by Sarah Faber
HUGO
Around and around the halls, Hugo walks. He craves the sun, but after the Thorazine injection, his body feels heavy and stalled. The sedative effect was immediate, and it’s taken days for his thoughts to clear, for feeling to come back, especially in these brightly lit rooms with plants, games, a television—all provided to help patients relax; but even medicated, he cannot sit still. He begged Dora, made her swear to instruct them: Not too much. Bring me down, but don’t wipe me out. I won’t be any trouble on the boat, I give you my word. She turned away when he pleaded, but she promised.
Another condition he stipulated: since he had voluntarily committed himself, he would be allowed to sign himself out, go for a walk, leave whenever he wanted. He tells the nurse at the front desk he likes to walk to clear his mind, but the truth is he has something he still needs to do. The nurse takes his day pass, makes a call to the ward upstairs, then gives a nod, and he is buzzed through the automatic doors and walks into the sunlight of late afternoon, his shadow stretched long and thin behind him. To the beach, to the water, always the water. The ocean, he thinks, will pull at him forever. When he was young he used to go down to Toronto’s waterfront to see the ships and look out, dazzled by the sun shining over frozen Lake Ontario. Could he ever go back to a mere lake?
The hospital is near the seafront, and he is at the beach in under twenty minutes, this time at the other end of Copacabana Beach, opposite Marimbás, where he ended his last walk. Today he’s coming from the other side; he’ll meet her in the middle, where he wanted to arrive last time but did not, could not. This time he will ask her what he needs to know.
The middle was where he and Luiza ended up nearly three years ago, on her eighteenth unbirthday, after their drink at the boat club.
‘Just like Alice in Through the Looking Glass,’ he said. ‘We’ll fête you 364 days a year instead of just one.’
They were celebrating a few weeks late because he’d only just returned from another month in hospital, and Dora had taken all the girls to Petrópolis for Luiza’s real birthday while he was away. His small way of making it up to her. He promised a bottle of their best champagne (for her, just one glass!), but when they arrived at the club that evening she was charmed by a ridiculous pink cocktail poured into a perversely curved glass, topped by a kebab of orange segments, strawberries, maraschino cherries, and spiralling rinds of a lime. They sat out on the balcony overlooking the darkened beach, lights around the bay reflected in the water.
‘This is the perfect drink for an eighteenth birthday, don’t you think?’ Luiza said as she held it up to the light, grinning. ‘A splash of rum for my burgeoning adult self dressed up in every little girl’s pink-princess dreams. I am between two worlds.’
These little speeches of hers sometimes made him nervous—they were affected, as though performed just for him. But so much had been expected of her at a young age, and for too long she had feigned maturity. Had he done this to her?
He raised his glass. ‘To my daughter, on her eighteenth birthday. Or thereabouts. There’s no rush.’
She tilted her head, furrowed her brow, then burst out laughing. ‘Not one of your better ones, Papa!’ But she connected her glass with his, their cold clink hanging oddly in the air.
Hugo cleared his throat. As close as they had always been, she was becoming the only person who could make him uneasy. Evie and Magda were still too young and absorbed in their children’s world to understand much about his condition, but Luiza knew—had known for years—that he was ill. And yet she still adored him. Unlike Dora, who was often suspicious and fatigued by him, Luiza was still enchanted by his energy, his caprice, even what she witnessed of his depressions before he was sent away. But disillusionment would be healthier, and he felt he had to disabuse her; she was, he sensed, becoming infatuated with the idea of instability, of a life lived in extremis.
‘I confess I have another reason for bringing you here,’ he said before he gulped so much of his martini that he choked. Again Luiza laughed, and he thought how much she looked like her mother, and how sorry he suddenly was that Dora wasn’t there, with them. When he’d asked her, she insisted she didn’t want to go—that Luiza would take the news better from him. But it felt wrong suddenly, their distinct little team of two, and he was struck again by all the damage he’d done. ‘No time to drown,’ he muttered under his breath.
‘Pardon?’ Luiza said, leaning toward him.
He reclined away from the table. ‘Nothing, nothing. I wanted to tell you—’ he was straightening up now, his voice hollow and loud. He tried to modulate his voice, soften it to a normal pitch, but it dropped back down to just above a whisper. ‘I wanted to tell you that we’ll be taking a trip.’ Luiza’s eyes lit up, so he added quickly, ‘All together. As a family.’
‘Oh?’ she said, primly putting her drink back on the table and interlacing her fingers. There it was again, her simulating adult gestures and inflections. He felt tears in his eyes.
‘There’s a study in Florida. For a new drug. Lithium. Apparently it’s done wonders for some tragic folks in Australia.’
‘What does it do?’
‘Evens you out, I suppose.’
‘And do you want to be… evened out?’
He could barely stand it, the way she was speaking, slowly and cautiously, like the nurses at the hospital.
‘You have to stop this, my darling, you really must stop acting like all this is normal.’ He was speaking very quickly, avoiding Luiza’s searching gaze, waving his hand for emphasis. ‘I want you to stop pretending like this is something you want for me.’
