Strangers

by Mort Castle

  She tried to pull in air and could not. Her head was pounding. Her blood rolled in angry, desperate demand.

  I am dying!

  No! A moment of calm and pause and internal hush. She had slipped out of the natural rhythm of respiration and once she regained it she would be all right. She focused on the pulsations of her wrists and temples, behind her ears, at the back of her knees, and she tuned in to the messages sent to these contact points by her racing heart. She had it then.

  In goes the good air, out goes the bad air, in goes the good air out goes the bad air… She was fine, just fine, breathing so deeply that she could feel the oxygen saturating the cells of her lungs. In and out and in and out…

  “Beth,” Michael said, “are you okay?”

  Okay can’t you see? She said that, or thought it, she wasn’t sure which, to the tune of the first line of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

  She knew that if her hearing was so sharp, her vision was probably no less acute. There was a trick, however, to seeing well, to seeing the everything that is the all, and that was instead of squinting the way most people did when they tried to focus on an object, you had to open your eyes as wide as possible.

  I see Eye See…

  The picture on a television screen was not a real picture. It was exploding dots of red and green and blue. She studied the dots, first the red, then the green, then the blue, and then let them merge into something more, a picture.

  The camera zoomed in for a close-up on Alan Alda. He was drunk, slurring an anti-war monologue: “What it is, is it’s all crazy, you see…”

  Yes, Hawkeye, I dosee!

  “…like a joke, but the thing is, the only way you can handle the joke is to come up with a few jokes of your own.”

  Hawkeye was—of course, of course—talking to her. He had probably tried to speak to her before but she had ignored him. She hoped that she had not hurt his feelings. Now he was telling her what to do.

  “Beth,” Hawkeye said, “believe me, if I could, I’d save you. I’d save everyone, Beth.”

  I know that, Hawkeye.

  “I can’t, so it’s all up to you, Beth. You’ve got to be the one to save yourself and those you love. Can you do that?”

  Yes, I can.

  “Beth…”

  It was not Hawkeye who spoke; it was Michael. She turned her head, saw his lips shape her name after she’d heard it like a badly dubbed foreign movie. Then she heard the cold echo:

  Beth

  Beth

  Beth

  Beth…

  “Are you all right?”

  He was the one who had played the jokes, all the vicious, heartless, monstrous tricks. But she could trick him! Whatever he said was certain to be a lie—Liar, liar, pants on fire!—and so she would not let herself hear it.

  “Look Beth…”

  There! She’d turned him off. It was no more complicated than clicking the knob on a radio. Michael was talking to her, his mouth was moving, but she heard nothing. Beneath the aqueous surface of his eyes lurked the dark specter that was the real Michael—Cruel Michael! Wicked Michael! Stranger Michael!

  She could feel the evil radiating from him. It was draining her of strength. She would get away, but calmly, so he would suspect nothing, and then she would concoct a scheme of her own, a trick of salvation, of rescue.

  She stood up and went to the stairs.

  “Beth! What in the hell!”

  Careful! She was not concentrating as intently as she had to and so his words broke through her barriers. She did not have to walk; effortlessly, she was carried up to the kitchen by the stairs that had become an escalator.

  She knew then that Michael did not control the house; it was on her side. In the kitchen, she stood with her head cocked, listening to the house, to the hidden messages it wished to share with her. The chilly night pressed against the windows and she heard the glass panes whisper “Courage” as they refused to allow entry to the dark and the cold. The quiet hum of the refrigerator was the house wiring’s electrical energies. She tuned in to that power, and felt it indomitable within her. The plumbing vibrated with liquid secrets and confidences meant for only her.

  She went to the sink, turned on the water Bluish-gray steam rolled out, a heavy fog filling the entire kitchen. She had a place to hide. She was invisible within this dense cloud. She was concealed from Michael.

  She saw him—I see him but he can’t see me—as he came upstairs. The girls were right behind him. Beth held out her arms. “Come to me, children.”

  Within this surrounding mist, they would all be safe. He could not find them, could not harm them.

  “Mom,” Kim said, “you’re being real weird!”

  Michael said, “Kids, your mom’s sick.”

  “Liar!” Beth screamed.

  “…so you get up to your room. Don’t worry, I’ll take care—of her.”

  No! The children were leaving, gazing back at her. They didn’t understand. If they did not come to her, she could not protect them!

  “All right, Beth. Everything is all right now. You calm down. Get a hold of yourself.”

  With his hands on his hips, he stood on the wispy perimeter of the fog. He was grinning—the flesh of his face peeled away and his skeletal head was of itself a horrifying smile—as he said. “Shit, Beth, looks like this is it. You’ve slipped your trolley, kiddo.” He laughed. “You’re freaked out. Your belfry is chockful of bats. Wifey dear, you are one hundred percent, stem-to-stem goofus. You are fucking nuts!”

  Hands balled into fists, she charged him.

  He quickly grabbed her wrists, spun her around, and, keeping her arms pinioned, crushed her to him in bear hug. Her tears exploded and, with them, a string of profanity. Michael laughed. “That’s great. Nice and loud so the kids can hear you call their daddy twelve kinds of fucker. They’ll have an interesting story to tell at school tomorrow. ‘Hey, teacher, my mommy went crazy last night.’”

  “I am not crazy!”

  “Tell that to the men in white.”

  The men in white arrived twenty minutes later. They stuck a hypodermic in her arm, strapped her to a stretcher, rolled her out of the house, and took her to Prairie Hills Sanitarium.

  He was strikingly handsome, she thought. In his brown, three piece woolen suit, the stylishly thin tie knotted in a precise half-Windsor, his beard sharply sculpted, he had the rugged but intellectual appearance favored by advertising men’s apparel in the more conservative men’s fashion magazines.

  She hated him. He was plotting against her, he and Michael…

  “Beth,” he said, leaning his shoulders against the door frame, “when I ask a question, you are supposed to answer me.”

  She glared at him. She was sitting up in bed, wearing a scratchy, white cotton hospital “Johnny.” She was numb—empty—from her hairline to her toes.

  Beside her bed, there was a toilet bowl and a sink in the ten by ten isolation room. The floor tile was white and unpatterned. There was an observation window in the door. From time to time, eyes had suddenly appeared at it, always catching her unaware.

  She remembered how when she was eight years old, her father took her to Chicago for a visit to the famous Shedd Aquarium. She peered at the sharks, those incredibly flexible torpedoes, behind the glass, and their glacial eyes looked back at her and she’d wondered who found who stranger. It was nearly inconceivable that both sharks and men shared a planet; they were so impossibly different. There in the aquarium, the sharks swam and she felt confusion, and fear, and even the hate prompted by the totally alien.

  Dr. Jan Pretre, she thought, was a shark. He belonged on the other side of the glass.

  “Beth, I want to help you. I can’t do that unless you cooperate.”

  His help? she thought. Perhaps he might help her choose her own casket! She said nothing.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  She said, “In an insane asylum.”

  “We don’t use that term nowadays,
” Jan Pretre said. “This is a private institution, Prairie Hill Mental Hospital, and you’re my patient. How long have you been here, Beth?”

  “Monday,” she said. “That’s when they brought me here.”

  “Very good,” Jan Pretre nodded. He folded his arms across his chest. “You’re far more in touch with reality today than you have been, Beth. Now, can you tell me what day of the week this is?”

  She thought about it. She wasn’t sure. Without a window in the room, no clock, the light, overhead that never went out, the constant dim illumination in the corridor, there were no ways to measure the passage of time. None of the people who unlocked the door to give her pills and shots answered her questions or even spoke to her. (And what were they drugging her with? Something that turned her blood to molasses and made it impossible to hold onto a single thought for more than an instant.)

  “Don’t you know what today is?” Jan Pretre said.

  “I know that you can’t keep me here. You have to let me out. I’m not a prisoner,” she said slowly and clumsily.

