The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  After a pause, Leo said, “It can’t be accidental that we bring back dead people we’ve known and loved in our dreams. Surely that’s a form of wishing.”

  Sonia was curled up in a chair. She glanced at Leo as he spoke, then hugged her knees and rocked herself a couple of times. She mouthed a word to herself, but I couldn’t make out what it was.

  We were all silent then. I watched a candle sputter for an instant before it went out. The party was all but over. Sonia whispered that she’d like to see me soon. Leo kissed my sister’s hand, and the gesture looked natural. I’m sure Burton would have liked to do the same, but hand kissing wasn’t in his repetoire. When Inga kissed both his cheeks good-bye, his face flushed to a deep red. My last impression was of my mother watching Inga say goodnight to Henry, her eyes both attentive and wary.

  Miranda and I returned by taxi to the same house. I invited her upstairs for a nightcap. I actually used the word, which sounded strange coming from my mouth, but she turned me down. She kissed me politely on both cheeks, thanked me for a “lovely evening,” and left me to my imaginary exploits, in which she, as usual, played no minor role.

  MY FATHER RETURNED home on the S.S. Milford in early April of 1946, debarked in Seattle, where he ate a small, tough, tasty piece of meat, that was indeed steak, compliments of the Army, and was then hastily discharged from the service. My last serious bout with malaria had started before I boarded the train for home. First comes a burning behind your eyeballs; the chills and fever come later. I shared a seat with a sergeant who was on his way to Camp McCoy in Wisconsin for discharge. From time to time he pulled out a letter, which he read. I could sense that it did not contain good news. Later, when I began to feel better, he told me that his wife had met another man and wanted a divorce. She said it was his fault. He was not pleasant company, but he wanted to talk. The rear car had a platform in back. I forget how we ended up there, but as we leaned on an iron railing and looked into the western horizon we were leaving, he declared—now without any fear of being overheard—that the first thing he would do when he got home was to kill his wife.

  My bewilderment was hardly as neatly packaged as I now explain it. Was this just army big talk? Was it a ploy to see how I would react? Should I find a way to report him? My feelings rose to defense of his wife. I first went through a “You can’t really mean it” speech. I mentioned that at least once a week someone in our unit would get a “Dear John” letter. “Welcome to the club” was about the best my comrades could say. “We’ll put in for a Purple Heart,” said others. “You’ll have to catch the next bus” also passed for army wisdom. I told him I thought his plan was stupid. By the time we reached St. Paul, he had decided first to visit his parents and then a married sister. He would confront his wife later. I made no efforts to report him.

  My father took the bus to Cannon Falls. His father was working his shift at Mineral Springs Sanitarium, and Lotte was at her job in South St. Paul. My grandmother, Uncle Fredrik, and Ragnild Lund were waiting at the station. My mother lost her composure completely when she saw me get off the bus. We had a public scene. Ragnild, whom I barely recognized because she had lost so much weight, looked on with mild embarrassment. There was something strange about Fredrik that at first I couldn’t grasp. He had grown at least six inches since I last saw him. Then we got into Mother’s 1935 Ford and drove home, where nothing had changed save for further deterioration of the buildings—the barn in particular. This was my homecoming.

  My grandmother must have burst into tears. I find this ordinary, but my father, usually compassionate, conveys in this passage irritation at best and shame at worst. Did she weep and wail? Did she throw herself on him? There is something missing. In the following paragraph, he attempts a further explanation: Our mother’s capacity for worry had no boundaries. Even though I knew this, I had failed to understand what she had gone through during my stint overseas. There had been war casualties in our community. As these dreaded telegrams reached families we knew, her fears mounted. Minister Adolph Egge had wept in the pulpit as he delivered memorial sermons over young men he had confirmed. This had caused Mother to wander around in the cellars of despair for days. Father did not know how to deal with it, nor did anyone else for that matter. I have often wondered what impact this had on Fredrik, on Lotte, too, for that matter, but she was older and did not live at home.

