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It’s one of his mute days.
Clarice has learned these days exist only by accident, not design — from the uneven intimacy which comes from living together for so long but never really sharing space. It’s a total muteness of a kind she’s not encountered before — vocal and spiritual. He becomes not just silent but also illiterate, refusing to pick up his pen and write his thoughts for her, staring blankly at an open book.
She suspects he’s been robbed not just of language but of coherent thought itself. He goes through the motions: takes his pencil but does not draw. Prepares a meal but does not eat.
Stares at her, but does not speak.
One of his mute days.
He appears to be sleeping, but he isn’t. It’s like him to sleep late in the day — since entering the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, he’s never been an early riser — but it’s out of character for him to pretend so poorly.
His eyes are closed. His jaw is tight. He lies curled on his side with the blankets tangled carelessly over his legs, and he’s pulled a sweater on over his head which is now twisted from too much tossing and turning.
He’s shaking, but she’d know he wasn’t really sleeping even if he weren’t. She puts a hand on his shoulder, feels his muscles twitch in response, and whispers, “Hannibal.”
He opens his eyes slowly. The gaze which meets hers is solemn and alert.
Perhaps he isn’t pretending to sleep, she muses. If he were, he would at least affect disorientation at being woken. Perhaps he’s lying in bed, eyes tightly closed, for some other reason, something out of her grasp.
“It’s late,” she says, and she’s not whispering anymore, though her voice is still hushed. He gives her a reproving look — he always sleeps late — and she adds, “It’s three in the afternoon,” and that reproving look turns into something guarded, and then she says, “You’re trembling,” and he sinks back against the mattress, rolling his shoulder in a subtle, polite movement which disconnects it from her hand.
He doesn’t respond. A moment later, she understands that he can’t. His eyes are pinned on hers, dark and hollow and peculiarly hard. It’s strange to see such a stoic look on his face when he’s shaking like a child left in the snow — but she knows him, knows he must be clinically aware of the shivers wracking his body, knows he’s already detached some part of his mind to label it, diagnose it, compartmentalize while the rest of him shakes.
She squeezes his hand and he allows it. His fingers are long and slender and cold; they feel as brittle as twigs. Only when she’s pulling away does his hand twitch against hers, and by then it’s too late for him to squeeze back. He lets her finish the retreat.
He watches, silently, as she moves for the door.
He doesn’t care for zinnias, but Clarice does, and she’s pleased to see the seeds she planted in the garden have not only survived this spring’s harsh weather, but have also bloomed into a stunning, deep purple which stands out sharply against the old stone garden wall.
Zinnias are hardy plants. Even Clarice’s black thumb can’t kill them. She trims them sparsely, pulling dead blooms from the rest of the plant and letting each petal fall from her fingers to the ground. She likes the way those petals look against the grass — purple drops in the center of a green sea.
Hannibal doesn’t like them. She cuts them anyway, arranges the fresh, wet stems into a loose bouquet. Inside, she finds an empty vase and has only just filled it with water when Hannibal comes down the stairs.
His step is light, almost inaudible. He’s casually dressed, the collar of one of his lesser shirts (deemed unfit for public wear; still finer than anything Clarice had owned before she met him) peeking out from underneath his sweater, the same sweater he’d been wearing in bed.
His feet are bare. He looks smaller than usual, hair uncombed and soft-looking as he passes her, sparing one dull glance for the zinnias.
He’s bothered by them. She places them on a table at the other end of the room, where he doesn’t have to see them, but he keeps twisting his head to look, eyebrows twitching, lips compressed. He communicates his displeasure to her without words; right now, it’s all he can do.
Clarice does her best to stifle the guilt which flares within her. Somehow, today, the flowers seem like more than just a nuisance. They feel like an offense.
She moves the vase into the kitchen. When she returns, Hannibal has opened a book and is staring sightlessly at the page. He’s pale and drained, like he’s spent a night on the run rather than lying in bed all day. She puts her palm over his forehead, feeling for a most improbable fever, and finds him cold.
Could he speak, if he tried? She’s never seen him attempt it on days like this; his lips stay closed even when he smiles and he refuses to eat, appetite gone, and if she asks him a question he only stares at her. Is it voluntary, then? Mental, rather than physical? Or does he wake sometimes and find his voice is simply gone, his throat sore, his vocal cords useless?
He leans into her touch, letting her skin warm his. Then he reaches up and his fingers tangle with hers, pulling her hand down to his lips. He kisses her knuckles; he smells the zinnias on her skin.
And then he sees the brush of purple on her fingertips, color bled onto her from the petals, and he silently lets her go.
In her dreams that night, she visits the Baltimore State Hospital and finds Hannibal in his cell, sitting at his desk, his posture rigid, his hands shaking and folded over his mouth. He doesn’t meet her eyes; his gaze is fixed somewhere far away, tears rolling unhindered down his cheeks.
He trembles. He doesn’t acknowledge her; he sits there and trembles and weeps, silent and unseeing, and the dream version of Clarice watches him nervously, so full of compassion she might start crying herself, and at the same time suspicious, waiting for a trick.
“Barney!” she calls, voice wavering, and he comes down the hall at a steady pace. She can hear his heavy footfalls but she doesn’t take her eyes away from Hannibal. Barney reaches her side and stands next to her, a silent, thoughtful presence. He studies Hannibal with his eyebrows furrowed, and then he steps up to the nylon net.
“Dr. Lecter,” he says. His voice is soft and firm. “It’s time to come back now.”
Hannibal doesn’t hear.
