The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

§

  After her mother’s been taken away, I go in search of Judy. The Director let the funeral boys have their zippered bag at the end, checking first that the van doors screened all sight lines to the windows. Like throwing kibble to snarling dogs. Toss them something so they don’t take it out on her on the ride. And after.

  A glassed-in veranda curves to either side of the front doors. Midway along it I find her. Sitting in a cushioned wicker chair, hands folded in her lap. I’d never seen anyone who could maintain such stillness. The orange-and-white cat pads up and rubs against her leg. Hops up onto her and pushes with its face at her hands, which she lifts and settles again on its curved back.

  “Do you want to go somewhere? Maybe get a coffee?”

  “Yes, that would be very nice. Thank you.”

  Formal and absent as ever. As if taught early—and this lesson stayed—that the world is a kind of Sunday School fronting terrible denominations.

  Even at her most extreme she’d enunciated primly. Standing by my bed in the ward’s gloom, a shock sight in her bloody nightgown.

  The Devil raped me. No, this time He was alone.

  §

  Driving west a few minutes, we come to Markville Mall. Another Super-something fronted by Walmart. Parking around back, we enter a more upscale assortment of shops, new names along with the regulars. A bigger, cleaner-looking food court, with more varied options. Amaya closed, though. The Thai place too.

  “Do you want me to see if I can find a sandwich?” I say, looking around at the unlit kiosks.

  “Not lunchtime yet,” Judy says, sounding for a moment like a mother.

  Checking my watch, I see it’s just after nine. For a moment I can hardly believe it. Death’s come and gone and I’ve been up for hours. Cooking, cleaning. Reading half a book. After all these years, hyper-time still astounds. Like living a couple of extra lives.

  Judy heads toward a table in the empty center—exactly opposite to the perimeter perches everyone else stakes out—while I go for coffees and donuts at the Timmie’s down the way. When I get back she has a plastic pill case out in front of her. 9 AM in black on the flip top.

  “Could you get me a glass of water, please?”

  Her hands shake, a fine constant tremor. Not as spastically as I remember, but more constant. Like a tuned, idling motor. She takes bee sips of the water, a lurch in her throat to get it down. Same with the coffee. Nibbles, with small beige pointy teeth, at the sides of her donut. I’ve never known a longtime mental patient with good teeth. Occasionally, decent muscle tone—gym rats who keep at it, at least in the early years. But healthy white teeth—never.

  I sip my coffee, waiting to see where Judy will take it. TAL gives me a good guess.

  “Do you still perform adjustments?” A wicked gleam in her eyes. She was always a bit of a flirt. With funhouse fractures, to be sure, but you could see the ghost of someone’s darling doll—a lot of people’s probably—who must have picked at hearts through childhood and a bit beyond.

  “Do you still do them?”

  Do them? They’re what I live for practically. “When they’re needed. And I can,” I say. Trading dangerous hints, just like in the dear old days of derangement.

  “The Adjustment League,” she says dreamily.

  “I can’t believe you remember that.” Though of the two people I’d imagined writing TAL, I picked Judy straight off. A mystery how she found my mailbox, though perhaps not much of one. Judy, when not in lockdown, slipping invisibly along the streets, and me hardly inconspicuous. A mystery that will wait.

  “I remember it.” She picks up her nibbled-at donut. “Brad. Lynette. What was his name?”

  “The nurse?”

  “The big fat one.”

  “I don’t remember.” Then I do. “Fresca. Moaning like a speared beluga as they strapped him to the stretcher.”

  Judy grins. A real grin—sickness trashed again. With those pointy brown teeth. Feral, like a squirrel’s.

  And for a few minutes we just remember together. Filling in each other’s blanks. Judy talkative, engaged. She switches on and off. Like anyone. Except her on is not far on. And her off is way, way off.

