Silas and Marlise were sitting side by side against a tiled wall of the OT room. Other patients and therapists milled about or sat motionless at craft tables under the fluorescent lights. This was the late afternoon hour for Occupational Therapy, before dinner, when people from all the wards gathered, not just the adolescents, and there were bent white heads among the darker ponytails, braids, and beards. Outside the trees were turning gold, orange, crimson.
Silas was small for a 20-year-old, about Marlise’s height, with thick dark hair that hung about his extraordinary, feminine face, but seated he was taller than she was, and his shoulders were broad, his arms tendoned and strong. He was as old as he could be and still be kept on an adolescent ward, and he had been here before, when he was younger. He’d been hospitalized in some other places, too, before that. In and out, he said, since thirteen.
Marlise felt safe inside the thick cabled sweater he’d given her, saturated with the smell of him, like the wet wool of a sheep-studded vista in a castle tale on the morning after a great and cataclysmic event . . .
She was drifting again, “lucid dreaming,” Silas called it, and shivered awake. Silas’s lips were wet and pink, they always were, as though he smeared them with Vaseline, maybe he did, above them the slight brown down of a mustache. Marlise stared as he spoke, holding up to the light a slide from a box in his lap.
“What about this one?” he asked excitedly. “Guess.”
Marlise shook herself and peered into the little cellophane square with its cardboard frame. His hand had a slight tremor. The medication.
“I don’t know,” she said. What was she looking at? Something like a bloated, inverted gold heart taking up most of the slide, which depicted a canvas on a slivered background of black and deep green. The heart-shape was yellow, hazy, tropical, flecked with something, dragonflies, maybe? Dragons?
“Tolkien?” she said.
“No, no,” he said. “It’s John Mitchell. The bastard. Don’t you see the copters? They’re dropping over America! Ha, ha, but Tolkien, that’s a good idea.”
Marlise touched Silas’s arm. She’d disappointed him, could feel his frustration with her. She knew little to nothing about the political issues and people that obsessed him. He was showing her slides, photos taken of a series of paintings he had done during the past two years, before he’d been readmitted. He called them the “Meat-Locker Torsos.” Each canvas, he said, was about the size of the average adult human torso, and showed an open chest cavity, shoulders to waist. The idea was to suggest the identity of these headless and legless figures by depicting what made them tick. “Visible manifestations of soul. If these people have one, or what stands in for one,” he said.
She’d guessed “your mother?” for “James Lovell,” mistaking the astronaut’s ropy cord floating across a fathomless field of deep indigo for an umbilicus.
They were marvelous, the canvases, as he held them up in miniature, celluloid copies, though she couldn’t once surmise the identities correctly. The shadowy corridors of a ruined roman bath in cross-section—stairs, alcoves, hallways, lurking male figures clad in crimson—was the Pope. The gears and cogs of an autopsied long clock was St. Augustine (“I know what time is until someone asks me,” Silas always liked to say). Two dove-gray lungs pelted with rain were meant to evoke the soggy insides of Silas’s grandfather, who had drowned himself in the Danube, or so he’d been told. Eyeballs floating in a gray soupy sea were for Ivan Denisovich (“You know,” said Silas, “from the Solzhenitsyn novel?”). One canvas showed two black, skeletal arms, elbow to fist, one emerging from each side of a scarlet canvas, the hands clutching one another in the middle, creating a double fist where the navel would have been on a real torso.
“Something about the Black Panthers?” Marlise had said.
“No, no, no. It’s Emily Brontë!” he’d said, shoving the slide back into the box and jamming the lid back on top. “That’s Heathcliff and Cathy, busted through their coffins, holding hands from beyond their graves.”
Silas had shoved off after that, and she didn’t see him for two days. Was it instinct, the pain she felt in disappointing him, that led her, at dawn a few days later, to the open door of the ward laundry room, gray and shadowy, where she’d found Silas slumped against the large industrial sink, arms up to the shoulders sunk under water? How had he gotten into that locked place? Why had she?—his clothes on the floor, a bloody dinner fork, thin ribbons of blood, red thread seeping from the small nicks in his wrists helixing up through the water, and she’d pulled him up into air by the armpits in her own skeletal arms, screaming, screaming. After that, she had felt for nearly a week something push against her from the inside, like the soul they say enters us when we’re born and lives within our bodies until we die.
*
While Silas was away getting stitched up and re-medicated at the main hospital, Margeaux, one of the occupational therapists, had confided in Marlise that Silas, now surely destined for shock therapy, already had something of a reputation as a painter. A prodigy. A painter’s painter, she’d said. Marlise didn’t know what that meant. He’d skipped high school, or gotten it all done quickly in a series of teaching hospitals and also, Margeaux thought, a special program for the arts in New York. He had even gone right into a famous art school in Rhode Island for a bit when he wasn’t in hospitals.
Rummaging in a cupboard, Margeaux extracted a postcard. On one side, in tile format, were six images, each showing a woman’s long neck wrapped with something different: a child’s two fat, bluish arms; an oversized pocket watch with needle-like arrow hands stuck at midnight (or noon); a gilt-edged mirror capturing a lone wisp of cloud. One neck was itself a bottle of something cedar-tinged, like tea or scotch, with little sperm-like bodies floating in it. A large red beak. A breast, the nipple bleeding. On the other side, Marlise read “Choke-Her: Mother Paintings” and the name of a Philadelphia gallery, with an address and some dates.
Margeaux’s boyfriend had been co-owner of a small gallery space, and they’d hosted a show for Silas when he was just sixteen. That was during his first hospitalization at The Institute. Back then, she said, the doctors had been much more permissive with him, the wunderkind, allowing his parents to send him shipments of the German and Italian oil paints and solvents he liked to use, letting him stretch his own canvases, and giving him his own space and extended time to work in the OT art room. The show had gone well, drawn a decent crowd, and received a nice write-up about “the boy genius working with Rilkean ‘thing-ness’ in a faux naïf style,” but none of the paintings had sold. And there had been a negative notice, too, along the lines of “immature, self-involved navel gazing, no better than the apprentice work of a beginning art student. Calling Dr. Freud!” This clipping, sheathed in a plastic folder, Margeaux had shown Marlise, as well.
Silas had been allowed to go to the opening, under Margeaux’s supervision, and was exhilarated all evening, she said, sipping champagne and chatting up the crowd despite the fact that no one from his family had made an effort to be there. But a few days afterwards, Silas consumed some turpentine and was found unconscious in the ward shower. His father had flown in then from Europe to retrieve him from the main hospital where he’d been rushed to have his stomach pumped, and Margeaux had lost touch with Silas after that for a year or so, though her boyfriend, now her husband, had since sold some of the mother paintings, and was very interested in the torsos, which he’d seen only on the slides. But Silas was not interested in letting them go. “Silas has a mean streak, you know,” Margeaux said. “Delusions of grandeur. Vindictive. He blames us for that bad review, can you believe that?”
Where were they at the moment, Marlise wondered, the actual canvases? All those paintings?
Silas, when he returned after his suicide attempt in the ward laundry, was heavily medicated, subdued at first. But he found Marlise and rebounded, and soon they were again inseparable, though never entirely alone, because of course Silas was now known by everyone to be not just charismatic, manic, and highly-strung, but a danger to himself. He was under much closer watch.