Songs of the Maniacs

by Mickey J Corrigan

  “I guess,” admits Ben. “So you don’t think this is leading to a loss of personality.” He rubs his nose with one finger and frowns. “That’s a relief. But still. I am behaving like a weirdo. No offense,” Ben says to Sasha.

  I sit back in my chair and watch. Let the young people work on their issues together.

  “I mean, I didn’t come here to talk about myself or say anything bad about people with SIPD. You do have SIPD, right?” Ben asks Sasha and she nods. They stare into one another’s eyes.

  Maybe they can feel something. Together.

  I half-listen while they talk. What I don’t do is share my thoughts on Ben’s so-called random compulsion. Because I am not so sure it is random. Because my office number is one hundred and eleven.

  “At least you’re out in the world. Even if it’s a struggle to keep it together,” Sasha says.

  Ben smiles. “Life out in the big world isn’t all that wonderful. Especially these days.”

  “That‘s probably true,” Sasha says. “But it is living. Living your life, rather than avoiding it or escaping it. Be grateful you can leave here tonight and never come back. If you choose not to.”

  Ben looks at Sasha and cocks his head. “Nobody said anything when I walked in here tonight. So, what would happen if we were to leave here right now? Who would stop us? Those big, dumb-looking guys who stopped in here for a minute?”

  “No, Ben, it’s not like that,” I explain. “There are no locked gates and no guards on duty at the front entrance. In fact, the front gate is never locked. That gate stands open day and night. Residents can come and go as they wish. But most stay right here. They no longer feel safe out in the world, so they stay put.”

  The prisoners have swallowed the keys.

  Ben leaps up with a grin. “Of course it’s not safe out there. So let’s go!” His voice is excited and he waves his arms. “I mean, I’ve got to go. I need to go look for my number. Talking about it has sparked the urge. Maybe you two want to come along?”

  He looks down at Sasha hopefully, his hair a shock of white in the stage lights, his tan face lit with the kind of hopeful expectancy I once had. The kind of passion I would do anything to have again.

  “When I gotta go, I gotta go,” Ben says with a shrug. “But I’d love you guys to come along. And see what I’m talking about here. Tell me what you think is going on,” he says as he begins to walk backward toward the stairs.

  Sasha shakes her head. She looks sad. This too is progress. At least she is expressing some feeling. “Sorry, Ben,” she says. “I’ll have to take a rain check.”

  Sometimes certain steps must be taken, specific things must be completed, before anybody is ready to listen. I will not tell Ben about the number on my office door, but I will go with him while he walks the streets looking for his number. Looking for a random one hundred and eleven.

  “Okay, Ben,” I call out to him as I stand and stretch. “I just happen to have my walking shoes on tonight,” I say as I head down the stairs after him and Sasha. “And it looks like this week’s Malaise Group meeting is over.”

  14.

  We stand in front of the Burdome Building in a splash of white-gold moonlight. Sasha and Ben are still talking and the wind is whipping their hair gently like a paddle fan on low and the cicadas are chirping from the oak trees where they must be mating or looking to mate and for some reason everything is starting to speed up. I hold my hands up to my face and I can see right through the milky skin to the bones. The bones in my hands are like twigs, I think, little helpless twigs trembling in an evening breeze.

  Sasha leaves with a casual over the shoulder wave. The darkness eats her in a few bites and I am alone with Ben on the sidewalk. I let my hands fall to my sides and ask, “Now what?”

  Ben touches my shoulder lightly and smiles. His dimple is like a hole in his chin in the black and white photo we make in the darkness. “Now we go straight to some random but perfectly placed one hundred and eleven. And then we have few drinks and you tell me what you think,” he says.

  Sounds like bar therapy, is what I am thinking. I smile and nod. A man like all men. Nothing I can’t handle.

  There is an odor on the wind that is unpleasant. Familiar. Meaty and slightly rank.

  I link my arm through Ben’s and say, “Let’s go.”

