I close my eyes. “Two shiny panels meet in the middle, silver panels. The doors slide open and I get in.”
Dr. Ari’s voice is soothing. “It’s comfortable and spacious. The lights are low, it’s almost dark. You can go anywhere you want to go. No one controls the elevator but you. Walk in, turn around, and face the panel by the side of the door. The panel is rectangular. The buttons are round, lit, and embedded in the panel. They start at number ten and go all the way to number one.”
I imagine the panel. I push a button. The doors close silently.
I’m safe and contained in this dark box. As the elevator descends, I have a moving sensation in my stomach, then the forces balance themselves, and right before the elevator stops, the force lessens and, again, I experience a floating feeling.
“Perfect,” Dr. Ari says and smiles. “I want this elevator to be a place of peace and control. Anytime you feel anxious, I want you to step in and go to a lower floor. The farther down you go, the more relaxed you’ll become.”
“And what’s it for? The exercise, I mean?”
“When humans get stressed or experience fear, our bodies exhibit a very primal response. You’ve probably heard of the fight-or-flight response. When facing a threat, our bodies respond with very distinct signs; a change in blood pressure, breathing, heart rate, temperature, muscle tension, just to name a few.”
“Right,” I say and imagine saber-toothed tigers pursuing a zebra.
“Our body is basically getting ready to fight or run away,” Dr. Ari continues. “I want you to face your fears, force your body into a ‘relaxation response.’ Once you manage to relax, over time, you will develop a heightened state of awareness. That’s what we’re after, being aware.”
“Sounds easy enough,” I say.
“Not quite. Combating primal responses requires practice. A trained nurse will instruct you later on today.”
The more I think about this concept, the less I can imagine any possible scenario that is positive for the zebra. “That means while I’m trying to remember, I won’t be afraid and I won’t run. I’ll tell my body to relax and be alert.” Fighting makes no sense when confronted with a saber-toothed tiger and I don’t think a zebra can outrun a tiger. Staying put seems like certain death to me.
“That’s the plan. You won’t avoid, and you won’t struggle against it.”
“
It
being . . . ?”
“The past.”
“Right,” I say but I can’t help thinking of a tiger sinking its teeth into my neck.
—
On the morning of our third session a damp blanket of fog has spread over the East River and the familiar smokestacks in the distance are all but disappearing behind its dense layer.
First I hear Dr. Ari’s voice coming from afar, and then I comprehend the words. “Tell me about Mia.” His voice is low, yet urgent.
I wanted truth serums and potent pills forcing my memories to the surface. I expected to be hypnotized, I imagined a chemical manipulation of my brain. But after two sessions with Dr. Ari I’ve figured out that I am all there is. Just me, my clouded mind, and Dr. Ari goading me on.
“Tell you about Mia?” I repeat his question to buy some time. I focus on the vague and ghostly smokestacks outside the window, looming a safe distance from this office within the thick cloud of water droplets. I wish the layers of skin that he is trying to peel away were just as safe from him as that old decrepit factory in the distance.
I don’t know what happened to my daughter, Mia. I opened drawers, old shoe boxes, and unlocked doors that led to storage spaces under stairs. I climbed into Dumpsters, looked under beds. I searched for her. A daughter is not something one misplaces like a set of keys or a take-out menu. What I know for sure is that one morning I woke up and she had vanished as if she had been swallowed by a hole in the universe. Not so much as an impression of her tiny body left on the sheet-covered mattress. Someone took her without picking the locks or prying the hinges off the doorjambs. She’s left a silence behind, a silence so loud it keeps me awake at night.
On a good day, after I’ve been able to sleep three continuous
hours, I imagine her with a nice couple in Arizona, tucked away in loving arms. When I imagine this scene long enough, it feels almost real. On a bad day I see her mutilated and lifeless under a mountain of dirt and pine-needled soil, next to acorn caps and deer droppings somewhere in the woods of upstate New York. The worst days are the ones when I can feel a sticky substance between my fingers and I wonder if I’m the one to blame.
But good days and bad days are not conducive to the truth. What I need is a clear day. A day so clear and pristine, so sparkling and new, that I dare to explore what happened to Mia.
For now, I have to take solace in imagining the abandoned factory with the crooked stack. I envision homeless people sleeping on top of cardboard there, junkies passed out in dark corners under colorful graffiti—their very own billboards on the edge of human society. Old, battered shoes, their counterparts lost forever, with all the missing socks we never seem to find. I can hear feet kicking cheap plastic gin bottles. They take off into the dark like shooting stars, hit the walls, and bounce back just to end up again in the middle of the long dark halls with their windows nailed shut decades ago. After self-inflicted prodding, digging, turning over stones that resisted turning like boulders in front of caves, somewhere between mandatory journaling and lights-out, I am ready. I will hunt her last images; I will try to catch the coattails of the truth and hang on to them, even if they pull me straight into hell.
