During the day, I was able to restrain my growing alarm, but at night I entered a state of dread. This feeling was intensified by the fact that they tied Mrs. O. down at night. They did it after we had been given our medication, and after the overhead lights had been turned off. The procedure required three people, two to hold down the patient and one to secure the straps to the bed. The nurses called the device a “posy.” When on, this canvas fetter resembled an elaborate and tortuous undergarment that took on a life of its own and sprouted appendages to foil the wearer. Getting Mrs. O. into this gruesome outfit was no small matter. She screamed, bit, clawed, and once as she fought, she said over and over, “What is it? What is this thing?” After they had left the room, she would begin the struggle to free herself. She shook the metal bars at the sides of her bed. She shook them, grunting rhythmically and without pause. She was indefatigable, an engine of determination. I don’t know how long she kept it up, but it seemed to go on and on. It was the sound of the night for me, and I never slept until I was sure that she had given up. I watched and waited, because even in those first days before she had done anything to me, I was expectant.
I can’t remember what day of the week it was, but on the morning of the first incident, Mrs. O., who had uttered perhaps twenty words since I first saw her, began to speak. It was a rambling, even idiotic monologue, but it had the tantalizing quality of an unfinished story.
“Where’s my old Peter? I put him away, and now I can’t find him. Oh, the songs I used to know, Lucy, every word by heart, every note as clear as day, and he used to tell me I sang like an angel. It was an open-and-shut case. They drowned him sure as if they’d held his head under water with their own hands, and not a single one of them went to jail. The last mean trick, I tell you. He wasn’t right in the head, and they took advantage. I can’t forget the two of them. They looked all pale and kind of stiff in their good clothes by the grave. Dirt poor, but decent as they come. And that dead boy was all they had.” Mrs. O. clicked her tongue. “A sad, sad story.” She shook her head. “Tell me the one about the lady on the hill, Eddie. You know, the one where she puts a cold hand on the back of his neck three nights in a row.” I heard her humming a tune to herself, something simple and melodic.
About half an hour after the outburst, Mrs. 0» turned to me and said loudly, “Don’t just lie there, stupid! Do something!”
“Are you speaking to me?” I said.
“Of course I’m speaking to you. Who else would I be speaking to?”
Mrs. O.’s lucidity left me speechless. I looked at her face and saw something cruel in it, like the guilty smile of a child tormenting another.
I didn’t answer her, and she seemed to forget me very soon. She wrung her sheet between her hands and bit at it distractedly. Within minutes, she was asleep on her back, her eyelids still partially open, and I could see the watery blue of one iris from my bed. I dozed too but was awakened by a sharp pain in my back. I turned and saw Mrs. O. standing over me. She was moving her thumb and index finger together like an angry crab. She reached out and pinched my cheek hard. I jolted backward and had an urge to slap her, but my arm was reluctant, too heavy to comply.
“Get up! Get up, sleepyhead!” she chanted at me, and grinned, displaying a row of small, discolored teeth. She bent over me again, waving those fingers in my face.
“Go away! Go away!” I heard my voice crack hysterically as I protected my face with my hands.
A nurse appeared. “Relax,” she said to me. “She’s not going to kill you. Up to your old tricks, are you, Ellie? Back to bed with you.”
Mrs. O. smiled meekly, took the nurse’s hand, and was led back to her corner of the room.
After that, I was reluctant to sleep. I have since asked myself why the pinching seemed so terrible. Her transgression had been minor, after all; the pinches hadn’t really hurt. Perhaps it was that she had come too close, that my bed had lost its boundaries, and that once that invisible threshold had been crossed, I no longer felt safe. She would be back, I knew it. The chant “Get up, get up, sleepyhead” resounded like an annoying jingle in my brain. Why was she pestering me? She never interfered with Mrs. M. I was her victim. Why? Was it because I did in fact know her from somewhere, and she, in her own jumbled way, remembered me? It was impossible. I began to worry that I was not only nervous but mad, one step away from an asylum. Mrs. M. stopped talking about getting another room: Mrs. O.’s attentions to me were far too amusing. “She’s got it in for you, kiddo,” she told me. “Who knows what the crafty little bugger will do next.”
