He turned toward the light and held the syringe up, pushing the plunger until a single glistening drop glinted on the needle. He took an alcohol swab from the bedside table, tore it open, and rubbed it on her shoulder.
“Relax,” he told her. “Think of something nice that we could do later on, okay?”
“Okay. Ouch!”
“There,” Parrish said, smiling. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“How come doctors always say that? It was pretty goddam unpleasant, actually. Getting stuck with needles is never entertainment, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” Parrish said. “I know.” He looked at his watch again. He really wasn’t sure how long it would take. A minute, two minutes?
Anna began to convulse. Parrish stood up and turned away. He didn’t want to watch. He took no satisfaction in what he was doing. She had brought it on herself, reappearing so suddenly, with her crazy notions of children, marriage.
And he wasn’t going to kill her. He was just silencing her mind.
He pushed the door open and stepped out into the hall. A nurse was striding toward him, and his heart jumped as Anna screamed behind him.
“Nurse!” he shouted. “The patient is having a seizure.”
A Code Blue brought them swarming.
Parrish found himself shaking. He had intended to be gone before interns and orderlies and lab techs bustled around. He worked at calming down. He went into the bathroom, downed two Valiums, and came back out.
“Is she all right?” he asked a wiry, dark-haired resident.
The resident shrugged. “Looks like an epileptic seizure. We are going to order an EEG and a brain scan. Maybe we’ll see something. Could be a reaction to her medication. Who is her doctor?”
“Dr. Moore. He should be down here any minute. I heard the nurse say that he had a session with her at three.”
The resident shook his head. “She’s not going to be having any breakthrough insights today, that’s for sure.”
Parrish thanked the man and walked back down the hall. He saw Dr. Moore entering the ward, and stopped him to tell him about Anna’s seizure.
Moore went to check on Anna, and then returned to where Parrish was waiting at the nurses’ station.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Miss Shockley,” Moore said. “When we admitted her, she wanted to see you. I know that you saw her when she came here years ago, and I thought you might talk to her again. Your perspective would naturally be immensely helpful. She may—”
Parrish interrupted the man. “I’ll be glad to do what I can, help in any way. I do fear that we may be dealing with something organic and degenerative. She’s quite delusional.”
Moore lifted a sculpted eyebrow and drew his hands through his blond hair. “She seemed rational when I admitted her. She told me about the hallucinations, but she was aware that they were hallucinations and that she had come here seeking treatment. I was, and still am, optimistic.”
Parrish smiled sadly and placed an arm on Dr. Moore’s shoulder. “Good doctors are always optimistic,” Parrish said.
7
October was rainy and cold, gutters filling up with dead leaves, black birds huddled like refugees in skeletal trees. I loafed around Diane’s house and got in a fight with Diane’s husband Charlie after Anna had been in the hospital two weeks. Charlie sold real estate, and he was a stocky, affable guy.
I don’t know what the fight was about. Yes I do. It was about mental health. Crazy people, Charlie said, were really just lazy, lying on their backs in institutions, watching TV, farting and pissing on the hardworking taxpayer.
I told Charlie that he certainly had the look of a man who had been farted and pissed on, and Charlie huffed up out of his armchair and went and told on me, and I could hear Diane and Charlie hissing in the kitchen. I knew that Diane, bless her loyal soul, would make allowances for me (stress, immaturity, stupidity). But I knew I had to get out of there, so I talked to Diane later that night, and said I was going to get a hotel room. She made all the obligatory nay-saying noises, but I knew she would be glad to have me out from underfoot. I wasn’t good company. It had been nice of her to take me in, but she had forgotten just how crazy I was in regards to Anna, how defensive.
I was experiencing black guilt. Bright-eyed Anna had been leading an idyllic existence when I came back into her life and chucked her into a clammy mental ward and watched her slide into darkness. I couldn’t forget Walker’s warning. “There is no good for her in that world,” he had said. He had been right.
