He sees things in the swirling dust. Minute dancing ballerinas and crystalline cogs. And the faces appearing in the wall. Appearing, and vanishing . . .
I wake up in room 230, Wemberly Sanitarium, a fifteen by twenty-three foot room with peeling green walls. A dream of freedom and intimacy vanishes and the truth comes thudding back like a door slamming. I’m strapped loosely to a narrow bed, where I’ve lain, unmoving, for six years. I lie on my back, sharply aware that the overhead light has just switched on for the morning. It’s only later that the sunlight comes through the high window, to my right. I lay there waiting for the faces in the walls. And the one face that talks to me.
Mostly, nothing happens in this room, except waking, and waiting, and watching the light change; the nurse coming and going, thoughts coming and going. Enduring the pain of bedsores. The paralysis.
I can move my eyes to look around, and blink—and thank God I can close my eyes. I’m able to breathe without help. I’m unable to speak. I can move my tongue very slightly. There’s a little movement in the thumb of my right hand. That’s it, that’s all of it.
I mentioned being strapped in. The only reason they strap me down at all is just because maybe I might have a seizure, and that could make me fall off the bed. But I haven’t had a seizure in years. Some kind of virus got into my brain, years ago, and gave me some really ferocious seizures. The paralysis came after the last seizure, like the jaws of a bear trap closing on me. Anyway, despite the restraints, this is not a mental hospital, this is the Wemberly Geriatric Sanitarium. Geriatric home or not, I’m not old, I’m one of the fairly young patients, for all the good it does me. Thirty-two, by my count, now. Does it sound bad? It’s worse. Maybe the distinct feeling of my life burning away, second by second, like a very, very slow fuse that’s burning down to a dud firecracker—maybe that’s the worst part . . . that and Sam Sack.
I imagine a guy in a band saying, “Fellas, let’s play ‘Paralyzed’—and play it with feeling.” I can feel. I feel more than someone with a snapped spine could. Sometimes I’m glad I can feel things—and sometimes I wish I couldn’t. I can feel the straps over my chest, though they’re not on tightly. I can feel a new bedsore developing on my right shoulder blade. I can feel the thin blanket over my lower half. I can feel the warm air from the vent as the furnace comes on; it blows, left to right, across on my face. I hear the fan that drives the air from the vent; I hear sleety rain hit the window. I can taste a sourness in my mouth—the staff rarely cleans my teeth—and I can taste food, when they bring it, but they give me very little, mostly soups, and not enough. And the way they make the soup there’s nothing much to taste.
Now I hear voices. People talking. They take talking for granted and so did I. We waste so much of it . . .
There is something, lately, that gives me some murky sort of hope. Bethany. Though I’m not sure what exactly I’m hoping for . . .
Before Beth, I had my sad little ways of coping. Daydreaming of course. And writing in my mind—I tell stories, only I tell them in my mind. I think them out and try to memorize them, word for word, and tell them over again, to myself. Sometimes I make the stories up. Sometimes they’re things that really happened.
The story I’m telling now, and trying to etch into a little corner of my brain, is a true one. I know it’s true because I’m telling it even as it unfolds. I have an irrational belief that somehow, someone will hear this story. Maybe I’ll be able to transmit it to them with my mind. Because in a certain way, my mind has become the strongest part of me. I’ll transmit the story all in one piece, out into the ether, and it’ll bounce around like a radio signal. A random writer will just pick it up out of the air, maybe years from now, and write it down—and he’ll suppose it’s all his idea.
My mother abandoned me here, but I guess it’s not like abandoning a child. I was an adult, after all, in my mid-twenties, when it happened. I’d been staying with her while I was recovering from a drug relapse.
My mother and I were never close. That’s an understatement—we had a simmering mutual aversion, muffled by a truce. It got worse after I grew up and went to college. You’re supposed to understand your parents better when you’re grown up.
I did understand her—I just couldn’t respect her. And she knew it.
I won’t say she was a whore, because she didn’t take money from her lovers. (I could almost respect her if she’d done it for money.) No, not a whore—but I do think she drove my dad away with her casual adultery, when I was a teenager, and I know she discouraged him from being in touch with me later. And I know she is an alcoholic and a woman who sleeps with the random men she meets in bars. Or that’s how she was—I don’t even know if she’s still alive.
I don’t know why Mom invited me to stay with her, after I got fired, and lost my apartment. Maybe she wanted me there to take revenge on me—she didn’t have my dad to take revenge on, so she took it out on me. It felt like she wanted me to always be saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Sorry for something I didn’t do.
“You’re just like him, Douglas, that’s the awful thing,” she’d say. Not that my dad was ever a drug addict. And not that I was always one either.
I got into speedballs in the early ’70s, when a lot of us went from Summer of Love thinking, to the whole ’70s glam decadence thing. I would get off work and go right out and score. Always a speedball—heroin and cocaine; heroin and methedrine. I got sick and tired of being sick and tired—so I got clean. I had five years clean, and a good job—before I relapsed. I started using again—and it got me fired. That was another wake-up call. I needed a place to get clean. Spoke to my mom, in a fit of familial yearning, she said, “You may as well come here.”
