Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  “She say she wasn’t going to jump,” Mr. Lee tells Dana. “She was looking at the view.”

  They are on the first floor and there are bars over the windows.

  Dana asks the couple to wait so one of the unit psychiatrists can talk to them, but she knows Mrs. Lee will probably just end up getting discharged because she’s there on a voluntary basis. She starts to leave a message for Dr. Miller, and for the 147th time in the 147 days she’s been working in the ER, she asks herself if she’s really helping anyone this way.

  “Excuse me.”

  The homeless man with the baby carriage is staring at her as she puts the pink slip in Miller’s box.

  “Yes?”

  “I was wondering if you had a minute.”

  She checks the in box at the nurse’s station to see if there are any other patients waiting. The one face sheet is for a John Gates. A momentary lull. The only other people in the waiting area are a Muslim woman in a white headdress and black basketball shoes and a Puerto Rican man whose lips are still blackened from the charcoal they pumped into his stomach to absorb an overdose. One way or another they’ve been taken care of.

  “You’re Mr. Gates?” Dana looks at the homeless man and tucks a couple of stray hairs into the bun behind her head.

  “Yeah, uh, well. Last I checked.” He smiles ambiguously within his beard.

  She shows him into her office. He stands in the doorway for a moment, studying the bare walls and the anonymous furniture, as if he’s looking for clues.

  “I’m Ms. Schiff,” she says. “Have a seat.”

  He takes off his cap and starts to sit. But then he suddenly stops, stands up straight, and slowly lowers himself into the chair. With his left foot, he carefully pulls the baby stroller close and puts his right hand on the back, like he expects someone to try stealing it.

  “So what brings you to the emergency room?”

  He looks at her for a long time.

  “Some kids tried to set me on fire the other night.”

  She’s not sure whether to believe him. In the five months she’s been on the unit, she’s talked to dozens of homeless people with hundreds of problems. Not that many were white, though. She wants to be careful here. Not just because she’s heard white homeless people tend to be crazier than the others, but because she doesn’t want to make a leap of empathy based just on skin color.

  “So somebody tried to set you on fire,” she says. “Why didn’t you call the police? What makes you think you want to talk to someone here?”

  He lowers his eyes and stares at the empty baby carriage. “Up until that happened, I think I kinda wanted to die,” he says. “Now I’m not sure.”

  He hums and rocks the stroller with his foot. Though he smells and his clothes are dirty like other homeless people’s, there’s something a little different about him.

  “You’re not sure you want to die.”

  “I think I want more life.”

  “All right.” She sighs and rubs the space between her eyebrows. Here comes another one. “I guess I need to get a little more pedigree information from you.” She looks over the face sheet and swivels in her chair to get a twenty-page yellow form off her desk. “What was your last address?”

  “Central Park.”

  “I see.”

  She notices the way his chin seems to be drawn down to his chest, as if by magnetic force.

  “Are you currently taking any medication?”

  “Haldol, five milligrams,” he says in a deep, froggy voice.

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, I guess you wanna know about the crack ...”

  “How much?”

  “Ten, twelve bottles a day. It offsets the Haldol.”

  “Well, that’s honest.”

  “I never lie.” He licks his ragged lips and starts tapping his foot. “The nuns taught me that in Catholic school. It makes things easier to remember.”

  She looks down to complete the first page of the form. He’s definitely beginning to interest her. So many people who come in are disorganized and have no real hope of recovery. Maybe it’s just the blue Transit Authority shirt he wears over his other layers of clothes. But she has the feeling that he was once connected to something in the real world and now he wants it back.

  She’s aware of him shifting his weight in the plastic seat as she runs through some of the other standard questions. But then he interrupts.

  “Look, can I say something to you?” He stops her with a bold stare and she notices he actually has beautiful green eyes.

  “Of course.”

  He pauses to take time with his words, like a man trying to figure out how to lift a grand piano by himself.

  “I know you’re gonna ask me all these questions on your form about previous employment and other treatment I’ve had. But none of that really matters. Okay?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” he says, squeezing his hands between his knees, “none of it can ever make up for the death of a child.”

  Silence. He hunches over, looking at the empty baby stroller again. His face seems older. The net of lines around his eyes tightens.

  “Is that something you’d like to talk about?” Dana asks, putting down the form.

  He releases his hands and sits back. She hopes her voice hasn’t betrayed too much. Countertransference. She’s been warned about it since grad school: don’t identify too much with your client’s problems.

  “No,” he says quietly. “I don’t think so. Not right now anyway.”

  He wraps his arms around himself and begins to pulsate in his seat.

  “So are you thinking you might like to be admitted to this hospital?”

  He shakes his head no vigorously without looking at her. She peeks out the door and sees patients are stacking up in the waiting area like planes on a runway.

  “Then I’m afraid I still don’t understand why you came here today,” she says. “You don’t want to talk about your problems. You don’t want to be admitted. What is it that you do want?”

  “Things have come apart,” he says, crossing his legs and examining the sole of his left shoe. “They need to be put back together.”

