The Shibboleth

by John Hornor Jacobs

  “Tell me about the Dubrovniks. How do you feel when you think back to when you escaped and ran amuck last year?”

  I think of Duck Amuck—one of Vig’s favorite cartoons he’d watch over and over on weary and threadbare VHS—that terrifying old cartoon in which Donald battles his sadistic animator overlord who keeps shifting the background and situation for the poor feathered idiot. Is that what’s happening here? Who’s the bird and who’s the fish?

  “It kinda sucked, honestly.”

  “How so?” After a long moment of silence, he says, “Shreve, you dislike the memory? On a scale of one to ten, with ten being intense dislike and one being fondness, how would you rate your feelings for your time spent on the run?”

  “Five.”

  He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, and for a moment looks truly weary. “Shreve. Let me tell you a little bit about the history of modern psychiatry to put this conversation into perspective, shall we?”

  He waits until I nod. When I do, he raises his knobbed hand and points an accusatory finger at the ceiling. “You, a ward of the state, have assaulted an employee of the state and, apparently, had a psychotic break after receiving a head injury. With me so far?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “So, in the years past, a century or more ago, we’d probably lock you up in the darkest padded room or cut little pieces from your brain to calm you down and ensure you wouldn’t be attacking little old ladies or raping little girls. Right?”

  “I’ve seen the History Channel.”

  His black and inscrutable vulture eyes go narrow, and he says, “Or neuter you.”

  I try to smirk, to sneer, but instead, my anus tightens.

  Maybe he senses my reaction. He says, “In the sixties and seventies, when I was just an intern, we’d put you through a treatment of electroshock therapy in hopes of resetting your brain’s chemistry—we still do this in dire cases—but the likelihood of lawsuits has caused it to fall out of fashion in most psychiatric wards. Hmmmm. You are a ward of the state with an alcoholic for a mother …” He’s musing, daydreaming. I half expect him to begin waxing rhapsodic about the “chokey.” “If electroshock failed, you’d be isolated and kept under guard. Given what drugs could be given to ease the real physical symptoms of your condition.”

  “All this is real nice, the history lesson, Doc.”

  He ignores it. “But now policy has changed. For the worse, maybe. It is now the policy of the Tulaville Psychiatric Hospital and Mental Institution to enforce a regimen of what the critics call ‘chemical straightjackets’ to those patients who are nonresponsive to psychotherapeutic treatment—like us talking right now.” He taps the table with his long finger. Once. Twice. Calling attention to his next words. “Me? I’d have you gelded.”

  He presses a button on his intercom. “This session is over. Nurse Philmon? Please escort Mr. Cannon out.”

  A tight, athletic woman pops in and stands behind my chair before I know what’s going on. Dr. Sinequa says, “To get better, first, the patient must choose to start on the road to health, and I’m afraid you haven’t, Shreve. We’ll meet again in a week to see if your attitude toward chatting with me has changed. In the interim, Nurse, we should titrate until he’s stiff, if not drooling.”

  I have no idea what that even means, but I seriously don’t like the sound of it. Not one bit.

  I don’t see Rollie again until late afternoon. She’s different now, slower, and she wants only to play Scrabble in the Wreck Room. They give us apple juice and everything’s quiet—no screaming, very little muttering, no whistling or tuneless singing. There’s just the low, white noise of two massive midcentury air conditioners struggling to push air through the behemoth of a building.

  Despite the chemical straitjacket, she’s hell on wheels when it comes to Scrabble. Rollie plays the word SLEEPING, using the S to change my last play of FIRE to FIRES and going horizontally across to hit the triple word score, netting her—sheesh—more than thirty points. She smiles, but wanly.

  “Don’t seem too happy about the play,” I say.

  “Yeah. I used to love winning but now—” Rollie looks up at the fading light coming in from the windows. “I’m not looking forward to night.”

  “Why?”

  She pauses for a moment and crinkles her eyes. “The last time I slept was four days ago, and Buster had to tranq me. Before that it was five days.”

