The first time it happened I was sitting at my desk, looking out the window, listening to the traffic down below and wondering where Julie and I could go for dinner. A second later I felt myself rushing into my own body like a ghost. The light in the window wasn’t right and Tom, our manager, had somehow materialized along side of me with his hand over his lips and his eyes bulging out, looking the way only men can when they’re helpless in front people who expect them to do something.
“What?” I said.
Tom kept looking at me but I could tell he was relieved. When he shrugged and looked around I looked around too. Everyone in the office was eye-balling me as if I had just turned into a giraffe.
“You okay?” Tom said, leaning on my desk.
“Yeah,” I said. But I didn’t feel okay. My mouth was dry, I felt a little sick to my stomach and my heart pounded in my chest as if I had just run up three flights of stairs.
“You’ve been starring out that window for almost ten minutes,” Tom said, narrowing his eyes. “I’ve been calling your name. Didn’t you hear me?”
“I don’t know,” I said, reaching into my collar to loosen it. The first realization that something was wrong-really wrong-sent an arc of pin pricks from one side of my jaw to the other.
For 29 years I had been one of those guys who could thump his chest and say, “Never been sick a day in my life.” I had been sent overseas during the war and came back without a scratch. My brother was crippled by polio when he was only nine and I had seen men die only a few feet away from me. And so I came to believe that I was different, that life had made me into some kind of miraculous exception to the general fate of humanity. A conceit of the young, I suppose.
“Well, you look a little pale,” Tom said. “Maybe you should take the rest of the day off.”
I liked Tom. He was about ten years older than me, knew by heart, I think, every joke he had ever heard on the radio, treated people fairly and made sure that everyone he met saw a picture of his wife and kids. Like me he had decided to move to California after the war; and like a lot of us who had been in the war, he didn’t talk about it much.
“I guess I was in deep thought about something,” I said, standing up and looking in the direction of the water cooler. Something from high school came back to me. A teacher telling us about one of those old Greek guys who got so lost in thought that he would stand barefoot in the snow like a statue.
“Since when did you get so deep?” Tom said.
I tossed down a drink of water, threw the crumpled Dixie cup away and then laughed.
“About ten minutes ago,” I said.
I hung in for the rest of the day because I knew I’d just worry and make myself crazy trying to figure out what happened but let me tell you, it isn’t easy trying not to think about something while people are looking at you out the corners of their eyes. By the time 5 O’ clock came around I felt so heavy I thought I’d take the elevator all the way to China.
Julie knew right away that something was wrong. I knocked on the door of her apartment-actually it was her mother’s apartment-and she let me in wearing a really pretty yellow dress that I liked and said, “Are you sick?”
I sat on the sofa in front of the radio where we liked to listen to Gun Smoke and The Shadow, where we talked about buying a house someday once we got married. A brand new track house with a backyard, the kind you’d never get in Chicago. Not if you grew up in a regular working-class neighborhood the way I did.
“Tired,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t sleep so good.”
“You still want to go out?” she said, sitting next to me.
I’d been thinking of going to Clifton’s Cafeteria, where maybe I could look at Julie with the waterfall behind her. A guy like me could eat there and feel like a millionaire with all those paintings on the wall, what they call murals. You could get lots of chow pretty cheap, too, and it wasn’t bad.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I said, looking at my brand new Wing Tips. I felt like a rat for letting her down but I didn’t want to go out and just sit there like a lump.
Julie put her palm on my forehead. I didn’t know if that would do so much good on account of the fact that it was so hot in her apartment. It was the middle of July, I had my suit on and there was only a little fan in the window.
“I don’t think you got a fever,” she said, crossing her legs.
She had long black hair-a lot longer than most women who tended to wear their hair short in those days-and even though she was only a year younger than me she still had the figure of a teenager. People said that she looked like a professional dancer, her figure was that good. She knew it but whenever I’d make some compliment she’d always say that she was fat. Women do that. I don’t know why but they all do that.
“Well, you know, I think I’d better go home,” I said, meaning my own apartment, which was a lot smaller than hers because I was the only one who lived there. My mother was still in Chicago and I wouldn’t have lived with her for a million bucks. I can’t say that Julie’s mom liked me but she treated me decently and I never saw her yell or kick a hole in the wall.
“Call me later?” she said, walking me to the door. I could tell that she was trying not to look disappointed.
“Yeah, I’ll call you later,” I said.
The next day I felt okay, and a week later I’d forgotten all about that day in the office. When it happened again, though, it was worse. A lot worse.
Julie and I were in the lobby of a theater. We’d just seen a movie with Errol Flynn and as we were going to the door I stopped to look at one of the posters on the wall. I had that weird rushing into my own body feeling again and out of nowhere a whole bunch of people are standing around me holding my arms saying, “Mister…mister…you okay?”
“What the hell,” I say and there’s Julie looking pale as death.
“Johnny,” she says, putting her hands on her chest. Tears are coming down her cheeks.
One of the guys holding my arms is a doctor, or he just talks like one because he asks me if I have episodes. What the-well, I watch my language but I say something like what the heck are you talking about, get away from me but he says that I could have had a seizure.
“Are you nuts?” I say and then Julie’s beside me and we’re making our way through the crowd even though my legs feel like rubber and my head’s spinning like a wind vane.
“We have to get you to a doctor,” Julie is saying as we walk outside where it’s cool and doesn’t smell like popcorn and damp skin.
“What are you talking about,” I say, making her let go of me.
“Johnny, you were just standing there. For almost an hour and you wouldn’t talk to me. I thought you were mad about something and then I got scared because you just stood there in front of that poster.”
I try to say, “An hour!” but can’t; the words stick in my throat. I want it not to be true but know that Julie would never make up something like that.
Hell’s bells, as Pop used to say. For the first time since the war I’m scared, the kind of scared that makes everything in your mind come to a complete stop, that makes the only sound in your head the pounding of your heart.
“Naw,” I say, trembling so hard it hurts my back.
“Naw.”
I had to see a doctor, and then another doctor. The second doctor makes me sit in a room with a nurse who sticks wires on my head.
“You’re not going to electrocute me with that thing, are you?” I say, pointing to the machine the wires snake out of.
“It doesn’t transmit electricity,” the nurse says behind me.
She pronounces electricity “e-lek-tristy” and I think that maybe she’s making fun of me. But the fact that she’s about my mother’s age and moves about the room as if I’m not there makes me think otherwise.
“It measures electrical activity in the brain.”
E-lek-tral.
The room is cold and there isn’t a single window. On the counter are glass jars of cotton swabs and those flat wooden popsicle sticks doctors put on your tongue to make you gag. I’m lying on white paper that makes a crinkly sound every time I move. There is too much light and so I keep my eyes closed most of the time.
“You won’t feel anything,” the nurse says, pressing the last cold, sticky pad on my head.
“Relax.”
I remember the last time someone said that to me and I almost laugh our loud. When I was fourteen I had to have a tooth surgically removed. The dentist put a mask over my face and the last thing I remember was him saying in a Polish accent, “Relax, kid, you won’t feel a thing.”
Later on at home, after I had gone to bed with the left side of my face still numb, it occurred to me that being anesthetized is what dying must feel like.
To go in the blink of an eye and to have no memory of having gone anywhere.
Poof! Relax.
Now the doctor taps my knees and makes my legs jerk. He runs something smooth and metallic against the soles of my feet and makes me look at blinking lights. He has a small round head and long, loose lips; and when he frowns and peers at me with eyes that have large black-blue bags under them he looks like an old, sad duck.
“You were in the army?” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Were you wounded?”
“No,” I say.
I have never wanted to talk about the war. People who gab about all the horrible things they had seen or had to do embarrass me. Now, for the first time, I feel a creeping sense of embarrassment about myself. What had once filled my hamster sized brain with stupid pride-my seeming invincibility-rises up inside of me like a mocking ghost. I’m alive while others better than me are dead; and all this time I’ve congratulated myself on the fact that I’m still kicking, still in one piece, as if that’s a worthy accomplishment, something to thump my chest about.
“I had a son who was in the army,” the doctor says.
“Oh yeah?” I say, putting my socks and shoes on, afraid to look at the sad duck eyes, afraid to see what they might say about his son.
“Yes, well,” the doctor sighs, folding his arms and then looking down.
