The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  Like Anas, I reviewed every thought, all visual trivia became momentous, my faintest desire a raving hunger. I kept Anas with me at all times, though the difference in our lives had become a strain. Anas had had servants to feed her and clean up after her. Even her debauched lovers picked her clothing off the floor; her dinner parties were full of social dangers and alarms, but afterward, she didn’t have to do the dishes. All the same, I, too, kept careful and replete diaries. Each notebook had a title taken from a diary entry by Anas. That fall’s diary was called “Sprouting in the Void.”

  As Anas would have done, I wrote long letters to Joseph. He wrote short ones back. Corwin drove me to school and I read aloud from her diary all the way. He only liked it when she had sex—otherwise he said she was “way up in her head.” Corwin visited from time to time. Our grade school romance was a joke between us, and his theft of my uncle’s violin forgiven after the funeral. He was a dealer, and supplied my friends.

  I’d moved in with a household of local poets, hippies, and everyone was dirty. I tried to be, too, but my standards of cleanliness kept me from truly entering into the spirit of the times. I had learned from my mother to keep my surroundings in order, my dishes washed, my towels laundered. The sagging clapboard house where we lived had one bathroom. Periodically, as nobody else ever did, I broke down and cleaned. It made me hate my friends to do this, and resent them as I watched the filth build up afterward, but I couldn’t help it. My fastidiousness always overwhelmed my fury.

  Late that fall, past midnight, I had one of my bathroom-cleaning fits. I got a bucket, a scrub brush, and a box of something harsh-smelling called Soilax. I ripped an old towel in four. I wet the bathtub down, the toilet and the sink, and then shook the Soilax evenly across every surface. I looked around for a moment and remembered the putty knife I’d stashed in the basement closet. I fetched it, and a plastic bag, and then I began to scrape away the waxlike brown patches of grease, hair, soap, scum, the petrified ropes of toothpaste, the shit, the common dirt.

  The cleaning took a couple of hours and the light over me seemed harsh once I quit, because I’d emptied the fixture of dead flies. But when the light poured down out of its clean globe, a few lines of poetry occurred to me.

  My brain is like a fixture deep in dead flies.

  How I long for my thoughts to shine clear!

  Disperse your crumpled wings, college students and professors of UND, Let your bodies blow like dust across the prairies!

  I jotted those lines in the notebook, which I always carried in the hip pocket of my jeans. “Sprouting in the Void” was almost filled. I wanted to take a hot bath to remove the disinfectant stink, but what I’d done in patches just made the tub look dirtier, and wrong, like I’d disturbed an ecosystem. So I showered very quickly, then went downstairs, where there was as usual an ongoing party. This one was a welcome-home party for a fellow poet who’d walked back across the Canadian border that day and was going underground, as he kept saying, loudly. He was also going to shower in my clean bathroom. I deserved to drink wine. I remember that it was cheap and very pink and that halfway through a glass of it Corwin took a piece of paper from a plain white envelope and tore off a few small squares, which I put in my mouth.

  She tried everything, Anas; she would have tried this! Spanish dancer, I cried to Corwin—he was my third or fourth cousin. She was in love with her cousin. Eduardo! I said to Corwin, and kissed him. This all came back to me much later. For because of the wine, I was not aware that I had taken blotter acid, even after all of its effects were upon me—the hideous malformations of my friends’ faces, the walls and corridors of sound, the whispered instructions from objects, a panicked fear in which I became speechless and could not communicate at all. I locked myself into my room, which I soon realized was a garden for local herpetofauna and some exotics like the deadly hooded cobra, all of which passed underneath the mop board and occasionally slid out of the light fixtures. I was in my room for two days, sleepless, watching red-sided garter snakes, chorus frogs, an occasional Great Plains toad. I passed in and out of terror, unaware of who I was, unremembering of how I’d come to be in the state I was in. My reclusiveness was so habitual and the household so chaotic that no one really noticed my absence.