My eyes focus on what’s outside the window. We both have been waiting for this moment. He wants to solve the mystery not even New York’s finest have been able to crack. His legendary status for restoring the forgetful is at stake. As for myself, if I can’t come up with a logical explanation, I will face life in prison. I am lucky in a way, if there is something resembling luck in my position; New York abolished the death penalty years ago. I can always plead insanity, for what mother in her right mind kills her
infant daughter? And if I didn’t kill her, what woman in her right mind does not know where her daughter is? Either way, my end of the stick is shitty.
“Tell you about Mia?” I can hear my own voice as if it were prerecorded. It sounds nothing like me. “Where do you want me to start?”
Dr. Ari’s Adam’s apple is bobbing as he swallows. He pushes the chair from his desk and rolls back a couple of feet. He glances at the digital recorder to make sure it is on.
“Start wherever you want.”
“I remember . . .” I hear my own voice trembling. I feel shaky, my stomach muscles are tight. I am trying to sit straight, keep my composure. I choose my words wisely, for they have the power to set my world on fire.
I’m trying to make a connection; I’m reaching for a marker, longing to connect the dots. I look down and avoid his eyes. I fold my hands in my lap. I’m surprised by the way this memory has returned to me.
“Go on,” he says.
D
uring the day thousands of coal black crows spread out over the Creedmoor estate, but in the afternoons they flock together in smaller groups to gather in their communal roost once dusk nears. All day long their calls create a tremendous noise level but then they settle down and remain quiet during the night. I watch them work in pairs, construct nests with dead branches, pick at their own feet when frustrated, play with acorn caps and sticks. The view of the building from above, a bird expanding its wings like a giant chief crow, might be the reason they gather here.
I discover a nest in the tree in front of my window. By the time I spot it, it’s fully constructed—I make out twigs, feathers, leaves, and mud—and I watch the pigeonlike bird lay her first egg. She leaves the nest immediately after and I worry about the egg and what will become of it. The next day she lays another one, just to abandon both of them. My anxiety heightens with every passing hour, but on the third day she returns and starts incubating the eggs, and from that point on she hardly leaves the nest.
Creedmoor is a dinosaur in its own right. It was built in the 1920s; its cutting-edge psychiatric technology mocks the history trapped in its walls after decades of chemically induced seizures and lobotomies. Even electroshock therapy is back in the medical community’s good graces, renamed electroconvulsive therapy and performed under anesthesia without adversely influencing treatment effectiveness.
Creedmoor’s legacy of long-forgotten architecture claims to have sheltered the likes of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Ed Gein. Ed Gein gained notoriety in the ’50s after authorities discovered he had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and constructed keepsakes from their body parts.
The Kirkbride-style building is a leftover from the early twentieth century, a relic building style considered an ideal sanctuary for the mentally insane. Kirkbride buildings segregate the patients according to gender and severity of symptoms, male patients in one wing, female patients in the other, each wing subdivided with more severe cases on the lower floors while the better-behaved patients are confined to the upper floors.
Not everyone considers Creedmoor the relic it is. I hear investors once had big plans for the building. A conversion into condominiums was imminent, but the project was shut down since the layout was not suited for individual residences. Its corridors were too long, and its rooms too small.
My room, at least for the time being, is my own; I don’t have a roommate. My bed frame is made of strong metal pipes, and the linens are soft, worn bare from years of laundering in scalding water.
The breakfast bell sounds at seven on weekdays, on Saturday and Sundays at eight, and the patients descend to the cafeteria at the end of the hallway on the main level. We all have preassigned tables. The table next to mine is the gathering place for a flock of anorexic women. Their condition is obvious: instead of eating, they merely rearrange their food, pick over their plates like seagulls
over a garbage heap. Their fingers seem dipped in blue ink and their hair is thin and downy like an infant’s, while enamel erosion has claimed their teeth.
My only company during meals is a middle-aged woman, Marge Ruiz. Marge is placid and looks twenty years younger than she is. Her story is similar to mine, I guess one can say; we’re both guilty of not speaking up when we were supposed to. Almost as if missing a deadline has sent both of us to the loony bin. Marge decided to keep the death of her mother a secret until the smell alerted the neighbors. She never told her husband or her children about her mother’s demise; she continued to visit her corpse for months, bringing fresh eggs, milk, and bread.
