Coming Ashore

by Catherine Gildiner

  A slightly bewildered Brad said, “I didn’t feel his kinship. Did you, Cathy? Did you, Sandra?”

  We assured him we didn’t feel the kinship either.

  “That’s good,” he said. Clearly he didn’t want to feel left out of Nixon’s kinship just because he was crazy.

  While the commentators were droning on about a dark day in America, Sandra was screaming at the TV, “You think you got troubles. It’s darker right here in Canada right now because we’re in a loony bin with no goddamn cigarettes at midnight.”

  This was indeed the first time that Sandra and I were both out of cigarettes at the same time, and we had a twelve-hour shift ahead of us. I had smoked since I was nine years old and I was not about to quit now. There was no way we could go out to a store for smokes. First, there wasn’t one, and second, it was late. Sandra said there was a cigarette machine in the underground tunnels that connected all of the ten wards. She announced that she’d once made the trip alone, and she said, in her usual offhand tone, she was “alive to tell the tale.” We flipped a coin and I lost. As she drew me the map, she said the cigarette machine was in a maze between wards seven and eight. I hesitated at the top of the stairs and she pushed me, saying that all the ward doors were locked at dusk and the tunnels were empty. The map had about ten different turns through the tunnels lit only by a few bare light bulbs at each end. She assured me that the whole trip would take about eight minutes each way. The fact that I was willing to do this tells you everything you need to know about the nature of addiction.

  Even so, after what happened that night, I never smoked again. Sometimes fear actually changes your neural configuration: I ­never had nicotine withdrawal and never thought of having another cigarette.

  I descended the old stone stairs, ignoring the thick cobwebs in the corners. Sandra had warned me that it was poorly lit, but she didn’t tell me that it was totally black in certain parts. All of the bulbs were in thick cages that obscured much of the light. We had the cages on the wards as well so the patients couldn’t steal the bulbs, start fires with the hot filaments or break them and cut themselves. The faint light illuminated rudimentary carvings in the stone walls, which, when I looked closer, were words and phrases such as help or God take me.

  When I was about five minutes into the maze, I heard what sounded like footsteps behind me, but Sandra had warned me there was an echo. I slowed down, knowing that if the steps were only an echo they would also slow down. Then I realized how stupid that was. If I were being followed, the footsteps would also slow down when I slowed down. I was too frightened to turn around.

  I had heard from the goon squad that there were some guys who had to stay in locked cells. Once one got a hold of one of the goon’s pencils and within seconds had it chewed into matchsticks and spit it out. I tried to repress stories like that one as I trudged on in my wooden Dr. Scholl’s exercise sandals, which banged and echoed with each step.

  Finally I stopped and heard no footsteps behind me. When I checked my watch, I realized I’d been travelling for only five minutes, but it felt like an hour. According to Sandra’s hand-drawn map, the cigarette machine was around the next corner. Sandra, although lackadaisical in certain ways, was exacting if she thought something was important and she wanted a cigarette. Suddenly I heard a scrambling sound. It must be mice, I thought. Then the scrambling turned into a rhythmical scurrying. An anguished cry and scratching against the wall followed. I decided to ignore it and dash around the corner at breakneck speed. I’d buy my cigarettes as fast as I could, turn tail and run like hell back to the ward. I tried to convince myself I’d made the sounds up. I heard my mother’s voice in my head saying I had an overactive imagination.

  I rounded the final bend and there, in a corner under a stone stairway, crouched a human figure. He peered out of small black wide-set eyes. All I could see were his eyeballs in the dark, but somehow I knew it was a man. I decided to ignore him and hope that he didn’t think I had seen him folded up like a troll. With a thundering heart, I nonchalantly sauntered up to the cigarette machine lit by a single bulb and slipped in my thirty-five cents. I heard it jingle down the metal slot like a warning bell.

  When he heard the change ring into the machine, he sprang out from his squatted position under the stairs and into the light. He looked as though he’d been buried alive and someone had just popped open his coffin lid. He began bowing and chanting in an otherworldly voice, “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth.”

