The Storm at the Door (24 page)

From the graveyard down the hill in Belmont, the names of
the dead sometimes speak in chorus, a sound coincidentally close to the trill rustle that often accompanies graveyard scenes in films.

Schultz chides himself for occasionally diverting his studies to a personal end, but he cannot help scrutinizing the sonic matrix for her name, his murdered Irit. Alas, he still has not heard it. Not entirely, at least.

But if the names of the dead can speak to him, then that further complicates the vexing question of this language’s origin. If the dead can speak in it too, then does that lend credence to the theory of the True Torah in which Reb Mendelsohn believed? A text that dictates the universe, written at all times by a High Author? Schultz likes to think of himself as a man of science, but he feels at the precipice of something else. Is it courage or is it foolishness to believe in what he cannot know for certain?

For the most part, Schultz has remained as skeptical of the kitsch and claptrap of the Bible and its notions as he was as a boy in Bolbirosok, studying the Torah.

You are telling me
, he would ask Rabbi Grossman,
that Baruch HaShem smote this man, Onan, for spilling seed? Rabbi, I don’t know how much time you spend talking to boys my age, but by this logic there shouldn’t be a Jew left in all of Lithuania
.

But, over the years, has Schultz begun to revise his position? Perhaps it is in no small part the influence of Irit, always contextualizing present issues with biblical parables, embarrassing Schultz in front of their Harvard friends, who scowled at her persistent faith and counterquoted from Kant, Marx, Nietzsche. Still, Schultz believes so little of the Torah. Not literally, at least. He has always seen that book as a series of metaphors, at the same distance from the truth of things as the languages men speak are distanced from the true language. But perhaps, in that
way, it’s all true. That which cannot be perceived by those without this form of perception must be explained in details people can understand. Though Schultz has not yet made the proverbial leap, the notion still occurs to him: perhaps each story within the Torah is molded after another, truer story, that can be told only in the lost, true language.

Nothing. Not one thing we don’t know about
.

It is Monday morning and Canon has ordered every one of his employees, all the way down to the kitchen staff, to an emergency meeting. He gesticulates dramatically, speaks vehemently, does not allow himself to sit, produces a performance perhaps subconsciously imitative of that of Alec Guinness in
The Bridge on the River Kwai
.

We have to be better than accidents
, Canon tells them.
We have to search, every day, in every drawer, under every mattress, so that not even an accident will give a patient the kind of possibility that that lighter gave Mr. Foulds. We must know about everything. What the patients track in on their shoes
.

At this point in the meeting, much of the staff undertakes the imaginative act that everywhere joins psychiatric patients with their caretakers: with enough will and creativity, what object is entirely safe? What thing could a determined man or woman not use to bring about his or her end? If one had the will, a book’s pages could be crumpled and jammed into the trachea; a
pen could be driven deep into an eye socket; a simple wall could crush a skull’s contents.

The Crew Crew, Visigothic in their late teens and early twenties, pillage room after room, per the new protocols. They do not pause if the patients they find inside are sleeping or engaged in some private act, they merely walk to the patients’ desks, as if the desks were their own, and then search every drawer, hold every book by its cover, shaking the binding loose in an attempt to dislodge potential contraband.

These things are not yours to rifle through
, Schultz informs the two boys rattling his journals.

The Crew Crew boys don’t respond but turn to each other and share a supercilious smile. Frederick, observing the scene, composes a thought to write later in his own tussled journal:
The history of catastrophe is populated by such young men, empowered by leaders with frightful ideology. We should be glad they carry only charts and reports, not guns
.

The men of Ingersoll are assembled now for group therapy, and the session opens with clamor, vociferous protests of the Crew Crew’s raids. Canon attempts to evade the questions, deflecting them back to his patients
—but why is it that authority bothers you so
?—until the group’s protests resolve into the familiar rallying cry, furious questions and invectives about the fate of Marvin Foulds.

