Malcolm Orange Disappears

by Jan Carson

  Bill was not the man he wished to be. He envied Cunningham Holt his unsinkable resolve. He envied Roger Heinz his monolithic balls. He even envied Malcolm his capacity to attract drama. It had been years since anything even faintly exciting had happened to Bill. Sitcoms and sports coverage, interspersed with his biweekly People’s Committee meetings, had come to form the bedrock of Bill’s existence and while he was quite content to pickle slowly, moldering into the living room sofa, he felt the pressure of his peers haranguing him towards a bolder kind of existence. Seizing the opportunity to prove himself capable, Bill had volunteered for the role of Primary Unit leader. It had seemed like an infinitely doable kind of challenge, the sort of thing Roger Heinz could do in his sleep. To all intents and purposes his was a mere cameo in the grander plan, a simple distraction affording the real heroes opportunity to save Cunningham Holt. Any idiot could have done it, but Bill had volunteered.

  He was already beginning to regret his unchecked ambition. Failures past flashed through his mind: last Christmas’s attempt to decorate the external walls of Chalet 11, the time he’d tried to surprise Irene with the Mediterranean cruise, the oft-recounted incident with the food processor.

  Approaching the Center’s reception desk, Bill ran over the nuts and bolts of Martha Orange’s plan, silently rehearsing his own small part. Two feet from the counter he had his lines word perfect and embellished with appropriate gestures and yet, as soon as the Director’s pinchy blonde assistant leaned over the counter to ask how she could help, he found he could no longer remember so much as a single sentence. Instead of alerting the staff to Miss Pamela Richardson’s plight, upended and floundering in the cul-de-sac turn circle, thereby creating the kind of diversion which would drag all but the dog-lazy Director out of the Center, Bill discovered that his mouth had an altogether different plan.

  ‘My wife just passed out,’ he shouted, slapping the countertop in a fit of false passion so violent it caused an avalanche of fliers for the Annual Friends and Family Backyard Barbeque to shift and flutter delicately, like parachutes and leaves, around his ankles.

  ‘No I didn’t,’ hissed Irene, stepping forwards to prove herself reassuringly vertical.

  Bill ignored her. For the umpteenth occasion of the last year, he wished for a different wife or at least a working version of the old model.

  ‘I didn’t pass out,’ reiterated Irene.

  ‘My wife is extremely unwell,’ continued Bill, raising his voice and bouncing slightly to draw attention away from Irene.

  The receptionist looked confused. Confusion suited her. It complimented the poofy undulations of her fashionable haircut.

  ‘I’m his wife,’ yelled Irene, ‘and I’ve never felt better.’

  ‘Fall over, Irene,’ whispered Soren James Blue, leaning into the elderly lady’s ear for emphasis, ‘we’re trying to create a distraction.’

  At the reception desk, Bill trawled the deepest recesses of his memory for a notion of what to do next. Too late he realized that he had never and would never be leadership material. The assistant glared ungraciously from behind a display of fliers promoting support groups for the incontinent, the diabetic and recently bereaved. ‘Which one is your wife?’ she asked, swooping a condescending hand across the female members of the People’s Committee. ‘They all look fine to me.’

  Later, the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs would claim they had simultaneously known exactly what to do and, acting on some otherworldly impetus, obliged their own initiatives accordingly. However, the confusion which broke out in the Center’s reception area, causing a distraction on par with a medium-sized tsunami, had very little to do with telepathy or anything quite so romantic.

  At the precise moment when Bill backtracked to confess in a bleating voice, ‘It wasn’t my wife who passed out, it was me,’ and feigned a dramatic, bruise-incurring swoon upon the foyer floor, Mr Fluff – the only individual present with enough sense to keep the plan on track – sank her teeth into Irene’s ankle so she toppled forwards, meeting her husband in midair like a pair of passing pine trees; and Soren James Blue quit her subtle whispering to yell, ‘We’ve got to create a distraction!’ Sensing all hell had already broken loose, the remaining upright members of the People’s Committee took Sorry’s words as a rallying cry and began to improvise their own peculiar distractions.

