by Anne Heltzel
I have to leave. I don’t have much time.
“Abby?” I look up quickly. “Abby,” he says again, and, as though he can read my thoughts: “What about Sam? Can you tell me about him?”
Sam. The name is a bullet through my chest. Sam’s name did not come up in my previous sessions; I’d thought he, at least, would be easy to hide.
“I don’t know who you mean,” I say. The doctor peers at me closely. He knows I’m lying.
“Sam,” he says. “According to the social worker from Saint Francis, you were repeating the name in your sleep.”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I don’t remember any Sam.”
We sit in silence for ten minutes.
“You should know that Lara’s run a background check,” says Dr. Tessler seriously. “There are no missing persons reports filed under Abby Jameson.” He pauses, as though choosing his words carefully. “We need your memories, Abby. There may be something that can help you if you’re willing to try it. Hypnosis.” He says it carefully, gauging my reaction. “Many people who suffer from what you’re experiencing can easily enter hypnotic states.” He forms his fingers into a little steeple in front of his chest. “Consider it. It could be very helpful.” His words sound like a threat, but I nod anyway.
“It’s noon, then,” he says, as if it wouldn’t have been noon otherwise. “Hang in there, Abby. I’ll see you next week. You can call me anytime before that if there’s anything at all you’d like to talk about.” I nod, pushing myself out of the recliner I’ve come to hate. My time here is running out.
“An interesting book.” His voice stops me just as I’ve reached the door. “What did you think of it?” I swivel at this; I’m caught off-guard. Dr. Tessler has an odd, curious look on his face, as though I’ve surprised him somehow. At first I don’t know what he’s talking about, but then I remember; the Inferno is jutting from the pocket of my jacket, its bulky form halfway exposed. I don’t know why I still carry it around. I guess because it’s the one thing I still have left from my time with Sam.
“I’m not sure,” I say carefully, even as my heart begins its instinctive race. “It’s frightening.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “But necessarily so, wouldn’t you agree? In the way it fits with the whole, I mean. Have you read the rest?”
“The rest?” Now it’s me who is surprised.
“Oh, yes,” he says. “You really ought to. The Purgatorio and the Paradisus. The Inferno is the most famous, of course; but it’s only the beginning.” I see that he is getting animated, as though this is a subject that interests him, but I don’t mind because I am interested, too.
Only the beginning.
“It’s all about the soul’s ascent to heaven,” Dr. Tessler continues, “starting in the bowels of hell and working its way up. At least that’s it in very simple terms. It’s really quite interesting; you should give it a look. A monster of a book, though,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t blame you if you don’t. I only dug through it under threat of a failing grade, way back when, in college.”
“OK,” I tell him, forcing a casual tone. “Maybe I’ll check it out.” I can feel the warm flush spreading to my face, so I turn quickly, striding out the door before he has a chance to see how his words have affected me. The soul’s ascent to heaven. So the story didn’t end in hell at all; there’s more to it. Something about knowing this makes me feel lighter, justifies my will to survive. All this time I’ve felt guilty for wanting to go on, but maybe survival is OK. I think about it all the way home, and it stays with me into the night, a tiny spark of hope embedded in my heart.
I am on the streets, technically the sidewalk, crunched up next to a set of stone stairs. I am supposed to be looking for a job; instead, I am begging. Because of my health, I have not had to go on mandatory job searches before today.
Now I pull my baseball cap low over my face, a cap I borrowed from a girl named Thed, short for Theodora, for the afternoon. My body almost doesn’t matter; by now it is a stranger’s body. But I wear one of Thed’s tight wife-beaters to show off my bones. It makes me look as skinny as I am. I feel naked, but it is so hot in this early-summer sun that I am grateful in a way. I sweat. I stare down at my sidewalk. It is the easiest way of making money. I’ve heard stories of people getting rich this way. So I’m doing it, even though there’s a risk. But I’ve seen myself in the mirror. I think I look different enough now, so skinny, like one of those girls on the talk shows and nothing like myself. Keep your head down. No one will recognize you. You could be anyone.
