"That means no voices in the hall, no rattling trays, no televisions, telephones, or clacking heels. Yes, I know they'll raise holy hell, but get it done. Yes, that's all for the moment. The orange velvet may have to wait until the shops open—I'll need a couple of yards. Right, see you soon."
A smile played across Kate's lips at the thought of Hawkin following this younger man's emphatic orders and sending out for patchwork quilts and velvet at five o'clock in the morning. Bruckner's matter-of-factness was daunting—did he not consider that extraordinary list just the least bit odd? She glanced over and saw that he was studying his hands, lost in thought, slightly ill-looking in the green dashboard lights.
"Do you mind my asking what you have in mind?" she asked him. His head came up and his teeth gleamed white at her.
"My dear Watson, can you not deduce my purpose from my requirements?"
"Sensory stimulation of some kind, but some of the things seem a bit—arcane."
"Eye of newt and wing of bat," he cackled, and continued in a more normal voice. "All those things have strong personal associations for Vaun. Some of them I know from working with her in the prison—I know some of the passwords that worked before."
"So you wouldn't ask for these things for just anyone in Vaun's state?"
"Oh, God, no," he laughed. "What I'm going to do for Vaun bears very little resemblance to any sort of proper psychiatric treatment, even my more experimental approach. That's one of the reasons I insisted on complete privacy—the good Dr. Tanaka would be shocked out of his shoes by my irresponsibility. I go as a friend, masquerading as a doctor. And you are not to repeat that to anyone."
"But what—I'm sorry, you probably get tired of explaining yourself to amateurs."
"That's quite all right. You want to know what I'm going to do to make her notice those things, right?"
"She is unconscious, after all."
"Ah, but there you get into the amazing subtlety of the human mind. I suppose I ought to qualify all this by saying that I am working under the assumption that Vaun's current state is analogous to the state she was in when I first met her. Until I see her I can't know for certain, but her symptoms and vital signs are nearly identical. How much psychological theory do you know?"
"I took some classes in psychology at the university. I don't know if you'd call it theory, it was more nuts-and-bolts stuff. Rats and such."
"Well, then I hope you'll assume that what I'm going to tell you is generally accepted among my colleagues, instead of being on the outer fringes of experimentally verifiable hypotheses. I'm not going to tell you otherwise, because I'm right, and it is the truth."
His voice was archly self-mocking with an undertone of dead seriousness, and Kate smiled.
"Another question: Have you ever spent much time around a small baby?"
"A baby?" Kate was surprised. "Not really. I have a nephew and I've changed his diapers, but not much more."
"Then you may not have seen the way a very small baby can choose to block out the world when the stimuli become oppressive. Newborns in a hospital nursery, for example, can sleep despite the most appalling noise, not because, as some people insist, they're too undeveloped to hear it, but because the noise and the light and the cold, dry air and their hunger for their mothers and the strangeness of it all just overloads the circuits and the switches blow, and the whole system shuts down. That is not a technical explanation, by the way," he added with pious precision. "Severely traumatized or neglected children do the same thing sometimes, to an extreme. Even if their bodies are strong and healthy, they'll just curl up in a corner and die, unless something interrupts the process." Kate nodded with feeling, as the memory of a tiny blond girl from her first week as a policewoman came to her, a child dead not of malnutrition or abuse but from the starvation of human contact. "That is what Vaun is doing. She is not, strictly speaking, comatose. She is closer to the state we label catatonia, although normally—if 'normal' is not a contradiction in terms—catatonia is a temporary state into which a schizophrenic person retreats and comes out again within hours or, at the most, days. Normally.
"Vaun, however, is not schizophrenic. She is an immensely sensitive artist who spends a good part of every day flaying herself and laying her lifeblood out on canvas for the world to gawk at. She maintains in her life the most tenuous of equilibriums, balanced between the world's pain and her own self-preservation, for the sake of the vision and the power she can find there, and only there, hanging on the very edge of the precipice.
"Since December she has felt herself slipping. When the first body was discovered her past suddenly rose up to haunt her. The second one nearly drove her from Tyler's Road. The only thing that kept her there was sheer willpower. I have never known a person with as powerful, as one-track, as unshakable a will as Vaun's. She has carried through under loads that would crush most of us flat, but now that will has turned itself toward death. It's killing her. The growing fear of the last months, followed by the trauma of the overdose, has knocked her off her tightrope, and all her power is now taking her away from the world, away from pain, into peace.
"I nearly lost her fifteen years ago. I was volunteering some time at the prison when I first saw her. She was completely withdrawn, curled fetally when they brought her out of the solitary cell. I waited in all my confident textbook knowledge for her to emerge, and a day passed, and two days, and four, and suddenly I realized that in spite of the IV her signs were weakening and she was slipping away. I worked my guts out for days, then, trying to find a way to get in, a key, some way to intervene in her chosen path. It was her paintings, of course, that made me do it. I'd go home and I wouldn't be able to sleep thinking of her paintings and of what I could do to restore them to the world. I learned more in my first two weeks with her than I had in all of my student days, and in fact my life since then has been largely an exploration of what she taught me. In my ignorance I nearly lost her, and God damn it, I'm not going to lose her now."
He was silent for a long moment, then laughed quietly.
"Have I answered your question?"
"Sensory stimulation."
"Of a highly specific, personalized variety. Do you know, it was only four or five years ago that I discovered why the smell of roses caused such a powerful reaction in her. She had come out to visit us—my wife and me—during the summer, and I found her in the garden one afternoon, tears streaming down her face, sobbing and laughing and shaking her head. She was sitting next to a couple of rosebushes my wife had planted, and she remembered: there was a faint smell of roses in the prison's solitary-confinement cells. Some quirk of the ventilation system brought it in from the warden's garden. For most people roses would be no more than a pleasant smell. For her the fragrance was the outside world, air and sun, while she lay curling up into a fetal ball choosing to die. We are nearly there, I think? To the hospital?"
"Twenty minutes."
"If you don't mind, I'll spend the time putting my thoughts together. I need to clear my mind before I see her."
"Certainly."
Kate called Hawkin and reported their progress, and drove into early dawn with a much-removed Bruckner, past the few stubborn press vehicles, their occupants distracted by a conveniently timed emergence by Trujillo, and up to the laundry entrance. Hawkin met them, and they wound their way through the silent, antiseptic halls to the wing that housed Vaun. The guard slipped out past them as they entered the room. Bruckner walked slowly up to the high bed and stood looking down at the sleeping woman. After a long minute he sighed, almost a groan, and with great gentleness put out two fingers to lift a lock of hair from Vaun's pale forehead, tucking it back with the others.