Sarah Canary

by Karen Joy Fowler

  ‘Well, he wants to see her,’ said B.J. ‘And he wants to see me.’

  ‘The hell he does,’ said Houston. ‘Who the hell does he think is running this asylum? He’ll see you when I say he can. He’ll see you in hell.’ Houston cracked the knuckles of his left hand with his right. He reached under the overhang of his belly and began to undo his leather belt. B.J. put his own hands up to cover his face. They were interrupted by the female warden.

  ‘On your feet, dear,’ she said to Sarah Canary. ‘The nice doctor wants to see you now.’ Sarah Canary did not respond. There was nothing to suggest that she had even heard. Houston gave B.J. one final look, fastened his belt back into place, and then turned to help. He gripped the collar of Sarah Canary’s dress and slid her along the bench to the end. Still holding her collar, he lifted her and held her in midair for a moment. She seemed to shrink, pulling her arms and legs closer into her body.

  ‘The nice doctor wants to see you now,’ Houston said, setting her down. ‘Let’s not keep the nice doctor waiting. I’ll take her,’ he told the female warden. ‘I’ll take her more quickly than you could.’ He prodded Sarah Canary from the back. She stumbled slightly, then moved in the direction of the push. He prodded her again and she was unresisting. They disappeared through the dining-room door.

  B.J. reached across the table for his bowl. Sarah Canary had not had a chance to finish; some of his breakfast remained. It was cold and congealed, but he ate it hastily. He left with the other patients, shuffling in a line through the yard for exercise time on the roller-skating rink. B.J. had fetched the water at sunup. It had been cold enough to see his breath. Now the yard was in full sunlight and the day was a beautiful one. Might rain later, but it really didn’t look like it. This was two days now it hadn’t rained. Both the wardens commented on it.

  B.J. waited for his turn at the skates. He was quiet and unobtrusive. Ordinarily B.J. enjoyed skating. Most of the inmates did not. Most of the inmates strapped on the skates and then stood precariously on the rink without moving until the wardens came and gave them a push and they fell over. Some of them fell even without the push. Ada was a wonderful skater; she had done a lot of ice skating in Germany as a child. Ada’s arms pumped about her body when she skated, not one at a time, the way most skaters moved, but both together as if they were wings. Ada was in the wash house and it was Sarah Canary’s fault. B.J. was hungrier than usual and that was Sarah Canary’s fault, too. He let several people ahead of him in line.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ the blond woman with bloodshot eyes told him. She coughed three times. She did everything in threes. It was an SOS, but B.J. refused to admit he understood it. That was all he needed, another woman in love with him. He shook his head at her.

  Eventually he had let everyone by and stood at the very back of the line himself. When no one was looking, B.J. slipped out. He followed a circuitous route to the doctor’s study, creeping through the old barracks that had been converted for storage. He avoided the part of the asylum that once housed young subalterns and was the current quarters of the asylum attendants.

  The doctor’s study was in the old officers’ quarters. B.J. listened at the door, which was solid wood and heavy. He could hear the sounds of humming inside. Making a fist, he tapped with the last knuckle of his hand. There might have been a response that didn’t carry through the heavy door. Or he might not have knocked loudly enough to be heard over the humming. He opened the door and the humming stopped. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to intrude. I just wondered if you were able to get that fire going.’ He could smell and he could hear the fire as he spoke. The wood snapped and gasped in the fireplace. Some of the wood was perhaps a bit too wet; the air was smoky, but the fire seemed a robust and reliable one.

  ‘Oh, B.J.,’ said Dr Carr. ‘Come in, come in. I need your help.’ B.J. turned to look at him. Sarah Canary sat in the patient-chair, a comfortable winged piece; her back was to B.J. and her head and the chair obscured much of the doctor. B.J. could just see his face. He was flushed from exertion, perhaps, or emotion. Dr Carr was one of those people who reddened easily. He stood close to his patient, holding one end of his watch chain a few inches before her. B.J. could not see the watch. Sarah Canary’s dark, thick hair was in his way.

