When her tears began, Dr. Burkert squatted beside her again. He smelled good and clean as a fresh bath towel.
“Getting close to people is hard for you,” he said, gently. “And perhaps even harder with a woman.”
For a second he understood, she thought. The room felt warmer.
She drew back, sucked in the wetness from her eyes. She started to speak, but then she stopped herself. “How long are you going to keep me in this room?”
“Not longer than I have to. I want you to feel more in control and hopefully understand why you lose control.”
“Humiliation,” she suddenly said, louder than she intended. “I feel humiliated. I’m just there so people can play with their ghosts, twist me any way they please into any meaning or non-meaning they please. Because I don’t matter in the first place.” It was the most she had said to him since she entered the hospital. She felt the looseness in her throat, words like a stream she couldn’t help.
When she looked at him, his eyes were warm, resolved to stay in the room with her and listen.
She went on: “I vanish. One person or another tells me who I am and what I feel. One person or another tells me what to say and do. I thought if I tried hard enough I could end my banishment from myself. It felt like someone else had ordered this punishment.”
“The punishment of—”
“Of not knowing who I was anymore.”
“That’s called depersonalization.”
“Like my body,” she said, now unable to stop herself. “My body was no longer familiar to me. But nothing was. I remember when I first felt I wasn’t there in real space, maybe I had died with my father in the coma. Maybe I was brain-damaged, too. My mother was pushing at me, like she was entering me and I was disappearing. I can’t really describe it.”
“You’re describing it very well.”
She gathered herself up now. She had said too much, and she couldn’t take it back.
But Dr. Burkert was looking intently at her, still in his same place. “That sounds terrifying,” he said.
“So this means I have a severe diagnosis; my mother has damaged me.”
“I’m not here to diagnose you. I’d like you to feel more comfortable and less damaged.”
Dr. Burkert came in the mornings for each of the days Lilly was kept in the quiet room.
The second morning she half-awoke, thinking that her father had died. But when she looked around the stark hospital room—the room was so vast. But then she was fully conscious, and she realized she was confined in a closed space. She listened to the clamber of patients moving through the halls, lining up with their coffee mugs in front of the dining room doors.
An odor halfway between the chemical smell of the highway below the barred window, and that of the tray of fried eggs on rye toast from her breakfast which she hadn’t touched, hung in the white space.
A towel lay over the rim of the basin of water, now placed by a far wall. She remembered Caroline coming in very early this morning, around 6:30, and bringing the washbasin, the hand towels, and a tiny white bar of soap.
They could not risk taking her to the showers, Caroline explained (though in softer words), nor could the staff risk stripping her themselves, exposing her nakedness to another female nurse. Not until she felt better. They would let her wash herself here, using the basin of water. She had drifted off after breakfast was brought in. She only had a taste of the salty eggs before she went back to the mattress and fell into another deep sleep.
Now she heard a gardener’s hose. It was 7:30, and she sniffed in wet dirt, flowerbed dirt. She got off the mattress and went to the window. Looking out, she saw the gardener in his green jumpsuit spraying the beds, the light purple flowers in the mud.
Caroline had wheeled in fresh clothes. Lilly thought that as soon as the morning nurse came to take her finished breakfast tray she would ask to be taken to the bathroom, which they would let her do, and ask if she could brush her teeth and her hair there. Then she left the window, washed and changed her clothes, trying to prepare herself for another session.
When she was finished, she looked around the padded room. The walls were still a shocking white but softer. The light delineating her silhouette on them had the gray intimacy of a Bedford morning inside her own bedroom when she was young. There was no noise from outside except for the muffled sounds of the highway below the barred window. The thick door was firmly shut.
By 8:30 a.m., from the portal-like window in the quiet room door, she observed Dr. Burkert as he talked to a slim woman, a young woman who was fragile and pretty. She wondered where he disappeared to during the day and night, how many patients he visited. Once she saw the retarded girl, Theresa, emerge from his office smiling, as if she’d had her first date with a man. Another time he walked an obese woman, with thickly coiffured hair and a kitchen apron strapped around her belly for no apparent reason, to her room after a session, guiding the woman through her imagined fears that a crowd of strangers might lunge from hidden corners of the corridor and attack her.
What was he thinking when his eyes plunged into them? Lilly wondered now.
Sometimes Lilly thought Dr. Burkert tried to break her down, into panic, into pieces. Suddenly her trust of him would crumble, and she saw a young, emotionally cold man who hadn’t suffered, proffering himself to those who had suffered far too much—cruelly remote and superior. But now, the door was opened by an aide, and once again, Dr. Burkert arrived inside the room.
“How is it going?” Dr. Burkert asked.
“Did my mother call you?” she asked him.
“No. Why do you ask that?”
“I thought, maybe—sometimes I dream that my father is hurt, that he died. I think I was dreaming it last night. I think it’s because of this room you put me in here. I would like to call my father, but I know my mother will be there. She takes over.” She added, quickly, “Ever since his accident, I seem to be having this dream that he died.”
“Because he can’t stand up to your mother?”
“What?”
