Odditorium: A Novel (6 page)

A skinny kid with bruised lips, a new arrival taking only Tofranil, pointed at the blue screen. “Been in a trance all my life, dolly. That’s what got me in here.”

Oodles, who had been committed by his daughter over the Christmas holidays, was nodded out in his chair. Skeeziks, who had been in the longest, so rumor had it, nibbled a jujube of earwax. His skin was grayish-yellow against the green hospital gown. He sat at attention, arms held rigid in front of him; every few seconds his tongue, chalky and cracked, slithered out in a fly-catcher movement. Skeeziks was exhibiting symptoms of tardive dyskinesia, a common side effect of a prolonged diet of tranquilizers from the phenothiazine group. Boots Malone, a two-year man, was encountering the same syndrome. He stood facing the wall, drenched in sweat, his hands shaking with palsy.

“Bootsie’s not looking too good today,” said Harris, lighting one cigarette from the end of another. He liked to smoke his entire ration before lunch, then beg the rest of the day.

“No wonder,” said Mikie. Mikie weighed 230 pounds and had lost most of his hair by age twenty-eight. “I saw at breakfast. They give him two of those orange bombers, you know. That’s almost half a gram.”

“Half a gram? Oh, my Lord.” Harris tapped ashes onto the back of his hand, smeared them into the shape of a cross. “They’re gonna make an eggplant out of him.”

“Don’t be an eggplant, Boots.” Mikie shouted across the room.

Waldo, one of the night attendants, stood in the doorway. He had just finished counting the sharps, making an inventory of every razor, scissors and kitchen utensil on the ward before clocking out.

“That’s right, Bootsie. Spit the shit out if you have to.” Emboldened by his friend, Harris was shouting too.

Why are these people alert? Waldo asked himself. There is no reason for them to be alert. “Quiet. This is a quiet period.”

“Fuck you,” Mikie whispered.

“What was that?” Waldo came forward fingering the striped top of an athletic sock that dangled from his hip pocket. Everyone knew there was a cake of laundry soap inside that sock—when Waldo hit you, it was just like a blackjack.

“I didn’t say nothing. Just watching teevee here.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, we were talking about the broad on the teevee show, that’s all.” Harris shrugged. “That’s all.”

“No, you were shouting. You were disrupting. I’m going to have to separate you.”

“We’ll be good,” Mikie said, starting to panic.

“Let’s go, asshole.”

“No, no. I wanna be with my friend.” Waldo yanked Mikie’s arm. “Nonono.” Harris looked at the linoleum as Mikie and his chair were dragged into the hall. He broke the filter off his next cigarette. Outside Waldo got some bandages out of his jacket and started to tie Mikie’s ankles to the chair.

Harris could hear Mikie starting to cry. He got the fresh smoke going and looked around. “Jesus,” he said very quietly. Then to himself: Mikie got hijacked out of here and I’m the only one that noticed.

At a low table at the opposite end of the dayroom, another inmate was having an informal interview with his therapist. The inmate had a ten-day growth of beard and thick dark hair that had not been washed in days. He sucked his teeth. The therapist rolled a freshly sharpened pencil between his palms.
DR. RECHETTE
said his black plastic name tag. “Informal” meant that he didn’t take notes.

“Do you want to tell me about yesterday?”

“The thing with Lightbulb Head?”

Rechette sighed gently. “Let’s refer to her as Nurse Amato, shall we?”

“Whatever. I didn’t make up that name, you know…. Okay. Amato and the others are locked in the nurses’ station. No scoop there. They’re always in there playing cribbage. Sometimes they only come out to get water for the coffee machine.”

“No editorials, Jim.”

“Didn’t I ask you not to call me that?”

“Christo. If that makes you feel more comfortable.”

“Right. There’s this new admission, anyway. Kid’s only been here maybe a week. Yesterday morning he gets this savage migraine attack, doubled over and his face all white. He’s got a history of these things, real gut benders. Yes, Marty, I saw it in his file and don’t tell me it’s against the rules…. You want to hear the story, you can’t keep jumping in. So … The kid is really going through it, but I’m cool. I figure before too long somebody will come out and give him a needle. That’s what they’re here for, right? But now the kid’s wrapped around himself down on the floor, bellowing. I walk over to the station and I suggest—maybe I raised my voice a little—I suggest Amato might want to investigate. Maybe I took a couple of swings at the door, who remembers? Well, Amato wanders out and she’s rubbing her eyes like we were dragging her away from a nap. She says, ‘Larry is being punished. He’s been spoiled by too much easy access to medication and now he has to earn back his privileges.’ I got a little hot at that point. Somebody got me in a hammerlock. They wanted to put me in a body bandage, but I talked them out of it.”