Marge’s family comes to see her every weekend. They invade the visitors’ garden, lounge in lawn chairs on the covered terrace. Marge has five children and twice as many grandchildren. Her family’s consolation prize for Marge is a weekly white paper box filled with sugar-topped croissants—
cuernos de azúcar
.
While Marge is surrounded by her family, I spend my time on a lawn chair under a big oak tree in the garden behind the main building. I practice the elevator technique obsessively and eventually I feel myself calming down the moment I imagine elevator doors opening.
I carry my journal with me; I write down every word and every image that pops into my head. Images that defy interpretation I attempt to draw. After a few days pass, I neither recognize the drawings nor am I sure that I even drew them.
Dr. Ari had handed me the journal during our first session. “As many details as possible,” he had said, “even if it seems trivial. It may turn out to be significant in the long run. Write down thoughts, images, even your dreams. The patterns and recurring themes speak volumes about what’s attempting to resurface. Everything is important. Everything.”
I draw random squares in my journal. Four corners, then I go
over the outline again and again until the lines fill the entire square. Those are the black boxes that contain the past. By writing and drawing in my journal, I try to force my hands to materialize a thought, to force that black box open. I descend into a state of relaxation and I allow my thoughts to wander, without borders and restraints. I see images, yet I don’t know their meaning. The sun, moon, and stars are ever-present heavenly bodies; they never change.
Sometimes, when I sit under the oak in the visitors’ garden, I catch a glimpse, a flash of an image. I know it’s there, right below the surface. The image floats by me like a cloud, a duplicate of a thought I once had—I’m not sure what else to call it—during which I catch the distorted image of some sort of replica, a copy of a copy, if you will, and I try to latch on to it like a fish to hooked bait. A theme emerges. Fruit. An abundance of fruit. Baskets overflowing—fruit, ripe and fragrant, bursting open. I want to be the fruit, want to will the fruit to deny its breaking point. Their insides luscious, their skins bouncing back as I poke at them. Eventually they burst open and I try to force the fruit—with some sort of mind control—to withstand.
Dr. Ari enjoys when I speak of these visions, he leans in closer, pays attention to my every word. He’s of Pakistani descent and somewhat of a legend at Creedmoor. Countless framed official documents grace his office walls: undergraduate degree, medical school, residency, and finally Creedmoor’s president and psychiatrist in chief. I wonder if he has a wife, a family. There are no photographs, no children’s arts-and-crafts projects on his desk. No hint of his private life.
I like to think of him as a magician unearthing skeletons and bringing them back to life. He smiled when I told him and said, “Thank you. It’s not quite as glamorous as excavating vessels from antiquity, but I envy your point of view. Most skeletons refuse to be uncovered. Makes for hard work.”
He told me he specializes in RMT, recovered memory therapy. That RMT sometimes, “depending on the case,” includes psychotherapy methods like hypnosis, even sedative-hypnotic drugs, age regression, and guided visualization. And that RMT is not considered formal psychotherapy, nor is it used in mainstream psychiatry.
I assume that he stumbled upon the crime-solving part by accident. Marge, also a patient of his, “may or may not have killed her mother,” according to Oliver, one of the orderlies. Maybe my case will be another cornerstone of Dr. Ari’s already-legendary status.
“We can only operate with the data we are consciously aware of. Everything’s there, just covered in a layer of dust. Gaining access to what lies beneath is what it’s all about.”
During the second week Dr. Ari talks a lot about how memory serves us. “Memory is nothing more than a concept that explains the process of remembering. Imagine you are trying to locate a parked car in a crowded parking lot. You were present at the act of parking the car, yet you’re unable to recall its exact location. Your subconscious mind knows its precise position and RMT will allow you to go back to the moment you parked the car.”
More than anything, I’ve been surprised the DA allowed this experiment. But neither the state of New York, the DA, or the Medical Board of Psychiatry has anything to lose. It seems like they’ve agreed to ignore scientific integrity and allow junk science to give it a whirl. I am well aware that Dr. Ari is operating on the fringes of science, and my constant jokes about RMT standing for “Rogue Medical Tests” have made him smile but haven’t cracked his shell of professionalism.
The next day, a Tuesday, when I reach his office, the door is ajar. I enter unprompted and uninvited. I’m immediately aware of his disapproving demeanor. The digital recorder, usually on top of his desk, is still tucked away in a drawer. His white coat is still unbuttoned. I have walked in without his permission, and I
have not only breached regulations, but also etiquette and, more important, his rules.
