Dinner is followed by Visiting hours. The psychos who are not expecting visitors, not tonight or maybe never, exit the dining room as if they were bumper cars or ants, seemingly in all directions without a destination, but there is a destination. In the living room, a game show, Family Feud, is playing on the wide screen television that takes up most of one wall. On the other walls there is nothing to liven up the beige. No paintings or posters or prints. Three rows of couches, two couches per row, line up to face the television. Two of the couches are upholstered in grayish-brown vinyl. The other four are a listless shade of sepia with a nubby weave that is best described as larval.
Behind the rows of couches, chairs are arranged haphazardly. The people sitting in those chairs are socializing. Bunny doesn’t want to watch Family Feud. Adrift in the sea of beige, tan, liverwurst, slate, sickly mint green, and wenge, Bunny keeps to the hallway where she is alone, except for Underpants Man who has planted himself by the pay phone on the wall, as if he were expecting an important call.
It feels like breathing, but, in fact, Bunny is speaking out loud. “Please,” she says, “help me. Someone help me,” although she is not asking, not really, for help. It is more like a figure of speech. Nonetheless, some insane woman shows up and puts her arms around Bunny, patting her back, short and rapid pitter-patter pats the way you’d pat a wailing baby, telling her not to cry, telling her not to worry, which serves only to exacerbate Bunny’s despair, when one of the nurses happens by. The nurse stops and says, “Come on, Jeanette. You know there’s no touching.”
Jeanette, whoever Jeanette is, lets go of Bunny and says, “But she’s crying.”
The nurse, Lisa Kendall, R.N.—her black name tag pinned at the V of her white scrubs—is wearing pink ballet flats like Bunny’s friend Lydia wore on New Year’s Eve, except Lydia’s pink ballet flats were Clergerie and Nurse Kendall got hers from Payless.
When Jeanette breaks away, Bunny gets a look at her face, which is a mess of a face, like maybe it was reconstructed after a hideous accident, the kind of accident where she went face-first through the windshield of a car, or it could be that she went overboard on the cosmetic surgery. Because the people here are not right in the head, you can’t rule out the possibility that this was the face she wanted, like that woman whose picture was plastered on the front page of the New York Post after undergoing extensive plastic surgery to look like a lion. Lions are beautiful creatures, but a lion’s face did not look good on a person. Also, there was the woman who turned herself into a Barbie doll. If Jeanette was after that kind of transformation, Bunny has no idea who or what she was aiming to be.
Nurse Kendall takes a packet of tissues from her pocket. The people who work here carry around packets of tissues the same way some people always have a safety pin with them, or change for a dollar. Nurse Kendall leads Bunny away from Jeanette and says, “Maybe you want to go to sleep now? You’ve had a rough day.” The nurse walks Bunny to her room where Mrs. Cortez, sitting on her bed, facing the window, says nothing and Bunny returns the courtesy.
Without taking the trouble to undress or brush her teeth, Bunny gets into bed. A beacon of light comes through the open six inches between the door and the jamb. A rod affixed to the top of the door prevents it from closing all the way. Not even in their sleep is privacy allowed. Bunny closes her eyes, and a voice in the void, someone, a man, calls out, “Holy fuck.” A few seconds go by, and again he calls out, “Holy fuck. Holy fuck.” Intermittently, he calls out, “Holy fuck.” Anyone who knows anything about experimental psychology or the fundamentals of torture will tell you that noises at irregular intervals are one of the surest ways to break a person.
“Holy fuck.”