Gordon tugs his sideburns. “No worse. They did some more blood tests and they came back normal.”
“Who would have thought she had normal blood?” Marcia says.
For three days that’s how it goes. No better, no worse, no fight, no movement. Specialists are consulted and order yet more blood tests. Before Joan was admitted, she was already a well-known case in medical circles—the girl whose retarded physical development no syndrome could definitely account for. The pint-sized idiot savant. Now she seems to be attracting every white coat in the city, mostly useless curiosity-seekers or self-serving researchers, Gordon suspects, but how can he speak up when there’s a chance that one of them might help her? Each leaves his mark on her inner arm. Arms scarcely wider than the I.V. tube, you’d think a needle would splinter them. Was she always this thin? Well, you can’t tell Gordon she was always this white. It’s not her regular bone pallor, it’s like icing, like a glaze.
“She’s trying to turn herself into a doll,” Marcia says after an hour of staring at her and not getting through and then going outside to smoke a joint and coming back to stare at her for another hour.
“Is that what she says?” Doris asks. She is clipping Joan’s toenails.
“She isn’t saying anything. I’m saying. I shouldn’t have thrown out my dolls.”
“I agree with you there,” Doris says. “But that has nothing to do with this.”
“It does. I’m not sure what, it just does.”
“For crying out loud!” (No flinch from Joan. They all glance at her to see.) Doris drops the nail clipper into her purse and whips the blanket over Joan’s feet. She stands, rapidly tucks the blanket in, goes to the table and starts rearranging the mess there. “You sound like you’ve lost your marbles,” she hisses at
Marcia. With a sleight-of-hand speediness she moves around two drinking glasses and a “Get Well Soon” coffee mug.
“You still think she’s doing this to herself?” Gordon asks Marcia. He pats her shoulder. He can see how Doris has hurt her feelings.
“I
know
she is,” Marcia says.
A nurse comes into the room, but before she can speak, Doris says, “I don’t want to hear that! I don’t want to hear how she’s doing this to herself! I feel like I’m in
The Exorcist,
for pete’s sake! Everybody getting the heebie-jeebies and … and … peeing on the carpet!”
The nurse laughs. A nervous titter. (You can hardly blame her for supposing she is meant to, the way Doris, when she’s this angry, sounds thrilled to death, but since that is out of the question the nurse’s next guess would be that she is an overwrought mother trying hard to keep everybody’s spirits up.)
That titter sticks with Marcia like a finger strumming the frets of her brain. The whole drive home in the car she is tortured by it. “This is awful,” she says, clutching her head. No one asks, What is? Sonja, though, gives her the ball of wool to hold and that helps.
For the time being, Marcia has moved back home. In her own bed she thrashes and itches. In Joan’s bed she falls into eight-hour comas. Wakes from them drugged, wondering where she is, where Joan is. Before she remembers, she can sense the bad news gathering outside the shattering crystal of her unconsciousness, and some salvation being extended, like a voice calling “Here!” or a rope dangling, but she is never quick enough.
Her boyfriends phone her at work and offer to distract her. She says, “I can’t make love when I’m worried sick.” Until now
she didn’t know this about herself. She didn’t know that she still believed in God, but she must because she’s praying. The whole family is, secretly, and coincidentally working the same angle—“Don’t make Joan suffer for my sins, my unbelief. Punish
me.”
They try to make deals. They say they will gladly give up their own lives, their love lives even.
Sonja, not having a love life, has already sacrificed half of her income. Until Joan is out of the hospital she is devoting afternoons and evenings to knitting receiving blankets for the maternity ward. Every night, as soon as she gets home from the hospital, she starts on another. Marcia lies on the chesterfield and holds the ball of white wool. The tug feels good, she says. “Like fishing.”
“When did you go fishing?” Gordon asks.
“I didn’t.”
An exchange without looking at each other. They are concentrating on the TV, they have become TV addicts—her because every show is mind-blowingly incomprehensible, him because simple truths seem to be forthcoming by the minute and he feels that all these years he has been short-changing the medium. News bulletins about Watergate interrupt regular programming. “I am the only one in this room who really knows whether I am guilty or not guilty,” says John Ehrlich-man, and to Gordon he sounds like King Solomon.