  In the corner, by the potted plants, Mrs George Kellerman and Mrs Hunter Huxley launched into a rousing rendition of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, choosing to begin on different verses for maximum chaotic effect. Simeon Klein, still oblivious to the reason for the madness and reluctant to find himself once again excluded on account of his cloggy ears, removed his pullover and deck shoes and launched into a doddering striptease on the coffee table. Rose Roper grabbed the standard lamp, cradled its spindly neck in her arms and tangoed round the reception desk until her hair came loose and the emphysema caught her in mid gasp. However, it was Clary O’Hare who unintentionally caused the most effective distraction. Tapping his way round the walls of the reception area with the tablespoons he kept permanently tucked into his breast pocket, he accidentally forced his Morse code upon the fire alarm, shattering the panic glass and throwing the entire Center into a shrill, whining maelstrom.

  Following protocol, the assistant, purple now with condensed rage, picked up the reception desk telephone and granted permission for a complete evacuation of the building.

  ‘It’s like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in here today,’ she muttered as she gathered up her personal belongings and prepared to vacate the building.

  Ninety seconds later the Center began to belch staff and seniors into the parking lot. Most walked, Bambi-legged on sticks and crutches. Many were evacuated against their will, protesting as they thrashed about in clunky, prehistoric wheelchairs. The remaining half-dozen patients, too far gone to contemplate consciousness, were dragged from the screeching building on emergency stretchers, and laid like plane crash corpses in the Garden of Remembrance which ran in a boggy, begonia-heavy strip down the left length of the Center.

  One such octogenarian, roused by the cool rush of outside air, opened his eyes briefly and, observing the mud and the flowers bunched in clumsy, funereal puffs, presumed himself already dead and soon to be buried. Never the type to cause an undue fuss, he closed his eyes and obligingly passed away right there in the Garden of Remembrance. It was only three hours later, when his already concrete body was transported back into the Center and tucked tightly into bed, that a junior orderly noticed he was no longer breathing. Such incidents were not uncommon in the Center. Patients often died and went unnoticed for whole half days at a time. (The nursing staff, terrified of having their negligence drawn to the attention of the health care authorities, had recently discovered that an electric blanket could be applied to a cold corpse with the effect of defrosting a few hours off the time of death. Alibis were everything in a facility where value for money and sheer laziness outdid professionalism at every turn.)

  The Primary Unit of the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs disentangled themselves from the foyer floor and, under the nursing staff’s insistence, joined the other evacuees in the parking lot. Reassured to see that the fire alarm had drawn everyone, even the catering staff, out of the building, they huddled by the goldfish pond and, in urgent whispered prayers, petitioned a variety of gods for the success and safe return of the Secondary Unit, for Malcolm’s perforations and Cunningham Holt, who seemed most desperately in need of divine interference.

  The Director had chosen to ignore the fire alarm. His pinchy assistant – only three weeks into the job and already au fait with her boss’s telescopic wrath – had been savvy enough to phone down and assure him that, ‘Yes, this is definitely a false alarm,’ and, ‘No, there is no need to evacuate,’ and, ‘Would you, by any chance, appreciate the lend of my headphones to block out the noise?’ The Director declined her offer in his usual perfunctory manner, wrapped a hand towel round his head to c
ushion the din, and continued to collate the previous week’s test results. The Director was oblivious to everything outside his own head. Swathed in his terry cloth turban, he was preoccupied with the case notes of Manuela Marguiles, a largish lady of Puerto Rican descent whose six sessions in the Treatment Room had eradicated the enormous warts that sprouted, like forest floor mushrooms, all over her face and neck, yet passed, disinterested, over the cancerous wrecking ball currently making mush of her uterus. So focused was the Director on Manuela’s notes that when he paused between paragraphs, lifting his eyes to scan the opposite wall for inspiration, it came as a tremendous shock to find Martha Orange standing in front of his desk, furious-faced and brandishing what appeared to be a Swiss Army knife wrapped in a wad of tissue.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  (Whilst the Director had, over the course of the last few months, enjoyed purposefully brushing against the breasts, backside and award-winning legs of Mrs Orange, it had never crossed his mind to ask for an introduction. Orderlies were a dime a dozen in the Center. They came, they lasted six to eighteen months and left in a haze of mumbled complaints about long hours, terrible pay and the wandering hands of their esteemed boss. They were a bovine breed, meagerly educated and lacking in self-esteem. Most seemed satisfied with the opportunity to slur his character. The few possessing gumption enough to threaten litigation had been silenced by virtue of the same offshore bank account which had kept Trip Blue’s professional reputation clean as a Christmas turkey all the way through medical college.)

