Concert of Ghosts (19 page)

Just because.

Maggie Silver said Look look

But that didn't quite make it, the voice was disembodied. Instead, he was blindly plunged inside the room in the house on Schrader and somebody was screaming, a girl, Maggie Silver, why was she screaming so—

The receptionist had returned. “Everything seems to be in order.” She produced a register in which visitors had to sign their names. Tennant stared at the book. The blank page accused him. He took the receptionist's pen and wrote down: Harry Rayland. She looked at him oddly, as if she'd seen through his need to be furtive.
A girl screaming
. The sound rolled through his head with all the piercing quality of a locomotive whistling in a black tunnel. I should be used to this. I should be accustomed by now to the synaptic explosions. But.

A man had come into the reception room. Tall, with a long jaw and tightly curled white hair, he said his name was Dr. Paul Lannigan. He was in his early fifties and wore a three-piece green tweed suit of an old-fashioned cut. The pants were a little baggy at the knees. His accent was hard to place; it had to it a lilt that suggested Irish origins tempered by many years in the United States. He shook Tennant's hand, then Alison's. Charm, bedside manner, a fine wide smile, honest blue eyes. You could put your trust in this Lannigan, Tennant thought. You could give him all your troubles and he'd conjure them away. Harry imagined telling Lannigan his problems, and the man would whisk him off to a peaceful room and have him lie down on a comfortable couch and say:
Now then, tell me what it is. What ails you
.

Lannigan, still smiling, said, “Rules are such a bore, but I should point out to both of you that we allow visits of no more than thirty minutes except for immediate family. Sometimes our clients become stressed by anything longer. What I'm saying is try to keep it short, if you will. I have the feeling you won't stay long anyway. Mr. Obe isn't a man you'd describe as, ah, well, communicative.” The doctor smiled and sucked in air, a small sound of sympathy. He had about him the aura of a general practitioner of the sort you rarely saw any more, the kind that treated everything from syphilis to tonsillitis, and who knew the names of your siblings because he'd delivered most of them himself at inconvenient hours in inclement weather.

“If you'll be good enough to follow me,” Lannigan said.

They went through a doorway and down a long corridor, a bright white rectangle lined with more pastoral prints. There were doors on either side of the corridor, all closed. They passed a large window that offered a view of a dining room, empty at present.

“We're quite proud of our facilities here,” Lannigan said, and he glanced at Tennant as if he expected agreement. “Our cuisine is the finest. The link between nutrition and mental illness is significant. Food for the body is also food for the mind,” and he tapped the side of his skull. He looked at Tennant again, rather expectantly.

Tennant felt compelled to say something. “Good-looking dining room.”

“Ah,” Lannigan said. “You haven't seen the half of it. Not the half of it.”

From overhead came the sound of a piano being randomly struck. A woman's voice sang tuneless lyrics that had no meaning.
Ooobee ooobee doodah
.

“Our recreation area is upstairs,” the doctor said. “Music, basket weaving, painting. Games. Some of our clients seem to respond well to simple card games. Some enjoy crossword puzzles.” He paused, as if to consider something, then added, “A mind challenged is a mind on the mend, after all.”

A mind on the mend, Tennant thought. Mend mine, Dr. Lannigan. Please.

A door opened and a white-coated nurse stepped into the corridor, carrying a small triangular enamel pan over which lay a square of linen. Tennant wondered if a hypodermic syringe lay concealed there. An unruly patient given a suitable infusion of tranquility. He had the sudden urge to turn and run: What was he doing in this place of paper slippers, smocks, plastic forks?

They climbed a flight of stairs. Another corridor stretched ahead. Halfway along, Lannigan stopped outside a door. “Karen Obe gave you permission to see her husband. She was vague, but she led me to understand that the matter is, I suppose you might say, of a somewhat personal nature.” Lannigan seemed to intend his last sentence as a question because he waited for Tennant and Alison to respond.

The girl said, “Personal, right.”

“I have absolutely no objection. None at all. I don't think you'll get whatever it is you might be looking for, but anyway, anyway …” And he knocked on the door once before opening it.

