It was almost ecstasy, when she talked to me like that—because I did think her accent was amusing. So that was almost like communicating. And when she played music for me, it felt excruciatingly good. It hurt that I couldn’t tell her thank you, and please come back.
She even touched my arm, a soft warm slightly moist touch, when she was ready to leave.
Then she stopped coming. I heard someone in the hall talking about a convent being closed. I think that’s what they said, I couldn’t hear it clearly. I wanted to believe that’s what it was—something out of her control. Sister Maria . . .
No more music, since then. Except what’s in my mind. The old songs from the sixties that replay, over and over in my mind. The whirling dust motes. The sounds from the hall; sometimes a patient crying.
But something important has happened—it happened, for the first time, three weeks ago. One of the faces in the walls has started talking to me . . .
Seeing faces in the wall was one of the ways I kept my mind busy.
It’s funny how the people who take care of me feel like ghosts—and Beth feels like a living person to me. That’s because she talks to me.
Beth spoke to me, in my mind and I replied to her—in my mind. And she heard me!
I wish I could talk out loud—to Beth, to anyone. It’s enough that I can’t move—but if I could at least talk . . . If I could berate the nurses, flirt with the woman who comes in to mop the floor, ask for things, demand to see an attorney, sing to myself—and tell a story to a nurse . . . that’d be worth something.
I can make just one little sound—a high-pitched immmm sound produced way deep in my throat—but it’s hard to make, and it’s such an embarrassingly piteous, subhuman noise I hate to do it. I only do it when I’m trying to ease the pressure, trying to avoid the inner hysteria, that’s like a funhouse in a very bad earthquake. If I feel that coming, then I might immmm.
I have to be sure the nurses and attendants are nowhere around when I make the noise. If they hear it, they get irritated, asking, “Well? What’s the point if you know you can’t tell us what you want?” Figuring I’m trying to get attention. They find ways to show they’re angry with me. They “forget” to change the diaper.
There—I hear the sound of the little metal cabinet on wheels that they roll around to feed those who can’t feed themselves. It clinks with dishes and rattles and its wheels squeak. I’m the first one in this corridor. So that means the morning nurse is coming in, just a few minutes late. I think of her as Mrs. White because she’s an old white woman with puffy white hair and a dirty white uniform. She smells old and talks old, when she mutters to herself, and she’s barely aware of what she’s doing, as she goes through the motions of cleaning me with her twisty old fingers, feeding me breakfast porridge, giving me a shot, brushing my teeth, putting antiseptic—a bandage if she feels like it—on my bedsores. She turns me, props me up back there with special little pillow to give the bedsore a chance to heal. I sort of enjoy that, since I can feel it. She’s supposed to change the sheet, but that’s a complicated process involving moving me a lot, hard work, so she doesn’t do it today. I am aware that her Polydent isn’t quite working and her false teeth are coming loose from her gums. I can hear the sound of them sucking loose as she mumbles to herself.
Sometimes Mrs. White says something to me. Always a kind of complaint. “You’re getting fat and hard to move. They’re going to want to put those electric things on your arms again to keep them muscles up. But don’t think they’ll keep on with it, they’re cutting back on treatment again, laying people off. Well, see there, you don’t poop much, I’ll give you that. But you still smell. That sore of yours, that smells. I don’t know why I got to do this. I should have some real retirement. You can’t live on what I’d have. Some of it got stolen. My husband died and left me nothing but debts. So here I am with you . . . ”
I like her visits, though—I can see parts of the room I can’t normally see, when she moves me about. I can think about the things she says and try to imagine her life. It’s better than hearing nothing from anyone. It’s better than Sam Sack.
After she’s gone, I listen to people talking in the hallway. They come, and they go. Now I pass the time with my worn out old fantasy that someday my dad will come looking for me and take me out of here. I imagine the whole scene, where he wheels me out, and tells me he’s going to find a cure for me. That doesn’t last long.
Sometimes I have other fantasies—I try to avoid the sexual sort. They’re particularly torturous. And I can still get a hard-on. Which makes the aides laugh.
There are darker daydreams, that come to me, at times. Furious, bone-deep violence against Sack; against certain orderlies; against the people who run this place . . .
I push all that down, deep down, because it only hurts me, not them. And I think about what I’ll say to Beth, instead. It’s not time for her to come yet. She won’t come till after it starts to get dark outside. I have to wait . . .
