Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  He entered the bathroom. He found the courage and opened the faucet wide. Plugged the drain and waited till the water filled the sink. Put his hands and leaned his weight on the edge of the sink, looking at himself in the mirror. Stopped the water, shut his eyes, and took time in silence. Listened to the silence inside his head. The shadows of the night were accomplices of that moment. He counted a dozen breaths. Finally, the body of water was ready, flat and still. Slowly, Alfred bent his head down and opened his eyes to look at the water below, beneath his face.

  Then, he looked at himself in the mirror once again.

  After he looked at the water a second time…it was looking at him.

  He was in the garden again, as he’d been the day before, the day of his awakening. Nothing really changed. Same lawn, same fountain, same hedge, and same sharp-pointed fence.

  And the quiet, the silence in his head. A brand new certainty came over him: Those voices weren’t gone, but they were silent. And they were silent because they belonged to real people. They weren’t the effect of a mind’s circuit breaker, or nightmares flowing over from slumber into consciousness. Yes. Absolutely. They were people.

  Alfred massaged his head staring at the blue sky, searching for sutures. He thought that Dr. Mark might have surgically extracted the voices from his brain. But Alfred did not find skull holes, or any cuts or scars. His fingers read the skin beneath the hair perfectly, untouched. That’s why Alfred could be sure that the voices were still inside his head, but in silence. They kept quiet as a consequence of the medicine, or do they keep hidden so as not to be caught? Or, even simpler, did they get tired of talking?

  Voices had been buzzing inside his head ever since he was a child. By the time he realized that his own head had turned into a hive of unknown presences, and was not just a messy box of thoughts, it was too late. He couldn’t tell, in that green oasis with flowering bushes and trees, how it had begun. Nor the reason why the voices had brought him here—if it had even been their fault.

  He stood up to walk to the fountain. Slowly. The other patients also wandered like him. They measured the other patients’ steps and trajectories so they wouldn’t collide with each other. After the accident at last night’s dinner, Alfred tried not to look at anyone. Instinct was the only way to avoid battles with the other patients. The sound of water in the fountain attracted him with an inexplicable and undeniable strength. As if inside that ornamental structure there would be an answer.

  The voices. They kept quiet. Or were they only looking at him? Were they waiting to see what he’d do? Did they fear something or, instead, in secret, were they planning a deadly ambush? Reaching the fountain, called by the moving water, Alfred tried to cross his own past life.

  The voices talked to him, talked among themselves.

  Continuously.

  At first, one lonely voice, from which popped out a second, and a third. One man, two women. The three, just like they were in a sunny square, attracted more passengers who stopped there and started chattering with them about different things. Everybody grouped around Alfred’s hearing. The group became a larger and larger discussion crowd. The matters were a storm of vague points at first, then they turned to focus heavily on Alfred’s life.

  In a few months, Alfred was able to recognize every single voice, and match the relationships among the talking presences. Couples, families, friends, single people, relatives. Everybody confluent in his mind. Later, Alfred could guess that the voices were from different times and places. His brain started to work just like a radio device running through the stations; the difference being that the voices had chosen Alfred as a forced listener. The voices themselves, all anxious to talk to him, interfered with Alfred’s passive listening.

  From buzzing chattering, the crowd of voices turned into a kind of vocal court.

  The voices controlled him. Judged him. Pondered everything Alfred thought and did. They recommended things, projects, words to say and even their exact etymology, places where he had to go. Alfred’s consciousness, at last, became a mute cobblestone path, walked by a mixed public of recognizable strangers. Soon the voices started to pressure him—what to do, what to say, anything: Eat. Sleep. Wake up. Shut up. Lie. Tell him you won’t go…Not for his benefit, just things chosen by them. The requests were repeated over and over, till Alfred could have satisfied each of them one by one. “Alfred go to your garage and say this,” “Alfred go to that city and bring flowers to that lady but don’t tell her who the sender is,” “Alfred you’ve got to sweep away all the leaves from the street,” “Alfred, Miss Smith. Go to Miss Smith’s shop, not the market,” “Alfred, call Uncle George,” “Alfred, bring money to that family,” “Alfred, send three postcards.” The unknown voices drove him to people he barely knew, some he never met, to fulfill the assignments. These people reacted in different ways. One was frightened, another thanked him, one hugged him, one sent him away. Alfred couldn’t tell anybody he’d been hired by a voice in his head.

