The First Mask

Elspeth

The pencils in the day room are soft, short and fat, and made so that nobody could drive one through a throat. Each is the length of my thumb. They live in a chipped blue cup on the writing desk, eleven of them, and I've counted them four mornings running.

On the fifth morning there are ten.

I take it between breakfast and the nine o'clock round. The key is to take it where the cameras expect a hand to be: the writing desk is where patients write letters that Bridget will read and never send. I sit down with a sheet of lined paper and a pencil, and I write Dear Mother, in a hand that wobbles on the M, and as my left arm moves over the desk, the right hand, in my lap and below the camera's arc, picks a second stub from the cup and slides it into the waistband of my gown.

Nobody comes.

I write four lines to a mother that Dahlia Reeve has never had. I'm feeling better. The doctor is kind. I don't remember much but I think you would like it here. The trees are very red. I fold the letter in thirds. Bridget takes it at the nurse's station without reading it, because it is addressed to a woman in a file, and the file says she is dead.

An hour later, in the room with the lock turned, I lie on my side with the stub in my fist and I unpick one corner of the mattress cover and write, in letters the size of grains of rice on the pale canvas inside:

5-0-3-1-7-4-4-0-9-2-6-1. LH Ltd. Landing. F.

It takes four seconds. I read it back twice. I re-stitch the corner with the thread from the blanket, and I tuck the pencil in the hem beside the eleven pills.

Now I own a pencil, a number, and a hem that is beginning to resemble a warehouse.

Now for the harder inventory.

…

Kestrel receives me at ten.

He is in a good mood. I know because he has changed the music.

There is always music in the study, the lowest notes of a cello played at a volume only a dog would notice. Today the cello has been replaced by a solo piano, a Satie piece, the first Gymnopédie, one slow note after another like drops of water falling into a well. He stands at the window with his hands behind his back, his shoulders loose.

"Dahlia."

"Good morning, Doctor."

"Sit. Not there. The chaise."

The chaise. I am being offered the couch, not the chair. In psychiatric grammar that is a promotion.

I lower myself onto the chestnut leather and fold my hands on my stomach. I wait until he is seated at the head of it, three feet behind me, before I turn my face upward and give him the first piece of the mask.

I have spent four days making it. I made it the way a forger makes a signature: by studying the original until I could produce it without thinking.

"Doctor," I say, in a very small voice. "May I tell you something? I'm not sure if it's allowed."

I feel the shift behind me. A man's attention narrows.

"Anything is allowed in here."

"I had a dream." I pick at the white strip on my finger. "Last night. I don't usually remember them. But this one... it was a staircase. Stone. It went down. And at the bottom there was a garden, but a glass one, and everything in it was white and still. And I wasn't afraid." I swallow. "I've never not been afraid. And someone was standing there, at the foot of the stairs, and it was..."

I stop.

"Who?" he says.

It is a single word, but he has dropped half an octave, and I can hear the breath behind it.

"I couldn't see his face," I whisper. "But he had a voice that made the dream stop hurting."

Behind me, the Satie note falls into its well.

I have given him a gift. Kestrel is a man who has built a staircase of ten steps under a bookcase and invited me to go down it, and I've now told him that my sleeping mind came up the same stairs to meet him, unprompted, grateful. It is the single story that every clinician who plays at being a god wants to hear: the patient dreams of the therapist. It means the therapy is working. It means he is good.

It also means, if he is as careful as I think, that he will be a little more careless around me.

"That is very significant, Dahlia," Kestrel says. His voice has gone velvet. "That is... very good progress."

"Is it?" I turn my head. I let him see my eyes, wide and wet. "I thought I might be going mad."

"You are not mad." He leans forward, a hand lifted, and for a moment I think he will touch my shoulder. He doesn't. "You are recovering."

Recovering. I add it to the column.

I wait four seconds. In the history of persuasion, there is no better length of silence.

"Doctor," I say, "there's something else."

The lie I've prepared lies ready, folded, in its drawer. It is the riskiest thing I have done since I woke.

"Hollis found some numbers on my wall," I say. "I didn't tell you. I was ashamed. I keep... seeing them."

"I know," says Kestrel. "I have the photograph."

"Four one two." My finger traces it on my own ribs. "And then zero nine one four. I've been trying to think what it is. I think... I think it's a room number. A place where somebody was lying down, and there was a window, and I wasn't allowed to go in. I think it might be my mother."

A very small silence.

I do not turn to see his face. I know exactly where his hands are: the left, I think, resting on the arm of his stool, the right drifting towards a cufflink.

"Dahlia's mother," he says slowly. "Of course."

Of course. The woman in his notes. The woman that he wrote, one night in the first week, in a black notebook, a woman with a hereditary illness and a long history in a hospital where Dahlia was a child visiting. Kestrel invented the Dahlia Reeve construct as he would an architectural fixture, a mother with a name and a cause of death. If I now claim that a number belongs to her, he cannot say I am wrong. He is the only author of the story.

All he can do is write the number into it.

"I think she died on the fourteenth of September," I say, my voice cracking on cue. "In a hospital room. Four-twelve. Am I right? Was that her room?"

His pen scratches. I hear it.

I count to six.

"Perhaps," says Kestrel. "Perhaps that is precisely what it is. I will check the file."

He means he will check his own fiction against the one thing I have just put into it. A man doesn't do that unless something has begun to itch.

He knows what four-twelve is.

And I know that he knows.

That is not the same as him knowing that I know that he knows. I hold the distinction as carefully as a glass of water filled to the brim.

