“I think an ambulance,” Shoshana says.
I try to wrestle out of her grasp. “No. I need some air. I need to walk.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Do you know,” I say to her, “if something changes your brain—like a flowerpot falls on your head or you get meningitis—afterwards, sometimes, you turn into somebody else. The person the flowerpot fell on is gone.”
“Should I be worried about you?”
“But when death comes, who’s died? The person before, or the person after?”
She gives Steele a look that makes him go away. “Your soul is inside you and it leaves your body, sweetie.”
“Whose soul, though?”
“Let me take you to the hospital.”
“No! I’m good! I’m good now!”
She lets me go.
THE SNOW HAS CHANGED. It was spitty and damp; now it’s feathery and insubstantial and melts on your tongue like communion wafers. It makes me think of the pills Cullen gave me and I get one out and start dissolving it on my tongue. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a kid’s Aspirin. I’d forgotten the aftertaste of metal.
I speed-walk to Morbier’s along Dundas, keeping my head down. I know Ingrid’s here, somewhere close. I can feel her eyes on me.
It’s getting dark. There’s something I’m supposed to do: an image flashes in my brain’s Fotomat. I see Ian and the kids. Their faces, and then their eyes.
I buzz at Dr. Morbier’s side door. There’s no response. The flakes have begun to join as they come down. An infinitesimal change in temperature at four thousand feet or a shift in electric charges attracts them to each other. They fall to earth in the shapes of anvils, barbells, skaters with their arms out, turning and turning. I buzz again. There’s an intercom button. It makes an electrical hum when you press to talk. “It’s Jean Mason,” I say. “I’m standing at your office door. Can you open? It’s an emergency.”
Release. No response.
I go around to the front. The entrance to your shrink’s house is a portal between kingdoms, between realms. Below, in the office, he’s my help and confidant; on this floor, he’s another person. But I have to ask him what he knows. He has to talk to me.
I knock on his front door. No answer. I knock again.
I stand back on his front lawn in plain view and study the house, looking for light within. But what is inner light and what is reflected from the incandescent bulbs fixed atop poles at thirty feet and what is the angle of the watcher—my internal observer effect—I can’t tell.
It’s too early for a spring dress, but I’d put it on in an act of encouragement to the weather gods. The cumuli snow was their answer, but it was coming from a dim, cloudless sky, a snow blown in from another weather system, hatched in clouds too far away to see.
The inside of my dress generates an icy draft that clings to my skin, tightening it. But Morbier won’t answer, no matter how cold I get. I put my hand against the front door frame. I feel nothing against my palm. I crouch and put my ear to the door. I hear the furnace chug a couple of times. Then maybe voices speaking in a low register. Not mechanical or singsong. A thump comes through the frame of the house: someone moving a chair.
I fly up to look down through the roof. Dr. Morbier stands right behind the front door, his arms held out from his sides like a gunslinger, except all he has in his hand is a steak knife. In the kitchen, they’ve already cut into their meat, his wife, I presume, and his two children, I presume. Motionless as gophers on hills, their little hands folded up in front of them.
I hear footsteps coming heavily to the door and I run down Morbier’s walkway and crouch on the sidewalk behind his hedge. Through its panoply of leaves, I see the door open, and August Morbier is framed within it.
“Who’s there?” he says, squinting into the night. “We’re at supper, you know!” There’s anger in his voice, a tone I’ve never heard in his basement. “And furthermore, I don’t buy things through the door to my house!” I stand up so he can see me before he slams the door. “Jean?”
“I’m sorry. I tried the side first. I have an emergency.”
“Jean,” he says and fumbles for what to say. “Jean, I wish I could help you right now, but the line between my personal and professional life has to remain sacrosanct. For the good of us both. I’m sure you can understand. I’m eating dinner with my family.”
I approach him, showing him my empty, unthreatening hands. “I’m dying,” I say. “Or going mad. Or I’m mad already. Or already dead. You have to help me.”
