The Musician

by Douglas Gardham

  Access to the third-floor elevator was a few doors down from the room. They descended to the lobby.

  “How was your morning?” his mother asked as they passed through the front entrance doors into the sunshine outside. They angled right to the open area they’d strolled through once a day for the last week.

  “Good but sad,” Ethan replied as his mother put her hand on the inside of his bent elbow. “I dreamed of Mila again.”

  “Oh, Ethan,” his mother replied, squeezing his arm.

  He knew she didn’t know what to say. Mila had been a recurring dream since his return. Each time, he would see her from behind. The long brown hair that covered her slender neck and spread across her shoulders always gave her away. In the dream, she would turn, and her brown eyes would take him away to a time before everything had been destroyed.

  “Did you see Dr. Katharine this morning?” his mother asked.

  Dr. Katharine was close to his recovery and saw him every couple of days. She was the reason he was still there.

  “Yes,” he said, sticking his right hand in the pocket of his Levi’s while keeping his left arm bent so as not to lose his mother’s hand on it. “She came by before lunch.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That I’m close,” Ethan replied, watching a fat robin hop through the greening grass in front of them.

  “Close?” his mother asked. Her voice rose, but her face looked deflated. Her eyes looked lighter, more gray than blue. She had regained her son, but the uncertainty of his mental health seemed to permeate her demeanor, making the skin on her face droop, her arms hang limply, and her shoulders hunch. It saddened him that his well-being was likely the cause of her physical decline.

  “Close to being ready to leave,” he answered, attempting a smile. He hated the empty feeling his dreams of Mila left him with.

  “How’s Dad?” he asked, changing the subject. His father was back in Toronto on business matters. He’d be back at the end of the week.

  “You know your father,” his mother said before pressing her lips together. It was a common expression whenever his father’s business came up. “He just can’t stay away. But to his credit, he all but gave it up while you were recovering.”

  “Yeah, Dad’ll never change,” Ethan said, shaking his head.

  His mother smiled and looked on ahead.

  Ethan thought of Dr. Katharine as they continued along the sidewalk in silence. The sun was warm on his face. It felt good. He had mixed feelings about Dr. Katharine. His emotions were charged whenever she entered his room. He had an undeniable attraction to her, as if there were more to their relationship, but he didn’t know why. Their familiarity seemed to go beyond that of a doctor-patient relationship. What he saw as love despite the twelve-year difference in their ages was not reciprocated. He had come to realize her interest was solely medical; he was an intriguing case—a patient with unusual needs, progressing through a complicated psychosis.

  “Did Dr. Katharine give you any indication of how much longer you’d have to stay?” his mother asked, interrupting his thoughts of the doctor.

  “Not really,” he answered, turning to face the south side of the hospital and its many windows, “but it’s got to be soon. I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.” His frustration came out in his tone.

  His mother sighed and squeezed his arm. “You do seem better.”

  “I know, but you say that every day.” He put his hand on hers and smiled. “I don’t think that’s enough.”

  They walked a little farther, reveling in the warm spring sunshine. His mother seemed to enjoy the weather as much as he did. Ethan looked at the buildings; he wanted to keep walking away from the constant scrutiny of the hospital’s eyes. He didn’t know what he would do. There were too many bad memories to stay in Ottawa, and engineering held no interest for him. But that was all second to getting out of this funny farm and assimilating back into what was real.

  The cement sidewalk they walked along transitioned to asphalt. They followed its curved route out behind the hospital to an open area edged by a stream that eventually fed into the Ottawa River. Along the route, every couple hundred feet, were wood benches. It was nice to sit and enjoy the outside away from the hospital environs. His mother stopped in front of an empty bench near the water’s edge.

  “Let’s sit for a while,” she suggested, letting her hand slide from his arm. “It’s too nice a day to waste indoors.”

  She sat down. Ethan remained standing.

  For a moment, he had a sense of déjà vu, feeling he’d been there before, but try as he might, he couldn’t connect the feeling with anything tangible. The sense of recollection faded and left him both aggravated and perplexed. Something was there that he couldn’t quite latch on to. It was like recognizing a face but not knowing the person’s name. He sat down beside his mother on the hard, freshly painted green planks between the cement supports at each end. Though short on comfort, the benches were sturdy.

  “I noticed you’re doing some reading,” his mother said, crossing her legs and putting one hand on top of the other in her lap. “Browning something or other. Is it a new book?”

  He’d found Browning Station on the windowsill in the room. He’d ignored it at first, having no desire to read or do anything other than sleep after his return. But boredom soon had driven him to do something more than stare at the four walls of the room or his silent roommate. It didn’t take long to get caught up in the story of a man who appeared to be well adjusted yet was able to commit atrocious acts of horror. What troubled Ethan as he read the book was how a person could imagine and put down on paper such evil and not in some way have experienced it.

  “I think it’s pretty new,” he replied. He’d put it down the night before after reading a particularly graphic scene: a victim had succumbed to the main character’s idea of retribution in the biblical eye-for-an-eye sense. “Apparently, I picked it up one day from the nurses’ station and brought it to my room. I read it for hours on end, but I don’t remember any of it. Parts are quite disturbing.”