I had practiced great restraint that first week, hadn’t gone to see her even though Diane’s reports had been infuriatingly vague. “How’s Anna?” I would ask whenever Diane returned from a day at Romner.
Diane would look evasive. “These things take time,” she would say—or something equally ominous. I didn’t like the way she said it, but I figured that was just me. Then one day Diane said, “I don’t know. I think she is getting worse.”
Then I had to go see Anna. A nurse was just unstrapping the restraints when I came into the room. Anna was wearing a hospital gown and her hair was a tangled mess. “We’re not going to be naughty girls anymore, are we?” the nurse was saying as she helped Anna sit up. “Look, you have a visitor.” A smell of vomit pierced the mist of disinfectant. Anna’s eyes drifted over me without recognition and she said, “Wooster. Where’s Wooster?”
“I don’t know no Wooster,” the nurse said.
“Anna, it’s me,” I said.
Anna blinked at me, flapped her arms. “Woooooster,” she moaned.
I hung around for about twenty minutes and that was all I could take. I raced back to Diane. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I shouted. “She didn’t even know who I was.”
“Oh David, I didn’t know what to do,” Diane said, and then she started crying. Driving back from the hospital, I had felt hollowed-out, dizzy with self-pity, and I had worked myself up into a nasty, lashing-out fervor, but Diane’s tears woke the primitive bonds of friendship, and I hugged her and tried not to think of Anna’s face, unearthly in its whiteness, the way her mouth had moved, the death of reason in her eyes.
Diane said, “Sometimes, when they start a patient on new medication, there is a period when the patient seems to grow worse, a sort of transitional period. That’s what Dr. Parrish said. He’s really concerned about Anna, and he has taken over the case himself. That’s very unusual, you know. I told him that she seems worse, and he assured me that the phenomenon is quite common.” Diane said it with all the conviction she could muster, but neither of us believed it.
After finally going to see Anna, I made myself go see her every day. I hated going. She didn’t know who I was. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Her eyes were full of fear. She would sleep and be jolted out of sleep by some brutal ghost. I wanted to comfort her, but I seemed a part of her terrors. She would jump away from me, scramble under the sheets, hunch her knees up to her chin and shiver.
Physically, the changes were equally drastic. Her eyes were dull. There were days when she looked like a stranger, a pale, anonymous refugee of institutions, standing in med lines, shuttling from one social worker to the next. I told the nurse I wanted to see Dr. Richard Parrish, but I couldn’t get an audience with that lordly personage. I could see in the nurse’s face, her bulging, incredulous eyes, that she found such a request wildly presumptuous.
So I loitered around, made a general nuisance of myself, and finally accosted the elusive doctor when he came on the ward to see Anna.
I knew it was him right away. I knew by the deference allotted him, the way the nurses and orderlies scraped and fawned in his presence. I also knew because an obsequious self-important head nurse named Mackey called him Dr. Parrish every second sentence as though the great man’s name were a powerful mantra. “Good to see you, Dr. Parrish. Is there anything I can help you with, Dr. Parrish? Yes sir, that’s right, Dr. Parrish.”
“Dr. Parrish,” I said, coming up beside
him as he moved on down the hall. “I’m David Livingston. I’m a friend of Anna Shockley. Diane Nichols and I brought Anna here about two weeks ago last Thursday. I wonder if I could talk to you about her?”
He turned and regarded me with a smile that was elegantly noncommittal. “Oh?” he said. “Well, of course.” He waited, holding his hands in front of him with the patience adults grant to children. I didn’t like him. He looked like someone who had slipped out of an advertisement for an after-dinner wine, leaving behind, no doubt, a thin fashion model with full lips and an expression of woozy eroticism.
I told him that I thought Anna was in worse shape then when we had brought her in, that whatever medication they had her on was having an adverse effect.
I was not expressing myself with my customary tact, but I didn’t think much about it until he interrupted. “I beg your pardon. Are you a doctor?”
