Bellevue Square

by Michael Redhill

  “That surprises you?”

  “I guess so. I never thought about it very much, although you see people with mental illness every day in a big city. They’re out on the street, they’re poor, I would guess most of them are self-medicated. And people see them as their symptoms. I did. When Jimmy’s really sick, I can’t see anything except his illness. The way he looks, what he does, what he says. Like there’s no room for Jimmy.”

  “Self-medication isn’t an inherent part of homelessness or mental illness. Just saying.”

  “I know. My point is, I feel different now. Medicine has helped me, it’s helped Jimmy. And more people should recognize that if you can treat it with medicine, it must be like every other disease and no one should be ashamed to have it and others shouldn’t be afraid of it.”

  “This is excellent self-talk, Jean. You must have done some CBT after you lost the baby.”

  The baby again. “I saw some doctors, read a few books.”

  “Are you uncomfortable talking about this?”

  “No,” I say with conviction. If I have to talk about it, I’ll talk about it. “It was a huge shock and then after it happened I couldn’t feel anything at all for the longest time. I was convinced Nick would never be born. For the last two months, I was really sick. Then I had more trouble afterwards.”

  “Postpartum depression.”

  “No,” I say. “Psychosis. Postpartum psychosis.”

  “That must sit heavy.”

  “Oh yeah,” I say. “The postpartum depressives look down their noses at us. I heard voices.”

  “How did you feel about that?”

  “It was very scary. I knew they weren’t real, but I still heard them.”

  “I wonder if you were already suffering from seizures that far back? Could have been a complicating factor.”

  “Maybe. It doesn’t matter. It happened.”

  “What did these voices say to you?”

  “Oh god. Well, they didn’t like me much. They told me I was a bad person and that even the baby knew it and the baby was going to die because it would prefer being dead to having me for a mother.”

  “I bet that was just for starters. But you didn’t see anything? No hallucinations?”

  “I don’t know. How would I know?”

  “Right,” says Morbier. “Well, it’s entirely possible that these were early manifestations of your bad wiring.”

  He’s so fixated on the etiology of my disease that he’s not paying attention now. “This isn’t that,” I say.

  “What isn’t?”

  “I thought we weren’t going to do therapy. Why are you asking me about my feelings?”

  “Your emotional life, if it remains within what I’d consider a wide spectrum of normal—including brief relapses—is a good way for us to measure your progress. When I asked you how you felt about hearing voices, you gave me a rational, balanced answer that included naming the feeling. This is not the answer, I’ll hasten to add, that you might have given me if you were still traumatized by your experience with psychosis.”

  “Us?”

  “Hm?”

  “You said a way for us to measure your progress.”

  “I mean your caregivers, including me.”

  “How many caregivers do I have? Are you all talking to each other?”

  “You’re misunderstanding me. You and your husband signed documents admitting you to Western for surgery. Then you were transferred to the Clarke and into my care, which meant I had to know what the issue you’d been treated for was, of course. How else can we coordinate your care? This is about your recovery. Although we can do up other papers that restrict everything that comes up in here to this room.”

  “Are you a shrink?”

  “No. Not really. I’m a specialist. You’re safe here, Jean. Can I ask you, have you heard voices at other times in your life? Before Nick?”

  There are certain problems that cannot be solved and one of these is the liar. Whether for strategic or emotional reasons, the liar who is convinced of the necessity of his lie will adapt the defence that he never lies. And a person who is trying to convince you that they are not lying could be lying about never lying, exemplum Morbier’s slick explanation of who us was. The liar is an example of Schrödinger’s cat: at all times half-true and half-false.

  “Jean?”

  “Not the way I did after Nick was born. But I’d had issues before. I played mind games on myself. To freak myself out.”

  “Ah,” he says, but he’s writing again.

  “I imagined a voice was telling me to stop breathing, that I wasn’t allowed to breathe and that I would never be able to breathe again. But obviously I never died or even fainted—I’d always have to breathe in finally. And the voice would say: This time, I let you live.”

