Raveling (22 page)

The rooms of the clinic were carpeted in orange. It must have been on sale at the Institutional Carpeting Warehouse. The walls
of the clinic were bright satin white and apple green. Many of the walls in the common areas, however, were covered in enormous,
life-size photographs of beaches or forests or canyons. There was a lobby near my room. And to escape Harrison’s constant
blaring of the television, I liked to sit in this waiting area and look deeply into the Superman-blue Caribbean water of a
photographic mural. There was a band of yellow for the beach, a band of deep ultrablue for the water, and a band of bright
shining blue for the sky. It was like a Rothko painting, so easy to look at. Everything else had become so complicated, so
confusing. When I looked at the television, it was just a mass of bright colors moving over the screen in no particular pattern.
The sounds it made were completely unrelated to the blur of images. This was a part of my illness. In our room, Harrison lay
in his bed and shivered
and moaned, watching the television continually. He had tried to hang himself on his first day here, inexpertly tying his
sheets around his neck and trying to find a way to attach them to the ceiling. I had watched this from a state of near catatonia,
and when the nurse came in and discovered what Harrison was trying to do, I pretended to be asleep.

There was a great commotion for a while. Then, I believe, they administered a sedative.

A day later, Harrison apologized.

I don’t think I responded.

“I’m sorry you had to see that.” He laughed. “If you saw that, I mean.” He sat up in bed and looked at me. “I’ve been a little
on edge lately. You know what I mean? I have this little problem. And it has ruined my entire fucking life.”

I think I told him that it was all right, no need to apologize to me. I tried to, anyway, tried to make my face move even
though it had been covered in liquid glass.

“Don’t do drugs,” Harrison said. He was a short man, with a black beard and hair that he had forced back over a bald spot.
“It sounds stupid, but it’s true.”

Then a nurse came in with our medication.

I could see this collection of bodies as if it were one. Like a number of microscopic organisms on a slide under a microscope,
the people at my parents’ party swirled and merged, their bodies fluid with alcohol. What was I doing out here? Every now
and then I’d catch a glimpse of something—my mother’s face, my father’s hand gesturing wildly to punctuate a joke. There was
darkness around me like an old blanket. There was a smell of ferns and earth and tree bark. And there was my sister—her face
bright in torchlight, her mouth open—laughing.

We took our medication in the morning, Harrison and I, and again throughout the day, whenever a nurse came in with a little
paper cup of water and a few pills in a paper dish. I began to feel saner, more and more all the time, as each medication
cycle completed its arc. Sitting in her office, I told Katherine, “I’m feeling much, much better. I’m still, I’m still a little
lethargic, you know, dazed, but I’m not hearing those voices anymore.” This was more or less true, even though I suspected
they were still there, whispering just out of range, so faint I couldn’t hear them. “There are no more arguments inside the
light fixtures.” I forced a smile, bright as I could, onto my mouth. The truth is, I just wanted to go home. I would have
told her anything.

“Pilot, that’s great.” Katherine’s face wore the same smile as mine. I felt we were both professionals here, both of us acting
our parts. “That’s really terrific.” She cleared her throat. “And what about the woods? Are you still afraid—”

Shaking my head, I said, “I’m not going out there again, if that’s what you mean.”

She was half sitting, half standing, leaning on the front of her desk. She smoothed her long khaki skirt with her left hand.
Today she wore a forest-green sweater, too, a good color for her. “I was going to ask if you’re still afraid of them,” she
said, eyes full of concern, “if you still think they’re going to snatch you.”

“That was a delusion.” I forced a self-deprecating tone into my voice. “I know that now. I’m crazy. I’m not stupid.” I had
never thought the woods would
snatch
me, anyway. I would never use the word
snatch
.

“Okay.” Katherine walked around her desk to sit down. “And what about your mother?”

“If she has something wrong with her,” I assured Katherine, “I’m certain we’ll figure out whatever it is in plenty of
time. There’s absolutely no reason to think she has cancer.” But she did, I knew. At that very instant, in fact, the radical
cells were twisting their way through the folds of her brain. “Especially if Eric thinks—”

“And your brother?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you still convinced?”

“Convinced?”

“You were certain he was trying to—” Katherine sat down behind her desk, hands on its surface “—to harm you. Do you still
feel—”

“Have you slept with my brother?” I felt molten glass pouring over me, hardening around my features, my face turning to porcelain
and crystal, bone china and blown glass.

“What?” It was like a veil had dropped away from her eyes. She had, I saw it. They had fucked.

“Have you slept with him?”

She gave a little shake to her head. “Pilot, that’s—”

I got up from her hideous brown couch. I knew everything now. The way her eyes flickered away, the pupils dilating, the blood
rising to her cheeks. “You’ve had sex with Eric, haven’t you? He fucked you.”

Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy, my therapist, who was fucking my brother, a murderer, was silent, looking at her fingernails.
The middle one was bleeding. She’d been chewing it past the quick. It traveled, now, to her mouth.

“Eric provokes strong feelings in women,” I warned her. “You should be very careful, Katherine.”

“Pilot.” She looked directly at me and removed her finger from her mouth. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

She didn’t understand. “Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy,” I said, “ask yourself this.” I took a step forward. “Why is he with
you? What does my brother see in you?”

Katherine got up from her desk, came around it, and
walked toward me. “He’s very concerned about you,” she said. “He’s very, very—”

“He’s one thousand times more beautiful than you are.” I was completely brittle now, ready to shatter. “What does he see?
What does he see in
you
?” It had to be said. “What does he want?”

She blinked her eyes. “Pilot—”

“It’s not to say you aren’t beautiful, because—”

“Pilot, I think it’s—”

“—you are beautiful, I really think so.”

“—time for you to—”

“But it’s a way to me.”

“A
what?
”

“That’s what you are to him,” I said. “All you are. You are a way to get to me.” I shook my head defiantly. “And it’s not
going to work. I won’t allow it, and neither should you.”

I was moving toward the door, but Katherine put her hand on the knob before I could reach it. “How did you know?” she said.
“How did you know about me and Eric? Did someone tell you? Did someone tell you something about us?” Her voice was shaking.

“I’m omniscient.”

She folded her arms. “You’re omniscient.”

“I don’t mean to be,” I said. “It’s just—”

“I think the session is over for today, Pilot.” She let go of the doorknob, and it just seemed to open on its own.

The ghosts were multiplying in her field of vision.

The cells were multiplying at the base of her optical nerve.

Hannah found herself waking up earlier and earlier. And when she walked by the front windows in the mornings she saw two orange
sunrises over the double houses across two
streets. She saw more ghosts when she went downstairs, her ankles
crick-crick-cricking
against the hardwood in the hallway. She saw two right hands on the banister. One was real. One wasn’t. Hannah set one pot
to boil on the stove for her morning poached egg and saw two. She tried to lift the newspaper from the front door, but it
was a ghost. The real one lay nearby. She tried to pick up the ghost teacup. She wondered, now, which of these items were
real and which ones were transparent. It seemed, sometimes, that they had switched. Wasn’t that magazine real a moment ago,
and wasn’t the one beside it the ghost of it? Had things been rearranged?

She no longer trusted herself.

“There’s nothing wrong with your eyes,” Dr. Carewater, her optometrist, had said. “At least, there’s no optical reason why
you should be seeing these double images. None that I can see.”

“Perhaps I’m receiving two signals,” Hannah had suggested, quoting Eric. “Like on television.” One from the real world, one
from the world of apparitions.

“There’s nothing to explain it.” He had sat down, defeated. Dr. Carewater’s ghost image sat down in the ghost chair nearby.
“Nothing that has to do with your eyes themselves. It must be neurological.”

Like me, Hannah couldn’t watch television. She couldn’t discern what was happening on the screen. She couldn’t work, either.
She’d been forced to refer her violinists and surgeons to a colleague. She sat in the chair by the kitchen door and listened
to the AM radio news.

“Let me at least give you something,” Eric said on the phone. “Something to make you feel better.”

Our mother cried sometimes, privately. Even when no one was there, she’d go upstairs and stand in the shower and pull the
curtain, fully clothed.

Every afternoon, she called me. “Pilot,” she said.

“Hannah.”

“How are you?”

“I’m getting saner all the time.”

“You’re not insane,” she said. “There’s nothing insane about you.”

“Adult-onset schizophrenia, Hannah,” I said. “That is the professional opinion of the professional psychiatrist, the official
diagnosis, the actual—”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means I can’t trust my own thoughts. It means I can’t predict my own behavior.”

She quoted Eric. “They have drugs now, medical options—”

“They only work for some people,” I said. “Obviously not for me. Do you know what I told Katherine the other day?”

“They’re working for you,” Hannah said. “Evidently they’re working for you. You sound perfectly normal. Perfectly cogent.
You’re just trying to rattle my old bones, that’s what you’re—”

“For some reason, Hannah, the only time I feel sane is when I’m talking to you.”

“I don’t know if I should take that as a compliment or not.”

I changed the subject. “How are your ghosts?”

“They’re fine. Don’t you worry about—”

The ghosts were fine. “How’s Eric?”

“You know how Eric is.”

“Not really,” I said. “I really don’t. He doesn’t come to see me.”

“He’s worried he’ll upset you. He’s afraid of you. He’s fine, otherwise. Otherwise, he’s good.”

“Did you know that he’s screwing my therapist?”

“Pilot.”

“It’s true. Him and Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy. They’re sleeping together.”

“Why do you call her that?”

“What?”

“By her whole, entire name? Why don’t you just call her by one name?”