The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  Wayne Kesterson, of course, was amazed and grateful to receive this news. “Un-fucking-believable,” he kept telling the St. Matthew’s nurses. Not that he doubted the story. But he had to keep explaining it to himself in order for the truth to sink in: Mr. Stottlemeir had been idiotic and crazy for many years. Now, with the right medication, he’d come to his senses.

  It was agonizing to wait for the bus after work on Friday. How awful it would be to see Mr. Stottlemeir again. But how disappointing it would be—crushing really—for Mr. Stottlemeir to be absent from the rows of passengers.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, he was there, same row, same window-side bench. The seat beside him was open. Wayne took it. For a few wintry miles he could do nothing but rack his mind for an innocent observation to share. “Four more weeks of winter,” he said at last. “I’ll be glad to be done with it. How ’bout you?”

  Mr. Stottlemeir tightened his regal expression. He seemed willing to acknowledge that someone had spoken to him, but for the time being he wasn’t ready to reply.

  “I work at St. Matthew’s,” Wayne said, more forcefully. “I’m in with the housekeeping crew. What I do is polish the floors.”

  Mr. Stottlemeir sat back a few inches in his seat. He turned his head and braved a quick glance at Wayne.

  “In a hospital,” Wayne said. “The floors have to be kept clean and shiny. It reassures people. So I polish. I clean up the messes. And I show up on time each morning.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Stottlemeir said. “Yes, you do.” His voice sounded raspy, unused.

  “I do my work.”

  Outside there were knots of people shivering within a mud-splattered bus shelter. Every time they opened their mouths plumes of foggy breath escaped them.

  “I pay my taxes, too,” Wayne said. “Federal and state.”

  “Good for you,” Mr. Stottlemeir said, weakly.

  “But some people, they think that if you’re not a brain surgeon then you’re not worth talking to. You’re a nobody. Or worse than that. A loser. A screwup.” He waited. His hands were trembling. “They think you’re a stinking puddle of piss.”

  From Mr. Stottlemeir came a slow and rather dreamy fluttering of the eyelids. He cocked his head to the side and concentrated on Wayne’s remark. “No, no,” Mr. Stottlemeir said. “They’d be wrong, if they said that. They’d be wrong, wouldn’t they?”

  Something about the politeness of this attention undid Wayne. One moment he was all right, the next he was pitched forward with his mouth hanging open, his face pressed against the forward seat, long, heaving breaths—all the way to the Friendly Village and beyond.

  The tract of land formerly known as Kindermann Forest Summer Camp appeared on the commercial real estate market in February 1997. It made for an altogether impressive listing: one hundred and sixteen acres (some wooded, some cleared), an access throughway to Barker Lake, a fifty-meter swimming pool and shower house, four large sleeping cabins, an expansive kitchen and dining hall, an infirmary and camp office, two single-unit sleeping cottages, a stable and wrangler’s quarters, two pavilions, five enclosed utility sheds. The price had been set at two and a half million dollars. According to the real estate agent, Schuller Kindermann preferred that the property be sold to individuals interested in operating an arts and crafts, nature, and Christian faith summer camp. He most definitely did not want the grounds and facilities turned into a commercial sports camp, of which there were already several in the Missouri Ozarks region. If necessary, he was willing to turn down offers.

  For a long while there were no offers to turn down. During the summer of 1997 the camp was rented out for family reunions and company retreats. This turned out to be a wasted effort. The money collected didn’t cover the liability insurance premiums. That fall the herd of sixteen trail horses was sold off, and Reggie Boyd, who lived in the director’s cottage and watched over the property, was released from his duties. The metal gate at the entrance to Kindermann Forest was closed, wound with chain, and locked shut.

  Seven years later a retired heart surgeon from Kansas City bought the grounds for five hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars. He and his wife planned to refurbish the buildings and open a Bible study camp. It never came to pass.

