The evening snack was over and some patients had already gone to bed. Others watched a small television set up in the common room. The music piping in was low-key and the lights had been dimmed, as they always were after ten, though it never got completely dark inside that place.
Then Silas Newman blew into the ward, a dervish of cannabis and autumn’s shiver, an easel under one arm and a paint-spackled duffel bag stuffed with brushes, solvents, and tubes of oil colors in the other hand. Even the evening shift aides took notice, italicized by his energy, his classic features, long, lustrous hair, the braided silver toggles of his pea coat bristling with leaf-smoke and the sharp season. And now Silas was hugging everybody, greeting each stranger—patient or attendant—as his oldest, dearest friend. That enchanting voice, his full lips. Hair a smoky tousle, mouth dank and sweet. Lit.
Partially cracked doors began opening wider along the hallway, and two nurses stood watching, silhouetted at the threshold of their fluorescent station. Within moments he was surrounded. Eyes shone all around the dusky common room. Wolves to a fire, thought Marlise.
Younger than the rest of them, practically invisible most of the time, Marlise also watched Silas from a shadowy corner where she sat cross-legged on the floor with the ward copy of The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare opened in her lap. Nina the Nympho was sidling up the hallway toward the crowded room, Marlise noted. She turned her attention back to the page, where Duke Senior was talking with his men as they entered the forest of Arden.
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
But Silas had spotted her after all, pile of twigs on the floor in the corner. She sensed this without looking up. If it had been possible to look down from the ceiling in that moment, at bird- or dream-flight height, she’d have seen the milling clutch of ragtag patients parting for him like the waters of the Red Sea in that Bible movie, as he approached in an aura of weed and linseed oil.
She stared down at the page. The muddy hems of his velveteen, flared pants and his heavy square-toed boots stopped in front of her. When he knelt down, she realized that he wasn’t very tall. Rough outside air still hung about his coat. She inhaled. She wanted to swallow, but couldn’t. He crouched, elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them, fingernails black.
He glanced at the book in her lap, then put his lips to her ear, wet and soft, though she felt his teeth. “Here,” he said, without turning his face from her but sweeping one arm out behind him to acknowledge and encompass the room and all its galvanized denizens, “here, on the inside, we feel not the penalty of Adam.”
“Nor,” she said, without skipping a beat or casting her eyes at the page in her lap, but looking instead right up into his startling face, finishing the lines for him, “the season’s difference, as the icy fang, and churlish chiding of the winter’s wind.”
He paused. Had she surprised him? A suck of breath, then his face opening. An irresistible smile. “Dearest of all!” he whispered, before standing, turning, and the room reclaimed him.
Dearest of all. Of all what? She would turn the phrase over and over in her mind, later. How utterly pretentious, how presumptuous, she thought. Yet she could not stop herself from savoring its husky threat, the thrill of having been seen.
*
Dr. Lance, finger pads pressed each to each, eyes half-cast in his dimly lit office, had said to Marlise, “you are fourteen but you have the lusterless eyes and body of a crone.” And other things like that, to shock. To get a rise. Was it that she didn’t care? No. But her mind wasn’t right, kept clouding up, her mouth dull, and the kinds of things she was invited to reveal had to do with a past with which she felt no connection, at least not one that she could put into words.
Once, when she’d walked over from the North Building for her daily appointment (what Silas, later, would call her “lance-ing”) in the main Institute mansion, which looked a little like Tara from Gone with the Wind, and was waiting in the gloom of Dr. L’s leather chairs and kelim pillows, his South American artifacts, she’d read a description of herself on a notepad on his desk, but obviously intentionally arranged so that she could see it from her seat—good grief, Marlise thought, it’s all so transparent—an account in Lance-a-lot or some lackey therapist’s briary scrawl of how at group therapy she, Marlise, would sit yoga-style, silently, and spit her saliva into tissues, sometimes even slipping mouthfuls to the floor, not once appearing to swallow. All true, of course, but Marlise refused to react. Instead, she settled back into the large chair, yawned, and closed her eyes. By then she knew that two-way mirrors were everywhere.
