Now we get to 302 and I get real nervous, because this is Sylvie. And her mother’s in there with the three little boys, and I think I’m probably, like, persona non whatever in there today. So I say, “Let’s not bother her, okay? She’s tired.”
Of course, I told Phil all about Sylvie and our Cabbage Night prank earlier, kind of bragging, I’ll admit, and he thought it was great, so he understands that the girl is exhausted. But he just trots on in anyway. I stay way back in the hallway, but I can hear him talking to the boys, all jolly uncle-like, and then he says something that actually makes Sylvie’s mom laugh, and I think, shit, he’s flirting with her. And I think how completely and totally pissed Sylvie’s father would be about that, and that’s a happy thought. So I roll myself just into the doorway and check it out. Sylvie herself is totally invisible, just a series of small lumps in her bed, covers pulled up over her head. I see Phil looking at the photos they’ve got plastered all over the walls, and I know what every one looks like, since I memorized them all: Sylvie in her private school uniform; Sylvie on the swim team, all long legs and nice round boobs in a stretchy suit; Sylvie going to some dance in a fancy pink dress, white flowers pinned to her newly blooming chest; Sylvie as a black-haired, brown-eyed baby; Sylvie with a bunch of her friends, all the boys tall and handsome, all the girls shiny-haired and cute; Sylvie getting some award; Sylvie on the front porch of a big white house, twin baby brothers on her lap; Sylvie at the beach, tan and glowing; Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie. They’re there, all those pictures, a record, so that everyone who steps into that room—which is a color Sylvie calls puke pink—will know that somewhere inside that yellow-skinned, bag-of-bones, bald-headed Sylvie is that other one: cool, popular, smart, nice house, nice family. And pretty. Really.
When Uncle Phil comes out of her room, that’s all he says. “Pretty girl.” And his voice is all rough and shaky.
Our next stop is the little lobby by the elevator, and here Phil stops dead. He’s staring at the harpy, who’s just setting up for the day. Phil leans over my shoulder and breathes, “What the fuck?” into my ear.
I raise one finger. “Exactamundo. Just wait,” I say.
The harpy, who today has her creepy white hair loose on her shoulders like a frizzy cloud, smiles at us. “Welcome, Richard,” she whispers. (She always whispers. That ups the weirdness quotient a notch, I say.) She settles herself on the little stool thing. She’s got on a long fuzzy skirt, black, with a shiny white blouse. She closes her eyes and raises her hands—long, crooked, creepy fingers—to the strings.
“Just wait,” I say again to Phil, soft. “Here it comes.”
But the harpy’s eyes spring back open and she smiles, dropping her hands. “Happy Halloween, Richard,” she says. And she reaches into one of the pockets in that black skirt and brings up a package of Good & Plenty. “I believe you’re allowed candy.” She tosses that little pink-and-black-and-white box into my lap, then lifts her hands to the harp, shuts her eyes, and starts to strum. The lobby fills up with sweet, sad sounds.
Phil’s hands jerk on the handles of the chair, and before you can say “Jack Robinson” (that’s an expression my grandma always says), we’re gone, backed right up into our hallway, wheels up against the nurses’ station. He stops and picks the Good & Plenty out of my lap with two fingers, like it was laced with arsenic or something, and drops it on the counter. He opens it up and pours out the little pink and white lozenges that look like pills. “Do not eat those, my liege,” he says. “Good & Plenty has been known to kill perfectly healthy monarchs. This was sent by your enemies.” He raises his voice and addresses the floor clerk, Mrs. Lee, a woman in her fifties who’s mean and cranky with everybody, but who, I heard, cries like a baby whenever they wheel one of us, covered head to toe with a white sheet, out the doors. Since this is a near-daily occurrence, the woman keeps a huge box of Kleenex at her side. The rest of the time, she’s universally rude, and that seems fair to me. Phil leans over and says to her, “That apparition in the lobby gave my nephew a box of these, these . . . items. For Halloween, she said.” He pokes a finger into the pile of candy. “Clearly, she is a servant of”—he lowers his voice and hisses—“what I will call only the Lower Regions.”
