In our parallel world, things happened that had not yet happened in the world we’d come from. When they finally happened outside, we found them familiar because versions of them had been performed in front of us. It was as if we were a provincial audience, New Haven to the real world’s New York, where history could try out its next spectacle.
For instance, the story of Georgina’s boyfriend, Wade, and the sugar.
They’d met in the cafeteria. Wade was dark and good-looking in a flat, all-American way. What made him irresistible was his rage. He was enraged about almost everything and glowed with anger. Georgina explained that his father was the problem.
“His father’s a spy, and Wade’s mad that he can never be as tough as his father.”
I was more interested in Wade’s father than in Wade’s problem.
“A spy for us?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Georgina, but she wouldn’t say more.
Wade and Georgina would sit on the floor of our room and whisper. I was supposed to leave them alone, and usually I did. One day, though, I decided to stick around and find out about Wade’s father.
Wade loved talking about him. “He lives in Miami, so he can get over to Cuba. He invaded Cuba. He’s killed dozens of people, with his bare hands. He knows who killed the president.”
“Did he kill the president?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Wade.
Wade’s last name was Barker.
I have to admit I didn’t believe a word of what Wade said. After all, he was a crazy seventeen-year-old who got so violent that it took two big aides to hold him down. Sometimes he’d be locked on his ward for a week and Georgina couldn’t get in to see him. Then he’d simmer down and resume his visits on the floor of our room.
Wade’s father had two friends who particularly impressed Wade: Liddy and Hunt. “Those guys will do anything!” Wade said. He said this often, and he seemed worried about it.
Georgina didn’t like my pestering Wade about his father; she ignored me as I sat on the floor with them. But I couldn’t resist.
“Like what?” I asked him. “What kinds of things will they do?”
“I can’t reveal,” said Wade.
Shortly after this he lapsed into a violent phase that went on for several weeks.
Georgina was at a loose end without Wade’s visits. Because I felt partly responsible for his absence, I offered various distractions. “Let’s redecorate the room,” I said. “Let’s play Scrabble.” Or “Let’s cook things.”
Cooking things was what appealed to Georgina. “Let’s make caramels,” she said.
I was surprised that two people in a kitchen could make caramels. I thought of them as a mass-production item, like automobiles, for which complicated machinery was needed.
But, according to Georgina, all we needed was a frying pan and sugar.
“When it’s caramelized,” she said, “we pour it into little balls on waxed paper.”
The nurses thought it was cute that we were cooking. “Practicing for when you and Wade get married?” one asked.
“I don’t think Wade is the marrying kind,” said Georgina.
Even someone who’s never made caramels knows how hot sugar has to be before it caramelizes. That’s how hot it was when the pan slipped and I poured half the sugar onto Georgina’s hand, which was holding the waxed paper straight.
I screamed and screamed, but Georgina didn’t make a sound. The nurses ran in and produced ice and unguents and wrappings, and I kept screaming, and Georgina did nothing. She stood still with her candied hand stretched out in front of her.
I can’t remember if it was E. Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy who said, during the Watergate hearings, that he’d nightly held his hand in a candle flame till his palm burned to assure himself he could stand up to torture.
Whoever it was, we knew about it already: the Bay of Pigs, the seared skin, the bare-handed killers who’d do anything. We’d seen the previews, Wade, Georgina, and I, along with an audience of nurses whose reviews ran something like this: “Patient lacked affect after accident”, “Patient continues fantasy that father is CIA operative with dangerous friends.”