There were two matters with Kevin that were going to have to be tackled sooner or later. First was Kevin’s hygiene. I realized right from the beginning that part of his difficulty with cleanliness was tied to his numerous fears. For instance, he was so afraid of water that there was no hope of getting him into a bathtub. However, lack of good hygiene made him generally so unpleasant to be with and so unattractive that I felt it should be given some priority. Beauty may be only skin deep but the judgments founded on it tend to go a lot deeper, whether we wished they would or not. No one was going to take to a kid who looked like the aftermath of Mount St Helens and smelled like a locker room after a game, regardless of how clever I or Dana or anyone else might be about changing his behavior. Ordinary people just aren’t that accepting.
Kevin never would set the world on fire in the looks department. He was sort of your basic model ugly kid. But if his hair hadn’t looked like someone had tested their lawn mower on it and his clothes fit and he washed, he had the potential to be a whole lot closer to average.
Unfortunately, I quickly learned that many of Kevin’s problems were beyond my control. His hair, for instance. It was the old buzz job up the back and around the sides, leaving one long lock hanging over his forehead. It looked like a grown-out Mohican. Unfortunately, all the boys at Garson Gayer looked like that. Zoe, the cook, brought in her clippers once a month and gave all the fellows a workover. But there wasn’t much to be done about it. She was free and she was there. I didn’t know any barbers at all, particularly ones who made house calls. And I couldn’t cut hair myself. I had tried once when I was a teacher at a state hospital, and one of my boys complained about looking like a girl. So I took the school shears from my desk and gave him a trim and, while he no longer would be mistaken for a girl, it ended any ideas I might have had about a potential future in hairdressing.
Kevin’s clothes were about as bad as his haircut. They were obviously thirdhand and at least ten years out of style. This wouldn’t have mattered much if it weren’t that they were so small for him. One shirt’s sleeves couldn’t be buttoned because they came so far up on his wrists that the cuffs wouldn’t fit around that part of his arm. He owned no pants that covered the tops of his socks. Worse, the pants were all too tight in the crotch. In the beginning, I had thought he was constantly masturbating. As it turned out, he was simply trying to pull the pants down a little to allow himself to sit comfortably. This daily torture was almost more than I could bear to watch.
Perhaps worst of all was Kevin’s skin. It could have kept a dermatologist in business for life. He had acne everywhere, undoubtedly aggravated by the fact that he did not wash. There were pimples on his cheeks, on his nose, on his chin, on his forehead, even on his ears. In the bad places, his pimples seemed to have pimples. It was gruesome to have to sit really near him, forced to view such devastation at close range, and I could only imagine, if it repulsed me, what it would do to strangers.
Clearly Kevin’s appearance and hygiene were areas for some definite overhauling, and as we grew more comfortable with one another, I mulled over methods of approaching it. However, before embarking on any wild schemes of improvement, I wanted to enlist the cooperation of Dana and the Garson Gayer staff who supervised the rest of Kevin’s day.
We were in a team meeting when I brought it up. I pointed out my reasoning on the matter, that it would make him more pleasant to be with, that it would reduce people’s negative image of him, that it would eliminate some of the prejudices surrounding this boy because he looked so retarded and disturbed when, indeed, I would not be surprised to find his IQ quite close to average, and that undoubtedly it would improve Kevin’s own self-esteem, since no one likes to think of himself as ugly.
These were reasonable objectives, I said, if we all worked together. Certainly, there must be a physician affiliated with Garson Gayer who could prescribe treatment for his skin. There had to be state money coming in for a clothing allowance. When had his eyes been tested last? And his hair … well, I inquired politely, could we give Zoe a vacation from that task for just a little while?
Here was an area where I met unexpected opposition. Or rather, apathy. Dana said forthrightly that she had been looking at Kevin for so long that she’d gotten used to him. Not too much under there anyway. He never would be Mr America. No, I agreed, and I didn’t expect a Mr America. But there was no reason for him to look like something off the back ward at the state hospital either. Someone at the table shrugged when I said that. He shrugged again when I looked at him. Why bother? he said. That time would come soon enough.
Dana had another counter, one which I couldn’t so easily dismiss. Why get him new clothes when he refused to wash or even change without a struggle? They’d be ruined in a few weeks. How would you get him to a dermatologist or an opthalmologist when he wouldn’t leave the building? Why put him through all that hassle when he didn’t care?
