Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

  She squeezed her fist tighter and a small quantity escaped and fell into the water. She looked over the edge of the dock and watched the heavier particles sink while the ashes swirled and bloomed over a rippling image of her own reflection. She brought the handful of ashes close to her mouth, maybe with the idea to kiss him goodbye or something else, Cady couldn’t recall, because when she gave into the next impulse, her mind was blank. All she remembered was how Eric’s ashes felt gritty as she rubbed them on her face, the dust stung her eyes, stuck to her wet cheeks and lips so she could taste it, and how she pressed harder and harder until the bone ash dug into her cheeks, but she couldn’t feel them enough, not enough to last forever.

  Cady brought her hands down from her face—they were white but empty, and shaking terribly. Horrified at what she’d done, a small cry escaped her lips, releasing more ashes in a puff of her breath. She turned toward the voices now shouting her name. First she saw her father’s mouth agape, Gram slumping against him, Aunt Laura leaning forward in her chair while Pete threw an arm across her chest, to comfort her or hold her back. But her mother looked the worst—her eyes were wild and her lips pulled back in a horrified grimace, and she had both arms outstretched in front of her. Soon they were all moving toward Cady, they looked terrified and terrifying.

  Panic seized her. Cady didn’t think. She turned and leaped to follow him into the water.

  8

  Having missed lunch with Ranjoo, Cady felt her stomach growl as she took her seat in her next class, “The Medieval Imagination,” a small lecture course in the History Department. The reading was incredibly dense—biblical apocrypha, the writings of Augustine, and other esoteric texts—but Cady had made it a priority to keep up with her assignments, largely because of how much she liked Professor Watkins. He was warm and wacky, a fifty-something-year-old Englishman with longish hair and a single earring, a hippie medievalist. He couldn’t be more different from Professor Hines. When a student arrived late today, full of apologies, he waved her off.

  “Not at all, my dear. It would be hypocritical of me to blame you for tardiness, as I myself was running a bit behind today, as these more diligent students will tell you. So I say, O Tosco, ch’al collegio de l’ipocriti tristi se’ venuto. Translation: ‘My Tuscan, you’ve reached the college of the hypocrites.’ However, I endeavor not to be among them. Does anyone know what that’s from?”

  Remarkably, a hand went up in the front. Cady craned her neck to see who could possibly know the answer. Professor Watkins called on the girl, whose hair was dyed pink at the ends, and she answered: “Dante’s Inferno.”

  “That’s right! Now, for bonus points, do you know what canto?”

  The girl paused. “Canto Five?”

  “Twenty-three. But very well done. Soon we will all get to know Dante as well as—”

  “Jessica,” the girl filled in.

  “—as Jessica here, later in the course. But today, we’ll discuss the Passion of Saint Perpetua, one of the most important, albeit little known, of the early Christian visionary texts. This text is significant because it was written, at least in part—the pre-gruesome-martyrdom-part—by Perpetua herself. We have very few female voices on record around 200 c.e., and I think you will find hers to be one of the most compelling …”

  Cady gave a weary exhale. She’d known she would have to work harder to keep up with her classmates here, but for someone to nail the source of one random quote—in Italian, no less—was next level. She sank lower in her chair.

  “Don’t be too impressed,” whispered a voice at her ear.

  Cady looked over her shoulder to the desk behind her, where a guy was slumped back in his desk like a low-rider; he didn’t appear to be the one who had said anything to her. She glanced around, a girl beside her was diligently taking notes on a pad, a boy to her left was furtively texting on the phone in his lap. Where had it come from?

  You already know.

  Anxiety bubbled within her—was she the only one hearing this?

  You know how she cited Inferno, you just said the clue she used. It’s simple.

  She wanted to jump out of her seat, out of her skin, but she didn’t want to flag for anyone else what was happening to her. What was happening to her? Was she speaking to herself? But it was a man’s voice. And it wasn’t stopping.

  The quote was in Italian. How many books on your syllabus are in Italian? Check.

  Cady slid her syllabus out from under her notebook. The only listed text with an Italian title was Inferno. This voice was definitely speaking to her.

  And it was right.

  I told you. She correctly surmised that the professor would reference something from class. I’ll bet she hasn’t read a word of La Divina Commedia. Anyone remotely familiar with Dante would know that a sin on the level of hypocrisy would occur much later than Canto 5. And anyway, Canto 5 is Paolo e Francesca, everyone knows that.

  Cady didn’t know that.

  Really?

  Cady heard the voice snigger.

  You’ll find that most people here are more adept at appearing intelligent than actually being so. They’re mostly dolts.

  Cady raked her fingers through her hair, pausing to press them tightly over her ears, willing the voice to stop.

  Don’t get upset. I didn’t mean you. Did it sound like I did? Forgive me.

  Why is this happening? Cady thought. Make it stop.

  Sorry, I’ll go.

  “Today, we would call them hallucinations,” Professor Watkins said, and for a moment Cady thought he was answering her directly. He continued, “But at the time there was real credence given to a ‘spiritual vision’ under certain circumstances. As Perpetua was left in prison to await her impending execution, knowing she was soon to become a Christian martyr or a lion’s plaything, she was poised to receive such a vision.”

