“What’s his name again?”
“Pilot Airie.”
“Unusual.”
He settled into Katherine’s couch, haunches shifting. “The mother, Hannah Airie, is a physical therapist,” he said. “Hands, I think. She used to be with the hospital. The father’s an airline pilot.”
“Explains the name.”
“More importantly,” Lennox continued, “the brother—”
“Also psychotic?”
He shook his head. “Other end of the spectrum. He’s a consulting physician for the hospital.”
Katherine nodded. “I’ve met him.” She had been introduced around—had smiled to my brother, in fact, from across the hall. Eric had lifted his hand in a small wave of hello.
Airie.
She’d thought it sounded familiar.
Dr. Lennox was still smiling. “Pilot has been in the hospital all morning.”
I lay in bed, faceup. I knew the movements of every person around me. I heard the thoughts of every human being who knew me. I heard this chattering coming from the light fixture above my head, an electronic discussion.
Katherine shrugged. There was little to do, anyway, she told herself. Just make sure the medication was taking hold. Begin me on the snaking path toward normalcy. This is all that can be done with schizophrenics these days. “I’ll skip lunch. I’m not hungry, anyway.”
She had no idea what she was in for.
“Thanks, Kate.” Dr. Lennox was standing now, hands in his pockets, nodding and smiling. He gestured toward the door with his head.
Katherine raised her Styrofoam cup.
I twisted my shoelace.
Alone again in an office with a stack of cardboard boxes, an ugly brown couch and chair, an oversize wood-laminated desk, a window overlooking the parking lot, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy looked through this window, across the parking lot, at the highway, its mid-morning traffic still heavy, and across the highway to the wide patch of trees, still green but fading, yellow at the edges. I had spent three days in those woods, and Katherine tried to imagine it. Had I been quiet the whole time, she wondered, catatonic, like a predator waiting for its prey? Or the other way around? Had I grown hungry? Was I hiding from something in particular? Why would anyone name their son Pilot? The intercom buzzed again. “Katherine?” Elizabeth said. “Your next appointment is here.”
I remember Fiona in still images, like a series of old photographs.
In one of these images I just see her face, the wide cheekbones, the gray-green eyes—like mine—and the light brown freckles across the bridge of her nose. I remember the dimple on the left side of her cheek. I remember her wispy blond hair curling at her temples. I remember Fiona, my sister, smiling shyly.
In another one of these pictures that I keep inside my head Fiona is standing by our backyard pool. There is a puddle of water beneath her. Reflective, it is shining in the light of the sun. She is smiling brightly. Fiona has a daisy-patterned towel wrapped tightly around her shoulders, and she wears her red one-piece bathing suit, a matching flower made of thread positioned between her nonexistent breasts. Behind the pool, on the other side of the yard, the leaves of the trees and bushes are emerald and yellow. At the base of the yard, at grass level, there is a blackness encroaching. I can see Fiona’s feet splayed out, ballet style. There were lessons, I think, practices and recitals. Her toes are round, and her toenails are painted a garish pink. There is movement behind her, it seems, or almost-movement, near-movement, about-to-be-movement. There is a ripple on the surface of the water. There is a rustling in the treetops. Her hair is scraggly and wet at the side of her face. The flowers of the towel are represented by a washed-out, Kodachrome yellow. In this picture of Fiona, which I have carried around inside my head because it is the only way I can remember her and because our mother has taken all the real pictures and hidden them away somewhere, there are tiny bumps of gooseflesh rising on the skin of her arms. There is a blur of red inside her mouth. There is a gurgling sound coming from somewhere inside her.
“How do you feel?” my brother was saying.
“What?”
Had my eyes been open?
“How do you feel, Pilot? Are you all right?” I was in a bed, in a bed in a hospital, the hospital where my brother worked, my arms trapped under the covers. The light above him was filled with electric voices, an argument over how I should be murdered, the methods and timing. If I could just keep them arguing, I thought, if I could just contribute to their indecision, I’d buy some time. “Can you understand me?”
“Understand you?” I narrowed my eyes. “In the picture,” I informed him, “there is darkness encroaching, there is a shadow falling over her, just touching her. It is the photographer.” Beneath the covers I felt the shoelace. It was still twisted around my finger, a reminder.
“Jesus,” my brother said. “Come on, Pilot.”
“In the picture,” I said. The voices inside the light fixture continued to argue, squawking like a yardful of chickens. The light formed a halo around Eric’s head.
I was in a room suddenly, a room so far and deep inside the woods that everything was white.
“We found you in the woods,” my brother was saying. “What the hell were you doing out there?”
“Someone,” I said, “had to rescue Hannah.”
“Pilot, Jesus Christ.”
“Eric.” Inside the light fixture the voices couldn’t decide. Keep arguing, I thought. Continue the debate. There was a gray nylon curtain hanging behind him. “There is a small dot,” I said, “on the very base of her optical nerve.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hannah.” I twisted the shoelace. I wound it around and around my finger.
“Mom?”
“You are the fucking brain surgeon,” I said. “But you are aware of this, aren’t you? You just don’t want to admit it.”
“You were out there for three days,” Eric said. “Did you know that?”
