window!” Caroline was shouting.
What lay below, outside them, was uncertain. The patients were trying to make sense of the patrolmen and security guards circled around in an area outside the garden gates, in a gully between the gates and the FDR.
There was a low haze of city morning. The sun hadn’t risen yet, and the gathering police squad threw no shadows. Somewhere, Lilly thought, as she struggled to look out, beyond the inside commotion of patients and nurses in the lounge, was the shadow of what lay on the ground, but she couldn’t see it. And she dreaded seeing it.
Then Lilly heard Caroline shouting out in the chaotic confusion inside the crowding room: “Please let’s gather around now!”
“Who was it?” A patient pulled at the silence.
Other voices rose. “Who? Was it Leonard? I saw him go in here.”
Patients were ushered away from the debris quickly, and Lilly was tapped gently on her shoulder by an aide, telling her to get away from the window. She followed the other patients into the South Lounge.
“Yes,” Lilly heard Caroline say, walking beside another patient in the group, “Yes… it was Leonard.”
There was a stone quiet in the South Lounge, patients fumbling through broken conversations about what had happened.
Lilly looked at the shaft of yellow lamplight that had bathed Leonard as he read or talked in the evenings. She only knew him for a short time under that light, she thought, too short a time for her to feel what she w
as feeling. But a thick doom gripped her.
Chapter Nine
Black water trickled between the flagstone tiles of the hospital’s courtyard. It was afternoon, the same day. An emergency meeting had been called at eight that same morning to briefly discuss the suicide, and then postponed. Cardboard and wooden boards were secured tightly on the gaping hole in the center lounge’s window, but it would be hours before the window could be fully repaired, so the lounge wasn’t safe. The lounge looked torn apart, though Leonard had only pulled out the lamp and crashed its base against the window glass. Staff and patients and scrambled through it, disrupting it’s orderly array of chairs and game tables. The patients were rushed out to other places in the hall again; most of them were listlessly and aimlessly wandering the corridors, or searching for therapists, asking where their doctors were. Gravity deadened the air—shock and silence—and it seemed like each patient was painlessly alone. There was no communion among them, as if the incident had made them into separate beings again, back into the loneliness of illness and hopelessness. Finally, by afternoon, the whole patient community was shepherded off the hall and taken down to the garden. Lilly felt herself pulled into a long string of blackening hours, bereft and empty, and she didn’t know why.
Now the garden air swelled with after-rain moisture. There was still hardly any sun, as if the gloomy dawn were still with them, and the sun had never risen at all. Lilly looked helplessly around the garden.
Wetted flakes of city ash—flecks that looked like black scarabs—tarnished the plump, assiduously pruned flowers inside the few patches of green enclosed by a square rod-iron fence. On the other side were long and heavy gates overlooking the highway, an ocean sound. But, it was the roar of cars traveling on the FDR Drive to the south.
Theresa was chasing the sounds, losing her loafers as she raced around the yard. Her white ankle socks dirtied and tore on the stones.
“Look,” Lisa said to Lilly now. “Theresa is trying to reach Nirvana.”
Lisa was sitting next to Lilly on the bench. Other patients were seated now, too, on the painted green benches inside the enclosed area.
Lilly shifted on her bench, disturbed.
“Lilly, are you doing all right?” Lisa asked. Lisa’s hair seemed to float in the muggy air, its strands brown feathers. A small, tickling wind made the mugginess feel thicker. “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” Lilly said.
“My mother and father were coming for a session this afternoon. We were going to talk about my discharge,” Lisa went on. “Fuck a duck. With this thing going on on the hall after Leonard, I’m sure it got cancelled.”
“Fuck is right,” Lilly said. She tried again to listen.
“Come to my room when we finish here, Lilly. We can talk about things, if you like.”
“Good,” Lilly said. “Yes.”
Beverly was seated alone on a bench appearing to read a novel, a short distance away. But she looked up every few minutes, scrutinizing the patients. It was the first time Lilly had seen the nurse since she had examined Lilly that first evening of admission. Beverly appeared shorter and older. But the rest of her was the same. Her tank top as before, too tight. Her round, lawn-colored eyes, cold. Bands of matching green eye shadow brushed on their lids. Lilly wondered if the nurse still smelled of department-store makeup counters and brand-name talc. Beverly’s man-sized arms and hands looked portentous—transformative material for Lilly’s anxious dreams tonight, Lilly feared, strong mother-arms or the weapons of an overwhelming perpetrator.
You can take me to the principal’s office and teach me a good lesson, Lilly thought in silence. Take me to the police, your locked bedroom. The lines swimming in her head must have been from some porno magazine she had seen of horrible, luring schoolmistresses. But then Lilly only wanted to look harder at Beverly, as if drawn unwittingly to a wound, or a scab that had only partially healed, and now itched, begging to be touched by clandestine strokes of Lilly’s fingers, unnoticed. And she was flirting precipitously with the nurse, with her inner thoughts. She wondered if Beverly had the same penetrating, horrid eyes.
“Lilly?” Lisa was speaking to her again. “What’s going on with you, Lilly?”
Lilly didn’t answer.
Then, as if hearing Lilly’s thoughts, Beverly turned a page in her paperback novel on the bench. She crossed her muscular legs, and her eyes darted a sullen glance at Lilly.
