“Theresa,” she heard Beverly say, and Beverly’s face became strict, her hand pulling up the girl who was now struggling to stand. Theresa was still giggling, and her drool was falling on her pants like viscous tears.
Lilly watched them, and, in spite of herself, Lilly was pulling Beverly tight against her to fill her emptiness. Lilly didn’t want to feel anything, but a heat passed through her, a warm breath like a kiss. Then a debasing sexual electricity overwhelmed her, as if a tangle of exposed wires and failed transmissions were running through her in a horrible, widening destruction. The heat became a voracious surge; a flaming ignited Lilly’s feelings and Lilly’s body.
Lilly doubled over, clutching her midriff. It was a catastrophe—this sudden letting-out, against her will. Eye to eye, filled by a woman she feared and hated and didn’t want to be near. No, she couldn’t have come, she told herself, but she had orgasmed, a tortured spasm and spill, and there were trembles within her now. It was because Lilly cannot love at all, she thought. Lilly could only love a behemoth, she was thinking, and not even know whether it is a man or woman, and what was Lilly? Hip to knee, she was only a vibrating pole of flesh, and now—Lilly was nothing. She wanted to push her fist between her thighs, into the hole of herself, dig her fist where the intense upheaval in her stomach was turning into a mix of sex and incontinence. The confusing trembling surged yet again in her genitals, and she was horrified, beyond any shame—as if she had expelled a miscarriage through her bowels.
“All right, people, it’s time to go in!” a staff member was shouting.
“People, let’s stay together. We’re going to have another community meeting. If you could all just remain together…,” the nurse was calling.
Beverly was standing and signaling the other patients with her powerful arm, trying to move them into a group in the center of the garden. Lilly sought the eyes of the man by the gate. But it was Beverly who held the exit door open and stood protectively, one foot outside in the courtyard, but one foot keeping the door ajar for the others. Her shadow gave off a warmth, and Lilly started to sink into it again.
Then Lilly pulled herself away, disoriented, her head filling with confusion and panic. Leonard’s suicide entered her thoughts, like a pull into blissful extinction.
Beverly was alert to Lilly’s behavior, gesturing at Lilly, and then Lilly knew she could not run toward the gates. Beverly was still bringing the patients into a shielded circle by the exit door, and her forceful arm was a sharper order in the air, calling Lilly to join the group of patients.
Finally, Lilly shambled to the courtyard door. She was splitting apart from the convergence of the two awful events she did not comprehend—the numbing orgasms and the plunge of a soul on the opposite pole of life’s spectrum into a different kind of oblivion.
Lilly followed the group into the building as Beverly let the garden exit door slam shut. The elevator doors opened as she slowly led the group into the elevator car, back to safety.
The elevators finally closed.
“All right, we’re moving,” another nurse said as the elevator began its ascension.
“Please, let’s start,” Caroline’s familiar husky voice reached out to the circle of seated patients in the lounge. “First I would like to tell you, as a group, exactly what happened. At four o’clock this morning, Leonard took his own life. He found a way to smash the window, and he jumped. We need to assure you the staff is here for all of you. We know it seemed as if the staff weren’t there for Leonard, whom most of you know well from our floor. Louise, you seem very upset.”
Lilly, seated across the room, tried to make out Louise’s face, but her stomach and bowels were blazing. Some horrible guilt was seizing her, torturing her from within, a psychic flame, as if from a candle consuming its own periphery, destroying its own center.
“What?” Louise asked in a high-pitched voice.
“You seem distressed, Louise,” Caroline said.
“I knew Leonard,” a male patient interjected. But Lilly didn’t look toward him, or try to determine who was speaking now. She had already removed herself from the crowded room of patients.
Leonard sped through Lilly’s imagination again: falling, shooting into a shattering explosion of a person, but what person?
“The staff wants to talk to all of you about what happened,” Caroline was persevering.
The drone of collective voices blended together until Louise shook into hysterics.
