The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  I did not resist as the orderlies shoved me into it, pulling my single arm across my torso and buckling it behind me so tightly that I could hear the squeak of protesting bone. I was lifted to my feet and rabbit-punched in my kidney, just for fun. Dobbin’s wide eyes glared past Scrimm’s sopping handkerchief, while Scrimm shook his little round skull.

  “Acting up will get you nowhere, Mr. Zipp—except to the Back Ward. And you won’t much like it there, I guarantee. My, my, my, my, my.”

  III.

  AS FAR BACK IN TIME as I’d traveled down Plato Manor’s hallway, the Back Ward (the capital letters were inherent in its syllabification) was farther back still. Sikes and Glover roughhoused me into the snaking fog, down a sidewalk that split the campus into hemispheres, past a small hilltop cemetery, and into a structure crouched like a hog barn. Inside, the floors were dingier and the light dimmer than any state-supported building in 1985 ought to have been, though my impression, firming by the second, was that no one beyond the unluckiest of Bear Claw patients and personnel had visited the Back Ward in decades.

  I was pushed through a swinging gate and steel door, then down a chiaroscuro hallway puddled with blobs of butter-yellow light, which illuminated, in brief flashes, foreboding details: grooves along the walls, which I attributed to fingernails; iron rings to which straitjackets could be clipped; doors, on rails, that could be slammed shut should someone make a break. Each cell door we passed had a plastic window, against which mental invalids watched me pass, hot breath muddying faces into abstractions. A nurse passed with a pair of glasses, a hearing aid, and a set of false teeth upon a tray—all potential hazards, supposed I, though I felt bad for the sightless, soundless, tasteless patient left in the dark like a grub.

  A door clanged open, and I was pushed through it. I managed not to fall, only by ramming full-speed into the back wall. The surface wasn’t hard; as decades of melodramatic clichés had promised, all surfaces were padded with squares of leather-covered cork. Sikes and Glover bade no cheerio. The door was slammed and locked before I could flop my torso, armless now due to the straitjacket, to face the front.

  I let my back slide to the floor, also coated with cushions, these much dirtier. I assessed the quarters: six feet wide, eight feet long, and without furniture, doorknob, or window, aside from the one aimed back into the hallway. So featureless was the cell that in minutes I’d begun to lose my internal compass and even a belief in gravity. Could it be that I was not at the edge of a room but rather falling down some unfathomable hole?

  If so, thought I, good. My extraction from the world had been tooth from gum—painful, yes, but the dentist was patting my hand now, telling me it was all over, the decay having been removed at the root. The Back Ward was not as dark as I would have liked (overhead lights were protected under safety glass), nor as quiet (the reverberant din of hooting, laughing, and sobbing was indissoluble). But secluded it was, which meant I’d achieved what I’d set out to do. Here I could atone with zero risk of harming anyone. I spent the balance of the day trying to feel satisfied about that.

  Night was better. The lights shut off, and most of the patients quieted. I lay upon the floor, ignoring the jab of straitjacket buckles, and ordered myself not to imagine the comforts that had become custom over a sleepless century—for instance, that Wilma Sue, not yet my slayer, snored, warm and happy beside me. So keen was I on this plan that for a solid hour I pretended I wasn’t hearing what I was hearing. From the cell to my right I could hear a patient, who sounded like a mere lad, talking to himself. Unlike the distorted yammers heard throughout the day, his words I could make out so clearly that achieving repose became impossible. I sighed, opened my eyes, and acquiesced to following the one-sided conversation.

  “No, I am happy to see you. Really I am.” Pause. “It’s just, I’m embarrassed, is all. I’m—look where I am. They think I’m crazy.” Pause. “That’s nice of you to say. But, you know, maybe they’re right. Maybe I—” Pause. “I’m just saying that you being here, it’s not going to help any. They’re going to hear me talking to you. They’ll ask me who you are.” Pause. “I know that. Don’t you think I know that? I’m just no good at lying. They’ll trick me, and it’ll just come out: ‘I’m talking to Jesus Christ.’ And once I say that, I’m done for.”

