David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘To be honest, I was asking about a different explanation.’ By now, Drinion appears considerably taller than he had when the tête-à-tête started. The rows of hats on the wall behind him are almost completely obscured. It is also odd to have someone stare into your eyes this continuously without feeling challenged or nervous, or even excited. It will occur to Rand later, as she’s driven home, that during the tête-à-tête with Drinion she’d felt sensuously aroused in a way that had little to do with being excited or nervous, that she’d felt the surface of the chair against her bottom and back and the backs of her legs, and the material of her skirt, and the sides of her shoes against the sides of her feet in hose whose microtextured weave she could also feel, and the feel of her tongue against her teeth’s rear and palate, the vent’s air against her hairline and the room’s other air against her face and arms and the taste of cigarette smoke’s residue. At one or two points she’d even felt she could feel the exact shape of her eyeballs against her lids’ insides when she blinked — she was aware when she blinked. The only kind of experience she could associate with it involved their cat that she’d had when she was a girl before it got hit by a car and the way she could sit with the cat in her lap and stroke the cat and feel the rumble of the cat’s purring and feel every bit of the texture of the cat’s warm fur and the muscle and bone beneath that, and that she could sit for long periods of time stroking the cat and feeling it with her eyes half-shut as if she was spaced out or stuporous-looking but had felt, in fact, like she was the opposite of stuporous — she felt totally aware and alive, and at the same time when she sat slowly stroking the cat with the same motion over and over it was like she forgot her name and address and almost everything else about her life for ten or twenty minutes, even though it wasn’t like spacing out at all, and she loved that cat. She missed the feel of its weight, which was like nothing else, neither heavy nor light, and at times for almost the next two or three days she felt like she feels now, like the cat.

‘You mean of the wanting to boff me thing?’

Drinion: ‘I think so.’

Meredith Rand: ‘He said he was basically a dead man, he used the words dead man and walking dead, so the point is he couldn’t be into me in that way, he said. He wouldn’t have the physical energy to try to get in my pants even if he’d wanted to.’

Shane Drinion: ‘He told you about his condition, then.’

Meredith Rand: ‘Not in so many words; he said it was really none of my business except in how it bore down on my problem. And I said my suspicion was starting to be that he was dropping all these hints about “my problem, my problem” but not just spitting out what it was supposed to be, to sort of string me along for some reason, and that I wasn’t going to pretend I knew exactly what the reason was or what he wanted but it was hard not to think on some level it was creepy or pervy, which I simply flat-out told him. I’d quit being polite by then.’

‘I’m a little confused,’ Drinion says. ‘This was all before he’d simply stated what he believed your main problem was?’

Meredith Rand shakes her head, though in response to what is now doubly unclear. One of the examiners’ complaints is that she goes off on these long stories but at some point loses the thread and it’s nearly impossible not to drift off or zone out when you can’t understand what the hell she’s getting at anymore. Several of the single posted examiners have decided she’s simply crazy, great to look at from a distance but definitely a wide-berth-type girl, especially on breaks, when every moment of diversion is precious, and she can be worse than the work itself. She is saying: ‘By this time I was either getting hit on or rapped to by every guy in Zeller, from the day attendant to the men on the second floor when we came down for OT, which was a major drag in all kinds of ways. Although he did point out that if it bummed me out so much, why did I put mascara on even if I was in a mental hospital. Which you have to admit was a valid thing to point out.’

‘Yes.’

She is grinding the heel of her hand into one eye, to signify either fatigue or an attempt to stay on track in the story, although Drinion gives no sign of being bored or impatient. ‘Plus also by around this time he said the Zeller doctors started saying that my so-called attachment to this one attendant — they also saw all the rapping and sniffing around everybody was doing — all the intense solo tête-à-têtes were starting to look dependent or unhealthy, and not saying anything to me about it but asking him all kinds of questions and basically starting to give him a really hard time, so we started having to wait for everybody to get all engrossed at TV time and then go talk in the stairwell just outside the ward, where it wasn’t so public, where he’d usually lie down on the cement of the landing with his feet up on the second or third stair up, which by this time he admitted wasn’t for his back but he needed the elevation to keep his circulation going. So we ended up spending a lot of the first couple days out in the stairwell talking about the whole business of my suspicions about what he wanted from me and why he was doing this, around and around, and he did tell me a little more about himself and getting cardiomyopathy in college, but he also kept saying OK, he’d talk about all this as long as I wanted to, but that it was kind of a vicious circle because anything he said I could be suspicious of and attribute some kind of secondary agenda to if I wanted to, and I might think it was all honest and open but it wasn’t really intense or efficacious, in his opinion, it was more like going around and around inside the problem instead of really looking at the problem, which he said because he was a walking dead man and not really part of the institution of the nut ward he felt like maybe he was the only person there who’d really tell me the truth about my problem, which he said was basically that I needed to grow up.’

