by C. P. Boyko
The words “manic-depressive” sank into her like a stain setting into a tablecloth. Disparate parts of herself came together; old beliefs and memories reorganized themselves around this magical phrase like iron filings around a magnet. Before now, she had had to rely, when telling the story of her father, on homely psychologisms like “abrasive,” “unreliable,” “arrogant,” “obnoxious,” “inconsiderate,” “sexist,” “self-absorbed,” “hard to get along with.” Now she saw how all these traits could be—in fact, had been all along—subsumed under the one precise, unemotional, clinical term. The reason no one had ever been able to get along with goddamn J. Jerome Singleton was that he was crazy—really, honestly crazy.
Take for instance that preposterous family myth that she had been his favorite. All her brothers remembered were the times he had shown an interest in her, the times he called her from the road, the times he inveigled her into coming to Chicago, Boston, New York on the train to visit him. What they forgot, or had never seen, was how quickly Jerome’s fatherly moods passed, how often she would find herself alone on some empty station platform or cooling her heels in some extravagant hotel room, a thirteen-year-old girl left to her own devices in a huge alien city. If he never invited Doug or Aaron or Tom, he also never abandoned them.
She had never understood these sudden inexplicable changes of heart of his. So many years she had wasted trying to figure out if her father loved her, hated her, or was simply indifferent. Now at last she saw that all of these had been true—in succession. “Manic depression” suggested to her exactly this changeability, this oscillation between extremes. It made sense. Her father was a manic-depressive. She heard herself saying it, wryly or matter-of-factly, but always without self-pity: My father was a manic-depressive. He hugged me and pushed me away. He called me to him, then ran off. He gave me a piano but left the lessons to me; and he never came to the recitals. (He bought Tom a car, but only after he’d enrolled Tom in a mechanic’s course!) When I wanted to build a kite, he ordered the kit, lent me his tools and his workshop (which the boys weren’t allowed to use—too dangerous!); then, on the day we were supposed to launch it, he disappeared. That is how I see him: encouraging me, even running alongside me; then, suddenly, gone. And I am alone, left holding the string. I was his favorite, and he didn’t give a damn about me. He was fickle. He was flighty. He was manic-depressive.
The ringing phone brought her out of her reverie, but she did not pick up. Instead she went for a walk. On West 68th she saw an old man in a bright green sport coat coming towards her, rubbing his hands and grimacing with self-importance, his tongue between his teeth—and she was thrown back thirty years to the day she’d crossed the street to avoid him.
She was on her way to school; she didn’t know he was back in town; he hadn’t been home in months. For some reason, she pretended she didn’t see him. She crossed the street. She was twelve and she had snubbed her own father.
At least, she’d always assumed she had. Now she saw another possibility: she had been scared of him. And she had been right to be scared. For he was crazy. He had always been crazy.
But the man on West 68th Street was not her father. In fact, he was not even holding his tongue between his teeth; he just had large lips.
When she got home she took the phone off the hook. Elroy seemed as trivial as a nightmare on waking. Subsumed by her past, she could not remember how any part of him connected to any part of her.
But the next morning, with two days before Carl was due to return, she put the receiver back on the cradle, telling herself that she was not committing herself to anything.
Singleton did not know where he was or who these people were, but he could see that they were only doing their jobs. He understood that he had been gripped by the cogs of some vast machine, that he was passing through the works of some immense bureaucracy; and his admiration for large, inexorable organizations (which reminded him of his factories), coupled with his dread of having his memory lapses detected, persuaded him to keep quiet for the time being. For about twenty-four hours he let himself be carried along like a cracker on a conveyer belt. Then character reasserted itself.
Identity is memory; and if we believe the latest theories of the psychologists, memory is stored in the connections between brain cells. Thus, for a memory to become established, to become part of ourselves, it must find connections to other parts of ourselves. New thoughts, new experiences, new ideas must find echoes already in us, if they are to be entertained, felt, or believed. This takes time. New memories establish themselves slowly, like spreading stains—or like strangers settling in to a new town.
