by Lucy Corin
MADMEN
The day I got my period, my mother and father took me to pick my madman. The whole time, my dad kept his hands in his pockets and my mom acted like it was her show. I hadn’t let her in on how scared I was that I might be a freak born with endometrial tissue of steel. Apparently it didn’t cross her mind that I might be worried, watching all my friends go through it and what was up with my body. I stopped digging, looked in my pants, and told her what was going on in there, and what she said was, “All right, but hurry and get back out here.”
It was getting toward lunch and we were digging a drainage ditch from the shed down to the woods. With my lateness, our preparations had become elaborate. We thought of everything, and my madman was going to really like his situation, I felt sure. We had a couple chickens he could take care of or else eat. Some of the almond trees still dropped nuts, and who doesn’t like nuts? We had a circle of rocks for a fire pit with a view of the creek and an iron pot handed down from my grandmother, the one that her madman used and her father’s madman used before that. In the shed I’d hung the curtains from my room before I was old enough to make my own decisions. They had a tassel fringe that I thought looked like paper-chain dolls with their hands merged together.
So I ran inside and did my best to remember what she’d told me about tampons when I was like ten, and then I ran back out and we finished the ditch even though I felt heavy and gross. In the shed we freshened up the straw, and then I went back inside again to shower while my mom called my dad at work so he could meet us. A lot of people would consider my mother grim, but I could hear her on the phone, at least until I turned on the water, and she sounded excited about taking me for my big day.
In the shower, I thought about my madman. It was getting hotter, so there were going to be a lot to choose from. Over the weekend, at my friend Carrie’s birthday, we’d told our fortunes with a questionnaire we found online. Her madman wouldn’t come out but we’d heard the basics about him. For what kind of house I wanted I put Treehouse, Houseboat, Malibu Mansion, and for my risk choice, Outhouse. If you don’t put a risk, it undermines the integrity. For what kind of job I put Parachuter, Famous Scientist, Hang-Gliding Instructor, and World Peace—which isn’t a job, but it’s the thought that counts. For who I was going to marry I put Anthony, No One, A Lesbian, and Yo’ Mama. For pet I put Yo’ Mama, Giraffe, Ant Farm, and Crabs. I was completely not being serious by the time I got to car because I know I’m never getting a car so I just put Anything, Flying Saucer, Argh!!!, and Who cares my parents are never getting me a car (though the window only had room for twenty characters, so it ended up Who cares my parent). But the point is I got serious with the madman question. Even kids who seem like they don’t care about their madman are faking it. They care.
“How did you know which madman was yours?” I asked Carrie later, in private. She said she looked each of them in the eyes, even just for a fraction of a second with the fast ones, but then with her madman she got them to take her into his cell—he was in the far back corner and she’d almost thought the cell was empty. He was pale and “Seriously,” she said, “I know it’s hard to believe, but he blended in.” I wondered if he was an albino madman, which suddenly seemed exotic and perfect.
“Is that how you knew?” I asked.
“No,” she said. All the other girls were asleep. It was dark and we were near the window, face to face with our legs over opposite arms of a giant overstuffed chair, with the black sky surrounding us and everyone’s sleeping bags covering the living room floor. It was like we were in a rowboat, bobbing in a sea made of our sleeping friends. “I went in and he wouldn’t look at me. I put my hand on his chin like this, you know, like when an older man wants to kiss you in the movies.” She shrugged. It seemed like our boat rocked. “I know that sounds creepy, but it’s not. I just felt older than him, and he kept turning his chin and not looking at me.”
“Will he look at you now?” I asked.
“That’s not the point,” she said. “Plus none of your beeswax.” She said she picked that phrase up from her madman.
I wanted one like my uncle had, who was an accomplished musician. Special. Or one time I was downtown, some girl was totally engrossed in window shopping, and her madman was sniffing around the sidewalk, lifting pebbles with his toes, humming very low, very soothing. I pretended like I was window shopping too, to get closer, and when I caught the tune, it didn’t even seem to be coming from him. More like it was surrounding him, moving through him, something like religion, or wisdom. Some people would be surprised how important wisdom is to me. I try to remember what he hummed, but I was young and I can’t remember. I mean, I know I’m still young. But your brain changes.