  I have a vague memory of my father dismantling the empty barn with Uncle Fredrik. I may be wrong. It’s possible that my father only told me about it, and I provided an image for the story. What is certain is that he didn’t want the dilapidated structure going to ruin on the property. The word eyesore comes to mind. He made sure it was taken down. A matter of pride.

  AFTER TALKING TO Mr. T.’s mother, the attending physician on the ward discovered what I already knew: Mr. T. had stopped taking his drugs. Zyprexa had apparently worked well for his symptoms, but it had also made him obese, and after a year he had found the weight gain and what he described as “a slow head” intolerable. When he stopped suddenly, it had precipitated the psychotic break I witnessed. They were trying risperidone, which seemed reasonable. Dr. N. was in a hurry, and when I asked him about Mr. T.’s writing, he alluded to “thought disorder,” and that was the end of it. While he was my patient, Mr. T. had aroused my sympathy and later, my affection. His paternal grandparents had survived the Nazi death camps, but his father had never spoken of it. I returned to my old notes. The first words he had ever spoken to me were “The ground is screaming.”

  THE STORY MS. L. told me was that when she was very little, “about two,” her mother had dragged her out of her crib in the middle of the night and had thrown her against the wall again and again “like a rag doll.” The memory had returned to her all at once. She kept seeing it over and over. When she finished telling me this, she said, “It was attempted murder,” and the trace of a smile appeared on her face.

  I have treated many patients who were hurt as children—beaten, raped, sexually molested—but I immediately sensed that there was something wrong with Ms. L.’s tale. Infantile amnesia prevents explicit memories from such an early age, although sometimes people mistake later events for earlier ones. The words “like a rag doll” also disturbed me: they suggested that she was watching rather than participating in the scene. This kind of dissociated vision can happen when people are severely traumatized, but her following reference to “attempted murder” had the ring of a courtroom, and the tiny grin after relating the memory alerted me to its sadistic value for her. It was as if I, not she, were the rag doll.

  When I articulated these doubts, she went silent for three minutes, staring at me with dead eyes. I reminded her that we had an agreement. If she had nothing in particular to say, she should say whatever came to mind. The words I hate you came to my mind, and I felt the pronoun slide between us. You hate me. What did I mean?

  Ms. L. began stroking her thighs as she continued to look straight at me. Then she began to knead them. The effect was immediate. I felt aroused and had a sudden fantasy of slapping her hard and pushing her off the chair to the floor. She grinned, and I had the distinct impression she was reading my thoughts. Her hands stopped moving. When I told her I thought her seductive gestures might be an effort to control me, Ms. L. said, “Did you know my stepmother’s been snooping around in my building and lying about me to my neighbors?”

  When I asked her what evidence she had for thinking this, she barked, “I know it. If you don’t trust me, what’s the point?”

  That was exactly the point, but my saying so led to another wall.

  After she left, I felt disoriented. Ms. L.’s delusions, paranoia, and what I feared were lies affected me like a man lost in a poisonous fog as he desperately searches for a way out. At the end of the day, I called and left a message for Magda. I knew I needed help with Ms. L. On the subway platform, I found it hard to think, except in fragments, and as the train roared into the station, I had the terrible thought that its screeching wh
eels sounded human.

