The Folded World Read online

  “Charlie,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

  No one could understand how much pain there was in watching one’s own child suffer like that, and Hal’s parents loved him very much. Because they loved him so much, they did not take him to the hospital. Hal did not want to go to the hospital. He did not want to go anywhere. He lay in his bed with the covers pulled over his head and the windows shut. His parents loved him so much that they did not even attempt to open the windows. They loved him truly, but Hal knew that in order to love him truly they had to despise him as he now despised himself, and this, he knew, was the paradox. If they wanted to support him, they themselves would have to welcome his own death. They would have to become him. They themselves would have to go without bathing for days, rolling back and forth like a corpse coming overseas in a berth, as he was coming overseas in the darkness of his bedroom.

  For several weeks after his concussion on the veranda, his head was silent. There was no Myself, but neither was there Hal; there was a certain black lack of meaning. But it would be spring soon, and everyone figured Hal would be up and running when the weather broke.

  Then, one morning, he heard something. A voice. Not a voice like Myself but a bigger, importanter voice, coming from outside.

  It said, Come here.

  Hal pushed aside the bed covers.

  Come here.

  He sat up. The room was empty.

  He waited for the voice to repeat itself but it did not elaborate.

  What? thought Hal. Where? He desperately wanted to go there.

  Just then his mother came into his bedroom, wearing a green dress and bearing an orange.

  He asked her aggressively, Were you just standing at the door? Did you just say something through the door?

  His mother smiled. She was supremely patient, and he remembered her as beautiful.

  No, she said. I was upstairs watching television with your father.

  You weren’t standing at the door, talking to me?

  No, she said.

  I heard something, he said.

  You may well have, his mother said. Something outside maybe.

  Hal got up and went to the window. He was wearing nothing but dirtied briefs. He had a beautiful back, arched like a bow in a quiver. He must have reminded her of himself as a boy, running away from the bath half-undressed.

  He put his fingers on the sill and looked out the window. His bedroom was in the basement and half underground so there was nothing but geraniums to look at. His mother joined him there. There was nothing to look at but geraniums.

  I know I heard something, Hal said.

  After a moment, bloated ankles appeared in the window. The old neighborwoman was stalking around in her garden with a watering can.

  There, said Hal’s mother. You must have heard Mrs. Z in her garden. She must have been talking to herself again.

  Hal’s mother raised her eyebrows. What do you think, she asked.

  Hal turned to his mother and looked at her, but did not say anything about how the voice was not Mrs. Z’s. He used to tell his mother everything. He did not tell her this.

  Do you want to come watch television with your father and me? his mother asked him.

  No thanks, said Hal.

  Look, she said, I brought you an orange.

  She put the orange down on the bedspread where it remained in its perfect singularity. In the darkness, it was not colored orange so was it therefore still an Orange? He looked at his mother, as if she were daring him to do something or understand something with the orange, as if she were making a very significant and encoded gesture.

  You used to love these, she said, gesturing at the orange on the bed. Let me tell you. I used to peel them and you would watch. You liked to lean over so the spray would cover your face. I had to section every piece for you and take out all the seeds. You wanted it all to go on as long as possible.

  Hal closed his eyes, rubbing the stubble on his chin. In his memory, he saw his mother’s young hands sectioning the orange. He saw the seeds tumble down into the dark grass. But when they fell, they made a thundering sound, like the sound of a truck door sliding shut. TAM. TUM.

  I’ll leave you, said his mother. No, no. It’s all right. I’m just in the way. I’ll leave you to rest. I’ll leave you with the orange.

  She put the orange on the chipboard shelf above his bed, next to his sketchpad and his wrestling trophies. The way she was behaving, moving the orange around, it made him anxious. He was glad she was leaving. He got back into bed, shut his eyes, and pretended to be asleep.

  But as soon as she left the room, he leapt up.

  What the fuck, he hissed, pacing. What the fuck? Fucking tell me where.