  “You were how old?”

  “Eleven. Twelve.”

  “Your voice never told you to hurt yourself or anyone else?”

  “No. It was a trick I played on myself. To see how scary it would get if I pretended some kind of paranormal thing was inside my head, like a parasite, and it had taken over my thoughts. I’d have to prove to it that I was myself and it couldn’t exist.”

  “Did you prove it?”

  “I must have. It went away.”

  “Or you just got used to it.” He smiles and his eyebrows seem to lift off his face. “How did you get over it?”

  “Oh god, I don’t remember. I called it the vampire and pictured it as this dark, square male face covered in hair. I told him I could make him stop talking to me just by trying, and then I would. But an hour later, he’d say, I stopped talking so you’d think you were free of me. I might stop for ten years and come back! So then I’d tell him as soon as I get distracted by something, you’ll disappear. No, I’ll just be watching, he’d say. And so on.”

  “So far his case is more convincing than yours. I didn’t hear a proof in there.”

  “I told him if I’m hearing him in my own head then he’s reaching me through my own consciousness, you know?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “So he’s inside of me, no matter where he thinks he came from. No matter how much he wants to pretend he’s separate.”

  “Beat him at his own game. How did he like that?”

  “He tried to tell me that one day I’d want him to be in charge. That there were things I couldn’t or wouldn’t do on my own. But I told him he’d have to show himself in person if he ever planned on taking over. And I’ve never seen him.”

  “Maybe Ingrid is a more sophisticated version of your vampire?”

  “It was a logic puzzle, like an existential one. I think a lot of people do it. To prove to themselves that they’re really there.”

  “So are you really here?”

  “I better be. Or you’re wasting your time.”

  He laughs. A person’s laughter tells you a lot more about their trustworthiness than their reassurances. He’s okay, is what his laugh says. But maybe he knows how to laugh in a trustworthy way…

  He asks: “Do you think Ingrid would have visited Jimmy in the hospital?”

  “Ingrid? I don’t think Ingrid knows Jimmy exists. I was the one keeping a vigil in the park.”

  “I’m asking, given the little you got to know her, do you think she was the sort of person to visit a stranger in a hospital? Is she as kind as you?”

  “Well. If a doppelganger is the exact same person as the doppelgangee, then I guess she would be. But if she’s different inside, how would I know? She’d had a surgery, one that I haven’t.”

  “You didn’t mention that.”

  “A recent scar, over her ribs.”

  “Show me where.”

  I put my hand under my left breast. “Here.”

  “What was the surgery for?”

  “To harvest some bone, she said.”

  He turns the little black clock on the stool toward him. He does this instinctively within three minutes of the end of our sessions. “Mayb
e she was telling you she’s Adam to your Eve.”

  “Turns out to be the other way around.”

  “I have faith in you, Jean. You’ve battled demons before and won. And so you have this time. Because Ingrid is gone.”

  When he speaks of her in the past tense, I get a little shock. She’s gone and I’m still here.

  “Time,” he says. “Let’s continue this in the new year.”

  JANUARY 2ND, which is the quietest day of the year, I find myself haring around the basement, looking for pictures of Paula and me from when we were kids. I’ve had dreams about my sister since matters have regularized. Normal dreams that feel like memories as well as their extensions into fantasy. Usually they’re similar: a scene from our childhood backyard, the one on Dunview with the two big white sidewalk slabs just a step down from the kitchen’s sliding door. Dad found them in a grassy lot and dragged them home behind his Volvo in a tin wheelie bed he made himself. Easier, he said, than going to Canadian Tire. The backyard has only a few elements in it, and these are the same elements I can bring to mind when I try to remember it: those two uneven, tilty sidewalk pieces, sitting atop glinting white gravel the size of acorns. Square shrubbery on three sides with birches rising behind them.

