In Extremis Read online

  I wait for Bethany. She’s never the first to come. It starts with the other faces . . .

  Now I see a face in the dull-green wall, turning to look at me. The face is made partly of places where the paint on the concrete is wrinkly, and partly from a wall crack and partly from shadow and partly from my mind connecting all these things. I can tell this one’s a hallucination. It’s a jowly man, balding, looking sullen, almost angry, put-upon, circles under his little eyes. His lips move but I can’t hear what he’s saying. I think I might know who he is. That happens sometimes—the faces are people from memory. I think this man might be Mr. Wemberly. I saw his face six years ago when Mom brought me in here. He looked me over and wasn’t too pleased. Talked about how the necessary staff time made it hardly worthwhile. “Put him in room 230.” That was the last I saw of him.

  Now his face recedes into the wall. I see another—it’s a pretty girl, one I sometimes dream about. She looks a little like Jayne Mansfield. She makes a kissy puckering with her lips at me. I’m sorry when she fades away. Another face takes her place—my mother. Her lips sneer, her eyes are heavy with disappointment. Sorry Mother, I say to her, in my mind. Okay? As if that satisfies her for now, she melts away, and I’m glad. Now comes a face I don’t know—it’s a frightened looking man. He opens his mouth. He screams. Is that my face? It’s too old to be my face. But I haven’t seen my own face in six years.

  That face collapses into another face, a little boy with colorless hair and very dark eyes. He seems to be praying. I don’t know him, do I? There’s something about him that makes me deeply afraid, but I don’t know what. He slips back into the wall, and along comes another face—a black woman, looking amused, curious. A pleasant middle-aged face.

  She seems to be singing to herself, judging by the movement of her head, from side to side, the way her lips move, but I can’t hear her. I like her. But . . .

  I want to see the one I can hear. The one who can step out of the wall. I’m impatient to see her today.

  I try to call her with my mind.

  I think, Beth . . . .Bethany . . . .Beth!

  I can feel her responding almost immediately. I hear her voice, phasing in and out of audibility: “Was . . . coming . . . anyway . . . don’t . . . so . . . imp . . .”

  Don’t so imp? Don’t be so impatient.

  Then the singing black lady melts away, and I see Beth.

  I wish I could smile to greet her. All I can do is lift my right thumb a little. She’s just a face in the wall, but then she thrusts her hand from it and wiggles her thumb at me. It’s a little mocking when she does that but honestly it’s just her sense of humor. She’s in a better mood than last time, it seems to me. That’s good. But I know that can change. Her sorrow’s never far away. She’s anchored in Wemberly Sanitarium by sorrow.

  Bethany steps out of the wall, into the room. Beth is a slim, barefoot girl in a short hospital gown—her legs are quite skinny, knees knobby. She has a mousy sort of face, but kind of cute the way a mouse’s face is, and long dull-brown hair, a bit lank, and brown freckles on her cheeks and brown eyes. Her coloration comes and goes—sometimes she seems to be made of a cream colored mist. She’s a little foggy below the neck but her arms come into focus when she uses them to gesture, or point. Her lips don’t move when she talks except that they smile or frown or purse themselves.

  Her voice seems to echo around, and the last echo comes clearest into my mind. Now and then a word drops out. “Douglas. I’ve come to see you again . . .”

  I reply in my mind. “Hello, Beth. Thank you for coming. I love it when you come here.”

  “Has he . . . back?”

  “Sack? Not for eleven nights now.”

  “He’ll come tonight. I’ve seen him, he’s been looking at that pillowcase with the holes . . .”

  I try to sound brave, and blithe, to impress her with my courage. “It makes a change. But he gets worse every time. I don’t know how the worst kind of guy can get worse.” I tried to make a laughing sound in my mind.

  “Don’t do that,” she says, frowning.

  “Don’t do what?”

  “. . . make that fake laughing. It sounds like one of . . . gag laughing toys. My father used to sell gags. He was . . . traveling salesman . . .”

  She’s already told me about her eccentric father, but I let her tell me about it again.

  After a while that story runs down. “Are you talking to someone else?” she asks.

