The Reflection (13 page)

A privilege of the “communal” patients was that they were allowed to receive mail. That, too, marked out the different categories of patients. The newcomers would be desperately keen to receive their letters, and nervy if the mailman was late or there was nothing for them that day. The regulars were more ambivalent; they didn’t jump up and pester the mailman like the newcomers, they patiently waited until he came around to them. But the old-timers were indifferent to the whole ritual. They got fewer letters than the others, and more often than not left them on the table unopened for the nurses to collect when they returned to their rooms. It was easy enough to understand why. For them, the outside world had simply ceased to exist. It had been squeezed out by the intense life of the mind peculiar to the psychiatric ward.

“Stephen Smith? Letter for you.”

“Couldn’t be. No one knows I’m here.”

“Take a look for yourself, bud.”

The name was carefully printed on the envelope, which had already been opened. I pulled out a single sheet of paper. The uncertain scrawl was hard to make out:

I put the letter down on the table by my armchair, then shoved it between the pages of a magazine. My hand was trembling as I did it, and I was also repeatedly shaking my head—a tic I seemed to have picked up from the other patients. I stared at the map of New York again, before shutting my eyes. I knew the layout of the city better now than I ever had when I’d actually walked its streets; I could visualize its avenues, subway stations, parks, districts. I fixated on the blank spot where the ink had rubbed off, and entertained a whimsy that the corresponding area in Manhattan might have disappeared as well.

In another part of my mind, though, I was working out the implications of the letter I’d received. The hospital people, or perhaps the police, had tracked down Smith’s father and, who knows, perhaps other members of his family. The letter did nothing to contradict the story I’d given the doctor. If anything, it confirmed it too well. What were the chances that Smith’s father might turn up in New York? Minimal, I supposed, given that the man was a barely literate alcoholic. I pulled myself up short: how did I know he was alcoholic? That was only a colorful bit of gloss I’d given Dr. Peters. Nonetheless, it felt true. Absurdly, the letter had moved me greatly, had almost brought me to tears, and another corner of my mind had conjured up a silly fantasy. What if I replied to the letter, taking the man up on his offer to stay with him and his wife? Perhaps it would be my ticket out of here. I’d be living in a family, as part of a family, something I’d never really
experienced. It might give me that emotional anchor I’d always lacked. My father had mentioned a stepson. Perhaps I could be an older brother to the boy, a mentor, which would give some shape to my own life. After all, my father had had his second shot at life. He’d remarried, moved to a new town. Why couldn’t I do the same?

I shook this ridiculous fantasy from my mind. At the same time, a new idea had taken root. Maybe this letter wasn’t real at all. Dr. Peters had fabricated it as some kind of trick or test, to see how I’d react. I worked my way back from this premise, trying to see why it might be true and how it might play out. But the line of thought quickly fizzled to nothing. It was too easy to get lost in speculation, with such a slender thread to follow. Too easy to succumb to the paranoia of the psychiatric ward, so contagious that even the doctors and nurses ended up infected by it.

A pudgy-faced, corpulent man tapped me on the shoulder: “Remember me?”

I scrutinized his features. For a moment I thought he might be an old patient of mine: the possibility of bumping into one here was something that had haunted me.

“No, I don’t.”

“You’re Smith, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“We worked together a few years ago. On the waterfront. Coimbra Shipping Company.”

“I … yes, I remember the job, don’t remember you.”

“Well, I’ll be … Guess I must have changed, even more than I thought. You really don’t know who I am?”

“I really don’t.”

“We used to go out drinking together. Say, whatever happened to that girl you were seeing? The foreign one? Pretty little thing.”

“She … she … we stopped seeing each other. I don’t know what happened to her.”

“I just can’t believe you don’t remember me. Torma. Joe Torma. We shared a flophouse room. On the Bowery. For a good month or so. You must remember that.”

“Yes. I remember that. I remember Joe Torma. You’ve put on weight. You look different. That’s all.”

“You had a fight with the boss, didn’t you? And then you took off. That’s the last I heard of you. What happened? How’d you smash up your face like that?”

