A window, too high to look through, let in enough light to tell night from day. Sometimes a shoe appeared in it. A bird. When the nurses came for food and medicine, I did not fight them. I yelled, but I did not fight.
The doctor visited. “You are not me, you never have been and never will,” I told him. “Your fingers on the armrests of that chair do not feel the leathery scratch as mine do, your toes do not inhabit your cotton socks as mine do, your thoughts do not move and agitate in the skull as mine do.”
He said, “It’s true, Giovanni.”
I lunged at him. “I lent you my voice, my posture, my facial expressions. More than that, I lent you my history.”
“Go on. Please.”
“When you were Bernard, you were yourself. When you were Heedling and Max, you were. You are yourself right now. You have always been yourself.” Tears flew out my eyes like snot. “Behind the moat there you lie, hiding still.”
My voice was hoarse, but I couldn’t stop speaking, even when alone. “Hell, I was hoping you’d hear about it. Really, what interest could I possibly have in a rotten piece of ass like that? No, when she was on me, I was thinking of you.” “Boy, the whole point of this—the revolution of it—is in imitating the audience. We do celebrities and we’re another two-bit nightclub act. But we get volunteers and we’re artists.” I tried my old radio voices: Richard Nelson’s, Jimmy’s. Each one eluded me. In the moment I reached for a voice, it escaped me, like Lucy’s in those wanting months, each attempt spurring another failed one until I was pacing, wringing one finger at a time. What terrified me most, what caused my heart to throb in my mouth, was to think that it had always been this way. That between each of these voices, the voices of my life, and my own, existed this—this gap. Always, onstage, in class, onscreen, this gap!
Yet I kept talking, babbling, for I dreaded silence more. I hummed, I clapped, anything to cause noise. In silence, I would vanish. I checked my hands, swatted the back of my neck. The fear was so great, I decided to express it to the doctor when he visited, but seeing him there—I had no voice to tell him with. “Your fingers on the armrests of that chair do not feel the leathery scratch as mine do,” I screamed instead. “Your toes do not inhabit your cotton socks as mine do, your thoughts do not move and agitate in the skull as mine do.”
• • •
There were new pills. Maroon. Sun-yellow. One gave me the jitters, another migraines. Orphels insisted we were making progress. Dips along the way to recovery. Important to feel the process, not just talk about it. I said nothing, except to hum or mutter his speech to me. “I know you can hear me,” he said from the other end of that padded room. Eventually I was returned to my room, so someone must have judged me better. It made no difference where they put my body.
• • •
I could hear people talking to me. I observed the doctor’s armchair abiding my weight. The water of the pool cinching around my waist. Every morning, Mama’s voice like a radio in my ear.
• • •
Spring dulled into summer. Time was passing, I was aware of that, but only distantly, in the way one is aware of a holiday celebrated by foreigners. Time no longer pertained to me. I learned that in the basement. A relapse, as it’s called by doctors, teaches you this: The condition is more a part of you than the solution will ever be. “You are not me, you never have been and never will,” I said to the birds on the lawn.
• • •
From the dreams of that period: I am onstage at the Communiqué. The crowd wolf-whistles, demands an encore. Max, looking as he did the day he visited me at No More Walls, beckons for the next volunteer. “Who will have the gall, the guts, the gumption, to join Giovanni on this grandest stage?” Max shields his eyes to see more clearly the hand in the back. “You, sir. Please come.” A hush. The figure ranges in the darkness. He can be heard excusing himself around the tables, takes his first lean steps onto the stage. He is tall and lanky, the volunteer. He is dressed in a tuxedo. The crowd, I see now, is all skeletons, white and shiny, jaws clacking with laughter.
• • •
A feeling started inside me: a gut-punching envy. Acute as thirst. I envied the heel of the janitor’s hand sweeping crumbs from a table, the liver-spotted cheek of a patient. I walked around with tears in my eyes.
