by Daniel Kraus
“Esther,” said he. “The only book in the Old Testament that never mentions Gød. I think we’ll find that to be significant. My theory? There’s no one in Esther worthy of Him.”
“Fuck. You.”
My curse sizzled, the pages of the Bible ignited, the window caked with ash, the ceiling mizzled smelt, and through choking brown smoke I made my backdraft adieu, my clothes on fire, my flesh pouring steam, my soul a red coal, still glowing.
XI.
ERIC DIDN’T SIC SIKES ON me. That is something, though in retrospect, I wish he had, for any catacomb into which Scrimm’s chief grave digger might have stuffed me would have been preferable to all that I saw, heard, and did during my final days at Bear Claw. Nurses and doctors could not help but note my disengagement, but had neither the time nor inclination to address it. My diet of Red Heavies did not change.
Eric pretended to rebound—it was, as he’d said, his job—by mining Biblical topics he believed tallied with my purported history. His most vigorous effort was his survey of pre-Christian resurrections, starring Isaiah (“Thy dead shall live, their bodies shall rise”), Ezekiel (“Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people”), and, most hauntingly, Daniel (“And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt”).
I didn’t give the coward the gratification of a single interested word. As gradually as Lucky had scratched his way through leather, hair, skin, skull, and brain, I wore through Eric Kwon until our sessions were as lymphatic as A.M. Analytic. Each day he sent me back to Kant earlier, which put me in no better mood, for outside I had to evade Jackie, who’d gone bestial with fear for Farm Boy. Her heightened agitation resulted in new meds, and her cusses became unintelligible behind spattering yellow froth until she, too, was plucked from gen pop and stashed away, maybe in the Back Ward, maybe alongside Chad, or maybe in Spinoza with Ry, where the odd couple could go raving mad together.
Not since the days of strewing Merle’s ashes across the Cascade Range had I been so alone. Unbeknownst to me, the clockwork of the end had been winded. In March of 1991, in the flat, ugly gray of night, came a soft tapping upon the window of Kant-17.
I bounded from bed and peered through glass. His slicked hair was in fins from his running, his generous forehead greased with sweat, his mustache chewed at by crooked teeth. It was Héctor, the singing saint, returned to his old ward in a mood so diametric to his typical placidity that I was struck with terror. He held no mop, pushed no caddy of cleaners. There was only one explanation for why he’d come to me in such a state.
The familiar sound of his key sliding the bolt turned my stomach. He opened the door himself and glanced at the nurse’s station—there was no telling how he’d lured her away—and beckoned me to hurry. I stepped barefoot into the hall; it was a long, black throat, pale-tongued by moonlight. Héctor rasped what English he could.
“You know the place?”
Jackie had seen to it. But even if I made it inside Spinoza unseen, what was my plan? Attempt a la silenziosità Hail Mary, despite the likelihood that giving Ry a glimpse of his lonesome death would further cripple him? Lead Ry over the fence, down the bluffs, and along the Atlantic, where I could teach him a fugitive’s existence? There were no answers, and yet I was nodding.
“Rápidamente,” said Héctor.
No red tag would protect me if I were caught, but neither had Héctor left himself a safe out. He had no choice but to stay behind and manage the nurse as I ran toward the western end of the hall and skidded down the stairwell, my naked feet providing stealth. Next I crouched in the foyer, waiting for the ruby pinprick of a smoking orderly to float back into an office. Finally I plunged outside into indecisive storm gusts that heaved rain at me in clumps, a crystalline sprinkling one second, a bucket deluge the next.
It was, you recall, an expansive campus, and I traversed it tree to tree, shrub to shrub, avoiding the few sodium lamps that hadn’t died in the 1980s. The night was as hard and loud as I was soft and quiet, shrieking with gales off a tormented ocean, but also, I swore, the gales of the nation’s tormented, individual agonized laments familiar and dear to me—is that you, Church, leading the charge after all these years?—begging that I balm their sore souls with a prophet’s affirmation that their pain had meaning and purpose. As I dodged from Kant to Hobbes to Pascal to Descartes, the phantom pleas were joined by real ones birdsonging from all eight wards. Did Bear Clawers always so vocalize at night? Or had my felonious flight aroused a hibernating hope?
