“It’s late,” Louise said, curling her legs against her seat cushion. Emmet did not stir himself to speak. He hung his head off the arm of his chair so Louise yawned at him, upside down. His body felt so weak and spongy that he fantasized he had overdosed on drugs. As the light in the recreation room grew darker and darker, he pretended that unconsciousness, not night, slowly blackened his eyes.
The windows were shut. It was winter now. Without the horns, shouts, and sirens to ground its place in the city outside, the hospital seemed built on a soundless tundra. It was so quiet in the ward that Emmet believed the globe must share its stillness. If the windows had not been locked, he might have felt the chill of an early-November wind. He remembered how he had loved the first blasts of serious winter, before the months slumped damp and gray, and how the frost seemed to purge the air of every poison.
The ward, too, seemed purged in Bruce’s wake. People spoke in hushed voices, as after a death. They drifted from hour to hour, disconnected, by either shock or fear or wariness that they would be threatened with expulsion next. All around him, Emmet saw patients grow compliant, like children seeking to seduce angry parents. When they had come to the ward, many believed they had found a safe place and had let themselves regress in that comfort. But Bruce had taught them something else: that there was no end to their falling. Those who had believed they knew the bottom had found it layered with crust, like dust on a moon’s surface or warm ice on a pond.
Emmet had known the state hospital existed, but Bruce was the first to be forced there. He had heard rumors of other patients being locked forever in its cells, but he had listened in the way people are able to hear of death, even see others around them dying, and still believe themselves to be exempt. Suddenly Emmet felt his body grow heavier, as if even with his caution and care, he had trudged too clumsily.
Louise’s reflection bobbed in the window. Mirrored beyond her, a white-hatted nurse carried a tray piled high with syringes and strips of muffy gauze. “Who for?” he wondered, imagining a patient strapped to a bed and doped against his will. In the past Emmet would not have noticed her. The staff had never seemed relevant; he had not guessed their power. Now the doctors strutted through their rounds, cocky with secrets.
Until he came to the ward, it had been Emmet’s habit to fall in love with his doctors. He had searched directories for their addresses and stalked their apartments after dark, reading the shadows flickering past windows, waiting to catch them entering or leaving. He had rung their telephones in the middle of the night to hear if a woman or a man answered, to discover clues as to what their lives were like.
Once he had followed his doctor to the grocery store and watched as he expertly tapped melons with his knuckles, as he thumbed the soft underside of the tomatoes, as he stroked the stiffness of the carrots and beans. Emmet had been mesmerized by the sureness with which he had handled the vegetables, deft as a surgeon. Emmet had followed him home. Hours later, the doctor walked to the movies with a man. Emmet chose a seat in the row behind, leaning forward so closely to listen that the doctor shook off his breath like the tickle of a roach’s foot. When they left the theater, the doctor’s pace quickened to a trot, but if he had noticed Emmet lurking behind, he gave no acknowledgement. That night when Emmet called the doctor’s number, no one answered, not even at dawn.
Emmet had never confessed to his doctors that he shadowed them like a detective. He had believed he loved them and did not want to be convinced otherwise. He had assumed he could behave any way he wanted. He had believed their hours together offered an unlimited freedom not permitted on the street. He had not foreseen that here, barricaded in their offices, the staff plotted against the patients, orchestrating their futures, and leaving them unequipped to fight back, even with all the desire and lawlessness they could summon.
“Hey, come see,” Louise said. She reached blindly behind for Emmet’s hand. They saw couples stroll across the grass in the quadrangle below, with books stacked on their arms, chatting easily. Emmet followed a girl as she cut a path from the library to the dormitory, whipping her braid behind her with every step. They saw clouds above her, even in the dark, whitening the sky.
“Looks like a storm, maybe a blizzard,” Louise said.
