Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  I had already been swallowed long ago.

  I was an organ inside its body.

  I twisted the shoelace, threaded it between my fingers.

  The shoelace.

  It wasn’t long before the sky was completely dark, and I could hear almost nothing in my immediate surroundings. The sound around me dropped away to an icy stillness, and I heard only the cars on the highway, the faraway whir of the engines. I saw lights moving overhead and thought of my father in his little seaplane, flying somewhere. Perhaps Eric had placed surveillance devices, electronic birds and metallic field mice, all listening to the sounds of the forest, all trying to detect my whereabouts. Overhead were satellites watching the movement of the trees. Somewhere, my father piloted his little plane through the flat, backdrop sky. If I stayed perfectly quiet, I thought, and did not move, they couldn’t find me.

  I’d had to sacrifice my mother. I knew the woods wanted her, and I wanted to help, but she was gone for now, Eric having made the move before I could find my way to her. He had simply gotten to her first.

  Nothing made sense anymore. But everything made perfect sense.

  “What is wrong with him?” my mother was saying right now.

  Eric remained silent. He turned the radio on to an all-news station.

  Hannah put a hand over one of her eyes. “And what’s wrong with me?” The cancer cells inside her brain divided and multiplied, tendrils of aberrant DNA curling around her optical neurons. Her eyesight disintegrated one more degree.

  “I think maybe we should schedule an MRI,” Eric said.

  “Do you think it’s neurological?”

  “Well.” He was driving his sleek black Jaguar sedan. I could feel that automobile moving smoothly, animal-like, through the faraway streets. “I don’t know.” I could see out through Eric’s eyes.

  “Is it a symptom of something you’ve heard of?”

  “I just want to make sure,” he said.

  Hannah looked out of the window. “Where’s Pilot?”

  “He’s probably on his way back by now. Maybe he discovered your car, saw that it was empty—”

  “Do you think we should have waited?”

  “I want to get you home. Are you still seeing ghosts?”

  “Yes.” Our mother began to sing, “Yes, I am, yes, I am, yes, I am.”

  “Please,” Eric said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t hear the radio.”

  She stopped. They listened to the announcer, who described break-ins and robberies, car heists, and drug seizures. There was a new war in a Latin American country. There was civil unrest in the Middle East. There was a whole new country in the Balkans. Someone had detonated a bomb at a local high school. Innocent animals were being tortured, it turned out, in the name of science. A group of scientists had found a way to extend the existence of human cells far beyond their natural life. There was reason for alarm, celebration, and dismay. My brother adjusted the balance. He fine-tuned the reception. This was, after all, a Blaupunkt. He drove his Jaguar sedan evenly, deliberately, the engine droning like a politician’s speech.

  “Mom,” he said during a commercial break, “do me a favor. Cover each eye and then tell me if you see any ghosts.”

  Our mother covered her right eye. “Ghosts,” she said.

  “Now your other one.”

  “More ghosts.”

  Eric nodded.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that it’s probably neurological. Aside from seeing double images, do things seem unfocused?”

  It was cancer.

  “Blurry?” she asked.

  “Yes, blurry.”

  She said, “Maybe a little.”

  They pulled into Hannah’s driveway. They did not notice the woods receding into the background, slipping away from the house like a wave returning to the ocean, like one animal that has been stalking another and isn’t quite ready to strike. Like the meaning of a word that escapes you. They got out of Eric’s car. “Can you walk okay?”

  “I can walk,” our mother said. “For Christ’s sake, I can walk.”

  “I’m just trying to help.”

  “I’m not dead yet,” she snapped.

  “Would you relax?”

  “Where’s Pilot? Where the hell is your brother?”

  I had twisted the shoelace around and around my finger until I felt like it would explode. I huddled down against the rough, damp trunk of a tree so no one could detect me. I knew what she meant. I knew exactly what our mother meant.

  I wasn’t dead yet, either.

