The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “Not him. The other one. The third one.”

  With that, he bounded to the right, but I shifted to block the path, and he drew back, holding high his bandaged fingertips as if they were whetted blades. The color of his jumpsuit was not incidental, I reminded myself. This boy had done things. For one single second, I believed that I saw in his sad eyes a hollow blackness and heard in the grind of his jaw the clash of cutlery. I held out a steadying hand.

  “I wish only to be your friend.”

  “He’s closer now. A lot closer. You don’t understand.”

  “I, too, have believed things that in the light of day were proven fantastical. Just as you hear these demons of yours, I once heard the voice of a dead friend coming from a book of poetry.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  This time he led with his shoulder toward my weaker, armless side, giving me no option but to cede the path. Ry’s jumpsuit had polka-dotted with perspiration, and he trembled so much that he could barely grip the door handle; only a lucky grab kept him from tripping over his own feet. Halfway out the door, he hesitated, then spoke without turning.

  “Frank, right? Frank Zipp? Look, you’re being nice. I know that, and it’s real friendly of you. But ask for a new room, okay? It’s going to get worse, trust me, and you don’t want to be anywhere near me when he comes.”

  VI.

  THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN THE end of it if Kant hadn’t been added to the cleaning schedule of one benevolent janitor. I recognized his shushed holas to nocturnal patients; I even recognized the plop of his mop, which he applied lightly in deference to sleepers. His appearance coincided with a bad patch for Ry, whose late-night blubbers to Jesus had gone viscid with sobs. I watched each night as the janitor brought his face to Ry’s window and did his Duérmete, mi niño bit, just like old times. Its efficacy, however, had waned. When the clock compelled the janitor to move on, he’d pause at my window to wave hello, his forehead knotted in a way that posed a question: What are we going to do about Ry Burke?

  One hot August night, while being tortured by a coerced butchering of  “Amazing Grace,” I heard a soft click at my door and saw the ducking of a brow of slicked-back hair. I got up, alert for ambush, but could hear nothing beyond Ry’s hymn. I tried my doorknob and found it unlocked. I opened it, recalling what it felt like to have a pounding heart, and peeked at the nurse station midway down the hall. The nurse was not at her post; one of her romance novels sat splayed on the desk. It baffled me until I saw, at the far end of the hall, a lumen of moonlight off freshly mopped flooring. The janitor: he was down there distracting the nurse with belabored bits of English.

  It was a bluff meant to facilitate my exit from room 17. But why, and to where? I cowered in puzzlement until I was taken with a hunch. I tried the knob of room 18, and it turned as freely as mine had. I took one last astounded look at the janitor before entering. What kind of man was this who would risk his job, if not outright arrest, to conduce the potential peace of caged lunatics he barely knew?

  So fantastic was my presence that Ry finished singing rather than believe it.

  “We’ve no less days to sing Gød’s praise / Than when we’d first begun.”

  With bandaged fingertips, he rubbed at his teary eyes. “Frank? You’re inside my room?”

  I gestured for him to keep his voice down and lowered myself, slowly so as not to spook him, to the foot of his bed. There was no other furniture; that his room was as bald as mine struck me as grievously sad. Such apathy toward life was not the rightful fortune of a young man in his prime. Oh, to reach the age of twenty-three and waste it away like this.

  “We shall talk,” said I. “That is all I propose.”

  “But . . .”

  Ry’s eyes flicked above me, where he could see the impatient Jesus.

  “Our savior,” said I, “has waited two thousand years to return. He will wait an hour or two more.”

  Ry laughed—the sound of life, Reader, a wild howl of wind through a crevice.

  “But what . . . I mean, what would we talk about?”

  This poor, blinkered boy! Were it only possible that I could cut from my belly salty slices of my century’s consumption so that he could taste it. Even in the brief span traveling between Tranquility’s Country Home and the Edgerton Home for the Aging, I’d seen enough of the new decade to keep any red-blooded boy’s mind swirling: pop-culture queens like Madonna, a lingerie-clad chanteuse who wore belts emblazoned with “Boy Toy” even as she postured like a dominatrix; painters like Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose frenetic hellscapes depicted America with higher emotional accuracy than any others I’d seen; TV tricksters like David Letterman, a goofy-grinned subversive out to suicide-bomb the very institutions who’d installed him to power.

