“Why?”
“Because the Horla only drinks water when it has to, and milk when it can. The man won’t believe what is happening until he has proof, and he devises a test to prove that he himself is sleepwalking and that he is the one who drinks in the night! He stoppers up the water jug and the milk jug and ties a white muslin cloth over the stoppers. Then he draws all over his lips and mouth with a lead pencil and goes to bed.”
She’s found the passage she’s looking for and starts reading. “‘Irresistible sleep seized me, which was soon followed by a terrible awakening. I had not moved, and my sheets were not marked. I rushed to the table. The muslin round the bottles remained intact; I undid the string, trembling with fear. All the water had been drunk, and so had the milk! Ah! Great God!…’” She closes the book. “I love that. ‘I undid the string, trembling with fear.’” I can see the stiff hemp twine coming off the bottle neck. You know what happened after he wrote this?”
“Do I want to?”
“He went mad and killed himself.”
“So you’re Guy de Maupassant and I’m your Horla,” I say.
“Something like that.”
“You don’t seem upset by it, though.”
“Well, you don’t control my thoughts. That’s what’s different. I control yours.”
“Maybe you do. I like the one you’re coming up with right now, about getting out of my store.” I go lift the blind in the front window.
“I tell you I’m dying and you kick me out?”
I open the door. “You can do it somewhere else.”
“When I die, Jean, you die, too.”
“Get out.” But Ingrid is unbuttoning her blouse. “Oh—god. What are you doing?!”
“You might want to close those blinds again. Take off your top.”
“Get the hell out of here!”
“I’m taking it off.” She removes her blouse and begins to undo her bra. I close the door and drop the blinds, which race down with a violent clatter. She stands topless under the cruel white light. A recent scar, one with the red dots still visible on either side, describes the curve of her sixth or seventh rib, on her left side. It resembles a cave drawing, a primal red in the shape of animal tracks. “In one of my surgeries, I lost our mole,” she says. “They needed some bone.”
I can hear sounds from the street as if they’re being piped directly into my head. I have a mole below my left breast. About halfway along where her scar is.
She brings her body to me. “Take your top off,” she says. “I won’t bite you. Unless you ask me to.”
I pull my shirt up over my head. She flips up my bra, nudges my breast aside and puts her finger on the brown bead of raised moleflesh. My heart thrashes behind her fingertip.
“See?” she says. “Now get a load of this.” She bends away from me and spreads the scar with her fingers. The very edge of the mole pops out. “When the Horla drives his victim mad, you know what he does? He burns down his own house and everyone who’s in it. Just to kill it.” She reaches out tenderly to flick my bra down. “Get dressed, sweetheart. We don’t have a lot of time left.”
“YOU’VE MADE SOME excellent progress, Jean.” Dr. Morbier flips a page in his notebook near the end of our session. Much writing this time. It helps to believe, as I unspool this story, that he is at least impressed by its originality. Then again, he has probably seen and heard everything.
“Did you tell me your father was an alcoholic?” he asks me.
“I don’t know. Did I?”
“Was he?”
“Yes. But I don’t think I talked about it.”
“I thought I’d written something down, only I can’t find it now.” He waves the notebook beside his head as if it’s somehow at fault.
“Maybe I exhibit some tendencies of children of alcoholics.”
“What kind of drunk was he? What was his behaviour like?”
“Not very friendly,” I tell him. “He had sulks. He screamed at our mother.”
“Our mother?”
“I have a sister. Paula.” He opens the notebook again. “She lives in Phoenix now. You might find this a little too coincidental, but she has a tumour in her ear.”
“You don’t have a tumour, Jean. Tell me more about Paula.”
“She’s older. Sick with this thing in her head, but she’s been a huge help to me through some of this.”
“Have you seen her recently?”
“She lives in Phoenix, so no. We Skype all the time, though.” He writes on his pad, for what seems a long time, and then puts it away in a drawer in the desk. “Well, we really do have to stop,” he says. “We’ll see each other again on Thursday.”
