The Aperture

Chapter 21

A Time of Separation

The room was bright. Sunlight shone through the opaque windows, and the light hurt her eyes. It was morning. When Alyndia regained some of her senses, she realized it was morning, and her wrists and ankles were strapped firmly to her bed. Her mind was filled with a fog, something like she felt while lost in the Wild. Her mind felt like a broken pot in which the shards had been reassembled haphazardly. She stared into the ceiling tiles pockmarked with holes, trying to recall the events that brought her there with a mind filled with the same. A television blared from someplace far away, probably the recreation room.

Her mind fluttered between wakefulness and a dreamy nether-consciousness, but as her lucidity gradually returned, she realized she was incredibly thirsty, and her mouth had a heavy, metallic taste. A period of time passed, though she wasn’t sure how much time. Gradually, she became aware of another presence in the room. Weakly, she turned her head. There she saw Dr. Kasabian looking down at her, dressed in white, gauzy sunlight shining down on his shoulders. She didn’t recognize him initially in her debilitated mental state. He appeared as an angel or some other kind of saintly apparition. He gave her a weak smile and placed his hand gently on her forehead. His hands were dry and soft.

“How are you feeling, Connie?” he asked.

“Dr. Kasabian?” she asked, her voice gravelly.

He poured her a cup of water and then raised her head enough to help her get the water down. She drank a few swallows.

“How is it you’re here?” she asked, barely able to speak.

“I work here a few times a week. It’s where I did my residency.” He gave her more water from the cup and then put it back on the table near the bed. “I was surprised to learn you were here. I only found out when I heard what you did to the hospital staff.”

“They tried to give me medication. I didn’t want to take it.”

“So, I heard. You did quite a number on them. Let’s see: one with two with a cracked rib, another with a concussion, another with a bruised kidney. You were busy.”

“I don’t know how I was able to do that. I guess I don’t know my own strength.”

“Still, wouldn’t it have been easier just to take the medication?”

“I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I can hardly think straight when they give it to me.”

Alyndia was now feeling more in control of her senses. She tested the strength of the straps that restrained her wrists, ankles, and torso. There was no way to get free that she could see.

“Why have they done this to me?”

“I’ve already mentioned what you did. Doesn’t it make sense that they’d restrain you?”

“I didn’t mean to do what I did. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. It just happened.” She raised her head to the doctor. “Please. You have to get me out of here.”

“I can’t do that. You’re no longer in my care. You’re Dr. Gilbreth’s patient now.”

Alyndia’s looked away from him after he said that.

He put his hand on her restrained wrist. “But I sympathize with you. You’ve been in here three days already. I’m sure you’ve had a chance to think things over.”

“I’ve been here—how long? Three days?” Alyndia gasped.

“It didn’t help when you broke the nose of that nurse while they were releasing you yesterday. They said you were extremely combative, and it took four orderlies to hold you down. They didn’t even want to risk moving you to a padded cell.”

“I don’t remember that at all.”

“Well, I read it in your file. That’s why they’ve kept you in restraints so long.”

Alyndia shook her head. The hospital had kept her drugged up so much that she had not even been aware of how much time had passed or what had occurred during that time. Gerald was probably wondering where she was. And then there was the promise she made to Joy of visiting their mother on her deathbed. No one even knew where she was. At that realization, she began to cry. She felt helpless. A sorceress of her caliber should never be treated the way she was. She felt disgraced, defiled. She would give anything to have her spells back, even for just a day.

Dr. Kasabian squeezed her hand. “I’ll have a talk with Dr. Gilbreth. I’ll see if I can get him to at least get you out of restraints.”

“I don’t think he really cares about my predicament.”

“He’s one of the top psychiatrists in the state.” He pulled a handkerchief from a pocket in his white coat and dabbed her tears away from her eyes. He patted her wrist. “I should be getting back to my floor.”

“Why do you have to go?”

“I have my patients to tend. I only stopped in to check on you.”

“I need to use a telephone.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to talk to Dr. Gilbreth about that.”

Alyndia bit her lower lip as she thought back on her last meeting with Dr. Gilbreth. Although, in her current state, she could not recall everything she’d said during the meeting, she strongly suspected that revealing her desire to call Gerald was the main thing that had worked against her. It might even have been the main reason he increased her medication. At that moment, she decided to no longer bring up Gerald with Dr. Gilbreth or with anyone else at the hospital—just in case it got back to him. Still, there was the separate matter of Connie’s sister Joy.

“Can you call someone for me?” Alyndia asked.

“That might not be a good idea,” he said, his voice heavy with reluctance.

