“Hello, Doctor Jacob’s Father,” Tina said. Tina had been there so long—the only one longer than Saul—she addressed anyone from the outside as Doctor.
“Dad, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Jacob said, rising to approach his father. “Since it’s my birthday we can go get cappuccinos at the mall, then like sit and talk about feelings and shit, like how I’m doing mentally etcetera.”
“Jacob, have you forgotten?” his father said sheepishly. “Your birthday isn’t for four months.”
“So?” Jacob said, lifting his monstrous white T-shirt to scratch at his back. His trousers were slung below his rear end, vibrantly printed boxer shorts pouting over his belt, skewing his body’s proportions toward those of a toddler.
“Mr. Drubinski, I’m not sure you are aware,” the nurse softly interjected. “We offer only decaffeinated coffee here on the ward, and I would say providing caffeine off the ward would be an unhealthy practice.” She cupped her mouth, “Much more difficult to deal with when they get back.”
“You stay out of this,” Jacob sneered at her, and he placed a large hand on the shoulder of his father’s coat. “Let’s do this, Dad.”
“Well,” Mr. Drubinski fumbled, reinvesting his weight in his other leg, “I suppose we should do what the nurse says, Jake—”
“What the fuck, Dad?” his son bellowed. “What happened to my birthday being mine? Do you know all day I’m stuck in this bugged-out place with all these kooks?” he said, gesturing to Saul and Tina on the couch. Saul squinted and gave his best closed-mouthed smirk, just like Columbo. The nurse’s hand drifted to the object dangling from her belt like a little plastic bat. Jacob saw this too. “So what are you going to do? Push your button? This place is so fucked! We have to go now if we ‘re gonna get back in time for bingo!” Saul saw lithe waves of rage scribble across Jacob’s face and told everyone to be quiet. But they did not react. Then he recognized that he hadn’t said anything—he’d just thought it with an intensity that approached speech. At this he chuckled into his collar.
“Today probably isn’t the best day, Jake,” Mr. Drubinski said, examining his shoes. “Like you said, bingo is tonight—” and at this Jacob palmed the face of his father and drove it through the doorway, sending him limply screeching over the sheen of the hallway linoleum like a floor polisher.
“I want a real coffee,” Jacob said, squeezing in between Saul and Tina, to the gentle clicking of the nurse working away at her button. Jacob’s shoulder was balmy and Saul felt him breathing in quickly and out slowly. Within seconds, the Assassin appeared at the door. He was winded and seemed dazed, less menacing. Saul wondered if he’d seen it all happen through the television.
The Assassin asked Roberta if she was all right and she began briefing him on the situation. More staff came. They encircled the couch.
“Jacob, we’re going to need you to go to the Quiet Room for a while so you can gather yourself,” said a large male nurse from another ward whose name was Pierre.
“I’m calm. What’s on TV, Tina? Let’s put your movie back on,” Jacob said, crossing his arms, plunging his hands in his armpits.
Pierre asked Tina and Saul to go to their rooms. Saul passed the Assassin on the way out. “Shouldn’t you be riding a miniature train somewhere, you wretched bastard?” Saul said, and noted a quiver of recognition in Luis’s cheek, deep beneath the scar. A tense second passed before the Assassin collected himself and thanked Saul for cooperating.
In the hallway, Jacob’s father clutched the arm of a nurse, who led him to the elevator as sounds of a scuffle issued from the TV Room. Then into the hall came a large, white, wriggling caterpillar with Jacob’s reddened face poking from one end. They dragged him like this toward the open Quiet Room door. The intercom said the TV Room was closed for the day. Saul would have to wait to get Tina’s tape so he could mail it to Martin Shenck.
The incident left the ward in unsteady stillness, and the patients retreated to their rooms to escape it. Saul could hear Jacob’s bellowings all the way from the Quiet Room, the sound drawing strength from the dead air and landing furious in his head like crows shut in a closet. To drown it he pressed his face into his pillow and opened his eyes to a great void humming beneath him.
Some time later he glanced at his clock and saw that it was still two hours to dinner. He decided to use up his last pass for the week. He scrawled Saul Columbo in the sign-out book and rode the elevator down.