“Yes.”
He rises.
“Doctor, when do you think I’ll be ready to go home?”
“Why don’t we revisit that at our next session, Jean? You’re having another CT scan tomorrow?”
“I can’t remember.”
“I’ll check with Miss Maufrinuz and she’ll let you know before the end of her shift today. All right?”
THE HALLWAYS IN THE WARD are hung with art made over the years by some of the “clients” of CAMH. A lot of it is drawings or paintings of faces, presumably self-portraits, done in various media. Some of them are excellent. They draw themselves looking into the mirrors they’ve been supplied with, along with the paper and the paint and the pencils (blunted 3B pencils), and if the eyes look alive enough you can feel the person who’s looking into the mirror.
You don’t see many eyes on a psychiatric floor. People are really into themselves here, staring out windows onto eternity, or looking down at the floor in shame or terror. If someone actually looks at you—and you learn this in the first week—you’d better shuffle along. Those of us still capable of rational thought were warned that there’s a number of inappropriate touchers on the ward. Not all of this touching is sexual; some of it is comfort-seeking. Some patients revert to childhood or infancy. It’s hard to know what to do when a weeping sixty-year-old man comes to curl up in your lap. If necessary, a doctor can prescribe something to quell too much zest for life.
Time goes differently in a place you can’t get out of. When Ian and the kids visit, I’m often wrong about how long it’s been. I get a lot of “Mummy, we were here yesterday.” I can’t imagine it’s any easier visiting your mother in a locked mental ward than it would be to visit her in jail. At least we’re free to walk around, as long as we don’t leave the floor. Because of the (small) risk of relapse in the first weeks after the surgery, best practice is keeping the patient safe and near medical professionals familiar with their individual case. Unfortunately, the locked psych ward is considered the safest place for people recovering from or prone to autoscopic hallucinations.
The surgery was ten days ago. The last thing I remember was Reid showing me a toy. It had been the summertime, but now it’s early autumn. There must be fifty get-well cards, some of them dated August, but I don’t remember opening them or reading them. Ian’s shown me some video he took of people who came to see me. A couple of my colleagues, my friend Brenda, (whose calls apparently went unreturned for three months), and my mother. But I can’t remember any of it. I see myself in the videos, laughing, talking, making jokes about doing my time. It’s as if it never happened. The surgery erased two months of my life.
Ian is in police uniform when he and the boys visit one day after lunch. I know this is Morbier’s idea, that it’s reinforcing to see Ian in his work clothes. I don’t care what he wears, I’m just happy to see him.
Daddy has clarified that Mummy isn’t crazy. Mummy had a little accident in her brain and nobody knew until she started seeing things. Kooky things, like seeing herself walking through parks in different clothing, shelving books in an imaginary little shop on Dundas (where it turns out there is a pet store).
Nick wants to know what it feels like to see something that isn’t there, if it’s like dreaming. It is like dreaming, I tell him. “You know
how in a dream, you’re convinced that the craziest things are real? Like you’re talking to your best friend except he has your father’s head and it’s normal in the dream? You don’t even question it.”
“You saw your own face.”
“I saw a lot of things. I thought I was running a bookshop. And Daddy had made two million dollars on the stock market!” They laugh at this, nicely, and Ian laughs because, really, what cop quits the force to make it rich on pot stocks?
(Ian: That’s the only thing you thought was strange about it? What about when I went to work every day in a uniform?
Me: I don’t know how I didn’t see that, but my mind edited it out.
Ian: It got cut in a seizure?)
“Anyway,” I continue, on this visit or some other visit another time (they’ve long ago blurred into a smear of sameness), “It wasn’t like a dream. It happened when I was awake. I didn’t realize I was seeing things because the stuff I wasn’t seeing, I mean the stuff that was real, kept it camouflaged. I mean almost everything was real, so I didn’t know. I’m pretty sure.”