  Just as I was about to run away, he blocked my path. I had a wall behind me, a wall on my right and a locked staircase to my left. The only way out was down the long hallway and this heavy creature was obstructing it. I was trapped. He had an unusually large head with a scar over his right temple and an ­institutional haircut, which Sandra had labelled “the-chronic-axe-murderer trim.” He was overweight and appeared to be about middle age. He had that grey pallor of an inpatient and the large stomach and thin limbs of a psychotic who has taken many years of ineffective antipsychotic medication that has remained lodged in his now-bloated stomach. His trousers were held up to an empire waist position by old-­fashioned wide suspenders, and his shirt was drenched in sweat.

  When we finally made eye contact, his look changed from fear to rage and he held up a knife, albeit only a regular knife from the dining room, but still it was a knife. Then he screamed, “Octavia, you Jezebel. I am not going to be persecuted by you any longer.” The words echoed through the tunnel system until they came back to us. He went up to the cigarette machine and began to pull savagely at the handle of each brand. He methodically pulled each knob twice more, and then fell to his knees and fervently prayed with his hands folded toward the heavens. As I started to back away, he jumped up, grabbed me and cornered me. His face was so close I could smell his institutional breath reeking of undigested medication as he said, “You will not feed me to the lions.” I thought of dashing past him and up the stairs, but all the doors were locked — except for one obviously. He held the knife to my throat and said, “You will not leave here until I’ve finished my services. Kneel in the sarcophagus. I’m praying.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I am St. Stephen.”

  “Ah, the martyr?” He didn’t answer. “I get it. We’re in the catacombs.”

  He looked pleased for the first time and nodded. He walked up and down in front of the cigarette machine, and about every third time he paced by, he would say, “Dominus vobiscum.” I joined in the service, saying, “Et cum spiritu tuo.” (Who says being a Catholic can’t save your life?) As long as I participated in the ritual that he had to compulsively perform, he ignored me and continued. Agitated, he pointed to an area under the stairs that was dark and about five feet wide and six feet deep. I looked in as he lit a match and I saw an amazing altar made out of cigarette papers and wrappers. The silver paper was wrapped around stones, coins, bottle tops, old broken crockery and hundreds of other solid small ­objects. These small objects were artfully layered to create a glittering mound about two feet high that included a tabernacle, which was a Chock full o’Nuts coffee can. (I thought of the heavenly coffee jingle.) Some of the other coloured parts of the cigarette wrappers were also twisted in so that all the colours reflected onto the aluminum foil. The walls of the side chapel were covered with religious imagery: the Lamb of God, the fish, and the Stations of the Cross. It looked like he’d dug out the images and then stuffed different coloured paper into the cracks. The Virgin Mary’s dress was done in Player’s blue. Christ’s side bled in Du Maurier red. The pallor of Christ was Craven A white. The crown of thorns was made of tiny twisted twigs with bits of Peter Jackson gold on the tips. You could see that stations thirteen and fourteen, the last two, were not finished. They were carved but had no coloured papers embedded into the crevices.

  When I figured I had worshipped long enough, I whispered, “I have to go now.”

  He looke
d up at me as though I were a child trying to get out of mass early. “Not until I do this for each year since my death.”

  “When did you die?” I asked, hoping it had been a fairly recent event.

  “I was killed by Nero. I’ve come down here many nights to meet other Christians but they have all been thrown to the lions.” He looked at my white blond hair and said he had to offer up a lamb to Our Lord. “One that is as white as snow.” I noticed for the first time that when he said the word white he had a slight European accent.

  As soon as I made a movement away from participating in the ritual, he immediately became agitated, pointing the knife in front of him and frantically yanking the cigarette knobs. I thought for sure the machine would fall forward, but true to government form, it had been nailed to the wall and the floor. Then he held up his own cigarette package as though it were a Eucharist, went into his little side chapel under the stairs and lit a cigarette. He swung the smoking cigarette back and forth in the air as though it were a thurible, the container for burning incense that the priest swings on a chain in religious rituals.