  It feels nice to touch his body. His bicep is wonderfully solid and warm. Like a smooth stone at rest in the sun. I would like to have such muscles, men’s muscles that are well-defined and strong. As we stroll through the silent quad, in and out of the yellow pools of light cast by street lamps, I am thinking how interesting it would be to walk around in a male body, looking out at the world through a man’s eyes.

  Ben picks up the pace. He is tall and his legs are long, but so are mine. To match Ben’s gait, I must let go of his arm.

  “Do you smell cheese fries?” I ask.

  He slows his pace, tilts his head back and sniffs the air. “You know, I do smell fast food,” he says. “Is there a dining hall around?”

  “This is the central quad we are crossing right now,” I explain, and launch into a brief version of our visitor’s tour. “The center has a total of twenty buildings, including residential dorms, a cafeteria and outdoor café, the residents’ dining hall, several office buildings, the gym, and an inpatient hospital. We have outpatient facilities too, but most of these are located in The City.”

  “On Second Street, right? I’ve walked past the outpatient housing and the therapy center many times. One benefit of my compulsion is I know this town like the back of my hand. Better, probably, even though I am quite familiar with the back of my hand.” Ben laughs. He pauses. “I didn’t want to say anything in Group tonight, but I’ve seen you before. On my walks. I’ve seen you out walking too. Many times,” he says without looking at my face or slowing his stride. “Hope that’s not too freaky.”

  “What do you mean, freaky?” I ask. A cold shudder passes through my rib cage. I do not like to be spied on. Or watched by unseen eyes. Even the thought of being stalked evokes a chilly paranoia.

  “I mean, I didn’t come to the Malaise Group tonight to look for you or anything. It’s not like I knew you’d be there. It’s just a coincidence. Okay? I don’t want you to think I’m a stalker.”

  My high school boyfriend used to stalk me, although we did not call it that. It was part of our game, our rough sex game, and I was into it as much as he was. At least, I believed I was at the time. Maybe I just didn’t know any better. Either way, I allowed it to happen and at the time it excited me.

  In one version of the game we played, he would wait for me outside my family’s house. As I lay on my bed on a school night, reading Twain or studying algebra, I would begin to feel his presence. I would get so excited. I wanted him so much on those nights.

  When I snuck out to find my boyfriend, my brothers would cover for me. All three of my brothers encouraged me to rebel in small ways against the rigid confines of my parents’ conservative rule of law. My brothers must have thought I went out to smoke dope and drink a few beers. They were normal boys with fast cars and hot girlfriends and multiple school detentions. All of the negative attention was centered on them. They thought it was healthy for me to stand up for myself too.

  But really, that was not what I was doing. I was not standing up for anyone at all.

  My brothers would never have let me out of the house if they had known about the games I was playing with my high school boyfriend. They never imagined their little sister wandering around in the dark, removing her clothes. They would have killed my boyfriend if they ever found out how he waited all those times in our yard, how he lay there in the black night beneath the wind-tossed fishtail palms, waiting for me to undress. How he always grabbed me from behind, clasping a dirty hand over my mouth and pulling me to the ground.

  One time I got the upper hand and rop
ed my boyfriend to a big banyan tree. I used his thin undershirt, cramming it in his mouth so he couldn’t yell at me. My thighs were pulsing that night with the feeling a woman gets when she owns a man.

  Boys all had the body I wanted. Not to hold onto in pleasure or pain, not to enfold and merge with my own, but to replace my own. To take the place of my body. To change me into someone else.

  After that one time, however, my high school boyfriend was more careful to maintain control. He would wait for me in my back yard, then drag me down the street to where he parked his parents’ Buick. Sometimes he drove us to the beach for a struggle down by the tide line. Other times we just fooled around in the back seat. Almost like any other teenage couple. Except I would be left with the marks his hands made on my skin.

  He liked to wrap his big cold hands around my throat. He liked that a lot. It scared me to feel the extent of the physical power he had over me. The physical and sexual and emotional power he was able to wield. It scared me and it excited and confused me and we went on like that until we both went off to college.

