David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Drinion: ‘It sounds as though he really helped you.’

‘He was very blunt,’ she says. ‘It turned out being blunt is something he’s proud of — it’s part of his act that there is no act. Only I only found that out later.’

‘…’

‘You can see, of course, how having somebody have this kind of compassion and understanding of what’s really going on inside you, how this would affect somebody that thought her big problem was the impossibility of anybody seeing past the prettiness to what was inside. Would you like to know his name?’

Drinion blinks once. He doesn’t blink very often. ‘Yes.’

‘Edward. “Ed Rand, partial BS,” he’d say. So you can see why I was pretty much primed to fall in love with him.’

‘I think so.’

‘So I don’t need to spell it out,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘In a way, if he was a perv or a creep that played things that way, it would be a perfect setup for getting pretty young girls to fall for him. Work in a place that everybody comes in all mucked up and lonely and in crisis, and find the young girls, whose basic problem is probably always going to be their looks. So all he had to do, if he was smart, and he’d seen hundreds of messed-up girls come through, who starved themselves, or stole clothes from shopping malls, or ate and couldn’t stop eating, or cut on themselves, or got into drugs, or kept running away with older black guys and getting dragged back over and over again by the parents, whatever, you get the idea, but that all had the same really essential problem, each time one of them came in, no matter what they were officially in for, which was not feeling like they were really known and understood and that was the cause of their loneliness, of the constant pain they were in that made them cut, or eat, or not eat, or give blowjobs to the whole basketball team in a row out back behind the cafeteria dumpster, which is what one cheerleader I know for a total fact did all the time junior year, although she was never really quite one of the foxes because she was known as such a total slut; a lot of the foxes just hated her.’ Rand looks briefly right at Drinion to see whether there is any visible reaction to the word blowjob, which he does not appear to provide. ‘And it’d be easy to get them in the conference room, and to tell them some stuff about themselves that totally shocked and amazed them because they hadn’t ever told anybody about it and yet it was totally easy to spot and know about because at the core it was all the same.’

Drinion asks: ‘Did you tell him this, during the therapy sessions that were designated as intense?’

Rand shakes her head as she extinguishes the Benson & Hedges cigarette. ‘They weren’t therapy sessions. He hated that term, all that terminology. They were just tête-à-têtes, talking.’ Again she uses the same number of stabs and partial rolls to extinguish it, although with less force than when she’s appeared impatient or angry with Shane Drinion. She says: ‘That was all he said it seemed like I needed, just to talk to somebody with no bullshit, which was what the Zeller Center doctors didn’t realize, or like they couldn’t realize it because then the whole structure would come down, that here the doctors had spent four million years in medical school and residency and the insurance companies were paying all this money for diagnosis and OT and therapy protocols, it was all an institutional structure, and once things became institutionalized then it all became this artificial, like, organism and started trying to survive and serve its own needs just like a person, only it wasn’t a person, it was the opposite of a person, because there was nothing inside it except the will to survive and grow as an institution — he said just look at Christianity and the whole Christian Church.’

‘But my question was whether you talked to him about your possible suspicion, the possibility that he didn’t really understand you, and care, but was a creep?’

Sometimes throughout the conversation Meredith Rand looks down critically at her fingernails, which are almond-shaped and neither too short nor too long, and painted a lustrous red. Shane Drinion looks at her hands only when Rand does, as a rule.

‘I didn’t have to,’ Rand says. ‘He brought it up. Edward did. He said given my problem it was only a matter of time before it occurred to me that maybe he didn’t understand and care but only understood me the way a mechanic understands a machine — this was a time in the second week in the nut ward that I was having all these dreams about different kinds of machinery, with gears and dials, which the doctors and so-called therapists wanted to talk about and get me to see the symbolism of, which he and I both laughed about because it was so obvious an idiot could have seen it, which he said wasn’t the doctors’ fault or that they were stupid, that was just the way the machine of the institution of in-patient therapy worked, and the doctors had no more choice about how much importance they put on the dreams than a little piece of machinery does about doing the little task or movement it’s been put there to do over and over again as part of the larger operation of the larger machine.’ Rand’s rep at the REC is that she’s sexy but crazy and a serious bore, just won’t shut up if you get her started; they argue about whether they ultimately envy her husband or pity him. ‘But he brought it up before I had a chance to even start thinking about it.’ She unsnaps her white vinyl case but does not extract a cigarette from it. ‘Which I have got to say was kind of surprising, because by this time I was eighteen, and I’d had such bad experiences with creeps and pervs and jocks and college boys’ “I love you” on the first date that I was very suspicious and cynical about guys’ double motives, and normally the minute this sickly little orderly started paying attention to me I’d have my defensive shields way up and be considering all kinds of creepy, depressing possibilities.’

Drinion’s red forehead crinkles for just a moment. ‘Were you eighteen, or seventeen?’

‘Oh,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Right.’ As she acts younger, she begins to laugh sometimes in a fast and toneless way, like a reflex. ‘I was just eighteen. I had my eighteenth birthday on my third day in Zeller. My dad and mother even came out and brought a cake and noisemakers during visiting hours and tried to have this celebration, like whoopee, which was so embarrassing and depressing I didn’t know what to do, like, a week ago you’re hysterical about some cuts and put me in the bin and now you want to pretend it’s happy birthday, let’s ignore the girl screaming in the pink room while I blow out the candles and you fix the elastic of the hat under your chin, so I just played along because I didn’t know what to say about how totally weird it was for them to be acting like, happy birthday, Meredith, whoopee.’ She is kneading the flesh of one arm with the other arm’s hand as she recounts this. Sometimes, as Drinion sits with his hands laced on the tabletop before him, he changes having one thumb or the other be the thumb on top. His former glass of beer sits empty except for a semicircle of foamy material along the bottom’s edge. Meredith Rand now has three different narrow straws she can choose to chew on; one of them is already quite thoroughly chewed and flattened at one end. She says:

‘So he brought it up. He said it was probably going to occur to me on some level soon, so if I wanted it really intense we might as well talk about it. He’d always drop little bombs like this, and then while I sat there like’:—she forms an exaggerated taken-aback expression—‘he’d groan and swing his feet around off the table and go out with his clipboard to do checks — he had to officially check on everybody every quarter hour and note down where they were and make sure nobody was making themselves barf or looping pillowcases together to hang themselves with — and he’d go out and leave me there in the conference room with nothing to look at or do, waiting for him to come back, which tended to take him a long time because he never felt well, and if there was no nursing supervisor or anybody around to watch him he walked very slow and used to lean against the wall every so often to catch his breath. He was white as a ghost. Plus he took all these diuretics, which made him have to pee all the time. Except when I asked him about it all he’d say is that it was his own private business and we weren’t in here talking about him, it didn’t matter about him because all he really was was a kind of mirror for me.’