“I don’t write the diary much anymore,” Rachel said. “I don’t read hers except for one hour a day. Exactly one hour. My grad school recovery was authentic.”
I was on my third beer, she her second, the two of us at the dining room table as if we owned the house. She lit a cigarette, placed it in an ashtray, and reached one hand into the pocket of her jeans, from which she withdrew two large pills, white and oval-shaped. “I have to take these every day,” she said. “Lithium. Not to be confused with Librium, which is a tranquilizer—very nice. Lithium is usually prescribed for depression or manic depression, but the OCD drugs they tried on me didn’t help, so when in doubt, lithium it is.”
“Not to sound like a broken record, but why that book?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Why any book? My sister Bethany is anorexic. Why does a girl who is thirty or forty pounds underweight think she’s fat? You’re right, there probably is more to it than that, but the doctors can’t figure it out. There are some similarities between the van Houts and the Franks, you know. Dad is the only male of the house. He has a wife and four daughters. Otto Frank had a wife and two daughters. The van Houts left one country to live in another. The Franks left Germany to live in Holland, and that’s where my dad was born. I made my first trip to Holland when I was eight, which was Anne Frank’s age when she moved there.”
“Wouldn’t a book about a family that has a happy ending be better?”
“Better or worse doesn’t come into it when you’re sick. Well, maybe worse does. Het Achterhuis has no ending. That might be why I couldn’t stop reading it. Can’t stop.”
“Well, they all die, don’t they?”
“No one dies in her diary. Not to beat a dead horse, ha ha, but you really can’t have read it very carefully. After they were captured, all of them but Otto died in concentration camps. But you only find out about their deaths in the foreword or introduction, or maybe the afterword, depending on the edition. But I always tear those out when I get a new copy. I only read what Anne Frank wrote.” She took a swig of beer. “You have that look in your eye again. I don’t like your chances of becoming the poster boy for open-mindedness.”
“No. No, it’s just the opposite. I’ve never met anyone who was anything like you.”
“Like I am now, or like I was when I was sick? Is that the me you’ve fallen for?”
“No—just sometimes I worry that I can’t keep up with you.”
“I couldn’t keep up with me either. ‘Beeile dich nicht, ruhe dich nicht aus.’ Do not hurry, do not rest, that’s my motto now. It’s from Goethe.”
For an hour some evenings, we sat across from each other in the front room, she reading her daily dose of Het Achterhuis while I read whichever book I was immersed in at the time. Every now and then, she looked up and smiled at me. I smiled back, sometimes wondering if she might be as mentally disturbed as she admitted she was widely assumed to be. I didn’t often have such thoughts. One day, she told me she had written a poem about me, about how lightly I slept:
The slightest sound keeps him awake;
it seems to him all things can make
some sort of sound, some sort of squeak.
He wonders why the wind must blow,
he hates the din of falling snow.
They say that, were he deaf, he’d hear
the sound a mouse makes on the stair;
they say he cannot stand the sound
that earthworms make while underground;
they say that, if he had no ears,
he’d hear mosquitoes cleaning theirs.
The ticking of the kitchen clock
is no worse than the sound a sock
makes inside the dresser drawer—
he cannot stand a sock that snores.
I loved it. I laughed, and she loved that. “You don’t often laugh,” she said. “Your whole face changes.”
She said she hated wasting one of the few hours we had together reading a book she knew by heart. “But I’m glad you’re here to time me.”
Whenever I declared that the hour was up, she closed her book without marking her page, ran upstairs and put it in her closet. Once, when she came back down, she said, “I feel as if I’m on the verge of not needing to read that book at all.”
I felt envious of her, even after it occurred to me that The Encyclopediary might be nothing but gibberish, millions of words made up of randomly chosen letters of the alphabet. That would point to a madness far more prolonged and profound than the one she had confessed to. Still, she didn’t seem like someone who had ever been that far gone. I decided that, whatever her state of mind when she wrote, she had, by the age of twenty-one, produced what even Thomas Wolfe might consider to be a lifetime of writing. I imagined an exhaustive autobiography teeming with details, digressions, reams of self-reflection. Freed of her mania, her demons, whatever they were, what might she one day write? I felt plodding, methodical, hopelessly uninspired in comparison with her. But my envy always gave way to admiration and the certainty that she had felt, far more profoundly than anyone I would ever know, the inscrutable urge to write, to depict the chaos of the world in words. She had almost died trying to complete what I had yet to work up the nerve to begin.
I’d watch her as she read. No one I’d known was compelled to do anything to the point of breaking down. Who cared so much that it drove them mad? Unlike me, she was living, not preparing to. I imagined the thirteen-year-old she had been, diarizing in a frenzy night after night, the eighteen-year-old who, though she knew the risks, dove so deep into her mind that she hit bottom and would have died if not for the voices she heard calling to her from above. Sometimes I went to her and lay my head on her lap, where, eyes closed, I listened as she turned the pages, as if, in her mind, she was reading the diary to me.
From The Arelliad
THE SIREN OF DUPLICITY (1983)
The sirens come ashore at night,
their lights unlike the lighthouse light,
the yellow light that comes and goes
at intervals that no one knows.
In coves you cannot find on maps,
they gutter in the wind, perhaps,
or else they go out when the waves
wash deep enough into the caves.
They do not stop until Cape Spear,
for sirens know what happens there.
In any case, they soon come back.
The flickering along the wrack
continues until morning comes.
The sirens, now that night is done,
must go back to the sea and hide—
they lost their voices when they died.
They cannot sing their secret song,
“The Mystery of Right and Wrong”;
they know the words but no one who
would sing them truthfully to you.
The sirens make their way along the coast from cave to cave until they reach the lighthouse at Cape Spear. The flickering along the wrack continues long past midnight. When the last of the sirens have gathered on the rocks below the Light, they try to sing as they once did, but cannot make a sound, so they write the words by candlelight, the scratching of their pens the closest thing to music they have managed since the Light lured them ashore.
When they are done, they file back the way they came, retiring to their caves, where they must stay till morning comes. By day they don’t do anything but swim about, remembering when they could sing in voices someone stole from them.
The man who came in from the sea might have heeded the warning of the song they couldn’t sing if I’d sung it for him properly, for I, you see, still have my voice. I sold my soul; I made my choice. I changed the words of “The Mystery of Right and Wrong” to suit another melody, the siren song of treachery.
Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t write, unless he does but never shows a word to me, the Anne Frank Freak who wouldn’t get the kind of book he thinks is great. Or he may be afraid to show me anything, worried he may not write as well as me.
But then, he’s never read a word of what I write, nor has he heard the language that I
brought ashore
the night that I was banished for
the murder of the Shadow She,
a siren now because of me.
When I betrayed the Sisterhood,
they sent me to the yellow wood,
where I must stay till I atone,
landlocked for leaving Anne alone.
Arellia’s the place for me,
the siren of duplicity.
But other sirens leave the sea;
Anne, Margot and the Shadow She,
The Frank sisters, the girl in black—
the three of them keep coming back,
sometimes in twos, sometimes in threes,
three sirens only I can see
who roam the yellow wood with me.
They want something, I know they do,
they blame someone—not one, but two.
The rhymes and metre of The Ballad creep back into my prose, sometimes swallowing whole paragraphs. Is this a thing that has to be, presentiment or fantasy?
Uzgv. Fate.