“Oh god, okay…come in.” He stands aside and lets me into his house. “Go in there,” he says, directing me to a half-open door. I go toward it, but I’m also frightened of it. I haven’t considered what will happen if Morbier is behind all of this, and here I am in his house, in a room, alone with him. He’s saying something, not to me. “Go back to the kitchen right now. I mean it.” There’s fire-flicker inside the room. And a child, a boy of five or six, is standing behind Morbier. I’m paralyzed where I stand.
“Who’s it, Papa? Who is that?”
“Jean, please. Wait for me in the den, would you?” I go into the “den” and close the door and recommence breathing. The fire is in a black pot-bellied stove. “That was a friend of Papa’s,” he says. “Now you go back and eat your supper.”
“She has long hair like Mummy.”
“Go back to the kitchen, sweetheart,” he says.
The room is furnished with a sofa and a couple of chairs at either end of it. The pouf that ties the room together is a gathering place for magazines and remote controls. It’s all upholstered with very soft brown corduroy.
“Sit anywhere,” Morbier says, closing the door behind him. “What’s the problem? Please sit.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather stand. I have to ask you directly…I’m sorry if this sounds crazy, but I need to know if you’ve involved me in some kind of an experiment. Am I a, a test of something? Did you drug me, am I being drugged?”
He searches my eyes, back and forth, one at a time. “No. I haven’t drugged you.”
“Am I the subject of an experiment, Dr. Morbier?”
He sits down on the couch and crosses his legs. “Jean. I’d like you to sit down. You’re clearly very upset, and I’d like to get an idea of what’s going on.”
“Please answer my question.”
“No, you’re not in an experiment. You can sit and tell me what’s going on.”
“Not going to take notes?”
“This isn’t a session.”
“So it’s off the record?”
“What kind of record do you think I’m keeping?”
“I want to know if you will treat me as an equal, right here and now, as a fellow human being, and look into my eyes and answer my questions truthfully.”
“If I know the answers, I’ll be truthful.”
“Do you know Ingrid Fox?”
He laughs softly. “Oh no. No. How could I? If I knew Ingrid Fox, Jean, then certainly you’d have a reason to think…to believe you were being duped in some way. But I don’t know Ingrid Fox, of course I don’t. I do not know, personally, the woman you have spoken about over a period of six months and whose provenance we now know to be seizures.” He looks up at me, willing me to sit and talk to him. “Or,” he says, shrugging, “I could be making it all up. If you believe what you’re thinking, you’ve probably already heard me say something like this in your mind. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“So let’s deal with that. You’re right to be suspicious. If I were a bad man or a mad scientist, I would talk to you in a rational way, and reassure you. Take your concerns seriously. I could do a great job of it if I had to. How do you know I couldn’t?”
“I don’t.”
“Of course, a lot more people than me would have to be involved. It would be quite an operation. It’s likely your husband would be involved.”
“I guess he’d have to be. So wha
t do I do? How do I get out of this?”
“Well…I would take the proposition very seriously and subject it to the best test I could think of. I might, for instance, press to understand what the point of the experiment was. If I could come up with a plausible scenario in which a medical doctor would breach his legal obligations to you so completely, as well as enrol others to play certain roles, then I’d proceed to the next question.”
“Which is?”
“Why?”
Finally, I sit. “Well. You’d have to be an imposter. Or it was part of the therapy.”
“Cure you of your autoscopy by putting on an elaborate performance of your symptoms out here in the real world? That would be ingenious if it worked. Is it working?”
“I don’t know. I feel like I’m getting very close.”
“To what?”
“To something that’ll be true. So. You don’t know Ingrid Fox.”
“No. I don’t.”
“What about Inger Wolfe? Do you know her?”
I see it immediately on his face. Or I’m imagining it. Or he’s doing it on purpose. “What would it mean if I knew a person named Inger Wolfe?”
