16

Summers end in tears and decades end in madness. Cells split and signal, and a fire begins beneath the skull. There are signs in the petals of wildflowers, in the whispering of cities, in the jingle of ice cubes in a glass. Sex is suicide. Doctors cut into the skin, lawyers lie, lie, lie. The following day, a Sunday, Frank called Kimmie at home; her father answered. Hello, Dr. Remington. It’s Frank. Is Kimmie home?

No . . . I thought she was with you, said Dr. Remington.

There are pills in the cabinet, liquor on the shelf, rain on the windowsill and music everywhere.

She left last night, she said she wanted to go home, said Frank.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. She’s not in her room, said Dr. Remington. Her door is open, so I know. I haven’t seen her.

People choose the clothing they wear, because clothing is a secret sign. Only objects live with a reason; people are machines. They give out names so that they will know who everyone is. Cocksucker.

Kimmie didn’t come home that day, nor the day after, nor the day after that. Weeks went by and she didn’t come home. Frank would search the schoolyards of Washington, D.C.; he called hospitals and the police, watched television for any picture, and read the papers for any story. He half expected to simply run into her, on the street or in the lobby of a movie theater, on a bus, in a store. He had tears always waiting for the spasm that would set them off, a sob threatening behind certain syllables—words with ha in them, or gr, or any word that began with a b—and he had to be careful about what he said, sometimes planning sentences well in advance, so that he could avoid certain obstacles, and be prepared for any that remained. The camera went into a drawer; he didn’t take any more pictures, but he studied the ones he’d made of Kimmie, again and again and again, and he began to tear others from magazines, anyone who looked like her, who had her skin or her shoulders or her smile. For several months he stopped masturbating altogether, because he couldn’t find a fantasy that didn’t feel poisonous.

From time to time he would stop by Dr. Remington’s house, to sit with the man and wonder. Was she taking something? her father asked. Did you give her something, some drug?

Nothing, said Frank. No, no, no. We never did anything like that. —But they had taken those pictures, hadn’t they, and he couldn’t keep himself from wondering if there was something he had stolen from her in the event; and if her grief was for its loss; and if there was, or would ever be, anything that he could do to make it up—anything he could return to her, anything he could say, anything he could be, if not to heal her then to join her.

They have methods, they never tell. All thoughts must be written down, so that when they change them it is still possible to know what they were. Solitude is real. Laughter is an evil, dogs are an evil. We are all part of one consciousness, which struggles against itself.

Kimmie called her father from Santa Fe four years later; she had found a place on the edge of the known world, but she needed money to pay the rent. Dr. Remington’s features turned to pewter when he heard her voice. Will you please, please, please come home? he said. —Home? she said. I’m on the planet. Mars, the planet of war, Venus, the planet of love, Pluto, the planet of cold. He flew to Santa Fe that evening, checked into a hotel, and consulted with the police and social services the following morning. They knew who she was, and with their help he found her, living in a small dark room by the railroad tracks. She had painted over the windows; beside her bed were three combination locks. She didn’t know where they had come from, who they belonged to, or how to open them. A bomb, A-bombs, candy bombs. Her red hair was long and matted, and she had split her underlip by biting on it. Look what they did to the aborigines, to the Indians, to the people of Tibet.

He called for an ambulance. I guess I can go now, she said, nodding casually. I need some rest. That’s true. She went to the hospital without resisting, and there they cleaned her up and put Haldol into her head, until her thoughts were muffled and her brain slowed down to a mumble. After a week her father took her back to Washington; on her chart the doctors had written a mirror-lettered couple, of curves half split and sharpened, the story of an S that gazed upon itself in a pond and saw within the ripples a fractured Z. During the flight home, Dr. Remington wrote the diagnosis over and over again with a ballpoint pen on a paper napkin while his sedated daughter slept beside him—a swirl of SZ’s, inside, beside, bestride one another.