He woke up soaked with sweat, breathing stale and fetid air. A naked light bulb shone in his eyes and he found he was in a steel-framed bunk slung by chains from the wall, like a bunk in a troopship or a jail.
“… Everybody out,” a voice called, and there were other sounds: groans and curses, wretched coughing and hawking, a loud fart, the creak and bang of bunks being folded back and clamped against the wall. “Let’s go, let’s go. Everybody out.”
When he sat up a hand closed around his shoulder and rolled him onto the floor. He was wearing grey cotton pajamas that were much too big for him: the pants tripped his stumbling bare feet and the sleeves hung to his fingertips. Swaying and squinting under the lights, he rolled up the sleeves first, disclosing a loose plastic bracelet that read WILDER JOHN C. He bent over to roll up the pants but was kicked from behind and fell to his hands, and he looked up frightened into the angry face of a Negro in pajamas like his own.
“Watch your ass, man. This here’s the corridor. You got no business hunkerin’ down playin’ with yourself; get up and walk.”
And he did. Steel-mesh panels were being drawn across the folded bunks to prevent anyone from using them: this was indeed the corridor, the place for walking. It was yellow and green and brown and black; it was neither very long nor very wide, but it was immensely crowded with men of all ages from adolescence to senility, whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans, half of them walking one way and half in the other, the dismaying variety of their faces moving into the glare of lights and then into shadows and then into the lights again. Some were talking to one another and some talked to themselves, but most were silent. He felt warm grit under his feet until he stepped on something slick; then he saw that the black floor ahead was scattered with gobs of phlegm. A few of the walking men wore dirty paper slippers, and he envied them; a few were smoking, with packs of cigarettes in their pajama-top pockets, which puckered the roof of his mouth. Then he saw that some weren’t wearing pajama tops but straitjackets, and he wanted to whimper like a child.
There were closed windows at both ends of the corridor, covered with steel mesh: the light outside was drab—either an early grey morning or a late grey afternoon—and there was nothing to see but air shafts and windowless walls.
Near the middle of the corridor stood a Negro orderly in hospital greens, and he hurried toward him with a mouthful of questions—Look: where’re my clothes? Where’s my money? Where’s a phone? What’s the deal here?—but when he confronted the man he felt small and shy and all he knew was that his bladder was about to burst.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“Over there.”
And he followed the pointed finger into a bright stinking latrine where men squatted on toilet bowls or stood jockeying for position at a long urinal trough.
“Now this here,” another orderly explained, “is your toothbrush. Way you can always tell is because it got your name on it. See that tape? Wilder. When you done with it, put it back here in this rack. Ain’t nobody gonna use this toothbrush but you, and you never gonna use nobody else’s toothbrush, understand? That way, nobody pick up no trench mouth or nothing like that. Understand?”
But nobody was allowed his own razor. The men stood four and five deep waiting to shave at a steamed-up mirror under watchful, official eyes.
“… Soon’s you done you rinse that razor and lay it on the shelf. Ain’t no use foolin’ with that razor; you can’t get that blade out. That razor’s locked …”
“… Showers for the new men only. Showers for the new men only. Not you, Gonzalez, you come on back outa there …”
There was no soap in the communal shower room and no way of regulating the water: the new men slid around on greasy duckboards and tried to clean themselves until each was given a towel in one hand and his own wadded pajamas in the other.
“Can I have slippers?”
“Ain’t no more slippers. Slippers all gone.”
And then it was back to the corridor with nothing to do but walk. He passed a locked door with a small wired-glass window and peered inside to discover a padded cell. Canvas mats of the kind used by wrestlers and gymnasts were hung from the walls and spread on the floor. It was vacant, but the one next door was occupied: a man in a straitjacket lay face down in it, as still as death, with a dark stain of piss around his thighs.
“… I don’t care! I don’t care!”
Both columns of walkers shrank aside to make way for the spectacle of a young white man shadowboxing down the middle of the hall. He was stripped to the waist and he’d neatly ripped off his pajama pants to the length of prizefighters’ trunks; he was bobbing and weaving, jabbing and hooking in a swirl of yellow dust motes.
“… Can’t you idiots understand? I don’t care! I want my father to see me like this!”
“All right, Henry; easy, now,” an orderly was saying, coming up from behind to put a hand on his shoulder, but the shadowboxer spun and faced him with both fists cocked.
“Don’t call me ‘Henry,’ you dumb black bastard—call me Doctor or I’ll break every fucking bone in your—”
“You ain’t gonna break nothin’, Doctor,” a second orderly said, and the two of them held his arms. Both orderlies were bigger than he; they had no trouble turning him around and leading him down the corridor. He didn’t struggle in their grip but his shouting rose until he sounded on the verge of tears.
“… God damn it, if I want my father to see me like this it’s none of your dumb, black, ignorant, motherfucking—”
“Your father iddn’t gonna see you no way, Doctor; come along easy now, ’less you want Roscoe to shoot you out.”
“Yeah, yeah, shoot me out, that’s all you know. Big deal! Ah, you poor, dumb—Whaddya do? Go home and tell your wives, ‘Hey, baby, I got me a doctor today’? ‘Got me a real white doctor right in the ass’? Well don’t forget I’m naming both of you, and your little buddy Roscoe too, tried to send me up to Wingdale. I’m filing a mal—a mal—a malpractice suit against this hospital, and when the facts—when the facts are out you’ll all be …”
He was out of sight now, and out of earshot because of the laughter and jeers and catcalls that broke in his wake. Another Negro in greens was hurrying down the corridor with a hypodermic syringe; he stopped and squinted at it under a light, holding it high while he thumbed the plunger just enough to make a drop of liquid appear on the point of the needle, then he went on toward the shouting man.
“Go get ’im, Roscoe,” somebody called. “Fix ’im up good.” And there was more laughter as the columns began to move again.
Wilder felt a light nudge at his elbow and thought he heard a voice say, “Want to kiss me?”
“What?”
A remarkably handsome Negro boy was smiling there, wearing a turban made of his pajama top, gently swiveling his shoulders to display the beauty of his naked torso and holding his half-erect cock in his hand. “Do you want to kiss me?”
“No.”
“Oh, it’s all right. It’s all right. You can kiss me if you want, but only if you say ‘I love you’ first.”
It was time for breakfast. Double doors were opened at one end of the corridor and both columns became a jostling crowd.
“… All right, hold it; hold it now. Two at a time. Two at a time, or nobody gonna get nothin’ to eat …”
The sense of entrapment was even worse inside the mess hall: once you’d been shoved crouching and sidling down the narrow space between a long table and its high-backed, immovable wooden bench, there was no way out. Wilder sat pressed between a toothless, ancient man and a fat boy whose wet mouth hung open as if in pain from the cramp of the table against his belly. Each of them received a plastic bowl of glutenous oatmeal with canned milk and a mug of lukewarm coffee, and Wilder didn’t know he was hungry until he’d dug into the oatmeal with a big tin army-surplus spoon. If he could eat, if he could drink this coffee and find a cigarette and a telephone, there might still be a chance of the world’s coming back to normal. But the old man couldn’t lift the shaking spoon to the reach of his gums without spilling it, and the fat boy picked up his bowl in both hands and plunged his face into it, slobbering like a dog as the porridge slid down his chest; then a shrill voice at one of the other tables rose to panic: “Lemme outa here, lemme outa here, lemme outa here …”
When the mess hall set him free at last he found that the men who looked the least insane had begun to congregate at the head of the corridor where there was a little ell facing the locked front door. On a high book-keeper’s stool beside the door sat a policeman—not a uniformed hospital guard but a real New York City cop, complete with badge and dangling nightstick and holstered pistol. He chewed gum steadily and talked to no one, not even the orderlies, and he wore the kind of sunglasses whose lenses were silver mirrors on the outside: if you tried to look into his eyes you saw only a double image of your own craning face. Even so, this seemed the best place to be: the place where rational things were most likely to happen.