“What about Rabbi Shoshana? Who’s Clark Steele? Or Cullen Gossage? Is Cullen your mole in the Clarke? Maybe those little children’s Aspirins really are No-mind! How can I know?”
“Try to calm down, Jean. You’re safe here. But I’m concerned now that you’re not right, and you should maybe go back to the hospital.”
I laugh at him.
“What is no mind?” he asks me.
“You’re trying to upload me. You and Cullen. He’s like you,” I tell him. “He knows what he’s talking about.”
“Cullen is bipolar.”
“Sure.”
“Come on now.” He stands. The power dynamic in the room shifts. “You know what this is. It’ll be easier to fight once you recognize it. That’s not half the battle—it’s the entirety of it. Knowing when you’re sick.”
“You want them to go back in and poke around my brain again? You know what you should do?”
“Jean?”
“You should get a lawyer.”
He doesn’t really block my way, but he accompanies me to the door and gets there first. “Where are you going?”
“Somewhere you can’t find me.”
“If you’re right and you’re part of an experiment, what makes you think I can’t find you anywhere? And how can you trust anyone? What if your husband is in on it?”
“I see through you. I’m going to Phoenix tonight. I’ll be safer with my sister.”
He lifts his hand off the doorknob and steps away. “All right then, go.” I pull the door open. “You don’t have a sister, though. Paula is not your sister.”
“Really? Who is she?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think she exists.” I remember him writing in his little spypad when I first talked about her in his office. Sister? he must have written. Delusional?
“Why don’t we ask her what she thinks of that?” I’m already at his front door with my phone out. I have one dot of reception, but it Skypes her.
“When did you last see your sister, Jean?”
“Hold on, she’s answering.”
My screen moirés, and then there she is.
“Hey,” she says. I step out onto his front lawn. The snow’s playing havoc with the signal; she breaks into lozenge-sized pixels. “I’m so sorry.”
I hold my phone out to him. “Okay? That’s Paula! Paula? Hold on a second, I need more reception—” He makes no further attempts on my liberty, but follows me and stands in his doorway. Little feet come galloping. Two faces appear on either side of him, two boys, identical twins. I hold the phone up above my head so they can all see Paula’s face.
“—haven’t been close,” she says. “I don’t know whose fault that is, but it doesn’t matter now.”
“Tell him who you—”
She continues over me; she can’t hear what I’m saying. “Sorry to put this in a note, when it’s too late. I thought…”
Her voice keeps changing. I have to bring her face to my eyes. There’s no moving picture; the screen shows shards of her face. It forms for the briefest of moments, and there she is and she’s crying. “You were right about me,” she says. “I never figured out how to get along in the world. Please don’t feel guilty. I love you, Inger. I know you love me. I know one day you’ll understand and you’ll forgive me.”
The screen goes black. I look up and Morbier’s front door is closed and there’s not a single light shining in the windows of his house or in any of the houses on Denison Avenue.
IAN IS NOT HOME, but the kids are, asleep and alone in their beds. No doubt Morbier has already alerted him to my visit and he felt the urgency of the matter excused leaving his children unprotected. He won’t have thought that I’d come straight home. I probably have ten minutes, fifteen at the most.
I start filling a backpack with necessaries. Underthings, T-shirts, an extra pair of jeans. Recharger cord, toiletries. I grab the $500 from the hollow book that’s shelved among the old travel guides Ian still keeps from his vagabond days.
Nick is asleep with the covers pinched between his legs. I watch him from the doorway. I listen to him breathing, in and out, with that body I made him. I do the same in Reid’s doorway, but he senses me standing there and turns over, murmuring. Their father loves them and I know they’ll be okay until I get back.
I’m almost ready to leave when I see his car pull into the driveway. I put the knapsack in the closet. He calls from downstairs: “Jean? Jean, are you here?”
I can’t hide. “I’m upstairs.”
He comes up to the bedroom looking flushed and worried. “I got a call!”
“I know.”