“Oh my God, did you see it? Oh, my God!” she cried.
“Yes, he jumped,” Caroline’s cautious, slowly enunciated explanation was continuing.” We had him on watch, but there was a change in shift at midnight. He waited until the early hours of morning, and then he broke the window.”
Leonard’s life was now vanishing into the thick, muggy gray outside. Lilly imagined him as he tumbled down in the air almost noiselessly, like a wind that only makes itself known and seen in relation to some other object—a treetop as it lashes, underbrush as it rustles, leaves swirling up from the ground….
Suddenly, Lilly wanted to flee from the circle, to go back to her own room and sleep. She was so tired, fagged out, she thought, remembering how she had described her fatigue to herself in the Northern Westchester hospital lobby the night her father fell, and she heard a thud below her in the bathroom. Remembering how she waited for her mother on a bare wooden bench in the hospital lobby, when her mother was upstairs visiting her father and she was alone, the sunlight piercing through some distant churchly windows with a celestial glow. If I am so tired and there is still so much tragedy to go through, I could curl up here, roll onto my side, tuck a hand below my chin and just sleep, she had thought. If there is still that much tragedy to go through, why couldn’t I take a short nap, rest up—“snooze” would be the word my father might have used, like the cartoon boys and girls in the funnies when all the zzz’s are trailing from their drawn skulls.
“Do people have fantasies about doing what Leonard did?” Caroline was persisting.
Lilly looked for Dr. Burkert at his usual spot, a swivel chair, in the corner by the phonograph, but it was empty. Desperately she made a harder effort to listen to what Caroline was saying, but the voices in the meeting were undifferentiated, as if from one bulk of body.
“This has been a very upsetting incident for all of us,” she now heard Caroline say. “And I want everyone in the group to have some time to think about what happened. You will all be talking to your doctors about how you feel. But please come and seek out any staff member if you feel like you need to talk about it at any time.”
Lilly looked toward Beverly. The nurse looked at her with concern. And then a feeling began, first in Lilly’s fingers, joints lightly burning.
People were fighting. Arguing, noise, and light expanding.
Then Lilly saw Dr. Burkert. He had slipped in, and his shirt was stained by slashes of lamplight. She wondered where he had been. He was too late.
She saw him approaching her, as if from a dark hole in her vision. The meeting was breaking up.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Lilly’s fingers flew to her face, jittery, rubbing her cheeks, as if smudges had stained them.
“It’s 4:45. You have forty-five minutes before dinner. Would you like to talk in my office?”
Lilly felt herself nodding.
He walked ahead of Lilly down the corridor, glancing back at her a few times. He turned the key to his locked office, bending down slightly. “You’re agitated. Is there something you are struggling with? You seemed very disturbed by the meeting.” He gestured her inside the room.
She watched him turn on the light; the plastic squares in the ceiling were like those in her room. She stepped forward and sat in her usual wooden chair. She felt her own quivering, a prison of trembling. Her hand wanted to hold the bulb again, and only in her imagination she was screaming “Fuck you!” at Dr. Burkert.
“What is it?” Dr. Burkert asked. “Can you tel
l me?”
Lilly swallowed more and more fiercely to smother her voice. Then she was ranting, but only inside herself. Because she was only air, she thought. Neither language nor emotion could gather together to prevent the inevitable evaporation. They couldn’t help her out of this. She felt a growing force pulling her to him. If only he would let her alone—take his eyes and hands with him. Go away!
Lilly looked down. But she was wet at the corners of her mouth from holding in her screams. Then she was slipping from the chair, and her hands had to grab for the bulb—she couldn’t control them.
A humming wind fluttered at the metal-shuttered window in the tiny office.
Lilly slipped, tripped into darkness. She thought Dr. Burkert would catch her in his arms when she began sliding from her chair to the floor. She almost fell. But she balanced herself and lurched, flinging open the office door, into the corridor.
