by S. T. Joshi
“…Through sunken valleys on the sea’s dead floor,” she said, as the wind howled at the window.
“What?”
The phone on his desk rang. He jumped a little in his seat and said, “Wait, Mom…”
He put the cell phone down, answered the desk phone. “Dr. Cheski…”
“Fyodor? You weren’t at home… here you are!” It was his mother. Coming in quite clearly. On this line. “You need to talk to that psycho Psych Tech, he’s following me around the ward…”
Sleet rattled the window glass. “Mom… You playing games with their phones there? You get hold of a cell phone? You’re not supposed to have one.”
On impulse he picked up the other phone. “Hello?”
“They tolled but from sunless tides…” Then it was lost in static—but it did sound like his mother’s voice, in a kind of dead monotone.
Monotone—and now a dial tone. She’d hung up.
He put the cell phone slowly down, picked up the other line. “What, Mom, have you got a phone pressed to each ear?”
“You sound more like a patient than a psychiatrist, Fyodor. I’m trying to tell you that the ‘Psycho’ Tech who claims he works here is… What?” She was speaking to someone in the room with her now. “The doctor said I could call my son… I did call earlier; he wasn’t at home…” A male voice in the background. Then a man came on the line, a deep voice. “Is that Dr. Cheski? I’m sorry, doctor, she’s not supposed to use the phone after eight. I could ask the night nurse—”
“No, no, that’s all right—does she have a cell phone too? It seemed like she was calling me on two lines.”
“What? No, she shouldn’t have one… Oh, there she goes, I have to deal with this, doctor… But don’t worry, it’s no big problem, just her evening rant, yelling at Norman…”
“Sure, go ahead.”
He hung up. Picked up the cell phone. Put it to his ear.
Nothing there. He checked to see what number had called him last. The last call was from Leah, two days before.
* * *
NEXT MORNING, A COLD BUT SUNNY WINTER DAY, Fyodor dropped by the ward, at the facility across town. A bored supervisory nurse waved him right in. “She’s in the activities room.”
His mom wore an old Hawaiian-pattern shift and red plastic sandals, her thin white hair up in blue curlers; her spotted hands trembled, but they always did, and she seemed happy enough, playing cards with an elderly black woman. Someone on a television soap opera muttered vague threats in the background.
“Mother, that house you suggested to Aunt Vera for me—did you say you were born there?”
Mom barely looked up when he spoke to her. “Born there? I was. I didn’t say so, but I was. Don’t cheat, Maisy. You know you cheat, girl. I never do.”
“Did you call me twice last night, Mom? Talk to me twice, I mean?”
“Twice? No, I—but there was something funny with the phone, I remember. Like it was echoing what I said, getting it all mixed up. Hearts, Maisy!”
“You remember reciting poetry on the phone? Something about tides?”
“I haven’t recited poetry since that time at Jimmy Dolan’s. Your Dad got mad at me because I climbed up on the bar and recited Anais Nin… What are you laughing at, Maisy, you never got up on a bar? I bet you did too. Just deal the cards.”
He asked how things were going. She shrugged. For once she didn’t complain about Norman the Psych Tech. She seemed annoyed he’d interrupted her card game.
He patted her shoulder and left, thinking he must have misheard something on the cell phone. Perhaps some kind of sales recording.
Suggestion. The lonely house, the odd story from Roman. Auditory hallucination?
It wasn’t likely he’d be bipolar like his mother—he was thirty-five, he’d have had symptoms long before now. He was fairly normal. Yes, he had a little phobia of cats, nothing serious…
He got back to the office a few minutes late for his first patient. He had six patients scheduled that day; four neurotics, one depressive, and a compulsive finger biter. He listened and advised and prescribed.
A few days later—after Roman signed numerous waivers—Fyodor was sitting beside Roman’s bed, in the guest room, with its repaired lock, waiting for the drug to take hold of his patient.
Roman was lying on the coverlet, eyes closed, though he was awake. He looked quite relaxed. He wore a T-shirt and creased trousers, his blazer and tie and Arrow shirt folded neatly over a chair nearby, the shiny black shoes squared under it. His arms were crossed over his chest; his mother had provided the warm slippers on his feet. There was a small bandage on his right arm, where he’d been injected. The furnace was working full-bore, at Roman’s request, and the room was too warm for Fyodor’s liking.