  §

  Brad, fat and oily-skinned, balding at thirty, tuned to Radio Moscow in the wee hours on the shortwave his father built. A decent Brezhnev when he isn’t weeping. Lynette, a buxom farm girl—honey pigtails, big breasts and hips anyone with traces of a sex drive wants to nuzzle. Sniffling softly, sleeping with a stuffed giraffe. But yells sometimes too—what gets her into trouble with Fresca. A couple of Bubble Room stints, which frighten the bejesus out of the poor kid, Fresca ogling her through the plexi nipple while she cowers in a corner, hugging her knees. Or it’s nothing to do with her rare outbursts, which are standard wardstuff after all, just that Fresca hates not sleeping with her, and for sure has tried… among his other slurs, petty rants, power trips…

  Fine. An adjustment is clearly indicated.

  What’s that? Brad and Lynette, excited. Easy to forget they’re younger. We’ve all paid a cover charge of violence to be here. Still, this stuff ages you.

  When you see something wildly out of whack. Something that needs straightening. Now.

  Which is everything. Hugging the giraffe. Sniffles starting.

  No. Most things take major bangs. And even then. But there are times—places—when a few good raps, sometimes just a tap, will set the whole thing tumbling.

  More words than I’ve spoken in weeks. Not tiring, though. And Judy doing a little bobble-head of yup atop her catatonia. If only mad would stay mad. The most disconcerting thing the way it can slide away suddenly, never with any warning and seldom for longer than a moment, and a sly knowing face peeps out at you—at a table, in a mirror—as if an alert little squirrel is nesting within the sticks and leaves of symptoms. It shows itself for a second every so often, testing the weather perhaps.

  Easy once you decide. Just bring him the world. Save a pill each, pot luck. Palm them when Becky, lazy and nice, is on meds. And fun, the meeting in the lab—whispers, evil giggles. The heavy tranks from Judy and me, real brain bombs, for the main load. But throw in the little upper from Lynette—a kind of jolter, jerky spiker, not a regular anti-D. Our shot of tabasco. Catch him in cross-currents.

  The pop he drains in noisy gulps a good dissolver. And Brad thundering from the Duma beside Lynette in a thin nightie almost overkill as distraction.

  Then just wait. Bedded down, like good nuts. And not for long.

  Flopping around the station like a flabby fish. Slurring, grunting wacko riffs. Drooling into his Maclean’s. His partner—Rodney?—back from patrol. Jesus, man! Here, lie down. Can you breathe? Fucking hell. No, stay—

  Good fun. And sets the ward chattering for a long time. New army on the march: The Adjustment League. Codename TAL. Wink it over putrid coffee.

  Not me, though. It disappears in my rearview and I go back to being bombed. Like Dresden after the soldiers leave. Slate days, weeks. And then—Lynette’s mom bringing apple cake in Tupperware. Thank you for our daughter. She says you’ve helped her a lot. Tearing up. Husband with big rough hands shifting behind her. Cupcakes, another time. Brownies. Mouthing slow sugars in a chair by the window. Snow melting on blackened brick beyond the mesh. Nothing.

  Or—way down deep—a dawning sense of adjustments adjusting beyond themselves. Adjustments becoming arrangements, even. Sometimes anyway…

  §

  “Do you still keep in touch with Brad?”

  “No. Brad killed himself a long time ago.” Attempted it from a balcony, then an overpass. Got it done under a subway train. St. George Station.

  “I know that he did.”

  “And Lynette I lost track of completely. No idea where she might be.”

  “I understand.” She’s phasing out again.

  The ward ta
lk takes my eyes down to her neck, her denim shirt buttoned to the top. A natural drop, which started at Vivera, but now my eyes get locked there. Natural when you’ve seen her naked as many times as I have. The bloody nightgown optional on her nighttime crawls. Her cuttings rampant but exact, stopping precisely at her shoulders and knees. Someone—herself, even?—wanting her in short skirts sometimes. With glass, with knives, with needles and pins. But never on her face, never below her knees. Nor her hands—not there, below the elbows, either. Barbie’s head—button nose, waterfall hair—and shapely calves, tapering fingers, jointed to a trunk spiderwebbed with scars and scabs, radiating and intersecting, like glass after multiple impacts. A mad monk’s vision of a ruined Eve. That horny-hateful.

  “Do you mind if I go to the bathroom?”