Rechette shook his head forlornly, dug a thumbnail into the spotless pink eraser at the end of his pencil. “Sometimes you make me want to retire.”

Christo reached across the table, jiggled a cigarette out of Rechette’s half-empty pack, and said, “How do you feel about that?”

“You think you did something noble, I’m sure, but it was moronic.” Rechette narrowed his eyes. “How do you suppose this is going to look when it comes time for your review? I’m greasing all kinds of rails to get you released and you pull a stunt like this. Don’t you want to get out of here?”

“More and more.”

“Then make yourself invisible for the next ten days. Fortunately Amato is being transferred to another facility next month so I can probably ease you through. You haven’t blown it yet, but don’t try again.” Rechette stood, smoothed his silk necktie, buttoned his herringbone jacket. He indicated the cigarette pack with a twitch of the head. “You can keep those.”

Christo watched him leave: that side-to-side cowpoke walk. He had to admire the way in which Dr. Martin Rechette grabbed life by the balls. The man was not board certified. He was a former urologist practicing psychiatry for the state. He had published an article in the
Journal of Mental Sciences
. He was in a lofty tax bracket. He was also the softest touch Christo had ever come across in thirty years of looking.

Later that day, Christo came upon Inocencia Amato in the corridor. She was bent over the drinking fountain; a hank of black hair had escaped from the pinnings of her cap and hung down past one eye. He crept up behind her and she whirled at the touch of his leg, her clawlike hands, with their long peach-enameled nails, prepared to strike.

“Hiya, Nurse Amato. Is it true that back in the Philippines you eat dog? Beat them to death with bamboo poles to tenderize the meat?”

“Yes.” She dried her hands on the front of her skirt.

“I bet puppies are the best.”

Amato batted at her loose hair. “You, sir, are wasting the time of everyone in this hospital.”

“Well, don’t get too excited,” Christo said. And when she had disappeared: “You might burn out your tungsten filament.”

It was in a cramped second-floor office that Christo’s final discharge interview took place. From somewhere nearby came the steady rumble of machinery. Christo adopted a submissive posture in a molded plastic chair from which he could view the parking lot through partially drawn curtains, could be tantalized by the mobility of others: relatives shuffling confusedly across the asphalt having been rebuked, perhaps not even recognized; dishwashers and orderlies still in uniform and hurrying to compact cars that would take them on lunch-hour errands to the bank, the dry cleaner’s; the doctors, distinguished Men of Science in British raincoats, padding along a strip of newly replanted grass to their reserved parking spaces as though prowling a parade ground at dawn, some new wrinkle in the elaboration of chemical warfare pricking the conscience.

As the last person entered and the door clicked shut behind him, Christo thought of teevee dramas in which the desperate hero dives through a cellophane window, lands nimbly, rolling to his feet, and races untouched into the commercial break. But such crude tactics were not his style. He was fully prepared to smarm his way out.

His panel of inquisitors consisted of Rechette; Monica Fortgang, head of nursing; Dr. Mool Dopesh, a Pakistani behaviorist (who in the last twelve months had received a color television set and a microwave oven from a major pharmaceutical manufacturer in exchange for running evaluation tests of their new drugs on fifty inmates); and the clinic director, an abrasively voluble man in a Santa Claus beard who was seated at a pressed steel desk. The others were bunched in on either side.

Rechette made some preliminary remarks, emphasizing Mr. Christo’s sincere desire to remake himself in therapy and the noteworthy progress he had achieved in dealing with such matters as flattened affect, reactive hostility and nihilist delusions.

Dr. Dopesh muttered to himself as he thumbed through the contents of a loose-leaf binder, boosting his volume to mention the patient’s original court-ordered detention after a trial on two counts of forgery.

“I was never convicted on that charge,” Christo said, regretting the pinch of belligerence in his voice. “And I paid back the money, too.”

“Really, Mool, I think that’s yesterday’s papers,” Rechette said hurriedly.

“What papers?” Dopesh was confused, fearful that some bundle of charts, some crucial file, had eluded him.

