The interviewer’s voice is further mangled by a PA system that is louder than what is happening just a few feet from my nose. She’s introducing her guest. She gives a history of the author’s four novels, all of them grisly small-town mysteries, “but that’s not what we’re here to talk about today, is it?”
“No,” says a woman with my voice, and there’s nervous laughter both on the stage and in the audience.
“Were you worried when you wrote this book, that you’d alienate the people who were expecting another mystery novel from you?”
“Well, this is probably the best mystery I’ve ever written!” There’s laughter, then more applause.
“Why did you use your writing pseudonym as a character in the book? A book you’ve called a novel in some places and a memoir in others. Which is it?”
“I think with the troubles I’ve had, it’s better to treat the story as fictional. But a lot of it happened to me.” They laugh. She must have made air quotes. They like her. “I used my pseudonym to put some distance between myself and the people I wanted to write about. Because there’s me and there’s her and then there’s HER. And I don’t think I could have written about any of it until I could get outside or above it, if you know what I mean.”
“You had to feel separate.”
“Yes. So I could imagine for myself again what it really felt like. And to give her her due.”
“Inger Ash Wolfe, when did you first start experiencing the symptoms you describe in Denison Square?”
“In the spring of 2014. I was walking around in downtown, and I happened to see myself, in the front window of a shop. But I didn’t realize it was me at first. I just didn’t. I thought there was a woman inside the store, and she was staring right at me. She looked like she was upset, but also trying to hide her feelings. That’s what I saw in her face. I decided it was none of my business—maybe she was looking at someone inside the store who I couldn’t see. But I glanced back once more, and she did too, of course at the exact moment.
“I kept walking, but I couldn’t get the look on her face out of my mind. I felt I had to…confront her, ask her if she thought we knew each other or something. So I went back to the store and I went in. I couldn’t find her anywhere. I asked the lady at the till if she’d seen a woman in a blue dress, wearing little hoop earrings, and she said, ‘Well, there’s one standing in front of me right now.’”
Good-natured laughter in the audience, a nice release. I touch my ears. I’m not wearing mine.
Linda says: “I see you’ve got them on tonight.”
I walk down to the dark inside the wings. Her earrings, like the ones I own, are gold, half an inch in diameter, and thicker at the bottom. Ingrid…Inger is wearing jeans and cork heels. And lipstick. She looks good.
“It happened a couple more times,” she’s saying. “I’d see this woman deep in a store or a restaurant, and she’d look right at me. Sometimes I’d be in the car and turn my head, and there she’d be, sitting in the passenger seat of her car. I finally told my husband about it. He was the one who broke it to me!”
“That you’d been looking at yourself, all this time, in mirrors.”
“I couldn’t believe it. How could it be I didn’t know I was looking at myself? We read up on it, and the more we read, the more scared we got. I told my GP I couldn’t recognize myself in mirrors—and they did the tests and then he asked me to come back to his office, like the next day. Something he didn’t want to discuss with me on the phone.”
“You must have been terrified.”
“I don’t remember the drive over. I could only think: this is it, I have cancer. The look on his face is going to tell me everything the second I walk in. But when we got to his office, his expression was, like, you’re not going to believe this. He told us the MRI and the x-rays both showed a lesion between my parietal and temporal lobes—”
“For those in our audience today who might not be brain surgeons?”
“Uh, in the brain, there are lobes? And the temporal lobe is mostly about processing sound. The parietal has a lot of functions, like establishing where things are in space, a lot of your visual and language processing, sense of your own body.”
“Proprioception.”
“Yes. Imagine not knowing where your own body parts are. Like in space? Hey, why’s this fork pointing at me?”
“Soon after your diagnosis, the symptoms got worse.”
“Yes,” Inger says quietly.
“You began to see yourself out in the world…walking around, in stores, in the street. But at a distance. And you and your twin’s movements were not synchronized, which I understand is unusual even for people who experience autoscopy.”
