George Chesbro: Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

"So all of this-the silencing of the voices and your ability to think rationally-just happened to you overnight?"

"Yes. I know it sounds odd."

It sounded not only odd but totally unbelievable; her story bore no resemblance to any of the anecdotal reports of remission in schizophrenics I'd read in the psychiatric literature I'd perused when Garth was sick. But I certainly wasn't prepared to call Margaret Dutton a liar, and the anxiety and plea for belief and understanding in her eyes were so strong that I decided I wasn't going to ruin her mood and meal, which I was clearly threatening to do, by pressing her any harder. I changed the subject, complimenting her on how nice her hair looked.

I ordered the same thing for both of us, and the first course arrived almost immediately. It was a clear soup with a mint leaf floating on top and a few tiny pieces of chicken paddling around near the bottom. But the fact that you could see the bottom of the bowl was the only clear thing about this soup, which contained a dozen ingredients, required hours of simmering for proper preparation, and produced on the palate a slowly unfolding, silent explosion of subtly blended flavors.

"Oooh," she exclaimed once again after she had first smelled the bouquet, then taken her first taste of the soup. "There are so many wonderful things in this-I mean, besides the chicken."

"You've got that right. Like it?"

"Oh, yes." She took another sip, closed her eyes, slowly swallowed. "Besides the chicken, I can taste the basil, pork, at least three different kinds of fish, and maybe nineteen or twenty spices I don't know the names of."

I blinked, set down my soup spoon, leaned back in my chair, and studied her. In the soup there were indeed chicken, basil, pork, at least three different kinds of fish, and nineteen or twenty spices I didn't know the names of either. I was suitably impressed. "Margaret, you can actually smell and taste all those things separately?"

"Well, Mongo, I just did, didn't I?" she replied in a strong voice as she beamed proudly. "I can smell all sorts of things. For instance, your friend who owns this place is wearing an aftershave lotion that's very strong. I don't know what it's called, but it smells like lemons and limes. He must like citrus smells, because the soap he uses smells like oranges. When you came in to see me this morning, I could tell that you'd showered with Dial soap and used witch hazel as an aftershave."

Well, now. I hadn't smelled anything on Peter, and I was surprised she could pick out anything as banal as aftershave lotion among all the pungent, exotic aromas in the restaurant-but I did use witch hazel as an aftershave, precisely because its bouquet didn't linger long, and I didn't like to smell like a perfume factory. And I had washed with Dial soap. I said, "That's very impressive, Margaret. You've got quite a sniffer on you."

She nodded in agreement, then brushed back a strand of gray hair that had fallen across her eyes. "I know. Sometimes it isn't so much fun. There are a lot of bad smells in the city, but I'm learning how to kind of ignore the really nasty ones and concentrate on the nice ones, like bakeshop smells."

"Have you always had this ability?"

"Oh, no. Only since yesterday morning. I started to get real good at smelling things at the same time I started to feel better."

By the time we ended our meal with simple orange sherbet and mint tea, my initial surprise and curiosity surrounding Margaret Dutton's olfactory acumen had turned to utter astonishment. All through the six courses following the soup she had carried on a running commentary on the ingredients in the dishes, many of which she could name, most of which she couldn't; when she couldn't identify some particular taste or smell, she would content herself with telling me just how many ingredients were in that particular dish. I didn't care to interrupt the flow of our meal by constantly calling Peter over to verify her proclamations, but I knew enough about Thai cooking to suspect she was right about most of the ingredients she could name. As I paid the bill, I mused on the fact that Mama Spit not only had undergone what seemed a near-miraculous, overnight transformation from raving psychotic to a thoroughly pleasant and lucid woman by the name of Margaret Dutton, but also had turned into something akin to a human bloodhound.

On Friday morning I lent Margaret two hundred dollars to go out and buy herself underwear and some changes of clothing from what she was wearing. And I told her to be very careful; during the night the ice-pick killer had claimed two more victims, one on a street in the Bronx and another at a subway stop in lower Manhattan.

She returned before noon with a good basic wardrobe of corduroy slacks, a skirt, a print dress, two blouses, changes of underwear, sturdy but comfortable shoes, and a cloth coat, all of which she'd bought at a church thrift shop on the Bowery. She even brought me back change. She'd also found herself a job, just as she'd said she would, responding to a Help Wanted sign posted on a building on Seventh Avenue, in the garment district. I recognized the address, and didn't like it; it was a sweatshop turning out knockoff designer jeans, no place for Margaret. I told her she could work for me, as my secretary's office assistant, until we could come up with something better, perhaps a job utilizing her extraordinary senses of taste and smell, which had to be of value to some enterprise, perhaps a perfume manufacturer or product-testing laboratory. I would pay her what I paid the temporaries Francisco occasionally hired when the paperwork in the office began to pile up. In addition, I would provide her with room and board and forgo payments on her loan, which she insisted she would repay, until she had saved enough money to go out on her own. In the meantime, I would check with some of the city officials I knew and inquire into the availability of low-income housing. The only proviso was that she would have to sleep in a spare bedroom in my apartment if and when Garth and Mary were in the city and wanted to use their apartment. She was grateful, and it took me fifteen minutes to get her to stop crying. Despite my protestations and reminders that she already had a job, Margaret insisted that she was going to spend the weekend scrub-a-dubbing the house from top to bottom. By the time she had finished, the brownstone was cleaner than the professional cleaning service had left it when Garth and I had first bought the property. I almost felt as if I were exploiting the woman, and I suspected I was going to miss Margaret Dutton when she moved on.

On Monday morning she was downstairs at the office promptly at nine o'clock to meet Francisco, who proceeded to teach her how to use the multi-line telephone and do a little basic filing. I went back into my own private office to prepare for an eleven o'clock meeting with the board of directors of a corporation for which Garth and I had been doing some in-depth vetting of potential CEOs. There was a fax from Garth, who for some reason had assumed I would be away over the weekend. My brother usually wasn't very particular about what he wore, but a monthlong skiing vacation in Zermatt, with its glitzy apres-ski nightlife, was apparently bringing out the finicky in him; the good news was that he was indeed learning how to ski and hadn't broken anything yet; the bad news was that he had forgotten to pack a favorite sweater, which he believed was in the apartment in the brownstone, and he didn't see how he could possibly manage to make it to New Year's without it. Would I send it to him? Well, sure. I couldn't have my brother skiing and partying in Zermatt half naked.

I finished typing and reviewing the report I was to give, then trotted up to Garth's apartment. It didn't take me long to explore the drawers and closets and determine that the sweater he wanted wasn't there, but when I turned to leave the bedroom I noticed something that was there, and it disturbed me very much. I went over to the nightstand next to the bed where Margaret had been sleeping and picked up a plastic bag containing perhaps two dozen or more rather large black-and-yellow capsules which resembled nothing so much as a pile of dead mutant bumblebees with their heads, wings, and legs chopped off. I shook my head in frustration, then punched the intercom on the wall. When Francisco answered, I asked him to send Margaret up to see me. Then I went into the living room and sat down on the sofa with a sigh.