I have eight days left at Saint Francis. Eight days to make enough money here on the sidewalk to get me far, far away, because after what happened with Sam, and after Dr. Tessler started asking me all kinds of questions I couldn’t answer, I decided for sure that I have to get far away from here. I am worried that eight days isn’t enough time. I’m worried it’s too much, that someone will figure out who I am — Addison James — before then. It’s the first time since I got here that I’ve let myself really acknowledge the name, connect it to myself. It feels like something dangerous. As if everyone can hear me whisper it privately in my head.
I know from Google maps that Saint Francis is about an hour by car from where I used to live, on the opposite end of the woods. I’ve been safe for now, or maybe just lucky, but an hour is not distant enough from my past. I won’t get a job here, because I won’t be staying here much longer. This time next week, I’ll be gone.
I have been actively not-thinking about my family all day, but they maul my thoughts with their presence. They’re with me all the time now. It is why I am sketching, even sitting here, sketching and begging. In my jacket pocket now is the Purgatorio, the book Dr. Tessler told me about, the one that comes after the Inferno. I took it from a bookstore yesterday, but I didn’t steal it — I made a swap. I left my old copy of Sam’s book in its place. The Inferno may have been beat up, but it was more than an even trade. It was hard to give it up. I can’t read Purgatorio yet, though; I don’t know what stops me, but for now it sits there, in my pocket, untouched — waiting for another day. Maybe a day when my thoughts are free and not constantly with my family, playing and replaying that horrible night. I wonder if that day will ever come.
I let one sliver of comforting thought cross my mind again and again: everyone thinks I am dead. All that time I was dreaming up my own world with Sam, I was dead in this world, in Circle Nine. That is why no one has searched for me. The fact that I am believed to be dead is why I am still alive, allowed to wander free in this world. Then the familiar sliver of horror: if someone recognizes me, someone I used to know, it’s all over. I don’t think about the other things I read in the clippings I have found. I don’t think about them all afternoon.
Instead I think, If I can make some money, I will be gone. I’ve been sitting here for four hours and I’m only four hours away from heading back to Saint Francis for dinner, and I’ve so far made only twenty-five cents. What am I doing wrong? I even brought my sketches to sell, so it’s not as though I’m just asking for money; I have something to give in return. I sold one sketch, the one that made me twenty-five cents, to a blind man. He wandered up with his dog, and when he figured out there was a me beside him, he asked what I was doing on the sidewalk all alone. I told him I was homeless — it’s almost the truth, anyway — and the old man’s eyes teared up and he reached into his pocket and I thought I was made — that I could go home and buy a bus ticket right away — but he only pulled out a quarter and dropped it into my palm. At the last minute, I reached over and tore off one of my sketches to give him. It ripped partway because I was too quick to tear, but he won’t be able to look at it anyway, so I’m not sure it even matters.
“Lovely!” he muttered, holding it up in front of his unseeing face. “I’m going to hang it in my kitchen.” And then he and his dog shuffled away, and now I’m sitting here wondering what else is hanging in the blind man’s kitchen. The sketch he took was of Myra from t
he shelter. Now he’ll have this in addition to the poems from one man on the corner opposite and maybe the dirty license plates I’ve seen others sell. Anything is treasure here. Anything is worth money. And anyway, it isn’t the stuff that’s being sold that actually sells. It’s me. It’s us. The stuff is just so people won’t feel like we’re being paid to take naps all day.
But some people give the nappers money, too.
Almost no one gives me money.
I imagine it’s because they can see my guilt written in my posture, in the way I grimace-smile, on the scar snaking up my right forearm. They look down at me as they go by. Most pretend not to, flicking their eyes over at the last second or slowing their steps to stare out of their periphery, but some stare openly. I fight the urge to stare back. I’m not supposed to. I’ve seen how others do things. And I won’t let anyone see my face, just in case.
