She spoke.
It was a breath, only, an exhalation. But that span of air had been a shape I recognized, that airy sound had been a word. I leaned close to her, my ear at her lips.
A vigil.
A long wait, guarding a border, beyond the empty place that is not human, from which humans come when they approach from illness, from sleep.
Valfort had me watched, more carefully than Nona was watched. These attendants were not the usual orderlies. These were alert, and had a more practiced bearing, young and wary of me. They were, however, polite when I commented on the warmth of the room, or on the slow passage of the time.
The time did not matter. It was Nona who had come so far only to linger just beyond us. From time to time a nurse touched Nona’s lips with a moist cloth. Sometimes Valfort came into the room, and when he did it was always to observe me as much as the sleep of his patient. He was not an adversary so much as a man who knew the things about me I had forgotten, or chose to forget.
Sometimes a glass of water, or orange juice, tasting strangely sour, was pressed into my hands. The hours that passed were the great, rolling passage of glaciers, or eras of geological time, but I was steady, there, waiting for her, a man watching the north, peering into the wind for a rider he knew would come.
Someone said: “You must be tired.”
Someone said: “You must be hungry.”
Each breath she took was another step for me, another moment on a climb across the cliff face.
Remember, I told myself, the quick acts of love she committed, the force behind her life. “I can’t stay,” she used to say. “I’m in a hurry.” “I’m due at the hospital in ten minutes.” “There’s a new child. He needs so much.” In that winter that follows loss we feel that we cannot consider the absent person. When we think they are returning, then we allow ourselves the pleasure of remembering.
It is not enough to love. We must enact the love, turn and walk back up the path, swim across the lake, and climb up upon the new outcropping that no one owns and which is never old, another day.
How did we find ourselves so dependent on accomplishment? How was it that we learned the way to believe in the future and ignore the flat, sun-warm soil at our feet? I had that awareness, that sensation that a hospital gives, that what surrounds us, the glossy, thick-painted walls, is the empty vision. What is real is what is gone.
She spoke.
My lips touched her ear. “I’m here.”
She stirred, just barely, a movement too slight to be noticed except for the fact that I was so close to her. Her head rolled, a slow, barely perceptible movement. Her lips, her eyelids, seemed to vibrate from some inner tension, some inner pleasure, like the shimmer of feeling on the features of a skater about to spin across the ice.
56
“I dreamed,” she said.
Her voice was a thread.
Her eyes closed again.
No, I wanted to cry out to her—please stay with me. And then I remembered that it was this selfish love that had been so shallow, so false.
Nona slept.
I began to feel an appetite for food again. Rick brought me snacks, a ham-and-cheese croissant, a chocolate bar. Valfort looked in frequently over the next several hours, and sometimes Barry stepped to my side, patted my shoulder manfully, and gazed at Nona with both joy and disbelief.
There have been times in my life when I thought that war might destroy our world, and when I considered this I wondered: how would we rebuild? It was not simply a childish fear. I had been raised knowing that hydrogen bombs would seek out the ports of San Francisco and Oakland, and the naval bases of the bay. The places I loved, like the people, could be blown out like a host of flames. The solidity of the buildings I loved was an illusion. The world was composed of space interlaced with happenstance.
If the world were erased, and yet enough people survived, as we rebuilt what would we neglect to include in our new recreations of life, what precious shadings of reality would we forget to replace? We might forget the charm of clutter, the pleasure of a footpath worn across a public lawn, the serenity of waiting while someone slept, and reconstitute a new civilization without the minor graces.
She opened her eyes.
I could not speak.
She let her strength gather. Then she said, “You talked to Dr. Valfort.”
“Yes. He helped me. Just like you said he would.”
“He’s very wise.” Her voice was weakening. She was about to drift off to sleep once again.
“I don’t think he likes me,” I said softly, believing that I was talking only to myself.
She moved her lips, and her eyelids parted once again. “The dream I had. It was a bad dream,” she said.
“We can talk about it later,” I said. “We’ll have time.”
A frown creased her brow, a small furrow. She tried to lift her head. “Something bad,” she said. Then, lifting a hand, stirring herself, “Something is after you.”
“No, nothing’s after me,” I said, not aware of telling a lie, wanting only to reassure her. “We don’t have to talk about it now.”
She fought to speak. “Something—”
I tried to hush her.
Her voice was a whisper. “Something real.”
She rested, still conscious, letting her strength return.
I repeated my reassurance. We would talk later. We would have years, and I felt the presence of this future inside me. I knew that I was telling her the truth. Seeing her alive to the world was all I would ever want.
“Someone tried to kill me,” she said.
“I know.” How could either of us forget the darkness, the broken glass, the baseball bats? “But you’re going to be—”
“Someone here. Here in the hospital.”
57
The room was gray.
The floor, the ceiling, the walls. There were no sounds. There was no show of pictures in frames, the kind of decor sported by the other rooms of the hospital, the Klee prints, the anonymous reproductions of seascapes and forest streams. There was no television with its flicker of smiling faces. Even the matter-of-fact dignity of the hospital room was missing here.