  ‘I was just about to perform an experiment in animal magnetism,’ Dr Carr said with some excitement. His pale eyelashes fluttered. ‘Something I’m ordinarily reluctant to do since it can get out of hand so easily. You’ve heard of Mesmer’s group? The original public exhibition in Paris? No? There’s quite a good account in Prichard. Not only were the infirm magnetized with mixed results, but a number of natural objects as well. Trees, for example. When the experiment was repeated in the garden of one Dr Franklin, a susceptible boy who came into contact with a magnetized tree fell at once into a crisis. He lost all consciousness. The hypnotist tried to argue that additional trees had become spontaneously magnetic, which had concentrated the effect. Balderdash. If trees had this ability, it would be worth your life to take a walk outdoors. The susceptible would always be fainting dead away. It was a naked attempt to disguise his own culpability. Truly irresponsible behavior on the part of the hypnotist. And ultimately tragic. Most of those involved in the French experiments were from the upper classes. Axed during the Revolution. The people, that is. The hypnotists. The magnetized trees remain to this day. Is it too implausible to argue that some link between those trees and the madness that followed the Revolution might exist? Is it?’

  This was the kind of question B.J. liked. ‘It isn’t,’ he said firmly. He knew he was right.

  ‘Caution, you know, has always been my guiding principle,’ Dr Carr told him. ‘I’d rather err on the side of caution. But now, here we have a woman who doesn’t speak. There appears to be some impediment to the woman speaking. Not a physical impediment. God knows she makes sounds. A mental impediment. I thought perhaps hypnosis could provide us with a way around it. And M. Petetin, in Lyons, reports such successes with cataleptic women. He has had eight cases in which the seat of sensation was transferred to the epigastrium. I was just reading his remarkable account of one of these cases. Young woman, completely deaf to sounds in the ordinary way, but, under hypnosis, able to hear M. Petetin’s slightest whisper if he bent close to the epigastrium.’

  ‘You thought Sarah Canary might be able to speak with her epigastrium?’ B.J. asked.

  ‘I was open – I am open,’ said Dr Carr, ‘to anything. But then she swallowed the watch. Reached out quick as a cat. I had no idea what she was about. You know how fast an ecstatic can be.’ B.J. took a few more steps into the room and around Sarah Canary’s chair. Now he could see that the other end of the watch chain was in Sarah Canary’s mouth. Dr Carr tugged gently on the chain. Sarah Canary allowed her face to be pulled forward but kept her mouth resolutely closed. Dr Carr slackened off. He looked as if he was playing a big fish. ‘It’s actually gone down into her throat. The woman has no gag reflex at all. And an unhealthy impulse to fill any available orifice. Women of a certain age are so prone to this. I suspected this the first time I saw her.’

  ‘How old do you think she is?’ B.J. asked him.

  ‘The shady side of thirty. Maybe even the shady side of thirty-five. Premature wrinkling is a characteristic of the female criminal profile, of course. And there’s very little gray in the hair. Let’s say thirty-three. I’d rather err on the side of caution.’

  ‘She ate my breakfast,’ B.J. told him. ‘Remorseless.’ He tapped Sarah Canary helpfully on the shoulder. Sarah Canary swung her head to look at him, jerking the other end of the chain out of Dr Carr’s hand.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Dr Carr, diving after it. ‘Get it, B.J. Don’t lose it! Don’t let her swallow it!’

  The watch chain was slipping away like a noodle into Sarah Canary’s mouth. B.J. seized the end and held it tightly. It was much shorter than it had been. He pulled on the chain. Sarah Canary had it clamped between her teeth. There was
no give. Dr Carr retreated to his desk and rummaged through the center drawer. ‘Here,’ he said, returning, holding out his hand. ‘Here’s a nice peppermint for you, Sarah Canary. A trade. Give me the watch and you can have the peppermint.’

  Sarah Canary reached for the candy, but Dr Carr closed his hand over it. ‘First the watch,’ he said sternly. Sarah Canary inclined her head questioningly. She looked sullen and stubborn. Dr Carr opened his hand again and showed her the peppermint. She did not respond.

  Dr Carr grew tired of waiting. He transferred the peppermint to his left hand and gripped her jaw with his right. His thumb drove directly into the bruise at her mouth. Sarah Canary winced. ‘Give me the watch,’ Dr Carr said loudly. He applied pressure on the jaw hinge. Slowly, painfully, Sarah Canary allowed her mouth to be pried open. As soon as a gap appeared between the upper and lower teeth, B.J. began to reel in the watch chain. The gap widened. The watch slipped into sight at the back of her throat, slid over her tongue, and dangled wetly in front of her face at the end of its chain. It was so large. He looked at Sarah Canary in awe.