“Please. You must do this.”

Dr. Kasabian knotted his brow. Alyndia noted his brows were darker and thicker than most of the other men she’d met. His skin was darker too, almost olive-colored. She wondered where on the planet he'd come from. Probably someplace far away, she thought.

“Who do you want me to call for you?”

“My sister. Her name is Joy West.”

“Maybe it’s not my right to ask, but why would you like to speak to your sister?”

“Dr. Kasabian, my mother is on her deathbed. She doesn’t have long to live. I haven’t seen my mother in years. My sister was supposed to take me to her in Wisconsin. Now that I’m stuck here, I can’t go with her, as we’d agreed.”

The doctor seemed genuinely surprised by this statement. “Your sister could have called your home. Your partner would have told her—”

“My partner wouldn’t. I very well know that.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because he’s probably learned by now that I purposely stole some important files.”

“What files?”

“Some classified files that were gathered as evidence against a university professor we were investigating. I took them into my personal possession after interrogating him. I hid them in my coat on my way to this hospital. I lied to my partner about where they were. I’d intended to destroy them.”

“Did you?”

“No. I didn’t have the chance. I threw them into a waste bin. Dr. Gilbreth says they were found and returned to the agency.” She sighed. “Because of this, I’m sure the agency doesn’t trust me now, and frankly, I don’t trust them either.”

Dr. Kasabian went silent as he ruminated over this for a moment. “Where is your sister?” he asked finally.

“I guess she’s in Wisconsin.”

“I see. Do you have her number?”

“Yes. It’s on a card in my purse,” she frowned when she realized she did not know where her purse was. “They also took my purse away from me. I have no idea where it is.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll just let Dr. Gilbreth know about your mother and—”

“No,” Alyndia interrupted. “No. I want you to call her.”

Dr. Kasabian knotted his brows again. “Why me?”

“Because he may not. The CIA is probably telling him to keep me here.”

He smiled slightly. “All right. So what message would you like me to give her?”

“I don’t have a specific message. Just tell her where I am and my situation.”

“Is that all?”

“What else can I tell her? Maybe you can add that they’re keeping me here against my will. I’ll leave it to her to react as she wishes. She and I have been estranged for many years, and I don’t feel I have the right to make any demands of her.”

The doctor nodded slowly.

“Please do this, Dr. Kasabian. I’ll be so grateful to you.”

“Okay, I’ll try. No guarantees though. Okay?”

“Thank you, thank you!” Alyndia said, almost in tears.

Dr. Kasabian looked at his watch. “I have to be getting back to my ward.”

“Wait, doctor. Before you go, I have a question for you.”

“Yes?”

“Where are you from?”

“I was born in Armenia.”

“Armenia?”

“Yes. My family emigrated here when I was a little boy back in the late 1990s.”

“Is Armenia far from here?”

“Well, it’s not close.”

“Do you miss your homeland?”

“Honestly, I can’t say I do. I don’t really know it very well. I was just a toddler when we came here, so I hardly remember it.”

“I see. Do you ever go back?”

“I haven’t been back in years. I no longer have any close relatives living there, so it’s hard to justify the time and expense to go back. Besides, I have a family of my own here now. They take up all my time.”

“You have a family in this land?”

He reached into his smock, pulled out his phone, and turned it on for her to see. “This is my family.”

In the picture, she saw a slightly younger version of the doctor along with a dark-haired woman and two young boys. The photo was taken in some open area on a sunny day, perhaps at a park. He pointed them out to her, telling her their names. He showed her a few more pictures.

“You have a lovely family,” she said to him.

“Yes. I’m a lucky man,” he said, smiling.

At the moment, she heard brisk squeaks of rubber-soled footsteps enter the room. Dr. Kasabian looked to the door. She craned her neck to look up and see one of the nurses walking toward her bed. The nurse held a syringe in one hand.

“What are you doing?” Alyndia asked the woman in white.

“Giving you your medication,” she said. At the bedside, she removed the plastic cap on the syringe to reveal a short, shiny needle.

“I don’t need this,” Alyndia said, her voice almost a plea. “I’m much calmer now.” She strained weakly against the straps that bound her, but it was no use.”

“Dr. Kasabian—tell her to stop.”

The doctor did not react immediately. The nurse stuck the needle into the I.V. tube that fed Alyndia’s left arm and, with the quick press of the plunger, injected the tube with the clear liquid.

“What are you giving her?” Dr. Kasabian asked the nurse as he put away his phone.

“Thorazine: 400 mg per day. Demerol: 150 mg four times daily,” she replied stiffly.