  ‘Martha Orange,’ replied Martha Orange. ‘I work for you. I need you to let me and my friends into the Treatment Room.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Cut the bullshit. Everyone sees you going in and out of the broom closet. God only knows what perverted experiments you’re doing on the old people in there. But I’ve seen that some of them are getting better and I need to get in there too.’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘I have a knife,’ threatened Martha Orange and began to unroll wads of Kleenex, exposing a shiny red Swiss Army knife no bigger than a can opener. After initially retracting the tweezers and toothpick, Martha Orange arrived at the largest blade on the knife, levered it out of the handle with a thumbnail and held it threateningly over the Director’s towel-clad ear. ‘I’ll stab you if you don’t let me in.’

  The Director shrugged, unconcerned. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, turning towards her so the point of the blade tickled his earlobe. The Director was not afraid of death. A pragmatic scientist to the core, he did not believe in any sort of afterlife. While the unpleasantness of dying bothered him somewhat and he was no great fan of physical pain, being dead, he presumed, would be a welcome relief from the ongoing nuisance of being alive.

  ‘I mean it. So help me God, I will kill you if you don’t take me to the Treatment Room. One of the residents has been shot in the stomach. He doesn’t have much time. It might be too late already. That stupid room of yours is his only chance.’

  Trip Blue heard nothing beyond the possibility of a resurrection. He had been waiting a terribly long time for an opportunity like this. He changed his mind in an instant, yet held the silence for a full minute, enjoying the way Martha Orange squirmed in front of him, shifting weight from one foot to the other. The Director’s consent was a given but Martha Orange didn’t know this; the situation was ripe for exploitation.

  ‘OK,’ he eventually agreed, ‘I’ll let you into the Treatment Room. But if I’m going to be nice to you, you’re going to have to be nice to me.’

  It was not the first time Trip Blue had found himself in such a position. Bracing his palms against the edge of his enormous mahogany desk, he shoved his office chair two feet backwards until the full length of his body rolled into Martha’s view, pinstriped, patronizing and already bulging with ugly lust. Martha Orange knew what was expected of her. The whole situation was worryingly familiar. She recalled the haylofts and motel rooms, the broom closets and back alleys which had slowly shaped her muscles and bones into one particular position; a position as low and penitent as earnest prayer. There was little point in arguing. God moved in mysterious ways and Martha Orange was more than familiar with the brutal kindness of his grace. As she lowered herself to her knees and sped through proceedings her thoughts slipped free of her head and went galloping round the south Kentucky plains. The small incisions on her shoulder blades reopened and wept soft and low for the open sky, which seemed always, lately, ever just beyond Martha’s reach.

  The Director, grasping the plastic lever on the side of his office chair, reclined and with eyes soldered shut – for the smallest part of him did not wish to be reminded of just how sordid he could be – thrilled himself on the imminent possibility of raising the dead. Martha Orange’s knife meant nothing to him; her earnest petition for a friend’s life, even less; but the possibility of using the Treatment Room to resurrect the very recently dead had Trip Blue so excited he could barely contain himself. He laid a hand on the top of Martha Orange’s bobbing head and, picturing himself on the cover of Time magazine, Nobel Prize in hand, felt himself explode with the ferocity of his own brilliance. Opening his eyes afterwards Trip Blue was surprised to find Martha Orange had not been obliterated. She sat before him, hunkered and wide-eyed, the cuff of her sweater sleeve covering her mouth. Her legs, he noted, tucked beneath her pert little backside, now floated about two inches off the ground. Trip Blue assumed himself responsible for this, and other miracles.