  Auditory hallucinations. Cady remembered her mother used the term after meeting with one of Eric’s doctor at McLean, Harvard’s affiliated psychiatric hospital, when they first got the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Was that what had just happened to her?

  “However, Augustine wrote at length about the process of ‘discernment,’ meaning the practice of discerning whether a vision is of divine or demonic nature.” Professor Watkins wrote “discernment” on the chalkboard with a sharp, hollow clack clack clack. “A spiritual vision was subject to the imagination and thus could be fooled, vulnerable to demons. Or, the mind could be the access point for divine clarity, wisdom, even prophecy. Thus the ability to discern the difference was of the utmost importance. We’ll talk more about this and the Neoplatonists next week. In preparation for Monday, please read Augustine’s exegesis in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, as well as his personal account in Confessions VII. Thank you.”

  Cady needed to calm down—she needed to be discerning. There was no need to jump to any conclusions; there could be a reasonable explanation for whatever she just heard. She was bored, she was daydreaming. She hadn’t eaten, or slept well, she was stressed by that call from her mom. Cady wrote down the reading assignment like a normal, sane student, but gathering her things, her hands shook.

  But there remained a question in her mind more frightening than the voice itself: Is this how it started with Eric?

  9

  Cady couldn’t make it all the way home. She found a quiet corner in Lamont, the undergraduate library, booted up her laptop, and opened her Gmail account. Cady needed to learn everything about Eric’s life at Harvard during his last year. All she had gathered from home was that he had been consumed by the Bauer project, and when he’d suddenly refused to submit it, it was the first sign that he was worse off than her family thought, much worse. But Cady didn’t even know the topic of his Bauer project, much less why he ditched it. Was that really the first sign of his illness taking over, or was it only the first loud enough to be heard back home? There were so many b
lanks to be filled in, her ignorance suddenly struck her as staggering, maybe even dangerous. Her whole life, the question had been Will I ever be as good as Eric? Not could I ever be as sick?

  Somehow it had never occurred to her that she could suffer from Eric’s illness. Eric was always different, special, marked. It made sense that the eccentricities of genius would be disposed to warp into mental illness. Cady thought of herself as the average, or at least more average than Eric, and she expected shelter in the bell curve. Now she felt stupid never to have considered it; they were blood relatives, they have, or had, shared genes. As her Psych book said, only genotype is inherited, the phenotypic behavior is triggered by environment. Well, now she had put herself in the exact same environment as Eric. What if her mother was right, and she couldn’t handle it any better than he could? She had all of Eric’s emails of the last year or so archived in a folder named E. She had made the folder right after he died, when she couldn’t bring herself to delete the emails nor could she bear to see them sitting in her inbox. She hadn’t opened the folder until now. Their last email correspondence was February twenty-fifth, almost a month before his death, and it wasn’t much.

  Cadence Archer to Eric Archer Feb 25, 2019

  You coming home for Dad’s birthday? Mom wants to make reservations.

  Eric Archer to me Feb 25, 2019

  no. can’t.

  Cady remembered how annoyed she had been at his short reply—annoyed but not surprised. He had become very distant by that point. She hadn’t even bothered to follow up with him. She recalled feeling relieved that he wasn’t coming to their father’s birthday dinner, relief for which she now felt guilty, but she had known it would be more relaxed if Eric wasn’t there. He had become so difficult, his moods so unpredictable. Eric’s attitude and behavior wore on her father, who would get short with him, and then her mother would get snippy in Eric’s defense, and before long, every family get-together was a tightly wound ball of tension, if not an all-out fight. None of them had truly understood how much Eric was suffering, herself included. If she had written him back, encouraged, cajoled, begged him to come to that stupid dinner, then maybe they would have seen how bad he had gotten. Maybe something could have been done.

  Her eyes ran down the list, skipping most. All of the ones from January on were short and clipped. He rarely came out of his shell by then, and he was even less forthcoming in email. One particularly cheery Re: line from an email Cady sent him in early December 2018 triggered something in Cady’s memory; it read: “When do we get to celebrate?!!” But despite her exclamation points, the memory was as dark and heavy as a storm cloud waiting to break. Reading her initial email first, she recognized the false enthusiasm in her words.

  What’s up with your Bauer project?? Are you almost done? We all have our fingers crossed, not that you need it. They’re going to love your submission, and next year you’re totally gonna win. I’m already happy for you, that’s how confident I am. Love, C

  She thought back a minute. This was the project Professor Prokop had been advising him on. The Bauer Award was one of the most prestigious academic prizes offered at Harvard, a one-way ticket to any graduate school science program and a clincher for job interviews. The adjudication process was so in-depth, students submit their work their junior spring and didn’t hear back until senior fall. Winning it had been Eric’s dream since he first set foot in Harvard’s Physics Department, but that had been back when he was a freshman, when it had seemed like only a matter of time for him to grow old enough to receive it. By junior year, nothing was certain. Still, as his mental problems worsened, his science grades stayed up. Her family had hoped that if he could stay on track, the satisfaction of winning the Bauer could pull him out of the depression that threatened to swallow him whole. They had all tried to act extra-supportive during that time. Cady recalled thinking the worst that could happen was that they would build it up and then he might not win—how naive she had been.

  His response was devastating then and now:

  I’m not going to submit. working on something way more important. can’t waste time on the Bauer. I’ll tell you about it some other way, this email account is not secure.

  The paranoia. This was when he had stopped trying to hide it. He had become suspicious of those around him, even close friends and family. He was on high alert, fearful of surveillance of any kind. He changed his cellphone number three times that year. Within the family, their father, inexplicably, caught the brunt of Eric’s mistrust. Whenever their father would leave a room, Eric would fall silent for a few minutes because he believed that his father was eavesdropping just behind the door. Whenever he was made to meet with a concerned or disciplinary Harvard administrator, which was increasingly often, he believed his father had put them up to it. He occasionally thought his mother was conferring with his therapist, seeking to learn his secrets, but Cady wasn’t entirely sure this was untrue.

  In a heartbreaking variation on the theme, the way his paranoia manifested with Cady was in concern for her. Growing up, he had never been the type of brutish big brother to intimidate guys or beat up school bullies; more often Cady was the one defending Eric’s quirky behavior. But when he got sick, his protective instincts went into hyperdrive. Even when he was away at school and she was home, there would be some nights when Cady would find ten text messages and five missed calls from him checking up on her. When she would ask him why he was so worried, he would never explain.

  Her eyes returned to the rows of subject headings until one burned like acid. It was dated January 4, 2019, from the email account of Dr. Mark Rowan, Eric’s psychiatrist; the subject was

  Holiday break episode, moving forward.

  She reflexively rubbed her hand on her neck; her pulse thumped against it. It had taken her three days to summon the courage to open that email when she first received it, and she didn’t want to open it again. She never wanted to open it again.

  So she didn’t.

  Cady scrolled way down to October 12, 2016, his freshman year, when Eric was still Eric. And when she was still Cady.

  Eric Archer to me

  A little bird (Mom, don’t be mad) told me that Justin broke up with you. The most simple observations are usually the most accurate, and in this case it is obvious that the man is a fool. But I know that love is rarely simple, so this fact is probably not much comfort.

  Cadence Archer to Eric

  Thanks for that. I love you.

  Eric Archer to me

  Love you too, kid. Hang in.

  The tension in Cady’s chest unwound. This was the brother she grew up with. This was the brother she so terribly missed. This was the brother she wanted to remember.

  Sometimes this was the only brother she remembered. Her mind did not go willingly back to that difficult period. It was as if her brain had dismantled the timeline and hidden the bad memories, switched them around like a magician hiding a ball beneath a trio of cups. When it came to the progression of his illness, emotion clouded the waters of her memory, and it surprised her how little she could now recall. She couldn’t remember when exactly he got his diagnosis of schizophrenia, or discussion of how his symptoms began, certainly never explicit talk of hearing voices. She did remember what her father had said after the diagnosis: “Things will get better, because now that we know what it is, we can fix it and get back to normal.” They hadn’t known then that normal was a long way away.

  But searching through their emails, she hoped to find something, somewhere, that would offer a peek into Eric’s interior world. She found only one email that dealt directly with his illness. On April 20, 2018, she had written:

  Cadence Archer to Eric:

  I know you’re freaked out about the diagnosis, but I think this is a good thing. Now that they know what’s going on they can give you better treatment. Soon you will be feeling like your old self. This is just a bump in the road …

&
nbsp; Eric Archer to me:

  I’m aware of things that I didn’t used to be. I just have to accept that these changes are a part of me now. I need to adapt to them, learn to live with them. It’s just hard. I miss my old brain. It’s different now, I’m different.

  Cady to Eric:

  You’re not different. You’re still my brother. I know you. I love you. I don’t think you’re crazy.

  Eric to me:

  I do.

  Was Cady becoming “different,” too?

  She closed the email and exited the E archives, returning to her inbox. At the top, she noticed that a bold new email had arrived from Prokop@fas.harvard.edu. She opened it:

  Pleasure meeting you as well. My office hours this week are busy, but perhaps next Thursday. Alternately, I will be speaking at the Cosmology Colloquium this Friday at 2pm in the Science Center, Lecture Hall B. You are welcome to attend if the topic interests you, it promises to be an interesting panel discussion, and I should have a little time to chat afterward. We will make a physics student out of you yet!

  “Well, hello there.”

  This was a voice, and an accent, she recognized. “Nikos, hi.” She quickly closed her laptop.

  Nikos was wearing a crisp white shirt tucked into dark jeans and a houndstooth blazer, she noticed he even had little braided cufflinks. On most people their age, the outfit might have looked stuffy or pretentious, but Nikos carried himself with such confidence, he pulled it off. “How have you been?”

  “I’ve been good.” Cady chided herself for saying ‘good’ instead of ‘well’; his accent made her self-conscious of her English.