by S. A. Hunt
Indoors or outdoors, it was all the same to a robot. She licked her lips again and looked down at a notebook.
Dozens of rectangles were drawn on the topmost sheet, and within them were more rectangles, creating small self-contained grids of five boxes. Rectangles within rectangles. Each of the boxes were bisected by a snaky, wandering line. Charlie, one of the other patients, had shown her this unfortunate puzzle just after she’d been admitted here, and she’d been singlemindedly pursuing the solution ever since. You were supposed to envision each grid as a “house,” and each of the five inner boxes as “rooms.” Then you had to draw a continuous line through every wall of each “room” without (a) crossing your own path, or (b) passing through a “wall” more than once. She had the feeling it might have been impossible to solve, but that didn’t do anything to mitigate its addictive nature.
She turned the notebook page. Dozens of room puzzles. Turned the page again. Dozens more. In some of the puzzles’ “rooms” were written the words yee tho rah.
Several pages of scrawled puzzles deeper into the notebook, she found a blank page. She stared at it for several moments before turning the pencil around and putting the lead to paper.
dear diary
Fuck this place
fuck green jello with peaches in it
peaches are fucking gross
fuck instant potatoes
instant potatoes are fucking gross
But who gives a shit
I wish I could get a decent cup of coffee in here
welcome to Hell
She punctuated the missive with another impossible puzzle, guiding the lazy line through each of the walls. She thought she was about to solve it when she realized she’d missed a line in the middle. Rats. Foiled again.
“Hey,” said a voice behind her. The teenager sighed and licked her lips, her eyes feeling hot and grainy. “Guess what?”
“What?” she asked, closing the notebook.
“I’m getting married today.”
The teenager turned around to face the owner of the voice. It was Mike Hurley, a tall, balding thirty-something who looked a bit like a young Dwight Yoakam. Unlike the girl, he was wearing a two-piece suit, and a tweed overcoat with leather elbow patches.
“Yeah?”
“I’m wearing my Sunday best.” Mike dusted his sleeves in a self-satisfied way. “Hey, wanna hear a joke about a ghost?”
“Not really.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“How much will it take to make you go away, Mike?” the teenager asked in her lazy Georgia drawl, hugging the notebook to her chest.
Her feelings about Mike usually vacillated between annoyance and genuine fear. He had some kind of schizo-bipolar issue—she wasn’t sure exactly what, and she couldn’t get a straight answer out of him about it—and it made him talk in an unfiltered, train-of-thought sort of way. This resulted in an unending kaleidoscope mishmash of ten thousand different topics, and they were almost always some combination of grotesque and silly. Sometimes they veered into vague threats and conspiracy theories, or veiled references to suicide, and that coupled with the way his hands shook and he always seemed wound as tight as a guitar string made the girl anxious. It didn’t help that once he got going, he could talk for an hour or more. He also liked to lurk around corners and ambush her with off-the-wall statements, like the getting-married thing, or an anecdote about teaching a dog how to whistle. She’d come walking out of the restroom in the dayroom once, and he’d come at her with the revelation that his dick felt sour.
“It’s Mark.”
“Whatever.”
“Ten thousand shillings in a potato sack.” Mark stooped to pluck a piece of grass from the lawn and stuck it in his mouth hillbilly-style. “Did you know, only one out of every seventeen hundred blades of grass has a trace amount of dog urine on it?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re statistically more likely to be speared by a swordfish on a deep-sea fishing vessel or run over by a steamroller than you are to put a piece of grass in your mouth a dog’s pissed on.” The way he spoke, in a measured and articulate tone, seemed at odds with his high-strung manner. He acted as if he were full of nitroglycerin, and the slightest movement would blow him to smithereens. “It’s almost time for my meds. I have a goldfish in my room. What are you writing in that notebook? Can I see?”
“I’d rather not,” said the teenager. Whether she had intended to or not, the pencil in her hand had revolved so the point jutted out of the bottom of her fist.
