by Jan Carson
The man was already dead when God finally snapped out of his stupor. Without stopping to switch the machines off, he yanked the headphones from his ears and, dashing from behind the safe confine of the shatterproof glass, made halfhearted attempts at restraining Trip Blue’s thundering fists. By this stage the young doctor’s rage was blind. He lashed out at God, cracking ribs, lacerating his cheekbones, drawing a sudden rush of blood from his nose. God persevered, pinning Trip’s arms and attempting to halt his progress in a standard issue army headlock. The realist in him knew that Trip had already killed the man but he kept wrestling. In all his Vietnamese days God had never witnessed anything as terrifying as Trip Blue’s unbound fury.
By the time God had managed to drag Trip off the battered corpse and prop him up, exhausted from the act of unleashing a lifetime’s worth of restrained fury, in the corner of the Treatment Room, both men had been exposed to a triple dose of condensed truth. Whilst the words had already spoken into God’s subconscious despair, instigating a process of decline which would see him dead within the year, the very same words fell upon Trip Blue’s stoic soul like fuel for his loudest ambitions. Trip Blue was a survivor. All things, he felt certain, would come to him, if only he had the audacity to persevere.
The next years would prove difficult. Though the Army did their best to make H Wing and all her filthy secrets disappear, Trip Blue left Pennsylvania with a blot on his resume, glaringly obvious to any consultant capable of reading between the lines. Hospitals were wary of employing him. Colleagues, having heard the rumors circulating amongst Vietnam vets, gave him a wide berth in the cafeteria. He moved often and early, quitting neurology and plastics and cardiothoracics before his over-leaping ambition could be discovered. Trip Blue never once doubted his own genius. Christmas 1978 had planted an irrevocable sense of worth deep in the darkest vault of his being. The Treatment Room hung over him like the proverbial ‘one that got away’ and yet Trip Blue did not dare to dust off the mirrors and continue with his research.
Instead he marked time, he saved his money scrupulously, and (though his personality preceded him) did his best to rebuild the shattered remnants of his professional reputation. Whilst most everyone who knew Trip Blue saw his move to the Baptist Retirement Village as the beginning of the end of his career, Trip himself had been planning just such a move for the better part of twenty years. By the early nineties, H Wing was almost forgotten and Trip Blue was ready to resurrect the Treatment Room, choosing a broom closet in a nursing home full of semi-delusional seniors as a perfectly anonymous setting for his latest advance on the Nobel Prize.
He told no one of his plans and, with the brave exception of his own daughter – a vile brat whom he secretly suspected to be Delusional – only permitted the most senile of residents access to this second incarnation of the Treatment Room. Any number of old-people diseases could be utilized to explain away the dead Delusionals. The recovered Terminals often talked but their friends and family, accustomed to the wild gibberings of the senile, never believed a word they said. Had it not been for Soren James Blue – blessed as she was with three parts of her mother’s gumption for every callous spoonful of her father – Trip Blue might well have made the scientific breakthrough of the century.
– Chapter Thirtneen –
Disappear Here
Two days after beginning work at the Center, Martha Orange had experienced her first fully formed doubt about the Director. Entering the ground floor drugs closet suddenly, without knocking, she’d stumbled upon her new boss, sleeves rolled to the elbow, exposing the pink red point where a drip bag full of tinted liquid was emptying its contents into his vein. Though the Director did not acknowledge her presence as she picked her way clumsily round the room selecting the pills and potions required for the early morning rounds, Martha Orange instinctively knew he was up to no good. No one in the Center had a positive word to say about Trip Blue. His own kid – a mouthy rodent of a girl – could not bear to be in his presence. Many of the long-term residents winced visibly when he entered the room.
The Director, Martha Orange suspected, was a very nasty piece of work.
Almost two decades of marriage to Jimmy Orange had made Martha a naturally suspicious person. She did not trust easily and having noticed the Director’s shifty behavior, could not help but let her suspicions multiply unchecked. Thankful for a distraction from her own absent sleaze of a husband, she’d been paying particular attention to all the Director’s comings and goings for weeks. What had begun as well-intentioned curiosity had lately flourished, like all Martha Orange’s best intentions, into an out-and-out obsession.
