Hysteria

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

  A series of small, high windows lined the ceiling along both sides, and these were the only source of pale light. Heike stepped away from the door to allow whatever moonlight possible to come in behind her. The shadows rose up on either side of her as though she were standing in a tunnel. A dull smell of ammonia. The fidget and murmur of birds. Pigeons, she thought.

  — Dani?

  There was no answer. As she stepped forward, her shoe slipped a little against the floor, a layer of grit making her slide.

  There was a sputter of light and the room warmed. Marek had come in behind her; he’d had a flashlight in his pocket. What had seemed like tunnel walls were bracketed shelves, racks five feet deep on either side of her, stretching from floor to ceiling. Each shelf stacked with travelling cases: trunks and duffel bags, hat boxes. Suitcases. Her stomach dropped, and she had to swallow against the impulse to gag. If Daniel were hidden away here—if such a thing were even possible—he was not alive. She cycled through the same set of images: Eric with a hand over Daniel’s mouth to keep him quiet. Daniel’s body, limp over Eric’s shoulder as he cut a path through the woods.

  She turned to Marek.

  — He’s here? Is that what you’re saying? She crouched low and began to crab along the floor, checking the lowest shelves first. Marek stood over her, and she saw that he was trying to hand her the flashlight. He wanted to go to bed, he said. She leaned a hand against the floor; it was rough and filthy, and she pushed up instead, standing with her face in Marek’s, and brushed the hand off against her skirt.

  — Why did you bring me here? You said you saw him. You saw him!

  — Na sicher.

  — So where is he? Wo ist er denn?

  — I saw a child with you. Kleines Kindlein, ja? A little child, sometimes far, sometimes closer. You were following her. Then you turned suddenly, and you washed your hands at the pump, like this. He stooped over and rolled the flashlight between his hands, then straightened again. A little girl, he said.

  He held the flashlight out to her a second time, and this time she took it, bringing it in close to her body and stepping forward to catch Marek’s face in the light.

  — Not a girl. A boy, a little boy.

  — Mädel, mädel, es war einmal ein Mädel. A girl. Pretty hair, long hair. So blond like you.

  — You’ve made a mistake. There is no girl, do you hear me? A boy! A little boy! Old man, your eyes must not be so good anymore.

  Marek only looked at her and turned to go.

  — And then your hands were clean and you wandered away. He said this with his back to her. He was leaving her there. He switched to German again: Allein.

  Heike had her tongue pressed hard against the back of her teeth. A cruel trick. There was the threat of the first prick of tears, and she refused them, drawing her forehead back and yelling out instead, her voice rough.

  — Hey! Was sagen Sie, allein?

  — Allein, allein! She was frustrating him. He batted a hand in the air, waving her away: You were. Alone.

  Heike let the arm holding the flashlight drop a little. Above her, the ceiling stretched high. She was back in the tunnel, the light dropping out. She spoke, and it was a child’s voice, unsure and recalcitrant, an apology for something she’d done but could not understand.

  — I wasn’t alone. He was always with me. Daniel.

  Marek’s eyes hardened, but it was not an unkind look. It was as though he were pushing her words around, through heavy weather. He gestured around at the trunks and cases.

  — There is a lot for you to see here, ja?

  Heike glanced down at the shelf closest to her. The place was a storage facility, unkempt and unthought-of. A mess. The room may as well have been filled with straw.

  — I don’t know why you’ve brought me here.

  She would have liked to lie down somewhere and sleep for a long time.

  Marek turned to go, pausing to look back at her over his shoulder.

  — You washed your hands, he said. He had cloudy eyes, very pale, the pupils visible even in the low light. When he spoke to her, he moved between languages, and there was grace in that. He said: Dann waren Sie allein. And then you were alone, walking away. But she followed behind you, of course. The little girl. Not right away, but slowly; slowly she followed behind you.

  He slung his spade back up onto his shoulder.

  — Just like today, he said.