Mrs. Lee eyes the Good & Plenty, and she eyes Phil. Then she picks up one of the little pink pills and puts it in her mouth and chews it up, smiling wide with licorice-blackened teeth. “The white ones will kill you,” she says. “Pink ones are yummy.”
I laugh—the woman’s all right, and she’s left Phil speechless, which is not easy.
After that, the rest of our tour is quick, just the west side of the hall. My side. Mrs. Elkins in 301, two old women in 303, another old woman in 307—and in 305, moi. I don’t know why I’m the only guy on what seems to be the female side. When I asked Edward, he shrugged and said, “Doesn’t matter. The rooms change all the time.” And then he sort of blushed, because he realized what that meant. Out with the dead, in with the dying. The king is dead, long live the king.
My room, I have to say, isn’t the absolute worst in terms of color or border. It’s what my mom calls mauve, and the border, she says, that’s lilacs and violets and ivy, all looped all over one another. It’s springy, she says. I don’t much notice, most of the time. Except at night, when I can’t sleep and I’m looking up at all those bunches of flowers, just hanging there on the wall. I wish they’d, like, wither or something. I mean, change, somehow. It’s not right when things stay exactly the same, day after day. Sometimes I think about all the other people who’ve slept—or not—in this bed and looked at those damn lilacs. But mostly I don’t think about them. What’s the use?
Phil sits down on my bed, staring out the window for a minute, kind of quiet. But then he says, “Great view.” And, you know, it is—that’s the whole beauty of the west side and the main reason I’m happy I got put here. We’re at the top of the hill, and the city of Hudson runs right down to the river. I can see all the way down Warren Street and, on a clear fall day like today, the river sparkles all blue and clean down there. Up close, believe me, the Hudson is not so sparkly. But from up here it is. And behind it, the Catskill Mountains rise up, darker blue and curvy on top. Look at those mountains like that, against the sky, and you see the shape of a naked woman on her back. I’m not making that up—everybody sees it. In fact, it was my mom who pointed it out, long time back. The Catskill woman, she’s lying down, and the mountains to the south are her hair, all sort of spread out. Then there’s her face, profile, sort of turned away, toward the west. Then her breasts, clear as day, two nice pointy ones. Then a sort of dip—her belly. And then two raised-up, bent knees. Like she’s lying there, all open and ready, like some sort of sky god or something is going to come down and make her day.
Mom always said the Catskills were, like, magical, that the Indians who used to live there way back, they thought the mountains were sort of sacred or something. And the whole valley, it’s Sleepy Hollow country. All of it, kind of haunted. Mom used to make up stories to tell me, especially this time of year, to scare my socks off. But from up here, it doesn’t look scary. It’s real pretty, actually. Church steeples and all that red brick and stone of the old buildings, like a painting.
Hudson has been around forever, and I’m glad that I get to see it from kind of above, you know? All stretched out, all the people who built the buildings and the churches and the railroad tracks and the boats—all long dead. That’s what I think about lots of times when I look out this window. Every one of them, dead. And new ones coming along every day. The maternity ward, all those newbie humans, that’s right above my head, fourth floor. (Where I myself put in my first appearance, I’d like to note, seventeen years ago.) The morgue? I guess that’s in the basement. Like our sign said: Going down. This means you. One of the therapists told me that’s why he can keep on working here, that’s what we all need to understand: the long view. I think about that for a while and we’re quiet, me and Phil, taking in the sights.
Second, he says, “So what do you do around here, my man? I mean, where’s your computer, your music, your entertainment center? Okay, there’s a TV, but what else?”
