Mystery Girl: A Novel

by David Gordon

  In my own case, my difficulties did not begin to emerge until my late teens, though looking back now I wonder, did I have a premonition about my own fate? Was I somehow, unconsciously, preparing myself? If so, it was of little use. When my turn came, I believed the lies my own mind told, just like an amateur.

  At first I began to suspect that someone was watching me. I wasn’t sure who, of course, because I couldn’t catch them. But I became convinced that “they” were lurking outside the house, ducking behind a tree when I turned or quickly pulling their shades. When I drove with my mother, I would become certain a car was following us. I would force her to drive in circles, change lanes, make sudden, aimless turns, but this proved or disproved nothing. Perhaps the reason the suspicious blue car didn’t follow was that the driver knew I suspected him and so was acting like an innocent person driving a blue car to trick me. Or perhaps it had been the green car all along.

  As my fears worsened, I took to wearing disguises. First I tried to hide this new obsession (my obsession with hiding) from my mother by simply donning a hat or scarf or dark glasses. Soon however, I became an expert, devising and refining elaborate characters with wigs, makeup, clothes, and prostheses: an old man, a large woman, a mailman, a blind beggar. Of course on some level I knew this was ridiculous. I am not a small person, and leaving my house in an Afro wig, my skin darkened and wearing a housedress, did not make me less conspicuous. Quite the contrary! But I could not stop.

  Finally I gave up leaving the house altogether. My mother was growing deeply concerned, but I was in denial, still consulting for colleagues via the mail, reviewing case files and critiquing their reports. Still, a crash was inevitable, and as my paranoid fantasies combined with the compulsive eating that marks my acute manic phase, I would order grand feasts, instructing the deliverymen to leave the food on the porch. Finally I lost all control and ordered Indian, Chinese, pizza, Mexican, and Thai at once. The deliverymen arrived to find me in an upper window, disguised as a rabbi and ordering them to place the food in a basket that I lowered from a rope while tossing loose cash onto the lawn.

  It was after this incident that I apparently blacked out and woke up in Green Haven, a well-regarded hospital for the mentally ill. I was medicated, stabilized, and returned to a coherent, if shaken state. They say that doctors make the worst patients. I certainly had as little interest in my psychiatrist’s attempts to fix me as I had regard for my hosts’ ideas of quality in food, books, or housekeeping. My only concern was to get out as soon as possible, first by arguing with my keepers and demonstrating my intellectual superiority (this rarely wins people over, I’ve found), and later by acceding to their demands—interpreting their splotches, solving their puzzles, coughing up their preformed epiphanies, and, most important, swallowing their pills.

  The pills! That chemical rainbow, those little time bombs of sanity, were to define the next era of my life. The cycle was always the same. For a while, I eat the brain candy, and life is placid as a suburban kiddy pool: chlorinated, clear, depthless, and dull. Sluggish and sheepish but technically sane, I paddle along, until something, a case, a clue, a crisis, or sheer boredom, restarts my mind. Inevitably I forget to take the pills or I “forget” to take the pills, or I misremember that I did take them or I just decide I don’t need them anymore. I’m better. I’m fine. Actually, I feel great. Greater! Really, I’ve never felt so good. The air is fresh and the sunshine sparkles and I savor every moment of the day. Food tastes wonderful (uh-oh) and music sounds divine (really this is the only medicine anyone needs) and I am grateful to be alive. I find myself deeply engrossed in my work, my mind blooming with new ideas, and frankly I am more brilliant than ever (though of course I am never brilliant enough to recognize that this happens every time, that this very brilliance is a symptom of the coming crash). Finally, I become so brilliant that I can barely keep up with my own amazing brain as it races ahead, without sleep, without cease, seeing more and more, understanding more and more, reading the world like a foreign text that suddenly makes sense, like a closed book that suddenly falls open.

  It is at this point that some small part of me, some inner librarian, taps my shoulder or whispers in my ear and asks, “Isn’t this merely a fiction? Don’t we remember how it ends?” But I don’t listen, my ears are plugged and I am racing ahead to the climactic chapters: paranoia, delusions, epic binge eating, intellectual ecstasy, and suicidal despair. And then I turn the blank page.

