Ghost Country (37 page)

She picks up her briefcase: habit. Looks at it, drops it on an armchair. Leaves the building. She smiles autonomically at other associates, at partners, the clerical staff, who watch her departure with jaw-dropping gaze: Harriet Stonds, leaving the building without her briefcase, and before six, let alone before nine? Is the sky falling?

D
R. TAMMUZ
. I saw you on the news this morning.” Melissa Demetrios faced Hector across the desk in the tiny cubicle the hospital allotted its senior psychiatry resident. “What were you doing down at that wall? Is it true that you’re there every day?”

Hector couldn’t speak. He spread his hands, as if gestures might convey his meaning. Anyway, the question shouldn’t be—was he at the wall every day—but—was he here at the hospital every day? Was it true that he tore himself from Starr, or the hopes of seeing Starr, or whatever it was he did with Starr, to put on his blue resident’s gown and wander among the patients? For even when he was reading a chart, or talking to Mrs. Herstein in clinic, or injecting someone with Haldol, he felt Starr’s lips, his own flesh clinging to her, himself buried in her wild cornucopia.

What is wrong with you these days? he heard Melissa asking. You look as though you haven’t eaten or shaved in weeks. I don’t even know if I should let you in the clinics or wards.

I can’t tell the difference between waking and dreaming. Have I ever suckled those breasts, drunk from that sweet vulva, or has that happened only in my dreams? How can I tell? But if he said that
aloud, then he’d be in one of those sixth-floor beds himself, shot full of Ativan, strapped down, kept forever from Starr’s side.

“… Because of the amount of public hysteria that seems to surround her, the hotel’s lawyers have hired Dr. Hanaper to examine her. They’re trying to pick her up, along with the diva who was in here a few months ago. In addition, Dr. Stonds wants his granddaughter to come in for treatment: she’s been living on the streets for over a month and he’s quite worried about her, The police couldn’t find any of them yesterday, although Dr. Hanaper doesn’t think they looked very hard.”

“Mara Stonds?” Hector tried to grasp hold of Melissa’s remarks and respond to them in a doctorly fashion. “Maybe it’s unconventional, her life on the streets, but whenever I see her she seems happy. She doesn’t show any signs of mental distress.”

“Well, you are not really in a position to make that evaluation. And in any event, it’s more the woman Starr that Dr. Stonds and Dr. Hanaper are concerned about, since she seems to be behind—”

“No!” Hector shouted. “Hanaper only wants to—to—I can see it in his eyes, when they interview him about the miracles. He keeps coming to the wall, hoping to see her, and he looks—looks like—” He buried his head in his hands. Hanaper, his jowls dripping, a jackal in the veldt, slavering over a wild cow.

“And what do you think you look like, Dr. Tammuz? This isn’t about some adolescent boy’s fantasy life. We’re an overworked urban hospital. We’re now getting almost double our patient load because suburban and foreign visitors are coming to the city, looking for miracles, and collapsing from the stress of not having their fantasies met. You are not pulling your share of the load, so your fellow residents and I have to work harder than ever. If you can’t be a team player here, I’m going to have to discuss your performance with Dr. Hanaper. I’ve avoided doing that until I had a chance to meet with you myself.”

Melissa’s face was white: it was hard to confront anyone about doing a poor job, but Hector couldn’t imagine that. Couldn’t imagine, either, that when he first arrived at the hospital, Melissa
treated herself to fantasies about him, his sensitive mouth and long lean hands on hers, and was repelled by his obsession with Starr, All Hector’s detachment, his patience, carefully harvested in order to survive his mother’s scorn, had disappeared. He could scarcely listen to Melissa, saw only her mouth moving like a shark’s jaw, as it sucked in fishes … the potential to be a good doctor … side-railed by your involvement with homeless … spoke to Dr. Boten at Lenore Foundation.

Hector’s head jerked up at that: Dr. Boten shared Melissa’s concern for the way in which Hector had overidentified with the homeless women he was treating at the Orleans Street Church. Until the women calmed down, the church was suspending the clinic, anyway; whether it would reopen, and whether Hector would be allowed to take part, would depend very much on his conduct over the next several weeks.