I watch the slanting sun make warped squares on the wall to my left. I start watching the dust whirling in the sunbeams. I try to count them. I select pieces of dust to study individually. To imagine as something else. Sometimes at night before the light goes out, I can watch moths. I’ve watched spiders cross the ceiling, watched them very closely. My eyes hurt with all this staring, but it’s all I’ve got.
Once in a while they bring in a machine that makes my muscles jump with mild electrical jolts. It hurts a little, but I like it, because it’s some movement, and I guess it keeps my muscles from atrophying. It’s experimental. Someone donated it. But Mrs. White says the muscle therapy is going to end.
No one comes today. No electricity, nothing but waiting for lunch. Patiently waiting. The hours are like blocks of ice in a room just two degrees above freezing. Ever so slowly melting. It’s a mystery, why I don’t go completely insane. But how would I know if I was insane?
I’ve tried really hard to go totally mad, cuckoo, out of my mind, lost in space. Definitively insane, in a mad hatter way. The important phrase is, out of my mind. That’d be a kind of escape. I’ve never quite gotten there. The most I’ve gotten to is some vicious fantasies and some hallucinations, now and then. The hallucinations are some kind of sensory deprivation effect maybe. Those faces. Except one.
I’ve seen things in the swirling dust. Minute dancing ballerinas and crystalline cogs. And the faces appearing in the wall. Appearing, and vanishing. The faces frighten me, but at least it’s some kind of stimulation. They sometimes seem amused—sometimes hostile. I used to be afraid they’d come out of the wall somehow and bite me. But they never do. They look at me as if they’re threatening me, but they’re as powerless, as stuck within walls, as I am stuck on the bed in room 230. They move their lips sometimes. I never heard any of the faces speak, though, till Beth showed up.
I’m waiting for her now, my eyes turned to watch the wall to my right, under the window. I can feel she’s near. Maybe she’s a hallucination, maybe that’s how I know she’s coming—because she’s from my own mind. But I want to believe she’s real. I do believe it. She must be. She knows things that I never knew.
I wait for Bethany. She’s never the first to come. It starts with the other faces . . .
Now I see a face in the dull-green wall, turning to look at me. The face is made partly of places where the paint on the concrete is wrinkly, and partly from a wall crack and partly from shadow and partly from my mind connecting all these things. I can tell this one’s a hallucination. It’s a jowly man, balding, looking sullen, almost angry, put-upon, circles under his little eyes. His lips move but I can’t hear what he’s saying. I think I might know who he is. That happens sometimes—the faces are people from memory. I think this man might be Mr. Wemberly. I saw his face six years ago when Mom brought me in here. He looked me over and wasn’t too pleased. Talked about how the necessary staff time made it hardly worthwhile. “Put him in room 230.” That was the last I saw of him.
Now h
is face recedes into the wall. I see another—it’s a pretty girl, one I sometimes dream about. She looks a little like Jayne Mansfield. She makes a kissy puckering with her lips at me. I’m sorry when she fades away. Another face takes her place—my mother. Her lips sneer, her eyes are heavy with disappointment. Sorry, Mother, I say to her, in my mind. Okay? As if that satisfies her for now, she melts away, and I’m glad. Now comes a face I don’t know—it’s a frightened looking man. He opens his mouth. He screams. Is that my face? It’s too old to be my face. But I haven’t seen my own face in six years.
That face collapses into another face, a little boy with colorless hair and very dark eyes. He seems to be praying. I don’t know him, do I? There’s something about him that makes me deeply afraid, but I don’t know what. He slips back into the wall, and along comes another face—a black woman, looking amused, curious. A pleasant middle-aged face.
She seems to be singing to herself, judging by the movement of her head, from side to side, the way her lips move, but I can’t hear her. I like her. But . . .
I want to see the one I can hear. The one who can step out of the wall. I’m impatient to see her today.
I try to call her with my mind.
I think, Beth . . . Bethany . . . Beth!
I can feel her responding almost immediately. I hear her voice, phasing in and out of audibility: “Was . . . coming . . . anyway . . . don’t . . . so . . . imp . . . ”
Don’t so imp? Don’t be so impatient.
Then the singing black lady melts away, and I see Beth.