His voice was rising, and when he finally met her eyes again he knocked over her drink. A pink puddle spreading toward the edge of the table. Hugo was suddenly on his feet, grabbing at napkins from nearby tables to sop up the spill.
‘Waiter! Another one of those pink drinks for my daughter!’ The urgency of his voice, the desperation—ridiculous man, he thinks, remembering it now.
When he looked at Luiza again, she was still seated and blotting her skirt with a napkin. Why hadn’t she stood up to avoid the spill? Why was she moving so slowly? Whatever they’d done for him in the hospital wasn’t enough—he always seemed to be moving at a different speed than everyone else.
He stabbed roughly at her dress with a fistful of napkins.
‘Now it’s ruined,’ she said, and at last she sagged into her chair, lip trembling, arms hanging limply over the armrests, soggy napkin balls on the floor beneath her. At last—the child he recognized, that he needed her to be.
Hugo sat down, leaning toward her now, trying to pull her chair closer. ‘It’s not like you think it is, being this way. Not any longer. I’m tired. Your mother is tired. Something needs to change.’
‘But I love you this way! Why can’t the world just allow for people like you? You’re going to end up becoming whatever’s easiest for everyone else. You’ll be just like the rest of us.’
He should not have told her; he should never have described to her the way it could be during those first warm and irresistible surges of mania, when his blood rushed with the immaculate connectedness of all things, and he was enchanted, his senses heightened and his mind tentacular, reaching out and grabbing ideas, pristine and preformed, from the air. Utterly cogent, sparkling ideas flying around his head like comets, which, when followed, only led to better, brighter ones; and all of them discrete yet connected, like the threads of a perfect web. But he’d told her, too, what eventually followed, when the lines blurred and once-perfect ideas muddied and congealed, and that dreamy sensuality and euphoria were replaced by an escalating, exhausting wildness. And about the anxiety that inevitably set in: what had been said, and to whom? How great was the damage? How much money spent? In the early days, apologies could still be made, friendships salvaged. But for how much longer?
‘I want to be like you,’ he said then, clearing away the bits of orange rind and strawberry hull from her spilled drink. ‘I
want to be with all of you. I don’t want to keep leaving for weeks every time I crash. I’m tired.’
‘But you have visions,’ she pleaded. ‘Such wonderful, otherworldly visions. In some cultures that would make you revered, a shaman. Genius has a price.’
He had tried to corrode her overly romantic ideas about his disease, yet he believed some part of her still wanted it for herself. He tried to tell her that she misunderstood. Those beautiful hallucinations, those showers of stars—those were undeniably beautiful, preternatural. He was grateful he wasn’t like other people, because he’d seen things other people only imagined. It had been enough, for a time, to make all the rest—the anxiety, the depression—worthwhile. But sometimes those weren’t even the worst aspects of the disease.
‘Don’t you remember,’ he implored her now, ‘all those weeks I believed the CIA was following me, hunting me? My body actually cramped up from the fear. But those delusions, this condition—sometimes it protects me from something worse. When they pass, I’m left knowing that in fact no one is tracking me. No one is listening in, or watching, or thinking of me at all.’
She said then, very quietly, ‘But I’m always thinking of you.’
And in that moment, he knew: that was what he had done to her, bequeathed to her the myth of their reciprocal devotion, a predestined twinning. Never when he was ‘flat’ of course, but when he was high, he had said such things. In you, I have geminated and borne my most pure and unrealized self. Such grandiose, cruelly burdensome things.
After one last garish pink drink and another martini, Hugo promised Luiza that the treatments were improving all the time and would only take away the worst parts of him, the parts none of them could go on living with. As though it were surgery, as though they could extract aspects of his self, of his mind, and leave the rest intact. Of course the doctors in Florida made no such claims, and without the lightning-strike cure they hoped lithium might be, he saw the years yawn open before him, sedatives alternating with antidepressants, one spitting water on a forest fire, the other a flutter-board thrown to a man already submerged, five fathoms down.
Luiza had bravely tried to smile and said that she trusted him implicitly, and he covered his mouth as he winced a little. After he paid for the drinks, they went down the spiral staircase to the beach and stood on the sand, dull and white in the moonlight. Luiza eventually asked if they could sit for a few minutes—the cocktails had gone to her head. So they turned back toward a set of stairs that led from the beach to the brick road, then followed the tree-lined sidewalk away from the beach. They sat on one of the little wrought-iron benches that faced a stone retaining wall and looked out over the water. It was completely dark now, and they took turns pointing out ships on the horizon, dotted with pinpricks of light.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ Luiza said, resting her head on his shoulder. ‘Maybe Florida will be a nice change. Everything here is becoming so crude and crowded, and there are so many more buildings going up. It’s decadent and cheap all at once.’
He laughed then, but felt sad more than relieved. He could hear her trying, lying—she was pretending again, for his sake. He had made her that way—sentimental, melodramatic, often awkward—then abandoned her for one of two extremes, private planets of light or dark he alone could inhabit. What was she to do? Who else could she have become? People like them weren’t fitted to the world. All she wanted that night years ago when she jumped into the water was for him to save her, to prove he loved her. On how many beaches would he lose her?
