When the group of them were being escorted from therapy (a citrus-scaled room with brown flooring, yellow walls, and orange plastic chairs arranged in a circle) to school (a citrus-scaled room with chairs arranged in a square), they passed a door that looked to have access to the outside world and, without thinking, Steven broke away. He slammed through it and was sprinting down a lane that had manicured trees and grass that was greener than any he’d seen in his life. He was tackled before even reaching midway along it.
This stunt didn’t just get him demoted from the P3 wing to the P2, he was also introduced to some of the rooms that were designed for the “implementation of disciplinary measures.” First, as he’d come back inside screaming obscenities at any and all of the staff, it was The Quiet Room, a cushioned chamber with thickly insulated walls and a door that appeared to have fingernails imbedded in the foam near its edges. There were no windows—not to the outside, not to the hallway—only a closed-circuit video camera mounted in one of the corners, a black iris steadily fixed on him. (When he first noticed it, he’d given it the finger.) He walked around in circles for several hours, maybe the better part of a day, finding the tender floor the most disturbing aspect of the room, the ground sponging under his sneakers like an orange quilt of moss. He thought of his family while he treaded around, which, of course, had never really been his family. He wondered why he hadn’t seen this all coming, seen the fact that he’d become not only another mouth to feed, but another delinquent to bail out of trouble, another stress in his aunt and uncle’s already stressful lives. He wasn’t even their child; they hadn’t brought him into the world, into their house, hadn’t asked for him; they’d taken him in as a kind of regrettable favour, and that was all. Yeah. He understood where they were coming from. Sure. But that only made him hate them more.
No. He was on his own now. For good. Just him. And that was fine. That suited him just fine. (Throughout his day in The Quiet Room, the most defiant thing he could think to do was, ironically, be quiet, and so didn’t make a sound padding around in front of the camera, didn’t even whisper.)
Then, after lunging at the first person that came to speak with him, he was introduced to The Bubble Door Room. There, the priority was in keeping the hospital staff safe, with a Plexiglas bubble on the door that they could put their heads inside, in order to see if he was huddled in either of the blind corners, readying himself to lash out again, but mostly to check that he was still sufficiently sedated. The sedative of choice was chlorpromazine (affectionately referred to as CPZ), and the instant it was injected, his vision became blurred, the sounds in the room muffled. But worst of all was what it did to his mouth, his tongue becoming gluey, a thirst coating his throat, scratching at it—a thirst impossible to sate. Always asking for water, dreaming of the rim of a paper cup, what it would feel like against his lips, the cool liquid slipping down the walls of his esophagus, wetting the membranes. But water would never come. Just the thought of it, the asking of it, the word spoken out to an empty room, muted echoes pasted onto the baby-blue walls: “Canuhave somewadder please?” Tongue doughy, flour-frosted. “Please? Coulduhget a lill’ water overhere? I’m real thirsty. Please? Just a cuppowadder?” Head tilted to the side, blinking slow blinks, eyelashes raking through the recirculated air. An epoch of stillness, of nothing.
Then someone would open the door, and be moving too fast through the room, suddenly standing in front of him with a paper cup of water, and a smaller paper cup of pills, a weaker dose of CPZ—provided he was good. He would look at the water, swallow the dust deeper into his throat, look at the pills. Reach a heavy hand out to the water, have the cup of pills placed into his fingers instead. A hesitation. “Are we going to have a problem here, Steven?” a voice would say too quickly. Another hesitation, blinking at the line of water in the paper cup, out of his reach, tasting it, smelling it. “Fine. Have it your way.” The faceless body turning around too fast, walking away too fast, calling out to someone as they disappeared through the door. Then the door filling with another body, someone carrying a syringe.
“No . . . Please . . . I . . .” His shoulders wrestled square, vein found, a new surge of limpness, new rush of thirst. He would coil into a ball and turn to the door where a face with glasses would be filling the bubble, looking at him, expressionless, now writing on a clipboard, now pushing the glasses farther up the face’s nose. In an alien and faraway consciousness, Steven understood that he was in very big trouble, understood that mental asylums were places where, the saner you were, the crazier they would make you. He knew he had to get out. At whatever cost, in whatever way. But he would have to be smarter this time. He would have to plan it through, think of everything. And he would have to play their game until it all fell into place, was in perfect alignment.
