Petty arguments began to erupt regularly. They were never resolved, these arguments; they were like a cold that won’t go away. Occasionally the arguments would be punctuated by a real fight, like the time Richard came home from a bad day at the office and found Vivian reading his diary. She was lying in bed and jumped when he opened the door, but she brazened it out, went back to reading, saying, “Hot stuff here. I haven’t gotten to the sex stuff yet, but …”
He beat her up good that time. She lost a tooth, and her face turned purple on the left side and ballooned out, but he felt no remorse, only a kind of wariness when he studied her. He knew she was vicious, capable of terrible retaliation. They both moved around each other carefully for a couple of days, but when Vivian’s face returned to normal, the same weary scrapping began again.
Richard couldn’t even remember the final argument of the final battle, except that it took place very early in the morning, when his heart felt like a black penny at the bottom of the ocean at the end of the universe—infinitely alone. They had screamed and shouted, and he had gone off to work where he had fought with his supervisor (who falsely accused Richard of intentionally ignoring an account because it was too much trouble) and Richard had walked out and glumly returned home where he found Vivian burning his diary on the patio. She had shaken the house apart to find it, and she had—hidden inside a hollow volume of Shakespeare’s collected works, where Richard felt it was safe from accidental discovery. She had found it easily enough, by tumbling the bookcase over. This was outright, frenzied war.
She hadn’t counted on Richard’s early return, and he was able to save the book, burning his hands. Later, he had to recopy some of the pages, but he recognized his extraordinary good fortune; he had saved his history, his best friend.
Vivian he almost killed. The fat neighbors heard her screams and ceased their own shouting long enough to call the police. When the police came, Richard was sitting on the sofa in the living room and Vivian was out on the patio on her back in a pool of blood. Her face didn’t look human, and she was in shock. The worst thing, described by an officer who ran back into the living room and beat the shit out of Richard Parrish, was the way bloody clumps of the victim’s blonde hair skidded in the wind across the patio like red-stained tumbleweeds.
Vivian lived, and her face, reconstructed at great expense, looked remarkably like the old Viv. The baby was lost. The marriage ended, and Richard moved back in with his parents.
Grace had shown up at the jail with several lawyers. She had spoken with Vivian about the incredible costs of competent medical care, money in general, and the follies of youth. Then she took her son home and nursed him back to health, reading to him at night, speaking of pleasant times, refusing to bring up the ugly past. Reconciliation was complete.
“Mother was right about Vivian,” Richard told his diary. “We weren’t suited for each other.”
4
In college, Richard Parrish was possessed of a seriousness that repelled certain women and attracted others as though it were an aphrodisiac. He was a handsome young man. An unhealthy delicacy had melted away, and a sense of purpose gave him a capable, masculine air.
Richard Parrish slept with seven girls during college. He found that he fancied a certain blonde type and he was particularly susceptible to high cheekbones and an imperious air. But these brief liaisons made no lasting impression and, indeed, the girls seemed glad to end the relationships, finding a chilly lack of intimacy in Richard.
“You just don’t open up,” one girl told him, and Richard thought about that and said, “That’s true.”
“Why should I?” he could have added. He had his diary, and there he could say anything he pleased.
After his marriage—which, in his diary, he referred to as the “Vivian incident”—his mother made him go to an expensive psychiatrist, Dr. James Ellis, a solemn Freudian whose offices exuded an air of masculine power. Dr. Ellis was a grey-haired man with a round face and shaggy eyebrows that must have been worth a fortune in his profession. He dressed in dark suits and spoke in a voice only fractionally louder than a church whisper.
Ellis was cool, Richard thought. An ice man.
“Maybe I’ll become a shrink myself,” he told the psychiatrist.
Dr. Ellis, lulled perhaps by the oakwood shadows of the room and the polite murmur of the air conditioning, had missed this remark, for later in these sessions when Richard said that he would be leaving for Duke University in three weeks, Dr. Ellis had raised his substantial eyebrows and said, “Three weeks? We are far from through here, I think.”
