by Dave King
Of course I understand. I’m of normal intelligence. I take a long breath and puff it out sorrowfully, then pat my heart. I put my hands together and give a little bow that means mea culpa. I pat my heart again. The doctor looks carefully at me, her lips pursed. “Now the crux of the matter, as I understand it, has to do with the woman who made the original complaint. Ms. Mohr. This is someone you’ve been involved with?” I nod, waving dismissively: long, long time ago. It’s over. “In a romantic capacity?” Yes. “The child, however, is not your son.”
In a flash, I see where she’s going, and I hope the color doesn’t drain from my face. I open my hands wide to show how innocent it all was, then stand up and swing a bat and march uphill. I smile broadly, spreading my hands again, and if it’s humiliating putting on a dumb show, I’d rather they took me for a clown than a pervert. But the woman interrupts my antics, almost as if I’ve gotten off point. “And Ms. Mohr found someone else,” she says thoughtfully, “and you felt . . .” She blinks inquisitively. Now I notice the silk blouse under her doctor’s coat, and a necklace of gold filigree, and I realize that to these doctors we’re a tale of tawdriness, not perversion. Sylvia’s an unwed mother with guys on the side, and I’m the Quasimodoid chump she strings along. It’s insulting, but I hold my tongue.
The older doctor says, “Mr. Kapostash, we are not a law enforcement institution. Ms. Mohr has declined to press charges on behalf of either herself or her son, and the officers at the scene reported that you were not a danger to anyone besides yourself. Under the circumstances, that would be enough to recommend your remaining with us for a course of psychiatric evaluation and treatment, and I’m not sure I don’t recommend such a course, if you’re so inclined.” He pauses, looking straight at me, but doesn’t ask if I understand, for which I’m grateful. “Certainly, your VA benefits entitle you to any help we provide.
“On the other hand, you have here a testimonial to your stability and work ethic and the fact that”—he peers at the letter through those little half-glasses—“‘despite his disability, Mr. Kapostash does an admirable job of maintaining an independent and autonomous life. He has for many years been a respected member of the secular staff here at Mercy Convent, and his contributions to both our comfort and our well-being are much valued.’” He raises his eyebrows, dropping the paper on the table.
I try to look as if this is my due. The fact that such a document exists is astonishing, of course, and I hope my demonstration with the air bat hasn’t compromised my dignity. The doctor continues, “Mr. Kapostash, let me stress again that you should not take the incident of Saturday evening too lightly. Someone with your history needs to be especially attuned to shifts in behavior, emotion, cognitive function, et cetera, all of which can change even this long after an initial injury. And while you can check yourself out, of course, just as you checked yourself in, you should know you remain responsible for your actions. Your personal record and the letter from the sister suggest you do pretty well, and that’s commendable, but I urge you to adopt a highly vigilant attitude. I refer to mood swings, inappropriate behavior or ideation, difficulty in coping, breaks in reality perception, and so on. I think you might, before taking your leave, ask yourself if it wouldn’t be a good idea to meet with a staff member for one or more sessions, just to iron out this event.” He pauses, and I wait a moment to make sure he’s finished. But really, who are they kidding? Does anyone really imagine I’ll stay voluntarily, what with the shisher and Ansel and all the other fruitcakes for company, the rude student and the nitwit resident and the rest of the keeper staff warning me not to act up while someone actually does smear shit on the walls? The doctors don’t look at all surprised when I shake my head.
“Very well,” the steel-headed doctor says, offering his hand so quickly that I wonder if they’re glad not to deal with me. I stand up and shake his hand, then the woman’s, and at last, the third doctor looks up and shakes my hand, too, murmuring as he does so that I should take care. The old doc nods at the orderly, who’s still standing, hands folded, by the door. “John will take you out,” he says, and though I do no such thing, I have an urge to raise the horrible blue gown from my backside and moon all three of them as I take my leave. Inappropriate ideation!
We don’t return to the ward, so I make no goodbyes. Instead, I’m led down the stairs to a kind of large coat check, and when a Spanish guy asks my name, John answers for me, again pronouncing it perfectly. On the far side of the coat check, an opening like a wide window gives onto a bright waiting room filled with people. When John gives my name a shriek goes up, and Laurel swims out of the brightness like a fish in an aquarium. “Howard?” she screams, and pushes through a set of swing doors. Then she’s hugging me: Laurel, who’s not girly or squealy in that way at all, hugging me despite my filthy gown, stinking hair, and terrible breath, telling me I look unbelievably awful and asking John if they really have let me go.