There was the flow of my breath, and the tread of my heartbeat. There was nothing more.
I had insisted. Barry had said it wasn’t necessary. He said there were better plans: private hospitals, brilliant psychiatrists, long walks under rows of ornamental plum trees, Mozart and saunas.
“You need help,” he had said, “but we don’t have the kind of facilities for someone like you.”
I was afraid.
I was afraid that I had, myself, with these hands, tried to hurt Nona.
Forgetting: That was the key. I had forgotten so much. There was a life, a world, I had repressed. I could not guess what sky I had fallen from.
The room acknowledged the harm a person could do. Just as a visit to a nursing home dashes away all complacency about the nature of illness and age, so a place like this room told everything about what the human will might descend to.
This was the rubber room of joke and legend, the mythical chamber of the madman. The rubber mats were gray, puckered all around from the plastic sealed rivets that spiked them to the walls. The smell was that of a clean locker room—metal, concrete, rubber.
Voluntary commitment, Barry had explained, would mean that I could leave whenever I wanted. Barry himself could have kept me in the hospital for forty-eight hours’ observation, “typical for someone who is suicidal.”
I had stated it as plainly as possible. “I want to stay locked up until I’m sure I haven’t killed anyone, or tried to kill anyone.”
“But this is hardly necessary,” Barry had said. “This kind of room is for someone who’s really …” Then he selected his words carefully, continuing, “This is the sort of room for someone in the most disruptive stage of behavior. Rooms like this aren’t even necessary anymore. We still need a sort of pressure-release place like this for
someone in the rocky stages of detox. Or a terminal alcoholic, someone who throws turds at people. We can have you so quiet with injections of chloropromazine that you might as well be a zombie.”
“That hardly sounds desirable.”
“Well, maybe zombie isn’t what I really meant to say.”
“I’m safe here,” I said, meaning: So are you. So is everyone. The staff psychiatrist, a man with the lean looks and detached manner of a computer programmer, discussed “chemical maintenance,” oxazepam “for anxiety” and “possible introduction of lithium as an antimanic.” But I was not anxious, and I did not feel manic.
I felt determined. The hospital food was adequate, orange juice in plastic cups sealed in aluminum with a label picturing a smiling orange in a cowboy hat. There was Jell-O, lemon flavor or lime, sliced turkey or chicken in gravy. Barry said that I could have dishes of my own choice sent in, but I declined.
Two days passed, a secure, gray chapter after chapter of silence.
Rick had brought me loose-fitting athletic clothes, red sweatshirt and only slightly faded red pants. If the gray walls gave me a feeling of security, the red I was wearing seemed appropriate, too. Red was the color of life, and of danger.
I sat against one wall, feeling very much like a wrestler awaiting his opponent, perhaps that angelic wrestler, the one who contends with the soul only to bless it.
I had that worst fear, deeper than the fear of fire, deeper than the fear of a fall from a great height. I was afraid of myself.
There was a click, a rattle.
Out there, in the world beyond, there was a key. A key, and a lock. The padding before me shifted backward. The gray, bunched surface swung away, along neat, straight lines. A rectangle opened up, and outside air flowed in—a doorway.
Barry smelled of coffee, of the vaguest reminder of cigarette smoke, the smell of a lunchroom. “Are you enjoying the view?” he asked.
I smiled. “Splendid.”
He kicked one of the walls. It sounded like someone kicking a sofa. We didn’t have to go into the argument again, but his attitude was plain: You don’t have to do this.
“Rick is here. He’s made some phone calls. There’s a really wonderful place in the East Bay. There’s another place in Mendocino County …”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Rick has a visitor. Someone I wanted you to see.”
I imagined the representative of a sanitarium, with an attaché case full of pamphlets. But Barry was so winsome, standing by the door, expectant, hopeful, that I could not bring myself to disappoint him.
After two days even the expanse of a corridor was vast, and it made me feel giddy.
The furniture in this room was screwed to the floor. The chairs were those out-of-date modern scoops, the sort airports had been fond of a few years ago, except that even an airport would have forgone this sherbet-yellow upholstery. I recognized Barry’s touch: a vase had been placed in the corner of the room, with a glorious eruption of irises.
There were two people in the room when I entered it. I felt fit and outdoorsy in my athletic clothes, but the people I was with were well-dressed, in the clothes one would wear to hear the reading of a will.
I knew this visitor.
Rick was nervous, whistling silently to himself. His companion was drawn into herself, a woman on a mission she would not enjoy. I let the two of them choose which yellow scoop they would sit in. They seemed to have arrived in the room just moments before I did, and we had the air of prospective jurors, waiting to be chosen, or travelers unexpectedly delayed.
The tall, handsome, gray-haired woman eyed the room as though sensing that it could swallow her. Her manner was not fearful so much as knowing and watchful. She had seen such places before and knew them well. At last, she turned and looked at me with clear gray eyes.
She did not speak. Her eyes were steady, regretful.
“Dr. Ahn drove up from Carmel,” said Rick. “Barry explained that I needed her advice.”
I told Dr. Ahn how good it was to see her.