  No one sleeps anymore. Things move in the ether; something sleeps in Maryland, but no one else does.

  “I think I know what might be causing the insomnia.”

  She slowly pushes her tray of letters away from her and stands up. “Now you’re just messing with me. Uncool.” She turns and walks away, out of the Wreck Room. The bull-nurse looks at me from his stool by the door, but his attention soon moves to the girl who’s feeling the walls, as if probing for a secret door. She places her ear against drywall, listens, then whispers something.

  As I put away the Scrabble game, it’s hard not to notice the letters on Rollie’s tray read NIHTMAR.

  EIGHT

  The sun goes down. I can feel it. I have dinner alone in the cafeteria. Rollie is gone—disappeared into the female ward—and there’s this stretched-out anxiety rippling through the zomboids shuffling about in the gathering gloom.

  Buster waddles up to me and says, “Hit your cot, Shreve. It’s time to take a seat for the night. You might want to grab some magazines or books from the Wreck Room first.”

  “Take a seat?”

  He laughs. “Yeah. It’s gonna be another long one.”

  “Why?” At his look, I hold up my hands. “I’m not trying to be difficult. I’m just trying to understand.”

  “Come here.” He turns and walks out, back down the hall toward the Wreck Room.

  The room is deserted now. Most of the patients are on their cots in either the boys’ or girls’ wards, the lucky ones in their cells, on beds instead of cots. The hoots and strange noises pass through the walls and echo down the corridors and bounce in weird recursive waves off the grimed tiles of the old building. We pass the neckless wonder from lunch with the long fingernails, who’s muttering something to himself as he draws on a white legal pad with a dark crayon. I catch a glimpse of black angular animals, birds maybe, or rats. There’s another bull-nurse—this one with a Taser at his side—standing watch down the length of the hall, staring over the cots lining the walls. Another nurse walks down the row of patients, handing out small yellow things that look like oversized pills, and it’s only as I pass him that I realize that he’s distributing earplugs.

  I follow Buster into the Wreck Room. He approaches the television, retrieves the remote, and turns on the set. Scrolls through channels until he hits the group of channels with tickers and rictus smiles and perfect hair, stopping on one with a flawless beauty in a business suit saying, “In other news, a lone gunman entered a senior center today in York, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, killing five nurses and nearly all of the elderly in their care, bringing the death toll to thirty-seven, as far as we know. When police arrived, he submitted to custody without a shot, reportedly saying over and over, ‘Kill me so I can sleep.’” A series of images washes over me. An aerial view of the senior center, clustered with flashing lights and vehicles, a terrifyingly ordinary man with a streaming face being led away in handcuffs. “Joining us now is Stephen Ballis, author of Sleepless in America. Stephen, how do you think this relates to yesterday’s mass suicide in Spain or last week’s riots in Beijing?” Cut to a thick man, crew cut and horn-rimmed, who begins to speak. But Buster cuts him off by mashing the mute button.

  “It’s all over, kid, not just here. The crazy. And it’s spreading.” He thumbs our way through more news channels, and a couple have maps with red spots like fungus. “Moving through the population.”

  “What is?”

  “Insomnia.”

  “You’re saying that sleeplessness is catching?”

  “Looks like
it.”

  “But I thought insomnia was, I don’t know, mental? How can it be contagious?”

  “I don’t know.” Buster looks defeated, shoulders slumped. “I haven’t had a wink of sleep in three days. Before that, four.”

  Buster waves a big, meaty hand at the hallway beyond us, toward the patients gibbering and moaning and barking and coughing but not sleeping. “You seem like you’ve got at least one marble rolling around in your skull, so I’m doing my duty to help you make it through the night.” His face is strained, like this conversation is taxing his neurons too much. “Stay on your cot. Use your earplugs. Sleep if you can. No one else here will.” He turns off the television and trudges to the door. I follow him into the hall and to the boys’ ward.