This is why, as we age and our minds deteriorate, new experience loses its capacity to impress itself on us, and why our distant youth begins to seem more vivid than what we did yesterday, last week, or last year. Old memories are like tomato plants: they have many roots.
Sometimes this trend is more pronounced; sometimes it is quite catastrophic. Sometimes the last year, or the last five or ten or twenty years of our lives, evaporate altogether, while the rain of new experience, of present day-to-day existence, dwindles to a faint drizzle, which scarcely dimples the face of the water; and, with so little downward force to oppose them, the deepest currents rise to the surface. Then the past grips us, while the present becomes shadowy and unreal. When today’s events do manage to pierce the bubbling upsurge of ages past, they reach us faintly, as if from a great distance, and often in isolation, untethered to other memories—just the way, in fact, that memories of our distant childhood reach most of us in midlife. This curious inversion sometimes leads to the mistaken belief that the recent past is ancient history, and vice versa.
This explains, for example, why Singleton wrongly placed the memory of his missing wallet in the distant past, when in fact it had occurred only a few days earlier. But it also explains why, fifteen years after Singleton had returned home to his family, fifteen years after he had retired from the active life of a manufacturing magnate, he began suddenly to revert to his former self. As he forgot where he was and what he was supposed to be doing, he could only remind himself who he was. That information was stored deep.
J. Jerome Singleton was a great man, a rich man, a powerful man, a captain of industry. He was a force to be reckoned with. His name was known. He was somebody, goddamn it. Events depended on him. People were waiting for him. He was needed elsewhere. He did not belong here.
Alvin had caught sunstroke on the beach and wandered into a well-to-do neighborhood where his odd behavior was interpreted as ravening drunkenness probably compounded by insanity. He had fully recovered within twenty-four hours, but within twenty-four hours he was in the asylum. Now he had to wait the minimum ninety days to get out, like everyone else.
Scott’s wife had caught him masturbating. Without a word, she’d left the house for a week; when she came back, she suggested, in her clear unabashed schoolteacher’s voice, that it was her opinion and the opinion of her closest friends that he was mortally oversexed, and that what was obviously called for was a long rest far away from everyone who knew him, and her. He had been too embarrassed to argue; secretly he agreed; his mother had caught him masturbating once, too, and had whipped him, and wept.
Syed drank too much. He didn’t even like drinking, really. When he drank he was outgoing but stupid. When he was sober he was clever but shy. He was lonely, so he drank. Every few months he was clapped in here when the little glowing cellophane creatures made their reappearance. He knew, when he was sober, that they were hallucinations brought on by D.T.; but at the moment they appeared, they were more real, more obviously independent of his perception of them, than any other thing he had ever seen. More than their grotesque appearance or the insulting things they said, it was the awful intensity of their existence that terrified him.
Cliff felt an exhausted tightness in his belly one day which he could not explain. It felt as if he had just done two hundred sit-ups, or vomited all night. It felt, he decid
ed, like guilt. He wracked his brain for possible causes, scouring his past for every error, mistake, and sin he had ever committed. Each transgression, in the moment that he considered it, seemed more than adequate. The pain in his guts got worse, and with it the conviction of his loathsomeness. Now all he could do was hold himself and sob broken apologies as he recalled each evil afresh.
Baltazar, who was thirteen, suffered from night terrors, which did not cause him much worry (because he did not remember them) but troubled his parents enough to send him away to be cured. In the asylum, however, his screams troubled his roommates—strange grown men with angry faces who were too embroiled in their own nightmares to feel sympathy. Instead of bringing him glasses of chilled apple juice like his parents did, they shouted at him to shut up, or else. The problem worsened. Baltazar grew to hate himself for what he could not control; and rather than wait for the thrashing he deserved and which was constantly being threatened, he actively pursued his punishment, insulting and irritating the men relentlessly until they struck him.