“He died because she takes over?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Not directly. Tell me about the night of your father’s accident.”
“It was three years ago,” Lilly said. “I already told you this.”
“Is that when you first felt that you were vanishing, that your life would no longer be recognizable?”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand what you are asking me. I was alone in the house with my father—” She stopped for a second to check herself. “If you must know the details,” she continued, restraining herself, “my mother went out that day to some garden club meeting. He was home because it was a Sunday. He slipped, but I didn’t see anything. I didn’t see him slip. I heard him fall down the stairs, a crashing sound.”
“Yes?”
“He fell a second time into a coma. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“A second time?”
“I meant his second fall put him into a coma. He lay on the floor, and he was there so long, just lying there, I mean. When I heard my father out in the hall, I didn’t go to him.”
“Why?”
“I was upstairs, that’s all.
“Hours later, my mother came back from the meeting and took over. She started yelling, she was hysterical, and crazy, and I rushed down, but I was frightened by her because she was talking really fast and she was so mad. I went right into the kitchen. I was sure he was there and just that they had a fight or something like that because she was so mad and yelling. But I saw him lying on the kitchen floor. He wasn’t moving, but he was still breathing; his eyes were closed.”
“Did your mother yell at you?”
“Yes. I didn’t go down earlier to check on him. I should have realized his first fall was a stroke. She’s not from this country.”
“Yes, you told me that.”
“She and my father, they didn’t understand each other. She was unhappy, she
wanted to go back to Israel.”
“Were they separating?”
“She couldn’t, not when he was sick like this.”
“I see.”
“I think I knew this.” She stopped.
“Knew that she wouldn’t leave him, or knew that she wouldn’t leave you alone with your father in his condition?”
“She wouldn’t leave me with him.”
“She wanted to protect you?”
“Yes. But even before that she wanted to protect me. When I was a child, too. She didn’t really have a good sense of how to do it. I mean, it felt like she wouldn’t stop. She didn’t live in her own country. And she wanted to leave.”
“And in spite of everything, you needed her to stay.”
“I don’t want to talk about this. I told you. Why can’t you just respect people here?”
He waited but Lilly said nothing more. “I do want to respect people, but I also need to help them,” he said. “You’re afraid to talk of needing your mother now. We’ll stop now, and I’ll be back this afternoon.”
In the late afternoon, Dr. Burkert returned. “Let me ask you about your father,” he continued as if there had been no break. “You visited your father in the hospital, when he was in the coma.”
“Yes, I went.” Lilly was feeling less drowsy, but restless. She wanted to get out of the quiet room now, and thought she should answer him. “We were together in the darkness.”
“‘In the darkness’?”
“I held his fingers. I talked to him by his bed, and we were together. We continued to speak when he went home. In the beginning, I stayed with him all the time. When I went to college, I came home almost every weekend for a long time and we spoke.” Lilly broke off. Now she was saying too much.
“Did you ever talk about what had happened the night he had his strokes?”
“It didn’t matter what I was saying. It was done. I couldn’t change it. How could I? I couldn’t change what happened to him. Don’t you understand that?”
“But you sometimes worry that you might have.”
“If I went down, if I got out of the water. I was upstairs, I was taking a bath. I just don’t remember everything, that’s all. It was a fucked-up night. My mother was leaving in two days. She was going away. I was taking a stupid bath and thinking about her leaving us.”
“I see.”
“If something happened, then she wouldn’t leave, would she?” The fierceness in her voice startled her even more than her words. She was letting anger fly loose along with words. “So if something fucking terrible happened, she’d have to stay. And so I just didn’t go down. I’m horrible, okay?”
“No, but I get the impression you’ve never spoken to anyone about this before?”
“Of course not. My mother was too freaked to come into his room downstairs. My mother left him there a lot alone. I came home to be with him, but all I could think about was running from there, the filthy room, his filthy sheets. I tried leaving her. I got a call in my apartment one day from the Bedford police that she had driven her car off a hill.”
“On purpose?”
“I couldn’t tell. She didn’t tell me. She was hysterical.”
“I see.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” Lilly burst out. She was suddenly imagining him as feeling superior to her, looking down at her. He hadn’t suffered—medical school all paid for, top grades, parents, what did he know about degradation and failure, being locked up, the self, a prison anyone could walk into? He talked as if people were pathetic for not managing themselves well, for simply not being able to survive anymore.
“I think you’re afraid your mother or the nurse needs to punish you.”
“No, I don’t have fantasies like that!” she said, furious.
“What fantasies?”
“Please, will you leave me alone?” she said. “You put me in here! Just leave me.”
He stepped back, away from her. “We’ll pick this up tomorrow,” Dr. Burkert said. “I’ll come back in the morning.”
