Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

Dear Ms. Fredricksen,

I had to tell u how great the class is. My Mom said I would like it but I didn’t believe her. She was right. You are really different from other teachers, like a friend. No like an ANGEL. I am learning a lot. I guess I just had to say it. Also, you have great hair.

Your very devoted Student,

Ashley

And then another message from an address I didn’t recognize.

I know all about you. You’re Insane, Crazy, Bonkers.

Mr. Nobody.

I felt slapped. I remembered the sign from NAMI on the wall of the hospital unit’s small library: FIGHTING THE STIGMA OF MENTAL ILLNESS. Stigmatos, marked by a sharp instrument, the sign of a wound. Sometime much later, the fifteenth century, maybe, it also came to mean a mark of disgrace. Christ’s wounds and the saints and hysterics who bled from their hands and feet. Stigmata. I wondered who would want to harass me anonymously — and to what purpose? Any number of people probably knew that I had been hospitalized, but I couldn’t think who would want to send me this note. I tried to remember if I had given my e-mail to another patient, to Laurie maybe, sad, sad Laurie who had shuffled around in her slippers with her diary clutched to her chest, making small moaning sounds. It was possible, but unlikely.

As I lay in bed that night, roiled by the usual tempests — Stefan’s note: It is too hard ; the Pause shaking my hand in the lab and smiling, the memory of Boris in bed and the weight of sleep in his body, then his shrouded face as he comes out with his decision, and Daisy, tears running, the sound of her shuddering breaths and sniffs; she is sobbing about her father leaving her mother, and I think of my own inscrutable father’s passion for someone else — the word crazy returned, and I pushed it away, and then the word in the note Ashley had capitalized, ANGEL, appeared for a moment on the screen behind my closed eyelids. I thought of Blake’s celestial visitors, the legend of Rilke’s supernatural gift, the first words of the Duino Elegies, and then of Leonard, my fellow inmate on the South Unit. He had proclaimed himself the Prophet of Nothing. He pontificated and he discoursed and he clearly loved the stentorian tones of his own bass voice, expounding to anyone who came near him. But no one listened to him, not his fellow patients, not the staff. Even his psychiatrist had looked blank as he sat across from Leonard in a meeting I glimpsed through one of the large glass windows. He interested me, however, and his grandiose appeals had genuine brilliance. On the morning of my release I had sat with him in the common area. With his balding pate surrounded by graying curls that fell near his shoulders, Leonard looked the part. He turned toward me and began his prophecies. He talked to me about Meister Eckhart as a messenger of the Nothing, who influenced Schelling, Hegel, and Heidegger. And he told me that Kierkegaard’s angst was an encounter with Nothing, and that we lived in a time of actualized Nothingness, and this was essential and mystical; “It should not be amiss,” he said, waving his index finger, “to open ourselves to the truth that Nothing is the primal ground of this world.” Leonard may have been mad, but his thoughts were not nearly as addled as the powers that be in the hospital assumed. He continued his oratory by explaining that this was all related to the deeper levels of Buddhism, and as I walked toward Daisy, who had come through the door to take me home, he drifted on to Goethe’s Faust and his descent into the realm of the Mothers and his union with the nothing, and that was the last I heard.

Lonely man. He couldn’t be Mr. Nobody, could he? After I had left the hospital, I regretted that I hadn’t made it clear to him that I was following at least some of his leaps, but all I could think about then was my daughter’s face. That something was all that mattered.

To recall me as she,

rocking in rooms

as white as eggs.

An underground of string—

these violent lines

of what used to be called

the heart, lost to

my now-bitter mouth.

“A tangle,” he said.

No, knots.

Not this or these.

She was distinct,

I believe. Shelved.

Put her away.

Inanimate thing.

Put her away,

And let her rock.

* * *

“Dear Mia,” Boris wrote. “Whatever happens between us, it is very important to me to know how you are. For Daisy’s sake, too, we have to be in communication. Please send a message back when you receive this.” So reasonable, I thought, such stiff prose: in communication. I felt like biting something. He was obviously worried. He had seen me on the day after I landed in the hospital, when I was acute, delusional and hallucinating, bouffée délirante, and I was convinced he was going to steal the apartment, push me into the street, a conspiracy cooked up with the Pause and the other scientists at the lab, and when he sat across from me in the room with Dr. P., a voice said, “Of course he hates you. Everyone hates you. You’re impossible to live with.” And then, “You’ll end up like Stefan.” I screamed, “No!” and an orderly pulled me away and they injected more Haldol, and I knew they were in on it.

His brother and his wife. Poor Boris, I could hear them say. Poor Boris, surrounded by crazy people. I remember babbling to Felicia, who had come to clean. I remember tearing down the shower curtain, explaining about the plot, yelling. I remember it perfectly, but now it’s as if I were someone else, as if I’m looking at myself from afar. It all fell away after Bea arrived. But I had frightened Boris, and because he had “agitated” me on the ward, they didn’t want him to visit again. I stared at the message for a long time before I wrote back: “I am not crazy anymore. I am hurt.” The words seemed true, but when I tried to elaborate, all further commentary seemed merely decorative. What was there to communicate ? And the irony that Boris wanted communication was almost too much to bear.

I don’t want to talk about it. I’m waking up. Let me have my tea. We’ll talk later. I can’t talk about it. We’ve been over this a thousand times. How many times had he uttered those sentences? Repetition. Repetition, not identity. Nothing is repeated exactly, even words, because something has changed in the speaker and in the listener, because once said and then said again and again, the repetition itself alters the words. I am walking back and forth over the same floor. I am singing the same song. I am married to the same man. No, not really. How many times had he answered Stefan’s calls in the middle of night? Years and years of calls and rescues and doctors and the treatise that would change philosophy forever. And then the silence. Ten years of no Stefan. He was forty-seven when he died. Boris was five years older, and once, only once, the older brother had whispered to me after two scotches that the most terrible thing was that it was a relief, too, that his own beloved brother’s suicide had also been a relief. And then when his mother died — the flamboyant, complicated, self-pitying Dora — Boris was the lone survivor. His father had dropped dead of heart failure when the boys were still young. Boris did not grieve in any demonstrative way. Instead, he receded. What had my father said? “I can’t. I can’t.” I had longed to find both men, hadn’t I? My father and my husband, both prone to long disquisitions about torts or genes and so mute about their own suffering. “Your father and your husband shared a number of traits,” Dr. S. had said. The past tense: shared. I looked at the message. I am hurt . Boris had been hurt, too. I added, “I love you. Mia.”