“It’s cancer.” I heard a tittering inside the lights. “I know what you’re doing,” I said. “I knew it then. I know it now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve followed through.” I looked at him. “Haven’t you?”
“Followed through on what, little brother?”
“All your plans.”
“Pilot, for Christ’s sake.”
Eric would slip into my room at night and kneel beside my bed, as if in prayer. “I’m going to kill you,” he would say. “You better not say a word or I’ll do it right now. I’m going to cut your throat from ear to ear. I’m going to take you out into the woods and hang you in the big tree. I’m going to put Drano in your applesauce. I’m going to kill you like no one has ever been killed in the entire history of murder.” I would close my eyes as tightly as possible in the darkness. Sometimes I would put my hands over my ears. But Eric would pull them away. “I’m going to take Dad’s gun out of the closet,” he once said, “and I’m going to march you out into the woods, way out there so no one can hear you scream, and I’m going to put one bullet in your left leg.”
“Stop it,” I whispered.
“And then I’m going to put one bullet in your right leg,” he whispered back. “And then another—”
“Eric, please.”
“—in your left hand, shattering all those little bones in your fingers, the metacarpals and phalanges. And then I’m going to shoot you in your elbow, and that’s just four bullets, there’s two more to go.”
“Please, stop,” I said. His voice was velvety, like a radio announcer’s.
“And then I’m going to shoot you in the stomach, and you’re going to lie there and squirm and bleed all over yourself, you stupid little whiner. You’ll probably throw up and taste your own stomach acids and the dinner you had mixed with your own—”
I was crying.
“—blood, you stupid fucking little crybaby. And then, when I’m totally bored with you, when I can’t
think of more interesting ways to torture you, I’m going to put the gun right up to your forehead, and as slowly as I can, I’m going to pull the trigger, and I’ll watch your brains ooze out of the back of your skull. Not that you’ve got a whole lot in there anyway.”
I closed my eyes even tighter and held my breath, letting a blackness cover everything, and when I lifted my eyelids, Eric was gone.
Until morning I’d lie in silence, waiting for him to return. Sometimes, when Eric and I were doing the dishes together, when our mother or father had left the room, he would whisper, “I’m going to kill you,” putting his finger over his mouth to keep me silent.
I didn’t doubt him. I never doubted him. And I kept silent, too.
I never told anyone.
I never told anyone.
Her hair was as insane as I was. Blond and black at the same time, it fell in curling, twisting spirals across her shoulders, almost to the middle of her back. The rest of her was tastefully disheveled in wrinkled gray wool pants, a satiny shirt. Her eyes, like Fiona’s, were green. But this woman’s eyes were brighter, more focused than any I’d ever seen—wide and, at the same time, sharp. “Pilot Airie,” she said, and her voice was in performance mode, overtly professional, “my name is Katherine DeQuincey-Joy.” Her shirt, pale green, open at the collar, revealed a gold chain and an antique locket with a Celtic design on it. She had a birthmark on her collarbone, a mole, like someone had pricked her skin with a needle and a tiny globule of blood had formed there and hardened, and then it turned black.
Or were Fiona’s eyes blue? I panicked to remember.
Green. Yes, gray-green.
I touched my face and felt the scratch across my cheek. I wondered if I looked tough or pathetic. “Hello,” I said. I decided on pathetic. I was sitting up now, although I felt impossibly bewildered.
“I am a psychologist with the clinic, Pilot. I met your mother in the hallway just a few minutes ago, and she told me what happened.” Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy spoke slowly, deliberately, her eyes like twin televisions broadcasting concern.
I said, “My mother doesn’t know what happened.”
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “Just for a few minutes to see how you’re doing. Is that okay?”
“Oh, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy,” I echoed her formality, “I do not believe at this moment in time that I am doing so well, as a matter of fact.” The voices inside the light fixture erupted into a riot of conversation. I had just given them a fresh supply of ammunition. I had made an admission. Thankfully, they had not yet decided how I should be done away with.
“Really?” she said.
I nodded.
I knew that, somehow, Eric’s would be the deciding vote, that he was in charge. Perhaps his communication gear was faulty. Perhaps he was out of range, trying to get through. Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy had a long neck, and beneath the pale green fabric of her shirt I could see the shape of her body, her skin-colored lace bra—practical yet elegant. She said, “Why do you say that, Pilot?”
“Can you turn out the light?” I asked. “I can’t hear you.”
She furrowed her brow. “If I turn out the light, you can hear me better?” She gave me an expectant look, eyes expanding, as if to suspend logic, as if to give me credit for an explanation that was clearly nuts.
Then she looked at my hand, at the shoelace I had twisted around and around my aching middle finger.
“Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy,” I wanted to know, “are we far enough away from the woods?”
“You’re safe,” she said. “You’re very, very safe here. I promise. No one can hurt you. And you can just call me Katherine, if you like. Or Kate.”
“You’d be surprised, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy,” I said. “They lash out, the trees and the branches, and before you know it—”
“What does, Pilot?” She leaned toward me, hands almost touching the hospital blanket. “What lashes out?”
“The woods.”
