The Ha-Ha

by Dave King

  I think of the acid years as my absent period, during which my rehabilitation was suspended. I had no sense of improving or of trying to improve, but after my father died, when I cleaned up, I learned what had been going on in my absence. Gone were all vestiges of the adynamia, and some processes that had been difficult had grown easier through regeneration. Speech, of course, was not one of those processes. Nevertheless, it was as if a chink of yellow had appeared in the clouds, the chink growing broader and brighter until it commanded the sky. As I began to move forward again, shouldering responsibilities in the household and accepting the convent job, I traced this clearing of the heavens back years, to when I woke from my coma. It was all part of the same unfurling, I felt, and all continuous.

  52

  THIS TIME, THOUGH, there's nothing gradual about waking to change. Rather, I’m so frightened I can barely sleep. By the time my head is bandaged and I’ve been processed it’s well after midnight, and a large Indian-looking orderly guides me to a small dark room with neither lock nor doorknob on its swinging door. The orderly holds the door open, telling me not to act up—as if, with this terrible headache, I might try something fast. I go in, groping for a light switch, and he announces that the lights are controlled from a central nursing station. He reminds me again that I shouldn’t act up and lets the door swing closed.

  On the far side of the room is a barred window from which a gray tic-tac-toe of light seeps over a couple of iron beds. But along with the headache, the last few hours have brought waves of double vision, so the gray squares circle nauseatingly as my heart pounds under my hospital gown. At last, I step over and peer through the bars, but I can’t tell whether it’s a hospital courtyard I’m seeing or an air shaft or city street or bottomless pit. Then something twitches behind me, and I almost scream. I turn and make out a shadow on the bed to my right, under a mound of black blanket. The shadow lies quietly a moment, then suddenly thrashes. It scratches, pummeling itself, and doubles up like a fist. Then it’s still again.

  I lie down on the other bed, pulling a blanket over my bare legs and keeping my slippers on for a speedy exit. A few feet away, the shadow continues its sporadic clenching, and I stare at the ceiling, my body braced for attack. Hours pass, and the evening’s events drift through my consciousness, but in a distant, soothingly pastel realm, and held at bay by my headache plus a general depressed passivity and the sedatives they gave me at intake. I imagine Ryan falling asleep in his own small bed, and I wonder if it seems he never went away. I can see how it would. Then my imagination moves to the adjacent room, where there are small roses in the wallpaper, and the quilted bedspread has been folded over a chair. I wonder if Sylvia allowed herself and Ryan to be dropped off at home, or if she required company to help her recover from her ordeal. The headache worsens.

  Slowly I become aware of a low shish-shish-shish, as rhythmic and measured as the tick of a clock. The sound surges, then disappears, and I listen to it rise and fall, then rise and fall again and again, and I think that between the shishing and the thrashing in the dark I may truly go mad. It occurs to me that what I’m hearing is the sound of my own blood pulsing into the corners of my head from some tiny leak in a vessel, and I wonder if I’ve made it worse by lying prone. Keeping an eye on the next bed, I sit up, and the pain bobbles around like a yolk in an eggshell. For a while I can only breathe, elbows on knees, then the shishing starts up again out of the silence. It strikes me that the sound is not inside my head at all, but out in the corridor, and though I don’t know if venturing beyond the swinging door is what the big Indian would call acting up, I rise carefully to investigate.

  The hallway’s almost as dark as the bedroom, with a single row of very dim bulbs—perhaps twenty watts—strung like a spine down the ceiling. The lights are out of reach, but each is surrounded by a yellow protective cage, and the wispy shadows of the cages crosshatch the walls. At the far end of the corridor is the security barrier I came through with the orderly, but I can see no guards beyond the bars. The only figure is a lone walker dressed in a blue gown just like my own. He moves resolutely toward the barrier, his reinforced-paper slippers creating the sound that drew me from my room.

  The shisher disappears around a corner, and I head toward the gate, hoping to score some aspirin. In a far corner, a young black guy reads a book in the square light of a desk lamp. “What you want?” he says.

