by Daniel Kraus
“DO IT AGAIN!”
NNNNNNN.
“AGAIN!”
NNNNNNNNNNNNNN.
“AGAIN, BASTARDS!”
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN.
“AGAIN! AGAIN! AGAIN!”
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN.
XII.
RY BURKE DIED ON APRIL 12, 1991. He did not die well. It is only fair that I lay plain the extent of my failure. Three weeks after they pumped his stomach of placebos, two weeks after he broke his toes against cement to pulverize toenails that might scratch someone, and one week after he abandoned English in favor of the insectile argot of the third demon, Ry, naked for a bath, was being lowered toward tub restraints when he wiggled free, cackling in a uncharacteristic manner, and drove an orderly’s head to the basin with such force that the porcelain shattered, and while nurses tried to staunch the orderly’s jetting blood, Ry took two shards of porcelain and jammed them into his gums to create fangs, and with these fangs attacked the nurses, blinding one and shredding the face of another, until he was killed with repeated blows to the back of the head.
Where the demon went after that, who can say?
America is a big country.
The death of a patient and orderly and the disfiguring of two nurses was the excuse the state needed to shutter Bear Claw for good. Scrimm was ousted, and an Augusta bureaucrat was flown in to oversee the six-month transfer of hundreds of mentally ill into other hospitals, private care facilities, or back into a society that, more often than not, had no help to give them. The parking lot echoed daily with the sobbing of forced departures. Bear Claw had been an abusive home, but it had been a home nonetheless, and the friends the patients had made there had kept them alive. Now those friends were gone.
The bulldozing of Bear Claw’s blight was the quickest way to get it out of headlines. On occasion I would spy protestors marching against demolition, some with the goal of facilitating investigations, others wishing to award the hospital landmark status. Both factions lost: Spinoza, police tape still caught on its eaves, was leveled first, and next the hydraulic cranes, backhoes, excavators, trenchers, and tractors went after Galileo, Hobbes, and Pascal, with what patients were left being expedited out through eddying billows of white construction dust.
The Back Ward was identified for what it was—a befilthed oubliette unfit for the twentieth century—and by summer it had been razed and I was back in Kant, the same living-dead boy as ever except for when I looked in the bathroom mirror. Electroshock burn marks covered the top and right side of my head. My right ear, previously in mint condition minus the lobe Leather had scalpeled back in 1907, had been torched to a black disc. And my hair—well, I might have been seventeen, but I now knew the cool-breeze tickle of male hair loss. A tuft on the left side of my head had survived, but I enjoined upon Bear Claw’s barber to shave it the day before he, too, was let go.
The single good deed I managed during the protracted death of both Ry and Bear Claw was to acquit Héctor of malfeasance. I insisted that I’d stolen his keys, and given the other feats I’d pulled off—they never did figure out how I’d stockpiled Red Heavies—they believed it. Héctor thereby avoided redress and sentencing, though that does not mean he kept his job. He disappeared during the next round of layoffs before I had an opportunity to thank him for what he’d done, or hear, one last time, the soft lullaby of Duérmete, mi niño.
Of the original ten buildings only three still stood. One of them was Cicero, and I was confused the day Glover came to room 17 to take me there. His frightful leader, Sikes, was gone by then, and Glover, always so stony, seemed wistful. As we ambled around the chain-link fence holding in the Locke cafeteria debris, he gazed at pink clouds as if noticing, decades late, that beauty existed.
Cicero was filled with people for the first time in a decade: hard-hatters consulting clipboards, pushing furniture down stairwells, tossing file cabinets out windows, and spray-painting demolition symbology over every wall and floor. It was hard to believe Eric Kwon would be onsite during Cicero’s death spasms, but when Glover gestured at the coffin-office, there he was, pausing from filling a box with books to sneeze out a nebula of grit. He wiped his nose, noticed me, and in one gesture sent Glover away and signaled me forward.