I did so because I am afraid. Last Friday, after I described to him the day my daughter Mia disappeared, he alluded to a new direction in our approach to my therapy. His eyes seemed restless that day, and I have a feeling that today we’ll dig deeper, we’ll do more than just gently brush away the sand from a shard of an ancient vase. Today we might lift the entire vase out of its sandy grave and, like archaeologists, we will proceed with caution, so as not to break the object into a million pieces.
I sit across from Dr. Ari, who, as a matter of retaliation, ignores me for quite some time. He is not the kind of man who expects an apology and so I don’t apologize for my impulsive entry. Eventually we exchange a few banalities and he distractedly flips the pages of my journal. He seems to be rushing along today, his whole demeanor reeks of urgency, and I have a feeling something that I’m not prepared for is about to happen. The official charge by the DA’s office is less than two months away and he probably does not want me to be a nut he failed to crack. I wonder what he has left, what else he has tucked away in his pocket. Is there a magic trick that will clear the clouds in my head?
His voice jerks me out of my thoughts. “Do you remember the conversations we had regarding forgetting and the reasons why we forget?”
During my research hours I read up on memory and how our brain copes with the loss of it. I actually find the entire memory business fascinating, but I’m also trying to show off, want him to know that I’m committed, even after our sessions end.
“I recall the decay theory and the interference theory. Memory retrieval—let’s assume that the memories made it all the way into long-term memory—fails because the memories have decayed over time or have been subjected to interference.”
“Very good. Your memory loss is quite peculiar. There’s no
physical evidence of brain damage and therefore I cannot say with certainty why you don’t remember. The moment we retrieve your memories, we will know the reason why. Not before then. There is no magic pill I can give you, no blood test or MRI that will tell us what causes you not to recollect the past. I hope you know that.”
I nod but I know he’s not telling the entire truth. There’re sedative-hypnotic drugs to help uncover the past stuck in my head but he wants the truth to come out organically, unrestricted, because who’d be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, the truth from drug-induced visions?
“But there’s something we can do,” he says. Then he throws a huge brick my way. “It’s time for a field trip to 517 North Dandry.”
I catch the brick and cradle it. It’s made of a brown stone; it is a piece of North Dandry, where Mia disappeared. I try to embrace it and make it my own, but it topples me. My heart rate picks up and my head starts pounding. My thoughts race, culminating in one predominant message:
I can’t go back there.
I try to remind myself of how inevitable this pain is. I force my breathing to slow, the image of the elevator an ever-present symbol of composure.
Dr. Ari is watching me like a hawk.
“You seem to be feeling better. Why don’t we—”
“I can’t do this.” I fear my voice will start trembling, but I manage to keep it stable.
“Revisiting the place where it all happened will allow you to re-create lost memories,” he says. “There’s no need to get upset. Just let me explain what we’re going to do.”
The place where it all happened.
Hearing it out loud makes it real. What he means to say is that we’re going back to the scene of the crime.
“Memory retrieval is much more likely when we test in the same physical context in which the memory we’re trying to uncover originally occurred. The application to re-create the past when it comes to trauma-related amnesia is frowned upon, yet the concept
itself is nothing new. We will make an attempt to re-create the same emotion you felt when the memory was born.”
Memories are born. Do they die, too?
“You call it ‘retrieval,’ ‘physical context,’ and ‘re-creation,’” I say and gesture quotation marks every time I use one of the words with which he disguises what is really going on. “You want me to stand in her room, look at her crib?” I’m not sure if I can do what he’s asking me to do. The thought of going back to where Mia disappeared fills me with a terror that reaches around my heart, wrapping itself around it like a fist.
I stare out the window at the scudding clouds and a concept pops into my head, an article I read in one of the medical journals scattered about the many waiting rooms at Creedmoor.
Takotsubo
. Stress-induced cardiomyopathy. Broken heart syndrome.
Takotsubo
are octopus traps that resemble the shape of the heart in an angiogram. I almost expect the sound of shattering glass and for my heart to explode into pieces.
As if Dr. Ari can read my mind, he gets up, walks around his desk, and stands in front of me, half sitting, half leaning on his desk. He crosses his arms.
“Those memories are potent and powerful, but your daughter’s life is at stake, Estelle. We need to try;
you
need to try.” His voice is urgent now and so are his eyes.
I want to be cooperative and I want to find the truth, like him. But what I want most of all is to not have a breaking point. Like the fruit in my dreams I try not to break open.