After his trial, when he was first admitted, Saul had attempted a handful of escapes—curiously, the doors to the outside were the only ones that weren’t locked—but soon stopped trying, because the police picked him up each time within a few hours. “How did you find me?” he’d asked. They only shrugged. Their lack of enthusiasm was dispiriting. Upon his return, the staff made him apologize and agree what a mistake it’d been to leave. This seemed to Saul now the most hateful form of captivity.
The outside air was crisp. He walked an asphalt path away from the ward and entered a grove of bunioned spreading elms that lay between the buildings of Centre Lawn and West Lawn. A hundred grey birds watched knowingly from the branches. Saul could feel how each of his muscles fit together, like those Chinese temples built without nails. On the way, he halted at his favourite bench and beheld the river, a murky snake that wandered all the way to Vancouver and the ocean. Riverview Hospital sat on land that was, in Saul’s youth, the middle of nowhere: a comfortable distance for a nuthouse. But from this bench Saul had watched the city break over the hospital, mazes of houses coiling up the river’s banks all the way to the seam of the horizon. Years back, they’d closed both East Lawn and West Lawn and shipped those patients someplace else. Luckily, Saul was allowed to stay, because they’d concluded he posed a threat to the community. “What community exactly are you referring to?” he’d said to Dr. K. in his office when he told him the good news. “Well, Saul, the world,” Kraepevic said, clicking. This was the period when they’d overhauled all the words: patients became clients, the Isolation Room became the Quiet Room, and the whole world became a community.
Saul continued on the path and met a few abandoned utility buildings. Kraepevic, in one of his impromptu dissertations, had once told him that when Riverview was founded it had included a farm, and the patients worked on the land as part of their rehabilitation. Some of these buildings were obviously part of the farm and others were for purposes he couldn’t guess at. Now, word was that the hospital made a little money on the side allowing crews to shoot movies and TV shows in the closed wards where all those people were once held. Even some of the same programs Saul watched religiously in the TV Room.
He left the path and ventured around back of West Lawn, buffing his palm along its stone wall. The grey masonry of the hospital was castle-like. Why build a nuthouse of such sturdy material? Saul wondered. What siege was to be defended against?
Near the loading dock, Saul noticed a wooden door, one he’d never seen before, about five feet high and faded, so it blended in with the colour of the stone. Saul gripped the doorknob and the door squawked against his shoulder, swinging into a dark corridor. He had tried thousands of doors of the many buildings at Riverview and they’d all been locked. He couldn’t help wonder why this door had opened for him now, on this day. He thought to fetch Kim to see if it would yield in the same way to her, then decided against it. He couldn’t stand to endanger her.
He floated through a dingy hallway that terminated at a narrow concrete staircase reaching up. Could it be a trap? He held his breath to listen for the Assassin and heard only the distant sound of a TV, or perhaps a radio. He ascended five flights to the foot of a long institutional hallway, identical to his own ward except that the paint, the colour of a browning avocado, was flaking. He saw a bundle of thick cables on the floor and decided to let them lead him. He walked to where they ran under a door that was painted to look like wood, fitted with a brass knocker and the number 235 in brass numerals. The number felt compellingly lucky to him
and he pushed open the door, also miraculously unlocked.
The room was furnished with a large-screen TV, expensive hi-fi stereo, leather couch, even art on the walls, all of it bathed by light from an arched window. He saw that the cables ran to movie lights at the edges of the room. The place was instantly familiar to him, maybe from the innumerable hours he’d spent in apartments like this on the TV shows he’d seen over the years, much like Luis had been familiar when Saul first watched him feed Georgina. This is a set, Saul said out loud.
As he inspected the place, the thoughts began to form. They began as an idea, an emulsion of insights laid over his vision. Then these thoughts birthed other thoughts, and those new thoughts came with sounds hidden in their pockets. They assembled in the city of his head like a murmuring crowd awaiting some great event. They conversed and argued, issued decrees from behind his ears. They were both everyone he had and hadn’t ever known. They came together like starlings massing densely in a flock, if only for a second, and in this way they became impossible to ignore. So it was, there in the familiar comfort of the fake apartment, that Saul’s voices instructed him to leave the hospital, move here and begin a new life.
