SIXTEEN

I walked the length of Van Ness Avenue in the drizzle, past McDonald’s, the old Jack Tar Hotel and the former Galaxy movie house, my kicks slapping against the wet pavement.

I was in despair. My budding career as an oracle was over. As Heller put it, my skills were shoddy. I didn’t have the grit to be a seer. I was kaput. The bullet pleaded otherwise, begging me not to believe 2-Time and Heller. What did they know about the mysteries of the cosmos?

I was inconsolable.

When I reached Doyle Drive northbound traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge was slow. I followed the pedestrian walkway onto the bridge, trekked another hundred yards and halted. I peered at the bay. Only a few miles off, the lights of Berkeley and Oakland were invisible, lost in the fog. The wind had a snarl, truculent sea gulls blitzed the sky.

I thought about jumping off the bridge. Because there was no room on this sad earth for an ass backwards oracle. No damn room at all. But jumping wasn’t an option. Not yet.

Lost in my ruminations, I didn’t see the two cops in yellow slickers creep up on me from behind. In a jiffy, they wrestled me to the ground. A Department of Public Health ambulance arrived and the cops plunked me in the back and cuffed me to a gurney. I lay still and pretended calmness while they interrogated me.

They wanted to know what I was doing on the bridge.

I told them I was an oracle.

My answer led them to conclude I was suicidal. So now I was off to General Hospital’s loony bin. In the nuthouse, I’d have to downplay my strange ways. While the ambulance rolled through the streets to the hospital, I did inventory, prioritizing which of my idiosyncrasies I’d have to keep under wraps.

At General Hospital I was booked and processed. I was tested again, and came up negative. My clothes were taken away, even my boxer shorts. I was issued an oft-laundered polyester gown and a pair of cardboard slippers. An orderly escorted me up a passageway studded with surveillance cameras to a cell that was furnished with a steel sink doubling as a toilet. A bed frame was welded to a wall. I dropped onto it.

I was starved and jittery, my blood sugar nosediving. I’d been processed so late in the day, I had missed the ward’s afternoon meal and wouldn’t get fed until later.

I flashed on the night Frank Blake shot me, how he looked in the seconds before he pulled the trigger, his moussed blond hair, the tarnished silver hoop in his right ear, the cheap small caliber automatic pistol in his fist. I was asleep when the cell’s door was unlocked and a burly, middle-aged doctor in a white smock breezed in.

“I’m Hess, your psychiatrist.” He announced his name in a congratulatory tone, giving me the impression I’d won the jackpot. “Let’s talk, boy.”

I roused myself. It was a chat or a straitjacket. Hess squeezed onto the bed, deliberately crowding my space. He fired off an introductory salvo.

“You informed the cops you’re an oracle.”

“I did.”

“Oracles were priests in ancient Greece. They made divine pronouncements. You’re not an oracle.”

“Who says?”

“I do. Are you suicidal?”

“Hell, no.”

“The police said you were going to jump off the bridge.”

“That’s their opinion, not mine.”

“Your medical records cite you were shot in the head.”

“Yeah, I was. Last winter.”

“You’ve been traumatized.”

“True enough. I’ve been catching hell lately.”

“Trauma lends itself to disassociation. The separation of the body from the mind.”

I didn’t take the bait. The separation I experienced wasn’t between my body and mind. It was between my mind and spirit. My mind forced me to do things I detested, like working for Heller and 2-Time. My spirit wanted to be free of earthly concerns.

“My mind and body are together. After all the shit I’ve been through? Nothing can tear them apart.”

“You need help. Medication is necessary. Your brain’s chemistry needs readjustment. Anyone who claims to be an oracle is mentally ill.”

I didn’t care for that.

“Do you want to remain hospitalized?”

“No, man, I don’t.”

“Then admit you need help.”

“Okay,” I improvised. “I need help.”

“Wonderful. I’m going to prescribe a mild dose of Haldol. An injection.”

“Do you have to do this?”

“It’s the first step. A big one. After the injection we won’t put a seventy-two-hour hold on you. We’re too overcrowded so you’ll be released from custody. Just don’t end up here again. Because next time, you’ll stay. What do you say to that?”

Not understanding why, just knowing it was happening; the colors in the cell were bright and the air smelled keen, I augured the future, a tiny sliver of it. Next year Hess would divorce his wife, lose the house to her, pay huge alimony, and get in a car wreck. And because I wanted to get out of the fucking nuthouse more than anything in the world, I said what he wanted me to say.

“Thanks.”