by Jan Carson
Christmas 1978 brought Trip Blue’s time on H Wing to a premature halt, severing his relationship with God (whom he was beginning to hold in the sort of familial respect he’d previously assumed himself incapable of engendering) and almost destroying his medical career. The next twenty years would see him traipse from one side of the country to the other dabbling in neurosurgery and plastics, accumulating – and subsequently losing – a teenage daughter and never, not once ever (fearing the combined threats of the Armed Forces, the American Medical Association and FBI) attempting to manipulate the mind of another human being. God was dead to Trip. Post-Christmas 1978, communication between the two men was irrevocably severed and, though Trip Blue was never to hear of it, the older man hit the bottle like a back alley turncoat, pickling his liver in a record nine months and dying an anonymous, vagrant death in a Salvation Army hostel, almost one year to the day after H Wing folded. Despite a last-ditch attempt with a shaving mirror, God was incapable of healing himself. He died like an ordinary man; his final words, a hacking, phlegm-filled ‘wise up’; his last coherent thought, the memory of his mother removing her hair pins in front of the bedroom dresser.
The events of Christmas 1978, consigned as they were to history and a handful of dusty confidential folders buried in the Pentagon’s records department, had marked the beginning of the end for God and his erstwhile assistant. On the day before Christmas Eve, H Wing held its annual Festive Party. On the other side of town, Magda Blue, driven desperate with the loneliness, cried herself into a drunken stupor and forced her husband’s best suit through the garbage disposal. Oblivious to this latest loss, Trip Blue commenced his last night on H Wing and, with little thought for the repercussions, killed a man, by accident with great deliberation.
The evening began without incident. Someone on the terminal ward was blasting The Best of the Shangri-Las from a portable record player whilst a handful of patients in festive party hats danced around with the junior nurses. Some danced in their wheelchairs, jerking forwards and backwards in a disco-like manner. In the far corner by the soft drinks machine two of the younger patients poked limply at a piñata. (A well-meaning orderly had spent the afternoon stuffing the piñata full of unused surgical gloves and Band-Aids. The patients, unaware and optimistic, poked on, hoping for coins, candy or at very least prescription drugs.)
An open bottle of Jack Daniels had been concealed behind the grey sofa in the dayroom. All five on-duty nurses, fully aware of the alcohol stash, had chosen to ignore their patients as they slipped noisily behind the sofa for a surreptitious slug. It was, they reminded each other behind cupped hands, a special occasion. The nurses were professionally superior. All their limbs were still attached and functional, allowing them to dance upright with no balancing aids. They wore party hats and full uniform. They were almost all called Sandra; each and every one popped from the same efficient pod. For one holy night they did not complain when the older men with hands found them on the dance floor. They pretended to love the Shangri-Las. They ate Christmas cake in cardboard dishes and made non-alcoholic punch in a bedpan. It was hilarious to serve punch in a bedpan. Everyone thought this was hilarious.
At seven o’clock Trip Blue drove into the parking lot, having left his wife sobbing on the kitchen floor, a meat cleaver clasped melodramatically in one hand. As he locked his car and strode purposefully towards H Wing, he realized that his Christmas tie was safely tucked away in the bedroom closet. He felt the lack of it dangling coolly against his shirtfront. Trip Blue did not, as a rule, acknowledge Christmas but it was important to maintain the trust of his patients and the Christmas tie, recently ordered from the Sears, Roebuck catalog, had been a calculated attempt to appear the everyman. As he absentmindedly ran his fingers along his shirtfront, Trip’s eye was drawn to one of the recently admitted patients, fully dressed in civilian clothes and dashing, with suspicious alacrity, towards the camp’s perimeter fence.
