The Woman In The Cherry-Red Convertible By The Platinum Sea
by Ilsa J. Bick
His name didn't matter to the type of Chicago people who lived on Lake Shore Drive, or Hawthorne Place. What mattered was he did the jobs the rich folk wouldn't, such as stripping insulation in musty old attics when it was hot enough to melt crayons. He dragged his forearm across what little he could reach of his face above his mask, mopping away sweat. He hated the fucking mask, except there was dust and asbestos and old insulation and Christ knew what shit floating around up here.
He tugged free a long tail of tattered insulation, and then he saw the suitcase wedged between two bare beams. He wasn't surprised. People put all sorts of things in attics that they forgot about: golf clubs, dead televisions, or Aunt Betty-Lou's still life of petunias that looked like Van Gogh on heroin. The black oilcloth case with brown leather trim had been elegant, once. It was the type of case he remembered from old movies when they still knew how to make movies, the kind where stickers showed where a person had been. This case had no stickers, though there were initials he could barely make out: one was N. The second was K. He thought the last initial might be F or E, but he wasn't sure because the oilcloth was cracked and fissured with age. The edges were metal-capped and there were two leather handles, one on the long, horizontal edge and another on the shorter, vertical edge. Rust sprayed over the two plated latches that secured the shorter vertical edge, and he reasoned that the case opened lengthwise instead of horizontally. Judging by the holes riddling the case, there was probably an old mouse nest in there.
He reached for the leather handle on the short, vertical edge. The case was light, but the leather handle had rotted and the plated latches were brittle. So the suitcase tore open as he pulled it free, and the contents tumbled out. Then he couldn't help it. He got a good look and dropped the case as if he'd been scorched.
"Ah, God," he said, his voice muffled by his mask. He felt his gorge rising, and tasted something sour in the back of his throat. "Aw, fuck me, Jesus."
The blanket had once been baby blue. It was white with age now and shredded, courtesy of the mice. The mice had also done a really good job of picking the baby clean.
Retching, he ripped off his mask and splattered vomit, as small brown bones bounced over bare wood, like orphaned buttons.
· · · · ·
The dream is black and horrible: blood everywhere, and wings rushing, like the headlong flight of a frenzied bat. Rachel is racing down a darkened alley, only she's going so quickly she's flying, and there are the voices, whispery as rat's feet over sand, swirling and echoing off moist brick. She thinks she might be flying away from something, but as the nightmare spirals out, she realizes that there's a shape at the mouth of the alley. Someone earthbound, walking, fast, heels clapping a staccato beat.
Suddenly Rachel understands that she isn't running or flying at all. She is rushing toward Fate, not in the slow-motion way of nightmares but fast, hell-bent, her life collapsing to this moment the way the tube of a spyglass folds in upon itself, and for an instant, she is in two places—two people—at once: the shape that's rushing pell-mell and the smaller, earthbound, frightened person tripping along in heels down the alley. Her heart thunders in her ears, and a clutch of terror has her by the throat so she can't scream.
And then she's caught—not in the one who's trying to get away, but in the other: the shadow, the thing with murder on its mind. And in the last second, as she's swinging something heavy, she feels the emotion surging through her, hot as molten lead: revenge. Rachel lets out a wild animal howl, the heavy weight in her hand propelling her forward as if she's thrown a bolo. The impact jerks the breath from her lungs, and then there is the shiver that runs up her right arm, and hot blood splashes into her face, and her mouth fills with a liquid that tastes like rust as the bells that are louder than the voices ring and ring …
And the phone rang again, hacking the dream in two as neatly as if the nightmare had been a neck sliced by the keen edge of a guillotine. My eyelids flew open, and my heart shuddered and then knocked against my ribs, the way the wings of parakeets beat against a cage that is too small. I dragged in a sharp, terrified breath, and then another.
Be calm, you're in your bedroom, you're in Milwaukee. You're not stalking the streets like a crazed vampire.