“Hey there, Shorty. How’s old Shorty today?” The man who said this wasn’t much taller than himself, and he was ugly—a sallow face with close-set eyes and a big humorless smile full of bad teeth—but his pajama pocket bulged with cigarettes. “I seen you when they brought you in last night. Boy you was high.”
“I was?” He could remember nothing of last night after the ride in the ambulance with Paul Borg rubbing his back.
“Yellin’ and screamin’, talkin’ a mile a minute; they shot you out and you still wouldn’t shut up. I figured, Jesus, this is some tough customer we got here; this must be some big son of a bitch. Then I seen you was even smaller’n me, and laugh? I damn near died.”
“Yeah, well, look. Could I have a cigarette?”
“I’ll save you,” the man said, and turned away.
“ ‘Save’ me?”
“He won’t save you,” another voice said. “He never saves nobody. He’s a prick.”
The door opened then, letting in a rush of cool air—not fresh air, but cool and better-smelling if only because it came from some wider, cleaner corridor—and there was a loud, happy chorus of “Charlie!” … “Hey, Charlie!” … “How are ya, Charlie?”
He was well over six feet tall and built like a heavyweight, a Negro dressed in greens like the others but dominating all of them, dominating everyone as he pocketed his key ring and moved slowly into the ward, trundling a medicine cart. “Good morning … Good morning,” he said in a deep, rich voice, and even the cop said “Morning, Charlie,” after making sure the door was locked behind him.
“Hey Charlie, can I see you a second?”
“Charlie listen: ’member yesterday I asked you about somethin’?”
They swarmed around him, coming from all sides as he wheeled his cart to a stop in the exact middle of the corridor, where he raised his head to address them all.
“Nourishment, gentlemen!” he called out to one end, and “Nourishment, gentlemen!” to the other. The trays of the medicine cart held many shot glasses filled with what looked like bourbon whiskey or maple syrup: it was neither, though it tasted a little like both.
“You bring my paper, Charlie?” said a man with a dirty bundle of newspapers under his arm.
“Oh, now, Mr. Schultz, you have plenty of papers. Use up the papers you have, then maybe I’ll bring you a new one.” And he turned to one of the orderlies. “How many admissions last night?”
“Eight. We got a hundred and seventeen on the ward now.”
Charlie winced and shook his big head. “That’s too many. And there’ll be more coming in today, more tomorrow, more Monday. We don’t have facilities for that many.” With a jangle of his key ring he opened a door marked KEEP OUT, briefly revealing what looked like a snug little den—a table and chairs, shelves with cups and a hotplate and coffee-makings—and came out with two packs of Pall Malls in his hand.
“All right, one at a time, gentlemen,” he said to the eager crowd that pressed around him. “Form a line to the right, please; one at a time and only one apiece. Not you, Mr. Jefferson, you’ve got a pack in your pocket. You know the rules: these are ward cigarettes …”
Everything was slightly improved with Charlie’s arrival, with the “Nourishment” and the ward cigarettes: the lights were less glaring and the shadows less dark, and there were new discoveries to be made: a long wooden bench against one wall, other places to sit in a recess between sections of folded-up bunks and even a place to lie down—four dirty mattresses on the floor of an alcove at the far end, well away from the mainstream of walkers. But the padded cells were still there, six of them, and one now contained the twisted figure of the man who’d shadowboxed and screamed before breakfast. He lay with his mouth still open in the shape of outrage, as if ready to scream again in his drugged sleep, and his dark hair glistened with sweat.
“Who shot Dr. Spivack out?” Charlie’s heavy voice inquired.
“Roscoe, Charlie. He was actin’ up real bad.”
“What happened to his pants?”
“Tore ’em off himself, tryna make like a fighter. Then he started yellin’ about his malpractice suit and all that; wasn’t no other way to handle it.”
“I don’t understand that. I thought he was coming along very well.”
“He has good days and bad days, Charlie.”
“Mm.” And Charlie got out his keys again. “Well, the least we can do is open the door. I don’t want him waking up with that door locked. Get him a new suit of pajamas, too.”
“Okay, Charlie.”
“Ah, Charlie, you’re a prince,” said a fragile, palsied man of seventy or more. “A prince among men. I swear to Jesus—I swear to Jesus you’re a saint, Charlie.”
“Well, Mr. Foley, I thank you for the compliment, but I’ve already given out the cigarettes and I happen to know you received one because you tried to take two.”
“Ah, Mother of God, how can you think of cigarettes? It’s spiritual help I need, Charlie. Spiritual help.”
“I’m not the man to see about that. Why don’t you go sit down awhile? I have other people to attend to. You, sir; are you one of the new men? What’s your name?”
“Wilder. John Wilder.”
“Did you take your Nourishment, Mr. Wilder?”
“Yeah, ‘Nourishment,’ ” said the old man. “You know what it is? It’s formaldehyde.”
“That’s enough, Mr. Foley; you go along now.” Then he said “It’s Peraldehyde, Mr. Wilder. You get it three times a day; it’s very good for you. Settles your nerves.”
“I see. And are you the chief orderly, or—or what?”
“I’m a male nurse. There’s always a nurse on duty here; my shift’s eight to five.”
“Oh. Well, look: it’s very important that I get to a phone as soon as poss—”
“Oh, no, Mr. Wilder; you won’t be making any phone calls here.”
“Well, how soon—I mean when can I see a doctor?”
That was when he learned it would be Tuesday before the psychiatrists came back, that it might well be Thursday before they could interview him and that the length of his stay thereafter would depend on their decision. “So meanwhile,” Charlie said, “I’d suggest you try and make yourself comfortable.”
He lumbered away, trailing other supplicants in his wake, and Wilder stood watching him go for what seemed an intolerably long time. “ ‘Comfortable,’ ” he said, and then suddenly he was padding after him, running, stepping in slime again and surprised by the shrillness of his own voice: “Comfortable in this fucking place? Are you outa your fucking mind?”
Charlie turned back, looming over the chattering men with one long forefinger raised in admonition. “Mr. Wilder. I’m telling you now to keep your voice down and keep your temper under control. I don’t want to have to tell you again.”
Yellow and green and brown and black; black and brown and green and yellow. The only way to shut out the sounds and the smells of this place was to concentrate on the colors, and to walk. Up past the latrine to where the cop sat; turn, back past the mess hall to the other end; turn. A small man could move unnoticed in a crowd like this if he kept his mouth shut and his eyes front and his arms close to avoid touching anyone. He could breathe at measured intervals and keep his own counsel; he could even burst into tears if he did so quietly; nobody would notice.
Instead of crying he sat down in the only vacant place on one of the corridor benches, and a brown hand slid onto his thigh.
“It’s all right.”
“Huh?”