“You’ve had two episodes. A person can have a seizure but not necessarily have epilepsy. More than one, however, well, that makes me concerned. If you’ve had seizures they would be considered what we call petite. Do you feel, taste or see anything unusual just before they happen?”
“No,” I say, but I’m not sure if that’s true.
“Sometimes people get a funny taste in their mouth or their vision changes. But not always.”
“I don’t feel anything,” I say. “One minute I’m doing something, and then a second later people are asking me if I’m okay.”
“Ah, ah. Well then. There are medications we can start you off on. They’re much better than the ones we had just a few years ago. I’m going to write you out a prescription and then I want to see you in a week. If you have another seizure in the meantime I want to see you right away. You understand me?”
“Yes, Doctor,” I say through what sounds like a parade ground full of beeping horns in my head. I have that feeling again that I might take the elevator to China. I see Tom looking at me again and cringe.
“It’s not the end of the world my friend,” the doctor says, putting his hand on my shoulder.
“You’re young and have a strong constitution. You have a good, long life ahead of you, believe me.”
But he was wrong. On both counts.
Waiting for something to go wrong with all those millions of cells that make you who you are is the worst thing of all to wait for. It’s like hanging around for death to show up-you may think you’re getting ready by thinking about it but down deep you know that you’re really thinking about something else because what’s about to happen to you is completely unthinkable.
I try to remember what had happened that night in the theater lobby but it’s like trying to remember what it had been like to have had my tooth sawed out of my head when I was a kid.
Poof! Relax.
As soon as I get up in the morning I feel my pulse speed up, and getting on the bus makes me nervous as hell. What if I fall down in front of everyone and start foaming at the mouth?
One day, at the office, it occurs to me that I’ll probably never drive a car again and it’s like someone hitting me between the eyes with an ice pick.
When you’re young you don’t know anything else but being young, you feel as if the road of life is something real, not just a metaphor, but something you can actually see always before you, a future of endless possibilities. Now, everywhere I turn, I find myself looking at walls. The sound of footsteps behind me makes me jump. Almost everything people say sounds stupid and it’s hard not to show my irritation. Food has no taste, I’m skipping meals and losing weight. Headaches terrify me, so I always keep a bottle of aspirin with me and take them at the least sign of pain. And sleep! I’d pay a million dollars for one good night’s sleep.
I still see Julie but I know I’m not much fun to be around. She wants me to go to the VA hospital but I wouldn’t go there if they paid me, I’ve heard enough stories about those places.
“I make decent money and I have insurance,” I say. “For Christ’s sake, it’s what I sell if you haven’t noticed.”
Here we are in my apartment, naked because it’s so damn hot. Julie wants to go to the park but I don’t feel like going anywhere. I don’t want to be around other people and at the moment I don’t much want to be around her.
“They might know something,” she says, wiping her face with a towel. “Other men in the army might have got something that causes seizures.”
“What in the hell are you talking about!” I say.
“I’m just saying…”
“I didn’t get anything in the army. I was never sick one day the whole time I was in the army. Do you know what you’re talking about because I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Never mind, then,” she says, putting on her clothes.
“Where you going?”
“It’s hot in here,” she says. “I want something cold to drink, like a beer.”
“I haven’t got beer,” I say. That’s brilliant. Of course I don’t have beer. I don’t even have an icebox.
“I know. Put on your pants, we’ll get us a beer, okay?”
“I don’t want to go out,” I say, putting my knees up to my chest as I sit on the bed. I probably look like a little kid.
“It’s an oven in here,” she says, bending over to put on her shoes.
“Well then go out and get a goddamn beer,” I shout.
I want to feel miserable. How else am I supposed to feel? But when Julie leaves and doesn’t come back I feel a kind of loneliness engulf me that I’ve never felt before in my entire life. I begin to regret what I’d said but I also start to regret something much bigger. I drove my girl away but somehow-God only knows how-I’ve allowed something to happen to me that will forever make me different from everyone else on the planet.
That isn’t true, of course. I know that isn’t true but so much of my brain is saying it’s true that I can’t just shrug it off and pretend that everything’s really okay. Hell’s bells, what’s okay?
I lay on my back, put a towel on my eyes and take a nap. When I awaken from a deep, dreamless sleep I think it’s the next day and I’m angry at myself until I look at my watch. The apartment really does feel like an oven, so I take a quick, cool shower, dress and then go outside.
There is a light breeze but even that is unpleasantly hot. Little kids in bathing suits and underwear play in a sprinkler across the street and I’m reminded of Chicago. The sidewalk feels hot enough to fry eggs on and I begin to wish that I had gone out with Julie for a beer. Instead of walking to Joe’s Market, though, I find myself walking to the park that is two blocks away.
“Splish splash I was taking a bath,” I sing under my breath.
“Splish splash…”
I walk past an elderly couple speaking Italian and a woman with three small, sticky looking children in tow. A Good Humor ice cream truck stops in front of a small mob of kids as crows, looking tired from the heat, pace on the far side of the park under tall, thick trees. I find a wooden bench in the shade, sit down and then fish around in my pockets for a stick of chewing gum. I want to tell everyone that, hey, I may not be able to drive a car but I can chew gum.
Being outside doesn’t make me feel much better. I don’t know what came over me and I make up my mind to call Julie as soon as I get back home.
I remember thinking, “I’ve got to get a hold of this thing so that I can go on. Other people find the strength. I just have to hold on and not give up.”
Someone near me rolls over in bed. Then darkness.
I don’t know where I am. Can’t see. There’s a sheet over me and I’m wearing pajamas. I’m in bed. How did I get in bed? Someone is breathing heavily, almost snoring, and I know that isn’t Julie. For a terrifying second I can’t even remember my name. This isn’t my room. This isn’t my bed. Where the hell am I?
“Johnny,” I say out loud.
I touch my face, swing my feet out and slap them on the floor while light flickers in the back of my eyes like burning spores. The cold linoleum sends sharp knots up my spine and for several seconds I feel nauseated as the bed seems to sway beneath me. This isn’t my apartment. This isn’t anywhere. I rack my brain but can’t think of where the hell I am or who I’m with. Did I get drunk? Am I sleeping on the couch in Julie’s apartment which is impossible but am I anyway?
I don’t remember anything.
After my eyes adjust to the darkness the burning spores transform into a faint white line on the floor. I stand up, lose my balance, fall back on the bed, stand up and then creep toward it, keeping my hands in front of my face. I’m stopped by something that I think must be a door. I run my hands over it, looking for the knob. There is a handle. I push, then pull it open.
I’m standing in a hallway lit by fluorescent lights. At one end of the hallway there is a desk. I walk toward it on black and white squares of linoleum.
Slowly it comes to me that I must be in a hospital of some kind. But why? I don’t feel hurt. In the distance there are female voices. Nurses? Young, by the sound of them.
I stand at the desk and try to gather my thoughts. Just when walking to the park occurs to me I hear someone approaching.
When she walks around the corner in her white uniform she hardly seems to notice me.
“Bert,” she says, turning her head. “Johnny’s out of bed and walking around.”
“Excuse me,” I wheeze. My voice sticks in a throat that feels as narrow as a drinking straw.
“Can you tell me where I am?”
The nurse freezes in her tracks and her eyes almost pop out of her head. She has brown skin and caramel colored blonde hair piled on her head. The body under the uniform is wafer thin and I guess that she’s twenty-one or twenty-two years old. There is a small name tag over her small right breast that says, in bright white letters, Morales, RN.
Nurse Morales continues to stare at me and I’m becoming increasingly aware that I’m barefoot and wearing only thin pajamas.
“Johnny?” she says.
“How did I get here? Where am I?”
Nurse Morales continues to stare at me with her mouth slightly open. People start to collect around her, including a pudgy, balding man I assume goes by the name of Bert. There is an unpleasant odor in the air that reminds me of dishwater and disinfectant, and I’m becoming aware that I’m hungry despite panic mounting in me like a tidal wave. Is this a dream? Am I having a nightmare? The first night of bootcamp flashes through my mind and I remember the dream I had, of watching myself floating, without clothes, without flesh, a soul peeled off the wheel of life, the smallest particle of me vanishing before itself.
“Sara, call Doctor Jack,” Nurse Morales says to another nurse, a woman with eyes too close together, dirty blonde hair and a slightly sunken, resentful face.
