Whisper to Me(25)

He looked at me strangely, then shrugged.

And they took me to the ambulance. They didn’t exactly carry me, but it wasn’t far off. I mean, it was clear I had no choice in the matter.

On the way, we crossed the yard, and I saw you, just for a second. You were in the space under the stairs where the shared washing machine and dryer are; I guess you were doing laundry.

You didn’t turn around, thank God.

But even then, even being escorted to an ambulance, I noted the elegance of your stance, the lines of your shoulders. You were working your way into my heart already, I think. Like people say that splinters do, slowly easing through the bloodstream until they hit the chambers of your— Although I think that’s an urban legend, so this is a bad analogy on a number of levels.

It was just a glimpse, and then you were gone. Or I was gone, more accurately speaking.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%





There’s a whole load of static in my memory after the trip in the ambulance.

I know I walked into the hospital, and it was raining, a damp warm smell rising from the asphalt. People smudged into ghosts. There was a low glass-walled restaurant taking up a whole city block by the hospital parking lot with the words EARLY BIRD SPECIAL $4.99 5–6 P.M. FILLS YOU UP ALL NITE frosted into the glass.

I know I was in room 314A on ward PP2. It was small and square, with beige walls, and had a small bathroom adjoining it, with an emergency pull cord, bright red, hanging from the ceiling by the toilet. The bed frame was made of metal, and there is something that immediately sickens the soul about a bed made of metal.

I remember all of that. But a lot of the sequence isn’t there. It’s like someone took a film and cut it into pieces, then stitched it back together in any order.

I don’t know how many days I was in that place. That’s because of the sedation. Have you ever been sedated? There are so many things we have never talked about. So many things I still want to learn about you.

If you will let me.

The thing about being sedated: You don’t remember what happened when the drugs were in your system. But you remember being conscious. So you knew what was going on; you just can’t recall it.

It’s really hard to explain.

Anyway, the reason for the sedation is that apparently when I first arrived I tried to hurt myself quite a lot, I assume because the voice told me to, but like I say, it’s a bit foggy to me.

So, the first thing that stands out clearly, like an island in the sea, is when I first met Dr. Rezwari. She was the psychiatrist. They must have dialed down my sedatives so that I would be able to talk to her.

I met her in her office. There was a window that looked out over the ocean, and over the older end of the boardwalk where there aren’t any stands or restaurants or gift shops, just old warped boards with grassy mounds of sand sticking through them. I watched seagulls wheeling in a pale blue sky, puffs of pink cloud scattered across it. From that I figured it was dawn or dusk, the time that Mom always called the gloaming.

We must have been three stories up. There was a collection of bonsai trees in the corner, like a little bonsai woods.

Dr. Rezwari saw me looking at them. “Someone gave me one as a gift once,” she said. “Now everyone does it. I don’t even like them. They strike me as unnatural. You know?”

I blinked at her.

She smiled. She had long eyelashes and black hair and the grayest eyes I had ever seen. Aqueous, like looking into a stream running over pebbles. Her face was small and delicate. Her desk was immaculate: some sort of antique, I thought, like something you would have seen in a lawyer’s office in the nineteenth century. There was a single pad of paper on it and an expensive-looking pen next to the pad. No computer—just a single silver plaque on a little wooden stand.

Not much stuff in the room in fact—no certificates on the wall, no photos, no personal effects that I could see. It was less like a doctor’s office and more like some person’s memory of a doctor’s office, the details elided by time.

The only exception, the only sign of personality at all, was a whole wall lined with books on shelves, behind me.

Out of habit, I turned and glanced at them. I was surprised to see that they weren’t textbooks, not psychiatric journals or whatever. They were nearly all fiction—Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Alice Munro story collections, a set of Dickenses, Mark Helprin—