  He looked back at the watch, wiping it on his sleeve and examining it more closely. He held it to his ear. ‘It’s still ticking, Dr Carr,’ he said. ‘Can you believe it? An ordeal like that? And it’s still ticking away. I wonder what else you could do to a watch like this? I wonder if you could put it in a box and drop it off a boat into a lake and leave it overnight. Would it still be ticking then? I wonder if you could hit it with a hammer.’

  Dr Carr reached for the watch without responding. He put it into his pocket along with the peppermint. ‘I don’t think this session can usefully continue,’ he said. ‘I think the basic trust necessary between patient and doctor has been somewhat violated.’ He sounded hurt. ‘Perhaps you’ll return the patient to her room for me, B.J. I’ll be prescribing phosphorus for her in the meantime. I really don’t see what else I can do. I am not one of those doctors who thinks phosphorus is a cure-all, mind you. The dictum “Without phosphorus, no thought” may be absolutely true, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that phosphorus will always rectify abnormal mental processes. How easy the alienist’s job would be if that were the case. No, it is perfectly possible to crowd the stomach with phosphorus and see no improvement in the patient’s condition whatsoever. But what else can I do at this juncture? You tell me, B.J. Suggest something. I’m open to suggestions.’

  ‘What else can you do?’ B.J. echoed. ‘You’ve done everything you can.’ He took Sarah Canary by the sleeve and tugged. She stood, shaking loose of his hand. She spoke to him, a happy stream of noise that must have been in some foreign code; B.J. didn’t understand it at all. She smiled, first at him and then at Dr Carr. Her noises continued, but her eyes began to wander. She was no longer directing her speech at either of them. She stepped around the desk, pressed a palm on the glass front of the bookcase, then tapped the glass with one arched finger. She was quiet for a moment, listening to the sound. Sunlight glanced off the panes at an angle now, making a mirror in front of the books. Sarah Canary pulled her hand back and bent into the sunlight. Her face appeared in the glass. She stooped to look at it, looked more closely, and the closer she came, the larger her reflected face grew. For a moment she stood still, merely staring. She pulled back and the face shrank. Then, quite suddenly, she leaned over and kissed the glass. The two mouths came together, but one was only an illusion and made no mark, while the other left behind an imprint, shaped vaguely like a butterfly, at just that place on the glass where the mouth that did exist tried to kiss the mouth that did not.

  Houston found them together in the corridor. ‘What did I tell you,’ he cried, ‘about male and female lunatics escorting each other around the hospital? What did I tell you?’

  He inserted himself between B.J. and Sarah Canary, drawing back his hand, knuckles out, to hit B.J. For a moment his hand wavered in the air by B.J.’s ear, a moment’s pause so that B.J. could anticipate its sting, but Sarah Canary, standing behind Houston, saw the motionless hand, rose onto her toes, and bit it. B.J. sucked in his breath in a long, horrified gasp. There was blood on the corner of Sarah Canary’s mouth. There was blood on Houston’s hand, just where the little finger joined the palm. Houston’s face went a terrible white, with bright red patches on his cheeks. He caressed the right hand with the left, wiggling the injured finger experimentally. His expression was one of disbelief. It seemed to B.J. that Houston grew larger.

  Sarah Canary had begun to run the moment she released Houston’s hand. She disappeared down the corridor back toward the doctor’s office. She ran well; her skirt was torn and did not inhibit her and neither did her heeled shoes, but where was she going to go? B.J. watched Houston’s back, receding from him in furious pursuit. The corridor twisted. He could hear their footsteps long after he could see either of them.

  B.J. had not moved. He stood and tried to adjust to the fact that he had not been hit. How had this been avoided? Bringing his hands up to his face, he patted his cheeks and his nose and his eyes inconclusively. He couldn’t be certain he felt anything. He began to suspect that he hadn’t been hit because he had ceased to exist. There was only silence around him and an arrhythmical ticking in the distance. B.J.’s hands shook. In the kitchen, he told himself, was proof. There was a scar in the wall. He could go and see it. He could feel it. He forced his shaking legs through the courtyard. A platinum lizard scuttled out of the sun and disappeared beneath a thinly veined rock. The Chinaman stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said.

