The Shibboleth

by John Hornor Jacobs

  “Oui, oui.”

  “What?”

  I can’t understand why my tongue said that so I just nod and duck my head.

  “All right, be a good boy and don’t cause any trouble.” He pats my head.

  I toddle off. My body is sore all over from the electrical charge and my shoulder hurts where Buster almost pulled out my arm and my back stings where the Taser’s prongs pricked my skin.

  Not my favorite morning ever, that’s for sure.

  Rollie catches up with me as I shamble over to the reading room.

  “Hey, beautiful,” she says, putting a bony hand on my shoulder—the smarting one—and stopping my forward movement. “When Buster gives an order, you gotta do it.” Her ammonia breath washes over my face. “He doesn’t play, you know?”

  “Yeah, I kinda figured that out.”

  “Makes you all jumpy, don’t it? The zapping?”

  She’s looking at me with those big liquid eyes and a grin on her face. She’s too happy for a prisoner in a mental ward.

  “Don’t you ever want to bust out of this place?”

  “You mean, escape?” Rollie grimaces and looks at me as if I am insane. More insane. Whatever.

  “Yeah, escape. You know—” I wave my hand at the green walls and unbreakable plastic windows. “The wild blue yonder? Baseball fields? Children of the corn?”

  She shudders. Her emotions seesaw across her face. Her bony shoulders hunch up into a tight knot. Her hands jitter. “No. It’s terrible out there. That’s why I’m here. Safe.” Her face clears. She tries her smile back on.

  “Safe? I just had a gorilla electrocute me. It’s not safe in here,” I say.

  Her newfound smile withers and dies. She whispers, “It’s terrible out there. Something’s coming. Some cancer is growing, and I can feel it.”

  “Have you slept recently?”

  She ignores that, closing her big peepers and touching her eyelids with her two tremulous index fingers. “Sometimes I can feel it growing behind here. My eyes. Growing. Passing into the world.”

  I’m cold for a moment, colder than normal, colder than the air of the ward, colder than the tiles of the building.

  “What is it?” I whisper back.

  Eyes open now, Rollie’s giving me the lip-nibbling look of worry, like she’s said too much. So I give her the old salesman grin, my tool of the trade back before Jack and the shibboleth busted up the party. When she smiled mean—that hurt and desperate smile—it didn’t do much for her appearance. But now, this vulnerability softens her and for a moment I feel like I can see her how she should be: whole, 11 percent body fat, olive-skinned, and smiling wholeheartedly on a softball field with other girls, her hair pulled back and threaded through the rear of her cap. Not this rattled bundle of nerves, fingernails eroded to nubs, hair as short as a prisoner’s, breathing out the ammoniac poisons her body generates as it devours itself.

  No, for an instant, I can see her beauty.

  And maybe that’s what the shibboleth is. It’s the commonality of human existence. It lets me get in their heads because we’re the same, all of us, this human utterance.

  She blinks and says, “I don’t know,” shaking her head. And the moment evaporates.

  We’ve been standing right outside the open double doorway, yet no one seems to notice two patients in gowns furiously whispering in their midst. A big bull-nurse sits on a stool by the door as zombies shamble in and out, humming, using their fingertips to trace invisible patterns in the air.

  We enter the reading room. There are magazines and National Geographics and books for teens, Judy Blume and Madeleine L’Engle. There’s a full set of smudged and threadbare Harry Potters and the requisite Tolkien. Fantasy is the preferred literature of the psych ward, it seems.

  I find a book of poetry called The Sorrow of Architecture by Liam Rector and paw through it. Rollie picks up a Glamour magazine. She’s silent now, and I have much to think about, but it’s hard keeping a single idea in my head with the medication thrumming and shivering in my system. It’s as if I cannot concentrate on anything for more than an instant, but each instant is an eternity. But Rollie stays close, occasionally glancing at me as if making sure I haven’t gone too far away.