One western in particular I watched over and over in the screening room, envying to death the puggish sidekick. The sidekick leaned over the horse to spit. He wiped his mouth angrily with the back of his hand. I wept at the perfection of that sidekick. In no time the film would end, the fluorescent lights would tick on, and the darkened windows would throw out cruel reflections: of me looking bearded, lavishly medicated. All that awaited me was the night and my room, where I hated going, where I was terrified of going, where I was sure—every night, sure—that I would vanish. “Your toes do not inhabit your cotton socks as mine do, your thoughts do not move and agitate in the skull as mine do,” I muttered in no one’s voice.
• • •
All I asked from life was to observe it.
It started with one of the custodians, a freckled woman, big-boned. During Free Hours I began to shadow her along the circuit she made to empty the property’s garbage cans. Before each wastebasket she’d gird herself like a weightlifter. Then with tensed arms she’d raise the packed can and upend it with a grimace, its contents tumbling, with a clotted rhythm, into a larger bag she’d placed nearby. Setting the can back down, she’d reach into it one last time, stretching for whatever bits of trash remained, her face producing a wonderful, effortful grin.
After the custodian, I followed a sunken-eyed nurse, a security guard. I learned to hide behind bookshelves, to look away at the right moment. These bodies offered a therapy far greater than that of Dr. Orphels, across from whom I sat every day without saying a word. They were my body, these people.
• • •
I first noticed her because of the camera. It looked expensive, hanging from a leather strap around her neck. She was always picking it up to take photos, usually of standard objects, like trees and doorknobs, ten or fifteen at a time.
Within the rigidity of the No More Walls schedule, she limited her range even more, sticking to a routine inside the routine. At breakfast she sat alone at a table by the window, consuming a half grapefruit and two hardboiled eggs with the wide-eyed avidity of a child. In the eight a.m. exercise class on the south lawn, she stood without fail in the farthest right row, second to the front, where she jogged in place and stretched with what was either a nervous or very earnest energy. Water Therapy followed where I was treated to a vision of her petite and queenly figure outside the vagueness of her scrubs. She wore the hospital-issued blue one-piece all the women did, and her dish-white legs flashed along the wet blue tiles, her bottom jutting and swinging like some oblivious tail. She had very correct posture, fiddled religiously with her ponytail: stroking it ten times with the right hand, ten with the left. These numbers were precise and repeated, just as she cleaned her fork nine times and walked around the lawn before dinner twice, all the while snapping photos of an oak tree, a wooden bench, a dinner knife. Each day she marched over to the rightmost Jacuzzi, tested its waters with her toe three times—always three—then three times up to her knee, before finally sinking in. When she did finally soak, she made a loud expression, as if she’d swallowed hot food.
She could not have been counted among the more social patients, those who chatted in the back of art class or gossiped in the mess hall. Not once had I seen her talk, yet a warmth radiated from her, an availability, despite the cocoon she, like so many of us, wriggled within. Her method of notifying another of her presence—of alerting them, say, that she stood behind them in the hall—was to cup that person’s shoulder gently. All in all, she carried herself with the overstatement of a silent-movie actor, frowning, shrugging, darting, her camera always clipping, loud as scissors. Behind it, her forehead tense with focus.
During Free Hours she retreated to the small, gummy pond behind the orchard. She liked to sit under the weeping willow. Tree frogs belched and dragonflies, like tiny helicopters, buzzed over the water, but this woman, sealed within herself, didn’t seem to notice. Often she chucked pebbles into the pond or ripped out blades of grass. Sometimes she cracked her joints or formed bats with her hands and flew them around. I’m ashamed to say that I, lying on top of the embankment like a scout with a spyglass—I witnessed her do this four or five times before I realized that she was talking to herself. It was sign language.
• • •
The next afternoon I discovered the note under my door. A folded piece of paper inscribed with the words For You. I recoiled from it as from a rat. The letters were so exact it looked like they had been written with a stencil. I turned on the bedside lamp and opened it.
You, Stop following me. I mean this seriously, STOP. Amelia Stern, Door 12.