Hector felt himself crumbling. His Friday afternoons at the clinic used to be important to him for the good he thought he did for the homeless. Now he yearned for time among them, for any word he could glean of Starr. If Melissa was forbidding him to go … No, it was Dr. Boten, Dr. Boten whose approach to psychotherapy had drawn Hector to Chicago and Midwest Hospital, was now betraying him, closing the clinic, probably jealous of Hector’s special relationship with Starr.

“… loss of dignity makes an unprofessional appearance …” Melissa was saying.

Longing for Starr drove any idea about dignity from Hector’s mind. He would stumble along the shore in the middle of the night, but often couldn’t find her. The parkland stretched over six miles, the beaches interspersed with rocky promontories, harbors, uncultivated bits of prairie. He couldn’t possibly search them all. He would return to the hospital then, shivering with disappointment in the warm summer air, forgetting to eat or shave, until he looked like one of the men who huddled on Fridays outside the Orleans Street clinic, waiting for Hector himself to appear with his bag of magic tricks.

Hector resented Mara’s closeness to Starr. Those times when he did happen on Starr, Mara would be at her side. Typical of a Stonds, to horn in where no one wanted her and take over. He didn’t mind Luisa, who continued to be the only one able to interpret Starr’s grunts—or who claimed to be doing so—maybe because the disintegrated diva didn’t seem really human to him. But Mara, despite her shaved head and broken tooth, or maybe because of them, seemed vulnerable, even desirable, and he feared that Starr loved her best.

Once, just as the sun was spilling pink and gold light across the water onto the sand, he’d come on the three of them, Luisa, Starr, and Mara, lying in the shelter of a rock on a spit of land at the Montrose Avenue beach. They were naked, and Mara was lying with her head nestled on Starr’s side. Hector cried out. Mara and Luisa didn’t stir, but Starr awoke and looked at him.

She said nothing, but Hector thought his jealousy and desire were mirrored back at him in those unwinking black eyes. He stumbled away and collapsed on the sand. When he came to, he found himself in bed in the on-call room at the hospital. He wasn’t ever sure whether Starr had followed him up the beach, folded him to herself, allowed him to enter her, drink from her, or if that satiation had happened in a dream only.

“Dr. Tammuz!” Melissa’s sharp voice recalled him to her presence, but not until she’d repeated his name three times. “Are you listening to me? We want to know the best place to try to hunt for Luisa Montcrief and Starr so that Dr. Stonds can get his granddaughter off the streets and into some much needed treatment. And for their own good we need to treat Luisa and Starr. If you know where to find them, you will be doing everyone—the hospital, the homeless women, the churches, even the city—a great favor by telling me. It will also help us know that you are really committed to your career here at the hospital.”

Committed to his career as a dispenser of drugs and minimalist therapies? If he went out of his way to prove that, he might be destroyed forever.

“They would prefer not to pick the women up at the wall,” Melissa said, trying to get a response, “for fear of causing a riot. Do you think they’re right?”

This was important, this could affect Starr, pay attention, he adjured himself. “Right about—oh, about a riot? The Blue Aura of Mary circle doesn’t seem like they would try—the ones who care are the homeless women, but the church, you know, they’ve tried to keep them away. That bully Rafe Lowrie, his son, taking names, taking pictures … Although they stopped that, but still a lot of the homeless women never came back.”

“So you think it would be okay if we asked the police to bring the women in when they next show up at the wall?” Melissa persisted.

He sat back lisdessly. “I don’t know. It’ll be on camera; even if the TV crews aren’t there some tourist is usually videotaping. If Hanaper gets hold of her—they mustn’t lock her up. I did it once, it was dreadful, I don’t know if she’s ever forgiven me for that, must ask Luisa.” His voice drifted off as he knotted his fingers together: he mustn’t ask Luisa—he couldn’t bear to find out that Starr hated him for what he did to her all those weeks ago, shooting her full of drugs, gloating as he did it.

“Dr. Tammuz, we’re all overworked here, we all make decisions that we hope are in the best interests of the patient—and sometimes, unfortunately, they’re not. In this case, we’ve got one woman who seems delusional stirring up a large population into an unhealthy state of agitation. Whether we can help Starr, or Luisa, or even Mara Stonds, I don’t know. But we can help a lot of other people by removing these three women from the streets for a while.”

