The Shibboleth

by John Hornor Jacobs

  SIX

  I wake up slow, caught in the sluggish tide between knowing nothing and wakefulness. I had no dreams, neither mine nor someone else’s.

  So I’ve got that going for me.

  On the other hand, I do have a vague recollection of motion, of bouncing. Ambulance, I suspect. And of Schneider leaning over me as my eyelids fluttered. “She said you were a thief,” he said, the words thick and hesitant. “I didn’t know what she meant. She didn’t know what she meant. But I saw you, last night—something is different now, and I should want to kill you—” He had a deep, barreled voice. “But I don’t. I feel—I feel lighter. I remember what I did, and all the things that came after, but it’s like it all happened to someone else. I’m calmer than I have been in …” He looked at my face for a long time. “Something’s seriously wrong with you, kid—though we knew that already. But I think you stole something from me that I needed stolen.”

  Still, no dream. That’s something.

  It’s a hallway I’m in, a long one, full of cots under fluorescent lights. Green tile. The stink of urine and chemicals. It takes a moment for the sounds to percolate through my consciousness. Painful laughing, sobbing, screeches, hoots and catcalls, cursing. Steady cursing. Boys in blue hospital gowns lie in their beds, read, gibber to themselves. Make strange geometrical symbols with their hands.

  I’ve woken to a nightmare. I put my head in my hands, crush my eyes shut, and rub, hoping when I’m through, this will all have been a dream and I’m back on my bunk in Casimir, safely incarcerado.

  Down the hall, one boy masturbates furiously, his head tilted back, saying, “I just want to sleep. I just want to sleep!” There’s no pleasure in it, and the other boys move away from him. One kid makes a weird ululation deep in his throat as he watches. Another kid trots over to the bulls. He says something I can’t hear and points. The bulls hop up and immediately approach the boy with their Tasers out. His body contorts when they zap him, and I can’t help but wonder if he came at the moment of electrification. When they’re done giving him the charge—click, click, click, click—his body relaxes, and he slumps back on his cot. “Pull up your damned pants,” the bull says, reluctant to touch the boy. “Or you’ll go into solitary. No more beating off, you hear?”

  The bulls are both good old American football players. Their biceps strain at their nurse uniforms.

  The other one says, “No more room in solitary. Doc Sinequa says we’ll have to rotate some out and ship off the others to the Fort Smith psych ward, if things don’t change.”

  The first bull shrugs. “Not my problem. I need to get a damned night’s sleep myself.”

  “I heard that loud and clear,” the other says. He looks at the boy, who’s crying now and trying to pull up his pants. “Try to sleep, kid. Okay? It’ll get better.”

  The first bull shakes his head as he walks back to the plexi-glass nurse’s station by the doors.

  My head is full of cotton, and my eyes feel gummy and slow to respond. I look at my hands for a long while, tracing the lines on my palm, and I’m surprised at how interesting my own flesh has become. I want to focus on anything other than the hell I’m in. I try to leave the meatsuit, to cast out my awareness beyond myself. I try to exert my shibboleth self.

  Nothing. I look at my hands. No more Ghost Dance. No more shibboleth.

  There’s a chart at the end of my cot. I pick it up, look at it, but the small type and black scribbles swim before my eyes. Sore all over. Head, back, ass, legs, shoulders. Every muscle aches—but dully. I’m aware of the pain, but it’s far away and muffled. It takes a while to realize my bladder is full. I stand, shuffle down the hall. At some point, maybe they’ll assign me a room.

  Screaming in one of the cells, and a boy sits on his cot and watches me blankly, saying over and over, “The best they is, the best they is,” as I walk down the hall to where the two bulls sit at the entrance to the male ward. They’ve taken my shoes but given me these nice slippers.

  At the Berlin Wall checkpoint, they scan my wrist and wave me through. The men’s restroom has no door, just a curved glass block wall. And inside, there are no partitions between urinals and no doors on the johns. A fat kid in glasses blinks owlishly at me from one of the toilets. I do my business as quickly as I can. And leave.