I read the note until it trembled in my hands. A thousand oaths I swore to myself: to knock on her door right then, to hide forever from everyone, and soon I was blathering to the man I trusted least in the world because I had to talk and Doctor Orphels, he was there. My session took place an hour after my discovery of the note, and there I spewed in breathless monologue what little I knew about this Amelia Stern. It was the first time I had spoken to the doctor in months, the first time in months I’d spoken at all (outside of muttering his speech to me), and I was expecting, I think, some theatrical rapprochement—a welcome-back sort of speech, a wry grin, at the very least, but Orphels simply listened, reading her note when I handed it to him. “I know,” he said. “I told her to write it.”
“Told her?!”
“She’s my patient. She noticed your following her and found it discomfiting. I told her she ought to notify you of this feeling. As you rightly observed, she’s deaf, so a written note seemed best.”
“You knew about this? All this time, you knew? Did you, did you orchestrate this?”
“But how could I have?” He smiled. “You were the one following her.”
“You’re just like Bernard. You use a person.”
“I believe you were the one who had been using me, Giovanni, using my voice, my history. I thought we discussed that.”
“You are not me, you never have been and never will.” I was scratching my scalp. “Your fingers on the armrests of that chair do not feel the leathery scratch as mine do, your toes do not inhabit your cotton socks as mine do.”
“Giovanni, if you had brought up the situation with Amelia sooner, I would have been more than happy to discuss it. You’ve brought it up, so I’ve addressed it.” He said, “What led you to her?”
“So you can run and tell her?” I was nearly yelling. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.”
That’s how he was. He picked the best moments to surprise you. He waved her note. “At the least,” he said, “you’ll have to explain yourself.” A few minutes later, the session was over.
That evening I paced the grounds until the sky was black. You’ll have to explain yourself. I wandered by the birch trees, the mountains going from blue to black to blue again against the sky. You’ll have to explain yourself. Bats soared and dipped like pieces of night briefly torn free. In low clouds the fireflies rose and evaporated. I wandered into the woods, away from the house, stumbling over roots.
Explain yourself. The words had never sounded so strange.
Soon I was sprinting through the woods. It was like being erased. Smeared in with the trees and ground. An owl was saying, “Whooo?” and the needles crunched under me and just then, without warning, as if God had snapped his fingers, all the intervening years collapsed, and I was thirteen again, being dragged out of the classroom by Heedling. I could feel it. The collar tightening around my neck.
Explain yourself.
Then Max slapped my cheek in Dun Harbor. I felt it in the woods: the slap. I felt other things, too, felt them as though mugged, physically, by memory: felt Mama’s arms squeezing my waist, her chin digging into my shoulder. (“Up, up!” she’d said.) The spotlight warming the shoulders of my tuxedo. Lucy’s calves scissoring the backs of my thighs. The girls outside Derringer’s office, their grins like hobos’. Max’s notes in the margins of his papers swarming like ants.
Explain yourself, and before I understood what I was doing I had run back to the house. I found a pen and paper at the commissary and wrote back to this woman, Amelia Stern, explaining myself, scribbling in a state of exhilaration:
Amelia Stern,
I do not mean to stare. I’m sorry, please know I’m sorry. I’m barely even here these days, so it’s medicine to find a person who is. I was invisible, I thought. As loose change gets lost in a couch, that’s how I’m lost in my body. You have a superb way of walking, that’s all. You have a way of touching people on a shoulder I admire. Of eating soup, etc. My mother was killed. You will not turn and see me following you, I promise. Sometime long ago I was a well-behaved man and will be again. You’re sweet medicine, that’s all.
Giovanni Bernini
I must’ve entered into some new delirium since before breakfast that morning, after slipping the note under Amelia’s door; I visited the library and, with no plan at all, checked out a dictionary of sign language.
Like everything, borrowing the book seemed a frightful ordeal—what with surviving the solicitude of the nurses and the fluorescent lights of the library—but I managed to do it. In my room I practiced, and if it hadn’t been for the terror of failing and the terror of succeeding, I could have torn through the book in an hour, so closely did it play to my talents. My hands were two ticklish birds, two anythings. Dancing origami—my knuckles, my meanings. There was a civility involved, a silence, and theatrics.
Awake. Do you know how you say it? You mimic the opening of the eyes. You form two L’s with your hands and push them away from your temples.
Freedom. You make fists and cross your arms, then uncross them. Cross, then uncross.
