by Daniel Kraus
Beautiful days they were, though for me, equally bittersweet. I’d raised Ry as successfully as I’d failed Merle, and I knew the time approached when he would have to leave me behind. I took long walks around the neglected yards, wondering what I would do after he was dismissed. During one idyll I was nabbed and forced to participate in Bear Claw’s annual softball game between the northern and southern wards, known to longterm patients as the Cuckoos vs. the Nuts. My understanding of the sport began and ended with Detective Roseborough’s goons, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, and I indicated my missing arm to no avail; I was herded into the “home” team, the Cuckoos. Rules, anyhow, were unenforceable, with upward of twenty people on the field at a given time, several of whom, should they obtain the ball, were just as likely to eat it as throw it.
Irrespective of which team was batting, I haunted the grass between first and second, staring into its unmown lushness and, inning by inning, becoming a partner weed. There was, admitted I, a heart-beat comfort to be drawn from the smack of fist into glove and the cackle of bat to ball. Autumn daubed Bear Claw with its only color of the year, the leaves coming alive at the exact moment they were dying. I daydreamed that I was doing the same. After all, I was on the home team. Didn’t that mean I was home?
Crack! From the edge of my vision I saw the softball shoot at me, too quick for a fellow with a stomach full of Red Heavies to evade. It clobbered me in the right foot, knocking off my canvas shoe and ricocheting toward five or six second basemen. I remembered to wince as if it had hurt, knelt down to put the shoe back on, and only then saw the damage.
The three smallest toes of my right foot had been knocked clean off. I looked about and spied one of them, a gray nubbin nestled in grass. My gut clenched in bereavement; the littlest one had been Clown’s chew-toy. My own body was the only memorabilia I had left, and I reached for The Toe, only to hesitate. Some patients were fanatical observers, and should I collect anything from the ground, they would cluster, worried I’d procured contraband they hadn’t. Even should I recover all three toes, then what? Reattach them with toothpicks? Become a pastiche more repellent than I already was?
A beetle waddled up to The Toe, tickled it with its feelers. I looked away, put on the shoe, stood, and swayed. I’d need to stuff the empty space with toilet paper. Eighty-some years before, in the People Garden, Dr. Leather had projected my longevity. Why, he’d fawned, you could last over a century, maybe twice that, given variables of climate, wear and tear, et cetera. Those variables had proven drastic. Here I was, at the low end of his estimate, already so putrescent that entire chunks could be whacked off by an infield grounder.
The ballfield did not look as halcyon as it had a minute prior. The grass was promiscuous, inseminated with litter. The players did not dart, they shambled, and their benign chatter was cretin keening. In hindsight, this black-mirror switch, which happened a good hour before the game was called for darkness, the Nuts over the Cuckoos, 26–19, served as a rebuke. A place like Bear Claw could never be a happy home for the living, nor could be it be a quiet crypt for the dead.
VIII.
EQUILIBRIUM WAS SCUTTLED IN JANUARY 1990. I’d returned to the Kant dormitory to find Ry’s door open and the bed stripped of sheets. Not only had the room been emptied, but it stunk of cleaner. Conflicting emotions whiplashed me as I charged the nurse’s station. The day-shifter preferred true crime to romance, and I’d long worried I’d find her clutching a lurid paperback treatment of the Savage Tragedy, complete with exclusive pics of a cult leader who, strangely enough, looked a lot like Mr. Zipp in room 17. Today, though, it was a Satanist exposé called Michelle Remembers, which I had no problem snapping shut to gain her attention.
“Ry Burke, room 18. He’s been released?”
She did me the backbreaking favor of checking a chart.
“Moved to another ward.”
“What? Which one?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t give out that information.”