  If I edged away even slightly, he started the whole thing again. We had a long time to go, since he had to do this for every year since 64 AD, and we were in 1974. I decided to sit down. When I defied him or questioned his obsession, he began to sweat so profusely that even his hair dripped. He smelled like a caged animal that needed his pen swept out.

  He pointed to his sparkling altar, which must have taken years for him to assemble, and said that he was leaving it to his “fellow man.” He began rattling off some more Latin, and I answered with words from a Christmas carol: “Adeste Fideles.” He seemed to relax at my continued participation, and he told me that it was time for communion. He lit up another cigarette and gave me one, saying it was the body and blood of Our Lord. He said we were going to make a sacrificial offering. Wanting to avoid the idea that I was the sacrificial lamb, I said, “Christ sacrificed a lamb.”

  He looked at me sadly, as though he had bad news. “You must be the blood of our Lord.” He walked toward me. He had no socks or shoes on and his feet were filthy with yellow-brown thickened nails that had not been trimmed and had begun to grow under. They looked like pig’s trotters as they scratched the floor. Thus the scurrying sound I’d heard earlier. Once I saw his feet, I lost all hope that his ward staff would miss him at head count. No one even gave him a bath.

  He came toward me and grabbed my hand. I recoiled in terror but thought it best not to resist. Suddenly I heard the door open at the top of the stairs and I yelled, “Help!” A man darted down the stairs and grabbed a hold of the early Christian and pinned back his arms as though he’d done it many times. He was a handsome blond man who was only slightly older than me and wearing a blue cotton shirt and chino pants.

  “Zekas, that’s enough.” Zekas struggled and the blond man said in a low, calming voice, “Let go of the lady. Follow me right now or I’ll have to call the goons.” Zekas looked like a large ape weighing his options. The blond said, “The goons will do more than give you a shot. They’ll take the key so you can’t get any cigarette wrappers. The doctor will have to tell everyone not to give you their empty cigarette packs.” The blond hesitated and then added, “They might even move the cigarette machine.” With that, Zekas ran to the cigarette machine, fell to his knees and hugged it and wept. “I’m … I’m …” He kept trying to talk between sobs.

  “You’re a martyr. I know that. All of your sacrifices go up in smoke,” the blond man said. Zekas nodded, pleased to be understood. The blond man patted him gently on the back and told him he had to go back to the ward.

  “He is really harmless,” the blond man said to me as Zekas lumbered up the stairs.

  “Well, he mentioned making me a sacrificial lamb,” I said, begging to differ.

  “Oh really. That is a new twist to the ritual.”

  “I put the money in once already but the machine went crazy when Zekas pulled all the knobs. Before leaving, can you wait a minute while I quickly drop thirty pieces of silver in here and get a pack of Du Mauriers?” The aggrieved Zekas stood panting at the top of the stairs, but I knew Sandra would never forgive me for not getting the cigarettes, and I never wanted to come back here. The attendant said he would take Zekas back to the ward and lock him in and then walk me back to the adolescent unit.

  When he returned, he introduced himself as Dennis and we set off for my building. He said he did troubleshooting all over the hospital.

  “Interesting ritual that Zekas has going on here,” I offered.

  “I know. His parents were deaf Lithuanians who were killed during the war. He heard no speech for the first three years of his life and then he was sent to Canada as a war orphan. He only went to grade school but seems to know several ancient languages.”

  “Is it language or gibberish?”

  “Who knows? Wouldn’t you think they’d get a linguist to check it out?”

  I thought it strange that this night watchman would be talking about a linguist and not just saying Zekas was crazy like most ward attendants would have said. Hearing that Dennis was interested in the content of psychotic hallucinations, I ventured, “Rituals are ­interesting. They are so often religious. Zekas looked crazy but his behaviour was no crazier than anything else in theory. I mean Saint Francis wore a hair shirt and ropes and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, one of the most popular saints, practised self-inflicted corporal mortification. For these feats, they became saints. In fact, eating a host or smoking a cigarette is really not that different. They are both oral experiences of ingestion. This is a man who knows ritual. Fire is used in most cultures for worship. Cigarette smoke is a kind of incense.” As we turned a corner and I could see that I was almost back to the ward, I added, “You know Jung or Freud would have made the most of this event. It would have been one of their cases in defence of a collective unconscious. Are ancient memories stored somewhere? Here is a man who is actually enacting an ancient ritual in a compulsive way. Why a ritual in the catacombs?”