Richard nonetheless left Dr. Ellis’s care to go to college. While he had found nothing healing in the sessions with Ellis, he had discovered a goal. He was going to be a psychiatrist. He was going to be above the dirty, ugly clamor of people, the pettiness and the stink. He was going to sit in a cool, dark room and keep his own counsel, a man of power, a shaman—ice cool.
Richard had an ample allowance and was able to live in an apartment off campus (an apartment furnished much more opulently than the wretched apartment of his Vivian exile). He was a good student, and he had the kind of compulsive mentality that makes for successful scholars and bureaucrats. In graduate school, teachers began to remark on his tenacity, his ability to grind massive amounts of research into something possessing a logical shape. There was more than mere endurance going on here, and his teachers began to think of him as brilliant, certainly a student to enlist in their own pet projects.
In his final year at Duke, Richard’s stepfather died. Richard was awakened at three in the morning by a wild, incoherent phone call from his mother. She had been drinking—something she almost never did—and it was only after she finally hung up, with a wail, that he was able to piece together what she had been saying. Poor Paul had died of a heart attack, sliding down behind his desk unobtrusively, at the lunch hour, so that he was not discovered until late in the afternoon. But that event had taken place three days ago, and that was not what had prompted his mother’s late-night phone call. What had shaken her decorous grief into tears was a meeting with the Baynard lawyers during which she learned that Paul had been a salaried employee, that old man Baynard still owned the company, and that all the evidences of ample wealth were, for the most part, on loan. Grace was reeling under the blow of this black news when she called her son. Richard, lying in bed, caught his mother’s fear and remembered the nightmare apartment of his days with Vivian.
As it turned out, the financial picture wasn’t quite that bleak. There was a trust fund, insurance, stocks. The mansion had to go, along with servants, but Mrs. Parrish-Baynard was able to live quite well. Richard, however, felt the purse strings tighten, and the fear of poverty and humiliation didn’t leave him. He wrote in his diary: “Without money it is all bullshit.” He was pleased at the obviousness of this observation, and aware that it wasn’t obvious to many of his fellow students, who didn’t understand that so many clients of mental health programs had only one disease: poverty.
Parrish interned at a large general hospital in upstate New York and then returned to the south for a residency at Romner Psychiatric Institute in Newburg, North Carolina. When his residency was over, he was asked to join the hospital staff. He accepted.
At the Institute, he labored to be liked, and he succeeded. He talked to everyone, and made himself available to everyone.
Richard was not naturally charming. He was, he realized, not even particularly likeable. It amused him to try to appear otherwise. And there were those of his colleagues who found Dr. Richard Parrish a bit too solicitous, too lavish in his praise. He had no real warmth, they suspected, and, in conference, he was capable of saying things that suggested an underlying indifference to the fate of patients. He was, his colleagues admitted, an astute observer of human behavior, but he often seemed to be observing it from somewhere beyond Andromeda.
Most people were impressed with young Dr. Parrish, however. He was a tall, strikingly handsome ma
n who spoke slowly and with care, and he was possessed of an earnestness of manner that resembled deepest concern.
Several of the nurses were in love with him. Diane Larson found him attractive, but Saul, her wayward rock guitarist, was her world and, in any event, she didn’t quite approve of the ribald jokes and unabashed lust of the nurses. Maybe she was stodgy, a puritan throwback, but nurses, acting like giggly cheerleaders, sighing over doctors, seemed woefully out of line, even in jest. Diane wanted to get on with the business of helping people who were desperately in need of help.
She wanted to help Anna, and Richard Parrish was a man who listened. “I’m really worried about a friend of mine,” she told him. “She never had much of a life. Ran away from home when she was a kid.
“Then this guy she was living with died of an overdose, and she got into this religious thing. I mean, it’s not just tripping on mysticism with Anna. It’s not like Hank or Gretchen, these other folks where I live. It’s like people when they do speed, words racing, you know. And her whole manner … not exactly crazy, but not exactly rational either. I’ve seen schizophrenics, and it’s sort of like that. David, her new boyfriend, he says she’s fine, but I know he doesn’t really think that.”