Martha Orange saw any unguarded paper, even those marked confidential, as fair game for investigation. She rifled through the trash can in the Director’s office and eavesdropped (mug to ear and occasionally via the Center’s prehistoric telephone system) on closed-door conversations. Over cigarettes by the laundry chute she grilled her colleagues for passing gossip and dropped the Director’s name into conversation with patients, hoping for fresh, bloody revelations. People talked, hesitatingly at first, and then with bitter, hurtling abandon, so Martha Orange soon found herself privy to any number of incriminating details about Trip Blue’s life.
The love of Scientific Investigative Research had descended from Martha’s erstwhile father – who had in his youth nurtured ambitions of cracking unsolvable cases for the police – to herself and, via the umbilical cord, to Malcolm, who could not help but translate the incomprehensible facts of life into bar charts and diagrams. Martha Orange kept bullet point notes in an old address book and when the accumulating evidence, beginning on the page marked A, looked set to approach pages P and Q, started to analyze her discoveries by a process of grade school mathematics and scientific reason. Each point was a small, incriminating nail in the Director’s coffin, which, when fully collated, Martha Orange planned to post anonymously to the Baptist Pastor who sat, somewhat flaccidly, at the head of the Board of Directors. A small sample of her research would be enough to get Trip Blue fired and, if Baptists believed in such a practice, excommunicated.
The Director was not a nice man.
Colonic irrigation twice monthly kept him regular as a downtown bus.
Friday evenings he paid the girls who marked time on the corner of 82nd and Killingsworth for an increasingly humiliating set of services.
He believed himself to be gluten intolerant but had never bothered to confirm the diagnosis.
Three mornings a week he practiced mind control techniques on Senior Citizens in a broom closet.
The Director referred to this bizarre ritual as ‘Treatment Room’, and while Martha Orange noted in her carefully collated graphs a rapid decline in the health of almost every patient slipped surreptitiously into the closet, and had very little understanding of what exactly went on behind the cheap plywood doors, occasionally she had observed miraculous improvements in the patients exposed to the Treatment Room. Just last week Marcy Tillerman, though permanently paralyzed after a childhood cycling accident, had climbed out of bed and fixed herself a mug of instant hot chocolate before attempting to walk unaided to the second-floor bathroom. The Director, when confronted with Miss Tillerman’s case and a selection of similarly strange recoveries (stone-deaf seniors suddenly able to hear, dementia in decline and the solitary case of a missing kidney which had, in the course of a week, managed to regenerate), had simply shrugged and put the miracles down to a dose of fluoride the Board of Directors had introduced to the Center’s water pipes.
Martha Orange had her suspicions. Each one of the recently recovered had been a broom closet visitor. Over the course of a month she continued to speculate about the Treatment Room but never once saw fit to open the door and investigate further. In her most honest moments she suspected the Director of some sort of abuse, possibly sexual. Though she was not without morals, Martha Orange held back from reporting her boss. There was always more evidence to be gleaned, always further collation neces
sary. Caution, she told herself, was just another way of being tactical. However, in her most honest moments she admitted herself shit-scared and unlikely to ever report the Director. Martha Orange could not afford to lose her job. When the guilt got too much for her, she reordered her notebooks and reminded herself, somewhat self-righteously, that whatever dark doings were taking place in the first-floor broom closet, some patients were definitely getting better.