  He took off his underpants and threw them against the wall. They made no sound. He balled his fist and shook it until the length of his starving arm shook. He grabbed the orange and smashed it. It exploded, pouring out of his fist.

  In that moment, the odor filling him, juice on his lips, Hal stood in the yard of his past, all those fireflies that used to ornament the ferns in the summer blinking at him through the evening, blinking through the dense vegetation, back when he was late, back when he was good, when there was no moon, when he was liked, when he played. When it was late, the light of the fireflies used to signal him home, and before he even saw his house, in which his parents were waiting for him, his old rat terrier would come bounding out of the ferns and run circles around his legs, crossing and recrossing the yards announcing him, as a prince returns to court—Hal, son, wrestler, half-back, doe-eyed child, dreamboat—and his mother would come to the screen door drying her hands and smile, and behind her, in his funnel of lamplight, his father, squinting fondly, no sound, no conversation, no need at all for words.

  The seeds of the orange crashed into the grass. TAM. TUM.

  He was beautiful once. Everyone said as much. They used to say—he heard it many times—they used to say he looked like a Greek statue. His back was swayed, his forearms and hands were beautifully articulated, brown and clean, his buttocks glowed white in the summertime, and the whites of his eyes glowed in the dusk, and the reason he had always been the last child home in the evening was because none of the mothers ever told him to leave, they just stared at him out of their kitchen windows, hands idle over their work, as he kept a soccer ball in the air by kicking it repeatedly with his bronze knee.

  His mother was beautiful too. He knew this. But one morning that spring, during his illness, during his first psychotic episode (later, they numbered it, in case there were more) on his way to the bathroom, he’d stopped to look at the photographs displayed on top of the television. There were photographs with people in them, and he knew those people to be himself and his mother and father, but he could not see the people or identify them as beautiful or ugly, and he was frightened, because he realized he had lost the ability to trust.

  He stopped reading. He stopped drawing. He stopped believing in colors. He did not get up and join society. Then he stopped eating. He began to waste away in his bed. When he was a wrestler, this would have been wonderful. They always wanted him to be thin and made of steel. They wanted him to be a soldier and stop drawing. Well now, he thought, you got what you wanted. He proceeded this way until he weighed one hundred and nine pounds and was on the verge of death. And when he was on the verge of death, they carried him out to the car, and took him to the hospital.

  Charlie was following Stephen Gregorian’s secretary up a flight of stairs. He had begun to perspire on first hearing the efficient, hostile sound of her skirt. Stephen Gregorian had been director of social work at Maynard for thirty years, through the comings and goings of trends and treatments and threats and scandals, and now had a fat neck and dark rheumy eyes, yet he still commanded tremendous respect with the staff. Charlie had studied several of his books in graduate school. How Charlie had landed Gregorian as his supervisor was unknown to him, but of course it had something to do with Banford. Charlie had been passed
along hand-to-hand by these men. And now, he was being summoned, so unnaturally, in the middle of a Friday afternoon. Charlie wiped the spit from the corners of his mouth. He barely knew how to get up to Gregorian’s office, and had to follow closely behind the secretary’s skirt.

  Walking like that, like a child to the principal, he prepared himself for trouble. Why else this formality, from a man who notoriously conducted his meetings on the fly, in elevators, in hallways? Until now, Charlie had taken Gregorian’s casual treatment as the highest compliment; he felt he was being trusted. But running through his recent performance in his mind—his decreasing efficiency, his phone calls home, the time last week he had come back an hour late from lunch because he had wandered too far in his reveries—Charlie decided it was true, the quality of his work was deteriorating. When the patients spoke to him, one part of his mind was spinning selfishly on his own life, yet he would nod and say yes yes with a lying disingenuous clenching of the jaws. He had become insincere and transparent. He had become self-centered. Climbing the stairs, dark circles forming under his armpits, he became furious at himself. He was going to be fired. He deserved to be fired. And now, he would be hurting not only Alice, but that little wad of matter, smaller than a mouse’s heart—his baby. The unknown personality whom he already loved too much to bear.

