Hystera
Page 17
“Elsewhere,” she read from the chapter of the alchemy text she had found again in a shopping bag Jane brought her at the beginning of her hospital stay, called: THE OPERATION TO THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE, “…the operations are there to baffle the vulgar, and reckon with the alchemist… the stages of the Great Work can appear to the alchemist as symbols, shadow, and paroxysms like the philosophic trees that spring from the phalluses of the androgens, from Saturn and Venus.”
Lilly remembered it was Helen who gave her the first notebook. It was somewhere in the closet inside her old bedroom in Bedford, buried like an abortion under a pile of outgrown clothes. She had bound it in some scraps of leather from her mother’s bookbinding table, and on the cover, in her childish scrawl, written: I would like to write novels someday and I like poems too.
She looked at her appointment schedule for next week. Dr. Burkert, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. He would be back, she thought, thinking of him last evening in her room, telling her where the outpatient department was sheltered under a brownstone overhead. “Past the parking lot,“ he had explained. “You go down a ramp.“ Lilly perused the form he had brought in for her to sign. She suddenly wanted to see, too, his signature beside hers, as if to convince herself that something—an insight, a feeling, an idea— he had showed her in the white room, or in his office, could cause equilibrium enough for her walk out of the hospital today, into the summer morning. She read:
White female
Age: 22
Prognosis: Good
Date released: July 20, 1974
Reason given for discharge:
No longer a danger to herself.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven