Hysteria

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

  — L. Wilson Greene, scientific director at Edgewood Arsenal, in his 1949 classified report “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War”

  Look back, look back: there’s blood on the track.

  — from “Cinderella,” as recorded by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

  LODI 242X Trial Journal, July 1956

  Ongoing long-term trial.

  July 1, 1956

  Extended trial of LODI 242X, 1803.

  July 2, 1956

  Extended trial of LODI 242X, 1803.

  Supplement: CANOGA 4622, one-time dose 1901.

  Patient displays stable mood and abnormal thinking consistent with drug history. No notable somnambulance. Increased confusion with supplement. Compliant.

  July 3, 1956

  Extended trial of LODI 242X, 1803.

  July 4, 1956

  Extended trial of LODI 242X, 1803.

  No supplement.

  No change in behavior. Stable mood and activity; minimal anxiety. Compliant.

  July 5, 1956

  Extended trial of LODI 242X, 1502.

  July 6, 1956

  Extended trial of LODI 242X*, 1202.

  Patient unchanged: Some continued experience of abnormal thinking, especially when led. Limited confusion. Stimulant effects unremarkable. Lack of initiative, controlled somnambulance. Unusual weakness/tiredness dissipating with decrease in dosage.

  *Research chemical’s availability in sharp decline. New supply so far unstable. Enforced reduction program begins here.

  18.

  Heike came up from the trail and stood at the edge of the property, her breath shallow and uneven. A long scratch tracked from behind her ear down across her shoulder where she’d scraped against the bare limb of a tree. She waited.

  The driveway was flat and empty. Unusual to find Eric away in the evening. In the old days, he’d had a routine: leave the house at eight, return at six, two drinks before dinner. On Cayuga, he’d begun to keep odd hours, and she’d found him less predictable: awake and working late into the night, sleeping half the day in his linen suit. His work, whatever he’d been doing at the hospital, had knocked him off his schedule but also galvanized him. Heike had never known him to use a sleeping pill in the city, but remembered now the little eyedroppers, the paper tab he’d slipped under his own tongue. Where he’d once held to his own rigid standards, here he’d begun to seem fearless, too dynamic to need any rules at all. Heike herself a detail he could contain.

  She skirted the grass that ran along the driveway. There was a light on in the kitchen. Another light, or the hint of one, upstairs somewhere, one of the back rooms. No sound from the house.

  Then, just at her feet, a long, low rattle.

  She stood fixed in place. Eric’s birdhouses hovered overhead, propped on their stilts, like strange puppets. Holes instead of eyes. She turned toward the sound. From beneath the feeders, a single crow clicked its comb call at her again, the same percussive roll. Head cocked in warning. The noise grew, and Heike stepped back: not one crow, but dozens. An occupying force. A few peanuts lay scattered over the lawn, still in their shells. Closest to her, the sentinel stepped forward and ruffled its wings.

  She went in the front door, arms brush-scratched in the light and the cuffs of her pants dragging, like her ball gown had turned to rags. There was a new girl in the kitchen. She was bent over the sink and jumped back at Heike’s voice.

  — Is Mr. Lerner at home?

  The girl put a hand to her mouth.

  — I must look a lot worse than I think. I’m scaring you? I am his wife. I’m Mrs. Lerner.

  The girl still said nothing, and Heike moved in closer.

  — Do you hear me? I’m Mrs. Lerner. Is my husband at home?

  — I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s just that . . . I thought Mrs. Lerner was dead.

  Heike blinked.

  — Who told you this?

  — No one. It’s just . . . Mr. Lerner, he seems so . . . She faltered. He’s in his office, she said.

  Heike stepped back and leaned out into the hall, looking for a crack of light under the office door, but there was none.

  — Oh, no, ma’am. Not here. At the hospital. Mister almost lives at the hospital. Sure I almost never see him home at all. The girl wiped her hands on her apron. Sometimes he don’t come home overnight.

  — But you stay here? Heike looked back and forth between the hall and the girl, not quite trusting in Eric’s absence. What does your mother say to this?

  The girl couldn’t have been more than fourteen. She had a country face. Her hair was not really red, but close to it.

  — I do what’s needed.

  She sat down suddenly at the wooden table, as though the wind had been knocked out of her.

  Heike moved close.

  — And what about the little boy?

  THE CAR WAS STILL HIDDEN AWAY in the ditch where Heike had left it. The girl told her that Mister had a hired car, that his own car was immovable: something had befallen it, the muffler was detached, or the gas tank had a bad puncture. He said he needed a tow truck, but never seemed to remember to order one. He mostly lived at the hospital. Lived for his work! Had she already told Heike that? Almost never home. It was why she had imagined him sad.

  Heike walked around the place, flipping switches on every wall, the whole house lighting up stark and lonely. Like she was the janitor on a movie set after all the players had gone home. The house was strange to her: a place she’d heard described once, or read about in a magazine, while waiting for an appointment or sitting on a train. She opened the closets and the cupboards. In the white room, she found a picture in a lacquered frame. For a moment she didn’t recognize herself. A half-glance over one shoulder. Taken how long ago? Two years? A prop. The bright sunlight off their Manhattan fire escape. She’d been wearing a dress the colour of heather.

  The girl had never seen any little boy, and Mister had never mentioned one. He came home at odd times, took short showers and asked only for cold sandwiches. The groceries arrived by delivery, left on the porch: bread, apples, onions, a chicken she was told to cook and leave cold in the icebox. When he was home, he could not keep still, she said. She hadn’t had to make up the bed once.

  Heike thought of the last time she’d seen Eric: unable to stay conscious, much less move around. His eyes rolling in their sockets. This version of him seemed unreal to her now, like something she’d once dreamt that had wormed its way into real memory.

  What she did understand was that he was not coming home often enough to tend a living thing. Nor had the girl been hired to look after one. Almost two weeks now since she had arrived home in the early hours to find Daniel missing. She had a sudden image of Eric striding through the forest, Dani’s small body slung over his shoulder as a woodcutter carries his axe. A spade in his hand. She shook her head in an effort to banish the thought and searched the house.

  The hardest places. The woodbox, wide and empty aside from the dust of last winter’s kindling. She cracked open the porthole of the dryer, just big enough to fit a child’s body. In Eric’s office, she rolled up the carpet, looking for a false floorboard, a wall safe. The room felt tight as a secret, and she set the carpet back neatly, everything in its place. The root cellar. The chest freezer at the back of the pantry. Whether Eric came home in the middle of the search no longer mattered. The girl followed her, room to room, and did not ask anymore what she was looking for.

  Everything gone, wiped clean. The toy box in the garage where she’d kept his ball, the yellow-painted dump track with its rusty axel. No trains, no toys tucked away; nothing hidden, put aside, as Eric had told Heike, to protect her. The house had an antiseptic feel. Eric’s razor and shaving brush laid out on the bathroom sink, meticulous. His toothbrush dry.

  No small body, alive or otherwise. No trace.

  In the bathroom, her eyes drifted from sink to mirror to vanity. Something caught her eye down in the tub, and for a moment she thought it might be a towel, so
me colourful thing, tossed aside, but when she leaned in to retrieve it, she found instead the blue boat, the boat with its wind-up motor that Eric had given to Daniel. Her heart caught in her throat; for a moment she thought she might vomit. A piece of him, the only piece left. She turned it over in her hand, recalling Eric’s delight as he pulled the surprise out from behind his back, the way he’d shown her the little rudder, playing at it with his finger and his thumb.

  The feel of the wind-up gear where he’d pressed the boat into her hand—and Heike who’d wound the mechanism for Dani, who’d pointed as the boat cut its path along the surface. The water warm against her skin. Heike watching the boat. Eric watching Heike.