“A figure of speech, Mool. But I think after six months with us, Mr. Christo is sufficiently mindful of the consequences of antisocial behavior that I don’t foresee any repetition.”

The director brought a Styrofoam cup to his whisker-hemmed mouth and took little sucking sips of black tea. “Certainly our main concern should be conduct inside the walls of this institution. I’m wondering about this dust-up with Miss Amato two weeks ago.”

“Just one of a series,” said Monica Fortgang in her wind-up Victrola voice. “Patient has continually shown a marked resentment toward authority, an unwillingness to cooperate and follow orders. He has been a disruptive force on the ward, and frankly I’m far from convinced that there’s been the slightest forward movement since he arrived.”

Christo felt that the floor was a hydraulic lift pushing him immutably toward the ceiling where, amid the crunch of bone and geysers of blood, he would be mashed against the twin eggbox light fixtures, neatly cube-steaked and ready for boiling. He took a deep breath.

“I deeply regret that incident. Since then I have had an opportunity to apologize personally to Nurse Amato. I’ve come to realize that however severe the other patient’s pain might have been, however much I might have felt that he was being denied the proper attention, it was wrong of me to interfere with staff since they know best how to deal with each patient on an individual basis. I understand now that I was improperly assigning to myself responsibilities I wasn’t either capable or eligible to handle.”

Monica Fortgang broke the paperclip she had been bending while she relived a year-old incident in which Rechette had accused her, in front of three members of the janitorial staff, of administering a near-fatal dose of Amytal to one of his favorite patients. “Very nice, Marty,” she hissed through glistening choppers. “Did you type that up for him?”

“I might point out, Monica, that I have been at this hospital considerably longer than you have. And any intimation that I am attempting to abet Mr. Christo in hoodwinking this committee is totally out of line and an insult to me professionally.”

“I’m sure you’re quite thorough and expert when it comes to bladder obstructions or cystitis, but this …”

“I fail to see how Monica expects to make a judgement on this case when she is so clearly biased.”

“Enough,” said the director, striking the desk top with an invisible gavel. “I’d hate to give patient the impression that the review process is in any way a matter of who your friends are.”

Dopesh pursed his lips as though he were about to kiss something. “Yes, we are all of integrity here.”

“Thank you, Mool.” The director, a habitual fisherman who tied his own flies, who had made many a turn with waxed thread around the shanks of Tufted Mites and Red Skimmers, wound the string twice around his tea bag and squeezed out tannic acid. “What about return to the community? Have any arrangements been made?”

Rechette launched into excited accolades for Synergy, a local halfway house and rehab program that had recently secured a sizable grant from Washington, but the director cut him off.

“I think you’ve said enough already, Marty.”

Rechette scanned his face for traces of suspicion or censure—there was little precedent for his going to bat for a patient in this way—but the director’s eyes were as neutral as a snapshot of topsoil.

“I would prefer to hear what patient has to say on this subject.”

Moistening his lips, Christo leaned forward in his chair and played straight to the director. “I’d have to say that from what I’ve heard, I’m pretty enthusiastic about the Synergy program. They stress a very supportive group environment there and I know I’m going to need a lot of help and reinforcement in the first couple of months. Another thing I like is that they have a strong vocational emphasis, and to get through to those final stages of recovery, I’ll need a steady, regimented work situation. Something I have to show up for every day, you know, something repetitive. I was thinking possibly about an electronics factory. I used to have a real flair for circuit diagrams in high school. Yeah, basically my goal is to make my life as, you know, as humdrum as possible.” He cracked his mouth and tipped his head bashfully to one side.

Bingo. The director was smiling and twirling the edges of his beard.

Christo thought: I’m in, three to one. Which means I’m out.

And: These people are defenseless. If I waited six months to take them, maybe I
am
crazy.

Eighteen hours after his official release, Christo appeared at Rechette’s suburban chalet with all his personal effects in a canvas sea bag. These included a memento from Harris (a cigarette lighter “which once belonged to Eddie Fisher”); two clip-on black bow ties; a personally annotated road atlas; his diploma from a mail-order locksmithing school; and a large baggie of blue Valiums. They were a kind of long-term going-away present from Dennis, the social worker upon whom Christo had prevailed to steal in installments over the last couple of months. Dennis wasn’t a total loser. He just needed friends. His mother had died over the summer in a boating accident on a private lake outside Rome.