Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “Crazy people,” she shook her head. “I can’t imagine. My mother went crazy during the storms…”

  “They were bad,” he grinned, noticing that something seemed to be ripening about her right there, in the bar, at nine o’clock in the evening, fertility swept her hair and lifted her breasts and reddened her lips like a Nile goddess. He wanted her. He wanted to touch her.

  “When the river flooded, we had to go to my grandfather’s place in the hills, and we almost didn’t get my mother out in time,” she laughed, shaking her head. He bought her a beer, she sipped it, and he had another one, and it seemed as if he’d just ordered another one when he was in the dark with her, in a small bed, and he was almost inhaling her skin and kissing down and up the smoothness of her. Even when they made love, he looked beyond her, out the arched window of the bedroom in her mother’s house, at the moon casting nets of light across the river, sparkling on its rumbling surface; across from them, up the third hill, the asylum waited to snatch his days. He smoked three cigarettes afterward, and fell asleep in the crook of her arm.

  “I can’t offer you coffee,” she said. Angela. That was her name. Out the window, it was still night. He smiled, almost afraid he would forget her name. “Mom would throw a fit if she knew you were here. Got to be quiet.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen,” she said.

  Shit, he thought.

  “You?” she asked.

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “When you were ten,” she said.

  “Back when you were still a baby.”

  “When you were ten,” she repeated, “you found your father crawling on all fours and braying like a mule.”

  “How did you know that?” he gasped.

  “You told me last night. Remember? You wept.”

  “I wept?”

  She kissed his cheek as he buttoned his shirt. “I thought it was sweet. It’s why you became a nurse. Remember? Your father attacked you. You had to somehow take care of it all. I can only imagine.”

  Layton laughed, hugging her. “My god, what was in that beer?”

  “Shh,” she said, covering his lips with her hand. “I have to get her breakfast and then get ready for class. You need to go.”

  “What time is it?” He glanced at the clock on the table. It was nearly six; not quite light out. “Damn it.”

  3

  “A lot can happen in twenty minutes,” Sheila said, her starched blouse looking like white armor covering her starched soul. “In twenty minutes I could’ve been home in bed already.”

  “Sorry. I’ll come in early tomorrow.” Layton took up one of the pens from the cup, and signed his name on the yellow paper next to her hand.

  “Well, I’m exhausted,” Sheila said. Her eyes would not meet his — typical — and she signed off on her papers, her shift done, passing him the clipboard. “Jones and Marshall are on today, and at nine, Harper comes in to do meds. Glover is over at State for three days. You need to do better on sharps check; I found this.”

  She drew something from her pocket. Passed it to him.

  He glanced at the thing in his hand — a safety pin.

  Her voice was gravel and rain. “Nix had it. Don’t know how he got it. Said something about some people giving it to him. He’s been known to kill with things like that.”

  “I can imagine,” Layton said, trying to keep it light.

  Sheila was senior staff and stupid, a terrible combination. She had Doc Ellis’s ear, and that meant she could make sure his review bit the dust, no raise, and no promotion to an easier ward.

  He grinned. “Thanks for covering for me. Twenty minutes is too much. Had a car issue.”

  “Oh,” Sheila said, her voice now all sleet. “That’s twice in six weeks. Better get it into the shop.”

  After she left — making sure to check his keys for him like he was a baby — he started on the basic rounds with one of the psych techs. Sharps check, whites check, laundry baskets rolled out as more staffers arrived, coffee in the vending room, twice-told jokes about the boy who grew trees on his back, complaints from Shaw and Rogers about their treatment, a backed up toilet, followed by basic bed check — Rance had the sniffles, and Layton quickly checked his temp only to find a high fever and then, oh shit, the day was screwed. Harper arrived and began a mini-quarantine to make sure it wasn’t anything worse than the flu — six ended up in Rance’s room, all with fevers, all beginning to moan about the demons who were scratching at them or their skin falling off, or any number of odd complaints. Diarrhea on the floor, dripping, spitting, and Layton going between them with juice and toast, just hoping for once they’d all get the plague and die.

  When he finally got to Nix’s room, he unstrapped him. “I thought Shaw would’ve done this by now, damn it,” Layton said, muttering to himself, but Nix laughed.