I hadn’t seen him in five months. He’d lopped his ponytail in favor of a cut better suited to adult life. His left ear betrayed its pinprick, but carried no hoop. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt—moving-day clothes—and took a seat on one of the packed boxes, for the desk and chairs had vanished. He nodded at another box, but I did not take it. He shrugged and slapped his hands free of dust.
“Nice of the state to keep me around this long, right? I’ve been trying to make it worth their while. Those mattresses stacked outside, I’ve got it worked so they’re being shipped to Sudanese hospitals. I’m transferring to Bangor myself. I start Monday. Private practice. It’ll be a big change, but a good one. It was tough out here. Not that I have to tell you that.”
I said nothing.
Eric sighed. “You all right?”
I said nothing.
“You’re probably wondering what’s going to happen to you. Barraclough’s hardly got any patients left. Deinstitutionalization, they call it—DI. Everyone must go. Personally, I have my doubts. Warehousing people like this was no good, that’s obvious, but . . . didn’t they learn anything from desegregation? That was a good idea too, but they forgot to build any means to enforce it, you know? They’re relying on what? Christian charity? That’s fucked up, if you ask me. Sorry, my language. Although I guess I’m not your shrink anymore. So, yeah. It’s fucked up. They DI all you guys, they’re going to end up with thousands on the streets and thousands in jail. And we’re all patting each other on the back.”
An indignant ghost whispered, and I relayed what it said. “‘You look at the jails and the prisons and tell Ritchie Tucker what you see. They’ll be packed like a hoghouse with brothers.’”
Eric elbowed sweat from his face. “Who’s Ritchie Tucker?”
I shrugged. “Just another dead man.”
“Yeah, well, he was on the money. It’s going to hit blacks the worst. You don’t have money to pay for private care, and you’re going to be shit out of—”
Eric whapped a thick text into the box and with his foot sent the box skidding across the room. He stood and turned away to hide what I suspected was the face of a man aware that he was leaving a job half-done. He stared up at the triangular hole in the window. A wily September wind waggled through and whisked his cropped hair. I’d preserved perfect apathy since Ry’s demise, yet two rats began to gnaw at me, the first Guilt, the second Empathy.
“From the Back Ward to the back alleys,” said I. “Things shan’t ever change.”
“But things could have changed. I could have listened better. I could have helped someone, anyone. I could have made a difference.”
“Decay is irreversible.”
Eric put both hands to his face. He issued no sound for a disquieting minute before whipping down his hands as if to clear his fingers of blood. He took a ballasting breath and wheeled around, his red eyes scouring my every gruesome part. He was, I think, estimating my weight, not in gold but in a substance even rarer.
He went back to packing books.
“You’re free,” said he.
Shouting foremen, clattering jackhammers, whirring bandsaws—had I heard him right?
“Say again?”
“I have the authority, all right? I’m the only one left who has it. You’re done, Frank. Go to Plato’s front office. Pick up your stuff and get out of here.”
It is difficult to say what other resolution I expected. Crouching inside Kant until a wrecking ball crashed through my wall and blasted me to dust? Nevertheless I felt like a child being led from his mother by a marm; only the room’s void of furniture kept me from finding a hat rack for support, a chair-back for balance, a sofa for collapse.
“Did I make you believe in Gød again?�
� managed I. “If so, I take it back.”
Eric laughed.
“Don’t give yourself so much credit.” He glanced at me and, if I’m not mistaken, smiled. “You did make me think, though, I’ll give you that. About the Bible. About things I hadn’t thought about in forever. About how you can write hundreds of pages trying to get toward a truth and never get there, but still, that doesn’t mean that those pages weren’t worth the effort, you know? The search, the struggle? What the hell else do we have?”
“I don’t want to search or struggle. Not anymore.”
“I don’t think you get a choice. Forget what I believe about you, what anyone believes. If you believe you are what you say you are, you have to keep searching. You’re so close now. I can feel it. Can’t you? Go to a community center if you want to; the front office has a thousand pamphlets. Me, I don’t think that’s where you belong. Go to Glastonbury Tor. Hike Mount Sinai. Watch the sun rise over Easter Island and figure out what it all means. Because if you’re right, and there’s a world without death, then all this around us is a kind of dream. Go wake up, why don’t you?”
