Stones

  Even as he’d heard his secretary speak, Everett had known the problem would be Kenneth Albright. Something in Kenneth’s eyes had warned him there was trouble on the way: a certain wariness that indicated all was not as placid as it should have been, given his regimen of drugs. He had stayed long hours in one position, moving his fingers over his thighs as if to dry them on his trousers; watching his fellow patients come and go with abnormal interest—never, however, rising from his chair. An incident was on the horizon and Everett had been waiting for it, hoping it would not come.

  Louise had said that Doctor Menlo was to go at once to Kenneth Albright’s ward. Everett had run the whole way. Only after the attendant had let him in past the double doors, did he slow his pace to a hurried walk and wipe his brow. He didn’t want Kenneth to know how alarmed he had been.

  Coming to the appointed place, he paused before he entered, closing his eyes, preparing himself for whatever he might have to see. Other people have killed themselves: I’ve seen it often enough, he was thinking. I simply won’t let it affect me. Then he went in.

  The room was small and white—a dining-room—and Kenneth was sitting down in a corner, his back pressed out against the walls on either side of him. His head was bowed and his legs drawn up and he was obviously trying to hide without much success. An intern was standing above him and a nurse was kneeling down beside him. Several pieces of bandaging with blood on them were scattered near Kenneth’s feet and there was a white enamel basin filled with pinkish water on the floor beside the nurse.

  “Morowetz,” Everett said to the intern. “Tell me what has happened here.” He said this just the way he posed such questions when he took the interns through the wards at examination time, quizzing them on symptoms and prognoses.

  But Morowetz the intern had no answer. He was puzzled. What had happened had no sane explanation.

  Everett turned to Charterhouse, the nurse.

  “On the morning of April 19th, at roughly ten-fifteen, I found Kenneth Albright covered with blood,” Ms Charterhouse was to write in her report. “His hands, his arms, his face and his neck were stained. I would say the blood was fresh and the patient’s clothing—mostly his shirt—was wet with it. Some—a very small amount of it—had dried on his forehead. The rest was uniformly the kind of blood you expect to find free-flowing from a wound. I called for assistance and meanwhile attempted to ascertain where Mister Albright might have been injured. I performed this examination without success. I could find no source of bleeding anywhere on Mister Albright’s body”

  Morowetz concurred.

  The blood was someone else’s.

  “Was there a weapon of any kind?” Doctor Menlo had wanted to know. “No, sir. Nothing,” said Charterhouse. “And was he alone when you found him?”

  “Yes, sir. Just like this in the corner.”

  “And the others?”

  “All the patients in the ward were examined,” Morowetz told him. “And?”

  “Not one of them was bleeding.”

  Everett said: “I see.”

  He looked down at Kenneth.

  “This is Doctor Menlo, Kenneth. Have you anything to tell me?” Kenneth did not reply.

  Everett said: “When you’ve got him back in his room and tranquillized, will you call me, please?” Morowetz nodded.

  The call never came. Kenneth had fallen asleep. Either the drugs he was given had knocked him out cold, or he had opted for silence. Either way, he was incommunicado.

  No one was discovered bleeding. Nothing was found to indicate an accident, a violent attack, an epileptic seizure. A weapon was not located. Kenneth Albright had not a single scratch on his flesh from stem, as Everett put it, to gudgeon. The blood, it seemed, had fallen like the rain from heaven: unexplained and inexplicable.

  Later, as the day was ending, Everett Menlo left the Queen Street Mental Health Centre. He made his way home on the Queen streetcar and the Bay bus. When he reached the apartment, Thurber was waiting for him. Mimi was at a goddamned meeting.

  That was the night Everett Menlo suffered the first of his failures to sleep. It was occasioned by the fact that, when he wakened sometime after three, he had just been dreaming. This, of course, was not unusual—but the dream itself was perturbing. There was someone lying there, in the bright white landscape of a hospital dining-room. Whether it was a man or a woman could not be told, it was just a human body, lying down in a pool of blood.

