“And that’s why this ward goes by that awful name? Do you really think Marian’s depression is incurable?”
“Post-Mortem Depression is like no other depression. Unfortunately, none of the fashionable potions psychiatrists prescribe these days work on the human body in our world.”
“So what exactly are you doing here?” Ben snapped. “In what way are you and the other members of your staff helping her out of this terrible depression?”
“We let her be.”
“Excuse me?”
“As opposed to other mental illnesses, which can be cured or alleviated with games, discussions, drills, and a whole host of other therapeutic means, PMD is best not tampered with, and believe me when I say I speak from experience. Aside from the futility of struggling frantically to make conversation with patients who are divorced from reality, even if they manage to break free from the prison of their memories for a short while, they will view any violation of their privacy as an impingement and will only crawl deeper into their warm shell of estrangement. History has taught us that the best way to deal with them is to simply let them be, and, to my delight, I can report that some seventy-five percent of patients from the second group show a full recovery.”
“When you say recovery…”
“I mean accepting this world and coming to terms with the final separation from the former one. I mean being born again, and pardon my contradiction in terms.”
“Why then is the ward called ‘incurable diseases’?”
“Because we do not take any invasive measures. From our perspective, as a medical institution, we do not offer any cures, aside from the necessary solitude.”
“But how does one get better if the sum total of the treatment you offer is zero? I’m sorry, but I’m just having a hard time understanding what prevents a depressed individual from merely wallowing in his misery. I mean, isn’t that one of the great and infamous temptations of those with suicidal or self-pitying tendencies, and don’t for a second think that my wife fits into either of those pigeonholes, but…”
“I know, Mr. Mendelssohn. On one of the few times I happened to visit her in her room, I saw a few scenes of the two of you together, and it’s all too clear to me that she was an energetic and altogether impressive woman—further evidence of how dangerous this disease is. And still, there is no better way to treat those afflicted by it. For all intents and purposes, the dying space we give them is unlimited. You want to rot in front of the TV screen for forty years? Go right ahead. And regarding your question about curing patients, I know how ludicrous this might sound, but, in the end, they just get sick of it. They get sick of their existence in the bubble they’ve so meticulously cultivated and they just pop it and go free. We had an eighty-nine-year-old PMD patient here who sat like a sloth in front of the TV for seventy-four years … seventy-four years she refused to move, and then, one fine morning, she just got up and left.”
“Maybe she went somewhere else to punch in a seven over three?”
The alias smiled compassionately. “If there’s one thing PMD patients don’t believe in, it’s death.”
Ben nodded in understanding. “The worst figure relates to the time that passes from the diagnosis till recovery. Can you say why it takes so long?”
“Of course. In most cases they’re so enchanted by their ability to watch their cherished lives, that during the first two years or so they skip through the tapes and watch particularly moving moments, the milestones, if you will, of their existence. Once they’ve seen the special moments enough times, they sink into a painstakingly detailed documentation of their lives, watching it all in real time.”
“In real time?”
“Yes. You lived forty years, then you spend four decades of your death w—”
“Have you ever considered destroying the tapes? Just putting an unflinching wall in their face?”
“Mr. Mendelssohn, you’ve been in this room for ten minutes. We’ve been living here generations. Any idea that comes to your mind has already been tested, evaluated, and reevaluated. For your information, the destruction of the tapes is a crime if perpetrated by anyone other than the owner of the tapes, and the temporary confiscation of said tapes for healing purposes has led to nothing more than the aggravation of the divorce between the patient and their surroundings.”
“And what about me?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sure I could help heal Marian. After all, I know her better than anyone else.”
“You know the former Marian better than anyone. As for the new incarnation, allow me to be skeptical about the depth of your knowledge and utility of your meeting her.”
“I don’t believe she’s changed so profoundly.”
“Because, like her, conceptually, you’re still stuck in the previous world.”
“I think you’re mistaken.”
“Mr. Mendelssohn, we both know you have nothing but the best intentions. Let’s just hope you were wise enough to prepare for the worst.…”
“The worst is already behind me. From here on out things can only get better.”
“You insist on seeing her, then?”
“Did you think otherwise?”
“I thought I might deter you from making this mistake.”
“Mistake? What’s mistaken about truly wanting to see your wife?”
