D
AYS WITHOUT SPEAKING
to a living soul. How do you do it? his mother kept asking. She called almost daily now that he was here (she hadn’t called Cleveland more than once every few weeks). He answered every three days or so if he was in the Red House when the call came, but only if picking up the phone felt more tolerable than listening to it ring, or if his guilt or loneliness won out. “How do you go so long without conversation; it would make me positively frantic!” As was her way, she always turned things around to her:
her
psychoanalyst (Was she back in it again? He couldn’t keep track) thought the one in Cleveland he recommended was among the best in the nation;
she’d
had panic attacks and yes they were god-awful;
she
believed (“But what do I know?” she’d add—and then go on) the way through was quite simple: top-notch medical care, intellectual stimulation and—more than anything else—structure.
Daddy could get you a lab assistant job, she’d say. Or you could garden for Gaga. Or she’d suggest he take up teaching. She taught high school and college sporadically, part-time, and often complained about how her students lacked curiosity and rigor, except for the rare ones she identified as prodigies; these she took home, offered books, complimented and talked to late into the night. Teaching, she told him, forces you outside yourself and makes you focus on ideas and other people. You could work with black children in Newark, or at that camp where you were a counselor. Oh, and by the way, the housing form for college arrived—Daddy forwarded it to you.
Obladi, oblada
. Charlie twisted the curly black phone cord around his leg, up his arm, looping it into a noose around his neck and letting his eyes roll back, his jaw drop into a silent gag. Dead, they would find him. He’d picture his skeleton, the stripped-down, could-be-anybody shape of it, as beautiful as it was frightening:
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical
within whose burning bosom we devise
our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
What, his own yammering mother liked to ask, do you
do
out there all day, as if the place had not been, for years, her native habitat, and theirs together. When he was five, six, seven years old, she used to take him and Will out of school a month early and return them a few weeks late each fall. They’d stay the whole extended summer, days filling, emptying, filling, time meaningless because there was so much of it. Bedtimes slipped. Mealtimes. Baths. Nearly everything Charlie did back then was clever and amusing to his mother, but she also left him alone much of the time, let him be, and he had Will, Rusty, Holly, Little Dick, a few other kids; from house to house they moved, from path to path, or he’d go swimming with Grampa, both of them naked in the water, Charlie thrashing toward his grandfather—
Head up, kick kick, attaboy!
He had his fairy houses made from the wooden crates the plants came in and furnished with sticks, moss, shells, scraps of fishing net. Holly, Will, Rusty and he each had a fairy house, and for a long time he managed to escape knowing that in the outside world this would be viewed as a deep humiliation for a boy. Together, he and his mother counted the morning glories, put messages in bottles and set them out to sea. It was and would always be (Don’t assume, said Dr. Miller. You’re still very young) the happiest time of his life.
Obladi, oblada, life goes on.
The phone cord could reach out the kitchen door onto the back stoop if you stretched, a dog on a leash,
just cut the cord
. And his mother in her study in New Jersey surrounded by her papers, by research projects she’d start with great gusto but rarely finish, or in the kitchen with a glass of Coke, and when she hung up, she’d call Dossy or Jane or Gaga or a friend; she talked on the phone to many people daily; she played tennis, read the newspaper, maybe gardened, squabbled with Caroline, wrote Percy and Will letters at camp, then complained that she wasn’t getting enough work done and stayed up in her study (doing
what?
) until dawn.
What do you
do
out there all day? In fact he had all sorts of things to occupy his time. He’d finally told his father, a research cardiologist, about the blood in his urine, so there were drives to the New Bedford Hospital, where he peed into cups and had (in a moment of pain so excruciating it almost made him forget himself) a catheter inserted into his penis—and peed into more cups (they’d found some albumen, whatever that meant), and was forced to explain that his tremor was preexisting, drug-related and, as far as he knew, unrelated to the wine-dark color of his pee.
