The Monopoly board is open on the table. Pink, blue, yellow, and green money is divided up more or less equally between Josh, Andrea, Chaz, and Bunny who are not, and have no intention of, playing Monopoly. But to sit around an open game board gives the appearance of Activity engagement, which is enough to keep the aides, nurses, and occasional doctor hurrying by from hounding them about Activities. Josh has been worrying the dice in his hand for about twenty minutes. Andrea is picking off bits of the red polish on her fingernails, and Chaz says, “Someone is watching us.”
Bunny twists around to look in the direction of Chaz’s line of vision. A young girl is there; eleven years old, maybe twelve, decidedly prepubescent, and Andrea perks up. “Nina,” she says. “I knew she’d be back.” Andrea knows Nina from before. Andrea says that the mental ward is like a minimum-security prison for repeat offenders of non-violent crimes. “It’s a revolving door,” she says.
Nina resembles nothing more than a newly hatched sparrow; prominent veins protruding through translucent skin covering bones so light as to seem hollow, short downy hair on her head. Bunny imagines her craning her neck, her mouth open improbably wide like the beak of a baby bird ready to be fed a worm, although if Nina were to open her mouth wide like that, it wouldn’t be for food; rather, it would be to emit a primal scream, an endless scream with the intent to purge herself of herself.
“Do you believe she is twenty-six, at least twenty-six?” Andrea says. “She might even be twenty-seven by now.” Nina is anorexic, but not your run-of-the-mill anorexic. She is also bipolar and not your run-of-the-mill bipolar either. Sometimes, she cycles in a matter of minutes, and even worse, the cycles sometimes overlap, so that her depression is manic, a depression on speed. “She’s a mess,” Andrea says. “The last time we were here together, she spent half her days banging her head against the wall. She really wanted out.”
“Who doesn’t want out? No one wants to be here,” Bunny says, but Josh disagrees. “Howie wants to be here,” Josh says. “He loves this place,” and not for the first time Bunny gets the idea, although she’d be hard-pressed to explain where she got such an idea, that Josh is someone who would go ice-skating for the fun that comes with falling down; he would’ve done such a thing.
“I didn’t mean here,” Andrea says. “I mean that she wanted out of life. She doesn’t want to be alive.”
Bunny and Josh, both, make a point to look away from the other.
It is true what Josh said about Howie. Howie does want to be here, here in life and here in the hospital, which, you could say, makes him the most mental of them all. Twice already, the doctors agreed that Howie was ready for discharge. Pam was here to pick him up, take him back to New Jersey. All he needed to do was answer one last question, sign on the dotted line, and he’d be home in less than thirty minutes, assuming that traffic on the George Washington Bridge wasn’t at a standstill. But Howie—he sat in the conference room across from the doctors and lowered his gaze. “Not to others,” he said. “I’d never hurt anyone else. But myself, I think about it. I had my gun out, and I was ready to do it, but my girlfriend stopped me. If it wasn’t for her, I’d be dead. But I still think about it. About doing it. A lot.”
Although Howie and Pam had been together for almost seven years, and he is now forty-four and she is thirty-nine—neither of them spring chickens—he wasn’t willing to marry her. Tired of waiting around, Pam signed up with Match.com, which was when Howie called her and said, “I’ve got a gun, and I’m going to kill myself.”
Howie’s gun might well have been a toy gun, the kind that looks authentic but shoots foam rubber pellets or bits of raw potatoes. Howie was never going to kill himself for real. Not then, not now, not ever. Howie is mental, but his mental illnesses—decidedly nuts and a wicked case of mindblindness—are not among the entries in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He is a different species of crazy, entirely.
Regardless Pam raced as fast as her short legs could carry her to his house, hustled him into his car, and drove across the bridge to the best hospital with a psycho ward in the tri-state area. Pam now atones for having signed up with Match.com by bringing him bags of food and doing his laundry. Never again will she press him to marry her.
Howie, meanwhile, is having the time of his life here. He goes about his days as if the loony bin were a Carnival Cruise ship, and he is the Activities Director full of vim and vigor and in charge of games like charades and Simon Says. All he needs is the whistle hanging from a lanyard around his neck, which, of course, he can’t have. Lanyards are Not Allowed.
“I’ll bet that when he was a kid, he got the living shit kicked out of him every day,” Andrea says. “Because you know he’s the kind of guy who never learns.”
“He thinks we’re his friends,” Josh says.
“Shit.” Chaz tears off the corner of a blue Monopoly bill. “That’s so fucked up.”
“Yeah, it is,” Josh agrees. “But he’s lonely. He’s a lonely guy.”
“Maybe,” Andrea says. “Maybe that’s it, but he’s got Pam. I don’t know. Maybe,” and then she says, “In three days, it’s my birthday.”