Kissing the Wind Read online

  chapter two

  Next morning, first thing, I made an appointment with our family doctor, Louis Litman, an extraordinary man who had watched over my well-being all my life. He had been a devoted friend of my father’s and was a man of years—eighty-eight, I’d guess—who dispatched healthy wisdom as well as prescriptions. The tragic loss of my father, a father who had been a close and vital part of my life, had prompted Doc Lou to keep an eye on me.

  “Well, Chet,” Doc Lou said with his gravelly voice, “it’s about time something’s gone kerplunk with you.”

  I was in no mood for our usual banter but went right into the onslaught of events that had bedeviled me, from the rubber plant in the elevator with its connected tendrils to the pine clusters in the salad, the grating over the water in my toilet, the black dots all over the carpets, the stranger in my apartment.

  “Unnerving things, and I’m spooked, Doc Lou.”

  “Well, you may have had a tiny stroke. That may account for it. Let’s take a look at you.”

  He gave me a thorough examination, stethoscoping my back with deep breaths, checking my heart, lungs, hearing, eyes, oxygen level, and blood pressure, and taking blood samples, the whole medical works.

  “Not a ripple, Chet. But maybe the lab’ll turn up something. Meanwhile, I think you should get an MRI of your brain and have the brain boys take a look. You ever had an MRI?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s a little spooky. They seal you into this coffin like a mummy and churn eerie noises at you.” He picked up his phone and made an MRI appointment for me. “I’ll be in touch when I get the results.”

  “Thanks, Doc Lou.”

  He scribbled on his prescription pad and tore one off for me. “All right, take one of these anti-worries at bedtime. You remember the time you came to me with your pal Charlie, when you two were the basketball backcourt for Haverford and you had an ankle the size of an aggravated salami and you were worried you’d have to miss the championship game?”

  I had to laugh. “And you gave me an anti-worry lollipop and a shot in my ankle before the game.”

  “And you guys were phenomenal! I felt pride in your ankle every time you scored a basket. So my advice is, go do the MRI and tonight take a good shot of bourbon and one of my pills, and let me do the worrying.”

  chapter three

  As Doc Lou had predicted, I felt like a mummy when I was strapped into the MRI’s cylindrical casket by two white-garbed men who told me not to move after the lid was closed, entombing me. The padded top was only an inch or two above my face. A deep throbbing sound flooded the space, accompanied by a voice that said to stay motionless. A high-pitched whining sound joined in, and the MRI took off! I had expected a stationary experience but to my rather frightened amazement the MRI bolted forward toward a canal of water that appeared before me. It charged right up to the edge, threatening me with immersion, then spinning away at the last second, running alongside the canal, weaving around obstacles while I shriveled in fright, unable to process what was happening, on the verge of passing out, feeling a kind of suffocation, until we suddenly stopped, the throbbing sounds turned off, and the cover of the MRI raised as the white-garbed men pushed a pedestal up to the hatch for me to use for departure. I inspected the MRI, which was now as solidly affixed to its base on the floor as it had been before, and there was no evidence of its having been anywhere. I wanted to ask the attendants about my wild ride but they were already busy prepping for the next patient.

  I had tickets for the theater that evening, but I decided I had had enough drama for the day and gifted them to Charlie. When I saw him I gave a moment’s thought to confiding in him, but I found myself in a kind of embarrassment about describing the events that were troubling me and said nothing. So we had a quick drink and he left to collect his wife while I stayed on, ordered a fresh gin and tonic, and faced the prospect of an evening spent alone, brooding about my whirling MRI adventure. I considered calling Doc Lou on his cell phone but instead ordered another gin and tonic and attacked the bar bowl of peanuts.

  While diminishing the peanuts, I found myself dwelling angrily on my Dixon entrapment. I came to the conclusion that I had to put a definite end to my uncommitted engagement to Violet and to all involvement with Dixon’s tennis and bridge and everything else Dixonian.

  Doc Lou called the following day to report on my MRI. “So, Chet, your brain is A-okay, no sign of any lesions from mini-strokes or anything else.”

  I was a bit disappointed, hoping there would be some evidence to explain the freaky nature of my recent encounters.

  I told him about my wild ride in the MRI machine.

  “It took you all over the place and skidded around watery canals?” There was a long pause on the telephone. “I think the best thing now, Chet, is for you to see a good neurologist who is better equipped than I am to deal with your special problems. I know one of the best, Dr. Alexander Brevoro. He is in demand, long wait list, but I can get you an appointment. What do you say?”

  “Please do. The sooner, the better.”

  I hunkered down in my apartment that evening, boldly turning on the lights and hanging up my jacket. The music channel was playing on television, Mozart. I went to turn it off, only to discover it had not been turned on. And yet channel 899 was playing. This was not a day for my cleaning woman, besides which Glenda had never ever turned on the television. She also despised what she called “long-haired pussy music.” I turned the set on and off and Mozart departed.

  Two flowering bushes had been planted in the living room carpet, but I didn’t make any effort to get rid of them.