  Or—and here Charlie actually paused on the step, shaken—the fact that Charlie had told Alice confidential patient information was somehow known to Gregorian. He tried to think of how Gregorian could possibly know. It was just him and Alice and a locked apartment, in bed. He imagined the neighbor downstairs, a taciturn schoolteacher, listening through the pipes. He imagined his mother-in-law, connected to a nineteen-forties–style switchboard. By the time he entered Gregorian’s suite, Charlie’s undershirt was wet. But there was Gregorian himself, standing at his office door, beckoning Charlie silently, like a playmate across a hedge. The secretary sat down and began to type in her corner.

  “Charlie,” Gregorian said, his faint accent making Charlie’s name sound exotic. “We usually meet downstairs but—” He shrugged.

  Charlie shrugged. Almost mockingly, Gregorian shrugged again, and then giggled. He turned and sat with a sigh on a hard leather loveseat by the window, then patted the seat beside him.

  “Sit down, Charlie.”

  When Charlie sat beside the older man, a wave of docility washed over him. In truth, he was exhausted. His shock and excitement over the news of Alice’s pregnancy had kept him awake for weeks. At night, he ran his fingers lightly over her side of the blanket. He planned. He wondered. But mostly he just stayed awake. There was just a sense of needing to be awake. As the man, the father, and the vigil. So now, if Gregorian was going to fire him, he would concede. If Gregorian asked him to put a gun to his head, he would have. Stephen Gregorian Stephen Gregorian, Charlie said to himself as if in a dream. He blinked slowly, overcome with an urge to rest his head against the man’s shoulder. He turned and watched the man’s mouth moving. He studied Gregorian’s hands as they rested on his thighs. A wedding ring, so long worn it was nearly embedded in the flesh of the finger, glowed in the afternoon sun. Soon Charlie was thinking of his own father. He felt as if he was being addressed by his father, in that same ceremonial way in which his father would invite Charlie into his study to discuss some boyish transgression. During such meetings, Glen Shade would have a weary air, elegant and transfixing as a man cleaning his gun, and there was always a sense that he’d forgiven you in advance for your sins, but as your father, he had to point them out to you, and scold you, and then you were allowed to have a cinnamon candy and to sit on the window seat in your socks and ask lots of questions.

  “… which is the point of this meeting,” Gregorian was saying. “So let’s us get on with it.”

  Charlie perked up and smiled. He liked the syntactic construction of “let’s us.” It sounded hopeful.

  Gregorian tilted his head. “Where do you see yourself going, Charlie?”

  Charlie open and shut his mouth. Immediately the prospect of being fired came back with more force. He cleared his throat.

  “Nowhere, for a while, I hope,” he said, laughing stiffly. “I like it here at Maynard, very much. I’m learning a hell of a lot. You know, true psychopathology, first hand. This is an incredible experience.”

  “What the hell is so incredible about it?” said Gregorian, shrugging. His neck pouched over his starched collar. “You fill out papers. You check boxes. You guide people around by the elbows. This is a very hierarchical setting. The doctors are the important ones around here. Hm? No? You don’t agree?”

  Charlie stared. Then, rubbing his hands, he laughed. “Have I made you think, somehow, I’m dissatisfied?”

  Gregorian laughed and got up. He took a stack of papers from his desk and put them on Charlie’s lap. The cover page read “Division of Mental Health and Management Services: Mobile Treatment Team Program Standards.”

  “You know of mobile treatment?”

  “Of course,” said Charlie. “Traveling psychiatric and counseling treatment. Sure.”

  “Now you got how many hours until you get your license?”

  “Still a good number.”

  “And do you want to spend all that time checking boxes? Or,” Gregorian sat again, smiling, “do you want to do something really challenging, really interesting for a while? Where you, as the social worker, have primary responsibilities, make decisions? Don’t answer yet.” Gregorian looked up at the ornate tin ceiling. “I heard an interesting thing recently. Of course you probably know that at one point, the continents were one big land mass. One land—one island—and all the oceans were one ocean.”