  She set the toy down on the edge of tub and peeled her hand off it, unnerved somehow, her hand slightly trembling. She went back to the white room and the photo on the shelf, then combed through all the pictures she had: two albums’ worth, summers and springs and Christmases. Page after page, Heike’s hair so pale that it appeared almost white in the photographs, and a thin white band framing every picture. She’d glued the little black corner-holders in herself, written captions. 1954, July: Staten Island Ferry. 1955, December: Manhattan wedding, Jack Wyland and Arden Lerner (Eric’s sister). Her fingers moved automatically. The corners dislodging as she grew rougher, more frenetic, the stiff photographs sliding out of the albums and onto her lap, then down onto the floor. Heike in the window of their apartment, Heike on the beach at Atlantic City. 1954, April: Balcony, 86th Street. 1953, August: Coney Island boardwalk. Heike in every picture, so thin in the beginning that her collarbones cut a line from shoulder to shoulder, so tiny in a bathing suit on the beach that you could see the jut of her hipbones, like sawed-off horns, pressing out against the fabric. Always Heike alone, as though she were merely a doll, a mannequin for Eric to catalogue and pose.

  A few of the photos lay scattered across her lap, and she brushed them off onto the floor. She left a hand pressed hard against her belly, trying to remember the long-ago pulse of Daniel’s movements inside her. What’s lost to the mind is not lost to the body: a baby rolling and twisting and pushing out, a sharp heel wedged between her ribs. She could feel it there now, as though something had kicked her open.

  Heike asked the girl, still lurking around, to leave her then; she climbed the stairs alone, ran a bath and sank into it, her skin reddening. A clean white dress and a thin belt draped over the clotheshorse, waiting. She imagined Daniel’s body, could almost feel it there: the pruning fingertips, smooth, round belly, scooping little thighs. Her hands slipped away from the sides of the tub but found only her own thighs, her own belly. The water hot enough to steam at its surface.

  Daniel wore cotton pyjamas after a bath, liked to pour the bubbles from one empty shampoo bottle to another, asked her to plug his nose for him when it was time to wash his hair, wrapped his arms around her neck and held on tight. He fell asleep curled against her chest or with his head in her lap. His breath, the little rasp in his voice calling to her early in the morning.

  The day she’d run up to this room, taking the stairs two at a time, sure of Eric’s firm hand on Daniel, pushing him under: Dani thrashing below the surface and then still.

  Now Heike pushed herself under the water and screamed. Pressing the air from her lungs; the pitch of her own voice, shrill and violent. Her hands slipped against the sides of the tub as she forced herself down. Eyes wide open, hair streaming. Her throat constricted. Water rushed in and she held it there, kicking out despite herself. Her ankle broke the surface, smacked sharply off the faucet, and she used it, bracing the foot against the tap to try to sink her body lower.

  She was choking. Her head felt light.

  Daniel, quiet and breathless and half-hidden behind the door in his hooded towel when she’d arrived to save him that day. She’d imagined him drowned. So far away now: Daniel safe in a hooded towel.

  And Eric, watching, his notebook in his hand.

  She pulled up suddenly and shot forward, coughing, leaning hard over the side. She couldn’t hear herself, and she couldn’t get any air. She kicked at the plug. The bath began to drain out, and she hauled herself against the side of the tub until she vomited, water spraying the floor, and she heard her own gasp, almost a shriek of breath. Her ankle was bleeding where she’d kicked the faucet, struggling against herself.

  The blue boat still sat where she had left it, placid, next to the tap. She had somehow missed it with her leg. When she could sit up, she grabbed it and hurled it at the wall. A sound sharp as a pistol—the boat’s plastic case splitting down the hull—the echo of metal mechanism and rudder hitting the ground and spinning out in different directions.

  The room was steamy. She sat sideways in the tub, her knees pulled in against her chest, and rested her forehead there and cried. The last of the bathwater sucked away, leaving her cold and naked and shaking in a warm room. A thin stream of blood ran from her ankle to the drain.

  After a while she lifted her head. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes for a moment, then wiped them roughly, slicking away whatever trace remained of tears or bathwater.

  Through the open window, the scrape of tires on the drive.