Somehow I was still standing.
“I’m afraid,” whispered I.
He stepped closer. The morning sun splashed over me.
“We talked about David. The Hebrew Bible’s greatest king, greatest lover, greatest warrior-poet. And yet he’s shown coveting and adultering and murdering. The best of people, Frank, can do the worst of things. The line between good and evil, I don’t think it’s drawn in the sand where we can see it. I think it’s drawn inside the heart. Only you know when you cross it. Only you know when you’ve decided which side you’re going to end up on.”
“I don’t want to fail, not again.”
“What’s failure? If there’s a plan to creation, even your long, long life is too puny to see it. There could be a third testament being written as we speak. What if we’re in the middle of it? What if these words I’m saying are words in a book being read right now by someone like us, searching and struggling, looking for guidance not from biblical guys in dusty old robes but from us, you and me, Frank, right here in Lubec, Maine?”
A Neanderthal hit the doorframe with a hammer.
“You guys about out?” bellowed he. “We gotta gut the electrics.”
Eric held up a finger to buy a minute.
He lowered that hand upon my shoulder.
“There’s part of me,” confided he, “that hopes that some of the patients manage to hide out, you know? Then when all the wreckers are gone and there’s all these odd parts of buildings still standing, they crawl out and take ownership of the whole mess, make it their own kingdom and run it however they want. See if the serfs can do any better than the lords.”
I laid my hand gently atop his. Hot, cold: like that, it blended to a warmth.
“ ’Twould be America’s most fitting epilogue,” agreed I. “The inmates running the asylum at last.”
XIII.
THE OLD BULB FLUTTERS—
It is challenging to see—
So challenging, indeed, that I wonder, dost the flicker emit from a chandelier resplendent, blinking so as to inform us, with the deference due to such esteemed Madams and Messieurs, that our opera, one of Wagnerian scope, has finally struck its final note?
Startle not, my sweet, as you stir from the dreamworld; it is only I, your gentle escort, patting your silk-gloved hand. Lower your theater glasses so that I might whisper you from your reverie. If not the alteration of light quality, surely the basso profundo bombast and soaring arpeggios, not to mention the demise of nearly the entire cast of characters, advised you that our two-act tragédie lyrique has come upon its denouement? Listen—hear the rustle of tassels? It is a stagehand at a rope—the curtain is about to drop.
Reality’s exit-hall illumination requires some acclimation. Our box seat is not the red velvet mahogany armchair of your fantasy, but a child’s school desk wedged into a concrete vault beneath the bulb that, for the past several hundred pages of autobiographing, has dimmed, with steady speed, to a russet brown and adopted a zoetrope sputter, as if each step of the businesspeople one hundred stories above me jars it toward extinguishment. Even through the strobe, you can see glowing finger bones where my flesh has worn away due to the clutching of pencils, including this one racing across these final pages of the final notebook. Unlike me, I do not think the bulb shall survive the hour.
The Uterus of Time ends not in rebirth but in abortion.
Quick, let us balance our accounts. I approached Plato Manor as Eric Kwon instructed, anticipating a trap, but was handed a box containing all I’d relinquished at admission: Gordo’s knife, Piano’s map, Merle’s photo, the Barker’s newspaper notice, the Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring, Merle’s blue slacks and black hooded sweatshirt, and, astonishingly, zipped plastic baggies containing Ruthie’s thousands of dollars. At the box’s bottom was the Excelsior, though someone in Plato was having me on, the same as when I’d reclaimed my belongings after Operation Weeping Willow, for the pocket watch had been recently winded. How else to explain its ongoing tick, tick, tick?
A Frank Zipp autograph later, and I was DI’d. No one halted me when I walked up the same woodland path I’d driven down with Rigby in 1985. When I reached the road, I veered through a ditch and into underbrush, heading east through the woods. In a few hours, I detected, closer than ever, the ocean I’d been hearing from Kant-17 for years yet had never laid eyes upon. I sat in the damp forest; with nocturnal scurriers, I waited out the night. When morning threatened, I crept the final mile so that, consistent with Quoddy Head State Park’s claim to fame, I would be the first sentient being to see the sun rise over America.