Face. My favorite. With your forefinger, circle your face.
It was like cutting a hole in the air.
• • •
As much as it pained me, I kept my promise, switching with the doctor’s help to B Schedule, which meant I did everything Amelia did an hour after her. Because her routine was so exact, it was painful but not difficult to avoid her entirely.
My sessions with Orphels those two days were among the least helpful yet. I went on and on about the letter, pecking at him for her reaction.
“Giovanni, you know I can’t discuss this.”
“I don’t know that. I don’t know anything about what you’re up to. You’re like your father, Dr. Orphels. A master of justification.”
He grinned. “You distrust me, but that’s okay. I would prefer you to be distrustful of me and in possession of your health than the reverse. Please tell me.” He said, “How did it feel to write that note?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have to say.”
“That’s true.”
A long silence. “As you yourself observed, Amelia suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder,” he said. “Must repeat most actions anywhere from three to forty times. Wash her hands. Open the door. She worked as a newspaper photographer, and this activity, photography, became a way of mitigating the obsession. Rather than touching a certain hydrangea bush three times, she would take three photos of it.”
“Big improvement,” I said.
“It was, actually. She’s suffered fewer obsessive episodes. There was, however, one lingering problem.”
“What’s that?”
“She did not like the photos,” he said. “Understand, the quality of the photographs was not a problem for me—I thought some of them were quite lovely—but Amelia hated them. None of those photos, in her mind, captured their subjects. Of course, I suggested many times that such ‘capture’ was impossible.”
“What happened? I still see her out there taking photos.”
“A twist.” He raised his finger. “She started taking photographs without any film in the camera.”
“No film?”
He nodded. “By snapping the photo but not actually committing the moment to record, she was acknowledging that she could never fully ‘capture’ the object, and yet was able to feel like she had.”
“There’s no film in that camera?”
He grinned. “It reminded me of you, you know.”
I said nothing.
“Maximilian’s quotation marks. That the stage is like a pair of quotation marks—everything you do inside them isn’t something you’re actually doing, but something you could be doing. Like taking photos with an empty camera, no?”
“You’re up to something here. I can feel it.”
“I know you distrust me. You will for a long time. But have I ever withheld anything from you?”
I was trembling.
“Tell me. It’s important for me to know. How did it feel to write that letter?”
I was looking off to the side, my hands cupped in front of me. “Crucial. Terrifying. I was trying to explain myself. Like you said, Doctor. Writing and betrayal. Writing and betrayal.”
• • •
I was returning to my room from one of these sessions when I nearly slipped on the note. It was folded primly in half, addressed to me: Giovanni. I held it, terrified. I brought it down with me to dinner, unopened, and, after eating, pondered it, folded, for a good half hour in order to savor the moment of knowing it had arrived but not yet knowing how it would disappoint me.
Again it featured those absurdly straight letters.
You’re a hell of a lot more charming on paper than you are stalking around with God-knows-what blasting in your head. Don’t think I don’t recognize you either, even with that bush of a beard. (To your beard I have this to say: Scram!) I covered one of your gigs for City Paper. Just now I shut my eyes and saw the shots from that night. I mean it: on the inside of my eyelids, little dancing movies. There’s one of you with a vein, size of a slug, popping out of your forehead. One of you wiping this fake tear from your eye. Digging real hard with your knuckle, like you were trying to fish out a silver dollar.
I swear I’ve got a museum in my head.
I like you in letters. In the letter you sound like a little boy wanting permission from the world. You’ve come a long way from that, huh? Perving around with hungover eyes? Write me letters, that’s fine. Nothing in person, though. I mean it. I can’t stand a man to throw his thoughts on me like that.
Amelia Stern
PS I’m sorry about your mother.
I read the note ten, twenty, thirty times. As I held it, my room took on a doomed and blanched quality, and a great panic fell on my head.
The next day I showed the letter to Doctor Orphels. I could barely sit still. “It’s the voice,” I said, “the voice inside of her.”
“You sound almost religious,” he said.
“I want it for myself.”
“Want what?”
“That voice! That can’t be spoken.”
