Pearl (24 page)

16

Dr. Morrisey sits down in the chair beside Pearl’s bed. We have met her already, you may remember. She was the one who cut Pearl’s chains; it was she who was able to start the IV when the others couldn’t. She is youngish, blond, a short woman with a muscular body. Her eyes are gray, the eyes of a candid boy, a boy adept at collection (stamps, rocks) or the minor, nontheoretical sciences (botany, taxonomy). Eyes that would seem to have very little in them of animal warmth, no sign of instinct or of appetite. This is misleading; this is the effect of her glasses, thick but not unfashionable.

“I’m Dr. Morrisey,” she says. “I don’t know if you remember me from the time at the embassy. I’ll be in charge of your case. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

Pearl won’t say a word.

“When’s the last time you had something to drink?”

She turns her head away.

“I’m just going to check on some things.” The doctor moves the sheets back so that Pearl’s legs are exposed; touches her feet, presses them, pinches the skin on her hand. Pulls the sheets up again.

“You could die as a result of dehydration. We need to know when you drank last so that we can help you.”

Help me? There is nothing you can do to help.

“We need to do some tests on you now you’ve had some fluids. Can you stand up at all?”

Pearl closes her eyes.

“I’m going to have to insist that you try to stand up.”

Insist all you want, she thinks. There’s nothing I will do for you.

“I would prefer not to do it this way, but I have no choice,” the doctor says. She comes back with two nurses. They lift Pearl to her feet. She tries to collapse. They force her upright.

“We have to do postural vital signs,” she says to the nurses. “Keep her that way, if you can.”

The nurses hold her up; the doctor attaches a blood pressure cuff to her arm. Squeezes the bulb. The pressure on her arm, the force of being made to stand, the fear that they will steal her death are overwhelming her. She begins to cry. But she can only grimace. Tears will not come. She feels the sense of overflowing, but nothing flows from her eyes.

“You see, the dehydration is so bad she can’t produce tears. I’ve seen tearlessness before, mostly in babies. It’s a dangerous sign.”

They lay her down, cuff her again, squeeze the bulb.

“The pressure’s way different sitting and lying down. The signs both point to acute dehydration. This is very bad.”

No, it’s very good, Pearl thinks, and, closing her eyes, allows herself to smile. Tom, the medical student—the suicide watcher, as she thinks of him—comes back into the room. He sees she is smiling. She sees his worried face, and she is sorry for him. When she dies, when she achieves what she has worked for, he will have been seen to fail.

“I don’t want my mother allowed in to see me,” Pearl says, in a voice that is not a voice but a croak. “I won’t cooperate unless you promise.”

“She’s flown all the way from America. She’s in Dublin now,” Dr. Morrisey says.

“I want her kept out,” Pearl says. The tube in her throat makes it difficult for her to talk.

“I’ll take it under advisement,” the doctor says. “I won’t do anything without consulting you. I promise there’ll be no surprises.”

I don’t promise anything at all, Pearl thinks. I don’t promise that I’ll cooperate as I suggested; there are no questions of honor for me anymore, except to keep the promise of my death. She knows that, up to now, she has always been a person of her word. But now her words are precious; the only real ones are the words that make up the sentence of her death. Death sentence . . . the sentence of my death, she thinks, and smiles again, and worries once more that Tom, who watches her, is troubled by her smiling.

17

Hazel Morrisey is glad that at least she was able to make some connection with her patient, to offer something that might be the beginning of a bond. Even if it is only that she will prevent the mother from seeing her child, something which, as a mother herself, she finds disturbing.

But Pearl Meyers is her patient; Pearl is her concern. She can’t allow herself to consider Pearl’s mother’s feelings or her own. She is a doctor; her job is to heal. In this case, to keep this girl alive.

Since she heard the first details of Pearl’s case, she has known that creating any kind of relationship would be difficult. She is the doctor on call at the hospital. Her primary job is to keep her patient alive. In the best of cases, she will succeed and then pass her on to someone else for long-term care. How can she suggest that Pearl can trust her, can rely on her, when their relationship will be so short?