  Walking back to my cot, I notice all the wide eyes, staring like those of frightened animals. One kid with fingers like tree branches tugs at my sleeve and says, “My brother, my brother…”

  But as we pass the chinless kid with fingernails, I notice he’s got his drawing pad clutched to his chest as he snores away into the dimness of the hall.

  There’s one guy here who isn’t afflicted.

  Turns out there’s two.

  It’s morning and I’m sitting in the reading room, peering at a magazine. Too early for breakfast and the “candy,” and I’m doing whatever I can to postpone it.

  When I look up, Rollie stands above me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She sits next to me, slippered feet next to my flappers.

  “It’s just all hard to get used to, you know?”

  She remains silent, head down, looking at her feet, her hands clasped lightly together.

  “I need your help.” She doesn’t move. “I need a distraction.”

  Rollie glances at me. She looks terrible, pallid skin and sunken eyes with deep, sleepless bruises underneath.

  “For what?”

  “To distract Buster.”

  “When?”

  “Candy time.”

  “Why don’t you just boost a name badge?”

  My tongue is tacky in my mouth, and I could use some water. But getting water involves swallowing two stones. And I don’t want that.

  “Because, if I can stay off the candy long enough, I’ll get back the—” It’s on the tip of my tongue, shibboleth. But she won’t understand that. “My ability. I’ll be able to just walk out, if I can get off the candy.”

  “Kiss me.”

  “Rollie…”

  “I just want to know what it’s like, you ass. And you’re the only game in town.”

  If that’s the price for her help, it’s very small. I check the room. The bull is reading, and for the moment, we’re alone except for a girl copying a picture in a sketchbook.

  Rollie’s lips are dry, papery. Her teeth separate, and her tongue probes at my lips, but I don’t open mine. I don’t let that snake in, and eventually she stops trying.

  She pulls away, staring at me, eyes huge. No love or kindness or sadness churns at her features. She’s blank now, impenetrable.

  But she says, “Okay.”

  “You will?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go to breakfast. Afterward, they’ll expect me at the dispensary, right?”

  “That’s the deal.”

  “Can you fake a seizure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Great.”

  The streamers of sleep and the tides of drugs lighten. I feel almost normal, if you can call reading people’s minds and eating their memories normal. But whatevs.

  NINE

  Rollie doesn’t seem excited. She’s even-keeled to the point of mellow. None of the winking, let-me-show-you-some-skin flirty-girl today. Her hands, I see, have small tremors in them, like Moms off the juice long enough to let her swollen liver subside.

  Powdered eggs, dry biscuit, jam, a sad and withered little sausage on her tray. Another apple juice box like we were toddlers at some suburban birthday party. She sips. She moves the food around, slowly.

  I feel like I could make a run at her head and get inside, but I don’t want to. Maybe I’m not ready yet. Maybe I want the drugs gone from my system before I flex any muscles. Maybe I don’t want to ever—ever—experience kissing myself.

  “If we’re gonna do this, we better do it now, before Buster comes looking for you,” she says, leaden and dull. Not into it, it sounds like.

  “You up for this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Listen, you don’t have to. I know it’s asking a lot.”

  “You kissed me.”

  “Yeah. I did.”

  “I can do it.”

  “Okay. Wait until the candy is in my hand.” Not much else to say, but she sits there, food untouched, looking at me as if waiting for something. So I stand and take my tray to the station to scrape the leftovers into the slop.

  She’s right behind me. We go out the double doors, to the dispensary where Steve-O waits. He’s got deep bruises underneath his eyes from sleeplessness. Not a happy camper.

  Steve-O hoists a clipboard with some effort. He’s big and bloated, but less of that is muscle than with Buster. Still, I don’t fancy a tussle. At my approach he raises his eyebrows and smiles in the way a butcher might as a new carcass is trucked into the walk-in freezer.

  “New kid,” he says. “Shreve Cannon.” He checks his clipboard. I hear the slow, lumbering squish of nurse’s shoes in the hallway, and I have a sneaky suspicion that Buster is standing behind me now. I turn slowly and he’s there, all five thousand pounds of him, arms akimbo, looking down at me. Even Buster wears a Taser now. He looks like a different person from last night, when he showed me the news. His skin is waxy and loose. Piggy eyes sunk into the swampy flesh of his face.