On a cart to one side was the tape recorder for the session, a used syringe, and the little tray with the prepared syringes for adverse reactions. Superfluous caution.
Leah entered softly, caught Fyodor’s eye, and nodded toward downstairs, silently mouthing, “His mother?”
Fyodor shook his head decisively. No monitoring mothers. Roman was of age.
“I do feel a pleasant… oddness,” Roman murmured, his eyes fluttering as Leah left the room.
“Good,” Fyodor said. “Just relax into that. Let it wash over you.” He switched on the tape recorder, aimed the microphone.
“I feel… sort of thirsty.” His eyes closed; his hands dropped loose, occasionally twitching, at his sides.
“That will pass… Roman, let’s go back to that experience by the ocean, a little over a year ago. You said after that, you were remembering a white room, with a nurse. Could we talk about that again?”
“I…”
“Take your time.”
“…She holds my hand. That’s what I remember about her. The soft pressure of her hand. Trouble breathing—a pressure, a pushing inside me, crowding my lungs. And then—my very last breath! I remember thinking, Is this indeed my last breath? Gods, the pain in my belly is returning, the morphine is wearing off… They say it’s intestinal cancer, but I wonder… Perhaps I should try to tell the nurse about the heightened pain. She’s sweet, she won’t think me a whiner. The others here are more formal, but she calls me Howard… I feel closer to her than I ever did to Sonia… my own little Jewish wife, ha ha, to think I married a Jew, and my closest friend, for a time, before he got the religion bug, was Dear Old Dunn, a Mick… I want to raise the nurse’s hand to my lips, to thank her for staying with me. But I can’t feel her hand anymore. I’m floating over her… There’s a voice, an inhuman guttural voice, calling me from above the ceiling—above the roof. Above the sky. I must ignore it. I must go away from there, to find something, something to anchor me safely in this world… I want to tell my friends I am all right… I drifted, drifted, found myself in front of Dunn’s house… There is a cat, heavy with pregnancy, curled up under the big elm tree. I love cats. Feel drawn to her. That calling comes again, from the deep end of the sky. I need to anchor. The cat. I fall… fall into her. The warm darkness… then sounds, the scent of her milk and her soft belly… light!… and I remember exploring. I was exploring the yard… the big tree, overshadowing me, days pass, and I grow… the sweet mice scurrying to escape me…”
Fyodor had to lean close to hear him.
“Oh! The mice taste sweeter when they almost escape! And the birds—they seem happy to die under my claws. Their eyes, like gems… the light goes out… the gems fall into eternity… mingle with stars… I can scarcely think—but my body is my thought as I patrol the night. I pour myself through the shadows. The other cats—I avoid them, most of the time. If I feel the urge to mate, I go into the house… this house!… through the back door… the girl lets me in… I know what a girl is, what people are, I remember that much. I know there is food and comfort there. I rub against the girl’s legs, climb onto her lap. I will let my embers smolder here. She admires my golden eyes. The girl tells her mother, and Father Dunn, who has
come to visit, that the cat understands everything she says. When she says follow, the cat follows. She tells them, ‘I think it understands me right now! It is not like other cats…’”
Fyodor shook his head. This was not going as planned. Roman should be incapable of fantasizing under the influence of this drug; the formula was related to sodium pentothal, but more definitive; it had a tendency to expose onion-layers of memories, real memories… but a memory of being a cat? Was Roman remembering a childhood incident in which he’d imagined being a cat?
“How…” Fascinated, Fyodor cleared his throat, aware his heart was thudding. “How far back do you remember… before the white room—and before the cat?”