  But soon, after the specific chores, the voices turned into a hellish burst of different commands impossible to obey at the same time: “Sleep” with “Wake up” and “Go out” with “Stay home”; or “Eat” with “Spit out what you’re chewing” and “Get dressed” with “Get naked.” They did it on purpose.

  The command storm had different intensities. When chaos got placid, Alfred could take a breath and listen to the single voices. Of course, his thoughts could not speak to the mind squatters. Alfred had only to receive, to undergo, to listen. So, as he was lost in the almost total aphasia and apathy, every single voice was so clear and clean to reveal a peculiar sonic background made of ambient noises and additional passing voices that stigmatized the places and times from which they were talking.

  Alfred knew that one always spoke from a barber shop in New York, in the 1930s. Another one, a woman named Lorena, spoke from a wool mill out of London. Abraham was a dealer in Monaco. Pier, a little child, spoke from a school in Paris. About these and many others, Alfred would learn all the clues to identify them.

  He leaned on the edge of the stone fountain, thinking about all of the voices. He frightened a bird that was drinking among the water jets, making it fly away. Water inside the fountain was a continuous movement of bubbles, rings, and splashes. The blue sky shone on the liquid surface. For Alfred, it was easy to find beneath his eyes, the outline of his body projected on the water.

  The face he saw reflected down, for the third time, was not himself.

  Alfred closed his eyes.

  Then he watched again.

  It was still there below.

  Alfred touched his own face.

  The reflection on the water did the same.

  The night before, Alfred had found his own face in the mirror. He knew the face.

  It was not the same face he now saw reflected on the water.

  “Who are you?” Alfred asked.

  The shape on the water could not answer.

  In his head, the voices, all of them, were silent.

  That night, on the water in the sink, Alfred saw an old woman’s face looking at him instead of his own reflection. He’d never seen her before. Her features did not bring any memories from his past life. She hadn’t been in previous water reflections either. But two men and a young boy with a shaved head had been: The boy was on the broth. In Alfred’s room, there was a little mirror. He left the sink and went to the mirror. The cool silence of the hospital. Alfred found the mirror lying on the desk. He looked at himself in the mirror and recognized his own face. He smiled at himself, then went back to the bathroom.

  The reflection on the water was still the old woman’s face. It was a living image. Staring at it with attention, Alfred could see the temple vein pulsing, the trembling and blinking of the eyelids and, suddenly, in an amazing gesture, her tongue quickly wet her lips. The woman looked at him. Followed him with her glance.

  “Look at my hand, woman,” he whispered.

  Alfred swung his hand,
and the woman, from underwater, silently followed the shifting hand with her eyes. To the right, then to the left, and then Alfred brought it down near the water. Suddenly dropping his fist, Alfred pretended to punch her head, and the woman’s face startled. She reacted just like a real person about to be punched. Instead, Alfred’s fist did not touch the water. He moved the little mirror closer to the water. He bent down to see if the little mirror captured the woman’s image on the water. Well, Alfred saw that the woman on the water appeared in the little mirror. Just like a real, living face inside the sink. From there, the woman looked at Alfred’s eyes, frowned, with a resolute stare.

  “You’re one of the voices,” Alfred said before turning out the lights and going to bed.

  “Yes. You are one of the voices and now none of you are talking. Mute. And now you are all looking at me,” Alfred said in the dark, looking at nothing.

  Morning.

