by Jesse Hilson
It was weird, how every little child Noah saw, seemed somehow to be all Jan’s, till she became the mostly off-screen mom. He saw her sentimental cameo a thousand times. His imagination cast Jan for the role, had her giving testimony in an infomercial he saw: “This program works! This program makes your infant literate! Your tot will read a USA Today…”
And then a moving 3D graphic showed the tiny, brilliant pathways of a child’s synaptic webwork, crackling like Rice Krispies’ busy plosives. Or, if intelligence were like magma, how it would overflow incomprehension’s levees so that when a baby was confronted with a flashcard, she would fathom in a teeter-totter way the trick that human beings play, that right-ward scan you do whenever you read poems or ingredients on sides of boxes.
Cut to a mom, amazed and proud, once again assured of her daughter’s radiance, her passion for a printed page. This particular suburban mom was put together: glass water bottle (no BPA), yoga pants, t-shirt not too tight, exercises once a day. She beamed to the camera: “This reading system fits into my busy schedule perfectly!”
This was not Jan. This mom did not make a suicide note with her husband’s Sony camera. This mom had never been stranded on a scarlet sand-dune of psychosis as had Jan. This mom had never known the dumbstruck horror felt by those parents who rub their children’s back tenderly while inside their fondest wish was to electrocute themselves or overdose on sleeping pill.
When did Noah first lay eyes on Jan? They shone a flashlight onto his sleeping face one morning, helped his name get out of bed. They took his morning vital signs. He glimpsed her sitting on a bench. She sobbed that by being hospitalized she had abandoned her autistic daughter, she was a bad mother. And a middle-aged, clipboard-wielding PNP in tweed business attire and heels crouched and clutched Jan’s hand and helped her cry.
Then, in the course of six autumnal days, Noah met Jan but was so unprepared for psych-ward crushes, how they can like a chrysalis transmute to unspoken attraction while his wife Natasha was elsewhere, outside the hospital with his daughter Leigh. There was an awareness, of that woman under the same plague as him, wherever on the ward she was, and a knowledge of how encouraged he felt by her mere presence and constancy. Jan was in her baggy beltless jeans and down on all fours in the common room, back vividly arched and looking at one of the ubiquitous jigsaw puzzles on the low table, showing a crescent-shaped slice of underwear (tiny grape-clusters of red flowers against a black background) below her lumbar curve. The skin of her lower back, quite visible, had either been quite tan or perhaps as swarthy as her face, it was her hypothetical all-over shade.
He broke a commandment as he stood there in the doorway looking at her for a few seconds, right away knowing he shouldn’t have looked. Who was she to him, and who would she be? Perhaps dramatically in retrospect but at the time deadly serious, Alex had an inkling that thoughts of Jan as a fellow mental patient might be a deterrent of his theoretical trestle-leap, his gunshot palate burnt. He folded her face into his own collection: in the stack, beneath Natasha’s and Leigh’s faces, but close at hand, for hazard’s sake.
He was discharged several days later, but felt he had created a strong bond with Jan and several other patients on the ward. On his last day all the patients sat together in the dining room joking and bonding, when a large black woman whose name Noah never learned – who had been brought in with severe depression and only was enticed out of her room by the temptation of the karaoke machine – chastised Noah for trying to get Jan’s contact information in case he wanted to get in touch with her out in the land of the sane.
“Y’all are both married, that’s all I have to say about that…”
“There’s nothing going on, she’s just my friend.”
“We’re not supposed to be getting all friendly and what-not…”
Jan was getting embarrassed.
“I resent what you’re implying,” Noah finally said. “I’m just thinking what if I would like to talk to somebody who’s been in my shoes and who’s been hospitalized. It’d be nice to check in with somebody who knows this experience, if necessary, from time to time.”
But the depressed lady had his number, at least partially. He had been attracted to Jan and, inwardly, it stung to be called out in front of everybody. This was in 2008, two years before the marriage with Natasha broke up, but looking back it seemed as likely as any other detail was to signify something in the big picture about him as a husband. It had been a moment of weakness and a moment of feeling like there was somebody he could relate with, who could be a source of warmth – not back in Oylesburg where he lived with his family, but immediately nearby.
Once Noah was discharged of course he went back to work at the hotel alone as its newly diagnosed third shift watchman. Between his rounds, his keys a sonic sparkle on his belt, he would wander, a nocturnal creature. He would check on spooky boilers. He would help himself to peanuts from the cavernous industrial kitchen. He would approach the baby grand piano which had been positioned on a riser in the dark abyss of the hotel’s empty dining room, using his flashlight to navigate between the ominous cells of the tables, each with its cluster of black twig-like chairs that reached out to trip him. He would sit down at the piano after propping up the flashlight so that he could see the keys and he would play melancholy fragments of melody, like Trent Reznor’s “A Warm Place.
But mostly he would just watch infomercials and cry. His medicine was a bronco that his blood had yet to tame. He became lost in a kaleidoscope of overwhelming empathies. Every child they hauled before the camera was, for Noah, a tiny prodigy of exquisite wonder and pathos.
Here was Toby from Fort Wayne, four and perched above an open book like a short wizard about to summon some miraculous stroke of weather. Actually it was a mathematics textbook. The hologram of Toby’s absent mom adored him from afar. That thing occurred, that thing of when a child reads but doesn’t stop for approval or some sort of acknowledgement that this reading is somehow about pleasing you. The training wheels were coming off. Toby fell into a trance that even onscreen glistened with new mentation. Reading aloud, Toby spoke in a tiny voice one word which choked Noah finally, crumpled him in the hotel lounge under the unbearable weight of a coalescing amalgam of happiness and pity: “Trapezoid.”
What an unusual word to have come out of a child’s televised mouth at that moment and to strike Noah’s head so visceral and tender-hearted. His daughter Leigh was four that year and the vista of reading was about to open up for her like a valley seen from a train that has just cleared the final cluster of interrupting trees. He couldn’t say why he wept. He supposed he wept for Toby’s growing ability marked by that specialized show-off word, and the fear of what this newly proud intelligence bent on innocent discovery would encounter out there in the world. And maybe his unstable tears were for the parents who, like himself and Jan, reel in suicidal horror from themselves: “a plague on both our spouses,” spouses who must stabilize the world around the children while “we ill ones” are away. And so it plucked the strings of lachrymose impulses.
It was 4am, the empty hotel slept. Noah crouched beneath the TV in the lobby lounge. Before tears, like snails all nostril-bound, departed, they caused an optical wavering, and there within his pupils the images of talking heads distorted, detaching from their voices. He was blinded by the periwinkle star of TV screen refracted in a glowing lens of tears.
Here comes the Q & A, all staged with moms who ask the psychologist about the literacy program. Placed in pairs on sofas around the room, these moms all seemed, like Jan, to be the heiresses of tensions never before fathomed, of a hyper-consciousness of syndromes doctors only now in magazines can name.