Only Doris moves around, but that’s Doris. She opens all the windows. She closes them all. Brings in glasses of beer and Coke, answers the phone. Sometimes she sits with a pile of magazines on her lap, tearing through them for coupons, but this lasts maybe a quarter of an hour. She tears through the photo albums. Except for baby pictures there are no pictures where Joan isn’t covering her face or doesn’t have her back turned. And yet Doris seems to remember a recent picture of her staring into the camera, and so she pores through the albums looking for it. Five minutes of that and she rushes
outside to fill the bird feeder or trim the hedge. Rushes back in to make popcorn. You get the idea. Nobody says, “Relax.” She is life carrying on, twitchy and off-kilter as you would expect life to be under the circumstances.
On Saturdays and Sundays they visit Joan twice, once in the afternoon and again in the early evening. Doris says that the prices in the hospital cafeteria are highway robbery, so after the first visit they return home for supper, and while the left-overs are heating up, Gordon goes downstairs to Joan’s office. He doesn’t intend to, he is suddenly there, opening the door.
Stooped over, just inside, he waits for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. He sees the reflecting silver strip along the bench, and the white-spined books on the shelves. He built these shelves. There are four on the west wall, five on the east, the lowest ones just off the ground and the highest a little taller than she is. He spent an entire Saturday afternoon arranging the books alphabetically and in subject order, but that same night Joan rearranged them in order of colour, a spectrum going from white to off-white to beige, brown, orange, red, purple and so on to black. White and black spines in opposite corners.
He limps to the stool and sits. Way down. He rubs the thigh of his bad leg. On each side of the bench, in two neat piles, are what he presumes must be the original tapes. Unlabelled, it goes without saying. How does she keep track of what’s on them? he wonders. And why this tidiness, everything put away, as if she was finished here? Maybe Marcia is right, not necessarily about Joan willing herself into a coma-like state but about knowing it was going to happen. Jack once told him about an elderly parishioner of his, healthy as a horse, who matter-of-factly said, “I’m going to kick the bucket next week, better get another fellow to pass the plate,” and the following Saturday night he died in his sleep.
“Jesus,” Gordon says to have thought of that. And then he is
crying in the dry-eyed, gasping way he has been doing all week. A sudden fit of panting followed by long exhalations, long sheets of breath as though he is blowing up a balloon.
When it’s over, he feels nothing, not even drained. He looks around. The visor is on top of the tapes, and he picks it up and turns on the penlight to check the batteries. He sweeps the beam over the bench, over David Rayne’s notes, over his own haggard, bewildered-looking face in the mirror, over a jar of pens and pencils, a bottle of rubber cement and, right in front of him, two more tapes still in their boxes.
Hold it right there. These tapes
are
labelled—“tape I” and “tape 2” typed on a strip of white paper and glued to the boxes. At the bottom of the tape 1 box it says, “finished composition” and under that, “ready to play.” He turns the boxes over, and on the tape 1 box a typed paragraph says, “On two different tape recorders (of course!) play the A sides of tape 1 and tape 2 at slow speeds and simultaneously, ensuring that the tape counters are in perfect synchronization with each other. At the end of the A sides, turn the tapes over and play the ? sides likewise.”
His heart starts hopping up and down. He shines the light on Rayne’s notes, back to the tape 1 box, comparing the typefaces. He leafs through the notes, and there it is—where she cut out the words “tape 1” and “tape 2.” He keeps turning pages and finds where the words “finished composition” came from. A few pages later is the hole that was the entire how-to-play-the-apes paragraph.
It’s not handwriting, it’s not even
her
typing, but she selected the words from Rayne’s notes and cut them out and glued them to the boxes, and that makes it written communication. Her first written communication. No matter what she has produced on the tapes themselves,
this
is a breakthrough.
He sits there for a minute waiting for his heart to stop jumping around. “Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh,” he thinks. No. “We have seen
Strange things today.” He is trying to come up with the right passage to fit the breakthrough, or at least his discovery of the breakthrough. There was a time he did this to impress Jack. Since Joan has been in the hospital he can feel himself doing it as penance for appealing to a God he doesn’t even believe in. And, yes, to soften Him up. How many atheists have over a hundred New Testament verses under their belts?