“Hmm,” Emmet murmured. He wanted to respond more warmly, but in his mind he replayed every word Dr. Franklin had uttered since his first day on the ward. He searched for a hint or sign of the plans the doctor withheld when he coaxed Emmet to talk about his life. Suddenly, when he was not in session, Emmet worried like someone left unattended by his captors, the door unlocked, uncertain if he had been abandoned to freedom or if they toyed with him, laying a trap at the hearth of his room.
“I don’t know snow,” Louise said. “In Florida you hardly ever get frost.” She spoke wistfully, pressing her face so closely against the pane that her cheeks pinkened from the pressure, as they would in a cold wind. She bunched her collar higher, almost to her ears.
Emily hailed them from the corner by the nursing station. Her voice rolled through the quiet, echo upon echo. She kissed Emmet’s cheek and nodded to Louise. The women stood together shyly, the wool of their blue sweaters mingling hairily, so that they seemed attached at the arm. Emmet felt a small satisfaction knowing that through him they had made their peace the past weeks. Emily’s cigarette slipped in her fingers. She shifted it to her other hand, absently, so that its tip singed Louise’s sweater. The wool hissed.
“Weird around here, huh?” she said, brushing away the smoldering hairs. Her palm was speckled with black cinders.
Emmet and Louise sighed in unison. Emily smiled expectantly, but neither spoke. She coughed as she joined them at the window, their three heads pinched into the same two feet of glass. Emmet wanted to hear the women speak excitedly of the day’s events, as was their habit, of the squabbles and shifting alliances that characterized their life on the ward. The first night in Emily’s room, he had hoped that life might continue indefinitely, as he often had in the past when he stepped into a rhythm that enveloped him so completely he could never imagine his contentment ending, no matter how many times it had before.
But in the awkwardness of the women’s smiles, he saw a disaffection pass between them, like a chill, as if they were meeting for the first time. He felt the spell of the last months break around him as they stood there, confounding each at precisely the same moment.
To dispel it, Emmet filled his mind with images of his friends talking late into the night, of shared dinners, of glances exchanged over the heads of doctors that had linked them in ways he had dreamed of possessing all his life. He tensed his body so that the images grew stronger, but Louise and Emily turned away from him, towards the window.
They watched a car race around a corner several blocks away, its lights beaming crazily in the dark. It skidded onto the curb, tilting a mailbox, smashing a newspaper stand, sending a garbage can sailing over its hood. Emmet imagined the squealing breaks, the clang of metal bouncing on the pavement, the sound of the newspapers skirting over the tar like tumbleweeds. But from where he stood, the violence passed noiselessly, like a film with no sound track.
“I love to drive fast,” Louise said. “Really race along the highway.”
“Even I’d like to have a car again,” Emmet said. “I used to pay cabbies just to cruise on the outer drive. I became so addicted I even budgeted for it. You could see things you never saw walking, almost like from an airplane, but you didn’t have to leave the ground.”
“No, no—I mean to really let loose,” Louise snapped. “I like to go so fast that everything out the window melts to a blur. I like to see the headlights behind me grow pinched as match heads. I like…ah, forget it.” The ridges of her knuckles blanched from red to white.
Emily cocked an eyebrow as she perched on the arm of Emmet’s chair. They had grown accustomed to waiting until Louise’s small furies broke like fevers. At the window, they sat like people transfixed on a long car journey, silently driving mile after mile.
“Funny how all these days go by and we forget we haven’t seen the sun,” Emily said finally. “But I don’t mind. I like artificial air or whatever it is they’ve got here. With lots of smoke,” she laughed, blowing rings that fluttered above them like webs.
“I used to bake in the sun,” Louise said, forgiving them. She tilted her face upward towards the lights. “I couldn’t get enough. I don’t even tan. I burn up, but I didn’t care. I used to love the way the wind blew in from the sea when it was hot and how my skin would get all fired by the end of the day. I could do that forever.”
