Hummingbird

by Hummingbird (retail) (epub)

  “Do you really love me?” Zoe said half a second later.

  “Of course,” I said, speaking to Boris now.

  Why?

  “Why?”

  Boris growled softly.

  Zoe put a hand on his back. “What is it, Bo?”

  “It’s me,” I said. “He’s growling at me.”

  The next bit of conversation came to me in a rush.

  He’s not growling at you.

  Yes, he is.

  Why would he growl at you?

  Because he knows what I’m thinking.

  I thought you weren’t thinking about anything.

  Well I fucking lied, didn’t I?

  Boris was staring at me intently, his hackles up. “He’s not growling at you,” Zoe said.

  “Yes, he is,” I replied, helplessly.

  “Why would he—”

  With an effort that hurt, I tore myself out of the scene and bolted from the room, hearing Boris’s substantial bulk hit the floor an instant later. His claws raked the hardwood. Naked, I sprinted through the living room and skidded into the kitchen, Boris close on my heels. The butcher’s knife was lying on the stove, where Zoe had left it. I snatched it up and whirled to face Boris as he charged into the room, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, eyes bright and happy. He wasn’t attacking. He was playing. Either he didn’t see the knife or he didn’t have the sense to fear it. As he launched himself at me, some weird reflex made me tighten my grip on the handle. The blade sank deep into his neck. He reared back, yelping, blood spraying the walls as the knife slid out, still in my hand. Zoe hurried into the kitchen, in her sunglasses and towel. “No!” she yelled, seeing Boris on the floor. “No! No! No!” She threw herself over him. The life was leaving his body with surprising speed. He thrashed in her arms a few seconds before going still. Zoe cradled his head in her lap, looking at me over her sunglasses, her eyes filled with despair. I couldn’t guess what she was going to say next. Nor did I want to find out. Dropping the knife to the floor, I walked past them both and headed for the door. In the hall, I punched the elevator button, stark naked and shivering, wet with Boris’s blood. When the elevator didn’t come, I abandoned it and took the stairs, jogging down flight after flight, until I reached the main level, where I passed several tenants on my way through the lobby. I could see from their faces that I’d transformed into something terrifying, an animal on whom clothing would have looked absurd. A wild shriek tore its way out of my throat, flattening them against the walls. Then, hunched like a troll, genitals swinging, I gripped the handle of the front door and stepped out into the crowded street.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The head psychiatrist listened to my description of the event with an indulgent smile, nodding from time to time, as if I were telling him something entirely expected. Then he turned to the other members of the team—an intern, a psychologist, and a nurse—and talked about me for a few minutes as if I weren’t in the room, using terms like fugue state, paranoia, hallucinations, psychosis. Sticky notes sectioning off different parts of my brain. Returning to me with a fatherly smile, he assured me that with the proper treatment, he could have me back to my old self within a few short weeks. And he had more good news. I hadn’t hurt anyone. I’d been found roaming the streets, bloody and naked, but the blood appeared to be my own, from a gash on my hand which had since been bandaged.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, crossing my arms in an attempt to maintain some dignity in my hospital gown and paper slippers. “What about Boris?”

  “Who?”

  “The dog.”

  “Ah,” Dr. Patel said, with a faint smile. “Right. The dog.”

  “It was an accident.” I rubbed the side of my face to quiet a spasming muscle. “He jumped at me. I didn’t mean to …”

  “No, I’m sure you didn’t. But the thing is, Felix, the officers who brought you in sent someone to check your apartment, and they didn’t find any dog there.”

  “Well, then Zoe must have taken him somewhere. Did they ask her?”

  The other members of the team exchanged uncomfortable looks, but Dr. Patel’s smile never wavered. “No,” he said. “They didn’t ask Zoe.”

  “Why not?”

  “Felix.” Dr. Patel leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. “Your landlord told the police that you’ve been living alone in that apartment since you moved in three months ago.”

  “What?” I barked out a laugh. “That’s crazy!”

  No one else in the room was smiling. I shook my head. “Why would he say that? My name isn’t even on the lease.”

  “Actually …” Dr. Patel picked a sheet of paper up off his desk. “Your name is the only name on the lease. I requested a copy. I thought you might like to see it.”

  I took the photocopied lease agreement, my eyes darting down to the signature at the bottom. “I don’t … That’s impossible.”

  “Is it?” Dr. Patel asked. “You say you’ve been missing time.”

  I rubbed the side of my face harder. “She must have taken her name off the lease. Maybe I did sign it at some point … I mean, I must have. But she was definitely living there, so …”

  “After your initial story,” Dr. Patel said, in that same mild tone, “the police interviewed your neighbours. None of them had any recollection of a woman matching Zoe’s description ever living in that unit, or a dog for that matter. In fact, the building doesn’t even allow pets.”

  I blinked rapidly, pushing hard at the fluttering muscle in my cheek. “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s no easy way to say this, Felix. We believe that Zoe was a mental construction. Something you built in your mind.”

  I crossed and uncrossed my legs, fidgeting wildly, touching my forehead, my mouth, the back of my head.