Meredith Rand pauses here and looks at Shane Drinion in anticipation of his asking what that diagnosis was supposed to mean, exactly; but he does not ask. He appears to have become reconciled to something, or to have decided to accept the way Meredith Rand remembers the story on her own terms, or to have concluded that trying to impose a certain kind of order on her side of the tête-à-tête was going to have the opposite effect.

She is saying, ‘And naturally the “grow up” thing ticked me off, and I told him to go sit on something sharp, but I didn’t really mean it, because by around this time he’d said also that the word was starting to come down that I was going to get discharged soon, the treatment team was starting to talk about it, even though of course nobody ever thought to tell me anything about what was going on, and that my mother had been trying to set up outpatient counseling and trying to get one of the doctors to keep seeing me in his private practice, which was very full and also not totally covered by my dad’s insurance, so the whole thing was a bureaucratic nightmare, and it would take some time, but it was starting to sink into me that this wasn’t forever, that by as early as maybe next week or the week after I wouldn’t be seeing him or having intense conversations with him anymore, or even maybe ever see him again — I realized I didn’t know where he lived or even his last name, for Christ’s sake. This all sort of hit me, and I start freaking out when I think about it, because I’d already got a taste of what a couple days of suddenly not getting to talk to him or know where he was was like, and I’m freaking out, and in my mind I’m toying with the idea of sharpening something and doing some cutting that I didn’t even really feel like doing, just so I’d get kept in the nut ward a little longer, which I knew was completely nuts.’ She looks up very quickly at Drinion to see whether he’s reacting to this information. ‘Which was crazy, and actually I think he knew this was going on, he knew how important he’d gotten to be to me by then, I think, so he had extra leverage or ammo to use to tell me to just cut the shit — I’d be sitting on the stairway up to Four and he’d be lying on his back at the bottom of the stairway with his feet up right below me, so I spent all this time looking at his shoe soles, which were like Kmart shoes and the soles were plastic — and that “grow up” meant now, right this second, and quit being childish, because it would kill me. He said the girls that came through Zeller were all the same, and none of us had any idea of what being a grown-up was. Which was totally condescending, and normally the totally wrong thing to say to an eighteen-year-old. So there was this little argument about that. His point was that being childish wasn’t the same thing as being like a child, he said, because watch a real child play or stroke a cat or listen to a story and you’ll see it’s like the opposite of what we were all doing there in Zeller.’ Shane Drinion is leaning slightly forward. His bottom is now almost 1.75 inches off the chair seat; his work shoes’ gumlike soles, darkened at the perimeter by the same process that darkens pencils’ erasers, swing slightly just above the tile floor. Were it not for the sport coat hanging off the back of his chair, Beth Rath and others would be able to see light through the substantial gap between the seat of his chair and his slacks. ‘It’s more like he was explaining than arguing,’ Rand says. ‘He said there is a particular kind of stage of life where you get cut off from the, like, unself-conscious happiness and magic of childhood — he said only seriously disturbed or autistic children are without this childhood joy — but later in life and puberty it’s possible to leave that childhood freedom and completeness behind but still remain totally immature. Immature in the sense of waiting or wanting some magical daddy or rescuer to see you and really know and understand you and care as much about you as a child’s parents do, and save you. Save you from yourself. He also kept yawning a lot and hitting his shoes together, and I’d watch the soles go back and forth. He said this is how immaturity shows up in young women and girls; in men it’s somewhat different in how it looks but really it’s all the same, which is wanting to be distracted from what you’ve lost and fixed and saved by somebody. Which is pretty banal, it’s like something out of a doctor’s textbook, and I go so this is my core problem? This is what I’ve been stringing along waiting for? And he goes no, that’s everybody’s core problem, and it’s why girls are so obsessed with prettiness and whether they can attract somebody and arouse enough love in that person to save them. My core problem, he said, and this connects to the core problem I told you about just now, was the neat little trap I’d made for myself to ensure that I never really had to grow up and so I could stay immature and waiting forever for somebody to save me because I’d never be able to find out that nobody else can save me because I’d made it impossible for me to get what I was so convinced I needed and deserved, so I could always be angry and I could always get to go around thinking that my real problem was that no one could see or love the real me the way I needed so I’d always have my problem to sit and hold and stroke on and make believe was the real problem.’ Rand looks up sharply at Shane Drinion. ‘Does that seem banal?’