My knees are like rubber and I suddenly feel as if I’m standing on toothpicks. The pajamas feel loose, like a shroud, and I’m afraid they’ll soon be around my ankles. Nurse Morales takes me by the arm and leads me to a small examination room. Her hand is small and firm, and as I pad along on the cold floor in my bare feet I think that I must look like a child or a very old man.
I’m led to a padded swivel chair. Bert drapes a warm white blanket over me, then lifts my feet one by one and glides them into slippers. I don’t know why, but for some reason this act of consideration strikes me as enormous and I have to wipe tears from my eyes.
“How do you feel?” Nurse Morales says, waving a thermometer up and down.
“Okay,” I say.
Truth is, I feel exhausted. Is it because I had another seizure? Maybe it’s because I’ve been sleeping all day.
My temperature and blood pressure are taken by the efficient Nurse Morales. There is no clock on the wall in this little room but I have to know what time it is.
“It’s…two thirteen,” Nurse Morales says, squinting at her little wrist watch. Timex by the look of it.
“Two thirteen what?” I say.
“In the morning.”
“How long have I been sleeping?” I say.
The look Nurse Morales gives me turns my blood into slush, the kind that always made my hands and feet numb when I lived in Chicago.
“Is it that bad?” I want to say but can’t.
Doctor Otis C. Jackson, a tall, thin man with hard, bright eyes, flips through my chart. His flat hair is parted in the middle, his face is smooth and clean shaven, and when he looks at me he rocks on brown shoes that are so polished they shine like mirrors.
“How are you feeling Mr. Parmington?”
I rest my elbows on my knees, hold the sides of my head and shrug.
“I guess I feel all right,” I say. “Maybe a little tired. When can I leave?”
The doctor seems to produce a folding metal chair like a magician, then sits down, putting my chart on his lap. His manners are brisk and business like. He could have been many things, I sense- a cop or a stock broker. Anything but a doctor.
“You’re in the psychiatric section of county hospital, Mr. Parmington. For over a year you haven’t spoken a word to anyone. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
Something, maybe a bird, is beating its wings in my ears. No, no I don’t understand. Jesus, sweet Jesus this is a nightmare if it’s true but how can that be? No, it’s not possible, can’t be, none of this can be true.
“Mister Parmington?”
“I can’t…It can’t be,” I say but then I can’t talk anymore because a truck has rolled over my chest and my head is about to explode.
“I need some help in here!” The good Doctor Jack yells.
Other patients are beginning to stir. I see them in their robes and pajamas as I am taken back to my room in a wheel chair. Some gape at me with old, toothless mouths. Pink light leaks through windows in the rooms on my right and I smell coffee brewing. Bert pushes me and Nurse Morales, who just gave me a shot of something to calm me down, walks briskly beside my chair, her slender hand on my shoulder. I don’t feel like crying anymore. I feel like sleeping, impossible as that seems.
“You should get some sleep, Mr. Parmington,” she says when I’m sitting on the bed. “We’ll bring you in breakfast when you’re up and feeling better if you like.”
“I don’t want you to leave me alone,” I say, somewhat amazed and ashamed to feel a tear trickling down my cheek as if my face alone decided to feel sad.
“Bert will stay here with you.”
“I’m afraid of what will happen if I fall asleep,” I say, looking at the pink light that leaks like rose water into my room.
My room? What have I been doing here, day after day, for a year? How could so long a time go by without a trace of it having passed me by? This is what it must be like to come back from the grave. I died, and now I’m alive again. Am I?
A man wearing nothing but underwear looks at me. His glasses are crooked on his face and his short hair sticks up on his head. His mouth hangs stupidly open and his lips look dry and cracked. Bert walks over to a small metal dresser, takes out neatly stacked and folded clothing and then hands it to the man, telling him to get dressed.
“I play with toilet paper,” is what I think the man mumbles through crusty lips, sitting down on a chair so that he can put a leg through his pants.
“That’s nice, Charlie,” Bert says, walking back over to me.
Holy mother of God. This is where I am. Has Bert been dressing me for a year? Feeding me too?
“It’ll be okay for you to sleep,” Nurse Morales says, sensing my unease and placing herself between me and Charlie. “You weren’t asleep before. Whatever it was that you were in, you’ve come out of it now.”
“What was I in?”
“We don’t know,” Nurse Morales says softly, looking through the corner of her eye at Bert. “Maybe you can help us figure that out now.”
“I can’t,’ I say, covering my face with my hands. “Figure, figure anything.”
“I know. I know, not now. Later, after you’ve rested.”
I’m sitting now at a table with Nurse Morales, watching through a window the sun come up like molten gold over rooftops, wearing clothes that feel too big for me. It is almost time for Nurse Morales to leave. In a little while other patients will shuffle or stagger in and breakfast will be served. In the meantime we sip lukewarm coffee in paper cups thick and heavy enough to hold lava.
“The first thing I want to do is call my girlfriend,” I say. “And then, well, I guess my mother. It’s hard to talk.”
“You haven’t been using your vocal cords much,” Nurse Morales says in a low voice that tells me that I should whisper. “It’ll take time for your body to build itself back up.”
“Am I dying of something?”
“No. There’s no reason to think that.”
I look down at my hands, feeling as if something impossibly huge has passed over me. This is a place for crazy people. Fear of losing my mind, of already having lost my mind, spreads in my chest like springs plunged into bone and muscle. I cover my face with my hands. I feel like doing that a lot lately.
“You need to lie down,” Nurse Morales says, walking to the back of my wheel chair.
“What’s happening to me?” I groan.
Someone is pulling me backward, then pushing me. Bert?
“We’ll talk some more, when I come back. Okay?”
I feel weak and dizzy. The chair is going too fast but I’m afraid to say anything and so I only hold my face and nod. Yes, yes. Please come back and talk to me.
I’ve never been so scared.
When I awaken I feel as if dreams hover around me like dying whispers. Something, something is there and then it’s gone and I sit up clutching blankets like a child, trembling and confused. Doctors walk in and out like curious tourists. A thin psychologist who smells like coffee and brandy speaks to me from the chair Charlie sat on to dress. He has the tired look of a priest who has given up fighting the devil.
“Do you know what year it is?” he says.
This is simple arithmetic but the calculation makes my temples throb anyway. When you’re my age a year is a lot to lose. A lifetime. How can I tell that to him or to anyone?
“What is the last thing you remember?”
I tell him, managing to keep a straight face.
“No, I mean before you came to us,” he says without the faintest smile. I wonder how long it has been since he last smiled. A year?
“I was in the park,” I say.
“Do you hear voices?”
I nod.
“What do they say,” he says, leaning forward.
“Oh,” I say. “Buy Lucky Strikes, buy war bonds, drink Ovalteen.”
“And where do these voice come from,” he says, frowning and sitting back.
“The radio,” I sigh. This jerk wouldn’t get a joke if it drove a tank and ran him over.
“Is there a radio on now?”
“Well if there were we’d both hear it,” I say.
He drones on some more, asking more pointless questions. Under all of them lurks the assumption that I’m crazy or retarded. Never once does he take the time to talk to me as if I were a normal human being. Toward the end of our little chat the very sight of his worn out, twisted face makes my skin crawl and so I look away with shame and horror.
I work in an office, I want to shout.
I work in an office and I’m not a freak.
When they all leave me alone again I stare up at the ceiling, listening to nurses and patients in the hallway, sleeping and then awakening once more in a near panic, eyes popping out of my head, heart beating like a drum about to break. And every time it’s the same. Where am I? How did I get here?
Have I lost more time?
When a nurse named Becky asks me if I’d like to go to someplace called the day room, I nod. I’m still not supposed to walk and so she pushes me in the wheel chair, talking a mile a minute in a Texas twang that makes me think of a little dog dancing on a banjo.
“You’re not cold are you sweetie?”
“I’m okay,” I say, grimacing. Sweetie! What am I, ten?
“You sure gave everyone here a big surprise. Why, I hardly recognize you.”
“Well,” I say, feeling the words sink into my chest. I’m tired but sleep is out of the question and it still hurts a little to talk.
My arms are so thin. Do I eat or just drink out of a straw?
“I don’t hardly recognize myself.”