  I can’t say how long I’ve stared at the same poem before moving on to a copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience and then, because the words begin to swim on the page, onto an issue of People, where everyone is beautiful and smiling. Flipping through the pages, I realize that in Hollywood, everyone gets a good night’s sleep.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be showing me around?” I ask when I can’t look at any more magazines.

  “You’ve seen the cafeteria. This is the reading room. That leaves the Wreck Room. Wreck with a W.”

  “Gotcha. Because it’s a wreck.”

  “No, because we are.” She tosses her Glamour onto the pile on the table and stands. “Come on, we can go play Chutes and Ladders. That’s not a euphemism for anything.” She winks at me. “Unless you want it to be.”

  In the Wreck Room, there’s a smattering of zombies pushing plastic figures around on printed cardboard. There’s one table of boys and girls seriously engaged in a card game. One of the boys is just bawling his head off, tears streaming down his face and snot running from his nose, and none of them seem to notice. In the corner, a very tall, very fat girl sings a song and tosses brightly colored Uno cards into a box, one by one.

  I am you, and you are me, though we always disagree … It’s a strange little song, yet she’s got a wonderful voice, a choir voice. Rich timbre, throaty. She’s found a melody, minor, lilting. Me is you and you am he, one and two and one make three. I feel like I’ve heard the song before, somewhere.

  “How ’bout some Scrabble?” Rollie asks. I’d been staring at the singing girl, and the question jars me a little.

  “Nah.”

  “It’s getting close to lunchtime anyway. Let’s go.”

  She should be hungry now, since she didn’t eat anything this morning.

  Back in the cafeteria, we join the line as Rollie again has an appetizer of fingernails and cuticles. She grabs a tray and motions me to do the same.

  The big bull-nurse stationed near the door watches closely. My back and knees ache where I fell to the ground when the electricity pushed into me, like Quincrux. My muscles feel achy and sore like in the onset of flu. My eyes won’t open fully, and there’s a thrumming in my ears and surging in my blood.

  “Hey, you don’t look so good,” Rollie says. “You should eat something. Try the rectangular pizza.”

  The conversation slips away. We approach the stainless steel line where the food is served. There’s some sort of meat patty swimming in brown gravy, mashed potatoes, evil-looking green beans swimming in grease, and, sure enough, a tray of rectangular pizza. Rollie takes some green beans and Jell-O and a milk. I get cranberry juice.

  We sit in one of the less densely populated tables, Rollie facing me, her big eyes still watching my every move.

  I take a bite of the rectangular pizza. Industrialized food, made with government cheese. I can taste it, and for a moment, I’m reminded of Moms and Holly Pines Trailer Park, out on the edge of the piney woods, out beyond everything I now know. Every month a packet filled with info would arrive at the trailer, pamphlets leading us toward job fairs and alcohol rehabilitation centers. But nestled amidst all the junk mail was an electronic benefits transfer card. Food stamps for the new millennium. Getting food for the family, for Vig and Moms. This was my job.

  The memory floods me, like the taste of the cheese and the sugary-sweet tomato sauce and the cheap over-leavened pizza dough. Cheap food for disposable people.

  I swallow and quietly, very quietly, I ask, “You said it was coming, from behind your eyes. What does that mean?”

  Rollie takes a bite of the green beans and grimaces, putting down her fork. “These beans are too squeaky,” she says, looking away. “I hate squeaky beans.”

&nb
sp; “Rollie. This is important.” I don’t know any way to make her understand. “I believe you. I just need to know what you mean.”

  Rollie does everything but look at me now. Confronted with what she said, she clams.

  I sigh, spread my hands. They already think I’m crazy. What does it matter?

  “Rollie, I’m going to tell you a secret. Okay?”

  Finally she looks back at me, but reluctantly. She suspects a trick. And I don’t blame her. I’m sure she’s been tricked before.

  “You won’t believe me. You’ll think I’m—” I make loony circles around my ear with an index finger and whistle tunelessly. Rollie giggles. “I’m here because I can read minds. I can get inside folks’ heads. Or I could, until they drugged me.”

