Odditorium: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  “No editorials, Jim.”

  “Didn’t I ask you not to call me that?”

  “Christo. If that makes you feel more comfortable.”

  “Right. There’s this new admission, anyway. Kid’s only been here maybe a week. Yesterday morning he gets this savage migraine attack, doubled over and his face all white. He’s got a history of these things, real gut benders. Yes, Marty, I saw it in his file and don’t tell me it’s against the rules…. You want to hear the story, you can’t keep jumping in. So … The kid is really going through it, but I’m cool. I figure before too long somebody will come out and give him a needle. That’s what they’re here for, right? But now the kid’s wrapped around himself down on the floor, bellowing. I walk over to the station and I suggest—maybe I raised my voice a little—I suggest Amato might want to investigate. Maybe I took a couple of swings at the door, who remembers? Well, Amato wanders out and she’s rubbing her eyes like we were dragging her away from a nap. She says, ‘Larry is being punished. He’s been spoiled by too much easy access to medication and now he has to earn back his privileges.’ I got a little hot at that point. Somebody got me in a hammerlock. They wanted to put me in a body bandage, but I talked them out of it.”

  Rechette shook his head forlornly, dug a thumbnail into the spotless pink eraser at the end of his pencil. “Sometimes you make me want to retire.”

  Christo reached across the table, jiggled a cigarette out of Rechette’s half-empty pack, and said, “How do you feel about that?”

  “You think you did something noble, I’m sure, but it was moronic.” Rechette narrowed his eyes. “How do you suppose this is going to look when it comes time for your review? I’m greasing all kinds of rails to get you released and you pull a stunt like this. Don’t you want to get out of here?”

  “More and more.”

  “Then make yourself invisible for the next ten days. Fortunately Amato is being transferred to another facility next month so I can probably ease you through. You haven’t blown it yet, but don’t try again.” Rechette stood, smoothed his silk necktie, buttoned his herringbone jacket. He indicated the cigarette pack with a twitch of the head. “You can keep those.”

  Christo watched him leave: that side-to-side cowpoke walk. He had to admire the way in which Dr. Martin Rechette grabbed life by the balls. The man was not board certified. He was a former urologist practicing psychiatry for the state. He had published an article in the Journal of Mental Sciences. He was in a lofty tax bracket. He was also the softest touch Christo had ever come across in thirty years of looking.

  Later that day, Christo came upon Inocencia Amato in the corridor. She was bent over the drinking fountain; a hank of black hair had escaped from the pinnings of her cap and hung down past one eye. He crept up behind her and she whirled at the touch of his leg, her clawlike hands, with their long peach-enameled nails, prepared to strike.

  “Hiya, Nurse Amato. Is it true that back in the Philippines you eat dog? Beat them to death with bamboo poles to tenderize the meat?”

  “Yes.” She dried her hands on the front of her skirt.

  “I bet puppies are the best.”

  Amato batted at her loose hair. “You, sir, are wasting the time of everyone in this hospital.”

  “Well, don’t get too excited,” Christo said. And when she had disappeared: “You might burn out your tungsten filament.”

  It was in a cramped second-floor office that Christo’s final discharge interview took place. From somewhere nearby came the steady rumble of machinery. Christo adopted a submissive posture in a molded plastic chair from which he could view the parking lot through partially drawn curtains, could be tantalized by the mobility of others: relatives shuffling confusedly across the asphalt having been rebuked, perhaps not even recognized; dishwashers and orderlies still in uniform and hurrying to compact cars that would take them on lunch-hour errands to the bank, the dry cleaner’s; the doctors, distinguished Men of Science in British raincoats, padding along a strip of newly replanted grass to their reserved parking spaces as though prowling a parade ground at dawn, some new wrinkle in the elaboration of chemical warfare pricking the conscience.

  As the last person entered and the door clicked shut behind him, Christo thought of teevee dramas in which the desperate hero dives through a cellophane window, lands nimbly, rolling to his feet, and races untouched into the commercial break. But such crude tactics were not his style. He was fully prepared to smarm his way out.