  I wished my arm were free so that I could smack it upon my forehead. Classic Finch luck: locked away at last and filed alongside a religious nut! I gnashed my jaws and hummed a medley I’d collaged during my overlong death—the Soothing Foursome, Cab Calloway, Artie Shaw, the Beau-Ts, “Beat It”—each tune a link in a chain of pain, but worth the chaining if it blocked these maddening insipidities.

  “I know, Jesus. Your friendship means the world to me.” Pause. “All I’m saying is that you don’t know what it’s like to be trapped.” Pause. “Right. Crucifixion. I guess you do know.” Pause. “Just that, you know, maybe this isn’t the best time. Could you come back once I’m better? Once I’m back in—” Pause. “No, I definitely don’t think we should sing. It’ll wake everyone up, and the nurses will come and they’ll be so mad at me—” Pause. “Okay. One verse. Just one verse, okay? And then maybe you can go?”

  Believe it or not, Reader, the goaded boy began to sing.

  “Praise Gød, from Whom all blessings flow. / Praise Him, all creatures here below—”

  I rammed my head against the wall, and the irritation broke out.

  “There is no Jesus, you warbling idiot! His is a tall tale told by the weak-willed wanting to believe that their rotten souls will be saved! This is simply understood, is it not? All right, then, church is over! I should think you ought to sleep quite soundly now, as will everyone else who has the misfortune of being caged in your vicinity. Good night to you, sir!”

  The singing had cut off. I waited. I listened. At last, an unhappy murmur:

  “There is a Jesus.”

  And then, this forlorn fellow began to cry.

  It was a pitiful sound, a random tumble of fingers across the highest piano keys. Some wails slide into comfortable grooves from frequency of habit, but these sobs came despite the sobber’s bravest efforts of suppression. I heard every brittle hitch of backbone, every choke of snot, every popped bubble of saliva upon slobbery lips. It was awful, Reader, just awful.

  “I apologize,” muttered I. “Did you hear me?”

  “No. . . . I’m sorry. . . .”

  “You don’t have to be sorry,” snapped I. “You’re crazy.”

  “I am. . . . Yes, I am. . . .”

  Time builds a mirror maze that reflects back your most repellent moments. Look! There is Little Johnny Grandpa, having caned himself into my Pageant of Health tent, mewling for the mercy of a single kind word. And look, there I am as well, close-lipped and cruel. I pivoted to the pernicious present: I couldn’t allow another boy to blame himself for tortures of which he was blameless.

  “I did not mean it. You’re not crazy. I was wrong. There is a Jesus. There is a Jesus and he is here with us.”

  “Really?” sniffled the boy. “You saw him, too?”

  “I did. I saw him. He was glorious.”

  A shuffling noise tracked the boy as he crept closer to the wall. I rested my ear against the cork wall so that I would not miss his confession.

  “Don’t tell Jesus,” whispered he, “but I wish he hadn’t come.”

  He cried no more that night. Lights flooded before daybreak, a signal at which we, human livestock, lowed for our morning feed. For an hour, the banging open of doors proceeded down the hall until two orderlies, both of them new to me, opened my door, consulted a clipboard, released me from my straitjacket, and set upon my floor a tiny paper cup containing Dr. Dobbin’s prescribed dose of Moban. I presumed it a tit-for-tat: I swallow the drugs, they release me from the Back Ward. As I wanted no such thing, I stared until they wrote a note on the clipboard, removed the drugs, and moved to the next cell.

  The boy fared better in the daytime, despite the harrying howls
and rude rattles of the ward’s wakeful. I heard him eat a gloppy meal that did not require silverware and glug water that no doubt flushed antipsychotics into his system. In the afternoon, I even heard soft snores as he made up for the night’s negotiations. It was easy to picture his sleeping body as frail and harmless, though I knew one did not get tossed into the Back Ward without biting a nose or something of the sort. The boy was troubled and hazardous; being both myself, I granted him clemency.

  Night brought with it the return of Jesus. I secured a prime position against our shared wall and interposed myself into the discussion, if that’s what you wish to call it, taking care not to be offensive to the savior—the boy, after all, believed in him with a vengeance—but rather redirecting the boy down duller, safer conversational byways: the weather (of which we had no sense), sports (for which I feigned enthusiasm), and television programming (about which I knew nothing). It brought me unexpected satisfaction to lure the boy from a plodding chorus of  “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” so that he could describe to me the premise of Knight Rider, a TV lark about a crime fighter who tootles around in a talking car.

