The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  The wards abounded with fractured foundations, broken windows, and safety nets lashed to stonework facades in danger of collapse. I saw no signs of air conditioning, and could only imagine the ancient cellar furnaces straining to black-magic wisps of heat. That day, a ward called Cicero had gone dark from electrical outage, and by listening to orderlies luxuriating over cigarettes, I surmised it a recurrent mishap. Only one patient during that first amble was alert enough to notice my discolored flesh. Not a bad start, thought I, until she pointed at my face and began honking like a klaxon.

  I ducked into a ward called Locke and crossed a footprinted foyer toward a dayhall bombinating with the gen-pop disturbed. The place smelled of nicotine, coffee, and urine, and the concrete surfaces garbled the gibber of the TV, which each patient interpreted through her or his own psychotropic smog. Others stretched their plastic-braceleted arms across board games with titles that seemed sarcastic: Monopoly (these cranks didn’t have a cent), Clue (they had even fewer of these), and Trivial Pursuit (what other kind of pursuit could they take?).

  The most mystifying game was one called, rather pointedly, Life, in which a wheel of fortune controlled the fate of you and your loved ones, denoted by a tiny plastic station wagon filled with little pink and blue pegs. Fake money was doled out willy-nilly as you drove onto spaces administering outrageous turns of fate (“Win photography contest. Collect $10,000.”), not one of which was disfigurement or death. On the other hand—no death? Perhaps this candy-colored distraction had been made just for me.

  Soon, though, I edged away along the room’s perimeter, as eager to find the boy as I was wary of a Life player who looked agitated near to explosion. While most Bear Claw residents were allowed to wear their own clothing, clients with a history of violence, I realized, were identifiable by the very same jumpsuit I’d been issued.

  Before I could achieve a thing, Plato Manor’s cupola bell gonged nine times, and those enslaved by nine-a.m. meds—and that was a lot of them—lumbered toward assigned dispensaries. I consulted my schedule and determined that the bells tolled for me as well: I was to report to Descartes for “Group Analytic.” I disliked the sound of it, but truancy might hasten a Back Ward homecoming, if not introduction to the Thunder Room, so I headed outdoors, found Descartes straight across the courtyard, tracked down room 60, and entered to the dire display of twelve people sitting in a chair circle. The leader of this clique was quite recognizable by a lambda of white tape across his nose.

  “Mr. Zipp.” Dr. Dobbin’s voice had gone nasal. “Please join us.”

  Instinct told me to run, preferably while screaming, but I exacted control of my corpse and slouched toward the closest empty chair. Before I could sit, a black woman in the adjacent chair shielded it with a tattooed arm.

  “The flying fuck? That’s Farm Boy’s seat!”

  “Pardon?” asked I.

  “Pardon yourself, fuckling. I said, that seat belongs to Farm Boy. We been saving it.”

  Her lips curled back from her teeth; the front two were gold. Whether I should have knocked them out of her head was an academic question; as I’ve indicated, all such instincts had vacated.

  “There’s another seat over there,” said Dobbin.

  This chair also had its defenders, though they confined their objections to nose wrinklings at my scent. Given such a welcome, I would have rather stared at the floor for the duration of the two-hour caucus, but even that, worried I, would exacerbate attention upon me. I braced myself and surveyed the psychotic circle.

  I wish I could introduce the regulars of A.M. Analytic with a pride equal to that with which I presented my Third Battalion. But no nation wished to claim these rattled souls; they were not the soldiers but the casualties. During my time at Bear Claw, group members came and went, most of them as normal as Shirley White, middle-class folk who’d become sad, or confused, or mixed-up, and would spend six days, or six weeks, or six months circling the drain with us before scrabbling free, some even able to avoid the recidivism that brought others back, their eyes darting in fear at those whose presence in the room never changed.

