by Joey Comeau
Half an hour later, the man was up again.
“Where’s my fucking leg?” he said, throwing the blankets on the floor and looking at his stump in horror.
My brother remained calm. You have to be calm when you’re talking to them, he tells me. If you get upset, it will only upset them even more. So when the man demanded to know where his leg was, my brother kept his voice perfectly level.
“I took it,” Ed said. “While you were sleeping. And if you don’t lie back down,” my brother explained, “I will have to take your other one.”
In the end, they had to strap the man into a wheelchair because he was so upset. He sat there all night, glaring at my brother and tearing at his cotton diaper. Ed wheeled him into the TV room and made him watch Deep Space Nine until the drugs kicked in and the guy fell asleep again.
Ed laughs when he tells me the story. He laughs when he’s describing the man raving and gnashing his teeth, pulling at the diaper, coating his fingers in his own shit and then licking them. My brother just launches into these stories. He loves them. He loves to tell the leg-stealing story to our mother, especially at the dinner table.
“People with Alzheimer’s all sound exactly the same,” Ed says. “It’s like they all get together and practise. They just lie there, tits up, saying, ‘Billy? Billy? Billy?’” He pauses and changes the tone from questioning to panicked. “’Billy. Billy. John? Billy? JENNY? JENNY? Billy.’”
The book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets opens with two seasoned homicide detectives arriving at the scene of a murder. They find a man with a gunshot wound in the side of his head. There’s blood all over the ground. It’s everywhere. The lead detective bends down to examine him.
“Here’s the problem. He’s got a slow leak,” the detective says, and they laugh a bit too hard.
These are regular people who have to deal with death each and every day, and so they make it a joke. Ed would have made a good cop. I remember when we all still lived on the east coast, how he would sit at the dinner table across from my mother, pretending to lick shit off his fingers while she looked horrified. Maybe he laughed too hard too? I don’t know. That’s just the way he laughs.
But yeah, it’s possible that Ed has a thicker skin than I do. I’m not the toughest cookie in the shed. I know that. But I’m gonna try. It isn’t tough to do something when you know you can handle it. It’s tough to go ahead and do that thing when you know that you probably can’t handle it.
I think.
The phone rings later that afternoon, and the caller ID says it’s the office-supply store. I don’t know if it’s Wallace or one of the other managers, calling to ask why I haven’t come in yet. I’m supposed to be starting at five. It doesn’t matter either way.
“Hello, Arthur here,” I say into the phone, cheerfully.
“Arthur, this is Donna. I have you scheduled for work today.” She sounds annoyed. “You were supposed to be here two hours ago.” Wallace would be working today too. He normally made these calls, but today it was Donna. He couldn’t even call me himself.
“Oh, I meant to call,” I say. “I’m sorry, I must have forgotten.”
“You’re sick?”
“No, I just don’t like working there anymore.”
“You know that you’re required to give two weeks’ notice before quitting, don’t you?” she says.
“Well, I’m not really required to, am I? I mean, I’m not going to get thrown in prison for not giving you notice. You probably just won’t give me a good reference. And, to be honest, Donna, I like to think that any decent job will view a good reference from an office-supply store as being about equal to no reference at all. So, anyway, The Muppet Show is coming on soon. I should let you get back to work. Wait. Donna?”
“Yes?” Donna says.
“Did Wallace come to work today?”
“Yes, Arthur. Some people actually care about their responsibilities.”
Chapter 4
My first night at my new job starts quietly. I’ve got hospital scrubs on. I bought them at the mall, which I didn’t know you could do, until Ed told me. I thought there was a special store somewhere, all stocked with scrubs and white sneakers.
I didn’t know what to expect, after hearing Ed’s stories. But it’s been quiet. I brought a book, and so I read a bit in the light from the hallway and try not to doze off. My patient sleeps. I don’t even know what he looks like. There’s a tuft of white hair sticking up from the blankets.
I’m reading Calvin and Hobbes. Comic after comic of tormenting the babysitter and making sandwiches out of dead bugs. And then suddenly there’s one that opens with a careful line drawing of a dead bird.