Dr. Parrish, sitting across from her at a table in the hospital cafeteria, nodded his head. “I’d like to talk to her,” he said.
“I’ll try to get her to come in,” Diane said. “I don’t know. Anna can be difficult.”
They left it at that. Richard had forgotten Anna—indeed, had forgotten Diane—when Diane called him at home and asked if he would admit Anna to the hospital.
He had just come back from dinner with Jane Solomon. The evening had been a success. He was slowly winning her skittish, high-born heart.
Always accommodating, Richard had assured Diane that he would take care of the matter immediately, and he had called the ward and spoken to the night ward clerk.
The next day, Dr. Richard Parrish had the first of many interviews with Anna Shockley.
5
Richard Parrish spoke into the Dictaphone. “Anna Shockley is a young woman, presently exhibiting schizophrenic-like behavior: disassociation, religious fervor, hallucinations. Behavior may be drug-related, but neuroleptic medication seems indicated during an initial two-week evaluation period.”
He turned the Dictaphone off. He had just come from talking with the girl. His hands were shaking. The minute he had seen her, that baby mouth in a full pout, those wide night eyes and predatory body, he had known her. She was a creature of sexual motives, all deviousness, like Viv, but far more beautiful, utterly beautiful. She had known that he wanted her, and she had smiled at him, knowing her power, as if to say, “Which of us is crazy, Doctor?” He had been irrationally unnerved by her.
That same night Richard called up Jane Solomon and asked her out to dinner, although he had planned not to see her for at least a week. The dinner went well, and he noted that Jane seemed flattered by his enthusiasm.
His interest was real and unfeigned. He wanted her. More precisely, he wanted to be Dr. Ron Solomon’s son-in-law. He wanted that with a passion. Richard looked at Jane Solomon’s pale face and languid body and his heart raced. As Dr. Solomon’s son-in-law, Richard could rule Romner Psychiatric Institute. He yearned for that.
Bobby Starne
1967
6
Bobby Starne lay out in the field and rain came down hard, trying to get into his body, but he was pure and he laughed out loud, and the rain skittered off his soaking shirt and the wet grass shivered. When he was away from the house, his energy returned and he was okay. But he had to go back soon. This time, when he went back, he would do what he had to do.
He was seventeen years old, and school didn’t want him and the army didn’t want him, and even Coach Bonner, who had once been all brag about his prize fullback, Bobby Starne, didn’t want him and got a troubled, dirty look when Bobby came out to watch practice and holler encouragement.
Bobby Starne knew when things had begun to go wrong, and he knew what the cause was.
Bobby stood up and the rain drummed on his shoulders, and pushed his straight black hair over his ears. He stood tall, and walked toward the house.
His dad—a man everyone, including Bobby, called J.D.—was in the kitchen drinking beer. “You’re soaking, boy,” J.D. shouted. “I swear, you are shaming me with your craziness. Can’t even come out of the rain. I’m putting you down to State if you don’t get right. They’ll shock you. They got them electric shock treatments that’ll set your hair on end.”
Bobby would have stopped and talked to J.D., but J.D. didn’t listen, especially when he was drinking. Besides, the house was already sapping his strength, as he moved closer to the room where Baby Lisa lay, sending out evil currents, weaving a spiderweb of poisonous rays.
Baby Lisa had blinded everyone else, had fogged their minds, so that they had already forgotten how she had murdered his mother in the hospital.
Baby Lisa meant to kill him, too. She knew he knew about her. The very first time he had seen her, when they had brought her back from the hospital, she had opened her eyes and spoken right into his mind. “Bobby,” she had said, “you are next. Say your prayers, because I am going to kill you.”
Baby Lisa was two months old now, although, of course, she was really thousands of years old, a demon parasite that wandered through the world, killing and spreading disease and ugliness, growing fat on the blood of innocents.