  These constants included Bobbi, a compulsive eater whose vacillating weight had left her with a flexuous rubber-band body, and whose every remark came scripted from Overeaters Anonymous, Weight Watchers, Weigh of Life, or other cabals inside whose philosophies she’d snuggled. Chad was an ex-stockbroker who still wore pinstriped shirts and suspenders and, due to his Wall Street ulcer, chewed antacid tablets into a powdery bolus past which he spoke circular drivel at a day-trader clip: “That’s a nice watch. I once watched a movie called Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I can show you a picture of my sister.” Lucky was an athletic buck who wore a 1920s leather football helmet, without which he’d keep scratching a specific itch, day or night, awake or asleep, that he described as being on the inside of his head. Before Bear Claw, he’d scratched through his skull and into his brain. Skin grafts had covered the hole for a time, until green goo in his hair had revealed that he’d done it again.

  Finally there was Jackie, the gold-toothed gang member (as she liked to remind us) who’d switchbladed thirty or forty or fifty people (the number kept rising) in storied skid-row rumbles before being booked into “all the best fatherfucking bughouses in the brotherfucking world,” which (you guessed it) she loved to tabulate: “Two years in Johnson fucking Square, six months at Three Pines fucking Behavioral, eighteen months at Gareth fucking Farms. I got bitches everywhere!” Jackie was covered with lousy tattoos, the boldest of which was across her forehead in big block letters: MAD. Had Jackie not lost her shit, she would have made a fine Black Panther. The dissolution of that estimable party, suspected I, had hastened the rise of the Crips, Bloods, and Vice Lords, about whom Jackie could not stop enthusing.

  During a lull in her rants, Dobbin addressed me.

  “Wouldn’t you like to tell everyone who you are?”

  The last thing I’d come to Bear Claw to do was talk.

  “I’ll have to read your admission report, then. You might find it embarrassing.”

  I slid low in my chair like the recalcitrant I was.

  Dobbin sighed and pulled the form from a folder.

  “‘Frank Zipp. Admitted February 12, 1985. Patient alternates catatonia and combativeness. Patient resists interview, and as such, suicidal and homicidal ideation not yet assessed. Patient’s affect is labile and inappropriate. Patient exhibits curious ego-dystonia and manic-depressive swings. Patient’s verbal skills are high and support delusions of grandeur in which Patient inserts himself into historical situations. Patient’s motor activity is good despite obvious physical challenges. Suggested psychopharmacology indicated below.’”

  Dobbin pulled at his mustache curls. “Would you agree with that assessment, Frank?”

  I shrugged. “They left out my devilish good looks.”

  Jackie slapped the MAD on her forehead. “Oh, damn! Weirdo One-Arm’s crazier than me!”

  Jackie, of course, had been the one to ban me from Farm Boy’s chair. Whoever he was, she loved him with a mother’s fire, and after my introductory shaming, discussion swerved toward this missing character. Even the most intransigent voiced concern regarding Farm Boy’s absence from A.M. Analytic and, when Dobbin declined to comment, talk spiraled into gossip:

  “I heard he tried to cut open his head once.”

  “That’s nothing—I heard he ate his dad.”

  Jackie told them she’d cut out their wagging tongues if they said one more bad word about her favorite brotherfucker in this whole fatherfucking joint. This was a violent threat, and Dobbin, checking his watch (“That’s a nice watch,” chanted Chad. “I once watched a movie called Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”), was obligated to give Jackie a warning, though a half-hearted one. Group therapy, it seemed clear, had been forced upon Bear Claw’s staff by Scrimm’s despised “do-gooders”; Dobbin was there for no nobler reason than that he wished to keep getting paid.

  I sank even lower, bl
issfully ignored and feeling the warmth of having made a correct decision. Though I’d traveled far and wide, never had I seen people of such diverse backgrounds—from ghetto gutter to Wall Street penthouse—stand upon equal, if aquiver, footing. We were the mad, but we’d claimed a cozy corner in that larger, colder asylum called the United States of America. Asylum. I had to agree with Scrimm that it was a shame the word had been stricken, for asylum was just what I needed.

  V.

  KANT, MY HOME FOR THE foreseeable future, was the “acute admissions ward,” where Bear Claw’s most afflicted were stabilized before (if ever) being transferred to less restrictive wards. Patients in Kant were “sectioned”—code for “legally detained”—which allowed Bear Claw to keep them under lock, key, and steel-reticulated plastic windows, which carved sunbeams into so many millions of spades that one began to doubt one’s own vision.

