Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  He split. A second after that, he left. My noggin felt as heavy as Coit Tower, my goatee weighed a ton. But I had to get it and the rest of me up. I came off the bed and went straight to my knees, which turned out to be bare; I was wearing some sort of gown. Figuring out I couldn’t stand if it was life or death and that I must be drugged, I dragged Maynard, G., and Krebs across cold floor and then more floor to the window like I was ready for Andrew Wyeth, who’d started painting Maynard’s World at an easel just behind me.

  I didn’t know what I was on, but I must have been higher than the snows of Kilimanjaro. For a few seconds, I hallucinated that I saw a metropolis of ivory and paste, dominated by a stubby pencil stabbing upward like the giveaway spiking in a lie-detector test. On the far side of the river it faced, I could see a mansion with pillars like fat cigarettes, topping a hill planted with endless rows of upright Scrabble tiles. Beyond it were bunched miles of pastel homes, mingled with older liver-spottings of slowly browning brick and leaking greenery the hue of my Suze’s tender, mocking eyes.

  Down near the water’s edge, a gaunt group of outsized men was struggling to raise a mast or antenna. Blind cars shot past them toward gang-a-gley. Gang-a-gley?

  Langley. The way my brain said it turned that humdrum name into a sound that both harbored the ogres and augured the harbors of tales heard from diaper days on. But I must have stepped into a puddle-piece of someone else’s addled, jigsaw-puzzled life, and no one in sight could explain it to me: not the history teacher plucking at his rubber-banded wrist, not the Scrabble-loving woman with the patriotic rain hat in her lap. Not the bourbon-sipping gargoyle moodily watching a helicopter settle on his lawn, not the empty space still shaped like a girl turning toward me, crossing her arms like a magician’s assistant to cover up twin winks I’d never seen in sunlight, but the magician had.

  Then I heard a splatter-pop that I mistook for musketry, but they must only have been shooting a movie. As soon as “The End” showed up, I blinked it all away.

  Saw fields, a power plant. A peeling sign that read EGAN’S GARA. Dead

  sky. And winter that stretched to the ends of the earth.

  When the drugs wore off and I could walk again, a week or another blink later—it was hard to tell here in the Mayo, when half an hour felt like all day—they moved me out onto the ward. There were maybe a dozen of us in all, though it was hard to tell that too; everyone had several faces, the dingy gowns all looked alike, and we were all indifferent to everything. I think Troop put something in the water.

  Holden Caulfield, who had the bunk left of mine—unless I lay with my feet on the pillow, in which case he was on the right—was just a nasty piece of work no matter how you sliced him. Kooky, but I hit it off better with Cpl. Ira Hayes, a full-blooded Pima Indian who’d helped hoist the flag on Iwo Jima. Once people quit taking pictures of him, he’d gone back to the reservation and hoisted a few more. Now he was in pretty bad shape. He looked a little like Tony Curtis, which was cool; I dug Tony in The Great Impostor and Some Like It Hot the most. Farther down our row, Edsel Ford spent most of the day just staring out the window, pressing his fingers to the glass and saying “Me?” in a soft voice whenever a car zipped by.

  Nixon, who was pregnant, had my old room off the ward. Troop said he’d been back six times so far. Not a mingler, but you could peek in by pretending you were on your way to the can while they fed him his daily cottage cheese and ketchup. You might lose your own breakfast, though, because he wasn’t easy to look at, with an adult head and torso and the arms and legs of a malformed child, the whole thing in a blue suit on the bed. We’d hear him screaming in the night like there was murder in his thighs, trying to bring out a new Nixon. One day, pop-pop, his hands would poke out of his sleeves, and black wingtips slither out his pants-cuffs. Sometimes it took him years, Troop said.

  Years, wow. I guess people can get used to anything if it’s them. But I was me, and that was Maynard Krebs and not the other G., and I never stopped thinking about North Beach, or wondering how could I get word to Ferlinghetti. He’d come out for Castro, he’d come out for me. He owed me that much, I thought. I knew he had a thing for Suze in some bald-pated, white-hairs-curling-out-the-workshirt, bright-eyed older-fellow way but that was all right, after all he was a much more established poet in our scene than I was, he’d taught us all a lot and anyhow I could hardly picture Suze’s face or her green eyes. She was going away and all I could see was the flow of her light brown hair as she glided past Columbus and a row of lookers on her way to history, I guessed that must be long ago but it was hard to tell in here, so long, so long, so long. There was something in the water but Troop would never admit it.