“The refusal. The stubbornness. The childishness. The lack of comprehension. The ignorance. The woman you will see is not your wife. As far as she is concerned, death has rendered you absolute strangers.”
“And you’re trying to protect me from the chilling confrontation with the naked truth?”
“That’s somewhat parabolically put, but not too far off the mark. If you want my advice, I say go back whence you’ve come and try to understand that there’s no use in this romantic nonsense. I have full respect for your surging martyrdom but it is fundamentally gratuitous. You are absolutely unaware of the dimensions of the ensuing disappointment, and that’s leaving aside the cliché about a hundred years being like a drop in the sea of eternity. Do you really expect that if and when she recovers she will leave this place and come running straight into your arms, weeping with heartbreaking longing? Do yourself a favor and imagine your reaction when she looks you over coldly and says you are part of the past, like the tapes she destroyed, like this place. The damage you will bring on yourself will be immeasurably greater. All I ask is that you take a clear-eyed look at the whole picture.”
“You don’t have such a great view of the whole picture yourself. After all, you base your entire prognosis on other stories and are dangerously close to a criminally crude generalization when you ask me to leave without having seen my wife.”
270 sighed with learned desperation. “People always make the same mistake. They convince themselves that their story is different, unique, special. Good luck.”
* * *
Ben trailed behind him, head down, eyes examining the gleaming floor. He tried to forget everything he had heard from the moment he set foot in the cursed hospital, if it was possible to so label this serene hotel, with its expansive views of empty, manicured lawns and its ghostly tenants in their noisy rooms. From behind each door came the sounds of vitality, bubbling conversations, intimate quarrels, lovers’ moans, dozens of horrifyingly accurate sound bites from scenes shot in one take, no rehearsal, no help from a prompter, pure improvisation, unpolished by screenwriter or director, a stylized fantasy, because behind the doors there wasn’t an iota of life, behind them life was being recycled with the diligence only death can deliver.
The firm partition the sick placed between the two worlds enraged him; all of a sudden everyone had become a righter and decided to end their stories where they saw fit without seeking the advice of an expert; all of a sudden everyone had seized the fine excuse offered by death and shut the book with limp hands, unwilling to write another word, sitting in their sofas and reading the dead words ardently in a pathetic imitation of a conclusion. Marian, too, was among the righters. She, too, had sunk into the depths of the couch, tossed away her writing instruments, and brought about a premature end. His task was complex and difficult. He had to emancipate his love from the talons of the past and show her that their future lay before them. He had to prove to her that he, of all people, who used to jangle a chain of keys and lock stories up for others, could cut an ingenious key of his own, which would open the glorious horizon for her, would ever so carefully unlock the firmly sealed ending.…
Before he had a chance to fully unravel the thought, his tour guide stopped suddenly, offered a second “good luck,” and turned on his heels. Ben examined the orange door. At first he had no idea how the alias knew Marian’s door from all the others, since there was no name, number, lock, or any other identifying sign on it. Only when he looked up and down the hall and saw at least twenty doors, each in a different shade, did he understand that each patient had been given their own color, and thought to himself how intentional it was that the woman who so hated orange had been put in this specific room. He decided not to dawdle, fixed his hair with four jittery fingers, closed his eyes, and put his ear to the door, straining to hear what part of life his wife was listening to at the moment, as though his timing vis-a-vis her viewing would influence the nature of the meeting. There was not so much as a murmur within the room. Maybe she’s watching us sleep, he thought, and knocked on the door. Answered only by a deep silence, he put a sweaty palm on the door and pushed gently. The submissive panel of wood opened with a soft sigh and he entered the absolute darkness. He called her name hesitantly and then again, confidently.
* * *
“Benji?” The tired voice stripped the darkness away.
He turned his head toward the source of the familiar voice and answered, “Yes.”
The long silence that greeted him did not leave him bewildered, and he asked pragmatically, cloaking the tremble that went up and down his body, “Where’s the switch?”
“Leave the light off,” she suggested coyly, giggling.