“What’s wrong with him?” asks Clarice, and she sounds young and breathless and scared, like she hasn’t sounded in years. Like she’s never sounded in real life at all. Her heart beats fast and she knows, without realizing that she’s dreaming, that this sensation is real, is physical, consumes her in a way the rest of her sensations don’t.
“It’s time to come back now,” Barney says. And simultaneously — in the way of dreams — he tells her, without speaking, that Hannibal has gone away and the man in the cell is someone different. Someone identical but younger, someone whose form isn’t exactly solid, someone made of light beams and unconnected atoms and invisible strings rather than muscle and bone.
She knows she must do something to help. She wants Dr. Lecter back. She needs him to fill out Jack Crawford’s blue-papered questionnaire.
So she steps through the nylon net and Barney watches her go, staying respectfully on the other side of the cell. She touches the wrong version of Hannibal and feels what he’s made of, and it’s cold snow beneath bare feet; gristle crunching in her teeth; bare skin pebbled from the brittle air; wood planks saturated with soapy water; cool sunlight and the flash of a smile and a fresh-picked eggplant still dirty from the garden resting in her hand.
The wrong version of Hannibal covers his mouth with the palm of his hand and cries into it, muffling every broken gasp, unaware of her presence. She reaches into him and finds the iron cords of escaped memories, and with deft, practiced fingers, she plucks them out, putting them back in the locked room of his mind palace where they belong. First the snow — then the gristle — then the water and the sunlight and the laugh of a bathing child. Memories she doesn’t understand; scenes she’s determined not to see.
And with the first string, Hannibal stops shaking. And with the second, he stops crying.
And with the third, he’s solid again, and Clarice is on the other side of the nylon net, and Barney says, “Welcome back, Dr. Lecter,” at her side again. And turning to Clarice he smiles and says,
“You see? He’s fine.”
They sleep together that night, Hannibal silent and still at Clarice’s side. When she wakes from her dream, he’s lying on his back and all she can make out are his elbows sticking up in the air, his palms placed over his eyes.
It’s so dark she can’t see him — his new hair, his new face — so her mind supplies what she expects to see. The red-tinted hair and fine cheekbones, the maroon eyes, the small, lithe body beneath the sheets. Sometimes she sees him that way even when it’s light out. Sometimes she feels a sixth finger when she grasps his hand.
“Hannibal,” she says. She watches him rub his eyes slowly, with the heel of his hand. “Can you talk yet?”
He doesn’t bother to open his mouth to try. His hands move down to his cheeks, pressure increasing, fingers skirting down until she can just make out his closed eyes. Has he slept? Or is this how he’s been since she turned off the lights? Just lying here with his hands pressed against his eyes, even while she dreamed of him in that cell.
She lays a hand flat on his chest. Feels his heartbeat, the expansion of his lungs, the coldness of his skin beneath his sweater. She sits up and reaches blindly for the knit blanket folded at the foot of the bed; when she finds it, she pulls it over him, covering him up to his hips, not bothering to shake it out.
Silently, he reaches for the edge and pulls it to his chest one-handed, leaving the other hand positioned over his eyes.
“If I ask you a yes or no question,” Clarice says, “will you answer it?”
His right hand joins his left, covering his face. He doesn’t nod. He doesn’t shake his head.
Clarice doesn’t ask.
He finally sleeps — hours later, maybe days. His hands go limp and slide from his face to the pillow so slowly Clarice almost doesn’t notice, and now both are arranged near his mouth, fingertips brushing his lips.
His jaw has relaxed. His eyes are closed lightly, lashes dark against his cheeks. He isn’t shaking. In his sleep, his throat is working, the columns of it flexing and tightening, and Clarice wonders.
Is he screaming mutely, in another world? Does his throat ache, does it burn? Is he back in the cell with his arms restrained, with a tube shoved down his throat and filling him with a mixture so cold and far-removed from life, from muscle, from blood, that it sends him into shivers?
She runs her fingers through his hair and imagines a steel cord she can extract from his skull, a cord threaded with bad sensations she can pull out knot-by-knot. In her mind, the cord winds along his jaw, moving in and out of his small white teeth until they’re all tied together with silver and his mouth is glued shut.
It must’ve been days since he last spoke, but it’s difficult to tell. Time melts together when he’s silent. But it must have been days, because he’s no longer wearing that loose red sweater; he’s in a silk shirt now, over-large and half-buttoned. She’s not sure where he got it. She likes it, though; she wishes, sometimes, that he’d wear it when he’s properly Hannibal, not just when he’s like this.
She kisses his forehead. She imagines she can feel his thoughts coalescing beneath her lips.
His skin is warm again.
In the morning, she rises early and sits in the parlor, staring out the window into the garden. She thinks of the hardiest flowers that grow there, capable of withstanding rain and drought, heat and snow. Flowers that come into her house in loose bouquets and make Hannibal wince when he sees them.
Upstairs, she hears him stirring — the silk sheets rustling, his bare feet crossing the floor overhead, the closet doors opening as he gets dressed. She opens the window, allows the scent of the garden to fill the house, fresh and fragrant as spring.
Upstairs, the sunlight will be streaming through the windows and Hannibal will be making the bed, dressed properly — like he hasn’t been in days — in fine, tailored clothes, his eyes sharp and clear.
Upstairs, shutting the bedroom door behind him, Hannibal says, “Good morning, Clarice,” and his voice is steady and clinical and clear. She smiles, eyes glazed a little, and turns her head away from the bare stems in the garden, from the empty vase on the windowsill, ringed with dirty water.
Upstairs, Hannibal is speaking again.
Downstairs, the zinnias are dead.