by Alex Pugsley
But each weekday morning on the polished floor I would hear the shoe-steps of the Perpetually Smiling Porter and I’d be wheeled again to the fifth-floor play area. The first day of my second week, my middle sisters brought me a care package (Twizzlers, Maltesers, a Green Lantern–Green Arrow comic), and, not finding me in my room, went searching. They came exploring down the fifth floor hallway, my sister Faith softly humming “See See My Playmate,” and then—and I remember this moment so exactly—they were completely bewildered by the sight of the purple-faced boy. Both reacted by staring at him, hardly blinking, gazing in a sort of simple fascination, not because of any prejudice but because of a lack of all reference for what they were seeing, which in turn provoked wild curiosity and disbelief. They were having trouble identifying the purple-faced boy as a person, as something less than monstrous, as a creature recognizably human. I felt in that moment that completely ignoring him was not the sort of example I should be setting for my sister Faith, who was four years old and quite an impressionable young girl, and so I turned to the purple-faced boy and said hello and told him my name. He did not have a lot of motor control over his neck and his pupils tended to quickly shift and re-adjust, often straining to the limits of the eye-socket. But he made a sort of smile, his eyes sympathetic to me, and through the bars of his hospital bed I touched at his crab claw.
After Bonnie and Faith left—for the fifth-floor play area was off-limits to civilians—I showed the purple-faced boy the Letraset I was working on, which was a space adventure called The Red Planet. Letraset was about finding the right place in the landscape for the action figure as well as cleanly transferring it to the panorama. Sometimes in my haste the figure, especially if he were in a pose I considered humdrum, would only partially come off the acetate, forcing me to line it up again and to try to match, say, a sentry’s hand with a disembodied ray-gun. The purple-faced boy examined my handiwork, noting the split-level choreography I’d achieved around a cliff face, and glanced at the sheets of acetates. I passed him the last sheet and the teaspoon I’d been using as a transferring implement. He accepted the acetate but made me aware that he didn’t need the spoon, producing from the bed-sheets a pencil, sharpened at both ends. He held this double-pencil in his crab claw and penciled the acetate figure into the landscape with surprising authority and concentration. His handiwork was superb and glitch-free, his effort very genuine, and, as I nodded to him, the mutual enterprise involving us, bonding us, I understood I had a colleague in the fifth-floor play area.
~
The purple-faced boy was steady and studious and resolute—he took nothing for granted, ever watchful, noting everything for himself—and he had a superpower. He had an ability to read fast, very fast, there’s-no-way-he-read-it-that-fast fast. His hospital-bed was home to an improvised library and book after book vanished into his eyes and the systems of his brain. I saw him put away Tintin au Congo, André Norton’s Witch World, and The Fellowship of the Ring in the space of a day. He would use his double-pencil to guide his eyes along a line of text and, when reading a newspaper, he arranged his bed-sheets on either side of a column so his gaze wouldn’t bounce around. Because he didn’t really speak, I guessed his reading was swift and free of any subvocalization, fields of text moving wholesale into his nervous system. One quiet Wednesday in the fifth-floor play area, Nurse Patty Oickle rolled over to our purlieu one of the hospital’s book trolleys. This was a collection of sorry-looking children’s books within which had been stashed some adult hardcovers like King Rat, Valley of the Dolls, and Papillon. The purple-faced boy was fascinated by Papillon. I saw him read it three times, and, though I could be baffled by the tedious sameness of the pages of an adult book, I scanned through it myself, understanding it was a true-life adventure about criminals escaping some place called Devil’s Island. But I was busy finishing General Custer, my next-to-last Super Action Transfer. The remaining Letraset was some jungle-themed piece I didn’t care for called Animals of the World, all elephants and peacocks, and I offered it to the purple-faced boy. His eyes spun to their furthest extreme, bloodshot with strain, indicating I should return to him the hardcover Papillon. He pressed down and held the book still with his stumpy left arm. In the top right corner of the book’s first endpaper, he placed the image of a bull elephant and rubbed it perfectly into the book. He turned the page and positioned a second elephant on the next recto page, again in the top corner, so the images would align. He turned the page and began another, in this manner filling up the book’s first quire, one end of his double-pencil whittled down to a nubbin. I said nothing, watching the acetate animals emerge glistening on each page corner. Then, in a moment that revealed to me an intricate genius, he fluffled these first pages, making the animals move in a flicker of animation. He’d made a flip-book.