  In the corridor, behind the curtain, Malcolm Orange wondered what was taking his mother so long in the Director’s office. He hoped she had not killed the Director. Murder was a sin against America and the Jesus God and Malcolm Orange was pretty sure they still sent people, even moms and ladies, to the electric chair for killing. Having just retrieved his mother, Malcolm Orange had no desire to lose her again. He closed his eyes and prayed to the Jesus God that Martha would not do anything terrible in the Director’s office. It was death dark behind the curtains. There was really no need to close his eyes but Malcolm wasn’t convinced that the Jesus God could hear open-eyed prayers so he kept his eyes closed and the words running like looping ticker tape round the inside of his head.

  It was nice behind the curtain. The smell of washing powder and cough drops had ingrained itself into the seams. Malcolm Orange had always hoped to one day live in a house saturated with such homely cleaning smells. Chalet 13, for all its permanence, had already assumed the Orange odor of fried food and incorrectly disposed diapers. Malcolm was sure that real family houses did not smell like the restrooms at the Dairy Queen. Someday he would live in a house which smelt like a detergent commercial.

  Tucked behind the curtains, the heavy damask fabric brushed against Malcolm’s arms and legs, reminding him that he had not yet entirely disappeared. With no light forthcoming he could not check on the progress of his perforations and might very possibly be healed. It was good to have his hysteria temporarily restrained. Sandwiched to left and right by his good friends Roger Heinz and Nate Grubbs, giddy with the realization that his mother had returned for him, Malcolm had all but decided to spend the rest of his life behind this curtain, companionable, safe and very possibly normal, when the curtains parted viciously. Blinking in the strip lights, he found himself staring into the furious face of Sorry’s father.

  ‘Out of there now!’ cried the Director, and when the four members of the Secondary Unit hesitated – three from fear and the fourth too dead or dying to manage even the smallest shuffle – the Director reached behind the curtain and manhandled them into the corridor using arms, ears and loose clothing for leverage. ‘We’re going to the Treatment Room. It’s not what I’d call the wisest decision I’ve ever made but let’s just say your friend Martha here was very convincing.’

  It was at this point that Malcolm Orange first noticed his mother, floating over the Director’s shoulder. The sight of her came as something of a shock. On any other ordinary day, a floating mother
would have been enough to tip Malcolm Orange over the edge into the land of explosive diarrhea. However, this afternoon, with his capacity for shock already dulled by the day’s deluge of weird and wonderful happenings, Malcolm Orange merely observed his mother’s latest achievement and wondered, ‘What in the wild blue world might happen next?’ Martha Orange’s face was familiar. Her clothes were the same tired jeans and sweater she’d been wearing since Illinois, but her posture was entirely alien. Malcolm stared in horrified amazement as his mother hovered two feet off the floor, the crown of her head grazing the ceiling like a helium balloon halted in ascent.

  The pressure of the last twenty-four hours had awakened in Martha Orange something ancient and prematurely lost. As the walls conspired to keep her anchored to cul-de-sac life, a thick and unquenchable longing for height had drawn the wings right out of her shoulders. Roots, clipped at birth, began to regenerate. Feathers formed from the downy hairs on her back and neck. Muscles melted into muscles, bones grafted, and in the last half hour a pair of knuckle-like protrusions had burst from the skin of her shoulders; baby wings, preparing for flight. Something had settled inside Martha Orange: a homely understanding that all would be well and if all should not be well, the opportunity to escape was still available. She felt fifteen pounds the lighter. Gravity had finally lost its hold on Martha Orange and only time would tell if this latest development was progressive or a reactionary return to her beginning days.