Concert of Ghosts Read online

  At night Tennant fought narcotic sleep, concentrating on the moon on the high window or the sound of rain. He would focus on Alison’s face, sometimes with such intensity that he’d lose sight of it, his memory would disintegrate, he’d be left with nothing. And then the panic kicked in. The night sweats. The tremors and palpitations. When he shouted for attention, nobody came. His voice died, without echo, against the white walls.

  One morning Lannigan said, What do you remember of Maggie Silver?

  I loved her, Tennant said.

  If I told you she didn’t exist, what would you say?

  I’d say you were full of shit.

  What would you say if I told you we spent a great deal of time here, you and I? We used to talk for hours. We talked about your problems.

  I don’t remember, Lannigan.

  Do you want to see your file? Shall I show you your records? Would they prove anything? Harry, you were here for more than a year.

  Tennant shook his head. He’d never been here. He was determined to deny it.

  You’d just say the records were false anyway, wouldn’t you?

  Yes.

  Oh, laddie, you were in a truly bad way when you came here first. You said you heard bells, gulls, you were terrified of telephones. You wouldn’t believe the half of it. We gave you drugs, and we counseled you, and we took damn fine care of you here, even if I say so myself. And I should know, Harry. I run this place. I know everything that goes on. We heal tortured souls at this clinic. We spread a little balm on the awful pain people feel. You didn’t get enough of that special balm, boyo. We let you down, I fear.

  You can’t touch me, Lannigan. I won’t let you get inside my skull.

  Lannigan soothed him gently, comforted him. Drugs were injected three or four times daily; then Lannigan would appear in the room to offer some encouragement, telling Harry he wouldn’t have to lie in this little bed forever, soon the straps would be removed and the bedpans—oh, they’re such humiliating things—taken away and he’d be able to get up and stroll around, and won’t that be absolutely grand?

  Days elapsed in the changing colors beyond the high window. People came and went with water, medication, soft foods. Sometimes a nurse changed his clothing, one loose-fitting pale green smock for another. His concept of time was altered. It was a matter of light, not clocks. He continued to concentrate on the girl. He wouldn’t let that go, no way.

  He sometimes didn’t listen to anything Lannigan said. He closed his eyes and the Irishman droned on—but every now and again the soft lilting voice would sneak inside Tennant’s head, insidious, ingratiatingly authoritative, a sly melodic voice unerringly controlled.

  Once he asked Lannigan: What do they pay you for this? Or do you do it for political motives? Is it a matter of belief for you?

  Lannigan used a bony hand to massage Tennant’s shoulder a moment. It was one of his techniques, the laying on of hands, a guru distributing calm among his troubled followers. Nothing’s for free, Harry.

  So what do they pay you, Lannigan?

  The Irishman had a way of answering questions obliquely, another of his techniques. I’m interested in what makes people tick. Their clockwork, if you like. I think of myself, ah well, as an explorer.

  A well-paid explorer, Tennant said. Mountains of blood money.

  It isn’t cheap to keep this clinic together. And I’m not a political creature.

  So it’s hard cash.

  Let’s say there are benefits, Harry. But that stuff shouldn’t concern you. You’re only here to get better.

  Or worse, Tennant said. Then he asked about Sirhan, about whether Sirhan had ever been a “client” of Lannigan’s country retreat.

  Paul Lannigan smiled, and sighed, and massaged with slow circular movements. I don’t think that name would be anywhere on our records, Harry. You surely get some very strange notions.

  One afternoon—was it early evening? how long had he lain in this bed? his body ached and he had sores—Lannigan told him that Rayland Tennant hadn’t been in San Francisco the day before Robert Kennedy was gunned down. He massaged Tennant’s neck. His smooth skin smelled medicinal. What you think you saw didn’t happen, Harry. Do you understand that? Your father wasn’t there, not on that day, not at any other time. Am I getting through to you, Harry? Neither your father nor Noel Harker. Is that clear?

  Tennant felt the big fingertips dig into his flesh. He couldn’t get away from Lannigan’s hand. He tried to move his head aside but the restraints prevented him. He thought: I saw Rayland. I saw Harker. I saw them in 1968 and I saw them again—

  When? When?