“It is. It’s called asymmetric autoscopy. There are only eight known cases.”
“In the book, you talk about how your family reacted to your diagnosis. Your daughter thought you were making it up.”
“Well, she didn’t like me having a wilder inner life than she did. She was ten at the time, full of her own imaginary friends, and now Mummy has one? Then she got with it. She started telling me about my doppelganger, how she’d see it sometimes near her school and it looked sad because it wasn’t really her mummy. It was sweet! She said it came into the house one day and made her a sandwich.”
For some reason, there’s applause again. There must be a rip-roaring scene of me making that child her gorilla. Linda asks Inger if she was worried that when the book came out her condition would become public, and Inger recites what sounds like a prepared statement, about mental illness and stigma, and cashing in on her own problems, et cetera et cetera, and the audience responds like it’s stroking her hair. But—Inger continues—she found the strength to publish. Praise be.
“Your husband was a great help,” Linda says. “You dedicate the book to him.”
“For one thing,” Inger says, “he was the one who found Dr. Mourguet, and it was through applying some of Mourguet’s techniques that I was able to…reassociate. Sometimes when you have a trauma, your mind can splinter. Not good for a writer. He taught me how to focus again. But yeah, Larry has been a rock. I’m lucky to have him.”
“I want to ask you about your sister. You talk about her a lot in this book.”
“When I got sick, I didn’t know if I was going to tell her about it. Paula and I had been estranged for such a long time I didn’t even know where she was living. I thought she was still in Phoenix, and I did write to her, to tell her that I was sick and to ask after her, but she didn’t reply.”
“You found someone who knew her, a man who did custodial work in her building. She’d never left Phoenix.”
“No. Because she’s buried there.” I mishear it at first. I hear Inger say Paula was spared. “She killed herself,” she continues, and the word killed penetrates me like a bullet in the head. “It hurts that she didn’t reach out. We barely spoke, but I thought she’d ask for help if she needed it. I was wrong. I don’t know if she ever tried to get help, but if she did, it didn’t stop her.”
“She’s gone, but during your illness, and since, you say you’ve felt much closer to her.”
“My memories of Paula are ancient. There were months in our childhood when she didn’t live with us. She could be unpredictable and violent. They shuttled her back and forth between the group home and our house, but this was the seventies. They weren’t sophisticated about her problem.”
“What was her problem?”
“Borderline personality? Psychosis? Maybe she had a vitamin deficiency. We’ll never know.”
My entire body feels cold.
“Has it helped to write about her?” Linda asks.
“I feel like we suffered together while I was writing this book. We didn’t do that when we were little and our house was full of drinking and fighting. And I miss her now.”
“Your doppelganger doesn’t know that Paula’s dead. Jean can see you, talk to you; she walks the same streets you do. We might say she knows you in
side out, but for her, Paula is still alive.”
“Someone should have Paula. And Jean’s got so much on her plate. She deserves some company, and Paula was beautiful company. Not for herself, I guess, but for me when I was a girl. She was like a protective layer in my life.”
“You could have used that in recent years.”
“I suppose in some ways, she’s been here for me.”
There’s a rustling on the PA and a squeak. Linda says, “We can take some questions now if you like.”
“Sure.”
Someone asks, “Do you still see it?”
“It?”
“Your doppelganger.”
“Oh yeah, gosh. All the time. Flare-ups. I can see her now, actually.”
Excited chattering. I back away from the light litter in the wings and stand nearer to the mixing guy.
“You can see her?” asks the audience member. “Right now?
“Yep. She moved when I looked at her. She’s like a floater in my eye.”
Linda leaps back in. “But what does it mean when you see—?”
“She’s like an aura before a migraine. That’s kind of what this is. But it’s not a migraine, it’s a, a seizure.”
“Are you okay? Do you need a glass of water?”
Inger laughs, and my guts churn. I tuck deeper against the canvas where it’s cool and dark. “I think I’m okay,” she says.
