This morning, after Owl Man shuts the door, but before he begins the usual grilling, I jump in and say, “Got something for you, Dr. Samuel Swann,” and it’s fun watching his head rear back because I’ve used his real name.
In the beginning, my hands were shackled, bound together with those plastic handcuffs, but today I’ve been delivered with my hands belonging to me. I hold them up now, say, “No weapons, just something I’ve got for you, something that will make you sing and set me free.”
Slowly, so slowly, I reach down into the crevice between breasts once lovingly admired and pull out a sheaf of pages. Already the handwriting looks foreign, shaky and disturbed, not at all the beautiful penmanship that used to win me gold stickers in childhood.
“You want to know the thoughts that assail me when I first wake? Well, here you go. Ten pages of my true beliefs,” and I drop into Owl Man’s flushed palm the whole of my life.
He asks me something real then, his voice nearly tender. “May I read these pages aloud? So we both can hear what you have to say?”
My head is doing the weird pill dance, swinging back and forth like a dying flower in a strong wind, the petals about to fall to earth, to be trampled and turned into crap that sticks, with other crap, to the bottoms of soles. Amidst all the head-bobbing, I say, “Here’s my offer. You find the relevant parts and read them out loud, or I shut this down. I don’t want to hear all of it again, not from start to finish. I’ve lived it once, would rather not return for another visit.”
“Which would you prefer?”
“I don’t know Swann, you’re the doctor. I’m fairly certain that in my real life I own a lovely apartment and have two cats who adore me, and once, not even that long ago, I used to have friends, and a serious profession, and I went to movies, and thought about going to the ballet and the opera, and I took hot baths, and never worried about offing myself, and I had a man who loved me and knew how to make me yell out in delight. So, what will it take to get me out of here and back home? What’s going to have the most ameliorative effect?”
“Ameliorative effect,” Owl Man says. “I like that.”
“Me too,” I say, in a calm voice that surprises us both.
Owl Man begins to read and I am convinced, first, that I am a wizard with words, how I make them arch like green leaves over tiny beauteous flowers, and send them soaring like silvered planes that leave behind fairy dust in the blue firmament, that I am a remarkable talent. Second, that I am shocked by the person I have become. I do not recall writing, just this morning, about my desire to kill everyone I have ever known. All the throat-slitting, the fish-gutting, the stranglings I intend to inflict on the people I thought I still loved.
Swann’s harmonious tone stays even, but I feel a million insects shivering up through my insides, taking up residence in the thin layer of skin that no longer protects me well from the world. When he comes to a stop and looks at me, I pretend I am lamb-calm, whistling through the wind.
“So the gist is, you would like a clean slate, live in a world where you can start fresh, become someone else, have no ties to the past, eliminate everyone currently entwined in your life.”
I don’t answer, just study his hanging diplomas in their fake wooden frames, think about the havoc I would wreak in a second on the supposedly innocent, how I would demonstrate to every one of them, in slow and painful ways, the taint lodged so deep in their hearts—
BETTINA’S CHILDREN
When Bettina was twelve years old and already half an orphan, her great-aunt—the aunt of her still-living father—gave her a series of books that told the story of Nurse Claire Peters. These books were not picture books; nonetheless Bettina could picture Claire, bright in her white uniform, beautiful despite the small white cap atop her lush blond hair, walking hushed hospital corridors, entering room after room, moving from bed to bed, her cool hands bringing relief, her changeling voice flowing from blue to violet to purple to the prettiest of greens, different colors for different maladies, the right ones always returning her sick and sometimes crotchety patients to vibrant life.
In Bettina’s mind, Claire’s lips were always shimmering in Claire’s favorite pink lipstick, and Claire’s eyes, observant and alert, the color of purified honey, were opened so wide that she always saw the truth of it all: what people were like when death was upon them. She held their hands then, to bring them forward to the light.
It took Bettina nearly that entire year to read the twenty-book series straight through, wishing with juvenile hope that her curly brown hair would turn as golden and straight as Claire’s, that one day her own lips, thinner than she would have wished, but prettily bowed, would look nice in some similar shimmering pink shade, and when Bettina stacked all the books in her closet, she had decided she would become a nurse.
In nursing school, Bettina found peace with her own uninteresting looks, turning herself outward, focusing quietly, privately, on her natural healing talents; she was often several diagnostic steps ahead of the doctors to whom she was to defer. In the books, Claire never aged or thought about romance, despite being surrounded by handsome doctors, but in her own daily chores as a nurse, Bettina found true love.
At odd times in the staff’s cafeteria, she would see one of the emergency room doctors, the tall ascetic one, but otherwise their paths did not cross: Bettina worked up on a general floor, and he down below, where the world washed ashore its human traumas.
One day, that emergency room doctor bought her a tea, a few days later a lunch. Standing in the cafeteria line next to Bettina, he looked down upon her from his great height and said, “I’m Jeffrey Caslon,” and Bettina nodded and slid her tray up to the cashier, and he said, “Oh, no, I’m paying. After all, this is our first date.” She had not realized it was any such thing.
Some weeks later, on a crisp and starry night, Dr. Caslon led Bettina outside, kissed her with a fervency she returned, and, at his request, Bettina transferred to the emergency room, aligning their shifts. She had not thought she would like her new assignment, but she relished its feral nature, the way the maimed, the shot, the stabbed, and those mysteriously sick arrived in the impure hours past midnight. Six months later, they had a small wedding in the chapel on the hospital grounds. A few months after that, their life then combined into Jeffrey’s spartan bachelor flat, he inherited a substantial sum from an old great-aunt of his own.
When Jeffrey said to Bettina, “Would you consider moving to Africa? Do our part to make the world a bit better?” they were in the emergency room, facing each other across the body of a middle-aged man who, in death, exhibited the true dourness that had infected his soul.