“Who remembers?” Emily asked. “Funny, I get more patient the longer I stay. I’m not even sure if I still believe a miracle might happen if I wait around long enough. I’m not even sure that’s what I want. Weird that it could soon be ten years from now, time just floating along, and before we know it, we might have waited forever.”
“You may have to,” Louise said. “This place is nowhere.”
“Maybe,” Emily said petulantly. “But you forget. I pay cash. I asked to be here.”
“Well, I didn’t,” Louise said. “And now I’ve wasted all this time. For what? I never wanted to be protected. I gotta go, do you understand? I want to stay out all night. I want to get mail in a mailbox with my own little key and read the letters in bed. I want to cook dinner. I want to forget about myself and just have a day, you know what I mean? A regular boring day where I go to the store, take my clothes to the cleaners, maybe watch a little TV, nothing special. Eat cake. Whatever it is these people do. I wanna kiss somebody good-bye in the morning. I wanna job, you know; I want to go to work and have somebody say, ‘You look tired, Louise’ or ‘Nice dress, Louise,’ and if I like ’em, I’ll invite them to lunch and if I don’t, I’ll walk right on by. But not this—not this. I mean, a vacation’s one thing, but this…” She sneered at Emmet and Emily with as much distaste as she did the orange Naugahyde sofas and the plaid plastic tablecloths in the lounge. “Shit. If I’m gonna be locked up, I’d rather kill the President or something and rot in a regular jail. I wanna be someplace real again. Come on, guys, don’t you ever think about it, especially now? We could all go, like on a prison break or something?”
Emmet and Emily edged towards each other. They exchanged a look that people get when they know they’re about to be asked for money.
“Outside?” Emily said. “No, not me. I don’t want to go outside anymore.”
“How about you?” Louise asked, turning to Emmet.
In his plans, he had never imagined further than seeing his body step outside and into a new apartment with hardly a breath in between. It was trouble enough to imagine pushing his legs through the brass revolving door at the entrance to the hospital. He could not conceive how it would be if someone followed a few paces behind.
When Emmet lived with his grandmother, once she took him down to the harbor in San Francisco, where they could look upon Alcatraz rising from the island a mile offshore. From where they stood, he could separate the bars on every window, so close did they seem. Late that afternoon they rode the ferry across, and as evening fell, the lights of the city seemed almost to illuminate the stone walls of the prison. Emmet imagined the prisoners on their cots, the city wafting into their cells, tormenting them with another life so near at hand, yet unreachably far. He used to think how it must have been for them to dream of escape and know that when they cut the bars they were nowhere still until they had swum for hours over the dark, shark-ridden waves. Only a few attempted; the rest let the routine close upon them, like a life.
On the tour of the prison, the guide had told them how some prisoners grew so accustomed to living behind bars that they panicked when they were discharged. At the gate, a strangeness undid them. So desperate were they to return, they committed any small crime—smashing a window, stealing a purse, kicking a passerby—to send themselves back inside. The guide had shared this information as if to describe the criminals’ intractability, but even then, Emmet understood their dread. When he imagined leaving, he thought only of the ways he had forgotten how to live. In his other life, the simplest details had stumped him. He could not imagine how he might shop, work, do his banking, unconsciously, as others did. He did not know how to free himself from what he had become.
Emmet had not told Emily or Louise, but the past week he had tested the outdoors. He had requested passes to the cafeteria in the basement. He had sipped coffee in public. He had wandered along the corridors and peered into offices. He had stood at the revolving door and watched people come and go. But he had not yet ventured even to the stone steps of the path.
“I would like to read a paper and watch the news every day,” he said finally, hedging Louise’s question. He ran his fingers through the curls that sprouted newly from his head. “And I would like to get my hair cut,” he added, dreaming of how it had been to shave his fingers along the coarse bristle of his scalp.
“There you go,” Louise said.
“I would like to take a scented bath filled with bubbles in a deep marble tub and have nobody sitting on the rim to make sure I don’t drown myself,” Emily said.
“See,” Louise said, appeased.