Six months with my mom. Staying clean, partly because she was staying drunk. She inspired me to sobriety in a backward kind of way. I was just about to move out into a clean-and-sober hostel—anywhere, to get away from her—when the virus hit me. The seizures, the paralysis. The doctors said it was incubating in me, all that time—that I’d gotten it from a needle, fixing drugs, maybe a year or two before.
My mom said it was my comeuppance, it was God’s way to say, “No more, Douglas!” She took care of me for a month—when she was sober enough. Thought I’d get over the virus, in time. But finally she put me here. And here I am still. Six years later.
Because I’m going to talk about Bethany, I should say that this place wasn’t always a Geriatric Sanitarium. It was, for years, a TB Sanitarium. Tuberculosis, consumption. The White Death. In the mid-sixties, when they had TB mostly licked in this country, Mr. Wemberly, the owner, changed it over to a Geriatrics Sanitarium—only, from what I hear, listening to the nurses, it’s only about seventy percent old-age dementia cases. The rest are just odds and ends of damaged people, all ages, who end up here because it’s cheap. Very cheap indeed.
Mom left me here, in 1976. So here it is, 1982.
Punishment. Punishment, punishment. Here I am. I’m sorry. Does that help, to say I’m sorry? If I say it again, does it help? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Now can I get up and walk out of here?
No. The tired gray sunlight coming through the windows says no.
Not much happened to me, for almost six years.
I ingest, I eliminate waste, I breathe. A few minutes of physical therapy, once a month; some electrical therapy; Sister Maria for a brief time. The day nurse and the visits of Sam Sack. That’s all. Anything really new that happens is profoundly exciting—makes my breath come faster, my heart pound. Anything new that has nothing to do with Sam Sack, I mean. I get some stimulation from Sack, sure, but that’s not excitement; that’s nausea in the shape of a man . . .
About four years ago, for almost seven months, I was visited once a week by a nun, a chubby little Hispanic lady named Sister Maria. She used to sit with me for almost an hour. She’d bring one of those cheap one-speaker cassette tape recorders along, play canticles and the like for me, and read to me. Not always from the Bible. She read from Quo Vadis? That was pretty exciting. She had a soft Mexican accent and she used to smile at me and wag her finger and say, “Are you laughing at my accent, Douglas? I think you are!”
It was almost ecstasy, when she talked to me like that—because I did think her accent was amusing. So that was almost like communicating. And when she played music for me, it felt excruciatingly good. It hurt that I couldn’t tell her thank you, and please come back.
She even touched my arm, a soft warm slightly moist touch, when she was ready to leave.
Then she stopped coming. I heard someone in the hall talking about a convent being closed. I think that’s what they said, I couldn’t hear it clearly. I wanted to believe that’s what it was—something out of her control. Sister Maria . . .
No more music, since then. Except what’s in my mind. The old songs from the sixties that replay, over and over in my mind. The whirling dust motes. The sounds from the hall; sometimes a patient crying.
But something important has happened—it happened, for the first time, three weeks ago. One of the faces in the walls has started talking to me . . .
Seeing faces in the wall was one of the ways I kept my mind busy.
It’s funny how the people who take care of me feel like ghosts—and Beth feels like a living person to me. That’s because she talks to me.
Beth spoke to me, in my mind and I replied to her—in my mind. And she heard me!
I wish I could talk out loud—to Beth, to anyone. It’s enough that I can’t move—but if I could at least talk . . . If I could berate the nurses, flirt with the woman who comes in to mop the floor, ask for things, demand to see an attorney, sing to myself—and tell a story to a nurse . . . that’d be worth something.
I can make just one little sound—a high-pitched immmm sound produced way deep in my throat—but it’s hard to make, and it’s such an embarrassingly piteous, subhuman noise I hate to do it. I only do it when I’m trying to ease the pressure, trying to avoid the inner hysteria, that’s like a funhouse in a very bad earthquake. If I feel that coming, then I might immmm.
I have to be sure the nurses and attendants are nowhere around when I make the noise. If they hear it, they get irritated, asking, “Well? What’s the point if you know you can’t tell us what you want?” Figuring I’m trying to get attention. They find ways to show they’re angry with me. They “forget” to change the diaper.
There—I hear the sound of the little metal cabinet on wheels that they roll around to feed those who can’t feed themselves. It clinks with dishes and rattles and its wheels squeak. I’m the first one in this corridor. So that means the morning nurse is coming in, just a few minutes late. I think of her as Mrs. White because she’s an old white woman with puffy white hair and a dirty white uniform. She smells old and talks old, when she mutters to herself, and she’s barely aware of what she’s doing, as she goes through the motions of cleaning me with her twisty old fingers, feeding me breakfast porridge, giving me a shot, brushing my teeth, putting antiseptic—a bandage if she feels like it—on my bedsores. She turns me, props me up back there with special little pillow to give the bedsore a chance to heal. I sort of enjoy that, since I can feel it. She’s supposed to change the sheet, but that’s a complicated process involving moving me a lot, hard work, so she doesn’t do it today. I am aware that her Polydent isn’t quite working and her false teeth are coming loose from her gums. I can hear the sound of them sucking loose as she mumbles to herself.