How did we know he didn’t care? I bet he did, I said, and my voice sounded weak in my own ears. We didn’t know. Kevin seemed quite happy in his filthy, unkempt state. He certainly never remarked on it to me. Maybe it didn’t matter. So, for the time being at least, I gave up that effort. Maybe I just realized what everyone else there had known, even though it wasn’t said. What did it matter to a kid like Zoo-boy? Where was he going anyway?
The other issue was less easily dismissed. Fear.
Fear lived with us like a third party. It had a life of its own. It ruled us; it tyrannized us. I came after a while to think of it not as a part of Kevin but as a separate entity. It bullied him and it bullied me. And try as we would to overcome it, if we ventured too far – whap! – it drew us up sharp like misbehaving puppies on leashes. Kevin would immediately be reduced to a shivering, quivering, teary mass and the next time he would be terrified to try whatever had frightened him the time before.
The fears were funny things – funny-odd. I never knew from one day to the next what things might evoke fear in him. Like the spirals on the notebooks that he’d imagined were lurking in that box. Or door hinges. He could go berserk with terror over a squeaky door hinge. Or squeaky chairs. I became a master at improvising squeak-stoppers. I used everything from pencil lead, ground fine between my fingers, to lipstick. And smells were terrifying. Sharp, pungent odors frightened Kevin and odors are an almost impossible thing to get away from. More than once I resorted to carefully stuffing bits of cotton up his nostrils so that he would not be able to smell some infinitesimally faint odor in the room.
After a point I felt like a squirrel on a treadmill. Yet, how ever bad it might have been for me, no doubt it was much worse for Kevin.
‘Sometimes, I lay in bed at night,’ he said to me one day. ‘You know how it is when you’re in bed and it’s dark. They leave a light on in the hallway but we can’t have them in our rooms after ten o’clock. And it makes shadows. That light in the hallway does, and regular things, they stretch all out. I lay there and I look at them and I think, you know, these are just regular things. That’s just my desk. Or that’s just a chair. But they don’t look that way then. They look like something else.’
He turned to glance briefly at me. His voice, as always, was very soft. When Kevin spoke, it sounded more as if he were talking only to himself, half aloud, and not to me at all. It was always in such a quiet, almost dreamy manner – the way my thoughts sounded when I heard them inside my head.
‘They look the way people look,’ he said. ‘You know, people you thought liked you who suddenly you know don’t really. The chairs and desk and stuff, they change in the darkness. Like people change. And I lay in my bed and I think, you know, this is the way the chair really is. The way it looks in daytime, that’s just a foolie. It looks that way to make me think it’s all right. But it’s an ugly thing, a chair at night is. And I know even in the day that it’s ugly underneath. It will be ugly again, when I’m alone with it. When it’s dark. The chair’ll be ugly.’
A small silence came between us. Morning sun bathed over me and I was warm.
‘I’m scared of chairs,’ Kevin said. When I said nothing, he glanced at me. Then down at the floor where he fiddled with some unseen thing in the carpet. ‘I try not to be scared of things. I try to fight it. But I’m not good at it. It’s everywhere at once. It’s like fighting the night.’
November came. Without the holidays to mark the passing of time as they did in school, the days and weeks got away from me and the months could pass softly without my ever remembering when one started and the other one ended. The sharp sunny days began to fade and grow gray and fitful. All the summer’s leaves were dead in the gutters and the final peace was made as the world lay down in winter.
Kevin and I kept at our work. Somewhere along the line, thirty minutes just wasn’t enough, and I extended my time with him to an hour. I couldn’t easily afford it with the other kids at the clinic, and it meant I had to work into the evening because I was still coming to see him every day. Kevin continued to talk to me and to no one else, although we had laid that problem to rest for the time being. All in all, it was a quiet period, spent sharing little moments.
We were coloring. Kevin had a thing about coloring, and I didn’t mind it because it was relaxing and it was the mindless sort of activity I found best for allowing us to talk without its being apparent that was what we were doing.
I had brought us one of those huge posters from the discount store which one colors in with felt-tipped markers. This poster depicted a spaceship out among the stars.
Kevin was coloring the crew at the window of the rocket and I was doing the sky because it was large and boring to color, so Kevin didn’t like it. I was not especially enamored of it myself.
‘You know,’ I said after what seemed like an interminable amount of coloring, ‘I’m not so keen on doing this either. I wish I had a broad-tipped marker instead of this one.’
‘Well,’ replied Kevin matter-of-factly, ‘you have to do it.’
‘We could split it,’ I suggested, looking at all that was left.
There was a long, long silence as Kevin stared at the poster. I saw his knuckles go white as he gripped the pen harder. His breathing tightened. They were the same old signs, and I glanced around the room quickly to see what could possibly be frightening him.