  I’ve been a ghost, B.J. thought. It was much worse. He tried to push past the Chinaman; he was still light-headed with terror. The Chinaman stopped him with an arm.

  ‘Did you come to tell me something about the woman in black?’ the Chinaman asked. ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘She’s running,’ said B.J. ‘Please let me by.’

  ‘Running? What does that mean?’

  ‘She was found in the corridor alone with a man,’ B.J. told him. His voice caught. ‘What is this, a hospital or a bordello?’

  ‘What will be done to her?’ the Chinaman asked.

  ‘What did they do to Bergevain?’ B.J. slid by the Chinaman at last and crossed the kitchen to the water bucket, his eyes on the mark in the wall. He reached his fingers to it. The gash itself was slick, though the wall around it was rough and splintery. He felt relief moving like heat through his body. His heartbeat began to slow. Warmth filled every extremity and testified to his completeness. He had fingers. They were warm. He had toes.

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ the Chinaman asked.

  ‘Louis Bergevain.’ The Chinaman had so many questions, he had tricked B.J. into answering them. B.J. was beginning to not like him.

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ It was not the Chinaman asking. Ross, the cook, stood in the pantry doorway, chewing on a piece of raw turnip. ‘What are you saying, B.J.?’ His voice flattened with menace. ‘We never had a Louis Bergevain here. Now, did we?’ Ross turned to the Chinaman. ‘You have to forgive him. He’s crazy. You can’t listen to anything he says.’ He pivoted again, turnip dangling from his lips, looking at B.J., who could not look back. ‘You go to your room now, B.J. You’re in the way here.’

  B.J. watched the ground as he left. He walked past the brown pants and the baggy black ones with the large boots. He thought there might be some message, some sign from the Chinaman, now that he had sacrificed himself to answer him, but there was nothing. He needed guidance. He needed to stay in those places where Houston was not for as long as he could. When he had last seen the warden, Houston had been heading in the direction of the old officers’ quarters. B.J. went the other way, toward the wash house and the old Laundry Row, but he circled it, doubling back along his own route to confuse his tracks. It took him perhaps fifteen minutes to come back out by the kitchen, where he had started.

  There by the door stood the Chinaman and the woman in black. The China
man had Houston’s keys in one hand and the woman’s sleeve in the other. There was a large bedroll tucked under one arm. His expression was one of absolute misery. B.J. was surprised at how easily he could read it. Usually he found Oriental faces hard to decipher. The misery deepened when the Chinaman noticed B.J. ‘Go back to your room,’ he said. ‘Everything here is fine. The woman is helping me in the kitchen.’

  ‘The woman is not allowed in the kitchen,’ said B.J. ‘Dr Carr thinks she may be a poisoner.’

  ‘I will watch her. I will watch carefully,’ said the Chinaman. ‘You go back to your room now.’

  B.J. looked at the keys that dangled from the Chinaman’s hand, winking in the sunlight at him. ‘You are escaping,’ said B.J. ‘You are kidnapping Sarah Canary.’

  ‘No,’ the Chinaman said. His voice was suddenly high. ‘Go back to your room or I will get the warden.’

  B.J. stood for a moment indecisively. The keys clicked together in the Chinaman’s hand. B.J. looked into the Chinaman’s face.

  ‘Go!’ said the Chinaman. He and Sarah Canary backed into the kitchen. B.J. followed. ‘No,’ the Chinaman said. The hand with the keys shook violently. He closed his palm over them to silence them, but it was too late. They had already spoken to B.J. The Chinaman opened the kitchen door into last year’s vegetable garden. He stepped through and pulled Sarah Canary after him. B.J. followed.

  ‘I am saving the woman as I promised. But I cannot be responsible for another lunatic.’ The Chinaman might have been speaking to B.J. or he might have been speaking to no one – to the air, perhaps, or to the keys. Nothing answered him. He began to run with the woman, through the empty furrows of the garden, and B.J. ran after them. They stopped at the main gate. ‘It is too much to ask,’ the Chinaman said. ‘You know it is too much.’ He began to speak a language B.J. did not understand. The words were low and then high like big and small bells. They rang with pleading. ‘Don’t follow us,’ the Chinaman said to B.J. in despair. ‘They will only find us and bring us back. You will end up like Louis Bergefin.’