The Cheshire Smile

Eli Albert

            St. Ives Mental Hospital sits at the top of a big green hill. Just The Hill, for short. On one side is a forest, where the patients definitely do not go, and in the front is a lawn. On the other sides are roads and a small strip mall, but there in the middle – Ives. It’s an imposing rectangle of a building, three stories tall, with gables and crows and rotten shingles. Think of it as a little like the White House, with a lawn and circular turnaround for cars in front and flags and a long straight path leading up the hill, but gray stone, gray path, gray grass, everything gray. And the White House certainly isn’t abutted by a decaying forest and an ugly strip mall. St. Ives is where I work.

            I met a girl at the edge of the woods. It was a misty morning in April, really a perfect morning. I was walking along the path on my way to work, almost at the circle, when I saw movement to my left. At the bottom of a hill something was swinging like a pendulum; I found this perplexing and, not being inquisitive by nature but considering this a part of my job as an orderly, I turned and walked towards the movement. As I got closer I realized that there was a girl at the edge of the woods, on a swing hung on a tree. She was swinging, forward and back, facing me, so that half of the time she was in the woods, and half of the time she was out over the lawn. In and out, in and out.

            As I continued to close the distance I could see that she was about sixteen years old, dressed in a blue and white skirt that hung down to her shins, striped leggings and a colorful, tight sweater. She had stringy black hair and looked a bit like a young Janis Joplin. I could tell she noticed me, but she kept on swinging. As I got closer, she called out.

            “Hi!” she said. The mist was starting to melt away, and I could already tell the day would be a hot one.

            “Hullo.” I hadn’t the faintest idea what to say. There was no plan, no curiosity. The girl tilted her head to one side, continuing to almost disappear at the farther peak while she swung.

            “Who are you?” I was glad she wanted to talk to me.

            “Ethan,” I said, slowly, as if recalling a distant thing. In my hasty digression from routine, I’d almost forgotten who I was. “I’m Ethan, I work at St. Ives.” She just kept on swinging, as I stood in front and a little off to the side, now only a few feet away. Behind her, the light of the rising sun penetrated the forest for about fifteen feet and then failed, and all was dark.

            “What are you doing here?” I asked.

            “Swinging.” What did I think she would say? I realized then that I had been treating all new acquaintances in my life as if they were charges at the hospital, as if they were mentally unstable. I had to stop doing that. This one, anyway, was not one of my charges, nor did the mental hospital accept children at all.

            “Don’t you have school?”

            “Vacation,” she said. Kids these days have too much vacation. I examined the situation for a minute and realized that I hadn’t known there was a swing in the forest at all. She finally stopped swinging and stood up.

            “I’m Ayla.” There was a pause. “What do you do at Ives?”

            “I feed and take care of the crazy ones, the ones who have to stay in their rooms.” She looked at me for a bit, head slightly cocked, and then turned around and walked into the forest. Teenage girls are so hard to figure out. My first impulse was to stop her, but I realized that she wasn’t crazy, that she could do what she wanted. I let her go – I had to get to work. As I watched her walk away and as I started to turn around myself, something caught my eye. She, or someone, had left a book lying on the ground by the swing. I walked over and picked it up, but when I straightened up to call her back, she was out of sight, as if she had never been swinging on the edge of the forest to begin with. The book was heavy and leather-bound, which made me think it was a diary. I opened it up, only to be assaulted by a heavy scrawl in dark ink, handwriting almost illegible but undeniably female. I closed it again and put it in my jacket.

            The rest of the day was unmemorable. I work at this mental hospital, sure, but some days are just not worth mentioning. Patients sit dumbly, nurses hurry by and fluorescent lights flicker; the orderly walks the halls. It was a beautiful spring morning, as I’ve mentioned, and I was happy to finish with work and get outside to take in the rest of the afternoon. I walked down to the swing, hoping to catch sight of the girl named Ayla and return her book (that is, I assumed it was her book), but there was no trace of her. Not knowing what to do, I sat on her swing. Soon it was too hot for a jacket, and I was left with the book in hand, swinging gently, in and out of the forest as she had. I realized that it was the first time I’d ever been in the forest, even if my feet had not yet touched its carpet. Of course I opened the diary and started to read.

