Story 2 - Emory Ward

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Without enough time to write, a story can really turn into something awful.  Any nuggets of inspiration, however forced or artificial, will be muddled and mutilated by the approaching iron deadline of despair.  This means that what this story was always supposed to be about and still purports to be about is, in my opinion, only marginally anywhere near the page.  And, without the time to go back and modulate language, the voice of my story loses all consistency or quality, even.  Ordering of events is something that I struggled to make natural and structurally functional.  Exposition occurs nonsensically throughout with little grace.  The many things I imprudently attempted to incorporate that might seem like poor craft are clearly not successful, which makes them, effectively poor craft.  Basically, the story needs a good old trashing, (or rewriting, if that is my only option.)  Nothing comes to mind that I think I did well in this piece.  Even proofreading will have to wait--this is already running late.

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Emory Ward

            They brought me into the long-term psych ward at Emory Hospital just after my twentieth birthday in May.  After an initial evaluation, it was decided that I should be placed with the adolescent patients.  On the first day, the guards searched my bag, pulling out pockets and tickling the seams of my jackets, even bending backward the spines of my books and shaking them like broken tambourines.  A few of us were allowed to eat with family that day.  One kid sprung up, propelling a green pudding-like material off of his plate and onto the walls, and he screamed without any kind of words or syllables until some large men carried him out with forced kind smiles, his gangly body jerking like spider legs.  I thought it strange at the time that no one said anything about it, not even my usually talkative grandmother sitting across from me who fingered her emerald broach as his screams faded out and the only sound left was the ugly weeping of the woman that I assumed was his mother.

            That first day, I noticed that the entire place was lit by long tubes of fluorescent light.  The stairwells, hallways, bathrooms, and every single bedroom, all under those oppressive things.  After being there for four months, I really thought that I would get out soon, and that sounded so nice mostly because those white tubes had become my bitter enemies.  Four months and I was still noticing some things for the first time.  We shared a basketball court with the adult inpatient ward.  Russell was a big man in his forties that had come in around the same time that I had, volunteering to be admitted after his wife hung herself from the rafters in their living room.  We were playing one-on-one and the September skies were overcast when I saw for a moment an awkward rendering of a creased neck emerging in ink from under his shirt sleeve.

            “Didn’t know you had a tattoo, Russ,” I said.

            “It’s my only one,” he said.  “Got this in Austin in ’92, the year I met Penny…”

            He pushed up his sleeve and the strangely detailed face of Willie Nelson stared at me with big, black pupils set deep in a maze of wrinkled skin and paisley bandana pattern.  It was not just the slightest glare on the film of his moist eyes, the meticulous density of his aging beard, or the cavernous shadows under his chin that showed me first the lonesome resolution of this Willie Nelson, but his lips that bent only so faintly in a frown.  His face, drawn in ink on this man’s arm, seemed to be whispering to me a request for something, calling me to a responsibility.

            I felt, when I was first carried through the sets of controlled security doors and down endless latticed hallways, some relief and hope that I could start to feel normal and act normal.  The blood that I had pushed out of myself only revealed a decade of mounting juvenile angst that came to require a slow and tactful deflation in this kind of sterile tranquility.  Those early days rang with commitment and innocence, and a self-imposed isolation from the patients that surrounded me.  All of these conditions could not withstand four months of repetitive examinations in which I was supposedly “not making adequate progress” because I still thought sometimes about trying to tangle myself in the high razor wire that surrounded the courtyard.  I still wanted, at times, to throw tantrums at others for fun.  When I arrived at Emory’s psych ward, I was my only source of pain.

            The night after I saw the tattoo, I dreamed of Willie Nelson.  He led me around corners of curious stone, singing “Whiskey River” and frowning in my direction.  The aura of it all was truly confusing, and I felt nothing like the obligation that came from Russ’s tattoo the previous afternoon.

            I woke to the sound of my roommate mumbling in front of my bed.  His voice was sharp and hollow like rain on sheet metal, and he stood with his face in the corner of the room.

