The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  I wake at the slightest sound, my pen and pad upon the bed.

  I wish I could put my pen down and never pick it up again. I write “The End” a thousand times, but still my mind won’t let me rest. Sometimes I think I know how and when the end will come.

  I plunge into the page and wake up in Het Achterhuis. I find the secret passageway that’s hidden by the big bookcase…

  “What about that secret passageway?” Doc says when, later, I emerge from the page. “Where does it lead?”

  “In her book or mine?”

  “In yours.”

  I tell him that, when I come out, I don’t remember what I wrote. It feels as if I’m reading someone else’s words, except that the handwriting is mine and the language is Arellian. I wonder what will happen next, as if I’m reading someone else’s book—I don’t know her, but she knows me. The pages are such a mess. She crosses out more lines than she keeps, crams corrections in the margins, draws arrows everywhere.

  I have to write some words in rhyme,

  I have to and we both know why.

  I’m getting faster all the time

  (so I’m allowed a few half-rhymes).

  It would be easy, I suppose

  to write the whole darn thing in prose—

  the easy way is not allowed,

  the easy way is for the crowd.

  Doc doesn’t know I write in verse,

  or that I write it in reverse.

  I write my way across the page

  from the left edge to the right edge

  so that it seems I’m writing prose—

  I have to make sure no one knows.

  I feel that it would break the spell

  if someone knew—I mustn’t tell.

  “Why do you write in code?”

  Code. Xlwv. Doc knows I won’t tell him.

  “Because the Sanskrit languages are dead,” I say. He smiles as if to say he can decode my every utterance, as if he’s seen sicker ones than me and fixed them with his trickery. There’s nothing I can say that someone hasn’t said before, nothing that can surprise him.

  He wants to know about Anne Frank—why hers and not some other book? He’s read it, looking for clues. “Why does she mean so much to you?”

  He talks about the characters—he calls them that, as if she made the whole thing up, as if The Secret Annex is a work of fiction, nothing more.

  “What do you think of Otto Frank? Is he the dad you wish you had?”

  “The one I have is not so bad.” I can’t hide that I speak in rhyme.

  He smiles as if I’ve given myself away.

  But then he’s on to Edith Frank, the mother that Anne didn’t like, and soon he asks about my sisters—he wonders if they make me jealous the way Margot did Anne. I nod. He nods and makes a note.

  “You like her book because she died. Could that be it? Could that be why? Have you considered suicide? Death seems romantic to the young—is there a boy? Are you in love?”

  (The music stops, the night is done; you haven’t danced with anyone.)

  “No one will ever understand why you did it. So young, so young. It seems so grand to die and be a mystery—they think about you, finally, the you whose specialness only you could see.”

  I let him think he’s onto something. Psychiatry and alchemy seem similar to me.

  No one was there to hold Anne’s hand,

  no one to say, “I understand,

  I’ve seen this kind of thing before:

  it’s only death and nothing more.”

  Two years younger, Anne outlived her sister by nine days.

  Death is always a surprise: there are no words for what it is, only words for what it’s not. Poems written by men trying to convince themselves they’re not afraid of it. Death, where is thy sting?…the soul will spring…One short sleep past…Death, thou shalt die.

  Death. Wvgzs.

  But it’s a safety net for me,

  this nothing that can set me free.

  I hope that I will cease to be

  or else be me eternally.

  To wish for death is not despair—

  how else can I get out of here?

  The thought of it keeps me alive,

  the ultimate alternative.

  “You want to be a writer, a girl who writes like Anne Frank. Maybe death will make you famous. But you have what she wanted most. Freedom.”

  “Not at the moment, I don’t.”

  “I really think she would rather have been the ordinary Rachel van Hout, don’t you, than die so young, so famously?”

  How important it is to him that I see myself as ordinary. Renounce exceptionality. Your madness is just vanity.

  “Your dad worries, which is what dads do when they can’t understand why daughters who once adored them grow up one day and turn on them and everyone and everything. Sex and drugs and self-starvation—your mom thought she’d seen it all, but then…but then this code, this creation of your gifted mind, this world that you and only you know how to make your way into and out of has them convinced that they’re going to lose you…”

  One day he said Arellia

  was just a place inside my head.

  I told him he should tell that to

  the monster sitting on my bed.

  * * *

  —

  It’s been six weeks now and Doc thinks I’m past the worst of it. He’s cautiously optimistic—he’d be less sanguine if he knew that I’m feeling much the same. Only I can make me what I was before I put my life on pause in favour of two diaries; the one I read, the one I write.

  It’s true that he’s partly weaned me off the books. He gives me looks when I admit that I’m still sick, so I’m somewhat underreporting the time I spend diarizing, the hours of reading and writing before I even think of pretending to be asleep when they come by to check on me. And then there are so many things that I withheld from him.