She reached for Michelle Remembers, but I snatched it and launched it down the hall, where a gent with a rare disorder—he swallowed everything from lightbulbs to steak knives, necessitating endless endoscopies—picked it up and sniffed it. The nurse gave chase while I tumbled downstairs and outdoors, forgoing the charade of a coat and sledging through snow in the most direct path to Descartes, where I found Dobbin inside a different room with P.M. Analytic’s alternate jury of nutsos. After the last of the patients slumped out, I lunged inside. Dobbin spent all day judging threat levels, and he’d hardly forgiven what I’d done to his nose. He retreated behind a desk and placed his hand next to an alarm button.
“Ry Burke,” said I. “Where did you put him?”
“The two of you were close. I understand that.”
“Where?”
“Mr. Burke has been transferred to a less restrictive ward. That’s good news, Mr. Zipp. I’m sure your friendship contributed to his progress.”
“I need to be close to him.”
“Bonds between males do happen in closed environments. But we can’t encourage them.”
“You think this is some naughty schoolboy romance?”
“I’m sure it feels more significant than that to you.”
“Listen to me, ignoramus. Without me nearby, they’ll get him.”
“Who will get him?”
The third demon! I nearly shouted. Did that mean I’d come to believe in them myself? Dobbin was giving me the look he saved for the truly hopeless—Bobbi, Chad, Lucky, Jackie—so why not make the classification official? With my single arm, I lifted one of the school desks above my head and dashed it to the floor. Its tabletop snapped off and, like that, I was wielding a prohibited weapon. What I said before, Reader, held true—violence no longer held any appeal—but for Ry, I’d give it the college try. A bitten nose? I’d rip the damn thing off.
“I want to see Scrimm,” growled I. “Now.”
Dobbin pushed the panic button. When the orderlies arrived, I dropped the chair and raised both arm and arm stump like an NSTF resister. The straitjacket came anyhow, and I was snugly buckled, pushed rudely out the front door, and back across the snow. Kant was the ward nearest the parking lot, and as odd luck would have it, I spotted a certain skull-faced man edging with an eagle-headed cane from Plato Manor to a hearse-sized Cadillac.
I wrenched leftward so unexpectedly that I tore from both orderlies’ grips and, top-heavy and hurtling, I planted myself face-first into the chain-link fence.
“Scrimm! You’re making a mistake!”
I watched the old man’s thin lips move in gasping-fish repetition.
My, my, my.
Caught out as incompetent before their boss, the orderlies fell hard upon me. I bit onto a fence link to buy myself three more seconds. The impulse was useless. To believe that the CEO of a sprawling psychiatric clinic would care about the skulduggeries of his underlings was naïveté itself. Yet Scrimm did seem to shrink further into his already shrunken body. He crept onward, wrists shaking and cane faltering, as I was extricated from the fence and handled unkindly until I was pitched, straitjacket and all, to the floor of Kant-17.
Even then hope survived. Héctor! thought I. If I could clear the language barrier, I could ask the janitor what he knew of Ry’s location. But Héctor, too, failed to return that night, as well as the next. I doubted that his ploys had been discovered—he was too careful for that—but believed rather that he’d been forced to obey bosses who’d decided his work ethic was better utilized in a different ward.
It was Scrimm’s fatalistic slouch I recalled three days later when the A-team of Sikes and Glover led me, still straitjacketed, as one might a nose-ringed cow, not to the Back Ward but rather to Cicero, the northernmost building at Bear Claw, which I hadn’t believed was still in use. It was, though barely, silent and freezing, with radiators doing a lot of zinging without producing one joule of heat. Perhaps, postulated I, Cicero served as the cafeteria’s meat locker, and I was meant to be hacked
and mashed into Friday’s casserole.
Instead of a subterrane of butcher counters and fluid drains, I was brought to what had been designed as a storage closet but had been repurposed as an office, despite dozens of superior ones vacant on every floor. It was a narrow space passable only due to the removal of shelves; no paint had been wasted to cover the scars and studs. The window at the end was rimed with frost, which made rhinestones upon the shivering shoulders of the man sitting at the desk, rifling through papers with mittened hands. That he wore a wrapped scarf and winter hat explained why he didn’t hear us arrive. What nugatory layabout, wondered I, had Scrimm exiled to this thankless station?
