“Let there be light.”
Louise turned. Ahead of her, the black wall seemed to split, revealing a bright light, which filled the room, blinding her, as two of the seated statues swung out to the left, the other two to the right. It took Louise, her right foot submerged, soaked to the ankle, a moment to realize that what she was looking at was the outdoors, an enormous white terraced patio. She followed the Wizard outside. And it was there that Louise understood the sheer size of the estate, its vast terraced gardens, its startling view of the San Francisco skyline, and, directly below her, an enormous swimming pool, around which sat a dozen young girls, just like her. A man in a dark suit moved among them, carrying a white pitcher, from which he filled their elevated wineglasses with milk.
“Look,” Louise will tell the therapist, sitting across from him on the screened-in porch, “you wanna talk about Mommy left me, or Daddy wasn’t there, that’s cool. I got no problem with the deep dive into why Weezy likes to clean the bathroom three times a day, but we’re not pals, and I don’t owe you anything.”
The therapist clicks his pen a few times. “It’s not what you owe me,” he says. “It’s what you owe yourself.”
Louise smiles, not because it’s funny, but because he’s acting like words matter, like being clever matters, like he can fix it all if she’ll just pick away the scab and let it bleed. But what if all your blood is gone? What if a vampire took it in the night and replaced it with something milky, something white?
“Why did Kevin kill himself?” she says. “Any of them? All.”
“Did you know him?”
“I saw him. He was here. We’re all here.”
Click-click went the pen.
“Why do you think he killed himself?”
“Because he didn’t want to live anymore.”
“That simple?”
“That simple.”
Click-click.
“It’s interesting, I think,” he says, “that when I asked if you’d had experience with abuse, you brought up suicide. Is there an implicit threat? Dig too deep and I’ll kill myself?”
Louise sighs. There are cobwebs in the top corners of the porch, and it takes all her willpower not to climb up and wipe them off.
“Does anybody ever clean out here?” she asks.
He looks behind him, sees where she’s looking and at what.
“Does that bother you?”
“Everything bothers me,” she says. “People don’t do what they’re supposed to do, and no one tells the truth about anything.”
Click-click.
“What are they supposed to do?”
She looks up at him from under her brows.
“The real question,” she says, “is what aren’t they supposed to do, and who’s doing it?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, you know, figure it out.”
“I’m gonna need a little more—”
“I’m saying sometimes the city is full of rats, and you call the Pied Piper, but instead of killing the rats, he steals your kids. I’m saying what does the Bible say about a trusted man who will rise one day, tricking people with signs and wonders?”
Click-click.
“You consider yourself religious?”
“I’ve been to church, but that’s not the point. The point is people say they love something, but really what they love is using it.”
“You feel used?”
She smiles again, this time bright with a kind of giddy rage. “It’s not a feeling.”
“What is it?”
Louise takes a Tootsie Pop from her pocket, peels off the wrapper. She slips it into her mouth. “It’s the facts of fucking life, kitty-cat.”
*
She sees Simon at dinner, sitting alone on a bench outside. He is sitting alone in front of an empty plate. It’s been three weeks since the Prophet told Simon that God has a plan for him. Three weeks of questions, of paper bag interludes and restless leg syndrome. In that time Simon has asked a thousand questions of the what where why how variety. The Prophet doesn’t answer them all. He tells Simon, I know only what God tells me. Each time, Simon’s anxiety spikes, and the doctors up his dosage of Klonopin, which makes him tired all the time and muddies his mind.
Then the dreams begin.
At first all he sees is a house with a red door sitting on a quiet street. An empty street. No people. No animals. No birds. No life of any kind. For many nights this is all there is. The street. The house. The door. And a sound, like scratching fingernails. He wakes sweating, dread in his gut. The next night he finds himself in a fluorescent kitchen. The walls are sweating. There is a bubbling pot on the stove. The room has no doors, no windows, the air so cold he can see his breath. And there is a smell, like a sour cabbage abattoir.
What’s in the pot?
At night, while he slumbers, the ambulances arrive, sirens off, flashing lights strobing the walls of the children’s rooms. The outside world is stalking them. Its sickness. But in their bucolic retreat, all they know is whatever happened to Kevin is going around—shoelace nooses, broken-glass wrists, or pills stored, hidden and gorged upon. Some nights it feels like the whole fire department arrives, trying to smother the problem with overwhelming force. But every morning, group therapy gets a little emptier, until afternoon check-in arrives, new clients flocking to the center each day, their parents hoping against hope that institutionalizing their offspring will ward off the suicidal ideation of the outside world, never realizing that a psychiatric treatment facility is a prison for experts—experts in self-sabotage, experts in starvation, experts in knot tying and pill taking, in sharp object management and plastic bag suffocation.
And experts talk. They share techniques, until your child too is an expert in falling apart.
Inside the cafeteria, all the other kids are lined up with their trays, trying to decide between chicken and salmon. But Simon seems to be here by accident, as if he had been wandering, lost in thought, and simply felt the pull of collective destination. Louise sits down next to him.
“Are the choices that grim?”
He looks over, his eyes focusing.