…

Afterward, he takes my pulse.

It's a standard ritual. At the end of each session, two fingers on the radial artery of my left wrist, eyes on the pocket watch. It is meant to be soothing. It is also meant to produce a number he can write down.

"Sixty-eight," he says, and notes it.

I lie there with my hand turned palm up in his and look at the ceiling. Fingers cool and dry, a pianist's fingers, or a surgeon's. He holds my wrist for a few seconds more than he needs to, as he does every time.

"May I?" I say.

"I'm sorry?"

"May I do yours?" I turn my head on the leather and I give him the look of a child who has been left in a hospital corridor for an hour, and sees at last a kind face. "I read once that you can feel somebody's heart in the wrist. Like a clock. I'd like to know if you have one."

It's a child's request, foolish and sweet. A professional would decline.

There is a pause that is just a little too long.

"A joke?" says Kestrel.

"No, Doctor."

I watch him calculate. If he refuses, he tells me he is afraid. If he accepts, he gives me what a patient needs in order to feel safe: a mirror, a reciprocity, a human body to rest upon. And he is the sort of man who has never, in twenty years, refused something that would allow him to feel that he was good.

"Very well," he says.

He holds out his left wrist. The cuff slides back, and I see the Eye of Horus on the cufflink, silver, a little worn at the edge.

I place two fingers on the inside of his wrist, just below the heel of the hand, where the veins run blue under skin so pale it looks drawn.

For a moment I feel nothing. Then, steadily, under the pads of my fingers: a beat.

One.

Slow. Heavy. Very regular. A clockmaker's pulse.

I let my thumb curl round the bone. I turn my head and I look not at the watch but at him. At the grey of his eyes, the small muscle at the hinge of the jaw. I make my own breathing slow. I don't speak.

Two. Three.

I'm counting. Sixty-one a minute. Sixty-two.

Then, deliberately, I lower my eyes to his mouth, and back to his eyes, and I let my fingers shift a fraction of an inch against the inside of his wrist, a stroke so slight that it could be an accident.

Four.

The beat under my fingers jumps.

It rises like a bird flushed from grass. Seventy. Seventy-six. Eighty-one. I feel the artery lift against my fingertips and the heat of his skin come up to meet them, and I do not move, and I do not blink, and I hold that rhythm in my hand for another seven seconds, eight, nine, until I have it clear in my head as a number on a page.

Eighty-eight.

Kestrel pulls his arm back.

It's not abrupt. He's far too controlled. He takes it away the way a man takes a hand off a stove that he has just noticed was lit, with a small smooth gesture, and his cuff slides back over the silver.

"That's sufficient," he says. His voice has not changed at all. That is how I know it cost him. "It's a good exercise, Dahlia. A good exercise in mutuality."

"Was I right?" I ask. "Do you have one?"

"You are very observant," says Kestrel, and gets up, and goes to the window, and stands with his back to me for a long time.

I lie quite still on the chaise and look at the plaster rose in the ceiling.

I am not thinking about his wrist. I'm thinking about what I felt in it.

Not desire. I would know desire; it has a signature on a pulse. This is a different thing. It was the sudden lurch of a mechanism being touched in its unprotected part, the way a clock jumps when you lay a finger on the escapement. It was the pulse of a man who has gone his whole adult life without being touched by someone who wanted nothing from him, and who, at forty-one, has discovered that he would very much like to be.

The hunger of an architect for a house that wants to be lived in.

It's the first real information about Dr. Ambrose Kestrel I've collected since I woke up. And I feel, in the pit of my own stomach, something that I did not plan, small and sour, that tastes like shame.

Because I did it so well.

…

Back in C-104, with the lock turned, I take my pencil from the hem and I open the ledger.

I'm not allowed paper. But the inside of the mattress cover is as large as a sheet of foolscap, and I lie on my stomach and write on it in tiny capitals, in the dark, with the corner lifted.

KESTREL. WEAKNESS SCHEDULE.

1. Needs to be needed. (Savior complex. Strong. Exploitable.)

2. Touch without demand. (Wrist. 61 → 88 in 9 sec. Withdraws at 88.)

3. Dreams of his own staircase, vide supra. Receptive to being the dreamt-of.

4. Cufflink: turns when lying. Also turns when deciding.

5. Fears: ? (Sleep. Clocks. Mother. Check.)

6. Knows what 412 means.

I stop. I look at the sixth line for a long time.

Then I add, smaller:

7. Chose not to say.

That one makes my skin tighten. Because a man who knows what the number means and doesn't say is a man who has chosen. And a chosen silence is an asset that nobody gave away for nothing.

I put the pencil away, press the corner of the cover flat, and pull the blanket over my knees.

Then I see it.

On the pillow, just where my head will lie, there is a small thing that was not there when I left. A single white mint. A round, hard, peppermint candy in a twist of clear cellophane. The cheap kind. The brand that Bridget Sorrell chews to hide the smell of cigarettes.

In all my days in this building, nobody has given me anything that wasn't pharmaceutical.

I turn it over in my fingers. The cellophane is warm, as if it has been held in a pocket and put down only a minute ago.

Someone entered this room while I was in session. Someone who is allowed to. Someone who did not search the bed, because the bed is exactly as I left it.

Someone who came to leave a mint.

Not a threat. Not a warning. A message in a language neither of us has spoken yet.

I don't eat it. I put it with the pills.

Seventeen days ago, I would have told you that nobody in Aldenmoor could be trusted, and I would have been right. Tonight I'm not sure whether I have been counting everything correctly.

There's an entry on the sheet I can't read.