Stones (13 page)

On the 29th of April—one week and three days after Everett had entered into his crisis of insomnia—Mimi sat on the floor in Brian Bassett’s isolation room, gently massaging his arms and legs as she held him in her lap.

His weight, by now, was shocking—and his skin had become translucent. His eyes had not been closed for days—for weeks—and their expression might have been carved in stone.

“Speak to me. Speak,” she whispered to him as she cradled his head beneath her chin. “Please at least speak before you die.”

Nothing happened. Only silence.

Juliet Bateman—wrapped in a blanket—was watching through the observation glass as Mimi lifted up Brian Bassett and placed him in his cot. The cot had metal sides—and the sides were raised. Juliet Bateman could see Brian Bassett’s eyes and his hands as Mimi stepped away.

Mimi looked at Juliet and shook her head. Juliet closed her eyes and pulled her blanket tighter like a skin that might protect her from the next five minutes.

Mimi went around the cot to the other side and dragged the IV stand in closer to the head. She fumbled for a moment with the long plastic lifelines—anti-dehydrants, nutrients—and she adjusted the needles and brought them down inside the nest of the cot where Brian Bassett lay and she lifted up his arm in order to insert the tubes and bind them into place with tape.

This was when it happened—just as Mimi Menlo was preparing to insert the second tube.

Brian Bassett looked at her and spoke.

“No,” he said. “Don’t.”
Don’t
meant death.

Mimi paused—considered—and set the tube aside. Then she withdrew the tube already in place and she hung them both on the IV stand.

All right
, she said to Brian Bassett in her mind, you win.

She looked down then with her arm along the side of the cot—and one hand trailing down so Brian Bassett could touch it if he wanted to. She smiled at him and said to him: “not to worry. Not to worry. None of us is ever going to trouble you again.” He watched her carefully. “Goodbye, Brian,” she said. “I love you.”

Juliet Bateman saw Mimi Menlo say all this and was fairly sure she had read the words on Mimi’s lips just as they had been spoken.

Mimi started out of the room. She was determined now there was no turning back and that Brian Bassett was free to go his way. But just as she was turning the handle and pressing her weight against the door—she heard Brian Bassett speak again.

“Goodbye,” he said.

And died.

Mimi went back and Juliet Bateman, too, and they stayed with him another hour before they turned out his lights. “Someone else can cover his face,” said Mimi. “I’m not going to do it.” Juliet agreed and they came back out to tell the nurse on duty that their ward had died and their work with him was over.

On the 30th of April—a Saturday—Mimi stayed home and made her notes and she wondered if and when she would weep for Brian Bassett. Her hand, as she wrote, was steady and her throat was not constricted and her eyes had no sensation beyond the burning itch of fatigue. She wondered what she looked like in the mirror, but resisted that discovery. Some things could wait. Outside it rained. Thurber dreamed in the corner. Bay Street rumbled in the basement.

Everett, in the meantime, had reached his own crisis and because of his desperate straits a part of Mimi Menlo’s mind was on her husband. Now he had not slept for almost ten days.
We really ought to consign ourselves to hospital beds
, she thought. Somehow, the idea held no persuasion. It occurred to her that laughter might do a better job, if only they could find it. The brain, when over-extended, gives us the most surprisingly simple propositions, she concluded. Stop, it says to us.
Lie down and sleep
.

Five minutes later, Mimi found herself still sitting at the desk, with her fountain pen capped and her fingers raised to her lips in an attitude of gentle prayer. It required some effort to re-adjust her gaze and re-establish her focus on the surface of the window glass beyond which her mind had wandered. Sitting up, she had been asleep.

Thurber muttered something and stretched his legs and yawned, still asleep. Mimi glanced in his direction.
We’ve both been dreaming
, she thought,
but his dream continues
.

Somewhere behind her, the broken clock was attempting to strike the hour of three. Its voice was dull and rusty, needing oil.

Looking down, she saw the words BRIAN BASSETT written on the page before her and it occurred to her that, without his person, the words were nothing more than extrapolations from the alphabet—something fanciful we call a “name” in the hope that, one day, it will take on meaning.