“It’s all right. You can kiss me if you want, but only if you say ‘I love you’ first.”
He was up and walking again, and he’d made three circuits of the ward when he found an empty mattress in the alcove at the far end. Sitting was better than walking and lying down was better still, though it sank him deeper into the smells of sweat and feet. He squirmed and sprawled facedown in total collapse—the hell with everything—and he even slept for a while, or thought he was asleep, until his eyes came open and saw that the men who lay very close on either side of him were masturbating.
But after lunch there was another call of “Nourishment, gentlemen!” and another round of ward cigarettes, and he found himself walking with Dr. Spivack. He didn’t recognize him at first because he wore fresh pajamas and had combed his hair and his face was free of hysteria: it was a tightly clenched, sardonic face.
“You come in last night?”
“Yes.”
“Half these poor bastards don’t even know where they are. You know where you are?”
“Bellevue.”
“Gotta be more specific than that, buddy. Bellevue Hospital is a great public medical institution. It’s—”
“Okay; the psycho ward.”
“And you honestly think there’s only one? My God, man, there’s an entire psychiatric wing in Bellevue. Seven floors, each one worse than the one beneath, and this is the top. The worst. This is the Men’s Violence Ward. Are you blind? Can’t you see these clowns in straitjackets? Can’t you see that cop? There’s got to be a cop on duty here because some of us inmates are police cases. Criminals. Nobody knows who; I don’t even think the orderlies know. I don’t even think Charlie knows.” He had been walking briskly, making Wilder stumble and hurry to keep up with him, but now he stopped short, grabbed Wilder’s arm and spun him around to face a stiff, jabbing index finger. “How about you? Huh? You a police case?”
“No. How about letting go of my arm?”
Spivack laughed and punched him on the shoulder. It seemed to be meant as a punch of camaraderie, but it hurt. “Hell, I’m only kidding; I knew you were okay from your face. Know how you look? Like some little kid’s lost his mother in a department store. What’s your name?”
And for at least an hour Dr. Spivack talked, steering Wilder through the crowds on either side of the corridor, pausing only to interrupt himself with little advisory asides—“Don’t ever take a flop in there unless you really have to,” he said of the alcove with the mattresses; “that’s Jerk-off City”—and most of his talk was autobiography.
He came from what he called a medical family. All his male forebears had been distinguished doctors in Germany until his father fled with his own family to this country in the thirties. His oldest brother was “tops: a first-rate heart man at Cornell Medical Center,” and the second was doing all right too, considering he’d never been the brightest guy in the world; he was a radiologist up at Mount Sinai—“You know, he’s dumb, but dumb in a way that doesn’t show. And he’s married to the most glorious piece of ass you ever saw, this big blonde Wisconsin girl with legs like—legs like—legs that defy description.” Then came his sister, who had married a psychiatrist—and wasn’t that the God damnedest thing? His own sister, for Christ’s sake, actually married to one of these Sigmund Freud freaks? And then came the youngest and the favorite, himself.
“… Ah, I had my share of suffering when we first came over; my mother died; they called me the Katzenjammer Kike in junior high and I got a few bloody noses, but don’t worry, I’m not trying to break your heart. I always knew I’d make it and I did. Never had any sex problems, either, don’t worry about that. Never thought I was a fag or anything. Lost my cherry at fifteen on the beach at Far Rockaway and I’ve been wallowing in pussy ever since. Wallowing in it. You married, Wilder?”
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe that takes care of it for some guys, but I’ll be a son of a bitch if any broad’s gonna hook me till I’m ready. What kinda work d’ya do?”
“Sales.”
“Yeah? That’s funny. You look smarter’n that. I always thought salesmen were slope-heads. Whaddya sell?”
“Space.”
The doctor reeled away in astonishment. “Christ, isn’t anything free any more? You sell space? Which kind? Inner space or outer space? Huh?”
“I think you know what I mean,” Wilder said. “Advertising space. For a magazine.”
“Oh. Yeah, I get it. Advertising space. What magazine?”
“The American Scientist.”
“No kidding? Well, that’s impressive. They run some pretty abstruse, sophisticated material. If you understand that stuff you must be fairly—”
“I don’t understand it. I just sell it.”
“How can you sell something you don’t understand?”
“Isn’t that sort of what psychiatrists do?”
And that earned him another of Spivack’s painful punches and a bray of laughter. “You’re okay, Wilder,” he said. “Anyway, I always knew I’d make it and I did. Straight A’s all through college and med school, did my internship at Johns Hopkins and came here as a resident two years ago. Internal medicine. Thought it was an honor to work in Bellevue Hospital; family did too. And I was damned good. That’s not bragging: I happen to be an excellent physician, that’s all. Then, wham! The old administrative double-cross, and look where the hell I wind up. Talk about irony, huh?”
Wilder wanted to hear more about the old administrative double-cross but thought better of asking; and when Spivack began talking again he had changed the subject.
“Speaking of fags,” he said, “you notice how this ward’s crawling with ’em? Fags, junkies, fall-down drunks. Another thing: you notice all this ‘Save me’ talk? ‘Save me, buddy,’ and all that? It’s supposed to be about cigarettes—they want you to save ’em the butt when you’re done—but it’s really kind of a half-assed prayer: you hear guys say it that don’t even smoke. They want to be saved. Find a lot of religious nuts in here. There’s one guy thinks he’s the Second Coming of Christ. Probably more than one—it’s a common psychotic delusion—but this guy’s a riot. Keeps to himself most of the time, then once in a while he puts on a show. Stick around; you’ll see him. Hey, and another thing: you notice how they only hire spades here? You know why?”
“No. Why?”
“Why d’ya think? Because they’re so ‘gentle’ and so ‘kind’? Yeah, yeah, they’ve got a Natural Sense of Rhythm too. They’re scared of ghosts and they’re just plain crazy about watermelon. What the hell were you, born yesterday? It’s because no white man’d work here for the kind of money they get. You know what kind of money they get? Even Charlie there? Huh?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Wilder,” Charlie said, blocking their path. “Those pajamas of yours don’t fit very well, do they?”
“No, I—No, they don’t.”
“Sometimes the night people are careless. We have Small, Medium and Large. A man of your size needs Small. I’ll see about it.”
“Yeah, you do that, Charlie,” Spivack said, “and while you’re at it why don’t you see about your buddy Roscoe. I want that little bastard put on Report, is that clear? If he shoots me out one more time I’ll have his nurse’s license. Is that clear?”
“All right; try to keep your voice down, Doctor.”
“Charlie’s the only halfway decent one they’ve got,” Spivack said when they were walking again. “Know something? This fucking place was built in the nineteenth century and it hasn’t changed a bit. Look at that.” He pointed to a bench. “And you seen the benches in the mess hall? Antiques! Antiques! Get some faggot antique dealer up here and he’d pay a thousand bucks apiece for ’em. Listen. Little piece of advice. Watch out for Roscoe. First morning I was in here he let me sit in my own urine for an hour and a half. An hour and a half! And mind you, this was after I’d asked him for a urinal seven times. Bastard kept telling me to go to the latrine, go to the latrine, go to the latrine.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
Spivack struck his own head with the heel of his hand in a spasm of exasperation. “You’re missing the point, Wilder! The point is, when a patient asks a nurse for a urinal he’s supposed to get it. Ah, Christ, I thought you showed a glimmer of intelligence, but you’re just as fucking dumb as all the other fucking—Look: get lost for a while, okay? My father and my sister are coming to see me tomorrow and I happen to have a few things on my mind.”