In the next four hours:
A man wearing a blue polo shirt and khaki pants leers down at me, asks, “What are your rates, sweetheart?” I don’t answer him. It’s an easy way to make money — I know that. But I can’t. It makes me think of Sid. It makes my heart shrink into a cold, hard pebble. I ignore him until he walks away in a cloud of swearwords, looking all around and over his shoulders to see if anyone noticed.
A little boy walks by, maybe four years old, clutching his mother with one hand and waving around a half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich in the other. His head is about as high as mine is, sitting here. Maybe a little higher. He is wearing green overalls and saddle shoes and a cap like mine. He’s chewing, but he stops all of a sudden and thrusts the sandwich at me. I take it instinctively. Food isn’t what I need, at least right now, but his gesture is so natural and sweet that I respond without even thinking. He turns as they keep walking, watching to see if I’ve taken a bite, and I do take one, and I smile my hard pebble-grimace, and he waves, and his mother never notices anything, and my eyes fill up just a little because she may never know this — this pure, beautiful thing — about her son. And I bet she’d be proud if she knew.
A dog stops and sniffs at me and lifts his leg to pee, but then his owner, a middle-aged woman, jerks him away and says, “No!” sharply. Then she blushes a little and says, “Sorry” with a little smile and places some change on the ground in front of me. She hurries off before I can thank her, and her shoulders are all hunched over and she walks fast like she’s terrified and anxious all at the same time. I wonder if she’s afraid of something like I am — if that’s how I move, too.
I only make a dollar twenty-five for the whole day. Even if I could sit out here for another thirty days, it wouldn’t be enough to get anywhere. The day has somehow made my need to get away, to start over, even more urgent. I will need to think of something else, because a dollar twenty-five is not nearly enough to buy my freedom.
I see a lot of things, though — things that make it worth it. Some beauty and a little filth, like the leering man, but more beauty than filth. And it’s obvious all of a sudden that everything’s all mixed up: you can’t guard yourself entirely from one thing or another because anywhere you are, there’s good and bad jumbled up like a huge casserole or like trail mix (I think of these things because I am suddenly very hungry), and you can never just have good or bad, one or the other. They’re both there, all the time, in Circle Nine or in my head or probably anywhere else, at least while we’re alive. I’m still alive. I know that now. I am not Addie anymore; too many people and things that made me Addie are now gone forever. And I never was Abby; she was something imaginary, some piece of fiction that Sam and I created. But I am here, and I am OK, even though I’m not exactly sure who I’ve become. And all of a sudden I want to see all the things I was shielding myself from when I was in the woods.
But I do hope that wherever Katie and my parents are, somewhere far away from this world, it’s only good.
Dr. Tessler adjusts his glasses and clears his throat in a way I can’t stand. I am keyed up, jittery in anticipation of what he might say to me today, or what he might make me say. He is cunning; I know that now. I know his cunning is maybe what makes him good at what he does, and I can see that I am right from all the degrees on his walls, from the framed awards he must have received over the course of his many years of doing what he does, which is to open up people’s minds and put them back together.
Which is to make me remember, make me feel all these things I don’t want to feel, especially in front of him.
Which is why I hate him.
But instead of asking me questions, he folds his hands over his plaid shirt, which tugs apart a little at the belly, and speaks to me with complete directness for maybe the first time. This is my third session. I have three days left at Saint Francis.
“Abby,” he says, “today I just want you to listen. I’ll do all the talking. You can ask me as many questions as you like when I am finished. I think you’ll enjoy asking the questions this time.” He smiles a little at this, his attempt at humor, before continuing. “It seems like you have no trouble remembering what it was like for you out there in the woods, but you seem to be having a little bit of difficulty remembering what happened just before you found yourself there. Now, I don’t know if this is subconscious or conscious.” At this I feel my face turning hot, but I don’t say anything. I won’t. “It may possibly be your psyche’s way of telling you that you’re not ready to confront whatever happened to you head-on. But it’ll undoubtedly come out in time, particularly as you become adjusted to your new environment and as you begin to feel comfortable during our sessions.” I nod. I can tell he knows I’ve been hiding something; I am growing more and more uncomfortable. But he said I didn’t have to talk, so I don’t.