“We can do this,” I said to him, excited, raising myself off my bed. “We can do the whole book. I’ll help you. Wanna do it?” The purple-faced boy looked at me, his own eyes shining a moment, their grimness replaced by curiosity. I asked him again and slowly, because the movement was onerous, he nodded his heavy head—yes, yes he would do it.
~
I’m not sure why, exactly, it became crucially important for two bedridden boys to transfer an acetate figure to every other page of a book called Papillon. The venture was ours, it was attainable, it was perfectible, and I liked that we were giving new and vivid meaning to a contraption already in the world. I suppose the project was our plan, our jubilation, our method of escape, and there was for me something so inexplicably right about it. My days in the hospital, which had once seemed never-ending, an infinity of bedsores and decomposing lunches, became fraught and finite. To inscribe every other page of the book would require 228 figures—elephants, eagles, lions, gladiators, wild-west cowboys, I didn’t care as long as they were transferred in the mint-perfect style he’d established.
In mid-August, there was a visitation from my mother, distracted in a floppy hat and peasant skirt. I put in my request for more Letraset then asked her about the purple-faced boy. How long had he been in the hospital? How long would he stay in the hospital? “He can stay till he’s eighteen,” said my mother. “And then he’ll have to go to another hospital.” Then where—where would he go then? But my mother, who was suffering from the lingering effects of a yearlong postpartum depression, who had spent a few weeks that summer in another hospital herself, who would shortly leave my father for some months, was not able or interested in pursuing an unknown child’s possibilities. She shrugged to show there were contingencies in the world she neither controlled nor understood. I didn’t push the subject, opting to simply re-emphasize my requisition order for Letraset. And to my deepest pleasure, my oldest sister brought me more Letrasets—copies of Zulu, Carnival, and Prehistoric Monsters Battle—leaving them at the nurses’ station the next morning.
~
In a children’s hospital, there is a lull the week after Labour Day, when canoe lessons are done, when sport camps have finished, when highways have emptied of summer vacationers. So the other bed in my room was unfilled, the hallway outside my room quiet. I was not sure where the purple-faced boy went at night, and, because in a few days’ time I was to be released from traction, fitted with plaster casts, and discharged from hospital—and we still had fourteen pages of Papillon to finalize—I asked Nurse Oickle, who had taken an interest in my partnership with the purple-faced boy, if he might be moved to my room. But the purple-faced boy never left the fifth floor, she told me, and needed to be kept under observation at night, and a shift to the second floor was out of the question. So I asked if my stay in hospital might be extended. But this, too, was impossible because the appointment for my casts with the orthopedic surgeon was booked for Friday morning. In this moment, the face of Patty Oickle from Herring Cove was faintly plump, solicitous, but baffled that I wanted to stay longer in hospital when there were, as she put it, “only three more jeezly days of summer left.” So I
asked, if the purple-faced boy couldn’t be moved to my room, could I be moved to his? She wasn’t sure but promised she’d ask.
The next morning the purple-faced boy was not present in the fifth-floor play area. He was somewhere having tests—he was in line for an operation to repair a congenital heart defect—and there was some concern whether his system could stand such a procedure. On my own, I worked on Papillon, but nervously, and only completed one image, a Triceratops whose horn-prong I almost mangled, very nearly twisting it in the final transfer. I had one last day in hospital and thirteen more pages to complete so I asked again if I could visit the purple-faced boy, wherever he was, and finally Nurse Oickle relented. I never learned if she got higher approval or simply snuck me in on her own. The Perpetually Smiling Porter wheeled me after hours to the elevators and we ascended to the fifth floor, moving beyond the play area and through a room of odd incubators where, inside, were cocooned, pinkish, wrinkled creatures—newborn infants—I saw, some smaller than newborns, and some with open chests, for this was the neonatal ward. I was mystified that hidden on the fifth floor was an entire subset of other patients, preemies kept alive in ICU isolation. And, in the doorway to his room, in his hospital bed, was the purple-faced boy.
