The doctors say I might need an operation. They’re taking a wait-and-see attitude. Some bad wiring is the culprit. Ian seems very relieved. The boys have been to see me a couple of times now. Ian had to bribe them with Happy Meals because they were scared. I understand. I don’t want them to see me like this, but I want to see them. Reid is playing with his plastic toy at the foot of the hospital bed. The toy says, “Always alert, to save our dirt!”
Ingrid leads me away from the house. “He calls you Jean,” she says. “Come with me! I have to show you something! This is just…it’s absolutely fucking incredible!”
“I should tell my husband where I’m going.”
She strides toward Dundas, looking back as if to check I’m real. “Come on! Jean!”
We’re going to the bookstore. When I catch up to her, she’s standing in front of it, shivering, although the air is not that cold. She jiggles the knob impatiently. “Come on. Open it!”
I unlock the store and she goes in first. She pulls the window blinds down, blocking the street lights and dropping the store into a gloamy dark. I get as far away as I can from her in the little space. In the lunarglow, her skin is tinged blue. “Turn some lights on,” she says.
“Stay over there.”
“Where’s the switch…” Her hand feeling along the wall makes a faint hissing sound. “I can’t believe you have a bookstore. This is fantastic.”
“What’s going on? Explain who you are! And don’t touch my lights!”
“Oh, here’s one.” She’s revealed standing in front of the Pavoni. “Does this work?”
She wants a coffee? “Can it wait until you’re done blowing my mind?”
“Oh sweetheart,” she says, her eyes tender, “you’re blowing mine.”
“Please, I’m begging you—don’t come any closer.”
“Our voices are different,” she says. “D’you hear it?”
“I don’t know what I sound like.”
She points at her lips and makes a circle. “You don’t sound like this. Can you whistle?”
“No.”
“I can.” She does. I’ve heard better. Whatever this is, I’m just going to have to go with it. “And this is your bookstore?”
“Yes.”
“When did you open it?”
“I rented—”
“Two Aprils ago.”
“Yes.”
“April 2014.”
“Yes. Why does it matter?”
“I was diagnosed that April. I get seizures. They alter my perceptions. Specifically, I hallucinate.” She looks to me for a reaction. I shrug with my eyebrows. “First I started having trouble recognizing myself in the mirror. I could take a photo of myself and I’d know it was me when I looked at it, but if I looked at the photo in a mirror, it looked wrong.”
“It looked wrong.” She’s got me trapped between Travel and Psychology. “Stop moving! Wrong in what way?”
“I made Larry cover all the mirrors. Out in the world, if I saw myself in a reflection and there were other people in it, I couldn’t find myself. I’d have to make a peace sign and see who made one back. Larry says, ‘I’m living in a permanent shiva house and no one’s dead!’ ‘Yet,’ I tell him. That’s our little joke. Too dark for some people, but you gotta laugh, right? I started seeing you that fall, last fall,” she continues. “I hadn’t looked at a mirror on purpose in months. I was doing fine. I was working on my book—”
“You’re a writer.”
“I shouldn’t presume you know everything about me. Hold on a second!” She vanishes down the back of the store. From there, she calls: “You’re pretty good looking! You dress like you think you’re not, though. We look good in long, simple print dresses and solid colours.”
“I don’t take fashion advice from phenomena.”
“Is there a light back here?”
I flick a switch behind me. “So you think you can read my mind or something?” I ask her. “What am I thinking right now?”
“Not much for alphabetizing, are we?” She stands straight, her head cocked. “You don’t know everything, but you understand before I’ve even explained it to you.”
“Explained what to me, Ingrid?”
She keeps hunting through the shelves. “Looking alike isn’t the half of it. Oh! There’s one!”
I whip out my cell and text Ian. I’m here with her now. We’re at the bookstore. I put it on vibrate.
“You have two of them!” She comes back with a couple of trade paperbacks and puts them down on the cash desk, turns their covers toward me. They’re titled Utter and Murder Plot. I have no memory of buying them, but Terrence does his share of buying now.
“Huh.” I run my finger over the shiny raised type. “Ingrid Fox.”
“Not my real name.”
“No? What’s your real name?”
“You don’t need to know that. I also wrote A Kept Woman and Sown Bones. Do you ever see them?”
“I don’t know. Why do you use a pseudonym?”
“I like pretending to be someone else. Although you probably think I’m overdoing it.”
With the desk between us, and the initial shock wearing off, I want to know more. “Go back to the part where you hadn’t looked at mirrors for a while.”
“Mirrors?”
“You said you couldn’t—”
“I lose my train of thought so easily.”
“You stayed away from mirrors, until one day…”
“I remember now. It was the fifth of April. The nones of April. Some months it falls on the seventh. The ides have always been tied to brutal murder, but the nones are just about phases of the moon, did you know that? Anyway.” She moves a couple of books off a display table and sits on it. “I was in Kensington Market and I thought I’d passed a mirror, but then my image walked away—and it was you! You were sort of dressed like you are now. I was stunned, I didn’t even think to follow you. And after that, I’d get a glimpse of you driving past in your car, or through a window of a restaurant. I lost my nerve on a couple of occasions, but I almost went up to you.”