One of the orderlies knocked loudly to startle the man. It worked. He leapt to his feet as if under fire, then relaxed, squeezing past his desk to meet us. He did not look like much of a challenge, Reader. He was of Asian origin and of early-middle age. He wore his black hair in a short ponytail and a blue dress shirt, brown tie, paisley vest, pleated slacks, and loafers, all of which suggested a softness that, to my mind, was confirmed by the large hoop in his left earlobe.
That he tried to shake the hand of a straitjacketed patient told me that, whatever his role, he hadn’t been at it long. I stared at him until he figured it out, grimaced his apology, and gestured me toward a cushioned, though duct-taped, chair in front of his desk. I sat, my feet positioning upon a pitiful rug he’d installed to contrive homeyness. He retook his seat.
“You need us to hang around?” grunted Sikes.
“No!” I could see the man’s breath. “We’re cool here, aren’t we, Mr. Zipp?”
Cool? Were only my hand free so that I might claw off my ears!
Sikes and Glover didn’t need to be asked twice. They skedaddled, leaving the living-dead boy in the custody of the new-age wimp.
“Man, look, I just want to say, it’s great to meet you, Frank. Is it cool if I call you Frank? I’ve gone through your file, and I’ve been dying to ask, have you heard of Cotard’s Syndrome? It’s named after a French neurologist, not that that matters, and it’s this state of mind, or state of being, really, where the sufferer believes himself to be a corpse, right down to insisting that he’s decomposing and demanding that he be buried—”
Embarrassed by his own zeal, he chuckled.
“Sorry, I should introduce myself. I’m Eric Kwon. Just call me Eric, all right? I want to keep things super casual. I would say kick off your shoes, but I don’t think they’ve got the heat going just yet! I’m working on that, I promise. One thing at a time, right?”
It was far beyond the ken of this blithering fledging to help me find Ry. I tried to gimlet-eye him out of existence. He gulped and shuffled through his papers.
“I, uh, don’t know how much they explained to you? But I’ve been brought to Barraclough as a personal therapist. It’s, like, a pilot program here in Maine where I choose my analysands from a list of irremediables. To sort of translate that to English, they’re giving me a whack at long-term residents who haven’t responded to medication. Some issues are strictly behavioral in nature, I truly believe that, and no pill anyone invents is going to help that, you know? I know they’ve got you in group therapy, but from what I can tell, the doctors here are way over-booked, and honestly? They aren’t trained for it. So I’d like you to think of this as something completely different, a weekly conversation between you and me, a safe space where you can open up about whatever’s bothering you. I work for the state, not Barraclough. Anything you say is confidential, and I mean that. Nothing is off-limits. Does all that make sense?”
I rearranged myself, taking care to jingle the straitjacket buckles. Misgiving crimpled Eric’s eagerness. He’d read my file; he knew what I’d done to Dobbin. I opted to capitalize upon his fear.
“So you’re a shrink,” synopsized I.
He shrugged. “I’m a psychologist. But, yeah, some people call us head-shrinkers.”
“And you’re new.”
“Well, like I said, it’s a pilot program—”
“Not new here. New, period.”
I could see his mind turn through options: deny, deflect, denounce. To his credit, he told the truth.
“That’s correct.”
“Which is why you drew this humdinger of an assignment.”
“I’m happy to go wherever I’m needed.”
“What were you before this?”
“Really, Mr. Zipp, our sessions will be more productive if we focus on you.”
“What happened to calling me Frank?”
“We only have an hour. I really think we should—”
“I’ve heard of this. The fifty-minute hour. The padded couch. The shelving of gilt-edged encyclopedia. The box of tissues for when memories of Mother become all too much.”
Eric forced a jittery laugh and busied himself unspooling his scarf, a good indication that I’d unnerved him. No wonder Scrimm had looked so morose! Shrinks, those latter-day carnies, had bridged the moats, swarmed the battlements, and stormed the keeps of the superintendent’s once-inviolable castle. It was an infestation upon which lice had nothing, though assigning Eric Kwon to the Cicero frontier was the action of one who didn’t understand the principles of plague.