54
LAUREL’S LITTLE BEETLE looks like close quarters, and I stand beside it for a moment, plucking at my Snakes baseball shirt and fanning my armpits apologetically. “Oh, Howard, stop it. I’ve got windows. And a moonroof!” We open the car up entirely, and Laurel says, “Must be great to be free, I can’t imagine.” The air flaps her black hair across her face.
It’s one of those spectacular July mornings, bright and warm, with just a little breeze, and the storefronts and high-rises sparkle as we pass through downtown. I wonder if it was this nice yesterday, when all that filtered into the psycho ward was a patch of sunlight moving down a wall. And then I want to forget I was ever there. Laurel’s delighted by the coup she scored in getting me out; she pulls herself up tight to the steering wheel and tells me I had a close call, and I sit barely moving, my arm dangling out the window. “I didn’t know what the heck we were gonna do, Howard,” she says. “We were sick with worry.” She says Robin came by the house yesterday to drop off the Indians cap and Ryan’s glove, which we’d left at the stadium. “Good thing she did, too, because that’s how I got the idea of contacting your nun. Who’s really a peach; wants you to stop by, talk about work. And Robin was splendid, too. How come you and Ran never told me about her?”
We enter the residential neighborhoods, and I feel I’ve been away a long time. Laurel says she’s heard nothing from Sylvia, but she knows there weren’t charges filed, because she called the precinct. “I suppose she didn’t want anyone looking too closely at her own decisions, or maybe she had a change of heart. I don’t know.” She slumps back in her seat. “House sure was lonely, though. I doubt I’ve spent a night there, Howard, without you, all these years; isn’t that funny? And then Ryan gone, too. Sudden change.” Remaining undiscussed is what happened in the kitchen Saturday, and if Laurel’s dying to dissect it, I appreciate her tact. Cruising down the boulevard, she says, “Well, the main thing is, I’m glad you’re back. I think we all need to return to some kind of normal something and not lose sight of what’s been gained. Seems our household barely knew each other eight weeks ago; who’d have thought . . . And your old job might be still available, too, so I’d advise—oh, hell, we’ll talk money later!” She reaches over and squeezes my hand, holding it just a moment before fiddling with the gearshift. Then we turn onto our street. “Oh, and Howard, I forgot! There’s a surprise waiting for you at home. Well, sort of a—I mean, not Ryan, don’t think that. But sort of a surprise.”
Our street looks cheerful, in the glittery way of everything that’s not a mental hospital, and on the railing of my front porch the paired boxes of petunias catch the sun. Yet suddenly I’m not glad to be home. I don’t wish I’d remained where I was, but I look up at my tidy house and dread walking into a certain empty room. I wish I had anywhere else to be. For a moment I stand dumbstruck, then Laurel runs a hand down my spine. The heart-shaped leaves on the morning glory vines flutter, as if in response.
In the back yard, a lawn chair’s been dragged into the sunlight, and a long figure sits wrapped in a patterne
d sheet. When the figure stands, I see it’s Harrison, very wan and still strange-looking with no hair on his face. He and I hug awkwardly. “Oh, man, How. I guess you’ve been through the wringer,” he says, and as he shrouds himself once again in his sheet he looks like an Indian chief draped in a blanket. I signal that I’m sorry about his dad, and he says, “Yeah. It sucks.” He looks expectantly at me, so I pat my heart. But I’ve been patting my heart so much lately that I’m really sick of it. If I never touch my heart again, that will be fine.
The kitchen door opens, and Ruby dashes out, making a quick circuit of the yard. I look at my fingernails and wish Harrison would speak, because despite the sunshine and the happy dog and the children’s voices in a yard not far away, I’m being drawn toward the tube of my own dark feelings. But Harrison, too, seems to have moved out of reach. His face and body have grown thin in his short absence, and as he draws the sheet around his shoulders his mouth is downturned. I suppose any friendship I thought we had was too brief not to be illusory, and perhaps kids and baseball aren’t enough for a connection, anyway; so we sit mutely, two gloomy, depressed men. At last Harrison says, “Well, I guess the little guy got to play a real game after all,” and I realize he has no idea what a disaster that was. I nod.
