From the bottom of my tank, I monitored the progress of their evening. I let the water flow through my gills and listened to the bubbling sound of Harrison’s apologies. From my position under the water I could feel every vibration of my brother’s speech, every inflection of Katherine’s responses. I could feel him moving in, and I could sense Katherine’s welcoming gestures, her glances feeling more and more familiar as they fell across his face.
The branch tapped on the window. Harrison begged for forgiveness.
His car was insanely luxurious, Katherine noticed, with buttery gray leather seats and a mahogany dashboard. Eric put his hand on his stomach. “I’m so full,” he said. “Way too full.”
Katherine leaned toward him. He turned his head. She tasted his lips, the red wine, the onions and garlic. He was delicious. She put her hand behind his head, touching the smooth little hairs on his neck, and pulled him even closer. He was nothing like Mark, she thought. They were in the parking lot in front of some little Italian place off a suburban strip mall, kissing, something that never would have happened with Mark, for some reason. Katherine breathed in.
“That was nice of you,” my brother said.
She smiled. Did she really just do that?
“Time to take you home?”
“I guess so.” She wondered if she had just made a mistake.
No, she told herself. No.
Eric pulled out of the parking lot and onto the turnpike. He pushed a button and the stereo came on. It was Miles Davis—quiet and complex. My brother would have been prepared for this. He would have had everything ready.
Katherine looked out the window. It was dark, and the road became a series of highway lights flashing by, the reflective tape on the guardrail flaring up in the wake of the Jaguar. “Do you ever regret it?” she said. “I mean, that you didn’t marry Dawn?” It was a stupid question, she thought. As soon as it came out, she realized it was idiotic.
“I don’t want a family. Not right away.”
“What do you want right away?” Katherine wanted to touch him, to put her hand on his leg, on his shoulder, her lips on his neck.
“This is nice,” Eric said. “This is what I want right now. With you, anyway. The other stuff—”
“Good,” she cut him off.
“I’m sorry about that French place.”
“Too stuffy.”
“I didn’t know. I really didn’t.”
“I’m glad we went to, to Joannie’s, though,” Katherine said. “It was really good. Thank you. What is it called?”
“Costello’s.”
Katherine repeated it. “Costello’s.”
At that moment they pulled into the parking lot of her building. She could see the window of her enclosure staring out into the lot like a stupid yellow eye. She had left the light on, obviously. Eric parked right next to her blue VW Rabbit. She opened the door to get out, pushing the front of her dress down with one hand.
He waited, gripping the steering wheel.
“It’s not a conflict?” she asked again.
He shook his head no, and she waited until he got out of the car.
In the beginning, before her eyes became so bad she couldn’t drive, Hannah came to see me every morning, saying, “How are you, sweetheart? Are you feeling better?” her hand on my forehead, as if I had a temperature, as if I would be going back to school soon.
I wasn’t, though. I wasn’t feeling better at all. In many ways, in fact, I was feeling worse. I’ll admit, this feeling was based more on my circumstances than on my disease: the fact that I was almost thirty, in the hospital, clearly insane, heavily medicated. At times I felt I was moving toward catatonia. At times I could only sit in front of a window and watch the clouds pass by as if on a separate plane in the sky, the treetops rustling across the hospital parking lot, the woods advancing toward me millimeter by millimeter.
Hannah smiled nervously.
“I’m all right, Mom,” I said. “Really, I’m feeling much better.” I knew she didn’t want me to explain this to her, and I knew she would never tell me how she was doing herself, not truly, so I just asked, “Are things all right with you?” not expecting an answer.
But there was a knot of cancerous cells forming at the base of her spine, I knew, like a wasps’ nest fixed to the branch of a tree, a tumor in the hollow beneath her medulla oblongata.
“Don’t worry about me.”
