The only two women he has ever loved have died, and though one death occurred years before the other, they became superimposed in his brain. It made him lose his mind. He fled. He ran without knowing where to or what from. He has now run far enough. He has no memory of how he arrived in New Jersey from Kenya, except that he has a benefactor, Eli Harris.
A week passes, measured not in days, but in cold sweats and night terrors. It is two weeks before the agitation and the shakes ease, and before the ugly little invertebrates begin a retreat. For so long they have been on his skin and on the edge of his sheets, scurrying to the periphery of his vision when he turns to look at them. Now they retreat to the chitinous underworld from where they came.
There is bread and cheese by his bed, sitting on a newspaper that is two days old. The paregoric bottle is empty. A pitcher of water has been refilled. When at last he feels it safe to take his chair to the window, the leaves have gone from carrot to brick to crimson and every hue in between, a palette beyond the imagination of any painter. He sits there like a statue, grateful for being able to sit, to see things for what they are. Leaves spiral down, each descent unique and never to be repeated. A million voyagers leave their invisible trails in the air.
One morning he is steady enough to go downstairs. A sparrow hops on the warped wood of the porch, the varnish flaking under its feet. Stone sees the ginger kitten inching forward from the wisteria, its shoulder blades gliding like pistons under its fur. He wonders if he is hallucinating. The kitten's unblinking eyes are locked on its prey. The bird tilts its head like a coquettish woman to regard man and beast.
Just when Thomas thinks the tension is unbearable, the kitten pounces, but the sparrow hops easily to the railing and out of reach. Thomas feels something crack inside, releasing him from the torpor that stifled his movements and slowed his thoughts. He has emerged to a world where a sparrow's fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cat's eye, such is the true measure of time.
HE KNOWS THE CEILING in his bedroom better than he knows his body. He has studied the molding. The decorative grooves are even in depth and width. He sees the handiwork of a craftsman. A clumsy amateur later subdivided the house with plywood partitions and with prefabricated doors. But the master's imprint is there to see.
At first he credits the paregoric for the curious phenomenon, but it continues after the paregoric is long gone: like a cinema projectionist he watches his life play out on the screen of the blank ceiling, or sometimes in the light playing on his window. He cannot control the content or order of the reels. What he can do is observe dispassionately, separate emotions from event, and judge the actor who plays him.
AN EARLY WINTER STORM comes over Ocean City and reaches inland by afternoon, first with freezing rain, crackling on the window, and then snow so heavy that when he stands outside it weighs down his eyelashes. It blankets northern New Jersey, five to six inches in as many hours. It shuts down interstates, airports, schools, and all commerce, but he knows nothing of this as he retreats to his room. Ice forms around the edges of his window, leaving a narrow prism through which to look onto a still and ghostly world. It is on this evening that he witnesses a scene from his life which makes him want to end it. He is seated on his bed, staring through that narrow breach in the frosted window. His mind is motionless and hushed like the landscape outside. The only thing that stirs is the ebb and flow of his breath, but even that seems to cease.
Then suddenly, he feels a quickening, as if the wearing away of brain cells has unroofed a lacuna of memory.
What spews out that winter's night is a vivid, colorful, and specific memory of Sister Mary Joseph Praise.
He is simply the observer, a man watching a bird, unaware of the feral cat lurking in the wisteria. This is what he sees, what he remembers:
Addis Ababa.
Missing Hospital.
Work.
He sees himself in the rhythm of operating, of clinics, of writing, forcing himself to sleep, his days full and satisfying. The weeks and months roll by. The master word. Work. And suddenly the machinery seizes …
(He thinks of this as his “Missing Period.” He prefers that to “breakdown.”)
It always begins the same way. He wakes from sleep in his quarters at Missing, wakes in terror, unable to breathe, as if he is about to die, as if the next breath will trigger the explosion. Though he is awake, the tentacles of dream and nightmare won't let go. A terrifying spatial distortion is the hallmark of this state. His bedroom in his quarters begins to shrink. His pen, the doorknob, his pillow—ordinary objects that normally do not merit a second glance—balloon in size. They become colossal and threaten to impale him, to suffocate him. He has no control over this state. He cannot turn it off by sitting up or moving around. He becomes neither child nor man, does not know where he is, or what scene he is reliving, but he is terrified.
Alcohol is not the antidote. It does not break the spell, yet it dulls the terror. It comes with a price: instead of straddling the line between wakefulness and nightmare, he crosses over. He roams in a world of familiar objects turned into symbols; he traipses through scenes of his childhood and through hell's portals. He hears a nonstop dialogue, like cricket commentary on the radio. That is the backdrop to these night terrors in Ethiopia. The commentator's voice is indistinct—sometimes it sounds like his own voice. As he drinks, he loses his fear but not his sorrow. He who has no tears in his waking now weeps like a child. He sees Ghosh—probably the real Ghosh, not a dream figure—standing before him, concerned, the Ghosh lips moving but the words drowned out by the commentator.
Then she is there. He cannot hear her words, but her presence is reassuring, and ultimately, only she stays, only she keeps vigil. She must have been asleep when she was summoned, because she wears a head scarf and a dressing gown. She holds him to her when a new wave of tears appears, and she cries with him, trying to rescue him from his nightmare but, in the process, she gets sucked in. (Every time he recalls this, there is a stirring in him.) In their work together, they share an intimacy that involves the body of another who lays between them, unconscious, naked, and exposed. But this weeping in her arms is shockingly different from their gowned forearms brushing or heads bumping during surgery. Separated as they are by an operating table for so many hours a day, when she holds him, the absence of the table, or of the mask, or the gloves, is startling. He feels like a newborn placed against its mother's naked belly. She whispers in his ear. What does she say? How he wishes he could remember. It sounds improvised, not a formal prayer. It succeeds in blunting the commentator's voice.
He remembers her blouse, damp with his tears—no, both their tears.
He remembers clinging to her, pressing his face to her bosom, sleeping, waking, clinging, weeping, sleeping again. She asks again and again, What is it? What is it that has come over you? For hours, days, who knows how long, she stays with him as he holds on for dear life, the storm raging, battering him, trying to pry him out of her grasp.
He remembers a lull, a startling silence which is a change in the pattern. Her blouse has opened.
Like a surgeon working to develop a tissue plane under the incision, he wills the blouse to open farther, and perhaps his nose, his cheeks, help it along. Her nipples stir from the coins on which they lie, and now her breasts escape her blouse to meet his lips. Her face must be a mirror of his because what he sees in it is fear coupled with desire.