Shadow-puppet people behind window shades were the only signs of staff until I came upon Spinoza, caddy-corner to the Back Ward, the former of which was dormant, but the latter of which hosted a confabulation of nightshifters laughing as they passed a flask. The smartest avenue of approach, as Jackie had indicated, was through the potter’s field, and though one could hardly hide behind the meager footstones, there was a fence that put me in position to wait unnoticed. Fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes passed. At some point, my absence from Kant-17 would be noticed; at some point, Héctor would have to lock whatever doors he’d opened.
At last the orderlies went back inside the Back Ward to burn off their alcohol fuel, and I sprinted for Spinoza. Héctor was as good as his unspoken word: The front door swung open. I closed it behind me with as little noise as I could, and then did what I’d seen the Marlboro Man do every single day in the wild—take a knee and go still, listening for activity, approach, or peril.
Spinoza was recognized as Bear Claw’s original building. It followed that it was both the most ornate and most dilapidated. Doors were too warped to properly shut, and I could hear a radio babbling from a room to my right. I headed left, and as the radio faded, the evensongs of the mentally ill cohered into duos and trios instead of the full chorus to which I was accustomed.
Héctor had thought of everything. A door to a service staircase was unlocked, but the door to the second floor wouldn’t budge. The janitor was guiding me to the third floor, and I took the final steps with speed and the door with force. The instant I barged into the short, dead-end hall, with its once-beautiful ceiling soffits browned by rain leakage and art-deco sconces unlit for a century, I recognized the voice that Jackie, having had the advantage of months in the cemetery, had already identified.
It was Ry Burke. But it also wasn’t Ry Burke; even as he’d suffered, he’d always kept a tight, Midwestern timbre, as if mortified that his noises might disturb others. His new noises were looser, a labored, uneven panting burbling with simian hoots that might have been comical if not so sickening. I rushed down the hall, my wet feet slapping the tile, until I came upon a vibrating door and threw it open.
Ry gasped; saliva suctioned down his throat, and he choked and spat. He had no reason to know that Héctor had unlocked his door, not that it mattered, for one of his legs had been shackled to the bed as if he were a monster. The cuff itself wasn’t upsetting; it was of hospital plastic, its vinyl tether too short to be used for strangulation. What upset me was how Ry, a boy of great physical shyness, strained to pull from it, head whipping, torso torqued against the floor as if trying to escape a racing fire.
He’d torn through three other cuffs, whether that night or weeks earlier, I could not say. Though I had yet to get a clear look at Ry, he recognized me right off, and not with the elated reaction for which, in my heart, I’d hoped. He dropped to bruised knees and snapped his face toward the floor. Gingerly I shut the door and crept close. Spit, maybe blood, was hot beneath my soles.
Ry’s head had been shaved, crudely enough that I could see scabbed nicks. Was it his baldness that brought him such shame? I knelt, placed my hand upon a shoulder so bony, it gouged my palm, and winced at the bedsores blotching his calves.
“Ry,” whispered I. “It’s me.”
“G’way.”
His was a mushy mumble.
“I’m here to help. I won’t leave until I’ve
helped you.”
His protruding bones shook. Straitjacket buckles rattled.
“Can yoo? Can yoo weally hewp?”
“I can try, Farm Boy. Just show me how.”
His shook his head, over and over, his scalp stubble scraping my chin.
“Oh, Fwank. Oh, hewp me, hewp me, Fwaaaaaank.”
He lifted his head. His skin was leaden; he hadn’t eaten in days. His sockets were oily black; he hadn’t slept in weeks. His lips were stretched wide in misery, and from them ran streams of saliva, for there were no more teeth to act as dam. A merciful lack of light obscured details beyond red gums, black abscesses, and the pale rear molars he’d been unable to reach. Yes, Reader, he’d yanked every tooth he could for the same reason he’d yanked his fingernails. The softhearted boy expected obliteration and was determined not to harm others along the way.
Hairless, toothless, armless, half-blind, and yowling like a newborn, Ry was barely human. He ground his grubby forehead into my chest and cried, which soon lengthened into a scream, and I held him there, tried to think of words to becalm him, something about Knight Rider, yet came up with nothing, and so stroked his scabby dome and stared in stupefaction at the plaster walls chipped all over, or so I deduced, from attempts to shatter his teeth. He’d survived Mr. Furrington; he’d survived Jesus Christ; but the third demon had come, and something told me that as few teeth and nails as Ry had left, his torturer had them in endless supply.