  “No, you’re not,” agreed Jan Pretre. “You voluntarily committed yourself…”

  “I did like hell!”

  “That’s your signature on the admission forms, Beth.”

  It was a memory or a dream or a fantasy or an hallucination: someone was telling her to sign something, that if she signed she would be safe and the girls would be safe and that everyone would be safe and she was signing, looking at her name and thinking That is all there is left of me, there, on that line…

  “I signed myself in so I can sign myself out!”

  “You could indeed,” Jan Pretre said. He put his hand to his bearded chin. “I’ll bet a lawyer would have you released in an hour.” Then he glanced around the room. “What a shame, no telephone in here so you can seek legal counsel.”

  Beth said nothing. She tried to think, but her mind was cluttered with bits of nonsense—a line from a nursery rhyme, the items on a shopping list, the remembrance of the way smooth stones glittered in sunlight as they lay in the shallow water of a stream.

  “Of course, Beth,” Jan Pretre said, “If you were released, then for your own good, your husband and I, as your doctor, would have to arrange for a sanity hearing. You’ve had a Psychotic episode. You might have harmed yourself or someone else. You’ll be found incapable of making your own decisions and. . .”

  His words were a droning blur. She couldn’t stand to look at him. She studied her calves. They were stubbly; she hadn’t shaved her legs in… how long? God, how long would she be here?

  “Beth?”

  She didn’t raise her eyes but she nodded let him know she heard him.

  “Let me help you. Cooperate with me.”

  She had no choice. She would pretend to cooperate. She nodded.

  “Good, Beth. That’s better. Tomorrow we’ll schedule you for electroconvulsive therapy.”

  She forced herself not to give a damn. He could schedule her to be strung up by the thumbs while hot coals were applied to her feet. She would go along with whatever he wished, and get out of this madhouse.

  She smiled at him. She made sure the smile was shy and hinting at sadness, that it was acquiescing and, more than anything else, trusting.

  “Anything you say, Dr. Pretre,” she said.

  “That’s good, that’s just fine.” She lay on a heavily cushioned table. To prevent injury during the convulsion she’d undergo, she had been given a muscle relaxant. She was also receiving a daily dose of 1,500 milligrams of Thorazine, a powerful tranquilizer, and she felt as limp as laundry on a line.

  She was surrounded by male and female nurses and attendants. It was their job to hold her down. “Open your mouth, please.”

  She opened her mouth for the rubber bite plate. Whatever they demanded—“Swallow these pills, let me have your arm for this shot, please roll over, turn yourself inside out,” she would go along with them. That is, the Beth they thought her to be would act as submissive as an abused puppy.

  But there was another Beth. That was the one buried deep within her. That Beth knew she was not insane, would not let them make her insane, and would hold onto her sanity no matter what!

  Graphite salve was smeared on her temples. She bit into the mouth guard. There were heavy hands on her arms and legs. The electrodes were touched to her head.

  Blackness in the shape of a huge rectangular sheet of metal dropped on her. She thought I am dead! and then she floated away, rising, buoyant and liberated. She gazed down at the Beth who was writhing, eyes rolling wildly, limbs thrashing despite the efforts of those trying to keep them immobile.

  Jan Pretre was below her, watching the convulsing Beth, never realizing that there was another Beth. Contemptuously, she mocked him with a line from Peter Pan, the book her mother had given her for her seventh birthday; Peter, about to be run through by his arch-enemy, Captain Hook, looked the heartless pirate in the eye and said, Do your worst, you old codfish!

  In the weeks that followed, Beth Louden’s Psychotherapy was intensive and eclectic. Dr. Pretre was convinced of the efficacy of shock, and so he had 100 volts sent through her brain three times a week, but hers was an unusual case and there were other potentially beneficial approaches. He experimented with heavier dosages of the tranquilizer Thorazine, then, not pleased with the results, administered a drug with an opposite effect, Tofranil, a psychic energizer. Beth went without sleep for fifty-eight straight hours, then collapsed.

