Cotard

The bus had tipped into a ditch, and all of us passengers were forced to get off and wait for rescue in the middle of the road, in the sweltering afternoon heat, lined up in the meager shade of the vehicle because its interior had become an oven, and to look at we had only the soybean field on one side and the savannah on the other, so we ended up watching the driver, up to his neck in grease, tinkering with the guts of that iron whale, sometimes looking at us with a pained expression and throwing himself back to work, a kind of martyr paying for our sins. He mentioned something about a broken hydraulic pump, a burst hose, a jammed rotary control valve that severed the wheels from the steering. After four hours, the new bus arrived to take us away, mute, filthy with dust clinging to our sweat, our brains cooked in our skulls. The driver, tending to his stranded whale, grew smaller and smaller in the golden light of the sunset, watching us as we were carried away, dimmed by the twilight and the air conditioning. I'm telling you all this just to say that when I disembarked alone from the cold darkness into the fluorescent lights of the bus station, dehydrated and starving in the middle of the night, and saw only one or two hopeless souls, it was as if I had died and gone to purgatory—but this image occurs to me only now, when I look back; at that moment, I just felt numb.

I had missed the interstate bus that would take me far from the countryside and had to wait another five hours until the morning. I stumbled between the grimy walls painted faded red, blue, and yellow, dragged my bags to a weak water fountain, and drank for a long time in hummingbird gulps. Around me, the shops were dark and abandoned. Only one snack bar was open, its ghostly vendor disappearing and reappearing under the flickering fluorescent light. Only stale savory snacks remained in the display case. I bought half a dozen deep-fried chicken croquettes and sat down in a plastic chair.

I bit into a croquette—it was as if they'd fried the sponge used to wash a pan where they'd cooked the chicken. It hit my empty stomach and churned my hunger into waves of nausea. My throat burned bitter with the rancid grease.

“This face you’re making, I once knew a corpse who did the same thing.” At some point, a man dressed too heavily for that warm night, wearing a cap and clutching a balled-up tarpaulin, had crept into the chair beside me. His eyes, deep-set in his thin face and shadowed by his cap, were lost in the night. He repeated, “That face you’re making, I knew a corpse that made this same face.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m telling you. At the Pax Psychiatric Clinic, where I was a patient for a while, there was a woman with the surname Xavier (they called her Mademoiselle X) who made that same face when she was forced to eat.”

“Ah.” A fly crawled on my hand as I held the plate of croquettes. In the clear light, another passenger slept in a corner, wedged between the armrests of the plastic chairs, using her suitcase as a pillow. The parking lot, dark with oil, was like the sea at night, illuminated only at its edge by the white fluorescence overhead and stretching out vast and mysterious. Only the fly moved.

“She was dead, which is why she didn’t eat. The dead don’t eat, she used to say.”

Exhausted, I took a deep breath and tried to come to terms with yet another episode in my day. “I suppose you find all sorts of things in an asylum,” I said. “Did she think she was dead, this madwoman?”

“No. She was really dead.”

I looked around. I'd already spent everything I had, except for a few bucks for food, and at that hour, in a tiny town like that, there was no guarantee a hotel would be open. My weakness made the idea of ​​wandering in the middle of the night as uncomfortable as a thorn in my foot. So I slid down on the seat, accepted my plight with masochistic comfort, thinking that perhaps that was how the bus driver felt when he decided to suffer in front of the passengers, and finally asked the wanderer, “What was the dead woman doing in the psychiatric hospital instead of the cemetery?”

“She said she had been evil and had lost her eternal soul.”

“No, I mean, why was she in an asylum?”

“Her family thought that she was just depressed, that she was misinterpreting this depression.” The man rummaged through his tarpaulin ball, sticking his hand into an inner fold. He knew the bundle by touch, because without looking he pulled out a bluish-green pamphlet and held it out to me (Pax Psychiatric Clinic consultation treatment multidisciplinary care etc etc), as if my disbelief were about the existence of the place.

“This undead woman wanted brains? Was she wearing a straitjacket?”

“She would just sit on the sofa. She said she felt cold, the kind of cold that creeps into your organs and makes them shrink away from your skin. One morning I went out for a therapy session that consisted of singing opera to horses, and when I returned in the afternoon, she was still on the sofa. I asked her how long she had been there. She told me, ‘A thousand years.’” Although his gaze was lost in the night and his head bobbed slightly, almost imperceptibly at first, simply dismissing him as crazy seemed too convenient; there was a disturbing intelligence in his formality.

