Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “I keep thinking of the old man. How he died,” Jesse said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Losing his temper over something an intern did, dying so fast, right in the intern’s arms.… I keep thinking of it. Imagining it. Nobody ever could figure out what Perrault was doing at the hospital so late at night, why he was wandering around … evidently he got mixed up and thought someone had changed the orders on a patient of his. He was actually going to yank the tube out of someone’s nostril when the intern stopped him. I keep imagining myself in the intern’s place, wrestling with Perrault, holding him at the instant he died.…”

  “Why do you keep thinking about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You bring it up so often.…”

  “I can understand death scientifically,” Jesse said slowly. “It’s no longer mysterious or frightening to me. It’s these deaths … certain deaths.… The deaths of certain people. These deaths fascinate me.”

  He was blank to her, like a wall or the side of a rocky hill. Everything was tense at the surface of his body, his skin impenetrable and luminous with a fine gleaming white, like ivory. Yes, he was mineral, elemental in his opposition to her: but it was an opposition that had no awareness of itself.

  He was not a man; he was Dr. Vogel. He was no longer Jesse. He was not available to her. Nightly he held himself from her without any awareness of what he did. Every night. His mind raced feverishly and would not let him sleep, racing with the image of Dr. Vogel, Dr. Vogel. He was no longer Jesse, the young man who had called out her father’s name and stridden into her life. He only appeared to be in this room with her, speaking to her as a husband to his wife; really he was elsewhere. His presence here was a lie. If his mind cast itself about in this house, exploring his possessions, it would only assure itself of their existing, bluntly and coarsely, without spirit: a wife, a daughter, another daughter.

  “I wish you would try to sleep,” Helene said helplessly.

  Jesse stood. His height always surprised her. She was the daughter of a short man—a man her own height—and Jesse’s size seemed a kind of threat.

  “I’m not tired now,” he said.

  “Don’t think about Dr. Perrault, please.…”

  Jesse stared at her. “But why shouldn’t I think about him? I can’t turn my mind off after thirteen years. Who else will remember him? Even his wife doesn’t remember him correctly.… She’s always calling me at the Clinic, you know. Wants to have us over for dinner, even the little girls, as she calls them.… But she can’t really remember him, she didn’t understand his work; he was a great man and he needs someone who can appreciate him.… Do you see what I mean?”

  Helene said faintly, “Dr. Perrault is dead.”

  “What? Dead …? Yes, he’s dead, I know that, I knew that,” Jesse said. “But I keep seeing him in my imagination. I keep having conversations with him. After thirteen years I can’t forget. People work themselves into the lives of others, into their brains. He exists in me, in my brain. In certain cells in my brain. Helene,” he said suddenly, “where do they go when they die? These people? They seem to be backing off from me, leaving me, I can’t keep hold of them … there is always something unfinished about them, about them and me.… I want to ask Dr. Perrault certain questions, I want that man to answer me truthfully, for once, not to be sly and sardonic but to tell me truthfully the secret of his life and of his death. It’s as if he still exists somewhere, but he’s mocking me, he won’t come back to me.… I need these people. I love them and I need them.… I keep imagining myself there at his death, instead of that intern. I see myself boring little holes into his skull and opening it up and draining the blood out, fixing him up somehow, saving him.…” Jesse said, holding out his hands for Helene to see. His fingers twitched as if with a desire to act, to grab hold of something.

  Helene could not speak. She was afraid of him.

  “I’m very tired. But I can’t sleep. Forget what I’ve just said.”

  He went upstairs and Helene remained behind, watching his back, her husband’s back, wondering at him. She did not know if she loved him for his strangeness, if she desired him as always, or if she feared him.… She remembered the way he had walked out of the house on Christmas evening, the way he had frightened the girls. But he had not frightened her: his walking out like that, so quickly and so strangely, had been a kind of relief to her.

  He was taking a shower upstairs. She lingered in his study, looking through the things on his desk. Typewritten pages, notes, offprints of articles.… Everything was scattered, and it was hopeless, the attempt to put the parts together. They would not add up to Jesse Vogel. She had married him but she did not know him. She had thought that marriage would be the beginning of her life; she had had a long life as a daughter, a famous man’s daughter, and she had been eager to begin her real life. She would be a woman, womanly and fulfilled. A wife. But this had not come about.… And then, puzzled, she had believed that the birth of her first child would fulfill her. So much apprehension and pain and joy … But the birth had left her exhausted and at a distance from herself, from her own body. Her baby had overwhelmed her. She was ashamed of herself and it occurred to her that she must have another baby, another baby to make her normal, a real woman. But after the second baby nothing was different. She felt a final, terrible certainty about her strangeness: she would never become a real woman.

  She was being destroyed by her husband, she thought, annihilated by him. He could not imagine her, had not the time to imagine her existence, and so he was destroying her.

  She picked up a sheet of paper. It seemed to be what Jesse had been working on when she had interrupted him. The paper was covered with his large, fine handwriting, looping letters and strong slashes that crossed t’s as if with impatience, dots over i’s that were like small pricks in the paper itself.