I told him that I wasn’t. I noticed then that his face had stiffened considerably and, while his smile may actually have widened, his eyes had iced up.
“I understand your concern,” he said. He looked thoughtful. “Just what relation are you to Miss Shockley?”
“A friend. We go back a long way.”
“So do Miss Shockley and I,” he said. “I treated her before the tragedy, her disappearance. The poor girl has been through a lot. I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.”
“Livingston, David Livingston.”
He nodded his head. “Anna has been through a lot, Mr. Livingston, and what you see as a sudden deterioration is nothing of the kind. Indeed, you may be making demands on her … you may have expectations that she cannot, realistically, fulfill. If so, you could—and I feel I must speak bluntly for my patient’s sake—you could impede her recovery. Sometimes those people closest to a patient are the people most damaging to real progress.”
I told him that I didn’t think I was being hysterical, that I felt—and Diane Nichols agreed with me—that Anna was reacting badly to some drug, was out of her mind.
“That may be,” Parrish said. “Patients often experience a period of adjustment to the medication.”
I had heard this before, but we went on, talking in circles. I was on the doctor’s turf, however, so I was destined to lose the argument. He brushed me off with a facile blaze of amenities, said he had to see Anna and appreciated my concern and was sure she would begin to improve dramatically, et cetera. I watched him walk on down the hall and enter her room. I left. I didn’t like waiting around on that ward. Anna had been moved to the fifth floor, a ward with no pretense of hope. A waxen, moon-faced girl sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, rhythmically thumping her back against the wall and shouting, “Ho, ho, ho, ho.” A fat woman wearing a man’s flight jacket and pajama bottoms argued hotly with two nurses: “You keepin’ my children from seein’ me. I know you got them children. You hidin’ them under the desk. You bring them out and I’ll kiss them little darlin’s.” The woman tried to crawl over the counter, and was hauled back by two disgruntled nurses.
The woman’s screams decided me. Anna couldn’t stay here. I went down to the lobby and found a pay phone. I had to get her out. I called Diane. It was her hospital; she would know what to do. She agreed with me so I was spared an argument. She said she would do what she had to do and call me back.
“Anna is committed for three months,” Diane said. She looked worn out, baffled.
“Committed? Nobody committed her. What are you talking about?”
“Hey, I’m on your side,” Diane said.
She spoke slowly, but her voice wobbled. There was disbelief in her voice. “Anna’s mother signed commitment papers.”
I started to say that Anna’s mother was far away and long ago, but Diane was plunging ahead, anticipating me. “Dr. Parrish located Anna’s mother in Ohio, had a local lawyer take the papers to her for signing. Parrish himself talked to her on the phone, convinced her of the necessity of committing her daughter.”
I listened, shaking my head. “Parrish is busy, isn’t he? Do directors of hospitals do this sort of thing as a rule?” I asked.
“No, they don’t.”
“I want to get Anna out of there,” I said.
That night Sharon called. She was my first argument of the night. She wanted to know when I was coming back. I told her I didn’t know, that Anna was in a hospital.
“I miss you,” Sharon said.
“I miss you too,” I said. I had, too, now that I thought about it.
We paused. Telephone silences are worse than other silences, because they are all silence and static, naked, no windows to look out of, no cigarettes to smoke or drinks to drink. Sharon started to tell me about an old boyfriend she had run into again, a guy named George Lasker.
“I always liked George,” I said.
“Great,” Sharon said, and that was the first clue I had that she wasn’t entirely happy with me. I had known that I was staying down in Newburg too long, but her phone call had seemed cheery. “Glad to hear you approve of George.”
“What’s the matter?”
“You are an asshole, that’s what’s the matter,” she said.
“Look Sharon, I have got to stay down here. Anna’s in really bad shape.”
“What if I’m in bad shape?”
“Is something wrong?”
Sharon turned the volume down. She sounded tired, disgusted. I have that effect on people sometimes. “No, nothing’s wrong. I’m hanging up, okay?” And she did.
