The Reflection (12 page)

Why on earth was Untermeyer here in front of me now? He was asking me questions about Stephen Smith, and I was blankly regurgitating what I’d already recounted to the doctor. He was looking straight into my eyes, seemingly without a flicker of recognition. Could he really not see who I was? Had I changed so much? I let the Stephen Smith persona ramble on, while I tried to pull together an idea of what could have led Untermeyer here. Perhaps he was already working in the hospital. Perhaps he’d heard the story of a patient supposedly impersonating someone he vaguely remembered from student days. Intrigued, he’d asked Dr. Peters if he could see the patient … But I couldn’t quite make that story stand. Yes, he might not recognize me had he not been expecting to see
me. After all, I myself might not have recognized Untermeyer had I simply crossed by him in the corridor. But a one-on-one meeting with the background I’d just dreamed up—no, it was impossible, regardless of how much I’d changed.

As he took leave of me, I searched his face for some hint of double play. But I could see nothing in that smooth expanse, no sense of the mind behind it. For a moment I considered blurting out: “Don’t you remember me? Can’t you see who I really am?” But I held back. Even if I couldn’t piece together why, I had this feeling that Untermeyer’s appearance was some kind of trick. Perhaps a sly means of getting me to admit that I didn’t really believe in Stephen Smith.

Sitting on my bed, staring at the door that Untermeyer had just closed, I realized that if I were to persuade the doctor that I wasn’t shamming, then I’d have to go some way toward persuading myself as well. I had to mourn the death of Manne, while at the same time assist in the birth of Smith. Right now, the two felt equally distant from me. Equally unreal. I was located somehow in a void between them, observing both as if they were someone else.

Then I’d find myself turning inward. And I’d search. And there was nothing.

“David Manne.”

“What of him?”

“Who was he? Tell me about him.”

“He was my doctor. He visited me in the hospital. One day he came to discharge me. They didn’t want him to. There’d been an argument. Finally I was allowed out, on condition that I saw Dr. Manne once a week.”

“Which was what you did?”

“For a time, yes.”

“How did you learn so much about him?”

“We met on Friday afternoons. One day, he let slip that mine was his last appointment of the week. Afterward, I waited outside and saw him come out of the building. I followed him into the subway and home. So now I knew where he lived.”

“What did you do then?”

“I came back the next morning. I waited at the corner. I’d only been there a few minutes when I saw him come out again. He went to a diner across the street. He ordered eggs, bacon, toast, coffee. Later, I learned that he ordered the same thing at the same diner, every day. Anyway, he finished his breakfast, paid the check, and left. And I followed him.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to know who he was. How he passed his time. He knew everything about me, but I knew nothing about him. I thought it was only fair.”

“So what did he do?”

“Nothing special. He bought a newspaper. He went walking in the Park. Later on he took a subway downtown. He wandered around the Village for a while and stopped for lunch. He did some window-shopping and bought a book at a secondhand bookstore. He took the subway back uptown, went to another diner, read his book over dinner. Then he went back home.”

“How often did you follow him?”

“Every weekend. But it was mostly the same. Breakfast, a walk in the Park, a little window-shopping or maybe a museum or gallery. It never varied much.”

“Did he ever meet anyone?”

“Sometimes. There were young women. I remember one occasion. He’d gone into a phone booth and made a call. Which surprised me, because he’d never done that before.
Afterward, he’d ridden the subway up to the West Eighties or Nineties. He’d gone to a bar where a woman was waiting for him, in a booth by the window. She was young, well dressed, although not especially beautiful. At first they’d both seemed uneasy, embarrassed. But as time passed I could see them relaxing, leaning into each other. I watched them as they talked nonstop for about an hour. Eventually, it was time to go. He paid and then they were on the sidewalk, still talking, but I couldn’t catch what they were saying. I could just hear the tone of the voices, which sounded melancholy. Things were winding up. They were making the goodbye gestures. She kind of pecked him on the cheek. There was a pause, as if they both knew something else was needed. Then he almost lunged at her. They were in each other’s arms for a good minute or so. After that she walked off, without looking back. Manne just stood there for quite a while. I thought I could see tears on his cheeks but I wasn’t sure. He was badly shaken up, though, I was sure enough of that. He wandered back down into the subway, but I didn’t follow. Instead I went off in the other direction. I knew I had to find out who the woman was.”