  Dr. Roderick Perrault was working on this book at the time of his death in February, 1968. For several years I had been assisting him in the preparation of certain chapters, and he had indicated his wish for me to complete the book in the event of his death. There has been little need for extensive editing, except in the case of the chapter on otoneurology, which I have brought up to date in collaboration with Dr. Ronald Myer. Dr. Perrault’s contribution to his field has, of course, been enormous—not simply in the quality of his written work, but in the quality of his personal work, his dedication and example to those of us fortunate enough to have studied with him. He was a model of scientific excellence. All of us who knew Dr. Perrault have been shaped by him and will never outlive him. We will never outlive outlive outlive his death death death

  The last sentence trailed away.

  Helene read the paragraph again.

  She put the paper down where she had found it. She folded her arms quickly, bringing her hands firmly against her ribs, tucked under her arms as if she were cold. After a moment she picked up a copy of a magazine that lay on top of some books—Studies in Neuropsychiatry—and saw from the table of contents that Jesse had an article in it. “Oddities of Retrograde Amnesia.” Helene skimmed the case histories of Jesse’s patients—a fifty-year-old man who believed himself ten years old, who kept asking the same question about the weather again and again, unable to remember any answer given him; another man who listened to the same record again and again, unable to remember having heard it before; a woman who remembered details of her childhood forty years before but who had forgotten everything that belonged to her adult life. She read:

  After certain types of traumatic injuries there seems to be a block between sensory reception and the process of retention. RA that is extended indicates severe damage that blocks out current and recent memory, so that the patient can recall distant memories clearly and believe he is much younger than he is. It seems that events of the distant past are more firmly established in the memory, with no regard to their relative (conscious) significance or insignificance to the individual; current and rece
nt events are precarious and may be extinguished completely by traumatic injury. Why should not distant memories be most easily extinguished? And yet in fact they are most firmly retained. We might hypothesize the following: that memory is not a patterned or predictable process. Brain damage may result in the extinction of all memory, of course, but it seems that the mere organic existence of the brain assures a constantly strengthening foundation of distant memories. Is it the function of the normal brain to hold the present cheaply and to honor only the distant past?

  She closed the magazine and put it back on top of the stack of books. The voice of Dr. Vogel, his presence, his hard, radiant, luminous mind.… She opened a drawer: notecards held together loosely by rubber bands. Notes taken in red, green, and blue ink. She opened another drawer: newsclippings. Strange. She picked up one of them—it was a brief article about a suspected murderer who remembered his victim’s name but not his own name, knew everything about his victim’s life but nothing about his own life. He had evidently murdered a young woman in Tampa, Florida, had stolen a small powerboat, and gone out into the Gulf of Mexico, where he had been picked up by the Coast Guard. Another news item was about a derelict who was hospitalized in Bellevue and who began gradually to recall that he was a doctor himself, or had been a doctor; the story had a happy ending, with the derelict restored to his family in Yonkers, New York, whom he had left eight years before. Another clipping told of a coal miner of twenty-nine in Hazard, Kentucky, who had shot to death his wife, his infant son, and his own mother, evidently on Christmas Day, leaving them dead in the living room of his home and going out to the barn to shoot himself.

  How do these things come together? Helene wondered.

  Jesse was out of the house by six-thirty. The girls were up by eight and Helene made breakfast for them. She was still nervous from the encounter with Jesse. There was some tension between the girls, some irritation, but she did not want to inquire about it.

  Jeanne and Shelley were totally different—no possibility of their being friends, only sisters. Jeanne was fairly tall, about five feet eight, much too thin, too serious. She was always staring critically, contemplating. She was sixteen years old and, like Jesse, paid scrupulous, courteous attention to all the details of her work—she was going to study biology when she entered college, hopefully at Radcliffe. But ordinary life seemed to baffle her.

  Shelley, with her sloppy posture, her noisy eating habits—she ate her toast quickly, dropping the crusts on her plate—was inattentive, dreamy, very pretty. She appeared older than her thirteen years. Her red-blond hair was brushed down to her shoulders; her cheeks were pink, even ruddy. She was a few pounds overweight and very healthy. Jeanne was always catching colds, always complaining of headaches, but Shelley ran out in the rain and returned in the cold from swimming practice with her hair wet and never got sick. Her only troubles were nicks and scratches and bruises. She was always slouching as if embarrassed by her figure; she twisted strands of hair around her fingers and sucked at them, she was surging, pushing forward, yet oddly lazy, exasperating, nervy. This morning she was sitting with her eyes downcast, that pure, pale, light green of her gaze turned down to her plate and the crusts of toast, as if she were afraid to look up.

  “Look at the mess of crumbs you made,” Jeanne said suddenly.

  Shelley said nothing, blushing. It was strange that she did not reply to her sister.

  “Why can’t she learn to eat decently?” Jeanne asked.

  Something was wrong between them. Wearily Helene felt the jabs and thrusts between them, like the pokings of an elbow.

  “Don’t bother Shelley so early in the morning,” Helene said.

  “Bother her? Who’s bothering who? She bothers me,” Jeanne said. She was staring contemptuously at her sister. “She doesn’t have any manners, at her age.”