Deep in the night I woke up and it was just me in the giant chair. Across the room, across the ocean of sleeping girls like waves, I saw Carrie and her madman in the doorway that went into the kitchen. They were silhouetted, standing forehead to forehead, passing a sandwich back and forth. Then the madman reached over and tugged on a handful of her hair. Like ringing a bell, but soft. Then Carrie reached over for a handful of his hair and tugged back.
Of course I don’t remember my online fortune, that’s never the part that sticks, and no one believes it anyhow. It’s more about answering the questions plus what you’re willing to tell people.
The shower went predictably. After my shower, I went right for the skirt and blouse I thought were a perfect balance of mature and still had hints of my personality. But once I put it on it was more like a combination of pretentious and someone who was not trustworthy. I started from scratch. I picked my underwear—serious underwear, but new. Car-crash undies. Then I picked footwear: dressy boots with square heels. Once you know the shoes, that narrows your options. Soon my mom was screaming for me. “It’s not a beauty pageant!” I don’t know why she has to scream, the house is not that big. I guess it doesn’t matter what I was wearing. But it does to me.
All the way in the car I wished I had skipped the tampon and went with a pad. It must have been in crooked, but at the time I thought this must be what it’s like. My mom, who is a bad driver and also incredibly opinionated about driving, was on her cell phone talking a hundred percent understandingly about someone in the hospital after an incident in the home, and then suddenly on another call, a hundred percent enthusiastically about someone’s idea for self-catering a wedding in a schoolhouse on a cliff. She’s not faking, either. Endless empathy, one person after another, all day long, like a buffet. I just wanted my madman.
Meanwhile I watched the world go by out the side window, comparing regular view versus including the mirror. I kept wondering if the world was going to look different after I had a madman, so I wanted to get a good “before” shot of it. To sum up, the world was: green, green, green, house, street, green, gas station, green, green, strip mall, green with brown, then hillier and hillier. Then, exactly as my mother was saying “schoolhouse” again, we went by this little white schoolhouse I’d never noticed before. It was as if her saying the word “schoolhouse” made it appear—I was so surprised I tried to point it out to her, but she shook her head not to interrupt, and by then she’d missed it. Or maybe it was a church.
It had its own velvet hill. It had a weathervane. A deer ate puffs of grass the mower had missed by its front steps. A motorcycle was parked nearby, tilted on its kickstand. It looked like it was thinking. The weathervane was spinning, so I couldn’t tell what it was, a horse, a whale… It didn’t seem windy out, but it’s hard to tell. Being in the car was like another planet.
I know it sounds stupid, but this was a big day for me, and everything felt like it might be important at any second.
After a few more hills, the facility rose up in the middle of nowhere. Ours was a nice facility, known to be professional and well equipped, but in some counties it could be hard, even dangerous to go, and some kids brought their whole extended families for protection. In those counties some kids ended up with a madman who died a
lmost immediately. That’s meaningful to go through, but it’s better if you have time for a broader perspective. The building looked like a normal white country inn, but closer up you could see it went on and on down the hill. We pulled into the parking lot and my mother stopped the car by as usual bumping into the curb. Maybe three other cars were spaced out in the lot, and two beat-up vans. My mother was still working on her phone call, though she did make some eye contact with me, meaning “just a minute.” The person would never know, from her nodding and assenting noises, that she was in any way ready to get off the phone, which she never really is. It’s the empathy. She loves to empathize. Sometimes I feel bad because maybe I don’t. She dove her hand into her purse, which sat open on the seat beside her, the most crammed thing in history, and dragged out a length of crinkled toilet paper because she doesn’t believe in kleenex. My mother was admirable—for example, trying to teach me to be the last person on earth resisting the corporate identity takeover of personhood. It made me so angry at myself when I just wanted her to go away, which is not the same as wanting her to die, although she will never understand the difference. She blew her nose using one hand and pushed the toilet paper back into the purse.