“And did you?”

“Not then. But later, yes. She was Abby Speelman, Manne’s former wife.”

I couldn’t stop puzzling over the Untermeyer visit. No scenario I came up with really explained it. There was that odd coincidence: on the night in my apartment with Esterhazy in my bed, I had thought of Untermeyer, for the first time in years. I’d wondered whether the psychiatric unit he’d been setting up had had something to do with the Stevens Institute. And yet why on earth should I have been wondering that? Why should I have dragged up from my memory a chance
meeting from long ago? I reflected upon this conundrum on and off for days. Why should Untermeyer have sprung to mind, and how was that connected with his subsequent reappearance? But wasn’t this exactly the kind of coincidence that the deluded always fixated upon? Once more, the trouble of having no outside reference points, no guiding stars. The awful necessity of recreating the world from your own mind. At the same time, your sense of self diminishes, dissipated into the very world you’ve created.

Perhaps Dr. Peters
didn’t
actually believe I was Stephen Smith. My supposed suicide attempt, my “paranoid” beliefs, my seemingly bizarre behavior had all led to my being sent to a mental ward after the accident, but the “Stephen Smith” story was some new kind of therapy. A means of resolving personality problems at a remove, through the creation of a different persona … I’d vaguely heard of such a therapy, through journal articles I’d skimmed over. As thoroughly unlikely as this scenario was, it at least had the merit of making sense of the Untermeyer visit. He’d have known my identity, but had simply refrained from saying so. If this were the case, how should I now proceed? I sat there musing and losing myself down myriad paths of reasoning and fantasy for what seemed like hours, without ever coming to any firm conclusions.

“You once described to me the interior of Dr. Manne’s apartment. Your description matched the photos I was shown in the police file. You told me Manne had a gramophone player, and that he liked Beethoven. Gramophone recordings of Beethoven sonatas were found in his apartment. How did you know these things?”

“It’s not hard to guess the layout of a Manhattan apartment.
As for Beethoven, I have no idea. He must have told me himself.”

“Did he tell you about the painting on his bedroom wall? The bottle of whiskey in the cupboard?”

“I suppose he must have.”

“Have you ever been in Manne’s apartment?”

“No.”

“You’ve never been in Manne’s apartment.”

“No. Does it matter?”

“You’ve been there. I know. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“All right … if it means so much to you. One day I followed Manne from only four or five paces behind. I don’t know why. Perhaps I’d actually wanted him to turn around and see me. He never did. When he finally went back home, I’d sneaked into the building behind him. I waited at the bottom of the stairs as he climbed up to the second floor. I could hear him fumbling around in his pockets for his keys, and not finding them. He’d left them somewhere, or had maybe accidently shut them inside. I quietly climbed up a little until I could see him. Now he was crouched down, halfway up the next flight of stairs. He took a key from under the carpet, then went back to his door and opened it. So now I knew where he kept his spare key.”

“And you used it?”

