Authors: Percival Everett
“I’m not thinking anything” Harry House said, which was not completely true, as he was thinking that the laundry room must have changed detergents because his clothes weren’t making him itch today. The light blue pajama pants and pullover shirt usually tortured him, but not today, and he looked at the doctor and said, “I’m not itching.”
The skinny man brought his body forward and put his elbows on his desk. “This is good, itching? Itching to what? You’re not itching to what?”
Harry knew the man wanted to hear him say that he was not itching to bash in his face or not itching to scale the wall and disappear into the poor black neighborhood on the other side. “My body isn’t itching. I think they changed soaps in the laundry. Do you ever get that? You know, when your skin is so sensitive to stuff?”
The doctor’s face fell, the disappointment couldn’t have been more obvious, though he tried to mask it and move on. “Are you still keeping a journal?”
“Of sorts.” Harry interlaced his fingers and offered his nails a brief examination, noticing that they were in need of trimming. “It’s more a recounting of some memories than it is about my feelings. I know that’s not exactly what you wanted.”
“That’s fine. I’m sure that will be helpful for you as well.” He looked at his pad, then made a note with a short, chewed pencil. “The last time we talked you mentioned the death of your brother as being a really bad time growing up.”
“Wouldn’t it have to be?”
The doctor nodded. “But you said you resented him for dying. I think your words were, ‘He found a way to get everyone to look his way.’ Just what did you mean by that?”
Harry shrugged. “If I did say that, I didn’t feel it. I wouldn’t have resented him. Especially since I never wanted anyone paying attention to me anyway. I would have welcomed the diversion.”
“Why didn’t you want attention?”
“Just didn’t.” Harry watched the man’s eyes, knowing that long ago he had diagnosed him as having schizophrenia. That was how he had overheard the man put it.
The patient has schizophrenia.
For the doctor it was a disease, but for the orderlies and nurses who dealt with him daily, he was
schizophrenic.
For those working on the ward at night when patients peed on the floor and screamed bloody murder, it was a matter of interpersonal etiology.
“Did you love your brother? No, wait, let me put it this way: Did you
like
your brother?”
“Yes.” The answer was automatic and a lie only in the sense that Harry could not actually recall a brother.
“Were the two of you close?”
“He was five years older.” This was indeed a lie.
“Yes, I know, but my question is, were you close?”
“Not terribly.”
“So, you weren’t greatly saddened by his death?”
“I guess I don’t know what actually constitutes
greatly saddened
in your thinking. My
normal
sadness might put your
great
sadness to shame.”
“I see.” The doctor tapped his pad with the eraser of his pencil, a rhythmic tapping and Harry began to count them. “You’re a bright person, Harry.”
“So you tell me.”
The doctor poured himself a glass of water from the clear plastic pitcher on his table. “Would you like a drink?” When Harry shook his head no, the man took a sip and asked, “Any dreams lately?”
“No.”
“No dreams?”
“I don’t dream.”
“Everybody dreams,” he said.
“I don’t.”
“Is this a decision you’ve made? Not to dream?” The doctor leaned back again. Harry could see that the man believed he had lured his prey into some open meadow.
“No more that you’ve decided
to
dream.”
“Well, I think that’s enough for today.” He looked at his appointment book, which was open on his desk. “I’m on vacation next week, so I won’t see you until a week from next Tueday.”
Harry nodded.
Harry didn’t go to the common room as he usually did to sit and watch televison game shows in which people always appeared a bit green. Instead, he went back to his bed on the ward where he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, smelled the urine that had collected on the floor of the bathroom just twenty feet away, counted the watermarks on the green walls. He pressed his eyes shut and searched for sleep, tried to remember how it was done, sleeping, was pleased he had lied to the shrink about his dreaming.
It was exceedingly difficult for Harry to find sleep on the ward, what with the snoring of the asthmatic old man in the bed to his right and the more than occasional meeting of one particular orderly and any of several nurses in the empty bed to his left. Tonight, the orderly was grunting away over the short nurse from the medication dispensary. Harry had always liked her and didn’t think she would become one of the string, but he could hear her breathing now, could smell her sweat and the orderly’s. He could hear her fingernails as she clutched at the bedding and he knew she didn’t want to be there, didn’t want that hairy orderly inside her and he wondered why she was there then. He knew that the image of her white hose flowing from the mattress to the tiles of the floor would stay with him and also the way her stocky, smooth thighs seemed so clean compared to the hairy legs between them. They were done in just a few minutes, but the sound of it all remained in the room, the mussed sheets seeming to glow in the darkness. Harry had watched them begin, but had then quietly turned away, turned away when for a sharp second the young nurse saw his eyes, saw him watching her, recognizing her.