            “Darryl, it’s 3:00 AM, what are you doing?”

            “They’re after me…invisible people…”

            I stood up and moved toward the door.

            “No one is after you, Darryl.”

            I entered the hallway and the overnight guard glared at me.

            “What are you doing out?”  This was what he thought appropriate to start with for patients in need.  I beckoned him into my room and he began to try to talk Darryl down.  This only made him cry out loudly and squeeze his head between his hands.

            “…people after me…”

            I stood in my doorway wearing only my thin pajama bottoms as all of the doors in the hall opened and the rest of the patients emerged halfway into the hall with squinting eyes to listen to the kid begin to scream and cry.  A doctor rushed down the hall and into my room.  He gave Darryl a quick shot and he immediately fell into his bed and slept.  Everyone returned to their rooms.  When I woke up at 5:00 for vital checks, the other bed was empty and all of Darryl’s belongings were gone.

            My new roommate was twelve years old.  He arrived the day that Darryl left and was the youngest patient that I had ever met.  I wondered if I would ever be transferred out of the adolescent ward.  As soon as the nurse that had led him into our room had left, he removed a bobby pin from his white-blond hair and stood on the one wooden chair to neatly position it on the top edge of the window frame.

            I thought that he looked closer to nine years old, skin pale and hairless and cheeks with no rosy color at all—only sharp indentions that twisted when he grinned, showing his shiny, crooked teeth.  His great, protruding Adam’s apple vibrated with his voice which was the highest thing I had ever heard.

            “Hi,” he squeaked.  “I’m John Henry.”

            “Hello, John Henry.  My name is David.”  It was like we were meeting at summer camp, or on the first day of school.

            “I think that I should learn everyone’s name,” he said.  His white t-shirt was almost see-through and the faint stains that covered it were only made more visible by the spotlessness of the sheets on which he sat.

            “Everyone’s name?” I asked.  “There are a lot of people here. There are nurses, doctors, guards, orderlies, and the other patients—”

            “I should know everybody’s name.”

            “I don’t even know every name,” I said.  “And I’ve been here for months.”

            There were probably too many glowing tubes of light that watched over us in the soft, sky blue vinyl chairs of the rec room.  I sat low in these chairs and poked tiny holes in the upholstery with a safety pin, and all of the nurses that walked through avoided eye contact.  Every nurse was forced into an agitated tone and a perpetual frown by their daily work.  Some of them were very honest and that meant a lot to those of us that listened.  They would tell us that they were overworked and undernourished and that their child was sick, maybe even in the ICU with something very serious, but the father had left or died or never even cared and it always started me thinking about life outside the Emory mental ward and about where any of us really belonged and how it was that we could get there and then I would just repeat the word belong until the honest nurse shook me hard and back into the cold, beeping nearness of the examination area.  I would ask what my medicine was supposed to do and there would be no response.

            John Henry asked everyone their name and never spoke to them again.  I do not even know if he remembered any of them.  He spent most of his time sitting on the floor in the back corner of the rec room, softly smiling and waiting to be called in for more sessions with Dr. Norton.  I often wondered whether he spoke at all during these examinations.  After we were confined to our rooms at 10:30 each night, he would talk to me for hours…memories he supposedly had from the age of two, a teacher that he had hated because of a silver necklace that she wore on the first day of school, a book that he had read about a monster that lived on a farm.  I never asked how he had ended up with us.

            “Well, this monster is very depressed,” John Henry said.

            “A depressed monster?  That’s new…how do you know that?”

            “I just know…he is always bent over, like bad posture, and he tells the farmer at the end that he ate his daughter because he was bored and because the daughter was disgusted by him.  See, the monster is like a sort of blob with a face that’s really hard to see.  He’s like an upside down bowl of mashed potatoes that leaves gravy everywhere he goes.  He touched the daughter and she screamed names at him and he didn’t even leave her clothes behind.”

            “How does it end?” I asked, realizing that I had just bitten off a fingernail and a tiny thread of blood was growing from underneath it.