  “Obsessive behaviour is when your brain is a very long playing record and the needle gets stuck in a groove,” Dennis replied. “As the years go by, the groove gets deeper and deeper. You have to keep enacting the same behaviour because you are programmed to do it. The thinking in the ’50s was to excise the groove directly in front of the problem groove. That’s what happened to Zekas.”

  “A lobotomy?” I asked.

  Dennis nodded. “Almost all the lobotomies are in building nine. Up the stairs from where you saw Zekas. The problem is that the brain is not as precise as a record. The operation was crude and it wound up cutting huge sections on either side of the ­obsessive groove. There was hardly anything left of the record. Like you’re listening to a symphony and then suddenly there are huge gaps until you can’t make heads or tails of the music.”

  Shaking my head, I said, “It must be hard to find a place to house all of the mistakes they made in the ’50s.”

  “Most of the lobotomies are dying off now. In building nine they use medication for obsessive behaviour. That’s like spraying the record with WD-40 and hoping that the needle slid over the sticky groove. The problem is the needle slides over the whole ­record and no grooves are penetrated. Those patients don’t hear any of the music of life, or else it is a one-note song.”

  “That medication hasn’t worked at all? Why do they still use it?” I asked.

  “It has worked for some people. Just not the people stuck in here — they have ruts so deep that when a synapse fires a spark it just keeps shorting out. No amount of medication can work.”

  We’d made it back to the ward without incident and I thanked Dennis for rescuing me. When I knocked on the ward door, Sandra opened it and bellowed, “Where have you been? I am dying for a cigarette.” She pulled me in and slammed the door on Dennis. As I sank into a chair, relieved to be alive, she continued. “I
gave you up for dead and I was really worried since I’d given you money for a large pack.”

  Sandra tore into the cigarettes as I told her what I’d seen. When I finished, she shook her head and said, “Christ, what the hell does someone have to go through for a frickin’ cigarette around here? We should get time-and-a-half for that kind of shit.”

  I said that the only decent part of the tunnel tale was that I had met Dennis and he was an interesting ward attendant and we’d agreed to exchange books. I said, “At least we’ll have someone stimulating to talk to in the staff cafeteria.”

  Sandra sat in her plastic-coated easy chair with her feet up on the coffee table and took a deep drag on her cigarette. She ­slowly blew out the smoke, then said, “Dennis is so stimulating that he is in his own locked ward — or is supposed to be. He is an ­obsessive-compulsive who has to lock all of the doors every night. He’s fine as long as you let him perform his ritual. If you don’t, he’ll peck your eyes out. That’s why he usually lives behind fine-mesh screening.”

  “Seriously? He seemed so smart and normal.”

  “He’s about as normal as you are. Next time you meet him check out the primary-coloured Fisher-Price plastic keys that hang from his belt.”

  CHAPTER 23

  different people have different customs

  You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.

  — Desmond Tutu

  1974 was the happiest year of my life to date and, now that I look back on it, probably the happiest in my entire life. Something had happened in the tilt of the world. Feisty women who didn’t put up with crap, the ones who came fully loaded with their own brand of testosterone, were suddenly in vogue. For the first time in my life, I belonged. Although I was popular in high school in Buffalo, I, like my mother, had for the most part learned how to look and act normal. I also knew how to be amusing and quickly learned that any group will put up with a lot of personal differences if they are entertained. I was like a really good spy; I had learned how to fit into an alien society without detection. The only place my normal veneer failed miserably was in Ohio, where I never got close to mimicking the others. It was the only place I have ever lived where even the girls were from Pluto. Maybe I was isolated because I’d dated a black man, but the upshot was I felt as alone as the boy with no immune system who lived in the glass bubble in Texas.