“Okay,” said Mark. “That’s fair.” He didn’t leave. “Do you remember me? From when we went to high school together?”
“We didn’t go to—” she started to say, but thought better of it.
“I guess you don’t remember me.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “I don’t blame you, I look different now. I used to have red hair, but I cured it by shooting myself in the head.” To demonstrate, he took one of his hands out and made a finger-gun, putting it to his temple. “You have no idea how many kinds of cheeses there are. Do you know why the army circumcises all of their drill sergeants? It’s because they use the foreskins to create an eyelid for the third eye behind their forehead, so the enemy can’t hear what they’re thinking. All right, I’m going to leave now. Be good to yourself and be good to your reptilian overlords.”
With that, he pulled a demonic Jack Nicholson grin, arched eyebrows and all, and walked away.
A knot in the teenager’s guts slowly loosened and relaxed. As soon as Mark/Mike was out of earshot, she got up and headed back inside. Fresh air or not, she didn’t want to be sitting in the courtyard when he got an urge to start talking again.
As she opened the dayroom door, she peered over her shoulder. Mark/Mike was goose-stepping enthusiastically up and down the sidewalk in the middle of the area, snapping a salute at every turn. Suddenly he broke into a sprint for the other end of the courtyard, angrily wrenched the nearest door open, and ran through it.
She slipped inside as quickly as possible.
The dayroom was peaceful. Most of the other patients in this wing were outside, so she more or less had the place to herself. She made her way over to the couch, an ancient and very homely thrift-store haul, and plopped down on it to watch TV. There was a movie on, an old one set in the seventies or eighties, with cops and cars, but she couldn’t be bothered to expend the mental energy to figure out which one it was.
Someone shook her awake a little while later. A short, stocky lady with frizzy hair. Jennifer, one of the second-shift nurses.
“You doin’ okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” said the teenager. The nurses checked on you like this every half an hour or so. Annoying, but not as infuriating as it would have been if not for the medication dulling her temper. “Is it almost time for supper?”
“You got a couple of hours.” Jennifer tossed a thumb over her shoulder. “Art therapy is in twenty minutes. You wanna go to that, or you wanna keep napping on the couch?”
The teenager scanned the room. Mark/Mike wasn’t here, but a few of the patients from outside had wandered in, and were watching TV while she dozed. “I’ll stay in here, thanks.” She rummaged around in her head and came up with something that might have passed for a smile. “Not much in the mood to paint fruit today.”
“Your call.”
The nurse left her alone, spoke quietly to one of the other patients in the room, and made her way toward the hallway door. As she approached it, however, the wing’s head nurse came out of it, followed by the tallest, rangiest Black man the teenager had ever seen. Looked like he was eight feet fucking tall. Dressed in a natty blue suit, his collar open to the second button to reveal a pale pendant on his chest.
Even through the med haze, she could tell he wasn’t used to wearing snappy garb. His walk was heavy, weary, slow, like an old giraffe, and his eyes were hard and cold.
The head nurse and the stranger spoke for a moment, and then t
hey scanned the room from the door. The nurse spotted the teenager first. “Here she is,” she said, approaching. The man did not join her.
“Hi, sweetie.” Nurse Anderson was a snake dipped in honey: sweet at first, and all venom on the inside. She was pretty in a 1960s-Hollywood-starlet kind of way, sharp features and slender frame, like a human stiletto. “How are you today?”
“Been better. Looking forward to supper.”
Anderson nodded. “Me too. I didn’t eat much of a lunch today, and boy, my dogs are barking.”
Oh, boo-hoo.
“Well, anyway. Enough of my whining.” Anderson smiled her patented smile. Her voice was birdsong, overly congenial, as if she were talking to an idiot. “This nice man here says he’d like to talk to you. Says he knew your family when you were a baby. Says he knows someone named Cutty?”
Ice tumbled into the teenager’s veins, as if she’d been injected with Freon. Cutty. Witch. Cutty. Witch. Her mother’s last words echoed through the hollows of her mind, cutting through the Zoloft and Abilify as easily as the aforementioned stiletto.