Digby treated strangers like they were old friends.
Claude had lost his wife in a car accident.
Immanuel felt ashamed. Most of the time he was able to hide his shame from others behind a façade of aloof derision. But recently he had begun to have a recurring nightmare which kept him from sleep. He lost his welding job, and a finger, before checking himself in to the asylum for the paraldehyde that clouded his waking mind and took some of the bite out of his dreams. Years later, he remembered nothing of the hospital, could recall none of the staff or his fellow patients. For him, those three months were simply the time of the bad dream. In the dream he was very ill, but could not stay home. He had to go out; something had to be done; someone was waiting for him. Then it happened. Always, inevitably, in some crowded public place—in the street, at school, on the train, at his mother’s shop—the worst possible thing happened: he was sick; he vomited. A hundred people turned to look with disgust at the mess he had made. He was so horrified, so ashamed, that the only thing he could do, each and every time, was get down on his knees and try desperately to lick it back up, scoop it into his mouth and swallow it again.
But everyone has a story. Life as we know it is less like a cohesive novel than an anthology of unrelated short stories whose protagonists, caught up in the development of their own individual plots, take no notice of one another. Novels, unlike collections of stories, promote the illusion that humans are not completely, or not always, incarcerated in their own concerns—that it is sometimes possible for our storylines to intersect, or even merge. Perhaps that is why people prefer novels to short stories: escapism.
All Singleton knew was that he was in the wrong place. All he saw around him were broken, inferior animals: a man placing chess pieces on the keys of the piano while working the pedals with his feet; a man lying under a table, shaking his legs in the air like they were full of bedbugs; a man sitting in a trash can chatting amiably to God, chuckling appreciatively at His replies, saying “Thank You, thank You, I’m glad You feel that way”; one man howling with frustration when another told him, with obvious malice, that it was Tuesday; one man stroking another’s head till he fell asleep; a man kicking a boy of thirteen, who laughed a brittle, bitter laugh and chased after the man for more; a man wrapping himself from head to toe in countless colorful scarves; a tall, wilted man spinning slowly in a circle; a birdlike, fidgety young man whose wet brown eyes were like two separate living entities in the dead mask of his face; a man whose huge, grinning face looked like something carved out of wood to scare a child; a man bawling like a child, and gasping, again and again, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to”; another who moved his hands over his body in an elaborate sequence repeated precisely and endlessly, and who could say nothing but “Cars need to eat too,” over and over.
Perhaps most appallingly, there were at least a dozen men who behaved perfectly normally, playing cards, reading, smoking, or writing letters—and implying by their normalcy that there was nothing abnormal, nothing even unusual, about the behavior going on around them.
When the orderly at the end of the hall, whose name was Brian, saw Singleton coming, his heart sank. He did not like getting into tussles with the patients, whom he believed were too mixed-up to know what they were doing. He felt sorry for them—almost as sorry for them living here as he felt sorry for himself working here. Clearly the last thing any of them needed was an ass-whooping; but sometimes they left him no choice. They always picked on him—him, the biggest guy in the place! That’s how mixed-up they were.
“You best get your ass back in the dayroom now, Signalton,” Brian suggested.
“Forgot something, can’t find my keys,” Singleton said, making impatient shooing gestures, “so if you’ll excuse me for a moment while I—well, man, are you deaf or just stupid? Get out of my way.”
“I think probably you best just go on back now, Signalton.”
“My name is Singleton goddamn it, J. Jerome Singleton Singleton Sing-gull-ton, and you’re costing me ten thousand dollars a day!”
“It says Signalton on your forms,” Brian said (truthfully), hoping to deflect the old man with trivia.
“Don’t you think I know my own name! If you don’t let me out that door right this very minute, so help me God I will rip your tonsils out and mail them to your widow. I will—I will eat your boss.”