  Ethan stared at the water flowing by in front of them. It wasn’t deep but was too wide to jump across. He was reminded of another time and place—alone, standing on a bridge behind a rusted railing. He could almost smell the cool fall air that had blown across his face. The water had moved fast below the bridge and his feet. He could feel his fear and then hear her voice: “Ethan, it’s okay.”

  He saw her. Mila was at the bar beside her friend Sean. It made him happy. She winked.

  “What’s it about?” his mother’s voice said, interrupting. He was standing up, his feet inches from the water.

  “What?” he asked, turning.

  “The book—what’s it about?”

  He’d gone away again. His mind shifted quickly.

  “What’s it about?” He repeated his mother’s question to give himself time to think. “It’s a story of how a psychopath fits transparently into society without drawing any attention to himself.”

  He turned back to the water, as if searching for meaning in its flow. He was glad to have his mother there, even if she wasn’t the company he most desired. He didn’t move.

  “Ethan,” his mother said, her voice quiet. He knew her methods; she wanted to be sure he was listening. “Are you ready?”

  “Ready?” he asked, knowing what she meant but unwilling to admit it. Like a child, he didn’t want to answer. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  Anger simmered inside him as he spoke. That god-awful question of what he was going to do—his mother had a thousand different ways of asking it. The water seemed to flow past like life, hardly giving him a chance to figure it out. Mila was dead. Would he ever be able to get his life back together again without her love? Life without her seemed almost unnecessary at times.

  “You’ll do what you have
to do,” his mother replied, getting up and moving closer. She rubbed her hand across the tension between his shoulders.

  “I suppose,” he agreed, hating the simplicity of the answer, which didn’t mean anything. He continued to stare at the passing water. “I can’t stay here. I think I’ll go back to Toronto.”

  His mother stepped back. “You can stay with us,” she said. “Only if you want to, of course. We know you can take care of yourself.”

  “Thanks. We’ll see.” He stiffened, feeling patronized, and then turned from the water. “Let’s head back. It’s getting chilly.”

  The real truth was he couldn’t stay still for long. There were too many thoughts moving through his head. A dark brooding that he feared would take him away again usually followed memories of Mila.

  As they headed back along the asphalt pathway, Ethan wanted to talk about Mila—what she meant to him, how her absence grew in his stomach—but it all seemed too much effort. Something inside him was broken, preventing him from touching and feeling the world. There seemed no way around it. The agony was oftentimes unbearable. It would diminish but never go away. As they approached the entrance, his mother spoke first.

  “Think you’ll finish it?” she asked as he opened the glass door in front of her.

  “What?” he answered, still struggling to find a way to explain his feelings for Mila.

  “The book, whatever it’s called—Brown something.”

  Her question brought back the book.

  “Browning Station,” he said to correct her. “I think so.”

  They walked through the foyer. Patients in robes were sitting with visitors in the fake-leather chairs near the large front windows. Sunshine and company pulled many from their rooms. Ethan walked alongside his mother toward the elevators.

  “Really?” his mother replied. She seemed preoccupied. He wondered whether she worried about his recovery all the time.

  As they passed the front desk, he thought of William Avery, the main character in Browning Station. He’d read about the existence of psychopaths in society—brilliant people with evil, incongruous personalities who blended into everyday society like chameleons. Those they interacted with daily accepted their eccentricities.

  As Ethan thought about the book, he caught sight of a person at the front desk. He stopped, drawn to what he saw for reasons he couldn’t explain. He stared at the back of a woman’s head. Her brunette hair was pulled back in a ponytail. The woman appeared to be in a heated exchange with a clerk at the admissions desk. While he stood there watching, the woman stopped, as if suddenly aware of the commotion she was creating. She turned toward Ethan. There was an immediate reaction of something akin to recognition in her eyes. Her lips seemed to take the prompt and curved into what appeared to be a pained smile. A warm comfort he hadn’t felt since his return came over Ethan. The woman at once seemed to regain a sense of where she was and turned back to her dialogue with the person behind the desk.

  “Who’s that?” his mother asked, looking in the direction of the woman Ethan had stopped to look at.

  “I don’t know,” Ethan replied, unhappy with his own answer. There was something familiar about her, but he didn’t know what it was.

  The elevator doors opened as they approached, as if awaiting their return. His mother stepped in. Ethan followed but not before glancing back in the direction of the front desk for the woman he’d just made eye contact with.

  She was gone.

  CHAPTER 2

  Monday, May 21, 1984

  When they arrived back at the room, Ethan was hungry. He wished they’d stayed downstairs and grabbed something in the cafeteria. He’d had his fill of the hospital’s menu; he never wanted to see another bowl of lime Jell-O. His medication was waiting in a miniature paper cup on the corner of the brown table that cantilevered over his bed.

  They weren’t in the room five minutes before Jackie, who occupied the room across the hall, came in. Wearing a tight neon-pink T-shirt and even tighter bell-bottom jeans, she brought her big smile into the room. While most patients wore pajamas, Jackie preferred street clothes and full makeup most days. Ethan couldn’t help but notice she was braless.

