Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  In the evening sometimes, Jack and McPhee would sit in the nearly empty dayroom.

  The television did not work and neither Jack nor McPhee was much inclined to conversation. They would sit and watch the few other patients (a shuffling old man with a very precise route around a sofa, over a low coffee table, behind the television; a thin, brittle girl with what looked like self-inflicted short hair who rocked in a corner, hissing; and a short, middle-aged man who talked out loud—or, more precisely, spoke into the cardboard core of a toilet-paper roll as though dictating).

  Jack felt safe and at peace.

  On a slow night, when the dayroom was empty, Jack thought that McPhee looked particularly unhappy, and Jack said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Beg your pardon?” McPhee said.

  Jack felt immediately foolish. “I... well, you don’t want to talk about it, I’m sure. I remember Hubert saying something about the difficulties you’ve experienced, the tragedies.”

  McPhee looked blank. “No, can’t say that it has been anything out of the ordinary Regular, steady folks, a brother in Cleveland. Never been married, always been a loner, I suppose. But I’ve been happy in my work, a man who likes having a task and the strength to carry it out.”

  Jack said no more although he seemed to remember Hubert saying something about McPhee suffering the loss of a wife and daughter.

  Jack woke in a sweat, heart racing. He must have been chased through a bad dream, couldn’t remember it though.

  He got up and padded down the hall to the bathroom. After he relieved his bladder, he went to the sink and splashed water in his face. His face and hands tingled, as they often did these days. As one got older, one adjusted to new sorts of discomfort, strange physical signals, inexplicable infirmities which were far too tentative for any doctor to address.

  Jack suspected that really old people had lost touch with what tiptop physical health was all about. An octogenarian might say, “I feel fine,” and mean it. If a teenager were magically lifted from his young body and dropped down in the ancient, feeling-fine oldster, the first use the teenager would find for an old man’s vocal chords would be to scream, “Aaaaaaaaargh!” Jack looked up and saw his face in the mirror above the sink. Someone had scrawled red words on the glass—lipstick in the men’s room?—and Jack leaned forward. Not English, something... not foreign characters either. Jack stepped back and looked at the whole message:

  Jack remembered the backward “E”s. As a kid, they had played this game, Jack and his father. Mirror messages, his father called it. Jack would take the message his father had laboriously printed and race to the dresser and hold the ruled paper in front of the mirror and in the mirror would be some instruction, the next step of the treasure hunt, something like, UNDER THE JUNIPER BUSH BY THE MAPLE TREE.

  Jack puzzled it out, right to left. It was Kerry’s poem, “Death,” some of the long lines chopped off by the mirrors edge. Trembling, he moved toward the glass and touched one of the red letters. He scratched with his fingernail but failed to etch a line in the lipstick. How could he, when she had most certainly scrawled it from the other side?

  Jack pushed his face against the mirrored glass as though, by pressing hard enough, he might see beyond the limits of the frame.

  He was sick, frightened, lost. “Kerry,” he whispered. “Where are you? Where am I?”

  He rested under the sink, knees pulled up to his chest. He began to feel better. His buttocks ached from the hard tiled floor, but that was the price of a dissociative life style.

  Finally, he stood up. The poem was gone. In its place was a new, concise message:

  Denial. The first property of alcoholism—perhaps of life itself—this ability to avoid reality, to declare that a wake of destruction (failed relationships, lost jobs, sickness, hallucinations) was nothing more than a personal slump, bad luck, a karmic misstep.

  It was a skill, this avoidance, and the best practitioners had honed their craft to such an art that it was reflexive. The actor forgot he was in a play.

  How do you get out of denial?

  Just saying “Hey I’m in denial” wouldn’t do it. Jack tried it, though, leaning over the sink and repeating the words “I am in denial” very slowly and precisely.

  Nothing. The faucet dripped; his hands clutched the rim of the sink. Nothing magical occurred. How many times had he sat in a chair, at two in the morning, dead drunk, and said, “I am an alcoholic,” and believed the words and thought, “And now I am ready to stop,” and walked to the fridge and snagged another beer and opened it, and slugged half of it down in a single swallow, pleased with his new resolve?