  His panel of inquisitors consisted of Rechette; Monica Fortgang, head of nursing; Dr. Mool Dopesh, a Pakistani behaviorist (who in the last twelve months had received a color television set and a microwave oven from a major pharmaceutical manufacturer in exchange for running evaluation tests of their new drugs on fifty inmates); and the clinic director, an abrasively voluble man in a Santa Claus beard who was seated at a pressed steel desk. The others were bunched in on either side.

  Rechette made some preliminary remarks, emphasizing Mr. Christo’s sincere desire to remake himself in therapy and the noteworthy progress he had achieved in dealing with such matters as flattened affect, reactive hostility and nihilist delusions.

  Dr. Dopesh muttered to himself as he thumbed through the contents of a loose-leaf binder, boosting his volume to mention the patient’s original court-ordered detention after a trial on two counts of forgery.

  “I was never convicted on that charge,” Christo said, regretting the pinch of belligerence in his voice. “And I paid back the money, too.”

  “Really, Mool, I think that’s yesterday’s papers,” Rechette said hurriedly.

  “What papers?” Dopesh was confused, fearful that some bundle of charts, some crucial file, had eluded him.

  “A figure of speech, Mool. But I think after six months with us, Mr. Christo is sufficiently mindful of the consequences of antisocial behavior that I don’t foresee any repetition.”

  The director brought a Styrofoam cup to his whisker-hemmed mouth and took little sucking sips of black tea. “Certainly our main concern should be conduct inside the walls of this institution. I’m wondering about this dust-up with Miss Amato two weeks ago.”

  “Just one of a series,” said Monica Fortgang in her wind-up Victrola voice. “Patient has continually shown a marked resentment toward authority, an unwillingness to cooperate and follow orders. He has been a disruptive force on the ward, and frankly I’m far from convinced that there’s been the slightest forward movement since he arrived.”

  Christo felt that the floor was a hydraulic lift pushing him immutably toward the ceiling where, amid the crunch of bone and geysers of blood, he would be mashed against the twin eggbox light fixtures, neatly cube-steaked and ready for boiling. He took a deep breath.

  “I deeply regret that incident. Since then I have had an opportunity to apologize personally to Nurse Amato. I’ve come to realize that however severe the other patient’s pain might have been, however much I might have felt that he was being denied the proper attention, it was wrong of me to interfere with staff since they know best how to deal with each patient on an individual basis. I understand now that I was improperly assigning to myself responsibilities I wasn’t either capable or eligible to handle.”

  Monica Fortgang broke the paperclip she had been bending while she relived a year-old incident in which Rechette had accused her, in front of three members of the janitorial staff, of administering a near-fatal dose of Amytal to one of his favorite patients. “Very nice, Marty,” she hissed through glistening choppers. “Did you type that up for him?”

  “I might point out, Monica, that I have been at this hospital considerably longer than you have. And any intimation that I am attempting to abet Mr. Christo in hoodwinking this committee is totally out of line and an insult to me professionally.”

  “I’m sure you’re quite thorough and expert when it comes to bladder obstructions or cystitis, but this …”

  “I fail to see how Monica expects to make a judgement on this ca
se when she is so clearly biased.”

  “Enough,” said the director, striking the desk top with an invisible gavel. “I’d hate to give patient the impression that the review process is in any way a matter of who your friends are.”

  Dopesh pursed his lips as though he were about to kiss something. “Yes, we are all of integrity here.”

  “Thank you, Mool.” The director, a habitual fisherman who tied his own flies, who had made many a turn with waxed thread around the shanks of Tufted Mites and Red Skimmers, wound the string twice around his tea bag and squeezed out tannic acid. “What about return to the community? Have any arrangements been made?”

  Rechette launched into excited accolades for Synergy, a local halfway house and rehab program that had recently secured a sizable grant from Washington, but the director cut him off.

  “I think you’ve said enough already, Marty.”