Roman moaned softly. “How far… how deep… the night-gaunts… I have come to this house to see Dunn. Of all my friends in the Providence Amateur Press Club, he was the one I trusted the most. Curious, my trusting a Mick—I sometimes sneer at the Irish in the North End, but even so, I love to work with dear old Dunn on his little printing press, in the basement of that magnificently musty old house. I am even tempted to take him up on the wine his father kept in that hidey-hole down there. But I never do. Dunn loves to cadge a little wine from his father’s bottles. Makes up the difference in grape juice. The old Irish rogue conceals the bottles from his wife, she doesn’t like him drinking… wine from Italy, a local Italian priest got for him… dear old Dunn! I even ghostwrote a little speech he made… ghostwriter, wondrous and most whimsical to think of that term, considering how long I wandered, here, from house to house in Providence, afraid of the Great Deep that yawned above me when I breathed my last. Gone. Did anyone notice?” He made a soft rasping moan. “What will people remember of me? If anything they’ll remember the intellectual sins of my youth. But why should people remember me? I’m sure they won’t… If I could tell them what I saw that day, on my trip to Florida! Getting out of the bus, on the South Carolina coast, an interval in the bus trip… my last real trip, in 1935 it was… driver told us the bus would be delayed more than an hour… there’s time to visit the lighthouse on the point near the station. Determined to get to know the ocean. Wanting to go against my own grain. But you can’t grow the same tree twice. Yet I writhe about, trying to change the pattern. I will go to sea, until I make peace with its restless depths. Despite what I told Wandrei—or because of it. I’ll show them I’m more than the polysyllabic phobic they think me. Found the lighthouse—tumbledown old structure, seems to have been fenced off… a broken spire… what a shame… there’s been a storm, I can see the wrack from the sea mingled with its ruins… the breakers have shattered the lower, seaward wall of the lighthouse… there, is that a hollow beneath it? I clamber over fence, over slimed stones, drawn by the mystery, the possibility of revealed antiquity… Perhaps the lighthouse was built on some old colonial structure… Look here, a hollow, a cobwebbed chamber, and within it a sullen pool of black water—its opacity broken by a coruscation of yellow. What could be glowing, sulfurous yellow, within the water of a pool hidden beneath a lighthouse? It’s as if the lighthouse had one light atop and a diabolic inverse sequestered beneath. There, I stare into it and I see… something I’ve glimpsed only in dreams! The tortured spires, the cracked domes, the flyers without faces… I’m teetering into it… I’m falling—swallowing salt water. Something writhes in the water as I swallow it. An eel? An eel without a physical body. Yet it nestles within me, biding, whispering…
“Darkness. Walking…
“Back on the bus, looking fuzzily about me. How did I make my way back to the bus? Cannot remember. The driver solicitous, asking, ‘You sure you’re all right, sir? You’re wet clear through.’ I insist I’m well enough. I take a few minutes to change my clothes in the station restroom. The other passengers are exasperated with me, I’m delaying them even further. I feel quite odd as I return to the bus. Must have struck my head, exploring that old lighthouse. Had a dream, a nightmare—can’t quite remember what it was… dream of something crawling into my mouth, worming through my stomach, down to my intestines… something without a body as we know them… Quite exhausted. I fall asleep in my seat on the bus and when I wake, we’re in northern Florida.”
Fyodor glanced at the tape recorder to make sure it was going. Had he administered the drug wrongly? This could not be a memory—Roman could not possibly remember 1935. Still, it was surely a doorway into Roman’s unconscious mind. A powerful mind—a writer’s mind, perhaps. A narrative within a narrative, not always linear; a nautilus shell recession of narrative…
Eyes shut, lids jittering, Roman licked his lips and went hoarsely on. “…trip to Cuba canceled but still—Florida! Saw alligators in the sluggish green river—seemed to glimpse a slitted green eye and within that eye a sulfurous light shining from some black sky… A great many letters to write on the bus back, handwriting can scarcely be legible… oh, the pain. In the midst of my midst, how it chews away. Cursed as always with ill health. Getting my strength in recent years, discovering the healing power of the sun, and then this—the old flaw chews at me from within now. I fear seeing the doctor. Nor can I afford him. Little but tea and crackers to eat today… can’t bear much more anyway, the pain in my gut… I seem to be losing weight… R.E.H. is dead! Strange to think of ‘Two-Gun