  Undiluted hogwash, though I reacted as if episode details held the secrets of life. Before the night was through, the significance to me of this nameless, faceless boy had grown to Mount Saint Helens size. Here, near literal cliffs that might as well have been those of humanity itself, the boy seemed to be the last human being in the world. My path thereby clarified. The devil Zebulon Finch might yet earn wings for himself—not leathered as usual, but feathered. Love, I told myself yet again, still mattered, and if I’d righted the scales with Merle, I might even tip them in my favor if I fathered this wretched soul.

  “That’s it, sleep,” whispered I as the boy began to yawn. “I shall keep watch o’er the long, darkling eve.”

  Over subsequent nights, my successes diminished. The tenor of the boy’s pleas suggested that Jesus Christ was being harsher regarding expectations of jubilation. Whatever grip the apparition had on the boy was a rigid one. The boy wept and atoned and sang, while other patients howled for him to shut up, and my own begging for Knight Rider updates went unfulfilled.

  Hence it was with gratitude that I identified a partner in my efforts. On my fifth night—each night purchased with four-times-a-day refusals of Moban—the midnight hour was interrupted by the lock-clanking arrival of a night janitor. This itself was not unusual; what was unusual was the man’s behavior. Between the hiss of cleaning liquid to plastic and the splat of mop to floor, the man murmured greetings to insomniacs and chuckled at their delighted replies—they’d missed him. Though the janitor spoke only Spanish, I gathered from his conciliatory tone that a personal matter had drawn him away for a while, but he was back, and sí, sí, sí, it was muy bueno to see you, too.

  By pressing my nose to my window, I could watch his approach. He was roughly thirty, absurdly short, shaped like a block, mustachioed, and with black hair greased back from a broad forehead. This was his second job if not his third; when not whispering hellos, he was yawning and massaging sleepy eyes. His obvious need for income made his risktaking all the more gallant. We under seclusion order were not to be addressed, and yet address us he did, and why? Because he was what I could only pretend to be: good.

  The janitor knew better than I that the boy, blubbering as he did through hallelujahs, required special attention. Every night, he’d lean his mop against the wall, knuckle the boy’s window until he was noticed, and then, in a soft, lovely bass, overwhelm Jesus’s hosannas by singing a song.

  Duérmete, mi niño,

  duérmete solito,

  que cuando despiertes

  te daré atolito.

  Duérmete, mi niño,

  duérmete, mi sol,

  duérmete pedazo

  de mi corazón.

  How many millions of Spanish-speaking children had been sung to sleep by this lullaby? The seraphic drifting of these small souls imbued the nocturne with an incantatory force that, almost without fail, brought the boy down from hymnal heights for overdue slumber. The janitor would sing it as many times as needed; one night he sang for over an hour. By the time he moved on, his mop splatting down the hall, I too was so consoled that I wondered if the power to sleep had been returned to me as well.

  Three weeks of this twilight canticle did what years of psychiatric work might have failed at. One morning, without preamble, the boy’s Back Ward sentence concluded. The sounds were curt: his door creaking open, the cushion squeaking as he stood, his footfalls fading down the hall, the distant salvos of gates opening and closing. I was relieved and happy; I was trepidatious. The boy was out of the thickest thicket, but even sparse groves provided cover within which Jesus Christ, or other blackguards, might lurk. If I were to continue to protect this boy, as I’d sworn to myself, I would need to get out as well.

  IV.

  A FEARSOME PREDAWN RACKET FROM A room at the end of the hall further prodded me to decamp the Back Ward. It originated not from cajoling staff or wailing patient but a machine, one booming like artillery barrage even as it whined like a truck engine pushed to extremes. By morning lights, I’d retreated to a corner; I hadn’t suffered sounds of such mechanized malice since the days of Dr. Leather decapitating dogs and crisping corpses. A childlike lobe of my brain dubbed the unseen space the Thunder Room—where bad boys go to be punished.