  He tried narcoanalysis, sending her into a “twilight sleep” with sodium amytal. During one narcoanalytic session, she—the real Beth—almost gave herself away. Calmly, in a drug thick voice, she said, “I’m fooling you, you know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “How are you fooling me, Beth?”

  “I mean I was fooling myself, Dr. Pretre, you know, that Michael was doing horrible things. I even thought you were helping him, that you were part of a plot against me.” She began to cry. “Oh, Dr. Pretre, help me so I won’t fool myself ever again.”

  Do your worst, you old codfish!

  After that she knew that though she had been careful, she must take still greater precautions not to reveal herself. There had to be a hidden and safe and faraway place to send the real Beth when Jan Pretre tried to ferret her out, to seize her and destroy her.

  She created one.

  The garden spreads for acres and acres, so great a distance that the flowers blend into the sky at the horizon line. Roses and zinnias and peace and tulips and geraniums and love and the thousands of perfumes coalescing into one heady aroma, the scent of Beth’s garden

  there is no fear

  are no wicked secrets

  is no death

  She had a refuge. She stole away whenever Dr. Pretre came too close.

  The petals of a tulip are as soft as a dream.

  Michael came to visit. “Yes, I am feeling so much better, Michael. Yes, I do want to come home.”

  There is nothing more beautiful than the purple of my morning glories.

  Sometimes Michael brought the children. “I’m sorry, girls. I didn’t mean to scare you. I was sick. But I’m going to be better soon and everything will be fine.”

  Quick, come with me. Safe in my garden, the flowers bloom and you will bloom with them, safe from harm, safe with me!

  Vern and Laura Engelking came to see her. “I’m blessed to have such wonderful friends. Thank you. Thank you.”

  I am in

  my garden and in

  my garden I live and am safe

  I live I live I live

  I LIVE!!!

  “Beth won’t be any more trouble, Michael,” Jan Pretre said.

  “Trouble? She’s so spaced out she’s a goddamned robot,” Michael said. He and Jan Pretre sat in a consultation room off the main lobby of Prairie Hills Sanitarium.

  “She’s docile enough,” Jan Pretre agreed. “Her will is virtually destroyed. We’ve g
iven her what amounts to a prefrontal lobotomy except that we didn’t have to do the actual cutting. Tell her to ‘stand up and she’ll stand up, but be sure you remember to tell her to sit down or she’ll keep on standing until her feet rot off at the knees.”

  “I don’t think she’ll have to wait that long,—will she, Jan?” Michael said.

  Quietly, Jan said, “Not many days from now, we’ll be in a new year, Michael. A new year…for everyone.”

  “Jan…

  “There’s nothing to talk about now,” Jan said, cutting off the conversation with a brusque wave. “You take Beth home. Remember, though, she isn’t always in contact with reality. She drifts away.”

  Michael nodded. The only reality Beth had to be in contact with would be the reality of death when he killed her.

  As he drove to Park Estates, he thought he heard Beth quietly say, “Codfish.”

  It was Wednesday afternoon, December 21.

  — | — | —

  THIRTEEN

  “DON’T YOU think it’s a good idea for you to give the kids a call?” Michael asked. It was 11:30 Thursday morning. Wearing a green and white checked flannel shirt and corduroy slacks, Michael sat across the butcher-block table from Beth. She was in a simple light blue housecoat that, he thought, seemed about ninety-eight sizes too large for her. Beneath her vacuous eyes, there were craterlike black circles. Her face was pinched and drawn, so pale that her freckles looked like punctures.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “Marcy and Kim,” Michael said. “You do remember the precious little tykes, don’t you? I’ll bet they’re just dying to hear from their dear mommykins right now.”

  Yesterday, before going to Prairie Hills Sanitarium to get Beth, he had taken the children to the Engelkings. That was Laura’s idea. You could always count on Laura for helpful ideas, when it was time for Vern to kill her, she’d probably suggest a practical way to keep the mess to a minimum. The kids were on Christmas vacation and so, with no school to worry about, it might be better for everyone if Beth had a quiet few days at home with Michael to get back to her old self.