Then he was in the bedroom, picturing his only jacket hung in the closet and his full colour spectrum of sweatsuits jammed into the drawers. In the kitchen he imagined the fridge laden with food, food he’d brought home on the bus from the grocery store. He saw his favourite blanket folded over the couch, where he would hole up and watch Columbo all day without people fighting and playing their depressing tapes whenever they pleased. In the bathroom he saw his toothbrush in a cup beside the sink.
Saul removed his clothes and donned the white terry-cloth bathrobe he found hanging behind the bathroom door. He felt fresh and sophisticated, regal almost, as he beheld the apartment’s sweeping view of the river, a vista unmarred by bars or wire mesh. Up this high, he could see so much more than he ever had from his bench.
The rustling of voices implored him then to sit on the blue lounge chair, and he did. He fell into the chair feeling free and competent, much like he did when he performed his chores, but the warmth of that sensation now twenty times greater. He immediately saw the hole in his plan: Kraepevic would never let him leave because he still believed Saul was unfit for the community. I’m not dangerous, Saul said, not anymore. At this notion something stood up inside him, a memory emerging in his mind like the sun from an eclipse: essential, beautiful and blinding to behold. A woman. He’d passed her twice each weekday that whole year he’d walked to and from work as a stockboy at Reno’s grocery store. Fearful of the sound of his own voice, he’d never dared speak to her, but each time he passed he sensed her reaching out for him in methods beyond words. She described her moods with the clothes she wore. She drew him diagrams on the sidewalk with her flashing eyes. Strung in her hair he found codes that could only be unravelled with the other codes written on her lily-white skin. Each day this simultaneous beckoning and rebuffing tormented and inflamed him. Each night in the bath, he’d practise holding his breath and find her voice swimming in the dull water. He’d find it in the hissing spaces between radio stations as he lay sleepless. Even now, with his brain crackling and encyclopedic, he could not remember what she said in these messages. Braids of riddles and baroque details, challenges and dares, but the thrust of them was her desire to have her life derailed, disrupted. She was unhappy, her days were a brutal chore. She said she could never speak this out loud, had never told this to anyone.
Sitting there in his robe in his blue chair, he watched himself passing with her out front of a radio shop. He watched her draw breath as if before a dive, her eyes, green and bulbous as an owl’s, set beneath a silk kerchief tied over hair glossy black as videotape. Beige leather gloves gripped tighter the handles of a vinyl handbag the hue of a poisonous frog. Then his hands were on her shoulders. An expression took root in her face, not fear, a determined concentration. She’d trusted him, even with the shop window now in glinting bits hanging around her like tiny stars and the heavy smell of new electronics wafting over them. He watched her delicate body strike a stereo cabinet and fall to the floor as scythes of glass dropped from the frame above and into Saul’s outstretched forearms, shearing them to the bone, and he was gladdened for the openings and he drew into his mind her silvery voice: thank you, thank you …
In court, bandages swelling his shirtsleeves, Saul saw that she wasn’t hurt and was relieved. Mostly, she hung her head, big tears tapping more codes on her skirt. When she was finally asked to speak, there before her parents and the jury, she was too afraid to face the truth of their secret communication. When Saul spoke to comfort her, to assure her she needn’t be ashamed, the judge thundered in his direction. When Saul ignored him, he was whisked from the room and stuck with needles that filled his mouth with sand. After the trial was over, he’d asked his lawyer her name. The lawyer pursed his thick lips, thought for a moment, then told him it was Ada Plinth. He was eighteen years old. Saul had probably written her thousands of letters since, unaddressed, just her name in the centre of each envelope, all to no reply.