She brought me rhubarb pie, of course, and tea biscuits. She brought a basket full of tiny cheeses and salamis and even a bit of black caviar. She brought a couple of news magazines. She wanted to know if I wanted anything else, a certain book, perhaps, or my Walkman and some tapes. She brought her hand to her face and touched her hair. She bit her lip. Everything looked so new to me. Did she always bite her lip like that when she was nervous? The color of our mother’s hair, chestnut fading to gray, when did it become like that? I was overcome by a feeling of amazement, the way I felt sometimes looking at a new car. “How’s Eric?” I asked. I had the feeling that I wasn’t me anymore. When I looked around, everything had that new-car look, that just-slightly-different-ness.
“He’s very concerned about you,” our mother told me. “Eric is very, very worried. He cares for you a great deal.” Every word she said was underlined. Eric was somewhere, at that moment, plotting my murder. He was developing insidious new methods of torture. He was formulating poisons, devising traps. He was rubbing his hands together like a fly. “He’s doing everything he can,” our mother went on, “pulling all his strings, just to make sure that you’re well taken care of while you’re here.”
“I’d like to go home soon,” I told her. “I don’t want to be here anymore.” I felt for the shoelace. This was one string, I thought to myself, Eric couldn’t pull.
“That’s Dr. Lennox’s decision.”
I put my head back. The pillowcase was overly starched, and it made a crinkling noise in my ear. It seemed like they changed the sheets every fifteen minutes. “I know.”
“He’s a very good psychiatrist,” she asserted. “Very well respected.”
“Right.”
“Pilot,” my mother said, “please.”
I didn’t know what she meant by the please. Please what? Please shut up? Please cooperate? Please stop pretending to be crazy? This room had wall-to-wall rusty orange carpeting to match the orange linoleum tiles in the halls outside. The windows were covered in heavy robin’s-egg-blue curtains. Our mother wore a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. She wore a pair of gray slacks. She wore a silk scarf, dark purple, around her neck. She wore a gold pin that I knew our father had given her, of two hands clasped together in prayer. “Hannah,” I said, “nothing matches.” The television, which was kept low but constantly on by my roommate, a cocaine-addicted bonds trader named Harrison Reardon Marshall, a man with three last names, erupted into a violence of red and a woman’s scream. He was watching a horror movie, I think. He also seemed to be living one, the way he thrashed around in his bed, the way he breathed all night through clenched teeth, apologizing over and over.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Hannah said. “Pilot, I don’t—”
“I mean,” I began, but then I realized that I didn’t know either. Despite the medication, it was still difficult for me to keep track of all the thoughts coursing through my consciousness. “Eric cut off Halley’s leg,” I told her. “That’s what I mean.”
“Pilot.”
“But not the way you think,” I said. “Eric cut it off with a hunting knife, the one—”
“Pilot, stop.”
“I don’t want you to die,” I said now, somewhat desperate. I twisted the shoelace even tighter. Her cancer cells divided, multiplied, divided again. It happened so quickly.
“Pilot.” I could see that I was making our mother cry. “Pilot,” she said, “if you don’t stop this nonsense, they’ll never let you out of here. Do you understand? Dr. Lennox has to believe that you’re normal, somewhat normal, at
least, before he can let you go.”
I had been sitting up, I thought, but now I realized I was lying down. I sat up again. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just—” These thoughts came out of nowhere, like someone had put them inside my brain. Did Eric have something to do with that? He was a neurosurgeon, after all, with the knowledge and necessary skill. These didn’t feel like my thoughts. Perhaps I wasn’t Pilot James Airie. Maybe I was looking out through his body, and my consciousness was something else, or someone else’s, entirely. And these thoughts were Pilot’s, this other person’s, and I was only observing them.
“I have a client coming to the house,” my mother said. She worked with hands—the hands of surgeons who had smashed their fingers in car doors, of violinists who had cut their tendons with kitchen knives, of writers who had inexplicably gone numb from the wrists down.
“It’s all right, Hannah, I understand.”
“Pilot, I’m your mother.”
“It’s your name.”
She closed her eyes and opened them. “I really have to go.”