Two days later, there was another incident. Again it happened while I slept. Sleep was irresistible to me then, and as hard as I tried to fight it, I couldn’t keep myself awake all day. It began as a dream that took place in the bed where I slept. In the dream I woke and saw a body lying next to me, a warm, strangely wet body of a woman. I lifted her arm, but it fell lifelessly to the sheet. This person is dead, I thought. I’ve got to get her out of here. But then I felt arms around my throat and something heavy on my face. I need air, I thought, and an erotic sensation coursed through me. I opened my eyes. Mrs. O. was in bed with me. Her skinny arms were around me in a suffocating embrace. She was kissing me. I pushed her away hard.
Mrs. M.’s voice came from behind her curtain. “For Christ’s sake, what’s happened now?”
“She’s in my bed.” I bit my hand to keep back a sob.
Mrs. O. was crumpled up at the end of the bed. Her gown was untied and had fallen over a bony shoulder. She looked at me; her small wrinkled face was wet with tears. A doctor was at the door.
“What’s going on here?” he said.
“She climbed into my bed while I was asleep. It’s unbearable, just unbearable. Please, move her somewhere else. I can’t stay here with her.”
He looked at me and squinted, as if I were very far away. “We’re making arrangements to have her moved, but we’re too crowded right now. As soon as a bed opens up, we’ll get her out of here. She’s really quite harmless, you know.” He smiled and pushed his hand over his balding head. “I’ll make sure someone keeps an eye on her.”
I didn’t mention the kiss to anyone.
After the kiss, nothing happened for three days. It may have been that the staff was keeping a closer watch on Mrs. O. and she knew it, but I’m not sure. In all events, she was less active, more prone to phases of immobility and blankness. In the morning when her husband sat with her, I wondered what he would think if he knew that his wife had crawled into my bed and molested me. The kiss, always entangled in the dream, became a physical memory that shuddered through me without warning. The heavy, moist corpse and the withered old woman who had pressed herself upon me, her tongue in my mouth, left their fitful traces, and I was helpless against them. My pain had ballooned: it filled my whole head and seemed to enlarge my skull as it grew. I was all head then, a female Humpty-Dumpty with four useless limbs. And I worried. I worried all day and most of the night. I worried about my head, about my exams, about Mrs. O., about Stephen’s upcoming visit, and I worried about worrying. Anxiety fed my pain, but I didn’t know how to stop it.
I looked terrible, and whenever I spoke, I panted and blew and embarrassed myself. Even Dr. Fish appeared concerned. He commented on my pallor and was clearly surprised that someone he had drugged so thoroughly was breathing like a steam engine. I was cold, too, and I couldn’t get warm. One afternoon, a nurse brought me a pair of circulation socks. They were long affairs made of a white girdlelike material. They had no toes. I never knew the reason for this curious omission, but I wore them faithfully throughout my internment and still have them in a drawer, souvenirs of a time when my blood moved too slowly.
I fell into a world of only liminal consciousness. Always at sleep’s border, I had to fight to remain awake. Mrs. M.’s patter took on a distant quality, as if she were speaking to me from another room. From time to time, I heard coins jingling. She’s counting her money, I thought. But my ears had star
ted playing tricks on me then, and it may have been nothing. Twice I heard my mother call my name. These auditory hallucinations were clear and loud. Her voice was there in the room, and the moment I heard it, I wanted to answer her, but instead I marveled at that inner voice and wondered if it wasn’t another indication of encroaching madness. I was overcome too by loneliness, by a sense that I was shut inside a body that was going its own way. I’ve done it, I thought. I’ve created this huge, bad head, summoned the voice of my mother, dreamed up dead bodies, and generally caused my own disintegration, but how can I undo it all? I’m a ghost. Mrs. O.’s lady ghost—or perhaps she’s mine, a revenant come to tell me something—my own half-naked little spirit braying in the wilderness.
