Alyzon Whitestarr

  “You think of anger as a sickness?” I asked, thinking of Serenity.

  “I think it is a sickness of the soul,” the old woman said. I was disappointed, and maybe she saw it, for she said, “I’m not talking about religion, Alyzon. When I say soul, I mean no more than your essence.”

  I shivered, because I had got into the habit of thinking I could smell people’s essences, but it seemed too prideful and eerie to think I could smell people’s souls.

  Rose Cobb sighed. “Poor Max. He deserved a better wife than he had. I would change that if I could. Go back and be a kinder and more compassionate partner. But that’s the one thing you can’t do, is it? You can only go forward and be the best person you can.”

  “I’m sure he loved you,” I said.

  “Oh, he did, but that was more due to his sweet nature than mine.” She poured herself another half cup of tea and offered me more, but I remembered that I had a train to catch. Before I left, Rose Cobb pointed out her house, telling me to drop in if I came back to visit any of the refugees.

  * * *

  Gilly was waiting for me at the station, and I asked worriedly if she’d mentioned my doctor’s appointment to her gran. She shook her head and, seeing my relief, asked why.

  I took a deep breath. “Because I didn’t go to Remington and there was no doctor’s appointment. I didn’t tell you the truth this morning because I didn’t want you to have to lie if Harlen asked where I was.”

  “But … where did you go, then?”

  I told her about going to the detention center in Shale-town and about meeting Rose Cobb, which led into the story of Aya and my belief that whatever was wrong with Serenity stemmed from what had happened to Aya and her family. As I hoped, Gilly jumped to the conclusion that visiting the detention center had been the only reason I’d gone to Shaletown.

  Then she said, “Harlen did ask about you. He said you hadn’t mentioned any doctor’s appointment to him, and I asked why you should have.” She frowned. “It’s weird how possessive he acts about you.” She hesitated, then she added, “He said he had a date this weekend with you.”

  “He sort of cornered me,” I said wearily. “I made it for the middle of Saturday in Eastland Mall.”

  “I don’t get it,” Gilly said. “Why are you so nervous about just telling him straight out that you don’t want to go out with him? Oh, I forgot, there was a notice about the holidays.” She began to rummage in her bag. After a minute, red-faced and muttering, she gave up, saying she must have left it in her locker. “I am so disorganized! I swear it’s my natural state! I keep thinking when I do this or that I will finally be able to get organized, but of course then there is always something else to get in the way.”

  I grinned sympathetically. “The thing is to tell yourself this is life and chaos is part of it.”

  “You sound like some sort of wise guru. Maybe that’s what you’re gonna be when you grow up.”

  I grinned. “All right, so I was raving on.”

  “Yeah, but in a good way,” Gilly said, and we both laughed.

  “That was great last night when you came to dinner,” she went on. “You had this amazing effect on my grandmother. Usually she is so stuffy and disapproving.”

  “I didn’t have an effect,” I said. “We did. The three of us. I think that the dynamics between the three of us produced the right chemistry for her to talk.”

  “Yeah, but it has been the same ever since.” Gilly shook her head. “I mean, we actually talked over breakfast this morning and … she made me laugh!”

  “She made me laugh, too,” I said. “Spooky.”

  “Idiot!” Gilly retorted.

  * * *

  Mrs. Rountree and Da were eating sponge cake and drinking tea in a pretty little conservatory I had not seen the night before.

  “Hello, Alyzon,” Da said. Then he held out his hand to Gilly. “We meet again, Gilly. I’m not sure if I mentioned how much I enjoyed your playing the other night. You have a fine technique.”

  Gilly reddened with pleasure.

  “It is lovely to see you again, Alyzon,” her grandmother told me warmly. “Macoll has been telling me that your mother is a painter.” I stifled a grin to see that her cheeks were pink. Da has visible swoon range.

  * * *

  “Oh, Da! You kissed her hand!” I laughed when we were driving off down the road. “That’s so old-fashioned!”

  “Millicent Rountree is an old-fashioned type of lady,” Da said with dignity. “And she liked it.”