But my right arm hurt, and at that moment, I remembered the momentum of a huge weight nearly yanking me off my feet. My head throbbed, and my voices, those damn voices, bludgeoned my brain with the insistence of jackhammers pulverizing concrete: Wake up, Rachel, wake up! My sheets were damp, as if I'd had a high fever, and my skin crawled with the slick, slippery feel of sweat. The room stank of fear and wet rust.
The telephone bleated again, and my voices shrilled that, for God's sake, I should answer the fucking phone already. So I did what they said.
Something bad's happened, and now Sonia's dying. At least, that's what the voices scream: For God's sake, keep bagging her, I need that atropine now, right now, crank her up to three-twenty! Clear, clear the damned bed! Where the hell's anesthesia?
All this noise. All this fuss. And the burning smell now—Clear!—is so sweet and crisp it's like roast pork left too long in the oven.
So maybe that's why Sonia decides to take a drive in a cherry-red convertible toward a platinum sea through a city she can't quite place. The top's down, so the wind pulls at her long blonde hair, teasing it free of her lemon-yellow scarf. Too late, Sonia snatches, but her scarf suddenly whirls away, spinning high and higher on a column of air, like newspaper caught in a dust devil. The sky is brilliant and china blue, and the streets and buildings flash by. There are no traffic lights, no police, and she heads east toward the lake that she first thought to be the sea because it seemed so endless but isn't. She drives so fast that everything blurs: glass-fronted buildings and sidewalks and green bronze dragons atop red brick that, much later, she will learn is the city library. Driving fast, headlong, like Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant: She can't remember the name of the movie because it was so long ago, back in 1954, she thinks. Four years later, in 1958, she'll marry Frank because she has to. In 1963, she will do something very bad, and there will be a nightmare.
And that's when Sonia knows. She doesn't want to say wrong because the feeling isn't as definite as knowing she's circled B when she meant A, or doesn't say Nick, stop even though she'll go to a hell she doesn't believe in, and she brings the nightmare that much closer. But the city's not right. No people on the sidewalks. No birds in the air. And even her own blonde hair, flailing in the wind, is too perfect: not roiling like a nest of snakes, but straight and flowing like the scarf that caught in the rear wheel of Isadora Duncan's convertible and strangled her to death before snapping her neck in two.
Sonia drives her cherry-red convertible through a deserted city until she comes to the shores of a lake that should be a sea but isn't. The sun is so strong, the lake is mirror-bright and platinum-gold, and the buildings march like glass and steel soldiers to the very edge and look like drawings she's seen of the way the future will be, and she thinks: Chicago. I'm in Chicago.
The platinum sea wavers and breaks.
"Rachel? Do you understand what Dr. Fowler's saying?"
Instantly—it was so fast now the action was reflex—I catalogued the voice. Right ear, male, non-accusatory: Dr. Winter, a real-person person. I always made mental calculations to judge how—if—to respond. I'd held so many conversations I could afford a little exclusivity. For example, I could safely say that God was a sucky conversationalist and not nearly as interesting as Satan. But since I'd started the new treatments a few months ago, my voices had subsided, muffled under yards of mental cotton—as distant and formless as the sleepy cries of a tiny baby in a dark room late at night.
That is, until early this morning: until that damned dream. That shadow in the alley. The thing I became.
Even knowing that Winter was there and very real, I didn't turn around but stared at angry whitecaps fracturing the surface of Lake Michigan. I had a good view: an eighth-floor window of the Milwaukee Lakeshore Hospital's ICU. I studied my reflection in the double-paned glass. I'm not pretty. Grim is the word that comes to mind. But that morning I looked awful: pale, square face; murky hazel eyes; greasy brown hair shot through with gray at the temples; and lips that were so white they disappeared.