She paused. Could she be electronic, too? Could Eric have sent her? “Do you hear anything, Pilot? Do you hear voices talking when they’re not really there?”
“I hear arguments,” I admitted. “But they are there.” I knew what she was getting at. I had trouble getting at it myself. They weren’t there. But they were. Both things were true.
“What kind of arguments?”
“In the light fixtures. About what to do with me,” I said, “my execution and disposal.”
“Who is arguing?”
I begged her slowly: “I asked you, please, if you could please turn out the light, please.”
Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy backed away from the bed. “I’m sorry.” Her fingers found the light switch.
Instantly the room went dim. “Thank you.” The murmuring of voices quieted without their electric lifeline, their wires and diodes, receptors and interceptors.
“Would you like to stay here for a while, Pilot?”
“Am I out of the woods?”
“Are you speaking metaphorically?”
I smiled. I would have to explain this. “Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy, imagine,” I said. “Katherine, please, imagine a tunnel, a man in the tunnel like an amoeba—”
“Okay.”
“—and the way it moves through the solution to a problem—” Fuck, I thought. I was losing my place.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“—the way it swallows its pride, taking them inside, an intelligence the size of an ocean, and catching—”
“Would you like to stay here, Pilot?” she asked again, smiling. “Stay here at the clinic for a little while, and we’ll make sure you’re safe, until you feel better?”
I couldn’t breathe. I touched the scratch on my face. My middle finger, wrapped tightly by the shoelace, throbbed painfully. “I think that would be good.”
Katherine put her hand, her thin, cool, smooth hand—could this be electronic? no—on mine and squeezed it lightly, just lightly. Like a mother. Or an old girlfriend.
“I think that would be really, really good,” I said.
Like regret.
She smelled like lemons.
When I closed my eyes I saw Fiona’s face like a prairie. My sister’s eyes like twin moons on an alien horizon. Her chin was a bluff to climb over. My memory of her was a fading map of a terrain I was no longer familiar with. Everything was different now.
I missed her so much.
Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy was hiding her hands beneath her desk because she had chewed her nails down to nothing—beyond nothing—and there was a bright halo of blood around each one of her fingertips. “I’m really glad you could come,” she was saying. “I know how busy you must be, and—”
“I’ll make time for this,” Eric broke in. “Whenever you need me, just call, and I’ll make myself available.” His hands were beautiful, Katherine noticed, the nails the perfect shape for a man, clear, with no trace of white, not dull but not shining. Dramatically, he said, “This is my brother.” She didn’t know that Eric checked his fingernails each morning in his chrome-and-black bathroom, holding a pair of silver clippers above a polished wastebasket.
Katherine nodded. “So I don’t have to tell you what Pilot is experiencing, what he’s—”
“It’s all too familiar.” Eric’s face was perfectly tanned, she noticed, with wide cheekbones, and blue, blue eyes. His figure was athletic, finished. His pose, however, was concerned, even distressed.
“Dr. Lennox’s initial diagnosis,” she began, “is, is that Pilot has some form of schizophrenia, whether it’s schizoaffective disorder or—” Eric closed his eyes, face upturned. “But naturally we would rather believe,” she rushed to say, “that this is a response to trauma of some kind, whether real or imagined, rather than”—she cleared her throat—“well, rather than late-onset adult schizophrenia, which I don’t have to tell you is more—”
“—degenerative,” my brother finished.
“Dr
. Lennox said your mother indicated that Pilot has had other episodes?”
Eric leaned forward, his long, perfectly manicured fingers touching each other habitually. Was he aware of this habit? “Pilot has always been psychologically—I don’t know—fragile. He had an episode when he was very young,” he said. “Around eleven. But we had always chalked that up to an event.”
“An event?”
“When we were children our little sister disappeared.”
Katherine was silent, her eyes wide.
“It was very traumatic, and Pilot suffered—” Eric seemed about to describe something more specific, but then he said, “Well, he suffered.”
“What was that particular episode like?”
He looked away. “It wasn’t like this one, really. It was more about being dissociative. He was down on all fours, snarling and growling like a dog, pretending he couldn’t understand English. He was getting lost in a game of make-believe, I guess.”
I am the wolf boy, I wanted to say. I’ll tear out your carotid artery with my bare hands.
“Were there any particular symptoms of schizophrenia then?” Katherine asked. “I mean, that you can see from your medical perspective now?”
Eric ran his tongue across his teeth. “Pilot was not always very coherent in those days, and he was always drawn to the woods.” His eyes flickered toward the window. “I guess the early signs of psychosis were present.”
Katherine couldn’t help but turn and look out there, too. The sky was darkening, the blue growing deeper. “May I ask what happened to your sister?”
“We never found her.”
“She was abducted?”
“Children are abducted every day.” My brother looked at Katherine directly for the first time, it seemed. “And not all of them are recovered.” His head was cocked at a slight angle now. “Just buy a carton of milk.”
“Of course.” She made her eyes soften, using them to reassure. “The only reason I’m asking is that, is that I’m wondering if Pilot felt somehow responsible.” She kept her eyes on him, waiting for Eric to break the gaze. “About your sister, that is, which might explain the dissociative—”
Raveling Page 4
