by John Case
Duran was puzzled by the question. “What about her?”
“You obviously like each other. I was wondering about your relationship.”
A frown from Duran. “She’s the plaintiff. I’m the defendant.”
Shaw smiled. “She says she’s dropped the suit.”
“I guess.”
“Then… perhaps you could stay with her for a while?”
It was Duran’s turn to smile. “I don’t think so,” he told him.
Shaw looked disappointed.
“There are some things… I don’t think Adrienne has talked to you about them, but… the two of us are… kind of in transit…”
“‘In transit’…”
“Yeah. For the foreseeable future.”
Shaw digested this for a moment, then excused himself, and went to the cafeteria line. Returning with a fresh pot of tea, he sat down, and said, “Why don’t we try the pentathol this afternoon? Actually—no. It’s Thanksgiving. My wife would kill me. We’ll save it for tomorrow. Anyway, I’ve got some sailing tapes—”
“Some what?”
“Audio tapes—Sounds of the Sea. Very relaxing. Water lapping against hull, lines rattling, sails snapping, fog horns—the whole nine yards—except you’ll be in a trance. So I guess you could call it ‘the whole ten yards.’”
Shaw was attempting to be funny, but the idea made Duran uncomfortable. Lines rattling. Sails snapping. “Where’d you get something like that?” he asked.
“What?”
“The sounds.”
“New Age Audio. Sixty-third and Lexington.” The psychiatrist swung his head to the side, sipped his tea and grinned. “Am I resourceful, or what?”
It was the jackets that triggered the memories—which was strange, because they never wore the jackets when they sailed. As Shaw had promised, Duran was immersed in the sounds of the ocean, the splash, and rush of water. With his eyes closed and the tape playing, he’d been racing with his friends, adjusting the rudder, falling off a little, judging the optimum heel and reach as they headed for the marker buoy. They were all wearing their jackets and, yet, as everyone knew, they never wore their jackets aboard.
“What ‘jackets’ are you talking about?” Shaw asked.
“Team jackets… not what you wear in competition. They’re what you wear before and after. And around campus.”
They’d already tried to see the campus through Duran’s eyes, to get him to describe its physical layout, the students, buildings, and professors, the names of the buildings, landmarks and statues. But Duran continued to block these efforts, forcing Shaw to focus on the seemingly inconsequential. Insignia printed on pencils and notebooks, area codes, and zipcodes, athletic gear—
And jackets.
“What color are they?”
“Black and white.”
“Black and white. That’s unusual. Are you sure? Are you sure you’re not recalling a photograph? Maybe they’re dark blue.”
“No they’re black. Ink black. White lettering.”
“Tell me about them.”
But Duran was growing more and more uncomfortable. He wanted to shift position, but he couldn’t. To say that his aversion to recalling his past made him freeze was not metaphorical. It was the way his fear manifested itself. He actually felt frozen, both cold and immobile, as if he were encased in ice, his metabolism slowing. Afraid to move, afraid to jar anything loose. But why? A logical sector of his mind was still weighing in on his reactions and it disapproved of his discomfort. How could he be afraid of thinking about jackets? How could jackets be threatening?
“Slow down,” Shaw said. “Describe them some more. Do they button or zip? What is the fabric made of?”
“I can’t think. There’s no room to think.” His sensations had narrowed to: pressure and cold. He had the panicked sensation that his head was being squeezed from all sides by plates of ice, his brain crystallizing.
“You can think. Do they button or zip?”
Nothing.
“Let’s hang the jacket up in your room,” Shaw suggested.
That was easier. The jacket was on a hook, not him. “They zip,” he said.
“Excellent! Is there anything on the front of the jacket? Apart from the zipper?”
“Embroidery”
“What color?”
“White.”
“What is it—the embroidered thing? Letters? A word?” He hesitated. “Your name?”
“It’s a bear,” Duran said, surprising himself as well as the doctor.
“Just the head? Or the whole thing?”