  Self-knowledge was worthless. That’s what they said in AA meetings, said it in a way that suggested they were quoting from text (“self-knowledge avails us nothing”).

  So.

  Jack walked back out into the hall. Here I am in the nut ward, he thought. Mt. Denial Memorial Hospital. Great.

  He walked into the dayroom, empty at this late hour, and flopped down on the couch. He dozed some, woke with something poking him in the ribs. It was a videotape, sticking out from under the cushion.

  Jack turned the plastic rectangle in his hands, revealed the title, Sara.

  No.

  He stood up. There was a VCR, but the television was broken, too bad, no way to view a video entitled Sara.

  It will work, Jack thought. Tonight, the television will work.

  He wanted to hurl the tape against the wall, flee. If this were a dream, if he were comatose somewhere, living in the fitful firing of the last surviving brain cells, he still had choices. He didn’t have to play this tape.

  He walked to the television and punched the power button. Of course, it flared into life, gray motes dancing, no picture. He turned the VCR on and inserted the videotape which was swallowed, the word PLAY lighting on the LCD.

  “Hello Jack,” Sara said. “I miss you.”

  Jack sank to his knees, watching. He was chained to this spot now, breathless, full of hot anguish and desire and desperation and any and all emotions that human creatures coveted or scorned.

  “Oh Jack, you are in a fine pickle. I won’t take the blame for it, you know.” She was sitting in a high-backed chair, in a room of feminine sensibilities, a big window, silk curtains drawn, a large vase of roses blooming with a red beyond the monitor’s capabilities, color smeared outside the lines. A phone, modern and sleek, sat next to the vase.

  “Oh God, Sara,” Jack whispered. He reached out, touched the cold glass of the TV screen.

  “I’m not really here,” Sara said. “Not even a video. You are, I guess you could say, talking to yourself, just as poor, crumpled Ezra is talking to himself, just as Dorian is talking to himself. It’s very sad, all these long, long monologues. That’s the sadness of alcoholism, how the self leaks out and swallows itself.”

  The telephone began to ring and Sara ignored it. “I don’t have time to tell you all about it. Somehow, Ezra started it all. He could make things happen with his mind. His alcoholism cared nothing for this mental power, rode roughshod over it and destroyed him. But his mind was—and is—still busy, still trying, with the megalomania inherent in the disease, to change that one terrible moment when he killed her, killed Anita. He could not change that. There are miracles that God reserves for Himself. Ezra can only replay the moment of Anita’s death, driving himself insane with self-inflicted pain. Meanwhile his nephew, drawing energy from his uncle’s obsession-driven powers, makes up stories, stories of demons and creatures from outer space—and he infects others with these brain fevers. Your detox mate, Hinkle, caught the Demon Belief, and that’s a hard one to shake—it is, after all, Ezra’s own—and Hinkle killed himself with the creature he conjured. I guess it didn’t look much like suicide from where you were standing.”

  The phone rang, and Sara shook her head, lifted the receiver. “This too is inevitable, I’m afraid. I’ve got to take this call.”

  Jack heard his own voice, small, metallic
, self-righteous, coming out of the receiver. Jack knew every sobbing word of the speech, for he had rehearsed it before the call, although, in drinking down the courage to make the call, it had finally been altered some.

  Still, he knew what he had said. He had said that he could not go on seeing her unless, that very night, she ended her loveless marriage, told Winslow Janson she was leaving.

  Now Sara held the phone to her ear and stared out at Jack. “But Jack—” she said. She waited, nodding. “Yes, but—” She paused again, waited, licked her lips absently. Finally she spoke again. “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell him. Yes. Tonight. Promise. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” And she hung up the phone, blinked at the screen. “That was you,” she said.

  Jack nodded, numbly. Yes, that was the truth of it. Sara had been reluctant to leave Winslow—the power of inertia, the power of fear, who knows?—and so Jack had felt it his duty to demand and plead. Jack had prevailed. Sara had told her husband. And Winslow Janson had responded promptly, no hesitation on his part. He had killed Sara that same night.