I’m in the day room which is the dining room when people aren’t in it to eat, hoping no one will notice me but of course some do, I’m the celebrity of the moment, the hospital’s very own Rip Van Winkle. Charlie, my roommate, the one who does something or other with toilet paper, shuffles over to my side of the room, stands next to me and then plops down on a chair without looking. Fortunately, the chair was empty. There is a flower-shaped splotch of what I think is toothpaste on the front of his shirt, the end of his belt sticks out and his shoes are untied. His clothes are so uneven and twisted that it looks as if he dressed inside a tornado.
“You look out the window,” he says, putting one hand on the top of his head.
I don’t understand this right away, since at the moment I’m not looking out of a window; but then I think that he must have seen me spending a lot of time looking out the window. Do I look or do I just look like I’m looking?
“I don’t know. Must like the view, I guess,” I say.
“You’re not looking out the window now.”
“No.”
“D’ya have cigarettes?” he says, flopping both hands into his lap, then looking at them as if they were two boneless fish that had just jumped into the boat.
“I don’t think I smoke anymore,” I say truthfully.
Is this the way it’s going to be? I wonder. Will I turn into a Charlie and spend the rest of my life in the day room? They can’t make me stay here I’m not a mental defective or crazy. I stand up, then wobble toward the door, determined not to spend another minute in this place. They can’t make me stay here they can’t I know my rights and there’s nothing wrong with me.
“Whoa there buddy,” some guy with a red sweater and a clip board says. He has nervous hands and a nose that looks as if it’s been broken at least a few times.
“Where you going?”
“None of your business,” I say.
“I’ll take you in the wheel chair.”
“I’ll walk,” I say, trying to get past a moon-faced woman with large eyes and tangled gray hair.
As the floor rises up to greet me hands out of nowhere take my arms and for a second I have the same giddy sensation I used to have as a boy when I’d hang upside down from the tree in our backyard.
People are in my room, which means that I must be in my room because I see them bustling about a bed, a bed that, I suppose, I must be lying in, hot and dizzy with something sticking out of my arm and something cold and damp wrapped around my head.
I’ll take a stab in the dark and guess that I didn’t get very far.
A nurse with slightly sour breath leans over me while a bald-headed doctor in a white coat glowers at me as if it were the seventh inning of the world series and I had just been thrown out for trying to steal home.
Two men who look weirdly alike roll me over, nurse sour breath is behind me. Sharp stabbing pain in the hip and
and…
I hear bells tolling and think, for a second that seems to hang between all the seconds of eternity, a pearl pulsating with its own uncreated and never ending energy, that I’m late for church and that Mom is on the other side of the door in one of her quiet, deadly rages. Then I’m in my own bedroom but that, too, fades away like the dreams of another lifetime as memories take shape in the dark and there is no escaping the knowledge of where I am and what is happening to me.
Sitting up, I expect pain to embrace me like a knife-wielding lover but find that I only feel mildly thirsty and a bit on the hungry side. The room sounds asleep and I hear Charlie’s surprisingly soft, almost infantile snoring.
It is the medication, I think, that makes me so calm as I put on my slippers. I’ve been here for a year. What difference will a few more hours make? Sooner or later I’ll be out, I’ll let everyone know where I’ve been and what happened to me and then I’ll pick up the pieces of my life and go on.
So here I am again, limping down the hallway, thinking of that old song
here comes Peter Cottontail…
and wouldn’t you know it, why bless her heart, it’s Nurse Morales and that lovable rascal Bert.
They don’t look too thrilled to see me.
“I don’t know what they gave me,” I say, standing there in my pajamas, just a weird looking kid with a bag of bones for a body, tip toeing out for a glass of water in the middle of the night.
“But it feels like I’ve been asleep for a whole year.”
“You should be in bed,” Nurse Morales says, clacking down the hallway in white shoes that make her look like a school girl.
“Oh the hell with that,” I say, making Bert snicker a little bit too loudly, and making me think that, perhaps, here is a man who works in a mental hospital for a reason.
“I’m too hungry.”
I have my robe on now and I’m sitting down with Nurse Morales in the empty dining room, an egg salad sandwich and a bag of potato chips in front of me. I’ve never particularly cared for eggs but there’s enough mayonnaise mixed in and as long as there are no pickles chopped up in there I’m happy enough.
“You look like you feel better,” Nurse Morales says, sliding a little tin ashtray out of the way.
I’ve just noticed what incredibly long eye lashes she has. Her mouth fills up her little face and her wide, toothy grin turns my backbone into a stick of butter.
“I don’t have to keep calling you Nurse Morales, do I?” I say, offering her my potato chips.
“Oh, no thank you,” she says, grinning even more and then resting her chin on a hand that glitters. “It’s Teresa.”
“Looks like you’re married,” I say, pointing at her hand.
“Engaged.”
“That’s good,” I say, wiping my mouth with a paper napkin. “I was. About a year ago. Guess I’m not anymore.”
“You should call her,” Nurse Morales-I mean Teresa-says, moving her eyes down to the table.
“I will,” I say, doubting my own words. “When I finally get out of here.”
“I mean, you never know.”
“How long have you been engaged, if you don’t mind me asking,” I say, suddenly wanting desperately to sit here all night and gaze at the face before me.
“No, I don’t mind. Six months. We’re getting married this June so I’m going to be a June bride, what my mother always wanted. A big wedding in the church I grew up in.”
“What’s his name?”
“Eduardo, Eddie. He’s a cook but one day he wants to open up his own restaurant. He has a good head for business so I know that one day he can do it. He’s also a very good cook.”
“Lucky you,” I say, picturing a large family around a table loaded with steaming Mexican food, Teresa dishing up rice and beans as I’m killing Eduardo Eddie in the kitchen.
Teresa is a busy woman with no time to sit around talking to me and so I’m taken back to my room where I can lay awake listening to Charlie snoring while I think about what I should do tomorrow once I’m out of this looney bin.
Is the world still out there? Am I dead? Hell’s bells. It’s just my imagination trying to scare me but the word “dead” makes my heart beat in a chest that feels as hard and heavy as oak planks. Christ. Get a grip.
I sit up, sensing walls on every side just inches from me. Someone outside is making funny noises. Beep beep beep, da- bidily didily beep.
It’s reverberating inside my head but what…
I’m having a dream the room is full of people I’m sitting in a chair beep beep beep it’s a song I know I’m dressed and it’s not a dream, no, too real but when I stand up legs heavy beep beep beep a folk song some are singing what is it I wonder trying to walk trying to get out as hands come out to touch me a man his red plaid shirt playing an accordion making the beep beep beeps help me help me help me I cry out for the love of Christ where am I…
Men and women in white clothes run to me, their mouths an O as I whirl in place.
Frankie and Johnnnnny were sweethearts…
My arms are pinned to my sides and I can’t breath.
“It’s Johnny. What? No, I don’t know.”
“Never seen him do that before!”
“Hey buddy. What’s up?”
“I was in bed,” I sob, gasping for breath. Goddamnit, can’t they see I’m dying?
“Wait! Wait! Let me talk to him! Get out of the way. Johnny, Johnny you don’t know me my name is Marcy. We’re here to help you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She is short, has a big nose and a voice that reminds me of shredded yellow cheese. Do I understand what she is saying? Why wouldn’t I?
“I was asleep,” I say as they walk me out of the room. “What’s going on?”
I’m sitting on a hard wooden bench in the hallway. Marcy kneels in front of me. I think from the look on her face that she is going to either talk to me or pray.
“Johnny, I want you to listen carefully to what I’m going to say. Okay?”
I look down at gray slip-on shoes I’ve never seen before. How did they get on me? I put my elbows on my knees and rest my face in my hands. Breath slower, I tell myself as my brain fills up with white oxygen. This woman wants to talk to me and all I want is for her and everyone to go away but I nod because what else can I do?
“Do you remember Teresa Morales?”
“Yes,” I moan. Fear and shock are putting my arms and legs to sleep.
“She’s a nurse. Her husband is a cook.”
“Good, good,” Marcy says, sounding as if she’s now standing over me.
“She gave me instructions that if you ever a…started talking that I was to call her right away. She wants to see you, Johnny. Is that okay?”
“Yes, yes,” I say, my face hot and sweaty as I realize that something furry is growing under my nose. When did I grow a mustache?
