The Beggar's Garden

by Michael Christie

  Though Saul respected Kraepevic immensely, he sometimes pictured him as a skittish islander with a bone-skewered septum, scampering up a volcano in full ceremonial regalia with a small payload of psychotropic medication the doctor and the other villagers had prepared in large steaming cauldrons, which Kraepevic then shovelled into the great smoking orifice to sate the bloodlust of an angry volcano god.

  “All thoughts are intrusive, Darko,” Saul said, rising from his chair. Dr. Kraepevic, he realized, might have had more to do with Luis’s appearance than he’d suspected.

  Attention: Martin Shenck Minister of Mental Health Province of British Columbia

  Dear Sir,

  Saul Columbo here and as you know and are aware Ive been residing in the care of Riverview Hospital for most of my long life because of my mental state being unfit determined by my personal psychiatrist Dr. Darko Kraepevic. I do not disagree with this please ignore any letters Ive made before now that says anything else. May I state for the record in light of my dangerous past actions I feel happy and safe to live in the care of Riverview Hospital and please keep funding such activities as bingo, video rentals, pizza night, crafts, etc, thank you.

  But this is part two of my letter. I wish to tell and inform you that through my detective skills and from my own observations Ive detected an individual or a person who is almost definitely an Assassin sent here (it is not as of writing this letter to you sir clear by who) possibly and probably with the help of my personal psychiatrist Dr. Darko Kraepevic who has infiltrated my mind and my hospital of residence and who I suspect means as well as intends to cause me harm possibly of the grievous bodily type or also more in my mind which is as you know sir much more difficult to know is happening. Also he might be shocking me while I sleep.

  This is a situation I want you to investigate with EVERY POSSIBLE AGENT through the right channels of course. I ask you sir to have this be kept in strict confidence. There is no one else for me who I can trust.

  Your Humbled Informant,

  Saul Columbo, Compliant and Concerned Patient/Detective, Riverview Hospital, BC

  Saul pitched a bolus of house laundry into the dryer, pressed Start, then filled the mop bucket and rolled it sloshing into the Dayroom to perform his next chore. Apart from TV and bingo, chores were his favourite pastime. They ignited in him a faint yet pleasurable feeling of competence that made his thoughts fall quiet as clouds. Chores also earned him the snatches of freedom called two-hour passes, which he spent walking the oak-strewn hospital grounds.

  Sending the letter to Martin Shenck had put the Luis affair out of his hands and Saul had officially closed his investigation. Though Saul disliked going over Kraepevic’s head, even if the doctor was in on it, once Martin Shenck intervened and Luis was exposed and all was returned to normal, Kraepevic would offer an apology, which Saul would generously accept.

  After a few swipes under the couch that yielded a dusty domino and a bendy straw, Saul saw he’d neglected to add soap to the water. The laundry-room door had locked automatically and only staff could open it. He knuckle-rapped at the nurses’ station window and mouthed laundry room to the duty nurse, Roberta, who sat with a cellphone clamped between cheek and shoulder. She put a hand over the phone and called out.

  The Assassin emerged like a lion from the medication room. Saul hadn’t seen him in days and was suddenly concerned he’d somehow intercepted the letter. Luis stepped into the hall, his freshly cut keys sparkly in his hands.

  “I’ll let you in, Saul, no problem,” he said.

  “I’d rather Roberta did,” Saul said, knocking at the window again. Roberta didn’t stir.

  The Assassin’s eyebrows vaulted. He shook his head and expelled a short burst through his nose. “Okay,” he said and reentered the nurses’ station. While he spoke with Roberta, Saul noticed all the binders labelled with patient names and file numbers crammed together on a high shelf. His eyes landed on the binder bearing his own name and he saw that it was much thicker than the others. Saul took comfort in the knowledge that his file was mostly well-crafted cover stories he’d been feeding them for years. Even so, he detested the idea of Luis’s unlimited access to any of it.

  “Well, Saul, Roberta’s busy at the moment,” the Assassin said when he returned. “Looks like it’s you and me.”