“Fwaaaaaaaaaaaank.”
No more high-flying plots or salty schemes. Here it was, the actual bloody thing of it, of men and madness, and I could no longer allow myself fantasies about a secret passage out of this dead-end hall. Since the first night of hearing Ry’s cries, I’d hoped that saving his soul might save my own. In seconds, my own fate became insignificant. My mission, realized I, was not one of rescue. It was one of deliverance.
“Shh, shh. Frank will make it all go away.”
I pushed the bed in front of the door, but not without making noise. Others in the hall awakened, and I had no doubt their arousal would mobilize staff. Yet five minutes passed before I heard the stairwell door open, by which time I’d removed my jumpsuit, exposing my body to the one person who wished to hug himself closer to it, tore apart my tired old abdominal stitches, and peeled back the flap Leather had cut in 1903. My stomach had a hole in it—do you recall the German bayonet stab of November 10, 1918?—and into that hole I worked my thumb and tore it larger. At first, nothing came out besides Little Johnny Grandpa’s marble, shiny as ever for having been protected for decades. I stopped its roll with my toes, then jostled my torso until the Red Heavies inside began to gush like blood, one drop for every person I’d failed to save. What a sight: I was bleeding, alive one more time, so that I could deliver death.
In a room cleared of all potential weapons, these undigested drugs were the only option. My peripheral vision caught a nurse’s face in the door window, and I heard her try to open the door, then pound against it, then order me to open it, but I was busy scooping up Red Heavies because, though I had only one hand with which to do it, it was better than Ry’s zero, and I cupped handfuls like Eucharist bread, into which Ry could dip his face and pull pills onto his tongue and onward back to his molars to grind, while sending others straight down his throat on a gruel of spittle.
“Sawah,” hiccuped he past a mouthful.
“I’ll tell her you love her,” said I.
“Mamma.”
“Her too. I’ll find a way.”
Years of meds went into his stomach as the nurse departed and came back with a second. I kept shoveling and cupping, and Ry kept nodding and gobbling. Alarm bells went off, and the hall, already an aviary, grew louder as Bear Claw’s night guard stormed it. I left Ry to the business of swallowing while I knotted the arms of my jumpsuit to the door handle—antiquated Spinoza still had handles inside the rooms—and twisted the garment around the bed frame before pulling it back toward the door, using leverage to multiply my strength. Orderlies threw themselves against the door; Ry, on instinct, started licking pills off the floor; and I tried to smile, knowing I’d done the right thing when no one else could or would, despite my heart having broken as surely as the Bible had broken Eric’s window.
Some people, reflected I, are never given a chance.
Other people get far too many.
It took much labor and cursing for them to get inside; keeping that door shut was the final heroic effort of my death. When six men exploded forth in a slapstick of twisted limbs, Ry was on his back, eyes rolled to white, stomach straining against the straitjacket. Orderlies and nurses alike balked at the shock of so many red pills being crushed beneath their shoes. How had Frank Zipp stolen so many? They rushed to Ry, rolled him to his side, stuck fingers down his throat, and began a contradictory program of Heimlich and CPR. By the time anyone thought to deal with me, I’d tucked Johnny’s aggie back where it belonged, twisted stomach tissue like a bag of bread, and gotten myself halfway back into my jumpsuit.
With utmost brutality two men took me, taking care to ram my shins to the bed frame and drive my noggin to the door, neither of which caused me pain, but did rob me of a last look at Ry; I admit that to see the young man, tormented his entire life, at last in a place of peace would have been a lovely sight. I was roughed into a hallway of deafening sirens and sent careering down the hall, but it was all right, for Eric had sworn that the Bible had been written by geniuses, and those geniuses had confirmed that good violence existed, and all I’d done was prove it. There was pride to be found in that, and serenity as well.
I was heaved out of Spinoza, collared by my punishers, and dragged oceanward, straight to the Back Ward, where the posse from earlier waited, flask and laughs replaced with fists and expletives, and they took over, displaying their skill by abusing me with practiced ease, thwacking me against this wall, then that, as they stuffed me into a straitjacket and took me by the neck, not with hands but with an iron rod that kept them at farmhand distance, with which they steered me into each and every cell door until every sleeper was awake and raving. I was pushed past Ry’s old cell, and my old cell as well, at which point I knew where I was going.