  They waited. Hannah paced back and forth across the old blue-and-white oriental carpet, humming nervously, her eyes unfocused, her ankles making that crick-crick-cricking sound. Eric sat on the old blue couch with his elbows on his knees and his fingers touching each other, tip to tip, like a spider and its reflection, his eyes on the door. It’s hard for me to imagine what he was expecting at this moment. Would I walk through the door, sneakers covered in mud? Would I stay gone forever? He went to the kitchen and straightened things up, compulsively washing the cups in the sink, the pot of coffee on the stove. Had he been in this kitchen only this morning? When he went back out to the living room, our mother was holding the door open, peering into the dark front yard. “Mom, he probably won’t even come in that way.” Eric walked to the door and pulled it closed. She sighed and went back to pacing across the oriental.

  Eventually, my brother suggested she take an aspirin and lie down, that it might make the ghosts go away. She nodded, finding a blue Valium in her purse. But she couldn’t lie down, she said.

  “I have to go.” Eric held his hands out.

  “Go,” she said.

  And Eric left.

  And so she waited alone, ghosts everywhere, doubles of everything.

  And by eight o’clock I was still gone.

  And by nine.

  And by ten o’clock that night our mother had waited long enough. Long enough, she told herself.

  At eleven she called Eric.

  “He’s not back yet?” My brother’s voice was filled with incredulity, but not panic.

  “I thought he might have taken the car to your house.” Her voice was panicked.

  “No,” Eric said. “He’s not here. Besides, does he even have a set of keys for the Mercedes? And why would he come here?”

  Our mother made a high-pitched whimpering noise.

  “Mom,” Eric said. “Stay calm.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He probably took the car somewhere.” Eric sighed. “I’ll drive by and see if it’s still out there.”

  But I hadn’t taken the car.

  I was in the woods, experiencing one amazing realization after another.

  I was comprehending things.

  Understanding.

  Our mother sat in Dad’s old blue wing chair by the window with her hand covering her mouth, holding in a scream. This is what happened before, she was telling herself. This is exactly how it had felt when Fiona—

  Twenty minutes later, Eric drove his Jag by our mother’s car on Sky Highway. Naturally, the Mercedes remained exactly where she had left it. He drove to our mother’s house to see if I had returned in the meantime.

  And of course I had not.

  So Eric picked up the black, rotary-dial phone that sat heavily on the end table, and, with a look of resignation, he called the police.

  She waited with the telephone in her lap—black, heavy, rotary-dial. Where did it come from? She waited while she paced every inch of the house, her feet touching every inch of floor, every weave of carpet. She waited while sitting in my room on the edge of my bed, looking at the pile of books and magazines I had left there, the National Geographics, the Smithsonians, the Playboy I had sneaked in under my shirt a few weeks ago. She waited and refused food, instead drinking endless cups of tea, all day and all night, ceaselessly, falling into a near-trance to take the place of sleep. She kept all the radios and te
levisions on. She listened to the local news. She saw those ghosts, double images of everything, shimmery and translucent. She saw two living room couches, two dining room tables. Our mother saw two pool/gardens in our backyard. She saw four police detectives at the front door, but when she let them in she heard only two voices. She tried to remain calm but her hand kept flying to her mouth and these sounds—these sounds, just the beginning of something, something high-pitched and awful— kept coming out of her. She kept telling herself, Not again, not again, this can’t be happening again. She saw two Erics sitting on the blue couch. “Mom,” he kept arguing, “you have to tell him.”

  “When he comes back, when we find him, I’ll tell him then.” She meant my father. She hadn’t told my father I was missing.

  “I’m going to tell him.”

  “No,” our mother said, “you will not.”

  Eric sighed, rubbed his hands together. “Are you seeing the ghosts?”

  There were two couches, two blue wing chairs, two Erics, two of everything. “I’m seeing them right now.” Her eyes were filled with tears, as well, blurring the edges.