  When I was ten, I broke a bottle of vitamins on one of those white slabs and I can feel the fear as I pinch up each tablet in trembling fingers and try to collect the glass pieces without making a sound. It was a miracle he didn’t come booming down the stairs at the noise of the big bottle shattering. I couldn’t put it into the garbage where it would be discovered, so I swept it into a paper bag and crept down the street to the mailbox and dropped it into the chute.

  That’s the backyard Paula and I are sitting in. In the grass, playing with our trucks. I’m seven or eight, she’s ten or eleven. It could be an accurate recollection, except that the vitamin tablets are lying here and there in the grass, glowing orange within green. I have my own point of view, which is to say, I don’t see myself, I see my surroundings. I’m inside my childhood body.

  I get up and start collecting the tablets. The more of them I pick up, the more appear, as if they’re multiplying through being seen. They are strewn around the base of the birches. I glance up to the house and see my father’s shadow behind the upper curtains, pacing. He throws a window open and looks right at me, sees what I’m doing, and his red face bulges out of the frame like a parade balloon, his huge eyes inky black.

  Paula makes a run for it. A woman wearing a beautiful black dress comes into the backyard and scoops her up. I don’t see her face, but I know it’s not our mother. Paula goes with her and they disappear through the gate. In this, and other dreams like it, the woman who takes Paula appears over and over until I begin to “understand” that this is Paula’s new mother. And that is my father whose face bursts from an upstairs window. Paula’s new father is in another house, but we are sisters! Are we not sisters? Our house, squatting on its foundation of broken stone, starts to shake and come loose of its plot.

  I don’t put as much store in dreams as Dr. Morbier would like me to. He says talking about them lubricates real memory, but I tell him there is much I would prefer not to lubricate. I don’t want to know what the vitamins in the grass mean. I don’t want to know why Paula has a different mother whose face I can’t see. Just because you can (try to) interpret a dream doesn’t mean you should. It’s like getting your fortune told, I tell him. You don’t really believe in it, but once you hear what the palm reader has to say, you can’t forget it, either.

  Morbier backed off. He seems more interested in Paula now than he is in Ingrid. Why does my sister have another mother? How can she be my sister, then? And where is my mother, he wants to know. The woman in black is not her—this I seem sure of—but my real mother does not appear in these dreams.

  Our lived lives end up feeling compact in retrospect. Some periods grow together in memory and become one, while others, important or not, vanish like they never happened. My experience of my life is the same as my experience with books: so vital when I’m present, forgotten afterwards. I can barely recall the names of the main characters in my favourite novels. I feel their longings and I might still fear for them in a specific way, but I can’t remember very much. I couldn’t bring to mind the way Virginia Woolf wrote a sentence well enough to make even a feeble imitation. I can’t hear her in my mind, nor the rhythms of any poems I have ever read. I don’t recall, but for a few very significant exceptions, the most stirring lines from the most moving plays I have ever seen.

  Where does it go, all this happening? The books that took root as pictures and sounds in my mind—sensations sometimes absolutely like life—are gone as soon as the book is finished. Same as my days. It’s like a fuse is burning just steps behind me, reducing my lived life to ash.

  While Ian is with the boys at the rink, I get down a few of the old bankers boxes from their shelves. After the first one, I vacuum up a dozen years of settled dust, and then change the bag and suck up some more.

  I find the baby pictures of Nick. We didn’t take as many of Reid. He’s chided me for that, for expunging him from the official record. But after the first baby, when you see there are nine thousand photographs you’ll never have time to organize, you go easy on baby number two. And baby one is making it hard to snap photos spontaneously because he is stuck to you like the monster from Alien.

  Still, I can’t find any photos of Reid by himself. He’s in many of the family photos, the majority of which show him with an expression as demented as he could come up with the instant before the picture was snapped. An earlier box contains albums from the wedding and our first couple of years dating. These take some time to work through. It’s only from this distance that I can see how good looking I really was. God, to have that skin again and those legs, which seem longer on my younger self. I had dimensions Pierre Trudeau would have appreciated. Now I have fifteen extra pounds and a gravity-induced ratio problem.