  Ben is quiet, peering through the darkness as we hike past the brightly lit mansions set along the road like cupcakes on black velvet. He stops only to check the house numbers on the mailboxes. None have the number we seek.

  “That last mailbox was fourteen-fifty, and the numbers are going up.” Ben increases the pace sharply. “We need to be in The City. The numbers are too limited way out here. And there are no cars. So no license plates.”

  As he speeds up I drop back, following along at an increasing distance. I am tiring and losing all sense of connectedness in the warm black night. The moon has moved to a new position behind us and appears dimmer, less golden, less sparkly than it did earlier. A more restrained persona, perhaps?

  I walk slowly and try to catch my breath. I do not feel well. I might have to say I do not feel myself. I want to take off all my clothes and lie down on one of these cool green lawns. I want to lie back in the grassy hand of some unseen stranger.

  My brain is fogging over as random thoughts push their way into my mind. Almost like snatches of dreams: little wisps of images and brief scenes from my life. Only, the memories seem created, like they may be memories from someone else’s life.

  I am thinking about or dreaming of or watching a young woman with long blonde hair and clear green eyes. She serves drinks, she talks and laughs as she moves rapidly and gracefully, working her way up and down a mahogany bar. Her reflection in the mirror above the bar leans forward as she listens to an old guy in a leather jacket slumped on a bar stool. She smiles and pats the man on the shoulder. She hands a drink to a talkative woman wearing a brightly colored head scarf, then fills a pitcher with beer from a tap, pumping slowly enough to allow the perfect head to form.

  As these images flicker across the landscape of my mind, I walk slower and slower, trying to make sense of them. The more I imagine or dream or watch the bartender, who is some version of me, the more it seems like she is the one who is real. I am beginning to feel as if the woman in my head is the real me. And the woman imagining her, the woman trailing Ben through the night and gradually falling behind, that woman is not me.

  Like the dream me is real, but the person doing the dreaming is not.

  The dream continuity in my mind offers me an existence in which I belong and am featured. I can feel the pulse of it, the heat of that existence. It calls to me like a lover. Then the images blink off.

  I bump into Ben. He is standing in the center of the narrow sidewalk, staring over my head. His body is taut and he grabs me hard when I yelp in surprise.

  “Shhhh!” he warns, clasping a hand across my mouth.

  I start to choke and gasp.

  He lets go. “Sorry. But be quiet for a minute. I think someone is following us.” He’s whispering.

  All I can think about is how every life story has an unhappy ending. Because they all end the same way, with the storyteller dead to this world.

  15.

  The woman looks right at Anders. She doesn’t seem to see him, though.

  A hawk swoops overhead. Anders watches the big bird circling, searching the park for a mouse or a rat. Anders admires raptors. He admires how they see through the night to the object of their desire. He admires how these birds reach into the darkness to take what they want.

  He can hear the woman talking now. “I do that too,” she says. “Sometimes I imagine someone is following me. Especially when it’s late like this. And like you said, no cars. Kind of creepy. The mind plays tricks.”

  Headlights poke through the darkness, bouncing off Anders’ back to light up the couple ahead of him. He can see the woman’s long smooth face, her fleshy lips and silky hair. She doesn’t look at Anders, but watches as the car slowly passes. An old Ford Mustang, a car from an earlier time and place.

  “Ben!” the woman calls out. “The license!”

  Anders watches as the boy, Ben, lets go of the woman and raises both arms in the air. Like the car scored a touchdown. The woman laughs. It is the first time Anders has heard her laugh. She has a low throaty laugh. A coarse man’s laugh. He wants to take that laugh and hold it in his fist.

  The couple walk slowly into the park. They sit down together on a bench across from a children’s swing set. All the plastic swing seats are empty and so lightweight they rock back and forth in the evening breeze.

  He imagines cutting the tall boy down to size with his chain saw, slicing off limbs and tossing them in the handcart. Downsizing him. Changing him so he can’t touch her anymore.