There were his showers and runs, the making of food, washing of dishes. He prepared all his meals in the cabin, bringing water down in jugs, heating it for dishwater. There was the digging of holes in the woods for his shit, and the shitting itself (at first, the water in the houses was off, and even after it was turned on, he rarely used a toilet). The beating off. The reading, first more Wallace Stevens, then
Anna Karenina,
then
The Andromeda Strain
; a renter had left it in the Red House the summer before, along with
On Death and Dying
, which he could live without. Sometimes he’d take a copy of his great-grandmother’s
How to Know the Wildflowers
or
Plants and Their Children
out to the base with him. She’d died when he was two so he’d never known her, but he liked her books, as much for their stores of information as for their bits of poetry (
a battalion of milky-tufted seeds from the cracked pod of the milkweed float downward and take lazy possession of the soil)
. On the base, he’d find flowers described in the book and press them into the pages, some of which already contained papery, sapped versions of what he found.
One morning he dropped to his hands and knees in the brush by the boat dock with the express desire to find a woodcock in the bush. He had arrived on Ashaunt just in time to catch the end of the birds’ mating season—the male woodcocks’ spiraling evening flights and fast, whistling descents. Now it was nesting time, and there—he’d not yet crawled ten feet—was a startled female woodcock, flying up so fast that she whacked her head on a branch and dropped like a glove to earth before gathering her wits and rising again. He backed away and later returned to part the branches and find a cunning little nest on the ground. His mother had been a passionate birder before her dissertation, before her turn away from this place, which had started as a gradual distancing but seemed, lately, like a full-out war. If he’d told her about the woodcock, would she have shared his pleasure—a bird in the bush, his own sixth sense, the universe briefly, startlingly, in sync? Or volleyed it back on him:
It’s not exactly a miracle, Charlie; you’ve been seeing woodcocks twenty times a week.
As for hearing other human voices, well, he did. Nearly every night he turned on the twelve-inch TV he’d brought to the cabin from the Red House, fiddled with the rabbit-ears antenna and watched a snowy, staticky rendition of the evening news. Spilled sacks of grain, thatched lean-tos, fire rising up from sandy ground. Soldiers bellying through the mud, a convoy of jeeps in a forest stripped of undergrowth and leaves. Helicopters everywhere, buzzing in, and the president with his bulldog face and oddly high-pitched voice, and occasionally a Vietnamese girl around his age, slight, scared and lovely with a slender jaw, or an old Vietnamese man, or a waving, half-dressed child. Charlie sat on his sleeping bag, hands trembling on his lap or pressed between his legs, and watched. What was happening over there was at once sickening and improbable; still, he
could
watch it, he could sit himself down—as a duty, yes, but also as a way to hear a human voice or two—and think (didn’t Cronkite get sick of saying it?):
And that’s the
way it is.
It was the home-front footage he had more trouble watching, for who were those college boys with their long hair, suntanned arms, signs and chanting, who were those swingy, angry, passionate college girls, if not the boy he might have been, if not the girls he might have loved, lifting their arms to reveal their downy armpits, nipples showing through their peasant blouses on national TV? In the shots of demonstrations, he saw himself as he should have been, as he was before. Before and after were the only working categories now. Before the hand brought tab to tongue. Before the throat swallowed, peristalsis, and the body began its steady breakdown work. Before the blood received, the body a dumb innocent.
After the brain cried no (too late).
“Don’t you think your division is a little stark?” Dr. Miller had asked a few months earlier, as they’d sat in his office in the university hospital psych ward, where old Miss Flower, whose family had endowed the ward, was a patient too, her footsteps audible as she did the Thorazine shuffle in the hall. “From what you’ve told me, you were not an unconfused young man before the drugs. You were not without a complex family, a complex past—like most of us.”
Charlie had laughed. He laughed too often during the sessions, to fill space, or because everything seemed absurd, or because he was trying to be amiable, normal, in
conversation
, and the doctor’s double negatives—“not unconfused,” “not without”—tripped him up.
“I was—” he tried to explain. “I wasn’t like now, it’s . . . I—” He raised his knees to his chest.
“What?” asked Dr. Miller gently into the long silence that followed. “What were you, Charlie?”
Myself
, Charlie meant to say, but his laughter had turned to gasps by then. To turn yourself inside out and find (if you were lucky) a scrap of plastic fluttering at the center? A box of tissues came toward him, though he was far from tears.
Okay, son, it’s okay
, and then the doctor’s hand was on his shoulder, and usually Charlie hated to be touched by people he didn’t know, but for once he didn’t mind. And his gasps slowed and the hand lifted, retracted, awkwardness intruding, each to his own, two men in a room in chairs.
