by Hugo Wilcken
At one point Maureen turned to me: “George never told me how you two became friends.”
“We were at school together. I don’t really remember exactly how we …”
D’Angelo butted in: “David was the smart kid, the popular kid. I was the loner. Truth is I was being bullied. David stuck up for me and got the bullying stopped. No idea why he saw fit to befriend me, but thank God he did.”
The response mystified me—that wasn’t how things had been—but I let it pass. After lunch, I helped wash the dishes, then D’Angelo and I drank some more beer and played a game of chess in the garden. It was hot, but cooling gusts of wind were coming in off the bay, shaking the already browning leaves onto the lawn. After the game, we sat out in deckchairs for a while, mostly in silence. But when I started talking about Esterhazy, I could sense D’Angelo stiffen, his face darken.
“Listen, David. We’ve worked together for a while, haven’t we? It’s been a couple of years now. You trust me, don’t you?”
“ ’Course I do.”
“Well, let me tell you. Esterhazy was damn crazy. He was swinging a broken bottle around and talking all kinds of crap. I’ve seen enough of those guys to know. Yeah, he’d calmed down by the time you turned up. Don’t worry that you did anything wrong signing his papers. You didn’t.”
“I appreciate you saying that. You know I’m not supposed to rely on hearsay …”
D’Angelo cut me off: “Look, we may have some things to talk about, but this is not the right time.”
“One last thing. Tell me about the Stevens Institute.”
“I’ll call you in the week, okay?”
“Sure.”
We lapsed back into silence, but not the comfortable one of before. I could feel the photo D’Angelo had given me in my pocket. I remembered the picnic, but I didn’t remember that picture being taken. Why would D’Angelo have had a camera with him anyway? I was pretty sure I hadn’t invited him; we’d simply bumped into each other on the street or in the Park. Either he’d remembered it wrong, or I had. But what did it matter?
D’Angelo looked at his watch, not in a showy way, but I could tell it was a performance. “Gotta go soon, help a neighbor with some plastering and stuff. You could come …”
“No, it’s been great, but I should be getting back.”
“Okay. Well I’m glad you could make it out. Gotta come down again. Let me call you a cab.”
No offer to drive me to the station. And the idea of the afternoon swim seemed to have gone out the window as well. D’Angelo went to phone, and I got up to say goodbye to the kid, who was playing on an old tire strung up to a tree to make a swing.
D’Angelo’s wife came outside. “George tells me you have to go. What a shame. I’m really pleased you could come. It’s so nice that George has a friend like you.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek again. “Please come again. We’re always around on weekends.” As she spoke, she put her hand on my shoulder and rubbed it slightly, unmistakably.
5
On the train back I took out some work I’d brought, a rough draft of an article I’d wanted to read over. But I couldn’t concentrate. Instead, I stared at the formless vista of suburbs and industry that slipped by as we trundled toward Manhattan. I’d lost confidence in my writing, I realized. It wasn’t because of the difficulty in getting it published. No, the problem was that every time I came to a conclusion, explicitly stated an opinion, the opposite view would always start to look more attractive. And the paper would inevitably end up feeling like an elaborate fiction. Only my very first piece, on Miss Fregoli, had escaped this rule.
We pulled into Penn Station. The mill of people, even on a Sunday, was momentarily disorientating after the graveyard quiet of D’Angelo’s suburb. I climbed the stairs to the main concourse with its gigantic clock, the second hand stuttering forward. One of my earliest memories was of this clock, on a trip from Long Island with my aunt and uncle, at the age of four or five. I gazed at the greenhouse roof high above as the late afternoon sunshine filtered in, spliced by the arched steel frame into a complicated game of light and shadow. I’d always found it comforting to arrive at this station. Its vastness, its Roman solidity. It had been there before I was born, was there as my memory had first been awoken, would be there long after I was dead.