“What?” she asked. She felt like the cold had spread to her face and mouth, rendering her lips stiff and mushy.
“He says his name is Heinrich. Friend of your family, before, you, ahh—” A index finger to the nurse’s upper lip. “—before you graced us with your presence. He says he wants to talk.”
The teenager’s eyes darted over Anderson’s shoulder to the man standing by the door with his fingertips in his jacket pockets. This Heinrich guy had a monolithic poise and was the king of Resting Bitch Face. “I don’t think I like him,” she said, drawing her legs up onto the couch, bundling them underneath her, her knees to her chest.
Anderson gave a subtle shrug to the man.
He sauntered over to them. “I can take it from here, ma’am,” Heinrich said in a low voice, soft and rough at the same time, like aural corduroy. If he’d had a cowboy hat he would have been holding it to his chest. The teenager got the feeling he had one stashed somewhere, probably in his motel room.
Anderson’s lips pursed as she straightened, and she shot the teenager one last exasperated look before she left them to talk.
Heinrich sat on the couch next to the teenager, between her and the patient at the other end, and gave her a moment to either grow accustomed to his nearness or be intimidated by it, she wasn’t sure which. Finally he said quietly, “Your name is Robin, ain’t it? Robin Martine. I came to the right place, yeah?”
She eyed him. “Maybe.”
“My name is Heinrich,” he said, offering a hand to shake. She didn’t take it. He withdrew it, the hand gently pinching into a fist, as if he’d reached out and taken something from her. “Heinrich Hammer. I knew your mother way back when. We were good friends.”
“I think you’re full of shit,” Robin told him. “My mama didn’t have no friends. And that’s a weird name.”
“She had Miss Cutty, for a little while, didn’t she?”
“You don’t know nothing about Marilyn Cutty,” said Robin. “You don’t know shit about me. I don’t know who you are, but you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“Oh, I very much think I have the right tree.” Up close, his face was saddle leather, and a beard of charcoal-colored wool grew on it like moss on a rock. As he spoke, he darkened a bit, if that was possible. Then he lightened again. “I knew your mother, I know who Cutty is, and most importantly—and I think this is most relevant to your interests—I know what Cutty is.”
Robin’s heart skittered in her chest, a cockroach in a can.
“She’s a witch,” continued Heinrich, “and you—”
“Witches ain’t real. Witches ain’t real.” Adrenaline dumped into her bloodstream. Under her sweatpants, goosebumps trickled across her skin, racing down her thighs. Her bladder threatened to open the pod-bay doors. “Witches ain’t real.” She looked down and realized she was scrunching up her notebook. “Cutty was just some lady
(go ahead and look, littlebird)
that lived across the street from us. My father murdered my mother. He’s a son of a bitch, and witches ain’t real.” Witches ain’t real witches ain’t real witches ain’t real witches ain’t real witches ain’t real— “I don’t know why you’re here, but I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore.” Witches ain’t real witches
(Mom made me forget)
ain’t real witches ain’t real witches ain’t real. She heard the sound of tearing paper, a snapping pencil. A sharp pain welled up in her left hand, but she barely acknowledged it. Witches ain’t real witches ain’t
(the woman had a gap for a face)
real witches ain’t real witches ain’t real.
The man’s face lightened and his eyebrows rose, as if he realized he’d gotten himself into a mess. “Hey, whoa now,” he said softly, placatingly. “I’m sorry, kiddo, calm down, okay? The shouting, it ain’t necessary here.”
Shouting? Who was shouting?
(even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil)
Witches ain’t real witches ain’t real witches ain’t real witches ain’t real. Nobody’s shouting here.
(I need to protect myself.)
The patient sitting behind Heinrich began to rock back and forth, bunching his fists against his ears. Someone behind them moaned in a quavering voice. Witches ain’t real witches ain’t real witches ain’t real witches ain’t real. Anderson came through the door and hesitated, her eyes flicking around the room at the increasingly agitated patients. Clutched in one fist was a hypodermic syringe.