  Inside Bear Claw, though, all was gray, monotheistic, a feedback loop.

  “We can talk about us.” I shrugged. “Us is all we have.”

  Ry gave me careful appraisal.

  “All right,” said he. “What are you in for?”

  “That,” chuckled I, “would require a lengthy answer.”

  It was the right reply; his chapped lips shrugged into something close to a smile as he realized that, for the moment, we’d scared off Jesus with nothing mightier than idle chit-chat. In Burt Churchwell terms, the Game had begun and I had the ball—so I’d better run with it. Thus I recited to Ry Burke the same curriculum vitae I’d recited to Superintendent Scrimm, fairy tales that Ry didn’t believe for a second but that the dry sponge of his brain was eager to soak up as fantastic fiction. He gasped at World War I adventures, giggled at Jazz Age gin-joint follies, nodded solemnly at indescribable Nazi horrors that I nevertheless described. He shied away but once, as I described Barringer’s crater. He hated meteors, he said.

  It was a peculiar thing to hate, and so I asked him about it. Though he refused to speak of past traumas—to name demons, he was positive, was to summon them—he did, by accident, rediscover the cardinal pleasure of limbering one’s tongue. He spoke, slowly at first, and of topics, I admit, of low interest, but the dawning delight in his eyes was to me the first catch of flame after days spent trying to light a fire in winter woods.

  Being an acute admissions ward, Kant had night watchmen who made rounds to ensure patients were not swinging dead from the ceiling. Our janitor, of course, knew this, and the watchman’s approach was precipitated by the janitor’s key-jingling jog down the hall, which I took as my cue to return to room 17, leap into bed, and listen for the cluck of my dead bolt, as well as Ry’s. The enterprise was dicey. Were the three of us caught, it would be presumed that the janitor was facilitating homosexual activity, and the penalty would be to fire the janitor and separate the patients, thereby leaving Ry all alone to face his stygian hectors.

  Yet roughly once per week, after Jesus had burrowed back into Kant-18 and Ry was audibly agonized, the janitor would find a way to distract the night nurse after unlocking our doors, and I’d zip into Ry’s room, perch upon his mattress, and coax from him stories that were free of anguish. These tales of monkeyshines with his little sister and schoolyard shenanigans with childhood pals were duller than dirt, but he loved to tell them and I loved to listen. Pretend these are your stories, I urged myself. Pretend such innocence was yours.

  Even anecdotes of tedium were finite, and there was, a few months after we began, panic that our ship had run aground. But I chanced upon the topic of Bear Claw’s history, and Ry responded eagerly. Shortly after being shipped to Maine and stabilized on Thorazine, he’d spent countless hours in Bear Claw’s library and, more to the point, its archives, which would have been sealed shut had Bear Claw not laid off their last librarian. The promise of entertaining me provided Ry with motive enough to hatchet through his druggy smother. He did incredible things. He left his room. He traversed hallways. He opened doors. He greeted administrators. He spent hour after hour raiding the archives. He slipped choice documents into his jumpsuit and had moxie enough to stow them beneath a loo
se chunk of cement under his bed. He did not make it back to A.M. Analytic, but who cared? I was proud of his progress, and of my part in it.

  Untold were the moonlit hours we spent huddled over his weekly hoards of dusty documents typed with brutal black ink onto fleshlike parchments. Some records dated back to when Barraclough Psychiatric Center was known as Barraclough State Hospital for the Feeble-Minded. Some hailed from a time further bygone, when the institute went under the blunt banner of Barraclough Lunatic Asylum. The years Otto Rahn and Udo von Lüth had spent looking for Hell had been wasted; it had been right here in Maine.

  The oldest epistles debated such Enlightenment-era practices as whipping, starvation, and bleedings. Stenciled charts tracked a swelling patient population across early-twentieth-century decades I knew too well. Then, starting in the 1950s, decline. Carbon copies of memoranda traced Scrimm’s frantic oaring against a tide of exposés. This came to a head in 1963, when President Kennedy—that good chap who’d assured me that there is no greater purpose in life than saving your fellow man, which I was trying so hard to do—honored his sister Rosemary, whose outbursts were “solved” by a lobotomy in 1941, by spearheading a shift from state hospitals to the community centers the superintendent so detested.