  “That’s the first time you’ve ever said anything that made sense, Mr. Conner,” Nix said, “and now, if you don’t mind, a little privacy?”

  Layton nodded and turned his back. He watched the wall, and tried to ignore the pissing sounds coming from the toilet in the corner.

  “All done,” Nix said.

  “Glad to see no writing on the wall today,” Layton said, turning.

  Nix had a face that was a genetic mix of wise child and prematurely old troll — Layton had never noticed ‘til now that Nix had a scar on his chin, or that he was beginning to go bald. His blond hair receded from a point on his crown. How old was he? Layton thought he was forty, but he might’ve been mid-thirties. It was on his chart, but who looked at the charts anymore? Administrative bullshit.

  “She finally stopped,” Nix said, getting fidgety. His face became stormy — his brows twitched, his lips curled, his skin began wrinkling with nervous spasms.

  Needs his meds. “You sleep okay?”

  “Not really,” Nix giggled, his fingers beginning their familiar snapping.

  Where the fuck is Rogers and the med cart?

  “Couldn’t sleep — “

  “At all?” Layton asked.

  “The baby kept me up, so I had to wander.” Nix said, and then went to the sink and began washing up. He shook like a drunk. Where the hell was the med cart? Layton watched him in the steel mirror. “I went out and had a drink or two and then made friends.”

  “Oh did you,” Layton nodded. He glanced at the open door. The squeaking whine of the med cart wheels echoed along the green corridor. Somewhere a fly buzzed. Out the window? He glanced outside, through the bars and glass, past the pavement, the fences, to the river and the valley. God, he wished he could be anywhere but in this room.

  Layton went and sat down on the mattress. It was clean, unlike other patients’ rooms.

  “Another night on the town?”

  Nix turned slowly, his face shiny with water. “Yeah. I met someone and we spent the night together.”

  “Well,” Layton grinned. “Not a total loss then.” Stretched his arms out, and hopped up again.

  Nix was an easy patient for the most part; violent when he was on the outside, but inside he was pretty much a kitten. Nix never went for the eyes. He spoke sensibly except when he ventured into some delusional chatter.

  Layton went to the sink and grabbed a towel for the patient.

  Taking the towel, wiping his hands slowly, Nix said, “Not a total loss at all. But then…that baby was still wailing. She hadn’t changed him, that’s why. She doesn’t know how important it is. See, the thing is, she can understand all this movement, this jumble of molecules, but he’s just a baby, his mind hasn’t quite sorted it out. She thinks because he’s a baby he’s better at it. I had to change him myself.”

  “Is that how you got the safety pin?”

  “The what?” Covering his face in the white towel, Nix’s features came through the cloth. Layton shivered slightly. Something about the towel on the face reminded him of his father’s madness. The form without expression. The open mouth without sound.

&
nbsp; “Nurse Allen found it, this little pin,” Layton grabbed the towel back, rolling it into a ball. “She took it from you. Last night.”

  “Oh, that,” Nix swept a hand in the air. “That night nurse is no good. She’s a brick. She finds that and she thinks I’m just plotting to stab her in the neck twenty times with it or plunge it into her heart and extract it. She’s crazy.”

  Layton wanted to add: it’s what you did to two women on the Outside, Nix. Why wouldn’t she think you’d use it on her, too?

  4

  Layton met Angela again the following Saturday, they got a little drunk again, ended up down on the muddy bank of the river, found a dry rock, kissed, almost began to make love, but she said she just wasn’t in the right mood. “It’s my mother,” she said. “She’s been giving me hell lately.”

  “I keep forgetting you’re nineteen.”

  “I turned twenty.”

  “When?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Happy Birthday.”

  “I don’t care about birthdays or age. Or anything. It’s all this proof. It means nothing. If I told you I was twenty seven, you wouldn’t really know the difference. It’s just revolutions of the earth. Years go by. Gravity pulls. We all buy into it.” Angela reached into her breast pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes. She offered him one — he snapped it up — and then sucked one up between her lips, lit it, puffed, and sighed. “All learning is about trapping. Keeps you trapped inside this…vehicle…we call a body. We learn that we’re flesh and bone, but somewhere it’s all particles. Somehow the particles convince us we’re solid. I took molecular biology last semester and barely understood a word, but the way I see it, we’re all just convincing ourselves that anything we are or see is solid, but it’s not. It’s confetti. Bits and pieces and then it’s all like this river. Look at the river — silt and fish and water and amoebas and all kinds of things, and we call it river, but it’s all one thing, and who’s really to say that the fish actually moves or if it becomes water and in the next second is fish again only because it was water?”