  A short, dumpy lady bull stops me coming out. She’s holding a clipboard, and her gaze bounces between it and me. “Been told to find you. Shreve? That your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re to have breakfast. The cafeteria is there.” She points a nubby finger toward another set of double doors, these standing open. “Then please report there.” Her blunt finger jabs out at an area beside the main nurse’s station. Another sliding expanse of Plexiglas, a counter. A small sign says DISPENSARY, and a sour-faced man sits framed in the open window, glaring into the glow of a computer monitor. Behind him, white shelves and racks full of white bottles and bins and cabinets. The drug slinger.

  I guess I’m standing there, looking about dully with my jaw hanging, because the nurse touches my shoulder and says, “Earth to Shreve. Earth to Shreve. You hear me?”

  “Sure.”

  “So, go eat breakfast. You can’t take your medicine on an empty stomach.”

  That sounds reasonable, but I don’t know if I want to take the medicine.

  I shuffle off. In the cafeteria there’s the normal clang and crash and clamor of trays, but this cafeteria feels more like a cheap hotel buffet than the cafeteria at Casimir. There’s a toaster with bread and bagels (but no cream cheese), a hot plate with biscuits and gravy and powdered eggs. A big tub of ice with milk and tiny bottles of juice. Poor, cheap fare. But I am hungry. It takes a long while to get the bread sack untied and two pieces in the toaster.

  There’s a bank of windows on the far side of the room, high up in the wall. Some kind of plastic. Crazy people and glass windows go together like infants and razor blades. It’s cloudy out there, the sky’s ashtray gray, washing the dull interior of the cafeteria in dirty light. Rows of long tables sit crookedly, and many of the tables are full. But where the Casimir cafeteria would be roaring with noise and laughter, the air full of tossed napkins and scraps of food, this cafeteria is quiet, hushed, waiting for something. The patients move from cafeteria line to table, bearing trays, slowly.

  I have no idea how long I’ve stood there, blinking in the light and watching the glowing mouths of the toaster, when I hear a voice say, “So, what’re you in for?”

  I’m surprised to find a girl standing next to me. I’ve been so long in juvie, surrounded only by boys, it’s jarring to find myself rubbing elbows with the other half.

  This girl, thin as a guitar string and as tightly strung, has a buzz cut and gigantic, luminous eyes. Her eyes are so large, they make her look like an anime doll come to life, but without the boobs. Or maybe it’s the drugs surging through my bloodstream. She moves forward, taking my wrist in cold, papery hands. She turns it over, looking at the light blue hospital bracelet complete with bar code. “Mr. Cannon comma Shreve.”

  “Grand theft auto.”

  “I don’t think that one’s in the DSM.”

  “DSM?”

  “Wow, they’ve really got you lubed to the gills, don’t they? Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Stats for mental disorders. You know, looneyville? The hatch?”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  She laughs and it transforms her face, but not in a good way. There’s a twisted, hurt sound in it, and her eyes go mean. But for all that—beyond the cotton in my head and heart—I feel sorry for her. She looks frail.

  “Sure you’re not crazy. None of us in here are.” She pauses. “I’m Rollie.”

  “Shreve,” I say. “So, uh, what are you in here for?”

  “Anorexia nervosa. Depression. Cutting. You name it. But mostly, the same as everyone else. I haven’t slept for more than a few minutes in a week.”

  I understand but don’t at the same time—even before t
hey pumped me full of juice, I was sleeping like a baby back in Casimir.

  “Cutting?”

  “You really are a fish out of water, aren’t you?” She glances around the cafeteria as if checking for observers and then leans toward me. Her breath smells of ammonia. She pulls up her robe, showing me skinny, knobby knees. The gesture is slow and—I’ve lived enough lives to know this—provocative, like she’s unveiling something that will give me an immediate boner.

  But her leg is scrawny and asexual and, as the hem of her robe rises enough for me to see her thigh, crisscrossed with half-healed scratches and cuts. She smiles at me, lowering her eyes.

  “It lets the pain out, you know?”

  I don’t, but I nod. By habit, I try to make a run at her, to get inside her mind and see if I can help her. But I can’t muster the shibboleth with all the Haldol swimming in my bloodstream. Seems I’m grounded for the time being.

