Apprehensions and Other Delusions (12 page)

She moved as near as the counter between them would allow. “It used to frighten me. When I first got here, it scared me. I felt ... out of my depth, you know? But not any more. Now I know how wonderful it is, to be near all the knowledge and the power.”

Philips shook his head. “If you like it, I guess—” He stopped abruptly.

Senta went on as if she had not noticed he had left his thoughts incomplete. “I used to worry about all kinds of things, little things. But since I’ve learned how it was here, how they were wise enough to have something to die for, I’ve been ... oh, I don’t know. Maybe eager, or envious that they were so much more true to themselves than regular people.” Her gesture took in the empty waiting area. “After my son died, for a while I couldn’t stand this place. I blamed it. I thought that it had caused the trouble with the blood, that there was a plot or conspiracy or something. But it wasn’t that, not really. It was that none of us were worthy yet.”

A few times in Philips’s career he had had conversations like this one, deep discussions with near-strangers about matters he would not discuss with anyone he saw regularly. It struck him that this was one of those conversations, and that in spite of the repellant aspect of the airport, this soft-voiced woman was drawing him toward her, as the tarmac drew his plane. “How could worth have anything to do with what happened to your boy?” He did not want to reveal his thoughts for fear of what the place would do with them, but he wanted to offer her sympathy or some consolation in this terrible place.

“I know that’s the trouble,” she said earnestly. “Because I don’t know anyone who has something they’re willing to die for, not any more.” Her smile was short and wistful. “I thought I had, once, but I don’t know.”

This confession only strengthened Philips’s resolve to do what he could to show her she was wrong. “You’re being too hard on yourself, and too easy on this place.”

“Don’t say that,” she said to him, putting her hand out as if to close his mouth with it. “This is a special place, remarkable and special, and that makes ordinary things more obvious for what they are.”

“No,” he protested. “That’s not it.” He wanted to argue with her, but all the coffee he had drunk was making demands on his bladder he could no longer ignore. “I’ll be back in a moment,” he said and went out to the men’s room.

Standing in the empty room, he stared at the white surface of the urinal, taking care not to look in any of the mirrors in the room. He had done that once here, and the memory of the hideous thing he saw could still sicken him. He closed his fly, washed his hands with his face averted from the mirror, and reached for a paper towel. Out of the corner of his eye a reflection caught his attention, but he refused to look at the image in the glass, and left with only a vision of a head with eyes removed and blood running down the hollow cheeks. I’ve got to get out of here, Philips thought as he rushed out the men’s room door. I’ve got to get out of here.

“You look tired,” said Senta as Philips came back to the gift shop. She was aligning the paperback books now, putting the ones with the brightest covers at eye level. “I hadn’t meant to keep you up.”

“I have to wait, anyway,” said Philips, thinking that his expression had more to do with what he had almost seen than with the hour. “I’ll get a chance to rest once I talk to the day crew about the plane.”

“That’ll be pretty soon, then, I guess,” she said, giving him another of her smiles. “It’s wonderful having someone to talk to. Most nights I’m lucky if I have a dozen customers, and most of them don’t have anything much to say. The administration talked about closing this shop down, but they decided against it. They want one service and one food area open on each arm, all the time, and for this arm—this was the best offer for me.” She gestured to indicate the little shop.

“I hope they pay you very well,” said Philips with feeling.

“Pretty well,” she said. “Better than the waitresses and like that. And I’m bonded. They pay for that, too.” She came back toward him. “You know, talking to you, I can’t stop thinking about traveling again, going all those places I’ve always wanted to go. I think you’re the luckiest man in the world, flying everywhere, seeing everything.”

“It’s my job,” said Philips, who did not think he was as lucky as she did. “It’s demanding, and it’s pretty solitary, when you come right down to it.”

“This is solitary,” she said. “You’re free.”

Philips did not want to dispute the matter. “I suppose it looks like that,” he conceded.

Her eyes brightened again with excitement. “I wish I could go with you when you leave. Just fly wherever you’re going—”

“Chicago,” he said.

“Chicago, Boston, Montreal, Hawaii, Melbourne, it doesn’t matter. Houston would be different.” She recited the names as if they were her saints and she their acolyte.

