by Robin Winter
"Don't project your judgments on me," she said. She wanted to say more, but the words tangled.
Lowenstein adjusted the ice on his knuckles. "Let me be blunt. Improvement has been slow, slower than I'd hoped. I think Wilton's better—we know she conceals it. But I don't think she'll ever be competent to be released. I'll keep you apprised. I promise."
"But how can you believe her…She's unbalanced and damaged."
"Maybe this began a long time ago. Before the war. Did her friends accommodate a friend's mild instability, or were they willfully blind?"
Gilman could only shake her head. She remembered the anticipation, the glowing promise of a world to make their own. She couldn't equate it with insanity. She pushed back the chair and stood, and felt his scrutiny like a physical thing. She replaced the chair exactly as it had been before she sat.
"Send us your new address," he said.
"Protect her," Gilman said. "If she gets better she could be in danger. If anyone should come for her, give me your word you'll help her get away. I know it sounds crazy, but promise."
Gilman returned to her apartment and took a long hot shower and drank three tumblers of whiskey, neat. That would put her to sleep.
She didn't dream. In the morning a few minutes after four she woke suddenly and completely, her head pounding, stomach acid. Was that whiskey or her remembered conversation with Lowenstein? She pulled on her clothes, boots and jacket and plunged down the stairs out into the blue cold of the city.
Gilman walked along the street. Confusion kept her vacillating between rage and panicky loneliness. The air blew chill. The streets littered with trash seemed sordid, hard beneath her heels.
Two hours later, Gilman let herself back into the apartment, cold and drained. Lunatic. She'd never thought about muggers or vagrants on that walk. She wasn't safe to let out alone. She remembered Sandy saying that about her once so long ago back at Wellesley when she'd failed a quiz and taken a walk without her jacket in February. Frost bit her earlobe that time. It throbbed now.
Gilman began to sort her choices while brewing coffee. She made toast. Some weeks ago she'd received an invitation to come as a visiting lecturer in tropical disease in London. She would go. Of course she would. There was nothing left to hold her in America now. Telephone calls, an acceptance and a resignation, passport check and visa. There was a lot to do in the next few days. She'd figure out some way to get her revolver cleared to go with her. Or she'd smuggle it some way. She wouldn't feel right without it.
The illuminated clock face said three. With a curse, Gilman threw back her blankets and got up. There was no use trying to sleep tonight. In twenty hours she would be on her plane to London. She opened the door into the living room and felt suddenly, irrationally, terrified. The absolute darkness and unnatural silence emphasized her isolation. She switched on the light, shielding her eyes from the brightness, half afraid that she'd uncover some grotesque presence in the living room. Of course there wasn't anyone there. She checked the lock and deadbolt on the door, then mixed herself a drink and sat down with one of the journals she'd been meaning to toss out. Rates of gastrointestinal absorption in barbiturate poisoning. A nice complicated graph to examine. The drink tasted foul but it did warm her stomach. She'd have ulcers if she kept drinking like this. She really wanted a cigarette.
A muffled sound came from the hall. Gilman shut the magazine to stare at the locks on the door. No one can get in, she told herself. She'd just checked them. The sound came again, and continued, resolving itself into slowly approaching footsteps. She heard herself make a small noise of fear, and it terrified her.
She leapt from her chair, intending to call the building supervisor, but when the footsteps stopped outside her door, she froze in the center of the room. The hinged mail slot on the door moved, clanked once, twice. She shut her eyes. A thud, then the tread of retreating footsteps. After several minutes of silence, Gilman opened her eyes. A manila envelope lay on the floor.
She hurried back to her bedroom, slid her revolver from under the pillow before she returned to the living room. She stared at the envelope as though she expected it to move, then advanced to pick it up. The gun gave her courage. Didn't matter that there was no one to shoot.
The envelope had her name in Lindsey's handwriting. No postage. God, Lindsey knew where she was.