I wish I could smile to greet her. All I can do is lift my right thumb a little. She’s just a face in the wall, but then she thrusts her hand from it and wiggles her thumb at me. It’s a little mocking when she does that but honestly it’s just her sense of humor. She’s in a better mood than last time, it seems to me. That’s good. But I know that can change. Her sorrow’s never far away. She’s anchored in Wemberly Sanitarium by sorrow.
Bethany steps out of the wall, into the room. Beth is a slim, barefoot girl in a short hospital gown—her legs are quite skinny, knees knobby. She has a mousy sort of face, but kind of cute the way a mouse’s face is, and long dull-brown hair, a bit lank, and brown freckles on her cheeks and brown eyes. Her coloration comes and goes—sometimes she seems to be made of a cream colored mist. She’s a little foggy below the neck but her arms come into focus when she uses them to gesture, or point. Her lips don’t move when she talks except that they smile or frown or purse themselves.
Her voice seems to echo around, and the last echo comes clearest into my mind. Now and then a word drops out. “Douglas. I’ve come to see you again . . . ”
I reply in my mind. “Hello, Beth. Thank you for coming. I love it when you come here.”
“Has he . . . back?”
“Sack? Not for eleven nights now.”
“He’ll come tonight. I’ve seen him, he’s been looking at that pillowcase with the holes . . . ”
I try to sound brave, and blithe, to impress her with my courage. “It makes a change. But he gets worse every time. I don’t know how the worst kind of guy can get worse.” I tried to make a laughing sound in my mind.
“Don’t do that,” she says, frowning.
“Don’t do what?”
“ . . . make that fake laughing. It sounds like one of . . . gag laughing toys. My father used to sell gags. He was . . . traveling salesman . . . ”
She’s already told me about her eccentric father, but I let her tell me about it again.
After a while that story runs down. “Are you talking to someone else?” she asks.
I’m surprised. “I’m sort of filing everything that happens in another part of my mind, as we talk. In the form of a narrative. You can hear it?”
“Not exactly,” she says. “It’s okay. Your mind . . . a strong one. Some people here . . . very feeble. Almost not there at all.”
“I’ve got nothing to do but make my mind work, in different ways. I’d forgotten algebra but I worked it out again to keep my mind busy, about a year ago. Are you ready to tell me, now, how you got here? You said you would, last time.”
Her frown deepens. “I guess so. I should.” She seems to look around the room, as if trying to remember something. I yearn to ask her to touch me, anywhere at all, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to feel her touch since she isn’t precisely alive. “One reason I came to this room,” she says, “is because I used to live in here. Right in this room.” I am hearing her voice more clearly now. That happens when we’ve been talking for a while. It’s like we hone in on each other’s frequency. “It really started in 1943. I was a nurse’s aide, for soldiers coming back from the war. Volunteering. I thought I might meet a husband that way. I wasn’t very pretty and I was almost thirty and wasn’t married. I was taking care of a soldier who was coughing all the time, he’d been in North Africa, and he caught something there. I thought it was just a bad cold. But then after a while I started coughing too, and then I was coughing up yellow and red stuff, like mustard and catsup. But it was bloody sputum. And I got feverish and started waking up in the middle of the night with the sheets soaked, all covered with sweat. So I went to the doctor and they said I had consumption—the tuberculosis—and they took me to the sanitarium. This sanitarium. This same room. The owner was Randall Wemberly and there was a young fat man who was his son, Charles. This boy Charles worked as an orderly, but he was going to inherit the place. He was learning the job and said we’d all better be good to him because he was going to take over the whole place someday. He’d laugh and wink like that was a joke but it was what was in his mind. Charles Wemberly. He would take us for our treatments. People thought, back then, that cold fresh air would kill the bacillus, so they took us to open windows and made us sit there, and breathe the cold air in the winter. And snow would come in, sometimes, and cover us. I saw two people die right there, in that room. The worst was the balloon, though. They’d put a balloon in your lung, and they’d inflate it. They said it would help the lung heal. I don’t know why they thought that. And it was a very awful feeling when they put it in but the worst was when they expanded it and that was the very worst pain I’d ever felt. Up till then. Blood would squirt out my nose, the first spurt shooting in an arc all the way down to my thighs. And they’d cut away people’s ribs, so the lungs could expand. All those people died, the ones who lost