Silent Boy

by Torey Hayden

  However, even we weren’t greatly blessed. He spoke only when he chose and that grew to be less and less frequently. I never knew for sure when I arrived if he was going to do anything with us, if he was going to sit with us and talk or if he was going to spend the entire time hidden under his bedclothes, blanket over his head, and refuse to even look at us. We had had to schedule our sessions in the vicinity of five o’clock, because of Jeff’s situation, and that seemed to be everyone’s absolute worst time of day. I was usually tired and hungry and not at my most understanding. Jeff was more hyperactive than normal then. And as for Kevin, well, nothing seemed to improve him much.

  One evening when I was sitting in the dusky September darkness because we hadn’t turned the lights on, I recalled only a year ago when I had first encountered Kevin rocking under his table. As I sat in the semidarkness and listened to Kevin’s and Jeff’s soft breathing, I remembered how Kevin used to line the chairs up and cower in the gloom and how in the beginning I had had to crawl under the table with him too. With sharp abruptness I longed for those first days again. Tables and chairs had never been able to form the kind of barrier that Kevin had built around himself now.

  The weeks went by. I cannot even remember them now, as to how they passed. Nothing happened; nothing changed. Kevin remained sunk in his depression, medicated beyond coherence, locked in some internal prison. I didn’t know what to do to get him out. No one did, neither Jeff nor I nor the hospital staff nor the consulting psychiatrist. So we simply lay siege and waited.

  Jeff and I started having dinner together afterward, mostly as a catharsis for having sat in silence for the hour before, but also partly as a bribe to keep us doing it. At least if we had something to look forward to, it didn’t seem too hopeless. We began first by eating at the fast-food places around Mortenson, and then Jeff started coming over to my house for supper when we got tired of greasy food and wanted more time to just sit and talk. I don’t think we meant to take over one another’s lives. It just sort of happened. Kevin’s depression was catching.

  Then we split the sessions up, me with three and Jeff with two, because he just couldn’t balance it out with his work and his on-call roster at the other hospital. That eased the burden, but we found we had to continue our suppers together. Sanity sessions were what Jeff called them. He was probably right.

  There was a window in the room, down at the far end. The view was panoramic, looking down from the rocky aerie where the hospital sat. The city stretched into the distance, and below the river moved angrily in eddies and rapids through a narrow canyon it had carved into the heart of the stony land. On the far side, houses and office buildings crawled up the tangled slopes, their angles softened by autumn-colored trees.

  Kevin began to live at that window as the weeks passed. Every time when I arrived, he would be standing there, hands behind his back, eyes fixed on some unseen point beyond the glass. That window became the thing around which our whole lives revolved. Kevin was able to stand there and talk to me without having to actually look at me. Often, he was able to stand without talking either. I was not much competition, I think, for the things he was looking at.

  ‘I wonder what’s happened to my sisters,’ he said to me one afternoon when the sun had set and still he stood, a silhouette against the brightening city lights beyond the glass. I hadn’t heard him speak of his family in a long, long time.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

  ‘I wonder. I think about them sometimes. You know how long it’s been since I seen them?’ He turned briefly to look at me. When I shook my head, he turned back. ‘A long time. Six years. Well, almost six years. Five years, eight months and about a week and a half.’ He fell silent a moment in calculation. ‘Eight months, one week and three days. You know how I know that?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I remember. I remember and I don’t forget. I got a very good memory.’

  ‘I can tell.’

  ‘But that’s a long time in a little kid’s life. My sisters were just little when I saw them last. I wonder how they are.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘My stepdad, he’d come home drunk. He used to get my sister Carol out of bed sometimes. You know, I think he did things to her sometimes. You know. Dirty things. She never said he did, but I think he did. Carol’d be embarrassed to say those things, even to me. But I think I knew anyway. I was always watching. And once he got Barbara out of bed too. But mostly it was Carol. She was oldest.’

  He paused.

  ‘They had to take Carol to the hospital once. After he’d gotten her out of bed.’

  Kevin turned to me. The dusk had just settled and I could barely distinguish his features when he had his back to the window, blocking the lights of the city. ‘I wonder how my sisters are now. I haven’t seen them since … well, since all that time ago. Ever since my mother stopped coming. That’s a long time. A lot can happen in that time.’

  He returned to the window. ‘You know what, Torey? I worry about them sometimes. I’m laying here and I get to thinking. Maybe my stepdad’s still doing things to them. Maybe he’s even doing it to the baby now, only she wouldn’t be such a baby anymore. But maybe he is. Maybe they weren’t so lucky as me and got out.’

  Some luck, I thought.

  ‘I’m sure they’re okay, Kev. Social services would be watching. After your going away, social services would watch your stepdad.’

  He shook his head. ‘No. Not really.’ Slowly he let out a long breath of air. ‘They never really care. If you get beat up just a little, they turn their heads and pretend they don’t notice. If you get mucked about with just a little, they never really pay attention. There’s too many big things they got to worry about. But what they don’t know is that it isn’t the big things that get you in the end. It’s the little things. Someone whacks you once every night of your life just for being alive, that hurts a lot worse than being knocked half-dead once.’