The nurses and aides had loved her, though. Infantilized her. She let them. She was young and simply starving, far less trouble for them than the heroin addicts, the nymphomaniac, the boy who wouldn’t wash, with matted hair and eyeglasses glazed with prune juice, or urine, someone said, and who knows what else, the suicide threats, the schizophrenics who came in manic, raving and riveting the ward like wind, or those on bad acid trips, one talking in rhyme, some of them balling one another in their rooms, the laundry, climbing the furniture and latticed sunroom partition, but who within a week, stunned on thorazine or stellazine, would hug the walls with shuffling feet. For them, the many locked doors, the barred windows, were redundancies.
Get it together, the staff would say. Get your head together now. Come down. At her last morning meeting, on the very February day she’d been driven to the bus terminal, Marco had shared with the group that he had remembered in therapy that his mother had tried to drown him. His doctor beamed. People applauded.
The Irish girl with the beaver coat was long gone by then. The girl—what was her name? Brianna? Bonnie?—had loaned Marlise the dank pelt, a junk store find or family relic, to wear on her daily walks that late fall, Marlise hymn-singing things she’d learned in chapel long ago, at school, circling the fenced-in grounds, the air burnt with institutional dinners and laundry from large smokestacks. A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone, and so forth. One stretch took her past row houses under the El, linden trees ringed with fences, children who sometimes stared back at her through the bars from gold leaf-piles, their jump ropes dangling, before running off. Marlise wondered what they saw. A Hallowe’en skeleton in a shaggy coat? A ghost. Barely there.
The Irish girl had been broad-faced, freckled and tall, Main Line, a rich hippy, with the belonging of the beautiful and bored, in residence for just a few weeks, who knows why, to get her out of someone’s way, perhaps, but how Marlise had admired her wide vacant eyes, her thighs stolid in pale robins egg-blue jeans, her musk of sure flesh. The beaver coat, heavy and napped, engulfed Marlise, kept her from feeling she might be blown away by the wind as she stalked the yard in circles, until one morning the Irish girl was gone, evaporated, taking the heft of her coat and her enviable gravity with her.
*
Silas interviewed himself sometimes, especially when he was in the early stages of a new hospital stay or new medication, alone in his room or in the shower, the drugs beginning their slow erosion, he felt, of his very cell structure, sludging up then dampening the fire in his brain.
Q: Why do you persist in believing you were born into a controllable world?
A: Wind instruments, bells, swept floors. Birds. Cages. Headstones.
Q: Are you a person?
A: In this one instance . . .
Q: Only one?
A: It is called the body.
Q: Why do you care about her?
A: I care that you ask me about her.
Q: Why her?
A: Because she is wasting.
Q: Wasting what?
A: Life. Body. Youth. Beauty. No words for it.
Q: What are you wasting?
A: Your time.
Nina was not the subject of this self-conducted interview. It was the other one, the girl who was disappearing, always with a book in her lap, open like a shield. A pelvic shield, he thought. But here was Nina, again, in his doorway, already unbuttoning her shirt, eyes fixed on him, twisted smile, little baby teeth. While he still had it in him, and before anyone noticed, he drew her into his room, where they fucked, without taking off their clothes, quickly and without speaking against the wall.
*
Meanwhile, in the bright refectory, pills in paper cups at meals, cones of salmon croquets, rice Marlise spit into paper napkins and stuffed into her socks, flushed later. Vanilla supplement drinks, creamy scarves frothing the sink, the white badge of grass outside her window, which only opened so much. Surely they knew she tossed them.