  In my dreams, Larry was often there. Sometimes he had Moe and Curly with him. Tiny planes dangled in the night, bombing us out of our gourds. We fired our Kerou ack-ack gun and fled to join Fidel; in the Sierra Mastre, there we felt free. I saw the best mimes of my generation destroyed, running through Ghirardelli Square at noon in flight from angry pedestrians.

  Then the lanky detective I had watched raising a blonde little friend of all the world out of the sea near the Golden Gate would push away my blue bedspread and come sit beside me a while. Only it turned out that he didn’t want to solve mysteries anymore: “I’ll tell you, son, once Hitchcock showed me what life outside of Bedford Falls would really be like, it made me dizzy,” he said affably. “I hustled back to Capra like a rabbit.” Saying which, he looked up past his shoulder. “Wouldn’t you?” he asked.

  That’s the way it was. Alack and shite gave way to living dolor. Brett Sommers surprised us, in her slack klugmans there I felt free. Bewitched, I dreamed of Suze’s eyes, blinking at me from inside a bottle. She was wearing acres of green petticoats, and I called her the hyacinth girl; sometimes we even talked alike. With a wiggle of her nose, she married Sergeant York. But she was mother-naked now, and those were the wrong eyes in the bottle, and I knew that wasn’t allowed. She swallowed the eyes and then I fled, I flew like a nun.

  The elevator at the end of the hall was the size of a phone booth, but must have been capacious for all that: “Max. 99” read the sign on its wall. Stepping out, I interrogated a couple of loafers: Who is the third son who walks always beside you? I was still hoping to find Suze, but Vic Morrow and vie morrow and vicmorrow kept me in this petty place from day to day. Rats were patrolling Room 222, gunsmoke made the sea be yesterday, oh Dr. Kildare F. Troop I’m on to you: I know what the Mayo Clinic is. And Nixon never let up screaming screaming Why does Nixon scream why does Nixon scream why does Nixon scream Why does Nixon scream so loudly in my one and only brain

  Believe me, most mornings it comes as a relief to learn I’m awake. When dawn wells up in the sky, she knots me together. Then we’d sit around the Cleaver Ward in our robes and gowns, waiting our turn to be led down to breakfast and wondering why our ward had the name it did. The one across from us was called the Burt Ward, and every schizo in it wore a mask and hopped around like batty robins.

  “There’d just better be some cee-real left when I get down there,” Ira Hayes used to grunt—“that’s all Γ m gonna say.” We all tried not to drink the water, but Troop knew that we’d have to if he kept us long enough. Since Nixon wouldn’t have been fed yet either, we’d hear his grunts and howls from his room, and Holden, who had a way of turning into Gore Vidal before your very eyes, would start in on his favorite joke. “Doctor Troop!” he’d yelp, although Troop wasn’t there. “Can Nixon come out to campaign?”

  “Why, Holden,” one of us always played along. “You know that Nixon has no arms and no legs.”

  “Oh, we don’t want him as a candidate,” Holden would snicker in his malicious prep-school whine. “We just need to use him as a power base!”

  “Ragh. Urgh,” we’d hear from Nixon’s room. “Gagh. Cough.”

  Then Julia would unlock the door, and we’d shuffle out to the stairs that took us to the cafeteria. “Man, I’m draggin’,” Ira Hayes would groan. “M
y feet feel like they’re made a’ bronze this mornin’.” That was his favorite joke.

  “Which one were you, anyhow?” I asked him one afternoon, when we were all sitting around the Cleaver Ward.

  “In the picture? I still am. Second from the left, I think.” He stood up to demonstrate for us, his arms straining toward an invisible flag as it went up and away from him; of course, it just looked goofy, with him in his flapping Mayo gown. Then his fingers started shaking, the way they always did, and he dropped his hands fast, wiping them on his gown. “Shit, but I could use a drink,” he said, trying to sound at home with it. “Yeah, some fuckin’ firewater over here for fuckin’ Tonto, whatcha say, Doctor Troop—Sergeant Stryker, Major Treaty, Colonel Custer, General Hospital. Man, if I ever get out of this place…”

  “You know what I’d like to do?” Holden said dreamily. He was lying on his bunk face upwards, watching a blue treasure map waft from his Chesterfield to the ceiling. “I think I’d like to shoot a really, really famous musician. That’s what Vm going to do, if they ever let me out of here. Maybe I’ll even get his autograph first!” he giggled. “God, it’ll be beautiful. I hope you can all be there.”