  I nodded and retreated back to the bed, where I sat down. My heart ached. It was a dreary, disconsolate pain in my chest, weighing down like a wet towel inside me.

  He turned again and looked at me. ‘How can you care about a world like this? I don’t really want to even be part of it. I’m crazy. And I think being crazy probably isn’t so bad. I mean, if worse comes to worst, all they do is pump you full of stuff and you don’t feel anything. But Carol wasn’t as lucky as me. She didn’t go crazy first. I think maybe she ought to have. I think there’s lots worse things than crazy.’

  Chapter Twenty–one

  Kevin certainly seemed to have settled that matter in his own mind. Whatever had happened to him over the summer during his brief flirt with the outer world, he had returned, deciding normalcy was not for him. He was crazy; he was completely resigned to staying that way. And perhaps it was that resolve that caused his incredible depression. I imagine concluding that the life he was currently living was the best available to him would be pretty shattering news.

  I found this attitude no small thing to deal with, particularly in light of the hospital situation he was in, where drugs to dope him into incoherence were distributed every four hours. Just as bad was the token system all the patients were on. They earned points for appropriate behaviors and these points determined all aspects of their day, including going to therapy sessions, attending the on-unit school programs and gaining passes to go off the hospital grounds. It was a perfect setup for someone convinced he wanted to stay crazy.

  Kevin refused to cooperate at every turn. If he did not feel like getting up in the morning, he did not get up. And he lost points. If he did not want to wash, he didn’t wash. More points gone. If he did not want to go to the schoolroom, he did not go. Each thing lost him more and more points or at least did not give him the opportunity to earn more, but Kevin was so unmotivated that none of the privileges he was losing was worth enough to make him try. The bottom line was seclusion, either in the patient’s room or ultimately in the seclusion cell. Kevin, afte
r a few weeks, became almost permanently confined to his tiny room. He loved it. What they ought to have done was boarded up his window.

  Understandably, the hospital staff was in a frenzy over him. He was so passively uncooperative that they were ill equipped to deal with it. He did not rage or scream or do anything aggressive, which merited time out in the locked seclusion cell, although when they came to the end of their ropes with him, they occasionally put him in for a spell anyway, to see if it might motivate him out of his lethargy. It didn’t. The psychiatrist upped his dose of antidepressants. No change. The staff decided to try the opposite of their normal routine. Kevin was not allowed to enter his room unless he earned the privilege, but the only place to keep him was in the TV room or the games room and they were hardly nonreinforcing. Or in the hallway where he would sit on the floor outside his room, his cloak of silence wrapped around him, and stare at the staff and visitors as they went by, his long legs sticking out across the corridor to trip unsuspecting passersby.

  My greatest difficulty grew to be simply seeing him. I couldn’t half the time. He got put on a system where he had to earn points to have Jeff or me come, and often as not, he wouldn’t earn them. Kevin maintained a slightly closer relationship with Jeff, and occasionally he did appear to make a token effort to get Jeff up there on Jeff’s two nights, but even these he lost frequently.

  It was like swimming in molasses – a lot of effort and very little progress. Jeff was more troubled by the situation than I was because he objected not only to our stalemated position but also to the types and quantities of medication Kevin was on. I entirely agreed with him but, because I normally couldn’t do much about things like medication, it didn’t eat at me. But for Jeff, who was used to being able to prescribe medication himself, it was agony to live with somebody else’s program when he thought it inappropriate, just because his ignominious status didn’t allow him to say anything.

  I almost threw in the towel. Several times I consciously decided it would be better for all concerned to give up on Kevin. I mean, after all, what did we have here? A kid who had been severely deprived and abused in childhood, who had spent most of his life in institutions, who demonstrated violent and aggressive behaviors, and perhaps most importantly, a kid whom nobody wanted. There was absolutely no one on the outside who cared one way or the other if Kevin improved. Just me. And Jeff. And we weren’t much. There’d been a whole lot of kids in my career with a great deal better prognoses than Kevin had and they hadn’t made it. Not a lot of kids did. Why did I bother to think this one might? Why did I keep endlessly chucking time and energy down the sewer? He sure never gave any signs of real promise.

  It got so easy to think of giving up. And I knew what they were, those thoughts. I had had them so often before. They were the mind’s way of preparing itself, the process of mentally letting go, so that when the inevitable happened and I had to give up, I could accept it. Even before I had decided, my subconscious was clearing the deck.

  God. The thoughts preyed on me. Especially when I had bothered to make a trip clear over to Mortenson and was turned away at the last minute because Kevin had lost points. Or when I had missed him for four or five sessions running and my life began to move on nicely without that 4:30 trip. Or when we sat face to face – or rather, face to back, because he’d always have his back to me while he stared out of the window – and I’d not talk and not do anything and just sit there feeling the minutes of my life trickling away while this kid did nothing. It was so incredibly easy to consider giving up. I even tried it tentatively a couple of times. I was supposed to come and I didn’t. I phoned with false excuses. A lot different this, than months before when Kevin had become so distraught because I had missed one day. We skipped so often now that I never knew if he missed me or not. If he did, he never said.