            I hate you, these were the first words, for reading this. I should have stopped right there. This was obviously someone who expected her diary to be read and did not like it. But why not sit here and read the diary? What else was there to do?

            But I know you will anyway. This was unsettling but hardly a deterrent. I read on.

            I’m not writing this for myself, in case you were wondering. There’s something wonderful about writing for someone else, pretending (hoping, wishing, expecting?) that someone else will one day run their eyes along the same text, turn the same pages, think the same thoughts. And this is why I hate you. For if there is one thing I hate, more than anything else, it is to be understood. I wear the façade of a teenage girl, of course. I feign innocence, ignorance, a lack of interest in my surroundings. I fit in. But were anyone to know my true feelings, I would not fit in. That is why I had to lock them up, but even that didn’t work. They kept coming out. Hence, the diary. Everybody needs an outlet of some sort for their secrets – I think some of the patients at Ives are there because they lack this outlet. Some people vent out loud, and lose their secrets, which isn’t always a terrible thing. Some people use a loved one, which puts a burden on the loved one, but that isn’t such a terrible thing either. I, however, don’t trust anyone enough for that. I do trust this book, though. This small black leather book that smells of cow.

            Still gently swinging in and out of the forest, I smelled the book. She was right.

            I suppose the biggest secret of all is that I have secrets. A large part of life is pretending that we have no secrets, so that when we come together in groups we can function without divulging everything or refusing to divulge everything. Do all the other teenagers have secrets? It’s hard to imagine. Everyone keeps so quiet – maybe their masks are just as well-crafted as my own. The second biggest secret is that I hate you.

            The entry went on. I read a bit more and then flipped through page after page, exploratorily. Each entry had a date and ended with a signature, and I thought I could make out Ayla, but I wasn’t certain. I picked out a random entry from the middle of the diary and read on:

            He hates me too, it started, and I don’t know how this will end. The sand has been getting in my eyes for the last hour of this walk, and time seems to be stretching. Maybe I’ve been walking for two hours, like the sun tells me, but then again, maybe it’s been years. I think it has been years. Decades, even. I haven’t aged, of course, just as the sun has barely moved, but something in my head is older. Something in the air, no, in the fabric of time itself is significantly older. Time feels spent.

            At the end of this walk I’ll see him again. It’s been so long! How can I know if I’ll be the same person? I know he won’t be the same person. Maybe we won’t fit together anymore like we used to. Maybe we’ll fit even better, but I wish I knew. There’s a man approaching from down the road pushing a cart, wearing a turban.

            As I read on, the day aged. The sun sank on the other side of the forest, until every backswing took me out of the light and into the gloom of the ancient, rotting trees. I had been reading and swinging, contemplating and reading more, for almost an hour. I was considering what to do next when she finally appeared, as I guess I knew she would. At that moment the diary was closed, on my lap, and I was not pumping in the swing, only letting it move in the breeze.

            She had come up behind and walked around; she sat on the grass in front of me. The darkness grew as she sat and looked at me, as I drifted in the breeze and looked back at her. I was damned if I’d be the first to speak, so we looked at each other for a long, long time. The thing was, now I knew her secrets. I knew what kind of person she was, I knew what made her do what she did. I knew her. At the same time, she knew almost nothing about me. This is what I thought as I looked into her eyes. I thought about knowing me, myself, and about what you would have to know to even claim to know me. “I am the messenger,” I would have told you.

            She must have known she would lose, so she must have guessed that I’d read the diary. Eventually she laughed, one short, ugly bark, the laugh of defeat. At that I tossed her the diary and she stood up.

            “Thanks for the book,” she said.

            “Of course.”

            “I’ll replace it with another.”

            “Why?” I asked. She didn’t answer, only stood facing me with her thumbs hooked in her jeans. She had changed clothing.