Hazel Morrisey is a psychiatrist who specializes in teenagers in acute distress, distress unto death. But when she was Pearl’s age and a medical student, she didn’t imagine she would do this kind of work. She is an interesting woman, Hazel Morrisey, with an interesting history.

When she finished her degree, Dr. Morrisey traveled, like many Irish, to Somalia to work in the famine. She was overwhelmed by it, wasted body after wasted body. She would save a life, many lives, but it didn’t seem to matter. There were so many who couldn’t be helped. And even if she saved everyone she saw, there would be more and more. She would hear of shipments of food rotting in warehouses because of bureaucratic errors. She would think of the waste of food, good food in garbage bins behind restaurants, on the sidewalks of suburban towns. She envied people who turned these perceptions into solutions she found oversimple: that there were the greedy and the victims, and the greedy must be punished so the victims could have their share. These people were given an energy by their beliefs, as some of her brother’s friends were given energy by siding with the IRA, but she couldn’t do that either. Temperamentally, she liked to consider things carefully, from all sides, not rush into plans that could turn out to be disastrous. So she didn’t know what could be done about her country, what could be done about the famine in Somalia. And she woke every morning, dead inside, to face dying body after dying body. A wave of them, endless to her.

She stayed her time; she knew that she did good, yet she left feeling a failure. She came home to her mother in Cork City and allowed herself to be cared for like a child. This went on for a month, six weeks. She decided she no longer wanted to treat sick bodies, to patch them up and send them on their way. The prospect of ailing bodies was dissatisfying to her imagination. In some ways it was impossible; in some ways it was too easy. She wanted a different relationship with death and body. Not just to treat a dying animal who would, whatever she did, somehow die of something. She would have a different relationship to illness. She would treat illness of the mind.

Dr. Morrisey retrained in psychiatry and found herself drawn to adolescents. Her time in Somalia had shown her the effects of hunger; it interested her that young people would choose death by hunger in places in the world where this could be a choice. She began treating anorexics, drawn to them in part by vanity, because most doctors didn’t like treating them (for most they were an unsympathetic lot). She sympathized with anorexics. She would keep them alive. Observe and treat their desperation, the desperation of their hatred for their own flesh, which they would burn up, consume, with the avidity of the old saints. Feed them and wean them from an ideal of perfection, which was really the ideal of death.

Pearl is interesting to her. Hazel Morrisey understands her feelings of being overwhelmed by the world, her desire for purity. She is interested in this girl whose language is the body and yet not the body: who wants to use her body, use her death. But she may only say Pearl is an interesting case. Her job is to keep her alive with chemicals: nutriments, psychotropic drugs. To give her, for a little while, the sense that she is not alone. And then give the real work over to somebody else.

She worries, of course, that her identification with the patient will compromise her effectiveness as a doctor. This was not a problem she had to concern herself with when she specialized in internal medicine. But now she’s a psychiatrist, and there is a word for the danger of overidentification: it’s called countertransference. She is the kind of psychiatrist who still believes in this sort of thing, this kind of language. There are others who would say their responsibility is to find the correct drug for the problem that seems to be in the patient’s way, no different from trying to find the right chemotherapy for a cancer patient. She is young enough to have been trained in the usefulness of psychotropic drugs, but she is of a sufficiently complicated nature to believe there is more—that beyond the chemical soup there is something else. A self, a soul? She will not concern herself with the proper naming of this other thing, but she believes in the power of language, if not to cure at least to begin to heal. So how should she talk to Pearl Meyers? She cannot say, What you are doing is quite interesting, in some ways admirable. She cannot suggest a connection between them that will go on for more than a very short time. What she must do is try to make this tormented young woman feel less alone, less helpless—while understanding that, in thwarting Pearl’s plan for her own death, she will have made her feel more helpless than before.

But she’s made a beginning. She’s said she’ll respect Pearl’s wish to keep her mother away. Or at least she’ll consider it. That was something. Something is better than nothing. This is, perhaps, the most important thing her work has taught her.