  My new intent was to be good. The Thunder Room quieted before orderlies made their first scheduled invasion, and they jumped back when I moved toward the Moban. I held up my hand to assure them that attack was not the plan, knelt beside the paper cup, and tipped the pills into my mouth. My throat bobbed, and I gave the two fellows my sunniest smile of fraternity.

  “He’s cheeking them,” said one.

  “We’re not stupid,” said the other.

  The beady-eyed boars were cleverer than they looked. They closed and locked the door, and for recompense did not visit again for a day. I spat the Moban, lodged them into a cushion crease, and dwelled upon my freshman ruse, nervous that the crunch and squeal of the Thunder Room would resume. It didn’t, and the next morning, when the orderlies returned, skeptical now, I transferred the pills to my palm, and in clear view placed one at a time upon my tongue and swallowed them. Each one clicked against Johnny’s marble inside my stomach.

  The orderlies scribbled notes. When they reappeared for the day’s second dose, a nurse had joined them to authenticate. At the third dose, a doctor came, peering importantly with his superior eyes. After I’d swallowed the day’s fourth and final dose—twenty Mobans in all, enough to bury the golden aggie—they were convinced. I waited out the night and was relieved when, once again, the Thunder Room squall failed to return. Had I imagined it?

  At daybreak a host of Bear Claw’s finest, including Sikes and Glover, deployed across my room to guard against funny business. The attending doctor explained that I was being extended “grounds privileges” with the rest of “gen pop.” Should I thrive, other privileges would follow: bath privileges, shaving-razor privileges, kitchen privileges, various other concessions for which I had no use. I gave the performance they wanted, shaping a smile of eager bewilderment as if, properly Mobaned, I was seeing the light. They gave their version of applause: they parted like an opening fence and gestured me toward the glow of the hallway’s end.

  I was unable to verify the existence of the Thunder Room.

  Orderlies gave me a modicum of privacy to exchange Merle’s hooded sweatshirt and trousers for a pocketless, zippered khaki jumpsuit and laceless canvas shoes, after which they shoved me outdoors. The Atlantic Ocean was hidden by a twenty-foot fence, thick boscage, and forest, but the sun drooping over all of it came at me like a fireball. My mental picture of Bear Claw had been one of perpetual fog, but here it was, almost April and bright as a dissection table. The institution’s layout became evident. Plato Manor, the most palatial building, was the point of an arrowhead from which swept eastward two rows of three-story, G
othic-design wards, four to the north, four to the south, the broad end of the triangle being the Back Ward from which I’d emerged.

  Someone had placed into my hand a piece of paper. Across the top was typed Zipp, Frank (Male)—say, that was me!—and, next to it, the code KANT-17. This doubled, guessed I, as both inmate number and room assignment, and I could not muster surprise. Seventeen: the number had chased me this far, so why not until the bitter end? Below ran a list of locations recognizable from childhood lessons as also named after classical philosophers. What I held, realized I, was a schedule, and I, like a lad on his first day at university, would be tasked with finding Descartes-60. I was the least happy of campers, for such responsibilities would only complicate finding a boy I’d heard but never seen, and from whom I, master detective, had never thought to request a name.

  My fellow pupils, however, were no jim-dandies competing for nods from august professors. I floated down the sidewalk, the loose jumpsuit and lack of Excelsior making me weightless, and took in a sprawling yard peopled by perhaps one hundred patients, some sprinting with limbs a-flail to their own obligations, but most wandering circles around weatherworn gazebos, kicked-to-shit benches, and unshorn shrubs, while yakking with figmental companions—Christlike or Hitlerian, who could say? When one strayed too close to a fence, men called mental hygiene assistants clipped him back onto the playing field like goalies.

  Bear Claw had been designed as a self-sufficient world; I could appreciate Scrimm’s elegy for its decline. Two of the water tower’s six legs were infected with corrosion that listed its swollen head toward Europe. The former greenhouse had become a taped-off death trap of splinterized glass. A dairy barn had devolved into a graveyard of forgotten trade machines: printing presses, laundry folders, sauerkraut vats, stockyard hooks. Disused storage sheds still held seasonal paintings by bygone patients that twenty years of winters had deformed into monstrosities: Santa Claus gone feral, the Easter Bunny gone rabid.