The Syndrome Read Online Free PDF Page B

kitchen cabinets and defrosted the refrigerator. She’d cleaned the oven after that, and washed and waxed the floors. Going into the bathroom, she’d emptied the medicine cabinet with a couple of sweeps of her hand, dumping its contents in a shopping bag. Then she’d cleaned the mirror and the shelves, thinking,
I don’t need any of it, anymore. Not the Vicks, not the lithium, not the aspirin.
This was the new Nico, clean and clear and energetic as an Evian waterfall.
    Today was her day to see Duran.
    His office was in Cleveland Park. To get there from Georgetown, she had to walk down M Street to the Key Bridge, cross the Potomac to Rosslyn, and take the Metro. It was a hike, but seeing Duran was about as optional as breathing. It wasn’t like the lithium. It was really important, so important that it never occurred to her not to go. Duran was her anchor, shrink and exorcist, all in one. He brought her face-to-face with the demons that bedeviled her and, with his help, she’d drive them out. He’d make her well. He’d promised.
    Entering the subway, she was struck by the smell that floated up the stairs, a mixture of the cave and the vacuum cleaner. This was the underground scent that darkness gave off, the perfume of hidden places. Subways, tunnels, basements. The root cellar in South Carolina. Shenandoah Caverns in Virginia—where the whole family went once on vacation, and Adrienne got yelled at for touching a stalagmite. She could still remember the guard’s snotty voice:
It takes tens of thousands of years for a stalagmite to grow a quarter-inch and some selfish people just cannot keep their hands off. Please respect nature’s majesty! Thank you.
    That underground smell was the subway’s olfactory background, like the bass line in music or the set on a sitcom. But there were brighter aromas, too. Coffee, sweat, tobacco, dust. A whiff of urine, a flash of perfume—or was it hair spray?
    And the ride! The ride was a massage that left her almost dreamy. She liked the sound of it, the rush of air, the rhythmic sway of the segmented train hurtling through the tunnel. She liked the way her body felt as it made a series of intricate adjustments, compensating for every change in velocity and direction, reacting instantly to Newtonian forces that were as real as they were unseen.
    When the train got to Cleveland Park, she took the escalator up to the street, where the Juice Man was waiting, three doors down. As she always did, she bought a papaya smoothie and sucked it down so fast that it gave her an ice-cream headache. Even that was okay, though, because when her brain unclenched from the freeze, there was a moment—there was always a moment—when her mind felt so
clean.
It was worth the pain, almost, to feel it, that sweet blur of relief.
    Once, she’d asked Adrienne if she had the same reaction—if she knew what she meant, but … no. Of course she didn’t. Her sister just got this weird, worried look, and made a joke of it.
    Unlike Duran.
    Who understood her—
    To a
T.
    His building was a block north of the Metro stop, on the east side of Connecticut. It was a nice neighborhood (if you didn’t mind the constant surf of traffic). Moms pushed strollers past the firehouse. Joggers zigzagged down the sidewalk, sidestepping businessmen on their way to lunch. Outside Starbucks, a young couple did their best to ignore a schizophrenic black man, wheedling for change.
    And then there were the old people.
    They sat on the benches in front of Ivy’s Indo-Thai place, feeding the pigeons. One of them was there every week. She recognized him by the fisherman’s cap he wore, rain or shine. And by his hands, which were as big as dinner plates, but clumsy with arthritis, so that he fed the birds by tumbling popcorn at them from a brown paper bag.
    Duran’s building was an old one and, while everything worked, it worked on its own terms. Which meant, among other things, that when the intercom buzzed, it