  So fell the house of Scrimm. For the twenty-two years preceding my admission, his fiefdom fell siege to the same power-brokers whose displeasing progeny Scrimm had kept from public view—and this was the thanks he got? Bear Claw’s population crashed by sixty percent. Patients once deemed insane were, by JFK’s new regulations, lucid enough to report to health centers that were unprepared, understaffed, and often shuttered within months. Articles from the Portland Press Herald, likely clipped by Scrimm’s own hand, told of the rocketing number of homeless and their obscene rate of mental illness. It did not please me to sympathize with Scrimm’s perspective, but the evidence was coercive. How much better were cardboard shanties beneath highway overpasses than Back Ward isolation cells?

  Pictures made physical the threats of text. Among Ry’s discovered boxes of photo prints were images struck when the campus had been kept by the northeast’s best gardeners, each sidewalk hugged by straight white pines, each building frocked by black-eyed Susans and tiger lilies so hale that their canary and tiger colors nearly bled through the black-and-white. These were promotional images; not so the interior shots. Because Bear Claw did not go coed until 1969, the photos taken inside the facility featured only boys and men, some caught off-guard, others staring into the lens as if aware it was pinning their souls to paper like butterflies to a lepidopterist’s board. They were massed for exercise, spiffed for Minstrel recitals, curled naked on dayroom floors. They did not sit still for photos: over and over, their heads, and only their heads, were smeared, eyes distended into cyclopic ovals, mouths stretched into giant screaming holes.

  I did the turning of pages. Ry’s fingers, even out of bandages, were too tender to use. The gentle boy, realized I, had yanked out his fingernails so that they would be less able to harm others when the third demon demanded it. Still he passed those fingertips across the blurry faces, as if to push aside what looked like fleshy tumors. I’d never met anyone whose thoughts were so easy to read. Ry believed that he too was being blurred, as if an eraser were rubbing across his face every day he spent at Bear Claw. A few years longer, and there would be nothing left of him. Would it matter? Would anyone care?

  It did, and I would. My affiliation with Ry might have begun as an act of contrition, but that had changed. Like Jackie, I loved the boy—nothing more complicated or less profound than that. At last there was a blessing to my overlong death: I had time to become the pencil that drew Ry Burke back into history. If I’ve done anything worthwhile with these pages, Dearest Reader, isn’t that it? To immortalize mortals that time would otherwise forget? By talking through Bear Claw’s past with Ry, I believe I helped him acknowledge that his past, too, was real, and true, and worthwhile, and rested along the same timeline as the past, and, by logical extension, the future, inside which he, in fact, belonged.

  One December night, after a night watchman made an early turn toward our wing and we heard the janitor come jogtrotting, I slipped out of Ry’s room and ran straight into the man. His short stature planted his nose into my sternum. We both startled; the janitor whispered an apology in Spanish and stepped back so I could access my room. I started in that direction but hesitated. Never had this noble fellow and I met, or spoken, or looked upon each other free from a barrier of unbreakable plastic.

  “Zebulon Finch.”

  The introduction was impulsive. He deserved my real name.

  The watchman’s footfalls echoed louder from the east, while the night nurse’s steps, eager to return to her romance novel, made the same threat from the west. It was a moment of electric duress, yet the janitor took the time to grin, a row of crooked teeth emerging from beneath black mustache bristles. He bowed and patted the breast of a work shirt splotched from years of cleaning corrosives.

  “Héctor,” said he.

  VII.

  FIXING RY’S EYES TO HIS own existence became my full-time job. Three years passed by like schooners glimpsed through a fog, though unlike my Bear Claw brethren, my fog I couldn’t blame on meds. Whereas Ry’s medications kept dividing like square-dancers into fresh pairings, my prescription resolved into a single red pill I took only twice a day (huzzah!), but which was almost the size of a grapefruit (boo!). These Red Heavies, as I styled them, collected inside my stomach gram by gram, until yours truly, if you can believe it, actually began to pack on a few pounds.

  The official Bear Claw ruling on Frank Zipp came down in early 1986. It put forward that I suffered a “dissolution of the capitalist self” and “eccentric ideations,” and that my background of grandiose fantasy, emotional detachment, precipitant aggression, sulky condescension, and obsession with death equaled a diagnosis—a disappointingly average one, if you ask me—of paranoid schizophrenia. I had a good laugh at that. Paranoid? Isn’t that what they call those who believe Gød is after them? I did not believe it, Reader; I knew it.