“But you have your own, Giovanni.”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“But look at what she said about your letter. She seems to think you did.” He said, “You won’t tell me what you wrote?”
“Honestly, I was in such a state. It was after our session, when I told you about her note to me, and you told me that I ought to explain myself. Those words had never sounded stranger: Explain yourself—I took a long walk at night and all of a sudden I remembered things. That’s when I ran back to my room and wrote her.” I said, “Why do I suspect you’ve arranged this all?”
“Tell me about the envy, Giovanni.”
“When I was imitating you,” I said. “What I envied was the telling—your telling your story. Not just telling it but that it was complete, that it made sense. You explained yourself.”
“Write yours then.”
“What?”
“Your story, Giovanni. Write it to her.”
• • •
Without the benefit of frenzy, the second letter took longer. My fist wouldn’t release the right words, but I took solace in knowing when a phrase was right and when it wasn’t. Soon I found myself writing, “Sympathetic to the bone,” and “Mama’s eyes could do things no one else’s could.” She wrote me back a few days later. Then I told her of the doctor’s suggestion. I didn’t think I could do it, I wrote, unless she, too, provided me with her own letters. The next day there was a note under my door: “Whatever the doctor thinks.”
• • •
Since then I’ve received hundreds of notes from Amelia. Each morning they appear under my door like the most important newspaper in the world.
Here’s one:
Men always take it upon themselves to pity me, but don’t for a minute fucking do it, no. My father’s a rich man, Giovanni, the publisher of newspapers. I had maids, a big fat yellow lab, the advantages. Anything for Amelia, that’s Dad’s philosophy. Here’s an image: He used to spread the Sunday issue out on the floor of my bedroom, and the two of us would roll around on it like mutts.
Her eye is as good as Mama’s. Her notes like clues in a treasure hunt. A crack in a tile, a certain chef’s frown:
Look at the bark on the first tree in the fourth row of the apple orchard. There’s a kind of gray patch on it I really like. The color of an elephant.
Or,
I love the doctor’s teeth. The way he just leaves them out. Does it make him more or less trustworthy?
Sometimes she describes old photographs. Like one of a candidate for state assembly:
He had thinning hair. You know how that looks—like a man failing to keep a secret. I climbed up a fucking tree to get it. To get the spots where the scalp showed, pale as a halibut under his wheat-tipped combover.
Or photographs she snapped with the empty camera:
I took a photo today I wish, I wish, I wish I had a copy of. Of a nurse (young, female) and a patient (the one with the gray goatee?) sitting on one of the benches on the south lawn, right at sunset. Both of them with their hands in their laps, hands not clasped, just floating in their laps, both with their shoulders sort of slumped, both with their heads tilted toward the sunset. The same exact pose. You know the way a dog tilts its head up at his owner—that’s how the two of them looked at the sun.
Her notes are a physical presence for me, a human company, and without their touch I couldn’t have produced this account.
Doctor Orphels saw to it that I was provided with a typewriter. Every night I left a fragment of my life under Amelia’s door, until, writing longer and harder, I would leave a whole sheaf of papers by her door every couple of weeks, describing the spring boardwalk in Sea View, for instance, or the pigeons outside the Stone-Wild Museum. Then I became more serious and asked for the pages I had given her back so I could revise what I had written, add what was missing, and deliver it when complete. She agreed, leaving the pages by my door, and I have been earnestly working since.
Throughout we’ve maintained our promised distance. Given Amelia’s schedule, this hasn’t been as difficult as it might sound. I’ve stayed on B Schedule and, in that way, experience the circuit of No More Walls an hour after she does: I see her residue in the kitchen, in the front lawn during exercise class. A few times I’ve glimpsed her blond ponytail in the commissary or the rose garden and my heart gasped, like seeing a figure from the other side, like seeing Mama, and I turned away, terrified. At first I ached to see her, but I know this is best, the two of us, close neighbors, pen pals.
Or so it had been until recently. At that point I had reached the moment in my story when I started following Amelia, and I asked if we could take a walk together to help me better describe it. The faithfulness of our accounts had taken on a religious seriousness for both of us. Later that day I received a note from her saying, “East Portico 3pm tomorrow.”