Hugo rises now from the sand where he’s been sitting, staring at the water. He wants to understand; he wants an answer. He can feel the distance between them rapidly expanding, can feel himself letting go, feel her slipping away psychically as well as physically—that thin gold thread that always shone between them is dulling. Soon, it will snap altogether.
‘Come back.’
He walks into the water, feels it fill his shoes. ‘Where are you?’
His pant legs are wet to the knees now, wrapping around his calf muscle with each wave. Now his thighs, back pockets, hips, belt, waist—all soaked through.
He leans into the waves, shouting, ‘Come back to me and we’ll face the sun.’
The waves slap higher against his chest, then his chin. He swallows water when he opens his mouth to speak again, quieter this time.
‘Come back and we’ll never leave.’
LUIZA
MARCH 1962
‘No nap today!’ Dora had warned her, over-enunciating as she strode briskly into Luiza’s room, pulling open the drapes. One must never be allowed to rest on the day of a party, thought Luiza as she lay on her bed, flipping through her old scrapbook.
‘Oh, Luiza,’ Dora sighed. ‘I asked you to sort through your things. You haven’t started packing at all.’
‘You said the movers weren’t coming until tomorrow. I’ll start now.’ Luiza made a move toward her dresser and began listlessly sorting things into piles until she heard the door shut loudly behind her.
Alone again, her whole body craved sleep. Today was a day of goodbyes, and yet she had been hiding out in her bedroom for most of the morning. She was meeting Carmichael for the last time today, and she still had to make up some excuse for leaving the house before the party. She’d also promised her father she’d help him pick flowers from the garden, but outside, the colours were too vivid, and the intensity of the light gave her headaches. Small sounds amplified in her mind and took on physical shape: if she dropped a spoon on the floor, its clatter reverberated for several minutes; when her father rubbed a wet finger around the edge of his wineglass to amuse the girls, it divided the hemispheres of her brain, thrumming in each side. When Evie pointed to rabbits among the clouds, Luiza saw only turds. Worst of all were Hugo’s delicate orchids. She’d helped him coddle them, but they were vulgar to her now, transforming into inverted ears, a spleen, sections of occluded rectum centred on the table at dinner.
Her mother didn’t want to hear about any of it—the naps, the headaches, the ‘so-called’ images, these psychic encroachments from the natural world. She cautioned Luiza not to indulge herself. In a few days, they’d be leaving for Canada. There wasn’t time for her to carry on.
Luiza left her room and went downstairs and out back to the veranda, inhaling the humid air. These days, Dora always seemed harried and put-upon, as though she herself would have to do all the packing and handle all the preparations alone, rather than simply bossing the maids around. Here she was again, scolding Luiza from the back doorway.
‘Luiza! Answer me, will you? Take this to your father.’
Luiza took the crystal glass of sherry from her mother, and was briefly mesmerized by the points of light that flashed in its cuts until she tripped a little and had to lick the sweet liquor that had gathered in the space between her thumb and index finger. But there wasn’t time for meditating on prisms today. As she walked out toward the garden, she wondered if her father would be able to detect her preoccupation on her face, how she kept thinking of Carmichael, how she’d been lying to her family for months now to hide the fact that she was having an affair with a man twice her age, slipping away to hidden, marginal places: the city’s northern beaches, unaired hotel rooms—places no one they knew would ever go. But she liked it, the dirty feeling that came with knowing they were living a life apart, the hushed details of secret meeting places, the sneaking around. Channelled into Carmichael, her hopelessness induced an oblique sort of pleasure. He needed her.
Still half expecting her father to read her mind, she fixed her face into wide-eyed stillness as she approached him, but he remained down on one knee, shirt sleeves rolled up over elbows, as he took the glass and sipped without looking up, murmuring his amateur gardener’s litany of self-recriminations: Really, he ought to have had Georges put the tomatoes beside the marigolds. And the geraniums weren’t really dead; they just needed a good cutting back. This year’s attempt at cantaloupes was a bit of a dog’s
breakfast, he feared (and she did see in their withered skins something unwholesome: the extracted brains of infants or small animals). He could go on in this pleasant, preoccupied way indefinitely, that is if Dora didn’t come out and interrupt them like she usually did. Luiza used to think it was simply her mother’s childish envy at seeing them enjoying a calm moment together, but now she understood that these periods when he was relatively steady were, in some ways, the most frightening of all; they felt like a held breath. Her mother was watching for signs, preparing herself for what his next cycle might bring. And after Florida, even Luiza had to admit that while her father’s plateaus were contracting, the poles of his moods were growing farther apart, each becoming more extreme than the one before. These days, the glint of hope they’d had in Florida was too dangerous to remember. In Canada, they would return to the familiar, old pattern: hospitalization, sedatives, antidepressants. Symptom management.
But for now, they walked side by side through the freshly mown grass, which was safe from her perverted perceptions as long as they were together. Clusters of large, soft-bodied flies billowed up from underfoot, their long, fine wings segmented in iridescent green and blue.
‘I think these are the ones,’ said her father, gesturing his spade toward the cloud of insects, ‘that only live for one day.’ He said they must get it all done—mating, reproducing, the entire cycle in a single day.