Linda’s voice is excited, or worried, I can’t tell. “May I ask? Do you still see her?”
“No, but she’s in the back, listening.”
“You’re a fraud!” I shout. “You’re an imposter!”
“What’s happening?”
“She’s calling me an imposter.”
“Who is she, Inger? What does she think she is?”
“She’s like everyone else. Me, you, everyone in this audience. She thinks her first-person experience is unique. She can’t see that she’s a variation on a theme.”
“And what’s the theme?”
Quaking with rage, I creep along the plywood wall behind the technician’s table, feeling with my hands.
Linda says “Inger?” in a strange way, but then the sound from the stage warps. I open and close the door in the plywood barrier as silently as possible, and once through, I can’t hear anything. I look at my watch: it’s only been twenty minutes. Apart from a couple of patches of light, the backstage area is too dark to see in. My hands shake uncontrollably. I try to focus on the rainbow against the pillar, the only thing in the room clearly lit. Sitting there in the dirt, it seems to me an abject thing.
I’m startled by a voice nearby. “Is it over—?”
I turn around; no one’s there. The canvas ripples in the air currents. I hear the voice again—“We should all get the hell out of here.” I look down and there’s a toad the size of a teacup on the ground. “Oh, she’s going,” it says. “Just now they attend her on the stage. Lissen.” There’s a different sound emanating from the faraway speakers. Confusion, people crying out and calling to each other.
I crouch down. “Are you talking to me?”
“Hello?” Jimmy steps through one of the backdrops. “If you’re going to kiss that thing, make it snappy. We have to get out of here.”
The toad’s run out of things to say. “I thought it was talking to me.”
“Maybe you should be on my meds.” There’s a scent coming off him, the pot maybe, but no, it’s smoke. Voices from the front rise in urgency. “I figured out what I am in Ingrid’s dream of you,” he says.
“Oh yeah?”
“I’m the alarm clock.” He has the matchbook I gave him. He tears a match off, snaps it alight, and tosses it onto a tabletop.
“Fuck, Jimmy!” I rush over to stamp it out, but he lights them one after another, tossing the eager little flames onto a table covered with crumpled napkins. I grab the matchbook out of his hand and pound out the redglowing napkins with my fist. My sightline to the tent’s entrance reveals flames running up the canvas walls and people screaming and running for the single exit. I rush back to the interview stage to see the audience fleeing into the piazza. Inger is not among them. Where she’d been, the stage is littered with a semicircle of sterile wrappers and syringe covers.
“They must’ve took ‘er already!” Jimmy says behind my left ear. “I think she had an attack.”
I shove him away from me. “What the fuck have you done?”
The smoke rushes in from left and right. People run past us, stumbling and crying out, and I hear sirens. Jimmy yanks me into the crush, and the mouth of the yurt is on fire like the entrance to the worst ride on Hell’s midway. Beyond, the dead leaves from last fall shiver in the rising heat and begin to glow. More bodies converge on me and I’m pressed, pushed down from behind until I’m on the ground. Feet stampede past my head. The empty Steele’s Tavern matchbook scatters from my palm and a black shoe steps on it. Someone wrenches my arm behind my back. “Run outta matches, sweetheart?” A woman’s voice. She pulls me to standing and starts pushing me through the entrance. “You’re under arrest,” she says.
All around us, people are coughing and struggling. The cop pushes me forward, her hand clamped to the back of my neck, driving me through the crowd panicking in the heat-shimmering air. Then her hand slips off and I feel her against my back. She knocks me to my knees. When I can scramble away and stand, I see Jimmy behind her holding a blood-smeared chunk of rock.
“Oh my god. Jimmy!”
“She was taking too much of an interest in you,” he says. Burnt skin hangs off his face and his brown irises float in red pools. He collapses to his knees. The officer, whose nametag reads WINDEMERE, lies on her back insensate but breathing. Blood trickles out of her scalp and into the snow. Jimmy takes her keys off her hip and tosses them to me. “You should go,” he says.