            “Who are you?” I suppose she meant the question abstractly, since I’d already given her the literal answer, so I answered as such:

            “I am the messenger.” At this she smiled, a real smile, a smile you only see once in a while – wide, happy, unsettling, accepting but predatory: the Cheshire smile. I half expected her to disappear right there. Instead she brought out a powerful flashlight from her pocket and stepped directly in front of me, shined it in my eyes.

            “Let’s go for a walk,” she said, and so I followed, stumbling, into the forest. Nobody was forcing me, and I surprised myself, I think, but there I was, walking into the dark unknown.

 

            The forest was dense and overgrown, but we followed a path that she seemed to know very well, and I only tripped and fell once. This was back in 1974, when a few acres of forest wasn’t such an uncommon sight in a suburban town. Ayla, as it turned out, lived in a housing project on the other side of the forest with her mother, who worked two minimum-wage jobs and I suppose didn’t sleep. I didn’t meet the mom, but when we emerged from the dark wood I did meet a mugger.

            “Hey!” he said, in a gruff and businesslike tone. “Give me your cash. All of it.”

It was strange for sure. The man didn’t seem to have any sort of weapon, though he was fairly menacing. He had his hands forward, fingers extended, knees bent and elbows out. He was dirty and smelt awful as well. As it happened, I had twelve dollars and change in my pocket. I looked around us: we were on the edge of an empty parking lot, badly lit and probably unused.

“No.” Honestly, the day before I probably would have given him the twelve dollars and change. The day before, though, I would have been alone, and I would not have recently walked through the forest.

“No?” The man suddenly had a lead pipe in his hands, after all. I wondered how I’d missed that. I looked over at Ayla, who hadn’t said a word in a while, but Ayla was not standing where I’d assumed. I looked to my left, and behind, but she was nowhere to be found. The robber advanced.

“Hey,” I said in turn, unsure of what to do. I held out my hands in capitulation, but perhaps it was too late for that. Suddenly, the man took two strides towards me and swung the pipe back, and then I guess I have to thank my years of experience as an orderly in a mental hospital because the next thing I knew this big guy was on the ground, moaning, and the lead pipe was skittering across the lot. Then Ayla reappeared.

“Wow,” she said. We stood there uncertainly, two shapes in the darkness towering over another. The man moaned again, so I started walking across the lot.

“Wait!” she called, and ran to catch up.

“What am I doing here?” I asked. I kept up a brisk pace, emerging onto a dirty and busy road. She had to run every few steps to stay abreast.

“You followed me. We’re going to my house.”

“Why?” It was the wrong thing to say, so I changed the subject: “Who lives with you?” We talked about her situation for a while, and mine, and it turned out that mine was a bit better than hers – at that point, though I didn’t have much money, I lived on the first floor of the mansion that my father had deeded to me, on the richer side of town. After that there was silence for a bit, and I could see what I assumed was her apartment building in the distance, looming over a highway on the other side. The lights of the cars swept back and forth, ugly and bright.

When we came to the building I realized that I didn’t want to see her apartment. I didn’t want to see the squalor, the overworked single mother, but most of all I didn’t want to see Ayla’s room. What if it looked just like any other teenager’s room, with posters of pop stars and trendy stuffed animals? I told her I didn’t want to come inside, so she ran in alone and came back with a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and we sat on the steps. After a long silence she spoke, sitting there on the steps, supporting herself with her hands behind her, legs arched lazily in front.

“You know what I think about sometimes? Sometimes I wish I could know anything I might want to know, as soon as I wanted to know it.” Cars kept passing, whooshing and blaring by, and I thought about this statement. It had never occurred to me.

“Why?” I asked. She seemed surprised.

“But can’t you see how great that would be? You could play the stock market and win every time! You could prevent crime and save lives and invent magical technologies.”

I thought some more. No, it simply wouldn’t do.

“I would hate that,” I told her. “But I understand.” Later, after a few minutes’ pleasant, relaxed conversation, I bid her farewell and caught a bus back around to the other side of town. There was something there, though, I had to admit, about knowing everything. For the first time in ages I found myself unable to fall asleep, and I was still reading This Side of Paradise when the sun came up the next morning.