Which is what he did, amounting to his second time being less an attempt and more an actual escape. It began by asking for extra jobs around the ward, to keep him busy, he’d said, out of trouble, and he started helping the kitchen staff clear plates after meals. He would scrape off the plates—instant potatoes and powdered gravy, a rectangle of meat tissue, and the only thing coloured a kind of indistinguishable vegetable matter—organize them into bus pans, and slide them into a dumbwaiter where they were lowered to an anonymous dishwasher in a kitchen where, he imagined, the security was minimal. This miniature lift was operated by means of a cable on a pulley, and he could picture himself crawling inside, gripping on to the steel line, and shimmying down it. The rest was in the timing. He waited two weeks, waited for October 31, 1980. Halloween.
He lingered around the dining hall until the dinner dishes were most likely done below, fire-poled down the cable in the dumbwaiter, skulked through the dark kitchen, left through a service door out the back, across the hospital grounds, and onto a sidewalk to join zombies, draculas, ghosts, and kids with bloodied hockey masks passing one another with little ceremony. He spotted a Zellers and, realizing that it was a Friday night and they were open late, went inside. He found a shirt, pants, and sweater that fit, then went into the bedding department, grabbed a pillowcase, shoved them all inside, and walked out the front doors, even getting a few Rockets thrown into his pillowcase from a woman who stepped out from behind her till to toss them in, wishing him a Happy Halloween.
He went to a few other houses while mulling over his next move, ringing doorbells, saying nothing, fluffing open his pillowcase. There was no look of shock on people’s faces, hands digging into bowls of candy, reaching out, hovering over his pillowcase, eyeing the grease streak from the cable that ran down the middle of his mint-green hospital scrubs. “So what are you supposed to be?”
“I’m an escaped mental patient.”
“Oh. Right. Good one,” tossing in a few lollypops.
Steven knew that, though he’d never really even been out of Regent Park, he’d have to leave Toronto altogether. And tonight. But before that could happen, he needed money; and it occurred to him that if he were to go into backyards and back alleys, listening at the doors for hollers of “Trick or Treat!” or for the doorbells themselves, he could be sure the people inside were distracted, and could check the latch, slip in, and do a quick scan for purses lying around. He headed in the general direction of the bus station and took every alleyway he could find. After trying only two doors, he imagined he had enough money for a bus ticket to another city. And any other city would do.
He changed into his freshly stolen clothes in the washroom of the bus station, shoved the remaining candy into his pockets, and walked up to one of the ticket windows. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone else in the lineup before him, so he didn’t have time to scan the list of places and prices to choose, at the very least, a place he recognized the name of. Improvising, he played the village idiot. “I want to buy,” he spoke in a slow nasal voice, slurring clearly, “a ticket.” Steven placed his money with overstrung care on the counter. The woman behind the glass fingered the bills, waiting for more details, and when they didn’t come, she off
ered the most likely possibility, “Looks like . . . to Kitchener? Leaves in fifteen minutes?”
Steven looked relieved, “Exactly.”
It was the shortest one hour and forty minutes of his life, the man beside him with a Walkman blaring his cassette of Back in Black, nodding his head to AC/DC, mouthing the words, “And youuu, shook me allll nighhht long,” his half-whispers in the eerie Greyhound dim, strangers in rows sitting still, sitting alone, together. Then the new bus-station lights were passing overhead, the door hissing open, the coach emptying as people dispersed habitually into taxis, into rides parked to pick them up, lovers embracing on the platform, mothers taking their sons’ arms, fathers their daughters’ backpacks. Steven walked alone with his pockets of candy and found a bench in the station to sit heavily upon, looking down at his new corduroy pants, pinching them. He noticed a pain in his throat, and he found himself blinking back tears. He had to be hard. Had to be harder than the world was to him. That was the only way to pass through it. Wasn’t it? He took a toffee out of his pocket, unwrapped it, squished it between his thumb and his forefinger. Then turned it to the side to do it again.