“Why are you still giving her such high dosages if the patient is restrained? And why Demerol?”

“Dr. Gilbreth’s orders.”

Dr. Kasabian scrutinized Alyndia with her head sunken into the pillow. “I just got through speaking with her. She seems coherent. I don’t think this treatment is necessary.”

“Well, thank you for the observation, Dr. Kasabian,” she said in a harried tone. “I’ll be sure to mention it to Dr. Gilbreth in my daily report.” She put the cap back on the syringe and squeaked out of the room.

“Friendly staff up here,” Dr. Kasabian said after the nurse was out of sight.

“See what I mean?” Alyndia responded. “I think they’re trying to punish me.”

“I very well doubt that. But, in the future, I recommend that you avoid harming the hospital staff. Harming anyone in this place, including the other patients, will not get you out of here any sooner. In fact, it will only prolong your stay. Promise me you won’t harm anyone else.”

“Okay. I promise you.”

He looked into Alyndia’s eyes. She returned the gaze. Now Alyndia felt the tug of drowsiness in the deep centers of her brain as her lucidity began to ebb. Despite the creeping lethargy that swept over her mind like an ocean wave in slow motion, she felt at ease. She sensed intuitively that Dr. Kasabian was her friend. She shut her eyes. Now she felt herself slowly falling, tumbling head over heels into what seemed an endlessly deep, dark well.

“Please call her,” Alyndia said to him, suddenly unsure as to whether he was even still there in the room with her.

* * *

Dr. Gerald Layton was now home after having spent a greater part of the day packing his belongings into boxes at the university. As word of his arrest and the pilferage of university supplies spread throughout the faculty, the decision was made to release him from employment at the university. Ever since he was released from custody a few days before, he kept the phone close by in case Alyndia called. It had been almost a week since he’d seen her at the police station. It baffled him that she hadn’t called. He’d spent a great deal of his free time online searching for Connie Bain’s contact information, but her phone number was unlisted, and she had no discernible social media accounts or Internet footprint that he could find. What scant clues he could find out about her always led him back to the CIA website. Unable to contact her, he feared the worst. He occupied himself with long-neglected minor home repairs and other household tasks. He felt that as long as he kept himself busy, he would be able to keep the demons of alcohol and worry at bay.

One part of his home he always avoided was the master bedroom he shared with Elise. Shortly after the accident, he’d stopped sleeping in the room and had a lock put on the door to prevent the cleaning woman, who came on Wednesday afternoon, from entering. And since that time, he slept in one of the guest rooms—or on the couch downstairs if he was too drunk to climb the stairs. But, on this day, he took the tarnished bass key from its hook in the kitchen and entered the room.

Although the house was full of memories of their long marriage together, this room was the most painful of all for him to enter, for all of her remaining possessions still dominated there. This room was a hallowed, sacred place, a lingering shrine to the harmonious life they once shared together. He’d kept the room in the same condition it was in on their last night together, hoping that someday she would return to it and life could go on as it had before. But now that Alyndia had arrived, the time had come to perturb this hallowed place by removing the relics contained therein. He approached this task not without a small amount of dread.

He unlocked the door, and with a gentle push, let it swing open of its own momentum. The room was lit with the nearly heat-less afternoon sunset that shone nearly vertical through the lace-curtained windows that faced the east. He gazed inside for a moment, then, after taking a few deep breaths, he stepped into the middle of the room and surveyed the contents.

All at once, he felt the ghosts of a happier past watching him from all corners of the room. The room held a veritable cornucopia of horrors for him. On the vanity was a hairbrush with her blond hair still caught between its bristles. Her half-empty perfume bottles sat neatly arranged behind the brush at the base of the mirror. Her pink lady slippers still sat at the foot of the nightstand by the bed, faithfully waiting for their owner to step into them for a nocturnal jaunt to the kitchen for a midnight snack of toasted bagels slathered with peanut butter. A pair of white silk pants lay on the seat of a chair exactly where she’d tossed them a year ago. He knew that with each item of hers he picked up or moved would cause him a pang of loss. For with each item he moved, a memory of the past faded further away from tangible sensation, never to be recovered again.

He opened the French door to Elise’s walk-in closet. The light automatically switched on. There, in plain view, right where she’d hung it, was the yellow summer dress she’d bought a few years back. How she loved the color yellow—yellow, like the color of daffodils! He took out the dress and felt it in his fingers. It was clean and neatly pressed. He turned and put it on a wall hook just outside the closet doors. After he did so, he gazed at it for a while, recalling how lovely it had looked on her. He moved back to the closet, but finding it too painful to remove the other items, he closed it quickly. The light inside shut off with a click.

