What the hell? How could he leave tomorrow? What was he going to do with her?
He went back and sat down again. He wasn’t really coming to grips with this.
After a while he supposed he could call the police.
And say what? he wondered.
Well, you see, I’ve got this crazy lady on my boat and I’d like to have you get her off.
How did she get on your boat? they would ask.
Well, she got on at Kingston, he would say… ridiculous. There was no way he was going to win that conversation.
He supposed the easiest legitimate way out of the whole mess would be to get her to see a psychiatrist. Then, whatever happened to her, he’d be done with her. That’s what they’re for. But how was he going to talk her into that? He could barely get her into the bunk up there.
And who was going to pay? Those guys don’t come cheap. Would they take her as a charity case? An out-of-towner in New York? Hardly. And anyway just the paper-work of it, the bureaucracy, could make it days before he got out of here.
Slowly the predicament he was in began to dawn on him. Boy! There’s no such thing as a free lunch. She really had him trapped. There was no way he could get rid of her now. What the hell was he going to do?
This wasn’t tragic. This was so dumb it was comic. He was really stuck with her!
He could see himself spending the rest of his life with this crazy lady up in the forecabin, never daring to report her, traveling from port to port like some yachting Flying Dutchman — a servant to her for the rest of his life.
He felt like Woody Allen… That’s who should play him in the movies. Woody Allen. He’d get it right.
What to do? This was impossible.
He realized he could just take her out and dump her overboard. He thought about it for a while, until it started to give him a sick depressed feeling. No sense in being ridiculous. He was really stuck.
It was cold in the cabin. The shock of all this must have prevented him from noticing it. He got out the charcoal briquets and built a fire in the heater, but all of the matches went out. More Woody Allen. All of a sudden nothing was working.
He went over in his mind all the things that had happened since he first met her in Kingston. She had given little warnings that something like this might happen. She was such a stranger he just hadn’t recognized it. The sudden anger over nothing, that crazy sex episode in the forecabin in Nyack. She had been acting that way all along.
He guessed that’s what Rigel was trying to warn him about.
He thought of starting up the stove for some coffee, but decided not to. He should try to get some sleep himself. There was nothing he could do now that couldn’t be done in the morning. He rolled a sleeping bag out on the bunk, undressed and got in.
The talk about the boatman, what was that about?
He wondered why she picked him up, of all people, at that bar.
She must see him as some sort of refuge. Some sort of savior.
He began to think about how isolated she really was.
After a while he guessed that must be the whole explanation. That’s why she came back here tonight. Apparently he was the only person she could come to.
He didn’t know what he was going to do with her.
Just listen to her for a while, he supposed, and then figure it out. That’s all he could do.
The absence of any harbor sounds here was strange. Here in New York Harbor he’d expected tugboats and barges going through the night and heavy ocean vessels. Not this. This was like some peaceful inland lake somewhere…
Sleep didn’t come… That light he saw around her. It was trying to tell him something.
It was saying, wake up.
But wake up to what?
Wake up to your obligations, maybe.
What were they?
Maybe not to be so static.
It was a long time now since those years when Phædrus had been a mental patient. He’d become very static. He was more intelligible to the sane now because he’d moved closer to them. But he’d become a lot farther away from people like Lila.
Now he saw her the same way others had seen him years ago. And now he was behaving exactly the way they did. They could be excused for not knowing better. They didn’t know what it was like. But he didn’t have that excuse.
It’s a legitimate point of view. It’s the lifeboat problem. If you get too involved with too many people with too many problems they drag you under. You don’t save them. They sink you.
Of course she’s unimportant. Of course she’s a waste of time. She’s causing an interruption of other more important purposes in life. No one admits it, but that’s really the reason the insane get locked up. They’re disgusting people you want to get rid of but can’t. It’s not just that they have absurd ideas that nobody else believes. What makes them insane is that they have these ideas and are a nuisance to somebody else.
The only thing that’s illegitimate is the cover-up, the pretense that you’re trying to help them by getting rid of them. But really there was no way Lila was going to sink him. She was just a nuisance now, and he could handle that. Maybe that’s what the light was trying to tell him. He had no choice but to try to help her, nuisance or not. Otherwise he would just injure himself. You can’t just run off from other people without injuring yourself too.
Well, he thought… she’s either come to the best possible person or to the worst possible person. No way yet to know which.
He rolled over and lay quietly.
He knew he had heard that talk of hers before, that style, and now he remembered some of the people he had talked to in the insane asylum. When people are going insane they tend to get very ingenuous like that… What did he remember? It all seemed so long ago.
Aunt Ellen. When he was seven.
There was a noise in the downstairs in the dark. His parents thought it was a burglar, but it was Ellen. Her eyes were wide. Some man was chasing her, she said. He was trying to hypnotize her and do things to her.
Later, at the asylum Phædrus remembered her pleading, I’m all right. I’m all right! They’re just keeping me here when I know I’m all right.
Afterward his mother and her sisters had cried as they left. But they didn’t see what he saw.
He never forgot what he saw, that Ellen wasn’t frightened of the insanity. She was frightened of them.
That was the hardest thing to deal with during his own commitment. Not the insanity. That came naturally. The hardest thing to deal with was the righteousness of the sane.
When you’re in agreement with the sane they’re a great comfort and protection, but when you disagree with them it’s another matter. Then they’re dangerous. Then they’ll do anything. The sinister thing that struck the most fear in him was what they’d do in the name of kindness. The ones he cared about most and who cared about him most suddenly, all of them, turned against him the same way they had against Ellen. They kept saying, There’s no way we can reach you. If only we could make you understand.
He saw that the sane always know they are good because their culture tells them so. Anyone who tells them otherwise is sick, paranoid, and needs further treatment. To avoid that accusation Phædrus had had to be very careful of what he said when he was in the hospital. He told the sane what they wanted to hear and kept his real thoughts to himself.
He turned back again. This pillow was like a rock. She had all the good pillows up there. No way to get one now… It didn’t matter.