Sometimes Mrs. White says something to me. Always a kind of complaint. “You’re getting fat and hard to move. They’re going to want to put those electric things on your arms again to keep them muscles up. But don’t think they’ll keep on with it, they’re cutting back on treatment again, laying people off. Well, see there, you don’t poop much, I’ll give you that. But you still smell. That sore of yours, that smells. I don’t know why I got to do this. I should have some real retirement. You can’t live on what I’d have. Some of it got stolen. My husband died and left me nothing but debts. So here I am with you . . . ”
I like her visits, though—I can see parts of the room I can’t normally see, when she moves me about. I can think about the things she says and try to imagine her life. It’s better than hearing nothing from anyone. It’s better than Sam Sack.
After she’s gone, I listen to people talking in the hallway. They come, and they go. Now I pass the time with my worn out old fantasy that someday my dad will come looking for me and take me out of here. I imagine the whole scene, where he wheels me out, and tells me he’s going to find a cure for me. That doesn’t last long.
Sometimes I have other fantasies—I try to avoid the sexual sort. They’re particularly torturous. And I can still get a hard-on. Which makes the aides laugh.
There are darker daydreams, that come to me, at times. Furious, bone-deep violence against Sack; against certain orderlies; against the people who run this place . . .
I push all that down, deep down, because it only hurts me, not them. And I think about what I’ll say to Beth, instead. It’s not time for her to come yet. She won’t come till after it starts to get dark outside. I have to wait . . .
I watch the slanting sun make warped squares on the wall to my left. I start watching the dust whirling in the sunbeams. I try to count them. I select pieces of dust to study individually. To imagine as something else. Sometimes at night before the light goes out, I can watch moths. I’ve watched spiders cross the ceiling, watched them very closely. My eyes hurt with all this staring, but it’s all I’ve got.
Once in a while they bring in a machine that makes my muscles jump with mild electrical jolts. It hurts a little, but I like it, because it’s some movement, and I guess it keeps my muscles from atrophying. It’s experimental. Someone donated it. But Mrs. White says the muscle therapy is going to end.
No one comes today. No electricity, nothing but waiting for lunch. Patiently waiting. The hours are like blocks of ice in a room just two degrees above freezing. Ever so slowly melting. It’s a mystery, why I don’t go completely insane. But how would I know if I was insane?
I’ve tried really hard to go totally mad, cuckoo, out of my mind, lost in space. Definitively insane, in a mad hatter way. The important phrase is, out of my mind. That’d be a kind of escape. I’ve never quite gotten there. The most I’ve gotten to is some vicious fantasies and some hallucinations, now and then. The hallucinations are some kind of sensory deprivation effect maybe. Those faces. Except one.
I’ve seen things in the swirling dust. Minute dancing ballerinas and crystalline cogs. And the faces appearing in the wall. Appearing, and vanishing. The faces frighten me, but at least it’s some kind of stimulation. They sometimes seem amused—sometimes hostile. I used to be afraid they’d come out of the wall somehow and bite me. But they never do. They look at me as if they’re threatening me, but they’re as powerless, as stuck within walls, as I am stuck on the bed in room 230. They move their lips sometimes. I never heard any of the faces speak, though, till Beth showed up.
I’m waiting for her now, my eyes turned to watch the wall to my right, under the window. I can feel she’s near. Maybe she’s a hallucination, maybe that’s how I know she’s coming—because she’s from my own mind. But I want to believe she’s real. I do believe it. She must be. She knows things that I never knew.
I wait for Bethany. She’s never the first to come. It starts with the other faces . . .
Now I see a face in the dull-green wall, turning to look at me. The face is made partly of places where the paint on the concrete is wrinkly, and partly from a wall crack and partly from shadow and partly from my mind connecting all these things. I can tell this one’s a hallucination. It’s a jowly man, balding, looking sullen, almost angry, put-upon, circles under his little eyes. His lips move but I can’t hear what he’s saying. I think I might know who he is. That happens sometimes—the faces are people from memory. I think this man might be Mr. Wemberly. I saw his face six years ago when Mom brought me in here. He looked me over and wasn’t too pleased. Talked about how the necessary staff time made it hardly worthwhile. “Put him in room 230.” That was the last I saw of him.
Now his face recedes into the wall. I see another—it’s a pretty girl, one I sometimes dream about. She looks a little like Jayne Mansfield. She makes a kissy puckering with her lips at me. I’m sorry when she fades away. Another face takes her place—my mother. Her lips sneer, her eyes are heavy with disappointment. Sorry, Mother, I say to her, in my mind. Okay? As if that satisfies her for now, she melts away, and I’m glad. Now comes a face I don’t know—it’s a frightened looking man. He opens his mouth. He screams. Is that my face? It’s too old to be my face. But I haven’t seen my own face in six years.
That face collapses into another face, a little boy with colorless hair and very dark eyes. He seems to be praying. I don’t know him, do I? There’s something about him that makes me deeply afraid, but I don’t know what. He slips back into the wall, and along comes another face—a black woman, looking amused, curious. A pleasant middle-aged face.
She seems to be singing to herself, judging by the movement of her head, from side to side, the way her lips move, but I can’t hear her. I like her. But . . .
I want to see the one I can hear. The one who can step out of the wall. I’m impatient to see her today.
I try to call her with my mind.
I think, Beth . . . Bethany . . . Beth!