I had that feeling again. That I was being followed, only it was more acute than before. Involuntarily I looked toward the Doric columns at the threshold of the waiting room. A man was standing there. He was wearing an ill-fitting suit and a fedora low over his forehead. I had the impression that I’d caught him looking away, although since a newspaper hid most of his face, how could I tell? But the conviction that this man was following me, and had been doing so for the past couple of days, seized me and wouldn’t let go. I felt hived off into two different people—the one who knew absolutely that he was being followed, and the other who stood beside him, observing, rationalizing the feeling away.
I went into a phone booth and asked the operator to put me through to the Stevens Institute. Moments later a receptionist answered. I cooked up some story to make the receptionist to give me the address—it was somewhere way uptown. I hung up and glanced at the big clock again. It was nearly five.
The man hadn’t moved. I went downstairs to the subway then waited around the corner by the ticket office, all the time telling myself how foolish I was being. When I’d all but given up I saw him again, coming down the same stairs. He was past me and through the turnstiles in a flash. It had all happened in such a whirl that once I’d gotten hold of myself again, it was probably too late to go after him. Or perhaps I didn’t really want to. Still a side of me resisted ceding to this absurd notion that anyone was following me. How could he be, I reasoned, when he’d appeared a good five or six minutes after I’d gone down into the subway. By that time, normally, I might have already left the station.
I jumped on a crowded train. As it worked its way uptown, I reflected on the events of the day. Nothing was any clearer than it had been before lunch. Instead of giving me an outside perspective, seeing D’Angelo had plunged me deeper into myself. I remembered that brief moment of euphoria in the garden, willing myself to believe in D’Angelo’s suburban idyll. I thought about his wife. No doubt she was bored out of her mind in Howard Beach. Bored with her husband coming home so late every evening, bored with their colorless existence. When she’d touched my shoulder, I’d felt a frisson and knew she’d felt it too. I imagined what it would be like to have an affair with her. The Manhattan assignations, the lunchtime cocktails. The afternoons at my apartment. Undressing her, laying her down on my bed. The desire. The cold, mechanical expulsion of it. I shook the idea from my mind.
The sky was a darkening gray. I was somewhere past Columbia. Very few people were around, and no one at all on the tree-lined street that the Stevens Institute was on. That was good, because at least I could now be certain that I wasn’t being followed. I wondered why Esterhazy had been committed this far away; weren’t there several downtown psychiatric hospitals? The Institute was a modest, anonymous-looking building. The one odd thing was that two military guards stood outside the main entrance—that threw me for a moment. I showed them my doctor’s license and when one of them asked if I worked there, I took a chance and said yes. Through the doors I found myself in an atrium. A reception desk at one end was manned by a young man who I assumed was a medical student, earning a few extra bucks on a weekend.
“I’ve come to check on a patient I had committed here two days ago. Here’s my card. The patient’s name is Peter Esterhazy.”
The receptionist had me wait in an area just off the atrium. I looked about, took in the details. Fresh paint, shiny carpet, new chairs. The place had only just been opened or renovated, and was a hell of a lot smarter than your average New York psychiatric hospital. Nobody about, apart from the receptionist, when normally there was a constant to-and-fro in places like these. As if to contradict my thoughts, a woman sudden
ly walked in from behind the receptionist’s desk, crossed the atrium, and went out the front door. For a bizarre moment I’d thought she was Abby, although on second glance the resemblance was quite superficial. In the couple of days since I’d learned of Abby’s death, I’d already had this experience once or twice. I’d had it with former patients as well—mistakenly thinking I’d seen them on the street. As though actors from my past were continually coming back in different form.
“Dr. Manne? I’m afraid I can’t get hold of the resident doctor at the moment. He’s probably gone to dinner. I’m not really supposed to disturb him after six-thirty unless it’s an emergency. Is this an emergency?”
“No. But I’d like to see my patient.”
“Well … the normal practice is to make an appointment beforehand … perhaps I could fix a time for you to see Mr. Esterhazy tomorrow?”