Ben smiled as he felt his way through the darkness until his nostrils were flooded with the bittersweet smell of perfumed skin and he bent down and patted the open space longingly. His wandering hand stopped when it recognized her small, upturned nose. He took a long moment to reacquaint himself with her welcoming face, and in the midst of the most luminescent blindness he’d ever known, a soft dainty hand took his and led it with deliberate leisure to her belly button. His hand glided around her belly button in circles, sending forth ripples of pleasure, Marian’s signature sign of desire, one of many secrets from their bedroom lore, and an unmistakable one at that. She pulled him toward her with sure hands, her body rising to meet him, bewitched and bewitching, a mound of flesh and blood craving to rub up against a longed-for skyline, to realize the only remaining dream, the impossible, the inexplicable. He was shocked by the purifying warmth that spread beneath his skin, the feeling of a man who has come home after a long time away, and even if the house is cloaked in darkness he is still able to pick out its scents, the trapped air in the closed rooms, the history smiling possessively from every corner, lying in wait and appearing suddenly, the house which is a detailed map of every movement and meditation. An instant after he opened the door and dared to enter, Ben already found himself wandering through the rooms, verifying that absolutely nothing had changed during his fifteen months away, opening one door and slamming another, pulling up blinds and drawing the drapes, straightening chairs, realigning the furniture, clearing away obstacles, making lanes, and, surprisingly, she did not reject him like a miffed dwelling, she accepted him with the passion of longing, and the moment was invincible, an unmatchable summit meeting between the home and the dweller, especially when her fingers sensed the sinewy tissue on his body, the slenderness she was so fond of that had been coated with unimaginable brawn. He could not have fathomed a warmer welcome, storming the contents of the house with impressive greed, leaving his mark on every object, shaking the walls, oozing with pleasure at the moaning roof held captive between his lips, huddling in the fissures between the damp tiles and skillfully skipping between every goose-bumped brick.
Finally, when Marian announced her satisfaction with a satiated moan, her ecstatic husband sighed and caressed her hair, thinking she’d say something, and yet she was unassailably mute. Even his whispered, “I missed you…” did not earn a reply. He gazed at her for a long while, seeing only what the darkness allowed, little fragments of Marian that his imagination fleshed out. The annoying alias’s words pecked at his mind, sounding like a baseless theory in the moments after their rational lovemaking in the bed where they were returned to the days of yore. A hint at what the future held—his lips spread in an optimistic smile. The alias had overstated the effects of the illness. I would have done the same exact thing had I died first. She did not stray from the normal. She simply broke down. That’s all.
It was the hushed voice that woke him from his rumination, the internal voice that managed to sneak away and settle near the base of her throat, the voice no one is supposed to hear but the speaker, whispering surreptitiously, expecting no answer. “That was so real you’re here next to me behind me in front of me above me underneath me this time I managed to feel you even to hear you you asked where the switch was and I asked that you not turn on the light because even though I was dreaming I was scared that if you turned on the light I’d wake up and understand and I really wanted you to stay really didn’t want you to go because only in the dark do I see you only in the dark do I feel you only in the dark do I know you’re here and that nothing will change the fact that you’re here not even the other patients in the other rooms I hope you’re not one of them there already was one who claimed he was Ben but he didn’t know what to do with my belly button so I chased him away and I shut the light and I went to sleep just like I do every day there’s nothing new under the sun so what use is there in turning on the light it’s not real not tangible definitely not like the way you were today I couldn’t believe it I still can’t believe that you made it and that you made me think you were real like in the movie I finally managed to bring you to me all thanks to the dark my love it did it all it kept the fire going I’m the only one who can see the spark I can smell you even now and hear those short breaths of yours but that will be our little secret I promise not to tell anyone if you keep on coming to visit me while I’m sleeping sweeten this nightmare flood me with promises we’ll keep it between us just like now Marian met Benji Marian was right and that idiotic alias was wrong he said I would never find you in this room between these walls outside the tapes and lo and behold you came and I’m not upset that you left because I’m sure you’ll be back tomorrow I know you have things to do probably another story to finish I’m busy too I still haven’t found the missing week like a black hole sometimes it confuses me where have seven days disappeared to I’m not sure I’ll find them but I’ll keep on looking and you keep trying to sneak into my room oh how I love you sweet Benji trying to find the perfect ending and I’m just here hanging out well not really because my ending was written long ago and now I’m just blabbing………………”