  “Stress,” he said. “It’s just stress.”

  There was a doubling of cancer cells at that moment deep inside the ganglia of nerves that let images travel electrically from her eye to her brain. They twisted like a helix around and around the wires leading to her eyes. Like the shoelace around and around my finger.

  “Go out,” Hannah told him, tears on her cheeks, finger pointing to the woods. “Go out and find your brother, goddamn it.”

  Eric reached for his jacket.

  Our mother put her hands to her face and said, “This couldn’t possibly be happening again, this couldn’t possibly be happening to me again.”

  After he left, she stood at the kitchen counter and looked at the woods, filled with double trees, double branches, double everything, and she knew that I was somewhere inside them, swallowed whole, knew I had been taken the same way Fiona had.

  Imperceptibly, without her knowledge, without her seeing, the woods crept closer, waiting for her to turn away from the window, just for a split second, so they could roll over her, take her and the whole neighborhood with her.

  She boiled another kettle of water. She poured another cup of tea.

  Across the woods, across the highway, across a parking lot of dull sedans, a cheap telephone was pressed hard to a woman’s delicate ear. And her eyes were closed, and her voice was hoarse, and she would be talking like this—arguing like this—for hours. And it was only this woman—Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy, her fingernails bitten beyond the quick, the acrid and strong taste of blood on her lips—it was only Katherine who could save me.

  The telephone rang and she was on it instantly. “Yes?”

  “They found him.”

  Our mother breathed in a jagged breath. “… oh God, oh God….”

  “He’s, he’s had an episode.” It was Eric.

  “An episode?” Our mother sank into the wing chair, one hand to her forehead. “What do you mean? Is he all right?” She looked up and saw the ghost of the black, rotary-dial telephone on the ghost end table. In the background, she heard voices speaking over an intercom, that faint institutional hum. She knew exactly where Eric was calling from.

  “Pilot—he’s, he’s physically all right. I mean, there’s nothing to worry about.” His voice was rushed, a vein of worry running through it, a hint of warning. “He’s not harmed or anything. He hasn’t been hurt,” he said. “He’s just—”

  “Just what?” Hannah looked at the picture window, silvery and reflective, and at the black sky outside. Where had I been? she wondered. Where the hell had I been?

  “He’s just sort of gone over the edge.”

  “Over the edge? Sort of?”

  Eric was regaining composure, formulating a theory. “It’s like he’s experienced some kind of psychotic break.” He allowed a pause. “Or something.” Right now he stood in the lobby of the East Meadow Community Hospital Emergency Services Center.

  “Or something.” Our mother nodded, repeating him, running her thin fingers through her thinning, graying hair. Then she put her hand on the back of her neck. She saw two blue couches opposite her. She saw two gaudy chandeliers hanging over two time-worn dining room tables. She saw two porcelain tea cups on the floor near her feet, the real and the ghost of each. “Okay.” This was not unexpected. This was within the realm of what she understood about me. “Okay.” This was not even surprising.

  I had gone over the edge before.

  “I’m having him admitted right away,” Eric announced. “And then I’ll come and get you, all right?” He was in control again, Hannah could hear it in his voice, a tightness forming around the consonants, a liquid fluidity in the vowels.

  “Did he say anything? Did he say why—”

  “I don’t think he even recognizes me, Mom.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Just hang on there. Are you seeing any ghosts right now?”

  “I’m so used to it I can’t tell the difference anymore.” She looked around, the first smile on her lips in three days—since I had disappeared. I was all right, she told herself. Eric had called and I was all right. “I see them everywhere.” I was alive, incoherent and insane, but alive.

  “Just wait.”

  “Eric, I’m waiting,” she said. “I’ve been waiting.”

