“Did you like the hospital where you were?”
“Like it…?” I raised my head. “You’re the one who said to me…” Another tear rolled. I felt cold. “…no, you said about learning to love the people at hand? Well there were a lot of very hurt people there, who it was very hard to learn to love, very expensive—emotionally. But I guess I did.”
“Why are you crying?”
“Because I don’t believe in magic.” I sniffed again; this time something salty the size of a clam slid back out of my nasal cavity and I swallowed it. “You’re a magic person, sitting there. You’re sitting there because you think you can help me.”
“Do you need help?”
I was angry again. But it was deep and bubbled down below things. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. But that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that that’s what you believe.”
“You’re angry at me.”
I took a deep breath. “Not…really.” The bubbles, one after the other, broke. I absorbed the fumes that raged.
My stomach was very tight.
“It’s all right if you are. You may have good reason.”
“Why should…?” and stopped because I could think of about ten. I said: “You’re smug. You’re not sympathetic. You think you understand. And you don’t…”
“I don’t understand yet; and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to. As of now, you haven’t given me any reason to be sympathetic. If I’m smug, well…I’d rather I weren’t, but I can feel some reserve in myself about getting too close to you just yet; which may be what smugness is.”
“I don’t think you can understand.” I lugged both hands together in my lap and pushed them against one another. They felt numb. So did my feet.
“What do you feel like now?”
“Like not much of anything.”
“Does it make you want to cry again?”
I took another breath. “No. I don’t…” I put my head back. “I think I lost it, whatever was coming out…”
“Are you a very emotional person? Do you cry often?”
“That’s the first crying I’ve done in…three years, maybe four…a long time.”
She raised her eyebrow. After a moment, she said: “Then you’re probably under a great deal of pressure. What kind of pressure are you under?”
“I think I’m going crazy. And I don’t want to. I don’t like it. I like life, I like living. I like what’s going on around me, all of it to watch, and most of it to do. There’re all sorts of people and situations around I really enjoy. And I’m at a place where I don’t have to worry about all sorts of others I don’t. I don’t want to go nuts again. Not now.”
After a moment she smiled: “I’ve occasionally given therapy to some rather successful business executives; lots of money, happy families, some even without ulcers—who’ve said practically the same thing in the same way. We do know each other outside the office, and I must admit, from what I’ve observed myself, and from what Lanya’s told me, I find it a little ironic; I mean that you express it in such similar words.”
“I said you wouldn’t understand. I said I was afraid—and I am angry—that I don’t think you can.”
“Tell me the symptoms of your going crazy.”
“I forget things. I don’t know who I am…I haven’t been able to remember my name for months. I wake up, sometimes, terrified, everything in a blood-colored fog, which begins to clear while my heart beats so loud it hurts my chest. I’ve lost days, days and days out of my life. I see things, sometimes, like people with their eyes…” And I felt my back snarl with fear. Sweat rolled down the underside of one arm. “People with…” I closed my mouth, so astonished I couldn’t say it that I couldn’t say it. I backtracked in my mind, looking for something I could loop with words. “Can I…?” I had to back up further; I was looking at the multiple loops of optic chain she wore around her neck. “Can I tell you about a…dream?”
“Please go right ahead.”
“I dreamed that…well, I was in a woods, on the side of a mountain. The moon was shining—one moon. And this woman, a nice looking woman, a few years older than me, she came walking up over the rocks and through the leaves. She was naked. And we balled, right there in the leaves. Like that. When we were finished, she got up and ran off through the bush—”
“—you completed making love in the dream?”
“Yes. After we came, she got up and ran off through the woods to this cave, and told me to go inside it.”
“And you obeyed her?”
“Yes. I remember that very clearly. I remember I stepped on some leaves once, in some water; I jumped over a crack in the cave floor. In a niche in one wall of the cave there was a brass thing, big around as my two arms, filled with glowing coals and little flames. I climbed this rock edge, and I found…” I touched the chain across my chest. “I dreamed I found these there.” I hooked the chain with my thumb and watched Madame Brown. “I mean it must have been a dream; because of what happened later.” She looked more intense; a fourth line crossed her forehead. “I put them on. But when I came out, she was gone. I looked for her in the woods, until I came to a moonlit road—just before, I remember, I stepped in a mud puddle. I was still trying to figure out where she’d gone when I saw her, there, in a meadow, on the other side of the road. So I started toward her, across the grass. And she turned into a tree. For some reason, in the dream, that terrified me. So I ran away, back down the road. Until I got to a highway. The rest of it is a little vague. I remember for part of it I was riding in a truck with this man with a sort of scarred-up face. Like bad pock-marks or acne. And this funny conversation about…Or maybe it wasn’t really a conversation. One or the other of us just mentioned something in some connection that I don’t remember…”
“That’s all?” Her fingertips came together.
“That’s all,” I said, while her hands parted, touched her knees. “But it was so…strange!”
“What made it particularly strange?”
“Well, everything happened so…clearly. And when this woman changed, I was so scared. I mean I was incredibly frightened. I ran away, I mean…”
Madame Brown crossed her legs.
Across her calf, glazed with nylon, a scratch curved down to her ankle.
She asked: “What is it?”
I tried to open my mouth, felt my face twitch.
She waited a long time.
I tried a couple more times.
My fingers were knotted together. Separating them was hard as prying lip from lip.
But I tried.
And sank backward in myself as if my eye-sockets were caves and the balls were rocketing toward the back of my skull, in rebound from the effort.
“Tell me about Lanya.”
“Denny—” the cave wasn’t where I lived, though—“and me, we like her a lot.”
She mmmed. “Tell me about Denny.”
“Lanya and me like him…a lot.”
My hands came apart. I was able to move again on the chair. I looked at her leg. But it was only terror. I took a couple of breaths, smiled.
“What are you feeling?”
“Scared.”
“That I disapprove of the relation between the three of you?”
“Huh?” That surprised me. “Why should I think you disapprove? Lanya’s never said anything about you not liking it. A couple of times she’s said it confused you, but like a joke. God damn, you don’t disapprove of the Richards, why should you disapprove of us?”
“Well, for one thing, the Richards are a normal, healthy family. They aren’t coming to me for help; and they don’t think they’re going crazy.”
“More power to me!” She’d catapulted me into a completely different part of my head and I’d dropped hard. I got myself together to see where I was—it had been a jolt. But this anger was very easy to make words: “You disapprove of people who come to you for help?”
“Now, that’s not what I—”
“Jesus Christ! Hey, what do you—” I leaned forward—“what do you think of the Kid? Sometimes I get the impression that’s all anybody around here ever does—though I’m sure I’m just flattering myself. Tell me.”
She joined fingertips, raised eyebrows; suddenly she asked: “What do you think of the Richards, Kid?”