  Kenneth Albright was kneeling beside this body, pulling it open the way a child will pull a Christmas present open—yanking at its strings and ribbons, wanting only to see the contents. Everett saw this scene from several angles, never speaking, never being spoken to. In all the time he watched—the usual dream eternity—the silence was broken only by the sound of water dripping from an unseen tap. Then, Kenneth Albright rose and was covered with blood, the way he had been that morning. He stared at Doctor Menlo, looked right through him and departed. Nothing remained in the dining-room but plastic tables and plastic chairs and the bright red thing on the floor that once had been a person. Everett Menlo did not know and could not guess who this person might have been. He only knew that Kenneth Albright had left this person’s body in Everett Menlo’s dream.

  Three nights running, the corpse remained in its place and every time that Everett entered the dining-room in the nightmare he was certain he would find out who it was. On the fourth night, fully expecting to discover he himself was the victim, he beheld the face and saw it was a stranger.

  But there are no strangers in dreams; he knew that now after twenty years of practice. There are no strangers; there are only people in disguise.

  Mimi made one final attempt in Brian Bassett’s behalf to turn away the fate to which his other doctors—both medical and psychiatric—had consigned him. Not that, as a group, they had failed to expend the full weight of all they knew and all they could do to save him. One of his medical doctors—a woman whose name was Juliet Bateman—had moved a cot into his isolation room and stayed with him twenty-four hours a day for over a week. But her health had been undermined by this and when she succumbed to the Shanghai flu she removed herself for fear of infecting Brian Bassett.

  The parents had come and gone on a daily basis for months in a killing routine of visits. But parents, their presence and their loving, are not the answer when a child has fallen into an autistic state. They might as well have been strangers. And so they had been advised to stay away.

  Brian Bassett was eight years old—unlucky eight, as one of his therapists had said—and in every other way, in terms of physical development and mental capability, he had always been a perfectly normal child. Now, in the final moments of his life, he weighed a scant thirty pounds, when he should have weighed twice that much.

  Brian had not been heard to speak a single word in over a year of constant observation. Earlier—long ago as seven months—a few expressions would visit his face from time to time. Never a smile—but often a kind of sneer, a passing of judgment, terrifying in its intensity Other times, a pinched expression would appear—a signal of the shyness peculiar to autistic children, who think of light as being unfriendly.

  Mimi’s militant efforts in behalf of Brian had been exemplary. Her fellow doctors thought of her as Bassett’s crazy guardian angel. They begged her to remove herself in order to preserve her health. Being wise, being practical, they saw that all her efforts would not save him. But Mimi’s version of being a guardian angel was more like being a surrogate warrior: a hired gun or a samurai. Her cool determination to thwart the enemies of silence, stillness and starvation gave her strengths that even she had been unaware were hers to command.

  Brian Bassett, seated in his corner on the floor, maintained a solemn composure that lent his features a kind of unearthly beauty. His back was straight, his hands were poised, his hair was so fine he looked the very picture of a spirit waiting to enter a newborn creature. Sometimes Mimi wondered if this creature Brian Bassett waited to inhabit c
ould be human. She thought of all the animals she had ever seen in all her travels and she fell upon the image of a newborn fawn as being the most tranquil and the most in need of stillness in order to survive. If only all the natural energy and curiosity of a newborn beast could have entered into Brian Bassett, surely, they would have transformed the boy in the corner into a vibrant, joyous human being. But it was not to be.

  On the 29th of April—one week and three days after Everett had entered into his crisis of insomnia—Mimi sat on the floor in Brian Bassett’s isolation room, gently massaging his arms and legs as she held him in her lap.

  His weight, by now, was shocking—and his skin had become translucent. His eyes had not been closed for days—for weeks—and their expression might have been carved in stone.

  “Speak to me. Speak,” she whispered to him as she cradled his head beneath her chin. “Please at least speak before you die.”

  Nothing happened. Only silence.

