Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  I could see that Katherine was taking in the living room, the mismatched pillows and drapes, the blue-and-white oriental on the floor, and the relic from the seventies—the ancient blue couch.

  “We’re finally alone,” I said, as if we were lovers.

  “Your mother has a beautiful house.” Katherine was trying to be sincere, and I could see that it was difficult.

  “It’s insane,” I said. “Even crazier than me. It was more orderly once. Once, it had a design to it, a visual approach, a point of view. Now it contains everything. Everything and nothing.”

  Laughing, Katherine sat down in the old wing chair my father used to sit in to read his spy thrillers. “Is this all right for you, Pilot? I mean, would you be more comfortable somewhere else?”

  “It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

  “Let’s begin, then.”

  “All right.” I sat down, feeling the grain of the coarse fabric.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “A little slow,” I admitted. “Sluggish.”

  “You’ve been taking your medication?”

  “As directed.”

  “Good.” Katherine opened her bag and pulled out her pad of yellow legal paper. I could see a fresh wound on one of her fingers, where she had recently chewed past the skin. “So I trust you’ve had no voices or, or strange thoughts?”

  “Just from my mother,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure she’s real, unfortunately.”

  Katherine wrote something on her legal pad. Then she leaned forward. “Pilot, I know we haven’t really talked about this until now because our main concern was making sure you stayed—”

  “Sane?”

  “I was going to say rational.”

  “Same thing.”

  I twisted the shoelace, just to check if it was still there.

  “Anyway,” Katherine said, “I think we should talk about some of the feelings you expressed to me at the clinic last week.”

  “About you sleeping with my brother?”

  “I thought we had worked that out.”

  “Sorry. I’m just being a wiseguy.”

  “I think we should talk about what happened to your sister.”

  “Eric happened to her.”

  “That’s what you mentioned before,” she said. “You should know he finds that deeply troubling.”

  “Of course he does,” I said. “No one wants to get caught.”

  Katherine sighed. “Can you let me try to explain something to you?” she asked. “I don’t want you to think I don’t believe you or that I’m calling you a liar, because I’m not. I absolutely believe that you’re telling the truth. But I want you to listen to a theory I have. I just want you to listen. Just listen. Would you do that for me?”

  I shrugged. “All right.”

  “Here goes.” Katherine’s hand was pressed flat against the pad of paper, bloody fingertips pointed toward me. Her other hand held a small silvery pen. “Because you’re a human being, Pilot, you have a very complex and active brain.” Her fingers started to stroke the smooth paper, the way Halley the Comet would gently paw at a sweater. “Unfortunately, your brain is not, is not as chemically balanced as it should be, and that’s why you suffered that, that scary episode. Now, one thing we know about schizophrenia is that it doesn’t alter the logic part, or thinking part, of your brain. Are you following me so far?” Her tone was that of someone talking to an animal or a retarded person.

  I nodded. I knew all this. I had read about it a million times, in fact.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “what is affected is the sensing part of your brain. You’re hearing voices, you’re getting disordered imagery through your eyes. So your logic part of your brain—which is completely intact—tries to make sense of all that wrong sensory data and tries to do the logical thing, but nothing really makes sense, right?”

  “Nothing made sense,” I said, nodding. “That’s what I remember.”

  “And the result is crazy behavior, because you’re trying to interpret what the right thing to do is based on the information you’re getting.”

  “Okay.” I unraveled the shoelace from my ring finger, then twisted it around my middle finger again, raveling it back.

  She seemed to be looking at it. For the first time, I thought, Katherine noticed my shoelace. “Pilot,” she said, “when you were suffering from all those chemicals rushing around in your head, I think some things got, well, got reordered, you know, reshuffled, and reorganized, and they didn’t get put back in the right places after you started taking the medication, and that’s why you have these feelings about your brother.”

  “I see.”

  “And what I would like to try to do is, is try to help you clear all that stuff up.”

  “So, Katherine,” I said, “you don’t think I’m lying. You think I’m nuts.”

  “No,” Katherine said.

  “You think I’m stupid.”

  “Pilot, I don’t think you’re crazy or stupid or anything. I think your brain is lying to you. I think you’re getting some bad information. And it’s hurting people. This is your family we’re talking about, your brother, and he loves you.”

  I considered the idea. I sat back, saying, “It’s possible,” twisting and untwisting the shoelace—raveling, unraveling.

  “Of course it is.”

  “Anything for my brother’s girlfriend.”

  Now Katherine reached up and touched her forehead. “Okay,” she began, “like I said, I’m not Eric’s girlfriend. I went out with him a couple of times for dinner and I think he’s a very nice man, but as long as you want me to continue being your therapist I don’t have to see him. We talked about it and both of us feel that is the right thing.”

  I repeated her. “You and Eric talked about it.”

  “Does that make you feel any better?”

  I leaned forward on the couch. I said, “It didn’t suddenly occur to me, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy.”

  “What didn’t suddenly—”

  “That Eric killed Fiona.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a fact I’ve been hiding all my life.”

