• • •
The next afternoon I discovered the note under my door. A folded piece of paper inscribed with the words For You. I recoiled from it as from a rat. The letters were so exact it looked like they had been written with a stencil. I turned on the bedside lamp and opened it.
You, Stop following me. I mean this seriously, STOP. Amelia Stern, Door 12.
I read the note until it trembled in my hands. A thousand oaths I swore to myself: to knock on her door right then, to hide forever from everyone, and soon I was blathering to the man I trusted least in the world because I had to talk and Doctor Orphels, he was there. My session took place an hour after my discovery of the note, and there I spewed in breathless monologue what little I knew about this Amelia Stern. It was the first time I had spoken to the doctor in months, the first time in months I’d spoken at all (outside of muttering his speech to me), and I was expecting, I think, some theatrical rapprochement — a welcome-back sort of speech, a wry grin, at the very least, but Orphels simply listened, reading her note when I handed it to him. “I know,” he said. “I told her to write it.”
“Told her?!”
“She’s my patient. She noticed your following her and found it discomfiting. I told her she ought to notify you of this feeling. As you rightly observed, she’s deaf, so a written note seemed best.”
“You knew about this? All this time, you knew? Did you, did you orchestrate this?”
“But how could I have?” He smiled. “You were the one following her.”
“You’re just like Bernard. You use a person.”
“I believe you were the one who had been using me, Giovanni, using my voice, my history. I thought we discussed that.”
“You are not me, you never have been and never will.” I was scratching my scalp. “Your fingers on the armrests of that chair do not feel the leathery scratch as mine do, your toes do not inhabit your cotton socks as mine do.”
“Giovanni, if you had brought up the situation with Amelia sooner, I would have been more than happy to discuss it. You’ve brought it up, so I’ve addressed it.” He said, “What led you to her?”
“So you can run and tell her?” I was nearly yelling. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.”
That’s how he was. He picked the best moments to surprise you. He waved her note. “At the least,” he said, “you’ll have to explain yourself.” A few minutes later, the session was over.
That evening I paced the grounds until the sky was black. You’ll have to explain yourself. I wandered by the birch trees, the mountains going from blue to black to blue again against the sky. You’ll have to explain yourself. Bats soared and dipped like pieces of night briefly torn free. In low clouds the fireflies rose and evaporated. I wandered into the woods, away from the house, stumbling over roots.
Explain yourself. The words had never sounded so strange.
Soon I was sprinting through the woods. It was like being erased. Smeared in with the trees and ground. An owl was saying, “Whooo?” and the needles crunched under me and just then, without warning, as if God had snapped his fingers, all the intervening years collapsed, and I was thirteen again, being dragged out of the classroom by Heedling. I could feel it. The collar tightening around my neck.
Explain yourself.
Then Max slapped my cheek in Dun Harbor. I felt it in the woods: the slap. I felt other things, too, felt them as though mugged, physically, by memory: felt Mama’s arms squeezing my waist, her chin digging into my shoulder. (“Up, up!” she’d said.) The spotlight warming the shoulders of my tuxedo. Lucy’s calves scissoring the backs of my thighs. The girls outside Derringer’s office, their grins like hobos’. Max’s notes in the margins of his papers swarming like ants.
Explain yourself, and before I understood what I was doing I had run back to the house. I found a pen and paper at the commissary and wrote back to this woman, Amelia Stern, explaining myself, scribbling in a state of exhilaration:
Amelia Stern,
I do not mean to stare. I’m sorry, please know I’m sorry. I’m barely even here these days, so it’s medicine to find a person who is. I was invisible, I thought. As loose change gets lost in a couch, that’s how I’m lost in my body. You have a superb way of walking, that’s all. You have a way of touching people on a shoulder I admire. Of eating soup, etc. My mother was killed. You will not turn and see me following you, I promise. Sometime long ago I was a well-behaved man and will be again. You’re sweet medicine, that’s all.
Giovanni Bernini
I must’ve entered into some new delirium since before breakfast that morning, after slipping the note under Amelia’s door; I visited the library and, with no plan at all, checked out a dictionary of sign language.
Like everything, borrowing the book seemed a frightful ordeal — what with surviving the solicitude of the nurses and the fluorescent lights of the library — but I managed to do it. In my room I practiced, and if it hadn’t been for the terror of failing and the terror of succeeding, I could have torn through the book in an hour, so closely did it play to my talents. My hands were two ticklish birds, two anythings. Dancing origami — my knuckles, my meanings. There was a civility involved, a silence, and theatrics.
Awake. Do you know how you say it? You mimic the opening of the eyes. You form two L’s with your hands and push them away from your temples.
Freedom. You make fists and cross your arms, then uncross them. Cross, then uncross.
Face. My favorite. With your forefinger, circle your face.
It was like cutting a hole in the air.
• • •
As much as it pained me, I kept my promise, switching with the doctor’s help to B Schedule, which meant I did everything Amelia did an hour after her. Because her routine was so exact, it was painful but not difficult to avoid her entirely.
My sessions with Orphels those two days were among the least helpful yet. I went on and on about the letter, pecking at him for her reaction.
“Giovanni, you know I can’t discuss this.”
“I don’t know that. I don’t know anything about what you’re up to. You’re like your father, Dr. Orphels. A master of justification.”
He grinned. “You distrust me, but that’s okay. I would prefer you to be distrustful of me and in possession of your health than the reverse. Please tell me.” He said, “How did it feel to write that note?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have to say.”
“That’s true.”
A long silence. “As you yourself observed, Amelia suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder,” he said. “Must repeat most actions anywhere from three to forty times. Wash her hands. Open the door. She worked as a newspaper photographer, and this activity, photography, became a way of mitigating the obsession. Rather than touching a certain hydrangea bush three times, she would take three photos of it.”