  I point to my head, then mime taking a pill. “Medications at the desk.” He cocks his head. “Don’t worry. They tell you when you ready.” He squints sourly at me, and I wonder how bad my face is. Certainly the hospital gown does nothing for my credibility. The guard says, “Git on, now. I got studyin’.”

  Halfway down a side corridor is the nursing station. An attractive young woman is looking up when I step to the doorway, and I realize the rasp of my own slippers has announced me. But if she knows me as the new guy she gives no sign. I run through the headache gestures, and she says, “No meds without your doctor’s say-so.” It’s as if we’ve been through this many times before. “Name?” But of course, they took my clothes, right down to socks and underwear, and in this fucking gown there are no little cards stating I’m of normal intelligence. Suddenly it dawns on me that I’m about to encounter people who have no reason to give me a break, and I back away. The nurse is on her feet in a flash. She grabs the plastic ID bracelet they’ve attached to my wrist, reads my name, and says, “Oh.” I clutch my fingers to indicate pain, but “You’ll see someone tomorrow” is all she says, perhaps daring me to contradict her. I step back to the dim web of the hallway.

  I hear the shish guy again. He turns a corner, rhythmic and inevitable as a robot; then, like a robot, he stops before me. For a moment, there’s only the convulsive twitching of his fingers, which battle one another before his sternum; though the light is dim, I think he’s made his cuticles bleed. He reaches out, and I spring back, but he’s only reaching toward a small table by the office, where a plastic vat the size of a tackle box stands upright. Shakily selecting a cup, the guy holds it under a plastic spigot, and a stream glugs out: milk, juice, poison, I can’t tell. But when he offers the cup to me—if I trusted my vision it would be a pair of cups proffered by two bloody hands which overlap at the center—I head to my room in terror.

  Perhaps I get some sleep before morning dawns at the barred window, but I’m staring at the ceiling when the shadow sits up. My thrasher turns out to be a thin, sad-faced boy of roughly twenty, with a poor excuse for a Vandyke and the tattoo of an apple on the side of his neck. He’s pretty shaky and has a hard time focusing, but he’s so much more ordinary than last night’s shisher guy that I begin to hope it’s not all loonies here. The shadow says his name is Ansel and he checked himself in, hoping to make it a few days without heroin. I gesture that I, too, checked myself in, because the Indian—as well as the physician who spoke to me before him and the squirrelly little intake guy before her—said that if the state did it they could keep me for fourteen days of observation. But Ansel only looks at me sideways and doesn’t pay a lot of attention. I’m not sure he even registers my lack of speech.

  With the dawn, my double vision begins clearing, though my headache persists. I follow Ansel to the can, where there are no doors on the stalls, nor even seats on the toilets, and a handwritten sign I’m unable to read probably explains why the showers are cordoned off. A battered steel mirror bolted above two metal sinks reveals me as a bruised and ugly cuss, with a real goose egg and a new set of black stitches embroidering my scar, but I have to admit I fit right in: my fellow inmates range from unkempt to openly drooling. Those of us who are better off skitter out of the way of the others, and when Shisherguy appears and vibrates toward a urinal, I hope the dampness in my paper slippers is only water, not piss.

  A breakfast room is open, and I eat quickly and alone, avoiding eye contact when anyone approaches my table. I’m hoping to slide through under the radar, and the kitchen clatter, from a steamy realm I’m not permitt
ed to enter, reminds me I should be forming a plan for getting out. But there’s a guy not too far from me who can’t sit still, and at the far side of the room someone’s playing a piano while someone else shouts, “Stop the music!” and no matter where I look, white-clad people are scurrying, cleaning up messes, telling someone to remain seated, holding someone else by the hand. It’s so demoralizing that I barely make it from moment to moment, and finally I get up and return timidly to the nurse’s station. This time, a redheaded nurse shuffles some papers and rewards me with two aspirin, but my own craven gratefulness gives me the jitters, and I go back to my room wondering if yesterday’s bashing has made me docile.

  The aspirin don’t do much, and I spend the day on my bed, even skipping lunch. I guess it’s sunny out, because for a while a grid of light from the window moves down the wall, then onto the floor. When I first woke up in Japan, I used to watch the light play across the big ward I shared with nineteen other wounded soldiers. I wasn’t able to move at the beginning, so I’d follow the light with my eyes until it drifted out of sight. Now, though, I roll over to watch it creep across the floor.