  She watches him a few moments, trying to decide how to describe him in a write-up. White male in his mid-thirties. Once married, according to the information sheet. Reasonably sequential in thought process. Diagnosis unknown.

  “I’m still not quite getting the picture,” she says.

  The gnarled scabby fingers of his right hand begin to play across the top of his knee like it’s a piano. Index finger, thumb, pinky, ring finger, middle finger. “See, being out on the street like I am, it’s changing me.” The fingers start to play faster. Thumb, pinky, index. “There are things in my mind that shouldn’t be there.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “I don’t know.” He half smiles shyly: if only you knew.

  “Well, are you hearing voices?”

  “Just yours and mine.” He looks at the hand lying on his lap. Ring finger, index, pinky, thumb.

  “And are you still worried you might hurt yourself?”

  “I’m worried that no one is taking responsibility.” The fingers stop moving.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I know I am not in complete control of my faculties.” The fingers close into a fist. “Being out on the street like I am . . . It’s like every day I wake up and I’m afraid of what I’m going to do.” He stops and gives a little shiver. “And I don’t think God meant for me to end up this way.”

  The mention of God is usually enough to make her scalp prickle. In this office, people attribute all kinds of things to God’s will. God wanted me to cover my body in peanut butter. God wanted me to go to Atlantic City with the union pension fund. God wanted me to stand in line at D’Agostino’s without any clothes on. But John Gates seems perfectly sober and serious mentioning the Lord even as his left knee does the crackhead jigglele-

  “So
you mentioned the idea of responsibility before,” she says, turning to the evaluation page. “Who are you suggesting take on all this responsibility?”

  “You.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  The air becomes very still between them.

  “You.” He leans forward on his elbows and looks up with his lost-little-boy green eyes. “You seem like a nice person. I can talk to you. I’d like you to be my regular doctor.”

  She looks at the empty extra-strength Tylenol bottle on her desk and wonders why she didn’t get a new one this morning.

  “But I’m not a doctor,” she says. “I’m a social worker. And this is an emergency room. Nobody sees regular patients here.”

  From down the hall, she can hear Mrs. Berkowitz in the waiting area. That demented old lady from Cherry Street who always shows up waving the empty prescription bottles her late husband was given in 1951. He must have died a happy man.

  “See, that’s the problem with the whole system!” he says loudly and then catches himself. “No one takes any responsibility,” he says, trying to modulate his voice. “Everyone’s giving me the run-around. Every time I get a new caseworker they either get transferred or they lose my file. And somebody’s going to get hurt!”

  She looks at him. Eyes clear, left knee still trembling. He’s not completely paranoid or delusional. At least not yet. He’s a man on the cusp.

  “So you want to get your life back in synch?” she says, testing his resolve.

  “Yes.”

  “And you want to get off drugs?”

  “Yes, Ido.”

  “And you want to get off the street?”

  “Yeah, and I’d like to get another apartment.”

  “Well this isn’t a real estate office.” She rubs her eyes. “Do you have any insurance?”

  A slow mournful headshake. “I lost all my benefits with the TA, ‘cause I failed the drug test. And then I fell off the rolls because I missed my face-to-face.”

  “You’re going to have to reapply,” she says, taking out a card and writing down some numbers on the back. “You need to start at the Emergency Assistance Unit office.”

  At least he once had a job. From the room next door, the Honduran patient in restraints is shouting. “I want puta music! Puta music!”

  Dana notices John Gates staring past her, looking at something in the hallway. “Hey, what’s that mean?” he says. “Be careful when opening doors; risk of elopement. ”

  “It means they want to be careful about patients escaping.”

  “Oh. I thought maybe they were worried about patients and doctors eloping.”

  “No. I don’t think that happens very often.”

  “Well you never know.” He starts to smile.

  Dana feels her chin sag and her ears get hot as she looks through the rest of her papers. The rumble of voices has grown louder in the waiting room and the mix of accents has become more dense. There must be a half dozen of them out there by now. Just the thought makes her tired. She’s going to have to move him out soon.

  “Look, give me a call in a couple of days,” she says in a frazzled voice, adding her office number on the back of the card and giving it to him. “Maybe we can work something out so I can see you at the Mental Health Clinic at the hospital. I’ll talk to my supervisor.”

  A major headache, to be sure. She can already see the sullen, heavy-lidded look on Rod Walker’s face when she brings it up at the next staff meeting. “If you do this, you’ll be setting a bad precedent for everyone else ...” She hopes John Gates will be worth the effort.

  He gets up and starts to push the stroller out the door. But then he stops and takes her hand, an almost courtly gesture. “Thanks, Ms. Schiff. You’re good people. I knew I was right about you.”

  His fingers feel like sandpaper blocks as they brush hers. She takes her hand back and sucks in her cheeks. She wonders what she said to make him feel so trusting. Maybe it was just the look on her face when he mentioned the death of the child.

  Probably she has to learn to put up a colder front, as Jake’s been telling her. Or learn not to care.

  5

  Who was the ...” Dana’s fork pauses in midair.

  “... the guy.” Jake finishes the sentence for her.

  “Yes, your old client. The one who ...” Her face pushes up, straining.

