by Ben Dolnick
Why exactly the professor had been hospitalized was a subject he steered around—a new patient, a schizophrenic woman named Marianne, asked him point-blank one afternoon and he just sneered at her before going on about oil prices. He made occasional allusions to some sort of betrayal, and to a daughter who, whenever she visited, failed to bring him the right sort of snack bars, but that was as far as he went. He showed no interest in anyone else’s stories—he didn’t even come to group therapy, most times; he kept the same kind of haughty curtain drawn around his life that the doctors did.
Most of the patients didn’t seem to mind this; oracles are meant to be inscrutable. “What do you think,” Diego asked him one day, “about Bloomberg? How come the dude got so rich but we still got people can’t even fit in the shelters?”
(The professor rocked in his chair, then gave a long answer involving the Bilderberg Group.)
“Why can’t we just suck pollution out of the air with a giant vacuum?” asked Linda. “You put it on the floor and all the dirt comes up. Why can’t you just point it up to the sky?”
(You had to understand about solenoid valves and bio-aerosols, the professor explained.)
I, though, because of genuine curiosity or an inkling I didn’t understand, couldn’t leave the question of what he was doing here alone. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get at it directly, so instead I developed a game of trying to bait him into revealing more about himself than he meant to. Boy did I know a thing or two about not being able to trust people, I’d suggest. Or: a guy as smart as him, he must have gone to a pretty good school; today colleges were just diploma factories, of course, but back when he went it must have been different, right? But his river of talk was not to be diverted.
My guess, if you’d asked me—and this is maybe part of why I was so interested—was that he’d done something violent. He’d once referred to Vietnam in a way that made me think he’d fought there, and he had the kind of shlubbiness-plus-self-regard that made it easy to picture him plotting against his superiors, being convinced that he alone was defending some important truth. I’d seen him once lose his temper with one of the social workers—red-faced, nostrils flared, thumping his fist against the shatterproof glass. I could imagine him in a standoff at an office complex, or standing with a butcher’s knife over his bloodied boss. Dr. Mital was right—exploring a mystery, however remote, was infinitely more appealing than dwelling on how I felt.
And then one afternoon—the professor and I were the only ones in the lounge, both sipping cups of lukewarm coffee—he diverted the river for me. I don’t know exactly what I’d said to bring this about; he may just have come to the mistaken conclusion, after all these conversations, that I was someone he could trust.
“I usually don’t get into the story of why I’m here,” he said.
(Of course not, I said, leaning forward.)
“It’s the kind of thing where, you give somebody the littlest bit of an idea, they go running off to the nurses, next thing you know you’re doped up on Seroquel, can barely string a sentence together. I’m working on a memoir. Memoir slash treatise. Major interest from a couple of places. Stuff already in the works. So I can’t have, you know, Diego going around telling everybody my story.”
(No need to explain to me about effing Diego. Please.)
“But I’ll tell you a little about it, you seem like the literary type. Have you read much spiritualism? About metempsychosis? Maybe Piper? That’s how I see my book. If I can get the public to actually take a look at this stuff, really understand what I’m saying, then I’m not going to be in a hospital, I’m going to have my name on a hospital, if you get what I’m saying. Major league sales potential, if I get the time to actually write the thing.”
(So the book’s about stuff you’ve experienced, then, or is it more…?)
“The place where I used to work—I can’t tell you, because you better believe I’m suing their asses—anyway, where I used to work, they should have welcomed this kind of stuff. They should have been shouting it from the rooftops. Could have been their book. But instead you’ve got people calling my phone in the middle of the night, you’ve got people telling me I’m neglecting my duties, planting viruses on my computer. It’s exactly the same thing I was telling you about with the Navy, how you get an institution so devoted to protecting itself that it forgets why it…”
And this, for whatever reason, was the moment when the coin finally dropped into my mental slot. The sensation was more like getting a joke than like learning a fact. So this was why I’d been drawn to the professor; this was why I’d spent all these hours peering at him, listening to him, pondering him. Some part of me—the part that ran my mind’s filing system, deep in the subbasement—must have recognized him all along.
“You didn’t used to work at a historic house museum, did you?” I said.
He was, for the first time since I’d met him, struck dumb. I pulled Hannah’s papers out of my pocket and started to unfold them.
“Who wrote this?” he finally said, looking them over. “Your girlfriend wrote this?”
James. Jim. So now I’d met the Wright House’s previous caretaker.
. . .
Jim told me his story—far less cogently than I’m going to recount it here—over a series of coffee-addled afternoons in the lounge. Sometimes he’d talk for an hour without a break; sometimes he’d stop after just a few minutes, muttering about a headache, and spend the rest of the afternoon staring out into the hospital courtyard. I continued, on those days, to see Dr. Mital, to sit mouthing platitudes in various configurations of chairs, but I could feel, from that first moment of recognizing Jim, that something was happening to me—that a match had been struck somewhere way down in the depths.