I don’t want to tell him this, but I don’t e-mail and I don’t text anymore because, real simple, I don’t see all that well these days. I mean, it’s just one more thing he doesn’t need to know, that when you get to this point, your eyes don’t work so hot. And screens, all that light and movement, they’re really painful and, I don’t know, unstable or something. All flickery and weird. Video games—all those flashy colors—they’re like torture. Like you’re not on the outside anymore, but got sucked all the way in, where the explosions happen inside your skull. And it’s just plain impossible for me to read words on any screen anymore. Even print on a page, it jumps around and makes you want to puke.
But I don’t say any of that, don’t bother to explain. See, there’s a whole lot of stuff you learn in here that you don’t necessarily feel you should pass on to the world. Like how sunlight hurts our eyes and how, overall, this whole process is like being hollowed out. Like a cantaloupe or something, you know, after someone’s metal spoon has been in there, scraping out all the good stuff—all the fruit and juice. Like what’s left is just shell, you know? The rind. So I say to Phil, “Hey, man, I’m entertained by the whole human comedy, that’s all. Live-action. There’s always something happening here. It’s a riot.” And it’s funny—that’s almost true. I don’t miss cyberspace at all.
After a few minutes of thinking about that, Phil says the third interesting thing. “Richard, my liege. You definitely need to get out more. How’d you like to spend Halloween night out in the Real World? Hit some hot spots, pick up chicks, trick or treat? Let’s blow this joint, man.”
And you’d think I’d be jumping for joy, right? I mean, a night out with Uncle Phil? My mother not around to say no? That’s like a lifetime fantasy come true. But what I feel is more scared than anything else. I haven’t been out in a long time. And I’m not so sure I can handle the Real World. Or it can handle me. See, around here, no one winces at how we look—there are no scars too horrible to bear. It’s all normal here to be hideous. I hate to be a wuss, though, in front of Phil. So I’m waffling when the phone rings.
I say, “Hi, Ma, how you feeling?” and I watch as Phil waves his hands and shakes his head, the classic I am not here gesture. I nod: right, he’s not here. Like I said, phoning is not seeing, is it?
5
MOM’S VOICE IS ALL hoarse and low. Hard to say if that’s from the flu or from crying, which she does whenever she thinks I can’t see her. It hits me that, this week at home, the woman is probably in tears about 98 percent of the time, and I feel pretty lousy that I’ve been enjoying myself so much. “Hey, Ma,” I say, “you okay?”
There’s one loud, throat-clearing hack and then she says, “Sweetie, I’m fine. You?”
“Fine. Doing good.” This is my standard lie. There’s absolutely no sense saying anything else, because if you do, you have to get all into it, and that’s just repetitive and boring.
“I’m so worried that you’re lonely. Anybody been in to see you?”
I close my eyes and try to come up with some version of the truth. “A couple of counselors. One of the Br’ers. Oh, yeah, Sylvie’s dad.”
There’s surprise in her voice. “Sylvie’s dad? He’s not usually a sociable man, I’ve got to say. Why did he . . . Oh, god. Is Sylvie . . .?”
That question pisses me right off. I want to scream: Is Sylvie what? Where? Sylvie? I just cannot go there. “Shit, Ma. Sylvie’s fine, okay? She’s fine. Listen, I got to go take a shower. Talk to you later.” I’m short of breath and I can feel my heart pounding in my ears. I get all dizzy and have to lean back on my pillows.
Phil’s been listening, not even pretending not to. He takes the phone out of my hand and clicks it shut. “Mothers, huh? What a pain in the ass.” He frowns. “So, Sisco have anything interesting to say?”
Sisco is Phil’s name for my mother, his big sister. I shake my head, not enough breath to speak.
Phil slides up the bed until he’s sitting right next to me. We’re both leaning on the pillows now. “Hey, man, forget it.” He nudges me with his elbow. “I bet there’s good Halloween stuff on TV. Like, Monster Movie Marathon or something.”