I can feel her responding almost immediately. I hear her voice, phasing in and out of audibility: “Was . . . coming . . . anyway . . . don’t . . . so . . . imp . . . ”
Don’t so imp? Don’t be so impatient.
Then the singing black lady melts away, and I see Beth.
I wish I could smile to greet her. All I can do is lift my right thumb a little. She’s just a face in the wall, but then she thrusts her hand from it and wiggles her thumb at me. It’s a little mocking when she does that but honestly it’s just her sense of humor. She’s in a better mood than last time, it seems to me. That’s good. But I know that can change. Her sorrow’s never far away. She’s anchored in Wemberly Sanitarium by sorrow.
Bethany steps out of the wall, into the room. Beth is a slim, barefoot girl in a short hospital gown—her legs are quite skinny, knees knobby. She has a mousy sort of face, but kind of cute the way a mouse’s face is, and long dull-brown hair, a bit lank, and brown freckles on her cheeks and brown eyes. Her coloration comes and goes—sometimes she seems to be made of a cream colored mist. She’s a little foggy below the neck but her arms come into focus when she uses them to gesture, or point. Her lips don’t move when she talks except that they smile or frown or purse themselves.
Her voice seems to echo around, and the last echo comes clearest into my mind. Now and then a word drops out. “Douglas. I’ve come to see you again . . . ”
I reply in my mind. “Hello, Beth. Thank you for coming. I love it when you come here.”
“Has he . . . back?”
“Sack? Not for eleven nights now.”
“He’ll come tonight. I’ve seen him, he’s been looking at that pillowcase with the holes . . . ”
I try to sound brave, and blithe, to impress her with my courage. “It makes a change. But he gets worse every time. I don’t know how the worst kind of guy can get worse.” I tried to make a laughing sound in my mind.
“Don’t do that,” she says, frowning.
“Don’t do what?”
“ . . . make that fake laughing. It sounds like one of . . . gag laughing toys. My father used to sell gags. He was . . . traveling salesman . . . ”
She’s already told me about her eccentric father, but I let her tell me about it again.
After a while that story runs down. “Are you talking to someone else?” she asks.
I’m surprised. “I’m sort of filing everything that happens in another part of my mind, as we talk. In the form of a narrative. You can hear it?”
“Not exactly,” she says. “It’s okay. Your mind . . . a strong one. Some people here . . . very feeble. Almost not there at all.”
“I’ve got nothing to do but make my mind work, in different ways. I’d forgotten algebra but I worked it out again to keep my mind busy, about a year ago. Are you ready to tell me, now, how you got here? You said you would, last time.”
Her frown deepens. “I guess so. I should.” She seems to look around the room, as if trying to remember something. I yearn to ask her to touch me, anywhere at all, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to feel her touch since she isn’t precisely alive. “One reason I came to this room,” she says, “is because I used to live in here. Right in this room.” I am hearing her voice more clearly now. That happens when we’ve been talking for a while. It’s like we hone in on each other’s frequency. “It really started in 1943. I was a nurse’s aide, for soldiers coming back from the war. Volunteering. I thought I might meet a husband that way. I wasn’t very pretty and I was almost thirty and wasn’t married. I was taking care of a soldier who was coughing all the time, he’d been in North Africa, and he caught something there. I thought it was just a bad cold. But then after a while I started coughing too, and then I was coughing up yellow and red stuff, like mustard and catsup. But it was bloody sputum. And I got feverish and started waking up in the middle of the night with the sheets soaked, all covered with sweat. So I went to the doctor and they said I had consumption—the tuberculosis—and they took me to the sanitarium. This sanitarium. This same room. The owner was Randall Wemberly and there was a young fat man who was his son, Charles. This boy Charles worked as an orderly, but he was going to inherit the place. He was learning the job and said we’d all better be good to him because he was going to take over the whole place someday. He’d laugh and wink like that was a joke but it was what was in his mind. Charles Wemberly. He would take us for our treatments. People thought, back then, that cold fresh air would kill the bacillus, so they took us to open windows and made us sit there, and breathe the cold air in the winter. And snow would come in, sometimes, and cover us. I saw two people die right there, in that room. The worst was the balloon, though. They’d put a balloon in your lung, and they’d inflate it. They said it would help the lung heal. I don’t know why they thought that. And it was a very awful feeling when they put it in but the worst was when they expanded it and that was the very worst pain I’d ever felt. Up till then. Blood would squirt out my nose, the first spurt shooting in an arc all the way down to my thighs. And they’d cut away people’s ribs, so the lungs could expand. All those people died, the ones who lost part of their ribcage. They didn’t do that surgery on me. But I thought I was going to die soon anyway. They had a tunnel they used for taking the dead people out—it’s still down there, I’ll show it to you sometime, Douglas—it goes out back, to a little building. That’s so the patients and their families wouldn’t see all the dead people going out of the hospital—it happened so often. Because most patients died. Almost all of them.” She hesitates. She looks at me with her head tilted. She seems to be trying to remember how it was. “I lingered on for a long time and I kept wanting to run away and find some peaceful place to die alone, without anyone watching. But then the streptomycin came in. And it worked!” She gives an ironic little smile. “That was in 1946. People were getting better from it. So they gave it to me for a while, and I improved—a lot! I wasn’t even infectious anymore, and I wasn’t coughing. I thought I would be leaving soon. I was planning what I would do when I was released.” She makes a gesture in the air, like she wants to push something away that isn’t there. “And then Charles came to me, alone. He was supposed to give me my medicine, but he said I couldn’t have it unless I let him play with my body. ‘It has to be however I want to touch you, any way at all,’ he said. ‘Or you will die.’ He pushed up against me and I remember his breath smelled like rotten eggs. I said, ‘Why did you choose me?’ I was just stalling. He said it was my legs, they were like the legs of a little girl. I shouted that I’d tell his father on him. Then he hit me with a bedpan, and that knocked me senseless for a while, and when I came to, we were on the floor and he was holding onto me, and humping my hips talking about how my legs were the legs of a little girl—he was not even inside me, but humping me more like a dog would hump on a person’s legs—and he saw I was awake so he started whispering that he would kill me, he would simply kill me if I didn’t do what he wanted and I shouldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t . . . ” She breaks off and looks at me. “Does this story offend you?”
“No,” I reply, in my mind. “Well yes: I’m offended that you were hurt. But I want to know what happened.”
She smiles. She nods and looks at the overhead light. “I can see the electricity in the wires, if I squint,” she says.
“Did he kill you?” I prompt her.
She sticks out her lower lip as she thinks it over. “No. Not exactly. He said his father was away on a trip, and now he was in charge and he would see I spoke to no one but him, and I would get no more medicine . . . unless . . . ”
She looks at the door. I hear people passing outside, in the hall, talking. A woman weepily talking about her aunt, saying she’s all the family she has. The nurse saying, “We can only do so much.”
Then they’ve moved on. I don’t know why Beth waited, since they can’t hear us talking. Maybe she is afraid someone might come in to check on me, and see her. Maybe she doesn’t realize how rarely anyone comes in here.
If she’s worried about that, does that mean that I’m not the only one who can see her?
“So,” Beth goes on, “I said, ‘Charles, do what you have to, but don’t hit me again.’ My head hurt so badly. And then he raped me. I laid still for it, like he wanted, and didn’t fight him, but it was raping. It hurt a lot . . . I was afraid I’d throw up and choke on the vomit while he was doing it . . . ”
We are silent for a while. I felt like making the immmm sound but I didn’t. Not doing that now is the only way I have of being strong for her.
She turns like she is going to melt back into the wall.
“Don’t go, Beth!” I call to her, in my mind.
She looks back at me, and I can see she wants to cry but, like me, she can’t. “I have to go. I have to rest in the wall. But I’ll just tell you this much more. Charles gave me something he said was streptomycin, but it wasn’t. It was just placebo. The symptoms started to come back. And he started coming to me wearing a surgical mask. Forced me to open my legs for him. Holding a hand over my mouth to keep me quiet. Then I guessed what was going on. I said, ‘You want me to die, so I don’t talk about what you’ve been doing to me. You’re not giving me the medicine at all now.’ He wouldn’t say anything and then I didn’t see him for a couple of days. I tried to talk to a nurse but I was locked in here and they wouldn’t respond, wouldn’t come to the door. I was shouting and shouting and then when I screamed really loud something broke in my lungs and I spit up blood, so much blood came up I choked. And then there was a lot of pain and then it was dark . . . ” She shrugs. “And then I was in the walls. Just in the walls. But sometimes I can come out and look at things. Mostly they can’t see me but sometimes they do.” She smiles at that. “I don’t like them to see me, I’m afraid they’ll bring Charles but . . . I like to see them afraid of me, too.”
“He’s still here?”
The color is going out of her. She seems to flatten, like she’s a cut-out, or something drawn on paper. “I’m tired . . . yes. Yes he’s here. Charles is Mr. Wemberly now. He’s in charge, like he said he’d be. He’s the one who put you in here, this room. Goodbye, Douglas, for now. Try to pretend you’re someone else when Sack comes in. That’s what I always did when Charles . . . and the nurses would pretend . . . can’t . . . ”
That’s all I can hear. She is slipping into the wall—almost as if something in it is pulling her slowly in, against her will. The wall is drinking her in the way water sinks out of sight into deep sand. Then she’s gone.
I feel like I’ve fallen into a wall, too. I close my eyes. I don’t try to call to her, though. Bethany needs to rest.
A nurse comes, looks at my sore, mutters that it’s not so bad. Goes away. An orderly comes, checks my lower parts, shrugs, and goes away. I hear the sound of a mop in a bucket in the hallway. Some kind of broth is brought to me, and I’m fed with something like a turkey baster. They have to crank the bed up a bit so I don’t choke. They get irritated when I choke.
The bedsore is tormenting me. It hurts and it itches. The itching always makes me imagine insects are crawling into the bedsore. They’re getting into it and laying eggs that will become hungry little grubs that will eat their way out of my brain. Sometimes I think I can feel them beginning to chew through the soft tissue inside my skull.
I must not think about that because if I do it just gets more and more vivid, worse and worse and I have to immmm. One of the ways I change the direction of my thoughts is to try to remember a song, note for note. There’s one by The Turtles.
So happy together . . .
They’re crawling into the wound . . .
So happy to-geth-errrrrr . . .