At the session’s end, he stepped into the hallway to find old Miss Flower standing over a slow-spreading puddle of her own pee. She had on red lipstick, a silk kimono, fuzzy slippers shaped like lambs. Her hair was white at the part; the rest was dyed jet black. Once she’d been a little rich girl; then, apparently, a student at Radcliffe. Now she lived here, in a private suite on a ward that bore her family’s name.
“Looks like it rained!” she said brightly, peering down between her feet.
Charlie laughed. Until that moment, he’d thought she was entirely out to lunch. She took a step, right into her own pee. For a moment she teetered. Instinctively, Charlie offered his arm, and she steadied herself. She reminded him of something, Miss Flower, of
Miss Happiness and Miss Flower
, that was it—a book about dolls, a girls’ book, but he’d read it anyway.
Somewhere, Miss Flower had a first name. Charlie sidestepped away from the puddle, Miss Flower still gripping his arm.
You are not without a complex past
. How had he gotten here? How had any of them? How had they not landed here before? Miss Flower smelled of perfume mixed with pee. Abruptly repulsed, he removed her hand from his arm finger by finger, and she clenched her hand as he returned it to her and studied her own knobby little fist. And then a nurse was coming down the hall, followed by a janitor with a bucket and mop.
BY THE END OF JUNE,
Charlie had stopped watching the news. He gave up cigarettes, cut the supply off in one day, though he’d been smoking off and on for years, his first cigarettes filched from his mother when he was nine or ten. He added on to his stone wall, repairing it, extending it a few feet more. One afternoon he came home to find the old army gate entirely removed, along with the wire fencing on either side. Just beyond where the gate had been, a white Pontiac was parked on the overgrown army road, and beyond it, a blue pickup truck. Charlie went down to the shoreline by way of the paths, kept himself low, heard male voices near the radar tower:
Trying to get it scheduled . . . one helluva job . . . stop by next week for paperwork . . . all right . . . Lemme know. . . .
As he hunched in the brush, he was tempted to strip, paint himself with mud and berry juice, and spring out at them, hooting Indian calls. It would freak them out; it would crack him up.
Mine
, he’d call in faux Wampanoag. The whole area had been the Indians’ before Wamsutta sold it to Governor Bradford and his cohorts for thirty yards of cloth, eight moose skins, fifteen axes, fifteen hoes, fifteen pairs of breeches, eight blankets, two kettles, one clock, two English pounds in wampum, eight pair of shoes, one iron pot, ten shillings (as part of his self-imposed study regimen, Charlie had memorized the list). A few years earlier, he’d have played Indian, then sat back to watch the story travel around Ashaunt. But things were different now. The men might have been told that a kid was living out here on his own, a rich screwup shut-in dropout. They’d call the cops, or at the very least tell Joe Olivera, the caretaker, that Charlie had “exposed himself,” and Joe would be obliged to tell the Point Association, who’d tell his parents, who’d take him back to Bernardsville and make him get a job or go to summer school or see his mother’s shrink.
After the men drove away, he returned to the base, where he found more surveyor tags, along with orange spray paint on some trees and rocks. This time he went out after dark with a flashlight and Swiss Army knife, slashing and removing tags, feeling at once righteous and ridiculous, and wishing—mostly—that he was a boy again, playing with the others: Capture the Flag, Freeze Tag, Sardines, Hide and Seek, along with invented games so absorbing they went on well into the night, until the mothers or nurses (sometimes both at once, a chorus of voices, then bodies appearing) forced the children in. They’d played a game they called Casemate, which involved going deep into the bunker and coming back with evidence—a twist of wire or discharged rifle shell. They’d played Sea Serpents’ Lair, Pirate Hide-Out, and Underground Railroad (slave catchers vs. slaves, blue-eyed towheads all; his mother had tried to lecture them—
It’s offensive, imagine how a black child would feel
—but they’d ignored her, though the memory made Charlie cringe). Tonight’s game would be to remove the surveyor tags as fast as you could, bring them to home base and tie them around the wrist or waist of a cousin of the opposite sex. (When they were ten or eleven, he and Holly had tied each other up. Houdini, they called it. She would gasp and giggle, fight him off, pin him—though tiny, she was wiry and strong—in a wrestler’s grip.)