“It’s a bear,” Duran told him.
“A white bear?”
Duran nodded. Speaking seemed to take a huge effort and a long time. “A polar bear.”
“A polar bear,” Shaw said, almost in a whisper. But there was a sense of elation in his words. “Black and white. A polar bear,” Shaw repeated, this time in a louder voice—one that carried a distinct if muted tone of triumph, a tone that filled Duran with dread.
The polar bear was on the front of the jacket. And on the back, which he could now imagine clearly, were the words Bowdoin Sailing. These were the varsity jackets the school provided to its athletes: Bowdoin Sailing, Bowdoin Hockey, Bowdoin Soccer.
“Bowdoin,” Duran said. “Bowdoin College.”
“Ah,” said Shaw. “Of course. Admiral Peary. Polar bears.”
That was where he’d gone to school as an undergraduate: Bowdoin, not Brown. And no wonder he’d gone unrecognized at the Sidwell reunion—because he was a Maine boy, all the way. He remembered now. He’d gone to school in Bethel at the Gould Academy, where his mother had been an English teacher.
And then big segments of his past snapped into focus in a way that made his heart stagger—as if he had been on a long voyage, and the ship’s engine had suddenly cut out. His life passed before his eyes in an instant that unwound for what seemed like hours, and the result was like a near death experience. For a moment—that moment—he was sure he was having a heart attack. But then, the engine started again, and he realized he wasn’t having a heart attack, it was just Lew McBride, coming home to himself after a long absence. For an instant, he was overcome with elation—until an image began to form behind his eyes. An ochre room, a sort of… abattoir, the walls running with blood, and a nonsense thought shrieking through his head: My God, I’ve killed them all.
And then it was gone. The image vanished as quickly as it had come. His eyes flew open, and he found himself where he’d always been, sitting in a comfortable chair across from Doctor Shaw, filled with a wintry mix of joy and desolation. Glad to know who I am, he thought. Sorry it had to be me.
They stayed at it. Now that McBride remembered his name, he was struck by how well it fit. He remembered his mother—his real mother, not the icon in the picture frame at his apartment—lifting him up, and singing, “Hello, yewwwww! Hello, Lewwwww!”
“Wait a second,” Shaw ordered. “I want to flip the tape.”
He’d been Lewis. He’d been Lew. For a while, he’d been Mac—and, as he recalled, there was even a semester when his friends had called him Bridey. But Jeff, which he had answered to just an hour earlier, was as foreign to him as Horatio or Etienne.
“All right, ready to go again,” Shaw told him. “You said your father medalled in the Olympics. Was that it? I mean—that’s fantastic, of course. But, did he ever compete again?”
“No, just the once. He was the first American after Bill Koch to medal in a Nordic event. But he was thirty-four when he took the silver. After that, he worked mostly as a ski instructor.”
“Where?”
“Killington, for a while. Sugarloaf. Stowe. Sunday River would have been handier, but it didn’t exist at the time.”
“That’s in Maine?” Shaw guessed.
“Right. That’s where we lived. In Bethel. Anyway, he’d go off for three or four months—come home midweek, if things were slow. Later, when cross-country caught on, he gave lesso
ns at the Bethel Inn—which is famous for it.”
“Were they happy?”
“Who?”
“Your parents.”
McBride didn’t know what to say. At the moment, he was wondering why he wasn’t happy—why, in point of fact, he was filled with a sense of trepidation. Finally, he shrugged. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” he said. “So there was that. My mother clipped coupons and hunted down bargains. Teachers in private school don’t earn that much, and my father’s income was… sporadic. And I’m not sure my mother really trusted him when he was away. He was a go-for-it kind of guy. Even during the run up for the Olympics, my mother wasn’t behind him the way wives are on those segments you see on TV.”
“Oh?”
“He stopped working to train and my mother didn’t want him to. She was pregnant with me. And even after he made the team, it wasn’t like she got to go to Sapporo. It would have cost too much.”