“I sure would if I could,” Brian said softly, “but you’ve been here long enough now I guess to know it ain’t up to me. Only ones that got a grounds pass are allowed out in the afternoon. So come on now, Signalton, why don’t you just …”
Singleton heard not a word of this. Because he was a loud man himself, calm or soft speech always struck him like a sanctimonious reprimand. This man was defying him. Anger flooded through his body like a toxin; it became an audible buzz in his ears. He squeezed his fists till his arms shook. Then he lowered his head and rammed the man in the belly.
For a moment, as the world tilted, he saw the door at the end of the hall swing open, and he saw himself emerge once again, through the sheer force of his will, triumphant.
The paraldehyde they poured down his throat unmoored him; he drifted through scenes half dream, half memory.
“You want to know my secret?” he asked the fawning elevator operator. “Always double down on aces. Put the money you make back into the business right away—that’s the only way it’ll grow. It takes backbone, a little fire in the belly, but you can’t be afraid to let your balls dangle. Take it from me.” He gave the boy a five-spot.
He looked at it coldly. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Don’t ask me—never saw it before in my life. Guess you found it on the sidewalk or in one of your pockets or something.”
The inspections agent continued to stare at the envelope, as if it might move.
“These goddamn peas now,” Singleton sighed. “These goddamn stalks and stems—let me tell you, I fired the sonofabitch let those through. You want to know my opinion, it was Hardy sent that sonofabitch my way. Goddamn agricultural sabotage is what it is—if we’re calling a spade a spade. I grow A-grade peas—ask anyone in the county. Come back to the farm, take another look at those peas—that’s all I ask. There’s a man. Say, you reading this?”
FINGERS FOUND IN PICKLE FACTORY.
The reporter whistled dubiously. “Who saw the finger?”
Singleton slid the piece of paper with the Pole woman’s name and address across the table. “You treat her gently now. She don’t speak English too good and they threw her out of her job and she doesn’t want her name in your goddamn scandal-rag. But she wants to do her duty, wants people to know what’s going on in those factories, wants the truth out. And I’m sure she wouldn’t say no to a little vig on publication neither.”
“What’s the matter, can’t find a place for her at your—”
Singleton shook an index finger in the reporter’s smug face. “You keep me and my
factory well out of it, you understand? I know Dallas Cullins and I know who your father is and I know my way around a goddamn libel suit, let me tell you.”
The retraction was printed a week later and seven pages deeper. Too little, too late: he’d already won the government contract.
“A good story doesn’t die,” he told the trashy torch singer. “Once it’s told, you can’t untell it. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow didn’t start the Great Chicago Fire!”
“I heard that one before,” she said, drunkenly determined to not be impressed.
“But a thing takes on a life of its own. The truth never stood in the way of a good story. Course, that’s the problem with the world. You can’t change nothing, all you can do is print goddamn retractions and corrections and addendums and— You come into the world like an immigrant after an election: the government’s already in place, all you can do … all you can do is respond to its stupidities. They decide the agenda, they the ones choose the game, all you can do is bicker over the rules …”
“Shucks now, angel, what’s the matter?”
He slapped her hand away. “Goddamn it, don’t fuss. One thing I hate is being fussed over by a woman.”
That stupid comment about immigrants! He had to be drunk. When she touched his hair again, he threw his glass at the wall, missing the piano player’s head by inches. They threw him out.
He cackled and whooped in the night air. He didn’t need them. He didn’t need anyone. He was his own man. He’d made himself out of nothing, less than nothing. Goddamn them all. Goddamn her. Those twisted teeth, those idiotic peasant’s costumes spattered with flour … Always fussing over him in that ignorant immigrant’s accent … Too stupid to know the difference between a boy’s name and a girl’s name … He’d overcome all that. He was as American as goddamn baseball. “I almost owned a Major League Baseball franchise!” he roared. “But they wouldn’t take my goddamn bid ’cause I don’t belong to a club, I never been to a university, I don’t wear a little ring. I made a fortune without any of their advantages! Aw goddamn it, sweetie-pie, you’re getting mustard all over my good slacks.”