  On the third day, only one eastern tiger salamander appeared, Abystoma tigrinum. It was comforting, an old friend. I began to sense a reliable connection between one moment and the next, and to feel with some security that I inhabited one body and one consciousness. The terror lessened to a milder dread. I ate and drank. On the fourth day, I slept. I wept steadily the fifth day and sixth. And so gradually I became again the person I had known as myself. But I was not the same. I had found out what a slim rail I walked. I had lost my unifier of sensations, lost mind, lost confidence in my own control over my sanity. I’d frightened myself and it was all the more a comfort to return to the diaries. Anas was so deeply aware of her inner states. She was descriptive of the effects of the world upon her—the time of day, the sky, the weather, all affected her moods. I began to shake as I read some of her entries, so filled with detail. I needed someone to pay close attention to the world I had nearly left behind.

  “Everything. The house bewitches me. The lamps are lighted. The fantastic shadows cast by the colored lights on the lacquered walls…”

  That was her bedroom in September 1929.

  No reptiles for Anas. My own dread kept returning. It was as though in those awful days I’d switched inner connections and now the fear seemed wired into me. Panic states. Temporary shocks—if I were even slightly startled, I could not stop shaking. Frightful but momentary breaks with reality. Daydreams so vivid they made me sick. I managed to function. Because I was so quiet anyway, I hid these dislocations of mind. Only, I had determined that I did not somehow belong with the careless well of the world anymore. I belonged with…Anas. On campus, I watched the well-fed, sane, secure, shining-haired and leather-belted ribbons of students pass me by. I would never be one of them! Instead, as I could not dance—what was Spanish dancing anyway?—and as I could not yet go to Paris, I decided that I must live and work in a mental hospital.

  I got my Psych 1 professor (the course was nicknamed Nuts and Sluts) to help me find a position just for one term. I was hired as a psychiatric aide. That winter, I packed a suitcase and took an empty overheated Greyhound bus to the state mental hospital, where I trudged through blinding drifts of cold and was shown to a small room in a staff dormitory.

  Warren

  MY ROOM WAS small, the walls a deep pink. In my diary I wrote: I shall cover them with scarves. I had a single bed with an oriental print spread. The lush landscape had pagodas, small winding streams, bent willows. This, I liked. There was a mirror, a shiny red-brown bureau, a tiny refrigerator on a wooden table, a straight-backed blue chair. Blue! My secondary muse—the color blue. I took the refrigerator off the table, and made myself a desk. I put everything away, my long skirts and the hand-knitted turquoise sweater I wore constantly. I’d met none of the other aides yet. There was someone in the next room. The walls were thin and I could hear the other person moving about quietly, rustling the clothes in her closet. There were rules against noise, against music, because the people on the night shift slept all day. My shift would begin at six A.M. So I showered down the hall and dried my hair. I laid my uniform out on the chair, the heavy white rayon dress with deep pockets, the panty hose, the thick-soled nurse’s shoes I bought at JC Penney.

  As always, I woke in time to shut off the alarm just before it rang. I boiled water in my little green hot pot and made a cup of instant coffee. The sky was a pre-dawn indigo. I put on a long, black coat I’d bought at the Goodwill, a coat with curly fur of some sort, like dog fur, on the collar and cuffs. It was lined with satin, and maybe wool blanketing, too, for it was heavy as a shield. The air prickled in my nose, my skin tightened, and an intense subzero pain stabbed my forehead.

  I walked across the frozen lawn to the ward and sat down in t
he lighted office. The nurse coming on duty introduced herself as Mrs. L. because, she said, her actual name was long, Polish, and unpronounceable. She was tall, broad, and already looked tired. She wore a baggy tan cardigan along with her uniform, and a nurse’s cap was pinned into her fluffy pink-blond hair. She was drinking coffee and eating a glazed doughnut from a waxed-paper bag.

  “Want some?” Her voice was dull. She turned to one of the other aides coming on and said that she’d had a rough night. Her little boy was sick. They all knew one another, and the talk swirled back and forth for a few minutes.

  “What am I supposed to do? Can you give me something to do?” I asked in a too bright, nervous voice.

  “Listen to this,” Mrs. L. laughed. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty. None of the patients are up yet.”

  “Except Warren,” said the nurse who was going off duty. “Warren’s always up.”