I doubted even Héctor had keys enough to unlock all three doors of the Thunder Room. I’d imagined it as a witchy cave with an earthen chimney through which lightning could strike. Instead it was smaller than the cells, or looked so because of all the equipment, so much of it burnished copper and old yellow tubing. I was slung to a hospital bed, face-up toward a satellite-dish lamp brought close and blazed to full wattage. I could feel straps tighten across my thorax and knees and heard a deep mechanized growl.
Fear nothing, I told myself. Ry is free of all this.
A nurse injected my arm with sedative but failed to notice when it dribbled out the kabob-skewer holes I’d self-inflicted to avert Mrs. Shoemaker. I rolled my dry eyes upward and saw an Indian headband being prepared, just as offensive as the one lowered upon Zebulon X as he’d been buried in New Jersey beach sand, though instead of being affixed with braided deerskin, quillwork, and eagle feathers, this one was decorated with steel electrodes a nurse was slathering with lubrication. I watched as this band was cinched tight around my forehead, concealing, to my dismay, THE END.
I’d been told during admission how Bear Claw had been at the forefront of lobotomy. It made good sense that they yet propagated the shunned, but still quite legal, practice of shock therapy, that infamous last-resort procedure for the severely depressed and schizophrenic. My Dearest Reader is not gullible; you know in your heart that the procedure was also used by doctors who wanted to watch their unruliest patients fry. The band about my cranium did not permit me to turn my head; I had to wait until Superintendent Scrimm, ten minutes later, caned into my field of vision.
“I never miss electroconvulsion,” confided he.
A foam block was wedged between my jaws. I heard a hum and darted my eyeballs rightward, where upon a counter squatted a cream-
colored box with plastic oven-switches and a needle meter. A nurse’s neoprene-gloved finger hovered over a toggle labeled, and I do not jest, TREAT. Abruptly the box was blacked out by Scrimm, hunched so close that I could see every squiggled blue vein pulse from beneath his rice-paper skin. He fashioned from his face one of Reichsführer-SS Himmler’s Death’s-Heads.
“You think you’re more qualified than we are to deliver mercy, do you? You think you did your friend Mr. Burke a favor? My, my, my. You must think yourself awfully clever, hoarding all those pills. Well, I have a little surprise for you, Mr. Zipp. Those pills were placebos.”
Was that sweat, an impossible secretion, puddling beneath my headband?
“Pla-ce-bo. It means the medicine you’ve taken all these years hasn’t been medicine at all. It’s been corn starch, cellulose, a pinch of sugar, pressed into a polymer mold.”
Only then did I feel sick. Ry hadn’t wolfed lethal loads of tranquilizer but pounds of candy, like Franny White on a trick-or-treat bender; he was not dead, not even close, and his agonies would expand like a tumor until they absorbed his every last functional part. I heard the crumpled-paper snaps of positive and negative ions, saw metal pinchers being fastened to the electrodes. I tried to scream Ry’s name, but that damn foam bit! The cry came out as Why!
“Why? Because I’m old enough to know that red-taggers aren’t ever sick—that’s why,” replied Scrimm. “They come to us to hide. And Barraclough Psychiatric Center doesn’t waste taxpayer money on fakers.”
Ask Dr. Leather if a corpse seizes from electrical current with a frenzy equal to that of a live body. Bursting lights catapulted me into a thoughtless black, which sounds like the state of Nothing in Particular I’d been chasing since Death-Day One, but was not, Reader, not at all. The sound of electrical torture was, oddly enough, quieter when heard at close proximity, a hard, insistent NNNNNNN. Unspecified seconds, maybe minutes, passed, and I came back, the lamp gyrating over me as if recently slugged, the faces of Scrimm and his playmates gazing down in cool arbitration, the malodor of burnt scalp slithering up my nostrils, and all I could think was that the Thunder Room’s next resident might be Ry. I needed to use up all the electricity, break the engines, leave it a smoking wreck, and so I tried, my screams lost amid those of every other madman who’d once cried out his emphatic existence.