Up on the main ward, though someone had stood on The Best of the Shangri-Las, the party had not stopped for lack of music. Patients made their own music, forming whistles from catheter tubes, beating rhythm on their exposed ribs, singing folk songs with their fingers crossed. At one end of the wing a Terminal stood on an office chair shouting loudly, ‘I only have three weeks to live.’ This was a terrible lie. As he screamed, the office chair undulated gently, mocking his hysterical prophesies. God was not interested in joining the festivities. From his office behind the nurses’ station he monitored the drowsy progression of fun and finger-picked at a limp tuna sandwich. Through the slatted blinds he watched a young nurse, hair tucked adamantly behind both ears, as she danced with a male patient. The man was missing both arms. He wore the nurse’s arms draped around his neck, grasping him in an awkward, swaying headlock. Under the Christmas lights the man looked like a giant, flailing anemone. Transparent tubes and wires dripped in and out of his chest, releasing plastic bags of clear liquid and rust-red blood. Around his ankle similar bags of tea-stained liquid drained away his sins, one bladder-full at a time. This man had spent the previous two mornings in the Treatment Room and his spirits, like the gummy scars where his elbows had once been, were beginning to experience significant improvement. Had the Treatment Room lasted into the New Year, he might have greeted 1979 with a pair of perfectly functional replacement arms.
God stared at the man. He had nothing better to do. The Treatment Room was shut down for the holidays. God watched his children like tropical fish in a Chinese restaurant. Half of them would be dead by New Year’s Day. The other half, he presumed, would be waltzing again within weeks. God had come to despise them all. Where Trip Blue’s scientific curiosity kept him keen on the patients, if only from a medical perspective, God had spent one Christmas too many on H Wing. He was beginning to feel the lack of an ordinary life: a wife, a family and a stack of earnest, if somewhat clumsily wrapped, Christmas gifts. The first nervous prickle of a migraine edged across the bridge of his nose. Christmas Eve 1978 would mark God’s four hundred and fiftieth night shift in a row. He had begun to dream of leaving Phoenixville, Pennsylvania and moving to somewhere less miraculous; Texas most likely, or North Dakota. God had just about decided to hand in his notice when the office door was flung open, admitting a middle-aged man (either dead, drunk or unconscious), slumped sideways in a standard issue wheelchair. Milliseconds later the arms, shoulders and furious pink face of Trip Blue appeared at the helm of the wheelchair, a huge wad of classified cardboard folders tucked into his armpit like an unfurled wing.
‘Bastard was running off with our research,’ he puffed, struggling to contain his fury. ‘So I knocked him out.’
‘You hit a patient?’ God asked.
‘Hell no – tranquilizer dart. I keep them in my car, in case of emergencies.’
God wondered – not for the first time – what sort of a person he’d taken on as an assistant. It was not yet obvious that the man, now depositing goopy, transparent drool strands on the office carpet, would prove to be their collective undoing and so God offered Trip Blue a styrofoam cup of coffee and, perching on the edge of his desk, attempted to address the situation. In the corridor outside his window, one of the Terminals, having sacrificed the last of his inhibitions to whiskey and prescription meds, was dancing shirtless to the Rolling Stones. God would have given anything in the world to swap places with this man.
‘Right,’ he said, sipping from his own styrofoam cup, ‘tell me the worst.’
The worst was pretty bad. A short ‘conversation’ in the parking lot – a conversation which God, fully aware of Trip Blue’s ruthless streak, presumed to have included firearms or other ‘conversational aides’ – had revealed that this particular patient was not actually a patient, but rather an undercover agent, planted on H Wing to gather evidence of their research project. Trip Blue suspected Russian involvement. Thankfully the man was still in the assessment stage of Treatment and though he’d managed to seduce one of the orderlies into giving him access to the fi
le room, had yet to see the inside of the Treatment Room.
‘Thank God for that,’ said God. ‘We’ll just hand him over to the powers that be and they can deal with him.’
‘We can’t do that, sir,’ replied Trip. ‘He’s seen the files. He knows what we’re doing here. He could compromise everything … all your research. Plus, well, I might have been a little less than gentle with him in the parking lot.’