  The essential feature of the Paranoid Type of Schizophrenia is the presence of prominent delusions or auditory hallucinations in the context of a relative preservation of cognitive functioning and affect…. Delusions are typically persecutory or grandiose, or both, but delusions with other themes (e.g., jealousy, religiosity, or somatization) may also occur. The delusions may be multiple, but are usually organized around a coherent theme. Hallucinations are also typically related to the content of the delusional theme. Associated features include anxiety, anger, aloofness, and argumentativeness. The individual may have a superior and patronizing manner and either a stilted, formal quality or extreme intensity in interpersonal interactions. The persecutory themes may predispose the individual to suicidal behavior, and the combination of persecutory and grandiose delusions with anger may predispose the individual to violence. Onset tends to be later in life than the other types of Schizophrenia, and the distinguishing characteristics may be more stable over time. These individuals usually show little or no impairment onneuropsychological or other cognitive testing. Some evidence suggests that the prognosis for the Paranoid Type may be considerably better than for the other types of Schizophrenia, particularly with regard to occupational functioning and capacity for independent living.

  “He wanted to kill me,” I told her, “when we were kids. Eric wanted to torture me.”

  “Did he ever do it?” she asked. “Torture you, I mean?”

  Once, just after Fiona disappeared, when I was ten, I think, Eric located me in the woods, had come looking for me out there, in fact. I was hiding in a particular bramble of bushes, playing with a nest of tiny, newborn, almost hairless mice. I heard my brother’s dry voice behind me. “Do you know what that man did to her?”

  I turned around. “Shhh.” I put my finger to my lips. “There’s mice he
re. Check it out.”

  “Fuck the mice,” Eric said. “Don’t you want to know?”

  I shook my head.

  “He raped her. Little tiny Fiona. He raped the shit out of her. He tied her tiny little stick arms together behind her back, and he spread her little legs open, and he raped her. He stuck his huge, mean penis directly inside her tiny little-girl vagina.”

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “Why?” Eric said. “Don’t you want to know what happened to our little sister? Don’t you care?”

  I put my hands over my ears, but Eric slapped them away from my head.

  “Then he fucked her in the ass.” He was whispering now. I was starting to cry, I think. On the outside, I felt like I was melting, my face getting all hot, but inside I was dividing, losing language. “He pushed his enormous, man-sized penis into her tiny little asshole.”

  I said, “Please, Eric.”

  “It could have been you,” Eric said.

  “No.”

  “It would have been you if you were just a little bit younger. They like boys better, everybody knows that. They’re called pedophiles.” He overpronounced it.

  “No, they don’t.”

  It was getting more and more difficult to squeeze out my words. And now, some of what Eric was saying seemed hard to understand, like he was speaking a new language, something I hadn’t heard before.

  “He’s out of jail now, you know. They released him. And he’ll be coming after you. He probably wanted you to begin with. He wanted to fuck a little boy instead of a little girl and now he’s angry that he didn’t get to. Oh yes,” Eric said. And when I opened my eyes I saw his face, but it wasn’t his face. It had too many muscles in it. “He’s definitely coming back. He’ll probably fuck you in the mouth first—” I had never thought about this before, had never heard of anyone doing something like that “—fuck you until you gag, until you practically choke to death, and then he’ll tear apart your ass. You’ll be lucky if he kills you before he cuts your penis off. They like to eat children. That’s why they can’t find Fiona’s body. That’s why she’s gone, because he ate her.” It seemed like I could hear Eric now, could hear Eric’s voice, but at the same time I could not understand what he was saying, the words themselves. I was the wolf boy. I let my eyes roll back into my head. I was clutching at the dirt next to me.

  “Dissociating,” Katherine said. “It’s something children do to deal with situations they don’t like.” She touched the tip of her silvery pen to the yellow pad of paper. “Let me ask you something, Pilot.” She leaned into the question. “When you were out in the woods recently, before you came to the clinic, did you feel like the wolf boy?”

  I thought about it. I had lost the power of speech out there, I remembered that. I had forgotten myself. “Maybe,” I said. “I just remember everything becoming extremely concrete, more solid than it should be, everything flat and artificial.”

  “You couldn’t speak, though.”

  “No,” I said. “I couldn’t. I just, all I could do was see things and hear things, you know, just the trees, the highway, and there were all these thoughts, thoughts that didn’t seem to be mine, exactly.”

  “Do you remember having that experience as the wolf boy, that same concrete reality feeling?”

  I thought back. I remembered bringing my face closer and closer to Eric’s trap, then pulling away. “Yes,” I said, “I guess I do.”

  “You had a traumatic experience when your sister disappeared, and then your brother teased you cruelly. He shouldn’t have.” Katherine’s face softened. Her eyes, emerald shards glowing, brought their focus into mine.

  “Why did he do that?”

  “Perhaps you can talk to him about it now.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “He could apologize.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  I knew that Hannah was listening upstairs. I could see her face responding to everything we said.

  “Pilot,” Katherine said, “it’s not ridiculous at all.”