She thought of Brian Bassett with his building blocks—pushing the letters around on the floor and coming up with more acceptable arrangements: TINA STERABBS…IAN BRETT BASS…BEST STAB the RAIN: a sentence. He had known all along, of course, that BRIAN BASSETT wasn’t what he wanted because it wasn’t what he was. He had come here against his will, was held here against his better judgment, fought against his captors and finally escaped.

But where was here to Ian Brett Bass? Where was here to Tina Sterabbs? Like Brian Bassett, they had all been here in someone else’s dreams, and had to wait for someone else to wake before they could make their getaway.

Slowly, Mimi uncapped her fountain pen and drew a firm, black line through Brian Bassett’s name.
We dreamed him
, she wrote, that’s all.
And then we let him go
.

Seeing Everett standing in the doorway, knowing he had just returned from another Kenneth Albright crisis, she had no sense of apprehension. All this was only as it should be. Given the way that everything was going, it stood to reason Kenneth Albright’s crisis had to come in this moment. If he managed, at last, to kill himself then at least her husband might begin to sleep again.

Far in the back of her mind a carping, critical voice remarked that any such thoughts were
deeply unfeeling and verging on the barbaric
. But Mimi dismissed this voice and another part of her brain stepped forward in her defence.
I will weep for Kenneth Albright
, she thought,
when I can weep for Brian Bassett. Now, all that matters is that Everett and I survive
.

Then she strode forward and put out her hand for Everett’s briefcase, set the briefcase down and helped him out of his topcoat. She was playing wife. It seemed to be the thing to do.

For the next twenty minutes Everett had nothing to say, and after he had poured himself a drink and after Mimi had done the same, they sat in their chairs and waited for Everett to catch his breath.

The first thing he said when he finally spoke was: “finish your notes?”

“Just about,” Mimi told him. “I’ve written everything I can for now.” She did not elaborate. “You’re home early,” she said, hoping to goad him into saying something new about Kenneth Albright.

“Yes,” he said. “I am.” But that was all.

Then he stood up—threw back the last of his drink and poured another. He lighted a cigarette and Mimi didn’t even wince. He had been smoking now three days. The atmosphere between them had been, since then, enlivened with a magnetic kind of tension. But it was a moribund tension, slowly beginning to dissipate.

Mimi watched her husband’s silent torment now with a kind of clinical detachment. This was the result, she liked to tell herself, of her training and her discipline. The lover in her could regard Everett warmly and with concern, but the psychiatrist in her could also watch him as someone suffering a nervous breakdown, someone who could not be helped until the symptoms had multiplied and declared themselves more openly.

Everett went into the darkest corner of the room and sat down hard in one of Mimi’s straight-backed chairs: the ones inherited from her mother. He sat, prim, like a patient in a doctor’s office, totally unrelaxed and nervy; expressionless. Either he had come to receive a deadly diagnosis, or he would get a clean bill of health.

Mimi glided over to the sofa in the window, plush and red and deeply comfortable; a place to recuperate. The view—if she chose to turn only slightly sideways—was one of the gentle rain that was falling onto Bay Street. Sopping-wet pigeons huddled on the window-sill; people across the street in the Manulife building were turning on their lights.

A renegade robin, nesting in their eaves, began to sing.

Everett Menlo began to talk.

“Please don’t interrupt,” he said at first.

“You know I won’t,” said Mimi. It was a rule that neither one should interrupt the telling of a case until they had been invited to do so.

Mimi put her fingers into her glass so the ice cubes wouldn’t click. She waited.

Everett spoke—but he spoke as if in someone else’s voice, perhaps the voice of Kenneth Albright. This was not entirely unusual. Often, both Mimi and Everett Menlo spoke in the voices of their patients. What was unusual, this time, was that, speaking in Kenneth’s voice, Everett began to sweat profusely—so profusely that Mimi was able to watch his shirt front darkening with perspiration.

“As you know,” he said, “I have not been sleeping.”

This was the understatement of the year. Mimi was silent.

“I have not been sleeping because—to put it in a nutshell—I have been afraid to dream.”

Mimi was somewhat startled by this. Not by the fact that Everett was afraid to dream, but only because she had just been thinking of dreams herself.

“I have been afraid to dream, because in all my dreams there have been bodies. Corpses. Murder victims.”