‘No, you have to do it,’ Kevin said. His voice was low. The muscles along his jaw tensed.
I stared at him because I could see his fear coming up on him but I didn’t know what was causing it. Then I looked back at the poster, thinking perhaps I could distract him from the fear.
‘Why don’t we just leave it blank? There’s too much coloring. I could do the stars instead and outline them in black. Then they’d stand out good.’
‘No,’ he said very quietly.
I looked at him. He looked squarely back at me. Fear had dilated his pupils but there was an intensity behind them that I did not recognize.
‘What’s going on, Kevin? What’s wrong?’
‘You have to do it. You have to color that sky.’
‘Why?’
He began to tremble. His whole body arched away from me slightly. ‘You have to do it.’
I watched him.
His voice was only a whisper. ‘You have to. Because I’ve told you to, do you hear?’
I shifted positions. I’d been sitting on my feet and the circulation was going, so I moved them.
‘Awk!’ Kevin screamed when I did. His marker flew out of his hand. Abruptly, he dived for the safety of the table.
‘Kev?’
‘I didn’t mean it!’ he shrieked and covered his head, as he rolled into a ball. ‘I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it. You don’t have to!’
Stunned, I only gaped at him.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it!’ He was in tears already, rocking and sobbing. ‘Please, please, please, I didn’t mean it. Honest I didn’t. Please. I’m sorry.’
‘Kevin, I don’t mind. It’s not that big a deal. Don’t be frightened. I’m not angry You want me to do the sky? I don’t mind. I’ll do the sky. Okay?’
‘Please, please, please, please, please,’ he begged. ‘Oh please don’t think I meant it. I didn’t. Please, I’m sorry.’
‘Kevin?’
He was beside himself, rocking and weeping, crying for me to forget and absolve him. I was too astonished at having caused such a furor to really think about what was going on. On my hands and knees I crawled across the carpet to try and talk him down from his hysteria.
WHAM!
Leaping to his feet when I approached, he threw the table off over his back. ‘Get away from me!’ he shouted. His face grew red, terror glazed his eyes. ‘Get away! Get away!’
Before I could gather my senses, he had picked up one of the chairs. He hurled it at me with keen precision and it didn’t really miss. Painfully, I staggered to my feet.
The room was too small for Kevin to be able to elude me to his satisfaction, and clearly it was I who terrified him. He reacted to me as if I were the Devil Incarnate.
Because the room was so small and he could not get away from me, Kevin felt obliged to keep me at bay by throwing things at me. He needn’t have. I was quite sufficiently panic-stricken myself and was perfectly willing to stay out of his way. This frightened, I knew he was dangerous. And looming up to his nearly six-foot height, he made an awesome sight when he held a chair aloft.
There wasn’t much for me to do. I ducked. A lot. Kevin threw anything and everything he could get his hands on. Chairs, pens, the poster, my box, its contents, even the table. His terror gave him improbable strength. And I, like a circus performer, jumped and ducked and dodged. The most painful things turned out to be the numerous small wooden blocks I had had in my box. They were two-inch square colored counting cubes with surprisingly sharp edges, and Kevin fired them like missiles.
Frantically I looked around for a call button or some other method of summoning help. There was none. I did have a key to the door, which the stupid aide persisted in locking. Still, with Kevin in this state, I did not want to chance turning my back on him for long, especially in front of an exit. But what else to do? Through my mind whirred all the alternatives I could think of. Would I be able to talk him down from this? Would he wear himself out before he splattered me? Should I just keep dodging and hope my strength held out longer than his? I don’t think he was dead serious on really hurting me. All he wanted was to keep me away from him. But that made him plenty dangerous. Every move I made was interpreted as an attack and provoked another frenzy of panic and missiles. But it was a vicious cycle. When I moved, he threw things. When he threw things, I had to move again to avoid being hit.
Around and around and around we went. He was screaming now, ripping at his clothes and throwing himself against the walls in an attempt to escape me. When he came to the door, he jerked at it violently, but of course it was locked.
In the end, I confined myself to the two bare walls and stayed away from the windows and the door so that he would not think I was blocking any exits from him. I held a wooden chair in one hand and fended off what he threw the best I could. He began to scream when I kept the chair in hand because I think he thought I was planning to attack him with it. He screamed and screamed and screamed.
That did the trick. They heard us. Within moments a crowd of faces pressed against the small door window, frightening Kevin even further. Next came the frantic rattling of a key in the lock. Kevin tried to run from the door and fell face forward over the table. His hysteria mounted as he scrambled to his feet and threw himself against the windows.