“At any rate, I am aware that you’ll soon be leaving Saint Francis, and we both know that means you’re not required to see me anymore, but I hope you’ll consider coming voluntarily. I think I can help you, Abby. I think you’ll benefit from our relationship. I can help you deal with what’s already happened to you, and I can help you transition.” He stops here, waiting for my reaction. He’s right: I will be leaving Saint Francis soon. And I’ll be leaving Vermont, too, for good. I am certain of it, because now I have a plan. I am only here, going through the motions, because I have to. I have to leave quietly when my time is up. I have to avoid attracting suspicion.
“OK,” I say, meaning I understand, but he takes it for something more positive than what it was meant to be and hurries forward.
“Good,” he says, visibly pleased. “I think it will very much help you to understand the full nature of what you’ve experienced. It’s important that you know you’re not the only one who’s gone through this. And that you shouldn’t fear it happening again.” Happening again. That wasn’t something I had thought of. I had thought of it in the most superficial sense — in the idea of Sam happening to me again — but I’d never considered everything else happening again: the lies I told myself, the world I lived in. Going crazy. That’s what it was. I went crazy. It was the obvious thing that should have occurred to me, and I feel foolish that it never did.
“I believe,” says Dr. Tessler, “that you experienced a disorder called dissociative fugue. It’s not that common, but it’s much, much more common in women than in men. It typically involves some sort of journey from your home to elsewhere, which is the fugue part of it, and you seem to fit this criteria. And it often involves complete amnesia for its duration, anywhere from a couple of hours to many months. In your case it would have been about two or three months, from what we can tell from your story and your physical state, and”— he pauses here, and I can tell he’s about to say something that he thinks will interest me, and he’s probably right because I am completely and utterly absorbed despite myself —“and perhaps most interesting, it’s characterized by a loss of one’s own identity, and, in some very rare cases, the individual actually adopts an entirely new identity.” He stops, taking a breath and looking at me carefully. I don’t know what to fe
el. It’s my situation. It is somehow a relief to know there’s a label for it — that it’s something worth labeling, something other people have gone through — but there’s still one question.
“How do people get this . . . disorder?” I ask quietly.
“That’s the thing,” says Dr. Tessler, leaning forward in his chair. “That’s actually the part of the puzzle that’s missing for you. It’s always triggered by some traumatic event. A lot of soldiers get it as a result of the things they see in battle. And sometimes people get it as a result of abuse — typically sexual abuse — which is why I asked you about that in one of our other sessions. But many people get it because something sudden and horrible happens to them — something so horrible their minds can’t deal with it and they disconnect, or disassociate, entirely. The whole thing can happen in perfectly healthy individuals, not as a result of drug use or any other psychological disorders, and you’re both clean and otherwise healthy. So like I said,” he tells me quietly, peering at me intently from behind his spectacles, “there is some part of your puzzle that must be missing. I think if we can only bring it to the surface, you’ll make a lot of progress. I hope we can work on it together. Whatever it is, Abby, this is a safe place.”
I am only half listening as he continues telling me the ins and outs of this thing I have — dissociative fugue — which sounds like something slimy and infested. He knows. He knows for sure that I’m hiding something. Something so big and so horrible that it pushed me out of my mind for a while and warped me forever. I wish I could tell him what I did that night. I wish I could work on it and get better. I wish I could let him help me. But even as I’m wishing these things, I feel the same suffocating guilt for even wanting to get better when my family is gone. They didn’t get another chance; they didn’t get to do anything over. I will never, ever tell him. I will live with my secret forever.