  I wake up in Green Haven with a tube in my arm and Doctor smiling kindly down at me and I know it has happened again. And again. And again. For it is a circular story, an eternal return, with minor variations (an escape, in my underwear, from dwarf-commandos who turn out to be girlscouts, a taxi trip to Sacremento chasing a cloud) and one major development: as the years passed, I ceased to be a troublemaker. I was too much humbled. What good was my supposedly great brain if it could not help me, if in fact it was my own worst enemy, the nemesis that beat me every time? (For those who are keeping score, this was the occasion of my mother’s second and last lie to me: her assurance that I was going to be fine. Once again her poker face revealed exactly what was on the cards she pressed lovingly to her maternal bosom. I will never be fine. She was, as she’d say, full of crap.)

  Besides illness, the other great force that humbled me was love. As Freud so beautifully writes: “Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.” However, he also notes: “One is very crazy when in love.”

  Her name was Mona Naught.

  Today Green Haven is like a second home to me. It is in a sense my alma mater. Instead of going to college (I was Harvard bound) I left home for the hospital, and there I have returned for further studies, albeit as subject and not student. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal. Just as a botanist, unable to visit the jungle, might become an expert on tropical flowers in his greenhouse, so I too have gained much from close observation of the rare species, the wild orchids and dark nightshades, the delicate violets, rank weeds, and bursting sunflowers that thrive in Green Haven’s eternal and protective spring.

  After a week’s recuperation and stabilization in my room, I was able to descend to the common areas, and gravitated to the “library.” I place the term in quotes because this room was hardly well stocked with either books or silence, but still it was much my favorite room in the house, free of the television and admirably proportioned, with high ceilings, wide chairs, and french windows open to the breeze that whispered in so alluringly that, though I might not, after a crash course of Haldol and electroshock, know my own name, I knew with one deep breath and the vague touch of soft air on my face—it was spring. Well enough to be bored, but still weak enough to be dazed, I shuffled in, failed to find either a new book or a worthwhile chess opponent, and drifted off into the land of nod with what, for all I knew, was a week-old newspaper on my knee. As is often the case when wading in that murky river between waking and sleep, my mind began to float downstream and a scene from memory appeared along the shore: I was on my back, on the stretcher, rolling down a hall, returning to my bed from the ECT room, where the mechanics had rebooted my mind with electricity, that torture which like so many things—whiskey, morphine, love—is medicine to some and poison to others. For me, frankly, it was a relief, the calm after the electrical storm, my brain washed clean after a long rain, or better yet, wrung out after a good scrubbing. At last I knew the fuzzy befuddlement that the healthy and stupid call “peace of mind.” The electrical staff generally endeavor to avoid interpatient encounters, but there was some delay by the elevator as my wheel stuck (my bulk is not easy to transport, and in fact my room at the clinic is fitted with a special bed), and I heard another stretchered patient roll raving down the hall. It was a woman and she was howling. I could not see her face beyond the white-coated backs fighting to hold her down, but as she screamed in a ragged, schizoid voice, I saw a hand, long, slender, delicate, with narrow tapered fingers, a violinist
’s hand, drop over the edge of the gurney. The nails were done in red.

  “It’s not true,” she was screeching. “It’s all a plot. I’m not Mona Naught. Zed’s alive. Please, someone believe me. It’s not real.”

  Suddenly I awoke, or revived, or resurfaced, in the “library.” My eyes popped open and I caught a thief filching my paper. Instinctively, I grabbed the intruding hand by the wrist. It was slender, fine-boned, red-tipped, and the thin wrist was circled with a pink ID band. It was the hand from my dream.

  “Pardon me,” the attached body said in a voice that was surely not the voice from my dream. That one had been a raging, raw, decidedly psychotic screech. This voice on the contrary was smart, amused, musical and refined. “I was just hoping to borrow the crossword. If you’re finished snoring through it, I mean.”

  “Yes. I mean, no,” I said. “I’m not using it.” My mind was still foggy.

  “Then unhand me, sir.”

  “Sorry.” I released her reluctantly. “It’s the afterglow of all the electricity they ran through my brain. I apologize.”