  She was holding open a men’s magazine.

  “Oh, Ethan,” she gushed, “you just won’t believe the photos this month.”

  A woman’s naked body stretched across the pages she held out. To some, Jackie’s open sexuality might have been funny, if not titillating, but Ethan had seen enough already to know it wasn’t. Sad was how he had described it to his mother, like a colorful toucan on display at the zoo for everyone to gawk at. Jackie set the open magazine down on Ethan’s bed in the way someone might have shown a photograph of a pride of lions in National Geographic. Usually oblivious to the world around her, Jackie then moved to show the photograph to his mother, who was now sitting in the chair by the window.

  “Ah, Jackie,” Ethan said, seeing his mother grimace. Ethan knew his mother had witnessed far more inappropriate behavior in the last number of months, but that didn’t mean she was used to it. “Mom’s a little tired.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Jones,” Jackie said, her smile flattening. “You should rest on Ethan’s bed.”

  Jackie started to move his table.

  “It’s okay, Jackie,” Ethan replied, holding the table, knowing how hysterical Jackie could get if her feelings were upset. “Mom likes the chair.”

  Jackie looked at Ethan with the quizzical gaze he’d come to recognize as petulance. She smiled hard and nodded.

  Ethan had taken a liking to a few of his fellow patients following his reawakening. Jackie was one such person. She had a heart of gold, but he was never sure what she might do. Twice before, she’d been to his room while his mother was visiting. The first time, she’d been about to lift the front of her sweatshirt. Ethan had stopped her but hurt her feelings in doing so. It had taken two nurses and an injection to calm her. He knew some of her story. Never-ending sexual abuse from a single-digit age and multiple arrests had landed her in the Royal.

  “Are you staying for dinner?” she asked his mother, closing the magazine.

  “Not tonight, Jacqueline,” his mother replied, preferring to use her full name when speaking to her.

  “Oh, there it is,” Jackie said, fluttering multicolored fingernails at the window beside his mother. She turned and walked to the window. “My book.” She smiled, picking The Catcher in the Rye off the sill. “I’ve been looking all over for this.”

  Ethan hadn’t even realized it was there.

  “Thanks, Ethan—you’re a honey,” she said, blowing him a kiss.

  “Glad to be of service,” he answered.

  Jackie left with her magazine and book in hand, closing the door behind her.

  “I must say, Ethan,” his mother said, “there’s never a dull moment here.”

  Ethan smiled, but the smile wasn’t a happy one. The place that had been his home for the better part of six months was not a place of comfort. Many of his fellow patients were entertaining, but he knew too much now. The funniness had lost its luster. Sanity might have had its challenges, but dealing with those who had lost theirs had taken its toll on his mind-set. Ignorance might have been bliss, but insanity sure wasn’t.

  Ethan picked up Browning Station, which sat on the bedside table. The plastic covering the dust jacket was scuffed, dulling the book’s cover.

  “You know,” he said more to himself than to his mother, “I will finish this. It’ll keep my mind off things.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Thursday, May 24, 1984

  “It’s difficult to explain, Ethan,” Dr. Katharine said.

  They were in an office on the first floor of the hospital. The doctors used it to speak privately with patients. Ethan had requested the meeting.

  “You came out of a delusion your mind created. As w
ith a coma, part of your brain was conscious and functional with your surroundings, while somewhere else, it was healing damage. It’s difficult to understand, as you have no memory of what happened. It’s like a dream. When we wake up, we remember little, if anything. We don’t know what triggered your brain to release you, but it does make an interesting study for insight into the brain’s workings.”

  Ethan heard part of Dr. Katharine’s explanation but became lost in her blue eyes. He liked being in her company and looking at her. She made him feel normal and not like a patient being observed, yet he sensed something more, a closer relationship. But she gave him no indication of such a thing. Age lines extending from the corners of her eyes and mouth showed the years between them. Her smile was warm, not coy, but comforting. He understood her occasional wink as reassurance and nothing more.

  “You don’t need to be here anymore, Ethan,” she said, raising her head from the file she’d been writing in. “I’d like to see you in a month or so and keep you on Orap for at least the immediate future. But keeping you here is no longer benefiting you.”

  “Really?” Ethan stared into the eyes that looked back at him through white horn-rimmed glasses. A twinge of memory nudged him. Her smile accentuated the C-shaped dimples at the corners of her mouth. He’d been there before. The feelings were there, but the place was gone.

  “Ethan Jones,” Dr. Katharine said, her firm voice jarring him from further reflection, “are you ready to rejoin the world outside?”

  Ethan didn’t say anything. He was remembering when he’d first met Dr. Katharine. Anger brewed with flashes of Mila and commotion. Images of a bloody room, a body on a bed, and the back of a person surfaced. The rage to strike out was nearly tangible, yet he stayed still. His face tightened as he clenched his teeth and balled his hands into fists. His heart beat faster. He could leave—but Mila couldn’t, no matter how much he believed. Mila was gone; death was final. She could come back, but he knew that when she did, she wasn’t real anymore. That had been Dr. Katharine’s concern from the beginning—that he couldn’t distinguish the difference.