So he was alone again, but it wasn’t long before he had his Small pajamas, which were heartening; then he joined a group huddled in one of the padded cells whose door had been propped open. The man with the newspapers was there—he had spread part of his collection on the floor for study—and among the others were two young boys, white and Negro, who sat deep in conversation against the rear wall.
“… So we was all fooling around this vacant lot up behind the Breyer’s Ice Cream sign, see,” the white boy was saying, “and see, I should of gone home when the other kids did; that’s where I made my mistake. Anyways, it was getting dark and me and this Kovarsky was just kind of sitting there talking and smoking cigarettes behind the sign, and then he—”
“Hold on a second, Ralph, you goin’ too fast. Who’s this Kovarsky?”
“I just told you. He’s this big-shot kid in the neighborhood out home; all the kids are scared of him; I mean he’s, you know, real big and he talks tough and he’s got a Record. Breaking and Entering. He’s nineteen. Anyways, he says for me to stick around after the other kids go home and I says okay. I mean I know it was dumb but I guess I was kind of—I don’t know, kind of—”
“Flattered, right?” the Negro boy said. “Sure, I can see that. So then what?”
“So then he starts giving me cigarettes and telling dirty stuff about girls, telling the names of all the girls in the Senior Class he’s had innercourse with, and like that. You know.”
“Yeah, shit, I know those kinda guys. How old’re you, Ralph?”
“Fifteen. I mean I’m fifteen now; I was fourteen then. So anyways, all of a sudden he kind of moves in close and opens up his pants and tells me to—you know. Go down on him. Blow him.”
“Jesus.”
“So I tell him no and I get up quick and start to run around the sign and he makes a grab for me and says he’s gonna break my arm. That don’t scare me—I know he can’t do nothing like that on account of his Record—but then he says, ‘Okay, kid, you got a choice: be nice to me and I won’t tell nobody nothin’. Run on home, and I swear to God you’re never gonna hear the end of this.’ ”
“Oh, Jesus,” the Negro boy said.
“So I go home, and the next day at school all the kids start in on me. You know. ‘Hey, Ralph, what’s it taste like?’ That kind of stuff. Dirty stuff. Or they’d grab the front of their pants and say ‘Wanna go up behind the Breyer’s Ice Cream sign, Ralph?’ And then around the candy store they start calling me Hot Lips Volpe. That’s my last name, Volpe. Even the big kids, Juniors and Seniors. Even the girls. ’Cause see, what he did was, this Kovarsky, what he did was, he told everybody it was me wanted to suck him off.”
The other boy looked puzzled. “How come you didn’t tell ’em the truth?”
“I did! I did! I told ’em and told ’em, and everybody just laughed. ’Cause it was just my word against his, see? And this Kovarsky’s such a big shot, who’s gonna believe me?”
“Mm. Man, that’s a tough story.”
“And then my father hears about it.”
“Your father? Your father didn’t believe you either?”
“Well see, he got it from the other kids’ fathers. He says ‘Ralph, I want you to tell me exactly what happened up behind that sign.’ So I tell him and he says ‘That’s not the way I heard it,’ and I says ‘I swear! I swear!’ He just sits there and looks at me like I’m some kind of—some kind of—I don’t know. And ever since then, ever since then—” Ralph couldn’t finish; he turned his face against the wall mat, wholly expressionless, and began fingering his pimples. All his fingernails had been bitten to the quick.
“Man,” said the Negro boy. “I mean, that is one tough story. Hey listen, though; I got an idea. Let’s play a game. Let’s play pictures. You know how to play pictures, Ralph?” Ralph didn’t answer. “How ’bout you, man? What’s your name?”
“I’m Francis, John; this here’s Ralph. You want to play pictures? It’s easy. I say somethin’, you all try and tell me what picture it’s in. Here’s an example. I say ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’ What picture is that?”
“Well, I guess I don’t—”
“You don’t know? Shit, man, that’s Gone With the Wind. Clark Gable says it to Vivien Leigh. You want another one?”
“Okay.”
“Here’s another one. Wait a minute.” Francis screwed up his eyes in concentration. “You got another one, Ralph?”
“No.”
“You got one, John?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, wait a minute. We’ll think of one. Plenty of good pictures.” But his downcast, brooding face had begun to suggest that there weren’t plenty of them at all. “Some pictures I don’t like,” he said. “I don’t like that Psycho, you know? Anthony Perkins? I mean that’s a bad picture, know what I mean?”
“Mm.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, let’s think.” He thought for a while and then he said “Shit, I don’t want to play pictures any more. You like music, John?”
“Sure. What kind of music?”
“Any kind. You like this?” He bunched himself into an athletic squat and began slapping his flexed thighs as if they were bongo drums; when the rhythm was established he threw back his head and closed his eyes as he sang, or rather wailed and howled, in what could have been an ultra-progressive style of jazz or an African tribal chant. Ralph seemed to like it: his own eyes glazed over and he wagged his head to the drumming.
“Hey,” said the man with the newspapers. “Take a look at this.” He had neatly torn out a sports headline from the New York Post: CAN MARIS TOP THE BABE? “Got that?” he said. “Well, watch. Wait.” Out of his raddled sheaf came half a dozen other scraps of newsprint, which he shielded from view. “Wait,” he muttered over his work, carefully tearing and smoothing and adjusting, and then “Look now,” he said. “Look at there.”
He had laid out a big photograph of Marilyn Monroe. The headline above it read: CAN pARIS sTOP THis BABE? And beneath it, in many different typefaces, ran the caption: Tired Blood? TALK ABOUT SUMMER VALUES! IKE VOICES ‘CONCERN’ AS Thousands Flee City’s Heat; F.B.I. Joins State, Local Police in Massive Effort to FLY AIR FRANCE.
“Well, that’s—quite something.”
“Ah, it’s not a very good one. I’ll do a better one. Wait.”
Francis’s music had grown louder and seemed to have put him in a trance. The effort of singing had brought up two gouts of phlegm from his throat, but he’d caught them both without missing a beat, one on the back of each flying hand.
“Mr. Wilder?” Charlie called from the corridor. He was holding Spivack close by the upper arm, either in restraint or affection, and Spivack glowered with narrow eyes, breathing so hard through his nose that his head wobbled slightly with each breath. “Mr. Wilder, Dr. Spivack would like you to join him for supper this evening.”
“… Okay, you can eat with me, Wilder,” Spivack said as they filed into the stifling mess hall, “but no more questions; no more fucking talk, is that clear?”
On Sunday morning Wilder was shot out.
It happened so quickly that he could never afterwards put it straight in his memory: there was no coherent pattern of helplessness and resentment and anger rising to rage. He’d had his breakfast and his Nourishment and his ward cigarette; he was standing alone at one of the grey windows looking out on nothing, and he heard the shouted word “Shit!… Shit!” before he recognized his own voice. He stepped back from the window, raised the sole of one dirty foot and slammed it against the steel-mesh grid, denting it, and the sight of that dent was so invigorating that he hauled off and slammed it again and again, making it deeper, while his raw throat burned with the cry of “Shit! Shit! Shit!…” He was only dimly aware of other voices around him—“Watch it, fella”; “Easy; easy”—and not until two orderlies grabbed his arms did he know he was in trouble. “Hey, Charlie!” somebody called. “Charlie!”