  “The one who threw his mother out the window? Al V. Strang?”

  “Right. Didn’t he . . .”

  “... cut off his penis and try to take a bite out of the patrol car when the police came to arrest him?”

  “Well.” Dana lowers her fork. “He was a hopeless case, wasn’t he?”

  Jake looks at his wife, curiously. “Yeah, I’d say so.”

  “So the one I saw today wasn’t like that,” says Dana. “This John Gates.”

  “Mom, pass the broccoli, will you?” says their son, Alex, who has long red-streaked hair and wears a blue-and-white checked flannel shirt.

  When people ask Jake if he’s married, he usually says “real married.” Here he is in the dining room of his new Upper West Side town house with his boy and the most beautiful woman who’d ever agreed to have dinner with him. It’s just recently that he’s been able to slow down enough at work and enjoy the life they have together. If he hasn’t quite arrived, he’s just a station or two away.

  “They say once someone’s been out on the street six months, you might as well forget them,” Dana goes on. “But this guy Gates has only been out a few weeks.”

  All right, what’s up here? Jake wonders. There’s definitely an agenda. He looks at the empty fourth chair at the far end of the table and listens to the sigh of traffic on Riverside Drive.

  “Dana, why are we talking about this?”

  “Because I think I can help this man,” says Dana, who wears a white T-shirt and gray sweatpants. “But Rod and the other supervisors are bitching up a storm about me seeing him at the clinic.”

  “Well, can I offer my advice in this area, which is probably worth nothing?”

  Jake can see from the vertical line on his wife’s forehead that she’s already made up her mind. It’s the same look she had when she announced she was going to go to grad school instead of continuing to try and have another child.

  “All right, let’s hear it.”

  He rubs his hands together like a wrestler about to step out on the mat. “What I think is that people who’ve been out on the street—whether it’s a week or a year—are not like you and me,” he says. “I represented a lot of these hard-luck guys at Legal Aid and let me tell you, almost every single one was a complete scumbag. If someone’s been at the bottom of the pile long enough, he doesn’t care about playing fair. He just wants to get his hooks into you.”

  He sees his little speech has only deepened the line between Dana’s eyes. Oh well.

  “Jake, I want to ask you something,” she says. “Why was it okay for you to start off your career working with people like that, but it’s not all right for me?”

  “Because you don’t have to work with scum. You can afford to pick and choose. We have a little bit of money now, remember?”

  “Yes, we do. But it’s not money I made.”

  Aha. Now we’re zeroing in, Jake thinks.

  “Jake, you remember how much time you spent on the securities fraud case last year and how you were so jazzed you couldn’t go to sleep most nights?”

  “Yeah, sure.” It was one of the few times a corporate case was as exciting as criminal defense work.

  “Well that’s what I want.” Dana leans toward him with her chin on her fist and her lips slightly parted. The same expression she has when she’s hungry or horny.

  “You wanna lose sleep?”

  “No.” She sits back and pours herself a glass of Australian chardonnay. “I want to feel that way about my job. I want to work two nights a week at the clinic.”

  Bingo. So that’s the subtext here. They’re not talking about some crazy homeles
s guy. They’re talking about changing the terms of their marriage.

  “Can I be excused?” asks Alex, who’s been sitting across the table, eating broccoli and yogurt while flicking hair out of his eyes.

  “Yeah, sure. . . . No, wait.” Jake stares at him. “What’s that you got in your nose?”

  Flick, flick. “It’s a ring.”

  “What are you, kidding?”

  “No, it’s a nose ring.” Two index fingers part the streaked hair.

  Jake drops the piece of fish he had raised to his lips. “You telling me you got your nose pierced?”

  The kid already wears a gold stud in his left ear.

  “I went with Paul Goldman to a place on St. Marks this afternoon.”

  Jake looks over at Dana, wondering why this is the first he’s heard of it. “What are you gonna do if you have to blow your nose? It’ll come out three ways.”

  “Lisa likes it.”

  “You gonna wear it to school?”

  “I can take it out.” Alex starts to demonstrate, but his father waves him off.

  “Jesus, you get another one of these things, we’ll start calling you Tackle Box.”

  “Cool,” says Alex.

  “Remind me to talk to you later.”

  The boy starts to go upstairs.

  “Hey, wait a second, you’re forgetting something,” Jake says.

  Alex stops and returns to the table. His father puts his arms around him and gives him a hug.

  “You’re still my guy, all right?”

  “All right.” The boy looks both embarrassed and pleased when Jake half-stands to kiss him on the cheek.

  “Love ya.”

  As Alex leaves the room, Jake puts his hands up to the sides of his head and pretends to scream.

  “Twenty years I busted my ass to get out of Gravesend and go to law school, and here my son pierces his nose and my wife wants to bring bums into the house.”

  “I don’t want to bring him into the house,” Dana says. “I want to see people like him at the clinic.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know.” Jake fumbles with the air as if he’s trying to pull words out of it. “It’s just, I’m feeling like we’re finally getting things the way we want them after we’ve worked so hard. I just don’t want to upset anything.”