Anyway, Jim’s story:
He’d been the director of the Wright Museum for almost ten years, from the early 2000s until a few months before Hannah and I moved in. The first seven or eight years of his tenure had been completely unremarkable, or no more remarkable than being the director of any other tiny failing history museum would have been: budget cuts, fundraising schemes, meetings with the local school board. He lived at the museum alone (“…my wife had the good sense to divorce me before I started on any of this”). He cooked for himself using herbs from the garden plot. He bickered with Donna and planned weekend events and talked what few visitors the museum had into a state of baffled submission. At night he read seven-hundred-page library books about the tribal history of the Hudson Valley.
Then, at some point in his seventh or eighth year at the house, something strange had happened. “You’ve got to understand, this was a winter when I was having a lot of health problems. Inner-ear stuff, lung stuff, stomach stuff. So I was unusually susceptible.” He was lying in bed one night, keeping himself awake with his coughing, when he suddenly realized that someone was standing in his room watching him. “The room—well, you know how dark the room is. And to get in there, you would have to…But I could feel the person, exactly the same as I can feel you. So I was trying to decide what to do, should I sit up or shout something or should I just lie there pretending to be asleep, when it happened. The only way I can describe it is, the person, whatever it was, it leapt on me—but instead of attacking me, instead of doing anything like that, it just…sunk into me. So now I was just lying there in the dark again.” But the thoughts he found himself thinking now, the memories he found himself having—they weren’t his, they belonged to someone else. Something, someone, was inside him now. And it wasn’t until four or five in the morning (“That night was just endless, endless”) that he realized who that someone was: Edmund Wright.
Jim didn’t tell anyone what had happened to him. “To be honest, I was afraid I was losing my fucking mind.” He had, of course, known that there was some loopy ghost-related stuff in Edmund Wright’s past, and he’d indulged the Wrighters about it, but he’d never taken it seriously himself. He’d always assumed, the way almost everyone assumed, that this was
Conan-Doyle-with-his-fairies stuff—a great mind, under the influence of grief and maybe some nineteenth-century drugs, coming unglued. But now, after the episode in his bed, Jim became convinced that there was more to it than that—that Wright had not only studied spirits but become one. “And I got obsessed. Writing out accounts of what had happened to me, seeing if I could get it to happen again. Reading everything I could get my hands on. Writing letters to people who I thought might have some old papers in their attics about this stuff.”
But he’d only been at it for a couple of weeks when he ran into a roadblock. As soon as Donna found out what kind of research he was doing (“I went to the bathroom and I left a goddamn browser window open”), she started going after him. “This woman, you’ve got to understand, she is not well. She is unhealthily fixated on…she’s obsessed with the fact that Edmund Wright was her great-great-whatever-he-was, and if she finds out that anyone’s even having a thought that she thinks might hurt Wright’s reputation, she launches a federal investigation.” Butch tried to defend him (“Butch actually knows much more about this stuff than he lets on. He knew the Kemps growing up. Knew them personally”), but even together Butch and Jim were no match for Donna. She convinced the board that Jim wasn’t well and that they needed to decrease his responsibilities. She started messing with the heat in the museum. She told Lydia Gibbens (“that absolute joke of a human being”), who was the authority on all things Wright, to send Jim a letter explaining how absurd his line of inquiry was.
But in the meantime—and by this point in the telling Jim was gnawing at his nails so vigorously that one of them had started to bleed—he was continuing to make discoveries about the spirit world. Donna could reduce his responsibilities, she could ruin his reputation, but she couldn’t control what he did at night when he was alone in the museum. Wright’s spirit had entered him a few more times in the weeks since it had first happened—he could feel, when he was getting ready for bed, whether the conditions were right for it—and he’d started to develop more control of the experience. He could now remember, for instance, on the mornings after his inhabitations, exactly what he’d experienced. It had mostly been a single scene, Jim said: Edmund Wright, alone at the desk in his study, drinking something bitter from a small blue bottle and then slowly losing consciousness. This, when Wright was inhabiting him, was what he would experience over and over.
And he discovered other things, too—for instance that he could write down the story of Wright’s death while he experienced it; and that Wright was just one of the spirits in the house. He felt himself inhabited one night by a woman he was fairly sure was Jan Kemp. Another time he thought it was a cat who’d died years before in the basement. Every living being who’d ever been killed in the house was there, he said. “This”—he reached over and flicked my pocket—“is what your girlfriend was up to with her list.”
But that wasn’t all. Spirits, he said, do more than just make you relive their deaths; that’s just what they do while they’re getting used to you as a vehicle. Once they’re comfortable inside you, they start playing your mind like an instrument. They show you visions. Horrible ones, even things from your own life. During those nights of being inhabited, he reexperienced a childhood memory of plucking the legs off a spider. He saw himself as an old man, choking on his own tongue. For spirits, he realized, the living were like books on a shelf: readable from the first page to the last.
By this point, Jim said, he was “figuring it’s either the Nobel Prize or a straitjacket for me. Because these inhabitations, they were lasting longer and longer. I was piecing together whole theories, which people become spirits and where they are, and I’m getting frantic, worrying that someone else discovered this stuff and is going to beat me to it. And then I realize—I was up there in the storage room going through some papers one night—I realized that someone did beat me to it, all of it, by about a century and a half. Edmund Wright.”