I think of songs and I watch dust motes. I watch the color of the sunlight deepen, and the crooked squares of light from the window travel down the left hand wall and vanish entirely, and the dread of Sam Sack comes on me, much later, when the light is switched off. I try to sleep, hoping for a good dream. But I can’t sleep.
Sack.
He comes into the dark room, I know it’s him from the smells—rancid sweat and Top tobacco. I can just barely see his silhouette. I hear the rustle of his homemade mask. He puts it over his head in the darkness. He switches on the little lantern he’s brought, dialed down low, and raises it up to see me, and so I can see him. There’s the sack on his head with holes cut in it—actually it’s a small pillowcase, but for a long time I thought it was a sack. So I think of it that way and I call him Sam Sack.
“Glad to see me?” he asks, his head cocked, his voice hoarse. It’s always hoarse. He adjusts the pillowcase with his free hand to let him see out the crudely cut holes better. I can’t see his face, only the eyes. Around his covered mouth, the cloth gets damp and dark with his breath. Why does he even bother with the mask? Maybe he’s got the “sack” on in case anyone turns on the light. Maybe he’s hoping he can run before they identify him. Or maybe he doesn’t want me to see his face. Because even though I couldn’t tell anybody who he is, he feels more powerful, stronger, if I don’t know. Maybe his face is one a man would laugh at.
But I think I know who he might be—kind of. No, he’s not Charles Wemberly. I can tell from smells on him—and the dirt under his yellow fingernails, his calluses, his oily overalls—that he’s probably on the maintenance staff. I think he’s the night janitor. He’s a white man, gangly, but with a pot belly. He has cigarette stains on two fingers of his right hand. Once I heard an aide walking by in the hall, saying, “Maybe Sam can clean it up tonight, I’m not going to do it, I’m going off shift.” I figured maybe he was that Sam. Sick Sam Sack.
He climbs up on the narrow bed, and straddles me, and I close my eyes. He starts pressing my eyes with my thumbs. “I could cram ’em back into your brain,” he says, “and you couldn’t do nothin’ about it.’ ”
He pushes hard, and it hurts, but he’s careful not to break anything there. He broke a couple of my toes once, and the nurses never seemed to notice. But they’d notice if he poked out my eyes.
He says, “I was thinking of the sewing needles today, how maybe I could do you with the pins again, they don’t leave much mark, and the aides just think it’s another sore or such.” He slaps me, once, hard. Stinging the left side of my face. It makes a loud noise in the room. The mark will fade before the nurses see it. And would they do anything if they did see it? I don’t think so.
He slaps me again, and twice more. “Maybe this’ll wake you up. Wake up in there, dummy! Wake up!” He laughs softly.
His eyes in the pillowcase holes are bright.
Sometimes he’ll pull hair from my head, my pubes, my armpits, one hair at a time. Once he started pulling out a fingernail, but blood came, and he decided that might draw too much attention, so he left it partly pulled. No one noticed. They clipped it like they always do, without a comment.
Sack puts his weight on my chest, presses down with his knees. I can’t breathe. He waits. Spots appear over my eyes. I’m close to dying. I wouldn’t mind if he’d finish it but I know he won’t. He won’t let me off the hook. I make the immmm sound and he gives out a soft laugh of pleasure. Then he lets up, easing off, letting me breathe. Then he does it again, almost smothering me, two times more.
Maybe I’m starting to turn blue, because he quits, and climbs off the table. “I’ve got something else for you.” As I lay there, breath rasping, he reaches into his pocket, takes out something brassy. He fiddles with it and holds it up so I can see it better. Lipstick. “I’m gonna pretty you up a little. I got a lady’s brassiere, and this. I’m gonna put this on your lips and rub it on your cheeks. I’ll clean it off before I go. And this time, I’m gonna have your ass. The girl I use—she died. She killed herself. So it’s you, now. We got to make you a little more like a girl. I’m gonna call you Sissy Thing . . . ”
He starts drawing on my lips with the lipstick, whistling a song. “Camptown Ladies.”
I feel something I haven’t felt for a while. I try not to feel it, because if I do, it’s like I’m on fire and can’t put the fire out.
It’s pure rage. And there’s nothing I can do to express it, but breathe harder. I can sort of snort out my nose at him. That’s all. This only makes him laugh, and he hits my testicles hard with his knee. The pain brings the rage up like a siren blasting full volume in my mind.
I fight the rage. Rage hurts me. I have to keep it down. Pretend to be someone else, like Beth says. Beth . . .
She’s there, suddenly. Standing to my right. Sack doesn’t seem to see her.
“Douglas,” she says, in my mind, “let yourself rage at him. If you do, then you’ll go into the rage, and you’ll be gone enough into it, and that’ll open a door for me, so I can help you . . . ”
And I stop fighting it. The rage was like a pot of water boiling over, making the lid rattle and fall away . . . I was uncovered by it . . .
I feel an unspeakable, glutinous intimacy. Is this being raped? But he hasn’t started that yet. This is up higher, coming from somewhere else—something is pushing into my gut, right under my rib cage. It’s passing through the skin without breaking it. But I feel it force its way into whatever it is, inside my body, and brain, that I think of as me. It’s doing it insistently, not brutally. I realize it’s Beth.
