A shifty Formica table wobbles awake when I lean forward for support. The crippled troll may be inanimate, but doubt, being king of all beasts, I withhold judgment. I know the freak lives half its life outside this room, traveling through doors, down halls, its reptilian tongue dripping overheard conversation, pausing at the nurses’ station, barely a fetid moment passing before it moistens the locks that shelter yet another nurse’s ear. Doubtless, it must be prattling sins and squalid tales of the psyche furtively skimmed from its slick of memories. I flunked reality once, and now my elbows hurt.
As I rub away the pain, a filing cabinet smarting staleness and the loneliness of disuse shrinks toward the corner. The rejection hurts. He’s my only friend at Seward Psychiatric, and I need a friend, especially now when psychotropics and their wilding gang of side effects are riding steeplechase through my bloodstream. Witness the clock’s sweephand taunting me by not sweeping but falling like an executioner’s axe, grimly beheading seconds—dismembered numbers scattered across the floor. The vision sticks to my eyes, then disappears. I’ve had enough, but there is more.
Enter Doctor looking grim, kicking aside the dead seconds with his Armani lace-tops. November draped on a frail tree holds more hope than Dr. Phillip Wylie, flawlessly dressed in a suit that would settle two months’ rent. The public address system crackles awake. The lights flicker and dim. A disembodied voice speaks in seductive tones as a catwalk unfolds behind my eyes:
“Dr. Phillip Wylie’s boyish good looks are enhanced by this Louis Vuitton single-breasted, handmade from the flesh of psychiatric patients and worn to great effect with a Caraceni Borsa of the finest nubuck crocodile highlighted by a delightful . . .”
Hope turns a corner where darkness is the only architecture. Even my chair feels empty.
Doctor sits, snaps papers awake, crosses his legs with the austere resolve of a bureaucrat about to give a bad man his due. Wylie, who suffers from eternal boyhood, enhances his affliction with well-fortified vanity. A fraction of his disposable income funds numerous products designed for the self-indulgent male: emollients, moisturizers, botanical extracts, essential oils, yak semen extract from Tibet—accessible to the uninhibited, preening shrink. Expensive haircut, eyebrows waxed, nails impeccably buffed, not a hint of red in his eyes, which I notice, even in my over-medicated state, are as bright and green as money. I see the cash heave like flotsam on turbulent seas as his eyes glide past me, around me, as if I weren’t there, perhaps invisible to the moneyed eye. Am I so reprehensible that if looked upon, my pale and beleaguered visage might prompt Doctor into a headlong visceral spasm, causing the poor boy to redistribute the half-bottle of Chateau Pichon served with luncheon?
When Doctor wearies of this circuitous route, his lids flutter, and with reluctance, he braces his psyche before lowering his eyes upon the wretched refuse that flounders in the tide lapping the tabletop. That’s me, of course, gasping air before going down in my bare-ass hospital gown that billows toward my eyes, blinding me before I meet his
unforgiving glance. I feel subservient, vulnerable, filthy as well, unblessed by hot water and coarse soap. Forgive me, dear doc, a gang of nurses’ familiars stripped me of my essential oils day one, and I haven’t had a chance to pleasure a yak.
* * *
Although Wylie seems hostile, I still have sense enough to question my perceptions. Could it be that I’m logged in but not online, misinterpreting everything? I may have a poor connection, but I know I’m not nuts. Still, I hear voices in the hallway—“loathsome man,” or is it “last bedpan,” maybe “loony man?” Is someone defaming my character, or is my imagination wired for the self-destruction of my already battered psyche?
Wylie flips through my records with about as much interest as a lobotomized nit, then cuts the kill short, yanking me ashore and, in the process, skinning my stomach on beach sand and medical waste. He lets me dangle from his hook a few seconds longer to access his catch, making sure I’m not just another laceless boot or an empty trash bag. My flesh stings as if pierced by syringes and rusting tackle. I feel like Saint Sabastian, my blood clotting, my eyes turned toward heaven.
* * *
Wylie hasn’t spoken a word yet. He’s expert at threading the air with unease and stitching it closed himself. He bounces his pencil on the tabletop as if transmitting an anger-laden Morse code via cracked Formica. Like an obsequious messenger, the table (six-legged Uriah Heep of Bedlam) commits each cryptic detail to memory. With excruciating slowness, the clock beheads more seconds found to be unproductive. Wylie taps the pink nubbin of his pencil on his lower lip before daintily sucking the bud. Is he attempting to allay his anger, perhaps rage, via a promising oral fixation? It doesn’t seem to be working. He’s glaring at me now as if I had but lately eaten his child and mailed back the bones as a thoughtful gesture (apparently not taken as intended).
