In the Absence of Angels (8 page)

The doctor shifted in his chair and lit a cigarette.

“I won’t keep you much longer,” said the visitor. “I saw the boy.” A violent fit of coughing interrupted him. This time his curious writhing motion went frankly unconcealed. He got up from his chair and stood at the window, gripping the sill and breathing heavily until he had regained control, and went on, one hand pulling unconsciously at his collar. “Or, at least, I think I saw him. On my way to visit him in his room I bumped into a tall red-headed boy in a football sweater, hurrying down the hall with a windbreaker and a poncho slung over his shoulder. I asked for Hallowell’s room; he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the door just behind him, and continued past me. It never occurred to me …I was expecting some adenoidal gangler with acne …or one of these sinister little angel faces, full of neurotic sensibility.

“The room was empty. Except for its finicky neatness, and a rather large amount of livestock, there was nothing unusual about it. The school, according to the current trend, is run like a farm, with the boys doing the chores, and pets are encouraged. There was a tank with a couple of turtles near the window, beside it another, full of newts, and in one corner a large cage of well-tended, brisk white mice. Glass cases, with carefully mounted series of lepidoptera and hymenoptera, showing the metamorphic stages, hung on the walls, and on a drawing board there was a daintily executed study of Branchippus, the ‘fairy shrimp.’

“While I paced the room, trying to look as if I wasn’t prying, a greenish little wretch, holding himself together as if he had an imaginary shawl draped around him, slunk into the half-dark room and squeaked ‘Hallowell?’ When he saw me he started to duck, but I detained him and found that he had had an appointment with Hallowell too. When it was clear, from his description, that Hallowell must have been the redhead I’d seen leaving, the poor urchin burst into tears.

“ ‘I’ll never get rid of it now!’ he wailed. From then on it wasn’t hard to get the whole maudlin story. It seems that shortly after Hallowell’s arrival at school he acquired a reputation for unusual proficiency with animals and for out-of-the way lore which would impress the ingenuous. He circulated the rumor that he could swallow small animals and regurgitate them at will. No one actually saw him swallow anything, but it seems that in some mumbo-jumbo with another boy who had shown cynicism about the whole thing, it was claimed that Hallowell had, well, divested himself of something, and passed it on to the other boy, with the statement that the latter would only be able to get rid of his cargo when he in turn found a boy who would disbelieve
him
.”

The visitor paused, calmer now, and leaving the window sat down again in the chair opposite the doctor, regarding him with such fixity that the doctor shifted uneasily, with the apprehension of one who is about to be asked for a loan.

“My mind turned to the elementary sort of thing we’ve all done at times. You know, circle of kids in the dark, piece of cooked cauliflower passed from hand to hand with the statement that the stuff is the fresh brains of some neophyte who hadn’t taken his initiation seriously. My young informer, Moulton his name was, swore however that this hysteria (for of course, that’s what I thought it) was passed on singly, from boy to boy, without any such stances. He’d been home to visit his family, who are missionaries on leave, and had been infected by his roommate on his return to school, unaware that by this time the whole school had protectively turned believers, en masse. His own terror came, not only from his conviction that he was possessed, but from his inability to find anybody who would take his dare. And so he’d finally come to Hallowell. ...

“By this time the room was getting really dark and I snapped on the light to get a better look at Moulton. Except for an occasional shudder, like a bodily tic, which I took to be the aftereffects of hard crying, he looked like a healthy enough boy who’d been scared out of his wits. I remember that a neat little monograph was already forming itself in my mind, a group study on mass psychosis, perhaps, with effective anthropological references to certain savage tribes whose dances include a rite known as ‘eating evil.’

“The kid was looking at me. ‘Do you believe me?’ he said suddenly. ‘Sir?’ he added, with a naive cunning which tickled me.

“ ‘Of course,’ I said, patting his shoulder absently. ‘In a way.’

“His shoulder slumped under my hand. I felt its tremor, direct misery palpitating between my fingers.

“I thought …maybe for a man …it wouldn’t be ...’ His voice trailed off.