  To shame me for my ongoing refusal to retract a single detail of my fanciful biography, Dobbin, his bandages gone but schnoz scarred with teeth-mark semicircles, read aloud my analysis in A.M. Analytic, not that anyone gave a hoot. Bobbi interrupted twice to effuse about Deal-a-Meal, an exciting new diet product from fitness guru Richard Simmons; Chad exhaled antacid dust before racing through non-sequiturs; Lucky scratched at a leather helmet worn thin in the usual spot; and Jackie jerked about as if only invisible tethers kept her from stabbing the lot of us. Their madrigals of dementia, neurosis, ferment, and melancholia were more discordant than those of Gesualdo, but to my ears so much sweeter. They were the friends, if not the family, I’d so long deserved.

  Dobbin, however, had a rare talent at needling, and so I borrowed a page from Jackie’s book and began using dayhall markers to write words on my forehead in lieu of speaking. Had Ry suffered a relapse that week, my head might read CONFUSED or FURIOUS. Had we achieved progress, it might read, I’M FINE. It was the one means of honest communication I had, though I was aware of its fringe benefit: it made me seem wildly off my nut, which, as Rigby had cautioned, was key if I wished to avoid dismissal.

  I acquired a calendar and with a methodology of Ruthie Ness rigor scheduled misbehaviors for the first weekend of every month. Violence wasn’t needed; any mad-hattering would do. In August 1986, I clambered up a wall in Descartes and hung upside-down from a water pipe to sing “I Wish I Was in Dixie.” In November 1986, I raided the kitchen of condiments, used them to fill a bathtub, and introduced it to nurses as my friend Eleanor Roosevelt. In February 1987, I let orderlies chase me to the Hobbes attic, to which I’d gained access and, beneath a tabernacle of exhaust flues, had transcribed the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence in feces.

  I’d been far crazier at Savage Ranch, but I put up a good show.

  My sanity I hoarded for Ry
, for madness regularly punctured Bear Claw’s order. Some bloke makes off with a knife—what idiot staffer brought in a knife?—and turns into a dust devil of slashing steel, warning every nigger, slut, Commie, and cunt to stay the hell back. Prison protocol slams into effect, reminding us where and who we are, with lock-down bells and PA warnings, and if there are injuries, ambulance sirens and the clatter of stretcher wheels and IV racks over broken sidewalk.

  Scenes like these somersaulted Ry into despair. Trapped with loonies, he, by logical extension, must have been a loon, and to whom could a loon turn but Jesus? I’ll tell you to whom—me. If Héctor didn’t smell trouble himself, I’d tap my door window and gesture urgently, and he’d expedite an intervention as soon as possible. Once inside Ry’s room, I’d display my reaction to Bear Claw’s latest flap with a forehead memo (OH, SHUT UP or TAKE ME NEXT) and elicit from the scared, skinny boy a smile, which shone from hardened fear like crystals from inside a geode.

  My century of failings bespoke that to be humane one must partake in humanity. If Ry was halfway lucid, I’d drag him to Bear Claw celebrations. Together we attended a Christmas social complete with a locally chopped evergreen flattened behind a steel grate so the ornaments couldn’t become shivs; an Easter egg hunt ruined by an Easter Bunny unable to resist unzipping his costume to masturbate; and a gen-pop summer shindig held in the gymnasium, at which Ry was asked to slow-dance by a girl so consumed with her acne (she had none) that she’d rubbed her face with sandpaper before coming. Whitney Houston’s “One Moment in Time” faded out, and Ry returned to me trembling, with a shirt-front stippled with the girl’s blood.

  Troubling, yes, but as I blotted with cocktail napkins, I reminded him that he hadn’t been the bloodletter. Three years, Dearest Reader, each day dedicated to outflanking the archfiends, real and imagined, of this boy I’d come to cherish as much as I had Wilma Sue, Church, anyone. From the time of the stock market crash of 1987 (you and I saw worse in 1929, eh?) until George Herbert Walker Bush’s pummeling of Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election, Ry became stable enough that I believed he might be cured. His sister, a winsome blonde named Sarah, was so encouraged by his progress that she began visiting every few weeks, and oh, how eagerly he recounted to me her every piece of news, from the mystifying “break-dancing” skills of Sarah’s fiancé to how neither sibling approved of their mother’s new boyfriend.