“Will he be all right?” the man asks.“I’m not comfortable with administering strong antidepressants to someone so young. I suggest that he comes back for several more
sessions so I can monitor his progress and let you know of any improvements. I recommend not putting him in any more stressful situations than he’s already in.”
“We’re going to be visiting his mother in an hour’s time.”The therapist frowns. “I’m not sure that would be healthy at this stage, Mr. Halloway, especially after the last time…”
“His mother’s been asking for him,” the father insists. “And I know that whatever he says, he misses his mother and wants to see her, too. We’re taking very careful steps this time. Nothing is going to happen.”
The therapist looks reluctant, but the father is resolute. The boy abandons the magazines, staring instead at a lone mirror on the wall.
***
“What about the other woman you mentioned?”“She wears a white dress, not like the lady in black. It’s really dirty, but that isn’t her fault. Not really.”
“Does she stand behind Tarquin, too?”“Nope. She likes to stand upside down on the ceiling sometimes.”The young woman feels a decided chill. “How do you know all these things, Sandra?”
“I don’t know,” the girl says, puzzled herself. “I just see them, and then I do.”
“Why doesn’t she like the number nine?”“She had ten things a long time ago, but then she lost one of
them so now she only has nine, and she got hurt because of it. She doesn’t like being reminded.”
“Why does she like standing on the ceiling?”“Sometimes she stands the right way like us, but she got used to ceilings, too. Someone hurt her really, really badly, and they put her down some place that was dark and smelly, like a big hole. Her head went in the hole first before her feet and she died like that, so she got used to seeing everything upside down.”
“I don’t understand.”The girl swivels in her swing seat. She grasps the sides of the swing with both hands and tips herself over backward so that her hair grazes the ground and she is looking over at the teaching assistant from the wrong way up.
“Like this,” she says. “She died looking at everything like this.”
***
The father and the boy finally leave, and the therapist returns to the solitude of her office, back to the one hundred and sixtythree volumes on her bookcase. She picks up the small device she uses to record conversations with patients and presses a few buttons.
“My mother.” The boy’s voice comes from it, low and tinny. “I remember that she used to sing to me before I went to sleep.”
“Was it a lullaby?” she hears her own voice ask.“I don’t know the song’s name.” The boy begins to hum.
Within the tape, something else begins humming in light counterpoint.
The therapist gasps and shuts the recorder quickly. She hesitates, steeling herself, and switches it on again. The boy’s humming continues, but this time there is no other accompaniment.
Melinda Creswell, psychotherapist, looks around the empty room with growing unease, but by then I am long gone.
The boy and his father enter a different building next, this one a dollhouse of white decay. The walls and floors are white. The doors are painted white and the ceiling is painted white and the windows are painted white, and whenever there are curtains, they are also white.
There are two kinds of dolls here. The first kind wears white shirts and pants. They hurry down corridors pushing white carts and carrying white towels, stacks of white paper, and white trays. They carry about themselves an air of forced joviality, though they know very well there are few things to smile about in these halls.
And then there are the broken dolls. They are pushed around in wheelchairs and fed, drooling, from plastic cups. Sometimes they are dragged, fighting and screaming, by the White Shirts into white beds inside white rooms. A needle is jabbed into their arms to keep them calm, but they are never truly cured. The broken dolls cry and laugh and shout and sing, and often they sound much more alive than the White Shirts.
The boy and his father follow one of the White Shirts down a
long corridor where many broken dolls live. One doll is banging her head repeatedly against the wall, over and over, until another White Shirt comes to take her away. Another has soiled himself, a stream running down his leg even as he meows and swipes at his own head with a curled arm, oblivious.
Still another steps out of her room and sees them. “I curse thee!” she shrieks, lifting a spindly finger to point at a spot behind the boy. “I curse thee, foul abomination! In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, I abjure thee! Begone, foul spirit, begone, begone, begone!”
A Shirt takes her arm but she shakes him off, still spewing curses at nothing. More arrive, seven all in all, to subdue the little woman, and she fights madly, like a crazed tiger struggling with its last breath to hurt one last time. “I abjure thee!” she wails. “For I am the Sword of God, and I order you to be gone, demon, begone begone begonebegonebegone—!”
She is dragged into another room, but the screaming continues. The boy is unsettled, and so is the father, though he tries to hide it. “I’m sorry,” the White Shirt tells them apologetically. “That’s Wilma. She’s been quiet the last several weeks. I don’t know what’s come over her today.”
“What’s wrong with her?” the father asks. “She thinks she’s the archangel Gabriel.”
“Who was she talking to?” But the Shirt only shrugs, because it is not their job to know, only to help.
The room they seek is located at the end of the hall, on the
far left. “We set up some Japanese sliding doors in her room, like you asked,” the Shirt says. “She seems to like it, and she’s been considerably calmer since they were installed. Says it reminds her of home.” He pauses, shooting the tattooed boy a significant look. “She’s under a heavy dose of medication right now, but I’m not sure she should see you just yet. You’ll have to stay behind the screen until we’re sure she won’t react as badly as she did before.”
The boy nods, though reluctant about this suggestion. The father squeezes his arm. The Shirt knocks quietly at the door.
“Looks who’s come to visit again, Mrs. Halloway.”Inside, a woman sits on a white lounge chair. She is a beautiful lady: no longer youthful, but far from the old age the white streaks peppering her long, black hair imply. Her brown eyes are unfocused. In contrast to the whiteness of the dollhouse, a wooden shoji screen splits the room in half and prevents her from seeing those who stand beyond the door. But the screen is not what makes this room different from all the others in this building.
Unlike the people outside, the dolls filling this room are real. They occupy rows of wooden stands that mark every wall. A large platform stands beside the woman’s bed, covered in heavy red carpeting, where a set of dolls have been carefully arranged—a likeness of the Japanese imperial family and their court, presiding over a roomful of subjects.