“That they may see your good works…” No. He picks up the tapes. Switches off the penlight. “They were filled with madness …” No.
T
he tape recorders are on the floor in front of the TV, their counters turning from one to two. It is four hours later. “We found the tapes,” Marcia told Joan when they went to see her after supper. “We’re going to play them as soon as we get back. We’re going to have a concert.” Marcia claims that Joan clicked her tongue at that. Nobody else heard, but they are all feeling encouraged.
Gordon has just taken his seat. Beside him, in her chair, Sonja knits. Marcia lies on the chesterfield with her legs across Doris’s lap to pin her there, keep her still for this. Doris has already gotten up once because she thought that a cricket was the kitchen tap dripping.
“Now, no talking,” Gordon says.
Out of the tape recorder nearest him a voice says what sounds like
tone, tone, tone.
But after several repetitions, it is obvious that it’s
Joan. Joan, Joan, Joan …
Not sung and yet describing a familiar melody.
“Mister Sandman!” Marcia says.
“Shh,” Gordon says.
Once more, at the same slow tempo, another string of
Joans
instead of the
bums
that “Mister Sandman” begins with.
“Who
is
that?” Doris says.
“You,” Marcia says, realizing.
“Shh!” Gordon again.
“I never said Joan like that.”
“No!” Marcia says. “I know what she did! She taped you
saying it once, then copied it, then she sped it up and slowed it down—“
“Quiet!” Gordon says.
Now the song itself starts, still that creeping tempo and not sung so much as spoken on key. Except that those aren’t the right words. It is difficult to make out
what
the words are because of a muffling hum in the background and because, as Marcia said, half of them sound mechanically altered. No two words in a row seem to be from the same voice. “Is that me?” Marcia whispers, hearing a girl say
shrivel
at a normal pitch. “That’s me!” she whispers, hearing
chuck. Heck
she hears and nudges Doris, who nods.
“We’re all in it,” Doris whispers, amazed. She has picked out Gordon saying
orange
and
peanuts,
Sonja saying
nostrils, father
and
jeepers.
Gordon has heard
nostrils
and
jeepers. Peanuts,
to him, was
penis,
but he instantly decided it must be
Venus.
He is concentrating on the second tape, which is playing a short passage of murmured words whose rhythm is syncopated to the “Mister Sandman” rhythm. This voice is not different voices joined together, it is a single voice, female, either Doris’s, Sonja’s or Marcia’s, it would have to be. He has figured out that much, that Joan was taping them, and he is already a bit apprehensive. What is the voice saying? He is about to get up and fiddle with the dials when the voice says distinctly and at such a high volume that it sounds shouted—
“YOU CAN KEEP A SECRET, CAN’T YOU?”
Sonja stops knitting. “Was that me?”
“It sure sounded like it,” Doris says.
“She taped us,” Marcia says excitedly. “I wonder when she did.”
“Well, those heaps of tapes she has,” Doris says. “She might have been doing it for years.”
“But I thought it would be her playing the piano,” Sonja says.
“Shh,” Gordon says gently.
On the first tape the “Mister Sandman” tune has begun again as before, with all of their voices speaking a word in turn. The words seem to have been chosen for no other reason than that they have the right number of syllables and the right pitch, although, as in the first verse, many words (and in some cases only parts of words) sound sped up or slowed down. Despite the hum these words are easier to make out than ones in the first verse were.
Tibby retard fly breast shebang carrot top Negro albino worms darn.
A nonsense jumble. And yet startling, some of them.
Tibby. Breast.
Meanwhile, on tape 2, a voice (Gordon’s) is murmuring another broken sentence of about seven or eight words. You can tell how long the sentence is because it is a rhythmic phrase being played over and over. Again the words are unintelligible until the end of the verse when suddenly they blare out, perfectly clear: “I
THINK ABOUT HIM ALL THE TIME!”
Doris looks at Gordon.
“Who
do you think about all the time?”