Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

“Not stuck,” we all say.

“Again—” the idiot interjected, but we shushed him.

“Ceased. We will all Cease eventually,” the theologian repeated, clearly annoyed by the topic.

Bored, the boy made the Indian powwow call he’d been perfecting and circled a nearby couple.

“We may Cease eventually, sweetie, but we are not Ceased yet,” Cat said. “At least, not exactly.”

“And what’s griefes ?” the girl asked.

“Where did you hear that?” the one with the soft voice asked.

“The man with the sword said it.”

“Ka-pow, ka-pow!” shouted the boy as he fired a few shots and then turned on himself and released an arrow.

“Formes, Moods, shewes of Griefe—” expounded the poet.

Cat leaned toward the girl. “It’s a kind of sadness.”

“—my inky cloak,” the poet sang, “trappings, suits of woe.”

We think now that Ceasing might be as wrong as everything else. We entered Jane’s dream and changed things and nothing happened; John took a name and he is still here. Even fluttering, in the understated ways we have done it, has gone unpunished. When pressed it’s hard for us to remember where these rules came from, if they were something we were born with or if they came from the theologian.

“There’s someone here,” the theologian says, and he looks from Jane’s bed toward the window. The rest of us, weary of his declarations, try to concentrate on what he’s perceiving, but we can see nothing but daylight streaming in through the window, the wind lifting the long grass that banks the river, and Sam, his paws twitching on the mat.

Jane pushes off the duvet and Sam stands in the square of sun where he’d been lying, shakes his fur and stretches. It’s almost noon, so Jane slips into jeans and a sweater to head to the shops for something to eat and to buy a notebook and pens so she can start into the Whitmore box, see if there’s anything she overlooked when she dipped into it last.

In the corner shop she grabs a sandwich, dry dog food for Sam, a cheap squeaky toy he’ll probably chew a hole in within minutes and some stationery. While she waits in the queue a young boy and his sister race up and down the candy aisle, and the flap of the boy’s jacket knocks a handful of chocolate bars onto the checkered floor.

“Phillip!” The boy’s mother glares at him from the till where she’s paying for two juice cartons and a newspaper. “Put those back right now.” She smiles apologetically at Jane and says sorry to the cashier. Phillip puts the candy bars back, then falls in line behind his mother. As soon as he does so, the boy and the girl who are with us run up and down the aisles just as the other two had done. “ Zoooooom, ” airplanes the boy, and the girl races alongside him imitating his engine sound, the two of them zipping up and down the aisle so fast they flutter the chocolate bars the boy had put on the edge of the box back onto the floor. The clerk looks up when they fall, Jane glances over and the mother frowns. She walks over to put them back: a small everyday slippage of matter.

Back at the inn Jane slides the Whitmore box over to the bed and sits on the carpet with her back against the wood frame and mattress. She pulls out the casebook pages she photocopied almost a decade ago when she was doing her MA. Riffling through them she decides to start with Leeson — her best source for what happened the night of the trio’s escape and visit to Inglewood House. Wanting, in more ways than one, to go back to the beginning.

The Whitmore patient casebooks always follow the same formula: basic statistics followed by descriptions of the individual’s symptoms upon committal to the asylum, and supporting statements from two doctors. Charles Leeson, age 42, solicitor, married . Jane sits against the wood frame of the bed in her room at the inn and rereads her copy of Leeson’s file, picturing him the way she always does, as the type of gentleman found in a crowd scene in a painting by Manet: his hair peppering into grey, his clothes fit and proper. Under “Symptoms” a doctor with spidery handwriting had penned: Believes he has murdered his infant and that he is to be put on trial. Hears animal noises at night. Is convinced creatures are trying to get into his house. Claims there is a man inside the statue in the city square watching him … And even though Leeson’s name is at the top of the page, some of us standing around Jane are confused, because it seems we both know and don’t know the man being described.

This kind of information — clinical and without context — can be found in the other files Jane reads: Eliza Woodward, 22 . Admitted: June 2, 1877 . Occupation: Button seller . Status: Single . Whether first attack: No . Duration: 2 weeks . Cause of insanity: Unknown . Symptoms: Believes she was being held captive in her own home. Disobeys her father. Invents mischief. Claims that she has thrown candles at the minister during mass and set him on fire. Injures herself by hitting. Will go out without a bonnet. Unpicks fancy work she has just completed. Has fits of laughing, crying and kissing people .

Alfred Hale, 36 . Admitted: January 25, 1877 . Occupation: Instrument repair . Status: Single . Whether first attack: Yes . Duration: 3 weeks . Cause of insanity: Blow to the head . Whether suicidal: No . Whether danger to others: Uncertain . Hallucinations: Believes himself to be a renowned composer. Maintains that he has performed for the Queen in her bedchamber. Claims to have powers in his hands and that it is dangerous for anyone to touch them .

Jane stands up and puts on the kettle and Sam stretches his back.

“What’s wrong with kissing?” Cat asks. She makes a loud mwah sound and then moves around the room— “Mwah, mwaaah, mwaaah” —pretending to kiss all of us.

When Jane sits back down to her files and notes, we gather around her again, though sometimes she reads too fast for us to follow because even a quick glance at a word like button seller can call to mind a shop with a wall of oak drawers along its length; the smell of the wood polish applied every morning before the doors were opened for business. We see teacher or joiner or clock repairer and suddenly some of us can feel the grit of chalk dust, or see holes bored into wood, hear a broken chime drag its heels across the hour — some version of our selves appearing in these notices, a hint of relation, though the details are so scant they don’t make room for the person we are starting to feel we were: someone who may have taken delight in snowfall or a child’s curtsey, the canter of a horse or the efficiency of stamps, or the rough ardour of a washerwoman. These files say nothing of generosity, playfulness, the wing-collared jacket one of us believes he preferred, the bowl of ripe fruit one of us remembers painting in art class, a fly sitting on the leaf of the strawberry.

At the end of each casebook there is a square box for patient outcomes. Inside some are the phrases discharged cured or discharged uncured or died of illness ; occasionally the note says transferred to —followed by the name of another institution. In John Hopper’s case there is a letter from the supervisor at a clockworks factory affixed between pages:… thought it prudent to appraise you of J. Hopper’s progress over these past two weeks. Overall he has shown a high degree of conscientiousness — both in work and personal command … Charles Leeson’s casebook has no such letter. Instead, in looping writing the last entry states: Died 5 September 1877 . Then, in a hand that Jane thinks might be Superintendent Thorpe’s, the added words: at the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics .