I didn’t mind institutional life. I got three meals. Food was always hot and on time. I never had to cook or even wash a dish. I even just pretended to wash my hands. I didn’t use soap, so there were still millions of invisible germs making highways of my fingerprints. I like myself that way. I wasn’t filthy, because I seemed clean. Nobody could imagine the diseases latent on my fingertips. Secrets feel close to home, they’re all I know.
I didn’t have to do laundry. I had to make my bed, but faked it. I didn’t let myself toss. I slept still; the sheets couldn’t come untucked. I had to suppress my dreams to maintain a faint awareness of my body. I had to override the irrational movements that came out of dreaming. I didn’t know the procedure for folding sheets around a mattress. I could have asked anybody, but that would have given up too much of myself. If the nurses saw a single limit, they could begin to define me. If I delivered an impression of maturity and intelligent grace, they wouldn’t piece me into something else. Their manipulations would begin at the first unrefined edge.
Bedtime began flat on my back, arms folded across my chest, but I couldn’t stay that way for long. I felt a flutter from levitation, and a dull sense of loss. I couldn’t stop it. I tried, panicked eyes and stiff throat. I could only look down on myself, at those arms crossed over my chest. I’d assumed the posture of a vampire sleeping in his coffin. I was posed as the prince of darkness, yet I didn’t feel safe. A word for a monster, power and evil, it was in my head, in my room. It just scared me. I knew what I’d seen from above, so I gave up. I put my hands on my pillow. I felt the sinking in my head instead of my stomach. The vampire spell was broken.
I wouldn’t make another move until I folded the blankets off of me in the morning. When I stretched the wrinkles out of the sheets, there was always a little extra. I’d leave the unnecessary fabric deeply wrinkled, smashed flush with the mattress. I’d cover the excess with the slightly fuzzy, baby blue, polyester hospital blanket. It was that color that could trick anyone into feeling at home now and then.
By the time I was through, there wasn’t a visible wrinkle. Nobody could have known my inexperience with hospital corners. On inspection, I got the praise I needed. They trusted me. My good natured obedience and unassuming smile were as fake as the Wellbutrin induced contentment dispensed at regular intervals from the medicine window. My shyness, rather my silence, won their trust. With youth, quietness is the most revered quality. Later in life, reserve signifies something sinister. But the nurses ran with common sense and never checked the details. I stayed hidden. They didn’t know that through all of my docile nodding, I kept notes. I scanned for stray sounds that might refine my larger sense of the institution. Every new word was processed against all the other information I gathered. I’d eventually turn their words to my own purposes, use the rules of the hospital to effect an efficient escape.
Good behavior would eventually get me outside the building. There was a system of points that would win me 15 minutes outside, unsupervised. I’d have to be ready when it came; it’s not a lot of time. I didn’t mind the institution, but I had another life on the outside that carried on despite my absence. It would make contact in little bursts like the previews to a movie, though quicker and entirely visceral, a cramp, or a sigh. If I weren’t simultaneously on the trail and on the run, if danger were to pass, I could stay forever in regimented paradise.
My doctor was a pretty average guy. He paid his dues, and paid his bills. He didn’t seem like the type to push beyond a good book, comfortable chair and regular contributions to PBS. He wasn’t caught up in some quest for a trophy blond, and didn’t know the vocabulary of the track. I don’t know why he got involved with them. Maybe evil was just his response to boredom. Everybody needs a hobby. He tried to win me over and take my confidence as his prize. But I knew too much. I knew his employer, not by name, but by crime. I couldn’t say what I knew. In every session, I performed the role of bored, depressed teenager evading a discussion of consuming and confusing feelings. I was desperate to tell my story. But I couldn’t finish. I didn’t know how they found me out. It should have been different. Maybe it was a spy in my own head who replaced the cyanide tablets with Pez. The doctor always wanted to know what I knew. I had to swallow. I couldn’t give him enough to assess my threat.
“So how are you feeling today?”
“I miss TV.”
“Can we talk about what brought you here?”
“An ambulance. I remember the paramedic. She was a woman with curly brown hair, a plain gold cross on a thin chain, pink turtleneck under her uniform and I noticed a chipped nail, burgundy. But I don’t remember her name. I was dying, her name wouldn’t have done any good.”