“I thought I was going crazy.”
“You’re not. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
It feels like a meat locker in here. I click the heat on. “How is it possible we didn’t run into each other? I spent hours and hours in that park.”
“What park?”
“Bellevue Square.”
“Is that what it’s called? I see it from my shrink’s window.”
“Katerina must have told you about me. I told her that if you were looking, that’s where I’d be. I gave her a letter for you.”
She looks concerned.
“What? She didn’t give you the letter?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about. No one told me about you and I didn’t go looking for you, either. I just kept seeing you.”
“Katerina? Your friend? My friend?” I’m about to use the word murdered. “So what are you, then? What is going on?”
“You’re my doppelganger, Jean. You’re here because I’m dying.” The fluorescents over Romance make a clicking sound like bugs trapped in a jar and go out.
“WHERE IS THIS BOOKSTORE?” Ian’s voice. I’m awake again. “You talked a lot about a bookstore in the spring, but you know you work at Ryerson University, Jean. Right? You’re a teacher. You had an accident, but everything’s okay now.”
“I have a headache. Why does my head hurt?”
“You’ve had a procedure—don’t touch that.”
There’s a tube going into the top of my hand. “What is this?”
“It’s just saline.”
“Ian, Ingrid doesn’t know Katerina. She’s never met her. So who was Katerina seeing?”
“I’m sorry, sweetie, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Why am I here now? Where are the boys?”
“Try to calm down, sweetheart. The surgeons warned us that you would lose some memory. You knew you were go
ing to have this operation. I can show you the consent form you signed.” A nurse enters. “I think she’s in pain,” Ian says. “The doctor said she can have up to two hundred milligrams an hour.”
The nurse smiles down at me like she’s hiding something. “Hello, dear. We’re awake, are we?” Her hand goes to the top of my head, but I don’t feel her touching me. “How much so far?” she asks a machine. “I can push fifty.”
“When did I have an operation? Ian? Where am I?”
“There it goes,” says the nurse.
“It’s September ninth, Jean, 2016, and you’re in the ICU at Toronto Western. You’re just waking up. It won’t make sense to you for a—Should she be touching those bandages?”
I AM HAVING a hard time with systems. Now that I’m awake more often, they’ve explained how after a surgery like mine things like numbers or grammar and colours or even the parts of my body may not make complete sense. They give me blocks and ask me to put them in order. There are numbers and letters and the blocks are different colours. I may not know what order to put the blocks in, but I know they’re different, I see they’re different sizes and have different symbols on them, but I can’t transfer this information to my hands. Touching the blocks changes them. Dr. Morbier says I have functional delusions, as opposed to the delusions people have who are not aware they’re operating under incorrect perceptions of the world around them or inside of them. In other words, I’m not crazy. Hurrah.
Dr. Morbier, after he agreed to take my case, warned me that my recovery would be lengthy and difficult, but that he had treated a number of cases of autoscopy successfully and that sometimes all it took was pills. Surgery first to snip the bad wires, then pills. He’s warned me I’ll probably need a “multimodal” approach, but “a motivated, intelligent woman such as yourself has the power to make a full recovery.”
Morbier is tall and bald and there’s a half centimetre of gum above his front teeth when he smiles, which is often. He has soft pike-grey eyes. My appointments with him are twice a week, on the weekdays that fall on either side of the middle day of the workweek. All of the visits so far, he wants to start from the moment I opened the door on Ingrid and go as far as I can, telling him as much as I remember, although now, in my own memories, scrambled as they are, I’m not with Ingrid the way I was before. In my mind, I have new perspective: from slightly above, looking over my own shoulder. Morbier encourages changing what he calls my camera angle. I see both of us. I see things I couldn’t have seen when I stood behind the cash desk and flipped the lights on for her, like the dust bunnies that had collected on the tops of the shelves. I can see the back of my own head.
“What happens when you go to the door?” Morbier asks. “Take me through it again.”
“I went to the door and she was there.”
“Remember, we speak in present tense here. So we can be in the moment as much as possible and really see what was there.”
“She says ‘I’m ready now.’”
“And then you go with her.”
“We go to the bookstore.”
“Does anything happen on the way?”
“She leads me there. I feel a…painful buzzing at the top of my spine, between my shoulder blades. It’s scary, the whole experience, but she’s making me…What are you thinking?”
“Go on,” he says.
“I open the door and she follows me in and pulls the blind down in the front window. I say to myself that whatever happens next, I’m just going to have to go with it. She stands in front of the door and I go to the cash desk and sort of wait and she stares at me like she’s falling in love.”
“Do you touch?”
“Not yet. She went, I mean she goes to look for her books. She’s a writer. Her books are schlocky mysteries.”
He writes on his lined white pad. I like it when he writes because it means I’ve said something interesting. I imagine him behind a lectern at an international symposium on disorders of the temporo-parietal junction saying, Patient is a Caucasian woman of forty-two who collapsed in the doorway of her home. First diagnosis was stroke, but an MRI revealed hundreds of seizures within the temporo-parietal junction as well as in the parietal-occipital cortex.