The Maine cliffs were as vertical as alcazars, furred with moss and clutching in creviced fists wads of fog like cannonry smoke, while far below, silver tides streaked over black sand. When the sun emerged, it turned the rock face red and each particle of tossed surf into a dewdrop of honey. I closed my eyes and osmosed the fresh day through my other four senses: the warmth over my skin like rubbing hands; the bouquet of sun-crisped autumn leaves; the sharp grate of sea salt against my tongue; the flip-flap of worm-getting birds chased off by light. Since Eric’s trusted Mitochondrial Eve, humanoids had greeted the sun in this way and felt reborn. Another dawn, another chance.
But not for Zebulon Finch, no matter the strength of Eric’s case. I’d done everything backward. I’d watched the sun set on the banks of Lake Michigan in 1896 as my century of midnight had begun, and now, as it ended, I watched that very same sun rise. I lifted my ear, the non-charred one, to listen for the approach of ghosts, perhaps the hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . that had chased me across the planet. There was nothing, and with no one left to pursue, why would I continue to run? I took a minute to fantasize about living life as depicted in the dayroom board game of the same name, hopping into my purple station wagon, inserting a few pink-and-blue peg children, and tootling over green plastic hills to the blank white mansion at the finish line.
The fog was as filmy as a negligee and just as easily lifted. Tempests, though, clashed sabers over the Atlantic, a memento mori that storm clouds forever brewed, and everyone, not just Ry Burke, must take up arms against demons preparing to swoop on ill winds. It is not, I think, inaccurate to say that our fair country, when seen at its worst—in other words, its truest—is one giant Thunder Room.
No—no—
Just now, our brave bulb died for ten seconds.
Hasten, Zebulon, hasten!
Had I kept during my Bear Claw incarceration a journal of vacation spots to hit when I got out, Manhattan would not have made even the alternates. I hadn’t breached New York City limits since Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 United Nations march, which, for me, had been followed hours later by the Stuyvesant shoot-out that had slain Ritchie Tucker. Prior to that, the city had been a mire of agonized memories: reeling with Church through a glitterscape of ginned-up flappers, careening
jazz orchestras, and brutal murders.
Yet New York was where I went, though hardly along a bird’s path. A year disappeared before I got there, and when I try to justify it, I see only a smear of trashed alleys, graffitied viaducts, and cloverleaf-interchange hideaways, each of them framed by the black penumbra of my sweatshirt hood. The pariahs that people crossed the street to avoid crossed the street to avoid me. I traveled slowly, mindful of how effortlessly a softball had torn off three toes. My voice, during those rare times I used it, could still muster the tone of high breeding, useful for when I made calls to the last friends I had in the world—telephone operators. With them I was polite and patient, for I knew that the hard worker I sought had to surface eventually.
He did, and I made my way to his home. Eric had been right about metropolitan centers. The mentally disturbed now roamed in such numbers that even a limping, one-armed, black-hooded creep went ignored. New York streets were populated enough with memories that each step I took sunk me lower, like the carriage wheels of my youth into muddy Chicago roads. My mental map was nevertheless true, and in Spanish Harlem I hunched beneath a street lamp, which turned snowflakes into fireflies, and cased a drab-bricked apartment complex until, among the predawn exiters, I saw a fellow who, though hidden beneath coat, scarf, and hat, was of unmistakable square shape.
Having neither subway tokens nor the desire to rouse the ire of grouchy commuters, I decided to knick my prey before he descended into the 6 train’s howling tunnel. I took hold of his elbow, and it speaks to his exceptional good nature that he did not wrench it away with an urbanist’s rightful disgust at the social infraction. He turned, ducked to see beneath my hood, got the gist of my features, stopped walking, and stared, until snow turned his black mustache white.