I was regretting saying it wasn’t an emergency. I’d committed Esterhazy for forty-eight hours, and by tomorrow morning he’d either be gone, or no longer under my care.
“I appreciate that this is unusual, but I would like to exercise my right to see my patient. You can check Mr. Esterhazy’s records to verify that he was committed by me.”
“I’ll have to wait until I can get hold of the resident …”
I shook my head. “Under the committal procedures of this state, I have the right to see my patient when I wish. If you won’t allow me that—right now—then I’m afraid I’ll have to take your name and refer the matter to the authorities …”
I’d badly flustered him. I’d been doubly lucky to find the resident absent, and an inexperienced receptionist. He picked up the phone receiver and murmured into it. Within a minute a nurse had appeared. I signed a form and was then led down a long corridor to an elevator. As we walked, I continued to look around, astonished at how perfect everything seemed, when usually these places were so shabby. Surfaces had a high sheen. A sumptuous vase of flowers sat on a corner table—more Madison Avenue advertising agency than psychiatric ward. The nurse too was immaculately groomed, as if she’d just stepped out of a makeup department.
We rode the elevator, walked down another pristine corridor, and then the nurse said: “This is Mr. Esterhazy’s room.”
There was only one bed. The man lying on it was tall and wiry, with thick black hair. The man I’d committed had been tall and wiry, with thick black hair. And yet I wasn’t sure, he looked different in some way. I was about to call in the nurse when he propped himself up and said: “Dr. Manne! Thank God you’ve come!”
I continued looking at him wordlessly. A chart was hanging off the end of his bed. I unhooked it. Marked at the top was “ESTERHAZY, PETER.”
The man seemed perplexed by my silence. “Don’t you know who I am? Downtown apartment. The woman there. Pretended to be my wife. Then they took me here.”
“What’s your name?”
“Smith. You remember me, don’t you?”
A dizziness swept over me. I was staring into myself, full-length in a huge mirror hanging by the bed.
“They’ve drugged me. You’ve got to get me out of here, Doctor.”
I squinted at the chart again. For a few seconds, the letters refused to form words. I shook my head and everything became clear again. The nurse had noted what he’d been given—heavy doses of sedatives. He’d spent the best part of the past two days under sedation, brought around for meals, then put under again.
“When was the last time they gave you pills?”
“Just before you came. You’ll help me, won’t you, Doctor?”
I could already see the sedatives taking effect—his voice slurring, the effort he was making to keep himself vaguely upright.
“Yes,” I said finally. “I’ll help you.”
As I said those words, I realized that I was crossing a frontier. I was in a different world now, and there would be no easy way back.
Now I was in the back of a cab, with the man who had been released to me as Esterhazy. Somehow I’d gotten him up out of bed, into a bathrobe and slippers, down the elevator and along the corridor, with the nurse running behind me, arguing with me, telling me I couldn’t do what I patently was in the middle of doing. Then I’d brazened it out with the receptionist—bullying, threatening, relying on the element of surprise, until finally he’d let me sign the release forms. I’d bundled the man into a cab that had passed moments after I’d heaved him through the front doors. It was a fantastic piece of luck that the resident had been out, and that there’d been no other senior doctor about, probably because it was a Sunday. Even then, I’d thought I’d seen the guards come after us, just as the cab had pulled from the curb.
“What’s up with your friend?”
“Too much to drink, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t want no accidents in my cab.”
“It’ll be fine, don’t worry.”
The man had managed to stay conscious for the time it had taken me to get him out of the Institute. He’d kept murmuring: “You’ll help me, won’t you? You’ll help me?” But now he was gently snoring. I’d gotten through it all on a rush of adrenaline; I was breathing deeply to slow down my heart rate, and even the brief conversation with the cabdriver had felt like a struggle. I peered out the window, taking in random fragments of the city as it flashed by—a broken fire hydrant, an old woman with a dog, a newspaper blowing down the avenue.