Bob’ taking his own life that way. He should have been a swordsman, striking the life from the faceless flyers when they struck at him in some dire temple—not muttering about his Texas neighbors, not stabbed through the soul by his mother’s passing. We should not be what we are—we were all intended to be something better. But we were planted in tainted soil, R.E.H. and I, tainted souls blemished by the color out of space. I wrote from my heart but my heart was sheathed in dark yellow glass, and its light was sulfurous. So much more I wanted to write! A great novel of generations of Providence families, their struggles and glories, their dark secrets and heroics! I can be with them, perhaps, when I die—I will become one with the old houses of Providence, wandering, searching for its secrets… And I refuse to leave Providence, when I gasp my last…
“The sweet little nurse takes my hand, more tenderly than ever Sonia did. But God bless Sonia, and her infinite patience. If only… but it’s too late to think of that now. The nurse is speaking to me, Howard, can you hear me?… I believe we’ve lost him, doctor. Pity—such a gentlemanly fellow, and scarcely older than… I can’t hear the rest: I’m floating above them, amazed at how emaciated my lifeless body is; my lips skinned back, my great jutting jaw, my pallid fingers. I’m glad to be free of that body. There’s no pain here! But something calls me from the darkness above. Is the light of Heaven up above? I know better. I know about the opaque gulfs; the deep end of the sky. The Hungry Deep. I will not go! I will go see Dunn! Yes, dear old Dunn. Something so comforting about the company of my fellow Amateur Pressmen. I’ll find my way to Dunn’s house… Here, and here… I flit from house to house… is it years that pass? It is—and it doesn’t matter. I drift like a fallen leaf along the stream of time, waft through the streets of Providence. How the seasons wheel by! The yellowing leaves, the drifting snow, the thaw, the tulips… I see other ghosts. Some try to speak, but I hear them not… There—Dunn’s house! I’ll see if he’s still within. But no. Father Dunn has moved on. There is the little Irish girl, adopted by the Dunns. And the cat, her cat, fairly bursting with kittens. Oh, to be a cat. And why not? The mice… sweeter when they run… I speak to the girl… she shouts in fear and throws something at me. She chases me from the house!
“What’s that? One of the great metal hurtlers in the street! Truck’s wheel strikes me, wrings me out like a wet rag… Agony sears… I float above the truck, seeing my body quivering in death, below me: the body of the cat. But I am at peace, once more, drifting through Providence. Let me wander, as I did once before… let me wander and wait. Perhaps next time I’ll find something more suitable. Someone. A pair of hands that can fashion dreams…
“The Great Deep calls to me, over and over. I won’t go! My ancient soul has stre
ngth, more strength than my body ever had. It resists. I remember, now, what I saw in the ruins of that old lighthouse—under its foundations: the secret pool, the shamanic pool of the Narragansett Indians. A fragment of a great translucent yellow stone was hidden there—a piece of a larger stone lost now beneath the waves, once the centerpiece of a temple in the land some called Atlantis.
“The cat-eye stone struck from Yuggoth by the crash of a comet—whirling to our world, where it spoke to the minds of the first true men; gave the ancients a sickening knowledge of their minuteness, the vast darkness of the universe.
“It has been whispering to me since I was a child—my mother heard it, she glimpsed its evocations: the faceless things that crawled from it just around the corner of the house. She’d tell me all about them, my dear half-mad mother Sarah. She had visited that place, and heard its whispering. And that seemed to plant the seed in me—which grew into the twisted tree of my tales…
“I drift above the elm-hugged street, refusing to depart my beloved Providence. But the call of the Great Deep is so strong. Insistent. I hear it especially loudly when I visit Swan Point Cemetery. No longer summoning—now it is demanding.
“There is only one way free, this time—I must hide within someone… I must find a place to nestle, as I did with the cat… Here’s a woman. Mrs. Boxer is with child. I feel the heartbeat, pattering rapidly within her—calling to me… I go to sleep within her, united with him, the tabula rasa…
“I wake on the beach, full-grown. I cannot quite speak. I cannot control my body. It moves frantically about, speaking into a little invention, from which issues a voice. ‘Why, what do you mean?’ says the voice. ‘This is your mother, for heaven’s sake! Whatever are you about, Roman?’ If only I could speak and tell her my name. A voice comes from my mouth—but it is not my voice, not truly. I want to tell her my name. I cannot… My name…”