“You can go there, Senta,” he said with a sudden welling of kindness for this woman. “Take a weekend, or a vacation, and go anywhere you want to go.”

She turned to him. “It wouldn’t be the same, going by myself. It would be a trip, not ... not a journey. Don’t you see the difference?” She held two paperbacks in her hands, one promising the bloodiest secrets of organized crime, the other offering the thrill and titillation of the sexual peculiarities of the very rich.

He had to answer honestly. “No, not really.”

She gave a short sigh. “No, you probably wouldn’t, because you do it all the time. You think it’s ordinary, not special. But you’re wrong.” She put the books into the wire racks and came up to him. “You don’t go places for vacations, or to be a tourist, you go there for the going. That’s what makes you special. It’s what I wish I could do.”

“It’s not ... the way you think,” he said, looking down at the hope that still shone in her eyes.

“But it is,” she said. “I wish I could prove it to you.”

Impulsively she reached out and took his hand. “I wish I could go with you. I mean that.” She saw his doubt and released his hand. “For years I thought I couldn’t do anything, that I had to stay here, because I had so much to do here, with the kids and all. I have a home and ... things. Just things. But if I could be really free, then I’d chuck it all for it.”

Before he could stop himself he asked, “And what about being worthy?”

She beamed at him. “But I would be, don’t you see? I’d show that something meant more to me than this place, than the things I have, than any of it. I would be worthy then. I’d be able to die for something.”

The alarm Philips felt was so great that he had to make himself remain where he was instead of fleeing. “I don’t think,” he said, each word separate and distinct, “I don’t think it would be the way you imagine it would.”

“I know it would,” she said with serene confidence. “Five years ago I might have doubted, but since Eric died, I’ve known that if I could just find a way to be free ...” The silence between them lengthened, widening like a chasm.

“Maybe Trager’ll let me take you up to Chicago,” he said at last, in an effort to reach her. At the same time he called himself a fool for making such an offer. “You’ll have to find your own way back, but I guess you could arrange that, couldn’t you?”

Her grin was wide and delighted. “You
mean
that? Really?
Really?”

While he was not convinced it was true, he said, “Yes. Sure.”

She reached out to take his hand again, faltered, and stepped back. “That’s wonderful of you. Wonderful.” She looked away, speaking more softly. “If you can’t do it after all, that’s okay. I won’t mind. It’s enough that you offered, you know?”

“I’ll ask when I call in my report.” He did his best to sound emphatic. “It’d be nice to have company, other than the copilot and the navigator.”

She clasped her hands together to avoid reaching out to him again. “That’s wonderful. Just wonderful.”

“I’ll let you know,” he promised her. He felt restless again, antsy, and he looked out through the huge shop windows to the boarding area.

Two figures waited there this time, but they were both carrying cases and had the unmistakable look of early travelers struggling to wake up.

“It’s twenty to six,” said Senta, observing him. “Probably time for you to go down to the repair hangars.”

“Yeah,” he said, aware that the sky was lightening. He turned and stared at her. “I will ask, and if they say yes, I will take you up to Chicago. I mean it.”

She nodded once. “Thanks.” After a moment she added, “This is a hard place to leave. You know?”

He hesitated, thinking there ought to be something more that he could say; then he strode off toward the central terminal, still feeling the airport all around him like a clammy odor. He wanted to get away from the place, and the sooner the better.

Just as sunset slipped into dusk the next evening, the Trager jet rolled out onto runway Number Four of Dry Plains International Airport. Galen Philips was at the controls; his copilot was David Reissman and his navigator was Jose Aguerrez. They flew an empty plane because D. A. Landis had refused to allow an unknown passenger on board.

As they rolled past the arm where Senta’s shop was, Philips could not help glancing up, wishing he had been able to take her along. It was such a minor thing, and it would have meant a lot to her, or so she said. He thought that maybe if she had been able to leave Dry Plains for a day or two, she might have realized what a pernicious place it really was.

There was a figure in the vast window fronting the waiting area, and a single figure stood in it, a shadow of greater darkness than the shadows around it. As Philips watched, he saw the figure raise an arm and wave to him.