  Rechette scanned his face for traces of suspicion or censure—there was little precedent for his going to bat for a patient in this way—but the director’s eyes were as neutral as a snapshot of topsoil.

  “I would prefer to hear what patient has to say on this subject.”

  Moistening his lips, Christo leaned forward in his chair and played straight to the director. “I’d have to say that from what I’ve heard, I’m pretty enthusiastic about the Synergy program. They stress a very supportive group environment there and I know I’m going to need a lot of help and reinforcement in the first couple of months. Another thing I like is that they have a strong vocational emphasis, and to get through to those final stages of recovery, I’ll need a steady, regimented work situation. Something I have to show up for every day, you know, something repetitive. I was thinking possibly about an electronics factory. I used to have a real flair for circuit diagrams in high school. Yeah, basically my goal is to make my life as, you know, as humdrum as possible.” He cracked his mouth and tipped his head bashfully to one side.

  Bingo. The director was smiling and twirling the edges of his beard.

  Christo thought: I’m in, three to one. Which means I’m out.

  And: These people are defenseless. If I waited six months to take them, maybe I am crazy.

  Eighteen hours after his official release, Christo appeared at Rechette’s suburban chalet with all his personal effects in a canvas sea bag. These included a memento from Harris (a cigarette lighter “which once belonged to Eddie Fisher”); two clip-on black bow ties; a personally annotated road atlas; his diploma from a mail-order locksmithing school; and a large baggie of blue Valiums. They were a kind of long-term going-away present from Dennis, the social worker upon whom Christo had prevailed to steal in installments over the last couple of months. Dennis wasn’t a total loser. He just needed friends. His mother had died over the summer in a boating accident on a private lake outside Rome.

  Rechette answered the bell in a velour pullover, designer denims and no shoes. “You never called.”

  “I couldn’t think of anything to say. Going to invite me in?”

  Rechette grabbed the sea bag and stepped back. “I was starting to think you might not show.”

  “I’m not a welsher. At least I try not to be.”

  Christo followed along to the living room. The carpeting felt like marshmallow. The decorating theme was early-to-mid 70s men’s magazine: German stereo components, half-ton glass coffee table, African bronzes and carved wooden masks. He settled into a leather-upholstered sofa and took peanuts out of one dish and a cigarette out of another.

  “Real nice layout, as they say in the crime films.”

  “You look tired. Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere. Out and around.”

  A tingle moved up Rechette’s leg, spread an insistent puddle of heat around his hips. He ran his eyes over Christo’s hooded face, the round, full arms capable of delivering blows with nonchalance, solidly wedged knuckles twisting against bone.

  “Something to drink?”

  “Whatever you’ve got.”

  Rechette poured brandy from an apothecary jar and brought the glass over on tiptoe, bending as he relinquished it to peer down Christo’s shirt.

  “You’re sleek as an otter.”

  Christo didn’t like the way Rechette was behaving in his home ballpark, all smug in his sportsclothes. His thinning brown hair was wet-combed over his forehead in shaggy Brutus bangs and he gave off a mossy vapor of expensive cologne.

  Then, for a moment, he was back in character. “If you’re going to put that down on the sofa, please use a coaster.”

  “Good liquor,” Christo said. “The first good liquor I’ve had in six months.”

  Rechette sniffed his own glass. “Didn’t Waldo sell to you?”

  “Garbage. Grapefruit wine, stuff like that.”

  “There never was anybody on the ward quite like you.” Rechette massaged the flesh over his heart. “You were a bloody master.”

  “And you’re a swell host, Marty.”

  “Come. Get yourself a refill and follow me.”

  Sliding down a narrow hallway in near darkness, Rechette led him to an airless corner room in the back of the house, with a paint-spattered floor and exposed wiring. Burlap was nailed over the windows. A mattress and corduroy pillows were against one particle-board wall. From a hatrack overhead dangled coils of nylon rope, dog leashes of various lengths, a hot water bottle. Resting on two packing crates in the middle of the floor was a movie projector aimed at a white sheet.