  MAREK’S FLASHLIGHT IN HER HAND made a disc of bright light at her feet, then another, wider ring around it, mostly shadow. He was gone; Heike was by herself. Her jaw was tight enough to make her head hurt. The old man’s glance shifting just beyond her, over her shoulder, when he said it: Just like today.

  For a moment she had almost called to him not to leave her.

  She thought of the girl, Tessa, as she had appeared on the raft in her blue bathing suit. Then again, Tessa, no longer a child, jaw set open and shining. The thing she’d heard in the water, keeping pace as Heike came down through the woods. Teeth bared: how Heike herself had described it.

  The air was still and warm, and the longer she stood there, the more she was aware of the smell. Dust and wet wood, and an animal smell, too, the birds high in their roost. She could feel her pulse, the surge of blood in her wrists, the back of her neck prickling with the heat and the space behind her, empty or not. She spun around suddenly, the light playing over the shelves and the blank floor between them.

  There was a flapping up near the ceiling; a little raw sawdust floated down from the beam. She’d disturbed the pigeons. Her breath came short and fast, and she worked to slow it down, to make a plan.

  What the old man had said: Es war einmal ein Mädel. The way her mother had begun every story. Once upon a time there was a girl. He was crazy, after all; or else he was trying to frighten her. There’s power in scaring a woman, whether or not you know her, late at night. Heike let the light fall to the floor and followed it with her eyes.

  For a moment, everything she’d seen at the house rushed in: the albums of photographs of Heike alone; Eric with his notebook, keenly watching as Heike set Daniel’s blue boat afloat in the bath. And then Marek’s words, sharp enough to make her catch her breath.

  She dropped to the ground and began beating at a raised nail with the end of her flashlight, then another, and another. The action felt like control. A little shock shot up into her elbow and shoulder every time the rubber-coated end of the flashlight made contact with the plank floor.

  Mäd’lein. A little girl.

  He’d made a mistake. What he’d seen was just Daniel’s blond hair, grown a bit too long, the little curls licking around his ears. He thought he’d seen a girl. But there was no little girl. There had only ever been Dani.

  She stopped hammering, leaving a ringing stillness in the place. From the back of the room, a soft ticking started and then stopped again, a sound like something moving, the creak of wood expanding with heat and pressure.

  She squatted there and shone the light to the back of the room.

  — So. Are you there? Come out, then!

  There was the hum of silence, like a high whine. Heike shifted onto the balls of her feet. The flashlight’s beam arced across the door, still open, an old white lab coat hanging from a nail on the wall.

  That first night, standing in Dolan’s greenhouse, how he’d come in with a lantern and groped around at her feet for a bottle of booze, the light flickering at her knees. An easy moment. She’d still been somebody’s wife, someone’s mother. This seemed very long ago now. Dolan offering a quick flush on her cheeks and in her fingertips, his light flicking at the hem of her skirt. She’d thought he was trying to embarrass her.

  Catch and release. She longed for it now, the safety of fluttering down out of the greenhouse.

  She stood up again, and her ear popped and cleared, as though she were coming down from a great height. The pigeons’ downy underfeathers were glued to the floor all around her. There could be only one good reason
for Marek to have brought her here. The little house was not much more than a storage centre for old garbage, the cases and trunks coated in dust and untouched, maybe for years. There was no little girl.

  SHE BEGAN AT ONE END, shining the flashlight first at the high upper shelf and jerking it down without method, shelf to shelf. The light trembling. Looking for any trunk large enough to hold a child. A child’s body. She did not want the image, but it came to her anyway: Daniel, curled tight inside a latched suitcase. His eyes closed, cheekbones high and pristine, rosy enough to make you believe in sleeping spells.

  There was a burgundy case half the length of Heike’s own body, with brass fixtures, and she dragged this out, but it refused to open even when she kicked at the lock with her heel. The centre beams that held the place up cast shadows as she moved around, the flashlight in her hand. She moved back and forth, looking first at the shelves, then wheeling to shine the light behind her again, the light revealing nothing, empty space, each corner darker than the last.

