A long silence and then, “So what do you want to know? I don’t know shit about Dodo’s business, you know?”
“He ever mention a guy named Wilson?”
“Wilson? No, not that I heard.”
“How about Jack. Big guy, blond hair like a surfer, drives a silver Lexus?”
“Oh, yeah, Jack?him I know. He came by, picked up Dodo a couple of times.”
“Good. You want me to take the cuffs off?” She nodded, and he did. Some further questioning and it became clear that she was telling the truth. She could connect her boyfriend with Jack Wilson, but that was all.
Paz said, “Could we check out his stuff?”
She nodded glumly and led them to a bedroom, rubbing her wrists.
The room was small and paneled in cheap imitation white pine. It contained a bed, unmade, a dresser, a bedside table, a TV on a metal stand, a color reproduction of Jesus, framed, and a large closet with mirrored doors. The two cops searched the place carefully, going through the pockets of all the clothes and checking the undersides as well as the insides of the bureau drawers. They took their time; the woman got bored. She asked, “Can I go back and watch my program?”
“Yeah, go,” said Paz, and then, “Hey, wait: what’s this hole in the paneling from?”
“Oh, that’s from Dodo. He used to hit the wall when he got mad. He was going to get it fixed.”
Paz brought his face close to the wall, then took a penlight out of his pocket and shone it into the space between the walls. His arm disappeared into the void up to the shoulder, and when it came out there was a white garment in his hand. It was a waiter’s monkey jacket with the seal of the Trianon Hotel on the left breast and a plastic name-plate with LUIS stamped on it on the right. There was also a small, dark brown stain on the right cuff.
Lorna has been feeling out of sorts for a week or so and thinks she may be coming down with something. Also, she does not know whether she is falling in love with Jimmy Paz, and so she has decided not to think about it. Low key, take it easy is her current mantra. Conversations with Sheryl Waits, which have heretofore acted as the analytical retort of her emotional life, have proven unsatisfactory. She does not seem to want advice or a sympathetic ear. Sheryl is too pressing, too avid for this to be a success, or rather a success in Sheryl’s terms. Give Sheryl any encouragement at all and she is offering consumer reports on bridal salons. Lorna hasn’t mentioned Paz at all to Betsy Newhouse, whose interest in Lorna’s emotional life is limited to a casual “getting any yet?” whenever they meet. She has twice turned down invitations from Betsy to go out with the less attractive pal of one of Betsy’s current squeezes, and this has caused remarks and comments about keeping a stock of new batteries for the vibrator.
In fact, Lorna has not gotten any from Paz. She has received three fairly chaste if sincere kisses from the man, one on each of their three dates: the beach outing, a dinner at a Chinese-Cuban restaurant, and an evening of dancing. All of these have been pleasant, but no one is talking about buying a ring. She wonders sometimes if he likes her at all, and as soon as this thought crosses her mind, well-oiled valves open automatically and her mental pool fills with all the reasons why Jimmy Paz is not quite suitable. A high school graduate? Please! Lorna has an album of set pieces in her mind representing mating satisfaction. She wishes to admire his brains and his career, with, naturally, equal respect forher career; she wishes masterly decisions to be made as to lifestyle, vacations, dwellings, but with due consideration of her tastes; she wishes a healthy sexual relationship, in which he will take the lead but not do anything perverse or disturbing; she wishes to be carried away but also to stay in more or less the same place; she wishes for coziness and comfort, doing theTimes crossword puzzle on Sundays, but also for unpredictability and excitement; she wants fidelity, but not tedium.
Yes, Paz comes up short in many of these areas. She can’t imagine him doing theTimes crossword puzzle. Or sitting through the ballet, not that she frequents the ballet, but still…. And then there is the whole gun and violence thing, which is faintly disgusting, and she is not sure she will ever be able to expunge from her mind the sight of him actually slaying a human being right there in front of her house, never mind that he probably saved her life.