Trembling now, Gilman carried it back to a chair and sat down. She laid the gun carefully on the broad arm of the chair and contemplated the envelope for a long time before marshaling her cold fingers to open it. She broke the seal, dumped it into her lap.
Two photographs. An old shot of Sandy, lounging against a door frame, her cap pulled down over her eyes, her grin easy. Then a sickening familiar scene, Jantor's corpse as she had left it for part of that long afternoon in the makeshift hospital—only someone had uncovered it to display his chalky face. She turned the photo over to hide the image and there was a note on the back.
"Madam,
"While the cadaver has been stripped of papers we have a positive identification that this is the man referred to in your bulletin. I hope you will accept this photograph as proof that the mercenary's incompetence has rendered our further interference unnecessary."
Gilman flung the repulsive photograph across the room. Gasping, she threw herself back into the chair, her fingers digging into the cushions. She sat there, biting her lips to keep herself from crying aloud. Gradually her breathing quieted, she straightened up. Her hand fell on the cool metal of the revolver.
She raised it, released the safety, and held it before her face. She strained to see what was down the black bore of the weapon. The undiscovered country, Gilman recalled her high-school Hamlet. Only pull the trigger and the world would explode into nothingness. Blissful nothingness.
She could use a rest. There was no one left who would be too sorry. Lowenstein might regret that he hadn't seen it coming, but psychiatrists must be used to that. Lindsey would look after Wilton.
But Lindsey would be pleased. This act would be Gilman's confession to Sandy's murder. She would not commit suicide to oblige Lindsey, no matter how it hurt to stay alive.
Gilman replaced the catch on the revolver and set it down. The urge to shoot something was still strong upon her.
"Close, Lindsey," she said between clenched teeth. "But I'm getting out of here. Beyond your reach."
Gilman stood by a window in the airport and couldn't suppress a shudder. Night masked the gray asphalt and only the bright rich stars of blue lining the runways competed with the glowing colored lights of the planes. But it wasn't the dramatic patterns that affected Gilman. The rising whine of an accelerating jet came to her ears and she felt her hands tighten on the flesh of her upper arms.
She uncrossed them. Another journey, another country, another purpose. Lindsey might look for her but why? They had nothing to say to each other. She supposed Lindsey was jealous when she thought Gilman might be happy again in the States with Wilton. Little did Lindsey know that all Wilton wanted was to kill her. She'd tried to tell Wilton good-bye, as Lowenstein had instructed, but the lack of response had left her emptier than before.
Yet did any of it matter? She felt in a flash of depression that all she had were the dregs of her life. In the last moments before her flight began boarding, panic surged. Perhaps she shouldn't be so rash. What would she find in London that she needed? What of the loneliness?
The loud announcement brought her with nervous alacrity back to her bags. She hefted one in each hand, clutching her boarding pass between two fingers, and started for the gate and the smiling brunette stewardess in high heels.
Chapter 101: Wilton
November 1971
Massachusetts, USA
Wilton sat in the cold on Lowenstein's hospital porch with her hands lying quiet in her lap, an attendant standing by. She sometimes knew he was there, but most of her days it didn't matter. She was really somewhere else, and the New England breeze made no impression on her skin.
The air was hot in the other world where Wilton was. Still afternoons—afternoons of sunlight and shade. Stripes of indigo running up and down the porch, woven thick beneath the palms, spots and dribbles under the vines. Lizards all in black, still upon the burning stones, their scrabble faded to nothing in the heat of the sun. And then, in the center of this place, a sound. Out from all those shadows. Distant, and like the drop, drop of water. Just a few notes in shifting cadence, like a spell to break the stillness. Such a song in the white sunlight. A cold song, so welcome, the drip of ice in the deepest of the hollows.
Some days she heard it still, and saw the ghosts that carried the music on. Even here, in a land apart they came to her. This song she would hear forever, plucked from steel, a metal-fingered hand piano boxed in wood carved and polished by the hands of uncounted players.