Rumors that James Taylor was living on a floor above the adolescent wing. Always his voice piping into the public rooms, something in the way she moves, or Neil Young, the Stones. Janis. Jimi and Janis both dead that fall. One night, she’d been flooded along, AWOL, with others to a Sly and the Family Stone concert at the Spectrum. On regular nights she’d help Jo, the night aide, assemble the evening snack she wouldn’t eat: vats of peanut butter, toast, the gleaming kitchen, smell of church suppers and bleach, that stainless steel vault a kind of chapel itself. Jo in her military hospital uniform, Jo with the sharp, weathered face of a man, who cut Marlise’s hair, wisps like milkweed floss, in her room, methadone roommate passed out on the other bed, Jo brushing the snippets off of Marlise’s shoulders, tenderly pausing over their knobs and keys. In Occupational Therapy, all those leather-fringed moccasins and belts, pre-cut from patterns. Pillar candles. Macramé plant holders. Where each afternoon until she was released, a girl, whose North Philly parents had her locked up for loving a black boy, would type “I want to live with a Cinnamon Girl” on the art room Underwood. “The rest of my life with a cinnamon girl.”
*
“Dear Mother & Father, You should see the way flies swarm the bins behind the loading docks and laundry here at Ye Olde Institute. Heaps of sullied linens, discarded dinners. How do I see this, you may ask. Why? For one thing, people love me like that. They flock to me that way, like maggots. And I’m given free rein here, you must know that. Rein. Reign, haha! I hope this doesn’t upset you. After all the times. After all. I go where I please. Does that alarm? Even as the year dies, days shorten, and the country goes to mother fucking shit, they flock and feed. I’m needed here. By now Lake Geneva will be gelid where you are, & the Christmas fairs! & your galleries and rooms all alight, and Sister’s pricey art shows, the spiced wine in copper vats & fresh horse dung in the streets!!! Well, I intend my own garden here. I tend. Yes, a garden. She is in need of me. Imagine. Me with a garden. Of course I speak in metaphor. I hope this does not seem to you crazy in any way. I have many plans. For my paintings. Which may seem useless to you. But what is ‘useless’? Consider the lilies, &c. Does He not feed & clothe them as well as you & me, &c?!! Do not forget them, then, and this, sent with greetings, from the Inside, from your Orphan, your Lily Boy of the Field, Silas.”
*
The nurses, smoking in the evenings in their crisp white caps and mini-skirts, their tall white boots, would stroke Marlise’s hair, her bones. “Did you love your mother?” the multiple-choice psychological tests asked. Marlise puzzled over these paper questionnaire booklets in the day room, pencil in hand. I never knew my mother, how do I know if I love her. Or, I love her. If I say I “loved” her, does it mean I no longer do? The rigid tense infuriated Marlise. “Did you love your father?” Impossible to answer that one, her mother and her father having died together in a car wreck, a fairy story, when Marlise was just a baby. No questions on those tests about orphans, or about guardians and god-parents, but Marlise always thought of Maurice, who was both her guardian and her godfather, when she blacked-in any circle for “no.”
In her first weeks at The Institute, Marlise spent her days moving, burning, burning, walking the paths that looped around the locked courtyard. When she couldn’t be outdoors, she jogged up and down the hallway. When her roommate was at therapy or out in the day room, she jumped on the bed like a child. Finally tired, she would sit, usually in some corner on the floor, orant, to read whatever she could find on the adolescent ward’s one shelf of books—Call of the Wild, a Webster’s dictionary, Girl of the Limberlost. Valley of the Dolls. To Sir, With Love. Two tattered editions of Shakespeare. What doctor’s child’s shelves had been raided for this motley library, she wondered. And at first there had been not only the many psychological tests and quizzes to puzzle over, but interviews with a series of nutritionists and student therapists. Marlise had shocked a psych resident when she said she pulled her own scant feces from her body with her finger. A ring of pimples around the white coat’s quavering mouth murmuring “I see.”
Then Silas had roared into her world. She unpacked her suitcase at last.
*
After that performance on his first night, when he’d whip-lashed into the Adolescent Wing and shivered through the place, Silas seemed to have disappeared from the ward. Marlise was reluctant to admit that she was hoping to see him again. Where was he? She didn’t even know his name and refused to ask anyone, lest she betray her interest. Had he disappeared, discharged as swiftly as he’d been admitted, like the girl with the beaver coat?
