Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

“But, Bridget,” I said to her, my heart pounding, “you talked to me on Friday. This is Monday. Do you realize that? You can’t have been unconscious for almost three days.”

“Well, I must have been,” she said. “Sometimes it’s for a long time. The last thing I remember was leaving the apartment and putting my overnight bag down to lock the door—and then this terrible feeling.…” She collapsed onto the convertible sofa.

“What kind of a feeling?” I asked.

“It starts in the pit of my stomach. Kind of a rush of pain. Oh, the worst pain you can imagine. Then I begin to feel dizzy. Nauseated. Sort of a sensation I’m being sucked into the center of a black whirlpool, pitch black, whirling around and around towards the very center. Strange high-pitched voices in another language that I’ve never heard before, can’t recognize. Voices in a foreign language—but I understand it perfectly. Perfectly.” She shuddered.

“What do they say?”

She put her head in her hands.

“Bridget, for God’s sake what do they say?”

She lay back and put her arms over her face and began to cry again.

“Bridget, I can’t stand this—what do the voices say?”

“Well—there’s this strange humming sound, buzzing—hurts my ears—like a dog whistle, very high frequency. I am walking down this long corridor, tunnel, endless, with lots of arched doors on either side, but I know they’re locked, I can’t open them. They say, in this strange language—I know it sounds crazy—but they are saying something like ‘Bridget, you must open the door, one of the doors,’ sort of in a chant, very high. ‘Try harder—you mustn’t come to the end of this tunnel—past the last door there’s nothing, just blackness.’ And the voices get louder and louder and I can’t stand it any more, and then at last I open a door with all my strength, and the light comes in, the sun, and I begin to rise—and I know I’m alive, I wake up, I’m still alive after all.”

“Bridget,” I said gently after a while, “this is really serious. I mean two and a half days is no joke. What if you were driving a car or crossing a street or something, and you went into one of these? I promised you on my sacred word of honor that I wouldn’t tell Father, but I’m beginning to think I should.”

“No, no.” She grabbed me. “Dr. Brenman [her analyst at Riggs] knows all about it. It’s happened before. Really. There are warnings. I know when it’s about to happen. The pain I was telling you about—if I was driving, I would have enough time to pull over to the side of the road. I promise you. Look—I was outside my apartment when I began to feel it and I had plenty of time to unlock the door and come back in to lie down on the bed here. There are my purse and suitcase. I have plenty of warning. Please, whatever you do, don’t tell Father or he’ll make me go to a closed hospital or back to Riggs.”

“But, Bridget, I don’t understand. I thought Dr. Rogowski gave you medicine to take every day so you wouldn’t have these blackouts. Aren’t you taking it?”

“Yes, yes, of course I am. Maybe he should change the dose or something.”

I made her promise me that she would go see Dr. Rogowski, and, in return, swore I wouldn’t mention it to Father. And that’s the way we left it.

Tom Mankiewicz:

“Throughout the winter we became closer. At that point in her life, she needed desperately to have somebody to hold on to. I think she very much wanted to marry Bill. But Bill was terribly unsure of himself, and to have Bridget fall in love with him was scary because her welfare was really completely in his hands.

“Anyway, Bill had convinced Nikos Psacharopoulos that I had to be his assistant up in Williamstown that summer. Nikos was the director of the Williamstown Theatre, which was really an offishoot of the Yale Drama School.

“Bridget wanted very much to be an apprentice and to work. And she worked her ass off. She was painting scenery and banging away with nails between her teeth. I think in many ways during that summer she was happier than she’d been in a very long time—at least she told me that and she certainly showed it. Not so much because of Bill, but because all the kids up there liked her.

“By that time I was so in love with Bridget I just couldn’t see straight. She was to me the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She always used to wear gardenia perfume. About two days before the first opening night up there, I found a place over the mountain, about an hour’s drive, that had gardenias but they couldn’t send them. I borrowed Peter Hunt’s car, a little red M.G., and I went over the mountain; it took me two hours to get there and back. I got the gardenias and she never knew where they came from. Every week when a play opened, I would borrow Hunt’s M.G. and go get them. I guess I must have logged sixteen hours or more getting her gardenias. About twice a year, I run into somebody or some place that smells of gardenias and even now, sixteen years later, I think of Bridget, instantly.”

One night in mid-August, when New York was at the height of a heat wave, I hopped in my little convertible for a cooling drive.

By the time I got to Greenwich, I knew where I was going. I stopped at my house there long enough to throw some clothes in a bag and to call Bridget in Williamstown. Although it was an ungodly hour, I told her I was about to pay her that visit she’d been suggesting for weeks. She sounded sleepy but pleased, and gave me explicit directions on how to get there. As I reached the Berkshires, the dawn came up;