“Senta,” he said, and against all his professional impulses, waved back. It was the least he could do, after he had failed to get approval to fly her to Chicago. It was only Chicago, he said to himself. It’s not as if I asked to bring her along on my next flight to India.

He never saw the landing 737 skid out of control just as its wheels touched down. There was a dull sound as the 737 exploded, lifting back into the air in the midst of flames, and then pinwheeled toward the Trager jet.

“What the—” the copilot began.

The explosion reached them, slamming the plane into the side of the airport arm a quarter of a second before the ball of flames engulfed them, bursting what the impact had not broken.

In the gift shop at the far side of the boarding area, Senta lifted her hands to her face and screamed as the window erupted in fire and glass.

About
Echoes

Although I generally dislike Wagnerian opera, the story of
The Flying Dutchman
, the famous ghost ship, has held my interest for some time, and I decided to see what I could do with it in a modern setting. I began this story in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, during a long, late wait between planes.

THEY FOUND
him
locked in the bathroom of the sixteenth-century B and B, smearing the walls with what he found in the catbox. The images were hideous, disturbing; the smell was nauseating. His robe was in tatters and his nails were broken and bleeding; he kept muttering profanities in English and Italian, his face set with a rigidity born of fury.

The police came, very polite and voluble as Italians are apt to be, and two psychiatrists; they conferred while the landlady wrung her hands and said to anyone who would listen that nothing like this had ever happened in her house before, appealing to the saints and all her previous guests to verify this for her. No one paid much attention to her; the psychiatrists made a few routine inquiries when the police had collected Thomas’s passport, making sure they understood how the incident came about; they drugged Thomas enough to keep him from hurting anyone; and then they drove him off to a small hospital in the hills on the south side of the Arno, to a room that overlooked the glowing beauty of Florence, where they left him while they contacted the American Embassy and began the slow process of deciding what to do with the young man. When Thomas woke, he began howling, making sounds that hardly seemed to come from a human throat. He ran himself against the walls, the sound of impact shuddering through them. He cursed. He screamed. He slammed his head into the bars over the window, which was when the four attendants came and injected him with a powerful sedative. Thomas kicked and muttered while the drug took hold, then he lapsed into an enforced sleep.

“Such a pity,” said the oldest nurse, a middle-aged man from Pisa with a nose like a potato and big, fleshy ears. “He looks like an angel.”

Asleep, Thomas Ashen did. He had the kind of regular, well-proportioned features that would not have been out of place in a Renaissance portrait; his hair was a sunny light brown and curled just enough to make a nice frame for his face. With his eyes closed, the wrath that smoldered within was hidden. Lying on his utilitarian bed he seemed serene, but that was the result of his stupor.

The other three men agreed, one of them reluctantly; the man from Modena said, “One of the Fallen Angels.” There was a long silence while they made sure he could not lower the sides of his bed, and then they left him alone.

It took nearly a week for Thomas to be calm enough to talk. When he did, he struggled visibly to control his anger and to hide his dread; he was drugged to help him maintain command of his emotions and to keep his apprehensions at bay. He slumped in his chair, his head and shoulders rounded forward as if he were about to fall forward into an abyss; his slippered feet dangled as if he could not see the floor, or did not trust it to support him. He listened to the gentle promptings of the psychiatrist with increasing loathing on his countenance.

“E impossibile,
Dottore,” he said, slurring his words a little as the drugs did their work.

“What is impossible?” Doctor Giacomo Chiodo asked in perfect Americanized English, the legacy of two years at Stanford Medical.

“Everything.
Tutti quanti.
It’s all for nothing.” He held his arms crossed tightly over his chest and he glared down at the soft slippers on his feet. “You don’t know what’s out there. You are blinded by reason, by rationality. You think what you see is what is there.” He had to stop himself from saying more, to keep to himself the tentacles he saw writhing out of the psychiatrist’s shoulders, or the huge bird talons that served him as feet.

“If I don’t know, will you tell me?” Doctor Chiodo appeared calm, even mildly disinterested, but beneath that facade he was paying close attention.

“That’s a psychiatrist’s trick, isn’t it? Turning the matter back on me so you don’t have to risk anything.” He scowled at the floor; it was too difficult to look at the man and ignore the tentacles. “You don’t want to admit it.”