“Yes. That was a Sunday. The next morning I waited until Manne had left for his office. I got into his building and dug out the key from under the carpet. I opened his front door and walked in. It was a weird thrill to be there. The apartment was stark and bare, just how I’d imagined it. His bed was neatly made, I noticed, whereas I rarely made mine, unless I was sleeping with someone. On the wall was a large portrait of a nude. I wondered whether it was Manne’s former wife, but I wasn’t sure. She was pictured standing in a doorway, looking
through to a room you couldn’t see, and perhaps to another person there. It seemed to capture the moment before or after something. The eroticism was at odds with the severity of the rest of the apartment, and gave me a new sense of who Manne might be. For a second I had the impression that the room the woman was looking into was real, that I might go through the canvas and discover its secrets myself. I walked back to the front room, then through to a tiny kitchen, maybe to escape the picture. There was a cupboard. In it I found a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and poured some into a tumbler. I opened a drawer. A pack of cigarettes was shoved down the back. I pulled one out. I lit it with a book of matches that had the name “Le Zinc” printed on its cover. Under that was an address I knew, a place I drank at in the East Fifties, not far from Manne’s apartment. It wasn’t called Le Zinc, though. It was Albert’s Bar & Grill. Perhaps I was mistaken. But I knew the street well, since I’d once worked there, and there was nothing called Le Zinc on it. I pondered that for a moment. I’d had no breakfast, and the whiskey was going to my head. I went back to the sitting room. In the corner was a gramophone player, with a dozen or so records stacked up against it. I pulled one out at random, cranked up the player and put it on. A mournful piano piece barely broke through the clicks and scratches. It added to my sense of foreboding. I didn’t know why I’d put it on, because I’ve never liked gramophone recordings. There’s something ghostly about them. I stood there feeling transfigured, as if in a scene or a photograph. The apartment was no projection of Manne, it
was
Manne. The painting of the nude, the whiskey, the matchbook, the music, the scratches of a record that had been played a thousand times before. The special intimacy of a room seen and lived in by one person only. I threw up my hands in front of me and felt I barely recognized them. I resisted the desire to
look at myself in the mirror. I pushed my hands back into my pockets as if to banish them from sight. I could feel my lucky coin in my left pocket. It had been given to me by a Portuguese sailor, for the drink I’d bought him. I pulled it out and placed it on Manne’s table. And then I left.”

Perhaps I’d passed some kind of test, because soon after Untermeyer’s visit I was allowed into the communal room. The scene there was familiar to me from my time as a psychiatric intern, even if I was now seeing it all from the other side of the looking glass. The dozen or so men sunk deep into shabby armchairs, dozing or staring at the garish wallpaper; a few more playing a desultory game of cards around a green table; others absorbed in their often eccentric hobbies; the dirty net curtains hanging over the barred windows. I recognized the different types of patient, too—an arc that stretched from the newcomer (anxious, nervy, solitary) to the regular (more vocal, sociable, highly sensitive to status), then finally to the old-timer, who’d slipped into a deathly routine from which he would now never be shaken. I was surprised at how easily I slotted into this scheme of things: how I too would sink into my armchair, refusing to meet the eyes of the others or enter into conversation with them.

Occasionally I’d glance through one of the magazines
lying about, invariably an ancient copy of
Life
or
Look
, never anything remotely current. The radio, too, would warble old show tunes from before the war, forever shrouding the patients in a forgetful nostalgia. On the walls were faded pictures of New York landmarks—the Empire State Building, Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park—like images from a collective dream. A large map of New York hung above the mantelpiece. When the mood struck me, I could spend hours staring at it, daydreaming about places I’d been to or tracing out past journeys. Living in Manhattan, I’d sometimes found its grid-like cityscape oppressive, but now I marveled at the simplicity and perfection. In my state of incarceration, it seemed to me that the map was real and the city a mere abstraction of it. There was a shiny blank spot in the midtown area, not far from where my old apartment was—the ink had rubbed off because so many people had put their finger there. It was no doubt where we were located. I’d always assumed we were somewhere downtown. I knew all the psychiatric hospitals in Manhattan, and could think of none where this was supposed to be. It was a shock to realize how close I was to where I used to live. In my mind, the hospital and the apartment were almost metaphysically different worlds. They couldn’t possibly be only twenty minutes’ walk from each other.

I noticed the slurring speech and shuffling gait of a couple of the inmates. It might have been early onset dementia—common enough among middle-aged psychiatric patients—or any number of other things. But I knew it was evidence of leucotomy. The procedures could have been done in another hospital, but why not right here? Perhaps they’d already done it to me. After all, the doctor would never tell the patient about the leucotomy, either before or after. The patient was of course aware that
something
had been done to him, but not what. In my case, such a procedure could have been carried
out while I was anaesthetized, and they were taking the staples out of my head. Objectively, how could I tell? Perhaps it was consistent with this vacuum I now felt inside me, this sense of being no one or anyone.