  “Well,” he said, nibbling on her ear, “college and beer are doing you good I see.”

  “Well, it’s hard to swallow some of the bullshit.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. It’s like being raised Catholic.”

  “You? Catholic?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, you know all that belief shit. Even science is full of its little beliefs, and half the problem is buying into them or not. Just like you said.”

  “Well,” she shrugged, “I believe in a lot of what you’d probably call belief shit.”

  “I gave up believing in anything I can’t see when my father died,” he said quietly. He wanted to laugh and make a joke of this, but he couldn’t.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but smoke came out. She stubbed the cigarette out on the rock.

  “My mother is basically dying,” Angela began, almost inaudibly. She said it again a bit louder. Layton had nothing to add. He wanted to say something wise and kind, but no words came to mind. “She’s dying, and I’m just getting started on life. She’s a nightmare at times. I’ve wished her dead with each surgery. For her own sake. I’ve wished her gone. Can’t imagine having a daughter like me.” She brightened for a second. “Change the subject, quick. I don’t want to think about it.”

  “I had a boring week,” he said. “You don’t want to hear about it. I’m sorry about…”

  “I really mean it. Change the subject. Poor baby. Boredom is worse than dying. Change the subject. Your work, your boyhood, your religious awakening, anything.”

  “In my job, boredom is good.”

  “Well, then.” She lit another cigarette. “Tell me how it was boring.”

  “No attacks, no riots, no bizarre rituals involving stray cats, no eyes getting popped out.”

  “Something to celebrate.”

  “Along with your birthday.”

  “Now I feel like it,” she said, leaning into him, and he felt her ripen again, as if she wanted him to open her, to be part of her. The cigarette went into the mud, his hands found their way beneath her blouse, her hands encircled his back. Nature took over — he found himself making love to her on the rock, in the torn fingernail of light along the banks of the flooded river. They dozed afterward for just a few minutes; then she said something; he opened his eyes but was still in a half-dream.

  “You see? You’re in it, too. You think you’re outside but you’re really in,” she said.

  When he asked her what she meant by that, she acted as if he had dreamed it.

  It was two a.m. when he walked her home, and kissed her on the forehead.

  She looked surprised.

  “You took all my passion.” He chuckled.

  “Ah,” she nodded. “Well, I best get some sleep. I have a Physics exam on Monday, bright and early.”

  “Physics? Ouch,” Layton grinned. “My worst subject.”

  “I kind of like it. We have a bizarre professor who talks about string theory and molecular shake ups and why we can’t just go through chairs and things.”

  “Okay,” Layton nodded. “You lost me. I’m just a nurse.”

  “Don’t play dumb,” she swatted him playfully. “Hey, wait, before you go, you need to give me something.”

  “Oh I think I did already.”

  “Not that, you cad,” she whisper-giggled. “Something to show you care.”

  He reached into his pockets, “Christ, I’ve got nothing. No mementos at all. Wait,” he brought up a half-roll of Lifesavers. “There you go. To save your life with.”

  He pressed it into her hand, and she giggled and told him that until they met again she would treasure each and every tropical fruit flavor.

  5

  “Where did you get those?” Layton asked. It was a few weeks later, and Angela had not been answering his calls and no one answered her door, and now he was at work feeling the worst heartache of his life — and Nix the Needle had a half-roll of tropical fruit Lifesavers in his hand.

  “You going to take those off me?” Nix asked, tugging at the restraints that held his hands to the bed. “Don’t I even have a right to candy?”

  “Give it to me,” Layton said, plucking the roll from the man’s hands. “Where did you get —”

  Nix looked up into his eyes, deeply , soulfully, and whispered in a soft voice, “She’s dying, and I’m just getting started on life. She’s a nightmare at times. I’ve wished her dead with each surgery. For her own sake. I’ve wished her gone. Can’t imagine having a daughter like me. Change the subject, quick. I don’t want to think about it.”

  6

  “I’m afraid for you,” Dr. Glover said. It was mid-afternoon and Layton was going off-shift soon. “I’m afraid in a way that I was afraid for Molly Sternberg.”