“Mademoiselle X knew how to read the clock,” he said, “but she did nothing with the information the clock gave her. She didn’t eat or sleep or participate in her scheduled activities.”

With his sunken eyes and the sour breath of a starving man, the wanderer looked as if he hadn’t slept or eaten in ages. I told him to eat a croquette, but he didn’t even look at the plate; he just stared into the darkness shaking his head harder and harder, to the rhythm of a song only he could hear. I feared he was going back to the asylum, and I feared the kind of madman he could become when he fell into a trance, so I said the first thing that came to mind: “Why do you say she was a real corpse, this Ms. X?”

“Because I never saw her eat or drink.” He pronounced the words as if he had learned to speak by reading a manual. “She didn’t even go to the bathroom. I also know she was dead because of how everything ended.”

“How was that?”

“The doctors insisted that it was a syndrome, that Mademoiselle X did in fact feel gray inside, but argued that she interpreted her symptoms of dissociation and detachment as a delusion. They maintained that, in trying to piece the puzzle together, she had formed an entirely wrong picture. So the director, Dr. Burton, asked for our help to dismantle her delusion by scrambling the pieces. Dr. Burton—with his beard, teeth, and physique all meticulously crafted in the style of modern medicine—is a thoroughly modern man, and he holds these thoroughly modern ideas. He proposed doing it through a prank.”

“A prank?” 

“A therapeutic prank. A Halloween party. We weren’t surprised—the clinic was always throwing some sad party, decking the walls with cardboard decorations that the patients ignored. This time, they met with us beforehand, without Mademoiselle X, and asked us to dress and act like zombies. Of course, they asked this only of the drug users, sex addicts, depressives and anxiety patients—that is, no truly crazy people. They said it would be fun, a joke, but those words were empty for us. We agreed to it because we agreed to everything. After performing incessant meaningless rituals, routines, and therapies, after obeying not only the nurses but also the lunatics who attack you if you chew in a way they don’t like, you lose track of the common narrative. Life becomes a theater stage, you become an actor pretending to see the walls around you.

“In any case, the doctors and nurses wanted to convince Mademoiselle X that if the undead around her were eating, she should eat too, and ultimately cure her with meat. Perhaps have her join us in a festive dance. In short, have her behave a little more as if she were alive. They explained this to us, but we barely listened, because the explanations and the world had become a sequence of absurdities. And for some of us, I know, they still are. 

“When Halloween arrived, we went down to the back patio. I had never seen a party as elaborate as that one. Prop tombstones turned the patio into a graveyard. Purple lights cast the shadows of giant skulls against the walls. No music played, only the sounds of night creatures over the loudspeakers. All of us patients had blood-smeared faces and deep gashes and amputated limbs, our arms tucked inside our sleeves. The nurses, who had helped us with the makeup, seemed happy, for the first time since I had met them, to see us dead.

“Finally, they brought Mademoiselle X. Two orderlies guided her thin, frail body by the arms in small steps. She felt her way down the step leading to the patio, afraid her head would fall off if she tilted it. Carefully, they placed her at the table before the banquet. Meats sculpted in the shape of human hearts, pasta in the shape of worms, gelatin in the shape of brains, white chocolate grapes painted as eyes. Away from her sofa, Mademoiselle X seemed frightened.

“Dr. Burton took the floor, said something about it being Halloween and spirits being on the loose, and called upon the dead to feast. Ignoring Mademoiselle X, we swarmed the table. Plates piled above and around her, hands reached out to devour organs as if the gates of hell had opened. Tongues snapped, eyes burst, sangria spilled.

“First, Mademoiselle X made a strange face, just like yours a moment ago, and then raised her plate. The doctors in the back, seeing this, smiled and patted Dr. Burton on the shoulder. Our crowd also cast admiring glances at Mademoiselle X, but Dr. Burton rushed forward, somehow shouting a whisper, ordering us not to stop. From behind Mademoiselle X, he gestured, ‘Keep going, keep going!’

“We continued with renewed eagerness. Encouraged by the doctors, we stopped using cutlery. A patient buried his face in the brain gelatin, groaning like a zombie from a movie, and we laughed madly. Mademoiselle X began to rise, a plate in one hand, the other bent into a claw toward the food. She was half-upright, her thin knees bent, when a nurse approached from behind and pulled the chair back to give her room to stand. The scrape of the chair caught her attention. Although she already had room to stand, she remained hunched over, her hand still clawed, and slowly turned her head to see what had touched her. In one swift movement, she dropped the plate and flew into the nurse's face. Her teeth ripped from upper lip to nose, a finger found the gap between eyelid and eyeball, and long nails tore at the neck. Both women fell to the floor. A sudden hush settled over the patio, pierced only by the nurse's shrill screams and the villainous laugh blaring from the loudspeakers. The orderlies struggled to get through the crowd. They pushed aside the patients, who stood inert, watching the attack like just another senseless event. A piece of flesh from the nurse's face lodged in Mademoiselle X's throat, making her gurgle as she breathed.

