Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  “You represent your client, Russell, and I’ll represent mine.”

  “And I’ll let Todd Bracken know that some of us are going to have a very serious problem working with you if our firms merge,” Russell warns him.

  “Ah, lighten up.” Jake tries to touch him on the arm. “In this business, you get a sharp elbow or two, it’s not the end of the world.”

  Hell, it’s conceivable the two of them might be friends in a couple of months. But right now Russell isn’t having any of it.

  He draws away as if he’s just stepped in raw sewage. “You just watch yourself, Jake,” he says stiffly. “Things can change around here in a hurry. No one’s ever a hundred percent secure.”

  11

  This one I like. She more like a motherly type of figure.”

  Dana is back at the psych ER. The patient is showing her a picture of a hefty naked woman spreading her labia with two fingers, which formed an upside-down Nixon V-sign. Dana bites her lip and tries to keep her eyes glued to her clipboard.

  “Now this next one is more like my sister,” says the patient, turning the page of his magazine. He’s a stumpy, roundheaded man who claims his name is Dwight Eisenhower. “She was a dear, sweet woman. Even though the only use she ever had for a black man was to give her a little dick and then get the hell on out of her bed. . .”

  There is a knock at the door and Dana’s supervisor, Rod Walker, sticks his head in. “You got a minute?”

  Dana sets aside her clipboard and excuses herself. Dwight Eisenhower barely glances up from his pictures.

  Out in the corridor, Rod is waiting, fluorescent light reflecting off a pink scalp that looks as if it’s been buffed with a shoe-shine rag.

  “Your friend came by the clinic yesterday,” he says in a pinched nasal voice.

  “Who?”

  “I think his name is Gaines. Gates. Something like that.” Rod’s nostrils quiver. “He was looking for you. He said you might not recognize him. The shape of his head has changed.”

  “Uh-oh.” Her right hand goes up to her chin.

  Rod fingers the buttons of the navy blazer his mother bought him. Forty-six years old and still living with his parents in Rego Park. It’s true, Dana thinks, some people in psychiatry need as much work as the patients.

  “He was very insistent about seeing you,” Rod says. “He said he had some papers for you. And something he wanted to say about random displacement. Apparently he made quite a fuss. He even threw a chair at one point.”

  “He threw a chair?”

  “Well, maybe he just knocked it over.” He takes a few strands of hair from the left side of his head and tries to pull them over to the right to cover his bald spot. “In any event, it was very disruptive for everybody there. Several patients needed their dosage adjusted.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Rod’s eyes get closer together. Dana instantly regrets having said anything. The words “I’m sorry” are like blood in the water to a career bureaucrat like Rod.

  “This was your responsibility, Dana,” he says like the class tattletale. “No one asked you to take on this patient. You practically begged me for permission.”

  “I really think you’re overreacting,” says Dana. “No one’s talking about Mr. Gates being seriously violent. He’s not even an inpatient.”

  He can’t be dangerous, she tells herself. It’s too frightening to consider. He knows where we live.

  “I’m just telling you, Dana,” he says, his voice honing in like a dentist’s drill, “it’s your name on his file.”

  The secretaries at reception stop fixing each other’s hair, aware they’re witnessing a ceremony as solemn as the unveiling of a statue: the covering of a bureaucrat’s ass.

  “Well, did anyone ask if he wanted to be admitted?” Dana says. “Or if he wanted his medication changed? I mean, he must have come in here looking for help.”

  “He came here because he said you’re his wife,” Rod corrects her.

  Her stomach sinks and the corners of her mouth follow. Over at the nurses’ station, a squat unshaven Polish man is trying to get one of the staff psychiatrists to give him back his harpoon.

  “No one else wanted to take him on,” Rod says. “They have enough clients of their own. And he has no insurance. Remember?”

  “I remember,” says Dana, wiggling her right knee nervously.

  “And bear in mind, we’re still cleaning up after your last patient.” Rod shakes his head as if he’s almost too mad to speak.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Mrs. Lee,” he tells her. “They found her on the sidewalk.”