“Do you think you were dying?”
“I don’t know. I guess. No.”
“You told somebody you’d swallowed cyanide, but you hadn’t. We call that a cry for help. What brought you to that point; what can I help you with?”
“It’s just something I saw on TV. Batman or something. The Penguin, I don’t know.”
“Do you like super-heroes?”
“No. I just watch whatever’s on, except news. I’ll watch anything, it’s all the same, something to fill my head, pass the time”.
“Eventually, you’ll tell me”. I filtered through his casually optimistic façade for the intentions that lingered beneath his breath.
Once I asked what he wrote in his pad. I looked down, diverted my eyes to the side. With a nervously aspirated squeak, I made my request. He wasn’t convinced. “I’m just keeping notes of your progress”. But he received the image of innocence and inadequacy. Through repeated exposure he’d believe.
It didn’t matter. I knew what he’d written. I could hear the sounds. They crossed the room like a dissipating trail of smoke. With careful concentration, I could catch the nuances of pen scratching against paper. I knew how to build the sounds into the letter forms that would combine into the doctor’s words in my head.
I needed to tell the story, that linoleum. It’s grid of squares, each marked by an ochre snowflake against an orange pattern with its sketchy geometric impression of sunburst or sunshine. It was covered by a million tiny, shimmering drops, some sort of liquid Vegas spread thin across the floor. They tried to clean up. They couldn’t have known I was coming. Anybody would have assumed it was a freshly cleaned floor. But sloshed into the corner were the tiny coagulated chunks and a few red drops that shifted and merged with residual wash water.
I had to get out. The adolescent ward wore me down. I learned to live inside my head, but I struggled against that stupid need for human interaction. I woke up one morning saying “I love you!” I stood, fully awake, and hugged an armload of air. I pressed it gently with my tongue. My lips closed, holding everything inside.
II
His story begins along a secluded street wedged between a freeway off ramp and a neglected city park. The houses emerged as the typically uniform post war construction that delivered the sense of confinement a GI would call home. Over time, places were bought and sold, each new occupant added to the aesthetic until regiment was lost to traces of eccentric whims. Examining the architecture was like past life regression. The Mediterranean chandelier that hung over green shag carpet alongside colonial oak paneling with an Empire lamp stand next to the lazy boy.
The seclusion of the small tract allowed the residents a certain liberty in constructing their private versions of paradise. Wayne’s neighbors had peacocks that flew up to the rooftop to serenade each other with the tortured falsettos of battered children. The yard was dominated by a weeping willow, and despite regular droughts, always seemed to be cool and muddy. The gate to Wayne’s picket fence was flanked by Napoleonic lions that guarded the cement bestiary whose residents dwarfed the delicately painted virgin they’d been placed to adore. (Wayne’s parents weren’t Catholic, but they didn’t want to live with the guilt of destroying religious art). The life sized deer became a stationary carousel from which Wayne saw the world by cocking his head.
The actual home was reconstructed as a miniature stucco plantation house. Despite Wayne’s room full of curiosities, each designed to socialize children to the arts and sciences, he hated being inside. He wanted nothing more than to cross the street and wander the dusty trails, among the tall oaks, dying grasses, racing squirrels, trickling creek and discarded exoskeletons. There were so many nooks to pursue. Among the trees, Wayne was expected to tune out the world and enter completely into the constructions of his mind.
His mother preferred the edge of the park, where a small section was leveled and green. In his mother’s park, the trees weren’t placed for natural occlusion, but to provide shade to the picnic tables and swing set. Wayne found retreat in the lulling motion of the swing. Even nauseous, he’d persist in swinging as high as he could. He liked to watch the world from the swing mistaking angles for perspectives.
A constantly changing row of cars always lined the street. From varying heights he would watch the men that sat in their cars, waiting for a pedestrian to take the passenger seat. Some times the men would emerge from their cars and enter the rough shrubs and poison oak.