“And after he won?”
“Well… he didn’t win, and it wasn’t the hundred meters. He finished second in the ten-kilometer biathlon—so there wasn’t a Wheaties box in it, or anything else, for that matter. I think my mother thought he was a case of arrested development. I remember, one time, he blew out his ankle. Which was not so good, because he didn’t have disability insurance, and he couldn’t work. So things were tight. I remember my mother standing at the top of the stairs and tossing the bills down, then coming down to see which ones were face up, because those were the ones she’d pay.” Duran paused. “Would it be okay if I had a glass of water?”
“Of course,” Shaw said, and scurried to fetch him a cup from the cooler.
Not that McBride was actually thirsty. He was just buying time—because he could feel the panic rising inside him, hear the tremor in his voice as his concentration began to fly apart—and this, despite the drug he’d been given.
“Thanks,” he said, and took a small sip.
“Keep going,” the psychiatrist urged.
“Well—where was I?”
“Things were tight.”
“Yeah,” McBride said, “they were tight, but she was crazy about him all the same—they were still in love, I think, to the day they died.”
Shaw gave him a sympathetic look. “They’re not living?”
McBride shook his head. “No. A semi fell on them.”
The psychiatrist was taken aback. “‘Fell’ on them?”
“Cat-Mousam Road. Truck jackknifed, went over the rail, and landed on the Interstate. Landed on their Volvo. Complete freak.”
“I’m sorry.”
McBride shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
“Who took care of you? Aunts and uncles?”
“Never had any. But my mother had some life insurance. I was in college when it happened.”
“And before that? Were you happy, as a child?”
“I don’t know. I suppose so. Bethel was nice. I had friends. And I worked.”
“Where?”
“Stocking shelves at the IGA, setting pins in the bowling alley. When I was older, I worked as a camp counselor. Lots of camps in Maine.”
As the afternoon wore on, Shaw sent out for coffee, and later for pizza. Several times he asked if McBride was too fatigued to continue—but the strange lassitude that had gripped him for so long—the languor which had enabled him to kill entire days watching television—was gone. Except for the sense of dread that came at him in waves, he felt awake and anxious to remember all he could. The drug that he’d been given had worn off, and Shaw was eager to keep going.
They talked about his childhood and his college days, about Bowdoin and Stanford, where he’d earned a doctoral degree in psychology. “I was interested in research,” he explained.
“So you didn’t do clinical. I mean, like Jeffrey Duran?”
“No, I never had a client, never shrunk a head. Eventually, I might have but… I received a fellowship that, uh, went on for a while.”
“Which fellowship was that?” Shaw asked.
“Institute of Global Studies.” McBride stirred uncomfortably in his chair. Coughed, and crossed his legs.
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s a foundation that makes grants to researchers in various disciplines.”
“So it doesn’t just pay your tuition somewhere.”
“No. They give you a stipend, and travel expenses. It’s pretty generous—plus, you get a lot of exposure.”
Shaw frowned. “What kind of exposure?”
Duran thought about it, then made a helpless gesture. “I’m sorry, I… I guess I’m uncomfortable. I mean, I’m trying to think how long… how long I’ve been away.”
Shaw shook his head. “Now, this is what happens when you start blocking. So don’t get fixated on trying to figure out where Lew McBride begins and Jeff Duran ends. Just… “ His right hand rotated in the air between them. “Roll with it. You were talking about the fellowship.”
McBride nodded. “Yeah, well, the way it worked: I wrote a sort of letter, a report, really, every month or so. I’d send it to the director of the Institute, and the Institute would send out copies to a slew of publications, the idea being that they could reprint it for free, so long as they gave the Institute credit. Other copies went to interested academics, and an A-list of influential people in the States and elsewhere.”
“Sounds wonderful. How do you apply?”
