Without a word, Helene turned and went back across the hall, and Deborah for the first time permitted herself to speak a small word of praise for the good light in her own mind.
During the dark months spent lying on the bed, she sometimes thought about the half-mythical person, that Doris Rivera, who had been in these rooms, had suffered these fears, had seen the subtle disbelief in those around her that she would recover, and yet had gone out, well, and taken the world.
“How can she stand it, day after day—the chaos?” Deborah asked Carla.
“Maybe she just grits her teeth and fights every minute, waking and sleeping.”
“Does she have a choice? Can she be sane by willing it?” Deborah asked, seeing Doris in her mind as a listless frozen ghost bending her every energy to the Semblance.
“My doctor says we all choose, really, these different ways.”
“I remember …” Deborah murmured, “… the years I lived in the world …” She thought of the Censor again. (Now take a step—now smile and say, “how do you do.”) It had taken extravagant energy to afford a Censor for the Semblance. “I gave up because I just got tired—just too tired to fight anymore,” she said.
Furii had told her that sanity had to do with challenge and choice, but challenge as Deborah knew it was the shock-challenge that Yr created for her in snakes dropping from the walls, people and places appearing and disappearing, and the awful jolt of the collision of worlds.
Furii had said, “Suspend experience; you may not know what it is like to feel, even remotely, what mental health is. Trust our work together, and the hidden health deep inside yourself.”
But in the shadows a huddled, skinny shape waited for her thoughts to come to it: Doris Rivera, who had gone into the world.
Finally, one afternoon, Deborah, for no reason that she knew, got up from her bed and walked the length of the hall to the ward door. She had come out. Her grayed vision was still severely limited, but it seemed to matter less.
Miss Coral was sitting on the floor near the door, smoking a carefully attended cigarette, and seeing Deborah she smiled her completely disarming little-old-lady smile.
“Why, welcome out, Deborah,” she said. “I’ve been remembering, if you still want to share it.”
“Oh, yes!” Deborah cried, and went to the nursing station, borrowed one of the “official” numbered pencils and a sheet of paper, and spent the time until dinner racing after Miss Coral and Peter Abelard and thick gusts of Medea. It had never occurred to her that Miss Coral would be happy to see her, or that Carla, when she saw her on the hall, would smile and walk up to her. “Well, hi, Deb!” It was brave of Carla to do this right off. It showed trust and a very touching loyalty, since it was usually far safer to wait to see, in anyone’s change, how the change ran before coming over and showing recognition. Deborah could think of no special reason for Carla’s courage and generosity. She wondered for a moment if it might not be that Carla was simply glad to see her. Could there be a world, really, beyond her walled eye?
Suffer, victim, Anterrabae said gently in the metaphoric Yri words of greeting. In obedience to him and his command the range of her vision grew, and with it, something like a potential for color, although the color itself was still not present.
“I’m glad you got out today, Deb,” Carla said. “I was going to come in and tell you: I’m set to move down to B ward tomorrow.”
You will not listen, will you, Bird-one? Anterrabae said softly. They plant the seed and call it forth in rich soil. Sun and water and food are all given. They coax it forth from its casing, crying, “Join us; join us.” Sweet singing and the feel of warmth. The first green beginnings come, and they stand over the shoot with a dropper full of acid … waiting.
The awful truth began to dawn on Deborah that Carla had become her friend, that she liked Carla, and that the scarred befriending part of her still had the power to feel.
The Censor began to roar with laughter, and Anterrabae fell faster away. He was teasing her with his great beauty; his teeth were fire-struck diamonds and his hair curled with flames. Deborah became aware that she had neither commented nor moved one plane of the mask.
“Oh,” she said, and then because she wanted it, to make herself suffer, and the only way she knew how was by telling the truth, she said, “I’ll miss you.”
The terror of the statement brought a cold sweating through her and she began to shiver with it. She got up and went to huddle with those of Dante’s third circle before the fickle mercy of the radiator.
