The Book Code: A Gripping Psychological Thriller with a Brilliant Twist (The Girl in the Book Box Set 2)

by Dan Noble

  “Right,” he said. I was relieved when he didn’t ask me to explain my father’s absence from my life.

  “Anyway, on the way back to the kitchen from the ladies’ room, I felt a surge of bravery and rushed to grab the handset. Only I tripped on a chair leg—Mother’s chair leg, where she always read—and twisted my ankle, which would have to be set. I propped myself onto Mother’s chair and called Angie.” What I didn’t say was that with her, I didn’t have to hide the tears, even if she wasn’t the softest person around. Instead I shrugged. “Angie knew me.”

  “This ankle?” Kennedy asked, holding the wrong ankle in an overwhelming way that I had never realized a man’s hand could pull off. In that moment, I wondered whether women’s lib wasn’t just for women who hadn’t found the real thing, because all I wanted then was to surrender to him. I nodded and suddenly found myself pinned under him in complete oblivion again.

  In two hours, he asked, “Weren’t you in the middle of a story before those?” His chin indicated the two silk scarves tied to the iron headboard. “Sorry, Mother Theresa,” he said to the painted image in the middle of all the scrollwork. We’d fallen asleep afterward, though it was the middle of the afternoon—somehow time seemed to backbend for us in those early days.

  “Do you really want to hear the rest? It gets weird.”

  “Ah, so this is what you were talking about that first day at Three Guys. As opposed to the other ‘normal’ stuff you told me earlier. All right, let’s have it. I knew this was all too good to be true. Bring on the bunny boiling.” Kennedy yanked the blankets around him sanctimoniously, pulling the last bit off me, and fixed his gaze so I’d know he wasn’t going anywhere.

  I turned over on my side, propping my head up on an elbow to make sure he could see everything. I was love confident. Over confident. “Why do men always use that cliché?”

  He shrugged. “There’s a reason it’s a cliché.”

  I threw a pillow at him. Disarmingly, he grabbed my hand and kissed it.

  “After the second suicide, Mother hadn’t spoken. She handed me a volume so old, it looked to belong in a museum archive. As she passed it over, there was something to her look—” I tried to mimic the memory but knew mine had nothing on the effect. “Eyes that seemed to expand to hold everything she knew. A supreme truth.” I surprised myself, shivering at the memory of that ghost family in the ice cream shop window. I began to take for granted the way Kennedy indulged my going on about Mother.

  “Let me give it a crack,” Kennedy said. He tried out a variety of stares that ranged from suggestive to X-rated. If I’d known him better, I’d have thrown a pillow at him.

  “Truth,” Kennedy said, cocking his head. “Overrated. Reality’s a lot softer than that.” Soft? I wanted to ask, how did he know about that? But he kissed me so hard I forgot what we’d been talking about. What was the point in talking about it anyway? This was real, here, now.

  The way he waved off all my escapades with Mother as hogwash was more than refreshing—it was an unburdening that blew life back into me. The words sounded silly to my own ears as I recited them.

  My mother disappeared, and I would’ve believed anything to give that meaning. It was easier to convince myself of that version, and my mind took to it nearly effortlessly, much easier than with all that painful therapy. Who knew all I needed was Kennedy? “Back to the book,” I said.

  “Oh, let me guess what book it was! Ummm, something really dramatic, and yet, obscurely literary, and yet, fantastical, but with a hip dose of irony. Hmmmmm. I’ve got it. The Hungry Caterpillar. The pickle always annoyed me. I can’t buy that with all that food around, a worm would be interested in a pickle.”

  “Maybe it was Jewish,” I said; that’s how Mother always explained her pickle addiction.

  “I’d have to look back, but I’m pretty sure there was a hotdog in there, which didn’t appear to be kosher. Not to mention meat with dairy.”

  “Pregnant? And how does a hot dog appear kosher?”

  “Pregnant—interesting theory. That would explain a lot. And if you work on the Upper East Side long enough, you can identify a kosher hotdog by sight. In fact, it’s part of the interview process.”