The memory now displayed to him so vibrantly, Saul was able to see he’d done nothing evil, or horrible, or unforgivable, nothing that could justify incarceration on the ward for the rest of his days. It had been Ada’s wish they’d been caught; she had panicked, and he’d accepted the punishment to preserve her dignity. Saul now could see the bitter hollow of remorse he’d inhabited over the years and hated Kraepevic for having convinced him to call it his home. It then became clear to Saul that such a diabolical foe as Kraepevic wouldn’t have made it his life’s work to persecute and torture him if there wasn’t something fundamentally important about Saul, something epic and dramatic, something innately good and worth destroying. He’d always suspected he was meant for great things and perhaps it was this very same fatedness that had drawn Ada Plinth to him, and had kept him from prison, and had protected him and guarded his sanity under Kraepevic and the Assassin’s plot to poison his mind. And it was perhaps this same goodness that had led him here, to this new apartment. As he warmed to this idea, he felt the blue chair in which he sat throb beneath him like the cockpit of a powerful machine. But was he dangerous? He certainly wouldn’t be if he lived here, free from poison pills and the cruelty of the other patients, with nobody scheduling him or scribbling about him in a binder.
It was settled. He’d never lived on his own but he’d learn. He’d keep the place clean, draw up a routine of chores for himself and, of course, he’d still return to Centre Lawn for bingo, the occasional hot meal or checkers match with Kim. Saul’s mind soared like this for a while until it was grounded by his stomach—he hadn’t been eating much since he’d spotted Luis mucking about in the cafeteria. His pass was probably up anyway, so he rehung the robe, got dressed and made sure the door didn’t lock.
The ward always smelled foreign after he’d been away, but this time it was startling: discount cigarettes, crayons, messed pants and bile curdling on the warm air. Bad as they were, the smells failed to bother him. He looked upon the whole ward as if from a high place, as though he were still in his white robe gazing out on the river. He saw Tina, Drew, Kim and all the other patients lining up for dinner and he pitied them. But he couldn’t take them with him; the apartment was too small.
After dinner, a salubrious feast of noodly casserole, Saul approached the bingo table, a folding thing the staff set up each time. With Jacob still languishing in the Quiet Room, Saul knew his bingo victory was certain. Jacob always won. He never missed a number, due to a youthful concentration that hadn’t yet been whittled down by meds and the lack of things to concentrate on. Saul vowed to put his jackpot toward supplies for his new place: food, candles and an alarm clock, because he’d need to wake early to perform chores when the staff wasn’t there to rouse him anymore. Saul thumbed the stack of cards, trolling for vibrations. In bingo, the selection of a card was the only aspect you could control; the rest was
just making sure you didn’t mess up. He sensed the aura of a winner and fetched a paper cup of pennies. They didn’t allow dabbers so the patients placed coins to mark the numbers called. A whole card was accidentally dumped at least once each game. Whoever dumped their card was usually dragged to the Quiet Room for a while to calm down.
The Dayroom was placid even with all the patients loaded in there. Saul marvelled at how much less insane they were on bingo night. There was a focus, a common purpose, or maybe it was just that everybody wanted to win. The lack of seating forced him next to Georgina, within range of the flailings of her elbows. Frieda, a tense, dead-eyed nurse, sat to the left of Georgina’s wheelchair to place her pennies for her, sure to raise serious questions of fairness if she ever won, which she never did because she was terminally unlucky. All she’d ever seen was spoons shoved toward her and TV she’d never understand and someone dropping pennies on a card of nonsense in front of her. Saul read her mind for a moment and it made no more sense than the babblings of a child. He’d have room for her at his apartment, but he didn’t know how to care for her, to change and feed her, and this saddened him.
Suddenly, the sphere of wire commenced churning the numbered balls. The Assassin was cranking the handle, grinning to the crowd like a Caesar. They locked eyes. Saul almost quit right there; he knew the Assassin would never let him win.
“Eye-thirty-seven. Eyeeee, thirteeeee, sevennnn …” he said, holding the first ball aloft, appraising it like a jewel.
Saul had I-37 and placed his first penny.
After that, Saul knew each number the Assassin was going to pick before he picked it. He and the Assassin were communicating telepathically. It was a covenant. Luis wanted Saul to win. And he did. He had the next three numbers after that—including the free space—and was first to get a line.
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