Why in God’s name won’t you just tell us what has happened—

Though he does not join in with the others, Frederick smiles. He is glad for the cacophony that, for the moment, is louder than his own agony.

Something in Canon nearly rises to the surface, but he catches it. He crosses his legs and watches the scene with a decent imitation of dispassion. He pulls his cigarettes from his white coat, lights one, and then takes a long Bogart pull. Then Canon gestures to the Crew Crew at the periphery, who remove each protesting man, one by one, as Canon—beneath the clamor—consults his notes and makes his normal therapeutic inquiries:
Bobbie, perhaps it would be more productive to talk about your feelings of alienation …
It is only in the session’s last moments—when Lowell, Stanley, Bobbie, and three of the catatonics have been pulled away—that Canon can be heard.

Mr. Merrill
, Canon says, meeting Frederick’s eyes directly for the first time since that night in solitary.
How are you feeling today?

Frederick smiles an inscrutable smile.

Welcome back
, Frederick says.

Canon must catch himself once more. And then, once more, he performs his well-practiced act of transcendence.

Frederick has known a variety of insomnias. There is the ecstatic insomnia, the universe too brightly electric and too loud to admit sleep. There is the insomnia of dread, the possibility of impending horror requiring nightlong vigilance, a febrile, inextinguishable wakefulness. And then there is this insomnia, similar to the dreadful, but somehow more archetypal, insomnia in its purest form. This is the insomnia of the meaninglessness of things, which includes the meaninglessness of sleep. Every object, room, and person is pregnant with the promise of decay. The mind is kept awake for the same reasons it is kept alive, arbitrarily. A happenstance of nature, electrons gathered to animate the inanimate for a time, to carry the dim flickering flame, day and night, until inevitably it goes out.

Every five minutes, the door swings open with a dull utterance of
checks
, which seems a dark existential metaphor, in some way Frederick is too exhausted entirely to grasp. And so Frederick lies in bed now, the darkness of the ceiling the only truth, as his roommate persists in his scribbling.
It doesn’t matter
, he wants to tell Schultz.
Sane or mad, what you are doing does not matter. Go to bed. Relinquish. Relinquish
.

But Frederick’s contemplation of the blackness above him is soon punctured by light, opening at an angle wider than the
Crew Crew’s routine checks. Frederick turns to find Rita in the doorway, raising a hand to greet him. Schultz hardly looks up from his notebook, offers a friendly
Hello
, his pen barely pausing on the page. Rita comes to Frederick’s bed and sits.

Well, there
, Frederick says.

Did I wake you?

What do you want?

Rita doesn’t say anything for the moment. She looks down at her hands, as if trying to devise the optimal configuration for her fingers.

I, well. For one, I came to tell you that they’re transferring Marvin from the hospital. To the infirmary here. He’s doing better
.

It’s not that Frederick isn’t grateful for the news but, in the midst of this insomnia, the news seems to belong to a place that he has left.

I’m glad
.

Better, but his burns are—

Forever
.

Terrible
.

A long silence now. But not the silence that Rita, walking to Frederick’s room, had imagined. Not a clenched silence, as she failed to find the words to explain herself, to apologize for what Frederick had witnessed, and the traumas that her ridiculous affair have caused him to suffer. That apology, at least in this moment, is subsumed into something else, a darkness that Frederick radiates, as powerfully as the hallway’s tubes fluoresce. Rita has always been unusually receptive to others’ moods; the energies of others transfer to her as cleanly as the motions of billiard balls.

Sometimes, Rita thinks, she is little but this: no person, merely a permeable membrane that absorbs the language, the passions, the glooms of others. Others are themselves; she is an amalgam
of them. Frederick’s despair is so total, such a boundless, wordless thing, a smothering black oil spilling over her perception, that when she does begin to apologize, it is a relief to speak.

I also wanted to tell you I was sorry
.

Frederick remains silent. If only for the comfort of her own voice, Rita speaks again.