* * *
With no one to turn to, I travel my usual guilt-cobbled path and begin to panic, redden, sputter questions to myself: “He is a doctor, right, not the FBI probing my hideous past? (What hideous past?) That is a stethoscope—(I think it is a stethoscope)—decorating his delicate throat, the silver disk inadvertently listening to his own pissed-off heart as it pumps his face to the limits of cherry-cheekdom. But who am I? I knew moments ago. Someone, please remind me. Filing cabinet tell me. You must know. Here’s your chance for meaningful existence. . . . I . . . I am . . . James . . . yes, James. Nice guy, quiet, private, somewhat reclusive, but not Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy. I never danced in the pale moonlight wearing someone else. A no-heads-in-my-freezer sort of guy, that’s me. Right? Right?” As far as I can see, everyone thinks otherwise. Why else would they treat me like an excrescence on the soul of a maggot?
It is my misfortune that I’ve long since lost contact with the nuances of reality (numerous variants having emerged like weeds in sidewalk cracks I’ve been careless enough to step on), and the drugs they’ve been doling out like party favors are pummeling my judgment, breeding paranoia like a squadron of colorful wasps dangling their long legs as they skim the poisoned icing. Trust now ranks with hope: disappointment deferred, as a great man once said. I reach for a bit of comfort by conjuring an old friend who has long since taken rooms in my memory.
Horatio, or I do forget myself. And what make you from Wittenberg?— (inadvertently spoken aloud). A mistake. A big mistake. Wylie bloodies a fresh page black; Horatio squeezes sideways out the door. That did it. Doctor’s mind is made up. He’s read My File, and (if I’m not yet delusional) he’s talked with god knows what surreptitious agency with its inbred paranoia sucking up tax dollars. Explained. Oh, indeed, I do forget myself—but for a moment, a lousy, antiseptic moment. To thine own self be true, James. I know who I am. I know what I’m capable of and what I’m not. I
know my reach in a world turned nebulous and intangible, but it’s not easy walking a highwire without a net or a wire. Each day the unexpected is expected—Wylie in the mix.
My chief doubt: Is Doctor willfully buttering my biscuit with fresh delusions or merely conducting, with clinical detachment, a standardized interview? This question, alone, may appear to indict me. Of course, of course, there is another option: He’s just one more inept shrink killing time while his Bently warms to blood temperature.
* * *
And the outcome of my first consultation with Dr. Phillip Wylie? Wary, hesitant answers to meager questions that could have been posed with better bedside manner by my buddy, the disconsolate filing cabinet, even though encumbered by stacks of folders soon to teeter with mine atop. All the dusty towers leaning toward irresolution, obscurity, not likely to free one lost soul. This saddens me, as it does the filing cabinet, who begins to warm to my dilemma. I know he must be weary bearing dead weight, as I am weary of what this pseudo-shrink diagnoses as paranoid schizophrenia while ignoring the side door where props are being hefted backstage.
Dr. Wylie, having grown weary sucking his Dixon No. 2 (exhausted, cooling in fluorescent light as it whispers to the tabletop), closes the intake with a flourish of his Mont Blanc Writing Instrument, then caps it with a quick rich click putting me in my place in the event I dare have the slightest presumption of equality. He tucks a note inside his shiny clipboard, cold as cryogenic storage: a prescription about to take me on the ride of my life. A prescription written facilely after probing name rank serial number and not much else—details already documented. It’s little wonder he believes everything a crippled Formica table tells him. The brain is a cloud leaking electricity. Wylie could more easily snare a cumulus than make a cogent diagnosis.
And so it is—my first day at Seward Psychiatric Hospital, a lofty appellation for a century-old madhouse lowering on the cusp of the city, like a malignancy rooted to the soil.
2.
Seward boasts a carnival and a freak show down the hall and to the right. That’s the dayroom up ahead scattered with lunatic revelers, some flailing their arms, some rocking forward and back, others swaying side to side with what seems hysterical glee—a freshly donned guise for newly discovered tributaries of pain. Others frenetically search for the lost origin of their misery, as if it mattered, as if it could help. Big Bev, the Tourettes girl, gabbling in-ine-ine, fall on, fall in, in-ine-ine, who’s inside the roof with me . . . a white duck, schmuck duck dick, slick-ick-ick; Motorcycle Boy nodding on his helmet dreaming of a Hog not made by Mattel; the new-in-town slumped and sleeping, unaccustomed to all the entertainment; Saint Michael at the upright playing out-of-tune Clare de Lune; and beyond the glass—the chronic pacers traversing the halls like slovenly pinballs gibbering a rut. Never one, no, not one damn jackpot.
