Breakable You (37 page)

It was probably better, in fact, if he saw her as little as possible. It would probably be easier for her to work out her problems without the clutter of family complications, the burden of the paternal presence. He was sure that it had always been difficult for Maud to live in the shadow of her overachieving father, and so it would surely be an act of sensitivity and tact if he stayed at arm's length.

Ellie's habit of visiting every day was different. She could follow Maud here, into this land of the dim and the drooping, because she had trained for it all her life. She had something to offer Maud by visiting her here.

Adam had something else to offer. When Maud imagines making her way back to the world outside these walls, he thought, the world of striving and achievement, she can think of me, residing in that world, and maybe it will inspire her. Maybe it will be better for her if I
don't visit
. Maybe that will plant the idea in her subconscious that in order to see me—and in order to rejoin the world of achievement and success—she'll have to work her way out of this dreadful place.

So Adam succeeded in reasoning his way to the conclusion that it would be better for Maud if he didn't visit her again. But it was just a sort of idle mental exercise. He knew that he was merely finding reasons to do as he pleased. And at bottom he didn't believe that he needed excuses. He believed what he had always believed: if you do what you want to do, as long as you are not actually going out of your way to be cruel, you are acting within the moral law.

He dropped the Zabar's bag in a wastebasket and left the building. He walked toward the subway. You couldn't just hail a cab out here in the boonies.

The evening blossomed before him. He was suddenly free. He was going home for a shower and a drink. After that, he was going to keep his place in the world of striving and achievement, and thereby maintain himself as a model for Maud to aspire to, by appearing at the party at Elaine's.

There was a knock on the door and then a staff member poked his head in.

"Rec therapy in ten minutes," he said. "Your visitor gone?"

"My visitor?" Maud said.

"Sign-in sheet said you had a visitor."

Maud shrugged. "My invisible friend."

"Anyway, rec therapy in ten. Just wanted to let you know."

Maud wanted to read another page or two. She'd been looking through the Kafka anthology she'd brought here—the bleakest, most dispirited set of musings that had ever been committed to paper.

She came across the line she'd read the day before: "One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of its triumph."

She put the book down. She would have thrown it across the room, but it was a library book.

The line had seemed mordantly beautiful the day before, but it bothered her now—the resignation it embodied, the passivity.

Dear Mr. Kafka
, she thought.
Fuck you
. If the world triumphs over me, it'll be because it kicked my ass, not because I politely allowed it to.

She wasn't sure if this was just braggadocio, or if she could back it up.

Focal girl in loony bin talks trash to Kafka; Kafka unimpressed.

She straightened out her room for a few minutes and then headed down the hall for the evening's activities.

The best thing about being here, Maud decided, the most restorative thing, was that you could sleep. For the first time in months, she was dreaming. It was good to dream, even though none of her dreams were happy..

All of them were about Samir. In one dream, they'd arranged to meet in a Dunkin' Donuts, and she was hurrying to get there on time, but her high school guidance counselor made her stop and take a math test. She knew the Dunkin' Donuts was going to close soon, and she was afraid that Samir, newly weak and fragile now that he was dead, would end up getting locked inside.

She kept dreaming that he was alive, but dying. In one dream, he was in a floating hospital, getting blood transfused into his jugular vein. Maud was waiting for him on Ellis Island. She spoke to him on the phone but he was vague and befuddled and she wasn't sure he remembered her. She asked him to put his doctor on the phone, and the doctor, in a sympathetic voice, said, "I wish we'd gotten to him sooner. We can rescue his body but it's too late to rescue his mind."

In another dream she came home from a walk and found Samir in her apartment.

"I thought you were dead," she said.

"I was never dead," he said. "But they won't let me stay here. I asked if I could live with you, but they say I'm not allowed."

David wasn't in any of these dreams. This made her sad beyond reason. She wanted Samir to meet him, if only in her dreams.

She dreamed about Samir almost every night. Only one of these dreams left even a trace of something like happiness. He was in a hospital room; she knew this was the last time she'd ever see him. She told him how much she loved him. He smiled and said, "I noticed that."

"What have you been thinking about?" Ralph said. They were in the activities room at Holliswood, but from his tone you might have thought that he was visiting her at a research institute, some noble center of learning, where she'd been spending a few days contemplating the higher mysteries of the philosophical tradition.

She was glad that he was speaking to her in this tone.

"I've been thinking that I need to read more about free will."

"Why's that?"

"I don't really know what put me here, and I don't really know what might get me out. Most of my fellow inmates think that everything they do and everything they can't do can be explained by chemical imbalances. That seems to be the prevailing view. The professionals here seem to believe the same thing. But I'd prefer to think that there's something about me that can't be reduced to chemicals. Call it consciousness. Call it imagination. I'd prefer to think I can think my way out of this, whatever my brain chemistry might happen to be."

"I believe that. I believe you can."

"I'm thinking of checking myself out for the weekend. Seeing how it goes."

"Can you do that?"

"I put myself here voluntarily, so I can leave anytime I want. They could stop me if they thought I was a danger to myself, but I've talked with the doctors and they don't think I am. I don't either. In case you were wondering."

"I wasn't," he said. "But I'm glad to hear you say it. Do you know what you're going to do if you do check out for the weekend?"

"I have an idea. But I don't want to talk about it. It's too stupid."

"I'm sure that isn't true."

She left the next morning, unsure of whether she was going to go back in.

She felt guilty to be leaving the clinic without going immediately to pick up David. But there was something she wanted to do by herself.

She went to the Port Authority and took a bus to Sparta, New Jersey, where Samir had grown up.

