ALCHEMIES OF THE HEART. David Dorian

      Inside the room at the psychiatrist’s facility, by the window a luxuriant bush with opulent milk-white flowers scintillated under the morning rays.

      Maren D’Arcy felt anesthetized as she walked into her husband’s space where illness prevailed.

      Gabriel D’Arcy sat placidly in the institutional armchair. His reverie had not been interrupted by his wife’s intrusion.

      She kissed him on the forehead, caressing the back of his neck. She sat on the bed and opened the paper bag. She opened the pastry box exposing a black forest cake.

      “Happy birthday.”

      She unscrewed a bottle of a nonalcoholic prosecco and poured the pale liquid into two paper cups.

      They sipped their drink in silence. She contemplated her husband, tracking a flicker of life across his eyelids, the whisper of breath in his throat.

      His skin was wasting on his bones. His eyes had sunk a few inches deeper in his brows surrounded by patches of chalky skin. She had tried many times to enter his inner world, but to no avail. Impenetrable, he had remained asunder, sealed, out of range. That synchronicity they experienced in their married life had ended. What remained was an emotional tundra, inhospitable and uninhabitable. He had become a pale ghoul marooned among the living. Maren knew he was on the brink of the void.

      “What’re you reading?” she asked, picking up a book on his lap.

      The Botany of Desire, she read out loud. The author asked, do plants use humans as much as we use them?

      “Read it,” he whispered with a muffled voice like a diver under water. Maren felt a wave of hope. He spoke to her.

      She put the book in her bag. Maren brought a spoonful of cake to his mouth. Maybe he will taste the velvety chocolate, the frothy cream. Suddenly he squinted. A sliver of morning sun hurt his eyes. Maren muffled the sun with the curtain. She approached the flowery bush. A maroon spider hanging by a thread from a creamy-white dangling flower was weaving an elaborate web.

      “I miss you,” he muttered.

      Maren was surprised.

      The student nurse came by with a plastic cup containing multicolored pills.

      Gabriel stood up and lurched toward the flowerpot. He inserted his hand inside the dirt and produced a black object. He limped toward his wife and handed it to her.

      She stared at the USB flash drive and put it in her pocket.

      Time leaked, unmeasured. They had been together for a few fragile moments, and she was pained by that sense of estrangement. The urge to leave was pressing. She kissed his forehead.

      The visit had unleashed her stomach acids. A cruel heartburn was singeing her esophagus. There was so much unknown that had crashed into her life. Although arrived with shocking suddenness that horror devoured its prey. For days, it spreads its murkiness into every corner of her being. As hope had drained, a heavy weakness had descended on Maren. She suffered from complicated grief. Every day she lived her hours in an uncertain compromise with despair.

      Gabriel had requested all the medical files of his condition to be off-limits to family and relatives. It was his prerogative. That action alienated her. Intrigued by her husband’s secrecy, Maren lived in limbo. She was excluded from the treatment. Her amateurish interpretation of his symptoms led to a diagnosis of psychosis. The psychiatrists at the hospital hadn’t helped. They confirmed a breakdown with reality, but they didn’t explain why. They waited to be let in his inner sanctum. They medicated him, pacifying his inner turmoil. There were powerful antipsychotic drugs to counter that disease, and Gabriel was put on three different medications. The chemical compounds he ingested kept him human.

      Since Gabriel’s hospitalization, Maren had immersed herself in her work expanding her yoga practice. The work distracted her. It engendered a welcomed stillness.

      As she walked toward her Rover in the parking lot, that flash drive ensconced in the palm of her hand, she wondered what shattering secrets that device stored. Was it a portal or a breach into another world, the realm her husband inhabited?

      Driving toward Manhattan, Maren was holding the electronic gadget tightly in her hand. Was it a key to some forbidden knowledge, to hell? Would she open that gate now and venture inside that dark domain, or delay? She wanted to throw that widget in the expressway. Her life would continue in that permanent state of not knowing, that purgatory of exalted ignorance. To decode the cryptogram concealed in the drive could modify her life, maybe forever. She entered the village of Little Neck. She parked her car outside a CVS pharmacy and went inside the store. She gulped four anti-acid tablets. On the same block, she located an internet café. She ordered a Moroccan mint tea and installed herself inside a booth. She slipped her debit card inside the slot then inserted the flash drive.

      Her husband’s words would appear on the monitor. Would they echo in her heart for the next hours, days, maybe eternity? She felt she was at the entrance of a labyrinth or at the edge of an abyss. A ringing of bells from the nearest church echoed. Was it an alarm alerting her she was stepping into forbidden grounds or a toll heralding the passing away of innocence?

      She pressed Enter.