  I can’t bring back a single memory from our wedding except the images I encounter in the albums. Before we had Nick, I looked at these pictures regularly. It was just Ian and me, and for some years, the wedding was the highpoint of our lives. Then I got pregnant, but only for seven months. Afterwards, I had my troubles and put the wedding albums away, as if to punish myself for thinking that was happiness. A living baby was happiness. When Nick arrived two years later, I was grateful he was a boy. I was afraid of giving birth to a girl. That I might have to love and grieve her all at once.

  After my miscarriage, I didn’t feel the emotions my wedding photos had once roused in me, and for years I’ve left these albums uncracked. When I look at them now, the people in them are so foreign. They’re as generic as the photos that come in new picture frames. The bride covers her mouth as the groom withdraws the cakey fork. A blur of arms below a garter frozen in mid-air. Some of the people are dead. There are dead people at my wedding. I can’t think of a thing I said or did that night. Nor what I ate (salmon mousse?) or if we made love or not (I’m sure we did), or what happened the next day.

  Strangely, of Paula there is nothing. She is in one wedding photo, surrounded by people who were my close friends at the time. She thinks nothing of broadcasting her couchbound self in real time now, but perhaps then she disliked being photographed. I don’t remember. We fought at times, maybe we fought that night. She could go weeks cutting me in the hallways of our childhood home. A famous period after her first boyfriend broke up with her was when she went silent on everyone she knew for the better part of a year. Then came accusatory emails and phone rants that sounded nothing like her. I look back on it and wonder if it was the earliest hint of the schwannoma.

  It’s worrisome now that I can’t locate any pictures of myself before I met Ian. They might be in a box with only pictures of me in it. Self storage. There are albums at my mother’s house, but if I begin asking for them, she’ll want to know why, and you can’t lie to our dreamproof mother. Standing in the basemen
t with open boxes all around me, I try to think of where else my older albums might be. I go check in Nick’s room. We keep extra pillows and blankets in his closet, along with unused candles, a humidifier, a painting I hate, and an ironing board. I feel along the blankets and remove them. The closet is deep, and once the clutter’s been moved, I encounter two more boxes. One of them is full of silent Super 8 movies still in their orange Kodak containers. The other has a projector in it.

  Ian won’t be home for another hour, longer if there is a stop for treats on the way. The projector is simple to set up, and a diagram engraved on the metal side of the motor housing shows how to loop your film through the gates and set the sprockets onto the spindles. It’s got a handle and weighs almost nothing. I plug it in and test the bulb; it works. In the middle of Nick’s room, I hold the thing and point the lens at a bare spot on his wall, between a José Bautista poster and a poster from the movie Rogue One. I flip the switch. The film chatters through the insides of the projector and a box of dark grey shudders onto the wall. Cracks splatter to a burst of light and then our mother’s face appears. It jumps up and down because I can’t hold the projector steady. I have to drag Nick’s side table around and put it down.

  My mother is talking to the camera. She’s sitting at a table and the ocean moves over her shoulder. They’re on the Queen Elizabeth, the first one, when it was still the Cunard Line—their gold laurel shines on her wineglass. Then a hard cut and the view is of the ocean all the way to the horizon. It pans over the railing to where my father is standing, staring into the lens with his bright, evil eyes. I can smell the burning soot coming from the liner’s funnels, but it’s dust on the projector bulb.

  It’s their honeymoon. Before they knew much about each other or what they wanted from their lives. For my father it was already booze. Later came the women, the pills, the car wrecks, the bad paper. I didn’t attend his funeral and felt no shame about it. He was his fourth wife’s problem. The third was the one he broke his fist on. The first and second were my mother. Here he seems undiluted. A man no one called father or fiend yet, looking at a woman he believed was the answer to all of his problems, chiefly his loneliness and his rage. I never asked him for the truth about anything. But I don’t want to know the truth. I don’t want to risk feeling something for him.