  “I’m not even going to continue that conversation. You’re right. It was. Mother was reading The Hungry Caterpillar.”

  He seemed to forget about the broken ankle, and I, for whatever reason, omitted that part of the story. I rarely allowed myself to dwell on it. It seemed a bridge too far to think, much less say the truth: that my broken ankle didn’t heal properly. That I’d walked for a year with a limp that couldn’t be fixed until Mother disappeared for good, and I was inexplicably healed. How to explain what the brain can simply write-off? Besides, this lens of Kennedy’s was so much more fun.

  Even as I thought it, I could see myself limping through life like an alternate version of reality. But I kept that bit to myself. Because it sounded wrong, like science fiction or clinical denial. And most of all, because I didn’t want that part of my life anymore. I wanted this.

  Still, for months on end, we unwound the rest of the story in this way and then I reached the crescendo of my rendition, when Dr. Pinocchio approached me. I told this part in as detailed a manner as I could. I had long since overcome the shame of what I’d been taught by Dr. Samuels to understand as a paranoid manifestation of my grief. It wasn’t so rare. Who wouldn’t go a little crazy in the circumstances? All the same, I was careful, as I chose my words to share the encounter with Kennedy.

  In the telling, I felt I had nearly liberated myself from the whole thing, and I wanted so badly to hear Kennedy’s skeptical summation: “Okay, well you thought your mother could cross into another dimension. Who hasn’t felt that way from time to time? Now, please pass the potatoes?”

  I wanted us to laugh over it and make jokes like “Where are those keys? Did you leave them in the Book World again?” Even the terms I’d come up with—Book World, for crying out loud—were so dramatic.

  Despite the posturing while I was reciting the story, a dormant image bank in my brain was tapped, and I was back to that cyclonic, banging silence of the weeks after Mother’s second suicide attempt. “At first, it had seemed a godsend when I was met by the new guard of psychiatrists—of the Gestalt school—at the Cuckoo Bird Hut,” I began. Enter Dr. Pinocchio. I remember that even the dusty Lipton tea in flimsy Styrofoam tasted better in the company of his revelatory approaches to mental health. I don’t know what I thought his team could do, but I knew they could do something.

  “Ge-what?”

  “Gestalt. It’s well. . .it’s complicated. But the part that’s important is that Gestalt therapy is about being authentic and responsible for oneself because everything we touch affects everything in time and space. Some people take this theory to extremes: relating it to field theory where no part of the field is uninfluenced by what goes on elsewhere in the field. You might have heard of the butterfly theory?

  And so, this identity we’re looking for is constantly changing. We never see the same thing twice, because each experience changes us, and therefore changes the way we see and experience things. We can never be the same. The essence of human nature cannot be pinned down ‘once and for all.’” Softer than that. “Basically, it’s a way of looking at the world that’s so complicated that you can drown yourself in trying to work it out. And maybe that’s what she did.”

  “Sounds fun,” he said, with a tone that belied his belief it’s anything but.

  “It’s believed that it’s possible to free yourself from past associations and experience life ‘naively’ in a fresh, objective way, that balances the subjective way we are normally limited to with all our emotional baggage.

  “Anyway, the goal of achieving such a thing is a new level of awareness. Most people believe it’s impossible to achieve. But say someone could get there, they’d see patterns that the rest of us couldn’t—with both that objectivity and subjectivity. And they’d be able to mani
pulate them.” Even across dimensions, I leave out. Because that’s the kind of thing Dr. Samuels had taught me to do. Her version of gestalt was quite different; simpler.

  Even expelling it this way, I felt myself being tugged into the mystical promise of it all, the idea of multiple dimensions, where, say, a little girl might still be sitting happily at an ice cream shop with her loving family. Or had a limp. But I allowed that image to stay in the background. “Probably getting too technical,” I said.

  Kennedy pretended to sleep, a loud snore wobbling his head on his shoulder. I couldn’t believe he didn’t have more questions.

  I elbowed him and his eyes burst open. “What did I miss?” he said, then took my face in his grip and kissed me, looking so deeply into my eyes that any desirability of all that other stuff was eclipsed. There was more kissing, then more other stuff, then a lazy afternoon nap, a steamy shower—the cycle of our early days together.