“Please say that I want to talk to her.”
Two hours later, after I’ve had to endure the usual parade of white suits, clipboards and blood pressure cuffs, Teresa Morales appears in my door, breathing hard, looking flush and a bit plumper than I remember her being the last time I saw her.
“Can I come in?”
“God yes!” I say.
She drags a chair to my bed and then sits down. This is the first time I’ve seen her wearing regular clothes and I’m a bit embarrassed, knowing that she has gone out of her way just to see me. But then again, I’m not one of those guys you get to talk to very often.
“I heard one of the nurses talking,” I say in my usual weak voice. “Are we at war?”
“In Korea,” Teresa says.
“We’re at war with Korea?”
“Kind of. It’s a civil war, I guess, north against south. It’s not even officially a war.”
“What the hell has that got to do with us?” I say, leaning back in bed as if talking to the ceiling.
“I don’t know,” Teresa says. “How are you feeling?”
This calls for a deep breath. How am I feeling? I feel like a man frozen in time, who watches the world rushing away from him in all directions. I feel weakness like an acid in my joints and I feel frightened and ashamed of myself. I can’t explain how, but I know that somehow I’ve lost control of something that’s kept me in the world and now I’m dying or I’m going insane. Possibly both.
“Johnny?”
I’m gripping the sides of the bed, lying very still, trying with all my might to hold on, just hold on.
“Do you want…”
“Teresa, I don’t know, I don’t think I can explain anything. Everything’s coming apart. There’s nothing left and I’ll never leave this place. Hard as I try, I’ll never get out. I don’t understand why I can’t die and get it over with. Do you know what I mean? I’ve seen men die, I understand what it is to bring a life to, to a, a conclusion, to a point where, I don’t know, it all adds up in some way. This is just, I don’t know what it is. A joke? Is that it? This is a joke, the biggest practical joke every play on anyone because this is impossible, no one can live this way. Jesus Christ, can’t anyone do anything for me?”
I feel her hand on my arm. People stop by to look in the room at us. My poor thin body is saturated in oxygen that feels liquid in my blood. I close my eyes, breath slower, and think, for just a second, of only her hand on my arm. Cold spots flow over my face and I think that I have to say something that isn’t about me because I no longer want to think about myself. What’s the point? Her warm hand is still on my arm and maybe there’s a point to that if there can still be a point to anything.
“How is Eddie?” I manage to say at last.
“Good, good. We have a restaurant. And two boys.”
In one day the Morales family has not only opened a restaurant but has reproduced itself twice. Will miracles never stop?
“Good God!” I gasp, unable to hold back the flood of tears that stream down my face.
“Maybe this will be the last time,” Teresa says, gripping my arm now.
“I’m working on it,” I say through the shattered remains of my voice.
“Maybe I should let you rest.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” I say. “I need someone to talk to and you listen. What are their names?”
“The boys? Phillip and Juan.”
“Oh. Those are good names. I bet they must be fine looking boys.”
“Phillip, the youngest one, takes after me. Juan looks just like Eddie. He has the same nose, eyes and dark curly hair.”
“I’d like to see them.”
Teresa reaches into her purse, slips two small snapshots out of a worn leather wallet. Two little boys look up at me, one smiling underneath a cowboy hat, the other looking weary and puffy eyed in a checkered sweater. Pictures taken at Christmas, she tells me.
The word Christmas seems to hit the back of my spine so hard that I feel myself shudder. We wait for Christmas to come around, it’s a marker along the road of life, a time of the year by which to measure the rest of our life. Are we better off than we were? What will the next year bring?
The realization that I will never celebrate another Christmas, that calendars must be meaningless to me, is too much to bear and I roll over onto my stomach.
Somehow, somehow, I think as Teresa silently rubs my back.
I’ve got to find a way to end this. It doesn’t have to be a knife. A piece of glass will do. Or a razor blade left carelessly in a trash can. As long as it’s sharp and I can get away from prying eyes.
“I’ve spoken to your brother Michael a few times,” Teresa says after a short silence. “He wants you to know that he’s married, has a boy and a girl, that he’s an architect now, works for a big firm. The last time I spoke to him he said that he’d like to come out to see you when you’re well. I’ve talked to your mother too a couple of times. Would you like to talk to them tomorrow?”
Michael, the brains of the family. Always liked to draw, took all the hard classes in high school, got good grades, polio, said he wanted to go to college and wouldn’t mind going in crutches. Guess he did, crutches or no crutches. Good for him. But I feel no urge to talk to him, to reestablish something that never much existed in the first place. I’m drifting out to sea and the ropes I’m throwing toward the pier are rotten and about to break. Better to let it go. Less pain that way for everyone.
“Well,” Teresa says, still rubbing my back. “Maybe you want to think about it.”
I roll over on my back, pull Teresa toward me, feel her breasts on my chest, press my lips to hers but it’s too stupid, I can’t fantasize about something so ridiculous, a married woman kissing a half-wit, a man with no future, a man with only one plan now, one tiny, sad ambition.
When the towels are soaked in blood they’ll have to throw them away in special plastic containers. I’ll be taken out so that no one can see me. But the curtain won’t come down even then. There I am, dead, in a wheel chair, a phone tapped to my ear, listening to Michael tell me all about graduating from the University of Chicago and how horrible it must be to be me.
Congratulations, asshole, at least I’m dead. Design a coffin for me when you have the time. I’m fond of brass, oak and straight Kentucky bourbon.
“I’ll let you get some rest now,” Teresa says as she stands, as the warm palm of her hand leaves my back, as someone clatters down the hallway in a wheelchair that sounds like wind-up teeth chattering and clicking, as the faint smell of dried urine hits me from my roommate’s bed, as a radio in another room comes on like an alarm clock, announcing to the world that it better wake up to the Red Menace, as the faces of Philip and Juan float below me like pictures at the bottom of a well, as I soak towels in blood, as doctors stick pads on my forehead, as I sling a rifle on my back, as Christmas burns to a faint ember in the family fireplace, as Michael fills a barren womb to glue the heads on children’s dolls, as someplace called Korea shudders like a woman in sex, the bombs bursting in air, as I stand up, dizzy and matted with sweaty hair and clatter arms swinging everywhere to the door, slowly at first, Teresa behind me muttering caution but I walk faster and faster and finally run down the hallway, run, run, run goddamnit to the door, any door because there’s booming in the sky, my face is slick and oh goddamnit, where, where…
In the dark a blue streak of light, the sky flashes, wind brings air heavy with rain on my face, clothes cling to me like torn skin, Teresa runs and we are both outside listening to thunder and I wonder and then I ask,
“Is it the war?”
“Johnny you’re talking again!” Teresa screams, her wet face now close to mine.
“I knew you’d come back.”
“Where am I?” I shout.
“It’s not the war, Johnny, you’re outside. We’re in the garden and it’s starting to rain. Come inside.”
I take her hand and she leads me through glass doors that slide open by themselves. There is a bench my wet, shaking body slams into. A few patients gather round and stare. How long have I been away this time? I ask before I’ll be afraid to ask.
“The last time we talked,” Teresa says into my ear, drying my hair with a rough, white towel someone has handed her. “Was, I think, almost, almost five years ago.”
“Damn,” I say.
“How are you feeling?”
I lean back in the bench, close my eyes and breathe in the starchy odor of the towel. Five years and Teresa is still here. And so am I. Strange thing is, this doesn’t bother me much. No need to do anything painful and dramatic like killing myself. I wriggle my toes in wet socks and feel a strange sort of relief come over me. All the mad electric panic racing through my body is gone as if it were never there to begin with.
“Are you going to work here for the rest of your life?” I say to Teresa.
She laughs as other nurses and a doctor come running up to us, gaping as if we’re the scene of an accident.
“Yes,” I say to the circle of wide open faces around me, my voice raspy in my own ears now that I have to speak up. “I occasionally talk.”
It is five thirty in the morning and I am pacing up and down the quiet hallway outside my bedroom in dry clothes, a young doctor with golden, wavy hair at my heels. He has the accent of a north-easterner, the body of a football player, the round face and upturned nose of a snobbish monk.
“Do you dream?” he says.
“No.”
“Do you see or feel anything unusual just before you lose consciousness?”