  Alfred woke up from a long, deep sleep, without remembering any dreams. He felt no sensations of his body or mind, refreshed after sleeping, and his brain looked like a clean blackboard with some random chalk cloud left to remind him of the basic elements of his human being. He had to piss. He stood up lazily and had the weird idea of surprising someone new on any puddle of water, any way, anywhere. He raised the toilet lid. On the water, as always, instead of his own face, Alfred found a man who was looking at him. Alfred smiled. He didn’t know what to do. But soon, the idea…

  “I’m, sorry, man. I guess it’s not a polite thing to do, and I don’t have it in for you, but…if you stay down there…” Alfred dropped his pajama pants and underwear. “As you wish. I warned you.”

  The face below, inside the toilet, a man of forty in a black jacket, white shirt, and tie, pretty elegant, started vibrating and distorting under the splashing jet of urine. Alfred even saw him try to cover his face with both hands, but for him there was nothing he could do. Before his bladder was completely empty, Alfred pissed on the floor. So there, on the amber puddle, appeared now not Alfred’s face, once again, or the man in the jacket’s face, but that of a bride under a veil. Her makeup and hairstyle were typical of the 1920s. That face, just like all the ones seen by Alfred, did not remind him of anyone at all. Alfred flushed the toilet, and with the water the man in jacket and tie was swallowed away. As the water formed again, Alfred looked at it and saw a new guy, a messy-haired man with a dirty T-shirt. He smiled at Alfred with rotten and bent teeth. His eyelids half shut made him look like an idiot.

  “On every pool of water, a different person. They’re back again. They are the voices.”

  Alfred got a notebook.

  He filled it up with rich descriptions of people he was seeing in every liquid reflection instead of his own face.

  “Shana, the voices have not gone away,” Alfred confessed.

  “Are they talking to you again?” the nurse asked.

  “No, miss. They aren’t. But now they are showing themselves to me.”

  “What do you mean? Can you see their faces? When you arrived here the first time, you didn’t tell us about faces, only voices.”

  Alfred paused before answering. The cool morning breeze made him feel alive. “Yes, I see them,” he said. He did not specify how. He guessed that would seem too crazy. Alfred feared that the doctors would do something bad and painful to him.

  “Who are they?” Shana asked.

  “Men, women, children. I think they were the same people who talked to me for years. They talked to me till the day I woke up in here. However,” Alfred added, “as you asked me the other day, I wrote down in a notebook every stranger I’ve seen up until now.”

  “Good. Then I’ll take a look at your notes.”

  “Of course, miss. I tried to write everything in detail.”

  “Do you want to know why you woke up in here? Do you still remember nothing before your recovery?”

  “I remember…” Alfred brought a hand to his face to hide his eyes. He wanted to cry. “I only remember the crowd of voices. A lot of orders and orders and orders.”

  Alfred cried, at last. Shana wrapped her arm around his shoulders. In the mansion’s garden, sitting on the bench, they were alone and distant from the fountain and other people.

  “Then, suddenly, I woke up in here. In my head I could no longer hear their voices,” Alfred said, putting his hand down from his eyes and looking at Shana beside him.

  Alfred’s eyes were full of tears.

  Shana’s face was marked with tears.

  But her face was blurry. Split.

  Because of the tears’ film in Alfred’s eyes, he was seeing a stranger’s face overlapping Shana’s, just like a motion picture projected over her head.

  And from her eyes, moreover, three little faces rolled down her cheeks, that Alfred saw brushed away when she dried her face with the back of her hand. “We thought,” Shana whispered, “we had healed you, Alfred.” Her features were deformed by resignation. She was beautiful no more. “I think I ought to tell Dr. Mark, dear Alfred. Before you hurt yourself or somebody else again,” the nurse proclaimed standing up.

  “No, miss. Please,” Alfred begged. “I won’t hurt anyone.”

  Feeling a waterfall of sadness rumbling inside himself, Alfred looked at Shana hurrying toward the mansion, face in her hands. She was crying.

  Tears.

  Water.

  Faces.

  “Doctor, are you sure there is no other way?” Shana asked.

  Dr. Mark answered, staring at the two doctors on Alfred, shaken on the table by an incessant wave of electric convulsions. “Nurse, this is 1975. Medical science has made massive progress since the end of the war. Shock treatment is the best cure against schizophrenia.”

  “What if he could already be healed? I mean, if the real problem was something different?”

  “There is no other possibility than the one we know. Maybe a resemblance between auditory and optical phases. This new hallucination form is the same mental disease with a different way of expression. Alfred is not healed at all. Evidently, the first shock cycle hadn’t generated the expected results. Alfred’s mental disorder seems to be stronger than we believed.”

  “He’ll never be healed, I guess,” Shana whispered, crying softly.

  “I think I agree with you, nurse.”

  “I’m sorry, Alfred. I am so sorry,” Shana whispered, crying.

  He was sitting at the same old chair of his awakening, in the garden. Three days after his brand new shock treatment. Four hundred and fifty volts.

  He forgot once again how to wash, how to dress himself. He didn’t know where he was, what day it was. Neither did he remember receiving the first of the new series of shock treatments. He only knew he was awake and so confused. His muscles were a mass of extreme tiredness.

  “May I have a glass of water?” he asked Shana, who was standing in silence beside him.

  “Of course, Alfred. I’ll be back in a while.”

  Alfred had no awareness of the treatment to which he had been submitted. Every session removed the most recent previous moments. Alfred knew he was under some therapy. And whatever that was, the cure made him unhappy. He felt empty. Erased. Violated.

  Shana returned with a plastic cup. “Here it is, Alfred. Sorry for the delay.”

  “No…no problem, miss. Thank you,” Alfred murmured. He was able to grip the cup with his shaky hand and keep it pretty steady. Alfred was sure he’d never seen this woman before, even though he thought he loved her. There was something magic between them.

  “I read your notes, Alfred.”

  “My handwriting is not so good,” he said smiling.

  “You’ll regain it soon.”

  “We have lot of time for that, don’t we?”

  “All the time we need,” Shana said biting her lower lip.

  “I am the periscope of the dead,” Alfred said.

  “Yes. I got it in your notebook. But, please, tell me…how can you claim a thing like that?”

 
; “I don’t know. They come from every time, especially the deep past. I saw ancient men of every race, soldiers from the last century, and a saint, the name of whom I can’t remember, dressed like a friar.”

  “Don’t you think they could be a simple projection of your mind? Maybe faces you saw in your life or that you saw around here?”

  “No, miss,” Alfred said. “As you read from my notes, I saw children’s faces on the water. And in here we are all old people. The ones I see on the water aren’t shadows from my mind. I am not insane. They are real, they come up to the water, inside every body of water. And they have chosen me, someone to watch in the world.”

  “Can you say why?”

  “I guess I can’t. I don’t know. Maybe they feel alone. Maybe each of them do not have someone who loves them. Who remembers them. Maybe one day Dr. Mark will figure it out.”

  “I really hope so,” Shana said bringing Alfred to her chest.

  “Now…you can go, Shana,” Alfred said when she loosened the hug.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am fine, thank you.”

  “So I’ll be back in half an hour for dinner.”

  “Half an hour for dinner,” Alfred lied, smiling.

  He wanted to be alone. He had to.

  The garden, the fence with those tall, sharpened points. The roses, the trees. And the fountain. He would never be gone from here. Only suffering and pain waited for him.

  He watched the water.

  The sun shined too bright, unbearable for his eyes. Inside his head, silence ran in the form of his breath. The moment was crucial.

  Once again, inside the cup, on the water in the cup, there was not the reflection of his face.

  There was another man’s face. Alfred knew all the faces he got pretty well. This man he had not seen before.

  Alfred drank him.

  Alfred drank that face.

  And he saw the man screaming in despair, as his liquid face slid into Alfred’s mouth.