“I’m really all right,” I assured her. “I really, really am.”
“Just try and take it easy,” she said. “Just try. No one wants to hurt you, okay? Especially Eric. And nothing’s wrong with me. So stop worrying.”
“You’re seeing ghosts,” I said.
“It’s nothing, sweetheart. It’s just my eyes. It’s just what happens to an old lady’s eyes.”
The cancer cells divided, multiplied, divided again. “I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “And you’re not so old, Hannah—Mom. Not old enough for something like that to be happening to your eyes without a reason.”
“Pilot,” my mother said, “you have to at least try to sound normal.”
“Sound normal?”
“Will you try?”
Sound normal. I wanted to, so badly. She had no idea how badly, all my life.
Hannah was growing accustomed to seeing double, though. It didn’t hurt, at least. It was even beautiful sometimes. The ghosts moved across her field of vision like reflections on glass, like flower petals floating along the surface of a brook. Every morning she poured herself a pot of tea from the kettle and saw the ghost pot inches away being filled by the ghost kettle. She sat in the real chair in front of the real television, and next to her was a ghost chair and a ghost TV. She lost sight, sometimes, of which object was real and which one was the ghost. She tried to pick up her ghost keys from the kitchen counter. The real ones lay nearby. She stumbled over a real wastebasket that she thought was a ghost. She reached for the real phone and was surprised to find that it was real. “I’m losing track of things,” she told my real brother on the real phone. “And these ghosts, they’re not going away anymore.” It was like she was seeing the sky on the still surface of a lake. It was like she was looking at a world full of twins.
“It’s only been a few days,” Eric said, the phone on speaker, his hands touching each other, a spider on a mirror, “and you’re just reacting to stress. It’s Pilot, and you’re worried about him. That’s all. That’s all it is.”
“We’re all crazy in this family.” Our mother’s voice was plaintive, whiny, high-pitched. “We’re all nuts.”
“No one’s crazy.”
“Pilot is schizophrenic,” she said. “Eric, for—”
“Mom, he’s already much, much better. There are new drugs. There are all sorts of medical options.”
“He still thinks you’re trying to kill him,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s crazy?”
“It’s a delusion that will go away with time. Please, Mom. I’m sure Katherine DeQuincey-Joy will help him with—”
“What do you know about her?” our mother said. “She’s new, isn’t she?” Hannah sat in the living room drinking tea. Right now she tried to put her real cup into the ghost saucer. She sighed, finding the real saucer now with her real hand. She watched the ghost hand put the ghost cup into the ghost saucer.
“Katherine is very qualified,” Eric said, leaning back in his office chair. “In fact, I’ve been out with her socially, and she’s really very intelligent.”
“You’ve been out with—”
“We just went out for some spaghetti, that’s all. That’s all it was.”
“She’s your brother’s analyst, Eric. Shouldn’t you—”
“She’s not his analyst, Mom. It doesn’t work like that anymore.” Eric sighed heavily. “Anyway,” he said, “she’s a very intelligent, highly competent, well-educated psychologist. And her job is simply to monitor Pilot’s progress on a day-to-day—”
“She wants to know why it happened.”
“True,” Eric said. “Katherine wants to know why.”
“Eric, she wants to know why it happened.” Our mother paused. And Eric said nothing. “Do you think,” our mother said after a while, “do you think it has anything to do with—”
“With Fiona? Because it happened around that time of year?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let it go,” Eric said. “Pilot has had a lot of problems in his life. It could be anything.”
For every object Hannah saw, there was a ghost. She imagined that for every object there ever was, a ghost of it remained somewhere, and that she was somehow seeing into that world. Her daughter would have to be there somewhere out there. If there was a little girl, there was a ghost of her, too.
“Mom?” Eric said.
“Yes.”
“Are you spacing out?”
“I guess so.”
“You were humming.”
“Sorry.”