• • •
I showed up a half hour early, forgetting how bad being early can be. The night before I had memorized certain remarks in sign language that now crackled in my fingers like static electricity. I tried to run my hands through my hair, pass them over my face, but all they wanted was to talk, to talk to Amelia, yet when I looked up and saw her fidgeting before me, one hand on her hip, they fell dead at my side. The dimple in her cheek looked like a play of light.
I said, “Are you early, too?”
She smiled, snapped a photo of me, and motioned with her hand, as if to say, Are we gonna walk or what?
I nodded. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. After you,” but she had already stepped ahead of me and didn’t see.
We walked as if chaperoned, maintaining a sort of legal distance, and in that way passed through the bee-haunted orchard and the garden. Amelia stayed a pace ahead of me, starting with the second row of apple trees in the orchard, doing what she always did, even with me trailing her, which I took as a handsome sign. From my week of following her, I knew what would come next: a walk to the garden, where she would snap the blue hydrangea bush four times, lean in, and smell its top flowers twice, circle it once more, and then continue down the embankment to the pond, where she would crouch next to the weeping willow.
All of this she did without once looking back, and I felt like Eurydice in the tale of Orpheus, one of the best and most pitiable from Heedling’s class. Watching her head to the embankment, wrapped so firmly in her repetitions, I thought of that myth all over again, and thought I understood it, too. It was that Orpheus loved Eurydice too much to look at her. He had to walk ahead or behind her. But to look at her directly, to see her head-on, the love would become a thing too real to exist. Amelia crouched under the weeping willow, anchored to that patch of earth she trusted. I sat next to her so we could face the same direction and not each other.
We sat for some time. A cloud of gnats hovered over the pond. I kept fearing she might disappear, or had already.
I turned. You just let me know—please let me know—if you ever want to leave.
When she smiled, it was like the world carving joy into her face. I had never seen a person smile like that. You can speak!
A little.
She punched my shoulder. You didn’t tell me you were practicing.
My last secret.
I doubt that. I doubt that highly, Mr. Bernini. I’d pin you for a secret machine. A secret machine, she repeated for emphasis and dropped her jaw. Then she frowned. A breeze passed and she lifted the camera to her eyes, snapping a photo. You getting all this?
What?
She waved her hand over her face. This. I feel like I’m posing for a portrait. With that, she leaned back, resting her head on her fist. Just as quickly, she snapped back to her previous position. The scrubs made the sound of raked leaves.
I’m getting it. I dared to flash a smile. But by then she was frowning again. Is it a bad feeling? If it’s bad, we can stop. Right now we can stop.
I don’t know. She shrugged. A new one. I don’t like new things usually, but this isn’t so bad. She checked over her shoulder. Twice. You really ought to do something about that beard. I don’t understand a man’s attraction to a beard. It’s something yet to be explained to me in any satisfactory way.
Hiding.
She said nothing.
I mimicked the strokes of a razor along the sides of my face. I can shave it.
It’s okay, I don’t care, really. Just making conversation.
She was sitting cross-legged, tearing out the grass. Each blade made a belching sound. I tapped her on the shoulder again. I’m worried we’ll run out of things to say.
Then we’ll say nothing. She smiled brusquely and then turned again to the grass. A moment later she looked up. And are you hiding now? With your hands? Is that what this is?
My expression, I realized, was greatly exaggerated: my brow ruffled, lips pursed. No, it’s better than that. Everything I’m saying is true, but it feels like, like something I could say, a what if. The quotation marks—it’s like we’re inside them.
Ah, Max’s famous quotation marks. She smiled wanly and tugged again at the grass.
I tapped her. You okay?
She pursed her lips in such a way that the lower lip hung out more than the upper, nodded, and returned to the grass.
I hope I didn’t say anything bad. If I did, please tell me.
But she was facing the ground.
I tapped her. I hope I didn’t say anything bad. If I did, please tell me.