“Sammy,” he said. “You've got visitors. Your wife sent them along.”

Tennant stepped inside the room, a white room with a small high window, a narrow bed, a chest of drawers. Newspapers, carefully sliced into strips for reasons only Obe could know, lay across the floor. Sammy Obe sat on the edge of the bed, huddled, shoulders hunched. His eyes had the singularly plaintive look of a man on a journey without destination, somebody who has been to places indescribable to others. His mouth was distended in a grimace. When he turned to look at Tennant, his expression didn't alter, as if his lips were sealed permanently in a look of contempt. But contempt wasn't quite the word, nor was disdain. The expression was a constant, without significance, a madman's vacantly sullen look.

“Remember. Thirty minutes.” Lannigan touched Tennant's arm lightly, in a way that might have been solicitous. He was apparently reluctant to leave. Eventually he said, “Well. Things to do, things to do.” He stepped out of the room.

Alone with Obe, neither Tennant nor Alison quite knew how to approach the man. How did you ask questions of somebody reputed to speak only gibberish? How could any question be the right one, if it were destined to remain unanswered? Sammy Obe, in his loose-fitting white clothing, didn't move.

“I'm Alison Seagrove, Mr. Obe.” A tentative opening, a fumbling. Alison's voice, though gentle, was filled with uncertainty.

Obe turned his face to one side and looked up at the window, which was unreachable even if he were to stand on the bed. You could imagine Obe's yearning, Tennant thought, for a freedom that might lie beyond that taunting little glass pane. If he yearned at all: How could you tell? Tennant studied the strips of newspaper. Obviously they hadn't been cut with scissors—Obe would not be allowed sharp instruments—but they'd been torn fastidiously. Random columns, advertisements, sports results, there was no logic to the papers. Did he sit here all day and tear papers?

Alison walked to the bed, where she sat down alongside Obe. She indicated Tennant and said, “You took this man's picture once. A long time ago in the Haight-Ashbury. Do you remember that?”

The ever-optimistic Alison, Tennant thought. She hopes for sensible answers, memories, details.

“I tear the papers,” Obe said, rather sadly. He sighed. “I never find what I want.”

“What exactly do you want, Sammy?”

“A sign, of course. What else would I be looking for? Are you blind?”

“What kind of sign?”

Sammy Obe didn't hear the question. He was lost in a world of his own making. How had it happened? Tennant wondered. If one day he was allegedly normal, what had occurred to destroy him overnight? People snapped; their wallpaper came unglued. But so abruptly?

Obe said, “Signs come in all forms, you know. I tear the newspapers when I can't find them. There's a knack to it, I think. I haven't quite learned it yet. But I will. I will. I swear to God I will.” He had his hands clenched tightly. “Newsprint comes off on your fingers. Smudges. I once believed the signs might lie in the smudges, not in the papers themselves, but I was spending too much time looking at my own skin, you see. I got to know my fingerprints pretty well. But not the sign.”

Dear Christ, Tennant thought. This rambling made him sad. It was clearly pointless to go on with this painful excursion, but Alison was undeterred. She dug like an archaeologist who believes, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that a major discovery lies a few feet under the sand.

“I wish you could explain what you expect,” she said quietly.

“It may come in the night, of course. Then I might miss it. It's dark then, you see. That's the problem. But there are all kinds of problems.” Obe gazed at her. “Who are you?”

“Alison Seagrove.”

“Who sent you?”

“Nobody sent me, Sammy.”

“Mr. Obe, if you don't mind. I like respect.”

“I'm sorry.”

“See that you mean it.”

Alison looked suitably chastised. She was silent for a time, staring at Tennant as if he might—by virtue of his own troubled history—have some insight into Obe's wandering.

“Somebody must have sent you,” Obe said.

Tennant caught an echo of Bear Sajac in this remark.
Okay. I got one question. Who sent you?
What corner of Sammy Obe's brain suggested that Alison must have been sent? Messengers, those who controlled the messengers, dark agencies.

“I promise, Mr. Obe. I wasn't sent by anyone.” Alison opened her purse. She took out the newspaper photograph. “Is the sign in this picture?”