  With difficulty, her breath misting in the air outside, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy removed herself—as well as her pocketbook, a disorganized clutch of papers, and yesterday’s edition of the New York Times—from her newly purchased but formerly owned, sapphire-blue VW Rabbit. It was a brightly lit fall morning. Glorious, in fact. The sun was runny as a broken egg, smearing its gooey yolk over the trees that rimmed the far side of the highway. But it stung her eyes like vinegar. Katherine had been up all last night arguing with Mark again, whom she would think of from now on as her ex, even though they had never really been married. And now she felt a pain forming, a thin coating of glass that shattered inside the back of her mouth when she swallowed.

  She was hungry, too—she knew this because her hands were trembling—yet she had no appetite, and she would have to face the entire day at the clinic without a break. She let a section of the Times slip away. It drifted as if in slow motion, the headlines announcing new diseases, old wars, mistaken identities, all blurring their way to the ground. If she tried to retrieve it, she knew, everything would fall—her pocketbook, the papers, the rest of the Times, her whole life. So she just stepped over it, closing her eyes momentarily and lifting her feet.

  She’d have some tea with lemon.

  Katherine smiled at two nurses who walked by, then stepped in through the clinic’s plate-glass doors. Her heels clacked down the long orange linoleum-tiled hallway. She said hello to her secretary, a large-eyed girl in a floral dress, who said, “Maryanne MacDonald is your first appointment.”

  “Thank you, Elizabeth.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Katherine pushed the office door open with her shoulder, throwing everything—her pocketbook, the paperwork she hadn’t looked at, the sections of the Times that hadn’t fallen—onto the hideous brown couch against the wall, let the door swing shut, and sat down heavily at her desk. It was covered in papers, pastel-colored sticky notes, psychological profiles to fill out, the clinical bureaucracy getting its long fingers in right away. It had been two weeks since she’d started at the East Meadow Psychiatric In-Patient Clinic, and her boxes from the old office in the city remained stacked in the corner by the empty shelves. Nothing had been hung on the wall, not even her diplomas. She’d meant to pick up something to throw over that couch—a blanket, a bedspread, anything. “Katherine?” her intercom said. It was Elizabeth again, her voice sweet as music. “I forgot to tell you, Dr. Lennox wants to know if you can take on a new client.”

  “Today?”

  “There’s an emergency client, a Pilot something-or-other, psyc
hotic. Dr. Lennox has already admitted him.”

  Eyes closed, I was in a bed upstairs, my arms under the covers so they wouldn’t float away. Outside the window a single branch was reaching toward the room, unfurling itself to tap against the glass, keeping me awake, warning me. I had a scratch across my face that began at my temple, crossed my cheek, and ran all the way to my upper lip. I had an old shoelace wrapped tightly around my middle finger. I had a problem. I had a psychosis, is what they told me later.

  Downstairs, Katherine sighed. “A pilot?” she said. “Why the hell not?”

  A voice said, “Thanks, Kate.” Now the door was open. From behind it appeared the face of a man in his late forties, salt-and-pepper hair, slightly rumpled. It was Dr. Lennox. “He’s not a pilot, though,” he said. “That’s his name. His name is Pilot.”

  Katherine smiled. “Get me some tea?”

  “Milk?”

  “Lemon.”

  Dr. Lennox disappeared. Katherine tried to neaten up her desk, and when the psychiatrist returned, smiling, she had cleared just enough space for the Styrofoam cup. “His name is Pilot Airie,” Dr. Lennox said, placing a wedge of lemon on a white napkin. “Not even thirty years old.” He pointed to the window. “Found in the woods near the highway, been out there three days.”

  “Three days? Has he been medicated?” Katherine squeezed the lemon, dipping it into the water, teasing some color from the bag.

  “You bet.”

  I had been sedated like a zoo animal.

  “Family?”

  “They live in the area.”

  “Full admittance?”

  Lennox’s eyebrows rose as if on strings. “Absolutely.”

  “Has he been in therapy?” She took a sip. “I mean, was there any warning?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lennox said. He frowned briefly, then returned to his near-permanent smile.