By pure reflex, his hand shot to his face to use his thumb and forefinger to pinch shut his nose to keep from retching. Otherwise, he remained frozen in time and space, afraid that if he moved, the apparition would again flee like it had done in the wee hours that morning. For some reason that he couldn’t explain, he wasn’t as afraid as he probably should have been, just mystified and confused. Why was his mind conjuring up such a strange vision and disgusting odor? Was his brain punishing him for denying it the rest it so sorely needed?
As the seconds ticked by, he became aware that the phantosmia had vanished but the visual hallucination hadn’t. Slowly he let his hand fall to his side as he watched the girl closely, appreciating that her expression was one of scorn, her upper lip pulled back in seeming contempt. Otherwise, she appeared the same as she had earlier, just as pale and porcelainlike, although her blond hair was even blonder in full light than it had been in the darkness, and it was now even more apparent that her dress was dated, as if she’d just stepped out of an old movie.
“Who are you?” Mitt called out, but there was no answer from the apparition, nor did he really expect one. Building up his courage to face his own imagination head-on, Mitt tentatively started inching ahead, fully expecting the hallucination would flee as it had on the first occasion, but it didn’t. Instead, the girl’s sneer turned into a self-satisfied smile, as if daring Mitt to come closer and pleased that he was doing so.
When Mitt was no more than ten feet away, he stopped because he noticed something strange. He could see what appeared to be a gleaming, narrow, slender stainless-steel rod complete with a stainless-steel handle sticking out of the child’s left eye socket and angled downward around forty-five degrees from the vertical. Now he remembered glimpsing it earlier that morning. He had no idea what it was or what held it in place, as it seemed to be defying gravity. Also, as close as he was to her now, he could make out what looked like a series of bloodstains running down the front of her bodice. Maintaining her smug expression, she reached up and pulled the stainless-steel rod from where it had been embedded above her eye and pointed it at Mitt as if threatening him with it. To Mitt it looked like a metal ice pick with a slightly flared but narrow tip.
Then suddenly the girl again bolted. But she didn’t turn and run back up the corridor like Mitt expected. Instead, she ran sideways toward a nearby door that she was somehow able to open although he didn’t see her reach for the door handle.
Mitt didn’t think about how to react to this sudden development, he just did. He ran forward, banged open the door through which the girl had just disappeared, and rushed headlong into the darkness. After just a few steps he stopped, searching vainly in the darkness of what was a fairly large room filled with indistinct shapes. The only light was what little spilled in from the hallway behind him. The door he’d thrown open had now mostly closed. The girl was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was a sudden high-pitched screeching noise and out of the dark a student chair came right at Mitt, seemingly on its own accord.
Reacting by reflex, he put out both hands, caught the chair as it came skidding across the floor, and stopped it. Twisting around and retreating a few steps to reach the wall switch, he turned on the lights, flooding the room with fluorescent glare. Instantly, Mitt recognized where he was. He was in the surgical conference room where he’d started his residency about thirty-six hours previously. Immediately he questioned whether the location was symbolic or ironic. He had no idea, but he felt it had to be one or the other because the young girl was gone. Had the chair run into him or had he run into it? All of a sudden he wasn’t entirely certain. It had all happened so quickly.
Mitt collapsed into the chair that had come at him in the darkness or that he’d stumbled into, bent over, and, with his elbows balanced on his knees, cradled his head. He couldn’t believe himself and the flights of fancy he was capable of in his exhaustion. After rubbing his eyes and then glancing around the room one more time to make absolutely certain he was alone, he got up, turned off the light, and walked back out into the hallway. As he did so, an orderly pushing a food truck, presumably bringing some late meals to new medical admissions, passed by. For a moment, as he watched the orderly push the wagon down the hall, Mitt luxuriated in the banality of the activity, a sharp and reassuring contrast to his own madness.
Turning around, he walked to the elevator lobby, where he pressed the Down button. He needed to get the hell out of the hospital and get home, and more than anything needed to get into bed. If he didn’t manage to get some serious sleep, he feared he might totally lose his grasp on reality, especially with his newly gained respect for his own imagination.
Chapter 13
Tuesday, July 2, 9:37 p.m.
As Mitt passed beneath the marble archway of the old façade into the relatively new Bellevue Hospital lobby-atrium, he glanced at his watch and did a little arithmetic in his head. With a sense of disbelief, he calculated that he’d been in the hospital for just about forty hours with maybe four or so hours of interrupted sleep. It was no wonder he was having “walking” nightmares, especially when he added the anxieties of starting his residency and the emotional shock of having to deal with the deaths of three of his assigned patients.
When he finally reached the street and exited out onto First Avenue, he was surprised by the sultriness of the early-July night. He’d become so acclimated to the low humidity and fully air-conditioned hospital environment that he’d completely forgotten that it was summer. As he walked, there was something comforting about the press of cars, taxis, and buses heading north and the familiar sounds of horns and the low roar of hundreds of automotive engines. He even appreciated gazing at the pedestrians he passed heading in the opposite direction although none would return his stare. For him it was like rejoining the normal world after being in a totally artificial environment.
Quickly he came abreast of the old Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, and just as he had early Monday morning and despite his exhaustion, he couldn’t help but stop and gaze between the pickets of the rusting wrought iron fence at the nearly hundred-year-old edifice’s First Avenue entrance. In sharp contrast to all the other buildings in the immediate area, which were ablaze with lights, its hundreds of windows were dark and forbidding. As he stood there with a fresh appreciation of the power of his imagination, he was suddenly fearful that he might start to hear cries of anguish from its thousands of previous inpatients. As if to underline that fear, he began to feel paresthesia, which made him abruptly leave. The last thing he wanted to do at the moment was to encourage any more hallucinations of any variety.
At the nearby corner, he had to wait for the traffic light to turn in his favor to cross busy First Avenue. He then quickly headed west along 30th Street. At his apartment building, he keyed its outer door with a huge sense of relief. Feeling much too tired to check his mailbox, which he normally did, he instead went directly to the tiny, claustrophobic elevator. Under normal circumstances, Mitt much preferred to use the pleasant, nautilus-like, original, open stairway with its decorative railing that wound up the center of the building, as he appreciated the exercise as well as the view. With his exhaustion, none of that mattered on this particular evening.
With even more relief, he keyed open the double locks on his apartment’s front door. Once inside, he pulled off his white doctor’s coat and draped it over the arm of the couch. As he headed into his bedroom, he undid his tie and pulled off his shirt. Stepping out of his pants, he eyed his bed with relish but knew he had to take a shower, as much to wash away the negatives of the day as to get clean.