  And for a moment, I’m relieved. It’s a strange, muffled feeling. The wet blanket of whatever they gave me evens out the seesaw of emotions. I’m just plain ole Shreve again. And that’s a relief. I feel weightless and untethered for a moment, free from the responsibility of saving this scrawny girl. Or Jack. Or myself.

  We shamble over to the tables, carrying our trays, and I eat the toast and drink boxed apple juice while Rollie watches me. She rips the rind from an orange and separates each section. She arranges the pieces in a pinwheel on her plate.

  Eventually, she starts talking again, watching my reaction.

  “That guy over there is named Digger. See him? The tall kid.”

  “Yeah, I see him.”

  “They call him Digger because they can’t call him Corpsebanger.”

  I don’t know if I like the direction this conversation has turned, so I focus on the toast for a while.

  When I’m done, I notice that Rollie’s right beside me, dumping her tray as well. She hasn’t eaten a single wedge of her orange.

  In the hall by the dispensary, a big male nurse waddles down the hall, his muscles making his walk bowlegged and his arms hard to hang straight at his sides. He’s got the gait of a morbidly obese person, but he’s got zero fat. His feet squeak on the tiles and echo off the bare green walls.

  “Rollie, you making friends with the new …” —he’s going to say fish, he’s going to say fish, and if he does I might scream if I can even muster the energy to do it, I’m so tired—“patient?”

  “You know it, Buster.” Bringing her hands to her face, she begins nibbling at her cuticles—probably the only meal she’ll have all day.

  He looks at me and raises a clipboard that looks toylike in his massive hands. “Shreve J. Cannon, ward of the state, placed here at the Tulaville Psychiatric Ward until deemed fit to be released back into custody of the state’s duly appointed representative. That you?” He reads this formally, bored of the routine. I don’t have to peep inside his head to know he’s sore from lifting weights and, judging by how his breath comes heavy through his horselike nostrils, exhausted from not getting enough sleep. A snorer, this one. Apnea, most likely. Didn’t get much sleep even before the insomnia epidemic.

  “My name’s Sylvester, but everyone around here calls me Buster. Follow me.”

  It takes me a bit to catch up with Buster. When I do, he cocks an eye at me and says, “Chart says you had a schizophrenic break and you were violent to an old lady.”

  “I—”

  “Hey, kid, don’t make excuses. All you got to hear is this: I can rip your arm out of its socket like I was pulling a wing from a roasted chicken. You know?” Matter of fact.

  “That right, hoss? I can go in your head and blow out all your lights and then work you like a meat puppet.”

  He lifts the chart, peers at it awhile, pulls out the pencil and scratches at the paper, and then looks at me again. Slow. Deliberate. Then he begins walking. “Right. Come on.”

  We bank around the back of the nurse’s station—a couple of massive orderlies eyeball me—and approach a small window at the back of the building. At least Rollie isn’t following anymore.

  “Not gonna repeat myself, right, kid? This here’s where you come every morning, right after breakfast—all meals in are in there—or we’ll find you. You won’t like it if we have to hunt you down. There’s the male ward; there’s the female ward. Do not try to enter the female ward. Fraternizing with our female guests is fine, but no sex. No mutual masturbation. No nothing. Got me? You start messing with one of the young ladies here, you’ll find yourself in isolation so fast your head will spin. Got me?”

  “You said ‘got me’ twice.”

  He ignores that. “I’m gonna make Rollie your tour guide for the common areas, since she’s obviously sweet on you. You’ve got an evaluation in that office there—”

  “You think that’s a good idea? Putting me with a girl?”

  “No one else seems interested in you. Might as well be her.” He jabs a thick finger at a frosted glass door. “You’ve got an appointment with Dr. Sinequa immediately following lunch.” He steps up to the window and pats the lime-green counter. The sour man glaring at the computer monitor is framed in the window and surrounded by shelves full of drugs. He’s got a Taser at his waist.

  Buster says, “I need Shreve Cannon’s morning candy, if you please, Steve-O.”

  Steve-O turns to the nearby computer and clacks on the keyboard for a few moments and then disappears back among the shelves of drugs.

  “You noticed the Taser, right? Don’t know what your problem is, kid, but if any patient is found behind this counter, Steve-O is allowed to put you down.”