The following morning as Harry stood at the window to receive the medication, blue and white capsules he never swallowed, the young nurse was abrupt with him, avoiding his eyes, and when he didn’t immediately step away from the station, she cut him a keen glance that embarrassed him. He could see beyond her into the office, the venetian blinds slicing the light coming through the window, and there was the orderly, strutting around, all pumped up like a peacock, his open shirt offering a glimpse of chest hair. Harry felt the smooth scars that halfway encirled his forearms, as he sometimes did for comfort. He then stepped away into the middle of the common room. Harry gave his medication to the quiet vet who always sat in the corner near the window, the vet who constantly tapped his foot, chanting, “One, two, three, boom,” and then went to sit at the card table with the old man, Harold.
“You know, of course, that I’m God,” Harold said, as he always said. “They all pray to me. That’s why they say, ‘Harold be thy name.’ Want to play chess?” Harold didn’t wait for a response, but started arranging the pieces on the folding hard-paper board. His pajama top was stained with the morning’s breakfast. “You’ll be black and I’ll be white because, frankly, that’s the way it is.” He laughed. He said the same thing every day and every day he laughed the same way. Harold pushed his king’s pawn forward two squares. Harry made the same move. “Hmmm,” Harold said as if the move were some complicated trick, then he giggled like a boy and said, “Did you hear them last night?”
Harry shook his head no.
“You must have. They were right there next to you. He was grunting away over her like a dog.” Harold picked up his queen and moved her in spirals through the air before setting her down on the square in front of his king’s knight’s pawn.
Harry studied the illegal move.
“I bet he’s fucked every one of them by now.”
“He’s a pig,” Harry said.
“Well, of course, he is.” Harold didn’t wait for Harry’s response on the board, but moved his king’s rook over its pawn, across the board, and captured Harry’s king’s bishop. “Check. My daughter is a slut. I told her so and she put me in here. I said, ‘Doris, or whatever your name is, you are a slut, a S-L-U-T,’ and then she and that Nazi boyfriend of hers put me in the back of their Toyota four-wheel-drive piece-of-shit pickup truck and brought me here. They told everyone I was violent and that I wandered off frequently and slept in the street.”
Harry took the rook with his king.
“I didn’t see that,” Harold said. “He’s a pig, all right, that guy, and all these little sluts he porks are his piglets.” Harold chuckled. “His piglets. The way he grunts. He grunts and they squeal.” He made a barrage of pig noises. “It’s your move. But I didn’t wander off frequently like they claimed. I slept in the street right in front of their house.”
“I’m going to break out of here,” Harry said.
“Sure you are. Sure you are. It’s your move. Besides, what would you do out there? Work? You fucked up and now you belong in here with me, God. God will take care of you. I’ll take care of you and send my daughter to stinking, sweaty hell where she can cook burgers for her friends. And another thing, if you were to ‘break out,’ as you put it, where would you live? You never did have any family or so you tell me. Where would you go? The only place you know is here.”
“I’m not crazy.”
Harold looked at him. “I know that, but it doesn’t matter. I’m crazy and I can see plain as day that Gillis over there is crazy and I can see that Greenfeld over there is crazy and I can even see that our orderly stud with the short and crooked pecker is nuts, but you’re not crazy.”
Harry couldn’t tell if Harold was joking.
“I’m a fucking expert on crazy. I know how it happens and I know what it looks like. Your fucking problem is that you’re not crazy. Your fucking problem is that you’re too fucking sane.” Harold’s cheek was beginning to twitch the way it did whenever he got excited, and soon he would be spitting on the floor. “You’re all right and that’s why you don’t belong out there. If you go out there, you will be crazy. Look at me,” he paused to let Harry find his eyes, “I know.”