Mimi—not really listening—idly wondered if she had been one of them.

“In all my dreams, there have been corpses,” Everett repeated. “But I am not the murderer. Kenneth Albright is the murderer, and, up to this moment, he has left behind him fifteen bodies: none of them people I recognize.”

Mimi nodded. The ice cubes in her drink were beginning to freeze her fingers. Any minute now, she prayed, they would surely melt.

“I gave up dreaming almost a week ago,” said Everett, “thinking that if I did, the killing pattern might be altered; broken.” Then he said tersely; “it was not. The killings have continued…”

“How do you know the killings have continued, Everett, if you’ve given up your dreaming? Wouldn’t this mean he had no place to hide the bodies?”

In spite of the fact she had disobeyed their rule about not speaking, Everett answered her.

“I know they are being continued because I have seen the blood.”

“Ah, yes. I see.”

“No, Mimi. No. You do not see. The blood is not a figment of my imagination. The blood, in fact, is the only thing not dreamed.” He explained the stains on Kenneth Albright’s hands and arms and clothes and he said: “It happens every day. We have searched his person for signs of cuts and gashes—even for internal and rectal bleeding. Nothing. We have searched his quarters and all the other quarters in his ward. His ward is locked. His ward is isolated in the extreme. None of his fellow patients was ever found bleeding—never had cause to bleed. There were no injuries—no self-inflicted wounds. We thought of animals. Perhaps a mouse—a rat. But nothing. Nothing. Nothing…We also went so far as to strip-search all the members of the staff who entered that ward and I, too, offered myself for this experiment. Still nothing. Nothing. No one had bled.”

Everett was now beginning to perspire so heavily he removed his jacket and threw it on the floor. Thurber woke and stared at it, startled. At first, it appeared to be the beast that had just pursued him through the woods and down the road. But, then, it sighed and settled and was just a coat; a rumpled jacket lying down on the rug.

Everett said: “we had taken samples of the blood on the patient’s hands—on Kenneth Albright’s hands and on his clothing and we had these samples analysed. No. It was not his own blood. No, it was not the blood of an animal. No, it was not the blood of a fellow patient. No, it was not the blood of any members of the staff…”

Everett’s voice had risen.

“Whose blood was it?” he almost cried. “Whose the hell was it?” Mimi waited.

Everett Menlo lighted another cigarette. He took a great gulp of his drink.

“Well…” He was calmer now; calmer of necessity. He had to marshall the evidence. He had to put it all in order—bring it into line with reason. “Did this mean that—somehow—the patient had managed to leave the premises—do some bloody deed and return without our knowledge of it? That is, after all, the only possible explanation. Isn’t it?”

Mimi waited.

“Isn’t it?” he repeated.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s the only possible explanation.”

“Except there is no way out of that place. There is absolutely no way out.”

Now, there was a pause.

“But one,” he added—his voice, again, a whisper.

Mimi was silent. Fearful—watching his twisted face.

“Tell me,” Everett Menlo said—the perfect innocent, almost the perfect child in quest of forbidden knowledge. “Answer me this—be honest: is there blood in dreams?”

Mimi could not respond. She felt herself go pale. Her husband—after all, the sanest man alive—had just suggested something so completely mad he might as well have handed over his reason in a paper bag and said to her,
burn this
.

“The only place that Kenneth Albright goes, I tell you, is into dreams,” Everett said. “That is the only place beyond the ward into which the patient can or does escape.”

Another—briefer—pause.

“It is real blood, Mimi. Real. And he gets it all from dreams.
My dreams
.”

They waited for this to settle.

Everett said: “I’m tired. I’m tired. I cannot bear this any more. I’m tired…”

Mimi thought,
good. No matter what else happens, he will sleep tonight
.

He did. And so, at last, did she.

Mimi’s dreams were rarely of the kind that engender fear. She dreamt more gentle scenes with open spaces that did not intimidate. She would dream quite often of water and of animals. Always, she was nothing more than an observer; roles were not assigned her; often, this was sad. Somehow, she seemed at times locked out, unable to participate. These were the dreams she endured when Brian Bassett died: field trips to see him in some desert setting; underwater excursions to watch him floating amongst the seaweed. He never spoke, and, indeed, he never appeared to be aware of her presence.