“Like us,” says Reid, with confidence. His tongue is stained orange with Popsicle. “We’re real. Orrrr…are we CGI?”
“Computers are amazing,” Ian says, “but the human brain can still come up with some doozies.”
“Can I have another Popsicle?” Reid asks. He’s irked by how unimportant he is right now, how little his needs count.
“You both go get another one,” Ian suggests, and the little one is gone in a flash. His brother follows morosely. After they go, Ian takes off his cap and lays it on the bed. He sits beside me and squeezes my thigh. “Are you okay?”
“I’m handling it. What are they saying at home?”
“My mum is at the house right now cleaning it from top to bottom—”
“I mean the boys.”
“Not a lot. They want normal life as much as possible, so there’s the regulation amount of bad words and name-calling. But I think they’re very scared.” He moves his hand up my leg.
“I was, too. Morbier says I can come home in another week.”
“Good. That must mean you’re better. And you look better to me. You look like someone I know.”
I let him touch me. His hand on my belly. “We were rolling in it.”
“We’re rich in all the ways that matter.”
“And you were…different sometimes. She told me you were made up of her ex-husbands.”
“The real thing is better, I hope.”
“I’m relieved.”
He leans down to kiss me, but on the forehead. The chaste kiss contradicts his vaguely sexual touching. I need to be fucked now like I never have before, not since before the kids. But who wants to fuck a mental patient? He goes to collect the children from the staff kitchen where the treats are. Later, when we’re lined up for pills, Corine (a bipolar coming down from a manic break) tells me how good it was to see children in the ward. “So sweet,” she says with a weak smile. “They have no idea.” She’s been in and out of CAMH for twenty years. I’m going home in a week. Morbier has promised me.
MORBIER IS A FRENCH CHEESE. I’ve been given access to the ward’s computer for an hour in the evenings. Morbier is made from “evening” milk and then covered in ash before “morning” milk is added to it the next day. The cheese has a thin black line in the middle, separating the layers. Apparently the evening milk is fruitier and the morning, nuttier. I wonder if “Morbier” is a pseudonym, adopted in order to communicate this complex metaphor to autoscopy patients.
There were some concerns with the recent CT, but I am not being told what they are. They are things “not to be worried about” and I only need “a bit more observation.” A few more days, which makes the promised week two weeks now. “You don’t want to leave until you’re ready, Jean,” Morbier says. “We want you good and strong when you go. I’m going to up your dose of oxcarbazepine. We’re almost there.”
IN WEEK SIX, still another week later than scheduled, and still on the maximum dose of oxcarbazepine, I walk into the wrong room. My mind has softened in the last couple of weeks, as though the drugs are massaging my brain into a smooth lump. I’m sleeping a lot. I’m half-asleep when I go back to what I think is my room—308—which is on the left, across from the nurses’ station and three doors past the mag-locked exit to the outside. I think I’ve opened 308, except in my zombie state, I’ve come from the other end of the hall and I’ve walked into a room on the same side as the nurses’ station. It’s also a private room, set up like mine, but there is already someone in the bed and I can’t help thinking: it’s her.
The door whispers shut as designed (imagine slamming doors on a locked ward). I freeze and attempt to camouflage by holding my breath in the dark. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust. The room sharpens into being like a photograph in developing fluid. I know the person in the bed. It’s not her—it’s Jimmy! He told me the last time he was in they had to knock him out for a week. It must have been curare, to judge by how anaesthetized he is. He lies under his covers, breathing very slowly and very deeply, curled toward me with his dirty beard tucked between his knees.
I creep forward, right to the bed, and kneel. If his eyes fly open, I’ll scream. But he’s so deeply asleep that they’ve sunk into his head. I imagine them pointing backwards, staring into his own frontal lobe, where his illness flows out from its source. This is the first time I’ve seen him this close up. The lines along his cheeks and beside his eyes look like dry riverbeds from the air. What do you dream of if you’re beset by demons? Nothing if you’ve had a couple shots of phenobarbital for dessert. He’s so still he could be dead.