  Anders would like to change the boy, Ben. He would like to change himself more, though.

  Now Anders can’t hear any of the words that are being spoken, so he just watches as they talk quietly to one another, sitting close together on the park bench. The moonlight makes both of their bodies look speckled, glittery. Like sequins.

  Neither of them says anything to Anders. He just stands there by himself on the edge of the park. Waiting for the woman and whatever future she might be creating for him. For all of them.

  Go ahead, Anders thinks. Talk all you want.

  16.

  I find myself sitting with Ben on a small park bench made from recycled plastic Diet-Water bottles. Listening to Ben. Or not listening to Ben. Somehow, the scene has changed and time has passed in some abbreviated form.

  “I was supposed to work tonight, and now I’m totally late,” Ben is saying. “I like the bar job so I don’t want to lose it. But it’s only a temporary thing anyway, a means to an end. I don’t see bartending as a career. Not for me anyway. Maybe owning a bar or a franchise, I can see that.”

  I can see chugging down a stiff one right now, is what I am thinking. Especially after a day like today. I would really enjoy a cold beer and a shot of Wild Turkey right about now. Oh yeah.

  “Ben,” I interrupt. “Didn’t you say that after we found your number we would talk about things over a few drinks? So why don’t we go to your bar?”

  Ben likes the idea so we stand up and brush the bench dirt from our backsides, and I smooth down my skirt.

  “How far is the bar from here?” I ask as we leave the park. The asphalt under our sneakered feet glistens in the sheen of the street lamps, but the puddles have disappeared. All the rainwater has been reclaimed, I am thinking. All that fresh water, used and reused without a drop wasted. The perfect system.

  “It’s downtown, a few blocks from the Second Street outpatient center,” Ben says as he picks up speed. He glances at a clunky sports watch on his wrist. “It’s only ten. My manager likes me, so maybe if I relieve her for the night she’ll let things pass. I mean, I can’t keep running off whenever I feel the urge. I certainly can’t do this when I get a real job.”

  A few wispy clouds trail themselves through the moonlit sky. The breeze is mildly floral, sweetly caressing my skin. Ben chatters away, and
I punctuate his monologue with the occasional non-committal grunt.

  He thinks this makes us friends. They all think that.

  As we reach the outskirts of The City, we are greeted by unfurling waves of late-night clamor and the stench of tropical rot. We are ablaze in red and green neon and the sudden repetitive flash of oncoming headlights. Traffic appears as if out of nowhere. We are no longer alone with the night. We pass pulsating clots of activity on the sidewalk, mostly in the form of rowdy students spilling out of noisy bars and clubs.

  I cannot remember the last time I went out for a memorable night on the town.

  The false daylight of the city street creates a trance state for me that I stumble through readily. The air is vibrant, electric, and it smells like a mix of overripe pineapple, fresh vomit and spicy aftershave. Music escapes from dark storefront interiors, ear-pounding music, along with gunshot bursts of laughter.

  We walk past Big Boy Bagel Deli. It’s packed with students. Suddenly, Ben steers me through an open doorway into the dark barroom next door.

  My eyes take a minute to adjust to the dim ale-colored lighting. Then I see her, moving around behind the mahogany bar. She stops to pour a generous shot of Black Velvet for an older man slumped on a backless bar stool. When he sits up straight and reaches for his drink, she looks at us and frowns.

  I am frowning too. And it is like looking in a mirror, a crazy funhouse mirror.

  “Ben, Ben, Ben. What am I going to do with you?” the bartender asks, shaking her head.

  Ben hurries to the bar.

  “What would you do with you if you were me?” she says with a half-smile.

  “I would give me that apron, then take the rest of the night off. That’s what I would do if I were you,” Ben says. He holds out an open hand and waggles his fingers. “Hand it over, Virginia. You know you want to go home and be with your man tonight. Let Bartender Ben take over for the evening,” he teases.