On the other hand…there is the memory of his hands on her body, and his body, its controlled stillness, the violence perfectly contained. She considers the Zen-like simplicity of his life. She reflects on how many of the men she has been with have been putterers, nudges, how Rat Howie had to have a particular brand of wood-strawberry preserves, or he couldn’t eat breakfast, how often he would send food back to the restaurant kitchen with elaborate directions for the chef, and the whole wine thing, the yacht thing…although he did finish the SundayTimes in less than half an hour, and Paz’s eyes, she had never seen eyes like that on a man, interested eyes, interested inher, and then a guilty thought but no less real for that, an end to a certain kind of liberal naggery, because if your man was black then that was proof, wasn’t it? Yes, probably he didn’t like her that much, but then hehad called her three times in one week, although that might have been cultivation for business purposes, but…or maybe she was simply going crazy, sinking into the early stages of erotomania, she’d end up parked outside his house slashing the tires of his real girlfriend’s car….
She laughs out loud, since if she is crazy she is certainly in the right place. Many of the people in the locked-ward dayroom would, like her, be conversing with the unseen (but out loud) were they not stupefied with drugs. Or nearly so: a big white man looms over her, about forty, ginger hair in outflung wisps like a circus clown’s. On his doughy face he wears the tight-lipped staring visage of the paranoid psychotic. “Are you laughing at me?” he demands.
Professional calm kicks in; this guy needs to have his meds cranked up a little, she reflects automatically, and puts on her bland-but-caring expression.
“Not at all,” she replies. “I just thought of something funny.”
“Liar,” he says in a hoarse whisper, but she slips past him and notes that the powerful Darryla and Ferio, the dayroom orderly, have picked up on the interaction. They begin to drift a little closer to the big man. Not her problem in any case.
She spots Emmylou off by herself in a corner, scribbling away in one of her school notebooks. When Lorna greets her she looks up, startled, like someone who has just awakened, and when she sees who it is, out comes her church-painting smile.
“I see you’re still writing.”
“Yes. It’s an interesting process. Painful, but interesting.”
“Why painful?” Lorna pulls up a plastic chair and sits facing her. She is a little frightened, she finds; she has not quite extinguished the memory of what she saw the last time, what appeared before the woman’s seizure. She hopes this session will involve only psychology and that she can steer the discussion away from the weird stuff.
“Inhabiting the former self,” Emmylou says. “Recollecting feelings I had, seeing things through my former eyes. I wish I was a better writer, but then I think, no, it’s a confession, not a novel, so I have to leave out most of the stuff that sets up what I was feeling at the time, people mostly, but also the air of a place, the essence of the other people, the way Flaubert and Dickens do. I’m afraid it makes pretty dull reading. Although I have to believe the truth can’t be dull, since it partakes of God. I just pray I can make myself do it. I finished another book. Would you like to take it?”
Lorna takes the proffered notebook and says, “I don’t think you have to worry about your writing. It’s very clear and vivid and not dull at all. And conscious. It’s really amazing, considering…”
“That I have no formal education? Higher education. Plenty of the lower kind, though.”
“Yes, and it’s remarkable that you’re able to write about that material so…dispassionately,” Lorna says. “Most people, it would take years of therapy to be able to confront all of that abuse, but you seem to ha
ve no trouble. That speaks to a lot of psychological toughness. It’s a good sign.”
“Not that good, since I seem to be locked in the loony bin.”
“Well, clearly you do have some problems. My God, who wouldn’t after what you’ve been through?”
The woman gives Lorna one of those searching, discomforting looks. She says, “Dr. Wise, I know you want to help me and I appreciate it, but we might be getting ourselves all crosswise, if you’re looking at my life from that point of view. You’re thinking of all the bad things that happened to me as traumas, leaving psychological scars that grew into a mental disease, which you think I have. I look at them as afflictions sent by God to attract my attention to him. Can I tell you about a dream I had once?”
“Yes, of course, but I’d like to continue our session in the therapy room.”