Laurel pushes open the screen door and asks if we want anything. We shake our heads. She strolls down the steps and puts a hand on each of our shoulders and asks Harrison what’s with the sheet, and he says he wanted something around him. When she asks if he told me about his time at home, he says the service was nice. “Harrison was with his dad before he died, which was the most important thing,” Laurel adds.
Again I remember the complicated, terrible time of my own dad’s death, and I reach over and touch Harrison’s hand. He squeezes my fingers. Thinking a moment, he says he appreciated the card and the cookies and Ryan’s drawing. “Dude, that picture!”
Laurel says, “I think we ought to all do something today, cheer ourselves up. Maybe get out, take like a walk or a hike? Be someone, for heaven’s sake. Aren’t there some kind of little hiking parks off to the west where you can get out and enjoy nature? What’s that hawk center?” I look up, amazed, and she says, “But first, I hope you boys are hungry for soup, ’cause I got a mother lode didn’t get delivered this morning.”
I’m not sure why this hits me so hard. Perhaps it’s simply the burden I’ve become, pulling Laurel from her customers to get me out of stir. Or that the notion of three sorry souls slogging up to the buzzards’ roost doesn’t strike me as redemptive. But suddenly my eyes well acidly, and I can’t sit here any longer. Laurel says, “Howard?” but it’s not her fault. I stand up blindly and rush to the house. I can feel my shoulders shaking, and in my mind the crushing and folding of everything I’ve ever known, until I’m crushed, too. I run up the staircase, and two steps from the top I trip on a step and go down on my palms, but I keep going. It’s a long way to my bedroom.
Laurel gives me twenty minutes, then taps on my door. “Howard? Are you okay?” I don’t respond. I know I’m being childish, but I don’t want to see anyone, and it’s not as if I can call out for solitude. A moment later the door creaks. “I guess we’re all sad right now,” she says. “Maybe we should be sad together, you know?” Still I don’t move, but stay curled on my big double bed. I hear Laurel walk into the room, and when I open my eyes she’s standing before me. “Why, Howard! You haven’t even washed. Don’t you want to take a shower?” I look at her balefully. I can’t or I don’t. She sits on the edge of the bed, scooting my feet back with her butt, and puts a hand on my leg. And despite the times I’ve thought it would be sublime to lie in bed with Laurel patting my thigh, at the moment I abhor her pity. “Come on now,” Laurel says. “Get up. Eat something, give yourself a shave. That twenty-five-o’clock shadow is not your style.” She gives a rueful smile and adds, “Does your head hurt?”
I should ask to be left alone. I can do that with gestures, but I close my eyes. After a moment Laurel says, “And that baseball shirt! Did you know it’s got blood on it? Take it off and let me work on the stain.” She reaches to unbutton the front of the shirt, and though her touch is gentle, I simply can’t bear it. I think if I allow this I’ll end up clutching at her more desperately—more hopefully, intimately, needily than I can live down—or I’ll bash myself on the floor again, and I’m not sure there’s a difference. So I kick my legs and thrash out with one fist, and I come close to striking her. In my embarrassment, I pull a pillow over my head. Laurel says, “Goddamn it,” and walks out.
In the evening she sends Nit up. “Hey, uh, Howard, man. Laurel wants to know if you had any supper. Me and Harrison and her were thinking of going for pizza.” I hear a board creak as he shifts his weight, then he says, “Yo, Howard?” I roll off the far side of the bed and cover my ears to block his idiot voice, but he’s already gone.
I try to be aware of nothing, and to a certain extent, I succeed. It’s a hot night, but I remain on the floor, wrapped in my white quilt, and maybe I get feverish. Nestling a little way under my bed, I find a layer of dust that feels soft on my fingertips, and I make friends with the dust. I’m not sure what exactly I’m after, but it has to do with obliteration and lying here always, until I’m nothing but bones inside a quilt on the floorboards, until Laurel and the boys have moved on to other lives and the house and all the memories collapse over my remains. For a while after I was injured I used to lie in bed for hours at a time, and nothing would happen. At extremely long intervals someone might come by to bring me food or change my sheets or shine a tiny flashlight in my face, but there were days when it was only food, and I got pretty good at learning how time passed. Now, of course, no nurse will be bringing me food, but I’m older now and require nothing. Only contemplating the empty guest room do I want to tear my ears off.