“I should go,” Eric said. “But I want you to relax now, all right? I’m bringing home a prescription for you, some Xanax.”
She shook her head into the phone. “I don’t want any Xanax.”
“You’ll feel so much better, Mom.” Eric leaned forward at his desk. In his drawer he had dozens of plastic containers filled with sample drugs.
“No Xanax.” She could just see him rolling his eyes, his frustration. From my position in the clinic lobby in front of the Caribbean mural, I could see it, too.
“I’ll bring it anyway, Mom, and you can decide.”
“Do what you like.” Hannah had already taken three Valiums today. Besides, she didn’t want Eric to know that she relied on pills. She said, “Good-bye, Eric.”
“Bye, Mom.”
Hannah put the black rotary-dial phone back into its cradle, and nearby a ghost phone was placed into its ghost cradle. She looked at her hand, the long, thin fingers, the blunt nails, and right next to it was her ghost hand, its long, thin fingers, its blunt nails, the hand of a ghost woman who lived in a ghost house.
She thought of me. Pilot must be the ghost-woman’s son, she said to herself. He can’t be mine.
I’m not sure how many other patients were staying on the ward. They all seemed new to me each time I saw them. I had the same roommate the entire time, though—poor old Harrison Reardon Marshall. And his problems were more drug related than mental, as far as I could see. He’d been doing crack, it seemed. And he was a bonds trader. Apparently, crack is frowned upon in the bonds-trading business. There were white-uniformed nurses and medical techs everywhere. It was a psychiatric clinic, however, so most of the people here were either threats to themselves or to others. I was considered a threat to myself. The question of whether I was feeling suicidal had been put to me many times.
Whenever I was asked that question, it was always with the same gentleness, the same fearfulness, as if just asking might lead me to try.
The rooms of the clinic were carpeted in orange. It must have been on sale at the Institutional Carpeting Warehouse. The walls of the clinic were bright satin white and apple green. Many of the walls in the common areas, however, were covered in enormous, life-size photographs of beaches or forests or canyons. There was a lobby near my room. And to escape Harrison’s constant blaring of the television, I liked to sit in this waiting area a
nd look deeply into the Superman-blue Caribbean water of a photographic mural. There was a band of yellow for the beach, a band of deep ultrablue for the water, and a band of bright shining blue for the sky. It was like a Rothko painting, so easy to look at. Everything else had become so complicated, so confusing. When I looked at the television, it was just a mass of bright colors moving over the screen in no particular pattern. The sounds it made were completely unrelated to the blur of images. This was a part of my illness. In our room, Harrison lay in his bed and shivered and moaned, watching the television continually. He had tried to hang himself on his first day here, inexpertly tying his sheets around his neck and trying to find a way to attach them to the ceiling. I had watched this from a state of near catatonia, and when the nurse came in and discovered what Harrison was trying to do, I pretended to be asleep.
There was a great commotion for a while. Then, I believe, they administered a sedative.
A day later, Harrison apologized.
I don’t think I responded.
“I’m sorry you had to see that.” He laughed. “If you saw that, I mean.” He sat up in bed and looked at me. “I’ve been a little on edge lately. You know what I mean? I have this little problem. And it has ruined my entire fucking life.”
I think I told him that it was all right, no need to apologize to me. I tried to, anyway, tried to make my face move even though it had been covered in liquid glass.
“Don’t do drugs,” Harrison said. He was a short man, with a black beard and hair that he had forced back over a bald spot. “It sounds stupid, but it’s true.”
Then a nurse came in with our medication.
I could see this collection of bodies as if it were one. Like a number of microscopic organisms on a slide under a microscope, the people at my parents’ party swirled and merged, their bodies fluid with alcohol. What was I doing out here? Every now and then I’d catch a glimpse of something—my mother’s face, my father’s hand gesturing wildly to punctuate a joke. There was darkness around me like an old blanket. There was a smell of ferns and earth and tree bark. And there was my sister—her face bright in torchlight, her mouth open—laughing.
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