  Our conversation about Mother unspooled intermittently throughout. “There had always been an emphasis on the creative function of the brain at this psychiatric department. But the problem was most of the old testing was done as a misguided observer, from the outside in, the way most creative research had been.

  “With new, progressive funding sources, these doctors were encouraged to make revolutionary inroads in connections of emotional health and the arts, in the plasticity of the brain, the exploration of complex creative thinking, of the ideas about those uncharted reaches of the mind, etcetera, etcetera.

  “The old guard had wasted years on unusual use tests with Mother, believing the key was in the outcomes, rather than in the processes of recognition and response. Always this black and white: what’s the conclusion? She must have hated them, really hated them. It’s no wonder she opened up to Dr. P. He was a breath of fresh air with his suprarationality.”

  “Dr. Pee?” He made a sound-effect to clarify.

  “No! P for Pinocchio.” I don’t know why I said that, but he laughed it off.

  “Oh, that’s much better!”

  God, how natural it all felt.

  Creativity, these young psychologists believed, was key to our emotional health, not only in creating art, but in survival. They wanted to test how. When Mother’s case was presented, Pinocchio was enchanted. She had already embraced all these ideas, seemed to live them. They spoke of Kant and Baudelaire and Joseph Beuys with his blackboards that looked so much like Mother’s. My definitive narrative astounded me. He seemed to buy it without question.

  “So it’s all very simple,” Kennedy said. “You’ve had to struggle with a crazy family just like everyone else, is what you’re saying.”

  I actually laughed. All the time. About Mother. It felt fucking great. I let out a big breath and felt like ten years had been expelled. I never spoke about all that field theory and gestalt stuff again, and Kennedy never asked me to. For that I was thankful. I started to forgive myself for the anger I’d harbored for Mother, discarding the ugly images, rather than grow numb at the loss and confused cluster of responsibility I often felt at the thought of her.

  Kennedy painted her as a problem I’d been forced to deal with, had done an excellent job of coming out the other end of, and this suited me.

  I remember very clearly, in the haze of one of those love-filled afternoons, Kennedy grabbed me and flipped me onto my back. “I will do anything for you.”

  I blushed. This was the real thing. It was too good to be true.

  I looked at him trying to pull off wry, but seriousness, esteem. He had chosen me. Of all the people in the world.

  I didn’t finish the story. He didn’t ask, and given his reaction, there didn’t seem to be a point. Kennedy accepted me warts and all, and I’d certainly shared enough. My shrink, Dr. Samuels, and I had already gone over what was necessary to share with someone, should I find a man I wanted to spend my life with.

  “Your paranoia and anxiety attacks are products of your illness,” he’d said. “There is no reason to share the specific manifestations of them. They could just as easily have been giant tortoises taking over the world. We call this need to tell, the urge to confess. And in fact, any time you feel that need, I want you to do just the opposite: keep the thought to yourself. Eventually you’ll be able to tell the difference between the real realities, and those produced by anxiety.” Gestalt.

  And so I didn’t tell Kennedy about how it had all ended that day in Dr. P’s office. How when I woke, I found I had been admitted to the hospital, under the care of Dr. P himself. He told me he had been trying to explain some routine testing they’d done on mother and I’d begun having a delusional episode, speaking incomprehensibly about “Bessie” and “the red room,” and “falling sick with crying,” and not looking at him at all, and then I became violent, throwing things from his desk, kicking at him when he tried to help me. Those words rang familiar: Jane Eyre, they were from.

  My instinct was not to trust him; it had all felt so real. But his own words assured me I would think this, and I didn’t dare utter a word of my suspicion. Why would he lie? Or was this a technique, a tricky way to get me to work out what this gestalt was all about for myself? So he could separate out those who had the magic touch and didn’t? I let it go. What choice did I have if I wanted out of here?

  My stay was short. I’d reached a crisis point, and this was how my brain shut down for a reboot. I needed some drugs to stabilize my field perception—determine what was real, and a prescription to begin therapy, and I was on my way.