  I’m surprised. “I’m sort of filing everything that happens in another part of my mind, as we talk. In the form of a narrative. You can hear it?”

  “Not exactly,” she says. “It’s okay. Your mind . . . a strong one. Some people here . . . very feeble. Almost not there at all.”

  “I’ve got nothing to do but make my mind work, in different ways. I’d forgotten algebra but I worked it out again to keep my mind busy, about a year ago. Are you ready to tell me, now, how you got here? You said you would, last time.”

  Her frown deepens. “I guess so. I should.” She seems to look around the room, as if trying to remember something. I yearn to ask her to touch me, anywhere at all, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to feel her touch since she isn’t precisely alive. “One reason I came to this room,” she says, “is because I used to live in here. Right in this room.” I am hearing her voice more clearly now. That happens when we’ve been talking for a while. It’s like we hone in on each other’s frequency. “It really started in 1943. I was a nurse’s aide, for soldiers coming back from the war. Volunteering. I thought I might meet a husband that way. I wasn’t very pretty and I was almost thirty and wasn’t married. I was taking care of a soldier who was coughing all the time, he’d been in North Africa, and he caught something there. I thought it was just a bad cold. But then after a while I started coughing too, and then I was coughing up yellow and red stuff, like mustard and catsup. But it was bloody sputum. And I got feverish and started waking up in the middle of the night with the sheets soaked, all covered with sweat. So I went to the doctor and they said I had consumption—the tuberculosis—and they took me to the sanitarium. This sanitarium. This same room. The owner was Randall Wemberly and there was a young fat man who was his son, Charles. This boy Charles worked as an orderly, but he was going to inherit the place. He was learning the job and said we’d all better be good to him because he was going to take over the whole place someday. He’d laugh and wink like that was a joke but it was what was in his mind. Charles Wemberly. He would take us for our treatments. People thought, back then, that cold fresh air would kill the bacillus, so they took us to open windows and made us sit there, and breathe the cold air in the winter. And snow would come in, sometimes, and cover us. I saw two people die right there, in that room. The worst was the balloon, though. They’d put a balloon in your lung, and they’d inflate it. They said it would help the lung heal. I don’t know why they thought that. And it was a very awful feeling when they put it in but the worst was when they expanded it and that was the very worst pain I’d ever felt. Up till then. Blood would squirt out my nose, the first spurt shooting in an arc all the way down to my thighs. And they’d cut away people’s ribs, so the lungs could expand. All those people died, the ones who lost part of their ribcage. They didn’t do that surgery on me. But I thought I was going to die soon anyway. They had a tunnel they used for taking the dead people out—it’s still down there, I’ll show it to you sometime, Douglas—it goes out back, to a little building. That’s so the patients and their families wouldn’t see all the dead people going out of the hospital—it happened so often. Because most patients died. Almost all of them.” She hesitates. She looks at me with her head tilted. She seems to be trying to remember how it was. “I lingered on for a long time and I kept wanting to run away and find some peaceful place to die alone, without anyone watching. But then the streptomycin came in. And it worked!” She gives an ironic little smile. “That was in 1946. People were getting better from it. So they gave it to me fo
r a while, and I improved—a lot! I wasn’t even infectious anymore, and I wasn’t coughing. I thought I would be leaving soon. I was planning what I would do when I was released.” She makes a gesture in the air, like she wants to push something away that isn’t there. “And then Charles came to me, alone. He was supposed to give me my medicine, but he said I couldn’t have it unless I let him play with my body. ‘It has to be however I want to touch you, any way at all,’ he said. ‘Or you will die.’ He pushed up against me and I remember his breath smelled like rotten eggs. I said, ‘Why did you choose me?’ I was just stalling. He said it was my legs, they were like the legs of a little girl. I shouted that I’d tell his father on him. Then he hit me with a bedpan, and that knocked me senseless for a while, and when I came to, we were on the floor and he was holding onto me, and humping my hips talking about how my legs were the legs of a little girl—he was not even inside me, but humping me more like a dog would hump on a person’s legs—and he saw I was awake so he started whispering that he would kill me, he would simply kill me if I didn’t do what he wanted and I shouldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t . . .” She breaks off and looks at me. “Does this story offend you?”