  The truth will set you free.

  Free to despair.

  Sara was still talking. She spoke as if anticipating his thoughts. “You don’t have time for guilt, Jack. There are people who need you. First, you have to leave this place. McPhee has been here before, and he can show you the way But he is asleep in his heart, and he doesn’t want to wake up. You can wake him. It will hurt him. In other circumstance, I’d say let him sleep, but too much depends on his helping you leave. So this is what you are going to have to tell him....”

  When Sara had said all she had to say, she said, “I love you.”

  She was gone then, fading to black. Jack turned everything off and left the room.

  “McPhee,” Jack whispered into the sleeping man’s ear. “McPhee.” McPhee opened his eyes but didn’t move. His eyes were the color of a winter sky on Scotland’s rocky coast.

  “We have got to leave here. This isn’t a hospital. It’s some dungeon conceived in the minds of Ezra and Dorian.”

  “Go away,” said McPhee.

  Jack shook him. “We are prisoners here. We might as well be dead.” McPhee was shaking his head now, sitting up. “We are not dead,” he said. “We have food; we have shelter. We are staying away from the drink. In a world of strife and hardship, there’s plenty who would say we have it good.” Jack was shaking his head. “We don’t have it good. If you don’t want to leave, that’s fine. Just show me the way out. You have been here before, and you know how to leave.”

  “You are talking crazy,” McPhee said. “And that’s your right. This is a madhouse, after all, so talk away. I can’t help you.” He fluffed his pillow, lay back down.

  “All right,” Jack said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Huh?”

  “Her name was Katherine O’Leary. You married her in 1978.”

  “Go away.” His voice had changed, cautious, tense.

  “Your daughter’s name was Kaitlan, but you both called her Keeper as in ‘You think this fish is a keeper or is it too small?’ Finally, when she was three, she insisted you call her Katie and you bowed to her wishes.”

  “You have me confused with someone else,” McPhee said, but he was sitting up again. He wore blue pajamas.

  “No, I don’t have you confused with anyone else.” Jack sighed. “You were the factory foreman. You were right to fire the man; he was a foub tempered brawler and a drunk. You didn’t drink back then. His name was Adams. You fired him. Anyone would have done the same, but he didn’t see it that way, thought it was something personal and decided to retaliate.”

  “For the love of Christ,” McPhee said. “Leave it.” There were tears rolling down McPhee’s cheeks, but his eyes remained the color of cold February skies.

  Jack nodded. “I’m sorry. I just need enough of the truth to set myself free. If you can remember who you are for long enough to help me leave, that’s all I ask.”

  McPhee nodded, pushed himself up. “There’s no choosing, once you open the door. I’ll have to come with you, I guess. Back to Hell.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said.

  “Katherine and Katie are dead, murdered by a crazy sonofabitch who knew how to build a bomb. That’s the whole story, right there. He meant to blow me up too, and I damn his soul to Hell for his failure to allow for the late shift I always pulled on Tuesdays—always!” There was fire in McPhee’s eyes when he said this, a devout disgust that would never abate.

  Jack waited.

  “I don’t ever forget they are gone,” he said. “Sometimes, in drink or a place like this, there is something that comes over me; I think maybe I can just run along the tracks until I die, not thinking overly much. But there’s always something that comes along. This time it’s you.”

  Apologies grow hollow with repetition, so Jack said nothing.

  “Come on,” McPhee said. “We have to go through Freud’s office to get out.”

  “Freud?”

  “Azzam Freud. He’s our resident psychiatrist, no relation to Sigmund. He’s sensitive about the name, though.”

  McPhee knocked on the door, and the voice from within, heavily accented, said, “Please. Open her.”

  “He’s Iranian, I think,” McPhee whispered as they entered the room.