The police had come and gone: two detectives from Violent Crimes named Priest and Cross—no joke. They'd met me at the hospital, given me business cards that I'd tucked into the back pocket of my jeans. I told them the truth of my life in shorthand: forty-four, single, a freelance journalist with a penchant for architecture (probably on account of all the damn states she'd lived in because her mother would pick up and move at the drop of a hat), and resident crazy woman. The crazy woman hadn't spoken to her mother in seven years because, well, her mother had pretty much disavowed the crazy woman. So the crazy woman had been alone, in bed, dreaming bad dreams and hearing voices.
Winter, again: "Rachel?"
I turned. Winter stood next to a woman named Fowler, who was my mother's doctor, and he held a long sheaf of paper with black squiggles. Winter was in his standard shrink outfit: blue jeans, black shirt, black boots, no white coat. Winter's a bit eccentric. He's thin as a reed, has ears like car doors, and wears rimless glasses, and I expect he chose psychiatry because he was an awkward, geeky kid. Winter's still the most compassionate, best psychiatrist I've ever had.
"I heard you," I said, looking first at Winter then Fowler, and then back to Winter. "But I don't know what you're saying. Is my mother dead or not?"
Winter's voice was matter of fact. "Rachel, the trauma to your mother's brain was severe. After surgery, she arrested in the recovery room, and she remains on life support. That's very bad." He held up the sheaf of paper. The paper rustled. "It's also bad that her EEG doesn't show brainstem or somatosensory evoked potentials. For all intents and purposes, your mother is brain dead … almost."
"What do you mean, almost?"
"Because there is something." This came from Fowler. She wore green surgical scrubs and still had a green surgical mask tied around her neck, and I saw that her ponytail of dark brown hair was coming undone. "Your mother has localized seizure activity in the angular gyrus of the inferior parietal lobe. That means she's got random seizure bursts, deep in the brain. We don't know if they were there before or not. Legally, I can't suggest taking her off life support until we're absolutely sure the damage is irreversible and that the seizure activity is meaningless."
"What do you need to make sure?"
Winter and Fowler glanced at one another. "I'd like to do a few comparison studies, if you don't mind," said Fowler. "There's really no urgency here. There's no reason to get upset."
"Yes, there is," I said, even though I hadn't been getting upset until she said that, a tacit admission on her part: Jesus, you gotta watch those crazy folks. "My mother's pretty much dead. You just said so. Now you want permission to pull the plug. But first I should wait a few more hours until it's more convenient, so you can run tests. What the fuck do you want from me?"
"Rachel, cut the crap," said Winter, not placating me at all but giving back tit for tat. It's what I love about him. "Fowler's doing her job. No one's denying that this is hard, but this is serious stuff. Someone came up behind your mother as she walked home from a restaurant and clobbered her with a hammer. So whoever attacked her wanted her very dead. Despite the fact that there's some rudimentary brain activity and those seizures, I think he succeeded. But there're no second chances here. We turn off life support without making absolutely sure, it's over."
"Oh, Jesus Christ." I felt tears start in my eyes, and that made me mad. I thought I was done crying over my mother. I stared down at the woman I didn't know: a tube, with clotted green junk sucked out of her stomach, snaked out of her nose; clear tape crisscrossed her mouth; a rust-colored blossom of Betadine and old blood bloomed on a bandage wrapped around her head like a white turban.
And now, of all the stupid times for the voices to start up, they did: Fucking cunt, you bitch, you slut whore, this is your fault …
"What do you want me to do?" I said, over the din, being careful not to shout.
"Give us time, Rachel. Let us make sure. Then," Winter's voice was kind, "you do what you have to. What makes sense."
Sonia sits on the hood of her cherry-red convertible, staring at the platinum lake that isn't a sea but ought to be. She knows without looking that if she glanced over her shoulder at the Sears Tower—and that's wrong, too, because the tower wasn't built until 1973, and now this is 1959, and I'm married and a mother—the tower might not be there. She's frightened that this is the way it will be with the entire city: that it exists only in the space of time that she thinks it before vanishing, like a heat mirage.