Draped over the chair at the vanity was her silky yellow nightgown. He picked up the soft fabric and felt it in his fingers, recalling that this very piece of cloth had once touched her body. He brought the nightgown to his nose and inhaled deeply. It still smelled of her. She was gone, that was certain. But as long as her heart beat in the hospital across town, there was always the remote hope that the essence of Annelise Layton would touch his life again either through her spirit or the supernatural soul of Alyndia.

Nightgown still in hand, he sat down on the bed, remembering the times she wore it. He thought it was funny that such a trivial memory, such as one’s wife wearing a nightgown, could become such a precious artifact in one’s mind. He stared up at the yellow dress hanging on the hook. “Elise,” he said aloud, imagining that the woman who once wore it could still hear him.

“So what do you think, Jerry?” Elise Layton asked her husband as she spun around in her bright yellow, new summer dress.

Gerald looked up at her from his book, a story collection by Jorge Louis Borges, a gift from a colleague in the Humanities Department. “What is there not to like about it?” he replied.

She gazed at herself in the mirror, fanning out the lower part. “Do you think it fits me well? Like in the shoulders?”

“Yes. It looks fine.”

“The color?”

“It’s as summery as summer can be.”

She spun around to face him before he could get back into the thrall of Borges’s fiction. “Really? Will you mind that I wear it to Richard’s graduation?”

He put down the book. “Elise, you could go naked, and I’d still go anywhere with you.”

“Would you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But I’m not twenty-two anymore, and my body doesn’t look like it’s twenty-two anymore either. I have some stretch marks here and here, and—you know.” She put her hands over her breasts. “Doesn’t it bother you?”

“No.”

“Not even a little? Be honest.”

“You’ve only improved with age.”

Elise gave Gerald a coy look. “Have I, now?”

“Okay, so there are a few differences between now and then, but you’re still the same woman I fell in love with so many years ago.”

“Am I really?”

“If you saw yourself through my eyes, you would understand.”

“Jerry, that’s a very, very nice thing to say to your wife.”

“Are you mocking me again?”

“Of course. You know I mock only those people that I like.”

He smiled at her. She moved over to the bed, where he was reclining with his legs outstretched. She sat down on the floor next to him, then girlishly rested her chin on her folded arms at the edge of the bed. He feigned reading the book while she gazed over at him quietly.

“I’ve been wondering—” she said finally.

She did not continue until he affirmed his attention to her. “Yes?” he returned finally.

“Would you still have married me if I’d been a cripple, or if I’d had no arms?”

“That’s a silly question. Of course, I would have,” he replied, not diverting his eyes from the book but keenly aware of her proximity beside him.

She lifted the book out of his hands and laid it on the floor. Then, one by one, she proceeded to unbutton his shirt, starting from the top button and working her way down. After all the buttons had been undone, she ran a manicured finger lightly over his chest. He closed his eyes and let her touch consume his senses.

“You said you’d go anywhere with me, even if I were naked,” she said, running her finger around his navel in a circle.

“That’s right.”

“Where would you take me right now if I take off this dress?”

Gerald reached out and stroked the nape of her neck. “Anywhere you want to go—just as long as we go together.”

The phone on the nightstand began to ring. Elise ignored it and continued running her finger in circles on his belly, feeding him butterflies in his viscera. The phone rang again. Then it rang again. Gerald tried ignoring the ring, hoping it would stop. But it came again. He knew he wouldn’t have success in succumbing to her touch until the phone stopped its insistent ring.

“So, what are you waiting for?” she said, oblivious to the phone.

“Someone is calling,” he said, his voice tinged with regret. “I have to answer it.”

All at once, Gerald woke up. He had fallen asleep on the bed with the yellow nightgown clutched in his hands. At first, he thought he dreamed that the phone was ringing too, until it rang again. He picked it up. “Hello?”

“I’m calling for Gerald Layton.”

“This is he,” Gerald replied.

“My name is Dr. Patel. I’m a physician in the ICU at Mercy Hospital. I’m calling in regard to your wife, Annelise Layton.”

Gerald swallowed hard. A feeling of dread washed over him as he held the handset to his ear. “Yes, Dr. Patel. How is my Elise?”

The caller paused briefly before he continued. “I regret to tell you this, but your wife went into cardiac arrest this afternoon.

The caller paused again. Gerald prompted him to continue.

“And?”

“We were not able to revive her. She passed away twenty minutes ago. I’m very sorry to give you the news.”