  I let it sink in.

  Her gaze does this little dance across my features. She frowns, and when I don’t react, Rollie smiles a little shyly, batting her eyes and nibbling on her lower lip. With some weight on her, she could be cute. Pretty, even.

  And those eyes. Like swimming pools you’d like to dive into.

  “You’re cute. You don’t have to make any of that stuff up just to get with me.”

  “No, I’m serious. There are things happening out in the world, and what you said—”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “About the thing that’s coming. Coming through your eyes. I need to know what you’re talking about.”

  She shivers and says, “This Jell-O is terrible. Black cherry? Who likes black cherry?”

  “I do. Black cherry is awesome with Cool Whip.”

  “Cool Whip? That stuff is crap. If you get Reddi-wip and you don’t shake it, you can huff the nitrous out of the can. It’s totally awesome.”

  “Nitrous?”

  She looks at me, curious. “What’re you in here for again? You don’t know whippets?”

  “I read too many minds, and my head got all jumbled. I was incarcerado at Casimir Pulaski—”

  “Incarcerado?”

  “Oh, yeah. Incarcerated. On lockdown. Caged.” It’s hard to track a conversation when lubed on antipsychotic medications.

  She nibbles her lip some more, processing. I can see the ole noggin at work behind those big eyes.

  “Go ahead and ask, if you have questions,” I say.

  “What’s it like? Surrounded by boys all the time.”

  “Not my favorite thing in the world. You’d probably like it less than I do.”

  She snorts and blushes. “Not hardly. The median weight of guys in here is like two-fifty or something.”

  “To answer your question, it’s hard, really. I was … I am—” I don’t know any way to say it. “I’m not much liked there. I’m hated, really.”

  She snorts again. “Bull crap.”

  “No. It’s true. You might not believe me—about the mind stuff or anything—but it’s true. They hate me there. Everyone. Bulls, admin. Inmates.”

  She looks at my scalp again, the bandage there. My left peeper, yellowed from the last black eye. “They do that to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I stole something from them.”

  “From all of them?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What?”

  “Memories.” I don’t know how to say it, really. “Not the bad ones. I took the good ones and it was like—”

  Her eyes go dreamy for a second, and she smiles beatifically, a genuine smile. “Honey in the vein? Like cumming your britches and realizing you’ve found something you’d forgotten you’d lost and losing everything all at once and not even caring?”

  I wonder for a moment if she has the shibboleth and has been rummaging around in my attic. “Yeah. Kinda like that.”

  “You’re just like me.”

  Normally I might snort or laugh or smirk—always smirking, always sneering—but there’s this wet blanket on me, and all spark of life gets smothered as soon as it lights in the heart, in the mind.

  I’ve got to get out of here.

  But I say, “Just like you?”

  “Yeah. A junkie.”

  I shake my head. That’s all I can manage in my defense.

  “Bullshit, honey. I can see right through you. You got the jones just like me. Something to take away the hurt, to smooth out the edges.”

  My head stills. Everything’s soft around the edges now, fuzzy, and part of me swoons while my physical body is steady, motionless except for the thrum of my heart and the tides of my tainted blood, teeming with foreign, lethargic molecules.

  It becomes still and quiet in the cafeteria as Rollie regards me, unblinking, and down the table a weak-chinned boy holds up a clawed hand to the handsome girl sitting opposite him and I hear his voice now, still talking, and he’s saying, “My soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, ‘Sir,’ said I, ‘or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, and so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door—’”

  He stops, looking at me, a strange glint in his eye. The girl’s gaze joins his, and they stare at me, hard, unsmiling, like two crumbled bits of statuary glaring into the gray light of the cafeteria. I can’t help but shiver and wonder if there are Riders behind their eyes. And what was that he was saying? It sounds so familiar.

  “Hey, zomboids. He’s new,” Rollie says.

  “I don’t fancy the stares, Miss Rollie,” says the chinless wonder.

  “What was that you were saying?” I ask.