I stop walking to consider this. There is something but I don’t want to go into it with him. I can hardly understand it myself.
“No,” I say.
“Do you see or hear anything?”
“I do now,” I say, resuming my pacing.
“I mean…at other times.”
“I go to sleep,” I say. “And then I wake up. In between, I don’t know. I’m not aware of anything.”
“We’re you injured in the war?”
“No.”
“Struck on the head?”
“No,” I say, moving more quickly now.
“Ever have hallucinations? Hear voices?”
I look down, put my hands behind me and walk. There is carpeting now in the hallway. Purplish red, the color of wine. Yesterday I was working in an insurance office. It feels as if that were fifty years ago. Are the same people still working there? I wonder. Or have they moved on? It makes me sad that I’ll never know. I have become a sad man, I suppose, but not a desperate one. Once upon a time I thought seriously about committing suicide. That almost seems funny now. What would be the point? It reminds me of something a buddy of mine once said while we were on a troop train.
“I’m just a passenger, Johnny, so it’s none of my business where we’re going.”
“What’s it like?” the doctor says.
I turn around and face him. He looks down apologetically and clears his throat.
“What does what feel like?” I say.
“Always waking up with…time elapsed.”
I lean against the wall, looking at the gaggle of nurses behind him, at the wine colored carpet, at Teresa who stands apart with her back to me. I think about the life I could have had. A wife, children, a home and a career. I think about the first time I ever fired a rifle, how I marched off to war like every other poor bastard, how I used to listen to the radio on a Sunday without getting out of bed and how good that felt. There was so much time ahead of me then. An endless ocean of it.
“It feels like,” I say, folding my arms across my chest. “It feels like I’m living my whole life in a day.”
“You know that,” the doctor says. He stops to scratch his monk’s upturned nose. “We’re working on it with doctors in other hospitals, even in other countries. It’s sort of hard to believe that I’m finally talking to you.”
“I find it difficult to believe myself,” I murmur, moving on.
The walls seem different. Must be new paint. Patients, limping out of bedrooms, their face grim, their glasses smudged, their hair the texture of spun spider web, look at me or through me and then, gripping their crotch or quivering like broken marionettes on a wire, limp quietly back in.
I walk up to the nurse’s station and then stop, listening to music that is playing at a very low volume. There is a cough behind me and I turn around to see Teresa.
“What’s the matter, Johnny?” she says.
“Nothing,” I say. “It’s just that I heard music and I wondered where the radio was.”
She walks behind the counter and then hands me something no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. I hold it up to my ear in astonishment, for this is the radio.
“How is that possible!” I say.
“Transistors,” Teresa says. “It’s a transistor radio.”
“Wowie,” I say, handing it back to her, afraid that I might damage it. “And you can take that anywhere and, and listen to the radio?”
“Pretty neat, eh?”
“I’ll say.”
“There’s probably a lot of things you’d find pretty interesting,” the doctor says with, I think, forced gaiety. “New cars, jet airplanes, color televisions.”
“I’d settle for a beer,” I say. “A beer, on a hot day, with my girl.”
As I walk on I hear something else but know that it’s not a radio. I’m not getting any closer to it but neither am I getting any farther away. It seems to be all around me; and when I stop to listen it seems to be more in my head that in my ears. A woman sobs.
He’s been shot.
Who, I wonder, has been shot?
And then for the first time I see-more in my head than with my eyes-a kind of wall before me. It’s black and pulsating, a slice of cloud in blank, brilliant light. I know that I can either step through it now or wait for it to enfold me with all of its black, radiant beauty.
Fingertips touch my back but I ignore them. I remember a night in Chicago when I told my mother that I was enlisting in the army, when she staggered up from her chair, wiped tears from her drunken face, laughed, boxed one side of my head so hard with her little rough red knuckles that bells rang and then fell to the floor on her knees to rest her head on the wall and talk to Jesus as if he were on the other side.
My brother, who can’t join the military because of his polio, thumped with me on braces out of the house. We stood looking at the moon and talking in low voices. It was a hot, humid night, a steam bath. People slept on porches and rooftops.
It was weird to think that I would soon be leaving the only home I’d ever known. The city of Al Capone, who used to leave food baskets on our doorstep. The city that had taught a skinny kid to drive a car, read Milton and Carl Sandburg, smoke, play poker and chess, listen to classical music and use a switch knife. The dirty, noisy, freezing hot, Italian-Polish-Catholic-Black-White, El train, mob-run city of my youth.
“She’ll get over it,” my brother said, handing me a cigarette. “Just one of her moods, you know.”
“I know I’m doing the right thing,” I said bitterly, still feeling the imprint of her viscous little fist on my head. “She should be proud of me like every other mother. What the hell’s wrong with her?”
“Oh you know,” he said. “She gets worked up over everything. You should have seen her the other day at the market when she talked to Mrs. Walters about Debbie going to the hospital to have her tonsils taken out. My God. More drama than a soap opera.”
But there is more to it than that, isn’t there? I ask myself in amazement. Didn’t Mrs. Walters have a brother who joined the army, who came back with an arm sawed off at the elbow and a duffle bag full of nightmares that made him want to look, for the rest of his life, at the bottom of bottles?
I inch forward, trying to get the feel of this soft, unfocused, flowing, pulsating, unseen and yet seen wall and I wonder if Jesus is on the other side but I guess not, no, only voices, the radio, Kennedy dead, shot, a sad moment for us all.
“Teresa,” I say, turning around. “Who is Kennedy?”
People stare at me like owls. I feel the wall at my back. Can they see it? Is that why they’re staring?
Don’t mind that, folks. It’s in my head, not yours. Be grateful for small favors.
“Kennedy?” she says, walking up to me through a crowd of smooth, printed feathers and big yellow eyes. “He’s the president.”
“Well,” I say, looking only at her, hoping that only she will hear me. “Is he okay?”
“As far as I know,” she says, smiling and dipping her shoulders. “Why do you ask, Johnny?”
“Oh, no reason,” I say, turning back to look at the wall. Hi, Jesus! Whadya know? Everything okay on the other side? I mean, is the world crazy or is it just me and don’t answer right away, all right, because I must be hearing voices but I don’t think, given the little I know about crazy people, that those are the kinds of voices crazy people normally hear but who am I to say?
Jesus Christ, I tell myself as I slide down to the floor. Do I really have to add this to the list?
Teresa kneels down beside me. Feet bounce down the hallway like basketballs, there are shouts and my heart nearly drowns out what the nurse is trying to say.
“…are you…hear me…”
I wipe the sweat off my face. The wall is all around us but it’s only around me. It gives off a heat that I can’t feel on my skin and it makes a sound I hear but not in my ears. The goddamn thing is in my head but it won’t stay there.
“Johnny I don’t want you to move, do you understand?”
“They’re saying that he was shot two days ago in Texas by some guy named Oswald. Is that what happened?”
“No, Johnny,” Teresa says, placing her hand on my forehead like a mother testing her baby for a fever.
“It’s closing in,” I croak. “Maybe it means that I can’t stay much longer.”
Teresa motions for the men with the stretcher. When she looks at me her normally light brown skin is pale.
I close my eyes but the darkness beats me to it.
A soldier comes toward me with a mine sweeper. Noisy, I think, for a mine sweeper. And the guy, instead of wearing fatigues, has on white pants and a white shirt, which makes him the perfect target. The mine sweeper has a brush on it that skips over the floor, leaving it shinny and smooth. I sit hunched over on a bench, watching it get closer and closer.
They’re all gone now, this is not where I was and these aren’t the clothes I was wearing. The soldier in the white fatigues is thin, black, and he whistles softly to himself as he moves the sweeper back and forth.
I look at the machine, avoiding the man’s eyes, then move my head slowly from side to side. No one is around, which makes me wonder what time it is.
Does it even matter, since time no longer means much to me anyway?
I stand up slowly, keep my hands down at my sides, look at the floor and shuffle down the hallway with the sweeper at my back. The man is whistling another tune which I like but don’t recognize. It’s a happy sounding little song. Perhaps the man is happy, or always likes to whistle while he works.
There is no one around, so it must be the middle of the night. The staff must let me wander around by myself. I hear someone snoring and then, far away, cups, I think, clattering to the floor and a woman’s high, musical chortle. The sweeper is silent, my heart beats like a bird in my chest and I feel so weak and dizzy that I bend over and lean against my legs, looking at my hands.