  I made myself a drink and turned on an evening news program. As the anchor came on, so did a troupe of children who bunched themselves beside the television screen to watch the picture. They were very well-dressed boys and girls who made no sounds, none at all. The children were a little strange but not identifiable. I tried to shoo them away, waving my hands at them and shouting, but they didn’t look in my direction. I took a candle from its holder and tried to poke it at them, but they skillfully avoided it as they moved away from the living room. I got up to see where they were going but they simply disappeared through the front door even though it was closed and locked.

  I stifled a strong urge to go out to dinner and calm my galloping nerves (“You never fix a problem by running away from it”) and resignedly took a bag from the fridge that contained my take-out dinner from Citarella.

  I was awarded an evening devoid of interruption, but when I went to the bathroom before going to bed, the grid had returned to the toilet bowl and a cover of white feathers had obstructed the mirror over the sink. I tried to wipe them off but no amount of rubbing could remove them.

  I went to bed early, not turning off the end tables’ lamps and donning a pair of sleep masks, one on top of the other.

  Despite my precautions, a few minutes after I had slipped under the covers, an unending file of children began to pass by me. They did not look directly at me but held hands and moved in a rhythmic way. They seemed to communicate but made no conversational sounds or laughter or singing.

  I watched them as they left my bedroom and headed to the windows of the living room, where they seemed to disappear through the cracks between the molding and the glass. Looking at them, I felt a kind of paralysis. These were not figments: they were fully dimensioned children. I felt a rising panic in my body that shortened my breath and dried my mouth. There was no one I could call. There was no one who would believe me. No one who would see what I was seeing. With great effort, I forced myself to turn off the lights and take out the vial of sleeping pills that Doc Lou had given me. I swallowed the pills but my mind was of a blackness that the thought of swallowing all the rest of them crossed my mind.

  I lay there in the dark, my panicky mind fighting the pills. I took two more and only then induced myself to fall
asleep, thereby escaping for the time being from my dread and confusion.

  chapter four

  Dr. Alexander Brevoro was younger than I had expected, a handsome man in his late forties, I’d say, with a close-cropped beard and remarkable, penetrating deep-set eyes. His office was simply furnished, with no framed diplomas on the walls. Just seascapes and moonlit clouds.

  Dr. Brevoro asked me a few questions about my combined life as attorney and mystery writer but seemed more interested in the writing part of it. In a painful piece of irony, my recurring character was a blind Black man named Jefferson Honeywell, who solved difficult cases with the help of his remarkable Bedlington terrier. Honeywell was fashioned after an extraordinary blind student who was in my law class and ranked in the high fives. Yet ever since the tennis incident, when I had half-joined Honeywell and his inspiration, my creative drive had dried up.

  Perhaps sensing my pain around the subject, Dr. Brevoro transitioned to asking me to describe the incidents that Doc Lou had mentioned to him. He said he had scheduled me as the day’s last appointment so I’d have plenty of time.

  I started with the strange appearance in my apartment, then the grid on my toilet and the children parading by my bed but not looking at me. I was in the middle of my recounting the MRI voyage when he interrupted:

  “Tell me about your eyes.”

  “My eyes?”

  “Yes. How are your eyes?”

  “Well…I have them but the right one doesn’t function.”

  “You’re totally blind in that eye?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since when? Birth?”

  “No. Recently. I got blasted in my right eye with an overhead tennis shot. Why do you ask?”

  “My initial impression, which I will have to corroborate, is that you have Charles Bonnet syndrome.”

  “What is that?”

  “A very rare affliction that primarily occurs in older people who are blind or partially blind. Not much is known about it even among doctors. Dr. Litman, for example, never heard of it. It happens to be something that as a neurologist interests me. I have had Charles Bonnet patients who are visited at night by crowds of children, by intruders with bizarre, distorted faces, by beautifully gowned women who dance exotically by waving silk scarves that turn into rabbits. All of them were blind or partially blind, and elderly. And I have had patients who are middle-aged and suffer macular degeneration. But none as young as you, and it remains to be seen what your Charles Bonnet is going to inflict on you. For it is, no doubt, a form of torture that you can only treat by fighting your hallucinations with a strong instinctual awareness, convincing yourself that what is happening to you is stemming from a brain that is rebelling against its deprivation of sight in that eye.”

  “Are you telling me,” I said, “that all I can do to fight off this onslaught is to try to convince myself that it is not real?”

  “I’m afraid it is. There is no known cure, no medicine that reaches it. Various remedies have been tried, but none have had any effect whatsoever. There have been attempts to fiddle with the brain and they have made the Bonnet even worse for those who have tried it.”

  “Who was this Charles Bonnet?”

  “He was a Swiss naturalist who lived in the eighteenth century and specialized in early research in photogenesis, psychology, and eventually philosophy. But his interest in hallucinations began when his grandfather Charles Lullin started to experience ‘visions’ when his eyesight began to fail. Bonnet asked him to keep a day-to-day account of his hallucinations. This was around 1750. Over the ensuing years, Lullin took his task very seriously and filled pages and pages with accounts of his hallucinations. Bonnet came to the conclusion that it was the brain that was the source of those hallucinations, and when Bonnet himself developed partial blindness and suffered hallucinations similar to his grandfather’s, he was able to identify those visions as uniquely more dimensional and more serious than others. Unfortunately, Lullin’s valuable account was lost for one hundred and fifty years. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Bonnet syndrome really started finding its way into medical books, and Lullin’s hallucinations became medical history.”