  “Don’t.” The fingers fluttered off lightly, like a butterfly bearing away the paper. “I know what it’s like. That’s why I want to try the puzzle. To see how many brain cells I have left.”

  “By all means then, proceed.”

  She smiled her thanks, I think, though I can’t be sure. The spring sun was shining whitely behind her, frankly her face was a diamond, but she gave a little witty curtsey, then retired to a table with, I was pleased to see, a proper pen, not a pencil. She did it in ink. While she bent to her task, biting her lip and brushing her long black hair behind her ear, I observed and surreptitiously timed her, leaning back, lids low, one eye on the grandfather clock. She was beautiful. She had a small face, large eyes that seemed sad although she was quick to smile, even to herself, as she filled in a word, then gnawed the pen with her little white teeth. She finished in ten minutes. Not bad really for a young person recovering from electroshock, though I can’t say what day of the week’s puzzle it was.

  “So,” she said, standing and smoothing her hospital robe as if it were a skirt. “How did I do?” She handed me the completed puzzle.

  I laughed. She’d caught me. “Just about ten minutes,” I said. “Quite impressive.”

  She beamed like a child. “Thanks.”

  I held out my hand. “I’m Solar Lonsky, by the way.”

  Fearlessly, she placed that pretty hand inside my ridiculous beastly paw. “Pleased to meet you. I am Mona Naught.”

  What can I say? (Dear Reader, gentle doctor, fellow detective, alien scholar, reading this archive perhaps in the far future, long after my molecules return to carbon following their brief adventure in consciousness, after my case studies are unearthed and published, perhaps on a tiny chip that you will read through the tip of your tongue while floating in a gelatinous blob through space) I fell in love. Preposterous, I know: an enormous (enormously obese) socially retarded, hermitic (hermetic), certifiably demented old fool with a heart like a scalpel falling for a demure little cocotte. But then again, isn’t love preposterous on the face of it? Isn’t it by definition a ridiculous enterprise? We have come up with only two modes to describe it: the tragic, about which I need say no more, and the happy version, the comedy, which suggests that even in its joyful, lucky, wedding-dance form, it is somehow absurd, and unable to be taken seriously, leastwise by the audience, frantically cheering for their own wishful thinking. Being happy in love means getting the big joke about humans, and I was the biggest, fattest joke of all.

  And my beloved, what did she think of me? Well, she certainly did not love me as I her: rapturously, exclusively, carnivorously. I am not an attractive specimen, and physical love is impractical for a medicated man of my proportions, heavily stuffed as I am with both blubber and libido-killing pills. And the great love of her own short life was her husband, deceased.

  But she was my love nevertheless, and if she did not love me back at least she did not despise me or if she did she hid it well. She was kind, and no doubt in that place, she was lonely. She needed a friend. She did not discuss her past or why she was there, and I did not inquire, though rumors swirled: she had a mysterious birth, a notorious husband who met a tragic death, she’d been living abroad in glamorous exile, and then, inevitably, after the flight, came the crash, the slash, the naked crying, the nightmare ambulance, the candied smile of happy pills. But that all belonged to another Mona. Our friendship was a little oasis, an island in the center of the dayroom at Green Haven, where I taught her chess and she described the paintings and buildings and plays she had seen in London and Paris and Rome. She drew my portrait in crayon.

  Then the day came when the keepers released me, and for the first time I was unhappy to go back home, to my study, my work, my books, my mother. Back to me.

  Time passed, memory faded: hers, I mean, not mine. As Dr. Freud notes, time does not pass in the unconscious, and everything that has ever happened is happening now. So too in my affective life, the clock had stopped. It was midnight in the museum of my heart. I kept watch and walked the empty chambers, guarding the precious exhibits: Here is the smell of her hair. Here are her eyes, green stones flecked with black. Here are the tiny bird bones moving in her hands. Here is her laughter, that sudden flight, that wild flutter folding into a smile. Here is that one crooked little tooth tucked behind another. Her narrow shoulders poking the thin cardigan. The pimples bursting, a five-point constellation, across her smooth forehead when her period is about to arrive. Her voice in the evening playing cards. Her long dry hand shaking goodnight. Her soft lips on my cheek the day I left. All this I preserved for posterity, in a vault whose only key I hid with her. Then one night, the doorbell rang.