Obe didn't touch the clipping. He got up and walked around the room in a stiff manner, wall to wall, back again, marching to a music he heard only in his own head. Alison held the paper toward him, a supplicant gesture.

“Please, Mr. Obe. Take a look.”

“I look at nothing unless I want to,” he answered. “I despise commands and directives. I'm a free agent, you understand. I do a thing only when I want to. You judge me wrongly, girl. You're an actress. You think you're showing me respect, but I recognize a facade when I see one. You're a facade, girl. You might not exist, for all I know. You might be some illusion they've brought in here to trick me. How do I know?”

“Touch me,” she said.

“I might. I just might.”

Alison held out her hand. Obe reached for it, caressed it. “You feel like flesh. But I understand—and so must you—that what I feel might not actually exist. I've been fooled before.”

“Please look at this picture,” she said.

“Obe agrees,” he said. “Sammy Obe agrees to look. But only for a second. I have pressing matters that demand my attention.” He took the clipping, then let it fall from his fingers. “I don't recognize the significance of it. You claimed it might be the sign. You lied to me. Obe doesn't like liars. Hah.”

“You took the picture, Mr. Obe.”

“What nonsense.”

“You took it years ago in San Francisco.”

“Deny deny deny. Look at the logic. If I took the picture, where is my camera? Search the room, you won't find it. You see.”

Alison picked up the clipping and sighed. “You also took a photograph you locked inside a safe-deposit box. Does that mean anything to you?”

Obe shrugged, turned the palms of his hands up.

“Try this, Mr. Obe. What does the name Maggie Silver suggest?”

“Silver. Nothing.”

“You took pictures of her.”

“So you say.”

“This is one of them.”

“Silver. Maggie Silver.”

“That's right.”

“Silver and gold, my blood runs cold.”

A riddle, Tennant thought. A crazed man's sorry riddle.

“Why does your blood run cold?”

“I lie.”

“I thought you were concerned with truth, Mr. Obe.”

“The truth is in the eating, girl. The pantry is the place where the food is kept. Look in the pantry.”

Alison shook her head. Tennant hadn't seen her look quite so frustrated as she did now. What had she expected anyway—coherence, answers to her mystery? You didn't come to a sad lunatic for answers.

Tennant was ready to leave. This was going nowhere: A pantry, blood running cold, what did these signify? He was depressed by this room now, and by Sammy Obe's wretched condition.

“Mr. Obe,” Alison said, still pushing for sense, “don't you remember anything about Maggie Silver?”

Obe stared up at the window, stroked his chin, opened and closed his mouth silently. He resembled for a moment a small desperate fish gasping for oxygen in a murky tank.

“Chinatown, Mr. Obe. San Francisco. Maggie Silver.”

“San Francisco,” Obe said. “Chinatown. Don't talk to me about Chinatown!” He became agitated, enraged, a spasm of anger passed through him quickly before he was calm again.

Tennant moved toward the door. The room choked him. He needed to get far away from here. Alison wasn't quite ready yet to yield. Christ, she could be irritatingly persistent.

“Do you remember
anything
about it?” she asked.

“Let's go, Alison,” Tennant said. “I need air.”

“Just wait, Harry.”

Obe, whose calm hadn't lasted, walked to the wall and smacked his forehead against it. The wall, naturally, was padded. They took no chances about self-inflicted pain in this joint. He continued, rather frighteningly, to smack, back and forward, on and on, his movements those of a man ensnared in a bad dream. When he stopped, his face was red; looking quite exhausted, he lay down on the bed.

“Mr. Obe, let me ask you again. What do you remember of Chinatown?”

“Zero.”

“And Maggie Silver?”

Some small light of understanding came into Obe's eyes, a momentary thing, as if a clear memory had come to him out of the general chaos of his mind. “Obe thinks of her as a Haight person. Frozen in time and place.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I refuse to prejudice myself.”

Tennant opened the door. “Alison, for Christ's sake.”

Alison sighed again; any small defeat annoyed her.

“Okay okay okay,” she said. “I'm coming.”

She walked to the door. Obe sat up suddenly, banging his forehead with a clenched hand. “It was almost the sign.”