  I tell myself I mustn’t get comfortable, that visualizing my real life, in the world beyond, will keep me sane. But the sedatives that made everything pastel have long since worn off, and my outside life is filled with danger zones—Sylvia’s betrayal, my crime against Timothy, almost anything to do with Ryan—and the difficulty of skirting those pain areas makes my head throb more. I think of yesterday, at the buzzards’ roost, and for a few moments I marvel at how happy we were. I listen to the rustle of the aspens in the breeze, and it strikes me I’ve always loved sitting high on a perch, with movement in the air and strong sunlight and human life—towns, agriculture—spread out before me. I think again of that burned valley; what was it like when the plantation was in full swing? I remember how I contemplated taking off with Ryan, going camping and driving until we were tracked down and captured, and I’m impressed by how bold I was, how wide my sense of possibility. Then, with a shift of some dark counterweight of the soul, I’m back in the danger zone with Sylvia. No matter how hard I try to go back further, to visit times before yesterday—to remember breakfast and backyard catch, petunias, Aqua Splash Down with Laurel, Harrison’s radio station, almost anything good—those memories are all part of a frail, distant dream. They don’t compete with the gray walls, the chaotic sounds from the hallway, or the sudden entrance of a hyped-up, chattering Ansel. Throwing himself on the floor beside his cot, he tries pulling the mattress over him like a shell. But the mattress is attached to the bed and the bed’s attached to the floor, and rather than watch him struggle, I flee the room.

  The ward’s laid out in a squared-off U. There are doorways leading to terrible common rooms and occasionally a bank of windows, and every window gives onto an air shaft like the one Ansel and I have as a view. The shafts have begun darkening as the sun slopes landward, so I give up on windows and stick to the hallway circuit, U after backward U, again and again. In the Japanese hospital, once I became ambulatory I walked as much as possible to resolve the drop leg as well as a certain exhaustion I felt standing upright. Then, too, there was a circuit I’d walk for as long as I could stand it: hours. I had such ambition! Back then, everyone knew who I was, and most of the nurses remembered me as a coma patient. They’d stop and congratulate me and tell me I was doing well, and I’d signal my thanks. No one doubted I’d get my speech back eventually. Here, though, I’m just a guy doing laps. Other patients pass me without registering anything, and the white-clad staff have crazies to attend to. I pass the milk dispenser for the umpteenth time and reach down to put my hands in my pockets; but the damn robe has no pockets, and suddenly I feel like a panther in a zoo. I head to the bathroom to see if the showers are open, but the barrier’s still hung with its unreadable explanation. Still, I don’t want to let myself go. I haven’t showered since yesterday, and I can smell the sweat of a long summer’s hike, plus the ballpark and Ryan’s tantrum and last night’s exercise in the kitchen and the stale, pungent scent of rage. I peel the robe from my shoulders and set to washing myself, lathering my hand with soap and smearing the froth through the hair on my chest, under my arms, even my crotch. I use wet paper towels to rinse. And I feel better, so I do my neck, which is grimy, and my ears, and then delicately, because the stitches are sore, the skin of my face. I’d like to shave, too, but I make do with lathering and rinsing my stubble. Finally there’s just my mouth, and it strikes me that the orderly should have issued me a toothbrush or a bottle of mouthwash or a pack of Dentyne, but what’s good for the face should be good for the mouth. So I make some soapsuds, and with my finger I rub my teeth and my gums. It’s a little sickening, but I’m on a clean spree. Then I look up and catch sight of the reflection in the metal mirror. Directly behind me is one of the wide-open toilet stalls, with a huge smear of brown on the wall.

  I rush to the office and stand before the redheaded nurse. I’m a patient with rights, and I’ll see someone in charge! Adopting a stiff pose, I mime a stethoscope. She’s unimpressed, but she gets it. “Just residents on weekends,” she drawls. I spread my hands: I’ll see a resident. “Unless you’re in crisis, there’s not much the residents do, sir. You’ll see your treatment manager first thing Monday.” She looks me over—paper slippers, blue gown, clean but lousy-looking face—and cracks what may be a joke. “You’re not in crisis, are you?” When I maintain my composure she asks a passing doctor to give me a minute.