Marlise was beginning to realize that there was something that happened, especially to the manic ones. They came in on fire, leaping onto couches, spouting verse, ranting, shedding clothes, but after about a week on horse tranquilizers, these same prophets became shades, shuffling, hugging the walls, monosyllabic, catatonic with runny noses in the morning meetings, hands hanging useless as the pendulums of broken clocks.
Silas had stirred her. And from her various hiding places—corners, the floor, the typewriter table in the OT room, or at the margins of the refectory where she picked at food, or in the outdoor courtyard with its fringe of fenced-in privet, yews, and hollies, its benches, walking, walking, sometimes jogging, often armed with one book or another—she’d kept an eye out for him.
*
It was Silas who found Marlise, sitting cross-legged on a chair in front of one of the art room typewriters, a blank sheet of paper rolled onto the platen, listening to the music piped in through ceiling speakers. Always, to Marlise, the lyrics seemed to be about food—black-eyed peas, peaches, fatback—could that be right?—when arms and a strong smell of sweat and stand oil wrapped around her from behind, smudged shapely fingers reaching to the keys to type out “Do you believe this LOAD OF SHIT place is really going to help you” on the blank sheet of paper emerging white and crisp as a surrender flag from the little machine.
Solvents, sweat, cannabis. Where did he manage to get it?
Without turning around, Marlise thought to type, “About time,” but paused, then tapped instead, “TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER, ALIEN VISITOR.”
Then they’d typed their names onto the sheet of paper. She clacked out “Marlise Schade” and pushed the carriage return. He, leaning in closer, arms still around her, tapped out, on a new line, right beneath her name, “Silas Newman.” “Ah, little bird,” he’d exclaimed “your first name holds mine!”
“Not quite,” she typed.
A little later, after Silas had wandered back to his easel, Marlise tugged the piece of paper out of the machine, folded it into a small triangle, and tucked it into a front pocket of her carpenter’s pants.
A few days passed, then, without a sign of Silas, during which time she felt unaccustomedly bereft.
One dawn she woke to find him sitting on the edge of her bed. Her roommate was still asleep on the matching twin across the room. Weak light striped the curtain of his hair as he bent toward her. “Come,” he whispered, shoving aside the covers and helping her pull on and button up a pair of corduroy jeans. She had been too groggy to wonder at the ease and tenderness with which he did this, and only later thought too, with a flame of vanity and shame, what he’d thought of her thin bare legs, startled hip bones, concave belly, her negligible body.
They made their way down the quiet ward, his hand at her elbow. A few early risers, patients, orderlies passed them. A clanking of pots and pans came from the distant kitchen. Odor of bland oatmeal, powdered eggs, toast, cinnamon. Weak coffee. The nurse’s neon station buzzed weakly at the far end of the hall. Opposite, down the dim corridor, was an open space, a sunroom, windows latticed with metal grids. “Come my lady,” Silas said. “My hothouse flower. Survey your realm.”
Shivering, faces pressed against the window panes, they’d peered out between the eyelet grill-work over the loading docks below, the avenues of brownstones beyond the yard’s metal fencing, amber haze of bolled trees, the streets adrift with red and yellow leaves. Sirens. Traffic. Rosy, lazy clouds. Two birds flitted past, lit by sun. The surf of the outside world. Seams of cold seeped through the grout. “Can you taste the seawater in your mouth?” he asked. She looked at him. “You are so beautiful,” he said. She did not know what to say.
After that morning, Silas and Marlise had been more or less inseparable, finding each other in the mornings, and parting only when they had to or needed to—therapy sessions, sleep, her walks, reading, his time in the art room, painting. She thought he probably did things, sexual things, at least at first, with other patients. There was a constant circle of desperate eyes around him now that he had reappeared from his initial druggy, post-admitted stage. Nina, Marlise noted, was always hanging around his bedroom door, edgy, nervous, stepping in and out over the threshold. But eventually the ward settled down and stopped vying so hard for his attention, Nina appeared to take her affections elsewhere, and Marlise wondered that if by attaching himself as a kind of protector to her, the ward baby, seemingly fragile and lonely, he was shielding himself from his own ferocious magnetism, the almost out of control power he had over others and himself.
It was the most coherent thought she’d had in months.