“Lilly?” Lisa touched Lilly lightly on her arm. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Nothing.” Shaken, Lilly snapped her head away from the nurse.
“I don’t care about her,” Lisa said. “You care what they think about you too much. Are you thinking about Leonard? You’re so intense.”
Lilly glanced up at the sky through a hole in one of the low, iron-gray clouds. Then, still shaken, her eyes fell back down to watch the other patients disperse around the courtyard. But within a few silent seconds, Lilly was pulled back toward Beverly. The nurse had gone back to her paperback novel.
In the distance, through a corner of one eye, Lilly caught the sight of a male patient talking to himself by the garden fence overlooking the highway. His wide shoulders absorbed the little bit of sunlight, and he was shining in the gray, muddy light. There was a light fog over the day, and the figure, tall and big-shouldered, reminded her of Leonard.
“The cookie-dough-flavored ice cream at Peppermint Patty’s is the best choice if you get a pass soon, Lilly,” Lisa began chattering absentmindedly. “I went there and ordered it with Louise from the fifth floor…. I’m just saying…. I’m just trying to talk about something cheerful for a change. I don’t want to think so hard….”
Lilly lowered her eyes to the soil and flagstone below them. She watched Lisa cross her shoes.
The wind flicked at the pages of Beverly’s unread paperback, and soon the nurse was loudly calling to one of the hospital aides: “Sandra, get Theresa to stop that now. Pick up her loafers and put them on. Come on, this isn’t a football field. Why is she running around like that?”
“‘Live each day as if it’s the first day of your life,’” Lisa went on.
Lilly said vacantly, “Sure, sure.”
“That is Louise’s daily chant. Did you ever see God-spell?” Lisa asked.
“I don’t think so. No, actually,” Lilly said.
“‘Oh dear Lord, each day I pray,’” Lisa sang, but now Lisa had tears in her eyes, and she brushed at a fallen leaf on her dress. “I don’t think you’re really listening. Where’s your head, Lilly?”
Lilly turned to stare at the man by the gates. He was reminding her now of her father, the way he looked buried within himself. He was struggling to light a rain-wet cigarette with his gold lighter, talking to himself again as Leonard did on the hall, thin lips muttering in slow movements. Lilly thought she heard the words he was muttering to himself, as she might hear a buzz in the wind, almost like a crow sound. They seemed to touch her, and she thought about what the dimensions of an invisible stadium of ghosts might be—how one could measure the space the dead took up by their spirits, and how the living could sometimes be like ghosts, half in that other sphere. She could feel the man’s baggy clothes on his reduced body, his words no longer communicating to this world, because she had developed a supernatural sense for the spirits inside withered bodies. It was one talent her father bestowed on her with his illness, the ability to search past the foul scents of his body, his brain damage, for the spirit she remembered he once had been. There was a small transistor radio playing “Catch the Wind,” as, becoming fearful, Lilly, resisted a pull to reach with her eyes back at Beverly.
“Don’t look at that guy,” Lisa sharply said to Lilly again.
“I thought he was Leonard,” Lilly said.
“Leonard was a sick man,” Lisa said. “He had a gun. Do you think I am misleading you?”
Lilly felt her leg muscles pinch, and she kept her eyes on the back of the stranger Lisa was describing, as if the si
ght could muffle the disturbing words Lisa was saying, but she did not want Lisa to think she wasn’t listening.
“I guess you’re right,” Lilly said, but she continued watching the man at the gate, wondering how a body that large and bulky could not, by sheer force, break through the gates. She imagined him for a moment pulling apart the bars with his bare hands—hands she would never have, muscles and stature she would never possess. She tried to read into his swaying body, but his aimless motion began to disorient her.
The sight of his knees, his construction boots filled her with fear.
“Hey,” Lisa said now, tenderly. “Lilly, what’s wrong. Oh, Lilly…”
Lilly turned away from the sight of the disturbed man, her mouth finally opening, though she couldn’t talk, her eyes grasping onto Lisa.
An aide, brandishing two fallen penny loafers, was trying to catch Theresa, who was wet with manic drooling, giggling, jumping, and skipping around the circled garden like a lighted firecracker. Beverly suddenly stood up and strode over, looming large in her concern, and sweeping Lilly into her trajectory. Her imposing girth made Lilly remember Helen when it was cold outside in Bedford, driving down to where Lilly had stood shivering on the driveway, waiting for the school bus to come. Her mother would open the door to the Ford Mustang, waving Lilly into the heated car with its red leather seats and AM radio. Her mother’s hands had once been as warm as the gusts from the car heater, like blankets on Lilly’s freezing cheeks. Then Lilly was thinking of the statue of the Mother Mary in the baptistery and, as if the bulb had been shaken, it stirred, conducting an electricity of emotions and sensations through Lilly. Everything was suddenly threatening: the rainy mist, the odors of city, and the garden. She didn’t want anything to happen, but a tension was building within her.
She watched Beverly as she approached the aide and the manic Theresa. Theresa had fallen to the flagstone now, her skirt had torn, and a flash of her cotton girl’s underwear, speckled with pebbly garden soil, glistened under the sparse sunlight.
Hystera Page 12