The Changed Man Read online

  Why couldn’t I go to her?

  Just keep me here, she had said. Any way you can, she had said.

  And I thought I knew the way. That was the problem. In the back of my mind all this was much too real, and the fairy tales were wrong. The prince didn’t wake her with a kiss. He wakened the princess with a promise: In his arms she would be safe forever. She awoke for the happily ever after. If she hadn’t known it to be true, the princess would have preferred to sleep forever.

  What was Elaine asking of me?

  Why was I afraid of it?

  Not my job. Unprofessional to get emotionally involved with a patient.

  But then, when had I ever been a professional? I finally went to bed, wishing I had Belinda with me again, for whatever comfort she could bring. Why weren’t all women like Belinda, soft and loving and undemanding?

  Yet as I drifted off to sleep, it was Elaine I remembered, Elaine’s face and hideous, reproachful stump of a body that followed me through all my dreams.

  And she followed me when I was awake, through my regular rounds on Monday and Tuesday, and at last it was Wednesday, and still I was afraid to go to the Millard County Rest Home. I didn’t get there until afternoon. Late afternoon, and the rain was coming down as hard as ever, and there were lakes of standing water in the fields, torrents rushing through the unprepared gutters of the town.

  “You’re late,” the administrator said.

  “Rain,” I answered, and he nodded. But he looked worried.

  “We hoped you’d come yesterday, but we couldn’t reach you anywhere. It’s Elaine.”

  And I knew that my delay had served its damnable purpose, exactly as I expected.

  “She hasn’t woken up since Monday morning. She just lies there, singing. We’ve got her on an IV. She’s asleep.”

  She was indeed asleep. I sent the others out of the room.

  “Elaine,” I said.

  Nothing.

  I called her name again, several times. I touched her, rocked her head back and forth. Her head stayed wherever I placed it. And the song went on, softly, high and then low, pure and then gravelly. I covered her mouth. She sang on, even with her mouth closed, as if nothing were the matter.

  I pulled down her sheet and pushed a pin into her belly, then into the thin flesh at her collarbone. No response. I slapped her face. No response. She was gone. I saw her again, connected to a starship, only this time I understood better. It wasn’t her body that was the right size; it was her mind. And it was her mind that had followed the slender spider’s thread out to Anansa, who waited to give her a body.

  A job.

  Shock therapy? I imagined her already-deformed body leaping and arching as the electricity coursed through her. It would accomplish nothing, except to torture unthinking flesh. Drugs? I couldn’t think of any that could bring her back from where she had gone. In a way, I think, I even believed in Anansa, for the moment. I called her name. “Anansa, let her go. Let her come back to me. Please. I need her.”

  Why had I cried in Belinda’s arms? Oh, yes. Because I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work.

  I did not do it in the fever of the first realization that I had lost her. It was no act of passion or sudden fear or grief. I sat beside her bed for hours, looking at her weak and helpless body, now so empty. I wished for her eyes to open on their own, for her to wake up and say, “Hey, would you believe the dream I had!” For her to say, “Fooled you, didn’t I? It was really hard when you poked me with pins, but I fooled you.”

  But she hadn’t fooled me.

  And so, finally, not with passion but in despair, I stood up and leaned over her, leaned my hands on either side of her and pressed my cheek against hers and whispered in her ear. I promised her everything I could think of. I promised her no more rain forever. I promised her trees and flowers and hills and birds and the wind for as long as she liked. I promised to take her away from the rest home, to take her to see things she could only have dreamed of before.

  And then at last, with my voice harsh from pleading with her, with her hair wet with my tears, I promised her the only thing that might bring her back. I promised her me. I promised her love forever, stronger than any songs Anansa could sing.

  And it was then that the monstrous song fell silent. She did not awaken, but the song ended, and she moved on her own; her head rocked to the side, and she seemed to sleep normally, not catatonically. I waited by her bedside all night. I fell asleep in the chair, and one of the nurses covered me. I was still there when I was awakened in the morning by Elaine’s voice.