I see greeting cards on his bedside cabinet. I can see some of the brief handwritten messages in the faint light. The one signed Dad reads, You will always be my son and I will always be your father. The one signed Karl and Wendy says, Get better and come party motherfucker. A third one is addressed to Daddy in a child’s script, and I look away.
The society of the mad contains primarily other sick people, as well as doctors and nurses. Some family if you’re lucky. I’ve learned that many of the people here have been here before and will return again. Out in the world they’re burning fuses, a danger sometimes to themselves or others. In here, they shamble, their legs confused on anti-seizure drugs; they wince at their thoughts; their lot in life is revealed to them over and over. They are poor and sick and shabby and hungry.
I back out of Jimmy’s room unnoticed. I heard that he had a job last year driving a forklift. Even had a girlfriend before the summer, the first one since losing his kid in the divorce, but he went off his meds because they gave him blurred vision. He hid his returning symptoms at work until he couldn’t control them anymore and then he took the forklift for a drive on the QEW and they canned him.
IN THE MIDDLE OF WEEK EIGHT, Dr. Morbier announces that my latest test results show great improvement and he has put me in for Sunday release. He begins to taper the oxcarbazepine. I’ll still have to take it for another couple of years and be monitored regularly, but he calls my recovery excellent. For two days I get a half dose, then for two days I get a quarter dose. On my last night, I dream in the ward for the first time.
It’s a simple, straightforward dream. I’m on a ladder passing books down to Reid, who is putting them into boxes. I look around and I see this is a house we lived in when we were kids, a house that was sold decades ago. These are my mother’s books. Reid tells me we have to go because the plane home is in two hours and we have to be at the airport an hour before. I come down the ladder and tape up his box and put it with the suitcases by the door. The suitcases are full of books, too. From upstairs comes the sound of footfalls and a rumbling voice. “We better get out of here,” Reid says. “Before it comes down.”
“Why is it here?” I ask.
Doors open and close somewhere in the house. The footsteps come nearer.
Reid is pulling my hand. “It’s in the room, Mom! You
have to get up! Get up!”
I awake from the dream and see a form at the foot of the bed. It’s come to claim me. I hold my breath, my mouth open.
Then it speaks: “You were in my room.”
“Jim-mee?” I say, through fear-hiccups.
“I saw you, but I was asleep. They shot a daylong nap up my arm. But I knew someone was there.”
“I’m going to turn on the light,” I say. “Okay? Don’t moo-hoove.” The light has a urinous cast, but it’s really him. He’s in the pyjamas they supply you with if you don’t have your own. White with grey dots, button-up top with lapels. The pyjamas hang off him. “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to go into your room.”
“But you were there.”
“Yes, I was. You’re totally right.”
“Good. I thought I was going crazy.” He twirls the air beside his ear with a finger.
“You were curled up in a ball.”
“I prefer paranoia to death. My room smells like diapers.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“There’s no sushi here.”
“That is one of its detractions. Can I ask what you’re doing in my room?” I hiccup so hard I belch.
“We need to talk,” he says.
I sit up, alarmed by his swaying, shuffling movement toward me. My pulse dances in my temples. “Okay, Jimmy. Let’s talk.”
“Look at me, okay? I’m sour in kopf. But before, you should have seen me, Jean.” The light picks his eyes out above his dirty, multicoloured beard. “I was a person.”
“You’re still a person, Jimmy.”
“In a villainous vessel.”
“You’re not so bad.”
“I was married. We had a boy of my own, we called him Tommy. But I haven’t seen him in a long time. I don’t know if he even lives here anymore. I worked as a bartender in a nice hotel downtown, made dirty martinis, made bourbon sours. Tommy’ll find me. When he learns about his mind, though, look out! He’ll say: Who put that in me? Was it my father? Was it my father’s father who put my terrible self in me?” He leans in and I pull the covers up. “Are you afraid?”
Bellevue Square Page 13