“ ‘Be the same? …I don’t know,’ I said slowly, for of course, I was answering, not his actual question, but the overtone of some cockcrow of meaning that evaded me.

“He raised his head and petitioned me silently with his eyes. Was it guile, or simplicity, in his look, and was it for conviction, or the lack of it, that he arraigned me? I don’t know. I’ve gone back over what I did then, again and again, using all my own knowledge of the mechanics of decision, and I know that it wasn’t just sympathy, or a pragmatic reversal of therapy, but something intimately important for me, that made me shout with all my strength — ‘Of course I don’t believe you!’

“Moulton, his face contorted, fell forward on me so suddenly that I stumbled backwards, sending the tank of newts crashing to the floor. Supporting him with my arms, I hung on to him while he heaved, face downwards. At the same time I felt a tickling, sliding sensation in my own ear, and an inordinate desire to follow it with my finger, but both my hands were busy. It wasn’t a minute ’til I’d gotten him onto the couch, where he drooped, a little white about the mouth, but with that chastened, purified look of the physically relieved, although he hadn’t actually upchucked.

“Still watching him, I stooped to clear up the debris, but he bounded from the couch with amazing resilience.

“ ‘I’ll do it,’ he said.

“ ‘Feel better?’

“He nodded, clearly abashed, and we gathered up the remains of the tank in a sort of mutual embarrassment. I can’t remember that either of us said a word, and neither of us made more than a halfhearted attempt to search for the scattered pests which had apparently sought crannies in the room. At the door we parted, muttering as formal a goodnight as was possible between a grown man and a small boy. It wasn’t until I reached my own room and sat down that I realized, not only my own extraordinary behavior, but that Moulton, standing, as I suddenly recalled, for the first time quite straight, had sent after me a look of pity and speculation.

“Out of habit, I reached into my breast pocket for my pencil, in order to take notes as fresh as possible. And then I felt it …a skittering, sidling motion, almost beneath my hand. I opened my jacket and shook myself, thinking that I’d picked up something in the other room …but nothing. I sat quite still, gripping the pencil, and after an interval it came again — an inchoate creeping, a twitter of movement almost
lackadaisical,
as of something inching itself lazily along — but this time on my other side. In a frenzy, I peeled off my clothes, inspected myself wildly, and enumerating to myself a reassuring abracadabra of explanation — skipped heartbeat, intercostal pressure of gas — I sat there naked, waiting. And after a moment, it came again, that wandering, aquatic motion, as if something had flipped itself over just enough to make me aware, and then settled itself, this time under the sternum, with a nudge like that of some inconceivable foetus. I jumped up and shook myself again, and as I did so I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the closet door. My face, my own face, was ajar with fright, and I was standing there, hooked over, as if I were wearing an imaginary shawl.”

In the silence after his visitor’s voice stopped, the doctor sat there in the painful embarrassment of the listener who has played confessor, and whose expected comment is a responsibility he wishes he had evaded. The breeze from the open window fluttered the papers on the desk. Glancing out at the clean, regular façade of the hospital wing opposite, at whose evenly shaded windows the white shapes of orderlies and nurses flickered in consoling routine, the doctor wished petulantly that he had fended off the man and all his papers in the beginning. What right had the man to arraign
him
? Surprised at his own inner vehemence, he pulled himself together. “How long ago?” he said, at last.

“Four months.”

“And since?”

“It’s never stopped.” The visitor now seemed brimming with a tentative excitement, like a colleague discussing a mutually puzzling case. “Everything’s been tried. Sedatives do obtain some sleep, but that’s all. Purgatives. Even emetics.” He laughed slightly, almost with pride. “Nothing like that works,” he continued, shaking his head with the doting fondness of a patient for some symptom which has confounded the best of them. “It’s too cagey for that.”

With his use of the word “it,” the doctor was propelled back into that shapely sense of reality which had gone admittedly askew during the man’s recital. To admit the category of “it,” to dip even a slightly co-operative finger in another’s fantasy, was to risk one’s own equilibrium. Better not to become involved in argument with the possessed, lest one’s own apertures of belief be found to have been left ajar.

“I am afraid,” the doctor said blandly, “that your case is outside my field.”

