Revival

On the other side of this open-air atrium is Cosgrove Hall, one of three Martin Center in-patient residences. The other two are for short-termers, mainly people with substance-abuse problems. The usual stay in those is twenty-eight days. Cosgrove is for people with issues that take longer to resolve. If they ever do.

Like the corridor in the main building, the one in Cosgrove is wide and carpeted. Like the corridor in the main building, the air is chilled to perfection. But there are no pictures on the walls, and no Muzak, either, because in it some of the patients hear voices murmuring obscenities or issuing sinister directives. In the main building’s corridor, some of the doors are open. Here, all are shut. My brother Conrad has been residing in Cosgrove Hall for almost two years now. The Martin Center administrators and the psychiatrist in charge of his case want to move him to a more permanent facility—Aloha Village on Maui has been mentioned—but so far I have resisted. Here in Kailua I can visit him after my appointments with Ed, and thanks to Hugh’s generosity, I can afford his upkeep.

Although I must admit my walks down the Cosgrove hallway are a trial.

I try to make them with my eyes fixed on my feet. I can do that, because I know it’s exactly one hundred and forty-two steps from the atrium doorway to Con’s small suite. I don’t always succeed—sometimes I hear a voice whispering my name—but mostly I do.

You remember Con’s partner, don’t you? The hunk from the University of Hawaii Botany Department? I didn’t name him then and don’t intend to now, although I might have done if he ever visited Co

I can think of two reasons.

One, Con wasn’t in his right mind . . . or in any mind at all, for that matter. After hitting the hunk over the head with a lamp, my brother ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and swallowed a handful of Valium tablets—a small handful. When Botany Boy came around (with a bloody scalp that needed stitches, but otherwise not much the worse for wear), he called 911. The police came and broke down the bathroom door. Con was passed out and snoring in the tub. The EMTs examined him and didn’t even bother to pump his stomach.

Con didn’t try very hard to kill either Botany Boy or himself—that’s the other reason. But of course, he was one of Jacobs’s first cures. Probably the first. On the day he left Harlow, Charlie told me that Con had almost certainly cured himself; the rest had been a trick, pure huggermugger. It’s a skill they try to teach in divinity school, he’d said. I was always good at it.

Only he lied. The cure was as real as Con’s current state of semi-catatonia. I know that now. I was the one Charlie co

There is hope, therefore I live.

Twice a week, after my talks with Ed, I sit in the living room of my brother’s suite and talk some more. Some of what I tell him is real—a kerfuffle at Harbor House that brought the police, a particularly large haul of almost-new clothes at the Goodwill, how I’ve finally gotten around to watching all five seasons of The Wire—and some of it is made up, like the woman I’m supposedly seeing who works as a waitress at the Nene Goose Bakery, and the long Skype conversations I have with Terry. Our visits are monologues rather than conversations, and that makes fiction necessary. My real life just won’t do, because these days it’s as sparsely furnished as a cheap hotel room.

I always finish by telling him he’s too thin, he has to eat more, and by telling him that I love him.

“Do you love me, Con?” I ask.

So far he hasn’t answered, but sometimes he smiles a little. That’s an answer of a kind, wouldn’t you agree?

 • • •

When four o’clock comes and our visit is over, I reverse course and walk back down to the atrium, where the shadows—of the palms, the avocados, and the big, twisted banyan at the center of it all—have begun to grow long.

I count my steps, and I take little glances at the door ahead of me, but otherwise keep my gaze firmly fixed on the carpet. Unless I hear that voice whispering my name.

Sometimes when that happens, I’m able to ignore it.

Sometimes I ca

Sometimes I look up in spite of myself and see that the hospital wall, painted soothing pastel yellow, has been replaced with gray stones held together by ancient mortar and covered with ivy. The ivy is dead, and the branches look like grasping skeletal hands. The small door in the wall is hidden, Astrid was right about that, but it’s there. The voice comes from behind it, drifting through an ancient rusty keyhole.

I walk on resolutely. Of course I do. Horrors beyond comprehension wait on the other side of that door. Not just the land of death, but the land beyond death, a place full of insane colors, mad geometry, and bottomless chasms where the Great Ones live their endless, alien lives and think their endless, malevolent thoughts.

It’s the Null beyond that door.

I walk on, and think of the couplet in Bree’s last email: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die.

Jamie, an old woman’s voice whispers from the keyhole of a door only I can see. Come. Come to me and live forever.

No, I tell her, just as I told her in my vision. No.

And . . . so far, so good. But eventually something will happen. Something always does. And when it does . . .

I will come to Mother.

April 6, 2013–December 27, 2013

Author’s Note

CHUCK VERRILL is my agent. He sold the book, and provided aid and comfort along the way.

NAN GRAHAM edited the book with a sharp eye and an even sharper blue pencil.

RUSS DORR, my tireless researcher, provided information when information was needed. If I screwed something up, it was because I failed to understand. In such cases blame me, not him.

SUSAN MOLDOW took all my calls, even when I was being a pain in the ass, and urged me ever onward.

MARSHA DeFILIPPO and JULIE EUGLEY mind my real-world affairs so I can live in my imagination.

TABITHA KING, my wife and best critic, pointed out the soft places and urged me to fix them. Which I did, to the best of my ability. I love her a bunch.

Thanks to all of you, and special thanks to THE ROCK BOTTOM REMAINDERS, who taught me you’re never too old to rock and roll and have kept me high-stepping to “In the Midnight Hour” since 1992. Key of E. All that shit starts in E.

—Bangor, Maine

About the Author

Photograph © Shane Leonard