God sighed and turned the man’s face gently towards the light, exposing in the unforgiving glare of his desk lamp a pair of perfectly formed boot marks. God was too tired to be furious. He felt every one of his previous four hundred and forty nine night shifts acutely. He wrapped the sodden remains of his tuna sandwich in a square of tinfoil, drained the remnants of his coffee and prepared to wash his hands of the matter. Trip Blue could be reported, the man handed over to the military police and, with a bit of luck, the whole G-D project put on ice for the foreseeable future. Of course there would be mountains of paperwork, most likely a formal warning and a black mark on his otherwise gleaming resume, but God had already begun to see the possibility peeking through the shit. This could be exactly the emergency exit he’d been waiting for.
‘Don’t worry, I have a plan. I’m pretty sure the guy’s a Delusional. I haven’t quite finished his assessment and, as you well know, he hasn’t had his first session in the Treatment Room but I’ve got a nose for them. I can usually spot a Delusional a mile away.’
‘And?’ asked God, hoping to high hell and reason the younger man wasn’t going to suggest what he was thinking.
‘If I’m right and we give him a really strong dose in the Treatment Room, well he’ll probably, you know … react in a way which could really help us out—’
‘You mean, die?’ interjected God, his voice stretching into a supersonic squeak as he watched his long-anticipated emergency exit begin to slide out of view.
‘Exactly. We’ll mark him down with all the other Delusional patients, put the folders back in the file room and no one will be any the wiser. It’s not murder. You know as well as I do that all Delusionals want to die. We’d actually be helping him out.’
‘Definitely not.’
‘It’s my whole career, sir. That guy’ll press charges if he ever wakes up.’
‘I don’t give a flying shit, Trip. You screwed up, you deal with the consequences.’
‘Alright God, you’re going to play it like that? Then I’ll be taking you down too. Matter of fact, I’ll be using you to cushion my fall. It’s not like there aren’t corners cut round here every day of the week. We’re hardly a conventional medical facility and I’ll bet the Pentagon guys start stepping back quick sharp as soon as the shit hits the fan. How’d you like to spend your retirement in Fort Leavenworth?’
God felt like he’d been around since the beginning of time. There was no point in arguing with Trip Blue. He wearily removed his sports jacket, slipped his arms into the white coat which hung like a skinned ghost on the back of his office door and prepared for career suicide.
Outside the office the Christmas Party had descended into a drunken rabble. Two patients and a part-time nurse had come to blows over the last of the nacho cheese dip. They sat in opposite corners of the day room, like soiled featherweights, nursing cut lips and bloody noses as they nibbled shattered tortilla chips straight from the floor. The corridors of H Wing were littered with deflating balloons and fallen comrades, slumped and sliding down the pastel green walls in their standard issue military pajamas. Trip Blue steered the wheelchair expertly past the drunk, the despairing, and the very possibly dead (for it was not unknown for the most delicate Delusionals to pass away suddenly and without warning, in full view of their fellow patients). God shuffled behind, silently cursing the moment he’d turned down a perfectly respectable female oncologist in favor of Trip Blue’s screaming genius. For the first time in his forty-nine years of existence God saw himself capable of failure, of making mistakes like an ordinary, fallible man. On any other day this realization would have been liberating.
When they reached the Treatment Room door Trip Blue reached up and, without looking, finger-punched the code. The door clicked open and with a single stride God crossed the line, dragging the unconscious man behind him. Trip Blue followed, locking the door from the inside so no one, not even curious senior staff members, could invade their privacy. It was pitch black in the Treatment Room, the darkness emphasizing the unconscious man’s shallow breathing and the rubbery clip of Trip Blue’s dress shoes as he fumbled around in pursuit of a light switch.