The mind's tricky. She's been reading. The books are at home. And home is Milwaukee now: not Los Angeles or Denver or Cincinnati or the other places I've run to. But Chicago is where memory takes me, where my life began and ended. The books are stacked in a neat pile on an oak night table, next to a photograph that her daughter's never seen because the time was never right, though Sonia knows that she's run out of time. But, as Sonia's gotten older, she's wanted to understand what her daughter's gone through—except she's started too late.
I wish we could say your daughter's got something like schizophrenia, but she doesn't. Her brain's quite unusual, the way it's structured. Think of it like a house that someone hasn't put together quite right.
Freud, Sonia thinks now. Freud said that a house is the dreamer, and the unconscious is a dark attic crammed with suitcases and clothes and boxes. So you swing your flashlight over the attic, and things jump out. Now there's a box, now there's a bicycle: here and then gone as soon as you've pointed the light somewhere else. Now there's a lamp, now there's a radio.
And now there's the suitcase.
In her mind's eye, Sonia sees the suitcase in bold relief, as if the image were a paper cutout pasted on a stark white background: black oilcloth, twin handles, brass plating, and two brass latches. And the initials, in white: N.K.F.
Sonia squints at the platinum sea, bright as a new penny: the same color as the copper pans in the big mansion on Hawthorne Place, the one with a third story and an attic. And Nick.
She realizes she can go there. Just as quickly, she understands that these mind-pictures are the only functions of her body she can control. She thinks back to the sensation of something electric sizzling along her limbs and the stench of charred flesh. With the memory, there is pain: sudden, quick, blinding. Before the pain, there was a feeling that someone followed, and she turned as there was a rush of air, and then a feeling of recognition? resignation? as she recognized who and, more importantly, why just before her face exploded and the world fell away. She knows she won't be going back to that world, either—the one that used to shield her the way a shell armors the soft vulnerable body of a hermit crab. Only her brain is the crab now, and it's scuttled out, searching for somewhere else in some other when.
Sonia slithers off the hood of her cherry-red convertible and turns away from the platinum sea and heads north: toward Nick. Toward the house on Hawthorne Place.
I took a cab to my mother's townhouse. She lived on Mequon Road, fifteen minutes south of downtown Milwaukee, and had been there for eight years, the longest I'd ever known her to live anywhere. I'd never been inside, but I saw that the police had beaten me to it.
"Detective Fine," he said. We were standing in a living room that smelled of roses from a Yankee Candle on a low wooden coffee table and had pictures, probably of people I didn't know, scattered on the walls and littering an oak sideboard. Detective Fine was a big man, about my age, and broad in the shoulders, though not Wisconsin-fat. Solid was the word that came to mind. The type of man you'd want to have around to punch out a mugger or open a jar of pickles. I knew before he pulled out his badge case that he was a detective, and I thought, Christ, fuck, not again, I've just had a lot of bad dreams, I didn't do anything.
And a voice, a woman's, right ear: But you're guilty, you slut, bitch, whore.
No way, I thought right back. My mother was always a cipher, and I know she hated me after I got sick. But when she was attacked, I was home, in bed.
Dreaming black, bloody dreams.
And they were just dreams.
But your arm hurt when you woke up. And you smelled of sweat and wet rust. You did it, you know you did. Don't deny that you're guilty of sins against God, you slutbitchcunt, you whore …
I didn't bother answering. Instead, I inspected the gold shield: Milwaukee Police. Detective Fine's number was 3-4-0, and I thought, Cagney and Lacey. Wrong city, though. I handed back the case. "I already talked to the police at the hospital."
"I know that," said Fine, tucking the case into the breast pocket of his coat. His jacket was rumpled like the folds of an accordion, and his tie tack was a tiny pair of silver handcuffs. His hair was a nondescript brown and, like mine, showed a liberal amount of gray and silver. His eyes were blue but very pale, like gray ice. There was a small scar arcing beneath his lower lip that reminded me of Harrison Ford. "I'm from Homicide."