“Things got bad. You know, same old story. Couldn’t find work, lost my girl. Couldn’t see a way ahead. Ended up throwing myself on the rails. Somehow I survived and they put me here … What about you?”

“Me? I stayed with the Coimbra people. Then one day I got slammed in the head with some timber we were loading. Fished out of the river and out cold for hours, so they tell me. Been in and out of hospitals ever since. I’m getting better though. I’ll be outta here soon. I’ll be back at work.”

I looked him over. One shoulder was slightly lower than the other, and so was one side of his face. He spoke hesitantly, out of the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t easy to understand what he was saying, and he seemed to have trouble saying it. All quite consistent with some severe craniocerebral trauma. I doubted he’d be back at work, not soon, not ever. In fact, I could already map out the rest of his existence, based on the life stories of patients I’d had. If lucky, they’d let him stay here in the hospital, which didn’t seem such a bad place, all things considered. But probably they’d let him go at some point. Without any support, he’d last a year or two on the streets at most. Or perhaps he had family to look after him, and then it would be longer. He wouldn’t be able to hold down a job, and he’d end up sitting at home all day listening to the
radio. He might take to drink. His personality would start to change. He’d become disinhibited, angry, violent, too fresh with the girls. Consequently he’d be increasingly left alone, which would only exacerbate the symptoms. He was perhaps around thirty now, and the serious decline would set in in around five years’ time. He’d be dead by forty, of a seizure, stroke, alcohol poisoning, or something else.

“Good luck, Joe. I’m sure you’ll be out soon.”

“Thanks. And good luck to you too.”

He loped over to one of the other armchairs. Strange how they were all arranged in a semicircle around the fireplace, even though it had clearly long been boarded up and wallpapered over. I watched him from a distance. Joe Torma. I knew no one of that name. He’d mistaken me for some other Smith—not exactly an uncommon surname. Or else, it was another of Dr. Peters’s ruses. He’d briefed Torma, asked him to pretend he knew me, as part of my ongoing treatment. There was that line about the Coimbra Shipping Company. Hadn’t I come up with something like that for Dr. Peters? There were times when it felt like I’d interiorized the doctor, that he was somehow observing me from the inside.

It was midafternoon. Torma was now dozing in his armchair. I rose from mine, and walked over to the window. The view was the same as from my room, only we were three floors below. Down in the courtyard there was an annex with a glass roof—it housed a printing press, one of the other patients had told me. The bright winter sunlight bounced off the roof, dazzling me. If I shaded my eyes a little, I could see the tiny reflection of myself in the glass down below, haloed by white light. I’d heard of a gruesome tragedy that had taken place here, a few years back. A patient had somehow gotten the bar frame off and jumped out, crashing through the glass below and impaling himself on a machine lever.

If I craned my head at a certain angle and looked up, I could just about see the balcony opposite my own room. Something was fluttering above the ledge. Was the woman out there? Difficult to tell, but I suddenly felt certain that she was. I moved away from the window, then made my way out of the communal room and up the stairs. If you left before the bell, you were supposed to tell the nurse in charge, and I’d probably get in trouble for not doing so, but I wasn’t thinking about that. Instead I was replaying in my mind a dream I’d recently had. I was in her apartment. I could see it all precisely, with a most undreamlike lucidity: the portrait on the wall, the corner kitchen with the icebox, the door through to the bedroom, the bed on which she lay. I was getting undressed, excited. She was waiting for me, I was eager to join her. At the same time, I’d felt an urge to go out on the balcony first. I stood there naked. Across the courtyard was the small window. I strained to make out the blurry figure staring through the bars.

Now I was walking along the corridor to my room. Just as I was about to go in, I heard a muffled thump that seemed to come from inside. It was as though someone had lightly banged the wall with his fist. A sense of unease invaded me, and I waited for a moment outside the door, but I couldn’t hear anything else. I turned the handle slowly. The room was cloaked in a gray light. I noticed a mark on the wall that I didn’t think had been there before. My notebook was on the floor. There was some white substance on the chair. I felt the presence of something, even before I saw it.

A small bird, a swallow I thought, lay on my bed, one wing tucked to its body, the other unfurled. Its head was cocked in my direction. I could see its eyes swivel as I moved into the room. Other patients would leave breadcrumbs for the birds on their windowsills, but I’d never done that. How
had it gotten in here? The window was firmly shut, just as I’d left it. Perhaps the nurse or cleaner had been in while I’d been downstairs. Perhaps she’d opened the window to air the room, then closed it upon leaving, without noticing that a bird had flown in. Not a very likely story, but I could think of no better one.

I watched the bird for several minutes. I imagined it flying in, suddenly finding itself in a closed world of alien geometry, then rushing at the window only to hit solid air. I imagined it flapping about desperately, dashing itself against the walls, until it dropped back exhausted onto the bed. I approached slowly, so as not to frighten it. I stretched my hand toward it, and cupped it gently off the bed. The bird offered no resistance. I could see and feel the palpitations of its tiny breast. Its eyes were dilated. I tucked the unfurled wing back to its body. Its head was pressed against my palm. I didn’t know whether it was injured or not, whether it would fly back out toward the light or fall helplessly to the glass roof. I looked through the bars to the balcony opposite, but to my surprise there was no one there.

I opened the window. Then I opened my hand.

It felt like midtown Manhattan, and the street signs confirmed that it was, but I didn’t recognize any of the buildings or landmarks. Odd, because this was a part of town that in theory I knew well. It was as if all the specifics had been stripped out, and I’d found myself in a generic version of the neighborhood. But after wandering about in a state of bewilderment for an hour or so, I turned a corner and it was like I’d crossed a boundary. I knew where I was again. I was back in my old life. There was the bakery where I sometimes bought doughnuts. The place where I got my shoes resoled. The hawker who sold me the
Times
. If anything, the street was too familiar, a vast simulacrum that had been waiting there for me to find it.

I was in sight of my apartment building, staring down at me from the other side of the intersection. The courtyard was through a gate, and then up the stairs was my door. The spare key I’d hidden under the carpet in the stairwell was no doubt still there. I imagined unlocking the door and walking through to the front room. Everything would be the same,
everything different. The records stacked against the gramophone player; the empty whiskey bottle; the novel opened face down on the table. The phone would ring. It would be the girl I’d flirted with over the summer, inviting me out for a drink. Or my secretary, with another appointment to add to my schedule. I’d speak briefly then put down the receiver. In the bedroom, the woman in the doorway was turned away from me, staring into another room that wasn’t there. I’d open the wardrobe that constituted an entire wall. Inside, a row of identical suits, shirts, ties. I’d change clothes and walk back out of the apartment, slamming the door behind me.

Why shouldn’t I be able to slip back into my former life like that? To do so would be no more extraordinary than the way I’d slipped out of it. I crossed the street. At closer range, I could see that the building wasn’t quite as it used to be. It was shabbier. The apartments that looked onto the street were now unoccupied. On the fourth floor, a window was broken. Even while I’d been living there, the block had been gradually emptying out. Presumably the owner wasn’t renewing leases; he probably wanted to redevelop the property. During my ten years in this neighborhood there’d been dramatic changes, as old tenement buildings had been torn down or remodeled into luxury residences. An uneasy superimposition of two worlds now existed; in some streets only a wall separated the super-wealthy from the families on relief in their cold-water walk-ups.

I’d fully intended to go into the building, but instead found myself walking right past it. At the end of the block was the diner I’d always breakfasted at, every weekend and most weekdays too. It had also changed, but I couldn’t really pinpoint how. Rather, I was the one who had changed, which had the effect of making strange what had been familiar. I sat down at my usual table. Next to me was a man I’d seen
there a hundred times—an insurance executive who lived on Sutton Place and was separated from his wife. There were a dozen other details I knew about him from overheard conversations. But if he were at all surprised to see me there, he didn’t show it.