They are wrinkled and as thin as paper.
Maybe I’m forty, maybe I’m sixty. I straighten up, take in a deep breath that makes my ribs ache, feeling anger build up inside me like steam in a kettle. In all these years what have they done for me? With all the medications doctors have why can’t one of them anchor me in the ocean of time I am adrift in?
Am I that damn different from every other human on the planet?
I make it to another bench, sit down, close my eyes and try to think, and what I think is that I won’t say another word, I won’t let them know that I’m here because there’s nothing they can do anyway but gawk at me.
And so I sit, shuffle, sit again and shuffle again, seeing through the corners of my eyes men pushing carts, a few nurses writing, chewing gum, talking on the phone and peddling around me as if I were a tree that had decided to uproot itself and stagger, thin, wooden and leafless, into the concrete habitat of the humans.
No, not a tree; a ghost. I stood in the lobby of a movie theater and fell into a trance when? This morning? I walk past a room, barely lifting my feet, and listen to someone urinating. What happens, I wonder, when I have to pee? I walk on, keeping my eyes down, looking at the floor turn white, then speckled, then into black and white squares. I am somewhere else now. There are tables in this room, and from somewhere nearby I get a whiff of coffee mingled with the acrid smell of water and vinegar boiling on a grill.
I look up and accidentally lock eyes with someone, a man with a pale, uneven face and unnaturally bright, green eyes. We look at each other in mute astonishment.
“Chuck,” he whispers to a man standing next to him.
“What’s the matter, Louie?” the man I assume is Chuck says.
“Is that the guy?” Louie says, blinking his unnaturally bright, green eyes.
“Dat’s him all right.”
“Is he…looking at me?”
Chuck steps in front of me as I let my eyes unfocus.
“Ole Johnny he just walking the floors is all. Does it most every night.”
“Valerie told me last night that he can see the future, swears up and down that he knew who was gonna shoot Kennedy, said she heard it with her own ears.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Chuck says. “People hear what they want to hear and sometimes they remember what they want to remember. Camp fire crap is all it is. God don’t let us see the future and for good reason. Forget that poor bastard, we got inventory to do and we don’t got all night.”
I look down again at the floor, listening to their shoes press against the floor. That’s right, forget the poor bastard. We can’t see the future and for good reason.
But apparently I did.
There was a president named Kennedy and a man named Oswald shot him. And I heard about it before it happened.
How could that be?
For the next hour I wander up and down the hallway until a nurse unlocks the lounge and turns on a television set built into a maple cabinet. I am still fascinated by these weird contraptions and so I stare at the ghostly image of a man, seated behind a desk, talking in a monotone voice about pork bellies and the price of corn.
Of course, it’s a farm report, the kind I used to listen to on the radio in Chicago.
Someone creeps up behind me, muttering, “Catch’in up on the news there Johnny?” before creeping away like a human centipede.
I slowly shuffle into the room, sit down on the couch and then, pretending to look at the floor, tilt my eyes toward the screen. There is a commercial for a powder than makes water taste like orange juice, then another for a powder than turns into pancakes when you add water. I guess no one has time to make juice or cook these days. My mother, crazy as she usually was, at least cooked.
I can’t see her face in my mind’s eye anymore. My father’s face was lost to me years ago. Now Mom’s.
It’s hard to know if I should be sad about this or not. Part of me is relieved that she is gone but another part of me feels empty, afraid and a little ashamed. Maybe this is what people experience when they are dying, the slow and horribly methodical stripping away of memory. I have to put this thought away. The world will go on without me, I know, but if I continue to let these thoughts build up and take over I’ll take the whole of reality with me and there will be nothing, I will soon never have existed and so I can’t think, I have to look at the television and pretend not to look or to think or to feel.
It occurs to me that, perhaps, this is what television is for. A kind of pacifier. If that is so then what kind of world is growing and spreading all around me as I sleep like Rip Van Winkle?
The day spreads out before me like a self-induced fog. Doors creak open and feet march through the hallway carrying bodies that swish in big jackets. Music dribbles out of small speakers amidst groans, curses and cackling laughter. I’m taken to my room, dressed and brought to the dining room, where a plate of lemony yellow eggs are dropped in front of me. I guess that I must be capable of feeding myself, so I nibble on the eggs, nearly burnt toast and a bland sausage patty.
I’m taken to a big room where people spend the day sitting at tables full of playing cards, checker sets, paperback books and assorted building blocks. I listen to people talking about medications, nightmares, parents and getting a pass. Some seem blissfully happy while others look as if they were born angry or depressed. I shuffle to the back of the room and watch another television.
For the first hour there are cartoons on and I’m stupefied at this. How can cartoons be on television? But then I think that anything can appear on the magic box. A male worker with long, skinny arms changes the channel and we watch the news.
Bugs Bunny has been replaced by American soldiers dying in some place I’ve never heard of.
“Shit,” Long Skinny Arms mutters to himself. “Fuck’n shit.”
One more war in another Asian country. This is becoming some kind of weird habit. But it doesn’t seem real. We never saw war like this in movies or even in newsreels. But I recognize it all right. The stupefied look on the faces of the soldiers, the look of terror on the farmers as they flee their villages. I can smell the rancid, acid sweet odor of death and suddenly remember more about the war I fought in than I thought I had remembered. The long roads we marched on, the tanks that made my feet tingle as they shook the ground, the strange feeling of hollowness inside me as I looked at gutted buildings filled with rubble and trash. At night I would dream about bodies rising out of the earth.
When the television is switched to soap operas and Long Skinny Arms has muttered himself out of the room, I stand up. The effort makes me dizzy. I stare at the floor and shuffle toward the door. A wave like wind made of stiff, invisible plastic hits me in the chest and I have to stand very still to breath. People with muted voices and stricken faces swirl around me. Insane, speeded up music fills my head. I am light, lighter than air but I barely have the energy to move. In the hallway the light seems to stick to the walls and I know that if I want to stay here I have to keep moving.
I hear crying.
As I shuffle, head down, the crying becomes softer, like breath that is sucked down and held. I can only see ahead of me now. The walls I can see but not with my eyes, the walls I can touch but not with my fingers, are all around me and so I must be careful.
“Maybe you should go home,” a woman says. “You should have taken a month off. Why don’t you go home now, sweetie?”
A sickening feeling boils up inside of me because I know who the woman is talking to.
I wait a long time outside the office before I finally hear Teresa’s voice.
“You know,” she says wetly. “The funny thing is, he graduated from high school but he never thought that he was good at school, he never got the grades we thought he should have gotten but when he joined he said, ‘Mom, when I get out I’ll be able to go to college and I’ll be ready for it. This will be.’”
She abruptly stops. The last sentence, “This will be,” hangs in the air like a bird trapped and panting in a net. This will be. This will be. But struggle as it does, it can’t, and never will.
I back away from this office that does not exist yet and almost trot down the hallway now so full of lost and wounded souls. Their faces are as vacant and haggard, I think, as mine must look. But I have to stay here, at least for a while, because I finally know what I must do, what I’ve always had to do.
Time moves very slowly, I’ve discovered, when I’m forced to stay awake. People scream and cry, and the staff sometimes makes rude and hostile comments openly and under their breath. I wonder if I notice when I’m in my state of suspended consciousness. Probably not and just as well. I will soon float up that dark stream but not now. I have to hang on.
At last there is the changing of the guard as I shuffle, stooped over like an old man, past the nursing station. There are faces, mostly young, that I don’t recognize and I’m beginning to worry. What if she doesn’t come tonight? What if, on this night of nights, she is sick or has car trouble? I pace, practicing my vacant, expressionless expression when I hear her voice behind me.
Carefully I wait while she talks to the other nurses, puts away her purse and coat, changes shoes or whatever else she’s doing. The walls feel as if they’re moving toward me. I can see the faint outline of the wall-the wall-in my head and I know that I’m running out of time.
An hour passes, two hours as stupid people try to move me into this or that room but I have to resist as best I quietly can. I am nearly sick with despair. I’m running out of time. Can’t anyone see that?
At last, when it’s quieter, when people have stopped trying to move me, I sense her presence.