“Admit what?” Doctor Chiodo sounded politely interested, as if they were discussing a film at a cocktail party. He waited, seeming to be in no hurry, his ferociously beaked face as benign as something that nightmarish could be.

“That you know what I see, that you know it’s real.” He glared at the Italian. “You aren’t as much a fool as the rest of them. You listen to so much—I can’t be the only one who has seen ... You must know more, the reality.”

“What do I know is real?” Doctor Chiodo asked with the same determined courtesy.

“Well,
look!”
he burst out. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t know? Don’t you look in the mirror? Can’t you see what’s out there?” He used his chin to indicate the window. “Do you have to think I am crazy in order to be sane yourself? Can’t you see?”

“I see hillsides and the western half of Firenze,” said Doctor Chiodo quietly, doing hardly more than glancing toward the north-facing windows. “With the Arno cutting through the city. What do you see?”

His jaw angled defiantly. “I don’t pretend. I see what’s really there; I see the monsters and freaks and grotesques. You’ve gotten used to them, haven’t you? You think you see a man’s face when you shave, that the people you pass in the streets are not macabre creatures in a macabre landscape. You pretend you haven’t got a beak, that no one has one.” He lowered his eyes. “You’re as bad as the rest of them. You don’t let yourself recognize what is there,” Thomas said, then added in a soft, desperate tone, “No one believes me. No one wants to believe me.”

“Why do you say that?” It was a standard therapist’s ploy, and it worked well enough.

“You sound as if you don’t believe me, either, but I know you aren’t really convinced that what you think is there is real, not doing what you do.” His eyes went sly. “You want it to be like Giotto’s window, where you can show the order of what you think is there. But you sense that the order is false, a trick of geometry, or you should, a man in your line of work. If you don’t, then—” He made a sound of contemptuous scorn. “You’re as bad as the rest of them. Admit it. You don’t want to see what I see. You’d rather look for reason and beauty than for the madness that is here. You have been seduced by all those lines Giotto drew out his window, forgetting it was all just a trick.” He kicked at the chair leg with his soft slippers. “This isn’t Giotto’s window—that’s the illusion you have accepted. The world is Bosch’s, with bird-headed men and flowers in walking cages. That’s what surrounds us. All the rest is sleight of hand.”

“If that is so, what are you?” Doctor Chiodo kept his tone level and his gaze indirect.

“Oh, I am as much a monster as any of you, but at least I know it. I have seen my beak and my leathery wings, and my talons. I know that mirrors can lie if you are afraid to look at the truth. I am not afraid to see what I am.” He snatched at the air as if to gather his thoughts. “You would see, too, if you permitted yourself to see them—I do. Oh, not the same monstrousness as mine, but some things all your own. I know you for what you are.” He sounded almost proud, but he would not face Doctor Chiodo as he went on. “I can see what you are. You’re one of the false men, with pink skin over the scales of a lizard, and fangs like a wild beast. The streets are full of beasts like you, chimeras and gargoyles and monsters; you all go on as if you were men: you have an armored raptor’s head, your arms are not arms at all, and your feet are clawed.”

“Is that what you see?” the doctor asked quietly as if they were talking about the pleasant Tuscan weather. “Is everyone so hideous?”

“Yes. And you would see it if you would let yourself,” Thomas insisted again. “You will not let yourself look because you know I’m right.”

“If you insist,” Doctor Chiodo said, maintaining his calm and prepared for more repetition. “How does it happen that you can see these things and the rest of us cannot?”

Thomas laughed. “Because I am not afraid of seeing the world as it is.” He leaned farther forward in his chair. “I know that if I fall from here, I will sink into the earth for miles. Don’t pretend you don’t know that, too. I can see it in your face.”

“Which face is that? The pink one or the lizard one with fangs?” He wished the words unspoken as soon as they were uttered. He strove to regain the removal he sought. Finally he coughed gently. “You should be able to inform me.”

“You won’t believe me,” said Thomas, so quietly that Doctor Chiodo had to strain to hear him. “No one believes me.”

“So you keep telling me,” said Doctor Chiodo. “I wish you’d tell me more.”