  Dana stares at a smudge on the wall, feeling dizzy, as if her blood pressure just dropped.

  “Oh my God, what happened?”

  “She took a dry dive from the tenth floor.”

  Only someone who still lives with his parents could afford to be so callous.

  “Jesus, when was this?”

  “The day before yesterday,” says Rod. “The police may be by to ask you some questions.”

  Dana keeps staring at the smudge as if it’s a Rorschach test. In her office, Dwight Eisenhower is still looking at pictures of fat naked women. She wonders what she’s accomplishing here. Her patients are throwing themselves out windows and showing up at her house.

  Why is this happening? All she’s ever wanted out of life is to be the good girl. To take care of people. Somehow she always assumed she’d get rewarded along the way. For all those times she drove her mother down to Sloan-Kettering and hid her liquor bottles after chemotherapy. For staying home being the good wife and the good mother while Jake was out beating the world. But now she sees there’s no reward for goodness. There are just complications.

  “I don’t understand,” she says to Rod. “I had her talking to one of the staff psychiatrists and I thought he prescribed Prozac for her. She didn’t seem like she was imminently suicidal.”

  Though if Mrs. Lee is capable of going ahead and throwing herself out a window, she shudders to think what John Gates could do.

  “She didn’tjump,” Rod says.

  “What?”

  “She was pushed. That moron husband she brought in here. He tossed her out through the glass. Maybe he’s the one you should have admitted.”

  Before Dana can respond, Rod turns and stalks away like one of the early mammals marching back into the sea.

  12

  John G. sits at a table in a gourmet Korean deli in Times Square. A neon ad for a Japanese camera company blinks on and off across the street.

  He keeps trying to stab at the moment and pin it down to reality. But his thoughts are coming in like tides, each one overpowering the one that came before it.

  The memory of love. Sunlight through the trees. Shar waving to him from across the street. Everything he’s had and loved, he’s lost. Like the sun.

  He remembers the day after his mother left.

  He messed his pants at school. A fourth-grade field trip to the Museum of Natural History. Two weeks before Christmas. His snot frozen on the sleeve of a thin windbreaker and his fingers red and chapped because his aunt didn’t give him mittens. He’d been looking at the apes exhibit in the glass display case when it happened. Something about seeing the mother gorilla with her children. He just forgot himself for a moment and lost control.

  No one would sit with him on the ride back. Stinky John! The cheese sits alone! For months afterwards, he’d sit by himself in the back, taking comfort in the warmth and the feeling of the wheel moving under him.

  I don’t want to lose you again. Oh forgive me, my daughter.

  He finds himself thinking about what his life would be like if Shar were still alive. Maybe if the molecules had gone in just a slightly different direction. A phone would have rung. Rain might have fallen. The light would have stayed green a second longer. Everything could have turned out all right. He sees himself years in the future, sitting by the door, waiting for Shar to come home from a date. The TV a
nd the fireplace going. Margo fixing him a late supper in the kitchen. The life he should’ve had. Somehow it’s slipped through his fingers. Who’s responsible? Who made the molecules go the wrong way?

  Shar waving from across the street. The screech of brakes. Random displacement. He should’ve been there for her.

  Outside, it’s getting dark and the neon camera ad is glowing brighter. Green and then white. White, then green. Little chaser lights around the letters. Like molecules pushing one another around.

  He’s tired. Soon he’ll have to find a place to sleep. Anxiety presses down on him like the hot breath of an animal. Where can he go? The shelters are out of the question. And so are the parks and hospitals. He doesn’t want to be wandering around some ward, ballooned on Thorazine, eyes blank, chin tucked into his chest, with another young predator like Larry Loud stalking him. No. He has to keep moving. He has the virus.

  His stomach hisses and pops. He starts to think about going home, but then he reminds himself that he no longer has a home. All he has is the virus.

  I’m worried about you, John. It’s not safe out here. He hears that lady’s soft voice from a few days ago. Maybe she can give him a place.