  “What a liar you are! It’s still raining.”

  It was a feeling of power, to know that I had called someone back from places far darker than death. Her life was painful, and yet my promise of devotion was enough, apparently, to compensate. This was how I understood it, at least. This was what made me feel exhilarated, what kept me blind and deaf to what had really happened.

  I was not the only one rejoicing. The nurses made a great fuss over her, and the administrator promised to write up a glowing report. “Publish,” he said.

  “It’s too personal,” I said. But in the back of my mind I was already trying to figure out a way to get the case into print, to gain something for my career. I was ashamed of myself for twisting what had been an honest, heartfelt commitment into personal advancement. But I couldn’t ignore the sudden respect I was receiving from people to whom, only hours before, I had been merely ordinary.

  “It’s too personal,” I repeated firmly. “I have no intention of publishing.”

  And to my disgust I found myself relishing the administrator’s respect for that decision. There was no escape from my swelling self-satisfaction. Not as long as I stayed around those determined to give me cheap payoffs. Ever the wise psychologist, I returned to the only person who would give me gratitude instead of admiration. The gratitude I had earned, I thought. I went back to Elaine.

  “Hi,” she said. “I wondered where you had gone.”

  “Not far,” I said. “Just visiting with the Nobel Prize committee.”

  “They want to reward you for bringing me here?”

  “Oh, no. They had been planning to give me the award for having contacted a genuine alien being from outer space. Instead, I blew it and brought you back. They’re quite upset.”

  She looked flustered. It wasn’t like her to look flustered —usually she came back with another quip. “But what will they do to you?”

  “Probably boil me in oil. That’s the usual thing. Though, maybe they’ve found a way to boil me in solar energy. It’s cheaper.” A feeble joke. But she didn’t get it.

  “This isn’t the way she said it was—she said it was—”

  She. I tried to ignore the dull fear that suddenly churned in my stomach. Be analytical, I thought. She could be anyone.

  “She said? Who said?” I asked.

  Elaine fell silent. I reached out and touched her forehead. She was perspiring.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “You’re upset.”

  “I should have known.”

  “Known what?”

  She shook her head and turned away from me.

  I knew what it was, I thought. I knew what it was, but we could surely cope. “Elaine,” I said, “you aren’t completely cured, are you? You haven’t got rid of Anansa, have you? You don’t have to hide it from me. Sure, I would have loved to think you’d been completely cured, but that would have been too much of a miracle. Do I look like a miracle worker? We’ve just made progress, that’s all. Brought you back from catalepsy. We’ll free you of Anansa eventually.”

  Still she was silent, staring at the rain-gray window.

  “You don’t have to be embarrassed about pretending to be completely cured. It was very kind of you. It made me feel very good for a little while. But I’m a grown-up. I can cope with a little disappointment. Besides, you’re awake, you’re back, and that
’s all that matters.” Grown-up, hell! I was terribly disappointed, and ashamed that I wasn’t more sincere in what I was saying. No cure after all. No hero. No magic. No great achievement. Just a psychologist who was, after all, not extraordinary.

  But I refused to pay too much attention to those feelings. Be a professional, I told myself. She needs your help.

  “So don’t go feeling guilty about it.”

  She turned back to face me, her eyes full. “Guilty?” She almost smiled. “Guilty.” Her eyes did not leave my face, though I doubted she could see me well through the tears brimming her lashes.

  “You tried to do the right thing,” I said.

  “Did I? Did I really?” She smiled bitterly. It was a strange smile for her, and for a terrible moment she no longer looked like my Elaine, my bright young patient. “I meant to stay with her,” she said. “I wanted her with me, she was so alive, and when she finally joined herself to the ship, she sang and danced and swung her arms, and I said, ‘This is what I’ve needed; this is what I’ve craved all my centuries lost in the songs.’ But then I heard you.”