“Do you? Do you know who called me?”
“You left the kids here, all alone.”
“You gave me no choice. They don’t feel there’s a choice now.”
“Excuse me, but who’s they?”
A look of fear—fear of me—crosses his face. “Jean, I have to take you in.”
“I don’t even care now. I just want this to be over. Can I wash up first?”
“I need to take you now.”
“You can wait for me downstairs, officer. I’m not going to jump out the window, for chrissake.”
His eyes fill with tears. “Jesus, Jeannie. You really don’t know how sick you are. I wish I—”
“Get out.”
He leaves me. I stuff two more fistfuls of underwear into the knapsack. “Come on, Jean,” he says from the hall.
“I’m almost ready.”
The bathroom window slides up silently—thank god we got the old shitty ones replaced. I shrug the knapsack on and step out onto the roof.
AFTER I BREAK Jimmy out of CAMH, I find someone to charter us to one of the airfields in Westmuir County, close to the town I used to call home. It costs four of the hundred-dollar bills.
Jimmy’s never been on an airplane before, and he finds the changing topography fascinating. Roads give way to lakes and then forest and the north goes on and on. He says it looks like a huge animal clawed gashes in the earth and centuries of rain turned them into lakes.
Over Georgian Bay, the plane bucks and shears. Down the cabin, people brace their forearms against the sides of the plane, as if they can keep it from flying apart.
Jimmy looks ridiculously serene. “You l-like this?” I ask him. “The plane shaking all over the place?”
“It’s not usually like this?”
“No. This isn’t normal. This is heavy air tur-bulence. You’re allowed to be scared.”
“I don’t scare easy.” The plane hits a pocket and drops for a full second. A toupée flies up amidst the screams. Jimmy laughs. It’s fantastic! This is life!
My own immediate fear is mitigated by the fact that I’ve been on medium sizzle, anxiety-wise, for weeks now. Having something to be afraid of is nice for a change. And
if the plane breaks apart and our last, heavily adrenalized, slow-motion moments on planet Earth end with the waters of the bay rushing toward us, so what. We won’t remember any of it. There will be nothing more to find out, to try to forget, to have to remember. Death is nothing compared to knowledge. Some days I’d rather die than find out one more thing. The captain comes on and tells us he’s going to look for some smoother air.
I don’t think you get much of those trippy death ludes in a plane crash. Too sudden. What a huge rip-off, to live your whole life and not get the loot bag. What is the end like? A great swell of feeling? Will it be of love or regret? Maybe it will be a vivid dream to reassure me of my selfhood before it’s lead or lured away to permanent night.
Jimmy sleeps. Twenty minutes later, we’re banking and descending. The wing slices a cloud.
—
The only stuff online for Ingrid Fox had been her books, reviews of her books, and snippy articles about her pseudonym. But when I put her real name into Google, it spat her life out. For the first time, she’d published a book under her own name. A fictionalized memoir or a novel based on real events, people weren’t sure what to call it. She was touring the book and she was appearing at the Underwood Festival in Brigham. It’s one of two writing festivals in the country that’s held in the woods, and the only one in wintertime. “The quintessential Canadian book festival!” the website boasted, over a time-lapse movie of people raising an enormous yurt within a stand of burr oak. Its roof is forty feet high and there’s room in it for a restaurant and a number of venues.
Underwood is just a stop on her tour, but it’s today and she’s giving her first interview at the festival. Her book has been lavished with praise and her public is walking into a forest in their parkas to hear her speak.
Jimmy’s the only person I can trust right now. It was easy to persuade him to come with me. Nothing strikes Jimmy as beyond the realm of possibility. His own mind partakes of the impossible often enough that he refuses to judge it, and the news that my doppelganger was doing a public interview under yet another name struck him as notably organic. I also offered to be his witness at any custody hearing he might have regarding his son, Tommy. His job was to keep watch for Ian, or Morbier, or anyone else who might take too much of an interest in me.
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