Harry didn’t play basketball out in the yard with the others, it being no fun, crazy people not being very good at games, certainly never understanding or even caring about the rules. With basketball they comprehended that the ball was to go through the hole, but when Harry put the ball through the hole they all got mad and asked why he was in the hospital anyway since he wasn’t crazy. So he avoided the basketball court and walked around to the side of the building where the gardeners had planted bearded irises along the walk, but he stayed well within the path because beyond the irises, between the azaleas and the wall of the building, a number of the homosexual inmates sometimes gave each other blow jobs.
Harry walked to the low brick wall above which stood high iron bars like the ones bolted to the windows. He looked at the row of houses across the street, tattered two-story houses that shared walls, only twice in the block were the buildings separated by driveways. A couple of teenagers who were sitting on a stoop pointed his way and shared a laugh and on the street, a couple of houses down, Harry thought he saw a drug transaction. A skinny woman in a crocheted skirt gave money to a man in a mid-seventies Chevy sedan with a vinyl top. Harry would find the other side of this barrier, but he was, of course, afraid and, of course, quite certain that what he would find on the other side would be just room enough to run to the next barrier, and there would be more crazy faces to mock and confuse him. He didn’t know how he knew the things he knew, didn’t know how it was he recognized place names in the newspaper or how it was he knew the car just pulling away from the skinny woman was a Chevy or how he knew that the skinny woman would suck a cock for ten dollars. He didn’t know how he knew that the welds on the wrought-iron bars were sloppy, though more than sufficient to keep him from pushing his way to freedom. A garbage truck rolled by, consigning to the air a momentary stench, and when it was gone so were the teenagers on the stoop and so was the skinny woman and her day’s fix, leaving the street empty, cold, lonesome, and desolate, and Harry knew somehow that was the place for him.
Harry was not asleep, a welcome pause from the dreams. He was lying on his bed, smelling the bleach in the sheets, knowing that the old man beside him had wet himself again, knowing because of the way he was not snoring, but whimpering and whispering his dead wife’s name. The orderly was making his way down the hall with the heavy nurse with red hair who was the only woman he fucked who truly seemed to like his brutish humping. Her nails twirled the hair on his back and near the end she spat out the word fuck over and over, not as instruction but as exclamation, and once when she was barking out the word, Harry saw her glancing about the ward, even pausing to offer him a brief smile as she caught him looking. Tonight they fumbled in through the darkness the way they always did, the orderly’s sneakers squeaking on the linoleum tiles, their giggling coated with the timbre of a few drinks from the bottle of Jim Beam that everyone knew the orderly kept in his locker. Once, the vet who sat in the corner was caught sneaking a nip from the stash and the orderly punched and kicked him until he bled from his ear. The orderly fell on top of the nurse on the empty bed between Harry and the vet, the frame squeaking as the whole of it scooted across the floor an inch or two, the nurse letting escape a loud and suddenly swallowed laugh. Harry watched them work off their clothes, panting and grunting, the smell of the alcohol wafting over to him, his eyes opened only to slits so that they would not see him watching; not that he was concerned with their discovering him, but he wanted them to assume that he was asleep. Their clothes off, the orderly was on top of the nurse, his fat ass rising and falling and she was staring at the ceiling like she was counting the cracks, but moaning all the while. The orderly’s face was buried in her neck and hair on the side away from Harry and so he didn’t see when Harry stood up, didn’t see when Harry reached under his bed and came back with the unopened can of soda pop that he had gotten from the canteen earlier that day, didn’t see when Harry raised it high over his head, but the nurse saw, her eyes growing wide, her mouth opening without a sound, and perhaps because she stopped moving or stopped breathing, the orderly began to come up. Harry brought the can down onto the back of the orderly’s head with the force of a baseball pitch, striking just below the bald spot, the dull thump of the blow not sounding real, the repercussion of it shooting through his arm to his chest, and the target fell limp over the woman, still motionless, still voiceless. Harry waited for the orderly to move, poised to strike again, but the orderly didn’t move and so Harry put down the can on his bed, picked up the man’s trousers from the floor, and stepped into them, pulling the cloth belt tight as the waistband gathered around his middle. He put his fingers to his pursed lips, signaling the nurse to be quiet, and she nodded. He then pulled the orderly’s smock over his head and felt for the ring of keys in the pant pockets.