What instruments do ghosts play with their bent bones? Do the broken things of another day leave echoes too? She knew they must. She heard their sound.
Wilton kept her hands tucked under her arms so that she would know exactly where they were. Lowenstein seemed withdrawn today, quiet, as if the rain depressed him. He would not remain so long. She looked out the window, seeing the Nigerian, Leviticus, working on the trimming of bushes. They spoke sometimes about Biafra and Nigeria. She would talk today, but not to him. It was the doctor's turn.
"Wilton," he said. "How do you feel?"
"Well," she said simply. "But not so deep as water."
She was well, well enough. She could follow an idea, stay in this room instead of going away to other places. She could walk and his men had learned not to touch her unless she began to fall. She was better, they were better. Now that Gilman had gone away she didn't need to concern herself with secrets. It was too late for Lowenstein to interfere with Gilman now.
"I'm glad."
He said a number of other unimportant things before she turned to him and stared into his face. Old comfortable face, but the eyes not so comfortable. He had lines and the flesh had weight upon his cheeks, his eyebrows hedged thick over his spectacles. His blue eyes looked back, startled. She was sure he wore that old plaid flannel shirt to put his patients at ease.
"I'm willing to speak," she said. "Gilman only told you true things. You wondered, you put a little mark against her words in your brain, meaning check this, check that. Any errors she made were only about things she didn't know. There hasn't been a willing lie in anything she said."
She could see him taking notes now in his crabbed code. Could imagine his attention to details. Speech, coherent, connected. Linear thought process. No impairment of diction.
"Gilman did not know everything. She wasn't aware of the relationship between Lindsey and Sandy and how it decayed."
"They were…?"
"No, they were not," she said, amused. "Psychiatrists have such base minds. No. Sandy lost her influence on Lindsey. That was the tragedy. Lindsey had her own ways and didn't want anyone's conscience holding her back. Now she'll have to face Gilman again and that will be terrible."
"Lindsey and Sandy," Wilton said. "They were such friends. But Lindsey's human ambition ruined that. Sandy knew it was gone. Lindsey didn't. She was too busy consolidating her power."
Her wrists ached, so she let her arms relax, hands slipping down to lie curled like old leaves in her lap.
"Gilman's returned." Wilton realized she'd raised her voice. God's words. "I would have given her over, but God made it clear he did not want her first. She goes to her destiny.
"God will give her peace." she said.
When Lowenstein came in two days later, Wilton sat by the window looking out, watching Leviticus. He worked frequently where she could see him. Lowenstein moved to come across her field of vision while he was still some steps away, but she had heard the security buzzer when he entered. She touched the beaten cardboard box on the seat cushion of the chair opposite hers.
"How are you feeling?" he said.
"You can open the box now," she said, "and I will tell you a story to go with each item that you find."
She chuckled inside to see how careful he was, how he made sure not to rush. But he wanted to. He sat down at her side and picked up the heavy cardboard box, setting it on the coffee table between them.
"First," she said, nodding.
Lowenstein laid back the flaps and drew out a sheet of watercolor paper. A painting of a pair of birds, small and vivid, an effect of iridescence on the male. They had been stopped in midmotion, one with its curved beak plunged into the heart of a white flower.
"Splendid Sunbird—Cinnyris coccinigaster. Lovely birds, painted from life and specimens held at the University of Ife in Ibadan. A pity about the raindrops that smudged the painting, but it is an original."
"So beautiful," Lowenstein said.
"This is my work," she said. "This is what I did. I lost most of the sheets over the years, but these few I kept. For old times' sake. For more than that. This was to be my book."
He gazed at the birds and the painted leaves twisting as if in a breeze.
"If you like, you can rub a bit of the gouache away from the male's breast by using water and a sponge," Wilton said. She invited him in with her manner. She calculated his response. She aimed to be as cogent and precise as a woman at a tea party, the courtesy in her voice almost warm, almost kind. "These sunbirds were painted over a miniaturized detail map of the supports of the Niger Bridge, Eastern side, with notes for the placement of explosives."