  “Please. Molly had a history of —”

  “All of us have histories,” Glover said. “None of us is immune to this. You work with mentally unstable people — sociopaths as well — and you become enmeshed. You begin to experience a similar dissociation from reality that they also experience. It is not that unusual. It is somewhat expected.” Glover scratched at the side of his head. “Don’t worry, Conner, I’m not going to put you away. You haven’t identified yourself as insane. But it would not surprise me that you might just need a little distance. When was your last vacation?”

  “Three months ago.”

  “Perhaps this is just one of those things,” Glover added.

  “Those things? You’re a psychiatrist,” Layton nodded his head slightly hoping that the doctor would laugh it off.

  “Because I’m trained in a way of handling medical issues doesn’t mean I have all the answers. Sometimes the unexplainable occurs. Sometimes it’s a delusion. Sometimes it happens. I’ve been here long enough to realize that there’s more to the world than has been catalogued in the medical texts. Now, what did Nicholas say?”

  “He said exactly what this woman said the previ
ous weekend.”

  “Precisely?”

  “As precisely as I could recall it.”

  “You could recall it?”

  “Christ,” Layton said. He stood up. “I’d like a few days off.”

  “Speak to your supervisor; as far as I’m concerned, take any amount of time you want off. Your job is secure.” Glover glanced over to his bookshelf. “You know, Conner, you’ve been here a few years. You know your ward inside and out. You’ve seen a lot. You’ve handled a lot. On the one hand, this could be your mind playing tricks on you.” Glover reached beneath his glasses and rubbed two fingers along the bridge of his nose. He shut his eyes for a moment. “On the other hand, sometimes there are things that come through the patients. I’m not even sure what I mean by that.” He took his glasses off. “Without my glasses, you are blurred.” He put them back on. “Now I see you clearly. Does that mean that when I see you blurred that you are in fact blurred and that my vision is perfect but your image is in flux?”

  “Sir?”

  “All I’m saying is, we can’t know everything. Assuming that Nicholas Holland said what you heard, perhaps he did know what this woman said to you. Perhaps he made it up and by some strange coincidence, for the first time in his own history, he said the exact words to disturb you. But I’ve learned in twenty eight years as a psychiatrist handling the more extreme cases of human insanity, that —” Glover leaned toward him. “We know nothing of the human mind. We are still in the Dark Ages of psychiatry. We are fumbling. Do you know what Nicholas said to me when he first entered this place? He told me that when the night came, the mechanisms changed, and that while I was eating supper the night before with my wife, he had already seen to it that the pie in the kitchen had fallen to the floor.”

  Layton, caught up for a moment, asked, “Did it?”

  Glover drew back, laughing. “No, of course not. And we hadn’t had any dessert. It was a complete fabrication. But how was I to know?” The laughter stopped. “I didn’t even mention it to my wife, I thought it was just a rambling delusion on his part. But a year or so later, I was at a dinner party at a colleague’s home, and some of the doctors were telling tales out of school. The usual — patients who sat up in the middle of operations, the near-malpractice suits that managed to get cleaned up in some hilarious way, the patients who hallucinated bizarre images — and so I had my glass of wine and told the story about Nicholas claiming to break into the house. I had them rolling mainly because I recalled all the details he added — how he sipped milk from the fridge, how he peed in the sink. And then I mentioned the pie claim, I said, ‘and he then told me that he dropped a pie on the kitchen floor just so I wouldn’t eat it,’ And Layton? I saw it in my wife’s face, out of the corner of my eye, even then I saw that she had gone white as if something dreadful had come over her. She said nothing at dinner, but on the way home she told me that she had bought a pie at the A&P and had warmed it in the oven for a bit before letting it cool on the cutting board by the sink. ‘And,’ I asked, ‘did it fall on the floor?’ She told me it had not, but that someone had broken the crust, a man, she thought, because the handprint was big. Handprint? Yes, she said. It scared her because it was nearly perfect, almost as if someone had baked his hand into the crust. She threw it out, not wanting to even think about it. So, you see, perhaps Nicholas knew something. Perhaps he didn’t. How could he? I am a man of some education and knowledge of science, Layton, but I have no basic explanation for this — or for you. Except to say: take a few days off and let this go.”