This afternoon, confronted with the gushing hole in Cunningham Holt’s chest, Martha Orange had instinctively known that despite its tendency to usher eight out of ten Center patients towards the morgue, the Treatment Room was his only hope. She could neither explain nor dismiss this hunch. Martha Orange had missed out on Sorry’s testimony. She had only the most rudimentary understanding of the Treatment Room’s mechanics. However, when the People’s Committee, informed as they now were, insisted upon storming the Center, she immediately agreed. Martha Orange had long since learnt to trust her gut and her gut was insisting upon the Treatment Room. As they made their way across the parking lot, Roger Heinz filled Martha in on the afternoon’s misadventures, clumsily paraphrasing Sorry’s summer in the Center, so by the time they arrived at the building’s doors – a trail of lukewarm blood marking their progress from one side of the Retirement Village to the other – Martha Orange had all but formed a complete picture of what the Director was orchestrating inside his broom closet.
‘Bastard,’ she cried, loudly and with tremendous vehemence; the only time Malcolm had heard her swear openly in his father’s absence. He could not help but be impressed. It was the first time in months he’d heard his mother express a conclusive opinion about anything.
Martha Orange was drawn, caught between a deep conviction that someone should take charge of this situation and a firm belief that this person should not be her. Inside her shoulder blades, something shuffled involuntarily. Phantom wings tensed in anticipation of flight, reminding Martha that she had not been built for commitment. Responsibility had always rested heavily on her shoulders and this particular responsibility, encompassing as it did a gravely ill man, more than a dozen seniors, three children and a particularly obnoxious housecat, was heavy enough to leave permanent indentations in the sidewalk.
The desire to bolt was almost overwhelming.
Martha Orange looked at Malcolm as he stood beside the wheelchair clutching Cunningham Holt’s bloody hand in his own. His school sneakers were now a particularly grim shade of menstrual red. He seemed smaller, thinner, less believable for the day’s events. She looked at the People’s Committee. In the last blush of daylight they appeared frail and inconclusive, hesitating on their orthopedic heels. This was a collection of individuals desperately in need of leadership and Martha Orange was forced to acknowledge herself the only adult available. She took a deep breath and stepped up, deliberately defying the wings which were drawing her eagerly towards the nearest bus stop. The movement pained her physically and specifically in the region of her right lung. It felt like a pregnancy contraction.
‘Right,’ she said, mustering every ounce of forced confidence gleaned from the Mexican soap operas, ‘we need a plan.’
‘A plan,’ grinned Roger Heinz, spirits suddenly lifted by the possibility of military maneuvers and covert operations. ‘You’re dead right, sweetheart. All morning I’ve been trying to tell these idiots that we need a plan. No one ever listens to me. I’ll go grab the gun from Nate’s bedroom. We can storm the Treatment Room.’
‘No guns,’ said Martha Orange and Malcolm – Cunningham’s blood already forming flaky scabs on his hands and wrists – nodded in shell-shocked agreement.
‘Fire throwers,’ suggested Roger. ‘Incendiary devices, knives?’ Bound by the pacifist contingent he could see his role in the operation slowly receding to that of a mere bystander.
‘Maybe knives or a big stick. A big stick would be less dangerous,’ Martha Orange said. ‘But on the other hand a knife would really make him jump.’
The People’s Committee for Remembering Songs were horrified by the faintest suggestion of further violence. The day had already forced them into contemplation of their own crouching mortality. The cul-de-sac had heard more than enough dying talk for one day and all but the truly senile had no interest in tempting fate with further guns and knives. Death hovered over the People’s Committee like the sure and settling threat of early snowfall. Without consulting one another, all but Roger Heinz – who still, even at the impossible age of eighty-three, planned to go down in a hail of enemy gunfire – aspired to a sleeping death; something soft and placid as a dimmer switch. Sudden, bloody death, of the kind now bearing down on Cunningham Holt, did not sit well with the People’s Committee. The possibility of further violence was enough to make them consider a tactical retreat. However, as Malcolm’s mother explained her plan – borrowing heavily from the plot of a Bruce Willis movie she’d once seen on pay-per-view – they came to understand the necessity of a sharp implement, well-placed.