Hector fumbled for an argument that would matter to his superiors. “And the utilization management committee? Are they happy to take on three uninsured patients? Maybe it’s only two—Mara Stonds must have some kind of coverage through her grandfather.”

“Don’t worry about that aspect of it. Just tell me the likeliest place where we might look for those three.”

“Don’t worry about the money?” His dark eyes blazed, anger pulling the fragments of his personality momentarily together. “Madeleine Carter might still be alive if this place weren’t worried first last and foremost about the money. When I took this residency it was because I thought the clinics would be a place to practice psychotherapy. Instead, in between March and last fall you went to a twenty-twenty program, where all you give people is twenty sessions of twenty minutes, although really I get cut off after fifteen, and screw the patients if that doesn’t make them well. You switched from therapy to pharmaceuticals because they’re cheaper. You forced Angus Boten off the staff. Now a homeless woman who can’t even speak has got the Great White Chief and his ass-licking sidekick Hanaper so rattled that they’ll even jettison their precious cost containment policies.”

Melissa became angry in turn at his lecture. “Dr. Tammuz, I’m not interested in your emotions on this matter. You are not in a position to get on a high horse about therapy, not when your own feelings are so out of control that you’re neglecting your job. If you can’t help me locate these women, can’t help the hospital perform this part of its mission to the community, then I will have no choice but to discuss your negligence with Dr. Hanaper, who may very well put you on probation. Is that really how you wish to start your professional career?”

Self-preservation with his mother had meant a capitulation to her demands for information on all his actions. He had tried to build a little shrine in his own center where his privacy could be established, where his thoughts remained secret, but ever since he’d met Starr he’d lost the ability to hold anything in reserve.

Now, looking at Melissa, his impulse was just to capitulate once more. Here’s where you can probably find Starr: usually at night she’s somewhere on those six miles of lakefront, probably near Montrose Harbor where he’d twice come on her, in the prairie grasses that grew in a secluded patch of park.

Before he could fumble words into speech the phone rang on Melissa’s desk. She let it go at first, hoping that the clerks, working
late to service the outpatient substance abuse and group therapy clinics that were meeting tonight, might pick it up. When it went on ringing she picked it up and snapped a greeting. Her manner changed abruptly.

“Yes, sir … I understand, sir … I’ll do my best.” She hung up and looked at Hector. “That was Dr. Hanaper. Dr. Stonds has ordered the head of hospital security to locate these women, since the Chicago police aren’t making it a priority, and bring them in. Dr, Hanaper wants you to ride along with them, since the women know you and trust you, I told him you’d do it: the head of the security department is going to be here to pick you up in a minute. Go shave, so you look more like a doctor and less like an inmate from the state mental hospital. It wouldn’t hurt if you showered, either.”

Hector stumbled from the room to the residents’ bathroom. As he shaved, he saw himself handing Starr over to Hanaper, and then—he couldn’t imagine living past that moment. He would hang himself in the morning. Or maybe he should do it now, before the moment of betrayal. He took off his tie and looked around the bathroom for something to attach it to. Before he could find a hook or knob strong enough to hold him, a man
in
the tan and orange of the hospital security staff stuck his head around the door:

“Dr, Tammuz? Dr. Hanaper said you’d be riding along with me to help me locate these women he wants to admit.”

I
N THE GRAHAM
Street apartment Harriet hears voices in the living room. Grandfather is home already, and has brought guests. She will have to put on her public face, calm but attentive, when all she wants is to crawl into bed, to lie as still as death and let the fog that has pushed on her mind all week roll in and obliterate thought.

Mrs. Ephers, hearing the key in the door, bustles into the hall, vigilant in case Mara has taken it into her head to come home. The doorman Raymond is supposed to warn her if Mara arrives, but Mrs. Ephers doesn’t trust him—he’s always let Mara twist him around her finger.

“I’m glad they let you go early tonight,” Mrs. Ephers tells Harriet in the dim entryway. “You’ve been working too hard lately, thanks to Mara. Time to settle that girl’s hash once and for all. Your grandfather has brought Mr. and Mrs. Minsky home with him. They’re anxious to see you, talk this situation over.”