  “No,” I reply, in my mind. “Well yes: I’m offended that you were hurt. But I want to know what happened.”

  She smiles. She nods and looks at the overhead light. “I can see the electricity in the wires, if I squint,” she says.

  “Did he kill you?” I prompt her.

  She sticks out her lower lip as she thinks it over. “No. Not exactly. He said his father was away on a trip, and now he was in charge and he would see I spoke to no one but him, and I would get no more medicine . . . unless . . .”

  She looks at the door. I hear people passing outside, in the hall, talking. A woman weepily talking about her aunt, saying she’s all the family she has. The nurse saying, “We can only do so much.”

  Then they’ve moved on. I don’t know why Beth waited, since they can’t hear us talking. Maybe she is afraid someone might come in to check on me, and see her. Maybe she doesn’t realize how rarely anyone comes in here.

  If she’s worried about that, does that mean that I’m not the only one who can see her?

  “So,” Beth goes on, “I said, ‘Charles, do what you have to, but don’t hit me again.’ My head hurt so badly. And then he raped me. I laid still for it, like he wanted, and didn’t fight him, but it was raping. It hurt a lot . . . I was afraid I’d throw up and choke on the vomit while he was doing it . . .”

  We are silent for a while. I felt like making the immmm sound but I didn’t. Not doing that now is the only way I have of being strong for her.

  She turns like she is going to melt back into the wall.

  “Don’t go, Beth!” I call to her, in my mind.

  She looks back at me, and I can see she wants to cry but, like me, she can’t. “I have to go. I have to rest in the wall. But I’ll just tell you this much more. Charles gave me something he said was streptomycin, but it wasn’t. It was just placebo. The symptoms started to come back. And he started coming to me wearing a surgical mask. Forced me to open my legs for him. Holding a hand over my mouth to keep me quiet. Then I guessed what was going on. I said, ‘You want me to die, so I don’t talk about what you’ve been doing to me. You’re not giving me the medicine at all now.’ He wouldn’t say anything and then I didn’t see him for a couple of days. I tried to talk to a nurse but I was locked in here and they wouldn’t respond, wouldn’t come to the door. I was shouting and shouting and then when I screamed really loud something broke in my lungs and I spit up blood, so much blood came up I choked. And then there was a lot of pain and then it was dark . . .” She shrugs. “And then I was in the walls. Just in the walls. But sometimes I can come out and look at things. Mostly they can’t see me but sometimes they do.” She smiles at that. “I don’t like them to see me, I’m afraid they’ll bring Charles but . . . I like to see them afraid of me, too.”

  “He’s still here?”

  The color is going out of her. She seems to flatten, like she’s a cutout, or something drawn on paper. “I’m tired . . . yes. Yes he’s here. Charles is Mr. Wemberly now. He’s in charge, like he said he’d be. He’s the one who put you in here, this room. Good bye, Douglas, for now. Try to pretend you’re someone else when Sack comes in. That’s what I always did when Charles . . . and the nurses would pretend . . . can’t . . .”

  That’s all I can hear. She is slipping into the wall—almost as if something in it is pulling her slowly in, against her will. The wall is drinking her in the way water sinks out of sight into deep sand. Then she’s gone.

  I feel like I’ve fallen into a wall, too. I close my eyes. I don’t try to call to her, though. Bethany needs to rest.

  A nurse comes, looks at my sore, mutters that it’s not so bad. Goes away. An orderly comes, checks my lower parts, shrugs, and goes away. I hear the sound of a mop in a bucket in the hallway. Some kind of broth is brought to me, and I’m fed with something like a turkey baster. They have to crank the bed up a bit so I don’t choke. They get irritated when I choke.

  The bedsore is tormenting me. It hurts and it itches. The itching always makes me imagine insects are crawling into the bedsore. They’re getting into it and laying eggs that will become hungry little grubs that will eat their way out of my brain. Sometimes I think I can feel them beginning to chew through the soft tissue inside my skull.

  I must not think about that because if I do it just gets more and more vivid, worse and worse and I have to immmm. One of the ways I change the direction of my thoughts is to try to remember a song, note for note. There’s one by The Turtles.