  “Sure, Holden,” Ira said, grateful for the change of topic. “But not Gene Krupa, okay?”

  “No, not Gene Krupa,” Holden said, with a strange, far-seeing smile. “Bigger.”

  “Nobody bigger’n Krupa in my book,” Ira shrugged. His hands had finally stopped trembling. “Blast away at whoever you want.”

  “If they ever let me out,” I said, surprising myself, “I’d like to go sailing.”

  “Me,” Edsel Ford said at the window. For all we knew, the car going by outside just then really was an Edsel—the one his father named for him. From the sound of it, the traffic was heavy just now: “Me-me-me-me-me-me-me,” he said.

  Then he said, “Mom?”

  “Gil—”

  “Krebs,” I said firmly, before Troop could finish. “Call me Maynard G. Krebs.”

  “Whatever. Well, that tears it,” he said, tearing up a fat little booklet on his desk. “The truth is, we’re not making progress. You’re not responding as well as you should.”

  “The truth is, there just isn’t a whole lot on the ward to respond to, Doc,” I said. “Unless you’re finally coming clean about the water, daddy-o.”

  “There is nothing in the water except water. But do you know what’s in the basement?”

  “No. But I don’t want to go down there.”

  “The basement,” Troop said, “is where we perform electroshock therapy on the patients we can’t help the normal way. It’s a last resort, but then,” he grinned, “that’s what some people call us.”

  “Do it to Julia, not to me,” I said. “Being the only black person in the whole Mayo Clinic has been driving your nurse absolutely goofy, Doc, or hadn’t you noticed?”

  “You think she’s black? That’s damned interesting. You must not know any real Negroes.” Troop jotted down something on a pad. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “I hate to be the one to tell you this. But hell"—with a sudden, Lark-packed chuckle—”that’s how it goes when you’rein -chargel Or so my predecessor, the great Dr. Benway Casey, used to say. Tony is no longer with us.”

  “Tony?”

  “I meant Ira. Ira Hayes is dead.” “Oh.”

  “He has been for some time,” Dr. Troop said gently. “Maybe you just hadn’t noticed.”

  “Oh again,” I said.

  His voice went back to its usual chipper briskness. “At any rate, I’ve scheduled you for your first session.”

  “Will it help?”

  “Who knows? We’re really just guessing about whatever it is a jolt of kickapoo joy juice does to whatever’s happening in there. But I can guarantee that it’ll take your mind off Ira, that’s for damn sure. Boy, did he hate it.”

  “When are we doing this?” I asked.

  “You, not we. But—well, right now,” Troop said. “I mean, it’s not as if you’ve got that much else besides that little bit of broccoli on your plate, is it?”

  “I guess not,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I followed Burleigh, Troop’s nicotine-stained assistant, down the stairs. The room at the bottom had that unshaded but creviced, crime-scene basement light. I stepped over a cardboard box marked “XMAS ORNAMENTS,” and hesitated like the joint was booby-trapped. Its familiar gray-green-white cover now a witch’s hat, an old Scribner paperback lay open and face down on the floor. As I heard Burleigh call “Who’s next?,” the basement’s combined glare and dankness were like the moon, the almost silent whistles, the dull trees and the smell of peat at town’s end.

  Out of habit, I started to move toward the sofa. But then I saw I couldn’t sit there, since there was a doghouse on it. Plunking myself down instead in a lawn chair with frayed webbings, I felt Burleigh’s hands attach the electrodes to my ears.

  I wondered if this was Maynard G.’s last stand. On my ward alone, Edsel Ford had turned into a car, and thought his mother was one too. Holden Caulfield was just itching to turn into an assassin. Nixon was slouching toward himself as always, hoping someone would ask him to carve the rough beast. Ira Hayes was all over the map, since he’d turned into a Marinę, a photograph, a statue, a memorial, a pauper, a drunk, a corpse, and Tony Curtis. At the start, all he’d been was an Injun; and that was just the Cleaver Ward. Who knew what other metamorphoses were going on in all the Mayo Clinic’s other wards, besides Dr. Kildare F. Troop? Maybe it made me the odd man out here in the Sally fields, but I didn’t want to turn into someone new, voyaging out past full fathom five to parts unknown. I only wanted the electroshock to prove that I could still be what I was, which was Maynard G. Krebs.