  “Gotta say, boss, you look like you could use a nap.”

  He nods, too tired to threaten me. “Going off shift here in a few, kid. Just rolled around to make sure you take your candy.” He blinks and looks at Steve-O. “You got his dosage ready?”

  Steve-O turns to an area hidden behind the open window of the dispensary, and when he turns back, he’s holding a small paper cup that he places on the cracked and spotted lime-green linoleum sill. I pick it up.

  A keening sound hits the ears. High-pitched and female.

  She’s started. I sense more than see Buster turning to her. Two gigantic pills in the paper cup stare up at me like twin pupils in a paper eye. I crumple the cup in my hand as Steve-O mutters, “Oh, shit,” and hustles around to the locked door, throwing it open.

  I have to see. I turn. Rollie’s standing there, looking directly at Buster with a furious expression like oil spreading across her features, legs spread in a wide stance. Near her foot is a growing pool of urine, and the sharp smell of it stings my nostrils as she launches herself at Buster with a growl and quick—scary quick—she snatches at his arm, his clothes, and scurries up his body to scratch like a madwoman at his eyes and lurch forward with teeth wide and gnashing to bite at his nose, his cheek. She’s devolved into some furious primate, and Buster’s overmuscled arms flail for seconds before he can get one of his ham-hands on her writhing form. When he does, the fat fingers bunch in her robes, and with a great tearing motion, he tosses her away.

  Rollie smacks the tiles of the floor at the center of the X that marks the cross of ward wings, right in front of the plexiglass nurse station. Two women I don’t recognize stand, alarmed, as Rollie slides across the floor and bumps the wall, where she begins to seize, like an unoiled engine catching and burning out. She jitters, she spasms. Her mouth froths and it’s flecked with blood and I don’t even know if it’s her blood or Buster’s from where she bit his cheek, which now streams crimson down the curve of his neck and discolors his uniform.

  She shudders and bows her back, only her feet and head touching the floor.

  Buster falls to his knees at Rollie’s side whil
e the two female nurses and Steve-O rush forward to help.

  Holy crap.

  Now’s my time to skedaddle. I knock back the water, turn to hot-step away while their attention is fully on Rollie.

  And run smack-dab into Dr. Sinequa.

  He holds out his hand, obvious.

  I don’t hold out mine, keeping it bunched tight at my side. The nurses have sedated Rollie now and call for a stretcher. She must’ve cracked something good in her fit. Buster rises from his hams, and Steve-O is already taking his place back behind the dispensary door.

  “This one,” says Dr. Sinequa, “plans on skipping his medication today. Mr. Smith, please ensure this does not happen. Actually, let’s move him to injections rather than oral dosage. We don’t want any more”—he smiles—“distractions.”

  Uncanny how he picked that word out. Almost as if he’d been listening to us. I’m paranoid, but I can’t get that paranoid. Can I?

  Buster puts his hands on my shoulders, keeping me still. Dr. Sinequa says, “I’m thinking another hundred milligrams of Haldol. Let’s settle this one down. He’s got the candy in his right hand.”

  Buster yanks up my arm and begins digging at my closed hand, and I push away from the warm trunk of his body, flailing at his bulk. He barks out a short laugh as my free hand claws at his chest and then my trapped hand is pried open and the candy falls, with the crumpled paper cup, to the floor with two bright little pings and silence.

  They’re moving Rollie out of the ward now in a bustle, and I hear a volley of acronyms being spouted: EKG, MRI, ASAP and the good old favorite, STAT. But the word I hear most is ISOLATION.

  Rollie, that was one helluva performance. Now they’re putting you in a closet.

  Steve-O makes the long pilgrimage back out of the dispensary, hefting a syringe in his mitt. He eyes me warily. I feel Buster’s hands clamp down hard on both my arms, and his buddy darts in and jabs me in the gluteus maximus.