The Summer Without Men

dictates of dogma, and she would not have them wrested away from her without a fight. After her early efforts, I had gently suggested she reconsider her wording and had watched her face close. “But it’s true, ” she would intone. I gave in. What did it matter? I asked myself. She probably needed these slogans to end her war. Nikki and Joan remained a team, although I came to see that Nikki was the dominant of the two. One day they both arrived with chalky faces, heavy eyeliner, and black lipstick, an experiment I decided not to notice. The Halloween getup had no effect on their personas, however, which remained chirrupy. Their tittering back and forth was equaled only by the expansive delight they took in fart poems, which was mostly contagious, and they responded warmly to my short lecture on the scatological in literature. Rabelais. wift. Beckett.
    I was not deluded that I knew what was going on in the lives of these seven. After class, telephones suddenly appeared in their hands, and I watched the girls’ thumbs pick out text messages at high speed, half of them, it seemed, directed at friends on the other side of the room. After a Tuesday class I found an e-mail from Ashley.
     
Dear Ms. Fredricksen,
     
I had to tell u how great the class is. My Mom said I would like it but I didn’t believe her. She was right. You are really different from other teachers, like a friend. No like an ANGEL. I am learning a lot. I guess I just had to say it. Also, you have great hair.
     
    Your very devoted Student,
    Ashley

And then another message from an address I didn’t recognize.
     
I know all about you. You’re Insane, Crazy, Bonkers.
     
Mr. Nobody.
    I felt slapped. I remembered the sign from NAMI on the wall of the hospital unit’s small library: FIGHTING THE STIGMA OF MENTAL ILLNESS . Stigmatos, marked by a sharp instrument, the sign of a wound. Sometime much later, the fifteenth century, maybe, it also came to mean a mark of disgrace. Christ’s wounds and the saints and hysterics who bled from their hands and feet. Stigmata. I wondered who would want to harass me anonymously—and to what purpose? Any number of people probably knew that I had been hospitalized, but I couldn’t think who would want to send me this note. I tried to remember if I had given my e-mail to another patient, to Laurie maybe, sad, sad Laurie who had shuffled around in her slippers with her diary clutched to her chest, making small moaning sounds. It was possible, but unlikely.
    As I lay in bed that night, roiled by the usual tempests—Stefan’s note: It is too hard ; the Pause shaking my hand in the lab and smiling, the memory of Boris in bed and the weight of sleep in his body, then his shrouded face as he comes out with his decision, and Daisy, tears running, the sound of her shuddering breaths and sniffs; she is sobbing about her father leaving her mother, and I think of my own inscrutable father’s passion for someone else—the word crazy returned, and I pushed it away, and then the word in the note Ashley had capitalized, ANGEL, appeared for a moment on the screen behind my closed eyelids. I thought of Blake’s celestial visitors, the legend of Rilke’s supernatural gift, the first words of the Duino Elegies, and then of Leonard, my fellow inmate on the South Unit. He had proclaimed himself the Prophet of Nothing. He pontificated and he discoursed and he clearly loved the stentorian tones of his own bass voice, expounding to anyone who came near him. But no one listened to him, not his fellow patients, not the staff. Even his psychiatrist had looked blank as he sat across from Leonard in a meeting I glimpsed through one of the large glass windows. He interested me, however, and his grandiose appeals had genuine brilliance. On the morning of my release I had sat with him in the common area. With his balding pate surrounded by graying curls that fell near his shoulders, Leonard looked the part. He turned toward me and began his prophecies. He talked to me about Meister Eckhart as a messenger of the Nothing, who influenced Schelling, Hegel, and Heidegger. And he told me that Kierkegaard’s angst was an encounter with Nothing, and that we lived in a time of actualized Nothingness, and this was essential and mystical; “It should not be amiss,” he said, waving his index finger, “to open ourselves to the truth that Nothing is the primal ground of this world.” Leonard may have been mad, but his thoughts were not nearly as