  Suddenly Shelley pushed her plate away. She looked up at Jeanne.

  “You can go to hell,” she whispered.

  Helene looked with irritated amusement from one girl to the other. What was this? What did it have to do with her?

  “Shelley, you can leave the room,” she said.

  Shelley jumped up. Clumsily, she backed into the opened silverware drawer, made a sobbing, choking noise—“She promised she wouldn’t bring it up and now she’s going to!” she cried.

  “Bring what up? Who’s bringing what up?” Jeanne said.

  “You are! You promised you wouldn’t tell and now you’re going to!”

  Jeanne smiled in amazement. “Nobody’s bringing anything up,” she said.

  “I don’t want to listen to this. Any of this,” Helene said.

  “There—you see! There!” Shelley cried.

  Jeanne shrugged her shoulders. Her face was sickly in its antagonism.

  “I mean it,” Helene said.

  Shelley put her dishes in the sink, ran the water noisily onto them, and left the kitchen. They could hear her heavy footsteps all the way out to the front door.

  “Shelley—” Jeanne began.

  “I said I don’t want to hear about it,” Helene said flatly.

  “But—”

  “No. I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “But Shelley—”

  “I said no.”

  Jeanne stared at her, startled.

  No, Helene could not listen to this, no more news of Shelley, no more bad news. Not this morning.

  “All right,” Jeanne said, her voice trembling, “if you don’t want to hear about it, you won’t.…”

  “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  Two weeks ago Jeanne had come in breathless from school to tell Helene that her sister was being talked about even in the high school, that the name “Shelley Vogel” was being passed around and joked about—that she had done something crazy—Helene, frightened at Jeanne’s ferocity, her anger, had wanted to shake her into silence. But Jeanne rushed on to tell her that Shelley had allowed herself to be picked up by a bunch of high school boys and to be used for target practice by them.

  “For what?” Helene had cried.

  “Target practice. With rifles. Real rifles,” Jeanne said.

  “But I don’t understand—”

  “Some boys picked her up and got her to hold out matches for them to shoot at. She’s crazy! I’m so ashamed! They had .22 rifles and instead of using paper targets the way they usually do, they got that stupid fool to hold out matches for them to shoot. And then—this is when the mother of one of the boys looked out the window—then they got her to stand with a cigarette in her mouth, and they were shooting it out of her mouth! Out of her mouth!”

  “I don’t believe it,” Helene said.

  Jeanne began to cry angrily. “I’m so ashamed. How could she be so stupid, to let them use her like that … to laugh at her like that.…”

  “She could have been killed,” Helene said.

  She felt faint. She had to sit down.

  “I’m so ashamed, everybody is talking about her.… She’s so stupid, so stupid!” Jeanne said. Her tears were hot and spiteful.

  Helene’s mind had whirled: how could this be true? She thought of her pretty daughter, with that face she herself envied a little, she thought of that face exposed to bullets.…

  When she confronted Shelley with this news, Shelley said nervously, “Oh, they were just fooling around … they’re nice kids … it was only a BB gun and I shot it myself a few times.… Nothing happened.”

  “How could you let anyone do such a thing to you!” Helene had asked.

  “They didn’t do anything!” Shelley protested, not meeting her mother’s eye. “Oh, Jeanne is always exaggerating things, she hates me, she’s always after me—They didn’t do anything, they’re nice kids and they’re my friends, they just like to fool around—Nothing happened.”

  Helene stared at her.

  “No, nothing happened,” Shelley said hotly.

  Helene had not dared to tell Jesse about this.

  Now, this morning, she s
aid slowly to Jeanne: “I don’t want to hear about it. Please.”

  Alone. It was a relief to be alone.

  She drove out into noontime traffic. At a new shopping center—Wonderland East—she hurried through a few stores on errands. She hated to shop and moved quickly, nervously through the crowds of other women.

  Crossing a concrete square—cheaply decorated with “modern” multicolored cubes and benches of garish carnival colors—she heard the start of music, greatly amplified—then it stopped abruptly. The other shoppers, most of them women and many of them middle-aged, glanced around at the noise, bewildered. Then it began again: a crashing of guitars, drums, indecipherable instruments.

  Helene wanted to press her hands against her ears. The racket was almost unbearable.

  She tried to hurry to her car, but she had to cross these small artificial “courtyards”—square after square of cubes and benches and potted plants, female shoppers, small children, teenagers in slovenly dress, with the screeching, harshly rhythmic music piped at her from speakers set high on posts. It was windy and she had to close her eyes against the flying grit. So much noise, the pounding of drums and voices, the ache in her legs to hurry, hurry, to get her out of this—

  It was mocking her, mocking the misery in her body.

  You are too old, too old. Give up. Forget. You are far too old.

  She was to meet Mannie Breck for lunch. For days she had wondered if she would really meet him, but now she was obviously on her way. The restaurant was located a few miles from Wonderland East, an older place set back from the white tile and strident signs of newer restaurants and shops, near a park. When Helene drove by the park she noticed a small crowd there, a kind of demonstration, young people with signs, a single policeman on horseback.