People shriek and flee into the forest, and I look back and see a river of burning sparks flowing through the roof like an aqueduct of stars.
OUTSIDE THE TENT, the grey-black pall has room to billow. It rises demonically. Behind, flames shoot up into the trees. Sirens come toward us along the service road, and a helicopter chops in from the west. Abandoned police cars stand empty beyond the smokewall, their lights going, a post-apocalyptic sight of bootless cries, and I run, crouching, to the nearest one. I get in and switch the flashers off. I know my way around a cruiser, until now a useless perq of being married to a policeman.
I try Windemere’s keys in the ignition. No go. I slide over to the passenger door and get out to try the next cruiser. The door is locked and my key doesn’t work. It won’t open the third car along, either. But car 1266 opens and starts and its onboard computer immediately comes to life.
I navigate out of the small herd of cruisers and head down the service road to Route 41. A line of police cars and ambulances comes stampeding north, sirens and lights blaring armageddon, and I continue beneath their notice.
I pick up the handset and depress the button. “Car twelve sixty-six, car twelve sixty-six, come in.”
“Westmuir twelve sixty-six,” comes a male voice. “What’s your location, Windemere?”
“South of the fire at the Underwood Festival. Need backup, as much as possible, and more air support—”
“We’re sending everything we have and Mayfair is mobilized.”
“Is that the hospital they’re taking people?”
“Julia? You don’t sound like yourself—”
“It’s the smoke.” I put the handset back on its hook. If Inger got out alive, they took her to Mayfair. There’s no closer hospital. I watch the powerlines slide past, black and silver portioning the night sky. Below them lies some of the same forest Jimmy and I walked through this afternoon, the same green mantle that was here when I belonged here with my little family. Maybe nothing has changed in my life and I’m actually still here raising two young children while my husband adjusts to his important desk job after years on the force. Maybe I’m still here, crying for no reason by th
e creek with Nick strapped to my chest. I see us reflected in the water, the steely sky behind us.
“Jean?” Ian’s voice, coming from the radio. I look at the handset. “Jean, pick up. Or turn on your phone! Where are you? Peter MacTier swears he just spoke to you, and you were in a cruiser? Pick up the handset, Jean. Talk to me.”
I bring it to my lips, push the button. “Don’t say anything if you want me to talk.” I leave a pause long enough to confirm compliance. “I’m doing something that’s important to me, Ian, even if you don’t understand it. You have to trust me.” Will he jump in here and plead with me? Reason with me? No…he’s actually listening. “I can get her to admit what she did to Katerina if I just talk to her. Get her to admit what she’s trying to do to me. Ian? Do you understand now?” He doesn’t answer. I push the button a couple more times and it dead-clicks. He’s gone. I switch my phone back on and dial him, but the last dot of reception goes blank and I’m driving in two layers of darkness, the road and the sky. I’m in a zone impermeable to signals.
Around another and then another jagged silhouette of pine stand and oak stand, I see in the distance a blue glow, the hopeful hospital H against the star-clad sky. I pull the cruiser in under the ER hood and park it between ambulances.
—
I go into emergency. Some of the victims from the fire are already here. I don’t see Inger among them. It smells like burning hair, and black soot smudges the railings and the registration countertop.
I don’t want to draw attention, which precludes standing in the line to ask a question. I huddle in among the people on the orange leatherette chairs in the waiting room and study the situation. There are a few cops around, but they’re waiting near the exits. I scan the other half of the waiting room and make out at least two people who were probably brought in by them. Drunks with bleeding faces. I have to take note of the police a few times a minute to make sure one of them hasn’t received instructions that pertain to me and/or my capture.
Past the registration area, painted footprints in red, yellow, and blue lead the way along the floor to various destinations: blue to the exam rooms, yellow to triage, red to the ICU. Choose your own ending. I get up and look like I know what I’m doing and then follow the yellow footprints. Doors hush shut as I go.
Bellevue Square Page 21