“But I don’t want it enough to leave.”
“Jesus,” Louise said. “What’s with you guys? What’s the worst that can happen? You leave. You return. You’re back where you started.”
“Not exactly,” Emmet said. In his months in the ward, he had seen people come and go and come again, each time more quickly and easily than the time before. If he left too soon, he could see returning become part of him, like a second nature.
“If you hate it, you miss a week, tops,” Louise said.
“I already know I hate it,” Emily said.
“But you could go,” Emmet said, unsurely.
“Not alone, I can’t. You can get passes, remember? You can get the door opened. You can get me out.”
“Well, on that note, I’m off to bed,” Emily said, tapping her cigarette pack against her palm. She slipped her matchbook neatly into the cellophane wrapper. “Will I see you in the morning or are you taking the night flight?”
“In the morning,” Emmet said, yawning.
“You never know,” Louise smiled.
Emily switched off the light in the lounge behind her as she left. Across the room, the nursing station glowed orange, like a fireball at the end of a tunnel.
“Can’t see you anymore,” Louise said.
“Me neither.”
Emmet heard her pick at the meshed wire screen with her nails. “Please, I need air,” she said. “I want to feel it. I want to go out on my own two legs. I want it to be over one way or another. You with me? I don’t have anybody else I can ask.”
“But we’re too crazy to help each other,” Emmet said, his panic rising. “It’s like two junkies sharing a needle. We need someone else as a buffer. It can’t just be us.”
“There is no one else anymore,” Louise said. “Think about it.”
Emmet listed the people he still knew. His brother was out of reach. He was done with doctors. Bruce, Winston, and Daphne were gone. Even Margaret had been discharged to her husband’s care. Their world grew smaller and smaller. The ward was empty of any purpose except to drag out his days, longer and longer.
Louise moved close behind him, fluffing the hair at the nape of his neck. She massaged his back with her fingertips, thumbing the muscles bolted with tension, reading the bumps over his skin like braille.
“In the dark I’m just the same as you,” she said, propping her chin on his shoulder. Her perfume was so heavy that the scent became part of him. When he breathed, it was impossible to tell where she ended and the air began.
He leaned into her. He tried to imagine the life waiting for them on the outside. What he saw were two bodies tripping through fog and the smoke of burning buildings: everywhere around them the charred foundations of a city. He pictured them as the last two people on earth, who neither by choice nor by planning had become each other’s only chance, drawn together by a hopelessness they could not name, and so they lied and called it love.
“So, you with me?” she whispered. “Say yes.”
Emmet saw the lights on the highway below swing in the breeze like party lanterns on a cruise ship. “I will try,” he said.
“In the morning,” Louise said, moving away. “I don’t want to give you time to think about it. You’ll come up with all sorts of excuses to stay. If we’re gonna do it, we’ve just gotta fly. There’s nothing to prepare for. If you wait, they’ll smell the guilt. You’ll end up confessing to your doctor. Anybody can read you. They’ll know something’s up.”
“But we will have no provisions,” Emmet said, patting the empty pockets of his jeans.
“I’ve already packed my purse. I’ve got a few dollars. I know a fast route to the bus station. What else do we need?”
In his room, Emmet inventoried his possessions, piece by piece. He did not sleep. At first light, he dressed in multiple layers of clothes. He pulled on triple underwear, triple socks. He buttoned three shirts under a sweater. He was so thin, the layers of his clothes made him appear to be a person of normal weight. No one would notice him. He stole the liner from the trash can in his room and padded it around his waist. He could pack his surplus clothes in the bag once they got outside.
He went to his closet and unpinned the money he had hidden in his jeans. He spread the bills like playing cards on the sheet. He could barely form seven perfect rows. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty,” Emmet counted as his eyes raced across the dollars. He turned away before he finished, but already he knew there was not enough money left to begin a life. “This is a mistake,” his alarms sounded in his head. He wanted to ask Louise to postpone their escape, but he knew he was no match for her. She was determined to leave.