  EXACTLY A WEEK after the dinner party, I was awakened by noises on the floor above my bedroom. I had been dreaming that I was building a contraption with a pulley that would facilitate retrieving books in my library. A lifelike hand was attached to the end of my device, but when I tried to use it to reach for a volume, the fingers withered into useless stumps. Half conscious, I thought at first that I was hearing my mother’s footsteps above me, but then I remembered she was staying at Inga’s. Perhaps someone was pacing next door. Sound is often hard to track in brownstones. It wouldn’t have been the first time I had been fooled. I sat up, held my breath, and listened. No, the steps were above me, coming through my ceiling. Someone was in my study. I had an intruder. As quietly as possible, I dialed 911 and whispered the information into the phone. The dispatcher said “I can’t hear you” several times, but I finally made her understand the address and the situation. In the next moments, I weighed the consequences of action. If I lay still, the robber might take what he wanted and leave. But as I heard him moving upstairs, I remembered the hammer I had left in the closet after mounting an extra hook inside the door. It is terrible to try to move silently in the dead of night when every noise is magnified, but I managed to move to the closet, open it with a single squeak, and grab the hammer. Then I stepped toward the door, opened it slightly, and poised myself inside for a view of the hallway and stairs. I knew that if he tried to descend those stairs, each tread would creak. Motionless, I waited. The person came down slowly, pausing between steps. It seemed to go on for a long time. Finally, I saw a large sneaker, followed by a naked leg and the bottom of a pair of wide shorts, between the rungs of the stairway. This lower body was only dimly illuminated from the skylight above. My lungs had tightened into two nearly airless sacks, and I consciously took a single breath so as not to get dizzy. Then I saw hands, bearing no weapon, followed by a lean torso in a loose T-shirt. The man was inching cautiously down the stairs as they groaned loudly. He kept his hand on the railing until he finally reached the landing and then paused. Slowly, carefully, he continued down the hallway in my direction. There was a nightlight shining from the open bathroom door, and it illuminated the face of a young man with black hair and tan skin, at least six inches shorter than I am. About four feet away from my door, I saw him put his hand in his pocket, and I leapt into the hallway, hammer raised. As I yelled, “What the hell are you doing in my house!” I noticed that the thing the man had taken from his pocket was a small digital camera, and in that same instant I understood that I was face to face with Jeffrey Lane. The revelation caused me to lower the hammer. Then I froze. He saw his chance, turned and ran, but had the gall to stop and photograph me. My rage reignited, I chased him up the stairs, howling that I’d called the police. He took the stairs two at a time, raced around the landing, thrust open the door to the roof and dashed up the steel ladder with me at his heels. As I mounted the ladder, I looked up and saw that the hatch was open. I lunged for his foot, but he was too fast for me. By the time I scrambled to the roof, he was racing past the neighbor’s chimney; I watched, panting, as he flew down the row of houses and disappeared.

  I told the police everything, except that I knew, or thought I knew, the identity of the intruder and that he had taken photographs. Lying to the officers made me feel uncomfortable. At the same time, I noticed how smoothly I did it, as if it were business as usual. Only seconds after the words were out of my mouth, however, I began to wonder whether my protection of Miranda had been misplaced. A man who breaks into people’s houses and takes pictures should be arrested, shouldn’t he? And yet I knew I had done something stupid. The Sunday before, I had gone up to check the condition of the skylight because I had noticed a small leak during a rainstorm. I had made several trips with sealant and brush to reinforce the cracked tar and must have forgotten to lock the hatch when I was finished.

  After the police had taken my statement and politely acknowledged that such incidents rarely result in an arrest, I returned to the kitchen, poured myself some red wine, and drank it slowly. I might have killed the man if I hadn’t seen the camera. He had taken a stupid risk. Was he trying to get to Miranda? What was he doing in my study? As I mulled over the incident, it seemed that I remembered something in his face just after he took my picture—an expression of excitement? No. I assigned it another word: glee. For an instant, Miranda’s ex-lover, Eglantine’s father, had looked gleeful. For him, I thought, photography is a form of thievery, a raid that acts as a stimulant. He was a man in the business of stealing appearances.

  “IT SOUNDS LIKE something he’d do, and at the same time it doesn’t,” Miranda said. “He told me once that when he was in high school, he used to steal from stores, not because he wanted the things, but because it was an act of rebellion against consumer culture.” She paused. “We argued about it. He called me a ‘rigid moralistic prude.’ ” As she pronounced his condemnation, she smiled. “He didn’t take anything from you, did he?”

  “Nothing is missing, as far as I know.” We were sitting in Miranda’s front room. Eglantine was in the garden. I could hear her singing. “I think he was looking for you.”

  “You know what I think? He probably wanted to photograph the house, maybe get into our apartment and take pictures of me and Eggy asleep.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, he likes to take pictures of people sleeping. He likes it because the subjects don’t know, because they’re vulnerable.”

  “But you’re not afraid of him?”