“Oh, this won’t take but a minute,” Emmylou replies, and her gaze shifts away from Lorna’s face. Lorna follows the look and sees the big man who confronted her in the hallway standing by one of a row of folding wooden bridge tables set up for card playing and the working of jigsaw puzzles. The man is standing over a small woman working a puzzle. His shoulders are hunched and his fists are clenched. Darryla and Ferio are standing a dozen feet from him, watching.
“I dreamed I was getting a guided tour of heaven?” Emmylou says. “I was wearing a jumpsuit and a hard hat and my tour guide, he was an angel, of course, but he looked just like a regular man, dressed the same as I was, and we were in this giant building, kind of an industrial shed like in those boring old movies they used to show us in high school, how they make paper or ice cream. And there was this big huge machine in it, whirring and clanking away, and there was a conveyor belt coming out of one end of it, and on the conveyor belt were rows of golden bricks, but softer: they looked like giant Twinkies, row after row of them, and when they got to the end of the conveyor belt they fell off of it. I looked to see where they were falling to and I saw that there was a big hole in the floor there and through it I could see clouds and blue sky and the earth far below. I asked the guide what the Twinkie things were, and he said they were blessings, and I remember thinking, in the dream, how marvelous is the Lord showering all these blessings down on us. Then we moved on, across an alley and into another big huge shed with the same kind of machine cranking away, the same conveyor belt, the same giant Twinkies falling down, and I said to the guide, ‘Oh, these are more blessings,’ and he said, ‘No, those are afflictions,’ and I said, ‘Oh, but they look just the same as the blessings,’ and he said, ‘Theyare the same!’ Excuse me…”
Emmylou rises while Lorna sits there dumbfounded a little by what she has just heard, and then the dayroom is shaken by a roar. “I knew it! I knew it!” shouts the big undermedicated psychotic, and now he has pushed over the jigsaw lady and snatched up the folding table, scattering like snow the tiny bits of a view of Mount Shasta. He holds the table over his head, bellowing, and smashes it down on the floor. Darryla and Ferio close in warily, Darryla pressing some kind of electronic device as she does so. The man smashes the table down again, and this time the wood shatters and he is swinging one of the table legs, which has a long, sharp screw and jagged splinters sticking out of one end of it. The man is now bellowing in tongues, incomprehensible. The table leg whirs like a fan as he swings it around his head. Now his direst paranoid fantasy becomes flesh as half a dozen orderlies and nurses rush into the dayroom. Theyare all out to get him!
Darryla talks soothingly as Ferio circles around to get behind the madman, but the madman sees him and strikes at his head with his club, and Ferio goes down with a cry, holding his forearm, grimacing in pain. He is gushing blood from a long cut on the top of his skull. Darryla rushes the patient like a linebacker, hitting him in a low tackle, and he goes over onto his back, striking repeatedly at Darryla with the butt of the table leg. One blow connects with her skull and she rolls off him, stunned.
Now the rest of the inmates have joined the fun, screaming, tossing things around, getting into fights and in the way of the reinforcements. Lorna is frozen in place, standing by her chair. She sees the madman and his blood-spattered club, he is on all fours now, roaring like a bear, and there is Darryla, blood pouring from a wound in her temple, trying to rise. Ferio is struggling to his feet, but it is clear that his arm is useless.
And suddenly Emmylou Dideroff is crouching in front of the madman. Lorna sees her mouth moving. Saliva drips from the madman’s mouth. Emmylou places a hand on either side of the man’s face, and then from his open mouth issues a sound Lorna has never imagined coming from the vocal machinery of a human being, a roar-scream-howl-sob of such intensity and pitch that for an instant everything in the room seems to freeze.
Emmylou falls away from him, down on her back, Lorna can hear above all the other racket the clunk of her skull against the linoleum, and she goes into what looks like a grand mal seizure. Lorna starts moving now, but Darryla is there before her, fitting the padded tongue-depressor she always carries into Emmylou’s champing frothing mouth. A drop of blood falls from Darryla’s head onto Emmylou’s forehead. Lorna swallows, fearing that she is going to faint.