  “This must be the maid’s room,” Christo said.

  The soles of Rechette’s feet made a swampy noise peeling up from the floor as he moved to the projector and threaded an 8mm reel. Christo finished his brandy with one stiff-armed toss. It was showtime.

  Images fluttered aquatically over the uneven surface of the sheet. A garage. A crew-cut boy with cream-of-wheat skin chained to a grease rack. He was being flogged by a one-eared black man in a studded leather vest and matching jockstrap. Crew-cut bent over. A socket wrench handle dipped in motor oil was inserted into his rectum. Christo listened to the whirr of the tiny fan cooling the projector lamp, to the steady click-click-click of taut celluloid passing over sprockets; and Rechette fell to his knees and, clumsily, urgently, tendons distended at his neck, performed on him an act of oral tribute.

  Rechette staggered out to the bathroom to mop up the curds he had squirted inside his pants. For a moment he was inundated with an urge to flee, to break away from the sadly trite cycle of his cravings. He flushed his burning eyes with cold water. When he came back, he looked ten years older than when he’d left.

  “King hell, Marty. You look like you need a doctor.” Christo had not moved, sat oozing out of his open fly, knees drawn up, head tilted back against the wall.

  “Tell me what you see,” Rechette croaked, tugging at his belt loops.

  “I had a cousin back home who was a cheerleader,” Christo ad-libbed. “She was just like a painting in her pleated skirt and the little sneakers with the pompom socks. Sweet kid, a bit erratic maybe, but then she only really came to life during football season. Used to practice her cheers in the middle of the night: ‘Muscle is muscle and bone is bone, come on, Southern, push it into the zone.’ Senior year was very tough on her. Kind of the last waltz, you know? On the bus coming back from the last away game, a six to three win over Collard Polytechnic in a driving rain, she blew the entire first string, offense and defense, and a few of the subs as well. They had to take her to the hospital and pump her stomach.”

  Rechette had come toward him on hands and knees and was now rubbing his cheek against the instep of Christo’s left shoe. Christo sighed, a long, tired sigh with a whistle at the end, and clanked the rim of the empty glass on his teeth.

  “Night of the long jives,” he said to no one in particular.

  For as long as he could, Christo camped out at the Rechette home, sitting tight and fattening himself up. He had his own room with a door that locked from the inside and nothing to do but sleep, eat a
nd work on his juggling. He needed time to depressurize before going back on the game. Casually he drifted through the role of houseboy, with its code of laconic passivity, but it was Rechette who did all the chores, cooking the meals, washing the clothes, emptying the ashtrays. The doctor’s desire to serve was unceasing. So were his advances, but he seemed to bask in placid rejections, to relish the indifference showered upon him.

  Christo was, however, willing to fulfill his need for mental stimulation and so invented a compliant and correlative past, spinning out anecdotes of a career as a male hustler in Dallas and New Orleans. Gulping vodka and water, Rechette would intersperse hints and clues in a husky drawl—his approximation of black-mirrored boudoir enticement, of the silver screen lovelies from thirty years ago—guiding these vignettes toward his own lust points. The poetry of pain and malevolence. When the heat had risen irreparably and Rechette was knee-deep in the lava of his mind, he would scuttle across the room and nuzzle Christo’s groin like a bloodhound. Christo might permit a few minutes agitation of his flaccid penis before shoving him away.

  “You just don’t do anything for me,” he would say, then open a magazine or fix himself a load of pasta with grated cheese.

  Ever ready to expand his powers of falsification, Christo withdrew to his room at night to pore over psychiatric bulletins, drug company monographs and the proceedings of various clinical symposia. Additionally, he canvassed the several periodicals to which Rechette subscribed concerning gourmet wine and food. It was debatable to what future use a knowledge of Breton cheeses or the proper technique for poaching quenelles might be put, but Christo did not like to impose limits on his creativity.

  Often, Rechette would interrupt these study sessions by scratching at the locked door and begging for attention.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Go ahead. I can hear you.”