part of their ribcage. They didn’t do that surgery on me. But I thought I was going to die soon anyway. They had a tunnel they used for taking the dead people out—it’s still down there, I’ll show it to you sometime, Douglas—it goes out back, to a little building. That’s so the patients and their families wouldn’t see all the dead people going out of the hospital—it happened so often. Because most patients died. Almost all of them.” She hesitates. She looks at me with her head tilted. She seems to be trying to remember how it was. “I lingered on for a long time and I kept wanting to run away and find some peaceful place to die alone, without anyone watching. But then the streptomycin came in. And it worked!” She gives an ironic little smile. “That was in 1946. People were getting better from it. So they gave it to me for a while, and I improved—a lot! I wasn’t even infectious anymore, and I wasn’t coughing. I thought I would be leaving soon. I was planning what I would do when I was released.” She makes a gesture in the air, like she wants to push something away that isn’t there. “And then Charles came to me, alone. He was supposed to give me my medicine, but he said I couldn’t have it unless I let him play with my body. ‘It has to be however I want to touch you, any way at all,’ he said. ‘Or you will die.’ He pushed up against me and I remember his breath smelled like rotten eggs. I said, ‘Why did you choose me?’ I was just stalling. He said it was my legs, they were like the legs of a little girl. I shouted that I’d tell his father on him. Then he hit me with a bedpan, and that knocked me senseless for a while, and when I came to, we were on the floor and he was holding onto me, and humping my hips talking about how my leg
s were the legs of a little girl—he was not even inside me, but humping me more like a dog would hump on a person’s legs—and he saw I was awake so he started whispering that he would kill me, he would simply kill me if I didn’t do what he wanted and I shouldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t . . . ” She breaks off and looks at me. “Does this story offend you?”
“No,” I reply, in my mind. “Well yes: I’m offended that you were hurt. But I want to know what happened.”
She smiles. She nods and looks at the overhead light. “I can see the electricity in the wires, if I squint,” she says.
“Did he kill you?” I prompt her.
She sticks out her lower lip as she thinks it over. “No. Not exactly. He said his father was away on a trip, and now he was in charge and he would see I spoke to no one but him, and I would get no more medicine . . . unless . . . ”
She looks at the door. I hear people passing outside, in the hall, talking. A woman weepily talking about her aunt, saying she’s all the family she has. The nurse saying, “We can only do so much.”
Then they’ve moved on. I don’t know why Beth waited, since they can’t hear us talking. Maybe she is afraid someone might come in to check on me, and see her. Maybe she doesn’t realize how rarely anyone comes in here.
If she’s worried about that, does that mean that I’m not the only one who can see her?
“So,” Beth goes on, “I said, ‘Charles, do what you have to, but don’t hit me again.’ My head hurt so badly. And then he raped me. I laid still for it, like he wanted, and didn’t fight him, but it was raping. It hurt a lot . . . I was afraid I’d throw up and choke on the vomit while he was doing it . . . ”
We are silent for a while. I felt like making the immmm sound but I didn’t. Not doing that now is the only way I have of being strong for her.
She turns like she is going to melt back into the wall.
“Don’t go, Beth!” I call to her, in my mind.
She looks back at me, and I can see she wants to cry but, like me, she can’t. “I have to go. I have to rest in the wall. But I’ll just tell you this much more. Charles gave me something he said was streptomycin, but it wasn’t. It was just placebo. The symptoms started to come back. And he started coming to me wearing a surgical mask. Forced me to open my legs for him. Holding a hand over my mouth to keep me quiet. Then I guessed what was going on. I said, ‘You want me to die, so I don’t talk about what you’ve been doing to me. You’re not giving me the medicine at all now.’ He wouldn’t say anything and then I didn’t see him for a couple of days. I tried to talk to a nurse but I was locked in here and they wouldn’t respond, wouldn’t come to the door. I was shouting and shouting and then when I screamed really loud something broke in my lungs and I spit up blood, so much blood came up I choked. And then there was a lot of pain and then it was dark . . . ” She shrugs. “And then I was in the walls. Just in the walls. But sometimes I can come out and look at things. Mostly they can’t see me but sometimes they do.” She smiles at that. “I don’t like them to see me, I’m afraid they’ll bring Charles but . . . I like to see them afraid of me, too.”
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 57