  “What’s with the sturm und drang routine, hoss?”

  He turns to me and snatches my wrist and gives a little jerk.

  “Don’t call me ‘hoss,’ kid. Look around this place.” He stops, puts his massive hands on his waist, and looks at me. “Seriously, take a good look.”

  I look. Robed zombies wander the hall, passing in and out of the cafeteria, the recreation rooms, the reading area. They murmur, mutter, moan, rock. Buster’s radio squelches and hisses, and a strange garbled noise comes from the tinny speaker. The air stinks of disinfectant and a whiff of raw sewage. The nurses, men and women alike, keep to the nurse station or move very fast toward their destination, as if the toddling shamblers were real zombies instead of medicated ones.

  I try, for an instant, to get out of my skin and go behind Buster’s eyes—not to do what I said, but just to understand. Time becomes elastic for that moment, and I’m out and looking from behind his eyes at me, but then the moment is up and the elastic tether that keeps me associated with my meatsuit snaps me back.

  Almost had it.

  Buster says, “This locked-down psychiatric ward has a forty-eight-patient capacity. You wanna know how many patients we have in here?”

  No, not really, but I can tell he’s going to tell me anyway. “More?”

  “One hundred and twenty. You’re Mister One Hundred and Twenty-One.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “You hit the nail on the head.” He stops, and then something about his expression clouds. “The whole world is going batty at the same time. It wasn’t like this a year ago.”

  “The insomnia?”

  He looks at me like I’m a moron. “Bingo, kid. And these poor souls—” He taps me on the shoulder. “Including your little ass—are the first ones to stampede off the cliff.”

  Steve-O returns with a small tray holding two small paper cups.

  “There’s your candy, Shreve. Take it.”

  I pick up the cups. There are two large capsules in one and a few ounces of water in the other. The pills most assuredly do not have the look of candy, and I would know.

  “What is this?”

  He bristles. “The red-and-blue one makes you smaller; the yellow one makes you larger. Ain’t got time for twenty questions. Take them.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “I hold you down and make you
take them.” He looks around for support. “Steve-O, this one’s gonna be trouble. Come out here.”

  Steve-O moves away from the computer station, puts his hand on his Taser, and exits the dispensary through a nearby door.

  “You have three seconds to eat that candy, kid.”

  It’s all happening too fast, and I can’t tell if it’s because of the gauze of the drugs swaddling my brain and preventing me from touching the shibboleth or if it’s really just happening too fast.

  “Three, two…”

  Everything locks. My whole body goes rigid and there’s an electric crackling sound—pop pop pop pop pop—and I have no control over anything because every muscle is tight and contracted and I teeter and hit the ground.

  I try to do the Ghost Dance like so long ago, back in Casimir, when the admin bull ordered me to stay behind the line, but the candy swims through my bloodstream, full bore, and I’m locked incarcerado. Blocked from the shibboleth.

  Buster fills my vision, a half-sad, half-determined look on his face, saying to Steve-O, “Get the pills. One went over there!” He forces open my mouth with his big paws—there’s no resisting him—and after a moment of scrabbling and muttered profanity, Steve-O roughly shoves them in.

  Buster covers everything that can take in air on my face and says, “Swallow or you’ll suffocate. More paperwork for us, but no one’s gonna bat an eye at some punk kid who asphyxiates. You got me?”

  With his face in mine, I make one more attempt to get behind his eyes. There’s the faintest scent of flame, and for a moment, I think I’m about to fly into the wild blue yonder, to touch the shibboleth, but the spark dies and I’m still firmly seated in good ole Shreve.

  “You got me?”

  The air in my lungs is exhausted of oxygen, and black is pushing around at the edges, but, yeah, I get him.

  I swallow and the pills, without the sluice of water, feel like stones traveling down my throat, rough and gigantic and full of sleep.

  He pats me on my cheek and says, “Good boy,” and lifts me off the floor and places me on my feet once again. Turning his head, he nods at Steve-O, saying, “Okay, he’ll be good from here on out.” He looks back to me. “I’m watching you, kid. There’s no fun and games in here. Next time you don’t want to eat your candy, Steve-O will pop you in the ass with a syringe full of juice. Understand?”