She fell back down on the mattress as Dr. Burkert shut the quiet room door. Her eyes stayed open against the white glare of the quiet room, and she was afraid suddenly that Dr. Burkert wouldn’t return tomorrow. That she had scared or disgusted him away. That the warmth flowing in her system from his eyes would be taken from her. She imagined him handing the notes on her to some other doctor, and then she would be completely alone, lost into nothingness. She had told him too much. She felt the pull toward Dr. Burkert as a magnetic domination over her against which she had to fight, and then she clamped her eyes shut to escape it. She imagined herself in a far-off space, but then she was falling in midair and her body gave off a shriek that threw her out of this world, as if part of her had broken loose from corporeality, a state before disintegration, an instant where she could simply jump off the precipice of her being. Like a parachutist, her equipment would bloom into a massive white sail, and she would become found and lost at the same time. If it were psychosis, it was also where the bulb was supposed to take her, she thought, away from the reach of those who would undo her. And maybe it was madness after all, this place. She could accept that now.
After a while, she went to splash some of the water in the basin on her face. But then the soft crinkled cotton of her fresh T-shirt suddenly made her feel like a schoolgirl, and the feeling pricked at her like a bite from something underfoot and it kept on growing.
She felt pulled to lie back down on the mattress and then felt wetness like a vapor from some monstrous visitation enveloping her until she was moist all over. She struggled to hollow herself out, but the orgasm still came, a rich liquid warmth that made her feel that she was floating, gliding somehow. She let it pass out of her, without touching herself, and it rolled through her, lasting longer, and she felt its odd residue of trembling and pleasure.
She stood to eat her breakfast, feeling her hunger for the first time since she was brought to the quiet room.
The next day, the quiet room walls hummed and murmured all morning with voices from the ward. Lilly looked out the small window on the quiet room to watch the activity in the hall as the day progressed. She watched Caroline instructing a handyman who held one of the hall lamps that another patient must have broken in a fit. She noticed a blonde, heavy woman in a blue hospital gown raise her hands to her tear-stained face. She couldn’t quite make out the woman’s words, but the woman was trembling and Caroline, standing sturdily, was explaining something to her after she turned from the handyman. Caroline’s hairpins had fallen, and her hair bun was collapsed across her back—waxy-looking threads, disheveled but still able to hold their shape.
Lilly continued to watch the activity in the hall. Two people were talking, a man and a woman. The woman was wearing a black skirt and carrying an alligator handbag. Her lips were thin; the stripe of red lipstick looked like tape had been pulled over her lips. She was a visitor. Lilly knew by the way the woman was dressed, her spring raincoat still on. And she was carrying something in a bag for the man, who slowly peered into the bag and seemed to recognize its contents. Clothes, things from his home, Lilly thought. The woman is his wife, or his sister. The man’s face tilted forward, and then she could see him well enough. He was taking out a pack of cigarettes, and now he held it out to the woman. When the woman shook her head at his offer, his eyes wandered over to the right of her shoulder and found Lilly’s. He let his hand holding the pack of cigarettes slip down, and looked straight into the quiet room window. Then he had turned from Lilly and Lilly watched him, imagining him take hold of the woman and kiss her on those thin lips. A lover’s kiss. Lilly didn’t know whether she felt relief or loss, watching him.
Dr. Burkert did not return that morning or early afternoon. After lunch, Lilly began to feel desperately empty again. She went to lie back down on the mattress and was pulled into a light nap. In her dream she heard her mother crying in the night, and Lilly went down the stairs to the living room. Helen asked
her to keep her hand in her own. Helen lay back down on the couch under the painting of Old Jerusalem, and Lilly felt herself pulled near her mother. But she had become Beverly, the nurse, and her leg brushed against Lilly’s skin and Lilly felt a sharp tingle in her thighs and then the room had darkened. Lilly pushed against the suffocation of her mother’s need, which she still felt, but it was the eyes of the nurse that were looking into her and pressing, as if the eyes were her mother’s lips.
Then someone else was rattling the doors in another dream waiting to enter. The image of the examining table came back into her awareness, and then Beverly was again bringing her into the invigorating caress. But she had felt an overwhelming sense of having lost herself. Everything within her was flowing and stirring, splitting her into pieces.
She awoke, sweating and terrified, as if a devouring ocean were rolling its waves toward her.
Her thighs and pubis had taken on the bruised tenderness of a woman who had sex. Then she began to cough, shivering. There was no blanket to warm her, and she no longer made an attempt to defend herself against the chill.
Lilly waited for the turbulence to pass, like a slow storm. A deepening doom clutched at her.
Lilly sat up and pressed her forehead against her knees, and her tears dripped onto the sheet. She felt helpless, sinking.
It was the first time since she came into the hospital that Lilly could not feel the bulb and felt no desire for her alchemy. She needed to be dead.
She closed her eyes and let herself drift, but it was a dreamless sleep, until again she slipped and was pulled back into the consuming ocean, sinking into a chasm, like buried bones.
When she awoke, she could not let herself fall back into sleep.
“I was on call. I couldn’t get here earlier. Are you all right?” Dr. Burkert asked when he arrived very late that night.
He stared at her disheveled corner in the quiet room where she lay on the mattress, anxious, a thin blanket wrapped around her. She tried to push down her relief. But the blanket had slipped as she startled and sat up when he opened the door, and fallen into a mound around her waist.
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