Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  We took our medication in the morning, Harrison and I, and again throughout the day, whenever a nurse came in with a little paper cup of water and a few pills in a paper dish. I began to feel saner, more and more all the time, as each medication cycle completed its arc. Sitting in her office, I told Katherine, “I’m feeling much, much better. I’m still, I’m still a little lethargic, you know, dazed, but I’m not hearing those voices anymore.” This was more or less true, even though I suspected they were still there, whispering just out of range, so faint I couldn’t hear them. “There are no more arguments inside the light fixtures.” I forced a smile, bright as I could, onto my mouth. The truth is, I just wanted to go home. I would have told her anything.

  “Pilot, that’s great.” Katherine’s face wore the same smile as mine. I felt we were both professionals here, both of us acting our parts. “That’s really terrific.” She cleared her throat. “And what about the woods? Are you still afraid—”

  Shaking my head, I said, “I’m not going out there again, if that’s what you mean.”

  She was half sitting, half standing, leaning on the front of her desk. She smoothed her long khaki skirt with her left hand. Today she wore a forest-green sweater, too, a good color for her. “I was going to ask if you’re still afraid of them,” she said, eyes full of concern, “if you still think they’re going to snatch you.”

  “That was a delusion.” I forced a self-deprecating tone into my voice. “I know that now. I’m crazy. I’m not stupid.” I had never thought the woods would snatch me, anyway. I would never use the word snatch.

  “Okay.” Katherine walked around her desk to sit down. “And what about your mother?”

  “If she has something wrong with her,” I assured Katherine, “I’m certain we’ll figure out whatever it is in plenty of time. There’s absolutely no reason to think she has cancer.” But she did, I knew. At that very instant, in fact, the radical cells were twisting their way through the folds of her brain. “Especially if Eric thinks—”

  “And your brother?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you still convinced?”

  “Convinced?”

  “You were certain he was trying to—” Katherine sat down behind her desk, hands on its surface “—to harm you. Do you still feel—”

  “Have you slept with my brother?” I felt molten glass pouring over me, hardening around my features, my face turning to porcelain and crystal, bone china and blown glass.

  “What?” It was like a veil had dropped away from her eyes. She had, I saw it. They had fucked.

  “Have you slept with him?”

  She gave a little shake to her head. “Pilot, that’s—”

  I got up from her hideous brown couch. I knew everything now. The way her eyes flickered away, the pupils dilating, the blood rising to her cheeks. “You’ve had sex with Eric, haven’t you? He fucked you.”

  Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy, my therapist, who was fucking my brother, a murderer, was silent, looking at her fingernails. The middle one was bleeding. She’d been chewing it past the quick. It traveled, now, to her mouth.

  “Eric provokes strong feelings in women,” I warned her. “You should be very careful, Katherine.”

  “Pilot.” She looked directly at me and removed her finger from her mouth. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  She didn’t understand. “Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy,” I said, “ask yourself this.” I took a step forward. “Why is he with you? What does my brother see in you?”

  Katherine got up from her desk, came around it, and walked toward me. “He’s very concerned about you,” she said. “He’s very, very—”

  “He’s one thousand times more beautiful than you are.” I was completely brittle now, ready to shatter. “What does he see? What does he see in you?” It had to be said. “What does he want?”

  She blinked her eyes. “Pilot—”

  “It’s not to say you aren’t beautiful, because—”

  “Pilot, I think it’s—”

  “—you are beautiful, I really think so.”

  “—time for you to—”

  “But it’s a way to me.”

  “A what?”

  “That’s what you are to him,” I said. “All you are. You are a way to get to me.” I shook my head defiantly. “And it’s not going to work. I won’t allow it, and neither should you.”

  I was moving toward the door, but Katherine put her hand on the knob before I could reach it. “How did you know?” she said. “How did you know about me and Eric? Did someone tell you? Did someone tell you something about us?” Her voice was shaking.

  “I’m omniscient.”

  She folded her arms. “You’re omniscient.”

  “I don’t mean to be,” I said. “It’s just—”

  “I think the session is over for today, Pilot.” She let go of the doorknob, and it just seemed to open on its own.

  The ghosts were multiplying in her field of vision.

  The cells were multiplying at the base of her optical nerve.

  Hannah found herself waking up earlier and earlier. And when she walked by the front windows in the mornings she saw two orange sunrises over the double houses across two streets. She saw more ghosts when she went downstairs, her ankles crick-crick-cricking against the hardwood in the hallway. She saw two right hands on the banister. One was real. One wasn’t. Hannah set one pot to boil on the stove for her morning poached egg and saw two. She tried to lift the newspaper from the front door, but it was a ghost. The real one lay nearby. She tried to pick up the ghost teacup. She wondered, now, which of these items were real and which ones were transparent. It seemed, sometimes, that they had switched. Wasn’t that magazine real a moment ago, and wasn’t the one beside it the ghost of it? Had things been rearranged?