Nature is ruthless and existence is fragile, Calvin says. But in order to go on with our daily lives, we can’t let ourselves think about that. (He’s telling all this to his stuffed tiger, of course.) Maybe this is why everybody takes the world for granted and acts so thoughtlessly, he says.
And then, FWOOOM! Back to spaceships and adventure! And now it’s time to mouth off to a bully, and to get rid of slimy girls. It’s time to vote for a new dad. It’s time to put on a purple costume and fight evil, instead of doing homework. Forget homework, I’m a man of action!
I almost brought Anna Karenina instead, and I think I made the correct decision. I’ll take this over fifteen pages about the sound of wheat in a field. (The sound of wheat in a field? Seriously?) Comic books are fun. They’re exciting and silly, and they can be about important things when they want to be.
So I read. And after a few hours, my patient sits up and pushes his blankets down to his feet. Then he sits in silence, staring at me. He stares at me for a minute, then he looks down at his feet, then back at me. I close my book.
“You want some help?” I say. I help him into his dark grey slippers, one foot and then the other. I take his arm in mine and lead him to the bathroom. It’s more like carrying him actually. He rests all his weight on me. But when we get there, he doesn’t want me to help him inside. He pulls his arm away angrily and gives me a dirty look. Like I’ve crossed the line, trying to follow him in. I don’t know whether he needs help using the bathroom or not. All they told me is that he’s confused.
“Sorry,” I say.
He wobbles a little, but gets his balance. Then he shuffles into the bathroom on his own. I close the door behind him. I don’t want to end up like that. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to get old either. I don’t want to lose control of my own body, my own mind. Still, I like who I am now much better than who I was at twenty-one. That’s not my age though, is it? It’s experience. If I had been twenty-one for seven years, maybe I would have calmed down anyway.
The patient hasn’t made a sound in a while. “You doing okay in there?” He bangs on the wall, so I open the door a crack. “Do you need help?” I say through the door without looking. He bangs again. I go in.
He’s sitting on the toilet with his pants still on, and he won’t look at me. I take him under the arms and lift him to his feet. At first I’m worried that he’s forgotten to take his pants off and gone to the bathroom anyways, but there’s no smell. He forgot to take his pants off and sat down, but he knew that something wasn’t right. He knew that he couldn’t go with his pants on, even if he didn’t know what to do about it.
I start trying to help him pull his pants down and he slaps my hand away and glares. He steadies himself on the wall and starts shuffling back toward the bed. Only he doesn’t go back to bed. He changes course and heads into the hallway.
We walk to the nurses’ station, him shuffling ahead and me trailing behind. Once there, he stops and smiles at me. That’s unexpected, but I smile back. We got off on the wrong foot, I think. He must know that I’m only trying to help. It’s a few seconds before I realize there are dark streaks on his pant leg and urine running to the floor.
What am I supposed to do now? I can’t stop him. How do you stop someone from peeing once they’ve started? I want him t
o know that I understand he is a human being, not a child, but I also need him to stop peeing on the floor.
“No, you can’t do that here,” I say, but he just keeps smiling. So I start yelling for the nurses. Urine has soaked through his pyjamas and now he’s trailing it all over the nurses’ station. He sits in each of the chairs, smiling and muttering the whole time. Still no nurses. I yell again, and he smiles wider at me. I can’t tell if he’s spreading his piss around on purpose or not. Maybe he’s just lost in some imaginary world.
The nurses are not pleased.
“Why didn’t you stop him?” the tall one asks.
I have no idea how she thinks I could have stopped him. I guess I could have guided him back to the bathroom, but I didn’t know he was going to piss everywhere. This is their fault. When I arrived, they said, “This is George. George is confused.” What they should have said was “This is George. George is confused about where to urinate.”
