Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

Now there were sounds. Inhuman sounds that sent chills up her neck. There were cries, half barking, half howling, as she went by rooms where the inhabitants were unseen. The floors were covered with small drains, glistening ominously.

Janice followed Dr. Geddes and the lawyer into a room with two cots, only one of which was occupied.

It was Bill. They had shaved his hair. There were two bright scars at the back of his neck and an oblong purple bruise on his jaw. His fingernails were cracked and grimy. According to the orderly, he was in isolation now because an inmate had tried to bite off his nose.

Janice stared at his eyes sunk into a strange, hard skull, unseeing, uncaring. The marks on his face were as though painted on by a sadistic artist. He did not seem like Bill. Janice reeled, then touched his cheek, and when he made no response, she burst into tears at his feet.

Dr. Geddes gently comforted her. “The important thing is that we get him out of this hellhole.”

“Where is he going?” Janice stammered.

“I couldn’t take him back to Ossining,” Dr. Geddes confided. “We don’t have the facilities. But there is an institution on Long Island — Goodland Sanitarium, part of the city’s authority — and I know the administration very well. It’s a very good hospital, very humane and decent, low density. Bill can get good, individual care.”

Dumbly, Janice listened. Later, out on the streets of New York, the nightmare sensation escalated. From the hospital garage a car drove up with a guard and Bill in the backseat. Bill had been changed from his gray pajamas into his own clothes, but they no longer seemed to fit. He looked shrunken in the darkness of the thick upholstery. The driver and the guard were both broad-shouldered and ham-fisted, and they kept their eyes on him.

As the car glided over the long system of bridges and thruways, Dr. Geddes began telling her about the institution. He had gone to medical school with the chief psychiatrist. The institution was opposed to the use of drug therapy. It had a relatively high rate of success. The landscape of Long Island swept by — marshland and distant stately homes obscured by clusters of brown apartment complexes, and then the lonely sweep to the sandy dunes again — and Janice saw none of it. She looked searchingly at Bill, and she knew that he was more dangerously sick than he had ever been before.

She said good-bye to him in his small, private room high on the ninth floor of the institution. There were bars on the windows, the furniture had no corners, and there were no implements of any kind in the drawers — no pens, no pencils, no scissors. Even the coat hangers were rounded plastic. Janice kissed Bill on the forehead.

“I’ll get help for you, Bill,” she whispered, stroking his cheek.

Now the airplane banked slightly, a warm shaft of light fell over her eyes, and she woke up. Janice strolled the aisles, her body lethargic and anxious from the two weeks

of conferences, arguments, and cables back to Elaine. At least that tension was gone. But it had been good for her.

Janice looked out the round window at the endless, hot sky over the ocean. A curved horizon demarcated the end of things that could be known, things that could be felt. Beyond, an obscure haze, born of heat and dry wind, desert dust and the glare of the sun, faded to a blue white.

One senses these things. One has training. My perceptions, after the holy utterance, were heightened ….

Janice remembered pounding on the door of the Temple. No one was in the sanctuary. When she went to the alley and looked into the Master’s room, it was empty. A pane of glass was already broken, and beyond it a few bare shelves were visible. Even the makeshift desk had been removed. At the front door black graffiti had been sprayed in large script. Two men stood there, contemplating the dimensions of the room inside through the glass panes.

“Excuse me,” Janice said. “I’m looking for the Master.”

“Who?”

“The Master of the Temple, Sri Parutha.”

The two men looked at each other and shrugged.

“Lady, this here is a vegetarian restaurant.”

They turned away, examining small diagrams and a section of blueprint.

It was true. There was not the slightest evidence that there had ever been a temple on the site. Not a flower remained inside or in the garden behind. None of the neighboring shops had cared to learn what had happened to the Master or his dwindling group of would-be ascetics.

At Des Artistes, Janice telephoned thirteen religious study centers in Manhattan. None had heard of the Temple. None had any answer for her.

One has to go by impressions — strong impressions — in the divination process.

Janice started, caught herself staring vacantly into the blue white haze, so evanescent, yet so impenetrable that it seemed the place to which all answers had fled. Reluctantly, she sat back in her seat and tried to nap.

The first days of seeing Bill had been an all-too-familiar kind of torture. He sat unresponsive, dead to her and the rest of the world. By the end of the week, however, he had begun speaking. Incoherent secrets whispered out of his mouth. He begged Janice to bring his daughter to him. He did not hear her answer that the Hernandez family had virtually boarded itself inside its dark apartment. Bill only leaned forward, finger gently tapping her forearm, insisting that his daughter was waiting, crying; she wanted him, he wanted to see her.

By the end of the second week, Bill seemed oblivious to the presence of humans. He stepped on their toes, bumped into them, as though they were fixtures of furniture. Halfway through the third week, Bill was reduced to violent gestures, moody silences, and occasional periods of gentle crying.

“He’s slipping,” Dr. Geddes admitted. “Slipping badly.”

“Maybe if he could be disabused of his obsession,” commented the chief psychiatrist. “This fantasy of reincarnation.”

But Bill was not disabused of his fantasy. He clung to it with a passion that startled Janice. Unable to articulate coherent sentences, he wrestled with his emotions, his neck muscles straining, the veins in his forehead bulging. He pleaded, wept, and collapsed in misery on his bed. The hospital staff began to consider mild drug therapy if his symptoms turned self-destructive.

When April ended, Janice felt ruined. She had neither the strength nor the hope for continuing the marathon trips to Long Island. A feverish, permanent fatigue assailed her, and her work became confused. It was late twilight with the rush-hour traffic already thinning out, when Elaine pulled up a chair near Janice’s drafting table.

“Janice,” she said softly, “I think we’d better talk.”

Janice looked up with foreboding.

“Am I slipping that badly, Elaine?”

Elaine smiled thoughtfully. “You’re tired, Janice. You’re exhausted. Running back and forth between Manhattan and Long Island. You’ve got all the symptoms of being worked to death. I’ve seen it happen. I want you to take a break.”

Janice paled. “Elaine, please, my job is my life.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions. There’s a couple of assignments in Europe that we need to look up. I want you to go.”

“But I couldn’t,” Janice protested. “Bill needs me. He’s helpless.”

“So will you be in another week. Janice, you look like wet newspaper. You’re going to disintegrate at this rate.”

Janice put down her ink brush and swiveled away from Elaine. The idea was totally unexpected, yet it had the clarity of a burst of sunlight through dark clouds.

“I suppose I could tell Dr. Geddes.”

Elaine smiled. “Excellent,” she said. “And if I were you, I’d start packing. The first conference starts next Tuesday.”