Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

“I’m going home next week,” she says one morning. “My parents said okay.”

Her parents? Why haven’t I ever seen them? A sudden burst of energy pulses from the center of my chest, grabbing all along my nerves. I clap my hands, fast, making sounds to divert the awful feeling, and then I wring them in the air, shedding the pain like drops of water.

Nonette looks at me and shakes her head, smiling. “Are you all right?”

I catch my breath, let it out slowly. “Have they been down to visit?”

“Sure. You work days. They drive down for dinner, then we visit in the early evening.”

“Next week, next week.”

My face stretches in a stupid smile and she twinkles back, into my eyes. Super cute! Popular! She’s not okay, I think. She’s crazier than I am if she can deny this. She must be. I tear my gaze away and feel my chest blaze. My ribs glow, hot, the bars of a grill, sending warm streaks washing to my feet. My thoughts spin a series of wild if questions. If she wasn’t crazy, if I was, if this was not out of the ordinary, if it couldn’t be helped, if I were wrong, if people could see, if this thing with her was a new thing, the first of many, if she left here, if it meant nothing, if she didn’t care at all about me. I step away from her. She has a lovely face, so gentle, a kind and pretty face. An American face. She is wearing a blue sweater, a plaid skirt, knee-high stockings, ultra-normal Midwest catalogue clothes.

“Come and see me?” My voice is miserable.

“Sure! I will!”

My throat half shuts and I gulp at air. I struggle to get a good, deep breath. The air hurts, flowing deep. I’m smoking way too much. She doesn’t mean it, of course she doesn’t, not now, not ever. I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for. I can hardly breathe for wanting her so terribly. I walk away with my hands shaking in the scratchy white cloth of my pockets. I keep going and without punching out I walk back down the corridors of the hospital, out the doors, across the snowy central lawn and straight to my room.

Nonette’s Bed

I CALL IN sick the next morning, and the next morning after that. Two days go by. I can’t make it to the telephone. I can barely force myself to get up and walk to the bathroom. At some point, I tack a note to my door. I forget what I’ve written. Once I’m in bed again a kind of black-hole gravity holds me there, or maybe it is fear. All I know is that the air is painful. Acid flows back into my brain. My thoughts are all flashbacks. I see moving creatures in the Chinese landscape of the bedspread and I throw it in the corner of the room. And there’s pain, gray curtains I can’t push aside. I breathe pain in, out, and the stuff sticks inside of me like tar and nicotine from cigarettes, making each breath just a little more difficult. A week goes by and then Mrs. L. comes to the door and calls, “Can I come in? Can you answer?” I try. I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. It is such a peculiar feeling that I start to laugh. But there is no sound to my laugh. I go to sleep again, sleep and sleep. And the next time I awaken Mrs. L. is in the room, sitting at the side of my bed, and she is using the voice she uses with the others.

“We’re going to move you,” she says. “We’ve called your mother.”

Which is how I end up in Nonette’s bed after all.

I am sitting on the cracked green plastic sofa in the patients’ lounge, wearing my nurse’s shoes, only now with no uniform, just baggy jeans and a droopy brown sweater. I have talked to my mother on the phone and tried to persuade her not to worry about me, that I only need a rest, that I am all right and will be back in school when the next quarter starts. I have signed myself in, I’m nineteen, and I can do this. I have told my mother that I’ll use this voluntary commitment as a rest period — but the fact is, I am afraid. I fear losing my observer, the self that tells me what to do. My consciousness is fragile ground, shaky as forming ice. Every morning, when I open my eyes and experience my first thought, I am flooded with relief. The I is still here. If it goes, there will be only gravity. There were body magnets underneath the bed in my little pink nurse’s aide room. There are magnets beneath the bed here, too, but they have a comforting power since it was Nonette’s bed and something of the lost happy calm of her skin, her hair, the length of her pressed against me, resides in the bed along with the drag and pain.

Warren enters the patients’ lounge. He sees me sitting on the sofa and he walks over, in his careful and dignified way, and he stands before me. He is wearing a rust-colored jacket and gray woolen slacks. He has dressed in his best clothes today. Maybe it is Sunday. He is wearing a striped tie of rich, burgundy, figured silk, and a shirt with turned-back French cuffs. Instead of cuff links, I see that he has used two safety pins.

“You should have cuff links,” I mutter.

“I’ll slaughter them all,” he says.

“Shut up,” I answer.

I LIE THERE days, and more days and days. I do not get out of bed. I do not read Anas Nin — she cannot possibly help me now. I am past all that and, anyway, she helped get me into trouble by providing the treacherous paradigm of a life I was always too backwards, or provincial, or Catholic, or reservation-or family-bound to absorb and pull off. I no longer want adventure. The thought of Paris is a burden. I’ll never see the back of Notre-Dame or visit the bird market or eat a croissant. The coffee I drink will always be transparent. Which is all right, as I am sick of endless coffee here. No, I’d better figure out where I am in this life. So I lie there trying to work it out in my mind.

I try to start with the beginning — my family. When Joseph comes to visit me I decide that we should be more honest with each other, resume the depth of our relationship, and so I start by telling him about my drug experience and the days of watching reptiles.

“What species?” he asks. He is studying to be a biologist.

“Well, the usual. But I also saw cobras.”

“That surprises me.”

“They were so real, too.”

“I wonder what part of the brain harbors such acute hallucinatory details, I mean, of something you’ve never seen in real life?”

“The reptile brain, asshole.”

“I didn’t mean to be insensitive,” he says after a pause. “I took drugs too.”

“What?”

“Marihootiberry. It didn’t do much.”

“Probably because it was oregano.”

“I got A’s in botany,” he reminds me.

“You got A’s in everything. You’re not helping my depression. Look around you, it sucks, contrary to what the fans of suicidal poets think. Why don’t you go discover some kind of cure?”

Joseph looks at me thoughtfully, then turns his attention to the people around us in the lounge. There is Lucille, glaring at linoleum tile, disheveled, and Warren, pacing, and others so dull and gray, slumped in torpor. Seeing the ward through his eyes, I am all of a sudden very disturbed. I’ve grown used to being part of this.

“You’re not one of the crazies,” he says then, half-choking, a little desperate. I can tell now that it is dawning on him something might really be wrong. His sympathy wrecks me. Joseph quietly takes my hand, which is even worse. For your brother to hold your hand. This is like some deathbed experience. I shake his hand away but pat his wrist. He sits with me for a long time and we don’t talk and that is peaceful. After a while he gets choked up again and says that he will go into drug research. I whack him on the arm as hard as I can, and he smiles at me in relief.