  “I don’t think he’d hurt us, if that’s what you mean.” Miranda looked away for a moment. It was difficult to know what she felt or didn’t feel for Lane. After a few seconds of silence, I asked to see some of her dream drawings.

  Despite my earlier glimpse of Miranda’s monster, I didn’t know what to expect. She explained that for dreams she liked a form with framed boxes to tell the story. The first panel took up an entire page. I looked down at a large, meticulously rendered interior stairway, colored in cool blues. Its precision and detail made me think of the Superman comics I had hidden under my mattress as a boy. Miranda had used pen, colored pencils, and some watercolors. After a moment, I noticed that the perspective was slightly wrong, that is to say, it didn’t follow the rules we have come to expect, and this slight alteration created the dream effect Miranda had mentioned at the dinner. Near the top was a narrow red door, its angle also tilted. The second drawing was of a large room with a lone piece of furniture: an iron bed with a tattered, striped mattress. High above it was a single window with four panes. In the next drawing, the bed was viewed from above, and a person had appeared in it, a frail old person whose body was covered by a sheet. I wasn’t sure whether it was a man or a woman, but the pale figure’s head was tiny and shriveled, rather like a shrunken head I had seen once, except that this one was the color of cream turning to butter—a whitish yellow. Under the sheet, one could see the outline of a tiny body curled up in the fetal position. In the final image, the sheet had been pulled away, and although the head remained, the exposed body now overwhelmed the narrow bed: the miniature head was attached to a robust female torso with long, athletic limbs, colored a deep brown. One of the feet was chained to the bedpost. The wizened pinhead on the voluptuous body was grotesque, and I made a sound of surprise.

  “I know,” Miranda said, “it’s awful, and I think it was even worse in the dream. I was terrified. I drew a sketch of the head right away, but while I was working on the sequence, I suddenly understood where it came from. I’ve been reading a lot of Jamaican history.” She pointed to the wrinkled skull, “This is like the little white colonial head that wanted to rule the huge black body of Jamaica. Look, one foot is chained, enslaved, the other is free, like the Maroons. It’s as if my brain collapsed it all into a single horrible figure.” She paused. “But I also think that the tiny old head and body in this part,” Miranda traced the covered body with her finger, “must have come from my gran. She got so little when she
was dying, Mum said it was like holding a child at the end. Her grandfather was a white man, so you see, it’s all mixed up, and there’s Indian blood in the family, too. Gran was many things. She went to Anglican schools, read English poets, and was big on propriety and manners. Her daughters and granddaughters were going to be perfect ladies. At the same time, she knew a lot about herbal cures and loved to tell stories about duppies.”

  “Duppies?”

  “Ghosts, spirits.”

  “My grandmother used to hear my grandfather’s ghost walking in and out of the house. She swore that his hat came and went with him.”

  I had hoped to see more dreams, but Eggy ran into us, and bouncing up and down in front of her mother, she said, “Please, Mommy, please, can we go to the park, please?”

  The three of us walked in Prospect Park for about two hours, making a great loop through the meadow to the pond, and then we pushed into the woods on paths I had never taken before. Miranda and I walked. Eggy skipped, twirled, did lopsided cartwheels, and ran. After asking permission from the owners, she petted every dog we passed. She called to the ducks, complimented pedestrians on their clothes: “That’s a lovely hat,” “I like your dress,” “Cute sneakers,” and made it generally impossible for the three of us to pass any human being or animal unnoticed. As I watched the child in front of me, memories of the night before returned intermittently to my mind, but even when I wasn’t actively recalling the man who had come through the roof, I understood that the encounter had left its trace in my body, an aftermath of anxiety that made me quicken to noises and sensitive to people near us. Several times, I turned my head to identify the source of footsteps. Although we said nothing, I felt that Miranda was skittish, too. When Eggy pursued a squirrel off the path and disappeared into the brush, Miranda called her back in a high-pitched tone I had never heard her use before. Eggy jumped out immediately. “Mommy,” she said, looking up at Miranda with a puzzled face. “I’m here. I’m here. Don’t worry.” Miranda looked embarrassed. She bent over and smiled at her daughter. “I have to keep track of you, that’s all, so don’t disappear.”