  She grasped the top rail and pulled up, stepping onto the low shelf as she went. There were fewer cases to look at here, and only the smallest ones. She ran a finger along the edge of a round hat box with a loop handle, trying to find the catch, the dirt coming up thick as a curl of apple peel. The slight ticking sound again. She stopped, frozen. At the other end of the row, the cases suddenly collapsed down on themselves, falling like rocks into a trench. Heike’s hand slipped on the flashlight and it fell, too, ringing off the floorboards. The sound and sudden darkness pushed her into a kind of hysteria, and she jumped down, swinging the hat box by its loop and smashing it against the floor to break the clasp.

  The light had rolled away from her and now shone back over the floor like a wide and solitary eye. She crouched low, quiet and panting so that she would not cry. The falling cases her own fault, Heike’s doing, an accident.

  She gathered up the contents of the hat box, spilled out: no hats, but pins, and a photograph, and an old envelope, addressed and torn and missing the letter inside. The pins were what she’d been after. She went to work on the lower shelves, each one stacked with more and heavier-looking baggage, using the hatpins to crack the hasps and prying them open, one after another.

  Some were nearly empty. In one there were only shoes: black dancing slippers with ribbon straps and dull leather strips stitched onto the soles, and a pair of farm boots, worn at the insides. A wooden crate held a stack of shellac records, the paper sleeves clean and thin, with a greasy feel. Fred Astaire and Jack Payne, and Billie Holiday.

  The racks were labelled, where the label wasn’t too filthy to read, by letter: A to Z. Everything she found on the upper racks was coated silvery white in pigeon droppings, and she wished she had a kerchief, anything clean, to tie over her mouth and nose. She worked faster and faster, not replacing the open cases but shoving them away from her and in her rage smashing everything, boxes too small to hold a child, breaking everything open, ruining it all.

  A black doctor’s bag filled with tools from an abandoned practice: a blood pressure cuff, the glass gauge with a hairline crack and the rubber of the bulb dry and crumbly at the join. Heike jarred at the flash of her reflection in the head mirror—a sudden memory of sitting in the roadway after the accident, Harry injured and bleeding in her lap, the first doctor who arrived to help with a light and a mirror like this one. The very fact of remembering, this thing that had been out of reach for so long, felt sharp as a kick to the gut. Razor wire. It almost made her double over. She crushed the thing under her foot.

  She was sweating and pushed the hair off her face. She was tired now, so tired. The flashlight shone down from where she’d lodged it, tight on a shelf; the trunks and broken boxes grew up all around her, casting their shadows. It was hot.

  He wasn’t there. It was a relief and it also wasn’t. She understood now what Marek had wanted to show her: that the bags and his graves were related. What they had in common were the patients locked up, working their days away in the cookhouse or smithy, or long dead and gone. This house the holding place, where they put your things when you had come in off the dock. No way out once you were in.

  ERIC HAD BROUGHT HER to the Willard three times. If anything, he preferred to keep a barrier between his home and his work, although each time he allowed Heike just that little bit closer. A weird delight in his eyes as he pointed out the buildings, the patients at their exercise. The first time, she had sat in the diner up the road, drinking coffee at the counter and watching the proprietor layer together a row of hot turkey sandwiches on blue-rimmed dinner plates. White bread, brown meat, green-flecked dressing. Brown gravy. The owner’s name was Lucinda; this was embroidered on her long apron, at the place you might pin a carnation on your jacket. She’d asked if Heike had someone in the asylum, a mother or brother, and Heike had said, no, her husband was a doctor there. Lucinda had made a face.

  — There’s a reason folks choose to go to work at the mental. Them doctors and nurses. Not like there ain’t other good work out there. Drawn to it, that’s what I say.

  She’d finished each plate with a scoop of mash and refilled Heike’s cup.

  The next time, Heike had waited more or less in the car, parked at the far edge of the grounds. Eric striding off to the asylum along the road and waving to a limousine as it rolled by. She’d opened her door for air, then taken a few steps away from the car into the long grass of the field, where a few young men were planting apple trees. Teams of three: a wheelbarrow and two spades. They measured the eight feet between trees by walking, toe to heel. There had been two teams; one moved faster down the line than the other, but it was because on the slower team the digger had a deformed arm. He knelt in the dirt to dig, the useless arm half the length of the other and withered. This was before Eric told her it was the patients who did all the work.