Bobby walked into the baby’s room and peered down into the crib. Bobby’s sister, Ellen, looked after Baby Lisa, but Ellen was at the store. This was when he had to do it.
The room had a bad, pink smell, and a chest of drawers that J.D. had painted yellow took up too much of the room. There was a teddy bear in the crib, and Baby Lisa appeared to be sleeping, with her small head squeezed into a pale frown, but she was watching through the button eyes of the toy bear, and she saw him, and she saw his thoughts, and she started to change them, to make them into doubts.
“She’s just a helpless little baby,” she made him think. “Your mom died in the hospital because sometimes women die having babies, just like they told you.”
Bobby knew that he had to act. As always, he was weakening as he stood in the room, his hands growing numb, his strength leaking into the dim light.
“I won’t think your thoughts,” he whispered. He leaned forward and picked up the pink blanket next to the baby. He balled the blanket up. Baby Lisa knew the game was up, and she came awake screaming. He pushed the blanket into her face and felt her tiny body bounce.
“Don’t do it, Bobby!” she shouted in his mind, but he knew better than to listen.
“Quiet!” He screamed. “Quiet, Baby Lisa!”
“Goddam!” J.D. bellowed. He was standing, reeling at the door, and as Bobby turned, J.D. lurched inside. “You crazy son of a bitch!” J.D. roared. He was holding a bottle in his left hand, and he brought it down on Bobby’s head, but Bobby ducked, and the bottle slammed painfully against his shoulder. Bobby howled, turned and ran out of the room.
Bobby was sitting on the curb at Waller’s Exxon when the car came up and the two policemen got out and asked him to get in. “Is Baby Lisa dead?” he asked them.
Then he saw the look in their eyes, the wicked anger, and he knew that Baby Lisa was alive. She had sent them.
Richard Parrish—Anna
1967
7
Dr. Richard Parrish’s eyes kept shifting to the window where a cold November rain had settled in for the long haul. He glanced at his watch. He had another twenty minutes of group, then he was gone for the day. He sat in his chair, hands in his lap, letting the silence grow. The rain hissed in the silence like a blank tape in a tape player turned to maximum volume. Nobody spoke. They all sat mired in the silence. Bobby Starne smoked a cigarette in a methodical, zonked-out manner, his Thorazine-blind eyes watching the smoke with lunatic intensity. Anna fiddled with her long hair. Mrs. Zimmerma
n looked scared and Al Bowling looked irritated. Most of the other members of the group just looked bored, lost in flat, tranquilized reflection. Jennie Corning, who hated the vacuum of silence, broke it with a rush of words about going back to her brother.
Dr. Parrish let her talk. When she wound down, he asked the others what they thought about Jennie going home.
Bobby Starne, who was brutally big and obviously nuts, said, “I don’t want to go home. I’m safe here. Baby Lisa can’t get me here.”
The other patients had been quick to understand that Bobby was authentically crazy, and they paid no attention to him.
“Anna,” Dr. Parrish said, “what do you think Jennie should do?”
Anna looked up from combing her hair and shot Dr. Parrish a quick, angry look. Parrish was surprised at how the brightness of those dark eyes caught him, started some reflexive, unwarranted apology in his mind. “I don’t know about Jennie,” Anna said. “I don’t think people can tell other people how to run their lives.”
“No, we can’t tell others how to run their lives,” Parrish said, “but sometimes we need the help of other people who can see something we can’t see because we are standing too close to the problem. It’s like standing six inches from an oil painting. It all looks like a confusion of colors, but when you move back, it turns out to be a landscape, a lake, forest, clouds.”
Mrs. Zimmerman sighed. “I used to paint,” she said. “But I never did like that painty smell, that turpentine and the way it got in your clothes.”
“Jesus Christ,” Al Bowling said, leaning forward. “We are not talking about fucking paintings, lady.”
Dr. Parrish continued. “Do you think Jennie should go back to living with her brother, or should she try to get a place of her own, maybe go to a halfway house?”
“Okay,” Anna said. “I think she should go back to her brother.”
Maybe I'll Call Anna Page 10