  Jack saw a handsome, dark-skinned man seated behind a large rosewood desk. His hair, black and combed straight back from his forehead, gleamed as though he had just come from the shower. He wore a white lab coat. On the wall behind him was a calendar with a photo of a naked woman lying on a couch. Her pose was more peremptory than suggestive.

  “No twos,” he said, shaking his head. “I see one and then one. Who has the appointment first?”

  “We don’t have appointments,” McPhee said. “We just wish to leave.” McPhee motioned toward a door behind the doctor. “Really leave.”

  “Hah. If wishes were the pretty women, we could fornicate with them,” the doctor said.

  Jack said, “We are in a hurry.”

  “Ah,” the doctor said, standing up. “How can you be patients and not have the patience?” He laughed to demonstrate that this was, indeed, a joke, his laughter articulated carefully (Ha hah ha ho).

  “Follow me,” McPhee said, racing past the doctor and grabbing the doorknob.

  The door did not open and the doctor, his lab coat flying, was on McPhee, hands clutching at his neck.

  “No,” the doctor said. “You have not achieved the transference or even the insight. You are no good yet. You cannot go so—”

  McPhee turned and shoved the doctor, who stumbled and fell. McPhee threw his shoulder against the door. It did not give. Jack ran to help. “On three,” McPhee said.

  “Help!” the doctor shouted. He flung open the door to his office and shouted into the hall. “Crazy people here! Help instantaneously!”

  “Three!” They hit the door together. Behind them, Jack heard voices, shouts. He turned his head and saw three white-uniformed orderlies hustling toward him.

  He tumbled into darkness, grabbed at a rusted railing, missed, and somersaulted into the icy night.

  “Aw shit,” he said (or perhaps only thought).

  He landed with a whump which he thought he heard before blacking out. (He went to see the Pope, at the Vatican, had to wait hours, sitting next to a woman who kept saying, “I can’t believe it; I’m in the fucking Vatican!” Finally, the Pope came out. The Pope looked a lot like the alien in that movie called Alien. The resemblance was uncanny, actually, and threw Jack off balance. “What do you want?” the Pope asked. Jack said, “I would like you to consider the possibility of declaring Aw shit!’ some sort of official, authorized prayer. It’s short, heartfelt, and is often uttered just prior to death. It’s popular...” Jack realized, with some dismay, that the Pope’s second set of teeth were trembling in a disconcerting manner.)

  Jack woke. He had fallen onto a dirty mattress, lying flat behind the dumpster (perhaps the Pope had, desp
ite appearances, been receptive to the prayer concept). Above Jack, a fire escape clung to a brick wall.

  Jack saw McPhee. The man was lying facedown (dressed in his black suit, no pajamas in this world).

  Jack ran to the man, knelt down. “McPhee.” Slowly, Jack turned the tall man over. There was blood on his forehead.

  They had tumbled from their alternate-world asylum to land next to the dumpster belonging to the Happy Roads A A Club. Jack called an ambulance from the club’s pay phone and, enlisting the aid of A A members, brought McPhee inside.

  Jack wondered if McPhee had had time for his own prayer on the way down. If so, it had probably been answered: He was dead.

  Jack called New Way from the hospital. Aaron answered.

  “Jack!” Aaron said, delighted. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear from you. We have been in positive turmoil out here. You would not believe it. Martin is gone, went off with old Daddy Warbucks or whatever his name is. Hubert! How could I forget? Eunice is going around wringing her hands like Lady Macbeth, sighing ‘Hubert, Hubert, Hubert.’ And Gretchen is no better. ‘Martin, Martin, Martin!’ She and Martin just declared their undying love for each other, and now he is gone. Well, I suggested that there might be a connection, and I thought that girl was going to scratch my eyes out. Turmoil And those teenagers ran off—bound for trouble, I’m sure. Well. Where are you, honey?”

  Aaron came and got Jack. “You don’t look so good,” Aaron said. “I bet you have been neglecting your vitamin supplements.”

  Jack confessed that he had been drinking since leaving New Way. “Well,” Aaron said, “I’m sorry to hear that.” He ran his hand through his flaming hair. “Fortunately, today is a brand-new day.”