  An orderly collared me ten seconds after I entered, checked my papers, and steered me to room 17 on the second floor. I considered thanking him by name, but he wore no name tag, for name tags, as you know, have sharp pins. My room was the jail cell I’d expected. There was a bed, though it lacked headboard, footboard, or legs; there were shelves, though they were built into the walls; and there were two windows, one of which looked out across northern woods and the other of which was built into my door for the pleasure of voyeur staff.

  It took but a few hours to learn the routine. A buzzer announced mealtimes, which I was required to attend to feign consumption while other drugged muddlers dribbled milk from benumbed lips. Medications were dispensed according to one’s personal schedule, and should you fail to show, mental hygiene assistants would track you down and force the issue. Doors were locked at eight, lights went out at ten. Some patients’ days were active with engagement (disciplinary meetings, counseling events, behavioral tests), all of which could be skirted if you knew how to sidestep attention. Reader, I know that restraint isn’t my forte. Nevertheless, I redoubled my redoubts.

  Kant’s structural difference from a prison was interior walls no thicker than any turn-of-the-century domicile; hearing through them was easier than in the Back Ward, where padding had swaddled every syllable. Though I hadn’t my Excelsior, I’d grown adept at estimating the hour. It was midnight when, stretched upon my bed, I heard the first whispered words of the patient in room 18.

  “No, no—not here. There’s a window in the door. Jesus, they’ll see you.”

  I sat upright, my head eclipsing moonlight. Bear Claw was crevassed with holes into which one might be stuffed, and yet the boy had been dropped into my lap! I scrambled from bed, eager to restart my repentance, and rested my forehead against the cold cement wall.

  “Boy. It is I. Your neighbor from the Back Ward.”

  His reply to Jesus Christ cut off. I smiled in anticipation of hearing a smile in his voice, but a minute passed without satisfaction.

  “It was but days ago,” prodded I. “We spoke of Knight Rider. Surely you remember? Each night when you spoke to Jesus, I endeavored to inspirit you with—”

  “I do not,” hissed he, “speak to Jesus.”

  It stung, this response, but the logic of it permeated. The Back Ward had been all right for me, but isolation was torture to a living human, and if reports surfaced that the boy in Kant-18 was carrying on with his invisible messiah, it might land him back into a padded room. I nodded, though he could not see it. The boy’s trust was all I wanted, so that, carefully, oh so carefully, I could help pull him away from the wraith that seemed to cause him so much pain.

  “As you wish,” said I. “Say, my name is Frank Zipp. What is yours?”

  Again, silence. Had he, like I, permitted people to inch toward his heart, only to ruin them? I affected a jocund chuckle.

  “I cannot call you ‘boy’ ad infinitum, can I?”

  He evidently believed that I could. No further words were shared that night, and when Jesus’s solicitations grew too oppressive to ignore, the boy buried his face into his pillow to mute his moaned responses. At length I returned to bed, disheartened. Somewhere in Berlin, or Kansas, or outer space, had I lost my last smidgen of human touch?

  Lights popped on at six. Doors unlocked at six fifteen. Breakfast buzzers sounded at six thirty. Having never slept to begin with, I sprang from my cell, already jumpsuited, and waited for the boy to make his exit. My predator crouch, however, caught the eye of an orderly, who spun his arms like a third-base coach at the khaki herd shambling toward the odor of undercooked eggs. I told myself to be patient and comply; neither the boy nor I were going anywhere soon.

  Patience, though, proved superfluous. When A.M. Analytic rolled around, Farm Boy’s chair, which Jackie had scooted closer to her own, was occupied. The group welcomed him back as gingerly as one hand-feeds a skittish dog. Jackie nodded approval, her MAD tattoo bobbing, though her body, as ever, was coiled for defense. Dobbin asked Farm Boy if it wasn’t polite to say something back, at which Farm Boy blushed and mumbled the only word he said all session: “Thanks.”