He stared into his lap until a crazy man passed in front of him. Steven watched him pluck an aluminum can of Canada Dry out of a garbage bin and slide it delicately into a black plastic bag.
“Hey, guy, can you show me a place to sleep?”
The man stared at him for a long while, then broke off to scratch violently at his nose. He turned and walked out of the station, never acknowledging that he’d even heard Steven speak. But from the other side of the glass, his body already enveloped in the dark, Steven could just make out the man looking back inside, gesturing for him to follow.
He never did say a word. They walked together, on his rounds presumably, checking garbage bins as they went, slipping cans and bottles into his plastic bag until he had to hoist it over his shoulder like Santa Claus. He smelled of urine, caked body odour, the dry rot of refuse. His seamed fingers were so dirty that Steven thought they looked gangrenous. He finally stopped outside an abandoned house, pointed.
“I can sleep in there? You sure?”
He nodded deeply, stopping with his chin against his chest, as if he were holding back a burp, then carried on.
Steven looked up and down the street, the last remnants of trick-or-treaters straggling along the walkways to and from the warm homes. The doors and windows in the front of the abandoned house were boarded up, but in the back, after threading through high weeds that were bolted and frost-limp, he found the back door ajar, pushed it open to the flickering light of a candle, casting quavering forms on the bare walls.
“Uh oh. You O-P-P?” a deep voice called out, two other people chuckling.
“Fuck no.” Steven approached them, stepping into the candlelight. He could just make out a pile of ratty blankets against one of the walls and in a corner, a rust-stained mattress, threadbare, dark blotches in its centre.
“Pheeuuw. Lucky for us I guess.” The young man looked him over. “New in town?”
“Yup. Comin’ from Tronno.”
“Oh yeah. Runnin’ or hidin’?”
“Both.”
Laughter.
“Well then, have a seat there on the floor, brother. I’m Larry, that’s Sam,” he picked up the candle to light a joint he’d produced, gesturing to the last of them, “Dingo.” He drew in a lungful of smoke, passed it to Steven. “Welcome to the Hilton.”
The group of people he found in the same plight were surprisingly diverse, some of them youth that had gone AWOL from orphanages and group homes around Kitchener, escapees from abusive parents, crazies, biker-gang misfits, older hobo types, or failed hippies whose peace and love and purpose had faded into a narcotic haze of bitter anti-conformism. There were even a few Natives, who’d fled their reserves in hopes of finding a better life but who’d found instead that no one in their right/white mind would hire an Indian. It was a community in constant turnover, people arriving one day, getting caught by the police the next, appearing again after days of being away, only to disappear once more. Their one common thread was poverty, survival their one common goal.
Steven lived on the food he could steal from convenience stores, and though it wasn’t the first time he’d stolen things, it was the first time he saw it as an art to be perfected. To start with, he’d learned, you had to look like you owned the place, walk like you had nothing to hide, nothing to lose. It also helped to appear as if you were looking for something specific, hunting for it, craving it, and turn out to be disappointed that that particular establishment didn’t carry it, maybe even mentioning this while passing the proprietor, pockets stuffed, jacket bulging. “You don’t have any dill-pickle Doritos, eh? No?” A listless look down at the Scratch’n’Win lottery case that made up the counter. “Well.” A shrug. “Thanks anyway.” And because this wouldn’t really work at grocery stores, butchers, bakers, or markets, his sustenance was composed exclusively of junk food: unmicrowaved microwavable hotdogs, Twinkies, salty soothers, jawbreakers, Gummy Bears, Blue Sharks, Black Nibs, ketchup potato chips, and cans of root beer.