  And then that last time, with Daniel.

  She stepped out of the storage house onto the grass. Marek was gone. Heike tried to shake off the feeling the suitcases had given her, the weird guilt and nausea of looking for a body instead of a child, as though it were her best hope, and becoming instead a silent witness to many lives, left to the pigeons and the mice. All their little things: petticoats and hair ribbons and photographs of children. She felt around inside her own bag and withdrew the photograph she’d pulled from the album at home.

  Heike, the kerchief over her hair, leaning on a third-floor railing. How many times had she looked through those pictures? Heike sitting on a bench in Central Park, or posing near a Christmas window, or holding a stuffed bear at Coney Island. Eric documenting each moment from behind the camera.

  The flashlight’s beam spread out wide, and she let it move from tree to tree, turning a full circle. The gardens where they’d been at their game of hide-and-seek were far on the other side of the property. There were no roses here, no lilacs to hide in. She turned again.

  At the base of a young oak, the light caught something globed and spongy. Slick. A cluster of mushrooms broad as a kitchen sink, tan and wet-looking, a glint of violet at their edges. She kicked at one with her toe, thinking it would be rubbery, but it broke immediately at the stalk, the cap flipping up to expose its scored underside, the furrows deep and tufted. A sound like breath all around her, warm and sweat-damp as silk.

  Soft in the throat: the lenient pant of a wild dog. Black and huge as a bear. Heike’s heart pounded against her back. She tried to summon the calm she’d managed along the stream, some creature pacing her in the water as she’d moved down the trail in the dark. What had Dolan said? An otter.

  Madness, Eric had told her once. Madness follows you like a dog.

  There was no stream here, no woods, no sharp sound. Just her own rough breath. She flexed her wrist, allowing the light to sweep the yard in an arc.

  Up in the main building there were only three lights still burning. There was nothing behind her at all.

  THE FLOORS INSIDE the entry were polished stone. She bent down and
took off her shoes so that she would not make any noise, then slipped the flashlight into a shoe and carried it along like that, a glow coming through the leather at the toe. There were a few steps up and then a door off the landing. As she came through, she heard the sharp tap of another woman’s shoes, but it receded into the distance, heading away from the residence. Halfway across the lawn, she’d imagined Eric, up in his office window or his lab, looking down at her, but there had been no shadow there and no curtains. There were nurses, she supposed, awake at all hours, but not many.

  She was at one end of a wide hall.

  Long doors lined the left side of the corridor, each with a transom window overhead, a half moon, now darkened. Every door open, at least a crack. The hall was broad enough that Heike could have lain down three times between one side and the other: fifteen feet across or more. She’d come up the side stairwell, and from here she could see the stairs from the main entrance where they opened out to a central foyer, and a light from a doorway there, on the right-hand side. The nurses’ station. The tick-tack of shoes she’d heard must have ended up there.

  She moved down the hall in her bare feet, her shoes and flashlight in one hand and a bit of her skirt wound around the fingers of the other. The thin drone of a radio made a tinny echo against the stone floor. The night shift, sitting in their lit room. They were listening to Benny Goodman to stay alert. Heike stopped briefly before each threshold to make sure that inside there was no nurse completing her rounds, no one about to pull back the door and surprise her.

  She crept closer. Something else now over the sound of the radio, a steady pounding. She would have said a hammer, or the dull butt of an axe. The stump of footsteps, if the stepper were a giant. She pressed against the wall. The air inside the building was no less oppressive than outside, and she stopped for a moment, trying to catch her breath. An ammonia smell, cleaning fluid or soiled sheets or both, mixed with the humidity and the scent of whitewash. Her stomach turned, the hall wavering before her. The odour reminding her of something. For a moment she felt surrounded by a different sound, sheer, a papery rustling. Shuffling. She shrank into her bones, working at her breath, each inhalation cutting out shorter than the last.