And there he came, lumbering down the corridor with his face pressed into a frown. He paused under a light to squint at his upraised needle until the drop gleamed on its point; then the orderlies tore down Wilder’s pants and Charlie sank the shot into one buttock. “I did warn you, Mr. Wilder,” he said. “I told you to watch that temper of yours.” The door of a padded cell was opened just enough for Wilder to be flung inside; it slammed shut and he heard the lock click. He couldn’t breathe and it took a great deal of work to pull up his pants and secure them while scrabbling on all fours around the soft floor; then the drug went to work in him—heavy waves of sleep as deep as drowning—and the last thing he knew as he turned and floundered and sank was that nothing in his life had ever been as bad as this. This was the worst.
“… Wilder? Hey, off your ass, man.”
It could have been ten minutes or ten hours later.
“Wilder?”
“Mm?… Wha’?…”
“Get up outa there, man. You got visitors.”
Visitors.
He stumbled up the corridor like a drunk, colliding with other men, reeling against one wall for support and then against the other. Even when he found his balance he had to stop and run furtive fingers down the fly of his pants to make sure it was closed while his free hand clawed hair away from his eyes.
The mess hall had been transformed into a visitors’ room—tables shoved out of the way, benches hauled around in conversational groupings—and he stood blinking in the doorway for some time before discovering his wife and Paul Borg. He tried not to wobble as he sat down with them and said hello.
“Oh, this must be awful for you, John,” Janice said, putting her hand on his knee. “This place.” She looked troubled and affectionate—she had even worn what she called his favorite dress, a blue-and-brown print that emphasized her breasts—and for a second or two he could see the girl who’d made all other girls unnecessary long ago.
“Yeah. Well, how’ve you been? How’s Tommy?”
“We’re fine. Except that we miss you.”
“I said you’d been held over by business in Chicago.”
“Well, but the trouble is you can’t possibly say when I’ll be back. I won’t even see a doctor till Thursday, and God only knows what’ll happen after that. Might be two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, and I mean whaddya gonna tell him?”
“Sh-sh.” She squeezed his knee. “Why don’t you let me worry about Tommy? He’ll be fine; I promise. You just concentrate on getting rested and getting well.”
“And I can’t even call him because there’s no phone here. Look, you better call the office Tuesday; tell George I’ve got the flu or something.”
“Oh, of course, dear. That’s no problem.”
Paul Borg had been gazing around at other patients as if trying to assess the degree of insanity in each case; then he turned the same cool scrutiny on Wilder for an instant before they both lowered their eyes, and that was when Wilder saw a carton of cigarettes on Borg’s lap.
“Jesus, are those for me? Can I have ’em?”
“… One thing I still fail to understand,” Borg was saying, “is this nuisance about the Labor Day weekend.”
“Yeah.”
“An institution of this size, a public institution; surely it’s reasonable to expect at least a partial psychiatric staff to be on duty over the holidays.”
“Yeah. Sure is.” With a cigarette in his mouth, a pack in his pocket and a carton under his arm he was ready to forgive anybody for anything.
At the end of visiting hour they went out into the pressing, overheated crowd near the front door. Borg shook his hand and Janice put her arms around him to kiss him goodbye. “John?” she said. “You know what I thought we might do? When you do come home? I thought we might drive up to the country with Tommy—he can skip a few days of school—and just relax and be together and have a little vacation. Maybe a whole week. How does that sound?”
“Sounds fine. I—Yeah, that sounds fine.”
And the door was locked behind them.
“Hey, save me, buddy, okay?”
“Save me, man.”
“Save me …”
He was the center of attention, passing out cigarettes, until Charlie said “Mr. Wilder? Will you come with me, please?” and led him to the KEEP OUT room. “That carton won’t last very long if you carry it around,” he said. “What we generally do when a man gets a carton, we keep it for him in here. I’ll write your name on it.” And while writing he said “Was that lady your wife, Mr. Wilder?”
“Yes.”
“A very nice-looking lady; very well dressed. You have children?… Well, that’s fine; a son. I have three little girls, myself,” he said when they were back in the corridor. “Seven, eight and nine years old. They’re the joy of my life.”
“All right, how d’ya like that, Charlie?” Spivack demanded. “Explain that to me if you’re so fucking smart.”
“Explain what, Doctor?”
“What the hell d’ya think? My father and my sister. I gave ’em every chance. I waited at that God damned door for a solid hour and neither one of ’em showed up. You know what I think?” His eyes were as wild as when he’d been shot out for shadowboxing. Charlie laid one hand around his shoulder as if to guide him away for a private talk, but he held his ground. “You know what I think? That jerk-off spook of a husband of hers’s got ’em both by the short hairs. He’s got ’em both convinced I’m a dangerous lunatic and they’ve written me off! They’re gonna let me rot in here!”
“Oh, now, I imagine there’s any number of reasons why they couldn’t make it today, Doctor. One thing, you have to remember your father’s getting on in years and it’s a long trip for him, all the way down from White Plains. Your sister has her family to look after, and she’s probably—”
“Charlie, you’re a great big chocolate sweetheart but you don’t know shit about human nature. Even a dumb little asshole like Wilder knows more’n you. Gimme your pen.”
“I don’t believe I’ll give you anything, Doctor, until you apologize to Mr. Wilder and to me. For your language.”
“Ah, Jesus fucking Christ. Language. Apologize. All right, all right, I apologize. Let’s try it this way. Nurse, would you please be so kind as to lend me your invaluable twenty-nine-cent ballpoint pen for approximately twelve seconds?” He tore a dirty scrap of paper from his pajama pocket, held it flat against the wall and wrote a set of numerals. “Here. Now listen carefully. This is my sister’s phone number. When you get off work tonight I want you to call this number and give her the following message. Tell her—”
But Charlie was shaking his head. “You know I can’t do anything like that.”
Spivack backed away three steps and stood there—legs apart, fists clenched and eyes blazing. “So what the hell can you do? Smile? Preach? Make everybody’s ass feel good? What the hell can you do, you big, dumb, motherfucking—”
“Doctor!”
“Yeah, ‘Doctor.’ Shit. Why don’tcha just shoot me out and get it over with?”
“I’ve considered that,” Charlie said, “but I believe you’re playing games with me. You know I don’t play games. What’s more, you’ve taken up too much of my time. There are a good many other patients on this ward besides yourself.” He turned and walked away into one of the shuffling columns, soon surrounded by other talking, favor-seeking men. Spivack slumped alone against the wall, and that gave Wilder a chance for escape.
He ducked quickly into the latrine. He had a comb in his pocket now—another gift from Paul Borg—so he dampened his head and restored it to the carefully casual shape of everyday: a clean part on the left, short front hairs combed sideways across the brow, longer side hairs back and down. It was a style he had copied from the actor Alan Ladd after years of experimentation, and it looked all right. He had to admit, studying himself from several angles in the dim, white- and red-flecked mirror, that this was a sound, manly, reliable face. Troubled, maybe, but not openly neurotic and certainly not mentally ill. It was nothing less than absurd for him to be here, in the Men’s Violence Ward, and the absurdity made him toss his head with a wry, amused little smile.