It’s just, with Albert, I don’t know. It started back when I was only—I know how he can seem, but there’s so much about him you can’t know. You should have known him before. I know he doesn’t mean—I mean—

From the darkness before her, the place where the darkness collects into a human-size shape in the covers, Frederick’s voice emerges.

It doesn’t matter. Things happen. I understand
. Rita gives a half-laugh of recognition,
things happen
. Frederick grunts, or perhaps it is just his breathing.
Your wife called. I was, well, in the office, and she called. She’s worried about you.

Katharine?

Yeah
. Rita says.
Katharine
.

Katharine. It’s not that her name cuts through his mental morass, or that this news in any way encourages him now. But amid that swampland—with its wicked desiccated trees, its noxious gases bubbling at all times from the turbid depths—her name is the promise of a house there in the distance. A door with a single warm bulb reflecting across the marsh. The marsh is tolerable if one joins it, if one kneels into its decay and waits for it to make its inevitable claims. But what the light of the house in the distance promises is, by contrast, heartbreaking. Katharine. This insomnia is an absence of feeling, or else agony reduced to its faintest, minimalist components. But Katharine’s name is pure
feeling, even if, at this moment, plain torture. Frederick sits upright, for the first time in hours, and finds himself pleading with Rita.

I won’t tell anyone. Can’t you explain that to him? I’m not angry, not at you or him. Of course I understand. Who could understand better than I could? But you have to tell him. There is something dark now; it’s like exhaustion that you can’t resist. This darkness. I don’t know. And I don’t know. Will you just explain it to him? That I won’t tell. That I don’t care. That I must go? That I must leave? That Katharine is the only—

Rita finds herself nodding at Frederick’s pleas, not in agreement—she knows even she is nearly powerless to persuade Canon in that way—but in recognition. At this moment, she too knows the agony of the house in the distance, its impossibly distant promise.

The only what?
Rita asks.

I’m not sure what the right word is
.

It is the next morning: a rare fall day, the unfiltered sun surprising everyone with its announcement that warmth is still possible, inspiring Bostonians to plan one last sweatered weekend in the lakes and mountains to the north, while there is a chance of the weather holding.

Has Frederick too begun to switch once more? On the march back from breakfast, he feels, intensely, some nameless need. It
is a strange, objectless demand; for a moment he even thinks it is the coming of a sneeze or else a sob, but none materializes. It is some need caught between his sinuses and lips, like a craving for a kiss, but then he decides that even an imagined kiss would not sate it. There is a panicking foreignness to it, like some new form of hunger. Like hunger, but it also seems to have something to do with violence. Frederick clenches his face as the line of men ascends to Ingersoll House, but the sensation doesn’t cease until he is inside, when it is replaced with other considerations.

Frederick is near the rear of the line, and so he does not learn of Canon’s new decision as soon as the others. By the time he enters the lobby of Ingersoll, he finds that some revelation has silenced the room, except for Stanley, shouting nonsense into his hands. The men are stooped curiously over a cot placed just behind the sofa. They lean in and rear back, like a pack of dogs trying to eat an overly heated dinner. Frederick approaches the cot, but already he senses what he will find there. Intravenous drips dangling above, bloodied bandages concealing most of his face, there is Marvin. Marvin’s one uncovered eye is closed as, in shame, he pretends to sleep.

Just then, like a play that was set to commence as soon as its audience was in place—has Canon planned it this way?—the infirmary’s doctor, Wilkins, enters Ingersoll, white coat flapping, retractable pen clicking, assisting nurse in tow. The nurse holds a bright orange wastebasket and a fresh roll of gauze.

Wilkins lowers himself to Marvin’s ear, and speaks to Marvin in the megaphonic way that the young often address the old.
It’s time to change your bandages, Mr. Foulds!
he says, loud enough that the words faintly echo off the far end of the corridor.

A hardly audible whimper rises from Marvin, as the nurse begins at his feet, unraveling. At the first glimpse of his exposed
shin, burned now to a strawberry’s porous red, Frederick surprises himself by speaking.