“I take it,” said he, “you’re not a believer in psychology.”
“I’m certain it is quite the treat for those who wish, for once in their chapfallen lives, to be the center of attention. I, myself, have no time for the hobby. I have a friend in need of help, and to waste time sifting through adolescent imbroglios strikes me as profane.”
“Your friend Ry?”
My curled spine went straight. “Have you spoken with him?”
“No. He’s just, you know, written on your face.”
Ah, yes, I’d forgotten. The latest message I’d markered across my forehead had set Jackie upon her sharpest edge, whether one of affronted adversary or a fellow insurgent I could not tell. Though purportedly improved, Ry had yet to return to group therapy, and so it had become my printed protest, which a few others in group had since copied upon their own foreheads: FREE RY.
“It is your first day, Mr. Kwon. But do you not already smell what is rotten at Bear Claw? The local bureaucracy thinks their drugs are to credit for Ry Burke’s improvement, but they are critically mistaken. I have helped Ry, and I alone. This conviction derives not from hauteur, though I know that will be your verdict. Ry’s demons may devour him if I can’t intercede.”
“I don’t discount that. Anything you have to say, I’ll listen to.”
Me, me, me, when all I wanted, for once, was to focus outward!
“I’m afraid this is what is called an impasse. You cannot help me, shrink; ’tis not your fault. For decades I have been all styles of naïf, and have a special sympathy for ignorance. Therefore I extend to you a courtesy. As I’m already here in your chair, I will grant you the oddment of our hour to pose what questions you will, and I, in the spirit of charity, will strive to answer them. When the hour is up, you will find me incommunicado. Am I understood? Wonderful. Proceed.”
Eric blinked. None of his fantasies of gradually prying open the mussel shell of succulent psychosis had included a ticking stopwatch. He sensed I was serious, though, and began pawing past the get-to-know-you malarkey of his notes while stammering, “Ah, ah, ah, ah,” as if afraid I might get up and leave. He whipped out a page and gave it a scan.
“What do you think it symbolizes,” panted he, “this idea that you were born in the 1800s?”
“It symbolizes that I was born in the 1800s.”
“Oh.” He squinted. “Do you, like, have any proof of that?”
“Of course. A premium pocket watch acquired in 1895. A newspaper clipping featuring me from 1901. A photograph of my daughter taken in 1913.”
“Can you show me this stuff?”
“All of it was stripped from my person when I was admitted. That might sound convenient, but I assure you, it was not so convenient to me.”
“No, not at
all. I mean, even if you had those things here, you could’ve bought the watch at an antique shop or taken the photo from some old album. We tend to think of physical objects as proof, but proof of what? Is it any less real to you that it isn’t here in your hand?”
“The hand buckled to my torso?”
“Yeah, that one.”
I shrugged. “I suppose not.”
Eric snapped his fingers.
“Right. You believe it, so I have to believe it. There’s no other way forward. You say you were born a century ago; I say, fine, let’s talk about that, what that was like.”
“Feed the crazy with more crazy, is that it?”
“You ever heard of apotemnophilia?”
“I’m afraid my savvy ends at six-syllable words.”
“It’s a medical condition in which the sufferer has the irresistible desire to cut off a certain part of their body.”
“Believe me, shrink, the pieces I’ve lost I would have rather kept.”
“Apotemnophiliacs are highly specific. ‘I need to lose my right leg just beneath the knee.’ ‘I need to cut off my left arm just above the elbow.’ They consider these parts foreign objects that simply don’t belong. How painful the amputation is doesn’t matter; it’s less painful than keeping the limb. Doctors, naturally, have their Hippocratic Oath—‘First, do no harm,’ and all that—so a lot of apotemnophiliacs self-amputate and then, while they’re still bleeding, mangle the detached part so it can’t be reattached. If they survive, their neurosis is gone, almost without exception. They are whole. They are cured.”