“Hey, what the hell you doin’, man?” said a voice behind him. “You tryna look pretty for yourself?”
“… I mean it may be understandable in my sister’s case,” Spivack said, coming up beside him in the supper line. “She lets that slippery bastard fuck her every night. He works the old cock up in there and shoves it around till she screams, and I guess you can’t blame her for believing all the Sigmund Freud horseshit he gives her in the daytime. But my father; that’s something else. And my brothers. They’re intelligent men! They’re medical men! They know I was railroaded in here on some half-assed, trumped-up charge of—Ah, never mind. Let’s go eat up our goody-good macaroni and cheese.”
One of the new patients brought in on Monday—or was it Tuesday?—was a grey-haired Negro so badly injured around the head and face that bloodstained bandages covered his eyes. They couldn’t make a blind man walk, so his bunk stayed down and he lay on it all day as the column on that side of the corridor detoured around him. Wilder passed him twice before noticing that his wrists and ankles were secured to the bunk by heavy restraining bands. He writhed constantly, groaning and muttering; several times he struggled up to a half-sitting position and screamed.
“D.T.s,” Spivack explained.
“How can you tell?”
“Obvious. Anyone with medical training can spot ’em. Lot of the drunks in here have ’em all the time. Hear what he was yelling just now? When Charlie went over to him?”
“No.”
“ ‘Ah! Ah! Ah got lucidations! Ah got lucidations!’ Didn’t you hear that? He means hallucinations. Bastard’s been soaking up a quart a day for twenty-five years and now his brains have turned to shit. You drink, Wilder?”
“Some.”
“How much? Four, five, six drinks a day?”
“I don’t know.”
“Eight? Ten? Fifteen? More’n that? Huh?”
“Look, Spivack: in the first place I don’t think it’s any of your fucking—”
“Wow! Boy! Talk about hitting a sore spot—So that’s your trouble. Well, it figures: you do look like a lush; funny I didn’t notice before.”
“Yeah, funny,” Wilder said. “Fuck you.”
And Spivack’s reply was to thrust a triumphant middle finger high in the air and say “Fuck you” as he turned and disappeared into the column of walkers.
For the rest of that day—Tuesday?—they avoided each other. Wilder tried to renew his acquaintance with Ralph and Francis, but Ralph didn’t seem to recognize him and Francis didn’t want to play pictures even when Wilder fed him a good one—“Hey, what picture is this: ‘Play it again, Sam’?”
He helped the newspaper man lay out a spread that didn’t work at all, and after that he kept to himself, walking the corridor, peering at his double image in the cop’s sunglasses, smoking cigarettes and saving people, wondering in a quiet panic if he really might be out of his mind.
But sometime during the next afternoon he heard the blind man saying “Oh! Oh! Oh!” and found Spivack crouching low over his bunk.
“What’s the matter, Sambo?” Spivack inquired softly. “You got them old lucidations again? You want a drink? Well, I’m afraid that’s tough, Sambo, because we don’t got no drinks in here.”
“… Oh! Oh! Oh!…”
“No, we don’t got nothin’ here but Peraldehyde and straitjackets and shots in the ass and …”
“Why don’t you cut that shit out?” Wilder said.
Spivack straightened his spine and turned around in a great display of surprise. “Well, I’ll be God damned.” His gaze ran from Wilder’s eyes to his bare feet and back again. “Look who’s preaching at me now. I thought I’d taken just about every kind of holy-Joe shit there is, from every kind of fool; and now some pipsqueak, some drunken little salesman starts telling me ‘kindness,’ starts telling me ‘compassion,’ starts telling me—”
“You’re an arrogant, insolent, overbearing son of a bitch, Spivack. You’re a prick …” Wilder walked backwards, letting Spivack advance on him, but it wasn’t a retreat; he was withdrawing to a wider part of the corridor where the crowd was thin and he could take a stand.
“And whaddya think you are? Some Boy Scout? Some faggot social worker? Some saint? Christ himself? Huh?”
They both stopped, three feet apart, glaring fiercely and ready for anything. Neither of them took up a fighting stance—their hands hung loose—but Wilder squared his shoulders and said “How’d you like a punch in the mouth, Spivack?”
“From you? Funny little alcoholic creep? Shit; I’d wipe up the floor with you in five seconds and you know it.”
“Don’t be too fucking sure of that, Spivack.”
“Wanna try it? See what happens?”
Then the KEEP OUT door swung open and Charlie was smiling there, happy with welcome. “Gentlemen?” he said. “Would you care to join me for a cup of coffee?”
Going about the cordial business of arranging chairs for them and measuring out instant coffee while the pan of water bubbled on the hotplate, he seemed unaware of their red, hard-breathing faces and trembling limbs. “I generally enjoy a little coffee at this time of the day,” he said, “and once in a while it’s nice to have company. If you don’t mind I think I’ll just shut that door. Makes the air a little close in here, but I don’t want to give the impression I’m holding open house. Sugar and cream, Mr. Wilder?”
“Yes, please.”
“It’s only a powdered cream substitute, of course, but it’s very tasty. You, Doctor?”
“No, thanks. Black.”
At first Charlie did all the talking as they sat and sipped and smoked in this unaccustomed luxury. Wilder kept waiting for his monologue to turn into a lecture (“… Now, I don’t want to see any more trouble between you two …”) but it didn’t, and soon they were able to relax. They could even exchange bashful, half-smiling glances of complicity, like bad little boys who’d managed to raise hell without getting caught.
“… Well, I’m certainly glad the holiday’s over,” Charlie was saying. “These long weekends are always difficult. We get badly overcrowded; we don’t have an adequate staff; it’s good to have the psychiatrists back. Oh, now, never mind, Doctor, I know your opinion of psychiatrists; we needn’t go into that. All I mean is, from my point of view, it’s good to have them back because they make decisions. Some of the men here have to go home to their families, right? Some have to be sent to alcoholic or narcotic facilities, some have to be sent up to Wingdale or Rockland or wherever, and some—well, it’s no secret—some have to go to criminal court. And I mean, those decisions have to be made, right?”
Spivack frowned over the careful stubbing out of his cigarette. “Charlie,” he said, “will you tell me the truth?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Who was it—which of these big decision-makers of yours—exactly which one of them told you I was a paranoid schizophrenic?”
And Charlie leaned back for a delighted peal of laughter, placing one great white shoe on the edge of the table. “Ah, Doctor, you tickle me. It wasn’t any of ’em. It was you yourself! You came out of an interview—what was it, two, three weeks ago?—and you said ‘Better watch out for me, Charlie, I’m a paranoid schizophrenic.’ It was you yourself told me!”
But Spivack was not amused.
When Charlie’s laughter dwindled he put both feet on the floor and leaned earnestly forward. “I do know one thing, though, Doctor. Mind you, this isn’t criticism, but I imagine every time you see those psychiatrists you go in with a negative attitude. I imagine you tell them about filing your malpractice suit and so on, and of course that’s understandable. You’re a physician too and you’ve been placed in a difficult situation here. All I mean to suggest is this: why don’t you surprise them next time? Walk in there and answer their questions, make a good appearance, show a little sense of humor, let them see the kind of rational, agreeable man you are most of the time, the kind of man you are with me, or with Mr. Wilder here.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” Spivack said. “I’ll turn on the old charm. Hey, here, I forgot to give your pen back.” He unclipped it from his pajama pocket and slid it across the table. “Don’t suppose you’ve got an envelope, do you, Charlie?”