  Saul trailed the Assassin by a good four paces, listening to his brand-new nurse shoes grunt on the linoleum in the wide, echoic hallway. The sound brought to mind Georgina’s repulsive habit of scratching her throat with the base of her tongue. Like a tree trunk come to life, Luis was at least a foot shorter than Saul, who was a gangly six-two, and moved with the wobbly power of an upright bear. Saul would have to use his reach advantage; the Assassin would crush him like a lamb if it ever came to grappling. Saul doused his fear with an image of Martin Shenck keying in a background check at that very moment, turning up all those poor souls Luis had tossed from the doors of unmarked helicopters.

  The Assassin stopped at the door. There was more jingling as he sought the correct key. Saul feared he was stalling.

  “There you go,” he said, jamming the door open with his left foot.

  “After you,” Saul said.

  “I’ve got to go get the medications ready,” he said, unflinching. There was no choice. Saul took a few steps. The Assassin did not move. Saul took a few more, shuffling his way through the doorway, his hands guarding his face, keeping perpendicular to the Assassin, just as he’d seen in the martial arts programs. But Saul did not want to fight; he’d always hated when the nurses had touched him in the past, forced him to do things, their unbreakable wills and their questions, their hundreds of latexed hands.

  “Sore back?” Luis said as Saul passed safely into the room.

  “I don’t want trouble,” Saul said.

  “Yeah, I heard they cut aerobics. Too bad. Could have used it myself,” he said, cupping his barrel of a belly.

  “You don’t get a face scar like that doing burpees,” Saul said.

  The Assassin chuckled, then grinned, his large white teeth like an open suitcase of money, as he traced the minnow with his thumbnail. “This? This is just something that happened to me when I was young. It’s nothing.” Then he let the door go and it hissed on its pneumatic hinge.

  Later, in the Dayroom, its floor luminous from the mopping job he’d done, Saul glanced up from a checkers game with Kim to watch the Assassin through the glass of the nurses’ station. Roberta was teaching him to punch pills from blister packs into paper cups with initials markered on them. Luis worked, squinting like a watchmaker, wary of a mix-up, which in fact happened frequently and was no great cause for concern. Saul had once got Darryl’s anti-seizure meds and his body went rigid for six hours until they stuck him with muscle relaxants and he’d melted into his bed.

  “King me,” Kim said.

  Saul counted Kim as his only friend, a manic-depressive and a shrewd and brutal checkers tactician, especially so when she was depressed. Saul clacked one of her captured checkers atop the valiant soldier who’d survived a brave advance to the underworld of his deepest rank. Why this checker? Saul wondered absently. What’s so special about it? He sat for a moment admiring its stacked, regal magnificence, even though it was about to be commanded by Kim to cut a swath of vengeful, bidirectional wrath through his already dwindling forces.

  “Med time, folks,” said a nurse named Parvinder as she cranked open the gate on the drive-through-style window where they dispensed pills four times a day. The patients assembled and Saul ended up with Drew ahead of him in line. Luis was behind the counter, and Saul felt his eyes narrow. He still couldn’t grasp why Luis hadn’t choked him to death in the laundry room.

  “Here you go, Andrew,” Luis said, sliding a cup across the counter.

  “These pills have eyes of the tiger shark,” Drew said. His cup brimmed with pills, a little buffet of shapes and colours. It took four swallows to get them all down and Luis had to refill his water twice. Saul ponder
ed the pharmacological rodeo taking place in Drew’s gut: Zyprexa, Carbamazepine, Clozapine, Seroquel, Effexor, all of which he himself had been given at one time or another, their names like alien cities, pregnant with syllables as unusual as the minds they were invented to reconfigure. Saul knew Drew was too far afield for a return journey, but as Drew tottered off for the smoke he received only after he took his pills, Saul pitied him for an instant. How horrible they couldn’t fit it all into one capsule.

  “You did a great job mopping, Saul. I’d eat off that floor, no kidding,” the Assassin said, grinning as he pushed a cup of pills, one blue (what Kraepevic bluntly called an antipsychotic) and one orange (to inhibit the side effects of the other) toward him.

  “Has the mail arrived yet?” Saul said, attempting to drain any eagerness from his voice. He should be hearing any day from Martin Shenck.