The cab slowed and stopped. I was about to ask the cabbie why, but then I noticed we were already outside my building. With great difficulty, I hauled the man up the two flights of stairs, as he fell in and out of consciousness. I unlocked the door. My apartment. There it all was again: chairs, table, books, gramophone records. The incredible strangeness of the overfamiliar. I got the man out of his things, put my pajamas on him, laid him down on my bed, and threw a blanket over him. I stared at his face, as if it were some sort of code I might decipher. But the more I stared, the more indecipherable it became. Nothing to do but let him sleep off the drugs. He could tell me his story tomorrow.
I sat at my small table. I poured myself the last of the whiskey. It had taken a year to drink half of the bottle, two days to drink the other half. I was hungry, but there was nothing to eat in the apartment. There never was; I ate every meal out. I didn’t dare go get something; I didn’t want to leave the man alone right now.
Thoughts bombarded me. Everything had changed, once again. I’d no doubt lost my police work. What I’d done had been unprofessional, if not downright illegal. I risked censure from the Psychiatric Association. It might even mean the end of my career—such as it was. Perhaps that would be no bad thing. After all, if I were truly honest with myself, I knew I was poorly suited to the work. I could go days without really talking to anyone apart from my patients. My ability to distinguish between the normal, the eccentric, and the unwell was itself highly compromised. And each succeeding event of the past couple of days had further distorted my horizon, ever more profoundly. Was it Abby’s death that had done this? The photo D’Angelo had given me was still in my pocket. I took it out. Again she stared at me. A frozen image, detached from the flow of action, always had an uncanny presence.
Eventually I made up a bed for myself in the front room with some spare blankets, and turned the light off. I lay there on the hard floorboards, unable to sleep, staring into the dark. I was wondering about the Stevens Institute. Seeing the guards at the door had jolted a memory. A couple of years back, I’d bumped into an old classmate, somewhere in Murray Hill. We’d been psychiatry interns together at Bellevue. He was in uniform, and I’d asked him what he was up to. He’d said that he’d been working at a military hospital. Setting up an experimental unit there. He’d been vague on the details, and whatever he’d told me about it, I’d long forgotten. In any case, that chance meeting came to mind now, when I thought about the Stevens Institute. Had I heard that name from him? Perhaps that was why it had seemed vaguely familiar to me.
I could hear the hesitant snore. I wasn’t al
one anymore; there was this person in my bedroom. With luck, I’d find out who he really was tomorrow. Or perhaps the mystery would only deepen. He didn’t seem real, in some indefinable way he didn’t even seem like the man I’d had committed. The various threads of thought running through my mind refused to cohere: it was the problem of having no perspective, nothing to measure myself against. In the solitude, in the darkness, it was too easy to lose one’s bearings.
The night wore on interminably. I’d left my wristwatch in the bathroom and the clock was in the bedroom; I couldn’t tell if I’d been lying awake for an hour or for five. Tiredness weighed my body down until it felt like solid lead but consciousness wouldn’t let go of me. At some point I entered an exhausted, disembodied state, neither wakefulness nor sleep. Thoughts became disconnected, dissolved into nightmarish abstraction. It felt as if the deeper I reached into myself, the less I found.
6
The light filtered through the grime of the windowpane and into my eyes. I sat bolt upright. Something was wrong: it was the silence—the absolute silence. I got up, went through to the bedroom. The man was laid out on the bed with his arms by his side, as if a mortician had positioned him like that. In shock, I grabbed his wrist. A weakish pulse—not dead, thank God. Body warm enough; the breathing soundless, irregular. I shook him gently, then more vigorously. He made a noise, a murmur, but didn’t wake up. He wasn’t just sleeping; he’d slipped into some sort of coma. The man was in my bedroom, on my bed, wearing my pajamas. I stood staring at him for a minute or two, at a loss as to what to do.