He surveyed the scene, reviewing his fellow-patients with steady interest. His colour was not good—his cheeks seemed desiccated, the consistency of tissue paper, the result, perhaps, of some augmented medication—and his thoughts, as ever, seemed far away. How many kids had he seen come and go? What did he know? From six o’clock we worked till ten, working until my eyes were dry, my fingers cramped and trembling. “Wanna leave the rest till tomorrow?” I asked, shaking out my hand. “The last two pages?” At that moment an exhausted-looking anesthetist arrived, confused to see me with the purple-faced boy. She told me I would have to return to the second floor, that a night nurse would arrive shortly to take me back to my room. I absorbed the sights around me, the pills and ointments at his bedside, the varied prescriptions on his rolling lunch table, the books piled in the windowsill. And all the books he read—where did they dwell? Where did they go in his imagination—where did their meanings reside? I stared at the purple-faced boy, this boy whose name I would never know, contemplating his care and diligence, the shift and flicker of his eyes. He was oblivious to the distractions of the other room—the beep-beep of the electrocardiograms, the chorus of haphazard breathing—and working on the Letraset with a single-pointedness of concentration I was only now beginning to fully appreciate. I was conscious of my staring at him, as he must’ve been conscious of my staring at him, as he must’ve grown used to all sorts of people staring at him, but the example of his intent was deeply meaningful to me and, as I was wheeled out of the room, I reached in kinship to my colleague, touching at the crab claw that held the double-pencil.
~
At the end of the summer, I was freed from traction, encased in hip-to-toe Petrie casts, and given a wheelchair. After two months in hospital, I was free to scissor off my hospital identification bracelet and return to my family’s life. My parents were busy divorcing that month, no one in my family was able to meet me, and I was told a taxi would be coming. I had no trousers that could fit over my plaster casts and so there I was, in pullover and Y-front underwear, waiting in a wheelchair at the front doors of the children’s hospital. I was so bewildered to be outdoors amid seagulls and flying beetles and smells of cut-lawns and thoughts of going home that I hadn’t really registered the unorthodoxy of my appearance. It was only when the taxi arrived, and the driver—who lifted me from my wheelchair and stowed me in the back seat—kept repeating that it was nothing to be embarrassed about, being in your underwear, no, it was exactly like being in a bathing suit, exactly like it, sure, just like being in a bathing suit, that I felt ashamed. For I sensed his humiliation for me, a blinking kid in underpants, unable to walk, waiting alone at the hospital, clutching a pencil case of curiosities. The driver was packing the collapsed wheelchair into the trunk when someone knocked on the back window. On this morning, the face of Patty Oickle was drawn, anguished. She opened the car door and gave me the copy of Papillon, saying I should keep it. I was never told of the purple-faced boy’s death, exactly, but I guessed it, I felt it, and from her face I knew it.
Years afterward, my older sister would talk of him, recalling in contemplative moments the person she’d seen for a few minutes one Monday morning. “He was probably better off not being alive,” she said. “A boy like that—he’s better off.” Life seemed random to me that summer, death more so, I was only a kid, seven years old, but my sense of fairness was disturbed. Something seemed off in the universe. But I had been given the gift of a book. Coming home that afternoon, lifted back into my house, I opened the final pages of Papillon. On the next-to-last page, in the top corner, was the blended image of two Super Action Transfers, a lion with the head-and-wings of an eagle—a gryphon. It was a work of keen talent and I was impressed by the rightness of the proportions, the invisible seam between creatures, the gleam of assurance in the eagle’s eyes. The last page was blank and I would wonder for years why it was left this way, deciding at last that it was simply a sign of things to come.