  I told him about The Ballad, the Ballad Bed, the Night Salon, the Land Within, the Land Without. But not the rumours or von Snout, or anything to make him think that the Land of Hout was not the perfect place Dad makes it out to be. “Your dad made The Ballad up for you. It must have taken ages for him to write that much. Some of the greatest children’s books began as simple bedtime tales parents wrote and read to their children.” The look on his face. So impressed.

  “Tell me about Arellia. Is it like South Africa, or is it like the Land of Hout? Is that where the idea came from, the ballad that your father wrote?”

  She writes because her father did, but why so much and why in bed? I mustn’t speak of Hout again. This man is from the Land Without. I have to throw him off the scent.

  “Tell me about Arellia,” he asks again.

  “I don’t remember it at all. Honestly. You told me I went on about the place when I was so strung out I might have told you anything. I might have said you were the king or called you Santa Claus. I’m just a simple case. I worked so hard that I wore out. The prodigy became the class clown, just as I did when I was thirteen. I think I’m prone to it. I don’t know why I try so hard, but I’ll probably do it all again.”

  He nods as if he’s found the key,

  the answer to what’s wrong with me.

  He nods as if my words confirm

  the answer that’s in front of him:

  he sees it now, he’s worked it out,

  it leads back to the Land of Hout.

  He has the pieces that he needs;

  what is it that he doesn’t see?

  The one piece that just doesn’t fit—

  what Anne Frank has to do with it.

  I’m discharged a week later.

  The lighthouse light still comes and goes,


  the foghorn muffled by the snow.

  It must have been like this for her.

  The sun came up; they found her there.

  WADE

  “I don’t write the diary much anymore,” Rachel said. “I don’t read hers except for one hour a day. Exactly one hour. My grad school recovery was authentic.”

  I was on my third beer, she her second, the two of us at the dining room table as if we owned the house. She lit a cigarette, placed it in an ashtray, and reached one hand into the pocket of her jeans, from which she withdrew two large pills, white and oval-shaped. “I have to take these every day,” she said. “Lithium. Not to be confused with Librium, which is a tranquilizer—very nice. Lithium is usually prescribed for depression or manic depression, but the OCD drugs they tried on me didn’t help, so when in doubt, lithium it is.”

  “Not to sound like a broken record, but why that book?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “Why any book? My sister Bethany is anorexic. Why does a girl who is thirty or forty pounds underweight think she’s fat? You’re right, there probably is more to it than that, but the doctors can’t figure it out. There are some similarities between the van Houts and the Franks, you know. Dad is the only male of the house. He has a wife and four daughters. Otto Frank had a wife and two daughters. The van Houts left one country to live in another. The Franks left Germany to live in Holland, and that’s where my dad was born. I made my first trip to Holland when I was eight, which was Anne Frank’s age when she moved there.”

  “Wouldn’t a book about a family that has a happy ending be better?”

  “Better or worse doesn’t come into it when you’re sick. Well, maybe worse does. Het Achterhuis has no ending. That might be why I couldn’t stop reading it. Can’t stop.”

  “Well, they all die, don’t they?”

  “No one dies in her diary. Not to beat a dead horse, ha ha, but you really can’t have read it very carefully. After they were captured, all of them but Otto died in concentration camps. But you only find out about their deaths in the foreword or introduction, or maybe the afterword, depending on the edition. But I always tear those out when I get a new copy. I only read what Anne Frank wrote.” She took a swig of beer. “You have that look in your eye again. I don’t like your chances of becoming the poster boy for open-mindedness.”

  “No. No, it’s just the opposite. I’ve never met anyone who was anything like you.”

  “Like I am now, or like I was when I was sick? Is that the me you’ve fallen for?”

  “No—just sometimes I worry that I can’t keep up with you.”

  “I couldn’t keep up with me either. ‘Beeile dich nicht, ruhe dich nicht aus.’ Do not hurry, do not rest, that’s my motto now. It’s from Goethe.”

  * * *

  —

  For an hour some evenings, we sat across from each other in the front room, she reading her daily dose of Het Achterhuis while I read whichever book I was immersed in at the time. Every now and then, she looked up and smiled at me. I smiled back, sometimes wondering if she might be as mentally disturbed as she admitted she was widely assumed to be. I didn’t often have such thoughts. One day, she told me she had written a poem about me, about how lightly I slept:

  The slightest sound keeps him awake;

  it seems to him all things can make

  some sort of sound, some sort of squeak.

  He wonders why the wind must blow,

  he hates the din of falling snow.

  They say that, were he deaf, he’d hear

  the sound a mouse makes on the stair;

  they say he cannot stand the sound

  that earthworms make while underground;

  they say that, if he had no ears,

  he’d hear mosquitoes cleaning theirs.

  The ticking of the kitchen clock

  is no worse than the sound a sock

  makes inside the dresser drawer—

  he cannot stand a sock that snores.