  By the summer of 2011 the buildings had begun to rupture. Wild shrubs sprang from every clear patch of lawn or yard. The open meadow of Kindermann Forest was lost to a drove of rangy young cedar trees. Inside the woods all four cabins were now banked beneath a crushing wave of tree limbs and bushes. Thick cords of ivy pried through the window screens into the dark inner chambers of the sleeping barracks.

  At the swimming pool a lone sycamore tree had pushed its way up from one of a hundred cracks in the pool floor. It wasn’t as impossible a place for a tree as one might think: all that dampness and uncontested sunlight.

  Still though, what a remarkable sight: a twelve-foot sapling rising up from the shallow end of an abandoned pool. It grew fast and wild and strange.

  Chapter Fifteen

  On Saturday morning she loaded into the passenger seat of her Honda Accord a handsome new piece of rollaway luggage and drove it out past the elegant brick houses of her neighborhood and onto the wide and uncrowded lanes of Kingshighway Avenue. The traffic lights shone mostly in her favor. In five minutes’ time she was rolling through a precinct of St. Louis know as The Hill, glancing now and then at the luggage belted into the seat beside her, and trailing behind a bread truck and a sprightly weekend bicyclist, past corner bars and shuttered restaurants, the bread truck and bicyclist turning right, and Harriet pushing ahead one more block and pulling up, at last, to the front security station of the Gateway Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center.

  From behind the paneled windows of the station the weekend security officer rose to his feet and nodded in recognition of Harriet, or perhaps her green Honda. He waved her in.

  Directly ahead, at the cusp of a circling blacktop lane, stood an immense and improbably beautiful brick and marble asylum built in the nineteenth century and topped by an elaborate pillared dome. You could see this building, aptly nicknamed the Dome Building, from numerous vantage points throughout South St. Louis. Sight-seers always mistook it for a state or federal courthouse. Once they learned its true purpose, they were inclined to drive along the fenced perimeter of the Gateway Psychiatric campus and scan the Dome Building’s six floors of windows in the hope of seeing an inmate’s deranged face pressed against the glass.

  Inevitably they were disappointed. But at least they still had their bleak notions of what a mental asylum interior might hold. All Harriet’s best notions had long ago been dismantled or turned inside out. She parked her car and towed the luggage by its laddering handle across the lot toward a newer region of the Gateway Psychiatric campus: a low-set and sprawling administrative building that fronted a network of redbrick living cottages. (Never mind the Dome Building, which still housed more difficult cases. Harriet hadn’t set foot inside it in nine years.) In the administration building lobby she donned her visitor’s pass, went straight to the security screening lane, and set her purse and luggage atop a viewing counter. She was the first and, thus far, only visitor of the morning, and she had to jingle the contents of her purse a few times before the weekend security guards, Maurice and Laquisha, noticed her and filed out from their windowed office.

  “We don’t open till nine in the A.M.,” Laquisha mock-scolded her. “What time your watch say, Nurse Harriet?”

  “Nine-oh-one.”

  “Hell it does. Try eight-fifty-eight. You got us off to the races two whole minutes before we ready to go.”

  “Well, giddyup then,” Harriet said.

  For this bit of teasing she was treated to Laquisha and Maurice’s sly indignation, their head-shaking disbelief and sharp, inclusive laughter. Even so, Harriet’s purse was pulled open and the contents given a thorough sift. Her empty rollaway luggage was unzipped and the nylon lining pressed and pinched, as if Laquisha were shopping at Sears and had take
n a fussy interest in the stitches and seams.

  “Step up to the line, please,” Maurice said, and once he’d powered the metal detector on, he motioned Harriet forward until she’d passed over the threshold of the machine, and he nodded his approval and said, “Thank you kindly, young lady,” a flattery he used only with middle- and late-aged black women.

  She was reunited with her purse and luggage, and off she went down a long corridor of doors and name plaques and bulletin boards until she passed through the width of the building and exited the doors at the other side. Here she followed a network of paved walkways until all at once she was in a village of sizable redbrick Gateway Living Cottages. Harriet’s destination was Living Cottage No. 8. At the front entranceway she pressed the buzzer and waited to be let in.

