The Shibboleth (13 page)

I rise, taking steps two by two. It's amazing what your body can do, even on drugs. My blue-slippered feet make padding sounds as I ascend. Looking up in the space between flights, I can see we're coming to the end of the line. Taking a left and another, I end up at a blank door with a bar release.

I stop, listen again, blood surging in my temples, hot breath blasting from my open mouth.

The sound of feet and wind being pumped in and out of lungs. Maybe some exasperation in there as well.

I press the bar as slowly as I can. It's a heavy, thick metal door. Industrial strength.

Below me, the footfalls continue.

When the gray door opens, there's a hot wind matching my breath, whipping inside the building due to some pressure differential I can only imagine, and I see an expanse of black and then white gravel and then black once more. I slip outside, onto the roof, as gracefully as I can manage, some drug-addled reflection of it. I'm out and moving away from the door before I realize that it might shut with a loud clang and alert the nurse.

Turning, I see the door swinging shut.

In movies, I'd make some dramatic leap, some superhuman dash, and stop it before it closes. But I'm still swimming in molasses, and an ungainly lurch is about all I can manage.

The door slows its movement at the very end, when it's about to close and latch, but I'm still too slow and now I see there's no handle to grab onto anyway, just a deadbolt. I fumble at it, hands numb, but the damned thing clangs shut.

The wind whips over the roof, making any other noise small and indistinct. But I heard the
clang
of the door shutting, and if I did, I have to assume whoever was ascending the stairs did as well.

I whirl about, my hospital gown giving a little flourish, and scope out my surroundings. Big metal boxes, gray-green, and some galvanized tin pipeworks. There's a wall of what looks like stone to my right, and capping the stone are little ornamental teeth, like the jagged skyline of a castle. It's an old building, the Tulaville Psychiatric Hospital.

I shuffle across what I realize now is black tar roofing. I hit a sticky spot, and it pulls the slippers from my feet. I take four steps before I realize the slippers are gone. I turn back to get them, stop, and then turn back again to the gray-green shapes I was heading for. Some sort of electrical or air-conditioning
units like gargantuan building blocks. As quickly as possible, I hide behind the bulkiest of them.

It's dark now, and the meager lights of Tulaville wink and tremble in the steamy night air. It's humid and loud with the roar of some ventilation machinery, and the spray of stars above is lost in the high, wispy cirrus clouds whipping by on hot winds.

I peek around the corner at the door. There's a single wire-framed bulb above it, swarmed with insects battering themselves against the glass. The door remains closed.

Breathless, I wait long enough to know that whoever was in the stairwell doesn't have an inquisitive bone in his body. Either that, or he's deaf.

Five minutes? Ten? I can't tell. My breath has slowed, and I'm not panting anymore. Sweating, though.

Eventually, I stand and shuffle back to the door and see if I can open it.

No dice.

I look around, wandering to the edge of the roof, the toothed—
no, crenellated
—wall surrounding me. Not much up here except splatters of bird shit and tar roofing and patches and puddles of water. There's some metal sheeting stacked in a corner, behind the stairwell hutch.

I can see most of Tulaville from the vantage, and beyond that, the phosphorescent lights marking the trestle bridge over the Arkansas River. Below me, the soft, manicured lawns. A parking lot, dimly lit. The building is old and over six stories tall. And judging by the crumbling mortar along the crenellations, falling into serious disrepair. But I guess I already knew that from my stint downstairs.

In the dark, I can make out a sub-roof below me, over the wings of the fourth floor and what looks like another stairwell hutch or some sort of rooftop storage shed, but it's a drop of twenty-five feet. Tulaville Psychiatric Hospital is an absolute beast of a building.

I don't know what to do. I can bang on the door and hope someone hears. But then it'll be more doses of candy and the wet blanket getting wetter. Or I can try to climb down with a high probability of falling to my death.

I have visions of groundskeepers driving trucks with beds full of bags of mown grass and leaves and me just jumping off the side of the building and landing amidst the soft, fluffy lawn detritus like a stuntman from a movie. But to get to where I can jump down over the parking lot—all of the eighty- or ninety-foot drop—I'll have to jump down the first twenty-five to the sub-roof.

They don't do lawn care at night, anyway.

I sit down under the single-wired bulb, arms on my knees and back to the door, and rest my head on my forearms.

After a long while, exhaustion and the seep of drugs wash over me. And I find sleep.

Sometime in the night, a furious explosion of black wings awakens me. I lift my head and try to stand but discover that my ass and most of my legs are numb.