  “One ocean,” said Charlie, nodding.

  “Sure. That’s what I heard. That means—what that means is—even though the continents just broke up and drifted away from each other, we all come from the same island. You see?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I knew you would. Nice tie, by the way. What are those, geese flying across it?”

  “Ducks. They’re ducks.”

  “Now, Charlie, you could have done anything. You didn’t go to business school or law school, though I know you could have gone to the best. But no, you chose social work. Social work, you fool. To work for society. Your Daddy was in—your Daddy worked—”

  “For the Xerox Corporation.”

  “Xerox! The ability to make endless copies, like a God! Now why would someone like you go into social work? It doesn’t make a lot of sense from the outside.”

  Charlie shook his head. Gregorian was trying to give him an out by making him see the point himself. “All right,” he said standing. “I think I understand.”

  “What? You haven’t even read the material yet.”

  Charlie hesitated. “But you said—”

  “Wait, wait!” Gregorian fairly screamed, pounding the loveseat. “No! I want to send you over to my friend Bruce Zabilski for a while. The mobile treatment teams. Look—look.” Gregorian waved the packet, laughing. “You. Why not? And then I want you to come back and work in my office once you’re licensed—here, in administration. Help me run the godforsaken place!” Gregorian sat back against the loveseat, looking at Charlie adoringly. “Don’t you know you stick out like a sore thumb here, with your sharpened pencils and your Midwestern manners? Not that we all don’t need some sharper pencils around here, but I’m saying you look ridiculous. Waiting around for Goliath or something. OK? Hm?”

  “OK.”

  “Read the material! Take your time! Go for a walk.”

  “My wife’s pregnant,” said Charlie.

  “Well, that’s great.”

  Charlie was beaming. “I always wanted kids.”

  “Kids are great. I have six! You’ll make a great father. And hey, this job pays more. More work, too, of course.”

  “It pays more?” Charlie swatted the papers in his hand, suddenly exhilarated. “I’m really excited about having a kid. My wife and
I haven’t told anybody yet. You’re the first person I’ve told. It just slipped out.”

  “I’m honored,” said Gregorian, clasping his chest. He leaned over and embraced Charlie roughly. Pressed at last against the man’s shoulder, Charlie almost cried out with happiness. He was going to be a father. And he himself was pregnant, and the extra-sensitivity that Alice had developed in these weeks—the readiness to weep, the ardor of the skin and stomach, and the ability to detect the thinnest scent out of the air (persimmon! moss! wet dog!)—were his own symptoms. For an instant, resting his head against his boss’s shoulder, he let himself imagine that indeed Gregorian was his own father, who lived very far away and with whom he spoke infrequently and with hopeless, unshakable cordiality. When the time was right, he would call his mother, Luduina, and with one hand over the receiver his mother would tell his grandmother, and then she would go upstairs and tell his father, and then his father would get on the phone for a short time, and they would talk cordially, and Charlie would shut his eyes and pretend he was resting his head on his father’s shoulder, such was the embarrassing tenderness he reserved for this man, the gentlest man he knew. His touch was so light and so gentle, sometimes Charlie couldn’t feel it.

  Gregorian stood. “Think about it,” he said.

  “I don’t need to think about it. I’ll do it. If you think it’s the right thing for me, I’ll do it. I’m really flattered by your offer to come back here and work with you. Ha!” Charlie laughed, pumping the man’s hand. “This is exciting. I’m going to be a dad! It just hit me.”

  “Congratulations, son. You know, you have a fine future ahead of you.”

  “I know!”

  “Don’t you worry. Everything’s going to work out.”

  “I’m not worried!”

  Gregorian patted him on the back, Charlie nodding and smiling and unable to move. Gregorian gave an excited little pounce.