“As a doctor?” said his visitor. “Or as a man?”

“Let’s not discuss me, if you please.”

The visitor leaned intently across the desk. “Then you admit that to a certain extent, we
have
been — ?”

“I admit nothing!” said the doctor, stiffening.

“Well,” said the man disparagingly, “of course, that too is a kind of stand. The commonest, I’ve found.” He sighed, pressing one hand against his collarbone. “I suppose you have a prescription too, or a recommendation. Most of them do.”

The doctor did not enjoy being judged. “Why don’t you hunt up young Hallowell?” he said, with malice.

“Disappeared. Don’t you think I tried?” said his vis-à-vis ruefully. Something furtive, hope, perhaps, spread its guileful corruption over his face. “That means you do give a certain credence — ”

“Nothing of the sort!”

“Well then,” said his interrogator, turning his palms upward.

The doctor leaned forward, measuring his words with exasperation. “Do you mean you
want
me to tell you you’re crazy!

“In my spot,” answered his visitor meekly, “which would you prefer?”

Badgered to the point of commitment, the doctor stared back at his inconvenient Diogenes. Swollen with irritation, he was only half conscious of an uneasy, vestigial twitching of his ear muscles, which contracted now as they sometimes did when he listened to atonal music.

“O.K., O.K. ...!” he shouted suddenly, slapping his hand down on the desk and thrusting his chin forward. “Have it your way then! I don’t believe you!”

Rigid, the man looked back at him cataleptically, seeming, for a moment, all eye. Then, his mouth stretching in that medieval grimace, risorial and equivocal, whose mask appears sometimes on one side of the stage, sometimes on the other, he fell forward on the desk, with a long, mewing sigh.

Before the doctor could reach him, he had raised himself on his arms and their foreheads touched. They recoiled, staring downward. Between them on the desk, as if one of its mahogany shadows had become animate, something seemed to move — small, seal-colored, and ambiguous. For a moment it filmed back and forth, arching in a crude, primordial inquiry; then, homing straight for the doctor, whose jaw hung down in a rictus of shock, it disappeared from view.

Sputtering, the doctor beat the air and his own person wildly with his hands, and staggered upward from his chair. The breeze blew hypnotically, and the stranger gazed back at him with such perverse calm that already he felt an assailing doubt of the lightning, untoward event. He fumbled back over his sensations of the minute before, but already piecemeal and chimerical, they eluded him now, as they might forever.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said weakly.

His visitor put up a warding hand, shaking it fastidiously.
“Au contraire!”
he replied daintily, as though by the use of another language he would remove himself still further from commitment. Reaching forward, he gathered up his papers into a sheaf, and stood up, stretching himself straight with an all-over bodily yawn of physical ease that was like an affront. He looked down at the doctor, one hand fingering his wallet. “No,” he said reflectively, “guess not.” He tucked the papers away. “Shall we leave it on the basis of — er — professional courtesy?” he inquired delicately.

Choking on the sludge of his rage, the doctor looked back at him, inarticulate.

Moving toward the door, the visitor paused. “After all,” he said, “with your connections …try to think of it as a temporary inconvenience.” Regretfully, happily, he closed the door behind him.

The doctor sat at his desk, humped forward. His hands crept to his chest and crossed. He swallowed, experimentally. He hoped it was rage. He sat there, waiting. He was thinking of the luncheon table.

C
HILDREN GROWING
up in the country take their images of integrity from the land. The land, with its changes, is always about them, a pervasive truth, and their midget foregrounds are crisscrossed with minute dramas which are the animalcules of a larger vision. But children who grow in a city where there is nothing greater than the people brimming up out of subways, rivuleting in the streets — these children must take their archetypes where and if they find them.

In P.S. 146, between periods, when the upper grades were shunted through the halls in that important procedure known as “departmental,” although most of the teachers stood about chatting relievedly in couples, Miss Totten always stood at the door of her “home room,” watching us straightforwardly, alone. As, straggling and muffled, we lined past the other teachers, we often caught snatches of upstairs gossip which we later perverted and enlarged; passing before Miss Totten we deflected only that austere look, bent solely on us.