Oh my god we were still in the parking lot. When I tapped her on the shoulder she looked about to smack me so I just sat there, probably the fastest route to her hanging up anyway. But I was resenting getting into a bad mood. My phone, for instance, was on vibrate for privacy on the occasion, and the last thing I needed was to be in a bad mood making a decision like this. She kept being herself on the phone. I got angrier and angrier. Then luckily my dad pulled into the spot next to us. I jumped out of the car to meet him, and he’s such a huge dork, he never knows what to do, but then sometimes he does exactly the right thing, and this time he got out of his truck with a shopping bag with a bow stuck on it because he can’t wrap boxes, although it’s funny when he tries.
I hugged him and took the bag. “What have we here!” I said, and dug in. It was a harness for my madman, the best kind, made of real leather with quality hand-stitching and brass appointments. My mother came around the car, stuffing her phone into her purse, saying, “Poor Irene!” She was about to launch into recounting everything from the phone, and it’s true that Irene’s life is pretty shocking and worth hearing about, but all I thought was, Isn’t there a time and a place? I handed her the gift bag for her to put in the car and catch the hint. She put her hand on my head and I could see her deciding whether to say something or not. For good reason she didn’t know if expressing her opinion was the best idea when it came to getting me to feel what she wanted. Finally she just plunked my gift into the back of Dad’s truck and said, “Here we go.”
We stepped up to the giant double doors, the kind with wire netting between the panes, and I buzzed the buzzer. A plaque on a rock by the stoop read AN ATTACHMENT TO ONESELF IS THE FIRST SIGN OF MADNESS. It was riveted under an engraving of a Ship of Fools, a little hard to see but you could tell it was a really good artist. A woman’s face appeared in the window, filling it with puffy red hair, and I thought I was making it up, but she had the kind of eyes a cat has—golden with black diamond-shaped slits instead of pupils. I grabbed my dad’s hand in the midst of a flashback to The Wizard of Oz where I’m Dorothy and Oz is the doorman but you don’t know it yet. My dad held my ID up to the window. She let us in. She wrote some stuff down from my ID and then gave it back to me. She was obviously really nice, but I couldn’t look at her. She sat us in the waiting room with another family and left through another set of double doors. This family was one with a boy who must have been turning thirteen, which is when they get theirs. It’s really unfair. They should have to go when they start splooging in the night or whatever. God, boys are known for being immature in general, but this one seemed especially short, making me feel extra freakish, that everyone has their madman already and here I am with this kid with a cowlick. But I went right over and plunked down next to him and asked, “What is up with her eyes?”
He said, “It’s just a disease. My dad’s a doctor. Dad, what’s it again?”
His dad was reading a magazine about cars. “Coloboma of the iris,” he said. His mother was sitting so close to his dad that their thighs touched all the way to the knee. Her magazine was called Pet City.
I whispered to the boy, “God, if I wasn’t already crazy and she was my nurse, I think I’d go crazy.” I could tell he thought I was making light of the situation, but I wasn’t.
“She’s nice,” he said.
I said, “I know.”
I was nervous, and I was going to remember this for the rest of my life.
There was a nurses’ station, but when I went over no one was at it. I slid the window open and put my head through. All I saw was extra pamphlets and forms piled around a computer, but I still felt sneaky so I stopped looking. Soon enough the red-haired cat-eyed nurse returned and the boy went through the double doors into the back with his mom, dad, and cowlick. My mom took another call and the room echoed with her voice. My dad walked around inspecting things—looking into the nurses’ station to see what I’d been looking at, squinting at a poster, pressing a thumb into the cushion on the chair like meat to test it for doneness, picking a stray bit of paint from the glass of the window that looked onto the parking lot. He was trying to find something to comment on. He picked up a pamphlet from a rack and started to say something but swallowed it and pretended to be chuckling to himself. There’s no such thing as chuckling to yourself. You do it so someone will notice, even if you’re by yourself and the person is imaginary. My parents are such a classic couple. They’ll either get divorced or he’ll get smaller and smaller and she’ll get bigger and bigger until they die. Then the red-haired cat-eyed nurse came through the double doors with a smile like homemade pie and said, “Ready, sweetheart?”