When he'd first told her the name of his hometown, she'd felt like laughing. It was too perfect. Clenched, defended Sparta: the perfect place for a militant to come of age. He'd told her that it was actually a tranquil town—almost tranquilized: rural, wealthy, and white. But she'd always liked to imagine him growing up in a place that was not quite a part of America.

When she got there, she took a taxi to the public library. The poetry section was in the basement. She didn't think there was much chance that she'd find the book he'd told her about, but there it was.
Contemporary Arabic Poetry
. Inside the back cover was a sleeve containing a checkout card. The book had been published in 1987; three people had checked it out that year, the last of whom was Samir. She found his signature, written in a careful hand, next to the due date of November 20, 1987.

One person had checked it out in 1988, another in 1990.

Sometime after that, the computer age had reached New Jersey, and the checkout card had become a charming artifact, a relic from a simpler time, and there was no way to know if anyone had taken the book out of the library since then.

She thought about the way he had used his mind. The mask he had worn when she met him—the mask of a brusque and literal-minded man—had only been a mask. This book was proof: this book, and the story he had told her about it. He was someone who had found in poetry a door to a wider life.

The two of them had been making their solitary expeditions in libraries at around the same time. He'd been a few years older, but she'd fallen in love with reading at an earlier age. Probably there were days in which each of them, miles apart, had felt more alive in the company of some new book, and wished there was someone to share it with.

Her hand was steady as she held the book, but she felt a sort of inner trembling. He had held this book in his hands.

She found the poem he had quoted from, and she read it slowly. It was just as Samir had described it: a poem about a man whose life has been overturned by love.

It was as if he, at fifteen, were imagining her, in the future. Reaching toward her. And she, now, was reaching toward him into the past. It was almost as if they were touching.

Not really, but almost.

She thought about removing the magnetic strip from the center of the book and taking it home with her. Instead, she put the book back on the shelf, for someone else to find.

She was incapable of visiting a library without taking a look at the philosophy section. The philosophy section of the Sparta library was very small, but she wouldn't have called it bad. There was no such thing as a bad philosophy section, in Maud's view.

She spent half an hour reading an essay by William James on free will, half arguing with him in her mind, half agreeing.

She had almost forgotten the pleasure of reading philosophy, the pleasure of thinking about unanswerable questions.

She put the book down and closed her eyes.

My first act of resilience, she thought, will be to believe in my own resilience.

She could almost see Samir smiling at her. If he could speak to her, he'd probably be saying something like
It's just like you to reach your moment of truth in a library
. She could almost hear him saying it.

She took a bus back to Manhattan. The bus to Sparta had gone through local streets; the bus back to the city, an express, went up the highway.

This turned out to be unfortunate. On the highway, she was reminded why people say the things they say about New Jersey.

There is a stretch of New Jersey that smells bad in a way that no place else does. It smells bad in a way that is both industrial and weirdly animate, weirdly intimate, as if factories were living creatures that sneak out to the marshes near Paterson to take their shits.

There is no species of optimism so sturdy in construction or noble in character that it can remain unshaken during a bus ride through northern New Jersey. Her feeling of triumphant hopefulness was fading. She missed Samir. She missed herself: the person she'd feel like, the person she'd
be
, if he were still with her. She had accepted his death, but she still hadn't fully accepted the idea that they weren't going to have a future together.

Their only future together was David. But the sheer challenge of taking care of him still seemed overwhelming. Being a mother was like a psychological experiment—a rigged experiment, in which you're asked to endure a level of stress that's in fact impossible to endure.

She tried to hold on to what she'd felt in the library, but it was difficult.

The ideal homecoming party, Eleanor thought, wouldn't have taken place next to a cemetery. But it was wonderful to be having any homecoming party at all.

"Could he have changed since Thursday?" Maud said. She was holding David in her arms. "Maybe he's been changing gradually and I'm just noticing it."

"How do you think he's changed?" Eleanor said.

"I can't define it. He seems slightly more mature, perhaps. Slightly wiser, after spending so much time with his grandmother."

The three of them were in a pocket-sized park.

"How does it feel to be outside?" Eleanor said.

"It feels good."

It was early December, but the day was mild and the sky was blue.

Maud had checked herself out of Holliswood, at least for the weekend, and maybe forever. Eleanor didn't know what she was planning to do.

"Have you been doing any writing?" Maud said.

"No. Not a word."

"That sucks."

Eleanor shrugged. "There are other things in life. This young man has been a charming companion."

A black car stopped on the bottom of the slope, a car from a taxi service. The driver came out, opened the trunk, and took out a wheelchair, and then he helped Ralph out of the car and into the wheelchair.

Eleanor hadn't seen him since Samir's funeral. He looked gaunt.

After Maud kissed him hello, she retreated to a picnic table to nurse David.

"How are you, Eleanor?" Ralph said.

"Today I'm good."

"It's good to see her back on the outside. Our beloved."

"It is good. Do you think she's going to go back in?"

She hadn't wanted to ask that question—she was sure that Ralph had no more idea of the answer than she did—but, in her anxiety, she had to. She had to look for reassurance.

"She's a fighter," Ralph said.

Eleanor wondered whether that was true. She hoped it was.

Her cell phone rang in her purse. She resisted the urge to answer it. She hoped that it was Patrick, but she didn't want to think about Patrick right now.

Maud was back. "Are we ready?" she said. She put her lips close to David's ear and said, "Are you ready to visit your daddy, little dude?"

Eleanor was tired from the walk through the park. She'd been tired out, anyway, from nearly two weeks of taking care of the little dude.

"If I can have another couple of minutes to rest, I'll be able to carry him."

"I can take him," Maud said.

"How'll you manage that?" Eleanor said.