  What day of the week, what month, what year. The idea of maintaining a calendar inside his brain was useless. He didn’t have the arithmetic.

  Somebody had hung a blind on the small window high above his head, and he wasn’t sure of time passing at all. The room was dark and stayed dark. Darkness became his life. He might have been submerged in a tank of murky water. He couldn’t feel his limbs. Couldn’t hear his heart. When they came to inject him, he didn’t feel the penetration of the needle.

  And still he fought. He fought to keep his eyes open. He fought sleep. He even fought dreams when sleep finally overwhelmed him as it always did. He would whisper to himself. I am Harry Tennant. I am Harry Tennant. I know what I saw. I remember Alison. I remember Maggie’s poor ignorant face. You can’t erode that, Lannigan. Not this time.

  You see, Harry, I am only interested in your well-being, your mental health. You’re a mess. You’re back on the highway to dementia with both feet working. Take a detour, Harry. Come with me. Get off that bloody road and come with me. Be cooperative, Harry. Be good to yourself.

  Hold on tight, Tennant. Don’t listen to him.

  There were more injections, many more. He lay in a listless state, suspended in the permanently dark room, where he longed for any kind of light to appear in the window. He was thirsty most of the time, but they didn’t bring him water the way they’d done at first. Weakened, parched, forever groggy, he found it harder and harder to differentiate between illusion and reality. People came and went in the room but they lacked substance. They drifted in a spectral manner, lingered over his bed, pulled his eyelids back or prodded his flesh, then left. He had the strange delusion he could levitate, but when he tried to will himself upward from the bed, nothing happened. His bedsores had begun to bleed. His flesh smelled of death.

  One time he heard a bell ring in some distant tower and a black-headed sea gull, razor beak clacking, flapped violently in his room, hovering over his face with all the concentrated malice of a famished creature. He shouted for help, nobody came. He thought: I have to hold on. But what was he supposed to be holding? Alison? Maggie? A nebulous notion of self? Self was an odd little word, he thought. It broke when you hit it, like flawed crystal.

  Lannigan whispered in his ear. Let me make you better, Harry. I know the way.

  Did he dream that? A fever raged through him, flames through a condemned building. He sweated until the pale green smock was saturated. He’d sink into his sweat and drown.

  Lannigan whispered in his ear, I want to be kind to you, Harry. But you have to trust me. You understand what I’m telling you? I can make you better. You’ve taken too many bad drugs in the past. They’ve hurt you badly. But if you leave it to me, Harry, I can take the pain away.

  Yes, Tennant thought. I want to be better.

  One day they let him walk around his small room. His legs were strange, liquid, not entirely his own. See, Harry, Lannigan said, you’re on the mend. Soon you’ll be out of here. On your way. Not yet. Not quite yet. We still need to talk.

  And so they talked. Tennant was taken to Lannigan’s office, a big room with plants and leather chairs. They talked every other afternoon for an hour. Each time Tennant was taken back to his white room, he could never remember anything Lannigan had said. But the straps and buckles had been removed from his bed and the blind was gone from the window and he was grate
ful for that kindness. The barren branch of a tree rapped upon the glass.

  What season is it? Tennant wondered. He didn’t know. The sessions with Lannigan became longer. The Irishman used a pencil-sized flashlight every so often, shining it into Tennant’s eyes and speaking quietly. We have to unburden you, Harry. We have to make you whole. But it takes time, you see. Everything takes time. This isn’t a walk in the park, Harry. This is a long process. We have to trust each other. We have to take that long walk together. Hand in hand, if you like.

  Do you trust me, boyo?

  Yes, Tennant said. He couldn’t think of a reason not to; in this friendless place, where corridors rang at night with the cries of strangers, and distant hands constantly thumped the keys of an untuned piano, Lannigan had become his only ally.