  The light from the neon ad turns white. But she’s only a social worker at the hospital, he tells himself.

  The light turns green. She wants him to come back. She knows he belongs in that home. She loves him. He wants her.

  “No sleep in here.”

  Mr. Slit-Eye-TV-Shaped-Head, who’d been wiping off the salad bar, is staring down at him. “No can sleep here.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping.” John G. feels the lethargy in his limbs and realizes that actually he might have been asleep for a second or two. “I was going to order coffee.”

  “No coffee. Now go.”

  He looks around, confused. Green light splashes in through the window. Night. He’s still a little bit high from the last jumbo he smoked.

  “What’s the matter with you, man? My money’s no good here?” He reaches into his pockets for some change but all he can find is his Haldol prescription bottle and the new boxcutter he picked up the other night to replace the one he gave away.

  “No money. Go.” The man slaps the table. “Go.” Another worker drops his broom and comes over from beside the beer refrigerator.

  “No money. Go. No money. Go,” John G. mimics him. “This is America. Why don’t you learn to speak fucking English?”

  Mr. TV-Head pulls the chair out from under him. His friend, who’d had the broom, is squaring off in a fighter’s stance. “Now you leave,” Mr. TV-Head says, leading with his left shoulder to set up a right cross.

  “You can’t do this to me!” John G. wobbles on his feet. “I’m a white man in America. I got my rights.”

  Two Puerto Rican kids in striped shirts and chains are laughing at a nearby table. The boy opens his mouth and shows the girl the half-eaten shrimp roll on his tongue. Seafood? The girl peeks at John G. through the pickets of her long green-and-brown painted fingernails. The combination of utter exhaustion and humiliation makes him feel like crying.

  “I’ll sue you, man,” he tells the Koreans. “I’ll sue your fuckin’ ass.”

  “Gai na pa na.” Mr. TV-Head pushes him toward the door. “Yeah, yeah, sue me, sue me.”

  “Don’t touch me! Don’t you even try to touch me, you fucking parasites!” John G. warns him as he shuffles along. “I’m not just some bum. I have a house on the West Side.”

  The guy who’d had the broom has gone back to start spraying John G.’s seat with Lysol disinfectant.

  “I’m going and I’m never coming back here again!” On his way out, John G. slams his fist against the door frame in frustration.

  Before he can even feel the pain in his hand, Mr. TV-Head gives him a good kick that sends him flying out onto the sidewalk.

  “And stay out, ya fuckin’ asshole,” says Mr. TV-Head in perfect Brooklyn-accented English.

  He lands on his right arm and more pain shoots up to his shoulder. He slowly rolls up his sleeve and looks at the elbow. That purple bruise still isn’t healing. If anything, it’s getting worse. The virus. It’s going to kill him. He tries to stand, but his knees won’t cooperate. He just lies on his back, looking up. Everything he sees reminds him of death. Cigarette ads on billboards. Car exhaust fumes. A gun jouncing on a policeman’s hip. And here he is, in the middle of the filthiest city in the world, with his immune defenses down.

  He closes his eyes and sees Shar again. Still waving from across the street. Wanting him to come get her. Hunks of metal flying between them. Molecules pushing molecules. The light turns green. The light turns red. Why can’t he reach her?

  A cab hurtles by, spraying gutter grit in his face.

  He wants so much right now that he can’t keep it all straight in his mind. He wants a place to stay. He wants more life. He wants the life he once had. He wants his baby back. He wants release from the past. He wants to get high and stay high until the moment he dies. And he still wants to hurt someone as badly as he’s been hurt.

  But he can’t even stand up.

  He thinks of a commercial he once saw—an old woman lying at the foot of her stairs, talking into the little microphone tied around her neck: ‘Help me, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.’

  All of a sudden, it strikes him as funny. Help me, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

  He starts cackling to himself and when no one notices, the cackle turns into a loud chuckle. Then the chuckle becomes a gale-force roar. Soon hordes of people are stepping around him like streams diverging around a rock as they head to Port Authority. Help me, I’ve fallen. Help me. Help me. Help me.