  And puts you in the position of minder. Gatekeeper. Always has. “Of course not. I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Thank you. I know that.”

  §

  Ward memories. So sparse and fragmentary, but the strangest and most haunting are of visitors, outsiders flaring like comets through black space, vanishing just as mysteriously. Could the lady with oozing butter tarts have been Maude, Judy’s mom? I see amber syrup, similarly coloured hair—nothing in between. And noses. My last foster parents, the ones I ditched mid-high-school, as monkishly persistent as gumshoes. Tracking me to rooms years apart, donating to the abortive stab at university. I know they made a couple of stupefied, awkward visits… but what I see, all I see, are noses. Pink fleshy organs of delicate sense, grimy grains settling on them. Made for better scents than Ajax and unwashed bodies.

  You two, staff said, and roomed us across the hall from each other. But Judy and I never more than bio-doppels. Ward grunts, two decades into our tours, with lookalike rap sheets: classic first breaks with reality, hallucinations, ideas of reference, violence and paralysis, the whole shooting match of florid madness, which in Judy’s case spelled schizophrenia, and in mine—less confidently—severe mania followed by equally severe and far more prolonged catatonic depression. Hyper-time, then Stone. How else for plump, indulged Brad to see us but as grizzled gurus? Tutelary berserkers. Even more so Lynette: in her twenties, but recently shucking corn with Dad, while Judy and I’d been on the streets since fifteen.

  I wondered with Judy, as with all of us, if her diagnosis did more than graze what ailed her, gesture at it with a medico-syllabic wave. Acumen what you keep hoping will rear its head. But far rarer than compassion: smart, sustained noticing.

  Not mere doped looking—Food Court pack sniffing difference over its chicken nuggets. Ogling singularity, judging it. Which makes me want to shove in their faces, as in earlier and less wily incarnations I’ve done.

  Psych rez in one of the tiny conference rooms, pre-Fresca. You touched knees in those closets, soul-moths sharing a jar. Tantalizing, or pure torment—depending on the other moth. A big guy, burly, with a drooping Nietzschean moustache. Mulish enough to ignore protocol and suss me out alone. A former millwright, he informed me gruffly—part of a “real-world” trial in some med school, presumably—and I certainly must have resembled a pile of scrap iron.

  Which he proceeded to tinker with aloud, undistracted by my silence.

  One name for your down phase. Stone. Right, I get it. Chained to the rock. But all these terms for your other pole—hairy sausage fingers in the file—windows, hyper-time, hyper-black. Not names, I notice. Things. States. Makes sense maybe. Too much happening to settle on one name. We are legion.

  “I am…” Scriptural correction a fly’s whisper.

  Huh? I get it. Course, another possibility might be: no names! Avoid ’em. Why, I wonder. Was it always like that? Or just since this last time, when your daughter, when Me—

  Got to him before he got her name out. Someone must’ve heard the bang when he hit the wall. Multiple hands scrabbling with his to pry mine from his throat. The neck brace he wore for a few days gave him more gravitas, an unslouched gait and flaring jowls that reddened when we passed. Keep it, I might have advised him, if I’d had a voice.

  §

  What is it about the mentally ill that tells you they’re off? Watching Judy walk towards me, I know that no one seeing her—and heads do turn, holding their stares for longer than curiosity permits—would mistake her for whatever they call normal. What is it, though? The unnaturally stiff spine and stately, mincing steps? A queen forced to walk a narrow ice bridge in armour. The child-like size and sex-toy hairstyle—but with puffy, mealy skin… aged doll, child crone. Her seeming obliviousness of, utter disengagement from, the other customers—which yet conveys an animal’s tense, secret-sense monitoring of their exact positions and potential movements. A general sense—weirdest of all, this—of being scooped out, hollow, at her center, with all that’s left standing sentry at the periphery. Guards around a pit operation. Is it just me seeing this? No, the other heads, young moms especially, their eyes narrowing as they track her, then turning back with renewed patience to mind their children, shushing their ruckus, helping them eat. There be monsters.