“An envelope? No.”
“Doesn’t matter. Even if I had an envelope I’d still need a stamp. Thing is, I wrote a letter to my sister. Want to read it?”
“Oh, I’d rather not, Doctor, if you don’t mind; I don’t really enjoy reading other people’s personal—”
The door shuddered with pounding and a voice called “Charlie! There’s a turd on the floor! Some son of a bitch dropped a turd on the floor …”
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said as he escorted them quickly back into the corridor. “I’ll have to lock up here. It’s been a pleasure.”
Would there now be a resumption of their fight? Evidently not. Spivack walked moodily but not angrily, and soon he made shy, tentative efforts at conversation. “There goes a Wingdale man,” he said as they passed a muscular, dull-eyed Puerto Rican wearing work clothes: high-top shoes, denim shirt, green twill pants with wide, old-fashioned suspenders. “When they dress ’em up that way it’s Wingdale every time. And oh Jesus, look at that.”
A very old white man stood crying like an infant—“Wah! Wah! Wah!”—as an orderly approached him with a straitjacket. He twisted away and tried feebly to escape; in the tussle his pajama pants fell and revealed genitals so shriveled and small that they might have been an infant’s too, and he clutched them either in shame or anxiety.
“Hey there, sexpot,” Spivack said in passing.
“Save me, buddy,” the shuffling men were saying of their cigarettes, “save me …”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll save you. Hey, look, Wilder: there isn’t a soul in Jerk-off City. Want to sit down?” And they sank onto the stained mattresses. “Want to read my letter? I mean I worked like a bastard on it; seems like somebody ought to read the damn thing.”
“Okay; sure.” He accepted the smudged, much-folded sheet of paper and opened it.
Dear Sis; dear Miss Priss:
If you are languorously glancing through The New Yorker and sipping an ever-so-extra-dry martini when you receive this letter, or if you are changing from a terribly sweet little cocktail dress into something svelte and provocative for evening, or if you are dabbing a delightfully subtle Parisian scent at your throat in preparation for prolonged and exquisite dalliance with your husband tonight, then don’t bother to read it. Drop it among the crushed gardenias and the empty Liebfraumilch bottles and the Tiffany invitations to parties you’ve chosen not to attend.
If, however, this letter finds you on your knees in your dungarees scrubbing the kitchen floor, or scouring a pot so badly encrusted with last Saturday’s Boeuf Bourguignonne that your fingers bleed into the Brillo, or better still sitting and grunting and raising a stink on what I believe your husband calls the “john,” then read the hell out of it, baby. This is important. This is reality.
1. —Call Dad.
2. —Call Eric and Mark.
3. —Tell your husband he is a simpering, pretentious little fool.
4. —GET ME OUT OF HERE.
HENRY
“So whaddya think?” he asked.
“Well, it’s pretty funny, but the general tone does seem a little—”
“ ‘Hostile,’ right? That’s every psychiatrist’s favorite word.”
“I wasn’t going to say that; I just mean it seems a little on the self-defeating side. Doesn’t seem very likely to accomplish its purpose.”
Spivack sighed and stuffed it back into his pajamas. “Ah, I guess you’re right. Purely an academic question anyway. Haven’t got an envelope; haven’t got a stamp.”
Wilder’s name was called on Thursday morning. He stood by the cop at the door, combing and recombing his hair while Spivack gave him last-minute counsel.
“It’s an inquisition. They ask you questions—loaded questions, the kind that’d never stand up in a court of law—and when you answer they don’t listen to you: they listen at you. They let everything you say slide past and hang in the air while they study it. Because it’s not the substance they care about, it’s the style. You can almost see them thinking ‘Mm; interesting. Why did he make that slip? Why that particular choice of words?’ Oh, and they watch you like hawks too. Not just your face—it’s very important to keep a straight face and look ’em in the eyes—but everything. Squirm around in your chair, cross your legs, put your hand up to your head or anything like that and you’re dead.”
“Okay, Wilder,” an orderly said. “Let’s go.”
There may have been less than a dozen white-coated men in the interview room but there seemed to be twice that many. They sat row on row in chairs with writing-panel armrests, like students, and Wilder faced them alone in an ordinary chair with his sweating hands on his thighs, as if he were their teacher. Nobody smiled. A bald, heavy man in the front row cleared his throat and said “Well. What seems to be the trouble?”
It probably lasted a quarter of an hour. First he did his best to tell them about the business trip to Chicago, about the week of insomnia and heavy drinking, about Paul Borg and St. Vincent’s and the poorly remembered events that had brought him here.
Then came the questions. Had Wilder ever been in a mental hospital before? Had he ever been under psychiatric care? Had he ever sought treatment for alcoholism? Had his drinking ever gotten him into trouble? With an employer? With his family? With the police?
No, he kept saying, no; no; no—and through it all he held his face straight, sat still and didn’t gesticulate. But after the questions they stared in silence; they seemed to expect him to make a summing-up in his own defense, and that was when everything went to hell. One hand leaped to his wet brow and clung there. “Look,” he said. “Listen: I know if I say ‘I’m not crazy’ it’ll probably just convince you I am; but even so, that’s my—that’s my position.” The hand fell back to his thigh, but he knew he was squirming because he heard his chair creak. “I don’t think I’m crazy, or mentally ill or emotionally disturbed or whatever the hell, I mean whatever you people call it.” His mouth was so dry he could feel every movement of tongue and teeth and lips in their laborious effort to form speech. “I know I was behaving erratically or whaddyacallit, irrationally last Friday, but that was last Friday. After the first couple of nights’ sleep and the first few doses of formaldehyde, I mean you know, Peraldehyde, I think I was all right again, and I’m all right now; so the point is—Christ’s sake, is anybody listening?” The spastic hand flew to his head again, messing up his hair, and his eyes closed to shut out their faces.
“What makes you think nobody’s listening?”
“Because I’ve been locked up in a God damned—because this place is enough to drive anybody out of their—I don’t know.” He opened his eyes, but nothing could be done about his hand. “Look. Listen: I don’t think I belong here any more and I think I ought to be discharged. That’s all I’ve got to say.”
He was reminded again of a classroom—this time of one whose students are embarrassed because their teacher has made a fool of himself—so his face twitched into an apologetic little grimace and he said what teachers often say at such moments: “Are there any—questions?”
“Okay, Wilder,” said the orderly, and he was escorted back and locked into the ward, where he wanted to smash his fist against the wall or scream or kick a window again with his filthy foot. Instead he walked and smoked, promising to save people.
“How’d it go?” Spivack inquired.
“Shit, I don’t know.”
“Slimy bunch of bastards, aren’t they? Make your flesh crawl. And when you think of the power those fish-eyed fuckers have over a man’s life—I mean talk about your FBI; talk about your CIA; talk about your Nazi secret police …”
But an hour later Charlie beckoned him aside for a hushed, private talk near the KEEP OUT door. “You did very well in there, Mr. Wilder.”
“I what? I did? How do you know?”