THE FUN HOUSE
Everyone knows the route to this part of the park, open every Tuesday and Thursday, but no one dares speak its name. The chrome shuttle tracks the hall toward the main gate, the red light above the door glows like any clown’s cocaine-inflamed nose, the spokes of the shuttle jettisoning light like a wheel of misfortune, gears clicking, circuits maxing out your wiring . . . sprockets meshing mincing seconds . . . past the nurses’ station decked for an insular Christmas . . . past the dayroom where ghosts mingle at the morning troth . . . past the tour bus, a few vacant faces behind the murky glass . . . past the glittering lights of the pharmacy with its, colorful drugs displayed like tantalizing prizes topped with a free tepid drink. Apparently, I have already won—my head bobs above my chair like a lost balloon and feels as light . . . past security guards kicking up
sawdust and remnants of candy cotton stained with spots of blood . . . clowns dressed in white sweeping up with mutant brooms with sprawling tentacles long enough to rouse the beast dining on your mind, growling for anything that will excite its appetite. Through the squeaking doors, down a hall so narrow it exacerbates astringent odors augmented by medical miasma . . . a breeze off the boardwalk cooling the sweat on your forehead . . . caged lights gliding above your head . . . wallpaper fluxing demonic patterns—prefab hallucinations—as if a congregation of bureaucrats thought the inmates too inept to conjure demons of their own (if we do one thing right here, anywhere, it is demons . . . nervous stomach shrinking to the size of a fist crushing one black stone . . . hands squeeze worn armrests so tightly you can feel the salt residue left by earlier fun-seekers. (Didn’t expect that quick swerve left, did-ja—all part of the entertainment—the all-inclusive package) . . . a short ramp up—bit-of-a-bump-there—into a tiny room listing toward the extinction of the optimum functioning synapse in your park, the only unbroken string of colorful lights left. You try to explain: “I did not—absolutely, sir—I did not buy a ticket. This is not my ride.” Your eyes are wide open, opulent as bubbles sparkling with what light is left.
Nurse slices a smile while flashing Wylie’s flamboyant Mont Blanc signature. You watch it rise from the paper like an obscenity written on the wall of an underpass. You’re through. You’re done for, over and out. At any moment, you expect a hand to settle on your shoulder, then a kind whisper through graying whiskers, I am truly sorry, son . . . the Governor has denied your appeal.
Nurse has lost her snide smile. She has no expression at all. Her face is peeled as clean as a cling orange. You wish you could blurt something to save yourself but only manage, “This is no way to run an amusement park!” Your words fade and fall off a precipice of sadness. And now your voice is gone, not likely to come back soon— a scream bouncing off the walls of a nightmare conjured by a deaf-mute—and none of this
is amusing. It’s time for ECT prescribed by Dr. Phillip Wylie (who signed the ticket, the all-important Consent to Treatment: Electro-Convulsive-Therapy. Or did I sign it? How? When? Nocturnal malfeasance? It’s the only ride in this unforgiving amusement park—The Main Attraction. All else was prelude. But there is no line, no waiting, no express ticket required.
“We’ve taken care of everything, sir. Hop in, please, strap in, nice and comfy . . . open wide . . . wider, sir . . . wider, please” (you feel a masseter tear), “now bite down, bite, yes, bite the rubber wedge, sir.” But it’s nice to be called sir—if only to be knighted by lunacy.
The smell of alcohol, antiseptic slather, a pinch to your arm for . . . good luck before they turn the lights inside out? Then something glides overhead, hovers, its light as brilliant as a UFO surveying the landscape, and whoosh . . . you’re off . . . . . . . . The only sound you remember is the leaden door resounding as it shuts out the world you’re leaving behind, then a vicious swipe to the brain, and you worry how much can be taken, how much lost or stolen before your mind leaves you behind. Will they return everything at the end of the ride?—“Here, sir, is this yours?”—like a hat blown off, tossed up and beyond where even the wind can’t reach it.
* * *
On the trip back to the rest area, head bowed and lolling as if fastened to someone else’s neck, you wonder why your feet look so far away, and the tiles appear to be wedges cut from clouds. Your hands curl around each other, fingers laced, seeking a sense of connection, cohesion. Your face feels like a crumpled tissue moist enough to slip, slide, and be gone. You take inventory of your bones, your limbs. You’re a broken tree after a hurricane.
* * *
The day is gone. The trees have lost their color now. The quiet presses softly against the night. You stand at the window and see life through the skin of your own reflection. You’re out there with all the others who have wandered too far. You’re lumbering through rubble into weeds on the cusp of the city—a wasteland of weathered dreams, the wind mumbling through everything broken as if it were just one more lunatic rummaging through debris, searching the remains.
We’re the black mirror eating up the light. The color of our eyes gone. No longer part of the species, we’re an ill-formed congregation of ghosts now and maybe always, with one simple goal: remember the way home and how it felt to have definable form instead of living each day like smoke passing through a filthy screen. We’re a field of headstones breathing graves marking the places our lives have been interred.
* * *
One thing I have learned, one thing I am sure of: there is a center, a sanctuary, where the missing, the spent, the victims—the fortunate few wanderers, the losers, the never haves—recall themselves. Those who do not, those who fail and continue to fail, the ones treading a disappearing landscape, will spend their lives perfecting their absence—the purest and most pristine of achievements in this realm, perhaps, any. Sometimes, I envy their success.
The survivors: those who have walked the park grounds once too often but still manage to exhume what’s left—we never travel too far from home, wary of losing our way, content with what we’ve found. And the city lights? We can see them from the edge, out on the curve of a gritty wind grinding down worn stones. The lights have lost their luster—a fragile glow, pale as the shadows they are part of, still too dim to light the way, just enough to see.