It takes a long while for the pins and needles to subside. Finally, I rise, creaky, to look at the now clear sky, brilliant with a million stars. The air has cooled as the hours ticked by, and my skin ripples with goose bumps as I look up into the indifferent
heavens. I can see the arm of the galaxy whirling around us, the milky wash of light arcing across the sky.

A raven stands on one of the teeth of the crenellations, in profile. I feel like it's watching me, but it's hard to tell in the dark. Its caw sounds more like the bray of a donkey when it comes, and I jump in my skin. The raven leaps upward, spreading its wings, wheeling out of sight. And then, as I turn my eyes back toward the heavens, the bird crosses my vision, flying overhead, a patch of absolute dark obscuring the spill of stars.

After that, I'm alone. The world settles and dims. All is quiet.

I'm a sentry in the castle, watching for the dragon. Waiting for the attack.

I am the eye of the world.

Later, I lie on the roof bone-weary, cradling my head in my arms. Thoughts bubble up in my frazzled brainpan, unbidden.

Rollie.

There's so many I should have helped, if I only wasn't so selfish—Vig, Moms, Coco, even Ox, Warden Anderson. Booth.

Where has that raven gone, and why was it here?

I am pinioned by stars until I cannot take any more of it.

I close my eyes.

It's hot already, and the sky is streaked with rosy streamers in the east when I wake. The air-conditioning units roar white noise and cacophonous fury, and I roll to my hands and knees and pant into the morning air like a damned dog, tailless and without a master.

My mouth is dry, and there's a pressure behind my eyes.

I stand, look out upon the world. I see the tops of the trees, the shadows below them shifting, shortening. The black tar road from the highway, lined with Bradford pears, lies straight, an arrow toward the highway. And as I watch, a state trooper turns down the lane, approaching the building.

They've figured out I've escaped. Well, almost escaped.

I could jump. If I lived, I could see what's below. Maybe there's a drainpipe I could shimmy down. Maybe there's a window or a door I could get in through.

I can jump. I can do it. And who cares even if I die?

Jack.

Jack cares. Vig, maybe. Booth.

And I'm a coward. And selfish. I don't want to die yet. Hell, I don't even want a twisted ankle.

And it's already hot again. Sweat trickles from my temples and prickles my back. I haven't had anything to drink since a slurp at one of the water fountains on the ward yesterday afternoon.

The sun's over the tree line now. An ambulance, sirens silent and lights unlit, turns off the highway, following the trooper's route to ye olde Tulaville Psychiatric Hospital.

It passes out of my sight, beyond the lip of the roof.

I wait.

Damn, I'm thirsty. But even so, I've got to relieve myself, and I'm half ashamed that I've been eyeing the corner of the roof where the stairwell hutch meets one of the old stone walls.

There's no atheists in foxholes. There's no modesty on the roof.

And no toilet paper.

On my way around the hutch, I pick up the tar-grimed, blue-green slippers that came with my induction into the Lethargic Boys' Choir.

I take care of the paperwork, holding onto the inner bicuspid of the roof's jaw, not having to strain too hard, and feel miserable afterward, leaving my scat there to petrify in the summer sun.

I've never felt more rooted in my body, more prone to the effects of gravity.

My stomach rumbles. My mouth is dry and my tongue like sandpaper. There's a five-foot pool of standing rainwater near the eastern edge of the roof, black and evil-looking.

I wait, watching the grounds. The air conditioners continue to howl—it's amazing, all this sound and fury just to keep a bunch of crazy folks cool.

I watch for the ambulance or the trooper. Maybe someone else got into an altercation, driven to violence by lack of z's and, well, being batshit crazy. Mr. Fingernails, maybe.

More cars turn down the drive. SUVs and sedans. A white city van pulling a trailer full of lawn equipment. It stops near the western edge of the grounds, and they begin unloading lawnmowers and Weed Eaters and other instruments of destruction and begin work, the buzz of their two-stroke engines inaudible above the steady roar of the air conditioner.

“Hey, guys!” I yell, top of my lungs, like I'm at a football game. I wave my arms. Nothing. They don't turn, but continue to weed-whack and trim and edge.

My mouth feels like I've been gnawing on chalk.

I walk to the eastern side of the roof. Already I'm getting comfortable here, the expanse of black tar. Where's that damned raven?

On my knees, I drink the standing water, trying not to think about how much birdshit I'm ingesting.

It tastes like fresh-squeezed juice from a burning-tire tree. My mouth rebels at the noxious taste—my lips burn, and the soft inner flesh of my cheeks feels hellish as I probe at them with my outraged tongue.

“Good times, Jack,” I say and vomit it all up in a rush.