The night before Stephen’s visit, Mrs. O. broke out. My recollection of this event is confused, and I can’t trust it. I know that they strapped Mrs. O. in as usual and that as soon as they left her, she began to writhe and shake just as she did every night. My pain had reached its zenith; it seared through the Thorazine and I lost all control of my breathing. I gulped and wheezed. I heard Mrs. O. rocking the bars behind her curtain, yet the noise seemed to be coming from within my own head. She groaned. I whimpered, but I wanted to howl in the dark like a wounded dog, to lose myself in an orgy of screaming. Instead I gagged myself on the sheet. Mrs. M. spoke to me, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying—something about “the racket.” I pressed my fingers against my temples. My nerves are erupting, I thought. Then I heard a loud noise, something being torn. I recall moving my fingers to my ears, as if that gesture could tell me where the noise had originated. The curtain across the room billowed, and then Mrs. O. was on the floor, her arms outstretched, her mouth wide open. It was much larger than seemed possible, a monstrous gaping hole in her face. I looked at her in the dim light of the room, her gown hanging like a rag from her shoulders, and I felt a violent jab in my chest, as if the wind had been kicked out of me. I tried to call out, but my voice was tiny, an inaudible squeak. I heard Mrs. M. bellow, “She’s out! She’s out!” Mrs. O. turned her back to me and headed for the door. I saw her flat, wrinkled buttocks as she ran stiff-kneed from the room.
The next morning Mrs. M. christened her “Houdini.” The name change signaled a shift in Mrs. M.’s opinion of her as well. Contempt was now mingled with respect. “Houdini’s got spunk!” she said to me. “Tie her up, chain her, send her to the bottom of the East River in a trunk, and she’ll find a way out. By God, she’s got spunk!” “Spunk” was the wrong word. Mrs. O. had will, a profound, unspeakable will. I don’t understand what I saw that night or why I felt knocked breathless. But the image of that midget body as it stood in triumph on the floor and that mouth, that terrible mouth, is now rooted in me and I can’t turn away from it. It’s still frightening, and yet I find it irresistible. I have a need to conjure it again and again, to go on looking into it.
But that morning, the morning after it happened, I tried to forget it. It was too recent, and I was a knot of misery. My headache had eased some. It always did with daylight, but my scalp was so tender that even the pressure of the pillow was irritating, and my arms and legs hummed with a peculiar energy, as if they were electrified. There’s more, I thought. There’s going to be more. Mrs. O. had been sedated, and she slept during her husband’s visit and for several hours afterward. I could see her through a gap in her curtain—a shrunken body in the sheets. Mrs. M. slept too. I waited for Stephen. At one-thirty I sat up in bed very slowly, found my mirror in a drawer, and tried to do something with my face. My hands shook. I was white, and there were black pits under my eyes. Now I’ve lost my looks, too, I thought. I managed to comb my hair, rouge my cheeks, and put on a robe. Mrs. M., who had just awakened, looked at me and said, “Must be a man.” Stephen was forty minutes late. He was always late. He appeared at the door looking elegant, his long coat draped over an arm. He presented me with a small paper bag. In it were two books: a new translation of selected poems by Leopardi and a volume of poems called Unearth by an American poet I had never heard of. I thanked him. He was garrulous and distant. He must have been startled by my appearance but said nothing. I wished he had. I spoke to him without gasping and felt proud of my control, but my eyes were sensitive to the light and I had to squint at him during our conversation. The impression I made was apparently worse than I thought, because at one point he looked at me and said, “How did this happen?” There was incredulity in his voice. “Iris, you’ve got to pull yourself together.”
I studied his face and impeccable white shirt. He’s a foreigner, I thought. He has nothing to do with me. Perhaps I had loved him for that, for his bouts of astonishing coldness when he detected weakness in others. I disgust him, I thought. It was probably the first time during my entire stay in the hospital that I truly forgot Mrs. O., but as I looked at Stephen, I saw her behind him, still in bed but awake and erect. Her blue eyes shone and she leaned toward me. I didn’t answer Stephen. Instead I looked at Mrs. O. I looked into her eyes and she met my gaze. She saw me. Stephen turned in his chair.
“Who is that?” he said.
“It’s Mrs. O.,” I said.
“What’s she doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you looking at her like that?”