She walks around me, peers into my face and smiles. No one else is around and so I look her in the eyes and smile back. As her pupils enlarge and her face whitens I whisper, “We have to talk. It’s important.”
“Johnny, how long…”
“Not here,” I say under my breath.
She has things to do so I wait, and when she returns we walk, hand in hand like an old married couple, to my room.
“Your roommates in the tub,” she says. “Johnny?”
“You know,” I whisper. “That I was right about Kennedy, don’t you? He was the president, and he was shot, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” Teresa says. “I remember that day. All of us who were there do. No one else believes us.”
“Teresa,” I say, almost afraid to look into her face. “Are your boys okay?”
“Why do you ask, Johnny?”
“I need to know.”
“They’re fine,” she says slowly.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” I say. “I can’t explain it, I can’t explain it to myself so you have to just listen. I’ve been in this hospital for years, kind of asleep, but I know about things, like what was going to happen in Dallas. Teresa, I never heard of Vietnam before. I don’t even know where it is. All I know, and don’t ask how I know, is that if your son joins the army and goes to Vietnam, he won’t come back. You have to keep him from going. Do you understand me?”
“Philip enlisted. How did you know?” she says. Her eyes are so unnaturally bright that it hurts mine to look at them.
“I don’t see how this war or whatever it is has anything to do with protecting our way of life. I get the feeling that it doesn’t make sense to a lot of people, not just me. Teresa, if Philip dies, and this is hard to say, but my gut tells me if your son dies it will be for nothing. Tell him what I said. This may be the last time we talk.”
There is no one in the room now. It is raining outside. I am in a chair, in a room, maybe it is my room. As I look about I see that the walls are covered with pictures of flowers, children walking hand in hand down a sunny lane and trees in a fine mist. I know right away that I have been away for a long time. When I look down I see the wrinkled hands and skinny arms of an old man.
I try to stand but find that is too difficult. My legs feel as weak as pipe cleaners. The skin on my face is lined and paper thin. I have to blink to focus my eyes and everything looks a little watery.
For some reason I came back, but I don’t know why.
An hour passes. Maybe two. I listen to the rain splatter against the window. There is no hunger or pain. I only feel a little tired.
When the door opens a large black woman with eyes the size of golf balls looks at me. I look back, smile, and then she stops, her mouth drops open and her lips form the V shape of a Vick’s cough drop.
I try to speak but the only words that come out in a dry croak are, “Hi. Hi.”
“Oh my God,” she says. God sounds like Gawd. I like her. She has taken good care of me. I can feel it.
“I’ll, you, you’ll, you stay right there, Honey,” she stammers.
As soon as she leaves I hear shouting in the hallway and feet running everywhere.
The whole thing feels funny, and I wonder if this is how Jesus will feel when he finally decides to come back. Oh my God! Oh my Gawd!
All kinds of people rush in to see me but one of them, a thin, nervous black girl who wears a sweater around her shoulders, says, nearly hopping on one foot and then the other, that she has to call someone, that I should stay right there, that she’ll be right back as soon as she calls this mysterious someone.
I think I know who that is.
Doctors in vanilla white suits and nurses who look like they’re wearing pajamas want to know how I’m feeling, what my blood pressure is, how fast my heart is beating, if I hurt anywhere, if I remember anything.
“Everything,” I say, taking sips of water from a bottle that someone has gently put into my hand.
“I remember that this morning I took a walk to the park. It was hot. I had just gotten into an argument with my girl friend. So I went to the park and thought that a beer would be a good idea after all.”
Some of the people standing around me are holding strange looking black boxes. I ask them what they are and they say, “tape recorders.”
“How can they make them that small?” I say.
“Transistors,” one of the doctors says.
“Yes. I think I heard of those once. Maybe it was this afternoon, when I watched television in the big room.”
“It wasn’t, ah, this afternoon,” someone with a flabby face and close eyes says.
“To me it was, son,” I say. “To me it was.”
After a weary hour or so of this I finally see Teresa behind people in the doorway and I wave her in.
“Long time no see,” I say to her as she squeezes in.
“I’m retired now,” she says at last, catching her breath. “But…”
“But you’ve been coming to see me,” I say. “I knew you would.”
“Johnny.”
“Wait,” I say. “We’ll have our little talk.”
It is almost midnight and at last we are left alone. Teresa tells me all about the chain of restaurants she and her husband own now, how they have been able to keep me in a private room they furnished themselves. How, every Sunday after church, she comes to see me.
“You didn’t have to do all that,” I say, embarrassed.
And I am still more embarrassed when she kneels, puts her arms around me and kisses my cheek.
“I did what you said,” she whispers in my ear.
“And Phillip?” I say.
“We helped him go to Canada. It wasn’t easy, you know, he didn’t believe me at first. I had to have other people, the nurses who were there when you told us about Kennedy, talk to him. I don’t know if he ever believed me because I finally had to do something dramatic. I think I told him that I’d kill myself if he showed up for basic training. In a Catholic household, that’s no joke.”
I hobble over to my bed and lay down. It is surprisingly soft and firm. She really has been taking good care of me.
“Do you want to sleep now?” she says.
“In a while,” I say, smiling on the inside. What I really want to do is look and look and look at this woman who has befriended me all these years.
“How do you do it?” I say.
“Do what”
“You haven’t aged a day,” I say, no longer afraid to say it. It is the confession of an old man.
“You’re still so beautiful.”
“Oh, Johnny!”
“Sounds like a song,” I say. “Maybe they’ll make a ballad out of me.”
“There were articles in the newspaper about you,” Teresa says.
“Oh?.”
“People said you talked about flying saucers.”
“I don’t even know what those are,” I laugh.
“I better let you get some sleep,” she says, standing up. From the clothes and jewelry she has on I believe that she does own a chain of restaurants. Good for her.
“I guess I’m pretty damn old,” I say. “This time I really do think it’s goodbye.”
I try to make it sound as if I’m joking but Teresa doesn’t even smile, she looks down at the floor, takes a big breath.
“What does he do?” I say.
“Who?”
“Who!” I laugh. “Phillip.”
“He lives in Canada with his wife. They have three grown children. We see them every year for Christmas and New Year. And of course we talk all the time on the phone.
“I didn’t tell you about Juan. He was drafted. I think he was glad because he was ashamed of what his brother had done.”
“Oh.”
“He came back with a star shaped scar on his chest that he got from falling out of a jeep and landing on a rock. I think I aged ten years every day he was over there. Now he has a beard and teaches kids guitar. Sort of the hippy in the family. Philip dropped out of medical school but then earned a PhD in psychology. He teaches and has a private practice.”
“Sounds like they grew up to be fine men,” I say. “You must be proud of them.”
“We are.”
Teresa and I listen for a few seconds to the rain.
“You saved my boy, I know you did,” Teresa says in a husky voice. “I don’t know how but I know you did.”
“I think there’s a reason why this happened,” I say, lacing my fingers and placing them on my chest. “Maybe none of us is complete until we’ve saved someone. I don’t know. That’s how I feel. I feel like I’ve become a whole human being at the end of a very long, strange day.”
“You’re a good man, Johnny.”
“Thank you, Teresa. I hope so, although I’ve come to think that maybe I just wasn’t good enough, but then again, how many of us are?”
“God knows how good you are.”
“I guess I’ll find out soon enough,” I laugh.
“The doctors are very hopeful,” she says.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say with a wave of my hand that, for some strange reason, reminds me of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself?
“I’m happy, and I mean really happy, for the first time in my life. Going through war, sitting in an office, kind of numbed me to how miserable I’d become. But I’m free of all that now.”
“Do you like the room?”
“You’ve done a beautiful job, Teresa, thank you. Thank you for looking after me all these years. I always knew you’d be a good friend to me.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“I just want to rest now,” I say.
She gives me one last kiss goodbye, then slowly closes the door. I am alone again.
I try to sleep but it won’t come. The rain keeps beating against the window. I get up, walk to the chair by the window and sit down.
There are rain drops that turn into streams of water on the dark glass. I’ve never given water much thought before and maybe that’s only natural; but now I think about drops, streams, lakes, oceans, rivers. All separate and yet all one at the same time.
I put my hand on the window and watch the rain trickle through my fingers.
End
Sierra Madre, California
2005-2006
Copyright 2006