  “She loved it,” Gilly said, and flushed scarlet when she heard the wistfulness in her voice. That broke me up, and I laughed until Gilly forgot to be mortified and elbowed me hard. Da pretended not to notice any of this, and only when we had quieted down did he look sideways and ask how school had gone. Which wiped the smile right off my face.

  Gilly told him about her own day, making it sound as if she was speaking for both of us and without her ever actually uttering a single lie. It was pretty impressive, and I told her so when we got home and went upstairs to my room.

  “I’m not sure I want to be congratulated for being a good liar,” Gilly said primly as we came through the door, then she saw Serenity’s half of the room and her mouth fell open.

  “Serenity’s side of the bedroom,” I said.

  Gilly gazed about, then finally she said, “I see now why you’re so worried about her. This is … a bit much, isn’t it? You really think that business in Shaletown is behind this?”

  “I don’t know, but …” I stopped because Jesse was yelling for us to come and eat.

  We had a great dinner, with Da telling jokes and stories about gigs, but I saw Gilly watching Serenity speculatively throughout the meal.

  I slept badly and woke with a blurred memory of a dream that refused to be recalled. I felt depressed and uneasy in the knowledge that I had to meet Harlen Sanderson in Eastland Mall.

  On the way downstairs I heard Neil Stone’s voice, but the pleasure I felt in anticipation of seeing the big musician faded when I entered the kitchen and saw his face, and Da’s.

  “Don’t be a mug,” Neil was saying. “It’s money and you need it, man. None of us would stand in the way of that. You’ve got to eat and take care of your family. Just do it! It’s not like you’re signing a recording contract.”

  “But we’re a band,” Da said.

  “So we are, and who says this changes that? Christ, I was playing at my sister’s wedding a month ago, and you didn’t see me agonizing over leaving you guys out of it.”

  “She wasn’t paying you!” Da protested.

  “Well, that’s true. Bloody cow.” He said this so fondly that Da laughed and suddenly the tension dissolved. “That’s more like it,” Neil said. “Just take the job, Macoll. Pay some bills and get Jesse the computer he needs.”

  But they were still talking about the gig when I left twenty minutes later.

  * * *

  I decided to walk to the mall instead of taking a bus. It was a crisp, bright day, and I set off on a route that would bring me down one of my favorite streets, lined with enormous old cypress trees, their twisted trunks and branches agonized-looking.

  I was halfway along it when I spotted Sarry coming out of a shop with an ice-cream cone. She was wearing luridly tie-dyed skintight jeans and a tie-dyed camisole over the top of a lacy T-shirt, and had an enormous flowered shawl wrapped around her shoulders.

  “Hi, Alyzon! Isn’t it a great day?” she said.

  “Blissful,” I agreed. “Where are you headed?”

  “Going with the flow,” Sarry said languidly. “Currents flow all around us, even though we don’t see them. If you don’t fight them, just, you know, hang loose and relax, they’ll sweep you somewhere interesting. Or even somewhere you’re supposed to go but you don’t know it.”

  For some reason, her words brought back into focus my elusive dream of the previous night. I had been in the street in front of the detention center. The enormous, simple
-minded protester I’d met through Rose Cobb had been with me, but in the dream his eyes had been less sweetly vacant and his golden halo of hair had shone with its own light.

  “I can smell the wrongness,” he had said. “You can smell it, too, can’t you?”

  “No,” I’d said.

  “Yes, you can. You smell it in people. The wrongness is inside them, making them sick and bad.” Then he had vanished.

  “Are you OK, Alyzon?” Sarry’s soft voice broke through the glassy screen of strangeness that the memory had evoked.

  Davey, I thought. Davey was his name.

  I looked at her. “Sarry, do you think a person could visit you in a dream?”

  She tipped her head to one side as if studying a painting and said tranquilly, “I think there is this country made up of all the dreams people have when they sleep, and it’s constantly changing and reshaping as people wake or dream something different. And if you were … what does Harrison call it … oh yeah, lucid dreaming. Do you know what that is?”