  She no longer trusted herself.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your eyes,” Dr. Carewater, her optometrist, had said. “At least, there’s no optical reason why you should be seeing these double images. None that I can see.”

  “Perhaps I’m receiving two signals,” Hannah had suggested, quoting Eric. “Like on television.” One from the real world, one from the world of apparitions.

  “There’s nothing to explain it.” He had sat down, defeated. Dr. Carewater’s ghost image sat down in the ghost chair nearby. “Nothing that has to do with your eyes themselves. It must be neurological.”

  Like me, Hannah couldn’t watch television. She couldn’t discern what was happening on the screen. She couldn’t work, either. She’d been forced to refer her violinists and surgeons to a colleague. She sat in the chair by the kitchen door and listened to the AM radio news.

  “Let me at least give you something,” Eric said on the phone. “Something to make you feel better.”

  Our mother cried sometimes, privately. Even when no one was there, she’d go upstairs and stand in the shower and pull the curtain, fully clothed.

  Every afternoon, she called me. “Pilot,” she said.

  “Hannah.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m getting saner all the time.”

  “You’re not insane,” she said. “There’s nothing insane about you.”

  “Adult-onset schizophrenia, Hannah,” I said. “That is the professional opinion of the professional psychiatrist, the official diagnosis, the actual—”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means I can’t trust my own thoughts. It means I can’t predict my own behavior.”

  She quoted Eric. “They have drugs now, medical options—”

  “They only work for some people,” I said. “Obviously not for me. Do you know what I told Katherine the other day?”

  “They’re working for you,” Hannah said. “Evidently they’re working for you. You sound perfectly normal. Perfectly cogent. You’re just trying to rattle my old bones, that’s what you’re—”

  “For some reason, Hannah, the only time I fee
l sane is when I’m talking to you.”

  “I don’t know if I should take that as a compliment or not.”

  I changed the subject. “How are your ghosts?”

  “They’re fine. Don’t you worry about—”

  The ghosts were fine. “How’s Eric?”

  “You know how Eric is.”

  “Not really,” I said. “I really don’t. He doesn’t come to see me.”

  “He’s worried he’ll upset you. He’s afraid of you. He’s fine, otherwise. Otherwise, he’s good.”

  “Did you know that he’s screwing my therapist?”

  “Pilot.”

  “It’s true. Him and Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy. They’re sleeping together.”

  “Why do you call her that?”

  “What?”

  “By her whole, entire name? Why don’t you just call her by one name?”

  “I didn’t realize I was doing it,” I said.

  I could feel her eyes closing as she said this. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it about Eric.”

  “I knew you knew.”

  “Please, Pilot, you have to get better.”

  “Better,” I said. “I know. I’m really trying.”

  He lost his virginity with Dawn Costello when he was thirteen years old. He had sex with her sister, too—with Joannie—who was two years older. My brother had a number of girlfriends in high school, including Renée Faust, Tanya Zellwieger, and Constance Johns. Of course, there were others. Girls he had been with at parties after football games. Girls he knew secretly. Girls he had brought into the woods. Girls he took into the tunnel that separates the woods from the highway island on the other side of Sky Highway. By his senior year Eric had even slept with an assistant teacher named Judith Freitag. She disappeared from Albert Einstein High under mysterious conditions. Someone had found out about them, I think. Once he got to college Eric began the systematic sexual elimination of the entire female student population. He slept with dozens, if not hundreds, of young women. I doubt he ever had to try very hard. In those days Eric’s handsomeness meant more. Not that women wouldn’t fall for him later on—they would. It’s just that when he was in college, girls walked up to him and sat on his lap. They whispered in his ear the things they planned to do with him. They led him by the hand back to their dorm rooms and walk-up apartments. I believe there were occasions where Eric had sex with more than one woman at a time. Over the years he had sex with every physical variety of female. By the end, as medical school was approaching, Eric had settled on one woman. Unexpectedly, she was not even beautiful. She even might be described as plain. Her name was Stephanie, a blonde with a slim build and a white scar that ran up her forehead and disappeared under her hairline. I don’t know what my brother saw in her. But it didn’t matter, because she refused to follow him to medical school in Virginia, even though he offered to marry her.

  As far as I know, Eric never developed any unusual sexual proclivities in all that time. He never got into pain, or strange costumes, or unusual fetishes. Sex, for my brother, became like water—something that was everywhere, just reach for it. His thrills came from school, from learning about the internal composition of the human body, from understanding the function of our various parts, the structure underlying the structure. He was always that way. Even sex could not dissuade him from his life’s first addiction:

  He liked to dissect.

  “Eric,” Katherine said into the phone, “Pilot knows.” Eric was in his car. She was in the enclosure.

  “Knows what?”

  She was nervous, biting through a scab on her middle finger. “He knows that we’ve, that we’ve been together. He knows about us.”

  “He does not.” It was night. Eric swerved to miss a dog standing in the middle of the road, eyes silvery-red in the headlights.