The door burst open. People spilled in. Relieved to be rescued, I slumped back against the far wall and slid down to the floor. They swarmed over Kevin and tried to pull him from the window. He shrieked louder and fought like a wounded tiger. The Marines were there and they had his legs and his pants. They pulled his shoes off as they tugged him down from the sill. I heard the sound of cloth tearing as they struggled to lift him. There were six of them this time, six big burly men with tattooed arms and Charles Atlas muscles rippling under their shirts. Still they could not maneuver Kevin. They got him down from the windows but now he was on the floor, wiggling and squirming. Kevin escaped their grasp and, like a caged bird, battered himself against the window again. Two more men came and then a nurse. Dana was there too. So was the psychologist and two people in business suits whom I did not recognize. I stayed away from them all, clear over to the far side because I was still afraid I would only add fuel to Kevin’s delirium, if I approached. In the end, it took nine men to defeat that one cornstalk of a boy and bear him out. All the way down the corridor I could hear him screaming, the pitch of it high and hysterical.
Dana came over to me, righting chairs and the table as she came. Of all the people in the room, she was the only one to come to me in the aftermath of the commotion. I was rolling up the sleeve of my shirt to look at my arm.
All of me hurt. There was no point in denying that. Now that Kevin had been borne away, I was feeling sorely in need of a little comfort myself.
The chair had hit my arm, and already a red-and-purple bruise stretched out along the upper half. Dana touched it gently.
‘They’ll have a doctor in for Kevin,’ she said. ‘You ought to have him look at that before he goes. Does it hurt?’
I nodded.
‘You’ve got a scratch on your nose too.’ She fingered it and then refocused her gaze on me. ‘What happened?’
‘I wish I knew for sure. I don’t.’
‘He just went off?’
I shrugged.
I intended to stay until Kevin quieted down and then go talk to him. However, when I went up to the ward, he was still in the seclusion room, still screaming and throwing himself against the walls. So I went down to see the doctor. There normally was not a physician at the residence, but to increase psychotropic tranquilizers in emergencies and to put an individual in seclusion with the door locked, the affiliated psychiatrist had to come over and sign orders. Thus, when I was unable to go in and see Kevin, I went down to where the psychiatrist was sitting in the back of the reception office, drinking coffee. He was a big, heavyset fellow in his late fifties, white haired and very jolly. He set me awash with antiseptic and plastered Band-Aids all over me while telling me about the king-sized sunflowers he had grown in his garden for a competition. Afterward, I treated myself to a can of Dr Pepper and went into Dana’s office to begin the nasty job of recording all this in Kevin’s chart. Most of the staff I encountered had a wry smile for me, a manifestation of the sort of gallows humor one develops working in such places. At least, they said, they had all heard Kevin now.
When I went back up to the ward an hour later, Kevin had been given a second tranquilizing injection. He was still banging around in the seclusion room, however. Briefly I gazed through the window in the door. He was entirely naked. Everything had been removed to prevent him hurting himself, even his glasses. He careened from side to side of the padded cell, knocking himself against the walls, bouncing off, falling into them again. His movements were woozy from the medication or perhaps just from sheer exhaustion but he kept at it. He was still screaming, although it was just a banshee cry now, thin and reedy and keening. His eyes were closed, his head back as he staggered around. With his hands he clawed at his face and his chest, as if to rip them open.
I stood at the window but stared instead at the grain in the wood of the door. It felt eerie to know I had the power to frighten somebody that much. One of the aides came up beside me. She said nothing but stood very close to me and I could feel the warmth of her body, while still not touching her.
‘He’s psychotic,’ she said. She spoke gently, as if they were comforting words, and I suppose she meant that they should be. My own emotions were in an awesome state. They pressed outward against my ribs and chest and upward until they almost forced tears into my eyes. I wanted to cry without really understanding why. I wasn’t disappointed by what had happened. It was natural enough. Nor was I depressed. I had no special expectations of this boy. In fact, I don’t think my emotions were even over Kevin, himself. But I was so near to tears. My arm hurt. I was tired and feeling very vulnerable. The single thing I wanted most just then was for that unknown aide standing next to me to put her arms around me. I needed comfort. I could not even give conscious thought to what was hurting so much inside of me. It was too deep, too complex for words.
Finally, I had to leave. I couldn’t wait any longer. That perhaps was the worst of all, having to leave Kevin like that. But there wasn’t any choice. I would be late as it was for my next commitment, and Kevin’s siege showed no signs of abating. So I left him there alone in his padded cell, alone with his fear.