Lilly ran to her room.
The dinner bell chimed, the night lights of the hall came on for the others clambering toward the dining room. But Lilly’s lips were bars, closing tightly on the screams within her, imprisoning her.
When Lilly reached for the desk lamp in her room, its lampshade looked like a little girl’s dress, flowing down the lamp stand, gingham and nearly sheer, transparent.
She hurled it and its cord jumped from the socket, whipped through the air, dashing against the window. She threw herself on the bed and turned over on her belly, and the outpouring of tears was worse than the rage. All she felt was her head imploding.
“Okay, young lady, that’s enough. We’ve had enough, do you understand, Lilly?” It was Caroline, standing with another nurse in her room. “Okay, you have two choices here. Let me explain them to you,” Caroline went on. “You can get up, get off that bed, and come to the quiet room willingly with the two of us walking you in, nice and calm. Or if you throw another goddamn thing—and I mean this—we’re going to do whatever it takes to take you there against your will.”
Lilly blinked. The swamp of tears stung. She brushed at her eyes with the back of her hand.
“I’ll go,” she said, and suddenly her form—the weight of her—seemed to come back, filling out her skeletal frame with real flesh and bone. There was no more of the tantrum welling up to tear at her from inside.
“So we are back here.” Dr. Burkert was over Lilly as she stretched under the overhead fluorescent light inside the white seclusion room an hour later. “You lost control again and threw a lamp. It would have been better if you could have spoken with me about what you were feeling.”
Lilly looked up. The whiteness of the room was glaring, like a blinding afternoon sun. The nurses had sedated her. She wasn’t sure what medicine had forced her into this drowsy heaviness, but her head felt as though it was detached from her body.
“Let her sleep it off,” Lilly had heard Caroline say, and then the quiet room door had shut. Lilly didn’t know exactly how long she had been lying here. She had walked into the quiet room by her own will, upright and fully dressed, anchored on both sides by more aides. She was still wearing the same blue jeans. They hadn’t changed her clothes.
Now she felt a tiny throb and reached for the sore place on her upper arm where the injection had gone in.
“For some patients, coming into the quiet room can bring a sense of control,” Dr. Burkert was saying. “You’ve been here for an hour or so, and you have been sedated.”
She didn’t answer. Lilly clasped her hands around both her arms, and she remained lying flat on her back. When she looked up she saw Dr. Burkert squatting beside her mattress; his sharp knees and long legs made a lap like a cliff. His hands were on the precipice over his bent knees, watching her.
“I’m sorry this is happening to you,” he said. “I know you feel very vulnerable.”
Dr. Burkert was quiet now. He waited. She knew he must be thinking; it may take time before she would open up to him. She let the silence blanket her.
The medicine made her head feel floaty, the extreme whiteness of the room was calming her. She could tell him everything that happened in the garden, if she didn’t feel him so close to her, she thought. And then, whether from the clouds inside her head, or her muscles that turned soft as butter from the strong medicine, she felt him moving through her. She would have said, Beverly was there, and I was with her, we were so close, my body became misshapen, I tried to look for a man but I came. Her mind was in a dream, and Dr. Burkert was suddenly in the dream with her. She could feel him moving through the folds of her imagination. In the dream, there was a young girl abandoned somewhere in a closet, a dirty room with only darkness. Lilly could heard her shrieks from somewhere in the distance.
“I want to help you.” His voice brought her back, and she realized it was the whiteness of the room, the spears of sunlight coming in through the barred quiet room windows she had been feeling, and she was sweating now.
Dr. Burkert still kneeled. He shifted and tried to hold her eyes.
Lilly floated back into the dream trying to join the shrieking girl in the closet. But Dr. Burkert’s savage journey through her was still real, and she lost the frame that separated her from him. He was reaching for her in the half-dream, and then in a flash he was beating her firmly with his hand. She heard her own cries. A plug from deep within her was pulled; a hole was exposed, as if she could feel her own breathing for the first time.