            “The monster grows up and gets huge and he goes to confront the farmer’s son so he can get himself shot,” John Henry said quietly to the ceiling.  “But the son who is the main farmer now doesn’t shoot him.  He invites him to live in their barn instead of out in the woods and the monster accepts the offer.  I think that maybe he didn’t recognize that he had eaten his sister, or maybe he felt sorry for the depressed monster…”

            “You don’t think that the son got eaten later?”

            “No…I think that they did not become friends, but things just worked out…”

            “It seems that the monster would have later gotten hungry and eaten him,” I said.

            “Well, probably not, because the story ends there.”

            There were no shower curtains, and the bathroom doors did not lock.  The only kind of soap that we were given was Dawn hand soap.  Every bedroom had light blue walls instead of the white that covered the rest of the ward.  There was the isolation of the Emory ward from the rest of the world, and there was the isolation of our rooms from the rest of the Emory ward.  The burn from direct contact with my own thoughts was becoming unbearable.

            Some sort of contact with whatever was outside the place could be found in television.  Almost everyone spent a lot of time in front of it.  For some of us, it was like a reminder of what things were like, what things would be like, when we leave, and that we cannot forget how it all works while we are in there.  It was mounted in the top corner of the rec room.  We looked up at it to understand how people were supposed to think and act.

            We all had zipties that kept our shoes from flopping off and pants from sliding down.  It made sense—I would not have felt comfortable around some of those people if they carried belts and shoestrings, so white plastic strips held our clothes on tightly.  Almost everyone on my hall had been caught switching pills at least once.  When John Henry told me that he had snuck off after lunch and met with Skaggs from down the hall in the game closet for a quick trade, I did not believe him.

            Some days dragged on that I started to believe the things that Dr. Norton had told me about dysfunctions of perception and cognition.  I tried to make myself accept that I would probably never leave, but I told everyone that I was on the way out of there.  The television was always too loud or too quiet, and the afternoon glare through the windows made it useless to attempt to watch anything until after sunset.  With these kinds of routines, nothing is honestly distinct after a while.

            John Henry found a tin of Jenga blocks late one night and we began to build a tower on the end table in the rec room.  Skaggs watched with disinterest, occasionally removing and placing a wooden rectangle.  John Henry worked with wide-eyed, hypnotic concentration, bringing his frowning face within inches of the square column and holding the piece loosely between thumb and middle finger, slowly wedging it into the most precarious position that he could find.  When he said that he was going to start another tower of alternately perpendicular blocks to look like an “X,” I told him that the game was not played that way.

            “You won’t even make it high,” I said.  “It’ll fall almost immediately.”

            “It won’t, it’ll balance,” he said, raising his voice.  “What do you know?”

            “I know you need to calm down, John Henry.”

            He brought his fists down onto the low table and our tower collapsed, sending wooden pieces onto the tile floor in all directions.  John Henry crossed his arms and closed his eyes.  I was angry, but immediately felt an immense empathy for him.  He was acting like Peter Pan without his Lost Boys—violent, insecure, possessive.  For four months I had been in that light blue room, confronting and grieving innumerable shapes of doubt and hatred that I had nursed for years.  But I found myself unable to look away from John Henry, his dampening eyes closed tightly in resolve.  This obligation was more painful than spilling my own blood, than being pushed through the sets of secured doors, than the clean and exposed isolation of our rooms without shower curtains.  It hurt that I knew nothing about John Henry, and he knew nothing about me.

            I stood up and walked to the thin, barred window that faced outside.  Atlanta was a dark blur, and headlights mingled and merged with terrifying spontaneity.  There was total silence, and I imagined the city whispering about invisible people like Darryl had.  The blue and black sprawl of buildings below looked monstrous under a cold streetlight grid.  I was again incapable to turn away.  A dull red firetruck soaked Clifton Road in blinking light and disappeared down Fishburne Drive.  I stood with hands in my pockets like I had ten years earlier on an icy December morning in Massachusetts.  The ground was frozen and my mother placed an open pink shoebox soaked in kerosene at the end of our driveway, dropped a lit match into it, and ran toward the house.  Our old calico cat had died during the night.  Glittering flames grasped upward almost three feet, and I watched with terror.  The fleas that escaped were killed by the cold air.