  I was dumbfounded by this unexpected reality. A future filled with children at my television, parading around my bedroom, joining me at a restaurant. Strangers participating in every aspect of my life. The bathroom, the kitchen, my home in Connecticut—everywhere I went, they too would go. And this might be just the beginning. Ahead of me might be a future with awful assaults, even worse than what I had already experienced.

  “I’m afraid all I can do is to help you keep protecting yourself with the reality that your brain is creating the hallucinations, that they’re not something generated by mysterious outside forces with a reality of their own. That is the essence of Charles Bonnet syndrome.”

  “Then by coming here…”

  “I will analyze your experiences with you to keep you holding on to the reality of who you are and what you are. Otherwise, on your own, the Bonnet syndrome is so realistic it can cause a destructive negativism. There have been suicides…”

  “You paint a terrible future for me.”

  “I hope not. Your future is susceptible to your power over yourself to adapt. Also, it often happens that the Bonnet rescinds or abates for a while, sometimes for years.”

  “But it can return?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on how lucky you are.”

  He accompanied me to the door. We shook hands. He did not look positive. I did not feel lucky.

  chapter five

  I left Dr. Brevoro’s office feeling that an essential part of me had been removed, or rather had withered and died. A life infected with Bonnet syndrome, impervious to any known treatments, what little hope there was confined to the intervention of luck.

  I couldn’t focus on where to go to try to straighten out my mind. I moved along with the flow of the passing crowd, stopping at the corner. When the sign turned to “Walk” I didn’t cross the street with the waiting group but stayed rooted while several “Walk” signs changed. I was desperately trying to get hold of myself. Finally, I became aware of where I was and realized I was only a few blocks from Central Park. I headed to the Ramble, an unkempt woodland section I often visited, and found a secluded bench beside a mound of logs. Squirrels were busy and a couple of pigeons came up to me seeking handouts.

  Well, Chet, I thought, you might as well face the facts: it all stems from Dixon deliberately and fatally blasting your right eye. That was all the invitation Bonnet syndrome needed to move in and do its dirty work. And that was only the beginning: with only one eye to guide me, I’d had to give up driving my car because the insurance company wouldn’t cover me; for movies and plays, I had to always get seats in the center or the right orchestra; at dinner parties I had to surreptitiously switch the name cards to put my preferred seatmate to my left. And now, with the Bonnet spooking my food, I would have to start declining all invitations.

  It was time to put my house in order. Dixon and Violet had to go, right away. And the country club! And nighttime activities would have to be reduced as much as possible, since the dark nurtures the activities of Bonnet syndrome. I was alone in this. I could not call for help. There was no help. I had to meet it head-on.

  I felt the semblance of a tear in my good eye as a ball came bouncing up to me with a little boy chasing after it. He was wearing a Yankees shirt and cap and a baseball glove on his left hand. I flipped the ball to him and he caught it with his glove.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir,” he said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jack.”

  “Good name.”

  “If it’s my mom. John, if it’s my father.”

  “They don’t agree?”

  “Nope. You wanna play catch?”

  I stood up and he threw me the b
all, a rubberized version of a baseball, and I pitched it back to him.

  “Hey, you’re a good thrower.” He zipped it back to me. “You play? Are you a baseball player?” We began to toss the ball back and forth.

  “In college I pitched and my best buddy was my catcher.”

  “You hit any home runs?”

  “Not many. My buddy hit the homers.”

  “Can you curve and do sliders and knuckleballs?”

  “Are you a pitcher?”

  “No, sir. It’s shortstop for me. I’m very fast.” He took off full speed and circled back, throwing the ball to me as he slid to the bench. A young woman with short blond hair, carrying a few of what I surmised were Jack’s belongings, appeared.

  “Has he pestered you into becoming a Yankee?” she asked, trailing laughter.

  “John-Jack is about ready for the big leagues, isn’t he?” I said.

  “He knows how to curve and throw sliders and knuckleballs,” John-Jack said admiringly.

  “I can see he’s turned his baseballese on you,” the young woman said.

  “He’s my friend,” the boy declared. “We’re having a great catch.”

  “No you’re not,” his mother said. “We’re late. I couldn’t find you.”

  “Oh, Mom…”

  “Another time, John-Jack,” I said. “I come here often. Okay? But don’t try throwing a curve, your arm’s not ready for it.”

  “Mom, how about five minutes more?”

  “No minutes more. Thank the nice man for playing catch.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll look for you when I come…”

  I threw him the ball and he nestled it in the pocket of his glove. His mom smiled at me, a wonderful smile, and they left, John-Jack’s mother with her arm around his Yankee shoulders.

  I watched them going over the Bow Bridge and over Cherry Hill and in the direction of the looming beauty of Belvedere Castle. I sat down hard on the bench. A little boy like that, and a wife like that…I always thought those things would eventually be mine, but not now. Not under the curse of Bonnet syndrome.