“Remember,” my mother said, “you, too, could grow up to be a madman.”
Shut up, Mom. No one cares about this more than I do.
The gallery was white and clean, and everything—the bars on the cells, the bars on the beds in the cells, even the chamber pots—seemed thicker because of layers of white paint, the sheets fragile by comparison. How could Carrie have looked each one in the eyes? The hall was narrow and endless, like a mirror facing a mirror. You could never look into all those eyes. The space swam with light and occasional arms of madmen waved through the bars. The ceiling was so white it disappeared. Cells lined one side, and the other side was a vast blank wall to walk along. This meant that you could only look into one cell at a time, but if you stayed near the wall you could keep out of reach. I could hear, dimly, that there was an army, like millions of them, beyond the walls. It was the sound of madmen who were not ready. My mother gripped my elbow and adjusted the strap of her purse.
I know from case studies in our Health and Human Development book that when a madman is reeling with madness it’s like his skin is ripped off, his consciousness is that naked. Just stepping from the entryway into view of the first cell I felt something—a wave—like there was empty space left where all these people had been so naked and now I was standing in it. The madman in there wasn’t even looking at me and I felt it. In fact, he was facing the back wall. He was bare and yellowish, with the knobs of his spine poking out and a cloth tied around his waist. He might have been peeing, my first potential madman. But he might have just been standing there, looking at the wall. I was just standing there, looking at the bars, with my mom latched to my elbow. Hands deep in his pockets, my father approached the laminated information card at the first madman’s cell and read it for our information in a low voice while I took in this prospect with my eyes.
He was a Melancholic madman. He glanced at us absently and then took a seat in a back corner of the cell on a three-legged stool, resting his chin on his fist.
“Appearance: gloomy brow, shrunken head, lethargic, passive,” my father read. “Medical history: mad with grief after violating his word to his wife
; shunned men and fled to the forest.”
“I don’t know, what do you think?” said my mother.
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t know what to do—imagine my life as his, or imagine him in my life, or what. At some point the nurse had left, and I felt very alone.
“Let’s look at another,” my mother said, and I knew that meant he would be fine for another girl, but not for us. I’d settled on picturing him on his stool by the window in our shed with his gloomy brow, in his thinking position. Where was I in this picture? Was I stirring his pot? Was I pulling up a stool of my own to sit beside him? Was he starting to cry? We stepped to the next cell.
This madman paced and a broken chain from one arm dragged on the ground. He had heaping wads of wiry hair.
“Appearance,” read my father. My mother craned her neck over his shoulder at the card, to keep an eye on if he’d miss something. “A bold, threatening mien, a hurried step, splayed gait, restless hands, violent breathing.” In the madman’s hair I could see a bird’s nest and part of a blue eggshell. His eyes moved mechanically in his head, like they had little rollers behind them, but I could hear him making low animal noises of being alive. His sandals slapped the floor as he paced, making angrier slaps than I thought sandals could even make. Heat came off him like from a toaster. Then he whirled to face me, looked right at me, and said, “I heard that, pussy,” and before I could even register this, my mother had yanked me to the next cell.
“Perverts are still madmen, but don’t pick a pervert just to pick a pervert,” she said.
The madman with the nest called, “I can fucking hear you!”
But it was interesting—as soon as we were no longer in front of his cell, it was as if we’d changed the channel. I could hear the dull white noise of whatever world tumbled down the hill behind the gallery, but it must have been something with the acoustics because I could no longer hear the madman at all—not his breathing or his sandals or his chain or anything he might have yelled—not once I was looking into the next cell. They’d really made things orderly. Or my brain had done it. But either way. I saw so many madmen that day: the whole world was made of one madman, and then it was made of the next.