  “Anansa,” I said, realizing at that moment who was with me.

  “I heard you, crying out to her. Do you think I made up my mind quickly? She heard you, but she wouldn’t come. She wouldn’t trade her new arms and legs for anything. They were so new. But I’d had them for long enough. What I’d never had was—you.”

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Out there,” she said. “She sings better than I ever did.” She looked wistful for a moment, then smiled ruefully. “And I’m here. Only I made a bad bargain, didn’t I? Because I didn’t fool you. You won’t want me, now. It’s Elaine you want, and she’s gone. I left her alone out there. She won’t mind, not for a long time. But then—then she will. Then she’ll know I cheated her.”

  The voice was Elaine’s voice, the tragic little body her body. But now I knew I had not succeeded at all. Elaine was gone, in the infinite outer space where the mind hides to escape from itself. And in her place—Anansa. A stranger.

  “You cheated her?” I said. “How did you cheat her?”

  “It never changes. In a while you learn all the songs, and they never change. Nothing moves. You go on forever until all the stars fail, and yet nothing ever moves.”

  I moved my hand and put it to my hair. I was startled at my own trembling touch on my head.

  “Oh, God,” I said. They were just words, not a supplication.

  “You hate me,” she said.

  Hate her? Hate my little, mad Elaine? Oh, no. I had another object for my hate. I hated the rain that had cut her off from all that kept her sane. I hated her parents for not leaving her home the day they let their car drive them on to death. But most of all I remembered my days of hiding from Elaine, my days of resisting her need, of pretending that I didn’t remember her or think of her or need her, too. She must have wondered why I was so long in coming. Wondered and finally given up hope, finally realized that there was no one who would hold her. And so she left, and when I finally came, the only person waiting inside her body was Anansa, the imaginary friend who had come, terrifyingly, to life. I knew whom to hate. I thought I would cry. I even buried my face in the sheet where her leg would have been. But I did not cry. I just sat there, the sheet harsh against my face, hating myself.

  Her voice was like a gentle hand, a pleading hand touching me. “I’d undo it if I could,” she said. “But I can’t. She’s gone, and I’m here. I came because of you. I came to see the trees and the grass and the birds and your smile. The happily ever after. That was what she had lived for, you know, all she lived for. Please smile at me.”

  I felt warmth on my hair. I lifted my head. There was no rain in the window. Sunlight rose and fell on the wrinkles of the sheet.

  “Let’s go outside,” I said.

  “It stopped raining,” she said.

  “A bit late, isn’t it?” I answered. But I smiled at her.

  “You can call me Elaine,” she said. “You won’t tell, will you?”

  I shook my head. No, I wouldn’t tell. She was safe enough. I wouldn’t tell because then they would take her away to a place where psychiatrists reigned but did not know enough to rule. I imagined her confined among others who had also made their escape from reality and I knew that I couldn’t tell anyone. I also knew I couldn’t confess failure, not now.

  Besides, I hadn’t really completely failed. There was still hope. Elaine wasn’t really gone. She was still there, hidden in her own mind, looking out through this imaginary person she had created to take her place. Someday I would find her and bring her home. After all, even Grunty the ice pig had melted.

  I noticed that she was shaking her head. “You won’t find her,” she said. “You won’t bring her home. I won’t melt and disappear. She is gone and you couldn’t have prevented it.”

  I smiled. “Elaine,” I said.

  And then I realized that she had answered thoughts I hadn’t put into words.

  “That’s right,” she said, “let’s be honest with each other. You might as well. You can’t lie to me.”

  I shook my head. For a moment, in my confusion and despair, I had believed it all, believed that Anansa was real. But that was nonsense. Of course Elaine knew what I was thinking. She knew me better than I knew myself. “Let’s go outside,” I said. A failure and a cripple, out to enjoy the sunlight, which fell equally on the just and the unjustifiable.