  I walked out of the office into the hall, which opened onto a huge square room floored with pink and black linoleum squares. The walls were a strange lavender-gray, perhaps meant to be soothing. The curtainless windows were rectangles of electric blue sky that turned to normal daylight as the patients rose and slowly, in their striped cotton robes, began wandering down another corridor that led into the big room from the left. Everyone looked the same at first, men and women, young and old. Mrs. L. handed out medications in small paper cups and said to me, pointing, “Go with Warren there, and make sure he takes it.”

  So I went with Warren, the night owl, an elderly—no, really old—man with long arms and the rope-muscled and leathery body of a farmer who has worked so hard he will now live forever—or certainly past the reach of his mind. His tan was now permanent, burnt into the lower half of his face and hands. There was a V of leather at his neck from a lifetime of open shirt collars. His legs and stomach and chest and upper arms would be deadly pale. He was already dressed neatly—he always dressed and shaved himself. He was wearing clean brown pants and a frayed but ironed plaid shirt and he was starting to walk. He popped the pills down and didn’t miss a step. He walked and walked. He was from Pluto and probably related to Marn Wolde, but she’d never mentioned him. I watched Warren a lot that first day because I couldn’t believe he’d keep it up, but he didn’t stop for more than a breath, filling up on food quickly at the designated times, then strolling up and down the corridors, crisscrossing the common room, in and out of every bedroom. To everyone he met, he nodded and said, “I’ll slaughter them all.” The patients answered, “Shut up.” The staff didn’t seem to hear.

  The first day’s schedule became routine. I woke early to record my dreams and sensations, then I dressed, putting a pen and small notebook in my pocket, plus a tiny book I’d sent away for—a miniature French dictionary made of blue plastic. I’d not given up. I noted everything, jotted quickly in a stall on bathroom breaks. At breakfast time I walked down through the steam tunnels to the dining room. My job as an escort was to see that no one hid in the tunnels or got lost. I ate with the patients, put my tray in line and waited to see what landed on it. Farina, cold toast, a pat of butter, a carton of milk, juice if I was early enough, and coffee. There was always coffee, endless, black acid in sterilized and stained Melmac cups. I ate what they gave me, no matter what, ravenous and forgetful. I did the same at lunch. Mashed turnips. Macaroni and meat sauce. Extra bread, extra butter. I began to think of food all day. Food occupied my thoughts. The food began to take up too much of my diary. There was nothing new to say about it in English, so I began to describe the food in French. Soon, there was nothing new to say about it in either language.

  I was assigned to an open ward. The patients could sign out if they wanted to walk the ice-blasted grounds. As long as they were not gone past curfew they could go anywhere. There was also a lot of sitting. It was supposed to be part of my job to listen to people, draw them out, provide a conversational backdrop of reality, tell them when they were having fantasies.

  Warren talked of the war sometimes, but one of the nurses told me that he wasn’t a veteran. “I was reviewing the troops. They marched by and turned their eyes upon me as they passed. I turned to General Eisenhower and I said, ‘Mentally, you’re not a very good president.’ His aide turned and looked at me. He was in civilian clothes…” And so on. His monologues always ended with “I’ll slaughter them all.” Always the same. I wanted to edit his mental loop, instead I walked with him. He would try to give me money—dollar bills folded fine in a peculiar way. We took a few turns around the halls, always at the same time. I knew everyone’s routine. I knew each person’s delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.

  Lucille, in the patients’ coffee room where snacks were fixed, ate cornstarch from a box by the spoonful.

  “We must put that away,” I told her. My voice was changing, growing singsong, indulgent and coaxing, like the other staff. I couldn’t stand the sound of myself.

  “I ate this when I was pregnant,” said Lucille. “Did you know I was artificially inseminated nine times?”

  “Please, Lucille, give me the spoon.”

  “I put all nine of the kids up for adoption, one after the other, but they didn’t like it. Know what they did?”

  “They didn’t blow spiders under your door. You just imagined that. So don’t say it, and give me the spoon.”

  “They blew spiders under my door.”

  “Hey!”