Having nothing better to do one day, he walked with an older boy to buy some hashish, then over to a few high schools where he sold it at lunch hour and recesses, making an easy twenty bucks. Steven watched how he cut it, listened to the prices, and was making his own money, even enough to scrape by on, in only a week. He realized that, were he to have shared in the profits that Kipp had been making (while he did all the running, mind you), he would’ve been rich.
As the winter set in, Steven followed the general migration into the basement of an abandoned apartment complex, where the boiler room was far enough below the frost line to be an even 14°C all winter, not warm, but not freezing either. Part of the deal of this unpaid co-habitation was for each person to supply as many candles as they could, which, besides the obvious light needed in a building with no electricity, helped to take even more of the edge off the chill. While walking between the schools where Steven made his money, he would pass by a few of the known make-out spots in the city, points with some kind of vista where teenagers brought bottles of wine and drank them with their backs against derelict walls, far from the disapproving eyes of their parents, running their clean fingernails—or so he imagined—through each other’s freshly shampooed hair. He would pilfer the candle stubs they left behind, wax-fastened to logs and stones, amid a scattering of milky condoms, their wrappers, the plastic shards of busted lighters.
He imagined that the courting and coupling done in these places were the very antipathy of everything he knew. In his world, there was never a gradual and delicate breakdown of inhibitions, the slow stripping of cultural restraint before getting down to something carnal and animalistic. It was the other way around. Everything began in that state, and often stayed there. Since there was no water or functioning sewage, people—teenaged girls, boys, men, and women alike—urinated and defecated where they had to, preferring the squalor of gas station toilets but often finding it easier just to squat in the alleyways, piss in the open air of parks, steam rising from the saffron arcs and vertical jets during cold spells. Sex was open and candid, and often referenced before anything else. “I’m not a whore,” a new girl said as she settled into some blankets in the corner, “so no one try anything or I’ll fuckin’ cutcha.” Or: “Uh-uhh.” Dingo’s posture becoming aggressive, bordering on hostile. “This’s the second day y’owe me money—so, like, pay up or give me a blow. Now,” already unzipping his jeans, the other person resignedly beginning to crawl toward him. There was no dignity, nothing holding anyone back. But that didn’t mean there weren’t glimpses, albeit rare ones, into something else. Like that afternoon with Sam.
The two of them had gone out to get some food, and it started to rain. Hard. Steven doubted very much that people who had homes ever thought about how people who didn’t coped in the rain. It was a real problem, with no raincoats or umbrellas, and nowhere to go. If it
was warm out, you could sit under a bridge or overpass, pigeons made anxious by your presence. The other option was under stairs, doorways, or buying an order of fries and spending the day in the abrasive colours and child-hectic ambience of McDonald’s. On this particular day, they’d sought shelter inside the closest building around, an office tower with a vestibule, where they could be dry and “inside” without actually entering the building. They lingered for a minute or two, still cold, bored, before deciding to wander around inside. They made it five metres into the lobby before being spotted by a security guard who approached and, when they ran, gave chase, deeper into the labyrinthine halls, both of them laughing, looking for a way out, the number of security guards increasing in their wake, until Steven ducked into a narrow hallway with a small bathroom at its end. They locked themselves in and listened to their searchers scramble past on the other side of the door. Minutes passed, and Sam, still cold, ran hot water onto her hands, vapour smoking the mirror.
It was her idea. She thought to make the most of the hot water, the privacy, the unlikelihood of being found, and take a sink bath. In her coarse way, she demanded he bury his head in the corner and never turn around. Ever. He promised, and was good to his word, listening to her undress, then splash water carefully onto herself, pushing the pink foam out of the soap dispenser, droplets running down the sink, plumping into a puddle on the floor behind him. He heard her use what sounded like the entire roll of disposable hand towels to dry off, then get dressed, tucking in her shirt, zipping up her pants.
“Your turn,” she’d said, shouldering him out of the corner. But as he turned around, she was too close, and his erection brushed against her on his way to the sink. As opposed to Steven, Sam wasn’t good to her word, and halfway through washing himself, naked and squatting over the faucet, she turned around, grinning at him seriously. She stepped forward, put her hands on his thighs.
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