  Sometimes after the sessions, Tennant would give in to depression, a deep black place from which escape was impossible. Sometimes he’d sit on his bed and cry uncontrollably for an hour or more and not know why he was weeping with such ferocity. He had the sensation of breaking apart inside, as if someone had taken an ice pick to his heart. He would bang his hands upon his thighs; sometimes he struck the walls for no good reason. I did too many drugs, that’s what happened to me. Bad drugs. Street drugs. LSD cut with cyanide. Angel dust. Anything going. That’s the problem.

  Lannigan helped him over the tears and the depression. You’ll come out of this, laddie. You’re going to get well again.

  Yes, Lannigan. Yes, of course.

  One day Lannigan asked him if he’d like to see Alison, and Tennant had to strive to remember the name. He almost had it, but it slipped away into nothing, and Lannigan looked pleased. You’re coming along nicely, Harry. You’re doing very well. Soon we’ll have you walking in the fresh air.

  Days later, Lannigan asked about Alison again. Tennant looked at the shrink blankly.

  After that, he was allowed to stroll in the parkland, accompanied by a male nurse whose name was Charlie. Charlie was pleasantly talkative, and the weather, though sharply cold, was sunny. Tennant liked these walks, although they tired him out and ultimately confused him.

  He dreamed of his father. He couldn’t quite remember his father’s face. He accepted this loss of memory casually because Lannigan said it was good to forget certain things about the past; if he kept them alive, he’d never get better. I have to get better, Tennant kept telling himself.

  The sessions with Lannigan grew longer, sometimes two or three a day. One afternoon, while he sat in the big leather chair in the Irishman’s office, Tennant had the thought: I like this man. I owe him a debt I can never pay.

  And one memorable morning, when the small high window was frosted with flakes of snow, he was escorted into a room filled with tables and shown how to weave a basket. The work was intricate at first, and frustrating, but Tennant learned. He watched his fingers work the cane as if they were somebody else’s. He got considerable satisfaction out of the task.

  —Would you like to see Alison? Lannigan asked on a certain evening.

  —I don’t think I know anybody of that name, Harry replied.

  Lannigan took him out of weaving and put him into the gymnasium. Total health, Harry. That’s the concept. Sound mind, sound body. It’s nature’s own equation. Harry worked weights, pumped iron, felt good. He suffered no further depression, no outbreaks of tears. It wasn’t a bad life in its way.

  Now when he went on walks, he was accompanied not only by Charlie but by another man, a small Oriental called Sammy something. Sammy was insane, babbled endlessly about signs and omens. Tennant didn’t speak to Sammy; he had nothing to say. The man was a sad case.

  He told Lannigan that Sammy made him uneasy, unnerved him. He didn’t want to be in Sammy’s company. After that Sammy didn’t appear for the walks.

  Just before Christmas, when decorations had been hung in Lannigan’s office and mistletoe pinned above the door, the Irishman asked him about his past, what did he remember?

  Harry said, I remember having a house close to some woods. I remember I grew marijuana.

  —And after that?

  —After that I came here.

  —Why did you come here?

  —I had a breakdown.

  —But now you feel better?

  —I feel terrific now.

  —Did you enjoy growing dope, Harry?

  —It was a living, I guess.

  Lannigan went away.

  Tennant didn’t dream so much anymore. His life had become comfortable in a routine kind of way. Talks with Lannigan. Sleep. Medication. Working the weights. He was physically stronger than he’d ever been, but a certain restlessness had begun to invade him. One morning he asked Lannigan when he could look forward to his release.

  —You want to get out, Harry?

  —Yeah. I think I’m better than I was. I’d like to get back to what I was doing.

  —Growing stuff, d’you mean?

  —Something like that.

  Lannigan said he’d consider it. A month, perhaps six weeks, after Christmas the Irishman said, You really think you’re well enough to go it alone, Harry?

  —You know better than me, but I’m beginning to feel, I don’t know, restricted. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, you understand. You’ve done a lot for me.

  Lannigan sat on the edge of the bed. He said, I know where there’s a small house with some land not far from here. It’s available, if you’re interested.

  —Sure, I’m interested, Tennant replied.

  —I ought to caution you. No dope this time.

  —Right.

  —I mean it, Harry. You want to grow things, grow cabbage, something people can’t smoke.