  “I don’t …” I said, fighting off tears, “I don’t know what’s happening right now …”

  The nurse handed me a tissue, her face creased with pity. “Take a deep breath,” she said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “But how can that even be possible?” I asked Dr. Patel. “I saw her every day. She talked to me. I touched her. We …”

  Dr. Patel’s indulgent smile returned. “Your mind’s been telling itself a little story. A very convincing story, but a story all the same.”

  I shook my head, remembering the timbre of her voice, the warmth of her body. “You can’t just make up another person. That’s ridiculous …”

  Dr. Patel looked over at the others. “I think that will be sufficient for today.”

  “I’m telling you—”

  “We’ll have plenty of time to go over all this later, Mr. Mallory. Right now, it’s important that you rest.”

  An invisible wall went up between us as he bent over his voice-recorder, leaving the others to descend on me with helpful smiles. Back in my room, I stared at the blank little TV mounted next to my bed. A chair for visitors sat at my side, empty since I’d been admitted two days before. Above the chair, a frosted window offered plenty of light but no view. The curtain around my bed was half-shut, separating me from my roommate—a thin, white-haired man who spent most of his time humming a tune I found vaguely familiar. At the moment, he wasn’t humming but whispering something I couldn’t quite make out. As I strained to hear, a sturdy, cheerful-looking nurse strode in with some pills and a glass of water. “Well hello, my dear! My name’s Meredith. I’ll be the nurse on duty this morning. You need anything at all, just push your call button by your side there, and I’ll come running, all right? Now, Dr. Patel has prescribed these for you …” She set the pills on a narrow table beside me. “You’ll want to take them with food so they don’t upset your tummy. I can get you some pudding or cookies, if you like.”

  “I’m not really hungry,” I said.

  “Well, how about some saltines? Just so you have something in you.”

  “Do I …” I lowered my voice, not wanting to sound combative. “Do I have to take those?”r />
  She put her hands on her hips. “Dr. Patel would like you to take them.”

  “I understand that.” My voice quavered and I tried to smooth it out, to sound reasonable. Sane. “But do I have to take them?”

  “No one will force you to take them,” Meredith said. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

  I thought about the state I’d been in when I arrived at the hospital: strapped to a gurney, naked and bellowing, fighting anyone who tried to lay hands on me, snapping at them with my teeth.

  “Um … were you here on the weekend?” I asked.

  Meredith shook her head. “I had the weekend off. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.” I gestured at the pills on the table. “So … you think I need those?”

  “Dr. Patel seems to think so,” she said, diplomatically.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he’s very good at his job.”

  Her smile remained friendly, her gaze steady and calming. I felt a hard stirring of physical attraction and looked away. “I think,” I said, “I’ll just wait a bit. If that’s okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded.

  “All righty. Well, buzz me if you change your mind.” She took the pills back and left me alone with my neighbour, who’d gone quiet. I thought he’d fallen asleep, but after a minute he started humming that same maddeningly familiar tune.

  For nearly a week, Meredith brought my pills with breakfast and took them away again when I politely refused. The terms of my confinement weren’t entirely clear, but I knew that the main door to the ward was locked and monitored with cameras. I could have visited the day room, but chose to remain in my own room, where my neighbour’s humming had begun to grow discordant and agitated. On his daily rounds, Dr. Patel insisted that I was never going to make any progress without medication, but Meredith never pressured, lingering in the room a few minutes to talk about the weather or innocuous stories in the news. When I finally worked up the nerve to tell Dr. Patel that I intended to refuse the medication indefinitely, he sat down in the visitor’s chair with my chart, looking mildly exasperated. “Do I need to remind you what brought you here?”

  I didn’t answer and he jotted a note in my chart.

  “It’s an illness, Felix. Just like diabetes or hypertension. The nature of your illness prevents you from recognizing this.”

  “You weren’t there,” I said. “You can’t say for certain that it wasn’t real, that there isn’t some other explanation for what happened.”

  “What I know,” Dr. Patel said, “is that you have nothing to lose by giving medication a chance.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that.

  The next morning, I woke feeling that someone had been sitting in the visitor’s chair, watching me while I slept. Tiny particles of dust swirled in the narrow band of sunlight pushing through a gap in the curtains. The room was unusually quiet, the noise of faraway traffic just audible above the hiss of the ventilation system.

  “Jasmine,” my neighbour said, in a sudden, loud voice, as if issuing a command, as if the name were a verb, something I was being instructed to do. I stared at the curtain dividing our beds, waiting for him to say something else. Then the door opened and an orderly rolled in with our breakfasts. I shut my eyes, pretending to be asleep. Once the orderly had gone, I chewed on a piece of dry toast and watched the curtain closely.

  When Meredith came in a few minutes later, I told her that I wanted to take the pills.

  “That’s good,” she said, looking genuinely pleased.

  “I want to,” I repeated, “but I don’t know if I can.”

  “Why not?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that my trips though time made me feel unique, that without them, there would be nothing to separate me from the pale man. She sat on the edge of my bed and smiled. She offered no advice, no platitudes, just her simple, calming presence. “Okay,” I muttered, and picked up the pills. After I’d taken them, she squeezed my hand and gave me a proud look. I flushed, absurdly pleased with myself. Before I could find the words to thank her, she stood up and carried on with her work, leaving me alone on the bed, straining to hold onto the warmth she’d briefly pressed into my hand.