  “I’m telling you,” Katherine said, “Pilot guessed it somehow. Or someone told him. Anyway, I was so flustered that I basically confessed.”

  My brother sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I should be his thera—”

  “Katherine, I don’t see a conflict.”

  “Maybe we should take a break.” She tasted the blood, raw and warm, on her finger. “At least until he’s, you know, until he’s more cogent.” She was naked, pacing the small area of tiles in her kitchenette. If anyone could see in, she didn’t care. As usual, the message light on her answering machine blinked steadily. Michele had called again.

  Eric’s voice was querulous. “I have a very good feeling about you, Katherine, and I don’t want to let this slip away.”

  “I don’t either.” She looked out the window, across the highway and the parking lot. “It’s just that Pilot is my client and I, and I want to be professional, I want to help him as much as I can. It’s my first responsibility.”

  “He’s getting better. The medication—”

  “I’m not so sure about that. He really believes you’re trying to get him or something, that you’re trying to…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Jesus.” Eric was turning into his long driveway that curved around to the front of his house. Katherine could hear the gravel crunching under the wheels of his Jaguar.

  “He thinks you’re using me as a way to get to him. And he really believes you, believes you had something to do with your sister’s—”

  He cut off the engine. “Well, you’re right,” Eric said. “Maybe we should cool it for a while.”

  “Why does he think that, Eric?”

  “I don’t know.” My brother sat still, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the phone. “He’s always been jealous of me. He’s always had trouble relating to people. Maybe when we were kids I could have been nicer, less of a bully.” Eric sighed. “Christ, I don’t know.”

  “Is there any way to prove it to him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To prove that your sister was—”

  “It was twenty years ago, Katherine.” His voice was angry now, the volume up. “There’s no way to prove anything.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I think it’s best to just leave that one alone and focus on getting Pilot to function like a normal human being.”

  Katherine didn’t say anything for a moment. She cleared her throat.

  “Katherine,” my brother said.

  Her voice was small. “I’m not used to getting yelled at.”

  “Katherine, I’m sorry.”

  She stared at the message light on the answering machine. Michele had called again, she was certain.

  A voice said, “Katherine, it’s me. It’s Michele.” Katherine paced back and forth in her little kitchen, raw fingers in her mouth, her bare feet on the cool tiles. She waited for the kettle to boil. “I just wanted to tell you where I was, where I am,” Michele went on. “I’m in Seattle, if you can believe it. Remember how you said you always wanted to live in Seattle? Well, I’m here! And I haven’t seen a drop of rain. Of course, it’s only been a little over a week, and they’re telling me it’s not unusual to go this long without precipitation… oh my God, I can’t believe I used that weatherman word, precipitation! Anyway, Katherine, I’m just, you know, checking in. As soon as I get a permanent place to stay I’ll leave my new number, all right?” In the background, Katherine heard cars driving by. Were there seagulls? Was Michele really in Seattle? “Anyway,” Michele said finally, “bye.”

  “Pilot,” Katherine said. I was sitting in my chair in the patient leisure area, looking deeply into the Caribbean ocean of the wall-size mural. I saw that she was speaking to me. I saw her voice making sharp little cuts and tears in the air around me. But at the same time, I didn’t hear her. At the same time, I didn’t hear anything. “Pilot,” she said again. “I want to talk to you. Would that be all right?”

  I turned my head away from the Caribbean mural toward Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy and said mechanically, “It would be all right.” My voice was made by a faraway sound-mak
ing machine.

  “I just want to clear something up, okay?” Her voice was urgent, red-tinged at the edges.

  “Okay.”

  “Your brother, Eric, and I are just friends, and that’s all.” Katherine pulled a chair up so she could face me. “And until you leave the clinic we’re not going to see each other.” She made so many patterns in the air I couldn’t see the mural for a moment. “Not socially, anyway.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “It matters to me.”

  In the distance, where the tropical blue water shimmered, it seemed almost like this picture were moving, as if the water were real. Or perhaps it was the air around Katherine’s head, the atmosphere made all shimmery by her hair.

  “If you’d like,” she said, “I can arrange for you to have another therapist, someone else. That way—”

  “No,” I said. “No. I want you, and you don’t have to stop seeing Eric.” I attempted a reassuring look.

  I’m not quite sure what she got, because she asked, “Why do you think Eric is trying to hurt you, Pilot?”

  “Because he took Fiona,” I answered, “and because I know all about it.”

  “I see.”

  “And because he told me he would kill me if I ever said anything.”

  He came up behind me in the hallway. I could hear the shower running in our mother’s bathroom. It was less than a month. There were still neighborhood searches. There was still a vigil at the East Meadow Presbyterian. There was still a moment every night on the news when they showed her little face. He put his hand over my mouth.

  “You want a hunting knife?” he said. “Is that all?”

  I shook my head no.

  “If I get you a hunting knife, you’ll give me the other one?”

  Again—no.

  “Do you want to go where Fiona went?”