“No!” said Robin, fear turning into anger. “Don’t you come over here with that fuckin’ thing!” She bared yellow teeth, her greasy dreadlocks parting to reveal a face twisted into a mask of alarm. “You stick me and I swear to God I’ll bite your fingers off!”
The man grabbed her shoulders. His hands were strong, iron-strong, but he didn’t squeeze her. Just enough pressure to restrain her, as if she were in manacles bolted to the wall. Heinrich looked over his shoulder at the nurse and shook his head. “No! No chemical restraints. I can handle this. Just do what you have to do with the rest of them. I got this.”
“Sir, it looks like you don’t ‘got’ anything. You’re disturbing our residents.”
“I do—I mean, I’m not. Look, I just—”
“Okay, whatever, just take her outside, all right?” Anderson demanded, marching over, the syringe needle still jutting from between her fingers. “Away from the others. You can talk to her out in the courtyard.” She and the man named Heinrich lifted Robin by her arms and escorted her out the dayroom door.
Out in the sunshine and vivid green grass and warm breeze, everything seemed a little less imperative, a little less ominous.
“Shut the fuck up for a minute,” said Heinrich, depositing her on a bench, obviously becoming some mixture of alarmed and irritated. Robin immediately went to the grass. She pulled up her feet and hugged her knees to her chest, the squished notebook caught against her thighs, and the grass under her face was cool, comforting, fragrant.
“Sir,” Anderson said sharply. “That kind of language is quite unnecessary.” She paused. “And look, she’s hurt herself. What are you trying to do here?”
In breaking the pencil, Robin had pierced the palm of her hand, and rather deeply. Blood trickled down the heel of her wrist. She looked up at the nurse with pleading eyes, squinting in the sunlight. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing, I don’t need to go to the infirmary, it’s nothing, I’m fine.”
She caught a look from Heinrich communicating frustration, disappointment, understanding, and appeal, all in one. Come on, work with me here, kid, it seemed to say. I drove all this way to see you and I expected more from you, not this caterwauling and batshittery.
Anderson took her hand and turned it over, inspecting the puncture wound. “I think it needs some Neosporin and maybe a bandage, at least.”
“I’m fine. This is fine. I’m calmin’ d
own, I think.”
She rubbed the blood off on her sweatpants. Anderson very visibly did not approve.
The man whipped a handkerchief out of a pocket in the breast of his jacket and wiped off the remainder of the blood, and then deftly tied it around Robin’s wrist. “There. Mission accomplished,” he said, squeezing her hand so hard she could feel her heartbeat in her fingertips.
Away from the patients and the other nurses, Anderson’s façade seemed to slip. Both of her hands had evolved into fists. “Are you calm now?” she fumed, capping the syringe. “Are you going to make me stick you?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean, y-you ain’t got to do anything.”
Heinrich knelt in front of Robin, still holding the bandaged hand. “We’re cool, ain’t we? We can be friends and talk about some stuff, right?”
Robin nodded.
Heinrich rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. “I think we’re good here.” His eyes pinged up to the nurse and back down again, then over at Robin’s pale face. “We’re good. You can go.”
“I hope you do take her with you like you said,” said Anderson, dropping the needle in her scrubs pocket. “She’s been a handful and a—”
“I said you can go.” His voice became stone.
Anderson turned and walked away. “This attention whore, I swear to God,” she grumbled under her breath. Her pink-and-purple New Balance sneakers scuffed across the sidewalk as she bustled across the courtyard in her busy-bee way, and she disappeared back into the dayroom.
“Now,” said Heinrich, still crouching in front of her, “as we were saying.”
“Witches.” Little more than a whisper.
He paused, and the slightest of smiles touched the corners of his mouth. “Yeah.” He squeezed her hand a little bit. “Yeah, we were talking about … them.” They shared the moment, sitting there in the sunshine, the light glinting on his bald brown head. Cool grass prickled Robin’s elbows.