  §

  Without sanity dictating the script, you can start anywhere. The relaxation of lockstep bathes you in a mild euphoria. Seductive. And addictive. And dangerous: you can drift so far out on warm currents of dissociation, it’s a hard desperate flounder to get back to programmed encounters when you need them.

  “What did your father do? As a career, I mean.” Thinking of the wedding photo on Maude’s bedside table. The groom already silver-haired, his black-haired bride beaming up at him. A long absence of widowhood, followed by the progressive absence of dementia. Long years of emptying. “He looked… distinguished. A professional, I assume.”

  “He put people to sleep.”

  Poetry or prose? The primal question with Judy.

  “An anaesthetist?”

  “Yes. The Sandman.”

  We work down more of our donuts with coffee.

  “How long did your mom live at Vivera?”

  “Two years and two months. Two and two, very true. She moved in in August.”

  “Who took care of her?”

  “I take care of my mother.”

  “You do?” I can’t keep all the surprise from my voice. “Where do your brothers live?”

  “In Toronto.”

  In Toronto, but AWOL. Letting their damaged sister shoulder the load. At least in Judy’s version. An adjustment is beginning to take shape. Or the outline, the need for one—a dull ache somewhere behind my eyes, like the first intimations of a pressure headache.

  I push it back, like cramming a gelatinous genie back into its bottle. There isn’t time, for one thing. Stone would be the first to remind me. Four weeks ago, perhaps. But this window’s closing. And I pick them more carefully than I used to. Conserving energy with age. And what’s here, after all? Asshole families nothing new. The rule, except in Dreamville. If you find these things remarkable, have another coffee.

  Which I do. So does Judy.

  “Do you still see Stone?” Out of left field again. But this time I don’t wonder at her memory. Or her telepathy. All our wardspeak’s coming back. All the invisible antennae fluttering, the warders blundering about with nets.

  “I’ll always need to see Stone.”

  “When is your next appointment?”

  “Two weeks, maybe three. In about two weeks. The schedule varies, but we always start in early November. Then I’m his till at least the New Year.”

  Nothing wrong with her memory. Horrible to contemplate, given the splinters of her mind.

  Does she remember seeing snowflakes behind me, as I remember seeing them over her shoulder beyond a window reinforced with heavy wire diamonds?

  “That is not what killed my mother,” Judy says. Bringing me out of a long spell of singling out faces and evaporating them. The food court filling lik
e a sink. With only the very young and very old looking content, settled in their lives. Everyone else, especially those with kids, looking more or less like murder. Not for the first time, I’m glad to have a face that sends stares packing.

  “That is not in fact what kills her.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Tch.” A teacher’s frown. “Heavenly choirs.”

  So strange, these formal and tangential memos, without contractions and with small clear spaces sheltering them. As if she never found a home in English, though she has no other address.

  Or is self-absorption all the key that’s needed? Living in an all-consuming drama that only occasionally needs to be spoken aloud. Another is part audience, part bit player—part neither, just someone left out in the lobby, catching stray bits of dialogue when an usher opens the door. You haven’t begun to fathom mental illness until you grasp the monstrous self-absorption it inflicts on its victims—like a giant snake, it forces us to swallow ourselves whole, digesting every facet of what we were in slow coils of peristaltic rumination.

  “I am glad to see you feeling better. Someone said you stopped treatment.”

  An accusation, clearly. And beyond that: a judgement and a sentence.

  Either way, not requiring an answer.

  We leave when Judy begins checking her watch repeatedly, murmuring of “lunch” and “noontime pills.” Clocks, meals, meds: treatment. But she spurns my offer of a drive to her group home off Danforth.

  “My brother bought me a GO pass. So I could visit her.”

  One way of making sure someone does.

  “Fine, but that works like tickets. You won’t lose anything if I drop you off this time.”

  “Max told me to use the pass.”

  Max. With that prickle of adjustment asking to be scratched.

  Yet, when I drop her at the Kennedy GO station, she walks in her slow stately way around to my side of the car. I roll down the window.

  “Could you pick me up tomorrow morning? They told me I have to clear her room.”

  “What time?” No reaction. “How about ten o’clock?”