  The resident’s a young guy with square fingers and a broad, smooth forehead. He takes me into an examination room and points to a chair, then hitches up a trouser leg and plants a butt cheek on the examination table. He’s so comfortable with his own generous condescension that he doesn’t realize I’ve met doctors, and I know they’re geeks. Still, I feel he can see through my gown. “So what’s up?” he says.

  I stare at him. I’m here, for starters. Isn’t that bad enough? I wave at the terrible robe and slippers, then at the door. Must I lead him to the shit? The doc swallows, tapping a finger on his thigh. “Okay, I’m just the resident, see. So I’m not really familiar with, uh, every case. You want to tell me how you got in here? In your own words.”

  53

  MONDAY MORNING I’m at breakfast, recovering from another night of Ansel’s turmoil. The showers were open when I arose this morning, but the line was so long that I decided to eat first. Now I’m worried they’ll close before I get there, and I’m gulping my French toast. An orderly appears and tells me to follow him, even pronouncing my name correctly.

  I stand up. There’s a bead of syrup on my gown, and I gesture that I’ll clean up quickly. But the guy says, “Nah, just come on along. Unless you have to urinate, they’re waiting for you, Mr. Kapostash.” He leads me down a hallway and unlocks a brown door, then there’s a short corridor with a staircase at the end. As we walk down the corridor, I remember the treatment manager the redheaded nurse promised yesterday, and I worry that with the syrup and two days’ growth of beard and my hair tufting over my ears I don’t look at all sane. And B.O.! What was I thinking, I who for years have showered first thing every morning? Today of all days, how could I let myself go?

  The orderly stops before we get to the staircase, opens a door, and stands back. In a square room, a woman and two men in doctors’ coats sit behind a table. The table’s spread with patient records, and there’s a bentwood chair, like a chair from a waiting room, which is obviously for me. I sit down, tugging my gown over my hairy thighs. Two of the doctors are conferring in low tones, while the third flips through the pages of a chart. With half-glasses and a shock of handsome, steel-colored hair, only this last doctor might be my age. None of them looks up.

  At last the gray-haired doctor says, “Well, Mr. Kapostash, you’ve certainly got influential friends.” This is not the remark I’m expecting. I wonder if they’ve confused me with someone else. “And you’ve kept out of trouble since—this is your first hospitaliza
tion since the seventies, is that right?”

  I nod warily to this, and the woman doctor turns to her colleague. “Now, am I right in understanding that he doesn’t speak in any way, shape, or form?” She looks at me. “You don’t speak?” I shake my head. “And he doesn’t write, either?”

  “Apparently not. Mr. Kapostash?” I shake my head.

  “And he doesn’t sign.” No, none of the above. But at least we’re getting this out of the way.

  “And he’s here since—” The female doctor glances irritably at me, then turns again to her colleague. “Yet he seems to manage satisfactorily on his own.”

  “According to the nun.” The gray-haired one passes a paper to the woman. Folding his hands before him, he says, “Mr. Kapostash, you are gainfully employed.”

  This is so clearly a statement of fact that I don’t know how to respond. I glance at the third doc, who still hasn’t looked up. Then I nod again. I’m sure not telling them I’m out of a job.

  “And you’re comfortable with the work you do? No difficulties there?” I shake my head. “Good. Miss, uh, Bridge is it—” I blink, and he leans over to glance at the paper. The woman taps it with a fingernail. “Yes. Sister Amity Bridge. Well, Sister Bridge certainly thinks highly of you.” I nod slowly, and he goes on. “The hospital has always had a strong relationship with the convent. I’ve not met Sister Bridge, but several of the sisters work as support staff in the wards.”

  “Mr. Kapostash,” says the woman. She has auburn hair and a shield-shaped face, and she’d be pretty if she put on a pretty expression. “Can you provide any explanation, by any means at all, for your behavior this past weekend? Do you understand what I’m asking?”