            John Henry did not tell me anything that night across the black space of our room.

            The television was malfunctioning and a small FM radio had been placed on the center table of the rec room.  Willie Nelson’s “Yesterday’s Wine” was playing at a barely audible volume after lunch and I was telling Skaggs how much I hated Willie’s hick voice and how useless a songwriter he was.

            “Can someone change the damn station?” I asked.

            John Henry’s voice came from the table in the corner where he sat alone.

            “Can someone change the damn walls in this place?”  He was standing bent over the round table, his pallid hair sticking out in strands between his fingers that pressed dramatically into his scalp.  “Can someone damn change, damn…”

            “You tell them, J.H.,” said Skaggs.

            John Henry had begun to pace around the room, pulling his hair and mumbling with heavy breaths.

            “What happened to the…I don’t know which…what if he could really hide himself…”

            All of the other patients were statues in their chairs.  John Henry almost walked into me and I saw that one bony ankle was bare.  Two guards were suddenly walking toward him.  His voice had risen to a steady shout and the guards were telling him to sit down and stop yelling.

            “Y-you can’t knock me down,” he cried.  “We could just all get out of here.”

            John Henry had backed slowly into a wide window.  He tore down the pink curtains with a grand sweep of his arm and turned toward the rest of the room, outlined in new streaks of gold light spilling through the window.  His feet were spread strangely far apart and his hands raised together above his head.  Underneath his left arm, Russ was visible through the window, playing basketball outside, his tattoo of Willie Nelson just a blur of ink from such a distance.

            John Henry lurched forward and his hands struck the tile floor like a hammer.  It sounded like a giant, rattling gear.  People flinched and ducked as if large birds were attacking them.  John Henry raised his head and was immediately hit from the side by a running guard.  He was shoved against the wall and held there, feet straining to touch the ground.  I heard his voice now fouled with breathless pain.

            “David…the brother…eaten—”

            Another guard wrenched something out of his hand and held it up to examine it.  John Henry had managed to unscrew a doorknob and stick it in his tube sock.  He cried and screamed to be let go, pinned up on the white wall by his scrawny, naked arms.  Suddenly, a nurse appeared and stabbed a large hypodermic needle an arm.  As his voice disappeared, creases in his forehead trembled, and his jaw went limp.  It looked like a terrible seizure and I closed my eyes and turned away.

            He was unconscious in the nurse’s arms.  She carried him out and down the hall.  Willie Nelson was still singing “Yesterday’s Wine.”

            John Henry underwent some mysterious treatment and was gone the next morning.  I do not think that he was forced to leave, but whoever had brought him here wanted him to be somewhere else.  When he came by the room with a guard to gather his things, I spoke first.

            “When you got hit in the side, real hard, I felt it in my side,” I said.

            “I think that I have to be the monster, David.”

            “That means you get a happy ending, I guess.”

            He stood on the wooden chair and pulled a bobby pin off of the top edge of the window frame and clipped it into his white-blond hair.  The guard led him out and I listened hard to their steps for as long as I could hear them.

            I sat on my tough plastic mattress, leaning forward and clasping my hands.  When I was younger, I had been so downtrodden, all the time, so obsessed with my own neuroses, and so destructive.  Sitting there, I missed those years.  Somewhere, some face had intervened and sent me flying towards insult and compassion and pain.

            I wondered into the rec room and sat on the shallow, blue couch.  The television had been fixed that morning, and I turned it on and watched a live stationary shot of the New York City skyline.  Thick, black smoke ballooned from giant holes in a skyscraper.  The sky was a spotless, floral blue.  A commercial airplane entered the bottom of the frame and disappeared into middle of the adjacent tower, identical to the first.  Fire burst outward hundreds of feet and climbed into the sky.  I turned up the volume.