  Juliet Bateman—wrapped in a blanket—was watching through the observation glass as Mimi lifted up Brian Bassett and placed him in his cot. The cot had metal sides—and the sides were raised. Juliet Bateman could see Brian Bassett’s eyes and his hands as Mimi stepped away.

  Mimi looked at Juliet and shook her head. Juliet closed her eyes and pulled her blanket tighter like a skin that might protect her from the next five minutes.

  Mimi went around the cot to the other side and dragged the IV stand in closer to the head. She fumbled for a moment with the long plastic lifelines—anti-dehydrants, nutrients—and she adjusted the needles and brought them down inside the nest of the cot where Brian Bassett lay and she lifted up his arm in order to insert the tubes and bind them into place with tape.

  This was when it happened—just as Mimi Menlo was preparing to insert the second tube.

  Brian Bassett looked at her and spoke.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t.” Don’t meant death.

  Mimi paused—considered—and set the tube aside. Then she withdrew the tube already in place and she hung them both on the IV stand.

  All right, she said to Brian Bassett in her mind, you win.

  She looked down then with her arm along the side of the cot—and one hand trailing down so Brian Bassett could touch it if he wanted to. She smiled at him and said to him: “not to worry. Not to worry. None of us is ever going to trouble you again.” He watched her carefully. “Goodbye, Brian,” she said. “I love you.”

  Juliet Bateman saw Mimi Menlo say all this and was fairly sure she had read the words on Mimi’s lips just as they had been spoken.

  Mimi started out of the room. She was determined now there was no turning back and that Brian Bassett was free to go his way. But just as she was turning the handle and pressing her weight against the door—she heard Brian Bassett speak again.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  And died.

  Mimi went back and Juliet Bateman, too, and they stayed with him another hour before they turned out his lights. “Someone else can cover his face,” said Mimi. “I’m not going to do it.” Juliet agreed and they came back out to tell the nurse on duty that their ward had died and their work with him was over.

  On the 30th of April—a Saturday—Mimi stayed home and made her notes and she wondered if and when she would weep for Brian Bassett. Her hand, as she wrote, was steady and her throat was not constricted and her eyes had no sensation beyond the burning itch of fatigue. She wondered what she looked like in the mirror, but resisted that discovery. Some things could wait. Outside it rained. Thurber dreamed in the corner. Bay Street rumbled in the basement.

  Everett, in the meantime, had reached his own crisis and because of his desperate straits a part of Mimi Menlo’s mind was on her husband. Now he had not slept for almost ten days. We really ought to consign ourselves to hospital beds, she thought. Somehow, the idea held no persuasion. It occurred to her that laughter might do a better job, if only they could find it. The brain, when over-extended, gives us the most surprisingly simple propositions, she concluded. Stop, it says to us. Lie down and sleep.

  Five minutes later, Mimi found herself still sitting at the desk, with her fountain pen capped and her fingers raised to her lips in an attitude of gentle prayer. It required some effort to re-adjust her gaze and re-establish her focus on the surface of the window glass beyond which her mind had wandered. Sitting up, she had been asleep.

  Thurber muttered something and stretched his legs and yawned, still asleep. Mimi glanced in his direction. We’ve both been dreaming, she thought, but his dream continues.

  Somewhere behind her, the broken clock was attempting to strike the hour of three. Its voice was dull and rusty, needing oil.

  Looking down, she saw the words BRIAN BASSETT written on the page before her and it occurred to her that, without his person, the words were nothing more than extrapolations from the alphabet—something fanciful we call a “name” in the hope that, one day, it will take on meaning.

  She thought of Brian Bassett with his building blocks—pushing the letters around on the floor and coming up with more acceptable arrangements: TINA STERABBS…IAN BRETT BASS…BEST STAB the RAIN: a sentence. He had known all along, of course, that BRIAN BASSETT wasn’t what he wanted because it wasn’t what he was. He had come here against his will, was held here against his better judgment, fought against his captors and finally escaped.

  But where was here to Ian Brett Bass? Where was here to Tina Sterabbs? Like Brian Bassett, they had all been here in someone else’s dreams, and had to wait for someone else to wake before they could make their getaway.