“Why do you think Ingrid writes mysteries?”
“Probably because my unconscious wants me to solve my own mystery. Good answer, eh?”
“Top-drawer. But you don’t recall ever stocking her books. I find that interesting. You own a used bookstore, but you’ve never heard of her books—four of them, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“You have a huge mystery section and there’s lots of turnover, but you’ve never seen her books. Why didn’t you stock them?”
“Well, it turns out I did!” We share a laugh about my imaginary bookstore. “I figured Terrence must have bought them.”
“I guess so,” he says. “Okay, so you arrive at the bookstore.”
“Yes. She tells me she’d been seeing me herself, but it was hard to catch up with me on busy streets, or she’d only catch sight of me when I went by in a car or in a cab. And then she says she doesn’t know who Katerina is. And she’s never been to Bellevue Square.”
“Maybe she has something to hide,” Morbier suggests. “Maybe she’s not telling you the truth.”
“She says we should sit down and talk. She says she’ll put the kettle on if there is one and then she offers me one of my own chairs.”
“SO,” INGRID SAYS. “How do we do this thing?”
“This thing?”
She passes me a cup of tea. She’s made it exactly how I take it. “It was just sightings before. This is a pretty significant increase in symptoms. I’m actually talking to you.”
There’s something amusing about her (I tell the doc) because she’s almost out-of-her-mind enthusiastic, manic even. “You know,” I say, “I didn’t think things could get any stranger than having an actual doppelganger, but to have one who doubts my existence? My kids would say ‘amazeballs.’”
“But you are my doppelganger, Jean.” She prods her own chest with splayed fingers. “You must see it now. Think. Almost all of your books in here are on my bookshelves. And why are you a bookseller?”
“Why?”
“Yeah, why?” She doesn’t pause to let me work out a response. “You’re a bookseller because I’m a writer. Of course you would have a bookstore! Who else would sell my books?”
“Your books are published by a large German conglomerate, Ms. Fox. I can see the colophon on the spine from here.” I point at the two books sitting on the cash desk, about a foot from her. “Make haste slowly. Did you know that’s what it means? Every bookstore in the city has your books.”
“How do you know all the bookstores in Toronto carry me? You didn’t know you carried me! This bookstore wasn’t even here until I hallucinated it.”
“So you’re hallucinating now? That I believe.”
“Do you?”
“A little,” I say. “I definitely think one of us is not well.”
“That’s right. It’s me. I’m not well.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Willowdale.”
A valve in my heart starts fidgeting. The area’s old postal-village name hurts to hear. “I grew up in Willowdale.”
“Get real, of course you did. I grew up in your house, Jean. I even had a doll with a porcelain head that I named Jean after Billie Jean King. I know everything about you. Anything I said about you would be true. Even if I made it up.”
I put the tea down. “Do you know how crazy you sound? You’re already off the scale, but trust me, you’re not making me up as you go along. I’d probably be a lot more interesting if you were. But I’m making me up as I go along.”
She studies me. No, admires me.
“Stop looking at me like that. Are you proud of yourself or something?”
“It’s easier than I thought it would be.”
“What is?”
She only smiles. �
��What’s happening to me gets refracted through you, changed into something similar but different. Like your husband.”
“He’s imaginary, too?”
“He’s based on two ex-husbands. Martin, an NHL agent who gambled and lost the way most people breathe. I had Jean with him. Marty was a risk taker and a very bad card player. But always chasing the next new kid coming up in the Canadian and American leagues, hustle hustle.”
“How many husbands have you had?”
“Three. The second one was Shaun. More smart than good looking. Meth-head. He worked for Wood Gundy. In fact, I worked for Wood Gundy. That’s where we met. Is Ian in money?”
“He was a meth-head?”
“Math-head. What does Ian do?”
“Cop,” I say. My fingertips are freezing cold. “Did you lose a child?”
“How do you know that?” She jumps up and disappears down a rank of shelving again. My hands are shaking. This is the panic-feeling I first felt in childhood, perhaps even as an infant. When I feel like this, there is no imperative but to run. I have the urge to wash my hands and I run scalding water over them at the sink and wash them twice.
“Look at this,” she says, returning with another book. “Guy de Maupassant. The Horla. Have you read it?”
“I haven’t.” I remain by the sink, my hands still dripping, as she sits and begins to read silently to herself, flipping pages.
“The Horla,” she says, “or, Modern Ghosts. Shall I read it to you?”
“Just give me the short form.”
“It’s the journal of a man who goes mad when he realizes that his mysterious illness is not physical. He’s been possessed by the Horla, a being that can control his thoughts and even his actions. Very dramatic.” She riffles the pages, and the book blurs into a little accordion. “The narrator is never named, but he writes in the style of de Maupassant. He does an experiment. When he thinks the Horla has been coming into his bedroom at night, he leaves out food and drink, like wine and fruit and milk. And by morning the Horla has drunk the milk and left the rest untouched.”
Bellevue Square Page 12