She signaled again, and this time I understood. I cried. I covered my face and bawled. I hadn’t planned to, but there I was, weeping. It had been a fantasy of mine for years: to cry in front of someone I might love, and the moment, finally come, was like most moments. What I mean is, I wanted to be done with it, hide, and it hit me then how lonely a man I was. The loneliness—all of my life it had been my spine, and I didn’t know if I could live without it.
She smiled again, discreetly this time, as if many people were watching.
To the bone, I repeated, and she reached across and rubbed my knee.
We sat in silence. I said, I like speaking this way. It’s like writing letters in the air.
Not for me, unfortunately. Just chatting.
But you have a voice, don’t you?
She shook her head. Nope. A second later, though, she took my hand and placed it around her throat. I didn’t feel it at first. Then it came: a low hum, like the whoosh of a furnace. Then she executed a smile I won’t soon forget: a smile as vulnerable as it was unshy, a smile I would’ve killed for in my old days and might have stolen even then if I hadn’t been so happy—and frightened—to be the lucky fool for whom it was meant.
She released my hand. She angrily ripped the grass out of the ground, lost in her own thought, and then stood up, wiping the bottom of her scrubs. All in all it took about twenty minutes for her to make it back to the east portico. I was wracking my brain for a proper goodbye when she leapt up and kissed me. The whole thing was very quick and bashful, and felt like language. Like a specific meaning that could only be communicated one way: lips together.
That’s all you get till you’re done, she said.
Done?
With your story, and with that she opened the door and entered the sunny house.
• • •
I’ve stayed on at No More Walls for two years. It hasn’t been a thousand days, but one day lived a thousand times. I see the doctor, eat with the patients, and in every free moment, chip away at this account. That I survived all those years without this typewriter seems a miracle. Yes, the practice of writing, as I’ve learned, is the best moat there is, or rather, outdoes the apparatus of a moat, a mechanism very literal and clunky compared with the magic of a story. Words, I’ve come to see, not so much recount experience as replace it, and as I reread this account of the famed impressionist, it is as if he never happened at all or that he is happening only now, here, where he can live as Giovanni the Words.
Doctor Orphels and I have had our moments. Several months ago he accused me of exploiting this story, twisting it into yet another performance—this time, he said, a performance of words. He is right, of course. And I know I’ve toiled over this account not only to improve it, but also to delay stepping out from behind it, back into the gnashing world, where all the applause and punishment are made. I suffered a relapse while trying to write about my years in Fantasma Falls, and he allowed me to speak sign language with him during that time, when my voice wasn’t strong enough. He has read every page I’ve written, he and Amelia, both. Mama, too, I like to think. Her eyes passing over every word.
Max made good on his promise and sent me a letter stinking of beer and ash. He brought news from Mama’s neighbor, Doctor Kessman: how for three months neighbors placed flowers and candles outside Mama’s door; how Doctor Kessman will leave everything as is in Mama’s house until I return. It is quite respectful of him, but I doubt I can ever enter that place again.
Max lives in the City. “The people here still talk of Giovanni Bernini,” he wrote. “Street vendors. Street people, they recognize me still, and they want Bernini. What do I tell them? I tell them the stage is too small for him! And they say, Is that why he went into film? And I said, Films are too small for him. And they say, Politics then? Is he returning to politics? Of course not, I say, Too small, too small. What could possibly be bigger, they ask? And I say, Real Life! He’s entering Real Life!”
The other day I shaved my beard. I look tall and anonymous, a man easily unnoticed. I might be the stranger reading the morning paper at the lunch counter, the man clutching the handrail on the subway. When this account is finished, Amelia and I will take a walk together. The prospect makes me tremble, but I can always run back to my room and write it down. Spying on my life in order to live it.
I do my old work, too, sometimes. Early in the morning I tiptoe down the stairs and out onto the lawn, the sky a bruised blue, the land black. At this hour all is for the birds and their homeless kingdom in the trees. A thousand doors opening in nature: squeaking hinges. I crouch under the oak and talk to them: to the blue jays, the thrushes, and cardinals. It’s in the tongue, the details of a whistle. Just the other morning a riot of bluebirds lighted upon me. Come here, I said. At first they hesitated. But soon they hopped on top of me, tapping me with their curious beaks, amazed that such a creature could be one of them.