Meanwhile, the psychotic is swarmed by many orderlies, although he has quite ceased to struggle. Lorna happens to look at his face and sees that it is the face of a confused man, a fellow caught in an embarrassing situation that he hopes will soon resolve itself, but the madness has gone from his eyes. Nevertheless, a hypo is slammed into his butt, a gurney is fetched, and he is strapped down to it and rolled away.
They shoot up Emmylou as well, and the spasms disappear into deep sleep. After she too is rolled off on her gurney, Lorna finds that her limbs are trembling uncontrollably. Instructed by the movies that violence is of long duration, balletic, and easily followed, she is unprepared for the way it really is. From the first psychotic roar to the takedown, perhaps forty seconds have elapsed. A heavy hand lands on her shoulder and presses her into a chair. “You okay, dear heart?” asks Darryla. “Look at me. You all right?”
Darryla is holding a gauze pad to her own temple. It is soaked in blood, as is the front of her green scrubs. Lorna locks eyes with the nurse, nods, and then a wave of nausea rises, with cold sweat breaking over her face. She drops her head between her knees until the worst passes.
“Wow, I wasn’t ready for that,” she says. “How areyou?”
“Oh, I’ll survive,” the nurse replies, and her face creases up in a grin. “I been cut, bruised, abused, and misused, dear heart. Just another day on the lock ward.”
“I don’t think so,” says Lorna. “What happened? Who was that man?”
“Oh, Horace Masefield? Horace killed his wife some years ago, mashed her up with a meat cleaver. It was a big deal on the TV, the Hialeah Hacker. He did five years up in Chattahoochee, and he got out all cured of his mental disease, and then he married a woman who probably didn’t pay much attention to the local news and guess what? He used a hatchet this time, which is why he’s here. He’s carrying a load of Haldol that’d stun a Brahma bull, but like you just saw, he still got his attitude going.”
“But whathappened, Darryla?”
“Oh, that. Well, dear heart, I got myPDR, and myDSM, and I attend the Sunset Park A.M.E. church on Sundays, and that all’s what I believe in. If we was living in Bible times, I’d say we just saw an unclean spirit driven out, but that ain’t what I’m going to put down on my violent incident report form. Uh-uh!”
Now a searching professional look. “You sure you’re okay? You want some water? A Valium?” Lorna tells her no; with a final grin and a hug, Darryla lumbers off to her duties.
Emmylou’s notebook is still clutched under Lorna’s arm. She gathers up her stuff and the bag that Emmylou has left, and drops this last off at the nurses’ station on her way off the ward. As usual, she has a review session scheduled with Mickey Lopez, who, the moment she walks into his office, asks, “What happened?”
She collapses into a chair and has
a little weep, which she thinks is allowable in the circumstances, and after some heavy Kleenex work she describes the events in the dayroom, but she cannot bring herself to convey the part that Emmylou Dideroff played. Or seemed to play, for by now the concrete sense memory of what she saw has fought against her belief system and her training, and has predictably tossed in the towel. Itcould not have happened like that, thereforedid not. She says instead that their patient had another epileptic fit in response to the violence, and Mickey nods sagely and says that such a thing is not unusual and actually a confirmation that there is a physical trauma at the root of Emmylou’s problems. They agree that an MRI scan is warranted and discuss for some time how this is to be paid for under the labyrinthine budgetary relationships among the university, the hospital, the county, and Medicaid.
Now she summarizes the information in the first notebook and then adds the material from the morning session. She has saved the dream, the best part, for last. Mickey focuses on this description, nodding, making encouraging sounds. This is, after all, his meat. He asks, “So, what do you make of this?”
“A coping mechanism? She can’t really admit the emotional effect of the trauma she was subjected to, so she lays it off on the will of God. She’s got guilt feelings too about the death of her mother and the little boy, so she…so if blessings and afflictions are really the same thing, she can resolve both the guilt and the trauma. She’s suffered, she caused suffering, but it balances out, and it’s all God’s fault anyway.”
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