“Be quiet,” I said. “She’s going to speak.”
He smiled then. I don’t know why he did it, but I saw his expression in the corner of my eye and remembered his sweetness all at once, but it was Mrs. O. who held me, not Stephen.
She had crawled forward to the edge of her bed and was holding the frame with her hands.
“What’s the matter with her?” he said.
“Shut up,” I said.
Mrs. M. answered. “She’s out of her head, but she’s got something for your girlfriend.”
Stephen said nothing.
Mrs. O. opened her mouth. At first there was no sound, but then a noise came from deep in her throat and she began to call out, her eyes fixed on mine. “Eleanor!” she said. It was a short, urgent cry. “Eleanor!”
“By God, she’s remembered her name!” said Mrs. M. “That tops it all. Bring on the interns! Let’s have the test! The first question, please!”
“Don’t,” I said to Mrs, M., and surprisingly, she held her tongue.
Mrs. O. was calling to me. I knew it. We were both kneeling at that point and facing each other. “Why are you calling me?” I said.
“Eleanor! Eleanor!” she repeated. Her face looked desperate.
Stephen had his hand on my shoulder. He was pulling me back. “Iris, what are you doing?”
His distaste was palpable. Although he cultivated ideas that embraced the perverse and forbidden, Stephen was squeamish, and his adventures were strictly of the fashionable, literary sort. I saw him recoil. He gave me a look of disbelief.
“You can leave if you want to,” I said.
“Eleanor!” cried Mrs. O. It was the same tone her husband had used when calling out to her.
Stephen had stood up. He touched my arm. “Do you want me to leave?” he said.
I did not look at him. “Yes.” I said it very softly.
My eyes burned in the light. I saw Mrs. O.’s pinched little face. She’s calling me, I thought. She’s calling me. I leaned over the end of the bed and called back. “I’m here!” I called her as if she were far away, and as the sound of my voice came from me, it was as if a wind had blown through my body, opening my lungs and throat, and I called out again, “I’m here!”
Two nurses responded to the commotion. I heard Stephen say “Excuse me” as he went out the door. Mrs. M. was busy explaining, but I didn’t listen. The truth was that I was indifferent to all of them. It didn’t matter to me that I had made a scene. The exchange absorbed me totally. I called out again and kept my eyes on Mrs. O. Her small frame trembled as she stared at me. A nurse had her by the arm, but she managed to wriggle free. She was listening. I could see it. Her head was cocked and her face had a pensive look on it. Her thi
n white hair was sticking up in wild tufts. She hugged herself and rocked. She had stopped calling.
A nurse tugged at my elbow. “You’re getting her all riled up,” she said.
But Mrs. O. was still, very still. She lay on her back with her eyes open, but they didn’t move, and her passive features seemed alien for the first time. She doesn’t look like anyone I know at all, I thought. I lay back and closed my eyes.
The nurse scolded me. “It’s been one thing after another with you two. I really believe that you’ve egged her on. You’re a troublemaker, that’s what you are. You should have known better than to get her crazy. Imagine, toying with a half-wit. You’ve gone too far!” I heard her march out of the room. I didn’t open my eyes. I began to breathe very deeply and slowly, and I counted each breath. I counted for a long time.
• • •
That afternoon Dr. Fish sent a psychiatrist to my bed. He spoke to me kindly in a low voice, and he had a white beard that I found reassuring. He didn’t ask about Mrs. O. until the very end. Instead he inquired about my studies, my parents, and my friends. He wanted to know when my headache started and what my other symptoms were. He touched on the subject of my love life with great delicacy and registered my response that it was nonexistent with half a nod. I tried to speak in good sentences and to enunciate clearly. My head hurt, but my breathing was much improved, and I think I convinced him that I was sane. When he finally asked me why I had been screaming at Mrs. O., I told him very honestly that I didn’t know, but that at the time, it had seemed important to do so, and that I hadn’t been screaming but calling. He didn’t seem at all shocked by this answer, and before he left, he patted my hand. I think I would have enjoyed my talk with him had I not worried about what the conversation was going to cost. He looked expensive to me, and I kept wondering if his sympathy was covered by my insurance.