  “When you know you’re dreaming?”

  “Yeah. So if you were lucid dreaming, you could visit a bit of that country formed by other people’s dreams.”

  It was a strange, lovely idea, although I didn’t seriously think that Davey had visited my dreams to tell me he knew I could smell wrongness. Like the dream of Harlen whispering that he knew what was inside me, it was no more than a prod from my subconscious. But what had it been trying to tell me? Something about Harlen and how he smelled? On impulse, I asked Sarry if she thought wrongness could have a smell.

  “You mean like an orange gone rotten inside where you can’t see it?”

  I was struck by a thought. If Harlen did smell like something rotten, what did it mean if the smell came not from a specific memory, as I had been imagining—but from his essence?

  It means his soul is rotten, Rose Cobb’s voice whispered.

  I shivered. “Imagine if you could smell that there was something wrong about a person just like you could smell the rot in an orange.” I looked at Sarry and found her staring at me, her eyes wide and frightened. I was shocked to see that she had crushed the ice-cream cone in her grip.

  “You can smell it in me?” she whispered. Bewildered but wanting to comfort her, I stopped on the verge of touching her, but, without warning, Sarry caught hold of my hand. Images flashed into my mind: a young ginger-haired man smiling, sliding his arms around a pretty, laughing woman. She smiled flirtatiously, and then her face changed to fright. She turned to me and cried out in a queer muffled voice, Run and get help. Please!

  The terror in me—Sarry’s terror—grew until I felt faint. But the images kept flying through my mind. I saw the man injecting something into the woman’s arm. She was struggling and crying out, but he was stronger. She weakened and became passive. The man smiled at me, his face greedy and triumphant.

  Then Sarry let me go. She backed up against the window of a salon and clawed at her face. I noticed people inside staring out at us. Shamed and alarmed, I stepped closer to Sarry and, without any warning, she started to scream.

  I reeled back as Sarry went on screaming, letting each terrible, long, piercing shriek unwind to a thin, shrill note before she hitched in a raggedy breath and screamed again. After a few seconds, she slumped to her knees, and her screams became grunting, gasping sounds. There were livid bloody scratches down both cheeks where she had raked them with her nails. I had never been more frightened or felt more helpless in my whole life.

  “What the hell is going on?” A red-faced man in an apron came out of the salon. “I’ll call the police if you two keep this up. Go somewhere else and take your filthy drugs.”

  I fought to gather my wits. “Sir … we didn’t … my friend is having some sort of fit.” I gestured to Sarry and he saw, as I had, that a white froth was beginning to bubble from her mouth. His face changed. “I’ll call an ambulance. Try to calm her down and don’t let her bite her tongue.”

  Sarry had hunched forward and began to rock and groan and mutter in between gasping cries. I was afraid to touch her, so I stood where I was, babbling anything I could think of that might calm her down.

  After an eternity I heard the sound of an ambulance.

  * * *

  “We were just talking,” I told the medic as he thumbed her eyelids open. She seemed to have fallen into some sort of stupor now and sat trance-like and limp on the pavement.

  “Had she taken any drugs?” the other medic asked me. Before I could answer, the first medic said, “Not drugs. Shock.”

  They both looked at me, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say. The medic with the notepad asked me her last name and the names of her parents, none of which I knew. Admitting this, I seemed to make the two medics deeply suspicious, although of what I couldn’t imagine. They took my name and address down but refused to let me ride in the ambulance. They half lifted Sarry to get her in, and her hands flopped down their backs as loosely as the arms of a rag doll.

  After the ambulance had driven away, I went to a phone booth and called Da. Then I called Gilly, but the housekeeper said she had gone out with her grandmother. She asked if I wanted to leave a message, but I decided against it. I said in as calm a voice as I could manage that I would call back later.

  * * *

  At the hospital a nurse told us that Sarry was under sedation but that we could wait and talk to the doctor when he came on his rounds in an hour. They wouldn’t let us go in and sit with her because we were not relatives.