  “No, sorry—I mean, yes. It came, but there was nothing for you—Oh, wait …” he said, reaching below the counter. He plunked one more large, urine-tinged pill into the cup. “I forgot to put this in, a multivitamin. Dr. Kraepevic ordered it, said you were looking a little pale.”

  Who knew what was fear and what was excitement in the sensation that gripped Saul at that moment. How silly it was to think the Assassin would risk hand-to-hand combat in the laundry room. This was no amateur; he was sophisticated, clandestine. Saul had often thought the perfect murder would be to poison someone slowly. A crime without a witness. Because watching the victim die was like attempting to see the hour hand move; people simply lacked that kind of attention span. This new yellow pill was no doubt laced with something vile and unnameable, and probably invisible to lab analysis. Even if Martin Shenck and his investigators arrived in time, they’d test the pill, find nothing and side with the Assassin and his extensive credentials spoken of so highly by Kraepevic in his office.

  “Who signs your paycheque, Assassin?” Saul said, grasping the cup of pills in one hand, water in the other.

  “Same as everyone else, Saul, the Ministry of Health,” he said, crinkling the dark pelts of his eyebrows.

  “And it’s good money? I mean for what you do to people? It’s worth it?”

  “Hurry the fuck up,” said a voice from somewhere in the line. “I like this job,” said the Assassin.

  Saul tipped the dose of pills into his mouth, the new pill large and bitter on his tongue. He splashed them with water, swallowed.

  The Assassin leaned toward him, his hefty forearms on the counter. “Saul, the doc said you were having some trouble adjusting to some of the newer staff, so I just wanted to let you know, if there’s anything I can do to make things go easier for you—you know, adjustment-wise—just talk to me any time. Sound good?”

  Saul nodded. He’d already manoeuvred the three pills under his tongue, a technique he’d mastered during that whole debacle with the sexually inappropriate nurse Janet, when he’d needed his mind unmuddled to successfully parry her advances.

  “Okay, Saul?” Luis said again, his eyes wide with feigned empathy.

  “Yup. Ochay,” Saul said.

  “Great,” the Assassin said, visibly relieved.

  Saul was relieved as well. Although fear was twisting his stomach like a balloon animal, it thrilled him to have detected such a diabolical plot. And at least he could spend the final days of his pitiful life clear-headed enough to muster some resistance, however futile it might be.

  Saul took the empty water cup and plopped it into the other one that had held his pills, pushing the little stack of paper cups back to Luis.

  “King me,” he said, and walked casually to the washroom, where he spat the already melting and bitter slurry into the toilet.

  Other than twenty-four-hour news, Saul’s favourite TV program was the detective show Columbo. This dishevelled, lazy-eyed dwarf, who acted the imbecile in order to lull criminals into a false sense of security only to spring his trap on them at precisely the most opportune moment, owned acres of Saul’s heart. In today’s episode was a blond woman whose father was murdered with a seven iron. This woman spoke words that Saul could not help but find personally relevant. “Sal, can’t we just let the detective do his job?” And then, “Sal, we have to move on with our lives, my father wouldn’t want us to act like this.” Saul could tell that her words held something prophetic inside them, but to what purpose he couldn’t decode.

  It had been three weeks since he’d commenced medicating the sewer system and his brain was crackling with sharpness as the chemical fog burned off him. This morning, upon waking, he’d felt a sensation like a subtle tearing away behind his eyes, then sensed a spotlight flicking on, its beam falling somewhere at the base of his skull. Today he’d completed the Spanish castle puzzle, plowed through a crossword, and his normally forgotten childhood was returning to him in vivid, painful chunks.

  “Do you think I need to move on?” he asked Tina as Columbo‘s credits scrolled at an unreadable pace.

  “Move on where?” she said.

  Tina was a Voluntary, meaning she chose to be there. The story was, her parents brought her the day of her eighteenth birthday and made her promise to always sign the voluntary admission forms each year when they expired. People said they toured the continent relentlessly with one of the largest RVs allowable on the road.