I wake up to the sounds of morning: Laurel heading to the bathroom, Ruby’s nails on the wood floor. I try to picture what Ryan’s doing, but I can imagine only what he’d be doing here, in this house. Moment by moment, I remember the sounds of him opening his bedroom door and going downstairs. I picture him pouring his grape juice and conversing with Ruby and doing all the little things that made up his morning, and I picture each moment in detail, just to remember his voice and the shape of his mouth. Laurel comes and knocks on my door, but I’m too deep in imagining to answer any summons. His tongue stuck out when he read the funnies. Laurel says, “Howard, why don’t you come on down for breakfast, please? Steve’s making pancakes.” When she’s gone, I pull the quilt over my head and grieve.
Laurel calls up the stairs that they’re leaving the batter in the fridge in case I get hungry, and I hear the van, then the Beetle, take off. I clomp stiffly to the landing, wondering if Harrison’s gone, too, but the house is empty. The air smells ripe, and I realize it’s my own self, still in my sneakers and what I wore to the ball game, but despite my yearning for a shower during the time I was locked up, I’m not yet ready to wash off that last day. Halfway down the stairs I realize my mouth tastes like I’ve been sucking on a turd, but if I go back up to brush I might never come down.
Nit’s pancake batter is too thick. I picture the dense, soggy pads it produced and wonder if anyone misses my cooking. But I’m hungry, so I thin the batter and fry up an enormous batch. I take my plate and a glass of grape juice to the picnic table, sitting with my back to the idiotic backstop. I should start living, I tell myself. It’s a decent day. But one bite of sweet, grainy mush and I give the plate to Ruby, who digs right in. Then, though it’s broad daylight, I step behind the stable and piss into Dwayne’s yard. When Ruby comes sniffing, I carry her inside.
The kitchen’s full of dirty dishes. When Ryan was first here, Laurel assigned KP to Harrison and Nit, and they stayed on top of it. But now the table’s not wiped and there are splatters of soup and pancake batter on the counters and stovetop. The disarray strikes a chord with me—life doesn’t go on—but I put away the milk and wash the frying pan, and I’ve
got the big mixing bowl filled with soapsuds when I decide I just can’t. I turn off the water, and for a while I sit with my head on my arm. Time passes; nothing happens.
I get up and pick up the bowl again, but I’m going to drop it, so I return it to the sink. Upstairs, I shut myself in my room. My quilt cocoon is rank with perspiration, but I crawl in like a hermit crab, pulling my torpor over my head. Ruby comes and kisses my face, and though I think crying might help, the most I can manage is to remain as I am, large and dirty and silent and inert. Around my nest, the house stands silent, and the whole city seems vacant, too. Everything beyond this void is meaningless, anyway. After a while I hear Ruby whimpering and scratching at the door, but that’s miles away, and I don’t budge. Later she vomits in a corner.
It’s late afternoon when a phone rings in the distance. I sit up, forgetting for a moment that I’ve forsaken the world, and as dust motes shimmer in the heat, I gasp for oxygen. Downstairs, Laurel’s familiar greeting fills the hallway, and I vault over the bed and open my door as the beep sounds.
“Howie?” says a familiar voice. I lean over the banister, but he’s silent so long I’m afraid he’ll be cut off. Then he says, “I got the answering machine,” and a voice says to leave a message, dummy. Ryan says, “Okay, it’s me calling, Howie, and I’m at, um, Martin’s house.” He turns away again, asking Fartin’ Martin for privacy, and I hear the Rottweilers in the background. “I couldn’t call you before,” Ryan says, “because first we went down to Chicago to get Bindi, and I don’t think Mom really wants me to . . . um, you know, whatever. But like I wanted to know if you were okay. And we didn’t really say goodbye because of what happened, and I wanted to tell you also that I’m sorry for being a bad sport at the Snakes game.” He lowers his voice. “I’m really ashamed of myself. And I know you can’t call me back, but I just wondered how you were doing. I mean, I guess Mom doesn’t really want to, um . . . but like maybe . . .” He breaks off, confused by the task of sorting all this out. “Hmm.” At last he says, “Thanks for everything, Howie,” and the machine clicks off.