  Da stopped me when I would have argued with the reception nurse, telling me that she was only doing her job and that we would wait. He went to get us some cold drinks, and that was when I remembered that Harrison had given me his phone number. I dug it out of my wallet, called him, and told him what had happened.

  “Oh, hell,” Harrison said. “Listen, I’ll get a cab down, OK? Can you wait?”

  I tried to get the number for her parents, but he just reiterated that he would come, and hung up.

  I went back to the waiting room. Da handed me a cold box of juice. I took it and burst into tears. Da gathered me into his arms and held me. Instead of being overwhelmed by his feelings, I felt only his love for me, as warm and soothing as a hot bath.

  “What happened to your friend is not your fault,” Da said gently. I heard his words as a warm vibration against my cheek. It felt so safe in his arms, but I knew that if I stayed for a few more moments, his concern would begin to give way to other thoughts and feelings, which would cause me discomfort. So I moved reluctantly out of the circle of his arms, using my need for a tissue as an excuse.

  “How do you feel?” Da asked gently.

  “I’m OK.” I looked up at him, wondering suddenly if I was OK. I seemed to have done a lot of crying the past two days.

  Harrison wanted to know in detail what had happened.

  “The man who called the ambulance thought she had taken drugs,” I said.

  “She doesnae take drugs,” Harrison said dismissively. “What were you talking about before she started screaming?”

  I told him, and when I got to the bit about the dream, he nodded decisively. “That’s it.”

  “That’s what?” I asked, feeling irrationally angry.

  “The trigger,” Harrison said, sympathetic despite my snappy tone. “I guess Gilly might not have mentioned it, but Sarry … well, the doctors say she’s schizophrenic. They claim the attacks occur because of something that triggers a chemical imbalance that makes her imagine things.”

  “I’m sure once she is given drugs to correct the imbalance she’ll be fine,” Da told me.

  Harrison frowned, and it was not the frown of a boy but the frown a doctor might give someone who disagreed with his diagnosis. “I’ve read a lot of literature on schizophrenia, and I’ve talked on the Internet with some people who suffer from it and people who live with them. Sarry doesnae fit the bill. Even her doctor admits there are anomalies.”

  “What do you thin
k is wrong with her?” I asked.

  “Something bad happened when Sarry was very small, tae do with how her mother died. She believes that whatever it was caused her tae be … infected by a sickness. Not a sickness of the body, but a sickness of the spirit that she calls ‘wrongness’—a sort of contagious metaphysical corruption.” He switched his calm gray gaze to me. “When you asked about people smelling of wrongness, Alyzon, Sarry would have taken that tae mean that you smelled the wrongness in her.”

  “She said that, but I didn’t,” I burst out. They both stared at me. “I … I mean, that wasn’t what I was saying.”

  “Of course not,” Da said. “You were just talking about a dream. Harrison is only saying that what you said made your friend imagine that her sickness was apparent to you, and this set off her attack.”

  “It’s called an episode,” Harrison corrected gently, with the same mild authority as before. “But there is something more. You see, Sarry has this sickness she carries under control, but she has tae fight tae keep it that way, so that it cannae infect anyone else. When Alyzon talked of smelling wrongness, Sarry would have believed the wrongness had become active without her being aware of it. Her greatest horror is that she will infect someone else, you see. That is what set off her episode.”

  “You talk as if you believe she is infected,” Da said.

  Harrison pushed a wedge of straw-colored hair from his forehead. “It’s easy for the doctors tae dismiss what Sarry believes as delusional. But it could also be that Sarry’s delusion is a genuine perception, just one other people dinnae have.”

  “Like in the H. G. Wells story ‘The Country of the Blind’?” Da said with a strange certainty, and Harrison nodded.

  “Exactly. It was seeing how useless conventional treatment with schizophrenia drugs was tae Sarry that made us—me, Gilly, and Raoul—decide tae try simply believing that she had a sickness other people couldnae perceive. It might interest you tae know that since then, Sarry has had far fewer episodes, despite Dr. Austin’s insistence that she should be on drugs all the time tae control her episodes.”