"How did you…?"
"Informers," Wilton said. "Arrested afterwards."
"What happened to them?"
"They were shot. They had no value left. It's simpler that way."
"But which side were you on?" he said as if couldn't stop himself.
"Both," she said. "The war had to end, sooner not later, and that was all I worked for. Peace requires death." She smiled at him. "Maybe you can't believe me, can you? Well, that will be far more entertaining."
She looked out of the window again, becoming still. There was Leviticus, bundled up against the chill, raking up leaves, only his black face showing how exotic he really was here.
She wanted Lowenstein to think a little, reflect on what she had said and let it lodge deep. When he moved slightly, she looked back at him.
"There's no need to be so slow," she said, and she used again the British schoolmarm to inform her voice and the crispness of her consonants. "Let's get on with the next story."
He pulled out a page with two great tawny hawks upon it.
"Ah," Wilton said. "I loved these black kites. Milvus migrans parasitus. One of the loveliest sights of my life was to see them winging mere inches from the slope of a rounded green African hill, snatching insects from the air. A hatch of termites, I believe. Oh, not those pitiful things you call termites here. These as long as a joint of your finger, with wings glittering like glass in the air. The famished birds swooped near, playing tag with their own racing shadows. I have always wanted to describe that to someone."
Chapter 102: Gilman
November 1971
London, England
Gilman flipped a patient's chart, smiling at the intern beside her. His red hair and freckles made her imagine how he would sunburn when he hit the tropics.
"Great stuff, these new antimalarial drugs. When you get to Africa, when you need them the most, you won't have them. The fever won't fall overnight like this. You'll be wrapping your patients in cold wet sheets to keep them from burning up—if you can get water and maybe ice to do it. But evaporative cooling's a great thing. Even without ice you can save lives."
In his face she read her past youthful longing for the adventure. To visit an alien and savage land and try one's hand against the most primitive medical conditions—to be medicine man, shaman, high priest to a desperate people. A wave of nausea washed over her, beading her forehead with a cold sweat. She turned aside and nodding goodnight, made her way blindly to the doctor's cloakroom.
&nbs
p; She leaned against the doorway to the cloakroom, pressed her face against the cool mahogany frame.
"Doctor Gilman," the young intern called. "Are you all right? You look ill."
"I'm fine, David, fine. Just a bit tired. It's been a long day."
She stood straight and smiled at him until he turned back on his way, but a sea of nightmares rocked her stomach. Jantor standing stone faced at the foot of her cot. Explosions and screams in the deep and dripping bush beyond the frail lantern light. Wilton…don't blame yourself, Jantor said. How funny. A mercenary learning all the doctor's book of soothing and trite expressions. All the medicines in the world couldn't have stopped the loss of Wilton's incredibly fine mind. And Sandy, who died so terribly…Stop it, I could have stopped it. Stopped all of it, from the beginning.
Gilman groped for her raincoat in the cloakroom. Pull yourself together. She steadied her hands with an effort, knotting her thick hair at the back of her neck and tying a scarf over it. You could have played bridge in a New York suburb.
She buttoned her raincoat and stared out over the ward. The warmth of the aged wood of the teaching hospital in the soft yellow glow of the night lighting steadied her. She looked along the frayed and shiny green cloths hanging from the bed screens, the lofty ceilings, the row of beds, and their sleeping occupants. The ward had become home.
London was free of associations. Since leaving Wilton in Dr. Lowenstein's care six months ago, she'd plunged herself into working the wards and giving lectures at the London Institute of Tropical Medicine, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.
When she left the hospital at night she retired to a pub in Baker Street for a late meal and two pints of draught beer, tossed off like medicine to induce sleep. Then to her apartment in a shabby mews, where on good nights she slept a fitful five hours and on bad read medical journals until dawn. But tonight when she reached her flat, a little drowsy from the beer, a note was stuck to her door.