The next morning when Carla was ready to leave, she said another short good-by. “I’ll be around. You could even get privileges to come and visit me down on B.”
Deborah turned a puzzled face toward Carla, for with the help of Yr’s codes and magic she had excised the feeling of loss and friendship, and the reality of Carla’s presence. So Yr was still strong; its queen and victim still maintained a shred of power over the world’s will to make her suffer. She went through the day almost gaily, and got Miss Coral to remember Lucretius’s hooked atoms, and gave a hard wit-parry and thrust home to Helene that brought the fleeting mixture of envy, respect, and terror that was Helene’s form of response. It was the first time since Deborah had come up on “D” that she had put on her disguise, consciously striven for in her fear of Carla’s leaving. Doris Rivera had got up and gone; Doris Rivera was semi-legend, and Deborah had mentally cast her as a sort of ghost, unable to live, unable to die, a figure of desperate and pathetic endurance; for Deborah could not imagine meeting the world again on any other terms than those. But Carla, she knew, was alive and responsive, and she was on her first step into the nightmare that people called “reality.” The eye of destruction was drawing closer to where Deborah waited, just out of its sight. Soon it would turn to her. She was eased in her illness now enough that the disguise of normality was gone. And the eye would focus on her and the hand would pick her up and set her out in the wilderness of reality, without even the thin coat of defenses she had spent her life making and this year in the hospital destroying.
Overhead, in the dimension of Yr, Lactamaeon, tauntingly beautiful, was free in his open sky, enjoying the shape of a great bird. She had once been able to soar with him in that great sweep. What do you see? she called to him in Yri.
The cliffs and canyons of the world; the moon and the sun in the same bowl, he answered.
Take me with you!
Just a moment! the Censor intervened with his raspvoice. Deborah never actually saw the Censor because he was not of either world, but had a part in both.
Yes … wait. Idat, the Dissembler, unmale, unfemale, joined him. While they discussed the matter elaborately, parodying the now familiar psychiatric manners and terms, Lactamaeon found a chasm, dove into it with a high eagle-scream of triumph, and was gone.
Somehow, in the interim, it had come to be evening. Miss Coral came up to Deborah, saying, “I guess that the secret of enjoying hospital food is to be too ill to notice it.”
“Mary still has some of those candy bars, doesn’t she? Ask her and maybe she’ll give you one.”
“Oh, but I can’t ask. I never could ask for anything. I thought you knew that. When I have to ask, something happens to me and I … well, I start to fight.”
“I didn’t notice,” Deborah said, wondering if she ever looked at anyone or noticed anything about the world.
“I wanted to tell you something,” Miss Coral said almost shyly. “I’ve found a tutor for you—someone who reads classical Greek fluently—a real Greek student, and if you ask him I know that he’ll be glad to help you.”
“Who is it? Someone here—a patient?”
“No, it’s Mr. Ellis, and he’s here now, on the evening shift.”
“Ellis!” Deborah realized that the episode with Helene and the bitter cost of witnessing and going Unhidden had been before Miss Coral’s time—that since McPherson had spoken to her she had not talked to Mr. Ellis at all and that somehow his sn
eering and scorn, while still as plain as Anterrabae’s fire, had faded into a part of the undertone of the ward. He spoke little now, and had little to defend. He was no longer new on the job, no longer being tested by the patients, and he was now looked upon by them and himself as merely a custodian of things, some of which were still alive. Perhaps he had been spoken to about beating patients; perhaps not. There might be or might not be those who rose from packs during his hours less convinced of the world than they had been when they went in.
“If you want to learn,” Miss Coral continued gently, “it’s he who holds the key—” She laughed a little at the allusion. “You have all the Greek I can give you.”