"My mother's not dead yet," I said, stupidly.
"But she's on life support, and they're just waiting on you to …"
"To tell them to pull the damn plug." I knew I was being nasty and vicious but decided I didn't give a damn. "Actually, I'm waiting on them. Then they unplug her, and then she'll be dead-dead. So I guess you're just really eager, huh?"
Fine's voice was mild. "I had a few questions, but when I came by the hospital, you'd already left. The nurse there said you'd gone to your mother's house."
"Yes," I said, feeling my pulse beat in my neck. "I came to get some of her things—to make her look nice."
Fine studied me with those ice-gray cop eyes. "Okay. Mind if we talk?"
Instinctively, I wanted to refuse. I hadn't done anything, but I was feeling defensive and guilty, as if I had. I knew these were the crazy thoughts of a crazy woman. Plus, my voices were there, the air thick with whispers: You can't refuse. He's already suspicious. And that woman, far away now, laughed: an evil sound.
So I said sure, and together we went up the carpeted stairs. My mother's bedroom was to the right and smelled like lilacs. Besides a king-sized bed and a bureau that was painted white with green-checked trim, there was an oak night table with a glass top. There was a telephone on the nightstand, a stack of books, and a photograph in a wooden frame.
I went to the bureau. Fine fingered the photograph, studying it a long moment. Then, still holding the photograph, he surveyed the titles on the nightstand. "Freud, Jung. Your mother into psychology?"
Not when it mattered, I thought. Pulling open a bureau drawer, I riffled through folded underwear and tweezed out a pink panty. "We never talked about it."
"What did you talk about?"
The next drawer held my mother's nightgowns, and I chose one that was sea-foam green with lace and a light blue bow at the throat. "Not much," I said.
The voices: You're guilty, he's got you, you slut.
"We haven't spoken in years," I said.
"Why is that?"
Playing cop games, I thought. He was a cop; he had to know about me, and the fact that he was jerking me around made me mad. "You're a detective. You tell me."
Fine replaced the frame on the night table. The wood clicked against the glass top. "Why are you so angry?"
"Fuck me, Detective, I don't know. Someone made scrambled eggs out of my mother's brain, and now I get to tell some doctor to turn her off." I would've said more, but my voices were shrieking that I should shut the hell up already, and I decided that they were, for once, right on the money.
Fine said, "You're diagnosed with some sort of psychiatric illness, is that correct?"
The shift was a little jarring, but that's how detectives in novels did things. "You read my record."
"I read that you've tried suicide, gotten kind of violent, and ended up in jail a couple of times, yes. Mostly, you got transported to the hospital."
Whore. Bitch fucking slut.
"My old doctor tried tapering my medicine too quickly," I said, ignoring the voices, all male. "I got sicker. Anyway, I'm off antipsychotics now."
Fine dug into his coat pocket, withdrew a tiny spiral-bound notebook and a pencil, and began flipping pages, just like Columbo. "Why is that?"
"They don't work. The doctors say I'm different. Part of my brain's missing. Einstein had the same thing. He was missing a tiny little piece called the parietal operculum. People think that's why Einstein said his ideas came to him in visions, because other parts of his brain had gotten bigger to compensate. Except I don't see pictures, and he did, and he was a genius, and I'm not, and my memory's not so good for some things. So I guess the similarity ends there."
"What type of treatment are you getting now?"
"It's experimental."
"Oh?" asked Fine, the nubbin of a pencil in his right hand. "What is it?"
I pulled in a breath then let it out. "It's called TMS: transcranial magnetic stimulation. They put this big magnet on my scalp over the part of my brain they think is malfunctioning. Then they flip the switch, and this magnetic pulse generates an electric field. It's supposed to...
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