Then I feel something strange in the muscles of my face. Like I have a muscle twitch. But it’s a muscle twitch that makes my mouth move. My tongue. A jabbery sound croaks out of me. Then some control comes and I say a word right out loud.
“Sack,” I say. Not in my mind—I say it with my mouth.
He turns to look at me, his head cocked to one side again. Staring. “You can’t talk . . . ”
“Sam Sack,” I say. “You’re Sam.”
Only it’s not me saying it. She’s saying it for me. She’s joined me. She’s with me in here. Beth! I can feel her there, a warm presence, twined about my spine, swirling at the back of my head, and stretching into my arms . . .
My arms are twitching. Jumping. They’re wriggling. The straps are loose. My hand is fumbling at a buckle on the restraints.
Sack raises a fist, slowly, over his head. I can see him flexing his arm muscle. I realize he’s going to hit me. Beat me to death, to keep me quiet.
My right arm comes free. I watch my own arm as it rises up like a cobra—some creature I have no control over. Sack stares at it, hesitating—and then my left hand gets free. It jumps up and grabs him by the back of the neck. Holds him. His surprisingly skinny neck. My left hand makes a kind of claw, with the index finger, and thumb, and it stabs out, and jabs him in the eyes. As we do it, I remember all the times he dug his thumbs into my eyes. My own will, set free, joins Beth’s, and I push my thumb and finger hard, into his eyes. Popping through his eyeballs, digging into the eye socket.
He gives out with a long, bubbling squeal, and blood splashes into the pillowcase and changes the color of the cloth.
He quivers and shakes in my hands—and then he wrenches free and falls flailing back, blind.
“Okay now,” Beth says, in my mind. “That’s enough. We stopped him.” Her voice is crystal clear. I can see her face in my mind, looking worried and almost pretty. “Let’s just get out of here, together. I can leave here with you. I can’t make it out of here alone . . . We can go out through that old tunnel . . . ” It takes some time to get better control of my limbs. But I get the straps off completely, and I stand. I’m dizzy, once I almost fall over, but I manage to stay upright. I feel firmer with every passing second. “I’m standing! Beth! I can move! You’re helping me do this?”
“I’m connecting something that was broken in your brain, just by being here, inside you,” she says. “Let’s go . . . ”
“Wait,” I say, my voice shaking.
I feel waves of emotion go through me, rage and joy all mixed together, driving me along. I step over to the writhing man on the floor, and I kneel down to press my knee on his neck, and I put all my weight on it. I crush his throat, hard and slow.
“Let’s go,” Beth says, sounding worried. “They’ve heard him scream! They’ll lock you up. We have to go.”
“You’re doing this too,” I tell her, gasping the words out, breathing hard as I feel him struggling under my crushing knee. The blood is coming from his mouth now as well as his eyes. I’m feeling pain with all this movement, as if my joints are all rusty. Oil can, squeaks the Tin Man. “You’re doing it, Beth, as much as me.”
“No. I didn’t even put out his eyes. I was just trying to push him back. Knock him down. Not that. You did that. No, I’m just here, but I’m not . . . doing that.”
I can barely hear her through the roaring. The roaring that is coming out of me. Then I realize that Sam Sack has stopped moving. He’s dead.
I pull the sack off his head—the bloody child’s pillowcase—and I throw it in the corner and I look at him in the light from his own lantern.
He’s a monkey-faced man with a big red nose. Old, his face deeply lined. His eyes are gone, blood running like red tears from the sockets. My hands are slick with the remains of his eye matter.
I stand up, feeling sick, and wracked with pain, but seething with a fierce delight. Roaring to myself with exhilaration!
I pick up his lantern and open the door, ripples of disorientation going through me as I step into the hallway. An orderly, a thick-bodied black man with a shaved head, is coming toward me, frowning, investigating the noise—he stops, staring at me. Seeing the blood on me and the lantern and the diaper—and the lipstick. He backs away. I roar at him. He turns and runs, and I laugh.
“We have to go downstairs,” Beth says, in my mind. “The tunnel . . . ”
“No tunnel yet,” I say. Because it’s coming clear to me, now.
I stumble along, managing to walk, spastic and hurting but loving every step. I hum to myself, sing bits of songs, just to hear my creaky voice. I find some stairs and go down—but only one floor. I step into the ground floor hallway, find the front door out into the grounds. It’s late, there’s no one watching it. It unlocks easily enough and I step out into the cold night. I’m almost naked, but I like the cold wind on me, the cold wet ground under my feet. I even like shivering. The stars, seen through the broken, racing clouds, are blue-white points of sheer intensity. I see the house in the corner of the grounds, near the front gate, close to the mossy concrete wall. I stumble across the wet lawn, through a pool of darkness. I make my way to the house, a white cottage trimmed in pale blue, in the corner of the grounds. I see there’s a light on at the small back porch.
“We should just keep going out the front gate,” Beth says.
I keep on to the little house. Beth comes with me, she has to. She has no choice.
I’ve heard the orderlies refer to the cottage. “You want the time off, go see Wemberly in that house out front, and ask. He lives out there . . . ”
I find the backdoor unlocked, and step into the kitchen, still carrying the lantern. The kitchen is painted a sunny yellow.