  On the whole what she’d seen over the years in the living cottages and the Dome Building and the administration corridors wasn’t wildly different from the things she’d seen in the long hallways of the hospitals and nursing homes in which she’d worked. If she were looking for bleakness and desperate behavior, she could find it easily enough in any of these institutions. Yet there was brighter evidence, too. The facilities at Gateway and the determined staff were a grade or two above those of most hospitals and homes. Not perfect, of course. No institution was. You could wrinkle your nose at the dissembling that went into a name like living cottage. But if you were institutionalized in the state of Missouri, it would be your good fortune to wind up in a Gateway Living Cottage. Better than a prison cell, certainly. And far better, infinitely better, than what had come before the Living Cottages: the Lunatic Asylum, the Insane Asylum, the City Sanitarium.

  The door to Living Cottage No. 8 eased open and Harriet was ushered into the Saturday morning rituals of what she’d come to think of as a large and varied family. They couldn’t be obliged or understood all at once, this family. She had to press forward into the foyer and choose her encounters carefully.

  First, a wave to the three on-duty care attendants—Mary Jo Savini, perched behind the staff station counter—and Franklin and Yvonne, who were out in the large common room guiding several residents through the rigors of morning cleanup.

  Holding tight to the station counter was B. J. Tompkins, a resident to be avoided because of his constant and anguished claims against the city’s utility services. With B.J. she averted her gaze and ignored his pleas (“That’s what I’m tellin’ you, lady. Come on, now. Come on now, lady”). His aim was to turn Harriet into the enemy spokesperson for the telephone or electric or sewer company.

  “Come on now, lady!” B.J. shouted.

  Harriet wasn’t buying. She skirted past him into the common room and found an unclaimed sofa on which to sit. Again she raised her hand in greeting to the care attendants, Franklin and Yvonne, an undemanding little wave that meant she was present and ready, when they were, to be accompanied down the hall to the residents’ living quarters.

  Nearby, at the common room activity table, several listless and sleep-disheveled men were fumbling with paper and paintbrushes and colored bowls of water. They were middle-aged gentlemen, each marked with a telltale unevenness in his gaze, a result of antipsychotic medications that tended to pool in the blood at night and made waking to the new day a formidable challenge. It was hard to imagine a less eager group of watercolor artists. But worse, somehow, to try to envision what their sense of the rackety common room might feel like: the bloated sunlight in the cottage windows, the slow crawl of time.

  Certainly there were more spirited men and women among the cottage’s ten residents. One of these, sixty-two-year-old Lucy Rose Dwyer, a staff favorite, was seated close by in a sofa chair having a hushed conversation with an absent relative or former lover or childhood friend. One could never be certain. What was obvious, at least to Harriet and the living cottage staff, was that for the past sixteen months Lucy had been speaking to these friends via a deactivated cell phone.

  “Oh, but he never did,” Lucy insisted. “He never, never did.” The lilt of her voice was pleading and vaguely southern. She cupped the phone to her chin at an odd angle. “He never did plant the sweet gum tree like he said he would. And should we be surprised? Should we, my darling . . . my dear one? No, no, no, no, no. Because he never would do what he was supposed to. For goodness’ sake. The problem—and everyone knew it, too—was that he was just very, very small. A tiny little man. He liked to slip inside things. Remember? He liked to crawl right into your shirt pocket, my dear. Zip-do-la. And there he’d be, riding around in your pocket all day long . . .”

  They were hard to resist, these monologues from Lucy Rose Dwyer. It was Lucy’s good fortune maybe that her psychosis and personality combined to produce the kind of eccentric behavior people enjoyed: her wistful, one-sided conversations, her deactivated cell phone, her tiny shirt-pocket men.