  Slowly, Mimi uncapped her fountain pen and drew a firm, black line through Brian Bassett’s name. We dreamed him, she wrote, that’s all. And then we let him go.

  Seeing Everett standing in the doorway, knowing he had just returned from another Kenneth Albright crisis, she had no sense of apprehension. All this was only as it should be. Given the way that everything was going, it stood to reason Kenneth Albright’s crisis had to come in this moment. If he managed, at last, to kill himself then at least her husband might begin to sleep again.

  Far in the back of her mind a carping, critical voice remarked that any such thoughts were deeply unfeeling and verging on the barbaric. But Mimi dismissed this voice and another part of her brain stepped forward in her defence. I will weep for Kenneth Albright, she thought, when I can weep for Brian Bassett. Now, all that matters is that Everett and I survive.

  Then she strode forward and put out her hand for Everett’s briefcase, set the briefcase down and helped him out of his topcoat. She was playing wife. It seemed to be the thing to do.

  For the next twenty minutes Everett had nothing to say, and after he had poured himself a drink and after Mimi had done the same, they sat in their chairs and waited for Everett to catch his breath.

  The first thing he said when he finally spoke was: “finish your notes?”

  “Just about,” Mimi told him. “I’ve written everything I can for now.” She did not elaborate. “You’re home early,” she said, hoping to goad him into saying something new about Kenneth Albright.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am.” But that was all.

  Then he stood up—threw back the last of his drink and poured another. He lighted a cigarette and Mimi didn’t even wince. He had been smoking now three days. The atmosphere between them had been, since then, enlivened with a magnetic kind of tension. But it was a moribund tension, slowly beginning to dissipate.

  Mimi watched her husband’s silent torment now with a kind of clinical detachment. This was the result, she liked to tell herself, of her training and her discipline. The lover in her could regard Everett warmly and with concern, but the psychiatrist in her could also watch him as someone suffering a nervous breakdown, someone who could not be helped until the symptoms had multiplied and declared themselves more openly.

  Everett went into the darkest corner of the room and sat down hard in one of Mimi’s straight-backed chairs: the one
s inherited from her mother. He sat, prim, like a patient in a doctor’s office, totally unrelaxed and nervy; expressionless. Either he had come to receive a deadly diagnosis, or he would get a clean bill of health.

  Mimi glided over to the sofa in the window, plush and red and deeply comfortable; a place to recuperate. The view—if she chose to turn only slightly sideways—was one of the gentle rain that was falling onto Bay Street. Sopping-wet pigeons huddled on the window-sill; people across the street in the Manulife building were turning on their lights.

  A renegade robin, nesting in their eaves, began to sing.

  Everett Menlo began to talk.

  “Please don’t interrupt,” he said at first.

  “You know I won’t,” said Mimi. It was a rule that neither one should interrupt the telling of a case until they had been invited to do so.

  Mimi put her fingers into her glass so the ice cubes wouldn’t click. She waited.

  Everett spoke—but he spoke as if in someone else’s voice, perhaps the voice of Kenneth Albright. This was not entirely unusual. Often, both Mimi and Everett Menlo spoke in the voices of their patients. What was unusual, this time, was that, speaking in Kenneth’s voice, Everett began to sweat profusely—so profusely that Mimi was able to watch his shirt front darkening with perspiration.

  “As you know,” he said, “I have not been sleeping.”

  This was the understatement of the year. Mimi was silent.

  “I have not been sleeping because—to put it in a nutshell—I have been afraid to dream.”

  Mimi was somewhat startled by this. Not by the fact that Everett was afraid to dream, but only because she had just been thinking of dreams herself.

  “I have been afraid to dream, because in all my dreams there have been bodies. Corpses. Murder victims.”

  Mimi—not really listening—idly wondered if she had been one of them.

  “In all my dreams, there have been corpses,” Everett repeated. “But I am not the murderer. Kenneth Albright is the murderer, and, up to this moment, he has left behind him fifteen bodies: none of them people I recognize.”