  But I didn’t give up. I don’t know why. There were a whole lot more reasons why I should have. But I didn’t. I never quite ever got around to doing it. I meant to, but I didn’t. I kept on.

  Kevin, however, seemed to have given up long ago. He got worse and worse and worse. It got harder and harder to see him and harder to do anything with him when I did see him. I wanted to be understanding. In the office with Jeff or at night when we were eating, I’d keep coming up with intellectual reasons for what Kevin was doing to himself and why. But when I was in the room with him, frustration overpowered me. My own insecurities would surface eventually. Maybe he didn’t like me. Maybe he was angry with me. Maybe he thought I’d let him down or not done enough. Maybe he just thought I was stupid. But mostly I just grew angry. As the days continued to string out and September became October, I became angrier and angrier with him, resenting him and the time I gave to him. We became in the end like troubled lovers, unable to live with one another and yet unable to live without each other either.

  I came after several days of being absent because Kevin had not earned sufficient points to see me. He had missed Jeff as well that week. In the end I suspect it was the hospital staff who capitulated and let me in because, when I reviewed his chart, there was no evidence Kevin had done anything more to earn my presence that day than any other.

  The weather outside was fierce. It was late October and the cadaveric feel of November was in the wind. Daylight saving time still smuggled us an extra hour at evening but it really wasn’t enough. I arrived late that afternoon, and the day was bound into darkness.

  Kevin stood before the window, as usual. He did not bother to acknowledge my arrival. There were no lights on in his room, and he peered out into the half-gloom, his silhouette blending into the grayness beyond the window.

  I flipped the light switch on.

  No response.

  ‘Kev, it’s me.’

  No response.

  ‘What do you see out that window?’ I asked.

  No response.

  ‘Kevin?’

  I studied his form. His hands were behind his back, one clasping the wrist of the other. I set my box down.

  ‘Kevin.’ The seconds slid by.

  ‘Kevin!’

  No movement. No nothing, as if he hadn’t heard me.

  The anger over all these wasted weeks began to froth up inside me. ‘Kevin,’ I said, ‘turn around.’

  When he did not respond I approached him. ‘I said, turn around, Kevin.’

  Nothing.

  ‘I said turn around, Kevin. When I say turn around, I mean turn around.’ I grabbed his shoulder. While he did not turn to acknowledge me, he resisted my grip, his muscles going rock hard under my fingers. Yet, he wasn’t a match for me. When I gave him a shove, it turned him.

  ‘Damn you, Kevin, turn around when I’m talking to you. I’m sick of this. I’m sick to death of sitting here in this stupid room and having you ignore me. So turn around and stay turned.’

  He glared at me.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Kevin? Acting like this? Do you want to stay in this place?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re wasting your whole life in here.’

  ‘So what?’ He shrugged and turned back to the window. ‘I couldn’t care less.’

  With force, I grabbed his shoulder and yanked him around to face me. The power of it set him off balance and he fell back against the window. He remained there, regarding me. I could not read his feelings.

  Silence. We sized one another up.

  ‘What have you got in this life, Kevin? Are you going to just lie down and die? Are you going to confirm everything your stepfather said about you? Are you just going to give up?’

  ‘I don’t care. Go away. Just leave me alone, would you?’

  ‘You’ve got to care, Kevin.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because. Because this is all you’ve got, Kevin, and the only way to make it better is to change it. Nothing else will, no dreams, no fantasies, no fairy godmothers. You’ve got to do it. Nothing else will.’

  ‘I don’t ca
re.’

  ‘You’ve got to care,’ I cried.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I care!’

  ‘Why? Who ever asked you to care? Who asked you to come butting into my life anyway?’

  ‘You did, as I recall.’

  ‘I did not. I never did. I never asked them back at Garson Gayer to go get you. And I never asked you to come back this time. And I sure never asked you to stay.’

  That was a rather hard thing to rebut.

  ‘So how come you’re here then? What have you got to be mad about, when you never were asked here in the first place? How come you keep coming back when I don’t want you?’

  There must have been a good answer to that. ‘Because,’ I said. It sounded like an answer to me.

  ‘Because why? Because someone pays you? Because you make your living off other people’s suffering?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because why then? Because you think you can help me? Are you coming because you think if you bleed on me enough, you’re going to save me from myself or something?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Then why? What do you care for? It isn’t any of your business.’

  ‘Because that’s just the way I am. Just like you’re the way you are.’

  ‘Then it’s a pretty stupid way to be. You’re pretty dumb, that’s all I can say. Dumber even than I thought.’

  ‘I never said I wasn’t.’

  Dead silence. We glared at one another.

  ‘To be perfectly honest,’ he said, ‘I hate you.’ His voice was soft and matter-of-fact. ‘You come in here where no person has a right to be and you pry where no person has a right to pry. You made me hope I could be like everybody else. You made me think I deserved to be. When we both knew I’m not and I don’t.

  ‘Who are you anyway, to think you know anything? You’ve never been me. You just sit there and you pretend to know. But nothing’s ever happened to you like’s happened to me. All you’ve ever done is read about it in books. I lived it. So who do you think you are to believe you can help me?’