“What is it?” Dr. Burkert was asking, and Lilly realized he hadn’t done a thing or heard her screams. It had all happened somewhere else. She came back into awareness, cooling. He went on, “It has been a very difficult morning for everyone. I spoke with Beverly, who was in the garden with you. She told me you were very agitated.”
When Lilly jolted at the name, he drew back, hesitating in thought.
“Let’s talk more about this later,” he said. “I’ll come back when you’re feeling more able to let me.”
After Dr. Burkert left the quiet room, Lilly wanted to get up, unbearably anxious without his presence. She became certain that there was a beast in her belly. She was on the examining table inside the wild turbulence of her imagination again as her thoughts reentered the realm where the sublime fire waited. It was the wet orgasm she remembered now in the garden, how it had made her eyes close and then she had been lost behind a screen as if blind. Was there ever an end to the vortex and its diametrical pulls? Her eyes peered out into blackness now.
Lilly looked toward the quiet room window, burning to escape. She imagined a fall that would land her on the stones below. She tried to estimate the travel time between unscrewing the nuts that hinged the window, crushing her body through the small opening, and falling to her death. But the medicine was wrapping her thoughts into dull clouds; she was so tired she could not sustain the intensity. Not tonight, she told herself. Not right now. She could only surrender to the weight of her exhaustion.
Lilly sank into the mattress. It wasn’t long before she closed her eyes and fell into her first deep sleep in days.
Dr. Burkert came into the quiet room by late morning the next day.
“How are you?” he asked. “The nurses told me you slept last night. You seem calmer this morning.”
“I didn’t get enough sleep this past week. I was not myself.”
“You haven’t mentioned any feelings about Leonard’s suicide.”
“I was shocked. That’s all. Everyone was.” The ghosts had had their way with her, she thought, and now they were finished, their petering presences vanishing into her thick confusion. Late last night, unable to get back to sleep, Lilly had imagined a spirit as a cipher of matter, the weight of one teardrop, but it was gone now, she thought. She had fallen asleep again, and her body, rested now, seemed the only survivor of Leonard’s and her father’s fall, their death.
“Is that why you lost control?” Dr. Burkert moved closer to get to speak to her by the mattress. “From shock?”
“I told you,” she said. “I wasn’t sleeping. And I was f
rightened.”
“But you told me you weren’t sleeping before Leonard’s suicide.”
“Lots of things frighten me,” she said, quickly. “It’s nothing unusual.”
“Were you frightened of Beverly? She told me she felt you were upset when you saw her there in the garden, and you were very anxious when she got near to you, to tell you you had to come back to the floor.”
“She was the same nurse who examined me that first night I was admitted.”
“But she wasn’t able to examine you that night. You lost control like you did yesterday in your room after coming up from the garden.”
“They took me up from the emergency room that night I was admitted, and I didn’t even see my friend again. I was scared. I don’t know what I told you.”
“You said that you needed help. You seemed to be reacting to something in your body. It was terrifying to you. I told you there would be an examination, that a nurse would need to examine you to make sure there wasn’t a physical cause you were describing. You lost control during the examination. I wonder if something like that happened with the same nurse Beverly in the garden.”
“No, no. She doesn’t have this effect on me. I was just very upset by everything, everything was very upsetting to me—I swallowed some pills the night I went to the emergency room.” Lilly threw her head back, it felt heavy again. Then she watched him shift on the floor, but he didn’t move closer to her.
“I think you are very upset by what happened in the garden with Beverly, and I understand you need to avoid that now,” he said. “A patient here took his life yesterday morning, too. Did you know Leonard? The nurses have told me you and he talked together in the evenings.”
“We knew each other for a very short time. There wasn’t time to know him.”
“I can understand how you may have felt devastated by what Leonard did. Did you want someone to make you feel safer after Leonard? After the morning?”
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