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “Whatever you want to believe: Elaine or Anansa. Maybe it’s better if you still look for Elaine. Maybe it’s better if you let me fool you after all.”

  The worst thing about the fantasies of the mentally ill is that they’re so damned consistent. They never let up. They never give you any rest.

  “I’m Elaine,” she said, smiling. “I’m Elaine, pretending to be Anansa. You love me. That’s what I came for. You promised to bring me home, and you did. Take me outside. You made it stop raining for me. You did everything you promised, and I’m home again, and I promise I’ll never leave you.”

  She hasn’t left me. I come to see her every Wednesday as part of my work, and every Saturday and Sunday as the best part of my life. I take her driving with me sometimes, and we talk constantly, and I read to her and bring her books for the nurses to read to her. None of them know that she is still unwell—to them she’s Elaine, happier than ever, pathetically delighted at every sight and sound and smell and taste and every texture that they touch against her cheek. Only I know that she believes she is not Elaine. Only I know that I have made no progress at all since then, that in moments of terrible honesty I call her Anansa, and she sadly answers me.

  But in a way I’m content. Very little has changed between us, really. And after a few weeks I realized, with certainty, that she was happier now than she had ever been before. After all, she had the best of all possible worlds, for her. She could tell herself that the real Elaine was off in space somewhere, dancing and singing and hearing songs, with arms and legs at last, while the poor girl who was confined to the limbless body at the Millard County Rest Home was really an alien who was very, very happy to have even that limited body.

  And as for me, I kept my commitment to her, and I’m happier for it. I’m still human—I still take another woman into my bed from time to time. But Anansa doesn’t mind. She even suggested it, only a few days after she woke up. “Go back to Belinda sometimes,” she said. “Belinda loves you, too, you know. I won’t mind at all.” I still can’t remember when I spoke to her of Belinda, but at least she didn’t mind, and so there aren’t really any discontentments in my life. Except.

  Except that I’m not God. I would like to be God. I would make some changes.

  When I go to the Millard County Rest Home, I never enter the building first. She is never in the building. I walk around the outside and look across the lawn by the trees. The wheelchair is always there; I can tell it from the others by the pillows, which glare white in
the sunlight. I never call out. In a few moments she always sees me, and the nurses wheel her around and push the chair across the lawn.

  She comes as she has come hundreds of times before. She plunges toward me, and I concentrate on watching her, so that my mind will not see my Elaine surrounded by blackness, plunging through space, gathering dust, gathering songs, leaping and dancing with her new arms and legs that she loves better than me. Instead I watch the wheelchair, watch the smile on her face. She is happy to see me, so delighted with the world outside that her body cannot contain her. And when my imagination will not be restrained, I am God for a moment. I see her running toward me, her arms waving. I give her a left hand, a right hand, delicate and strong; I put a long and girlish left leg on her, and one just as sturdy on the right.

  And then, one by one, I take them all away.

  PRIOR RESTRAINT

  I MET DOC MURPHY in a writing class taught by a mad Frenchman at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. I had just quit my job as a coat-and-tie editor at a conservative family magazine, and I was having a little trouble getting used to being a slob student again. Of a shaggy lot, Doc was the shaggiest and I was prepared to be annoyed by him and ignore his opinions. But his opinions were not to be ignored. At first because of what he did to me. And then, at last, because of what had been done to him. It has shaped me; his past looms over me whenever I sit down to write.

  Armand the teacher, who had not improved on his French accent by replacing it with Bostonian, looked puzzled as he held up my story before the class. “This is commercially viable,” he said. “It is also crap. What else can I say?”

  It was Doc who said it. Nail in one hand, hammer in the other, he crucified me and the story. Considering that I had already decided not to pay attention to him, and considering how arrogant I was in the lofty position of being the one student who had actually sold a novel, it is surprising to me that I listened to him. But underneath the almost angry attack on my work was something else: A basic respect, I think, for what a good writer should be. And for that small hint in my work that a good writer might be hiding somewhere in me.