“When an orderly finally reached her and gave her a pull and a shove, Mademoiselle X rolled toward me. I fell to the floor, Mademoiselle X fell on top of me, and other orderlies arrived, wrestling over my body. News of pain reached me as if through a tunnel; a great apathy had taken hold of me. Everything was absurd and exhausting, and I was so tired of pretending for so long, and I still am, but it was at the moment of that attack that I took in all that dejection.”

Something screamed in the darkness, maybe an owl. The sleeping passenger stirred in her seat. I simply stared ahead as the wanderer did, following the rhythmic flickering of the fluorescent lamp behind us by the shadows leaping from side to side ahead.

“Wow,” was all I could manage to say. “Damn. That’s something…” I had several questions, especially whether any of it had really happened, but I didn’t know how to ask such a thing. “And what happened after the party?”

“The orderlies carried Mademoiselle X into the building as she thrashed about, and I never saw her again. I don’t know if the nurse is alive. Dr. Burton was fired. My family, who had been paying to be rid of me, learned that I’d been wounded and suddenly began pretending to care deeply about my health. Hah. I’m an expert in pretense now; I can tell when things are mere convention.”

“Were you wounded?”

The wanderer pulled up the sleeves of his coat, his shirt, and the T-shirt underneath, revealing a gaunt forearm with three or four crescent-shaped wounds. Stretched and red as a balloon, his skin looked ready to burst into pus between the blood clots. At a point near the wrist, the crescent-shaped bites overlapped and a clear liquid had seeped out and solidified, giving his arm a plastic sheen. From under his clothes rose the smell of a dead animal. “They got me out of there, and they’re suing Pax for allowing me to get hurt. But when I ran away from my family’s house again, I know they were relieved.”

“Man, you need a doctor.”

“I'm tired of doctors. Besides, I don't care.”

“Don't you think Ms. X has also left you a little gray inside?”

“I do feel like none of this can be real.”

In an effort to be more articulate, I mustered my wits and felt proud of myself when I said, “Well, since I’ve never been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, I’m an expert on matters of reality, and I assure you that some things are real. You need antibiotics, food, rest.”

“That’s where we disagree. I think you’re operating under a series of delusions—as Dr. Burton would put it—and, having seen both sides of the coin, I believe I’m more reliable when it comes to asserting that no sentence beginning with ‘you need to do such-and-such’ can possibly be real. Nothing is real except this cold weather we have today.” 

It was always half past four on the station's stopped clock. From the dark parking lot, the cold wind carried the sound of trees rustling like waves. The wanderer gradually stopped swaying; I noticed it out of the corner of my eye, and stopped feeling the rocking of my chair. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it was like to live in Mademoiselle X’s world, on the other side of death. I felt a contraction, a detachment from the sensations of my body, from the touch and sound of the wind, and in their place a silence, an artificiality of lights illuminating absurd things that wouldn't concern me. A terrible jet lag. It was cold, though at least my hunger had passed. Hours went by; I waited for the morning bus, but morning didn't come, and it still hasn't. 

In a flash I saw, and I opened my eyes in fright. I touched the arms of the plastic chair, felt my legs, and shook my head. Looking at the dirty, primary-colored walls of the bus station, I repeated to myself, “This is all I have left,” because I had seen this house of cards collapse into a senseless hell, and I still feel the free fall, and know that I will see the abyss if I look at the world with the wrong eyes.

Quickly, I lifted the plate, grabbed the other half of the croquette I had bitten into hours ago, and put it in my mouth. “You need to eat something,” I said to the wanderer, his head now hanging over his shoulder, resting on me, his cap covering his face. “How long have you been here without eating?” I insisted, chewing the cold and oily mass. “Which bus are you waiting for?” I pushed the plate against his arm, but he did not answer. I gave the wanderer a hard shove with my shoulder, toppling him to the other side, and for the first time my gaze met his. Although his eyes were fixed, deep and shadowed by his cap, I could see how the fluorescent lights of the station reflected in them, as if I were looking through the shroud at the stars of a strange sky. As the greasy lump hit my stomach and my face twisted in a tearful grimace, his fingers wrapped around my wrist.