gun and set it in the safe.
“Del?” It was my mother.
“Down here,” I called. I was afraid to close the safe, sure that the metallic click would be immediately recognizable. I pushed the door to within an inch of closing. “Don’t worry, I’ll turn off the lights when I’m done.”
The stairs complained as she stepped down. I did the only thing I could think of: I coughed and pressed the door shut. When she turned the corner I was walking toward her, a short stack of vinyl LPs in my hands. “I hope I didn’t wake you up,” I said. “You know, you could sell these on the Internet.”
She was dressed in a housecoat and thick blue woolly socks. She glanced at the albums, then at my face. “You haven’t slept at all yet.”
I shrugged. “My circadian rhythms are all messed up. I don’t sleep much anyway.”
“I used to hear you walking around the house at all hours,” she
said. She took the top album from me, a painted photo of Bing Crosby in a Christmas stocking cap, and turned it over in her hands.
“You could have told me,” she said.
“I know.”
“I would have come.”
“I know.” She would have. She’d pulled me back from the brink twice before, and she could have done it again. She would have flown down, cleaned my apartment, counted out my pills, rubbed my head through the night.
But I couldn’t tell her. I’d talked to her on the phone almost every week, and I’d never once said, Hey, I’ve lost my car and my job and my mind. And by the way, I’m calling you from the crazy house.
“It’s not . . .”
I almost said it aloud: It’s not just noises. I felt . . . vertiginous. Like my heels were rocking on the edge of a balcony rail. All I had to do was lean forward a few inches and let myself fall. The thing’s inside my head, Mom, and it’s trying to get out.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to tell you,” I said. She picked up the hammer and hung it in its silhouette on the pegboard. “Well, you’re home now.” She touched my arm as she passed. “Don’t forget to put everything back when you’re done.”
2
When I was fourteen I became famous in my high school for leaving so much blood in the pool that they had to drain it. It was a fabulous head wound for such a stupid accident. I was at the side of the pool, trying to pull a canoe paddle out of another kid’s hands, when I stepped back and put my foot down on a foam kickboard. The deck was wet, the kickboard shot out from under me, and I went down. I smacked my head against the cement lip of the pool and fell into the water. I didn’t lose consciousness. I don’t remember being afraid. I floated facedown for what seemed like a long time, unable to push my head out of the water. The bottom of the pool turned black, but maybe that was blood loss or oxygen deprivation. Then a brilliant light as my classmates hauled me out. The gym teacher, I can’t remember his name, laid me out on the deck and pressed towels to my head until the paramedics came. The blow swelled the side of my head to the size of a softball and blurred my vision. But I wasn’t paralyzed, or even badly injured. They kept me in the hospital overnight just to make sure, but they said I’d be home in the morning.
It was that night in the hospital that the “noises” began. The first thing I felt was a thump, like someone in the other room had knocked
the wall behind my head. I turned, and it happened again, and this time there was nothing behind my head but my own room. I called for the nurse, asked her if someone was in the room with me. She thought I was dreaming.
Then the intermittent thumps grew louder, more frequent, and changed in character so that now it was like a baseball bat slamming repeatedly into a tree trunk—with the sting and burn of each impact running straight into my head.
I freaked out. They held me down and gave me something to knock me out.
The swelling from my concussion receded, my vision cleared, but the noises kept coming back. Sometimes it was the pounding; sometimes it was just a wordless whisper that scritched and scraped inside my skull. They took blood, made me lie still in expensive machines, changed my diet. Mostly they fed me pills. If I was asleep, I couldn’t run out of the hospital.
Mom and Dad were there—Dad was alive then—but it was Mom I remember sleeping in the chair beside my bed. The doctors decided it wasn’t a physical problem—not internal bleeding, not brain damage, not tumors—and it wasn’t like any possession anyone had ever heard of. They suggested that it was time to bring in a psychiatrist. It was Mom who found Dr. Aaron.
Her office now was in an elegant two-story Victorian, a block from the train station. A big improvement over the flat-faced brick building she’d rented space in before.
“Is this it?” Lew said.
“This is the address.” I levered myself out of the Audi.
“Comb your hair—it’s sticking up in back.”
I’d had trouble getting up this morning. I’d taken two pills to make sure I’d stay out, and it had worked. Lew had started pounding on my door at 10:30—he couldn’t understand why the door was locked—and I’d finally stumbled out like a zombie.
“I’ll be back in an hour to pick you up,” Lew said.
“Is that a therapy hour or a real hour?”
“A TV hour. I’ll see you in forty-two minutes.”
Inside, the house seemed empty. There was no receptionist at the tiny desk out front. On the wall were a dozen plastic in-box trays labeled with other “doctor” names. I stood for a while looking up the big staircase, wondering which room might be Dr. Aaron’s. It was a Saturday—maybe she wasn’t even here yet.
I sat on the couch in the waiting room, a converted living room with a long-dormant fireplace and big windows that faced the street. I stared at the front door for a while, then picked up a copy of Newsweek. Marines were still in Kashmir. The Church of Scientology was suing the Church of Jesus Christ Informationalist for copyright infringement. Critics were panning Exorcist: The Musical. The issue was a month old, but it was all news to me—I’d lost touch with current events just before Christmas. I wondered if the demon from the airport had showed up in today’s papers. Somewhere upstairs a door opened and closed. I looked up, listening to the steps. A large woman in a black, knee-length sweater coat came down the stairs, and there was a moment before she turned and saw me. My God, I thought, she’s gotten fat. And then: I am such a jerk.
“Del?”
I stood up, stepped awkwardly around the coffee table. “Hi, Dr. Aaron.”
I hadn’t seen her since I was in high school. Then she’d been trim, serious, and in my fourteen-year-old eyes, seriously older: at least in her forties. But she was no older than forty-five now. Back then she would have been in her early thirties—probably only a few years out of med school.
I took her hand, unsure what was permissible—were we old acquaintances, or doctor and patient? Her open smile disarmed me. I leaned in and hugged her with my free arm, and she patted me on the back.
“It’s good to see you, Del.” Her face seemed to come into focus. Short black hair, thin dark eyebrows like French accent marks, pale pale skin. The woman in front of me overlaid the hazier version in my memory, replaced her.
