“I wish,” Kidd said, “he’d paid me for the whole day. Of course, if they’re feeding me and stuff—” another highrise loomed before them, tier on tier of dark windows—“five dollars an hour is a lot.” Smoke crawled across the facade. He had thought about them, of course; he remembered all his mulling while he worked in the upstairs apartment. And—again she was right—he’d certainly reached no synopsizable conclusion.
Madame Brown, hands behind her back, looked at the pavement, walked slowly.
Kidd, notebook before him in both hands (He’d almost forgotten it; Madame Brown had brought it to him at the door), looked up and could make out practically nothing. “You’re still working in that hospital?”
“Pardon me?”
“That mental hospital, you were talking about.” Walking revived him some. “With the children. Do you still go there every day?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
When she said nothing more, he said:
“I was in a mental hospital. For a year. I was just wondering what happened with—” he looked around at building faces whose wreckage was hidden behind night and smoke; he could smell smoke here—“with yours.”
“You probably don’t want to know,” she said, walking a few more steps in silence. “Especially if you were in one. It wasn’t pleasant.” Muriel spiraled back and away. “You see, I was with the hospital’s Social Service Department—you must have gathered that. Lord, I got twenty-two phone calls at home in two hours about evacuation procedures—the phone went dead in the middle of the last one. Finally, we just decided, even though it was the middle of the night, we’d better go to the hospital ourselves—my friend and I; you see, I had a little friend staying with me at the time. When we got there—walking, mind you—it was just incredible! You don’t expect doctors around at midnight in a place as understaffed as that. But there was not one orderly, one night nurse, one guard around! They’d just gone, like that!” She flung up her hand, in stark dismissal. “Patients were all up in the open night wards. We let out everybody we could. Thank God my friend found the keys to that incredible basement wing they first shut down fifteen years ago, and have been opening up and shutting down regularly—with not a bit of repair!—every three years since. You could see the fires out the windows. Some of the patients wouldn’t leave. Some of them couldn’t—dozens were logy in their beds with medication. Others were shrieking in the halls. And if all those phone calls about evacuation did anything besides scare off whatever staff was around, I’m sure I didn’t see it! Some rooms we just couldn’t find keys to! I broke windows with chairs. My friend got a crowbar, and three of the patients helped us break in some of the doors—Oh, yes: Did I mention somebody tried to strangle me? He just came up in his pajamas, while I was hurrying down the second floor corridor, grabbed me, and started choking. Oh, not very seriously, and only for about two or three minutes, before some other patients helped me get him off—apparently, as I discovered, it takes quite a bit of effort to really choke somebody to death who doesn’t want to be choked. And, believe me, I didn’t. But it was a doozer. I was recovering from that in the S.S. office, when she came in with these.” He heard Madame Brown finger the chains around her neck: it was too dark to see glitter. “My friend. She said she’d found them, wound them around my neck. You could see them flashing in flickers coming from outside, around the window shades.” Madame Brown paused. “But I told you about that…?” She sighed. “I also told you that was when she left…my friend. Some of the rooms, you see, we just couldn’t get into. We tried—me, the other patients, we tried! And the patients on the inside, trying just as hard! Christ, we tried! But by then, fire had broken out in the building itself. The smoke was so thick you could hardly—” She took a sudden breath. Did she shrug? “We had to leave. And, as I said, by that time, my little friend had left already.”
He could see Madame Brown beside him now.
She walked, contemplating either the past or the pavement.
Muriel wove ahead, barked, turned, ran.
“I went back once,” she said at last. “The next morning. I don’t want to go again. I want to do something else…I’m a trained psychologist. Social service was never really my forte. I don’t know if the patients who got out were finally evacuated or not. I assume they were; but I can’t be sure.” She gave a little humph. “Perhaps that has something to do with why I don’t leave myself.”
“I don’t think so,” Kidd said, after a moment. “It sounds like you—and your friend—were very brave.”
Madame Brown humphed again.
“It’s just—” he felt uncomfortable, but it was a different discomfort than at the table—“you made it sound, when you were talking about it at dinner, like you still worked there. That’s why I asked.”
“Oh, I was just making conversation. To keep Mary entertained. When people take the trouble to bring out the best in her, she’s quite a handsome woman; with quite a handsome soul—even if the quotidian surface sits on it a bit askew. I imagine some people find that hard to see.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “I guess so.” Half a block ahead, Muriel was a shifting dollop of darkness. “I thought—” on the curb, he scraped his heel—“Hey, watch…!” He staggered. “Um. I thought you said they had three children.”
“They do.”
They crossed the damp street. On cool pavement, his heel stung.
“Edward, the oldest, isn’t with them now. But it isn’t a subject I’d bring up. Especially with Mary. It was very painful for her.”
“Oh.” He nodded again.
They stepped up another curb.
“If nothing’s functioning around here,” Kidd asked, “why does Mr. Richards go in to work every day?”
“Oh, just to make a showing. Probably for Mary. You’ve seen how keen she is on appearances.”
“She wants him to stay home,” Kidd said. “She’s scared to death!—I was pretty scared too.”
Madame Brown considered a few moments. “Maybe he does it just to get away.” She shrugged—it was light enough to see it now. “Perhaps he just goes off and sits on a bench somewhere.”
“You mean…he’s scared?”
Madame Brown laughed. “Why wouldn’t he be?” Muriel ran up, ran off. “But I think it’s much more likely he simply doesn’t appreciate her. That isn’t fair of me, I know; but then, it’s one of those universal truths about husbands and wives you really don’t have to be fair with. He loves her, in his way.” Muriel ran up again, leapt to Madame Brown’s hip. She roughed the beast’s head. Satisfied, it ran off again. “No, he must be going somewhere! Probably just where he says he is. To the office…the warehouse…” She laughed. “And we’ve simply got far too poetic an imagination!”
“I wasn’t imagining anything.” But he smiled. “I just asked.” In the light from a flickering window, a story above them, he saw, through faint smoke, she was smiling too.
Ahead, Muriel barked.
And what have I invested in interpreting disfocus for chaos? This threat: the only lesson is to wait. I crouch in the smoggy terminus. The streets lose edges, the rims of thought flake. What have I set myself to fix in this dirty notebook that is not mine? Does the revelation that, though it cannot be done with words, it might be accomplished in some lingual gap, give me the right, in injury, walking with a woman and her dog, to pain? Rather the long doubts: that this labor tears up the mind’s moorings; that, though life may be important in the scheme, awareness is an imperfect tool with which to face it. To reflect is to fight away the sheets of silver, the carbonated distractions, the feeling that, somehow, a thumb is pressed on the right eye. This exhaustion melts what binds, releases what flows.
Madame Brown opened the bar door for him.
Kidd passed by vinyl Teddy, the bill in his fist. But while he contemplated offering her a drink, someone came screaming across the bar; Madame Brown screamed back; they staggered away. He sat down at the counter’s end. The people whose backs he had seen along the stools, as he leaned forward, gained faces. But no Tak; nor any Lanya. He was looking at the empty cage when the bartender, rolled sleeves tying off the necks of tattooed leopards, said, “You’re a beer drinker, ain’t you?”