  So happy together . . .

  They’re crawling into the wound . . .

  So happy to-geth-errrrrr . . . .

  I think of songs and I watch dust motes. I watch the color of the sunlight deepen, and the crooked squares of light from the window travel down the left hand wall and vanish entirely, and the dread of Sam Sack comes on me, much later, when the light is switched off. I try to sleep, hoping for a good dream. But I can’t sleep.

  Sack.

  He comes into the dark room, I know it’s him from the smells—rancid sweat and Top tobacco. I can just barely see his silhouette. I hear the rustle of his homemade mask. He puts it over his head in the darkness. He switches on the little lantern he’s brought, dialed down low, and raises it up to see me, and so I can see him. There’s the sack on his head with holes cut in it—actually it’s a small pillowcase, but for a long time I thought it was a sack. So I think of it that way and I call him Sam Sack.

  “Glad to see me?” he asks, his head cocked, his voice hoarse. It’s always hoarse. He adjusts the pillowcase with his free hand to let him see out the crudely cut holes better. I can’t see his face, only the eyes. Around his covered mouth, the cloth gets damp and dark with his breath. Why does he even bother with the mask? Maybe he’s got the “sack” on in case anyone turns on the light. Maybe he’s hoping he can run before they identify him. Or maybe he doesn’t want me to see his face. Because even though I couldn’t tell anybody who he is, he feels more powerful, stronger, if I don’t know. Maybe his face is one a man would laugh at.

  But I think I know who he might be—kind of. No, he’s not Charles Wemberly. I can tell from smells on him—and the dirt under his yellow fingernails, his calluses, his oily overalls—that he’s probably on the maintenance staff. I think he’s the night janitor. He’s a white man, gangly, but with a pot belly. He has cigarette stains on two fingers of his right hand. Once I heard an aide walking by in the hall, saying, “Maybe Sam can clean it up tonight, I’m not going to do it, I’m going off shift.” I figured maybe he was that Sam. Sick Sam Sack.

  He climbs up on the narrow bed, and straddles me, and I close my eyes. He starts pressing my eyes with my thumbs. “I could cram’em back into your brain,” he says, “and you couldn’t do nothin’ about it.’

  He pushes hard, and it hurts, but he’s ca
reful not to break anything there. He broke a couple of my toes once, and the nurses never seemed to notice. But they’d notice if he poked out my eyes.

  He says, “I was thinking of the sewing needles today, how maybe I could do you with the pins again, they don’t leave much mark, and the aides just think it’s another sore or such.” He slaps me, once, hard. Stinging the left side of my face. It makes a loud noise in the room. The mark will fade before the nurses see it. And would they do anything if they did see it? I don’t think so.

  He slaps me again, and twice more. “Maybe this’ll wake you up. Wake up in there, dummy! Wake up!” He laughs softly.

  His eyes in the pillowcase holes are bright.

  Sometimes he’ll pull hair from my head, my pubes, my armpits, one hair at a time. Once he started pulling out a fingernail, but blood came, and he decided that might draw too much attention, so he left it partly pulled. No one noticed. They clipped it like they always do, without a comment.

  Sack puts his weight on my chest, presses down with his knees. I can’t breathe. He waits. Spots appear over my eyes. I’m close to dying. I wouldn’t mind if he’d finish it but I know he won’t. He won’t let me off the hook. I make the immmm sound and he gives out a soft laugh of pleasure. Then he lets up, easing off, letting me breathe. Then he does it again, almost smothering me, two times more.

  Maybe I’m starting to turn blue, because he quits, and climbs off the table. “I’ve got something else for you.” As I lay there, breath rasping, he reaches into his pocket, takes out something brassy. He fiddles with it and holds it up so I can see it better. Lipstick. “I’m gonna pretty you up a little. I got a lady’s brassiere, and this. I’m gonna put this on your lips and rub it on your cheeks. I’ll clean it off before I go. And this time, I’m gonna have your ass. The girl I use—she died. She killed herself. So it’s you, now. We got to make you a little more like a girl. I’m gonna call you Sissy Thing . . .”