  “. . . and he was happy as a little crab in its shell, wasn’t he? As long as you didn’t ask him to weed the garden on Sunday or wash behind his little ears . . .”

  There’d been a time when Harriet had turned incidents like this into funny anecdotes. She’d trafficked these anecdotes to the outside world, to the hospital break room with her fellow nurses or out on the occasional date. After a while she lost her enthusiasm for it. Not because she thought it in bad taste. But because she’d come to realize that even her best reenactments lacked accuracy. You could mimic what was said easily enough, but you could never capture the longing that propelled these stories or the world-unto-itself conviction.

  “We had to follow him everywhere,” Lucy sighed. “Didn’t we, my darling? I’m not saying it was fair. I’m just saying it was the job we got stuck with, you and me . . . my darling . . . my dear one.”

  One of the cottage’s care attendants, lean, handsome, unperturbed Franklin, summoned Harriet from the couch and accompanied her down a short hallway to the last of several resident rooms. Any foray beyond the common room required an escort—though Franklin wasn’t necessarily along for Harriet’s protection. Visitors to the living cottages sometimes had odd notions of what might restore a friend or loved one to mental normalcy: a bit of smuggled wine or homegrown marijuana or, in rare cases, a bout of hurried sex atop the resident’s single bed.

  Franklin’s job was to monitor room visits from a cool distance. He knocked on the open door of room ten and, before stepping aside and ushering Harriet in, he shouted out a canny greeting, “Hey-yo, there. Wyatt, my good man. Your lady friend has arrived.”

  In many ways the room resembled a modern college dorm room, though this dorm room was composed of four thirteen-foot redbrick walls and a single casement window too high and narrow to crawl through. Every furnishing in the room had been meticulously set to order: the chair and desk, the bookshelf, the polished night table bearing a remote control for the thirteen-inch television bracketed into the wall. The bed had been expertly made. Atop the taut covers were three tidy stacks of folded clothing. The arranger of this clothing and the keeper of the room, Wyatt Huddy, was sitting at the foot of the bed, arms folded, his head lowered and his eyes drawn almost shut. He might have been contemplating the gleaming tile floor or the satiny tops of his running shoes. Certainly, he was aware of Harriet, though he didn’t speak her name or return her lively good morning. The signs of his gladness, his relief, were more subtle than that: his tightly squared shoulders slackened by a degree or two; the corners of his uneven mouth creased outward in what she’d long ago recognized as a grimace of intense satisfaction.

  She steered the rollaway luggage right up to the tips of his running shoes, tapped him with it once, twice, three times. “Look at this here,” she said. “It’s got wheels. You pull it right along. Like so. It’s luggage for people on the move.”

  He reached out and touched the dangling sales tags: $49.99. She’d left the tags on so he’d know he was worthy of brand-new.

  “I got my clothes ready,” he said.

  “I see that. Where’s your blue Windbreaker?”

&n
bsp; “It’s hung . . . It’s hanging in the closet.”

  “Well, let’s bring that along, too. You’ll need it in the evenings when we go out walking.”

  She stepped back and watched him rise and retrieve the Windbreaker. “And your retainer,” she said. “And toothbrush.” He veered toward the bathroom and gathered both objects. “And your scorecards, too, Wyatt. Let’s not forget those.”

  She was certain of this: he would place into the suitcase whatever she asked. He would do it without hesitation or question. It wasn’t a matter of his being stupid; from the very beginning of his confinement she’d instilled in him a habit of strict compliance. He did as he was told. If he had a grievance with a resident or care attendant, he waited to speak his mind until Harriet visited—Tuesday or Thursday evenings, most Saturday mornings. To meet her standards of cleanliness, he rose a half hour before the 8:00 A.M. staff wake-up and wiped down every bare surface in the room with a damp cloth. He swept the floor. Then he made his bed to Harriet’s exacting specifications. He performed these tasks six mornings a week. Sundays he slept until eight and then attended services in a chapel inside the administration building.