  It was the only word I needed to make a positive ID: “The boy” and “Farm Boy” were one and the same. As I didn’t speak aloud, he hadn’t the chance opportunity to place me, and of that I took advantage by gawking. How to reconcile the mewling child of my mind’s eye with this considerably larger figure? Even horribly slouched, his six-foot-three height was obvious, though he couldn’t have weighed over one twenty. He was, I would come to learn, twenty-three years old, though his dodging eyes and stooped shoulders remained those of a kid straining to accept a world where the punishments of adults shot like bolts from the blue.

  Ry Burke was his name, and when I heard he was from Iowa—Church’s hinterland home—I felt a Jackie-like upsurge of protectiveness. The next group discussion, to Ry’s horror, readjudicated snippets of his personal history. He’d had some sort of prickly upbringing and several years prior had suffered a psychotic break bad enough to get him traded across a series of mental hospitals, none of which his single-mothered family could afford, hence his being dumped into the Bear Claw trough. His particular madness took the shape of a triad of demons he believed were in the midst of manifesting for the third (and final) time in his life. The first, a talking teddy bear named Mr. Furrington, had come and gone; the second was occurring right now in the form of Jesus Christ; but it was the arrival of the third demon, whose name Ry would not share, that he feared would force him to murder.

  Even by A.M. Analytic standards it was batty, and so the regulars rallied around Ry’s more identifiable ordeal: his regimen of antipsychotics, which quacks like Dobbin kept shuffling to see if a new cocktail could improve upon a previous—and if the boy’s mind was bulldozed along the way, well, these things do happen. Ry, too, had been started, long ago, on Moban, but when that had failed to chain his demons, what had followed were Haldol injections and five thousand milligrams of Thorazine a day—a dosage, decried the group, that would’ve calmed a pig on a killing floor. Yet calm Ry it had not, thus the Elavil, Mellaril, Navane, Prolixin, Sinequan, Stelazine, and Taractan, all of which, in less than five years, had turned our strong, healthy Farm Boy into a gaunt, enfeebled wretch.

  Ry tolerated the group’s restive bickerings, blubbery admissions, and inchoate tirades for one week before again dropping out, this time for being too doped up to get out of bed. I glimpsed his inert, waxen face when orderlies trucked food into Kant-18 or bedpans out. He still spoke to Jesus at night, but his voice was too airy for me to hear and his ears deaf to anything I said. It wasn’t until late June that Dobbin shuffled Ry’s meds yet again. From what I’d come to learn, this often provoked a short period of clarity. I’d need to move fast.

  After three days of failed attempts to corner Ry, a man’s morning seizure drew nurses and assistants long enough for me to trail Ry to the men’s room, an odiferous coop greened by the ivy choking the window mesh. There was a mirror behind Plexi, a single doorless stall, and three urinals divided by waist-high barriers. One urinal�
��s water was still swirling, and Ry, in a touching display of manners, stood at a rust-striped sink, washing his hands. That is inaccurate; he was washing his palms, for all ten of his fingertips had been swaddled in cotton and wrapped in medical tape.

  He took a step away upon seeing me, backing into a cupboard almost identical to Leather’s Revelation Almanac, except instead of a jar of flesh, each small shelf contained a toothbrush. Each handle was affixed with a patient’s name, which coincided with a labeled peg, so that each night all of them could be counted. Toothbrushes could be whittled, and whittled objects could stab.

  “You’re in Group,” stated he.

  “Yes. And my room is next to yours.”

  He stared at the moldy tiles, the pink of his neck pouring into his cheeks.

  “Ask for a different one,” murmured he.

  “Say again?”

  “I’m loud. At night. You should ask for a different room.”

  “Bosh. I do not sleep much myself.”

  His head shot back up, eyes pleading. “Please. We shouldn’t be talking.”

  “I have noticed you aren’t much of a mingler.”

  “So? Neither are you. You never talk at all in Group.”

  “I am choosy with whom I parley.”

  “Choose someone else.” He leaned his beet-colored face closer and whispered. “He’ll hear. Then he’ll come. He doesn’t like me knowing people.”

  I donned a lighthearted smile. “I was given to believe that crackpots thought they were Jesus, not merely spoke to Jesus.”