So that’s what we do, all afternoon: watch old horror flicks on TCM. There are the silly ones, the stupid ones and the ones that scare your socks off. Like The Haunting—the old one, that is, not that new piece-of-crap version. No, this is the one where this woman named Eleanor—Nell, they call her—is, like, half nuts, half sane. Half in love with Hill House, half scared as shit. The house wins. The last thing she says, driving straight into a tree, is “Why don’t they stop me?” Jeez Louise. Mom and me, we read the book, The Haunting of Hill House, together when I was about twelve. We had to read it together because we were both too scared to read it alone. We’d sit on my bed—I was hooked up to IVs, even at home, every night, long story, not worth going into—and we’d read, silently, turning a page only when both of us were done with it. Then we went on to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. That Shirley Jackson, man, she can throw a lump of pure darkness into your chest, you know? She can spin your head around and make you totally, like, off balance. But I got to say that, looking back, those were sweet times for Mom and me. I was home, we were scared together, not alone. Kind of nice, really.
The supper tray comes at five. I’ve got such a headache from TV overload that I can’t even look at it. Phil makes fake gagging sounds, pointing at the food. But he sits down and eats it all while I sip the coffee. Then he claps his hands and says, “Okay, my liege, your food taster has declared this safe for your consumption.” He waves at the empty tray, and we both laugh like hyenas. He paces around the room a few times, looks out the window and puts his hands on his hips. “It’s time to go, pal.” He makes his voice all dramatic and fake spooky: “As darkness falls on the city of Hudson this hallowed night, strange figures appear on the streets. Children in costume? Or the denizens of the deep, showing their true faces? Who really knows? Who can really tell innocence from evil on this Halloween night?” He gives a long, loud, monstrous laugh: “Bwaaaa, ha, ha, ha.”
There’s applause from the doorway. Jeannette’s back on duty and she’s smiling. In fact, she’s got a funny, shy kind of look in her eyes. “My god, it’s Philip Casey,” she says. “I haven’t seen your ugly face since, what, freshman year of high school? Fancy running into you here.”
Phil looks at her for a few ticks. She’s big, like I said, but she’s attractive and she’s got a real spark, tonight at least. She’s wearing a uniform top with smiling jack-o’-lanterns all over it. Suddenly, this hits me: it’s the first time in all my whole life that me and Mom didn’t carve one. For a second, it’s all there in my head: the newspapers on the kitchen table, the knife in my hand. The deep cut around the stem, careful not to damage the stem, then the tugging off of the top of the pumpkin. It’s right there: the orange-gold of the innards and the smell, sharp
as anything, of pumpkin guts on my hands. The clumsy triangle eyes and fangs we always went for. That great moment when Mom lit the candle inside and, bammo, the thing came to life. And the taste of the seeds, roasted in our oven and covered with salt. I can feel tears stinging my eyes, and I’m glad that Phil and Jeannette are too busy looking at each other to pay me any mind.
“Jeannie?” Phil’s got a big ole grin on his face. “Oh man. Jeannie. Long time, girl. I had no idea you worked here.”
Jeannette comes all the way into the room, sashaying her hips. “Well, I didn’t know that you know our Richard,” she said. “Didn’t put the names together ’til right this minute.”
“Know him? Know him? Hey, I’m his uncle. I’m family. We are both Casey men. We’re tight. Aren’t we, my man?”
Tight, me and Phil? I wish it were true, so I try to smile. “Yep.”
Phil goes over and gives Jeannette a hug. “Listen, Jeannie,” he says, right in her ear. “Can you, maybe, just not check on our man Richard here? For a couple hours, maybe?”
She pulls back and frowns. “Not check on a patient? I don’t think so.”
Phil smooths his hand along her back. “Honey,” he says, soft and sweet. “This is a seventeen-year-old kid we got here. Remember what it was like, being seventeen? It’s Halloween night. I’ll take care of him, I promise. Don’t you allow, like, little leaves of absence? When accompanied by a responsible adult?”
She snorts. “Yeah, sure. And who might that be?”
His voice gets even softer. Maybe he thinks I can’t hear him. But that’s where he’s wrong. The best sense I got these days is hearing. It’s sharp as can be. “He’s a kid,” he says. “And this is his last Halloween.”
Somebody Up There Hates You Page 4