In Peanuts, you see strip after strip where it’s joke, joke, joke, and then there’s a comic where Charlie Brown is in his sandbox, building a sandcastle. A girl comes along and kicks it down, and Charlie Brown just sits there. Then he goes inside. At home, he takes off his clothes. He climbs into bed and just lies there looking sad. Then, next comic. Snoopy is a World War One flying ace! Linus loves his blanket!
One of the last Sunday Peanuts strips is Peppermint Patty playing football. She yells at Chuck, hey great game, right? Is he having as much fun as she is? It’s still his ball. What’s he going to do? Chuck? And then here comes Marcie to tell her everyone’s gone home. Patty should go home too. It’s dark. And Peppermint Patty asks her if they had fun.
Yes, they had fun, Marcie says. And then she leaves Patty there in the rain.
The last panel is Patty, standing alone. And to the empty field she points out that nobody shook hands and said, “Good game.”
I love those dark moments in Peanuts. I love that they’re in there, that Charles Schulz put the sad, lonely bits of himself into the comic. I love the silliness too: the dancing Snoopy strips; the little boy Rerun drawing “basement” comics about Tarzan fighting Daffy Duck in a helicopter. Those are the bits that keep me reading. The funny parts! The fun parts. The silly bits that don’t make sense. And when I get to the sad, lonely Peppermint Patty standing in a field wondering why nobody shook hands and said, Good game, well, it works because that’s not all she was. I try to think that way about everything. That’s the kind of person I want to be.
The nurses clean up George and give him something. I don’t know what. He sleeps for the rest of the night. In the morning, there’s a girl here to take over. She smiles, and I stand up to let her have the seat.
“How was he?” she says.
“Good,” I say. “Good, yeah. He slept all night.”
Clay picks me up downstairs, looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He leans over to the passenger seat and kisses me. I haven’t brushed my teeth. I probably smell like hospitals and hand sanitizer. If he notices, he doesn’t show it.
“Let’s go to that cupcake place at the mall for breakfast,” he says. “We’ll get you all stuffed full of chocolate icing and then put you to bed.”
“Okay, sure,” I say, and he pulls out into morning traffic.
“I talked to my manager, about maybe hiring you as a security guard. She said we don’t have any openings at the casino, but maybe she could set you up an interview with the company. Nothing’s set in stone, but just in case you change your mind, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask.”
In the food court, Clay and I eat cupcakes. Life is good. Cupcakes for breakfast! Being a security guard might not be so bad. There would probably be training. They’d train me to be a badass. I could use a bit of that in my life, I think.
“I had drinks with Sam last night,” Clay says. Sam’s the girl from the DVD place. The one with her hair cropped short like a lesbian, but who was straight enough to ask for Clay’s phone number. The girl who, before ever talking to him once on the phone, sent him a message that said, “I want to bend you over a straight-back chair.” You have to admire a classic sensibility like that.
“And?” I say. “Did she bend you over a straight-back chair? Details!”
He tells me about the date, about the small talk. He laughs again at the jokes he told, and when he starts getting to the good stuff, we get up and head to the gentlemen’s room. He continues his story more quietly, his mouth against my ear, pressing me back against the wall, gently but firmly. He unbuckles my belt.
“We fucked in the alley behind the library,” he says. “We had two drinks at the restaurant and decided that we didn’t need dinner. She told me she wanted to fuck me. To climb on top of me and take me inside her. She said this so casually, and took another sip of her beer. ‘And then,’ she says, ‘after you’ve fucked me, I want to tie you up.’”
Clay has my cock out now. He lets go of me so he can lick his fingers, and then wraps his hand around me again.
“When we found the spot behind the library, I told her I’d let her,” he says. “I’d let her do whatever she wanted. She can tie the knots too tight, so I can’t get out. I’d let her do anything.” He’s stroking me while he whispers. His other hand is lower, first just brushing my balls, then squeezing them. Now pushing against my asshole while he strokes me.
“Anything?” I say.