He felt his clothes thick about him. He stuck a bar of soap in his back pocket like a wallet stuffed with bills. He folded the real money between his sock and his shoe. It lumped under his foot, rough as a callus. He dreaded leaving so lightly. He would own nothing but the things packed about his body. Every time he changed places, he seemed to go with fewer and fewer possessions. Now there was almost nothing. He pressed the photograph of the dog Jonathan had left him under his shirt. It was slick and cold against his skin. He wanted to sneak into Jonathan’s apartment to kidnap her, but unless he pretended he was blind she would never be allowed on the bus. The dog could wait, until he sent for her, like a bride.
He waited until he heard the shifts change. He scattered papers messily on his desk and threw his favorite pair of jeans carelessly over the bed. He placed his toothbrush on the chair by the door with a slathering of clear blue paste swirled on its bristles. He dropped a small towel next to it. He spilled his prescriptions among his socks inside the top drawer. He left the lights on.
As he walked to the nursing station, he saw Louise reading a magazine in an easy chair parked by the door. She wore a red, plasticine car coat so stiff that its epaulets stuck from her shoulders like splints. Her hair was teased wildly over her head, jutting in long, rigid tufts. Her face was a palette of bright colors: a citrus yellow shadow for her eyes, a deep rose for her cheeks, a pure orange for her lips. He saw the shiny toes of black patent-leather pumps and a sheer glimpse of sparkled nylons under her wool pants. Her purse bulged at her feet.
Emmet calmed himself by concentrating on the pale skin of the charge nurse and the starched creases of her uniform. “I’m going to the cafeteria for coffee,” he announced.
“Okay,” she said.
He lifted the clipboard from the hook by the wall and signed his name. He noted the correct time. It was 7:03 A.M. “I’ll be back in the blink of an eye.”
She nodded, checking names off a roster of patients.
“Only a quickie,” he said.
“Have fun.”
“Can I bring you something back? A nice hot tea?”
“Nothing, no.”
Emmet patted his chest. “Cold this morning. I needed an extra shirt.”
“Bundle up,” she said, still looking down.
Emmet saw an orderly pushing a large metal cart stacked with cartons of milk and thermoses of coffee. He saw a nurse kneeling before an elderly patient, pushing a red pill between her lips. She dangled a paper cup in her free hand, like a bribe.
“Coffee smells good,” he called to the orderly.
“Fine morning,” he called to the nurse.
“Pretty robe,” he called to the patient. The pill stuck out from her lips like a tongue.
He heard Louise mutter “Jesus” as he passed her chair on the way to the door. He did not acknowledge her. He centered his finger over the round white button and pressed. He waited for a hand to snatch him from behind, but in an instant he heard the buzzer as the door swung free. He was stunned by a rush of heat and a dazzle of lights. He heard Louise fling her magazine to the floor as she rushed to his side.
“Let’s go,” she hissed as she stepped into the hallway. It was empty except for a janitor mopping the floor. Louise ripped the plastic identification bracelet off her arm with her teeth. She tossed it into the janitor’s cart as she raced past, shouting, “Run, Emmet, run.”
Emmet paused, like a bird gathering its wings before flight. He tied his laces into knots until his shoes bit his flesh. He counted to three. He saw the long stretch of green corridor, the glistening tile walls, the stairwell lit with a red exit sign. He saw the janitor study him, mop in hand.
“Am I going to do this?” he wondered as he watched Louise turn the first corner. He considered returning to his room, but her departing pulled him forward like a magnet.
“Wings, wings,” Emmet thought as he sprinted after her. He kept his head low. His sneakers made no sound on the floor as he ran, but Louise’s high heels clattered so loudly that he followed without having to look up, hearing her voice sailing ahead, “Run, Emmet, run,” as if she needed to feel the staff chased upon their heels, desperate to bring them back.