‘My dad’s a cold-hearted monster,’ reiterated Soren James Blue. ‘He won’t do shit for anyone unless you force him. Take a knife in there with you – two if you can.’ And the People’s Committee, though not by nature inclined to violence, remembered that the Director was a very nasty man; a man who had recently slashed the budget for the Annual Thanksgiving Turkey and Tipples Tea Dance and limited library privileges to once a quarter; who had, for want of an extra few gallons of winter oil, allowed Maybelle Symmons to freeze solid in her reclining chair, skirts akimbo and heels to the ceiling like an upended standard lamp; and had, on one unpleasant occasion, laughed as he telephoned the Portland Dog Pound whilst Mrs Hunter Huxley wept penitent tears for the life of a recently acquired and terribly companionable stray Westie. ‘Knife the old bastard in the back,’ shouted Mrs George Kellerman, bucking her Baptist morals to vocalize the opinion of the masses.
Martha Orange had no intention of knifing anyone.
Accepting the Swiss Army knife which Roger Heinz passed to her, she folded the blade into its sheath and, for an added safeguard, wrapped the entire knife in a couple of unused Kleenex. ‘I’ve no intention of knifing anyone,’ she said. ‘It’s just in case he needs an incentive to get his ass in gear.’ Then she tucked the twice-bandaged knife into the strap of her bra, where it nestled coolly against a Chapstick, the remainders of the Kleenex pack and her left breast, already deflating from lack of Ross. Thereafter, the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs split into two units and, commissioned with a hasty prayer, delivered in perfectly pitched unison by the Mrs Huxley and Kellerman, mounted a twin-pronged attack on the Center.
The Secondary Unit – acting on insider information from Mrs Orange – penetrated the building via the emergency exit by the staff room. Led by Roger Heinz and comprising of Martha Orange, Nate Grubbs, a quickly coagulating Cunningham Holt, and Malcolm (who, due to the perforations which had increased in direct correlation to his growing panic, could only reasonably be counted as half a person), the group divided upon entry. Martha Orange headed straight for the Director’s office. The other four, leaving bloody wheelchair tracks in the ground-floor carpet, followed a hastily sketched map to the Director’s ‘special’ broom closet. Following Mrs Orange’s explicit instructions, they secreted themselves behind a set of floor-to-ceiling drapes (somewhat conspicuously, for they were largish men with protruding feet and a wheelchair), and waited for the prearranged signal.
The Primary Unit – a ragtag collection of the less competent Committee members – approached the Center via the main doors. In lieu of a responsible adult, Bill had stepped in to the leader’s role. Bill was the sort of man who balked at responsibility. It was almost twenty-five years since he’d last led anything more taxing than a round of choral singing. Even then, most all of his leadership experiences had ended in confusion or localized disaster. Bill was fully aware of his own ineptitude and until recently, fearing further calamities, had been more than content to navigate towards the
back of the room, defaulting leadership to the closest consenting adult. Irene was delighted with her husband. Previous suitors had attempted to play the alpha male, mistaking her quiet determination for submission. None had lasted longer than a month. In her prime, Irene had been a formidable woman, dominating men and women alike within her home, her workplace and the local chapter of the Women’s Institute. Before the head muddle had turned her dry wit sodden, Irene loved to watch her husband squirm as she recounted tales of mislaid Scout troops and mutinous little league teams to their equally embarrassed guests and friends. She was not a mean woman. She mocked to reassure Bill that he no longer need worry about taking the lead.
Over the years Bill had gradually defaulted control of everything – from finances and child-rearing, to the increasingly fickle movements of his penis – to Irene. And Irene, until very recently, had been happy to oblige, leading her husband from one end of the week to the next by virtue of a wall-mounted Disney calendar on which she marked all his comings and goings. This unconsciously agreed system had begun innocently enough with dental appointments and business meetings and peaked in Bill and Irene’s twenty-third year of marriage with a carefully collated schedule allocating precise times and timings for bathing, teeth washing and even defecating. Bill had always found his wife’s meddling a great comfort and when the dementia began to spirit away large slices of her good sense, struggled to fumble his way through a day’s activities in the correct order. Forced to wear the pants, he had grown increasingly insecure in the role.