18

“There’s a message for you, Ms. Meyers,” Orla, the desk clerk, tells Maria, as she passes the desk on the way from the breakfast room to the elevator. Maria’s heart beats hard. Has something happened to Pearl? She doesn’t want to look. No, it is Joseph, only Joseph; his plane is delayed.

She goes up to her room to try the doctor’s office again and is told, again, that the doctor will be unavailable until afternoon. There is no change in her daughter’s condition. Is there any chance the doctor will be available before the afternoon? No chance, the secretary says. I’ll try anyway, Maria says, warning the woman of her determination.

What can she do, alone, trapped in this room (she must not leave it, she must be by the phone), still with nothing to read except the papers she stole and the old copies of
The Economist
she borrowed from the lobby? She turns on the television: once again, they are speaking about the weather in the west. On another channel, politicians who mean nothing to her are discussing issues in which she has no interest. An episode of
Seinfeld
. She lets her eye fall on the familiar New York landscape but cannot concentrate; the laugh track irritates her, and she turns it off. She opens the newspaper. Reads about the Middle East. Puts the paper down. Why is the room so ugly? Its smallness, the ungenerous nature of its lines, makes her feel punished, and her punishment, she feels, with her daughter close to death, is already more than she can bear. And what is her sin?
Sin, punishment.
She thought she had given up those terms.

She turns off the light. Better to lie in darkness than have her eye fall upon the spirit-stealing curtains, the discouraging rug. She will enter a darkness in which she can compose herself. In which she can prepare a course of action. Arm herself. Against what? She must arm herself against assaults she cannot yet see or name. She must prepare a face and a voice that betray no uncertainty, a voice and a face like a fortress. Or turn herself into the tiger mother, using teeth and claws against the thick bureaucracy that keeps her from her cub. There is no one to help her; she must do it alone.

The air in the room is damp. The artificial fabric of the spread insults her skin.

What is happening to Pearl? How can it be that somebody can keep her from her child at this her hour of danger? She is afraid to think of what might be happening to Pearl’s body.
Just stay alive, just stay alive,
she whispers to her in the dark, pressing her nails into the palms of her hands.

She picks up the phone. Perhaps she’ll call the embassy. But what would she say? She puts the receiver in its cradle. She looks at her watch. It’s only twenty minutes since she’s called the doctor. Five-forty-five a.m. in New York. It’s Sunday; no one is awake; no offices are open. There is nothing for her to do but wait. She closes her eyes. Opens them. Turns the lights on. Pours herself a glass of lukewarm water from the sink. Drinks it. Starts the newspaper crossword puzzle. Puts it down. Turns the lights off again. The tiger mother. Caged.

19

“Just checking on a few things for a moment,” says a young doctor, looking at the tubes coming from Pearl’s arm, her throat, uncovering her legs, pinching the skin on her hands and feet. “Very good,” he says.

She wonders what he means by that. What is the difference between good and bad? He turns away from her, toward Tom, who has not moved from his seat beside her bed.

“So you pulled the suicide watch? I guess that means you’re one of Morrisey’s fair-haired boys.”

“It’s fine. I can get my reading done.”

“Don’t screw up. If you get the rough side of Morrisey’s tongue you might not live to tell the tale.”

Suicide watch. So that is how they think of her: a suicide. In all the ways she has thought of what she is doing, she never thought of it as suicide. Suicide seems a private thing, a simple ending. She is making a sentence of her life, a sentence she wants others to read so that something can be learned. She’s thought of herself, always, as a witness, never a suicide. Her anger at the violation of her body takes on a new tone. She has been misunderstood, misnamed. She understands for the first time the rage of Bobby Sands and his fellow prisoners at being misnamed—in their case, as criminals rather than political prisoners; in hers, as suicide rather than witness. There is a difference, she wants to tell them, using all her force, between a witness and a suicide. But what force has she now, attached to tubes, compelled against her will to take in nourishment? She would like to say to this young man, her watcher, “Don’t you understand the difference between a witness and a suicide? Is it possible you will not understand my death?”

This possibility, which had at no time occurred to her, fills her with dread. As the idea of death itself has never, till this moment, done.