  Eric left me there, deep inside those bushes, where I had found the nest of baby mice. I remember that my face became hot for a while, and then I remember feeling the liquid glass pouring over me. I took a small pointy stick and pushed it, one by one, into the heads of the little hairless mice inside the nest. Their tiny skulls made a popping sound when the stick poked through. And the remaining ones started squeaking and wriggling around frenetically, a panic settling over them. I imagined the little mouse parents coming back and finding the little mouse babies all dead like this, their tiny skulls crushed. So I picked up each of their little dead baby mouse bodies and flung them outside of the bushes, knowing that it would be worse for the mouse parents this way, to come home and find them missing.

  Find them missing. Find them missing.

  I pawed at the dirt beside me. My throat felt rough, like I had been growling.

  Find them missing.

  They were in bed again, the enclosure dimly shadowed, lights out, their clothes on the bare floor beside them, both huddled under a thin sheet and Katherine’s only blanket, a white summer throw she had managed to keep after the breakup with Mark. A wind was building steadily outside, beating itself like a giant moth against the apartment-complex windows.

  “I was a mean kid,” Eric said, his voice resigned. “I had a tough time growing up, and I picked on my little brother. I’m sorry about that now.”

  “Did you tell him those things?” Katherine asked quietly.

  “Those things,” he repeated, as if not quite listening. There was something faintly amused about his expression, she thought. It was the same expression she had seen on Hannah’s face. “It couldn’t have been those particular—”

  “About what happened to Fiona? About her being tied up, raped—”

  He rubbed one of his eyes. He said, “I don’t remember saying anything like that.” Then he paused, and after a moment, he said, “I couldn’t have. Because that was all before.”

  “When did you do this, then? Do you remember when?”

  “What day?”

  Katherine felt this was important to know. “When did you, when did you torment Pilot like this? How old were you?”

  “I was a kid,” my brother said. “It was all before Fiona disappeared. All before.”

  “So Pilot would have been nine years old or younger?”

  “I guess so.”

  “He remembers it differently.”

  Eric sighed. “Obviously,” he said. “But I only wanted to threaten him. I just wanted to scare him. I felt, I felt like I had to be good all the time, you know. Good in school, good on the football team, good in science. I could be bad around Pilot, to Pilot.”

  She cleared her throat. “I think,” Katherine said softly, “that at some point he’ll need to, to talk to you about that stuff.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He found it pretty traumatizing.”

  “Do you think it contributed to his illness?”

  She thought for a moment, biting her lip. “Not really,” Katherine said. “Brothers and sisters are rough on each other, that’s all. It’s part of the family mechanism. As the oldest sibling your position in the family was threatened by him, so you found—”

  “—found a way to put him down.”

  “And you know more about brain chemistry than I do. His condition may have been triggered by trauma, but not created by it.”

  Eric turned and put his feet on the floor. “What a shitty brother I was.”

  “You can make up for it now.”

  He reached back to put a hand on Katherine’s leg. “How?”

  “You can be very, very nice to him.” She curled into him, wrapping her body around his.

  “That’s your expert psychological advice?”

  “Yes,” Katherine said, “it is.” She slid down in bed, so she was completely tucked around the curve of Eric’s body, facing the window. Then, conspiratorially, she said, “I
told him we wouldn’t be seeing each other until after his therapy was over.” Across the parking lot outside was a broken street lamp. It flickered on and off, glowing yellow light like the tail of a firefly on a summer evening.

  “That could be years.”

  “Years,” Katherine said. “I don’t think so.”

  “He’ll know.”

  “You know what’s weird?” she said. “Pilot told me a while ago that he was omniscient.”

  At that moment I was standing in my mother’s kitchen, my bare feet on the cold tile floor. My hand was on the refrigerator door handle, but I hadn’t moved in over ten minutes. Upstairs, a radio was playing.

  Behind the woods, across the highway, down the turnpike, in Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy’s enclosure, my brother turned, pushing Katherine’s tangle of hair to the side and nestling his chin into the hollow of her shoulder. “Strange.”

  “How did he know?” she asked.

  “About us?”

  “About us.”

  “Good question,” Eric said. “He just knew, I guess. He sensed it somehow. Pilot’s intelligent, if nothing else.”

  “You didn’t tell him?”

  “I haven’t seen him lately. I’ve been afraid to. I’ve been afraid to talk to him about anything.”

  Katherine shook her head, somewhat bewildered. “What about your mother, could she have—”

  “I didn’t tell her, either.” Eric paused for a moment. “Or maybe I did,” he said. “Maybe he found out about it from her somehow.”

  The wind beat against the glass of the complex again, and the entire wall rattled. Katherine thought this flimsy building would blow over if it became much stronger. She saw my mother now, imagined her sitting in her old-lady bedroom, drinking a cup of tea, listening to the same wind blowing through the same treetops outside, seeing two of everything, eyes permanently unfocused.

  “How is she, anyway?” Katherine said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think it’s something serious?”

  “I think it’s some kind of infection in her optic nerve, viral, bacterial, I don’t know.”