‘And God said let there be light!’ Trip cried, a running joke, wildly incongruous under present circumstances. The lights came blinkering on, blipping like erratic disco beats until they finally settled into a steady glare. Fully illuminated, God saw them for what they were: two lonely men and a stranger, reflected fifteen different directions of honest in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. God had, over the years, developed a real phobia of reflection. Every reflective surface under his direct authority – H Wing bathrooms, cutlery and internal windows – had been deliberately removed or tarnished, under the fabricated assumption that encountering one’s true self too early in the treatment process might stilt a patient’s recovery. The truth fell closer to home. God had long since lost the ability to look directly at his own shitty self. On the rare occasions when he left the military compound he could barely bring himself to catch his own eye in the rearview mirror of his station wagon. Though he spent the better part of every day trundling patients in and out of the Treatment Room, God had perfected a peculiar way of squinting out of the side of his eyes, so he was at no time forced to deal with the fullness of his own reflection. These optical aerobics had resulted in a semi-permanent migraine and an inability to focus on anything further than six inches beyond the end of his nose.
On Christmas Eve 1978 the headache rested heavily upon God. On another day, a rare cool-headed day, he might have resisted Trip Blue’s plan, but the migraine had turned his resolve to mush. Mutiny was impossible. It was all God could do to remain inside the room, comprehensively reflected and suffering from localized explosions of the skull.
‘Get on with it,’ he said and though he was not directly responsible for the deathblow, these four words stuck to him. In the remaining twelve months of his life God would assiduously deny his culpability, first to himself and then, as the alcohol took hold, to a growing number of down-and-out friends. Each time he proclaimed his innocence the four words would rise like a personal cockcrow to mock the distance he’d placed between himself and the act. Blood, he soon came to realize, stuck, no matter how far away you were standing.
Meanwhile, Trip Blue had already wired up the Treatment Room and, fearing the man might regain consciousness, making the whole process distinctly more unpleasant, was keen to press on. God found himself drawn elbow-first behind the shatterproof screen which protected staff members from the insidious forces emitted by the Treatment Room. Trip Blue flicked a switch. A series of red, robotic lights bubbled on, and through their protective headphones, God and his erstwhile assistant listened as a sexless voice dripped, disembodied from the wall-mounted speakers: ‘WISE UP. WISE UP. WISE UP.’ The man, slumped sideways in his borrowed wheelchair, drooled on, unaware and very possibly impervious to a generous American helping of the truth. A series of wires, attached at wrist and temple, connected him to the control room where his vital statistics pulsed in a red, monotonous line across a computer screen, proceeding like a symmetrical alpine range from one side of the monitor to the other. God watched the pattern, intent upon discovering an anomaly in the unbroken landscape. The man’s condition remained consistently unchanged.
‘I’m going to crank it up to 120,’ muttered Trip Blue some ten minutes into the monotone liturgy wheedling from the speakers. ‘He doesn’t seem to be responding to a normal dose and we don’t have time to hang around.’
Though no perceivable change in speed, pitch or volume could be noted, bot
h men were aware that the unconscious man was now being exposed to three weeks’ worth of Treatment in a single, condensed dose. And when a further ten minutes showed no sign of deterioration and the dial was cranked all the way up to 200, Trip Blue crossed the line from science into scientific research, experimenting with truth so intense and potentially corrosive it had never before made it beyond the hypothetical stage.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Trip Blue. ‘I know he’s a goddamn Delusional. I’ve never been wrong before. This much should have killed him half an hour ago. Maybe the tranquilizers are interfering with the Treatment.’
God shrugged. ‘There’s not much we can do about that.’
‘Like hell there isn’t. I’m going in there to wake the bastard up. We’ve started this now and damned if I’m leaving it unfinished.’
God watched on with growing horror as Trip Blue entered the Treatment Room and started to slap the unconscious man violently around the head with his open hand. As it became clear that the man was not responding, Trip’s blows turned increasingly vicious. His open palm curled into a fist and he began to pummel the man with pounding blow after blow until his nose broke, and his cheekbones fell flat, and a thin, ketchup-colored trickle of blood began to surge free of his left ear. Behind the glass, God watched passively on, noting the way Trip Blue’s face had contorted into a caricature of rage, splintered and reflected like some circus horror in the Treatment Room’s mirrors. Later, God would convince himself that he’d been too afraid to step in for fear that Trip’s volcanic anger would turn on him. Fear was excusable, while the shrill and illicit pleasure he’d taken in watching one man batter another to death was a little harder to live with.