  ZZZZTl

  vast wasteland teenage wasteland sons of he woe gee ma john wayne newton minow who minow Minnow Me now No no Krebs ZZT Krebs ZZT Maynard Krebs who’s next ZZZT ZZZT

  Ocean waves.

  Here it came now. “Boom!” went doom.

  Her nipples in sunshine. What I had run there to tell her: he was gone.

  Then doom went boom. Here came everybody but me.

  Too late to save me, Ferlinghetti, or maybe Dobie, finally got a message through. It said “Maynard! I’m with you in Rochester” and I said Look here is a postcard that calls me Maynard I am Krebs I tell you I am Krebs ZZT ZZT. And I said “I bet you wouldn’t do this to Papa” and Burleigh said We did he thought he was Hemingway there was no cure for it but me ZZZT oh man what I’d give for some reefer now ZZT ZZT.

  Why couldn’t I remember anything? I used to be able to remember things practically while they were still happening. Somewhere in a part of what was gone now, Thalia or maybe it was Suze and I used to know whole chunks of our favorite novel backwards and forwards. We’d play a game that she named Memory Substitutions, changing names and garbling lines on purpose to turn the passages we knew by heart—each other’s heart—into jokes that only we understood.

  “In my younger and more vulnerable years,” I’d start, “my father gave me a dead animal that I’ve been turning over with a stick ever since.” Hugging her knees at her end of the sofa, she’d giggle, with the light brown hair that flowed in two waves from a central part on her high forehead unveiling her mouth as she tossed her chin, and say in an incredulous voice: “Can’t reread the Washington Post, old sprout? Why, of course you can!” Or else we’d reverse the game, and rearrange everything else we knew—old songs, TV shows, other books, news of the day—to make it refer to our shared text, and so to us:

  “Daisy; Daisy—give him your answer; do,” I’d sing. “He’sJay Gatsby—all for the love of you.” And then I’d wait for her to decide what came next.

  “ … Don’t swerve to hit that floozy! That drive must be a doozy,” she’d croon within seconds, giggling, her eyes’ twin pools of dilute green light bright, eager, tender, mocking and observant all at once.

  “But don’t you beg, back in East Egg—” and then I hesitated, even
though it wasn’t her turn. But she thought it was, and our two voices tangled: “For another man to love yooo!” I tried out, just as Suze sang, “Why don’t you escape the zoo?”

  Then we’d stop. But soon she’d wiggle free, because she was virgo intacta and she had to go, back up the stairs quick-quick and out the kitchen door. So I’d beat off, a boat against the current, borne ceaselessly back to her ass; and if you find that unromantic, I think you know nothing about youth. But skip her.

  Skip her.

  In the basement, when I wasn’t getting electroshocked, they’d put me on laundry detail. I didn’t like it, because laundry was the cruelest chore—breeding clean clothes out of the dead wash, mixing Tide and Joy, and so on. There was so much of it, so much more than I thought there would be from our now reduced numbers, a million airy pieces to fluff and fold, and yet all of it kept billowing, teetering, swarming up damply to swamp me, fear death by laundry, and I said “Doc be a lovey tonight and take me off the laundry detail” but he wouldn’t, and gingerly I handled laddered hooks and many buttons, tender buttons, I had not thought Suze had undone so many, was she merry as she did it, was she merry and I cried, and still I cried “Krebs Krebs” to dirty socks.

  But “Your goatee’s gone,” Holden, who had a way of turning into Paul Lynde before your very eyes, told me snidely when they brought me back up to the ward one day. Since there was no mirror other than his snicker, I touched my chin, and found it bare except for glue. Airplane glue, so clear and pearly when you squeeze it out to fit the bridge to the deck of a PT boat or join the wing and fuselage of a Curtiss P-40 with the sabre-toothy Flying Tigers snarl pasted on the snout, but soon glaucomic as it makes maps of nonexistent countries on your fingers. Even though I hadn’t done it in years, I sniffed mine—and boom, hey daddy-o, I was back in front of Troop, and I said Just tell me Doc please What was in the water and Troop said Kim Novak you damn fool Kim Novak was in the water The water by the Golden Gate and afterwards naked in lockup with the lights out I whimpered krebs i was krebs and the food stinks here.