“Well, now, never mind; I just happen to know you gave a good account of yourself. Matter of fact I understand they’ll be taking you down to Rehabilitation after lunch. It’s very nice there, very clean; they seldom keep a man more than twenty-four hours. Give you a little counselling, finish up your paperwork, get your clothes and you’re free to go. But look: it’s a busy day and I may not see you again, so I’ll just say goodbye and wish you well”—he held out a big hand to shake—“and another thing. I think it’s very nice the way you’ve been so friendly with Dr. Spivack; talking with him, taking your meals with him. Dr. Spivack didn’t really have any friends here till you came. He’s a fine man, as you know; only trouble is he’s a little—disturbed. Well. Good luck, sir.”
“Thanks. Thanks, Charlie.”
And he watched him move away to bear down on the beautiful boy in the turban. “Gail! Now, Gail, how many times have I told you to take that pajama top off your head? And put your penis back in your pants where it belongs. Nobody wants to look at that thing.”
They called six or eight men to stand by the front door after lunch, and Wilder was among them.
“Well, look at you,” Spivack said, advancing on him. “Wudga do in there anyway? Bribe ’em? Blackmail ’em? Crawl around and kiss their asses? Hey, wait a second. Got something for you.” And he probed in his pajama pocket, to which Charlie’s pen was clipped.
“What’s this? Another letter?”
“No, shitface. My address and phone number. If I ever do get outa here I might buy you a drink sometime.”
“Well, that’s very—Sure; thanks.”
“So here’s the pen: wanna give me yours?”
And Wilder did so. “I’ll look forward to it, Spivack,” he said.
“Yeah, well, don’t hold your breath. I may forget your fucking existence in an hour and a half. Anyway, keep a tight asshole, Wilder.”
“I’ll try. You too.”
The door opened, not to let the men out but to admit an elderly female nurse trailed by a dozen very young girls in fresh blue-and-white striped smocks and white stockings.
“My God,” Spivack said. “Student nurses. Beautiful little student nurses on a training tour.” He stepped back into the corridor and stood with his arms flung wide, like a master of ceremonies. “Girls, I’m delighted to see you. It’s nonsense for them to send you up here because once you graduate you’ll never get near this place, but even so you might learn something—Oh, it’s all right, Nurse,” he said to their leader, who seemed to have been stricken dumb. “I’m a staff physician; I can handle this. Girls, what we have here is a relic of the nineteenth century. This isn’t a ‘psychiatric ward,’ you see; it’s a madhouse …”
Some of the girls looked bewildered and a few looked scared, but most had begun to giggle behind their hands to show they found Spivack “cute.”
“Officer,” the nurse was saying to the cop, “who’s the charge nurse on this ward?”
“His name’s Charlie, ma’am. I can’t leave the door, but I’ll send somebody to get him—just a second. Hey, uh—”
“… We have psychopathic criminals here, girls, and we have men in advanced stages of madness caused by venereal disease and alcohol and drugs, and we have at least one Second Coming of Christ; then we have men who don’t belong here at all. Take my own case: I’m what you might call a political prisoner. Hospital politics, that is; medical politics. I don’t suppose they teach you girls about medical politics, but I really think they should because believe me it’s a very real, very treacherous—”
“Doctor!” Charlie came loping up the corridor in a swarm of laughing men. “Doctor, I want you to leave those girls alone …”
The door opened again to let Wilder’s group out, and then it was locked behind them.
Rehabilitation was very nice and clean indeed: real beds, chrome-and-leatherette armchairs, good showers with soap and a kind of shampoo guaranteed to remove lice. The talk was quiet and most of it courteous: nobody wanted to make trouble.
“Counseling,” the next day, meant being taken into a roomful of cluttered typewriter desks—it might have been a state unemployment office—and sitting down beside a pale man who looked like an underpaid clerk but was said to be a psychiatric social worker.
“… and you’ll be seeking psychotherapy after your release, right?”
“Well, I don’t know; I haven’t really thought about it.”
The interviewer stopped typing, closed his eyes and ran pale fingers over his face. “You know something? I don’t understand some of you people. You’re a mature, well-employed man with family responsibilities. You spend a week as an involuntary patient in the tightest lockup in the city and you ‘haven’t really thought about it.’ ”
“Okay. I will, then.”
“You damn sure better, mister. Now. Can you afford private care, or do you want to apply for outpatient treatment here?”
“Private care.”
“What about your drinking? You gonna quit?”
“Frankly, I think that’s my own—Well, look: if you’re filling out a form there, just write ‘Yes.’ That’ll take care of it.”
“Oh, you are a little wise guy, aren’tcha? I don’t know; I don’t know. Some of you people.” He finished typing, ripped the forms from the machine and tore out the carbon paper; then he stapled them, banged them angrily in several places with a rubber stamp, and the business seemed concluded.
“Can I get my clothes now?”
“You’re kidding. You’ve gotta be kidding. You think the City of New York’s just gonna let you walk outa here, after the way you came in? You can be discharged,” he said, “only in the custody of Mr. Paul R. Borg; only after he has personally met and talked with me; and only if he agrees to sign these papers.” He reached for his phone. “Now you go back inside and wait. I’m tired of your face.”
It didn’t take very long. Paul Borg came walking into Rehabilitation with an anxious smile, carrying a mimeographed slip. He had signed the discharge papers, he said; this was the one for the clothes. “It says Room 3-F. You know where that is?”
They found it only after walking down wrong corridors, taking wrong elevators and asking directions of people who didn’t speak English; and when Wilder was dressed (an incredible pleasure: his own clothes and shoes, his own wristwatch and walletful of money), he said “Listen, Paul. Something I’ve got to do. Got to find the canteen, or the gift shop or whatever they call it.”
“Why?”
“Never mind. Come on. Must be on the ground floor.” It was, and Wilder bought a carton of Pall Malls. With his own pen he wrote “For Charlie with many thanks,” and signed his name. “Now,” he said. “Where’s the Psycho elevator?”
“John, what is this?”
“Never mind. It’s important.”
“ ‘Men’s Violence Ward?’ ” said the puzzled elevator man. “Ain’t no ward by that name.”
“Well, that may not be the official name,” Wilder said, “but it’s the men’s ward on the seventh floor.”
“Can’t take you up there anyway. Ain’t no visiting hour today.”
“I’m not a visitor, I’m a—Well, look. Just take this up to the ward, give it to the cop at the door and tell him it’s for Charlie. Will you do that?”
“Oh. Sure, okay.” And the door slid shut.
“Son of a bitch’ll keep ’em for himself,” Wilder said, “or else he’ll give ’em to the cop and the cop’ll keep ’em. I should’ve insisted on going up. I should’ve demanded to go up.”
“John, it doesn’t matter. Can’t you see it doesn’t matter?”
“It does matter. Some things matter, that’s all.”
But at last they found their way through corridors and waiting rooms and doors into the abrupt, fresh air of First Avenue, and Wilder said “Wow.” Then he said “My God.”
It was midafternoon on a fine September day, and nothing had ever smelled so sweet. Tall buildings rose in a deep blue sky and pigeons wheeled and sailed among them; clean cars and taxicabs sped uptown bearing sane, unfettered people to the sane, unfettered business of the world.
“I’m parked right around the corner,” Borg said as they walked. “Have you home in no time at all. John? What’s the trouble now?”
He had stopped to read a torn scrap of paper from his pocket: Henry J. Spivack, M.D., with an address and phone number lettered underneath. “Nothing,” he said, and let it flutter from his hand to the dirty street. “It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter.”