That was the same night that Charlie Nichols decided to air his views on mental health opportunists and my second argument of the evening ensued.
The next day I moved to a motel.
The motel was called The Rainbow Motel, and it had a neon sign with an arcing rainbow. The sign had seen better days, and the rainbow now winked fitfully red and yellow, more nightmare than enchantment. That first night, I watched it for about an hour, decided its staccato light held no personal or religious significance and fell asleep in a chair. I woke at about two in the morning thinking about one ripe summer day when Anna and I had gone fishing and Anna had caught a fish and been horrified as the fish flopped around in front of her on the grass.
“It’s dying!” she screamed. “It’s dying. Do something!”
I unhooked the fish, a small bluegill, and tossed it back into the lake. “Haven’t you ever been fishing before?” I asked.
Anna pouted, pushed tears from her red, sunburnt face. “No.”
“But you know about fishing. Surely you’ve seen people fishing before?” For some reason, I wanted, that day, to pursue Anna’s outburst, corner her with reason. Maybe I thought that a little logic would temper her eccentricity.
“Yeah,” Anna said. “I guess I’ve seen people fishing. So what?”
“So I don’t think you have to get so emotional. I mean, what did you expect would happen? A fish can’t live on land.”
“I know that,” Anna said. “Jesus, David, you always act like you’re some old fart of a school teacher and I’m a moron. A fish can’t live out of water. Okay.”
“So why did you throw a fit when you caught that fish?”
Anna glared at me. “I didn’t think it through,” she said.
I started laughing, and Anna joined in. “You old fart,” she shouted, and she leaped at me and we wrestled into the water and we both came up all muck and kissed and crawled out on the scratchy, weed-thick bank. The mud dried grey and crackly on our flesh. “Dinosaur skin,” Anna said, touching my muddy cheek. “You are my dinosaur love.”
There had been days like that. Sitting in that motel room, as tacky and barren of dreams as any motel room, I remembered that day, and I felt desperate.
I wasted the morning talking to a lawyer who didn’t seem eager to go up against the director of Romner Psychiatric. Apparently Parrish had a father-in-law who owned half of Newburg, and while the lawyer did not want to say that he positively would not take my money, he did indicate that he lived in the town
while I was just passing through.
I spent the afternoon more profitably. I went out to see Walker.
“I guess you can say you told me so,” I said. We were sitting on the porch. Walker was holding a small chow puppy, chucking its ears.
“I told you so,” Walker said. He smiled at me and rocked in the rocking chair. “You know,” he said, “I am a wise man. Everyone tells me so, and they are my friends. They have no reason to lie. I believe them. Do you know what my wisdom, in large part, consists of?”
I told him that I didn’t.
“It consists of believing in good things, the goodness of life, the goodness of love, believing that the unraveling of events is, against every ugly evidence, benign. I am a guru and a wise man because I believe more ardently than others. I believe, for instance, that you wish Anna well, that you want her to live and thrive, that you mean her no harm. I believe this against the evidence.”
I stood up, walked to the edge of the porch, turned. “I am in love with Anna,” I said. “I was in love with her thirteen years ago, and I am still in love with her.”
“Anna is easy to love,” Walker said. “Too easy to love, perhaps.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Walker put the puppy down on the porch where it barked its toy-dog bark and began chasing its tail.
Walker pushed himself out of the rocking chair and came over to me. Together we regarded the mountains. “Maybe Anna doesn’t need your love. Maybe she needs your understanding.”
I realized then that I was talking to Anna’s present lover.
“What about you?” I said. “Your interest in her doesn’t strike me as entirely altruistic.”
Walker turned to me. He had a likeable, open face with grey eyes. His smile was mischievous. “I never said my interest in Anna was altruistic. I love her.”
“She trusts you,” I said. “She thinks of you as a father.”
Walker nodded. “And you feel I take advantage of her trust. I sleep with her. An old man like me. Young Anna. And she was younger then. Inexcusable behavior.”
“That’s right,” I said.
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