The Pigeon Lady
When she was a little kid, my youngest sister had a habit of running away. It wasn’t the I-hate-you-guys-and-I’m-escaping-forever sort of running away. It was more the what’s-inside-this-hollow-tree-probably-a-tunnel-to-an-enchanted-kingdom sort of running away. “Wandering off,” my mother called it. “Katie, she can’t help it. If you don’t watch her, she ends up on somebody’s rooftop, waving at clouds, talking to sparrows.” The last of six children, Katie felt she was sometimes forgotten or ignored or presumed negligible, so she and Faith, the next-to-youngest, looked for their own kinds of connections in the world. They were a little more than a year apart, my mother dressed them in matching outfits, and they were pretty inseparable—stockpiling Barbies in a velvet Crown Royal bag, trading Paul Lynde impersonations, dueting on the piano—but where Faith was social, outgoing, literal, Katie was notional, dreamy, intuitive and when Faith began going to school in the afternoons, four-year-old Katie was left on her own.
~
Neason and Boba were her first Imaginary Friends—flying horses who lived in her sock drawer. Rupert Pocket slept in a night-light. Vuvy and Noo-Noo she set places for at Sunday dinner. Scroop and Melnick, the Doy-Doy Monster, all manner of night-tripping elf and faery otherkin glimmered in her imagination, but to Neason and Boba she always returned. The soft sound of their names, the inflection of phonemes, had on Katie a hypnotic effect and she sifted such sounds into her own idiolect. You would hear her out in the backyard, singing to herself, babbling their names over and over. Inside, she diverted herself by staring at boa constrictors in the World Book Encyclopedia, doodling her name in colouring books, watching miscellaneous television. This last practice had its hazards because some story points, like Dumbo and the clowns, or anything to do with Bambi’s mother, could destroy her for days. “Katie,” said my father, “doesn’t have a lot of insulation from creatures in distress.” This sequence culminates in the I-Blame-the-Babysitter incident when a newbie sitter did not know to prevent Katie from watching a movie on television called Ring of Bright Water. Returning home from dress rehearsal one Thursday night, my mother found her youngest child howling, grieving, miserable in onesies pajamas. Grabbing a legal pad, and gargling with Amosan—my mother was a stubborn champion of offstage vocal rest—she scribbled the words, “I Blame the Babysitter” and this line would pass into family vernacular as our version of The Butler Did It. So if you were to drop and break a bottle of ketchup or forget to clean the litter box, you might stare vaguely out a window and murmur, “I blame the babysitter.”
Katie did not really appreciate the catchphrase, so shaken was she by her encounter with the movie, and months later you would find her sitting at the bottom of the backstairs, tears spilling down her face, clenching a Fisher
-Price Little People with such force her elbow shook, as she contemplated a world for river otters that allowed for such a ditch-digging labourer and such a shovel.
~
It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon—around 1972, I think—when Katie was four-and-a-half and I was nine that I found her colouring in the basement television room. Katie cultivated a certain disorder in her dress, displaying, say, one of our mother’s clip-on earrings on a shirt collar or an elastic ponytail holder around her wrist. These ponytails holders—Faith and Katie called them hair bobbles—were ornamented with two plastic balls, the balls coming in red, blue, clear, and yellow. In recent weeks, for some reason, Katie permitted only the blue type on her person and all others were flung in fury across the room. Today she wore bell-bottom slacks and a fuchsia blouse with a white Peter Pan collar—a collar buttoned up to the top—and she lay on her stomach surrounded by markers and paper. Now it could be a trial colouring with Katie because she didn’t really care to match the cap to the marker—she tended to mix by feel—so a pink cap did not guarantee a pink marker and green markers might be capless for days. She was, however, very invested in her work. Head bent fast to the floor, she’d filled several pages with her squiggles, dutifully scrawling over and over the same six-pointed star. She was using an implement new to me—a Mr. Sketch Scented Marker—a stout device with a chisel-tip. It smelled richly of blueberry and I asked where she got it.