  But then the camera-ad light turns green and he hears that lady’s nice voice again. “I’m very worried about you, John.” She cares about him. She wants him to come back. He heaves himself up to his feet and starts staggering toward the bright lights uptown.

  13

  Jake and Dana’s son, Alex, is walking home with his best friend, Paul Goldman, just before twelve-thirty that night. They are both dressed slightly grunge, in black Nikes, oversized flannel shirts, and jeans as baggy as potato sacks.

  “So what’d your father say about the nose ring?” Paul asks.

  “He was cool about it.”

  “Ah, that’s cool. Your father’s cool.”

  “Yeah, he’s all right.” Alex puts his hands in his pockets and sighs as if he’s feeling every one of his sixteen years. “But I think I’m going to stop wearing it soon. What if I get a cold and have to blow my nose? It’ll come out three ways.”

  Paul can’t think of an answer, so he keeps walking. “I think I’m gonna shave my head,” he says after a while.

  “Cool.”

  They are on the west side of Broadway, going past a drugstore full of white light and a newsstand where a frail Pakistani man arranges stacks of gay pornographic magazines.

  “If I shaved my head, would you shave yours?”

  “No way,” says Alex, flicking hair out of his face.

  They keep walking. Paul bows his head and rocks from side to side, mumbling the words to a hip-hop song. “Insane in the membrane, insane in the brain.” Alex has his mother’s straight back but his father’s slightly pugnacious bearing, so that he always seems to be leaning forward on the balls of his feet.

  Paul flips a Turkish cigarette into his mouth as they round the corner and head toward West End. “Can I copy your paper from English?”

  “What? The whole paper? Dude! Didn’t you read the book?”

  “Dude!” says Paul. “I didn’t even know what book it was.”

  “We’re up to the Odyssey.”

  “Huh.” Paul lights his cigarette and immediately starts coughing. “What’s it about?”

  “Dude! That’s so bogus! We spent the last two classes talking about it. What’s the point of going to summer school if you don’t pay attention?”

  “I was spacing, dude.”

  Alex
flaps his arms. “It’s about a guy trying to get back to his family after he’s been away twenty years.”

  “Cool,” says Paul.

  They cross West End Avenue, heading toward Alex’s house. The street is dark and lined with parked cars. Right before they get to the front steps, they hear a grunt and look over to see a skinny bearded white man in a Yankees cap and an MTA shirt, taking a leak in the gutter and singing in a cranky wayward voice.

  “I been in the wrong place but it musta been the right time . . .”

  “Yo, the Night Tripper, what’s up?” Paul calls out from twelve feet away. “That’s a golden oldie, bro. My father listens to that shit.”

  The man looks up, dazed and slightly offended. “Ha?”

  “You gotta pardon my friend,” Alex intercedes. “He acts kinda retarded sometimes.”

  Paul punches Alex on the arm.

  But the man doesn’t seem to notice. He trips coming out of the gutter and glares at the boys as if it’s their fault.

  “Where you guys going?” he asks.

  “I live here,” says Alex. “This is my house.”

  In the light of the street lamp, the man’s eyes go up and then suddenly move over to the right. It’s as if he’s picking up some frequency no one else can hear.

  “Is one of you here to see my daughter?” he asks.

  “No,” says Alex.

  “Like, we don’t even know your daughter,” Paul adds, bopping in place.

  Somehow their words don’t make it across the eight feet of sidewalk that separate them from the homeless man. He’s hearing something else entirely.

  “Well, I don’t think that’s right, a girl her age going out with anybody,” he says, completing the non sequitur. “She’s too young. I’m gonna have to talk to my wife in there.”

  “Mister, you don’t live here. I do.”

  The homeless man seems thrown by that answer. It’s as if someone has just changed the channels in his mind. He looks confused and then upset as he tries to regain his bearings on the street.