There is Charles Wemberly at the kitchen table, a fat balding elderly man in yellow pajamas. He’s eating a big piece of yellow cheese, which he’s cut up on a carving board, with a large knife. A bottle of Riesling is uncorked beside him. A wine glass brims in his age-spotted hand.
He looks up; he stares; his jowly mouth hangs open, showing half-chewed cheese. His hand shakes; the wine spills.
I stalk toward him and he gibbers something and flails, dropping the wine glass. I smash him in the face with the lantern. He rocks back. I drop the lantern and pick up the half empty wine bottle, and hit him in the face with it, over and over. The skin splits over the bones of his face, and I can see them showing through, till they’re covered with blood. He howls for help and thrashes at me and I keep smashing into him, knocking him off his chair, till the bottle shatters.
I discard the neck of the bottle and take the knife he was using—and I straddle him, like Sack did to me, and I start sawing at the back of Wemberly’s neck. Cutting here, cutting there. Sawing through neck muscles, tissue I can’t even identify. I’m smelling blood; feeling its wet hot thick warmth on my hands, my wrists.
“Oh no,” Beth is saying. Her voice in my head is a sustained high note on a violin. “Oh, no Douglas. We have to go . . . ”
“It’s Charles,” I tell her, quite reasonably, saying it right out loud, as I saw at his back. He thrashes under me. I saw away, hacking down further, digging a trench in him around the spine, all the way from neck to tailbone.
“Yes. But . . . ”
“He’s the one who raped you and let you die. And he hired Sam Sack. He left me in a moronically cruel state of neglect for six years.”
“Yes, but Douglas, listen please . . . We have to go.”
“Wait!” I shout. “Almost done!” I keep sawing, working hard to separate the vertebrae from the body. I feel the strength of years of rage coming out in my hands, and he’s thrashing and squeaking and I drop the knife and I get a grip on the spine, I pull and wrench . . .
It comes loose from his body, his entire spine comes out rather nicely, with his head attached. I have to cut through a few more connective threads around his neck, some cartilage, and then . . .
I’m standing over the rest of his body holding his spine in my two hands. His head, his mind, is still alive in it, attached to the spine; his face is twitching convulsively, eyes going back and forth, back and forth.
I swing his head on his spine, like swinging a polo mallet; it’s cumbersome, and I think of Alice in the Lewis Carroll book, trying to play croquet with a flamingo. But this one drips blood, and sputters.
“This is to you, from me,” I tell Beth. “I am your man, Beth, and my strong arm has done this for you.”
A shout comes from the back door and I turn to see the big black orderly and a white man in a uniform; he’s a security guard with longish hair and a cigarette in his lips and a gun in his hand.
“Oh my fucking stars,” the security guard says. He’s staring at Wemberly’s wet-red spine, the attached head coated in blood.
I swing the head on the spine and roar at them—and the guard’s gun roars back.
“Beth!” I’m staggering back with the shot, which has struck me in the lower left side. Blood spurts out of me.
And something else is leaving me—Beth.
She’s draining out of me, with the blood flow. I see her floating away from me—she’s drifting away, turning around in the air to face me so she can see me as she goes. She’s getting smaller, going into a vast distance that shouldn’t be there, in a kitchen.
“I’m out,” she says, speaking to my mind. “I’m free, Douglas. But I wish we . . . ”
Her voice trails off. She vanishes. She’s gone. The guard is staring at me, uncertain what to do.
But I realize—
I can still stand. I can move! Beth’s presence in me, the movement since then—it seems to have permanently bound up the broken connections in my brain. I no longer need Beth to move.
I swing Wemberly’s head and spine, release it at the guard like an Olympics hammer throw—it trails blood through the air, falls short; the head, breaking from the spine, thunks and rolls, trailing blood. The guard makes a yelping sound and steps back. As he does, I switch the knife to my left hand, use my right to cover the wound, slow the bleeding. This wound will not kill me. It is shallow.
The guard and the orderly are coming cautiously back into the kitchen. The guard’s hand, pointing the gun, is wavering. The gun is shaking.
I start toward them. The orderly tells him, “Shoot him again, you damn fool!”
I roar—and the gun roars back, once more. Then again.
I feel a cold, punching impact in my neck. I fall, fall slowly back through space. The room around me is suddenly a different color. It’s painted red, and the red paint swirls and thickens and carries me somewhere . . . into dreams . . .
The hard part is waking up.
I’m lying on my back. I don’t want to open my eyes. I can feel the warmth of the light bulb over me. I can smell the room. Must not open my eyes.
But I do. I see where I am. I try to get up. I can’t. I try to lift my arm. Can’t.
I can’t feel anything, below my neck. I’m aware of a bandage, taut around my throat. A hose going into my mouth helping me breathe.
I see a doctor, in his white coat—a red-faced man with a mustache—talking to a frightened looking black-haired wisp of a nurse, near the door. He’s saying, “Oh he can’t hurt you.” He glances at me. “He’s paralyzed . . . The bullet destroyed his spine. And this time the restraints are quite tight. As tight as we can make them. So even if he could move . . . ”
I had my chance. I didn’t listen to Beth. Now I’m being punished. But this place was always my punishment.
So I had to come back here. To room 230. Does it do any good to say I’m sorry? I’m sorry. I’m sorry . . .