Down the hall Deborah could see Ellis unlocking the bathroom for The Wife of the Abdicated. He did not look at his charge or speak as he stood back and let her by him. Without expression he moved back on the corridor, not looking at anything or anyone. As he passed Deborah, the tumor wrenched inside her, doubling her over hard so that she found herself on her hands and knees. The dark sweat took a while to pass, but it was Castle, the new aide, and not Ellis whom she found watching her shaking the dizziness away.
“What’s the matter, Blau?”
“Your spatial laws are okay,” she said from the sweat, “but God—watch out for the choices you give us!”
chapter sixteen
For weeks Esther Blau had worried and fretted over having to tell Suzy about her sister’s illness. Who had not heard all the old-style high melodrama of insanity; of the madwoman in Jane Eyre, of bedlam, of the hundreds of dark houses with high walls and little hope; of lesser dramas in lesser memories, and of maniacs who murdered and passed on the taints of their blood to menace the future? “Modern Science” had given the official lie to much of this, but beneath the surface of facts, the older fears remained in the minds of the well no less than of the sick. People paid lip service to new theories and new proofs, but often their belief was no more than the merest veneer, yielding at a scratch to the bare and honest terror, the accretion of ten thousand generations of fear and magic.
Esther could not bear the thought of Suzy replacing the familiar image of her sister with the wild-eyed face of the straitjacketed stereotype chained in an attic. She realized now that it was this stereotype that she and Jacob had begun to imagine the first time they heard the grating of the locks, when they saw the barred windows, and when they shuddered to the screaming of a woman from some high gable. Still, Suzy had to know; it was past time. The little sister was growing up and they could no longer talk around her; it wasn’t fair to keep shutting her out from the source of their deepest concern. But the telling would have to be done in some sure way, safely and expertly. They wondered if Dr. Lister could tell Suzy. But Dr. Lister refused it; it was Esther’s job and Jacob’s, he said.
“Wait a little longer,” Jacob said. Esther knew that “wait-a-little-longer” was only one of the doors he used to slip quietly into inaction. Close your eyes and it won’t exist; everything will be fine-fine-fine. It was a lie. So they fenced back and forth with it and at last Esther won her way. That evening, when they were finished with dinner and Suzy had gotten up to do her practice on the piano, Esther called her back.
“This is serious….” To her own ears her voice had an odd mixture of gravity and embarrassment. Sitting stiffly, she began to tell her younger daughter that Deborah’s “convalescent school” was a hospital; her doctors, psychiatrists; her illness not physical but mental. After they had eased into the icy subject, Jacob began to add, modify, explain this part and that, presenting as fact much of what he himself had been uncertain about.
Suzy listened with the complete impassivity of a twelve-year-old, her face giving no sign or flicker by which the parents could detect how she was hearing the words they were wringing out of themselves. When they had finished, she waited a while and then spoke slowly.
“I always wondered why those reports seemed to be more about Debby’s thoughts than about her body, like pulse or temperature.”
“You read the reports?”
“No. I hear you quoting things to Grandma sometimes, and once you read to Uncle Claude part of it, and it sounded kind of funny to be about the usual kind of sickness.” She smiled a little, no doubt remembering something else that had puzzled her. “It all fits now. It makes sense.”
She went into the next room to practice her piano lesson. A few minutes later, she came back to where Esther and Jacob were still sitting at the table, stunned, over their coffee. “It’s not like she’s Napoleon or something … is it?”
“Of course not!” Then they spoke a little stiltedly and painfully about the optimism of the doctors, the advantage of early treatment, and the strong force of their patience and love all weighing in Deborah’s favor.
Suzy said, “I hope she comes home soon—sometimes I miss her a lot.” And then she went back to the duty of Schubert.
They sat for a long time shocked at the difference between the expectation and the happening. Esther felt weak with the sudden easing of the tension.
Jacob said slowly, “Is this all? … I mean is this all there is or didn’t she really hear us? Will she be back, when the shock wears off, with the look on her face that I have been afraid of for all these months?”