“You don’t. What happens is, someone recommends you—they don’t tell you who, but it’s usually a professor, a former fellow—someone like that. Anyway, they take you to lunch a couple of times, and ask what you’d do if you had the time and the money to do what you want. After a while—unless you’re an idiot—you find yourself pitching a study. They make some recommendations about how the study could be better, and the next thing you know, you’re taking a lot of tests.”
“What kind of tests?”
“Like the ones you gave me. MMPI, Myers-Briggs… it took all day. I remember that.”
Shaw made a face. “Hunh! Why would they do that?”
“I asked the same question. They said it had to do with identifying candidates who could work on their own—there’s very little supervision. Basically, they pat you on the back, and send you on your way. And I think they want to be sure they’re getting people who are comfortable working abroad—because they’re big on that.”
“On what?”
“Working abroad.”
“What was your area of study?” Shaw asked. “What did you pitch?”
McBride smiled, a little sheepishly. “The title was ‘Animist Therapeutics and the Third World.’”
Shaw raised his eyebrows. “Interesting!”
“The idea was to study the psychological and therapeutic components of nativist religions. Which meant studying everything from Indian sweat lodges to the induction of trance states, the effect of eclipses and different ways cultures used hallucinogenic mushrooms.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. I started in this hemisphere and… “ McBride’s voice trailed off.
“What?”
Suddenly, he felt as if a small bird was doing barrel rolls in his stomach. “I’m sorry” he said. “I get distracted.”
Shaw’s brow furrowed. “So what did you do?”
“I was in South America a lot, and the Caribbean. I wrote pieces on everything. Faith healing, Santería, one on ultramarathoning as a form of flagellation and meditation. Two of the articles I wrote were reprinted in the Times.”
“What were they about?” Shaw asked.
“One was about the spiritual aspects of video gaming—the quest, you know. The other was about communal drinking games as a way of relieving seasonal affective disorder.”
“And how did that work?”
McBride laughed. “I went up to the Yukon in February, and got drunk with the Inuits.”
“And then what?”
“I stopped caring about the weather.”
Shaw chuck
led. “You mentioned the Caribbean.”
“Right. I was in Haiti for a while. Studying cadence and tempo cues in posthypnotic suggestions.”
“Sounds fascinating.”
“It was, actually,” McBride said. He rapped out a rhythm on the table with his fingertips. Tippety tip tip! Five taps. “Something as abbreviated as that could do the trick.”
“Really. Well, not so surprising, I guess. Aural memory tends to be sequential so that once you initiate a progression of sounds, the mind tends to complete the sequence. So, where else did you go?”
“I was supposed to go on to Jamaica.”
Shaw waited for McBride to continue. When he did not, the psychiatrist broke the silence. “Yes?”
Suddenly, McBride couldn’t speak. There was an ache in the back of his throat that had to do with flying back to San Francisco from Port-Au-Prince, bringing home his tapes and photographs and notes. It was expensive, flying back, but his apartment was a good place to write and, what was even more to the point, it gave him a chance to spend time with Judy and Josh. They could be a family—if only for a few days each month.
The news of Judy’s pregnancy had come hard on the heels of the news that he’d won the fellowship, and they’d agreed that he couldn’t pass up the chance it represented—that they’d just make the best of it. He would come home, as often as possible, and that would be that.
And that’s exactly the way it was. In the months before Josh was born, Judy had come to join him for a week here and a few days there—whenever she was able to take time off from her own career as a graphic designer. But that stopped when Josh arrived because… well, for one thing, they couldn’t afford it and, even if they had been able to, the places he was going were no place for a baby.
“Lew?” Doctor Shaw leaned forward, his forehead wrinkling with concern.
McBride could hear a helicopter outside and, down the street, a siren moving closer, with its fluctuating wail. Sunlight poured through the slats of the venetian blinds, striping the bloodred, oriental carpet.
No place for a baby.
“Lew?”
He had the sensation that the pattern of light and shadow had risen up from the floor, and shone through his brain. And that the wail of the siren was the inconsolable bawl of an infant.