  I was the only one up so I answered, something I generally avoid. I peeked through the portal. It was she, messy and distraught, her hair wild, her cheeks streaked with black tears that trickled from her eyes to the corners of her mouth. I opened the door.

  “Mona?”

  “I’m not Mona. Don’t call me that,” she whispered in another voice. It was the voice I’d heard in the hospital corridor, the voice from my dream, raspy, raw, and crazed.

  “What do you mean? What’s wrong? Come in, please.”

  She wouldn’t come in. As I fear the outdoors, so Mona, or “Mona” in her crisis, loathed the inside. She refused to cross my threshold. She shook her head in horror but clutched at my hands. I admit this thrilled me: aside from that first handshake and the brief farewell kiss on my cheek, we had never touched.

  But if her warm, clammy hands on mine made my sore heart soar, her story broke its wings. Clearly, my darling had been driven out of her mind. She chattered out a frantic tale between clattering teeth. She claimed that she was not Mona, that she was being forced to play her, by some elaborate and complex conspiracy involving her husband, her doctor (who was my doctor too, Dr. Parker), and, of all people, a famous motion picture director called, absurdly, Buck Norman, providing her scenario with the classic paranoid’s pathetic signature, the love or enmity of the famous. She also claimed that her husband, dead for years, was hiding on a mountain with a fabulous treasure. (She was hyperventilating by this point, and her clutch on my hands, once delightful, was beginning to numb. I could feel her nails digging in.)

  She had escaped from the hospital. Her plan was to discard her false identity and thereby win her freedom. Would I therefore proceed immediately to Vegas and make her my wife, Mrs. Lonsky? (Never mind that she had just unwidowed herself by declaring her husband extant.) She knew, she said, that I had loved her once. Perhaps I did still. She did not love me, she admitted, but she respected me, trusted me, admired me above all men. She would be a good wife…

  She was on her knees now, weeping into my crotch. She kissed my hands and bent to my slippered feet. That was unbearable. I lifted her into my arms. She weighed nothing. I kissed her cheek. Nothing like that was necessary, I told her. She owed me nothing,
not even gratitude, for since my heart was hers, by rights everything else I possessed was hers too. She had only to ask and she would have it, especially as cheap a gift as my name. I told her we would leave at once.

  I returned to the interior of the house and called for a taxi since I do not drive. (Nor had I ever flown on a plane or been to Las Vegas.) Then, while she hid on the porch from Buck Norman, ducked down low behind the railing and some bushes, I quickly prepared to go out: overcoat, scarf, hat, umbrella, gloves. I was tempted to disguise myself but fought the urge. I returned to “Mona,” cowering by the door as headlights approached. And then, summoning the courage that only love can inspire, I shut the door to my house behind me, took my bride by the hand, and stepped into the dark new world.

  Alas it was not the taxi. It was the police. Dr. Parker may not have my insight when it comes to psychological analysis and interpretation, but he is no fool. When the nurse found Mona missing, he searched her things, found my unanswered letters, recalled our friendship, and dispatched the authorities. There was a bit of a melee I’m afraid. For a small woman Mona put up an impressive fight, biting and scratching. I rushed to her defense, plowing into the fray, powerful but useless, like a furious bull walrus flummoxed on land. I thumped two policemen to the ground with my padded blows before a swift crack at my knees with a nightstick toppled me to the pavement, where I floundered hopelessly in my cloak and gloves and extra-long scarf. My umbrella opened accidentally and I couldn’t see. More officers came and an ambulance. In the end they took her away and, after my mother proved I was insane with some official paperwork, dragged me back in the house.

  What can I say? After this, to use the technical term, I decompensated. First, I went off my meds. I needed my full powers to help my ladylove. In reality I stopped sleeping and started eating, glutting myself with fried chicken, ice cream sundaes, and pâté on toast, while I tried to untangle her story. In the end, after a few accusatory letters turned over by Buck Norman’s security consultants, and a number of wild late night phone calls to Dr. Parker’s home number, it was decided for the safety and sanity of everyone involved, and with my mother’s consent, to swear out some restraining orders keeping me from approaching Mona, among others.