“I don’t know, but maybe the cannon blast we were fearing was only what we heard.”
Jacob took a long draw on his cigarette and let his anguish leave his body with the exhaled breath.
“English is a wonderful language,” Furii said, “to have such expressions. You look like what they call …down in the dumps.’”
“English is no better than Yri.”
“To praise one thing is not to damn another.”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t being wrong courting death?” (The sharp sword of precocity had been comfortable in her hand; she had honed its edge herself. To be queen of Yr [and its slave and captive] was to be right and only right.)
“But you made costly mistakes, didn’t you?” Furii asked gently. “You identified the wrong girl at the camp.”
“I was wrong a hundred times. But as long as I was ugly and ruined and beyond hope, and of a substance that was poisoned and poisoning, I could still appear to be right. If I was wrong—even a little—then what was left?”
She saw the weak and wound-licking ghost of old vanity in what she was saying and laughed. “Even in Pernai—nothing—I had to have a little something.”
“And so do we all,” Furii said. “Are you ashamed of it? To me it is one sign that you are a member of Earth at least as much as of Yr. Do you believe that your substance, as you call it, is really poisonous?”
Deborah began to tell her about the Yri laws governing the ultimate substance of each person. People were differentiated by this substance, which was called nganon. Nganon was a concentrate which was defined in each person by nurture and circumstance. She believed that she and a certain few others were not of the same nganon as the rest of Earth’s people. At first Deborah had thought that it was only she who was set apart from humankind, but others of the undead on D ward seemed to be tainted as she was. All of her life, herself and all her possessions had been imbued with her essence, the poisonous nganon. She had never lent her clothes or books or pencils, or let anyone touch any of her things, and she had often borrowed or stolen from other children at school or camp, delighting, until their stolen nganon wore off them, in the health and purity and grace of the possessions.
“But you told me that you used to bribe the children at camp with the candy that your mother sent you,” Furii said.
“Well, yes. The candy was in a box, all cellophaned and impersonal. Being unopened it had no essence, and it takes about a day or so before the Deborah-rot sets in. I gave it right away almost as soon as I got it.”
“And so you bought a little popularity for a few hours.”
“I knew I was a liar and a coward. But by that time the Collect had begun to come stronger and stronger, and …liar and coward’ w
ere standard comments.”
“And this feeling was threaded through with the precocity that you had to maintain, and with your grandfather’s saying always how special you were.”
Deborah had pulled away her mind and the doctor looked up with a kind of sharpness in her eyes, catching Deborah at the edge of something.
“Anterrabae …” Deborah called in Yr.
“Where are you now?” Dr. Fried interjected.
“Anterrabae!” Deborah said aloud and in Yri. “Can she bear the great weight?”
“What is it now, Deborah?” the doctor asked.
She moaned to the god, then turned to the mortal in desperation. “Anterrabae knows what I saw—what I have to speak of…. If only I had not seen it; if it had been hidden, that special thing … that thing.”
When she began to shiver with the cold of an ancient parting, Furii gave her a blanket, and she lay on the couch rolled up in it and shaking.
“During the war …” she said, “I was a Japanese.”
“An actual Japanese?”
“I was disguised as an American, but I was really not an American.”
“Why?”
“Because I was the Enemy.”
It seemed to Deborah an ultimate secret, and Dr. Fried was forced to ask her to speak louder time and time again. She began to explain that because she could go into Yr or rise out of its incredible distances without visibly changing, Yr had given her, as a gift for her ninth birthday, the power to transmute herself in form. For a year or so she had been a wild horse or a great bronze-feathered bird. She quoted to Dr. Fried the Yri incantation which had once freed the bird-self from the illusion of the ugly and hated girl:
“e, quio quio quaru ar Yr aedat
temoluqu’ braown elepr’ kyryr …”
(Brushwinged, I soar above the canyons
of your sleep singing …)
I Never Promised You A Rose Garden Page 13
