ONE

The World

[2005]

This is the world, and my name is not Proteus. It never was. People in the world don’t get names like that anymore. At least they haven’t for a very long time. But it is what I will call myself, and what the others will call me, should they refer to me as anything at all.

That’s enough for the moment, probably too much, about me. I’d rather talk about Willy, because the situation is this: he sits. Willy sits. He sits to the other side of the desk from me, and this is a typical arrangement. It is of a type. He is on the one side and I am on the other, and it seems to have always been like this. It wasn’t, but it seems so. He is there, this person of Willy, this sea-creature, and he will always be there, I’m sure of it, right there, and me, right across the desk from him; me, right here.

Okay.

Willy: toothless. The man is a stick in a flop hat. The hat sits crooked, always and in every way crooked, and loose and limp and flopped, and that’s because his head is that way. It’s worse if he takes the hat off. His was a head never meant to be uncovered, as if the naked gaps between his few sparse, long, stringy hairs exposed also his brains, and everything that was wrong with them, because yes, his brains were all wrong, and all that was damaged and deranged in his thinking lay open, much too open, and in seeing this it became a part of me also and I could feel it, and I couldn’t help but think in that same, wrong way as he did, and so the damage became contagious and that was unbearable. I was not able to accept Willy’s damage as my own, so if Willy ever took the hat off (which, granted, he seldom did) I promptly asked him to put it back on again.

A rag of a denim jacket drapes, ripped, over his bones, and Willy is only bones. His jeans – the pair he wears every day, every night, all the time – their stains tell the story of the moments of his life as it stands, here, now, today: the moment, in summation. If he has any past, that is what made the stains, and the man’s eyes are hollow and they stare as if stunned, but they are alive. This is important. Willy is a man whose eyes are alive and staring. And he can see the future. He tells me this. It might be the thing that he stares at.

“The future,” Willy says, “I see it.”

•

It may well be argued that prophecy was not Willy’s business, but mine. Point taken. For my money, I thought he was rather good at it. Yes, Willy was onto something. He knew what was what, when it came to these things – that is, the future – and I was happy to let him do the job instead of me. I’ve always been reluctant to get involved in this business. Things can get messy. But it is true that I may know something about it. It’s a skill, one of a few. Beyond that, I’d rather not say anything more about it.

But I will say this: that I can’t lie.

And I will also say this: I came from the sea.

It’s true – I am a sea creature as well, a bit like Willy. It wasn’t so long ago that I myself stepped from the foam-green waters, new and blinking and uncertain, staring around me in wonder at this new world above-surface and all those things and people in it – all so unfamiliar, so transformed by my life below, my eyes in the time away from it all sea-changed. Though I may have remembered the names of things and recognized their functions and forms, all that was not related to the sea had become another world, quite literally. People were another world; people, things, and what they all got up to… and I was ill-prepared to find my place in it again. I, like them, had been born to the flat Earth, but had chosen to leave, or had, I think more accurately, been driven from it. But as those forces that led me to take my refuge in the sea were beyond my will to change or resist, so also were those that led me back out again and into the world above. I was as ever their puppet. I was a sea creature. The tides, slow and gentle, have always proved stronger than me. They have, and I suspect always will.

The truth was that I’d felt ill-prepared to find my way in this world in the first place, and ten years as a Zen monastic, though it had done many good things for me, had not improved this condition one bit – in fact it had made things much worse. And so leaving the monastery and its placid cloister, amidst the high, arid mountains of California, was not a move I’d eagerly taken, perhaps not even willingly so, though no one had compelled me to leave but myself. Myself and the tides, myself and Mosquito – who requires some explanation.

But before I try and explain my friend Mosquito and what it did to me, let me return for a moment to re-imagine Willy, because he’s still right there and still waiting, sitting across the desk from me. And though he’s got nothing but time, nothing at all, I can see he’s feeling a bit impatient.

His cheekbones sit high like knobs above his hollow cheeks, and the man is thin. I think I’ve explained that much already. The man is thin, a bone, a stick, and I don’t know how old he is. With a person like Willy, these things are hard to tell, because chances are he’s a good deal younger than he looks. His ruined mind has for so many years ravaged his body and his face so that he appears already ancient, though he may in fact be younger than me. He’s not had it easy. Nobody has. But Willy’s tried to kill himself twice, as far as anybody here knows, because that’s what his folder says – the one on a shelf just behind and above me, on the wall to my left – though I’ve not myself seen him exhibit such behavior or intent, and it’s part of my job to watch closely for these things.