  BUT THE FUSS the girl kicked up. What a lot of squawking and foot stomping. Heike curled in, combed her wet hair back with her fingers, wrapped her arms around her knees. With the door closed, she could hear only so much. There was volume. The words were missing, but the vehemence carried. She should jump out of the tub, cover up, dress, protect herself. She did none of these things, but only crouched there, her breath still shallow.

  The foot stomping gained sudden fervour, and the bathroom door swung into the room, its interior handle smacking off the wall. But it was Dolan, not Eric, who came in, and the girl after him, frantic, arms waving.

  — It’s alright. Heike took a hand from around her legs and gestured to the girl to go back downstairs.

  The girl paused in her discomfort, treading from one foot to the other out in the hallway, and did not leave but backed up to watch from a safer distance.

  — I know: it’s unusual. But I know this gentleman. Heike gripped the edge of the tub and pulled herself to sit upright, leaning out with her head and shoulders. She coughed.

  Dolan stepped in a little farther, glancing down only for a moment at the wet floor.

  — I didn’t expect to find you here, he said.

  — You thought I was eaten by a wild wolf?

  — I came to see Lerner.

  She stood up in the tub.

  — I am afraid you’re out of luck, Mr. Dolan. Only Mrs. Lerner is at home.

  The water had made her hair curl, and the ends of it lay damp, stuck to the hinge of her jaw. Her arms hung at her sides, and she stood with one knee angled out like a street urchin, the cut on her ankle throbbing. The maid, half-forgotten at her hallway post, looked down in a modest way and then up again when she thought no one was watching. Heike held a hand out. Dolan went to take it, but she waved him away.

  — The towel, of course. Give me a towel.

  When she was wrapped, she stepped out of the tub.

  — I figured I could choke the truth out of him, Dolan said. Man to man.

  — You long to be needed.

  Heike stepped to the mirror and polished a steam-free circle with the flat of her hand. She wanted to take a good look at her face. Dolan was there behind her, a rough silhouette.

  — Woods were wolf-free, then?

  She turned, gripping the towel just under her collarbone.

  — There was something there. In the water. Barking at me almost. Not a bark. I don’t know. She looked away for a long moment before coming back to him. Snarling, she said finally. Not barking. But after a time I wasn’t afraid of it. It wasn’t chasing me. It’s like we were travelling together.

  Dolan watched her.

  — An otter can make quite a noise.

  — If you say so. She went back to her own reflection. I’m tired of arguing with
men.

  The fog was slowly losing its territory in the mirror, the counterpart version of Heike widening out and gaining in detail. She fingered her earlobe, the tiny nut-brown skin tag that had grown there in adolescence. One of her eyes was strangely bloodshot, as though a capillary had burst.

  — You won’t come home with me, then.

  Dolan stood over her shoulder, his reflection in the mirror still obscured by steam. She straightened.

  — I will find my son.

  There was a long silence, Heike examining her eyes, her jawline, her lips. Dolan behind her. He reached out to touch her waist, and his hand stayed there. Heike turned to the doorway. The girl, still waiting in the hall, arranged herself.

  — I really must ask you to go downstairs now, Heike said.

  They could hear her feet on the steps, shuffling her way down, and then the long creak that was the middle stair. She’d sat down to continue listening. Heike let the towel drop and began to dress.

  — I needed a place to go; you gave me one. I won’t forget that.

  She bent at the waist to fasten her bra, then straightened, adjusting the straps in the mirror. Dolan watched her pull the white dress over her head, cinch the alligator belt in. Her fingers with a slight tremor. She threaded the buckle through.

  — Is that all this was?

  Heike grabbed his elbow for balance as she slid her feet into her shoes.

  — This? This was nothing. A distraction. Everything in me is for Daniel. Surely you always knew this. She stamped her heels lightly, a final adjustment, and looked up at the reflected Dolan, the mirror clean and clear. I have no more time for distractions now.

  He stepped back and away from her, out into the hall, and she followed him. They crossed into the bedroom. She dragged a stool over to the closet and pulled down a wicker laundry basket from the top shelf.

  — Here, she said. She motioned to Dolan to put it on the bed, then climbed down herself. She started pulling clothes out of the wardrobe and layering them in the basket.