Knowing that strangers don’t talk to each other, he determined that the men in the cars were engaged in the surreptitious dealings that filtered off the TV and out into the world through his mind. He heard their discussions of stolen gold, counterfeit bills and other sorts of booty. The feeble old man with liver spotted hands, whose turtleneck looked like a fresh wash of hanging skin seemed to be the king of them all. Despite his reluctant spine, he was always at the park, and spoke to everybody. He had a big and bright smile. The firmness of his lips seemed out of place between jowls.
Wayne focused on his golden medallion. He dreamed of toppling the old man and grabbing it for himself. Other men offered less temptation, only signet rings and dusty loafers. It was alright to dream of plunder. As a crook, the old man’s gold was stolen from thieves to be stolen again.
III
Laws will still govern my body after I die. There’s no loitering. There’s that offensive smell, and my complexion might be troubling. Alleyways are no longer an option. I wouldn’t mind someplace remote, an unresolved territory where children and vagrants find themselves. A chance encounter with a corpse satisfies one childhood fascination at the risk of creating another.
It would be an imposition to ask the favor of sizing me to fit Hefty bags.
Burial at sea lacks the beauty its name suggests. It’s about ashes. It’s not the slosh of water into the boat as my flaccid vessel is rolled overboard by fishermen in tattered yellow overalls and matching hats. My body would never have the chance to float awkwardly until, waterlogged and salted, I found a definite direction.
I guess somebody has to ask why, as if I should know the answer. I have to guess, but I suppose it’s because I’m stupid. I know just enough to feel discomfort, but not enough to improve my circumstance. I only see problems, and that’s a hell of a way to live. There’s no wonder. Early infatuations with textbook Greece or China are as distant as ever, so I think maybe I have seen it all. I’m hungry for something beyond the rush of hyperventilation and the sublime feeling of allergy headaches. When I take a deep breath, I just don’t feel anything new.
IV
The tinny ring of a distant radio drew Wayne to the window. He saw fire, candlelight or something fierce. The image filtered through the forest, so it was hard to tell. He saw the silhouetted breasts of ecstatic women flinging their bodies with cartoon limberness to the satanic din of an AM radio.
He changed his mind. The women were in long black robes with thick gold piping around the hoods, pacing crestfallen around the stone pit. He heard their call dodging in and out of Cool Clear Waters. Their voices came through Hank Williams like tiny scraps of paper falling to the floor.
He focused beyond the sound of his window. The corroded aluminum rattled along its track. The whirling laughter of the cicadas and the deeply drawn comments of the frogs added a viscosity to the air. Though it was an impression of a voice that traveled like a secret code within the sound of the radio that lured him onto the lawn.
Escape didn’t require a second thought. The thrill had worn away. The world of mosquitoes, rats and playing opossum is where he felt safe. Wayne found a strange comfort in red eyes and buzzing.
Jumping out his window used to deliver a shock. But now, feeling only came with the impact of feet smashing dark footprints into a green field of tiny pearls. The suction of mud around his toes might also be enough. Thoughts of warmth, bed sheets and slippers, flashed so rapidly through his head, they became foreign.
It made sense that Wayne would experience the world while his parents slept. He never understood family the way he was supposed to. His discontent was greatest at night, when he had to focus his mind and put it to rest. Instead, he would wander, looking for clues that could be fastened together for a sense of understanding. He became sidetracked by the spectacle of nature in the pleasure of his abandonment.
That night, he avoided the thick gray mists along the creek and stuck to the sidewalk. The crackle of the radio led him three doors down. Wayne walked to the side, fascinated by the stucco monolith disrupted by a faintly glowing window. The light defined a subtle path between the house and a row of cypress trees that was almost lost in the grainy image created by the strain of rods and cones. He stared at the wall feeling what was inside. X-ray power was more premonitory than visual. A sense of purpose washed over him like a sweaty chill. He felt at ease.
He saw eyelids resting in the dull glow of the candlelight. Her skin had the slight translucency of butterscotch candy. Thin veins appeared as fragments, hiding just under the surface. Her heart was buried too deep to notice the beating, and the lungs were defined by a residue of incense smoke. Her chest didn’t seem to rise or fall, and even under the warmth of the candle, she looked a little blue. Her breasts were tipped with large blots that seemed to absorb the color of the light. It reminded him of the color of scabs, sucked off his arm and held to the sun. He wondered if she tasted the same.