  I loved it. I laughed, and she loved that. “You don’t often laugh,” she said. “Your whole face changes.”

  She said she hated wasting one of the few hours we had together reading a book she knew by heart. “But I’m glad you’re here to time me.”

  Whenever I declared that the hour was up, she closed her book without marking her page, ran upstairs and put it in her closet. Once, when she came back down, she said, “I feel as if I’m on the verge of not needing to read that book at all.”

  I felt envious of her, even after it occurred to me that The Encyclopediary might be nothing but gibberish, millions of words made up of randomly chosen letters of the alphabet. That would point to a madness far more prolonged and profound than the one she had confessed to. Still, she didn’t seem like someone who had ever been that far gone. I decided that, whatever her state of mind when she wrote, she had, by the age of twenty-one, produced what even Thomas Wolfe might consider to be a lifetime of writing. I imagined an exhaustive autobiography teeming with details, digressions, reams of self-reflection. Freed of her mania, her demons, whatever they were, what might she one day write? I felt plodding, methodical, hopelessly uninspired in comparison with her. But my envy always gave way to admiration and the certainty that she had felt, far more profoundly than anyone I would ever know, the inscrutable urge to write, to depict the chaos of the world in words. She had almost died trying to complete what I had yet to work up the nerve to begin.

  I’d watch her as she read. No one I’d known was compelled to do anything to the point of breaking down. Who cared so much that it drove them mad? Unlike me, she was living, not preparing to. I imagined the thirteen-year-old she had been, diarizing in a frenzy night after night, the eighteen-year-old who, though she knew the risks, dove so deep into her mind that she hit bottom and would have died if not for the voices she heard calling to her from above. Sometimes I went to her and lay my head on her lap, where, eyes closed, I listened as she turned the pages, as if, in her mind, she was reading the diary to me.

  From The Arelliad

  THE SIREN OF DUPLICITY (1983)

  The sirens come ashore at night,

  their lights unlike the lighthouse light,

  the yellow light that comes and goes

  at intervals that no one knows.

  In coves you cannot find on maps,

  they gutter in the wind, perhaps,

  or else they go out when the waves

  wash deep enough into the caves.

  They do not stop until Cape Spear,

  for sirens know what happens there.

  In any case, they soon come back.

  The flickering along the wrack

  continues until morning comes.

  The sirens, now that night is done,

  must go back to the sea and hide—

  they lost their voices when they died.

  They cannot sing their secret song,

  “The Mystery of Right and Wrong”;

  they know the words but no one who

  would sing them truthfully to you.

  The sirens make their way along the coast from cave to cave until they reach the lighthouse at Cape Spear. The flickering along the wrack continues long past midnight. When the last of the sirens have gathered on the rocks below the Light, they try to sing as they once did, but cannot make a sound, so they write the words by candlelight, the scratching of their pens the closest thing to music they have managed since the Light lured them ashore.

  When they are done, they file back the way they came, retiring to their caves, where they must stay till morning comes. By day they don’t do anything but swim about, remembering when they could sing in voices someone stole from them.

  The man who came in from the sea might have heeded the warning of the song they couldn’t sing if I’
d sung it for him properly, for I, you see, still have my voice. I sold my soul; I made my choice. I changed the words of “The Mystery of Right and Wrong” to suit another melody, the siren song of treachery.

  Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t write, unless he does but never shows a word to me, the Anne Frank Freak who wouldn’t get the kind of book he thinks is great. Or he may be afraid to show me anything, worried he may not write as well as me.

  But then, he’s never read a word of what I write, nor has he heard the language that I

  brought ashore

  the night that I was banished for

  the murder of the Shadow She,

  a siren now because of me.

  When I betrayed the Sisterhood,

  they sent me to the yellow wood,

  where I must stay till I atone,

  landlocked for leaving Anne alone.

  Arellia’s the place for me,

  the siren of duplicity.

  But other sirens leave the sea;

  Anne, Margot and the Shadow She,

  The Frank sisters, the girl in black—

  the three of them keep coming back,

  sometimes in twos, sometimes in threes,

  three sirens only I can see

  who roam the yellow wood with me.

  They want something, I know they do,

  they blame someone—not one, but two.

  The rhymes and metre of The Ballad creep back into my prose, sometimes swallowing whole paragraphs. Is this a thing that has to be, presentiment or fantasy?

  Uzgv. Fate.

  WADE

  After I got off work one afternoon, we went out for a stroll and a bite to eat. As we were walking back up the street toward her house, Rachel stopped. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Shit, shit, shit.” There was a large grey van parked in the driveway, behind the Malibu.

  “Whose van is that?”

  She sighed, pressed the heels of her hands against her forehead and closed her eyes as if she hoped that, when she opened them, the van would be gone.