I have, however, oftentimes found him screaming, at the moment of the morning’s first light, a false-dawn salute of sorts, standing on the lawn in the side-yard and facing toward the apartments next over (where how anyone ever gets a night’s sleep is beyond me), at the top of his wrecked voice, “I told you to get out of here, old man!!!,” for instance, at something or somebody only he can see.

For which the best thing I’ve found is to hand him a broom and ask him to sweep cigarette butts from off the front porch of our old converted house, because if he’s busy doing something, he tends to forget to act that crazy.

“Oh… Sorry. Of course.”

But most often where, or how, I’ve found him is walking his tight, little circles on the floor, over and over, over and over, all night long, unceasing. This is the thing that he does, more than screaming, more than seeing into the future. I find him usually in the foyer beside the office where we are right now, there or just outside the front door, on the wide porch where everybody smokes, where everybody smokes, where everybody smokes their generic cigarettes bought in great cartons by the month, on the day when the slight remainders of their benefit checks are granted them, cigarettes bought from the Indian reservation up north, where, at the casino where the company van will take them, never to gamble, it doesn’t even occur, but to spend their last forty dollars of the month, tax-free, on tobacco, to keep their lips supplied with things to suck on, to stay hazed within a self-made cloud that will quieten the voices, maybe, so many fingers, yellowed and stuck and twitching, and to keep staring into, to keep staring into some void beyond themselves, however temporarily.

Willy shifts impatiently in the plastic chair, across the desk from me. He’s waiting for his evening medications. Behind him, outside, a line is formed. All are waiting. Everyone wants the same thing.

But there is one small piece of business left before we can get on to this: the future.

“In the future, this, this…” Willy tells me – he holds his hands up, one then the other, palms out, empty – “everyone… goes… away.”

•

The house was a much bigger house than it appeared from the street. By way of an addition, built twenty years previous, it had quadrupled its occupancy from a claustrophobic dozen to a cramped fifty souls. Its century-plus original craftsman facade fit easily and anonymously within its residential context, though from 17th Avenue, which it fronted, at the peak of Capitol Hill, what the real-estate people would’ve had to say about it would be less than kind. That didn’t matter. No one meant to sell the place. The expansion that had been built in the mid-Eighties, to accommodate this new breed of resident, who up until then would have lived in a state- or county-run hospital, did nothing to help its appearance. No thought was given – perhaps none could be afforded – to architectural sympathy. The result, though practical, was that of a once-grand, old house, worn and scuffed but sturdy in its bones, with a cement bunker grown absurdly out from its back end like a disease of the imagination. Nobody, however delusional, however dissociative, could call the place beautiful, yet compared to where many of the residents had come from, this was a grand resort five-star hotel.

The older ones had spent significant time in the asylum, at least until budget cuts from the federal level down had sent them out into the streets, out to nowhere, out to drift like so many balloons released into the sky. The lucky ones landed here at Inn House Manor, or someplace like it. The younger residents had spent less time in the system, admitted first to the psychiatric ward until their immediate crises were pharmacologically diverted, and then, once processed, sent here. My employer, Republic Mental Health Residential Agency of Seattle, ran six such houses. I’d worked at five of them in my brief career as an on-call “therapist,” usually covering the overnight shift, where replacement staff were always needed, until I’d been settled into a permanent job at this house. Of all them, I liked this one the best, if “like” is the word. It was where I’d started. It was where Vivianne also worked. And it was within walking distance from my apartment.

To call what I did “therapy” however was akin to calling a chain-store cashier a “brand ambassador” – the sort of neurolinguistic mind-garbage somebody far removed from the job had thought up to sell upper management some notion of their own genius. Despite this, I did feel a debt of gratitude to Republic. They’d given me a job when my résumé amounted to less than the paper it was printed on. For ten years I’d polished brass. For ten years, I’d sat quietly and mostly still, and stared for hours each day at a spot on the wall. I’d chopped wood. I’d cleaned dishes, I’d collated papers, I’d performed minor repairs to the great Buddha Hall. I’d gone into town with the others and begged for alms, and I’d performed my role in the many ceremonies, public and private, without egregious fault. I had gotten to know my mind, at least a little. I had not done nothing. But these were not things that looked like much on paper, not without some genius kind of spin, and I knew it. So Republic could call me a “therapist” if it made them happy. They could call me a goddamn firetruck, if they wanted. But the truth was I treated nobody. My therapy amounted to dispensing medications and cooking breakfast, and to keeping the house from burning down in the night. Which was fine, I wasn’t complaining.

It really wasn’t much different from what I’d done at the Abbey all that time.