  For the next month, I took my pills every morning. Dr. Patel came and went, asking pointed questions, making small dosage changes based on my responses, calibrating me like a finicky machine. Gradually, the world around me felt more permanent. Time passed—slowly, predictably. My fixation on the past softened. My unimportance reasserted itself. People remained terrifying, but the intense paranoia I’d been experiencing abated.

  Twice a week, I met with Dr. Howard, a distractingly attractive psychologist who favoured short skirts and high heels. Her fingers were conspicuously bare and she wore abstract little brooches that drew your eye to the exposed skin at the base of her throat, a prelude to cleavage, somehow more enticing than actual cleavage. She had a bizarre fixation on my childhood, teasing out old traumas, while I sat in a state of semi-aroused panic and responded with as few words as possible, wanting desperately to return to the quiet of my bed.

  Meredith was different. She understood, or at least respected, my need to be closeted away and never tried to coax me out further than I was comfortable with. She had big motherly arms, solid thighs and a short, practical hairstyle. When she stepped into my personal space, my anxiety levels still went up, but only slightly. Unlike Dr. Patel, she treated me exactly as she would have treated someone with a physical illness, without judgment. She asked concrete questions about my life: where I grew up, where I went to school, my favourite bands and movies. She patiently listened to my halting replies, before sharing little details about herself—how she’d backpacked through Europe and Asia in her early twenties, then worked her way through college in a supermarket deli; how she was obsessed with reality television, and preferred nonfiction to fiction, and magazines to books. When she occasionally touched my arm for emphasis, the shape of her hand stayed long after she’d gone, like an impression in wet sand.

  Eventually, I must have achieved whatever threshold of sanity they’d been aiming for, as Meredith arrived one morning in a celebratory mood, holding a piece of paper with Dr. Patel’s sprawling signature across the bottom, informing me that he’d approved my release. I read the form closely, then set it aside.

  “Isn’t that great?” Meredith asked.

  “Sure,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. In the month that I’d been there, I’d grown accustomed to the hospital’s countless little intrusions. I felt supported by them, taken care of. Meredith’s regular visits sustained me. The prospect of stepping out of the hospital, never to see her again, wasn’t just depressing, it was terrifying.

  We did our ritual with the pills and she asked if I had somewhere to go.

  “Of course,” I said, although I’d written Zoe’s landlord that very week, asking him to end my rental contract and dispose of my things however he saw fit. At the time, it had felt liberating, but now, given the fact that I didn’t even have an old pair of jeans to wear, it just seemed rash. Evidently aware of my predicament, Meredith asked, “What size waist are you?”

  “Thirty-four,” I said.

  “And shoes?”

  “Ten.”

  “We should have something in the donations closet. I’ll be right back.”

  She returned a minute later with an orange tracksuit and a pair of white tennis shoes, then left me alone to change. The shoes were loose, but stayed on if I laced them tight. The tracksuit fit perfectly. When Meredith swept back the curtain, I was sitting on the bed, fully dressed.

  “Looking good!” she said. “You know, it’s not going to be the same around here without you.”

  I blushed, even though I knew she must have said those exact words to every patient she’d ever discharged. The old man in the next bed was either deeply asleep or dead, his eyes shut, his mouth open
.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready,” I said, panicked.

  “Oh, you’re ready.” Meredith gave me a confident smile. “I’m so happy for you, Felix.”

  I could feel her getting ready to leave the room. My throat clenched.

  “Would you …” I said, and Meredith stopped at the door. The rest of the sentence tumbled out in a rush, like an eight-syllable word: “like to get a coffee sometime?”

  The question was ludicrously bold. She was a nurse. I was a psych patient. Even under different circumstances, she’d have been too normal, too kind, too good for me. I nearly retracted the invitation before she could answer, but she seemed to actually be thinking about it: her mouth bunched up on one side, her hand on the open door, an eye on my neighbour. Then her usual sunny smile returned and she shrugged. “Sure. Why not.”

  We met a few days later in a leafy neighbourhood in the suburbs, far from my old apartment, on the patio of a café filled with retired couples and trendily dressed moms. I hadn’t had a cigarette or a drink in months, and as we sat down at a small table together, I suddenly wanted both. Although my breakdown had happened in a different part of the city, any one of the people on the patio could have witnessed me naked and screaming downtown not that long before. I’d bought new clothes, but felt like an impostor in them. Meredith herself looked entirely different in street clothes—her hair teased back from her face, a generous amount of makeup rendering her almost unrecognizable. Her gently smiling face blazed across the table at me. I couldn’t make eye contact for more than a second, my body vibrating as obscene levels of cortisol pumped through it.

  “Can we leave?” I asked, before we’d even had a chance to sip our drinks.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’d like to go somewhere else. Do you mind?”

  Meredith seemed bemused but gamely collected her things and followed me off the patio with her paper cup.

  “Tables are hard for me,” I explained as we walked down the sidewalk together. “I find it easier to talk to someone when we’re both facing the same direction.”