“Why? So you can say I am hopelessly delusional, spending my time hallucinating? So you can embrace the dream of rationality and tell yourself
you
are sane? So you can proclaim the triumph of rationality?” His sarcasm sounded exhausted; his defiance was fading, giving way to increasing dejection. “Look in the mirror, Dottore.
Guard’ al viso.”
He swallowed hard. “If you used your real hands, you could touch your real face. You are not as lost as most are—you still have the capacity to know yourself.” The doctor’s tentacles waved at him, and the large, beakish horn that went up his nose and over his eyebrows dipped as the psychiatrist nodded.

“No doubt,” said Doctor Chiodo. He wanted to pursue the matter later, when Thomas had rested, for the young American was slumping in his chair, his head nodded down onto his chest. “When you are more alert we will continue this.”

“You think I won’t know you for what you are? Do you think anything you do to me will change that?” Thomas challenged in a whisper. “The world isn’t rational, Dottore. It never was.” There was nothing Doctor Chiodo could think to say; he rang for the orderlies to escort Thomas back to his room.

* * *

“I am Jane Wallace,” she said as she presented her passport and her letters of authorization; Director Biancchi glanced at them and took them carefully. “You were told to expect me? I’m here to ... to escort Thomas Ashen home.” She waited while the director of the sanitarium examined her credentials. “How is he?”

The director sighed with Italian eloquence as he gave her back her passport and letters of authorization. “He is still delusional, as Doctor Chiodo says in his report. This does not seem to have changed, although it is difficult to know. He is not saying much to us, but he flinches when he is with others, and he refuses to look out the window, so we have assumed he is continuing to see something other than what the rest of us do.” This was as soothing as he could make it, and he watched Jane’s response; then he waved to the chair across his desk. “Sit down, sit down. We must discuss this, you and I, if you are planning to travel anywhere with him.” His face was slightly pinched, as if he had smelled something not quite wholesome.

“I wonder if it will be safe to travel with him at all, given what your reports say,” she said to him as she sat down. “I read them quite thoroughly on the flight over. His family wants him back as soon as possible, but I don’t know if it would be wise.” She tapped the folder that held the evaluations. “I appreciate your faxing them to me before I left. It was all done in such a hurry—” She broke off. “Has he been violent?”

“Only to himself. This morning he hit his head on the door two times before we stopped him; he said he was trying to leave an impression of his beak, to prove he has one. He still attempts to eat feces if we leave him alone in the toilet. He has scratched his arms, saying that the scrapes prove he has talons instead of hands.” The director sighed. “I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: He has not improved in any creditable way since we undertook his care.” He folded his hands. “He is filled with despair, insisting he is surrounded by monsters.” He shook his head again. “Doctor Chiodo has kept him moderately sedated, and that has made him easier to handle, but it does nothing to alleviate his condition.”

“No,” Jane said quietly. “I can see how it is advisable, however.” She was just tentative enough to encourage Director Biancchi to continue.

“You would be well-advised to keep him under heavier sedation while you are traveling; I know you are not required to, but I do think it would be prudent,” he told her, a slight edge in his voice. “He has not been violent, as I have told you, but if he is closely surrounded by those he sees as monsters, I cannot promise he will not lash out. If he is in a stupor, he might endure his surroundings well enough for you to get him home.”

“That’s not very encouraging,” said Jane.

“No, it isn’t,” Director Biancchi agreed. “You are a psychiatric nurse and you know how easily some patients can be overcome by their delusions. I’m afraid Thomas Ashen is wholly given over to his beliefs and regards all attempts to change his mind as confirmation of his worst suspicions.” He tapped the shiny top of his wide desk.

“So I gather,” said Jane, her manner a bit more assertive. “That makes him doubly troublesome; we must assume he will be responding to his hallucinations at all times. It will make traveling with him more difficult.” She stifled a sudden yawn. “I’m sorry. Jet lag.”

The director nodded, his manner politely concerned.
“Capisco.
You have come a long way, and you must travel again in another day or two; it is very demanding.” He indicated the tall windows. “There is a guest cottage on the grounds, if you would like to rest until evening. Your bags have already been taken there. We can discuss this case further when you’ve restored yourself.” His smile was genuine and practiced at once, the smile of a man who has spent his life putting frightened people at ease. “I will have the most recent reports prepared for your review.”