Because Jim had discovered that winter that there were large and suspicious gaps in Edmund Wright’s official papers. “You ask Lydia Gibbens, you ask Donna, you look in the published works, you’d think spirits were just one of Wright’s little side interests, like the thing with cross-fertilizing carrots. It’s bullshit. The truth is he spent years on this. He wrote a letter to William James calling this the work of his life.” Sometimes in the original copies of Wright’s journals, Jim explained, there would be a reference to months Wright had spent trying to solve some particular spirit-related problem, but if you went back and tried to find those months of notes, they would just be gone. Same deal with the letters. Certain pages didn’t even look like they were in Wright’s handwriting.
“Somebody—I think it’s got to be his wife—went through and tossed almost every word he ever wrote about ghosts, about spirit writing, all of it, right in the fireplace. The stuff that I found is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. And whoever it was left just enough so we’d think we had the whole picture. Completely unconscionable. Worst crime against intellectual history since the burning of the Library of Alexandria.”
And Jim thought he knew why Wright’s wife would have wanted to hide what Wright had been working on. Wright hadn’t died of accidental poisoning, the way the Lydia Gibbenses of the world would have you believe. He’d died because the spirits had killed him—that is, they’d shown him something so awful that Wright hadn’t been able to bear it and had killed himself. This is what spirits do; this is what they’re after with the visions they show you. They want you dead, so they can get reincarnated in your place. That’s how they get free. They probably would have killed Jim, too, if his health hadn’t fallen apart.
“I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating, I was hardly ever leaving the museum.” He’d developed holes in the lining of his stomach, he said, plus his hip was crumbling, and the problem with his ears had changed so that now, in addition to being dizzy all the time, he heard the sound of rushing water whenever he stood up. “Except I couldn’t take time out to go to the doctor, because a doctor would tell me to take a break from the museum.” He was right on the cusp of something, he felt. Just days away from discovering the vision that had killed Wright and Jan Kemp. He had more or less given up on running the museum to pursue this question—by this point spirits were coming into him every night—when he got so sick that he passed out on the way to the bathroom and cracked his skull on the toilet tank. When Donna found him in the morning she thought he was dead—his eyes were half open, his tongue was hanging out, blood was all over the tiles.
But he wasn’t dead, and the doctors in Poughkeepsie, once they’d cleaned him up and tested him for everything they could think of, told him there wasn’t anything physically wrong with him other than high blood pressure and a sinus infection. He was admitted to Sommers on a Sunday afternoon, officially terminated by the Wright House on Monday morning. No matter what he said, the doctors wouldn’t let him have his papers from the museum. He started taking half a milligram of Haldol three times daily, plus eight milligrams of Rozerem for sleep. He’d been here babbling to his fellow patients, scribbling notes for his memoirs with a felt-tipped pen, ever since.
I can’t explain how hearing all this affected me, exactly—can’t reconstruct the moment when I went from listening to him as a skeptic to listening to him as a potential disciple—except to say that I was, by the time he finished, shivering to the base of my spine, and not from caffeine poisoning. Hannah’s list was in my sweaty hands.
monday - woman on bridge
tuesday - bird on porch
thursday - boy in wheel
saturday - cat in basement
I had, I felt, arrived at the point where I needed to make a choice. I could believe that what I’d heard was just a Russian nesting doll of insanity: that Jim lived inside Wright’s craziness, and that Hannah, thanks to bad luck and some organic predisposition, had come to live inside Jim’s. Or I could believe—at the risk of becoming the innermost doll myself—that Jim, and so Hanna
h, had glimpsed something real, and that all the work I’d done in the hospital was just a complicated means of rejecting the stray bits of oddity that had been begging me to assemble them since Hannah’s death.
“Your girlfriend,” Jim said. “It sounds like she was following right in my footsteps. Those papers you’ve got, they would have been the least of it. You said she was always writing in a notebook, right? That’s the mother lode. She probably would have tried to hide it. She wouldn’t have wanted Donna to find it, maybe not even you. That’s what you’ve got to find.”
I sat silent for a few seconds. “What does it mean when you say spirits want to get free? Free from what?”
“From what? From not having a body, from reliving their deaths over and over. It’s got to be agony.”
I nodded numbly. So this was how grief-sick widowers ended up signing over their life savings to psychics on the Lower East Side. This was how otherwise intelligent people came to fill their houses with quartz crystals and sage bundles. If I could, by taking Hannah too seriously now, make up for having failed to take her seriously enough in the fall, then I was ready to toss away my sanity like a crumpled dollar bill.
I cleared my throat and leaned so close to Jim that our knees were touching. “Do you know if anyone’s ever broken out of here?” I said.
[From Lydia Gibbens, Edmund Wright: A Life, published by the Dutchess County Historical Society, Notable Figures Series]
…That Wright was, by the middle of that winter, in a state of great despondency is indisputable. Producing fewer and fewer pages, beset as ever by money troubles, he had turned once again for relief to that reliable friend, laudanum. It is the bitterest of ironies that Wright, whose career had been built on scrupulous experimental practices, would be undone by something so trivial as a routine mismeasurement…