  Saul got up and flipped to the twenty-four-hour news station—no remote, because Georgina had dunked it in sugar-free Kool-Aid—to see what skirmishes men like the Assassin were concocting in the world’s hot spots. Some hungry-looking boys had firebombed an armoured vehicle, incinerating a diplomat; vengeful machete-wielding militants had seized a town, killing all but those they wished to rape. As if the images weren’t enough, words traversed the bottom of the screen like a freight train loaded with sadness. “What the people of this country need right now, Chris, is leadership,” a reporter said, and Saul found that he couldn’t agree more.

  “But from where?” Saul said, possibly out loud.

  “I hate news. Let’s watch my movie,” Tina said, the worn VHS tape clutched in her hands, still purple with lunch’s dessert gelatin. The tape had been re-dubbed at least ten times, thus accumulating a permanent drizzle of static. Tina would pass every minute of her life viewing it if she could. To her, its joys were boundless. Staff would limit her viewings if she hoarded porridge in her room or cackled at something inappropriate, like the dropping of a plastic cup.

  Saul sat watching Tina watch her movie while she picked obliviously between her legs with a long thumbnail. Back when there was funding, a volunteer group took Tina and some other patients—Saul was in the Quiet Room at the time—to ride on a miniature train that looped around a great treed park. The staff member who’d brought the video camera had no idea he was shooting a movie that would be viewed more times than Jaws, except by one person many times rather than by many people just once. In the movie, Tina rode up front of the train with the handsome conductor. The train pulled into the station to a recorded whistle sound, Tina clapping giddily as she hung from his arm, her sweatpants yanked up high near her armpits and a yellow sun visor pulled down uncomfortably over her hair like someone else had put it on her.

  But this time something about the video was different: the sunlight had a greenish tinge and the train moved with a snarling lurch. Then Saul observed a man on the train, sitting alone, five cars back from Tina, in dark sunglasses and a hat like a reporter from the fifties. As Tina stepped from the train and the social worker said, “How was it, Tina?” and Tina said, “I’ve been riding the train, one … two … three … four … five! Five times!” counting the rides on her fingers for the camera, while real-time Tina counted on the same fingers as she leaned into the screen, the man dismounted the train and left the camera’s view, moving with the very same waddling gait Saul had noted in Luis.

  How had he failed to see this before? No wonder Luis was familiar—he’d been watching Saul for years, perhaps through this screen somehow, gathering information, biding his time, and now S
aul possessed proof that even Martin Shenck couldn’t deny.

  The video concluded and Saul punched Rewind. This was how Columbo did it, his obsession with the case’s even-most-insignificant details always paid off in the end.

  “You like watching my movie too, don’t you, Saul?” Tina said.

  “Shhhh, I think he can see us now,” Saul said, just as Jacob stalked into the room.

  Jacob couldn’t have been more than twenty, huge and meaty, ruddy like a farmboy. Saul felt himself squint from his cologne.

  “Time’s up,” Jacob said. “I’m checking the weather channel,” which was on 68 and the news was on 3, so Jacob started clicking the channel button with a frantic, masturbatory intensity. Every second Wednesday, Jacob’s father picked him up and took him on an outing, which involved Jacob pressuring his father into a trip to the mall to buy CDs. He was one of the only family who came and visited any patient regularly.

  Tina yelped. “We were, we were watching me! In my movie!”

  “I’m sure the mall will be good, weather-wise,” Saul said.

  “Yo eat a fat dick, Saul.”

  “Jacob,” Roberta said from the door, and Jacob stood, shrugging, ready to receive what passed for a reprimand on the ward. “Your father is here.”

  “Dope!” Jacob said, as a short, silver-haired man came in, a mesh cap wadded in his hands. His neck hung meekly, his shoulders hunched toward his large ears.

  “Hello, Jacob,” he said, timidly, and Saul realized he could see into the father’s mind. Jacob was an explosive device that could be triggered by ill-chosen words. Saul’s own parents were both elementary teachers, and for the first few years they’d come twice a month with second-hand paperback books, mostly spy thrillers and detective stories. Saul had a younger brother, Isaac, who his parents said had died logging up north. Over the years, their visits dwindled, and now all he got was a Christmas card with their three names, including his brother’s, all signed in his mother’s shaky hand.