  Later, throughout my outpatient therapy at a local psychologist, Dr. Samuels, we unpacked everything that happened on that day, and everything that had led to it, in welcome absolutes: I’d imagined the whole thing; not an uncommon occurrence after a period of such extreme stress, not to mention abandonment. Still, while it was happening, the experience was so real: I was in the world of Jane Eyre.

  It was no surprise why it was this particular passage I’d been transported to: the four hands carrying me up to the red room. I was Jane Eyre as a child, after Master John had struck her. God, how I’d responded to that opening scene. She was ten, the age I was when my parents split. Her mistress “regretted the necessity of keeping [her] at a distance,” the girl who was excluded from privileges, who “was like nobody there,” and felt “resolved in [her] desperation to go to all lengths.”

  I lost myself in her misery, my misery, relished the company, the words that expressed my loneliness at home, my failures and isolation. And then there I was, telling Bessie she needn’t use her stays to tie me in a chair, alone in the room. Jane was me; I was her—asking why could I never please? To feel this deep empathy was everything. It’s why I’d read that scene over and over.

  I loved the idea that one could “fall sick with crying,” as Jane did. And I felt myself do so, the physical manifestation of my suffering I had always hoped for. It was rich, delicious, and then sickening, when the paltry gestures of tenderness of Jane’s visiting physician—rather than the people who should have cared for me—made my heart sing.

  The beauty my pain transformed into was meaningful, soul-nourishing, inspiring as I’d always wished it could be. I felt power zing through every bit of my body, which both was and was not a pale, frail ten-year-old. I was proud to be a “noxious thing; and did not shy away from it.”

  But had I dreamed, imagined, hallucinated it all? Or was I in the dimension created by my mind’s interaction with Jane Eyre? It felt so real. Sometimes I truly didn’t know.

  To this day, I can see the crimsons of the room—damask and heavy velvet, the slight covering of dust over the mirror, the darkness, the strange light, the careening of Jane/my mind in directions I couldn’t discern as real or imagined, the terror, the screams that ripped and shredded me, the ensuing comfort, “however meagre or resented,” from the nursemaid and servant, the physician.

  It was at once an experience I’d known, but felt in a new, beautiful, haunting way, that could touch one’s soul, that did to
uch my own soul. I felt the warmth and caress that in real life I never got as a child. It had fed my needy soul and strengthened me for what I needed to do: care for myself, as both Jane and I understood that no one else would.

  Sometimes, afterward, words would come to me—dreaming or conscious. And this was no delusion: suprarational, preconscious. I would see them, like words on a page, before my face, telling me that in this conversation with Dr. Pinocchio, he had been telling me that magical things had happened; it wasn’t just a delusion. But Dr. Samuels explained this can be the way with delusional episodes—we can find meaning where we want to, though it isn’t really there. I wanted so badly to believe him. That way lay answers, solutions.

  I learned to take pills and ignore them, ignore the little girl with her family through the window of the ice cream shop. The limping version of myself, holding on tightly to the handrail. Laugh at the intrusive thoughts, my therapist instructed. And I learned to.

  For the same reason, I never told Kennedy the strange shards of memory about what I’d buried in the garden. Despite my work with Dr. Samuels, and my increasing power to laugh at intrusive thoughts, I wasn’t always sure. I admit my stomach swirled with terror sometimes.

  Mother had disappeared for good. And I hated her by then. I’d found myself in the garden more than once, dirt under my nails. But if I’d done something terrible, wouldn’t I remember? After a couple weeks of particularly painful mind-grinding on the subject, I confessed my worst fears to my therapist.

  “My dear, I have no doubt you are nothing but the lovely young woman I see before me,” Dr. Samuel’s had assured me. I’d written his words down, so I could stop asking him to repeat them.

  “Survivor’s guilt. That’s what you have. Unethical. That’s how I’d classify the medical treatment of your mother. Psychiatric patients should not be used as guinea pigs. Science has already made these mistakes. There’s plenty written on the subject. And as for you, don’t you think the police would have found something if you’d buried her back there?”