  He points a long, gnarly fingernail at my face and says, “Miss Rollie, I do not like this one. This one has no respect for the masters.”

  That sounds too suspiciously close to Riders for my taste. I pop up, standing as if some elephantine invisible hand has marionetted me erect on wobbly feet. I’d not care for the company of the Rider.

  I snatch up my tray and turn, but my brain jerks the old meatsuit clumsily, doped and sluggish and muddied like river water, and I nearly lose my balance reaching for the tray and then overcorrect my movements, clutching it slowly and straightening my back.

  “Seriously, Shreve. They’re just cocoa puffs; they’re not real zombies. Don’t get all feelings.”

  Feelings is definitely what I am. But I force myself to sit, replacing my tray.

  The rectangular pizza isn’t too bad.

  SEVEN

  I don’t know what textbook or medical journal he’s read it in, but Dr. Sinequa seems dead set on using my name every single time he speaks to me.

  “So, Shreve, can you tell me about the events leading up to the incident with—” He flips open the manila folder and adjusts the bifocals on his long, very white and very thin patrician nose. “Nurse Cheeves?”

  It’s a large office, one with a big bay window framing the nicely manicured grounds of the Tulaville mental hospital. I can hear lawn mowers buzzing out beyond the glass, the high-pitched whine of a blower, the angry growl of a WeedWhacker, and I imagine a team of soiled khaki-clad groundskeepers swarming over the morning-dewed lawns and clacking away with clippers at dense privet hedges, scrabbling and resistant, and scratching at their sweat-cooled brown skin. In my mind, one is trimming a hedge into topiary. A trumpeting elephant.

  There are big, dark, heavy bookcases lining the room and the faint whiff of tobacco, though the smell might be hallucinatory—shit, I don’t know. A wood-paneled wall is dedicated to diplomas, and I can’t help but wonder if any of them are from Bethesda Medical Center or Johns Hopkins or the University of Maryland. But they’re too far from my seat to read, and it’s hard to focus my eyes for long, anyway.

  Even if you are paranoid, that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

  “Couple of bully boys in the general pop jumped me. Cracked my head on the ground.”

  His head bobs in acknowledgment, and he purses his lips. The little hair he’s got ringing his speckled cranium he lets run wild like a withered clown in a doctor’s smock. A humorless clown
, for certain.

  “Shreve, have you been having trouble sleeping?”

  “No.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Yes. Sleeping fine.”

  He scratches at the paper with a tooth-worn pencil. “Appetite? You look underfed.”

  “Used to be a slave to the sweet stuff. Then a woman stuck a knife into my guts and ever since then … meh.” I try to sneer, and I can’t be sure if my face is really doing what I’m asking of it. “I eat enough. Just don’t get into it like a lot of the other boys in lockup. Dans la chair, mais pas du corps.”

  Dr. Sinequa raises his eyebrows and adjusts himself in his seat in a way that lets me think his balls are pinched or he’s got a terribly itchy hemorrhoid. I would take a run at him to get inside and see what he was writing but … yeah, the drugs. The doped sluggish tides of my blood.

  “So, you speak French, do you?”

  Honestly, that just slipped out there. I know it and I don’t know it. “A little. I knew a guy.”

  He notates that.

  “When you assaulted Nurse Cheeves, what were you feeling?”

  I don’t like the way these questions are going. So I remain silent and look at the spots on his dome. I can imagine a crack opening on his cranium and a little bird’s beak peeking out. I smile.

  “Shreve, did you intend her bodily harm?”

  “No.”

  “So, Shreve, would you say you were not in control at the time of the assault, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you in the habit of doing drugs, Shreve?”

  “Hard to say. I’m pretty lubed right now.”

  “Have you used drugs before?”

  “No.”

  “Truly?”

  “Yes.”

  He rifles through more papers. “Ahh. The mother. That makes sense.”

  If there are tricks he misses, I’d find it hard to believe. His sense of cold and detached competency reminds me a bit of the way Quincrux might look at you, head cocked and inquisitive and calculating.