  —Sure. Cabbage. Corn. I can see that.

  —That keeps you legal, Harry. You don’t want another breakdown, do you? You don’t want to go near dope of any kind.

  —No.

  During the third week in February, when the fields were covered with snow and the trees looked as if they might never live again, Lannigan drove Tennant to a tiny frame house that stood on eight or nine acres of mixed woodland and fields. It was a twenty-minute drive from the clinic. Tennant explored the small rooms. The house had good light from the west and the paintwork wasn’t bad. The furniture was functional. All in all, he liked it.

  —I might get a dog, Paul.

  —I think that would be helpful.

  —And if I don’t feel good, I know where to find you.

  —Down the road, take a right. You know the way.

  —Who owns this house?

  —Oh, some corporation in D.C. I don’t remember the name offhand, boyo.

  The following week, after days of intensive talks with Lannigan, during which the Irishman constantly interrogated him about his family, his past history, Harry moved in. From a nearby breeder he bought a Great Dane pup. He couldn’t think of a name for her.

  He walked the fields, enjoying the way his feet sank through the crust of snow. He walked in the woods, delighting in the barren melancholy of the trees. From a certain angle he could see the small house between the trees. Something in the perception touched him: He felt at home here.

  Lannigan had loaned him a shortbed truck. Every now and then he’d drive it into the nearest hamlet—a place called Shelbyville—and buy groceries and beer and dog food. The store had everything he needed. Once or twice he lingered outside the public telephone located in front of the shop, possessed by the odd idea that he had a phone call to make, but he didn’t go inside the box. He couldn’t think of anyone to call, and he wasn’t sure why he had such an irrational urge in any case. I will have to make a friend, he thought. Just so I have somebody to call. But he wasn’t lonely.

  One morning when he was stepping out of the store, he saw a gray bus parked alongside his truck. He knew it was the private bus that sometimes ferried the clinic’s clients here and there—therapeutic outings, day trips to one place or another. Lannigan believed in exposing his patients to what he called the real wor
ld. Otherwise, he always said, they feel more cut off than they should.

  Tennant gazed at the windows of the vehicle. A pale-skinned girl looked at him through the window. Some aspect of her impassive face provoked a sense of curiosity in him. He wondered why. He got in the truck and drove back to his house, thinking of the girl all the way. The black hair, the big sad empty eyes. Her image troubled him for the rest of the day. She was one of Lannigan’s patients: What had happened to her? Why was she sick? He took one of the tranquilizers and lay down, the Dane at his feet. Then he forgot about the girl.

  He lived quietly.

  He lived quietly for weeks before he awoke one dawn with a sense of panic. He’d dreamed something menacing, a situation crowded with figures who meant to harm him. A girl dressed in black had entered the dream. Sweating in the unheated house, he dressed quickly and drove the truck to the clinic, where he asked to see Lannigan.

  The Irishman calmed him down, gave him some tranquilizers, massaged his shoulders in that comforting way he had.

  Tennant didn’t describe his dream in detail. Dreams were sometimes too obscure to talk about. He told Lannigan he’d woken up with a bad feeling. He just didn’t know why.

  —Don’t worry about it. Don’t get stressed. Go back home. Take a pill and relax.

  —Yeah. I’ll do that.

  Tennant left the clinic and drove back to his small house. The day was cold and bright. He shivered when he went indoors. He stacked logs and kindling and lit a fire in the living room. He sat on the sofa, watching smoke drift. He had a feeling of satisfaction. House, fire, dog. What could be better?

  Crazy question. I have it all. All I’ll ever need. He rose to lift the poker. The logs had to be prodded. A few sparks disappeared into the blackness of the chimney. Wood crackled, spat. A flying chip, burning fiercely, adhered to the back of his hand. Moaning, he brushed it quickly away. He went inside the kitchen, ran the hand under cold water, dried it gently. He returned to the old horsehair sofa and sat down, hunched forward. He watched the fire, the sparks. His hand ached. He looked at the scorched mark on his flesh and found himself for some reason thinking of the girl he’d seen on the bus. The image was quickly gone, leaving him with an unfocused sense of pity.