  I snatched the spoon and box away. One quick grab and they were both mine.

  “Nobody blew spiders under your door.”

  “My children did,” Lucille said stubbornly. “My children hated me.”

  Warren came in. He had been looking more disorganized, unshaved, his shirt buttoned wrong, his pants unzipped. His hair stuck to all sides in clumps. But for about five minutes, we held a perfectly normal conversation. Then he mentioned General Eisenhower and was off. I left, carrying the box of cornstarch.

  Nonette

  MRS. L. WAS admitting a new patient, a young woman sitting with her back to me. I paused in the door of the office. There was something about the woman—I felt it immediately. A heat. She was wearing a black dress. Her eyes were angry blue and her lips very red. Her skin was pasty and shiny, as though she had a fever. Her blond hair, maybe dyed hair, was greasy and dull. She swiveled in the chair and smiled. She was about my age. Each of her teeth was separated from the next by a thin space, which gave her a predatory look. I handed the cornstarch box to Mrs. L., who put it absently on the windowsill.

  “This is Nonette,” she said.

  “Is that French?” I asked. That was it. She looked French.

  The new patient didn’t answer but looked at me steadily, her smile becoming a false leer.

  Mrs. L. pursed her lips and filled in blank spots on the forms. “Nonette can sleep in twenty. Here’s the linen key. Why don’t you help her settle in?”

  “Fetch my things along,” Nonette ordered.

  “Evelina’s not a bellhop,” said Mrs. L.

  “That’s all right.” I lugged one of Nonette’s suitcases down the corridor. She smiled in an underhanded way and dropped the other suitcase once we were out of Mrs. L.’s sight. She waited while I carried it to her room, and watched as I took her sheets, a pillowcase, a heavy blanket, and a thin spread of cotton waffle-weave from the linen closet. Her room was one of the nicer ones, with only two roommates. It had built-in wooden furniture, not flimsy tin dressers, and the bed was solid. It even had all four casters on the legs.

  “Fuck this dump,” said Nonette.

  “It’s not bad.”

  “You’re a bitch.”

  “You’re a bidet.”

  In a Salvation Army store I had acquired a 1924 edition of a French dictionary called Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustr. I’d gotten to the B’s. The page with the word bidet also had beautiful tiny engraved pictures of a biberon, a biche, a bicyclette, and a bidon.

  Nonette’s mouth twisted open in scorn. I left. The n
ext day Nonette was extremely friendly to me. When I walked onto the ward, she immediately grabbed my hand as though we’d interrupted some wonderful conversation the day before, and she tugged me toward the glassed-in porch, which was freezing cold but where patients went to talk privately. I sat down beside Nonette in an aluminum lawn chair. I was wearing a sweater. She had on a thin cotton shirt, button-down style, a man’s shirt with a necktie and men’s chino pants. Her shoes were feminine kitten heels. Her hair was slicked back with water or Vitalis. She was an odd mixture of elements—she looked depressed but, it could not be denied, also chic. Today she wore black eyeliner and her face was prettier, more harmonious in the subdued light.

  She didn’t smoke. “It’s a stinking habit,” she said when I lit up. I was smoking the ones with low tar and nicotine because I was smoking too much there, constantly, like everyone else, and my chest ached.

  “I should quit.” I stubbed out my cigarette. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “I wanted to talk to someone my age, not those jerks, shrinks, whatever. You’re not bad-looking either. That helps. I wanted to talk about what’s bothering me. I came to get well, didn’t I? So I want to talk about how really, truly, sick I am. I’ve talked about it, I know I have, but I haven’t really told it. Or if I have, then nothing happened anyway. So that’s why I want to talk about it.”

  She paused for a moment and leaned toward me. When she did her whole face sharpened, her eyebrows flowed back into her temples, her mouth deepened.

  “If I could just be born over,” she said, “I’d be born neutral. Woman or man, that’s not what I mean. I wouldn’t have a sex drive. I wouldn’t care about it, need it or anything. It’s just a problem, things that you do, which you hate yourself for afterward. Like take when I was nine years old, when I had it first. He was a relative, a cousin, something like that, living with us for a summer.”