Dr. Ahn had been my mother’s physician during the worst of her crisis after my father’s death. The truth was, that while I was pleased to see her, I sensed in her a potential adversary. I could not guess why. Perhaps I found her steady gaze cool and all-too honest.
But it was pained, too, and I realized that she was a woman of compassion. She reminded me of Nona, the way she ran a hand along the seam of her chair arm, where the thick plastic was joined. She sat easily, with a straight back, as though her figure created the room it inhabited, endowing it with color, substance.
“It’s a medical matter, really,” said Rick. “So I really don’t have to stay.”
“Stay,” said Dr. Ahn.
Rick clenched his hands together, prayerful or tense. “She has a lot to say. About Mother. About both of you.”
Why did I resent Rick so much at just that moment? I turned my gaze upon Dr. Ahn. “I certainly don’t need the help of this distinguished doctor.”
She spoke, breaking her silence. “I’m afraid you do.”
“She has something very important to tell us,” Rick said. “When I told her about my fears—my fears about you—she took me into her confidence.”
Why did I continue to find Rick’s manner just slightly offensive?
“I ran across a book of yours recently,” I said, turning to Dr. Ahn. “Something about the Woman at the Well. The New Jerusalem.”
“I studied hallucinations for years,” said the doctor, with a strong, steady voice. “I believed that in the disorders of the mind we can see the fountainhead of religious experience and creativity.”
“There’s no need to establish your credentials here,” I began.
“I think I was wrong,” said Dr. Ahn. “William Blake said that while truth has bounds, error has none. The waywardness of the psyche can be understood, but it produces no cathedrals, writes no—or at any rate few—symphonies.”
“You sound disappointed,” I said, suddenly liking her very much, her thoughtfulness, the sound of her voice.
“In the end,” she said, “I came to believe that our greatest discovery was not the glories of genius, or the colorful landscape of the mentally ill.”
“You have me wondering,” I said.
“Compassion,” she said. “Not any form of vision, not any other form of understanding or any other mastery of anything. Compassion. It’s our finest characteristic.”
“So your studies,” I said, “were not really in vain after all.”
She looked at me appraisingly. “I have made mistakes as a therapist. And I have always been unorthodox. May I make an entirely personal comment?”
“Of course.”
“Knowing what I know—or, at least, believing what I have heard—I expected an entirely different person.”
“I disappointed you.”
She did not respond to that statement. “My conversation with Dr. Valfort convinced me to come here today,” she said. “Dr. Montague was persuasive, too, of course. Otherwise I would never have discussed your family with anyone. As it is, I only begin to mention any of it to save you, Stratton.”
“Valfort thinks I’m dangerous,” I said.
“He called me and said as much,” she said. “He was very concerned. So is Dr. Montague.”
I could not keep from sounding ironic. “I’m touched to be a matter of such earnest concern.”
“And what do you think?” asked Dr. Ahn.
I could no longer sound calm. My voice was hoarse. “I agree with them.”
“You don’t know what you have done. You don’t know what you might do.”
I could hardly speak. “That’s right.”
“Why did you consult with Dr. Valfort?” she asked.
I cleared my throat. “I flew to Paris because Nona suggested it. Urged it.”
“Do you respect her opinion?” she asked.
“Of course.”
She continued, “His theories are
sometimes questionable. But he is a well-established hypnotherapist and a surgeon of the best sort. He knows the human body is not a domain of chemicals and tissues.”
“Look at me. Calm. Civilized. But I’m forced to wonder if I’ve killed people.” I said this with as much cheer as I could muster.
“Valfort believes that you have killed two men,” said Dr. Ahn.
She paused, waiting for me to respond, but I did not make a sound.
“You described the murders to him during hypnosis,” she said. “He hesitated to tell anyone else—for example, the police—because one can never be certain whether what one hears in hypnotherapy is the literal truth, or merely what the patient wishes were true. Or really believes is true.”
I remained speechless.
Rick’s voice was broken. “Stratton, whatever she tells you, I want you to know that I’ll help you.”
I stood. I didn’t want to hear any more.
Rick continued, “She has something terrible to say about Mother.”
I had heard enough. “You two have plotted. You put your heads together to come up with this brutal story. Let’s see how much Stratton can take. Go ahead. I’m strong. I can take it. Say anything you want. Barry is using you to convince me that I am totally mad. Maybe I am. Keep talking. Say whatever you like.” I stopped myself.
I had known all along. I was guilty.
Rick was solemn, unable to meet my gaze. “She has something else to tell you. Something terrible—that I believe is true.”
I fell into my chair. “What is it?” I asked.
“It’s very bad,” said Rick.
I turned away, knowing I did not want to hear what was about to be said.
Dr. Ahn spoke like someone reciting an old memory. “Your mother’s case shook me. It was the way I handled your mother, and my failure to help her, that made me decide to retire.” Dr. Ahn waited for me to prepare myself. “Your mother’s mental illness predated the death of your father. For years before his death she had hallucinations,” said Dr. Ahn. “She saw people who weren’t there. She heard voices.”
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