“And while I’m pushing inside her, she says she’ll do whatever she wants. ‘When I tie you,’ she says, ‘I’ll tie you tight. And then there’ll be a man in the room with us. A stranger. He takes you by the hair and shoves his cock into your mouth while I watch,’ she says. I have her shirt pulled up so I can touch her breasts. So I can see them while I slide in and out of her. I have my hand around behind her, my fingers pushing at her asshole.” Here Clay pushes more aggressively into my ass with his fingers.
“Up against the wall,” I say. I’m bucking a little under Clay’s touch now. I don’t want to come on his uniform, but I do want to come on his uniform, if you know what I mean. I can picture him fucking her, her back to the wall, the brick scratching, his cock hard and pushing inside her. I want him to tell me how he turned her around, fucked her in the ass.
“Up against the wall,” Clay says. “She tells me how the stranger fucks me in the mouth, and how there are tears in my eyes. There’s spit on my lips. He has my hair in a fist, holding me down on his cock. And then he comes down my throat. I get startled and I jerk back, so the next spurt goes on my face, and on my hair. It’s thick across my lips and neck, and he leaves me there on the floor, tied up, cock hard, come on my face and in my mouth. For someone else to find.”
“Slower,” I whisper, and Clay slows his hand down. I can feel his cock through the front of his pants, but when I start to fumble at his belt he pushes my hand away.
“I have my finger inside her, and I’m fucking her hard and fast now. There’s no rhythm anymore. I fuck as fast and hard as I can, until I’m too tired, then I slow down. Then I speed up again. I know I’m going to come,” he says. “She’s not smiling. Her eyes are intense. She tells me another man comes in and stands above me while I’m tied up. He’s just there to just jerk off on me, she says. While I’m tied down. He gets down on his knees in front of me, puts the head of his cock right against my lips and jerks off hard and fast, so his fist hits me again and again in the face. I try to turn away, but he’s straddling my face, so I can’t. And then there’s someone behind me that I can’t see. Someone else in the room with us, spitting on my ass, pushing a finger into me. I can’t turn around. I can’t turn away from the cock being jerked off against my clamped-shut mouth. He pushes his . . .” But Clay has to stop his story, because I’m coming into his hand.
“Oh fuck,” I say, smiling.
Clay pulls some toilet paper off the roll and wipes himself clean.
“You like that, eh?” he says. He pulls me close to him, with my pants still around my thighs, and he kisses me hard. I feel like I might
fall over. Christ, he’s hot.
On our way out of the bathroom, I notice that that under his uniform sweater, there’s a T-shirt tag sticking out. He’s been walking around all day with his T-shirt on inside out. And he’s mine.
Chapter 5
“Get another patient,” Ed says. We’re playing video games in his basement apartment. The curtains are drawn and we’re sitting in front of the TV on the floor like kids. I have to be at work in a half-hour. It’s too late to cancel my shift.
“They didn’t say he was violent or anything,” I say.
Ed shrugs.
“They never say anything,” he says. “You can’t get out of it?” I shake my head. “Well, okay. Don’t get between him and the door. Don’t stand too close to him. Don’t follow too close. Don’t meet his eyes or stare. If he picks up something heavy, get away from him.” He pauses the game and looks at me. “They gave you him because you’re new, Arthur. No one else will take him.”
“Oh.”
“But,” Ed says, smiling, “if he kills you, don’t worry. I will avenge you!”
When I get there, the mental ward is just like the rest of the hospital. There’re no plaintive howls coming from behind any doors. There aren’t any restraints on the bed. Nobody is raving. It’s just me and a three-hundred-pound man named Dave.
Brain damage put him here. His truck flipped over, and now this is Dave. He laughs a lot, but not with me. He doesn’t even acknowledge that I’m around, unless it’s to glare at me. But he gets happy whenever he sees a nurse. Gleeful.
“Hello!” he says when he sees a nurse. “Hello!”
“Hi, Dave,” the nurse says. “Are you going for a walk?”
“Yep!” he laughs. “Yep!” He likes to touch their arms when he’s talking to them. He reaches out to touch their shoulders, and he leans close to their faces. “Hello!” he says. “Hello! A cookie?”
