I was in full agreement. Our only crime was being born. How we drifted off into the trees I don’t remember, but I stumbled and she caught my hand. Sitting Indian style in the flittering shade, our knees touching, we whispered in the language of heat as the green leaves seethed and the words we used ceased to have meaning. Behind the Program 3 office, I kissed her. Too fast, I thought, but she kissed me back and everything shifted underneath and fell away to open space.
It’s always easier getting along with someone when you have no future with them, but how nuts is it to meet the woman of your dreams in a nuthouse? To keep creeps like Morris and Cecil from having their way with her, I used my influence and networks to protect her. She called me Big Eddie and said that I was the funniest, bravest person she’d ever met. She spoke a beguilingly fastidious German that convinced many it was genuine until she arrived at the final made-up word in her sentence, düdüscheiner, slutprincessan, or das nincompoopen.
When Morris told me she was undergoing ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), I confronted her.
“It is voluntary,” she said. “For depression.”
“You must be crazy,” I said.
“Shocking, isn’t it?”
“You’ll lose your memory.”
She sucked in her cheeks and crossed her eyes. “Promise?”
In her first month she taped to the wall above her bed a reproduction of Millet’s The Angelus, which she said Salvador Dalí asserted was not a spiritual or pastoral work as the critics had decided but that the two figures were praying over their buried child. Dalí insisted on this so vehemently, Sofia said, that eventually an X-ray was taken of the canvas, where a painted-over shape similar to a coffin was discovered.
“That is my little baby, too,” she said, pointing in the area of the coffin.
“Your baby?”
“Olivia,” she said.
“How long ago did you lose Olivia?” I asked.
“It’s been five years,” she said. “She was only two.”
“You are young enough to try again.”
She turned away and said, “That is not the point.”
Raindrops began to tap the glass then, and I thought of the exquisitely sad Temptations song: “I Wish It Would Rain.”
“What is the point?” I asked.
She wiped her face. “It is the same heartbreak every day,” she said, fighting tears. “It does not diminish.”
“I will try to help you forget,” I said. “I have undertaken a Crusade of Oblivion myself. You should quit the ECT and get rid of that morose painting.”
“I know.” She endeavored a valiant smile. “I cling too fondly to loss.” She tore the painting down. “Dalí was an asshole anyway.”
Sofia suspended the ECT and joined my Crusade of Oblivion. We gamboled the woods, sneaked off into the back wards, tossed the egg (with the insides blown out so it was hollow) and the coffee can lid. We golfed in the halls, argued about Kafka and grappa, sang improvised campfire songs, paid exorbitant underground rates for her precious English cheese, and played gin rummy while sipping from foam cups of smuggledin cognac before an Amish electric fire.
One day Sofia borrowed a pair of reading glasses, pulled her hair into a bun, and wearing one of Morris’s lab jackets went around visiting patients and pronouncing in a German accent with her chin nested in her fingers: “Hmmm, well mein liebchen, it’s obvious you’re a cuckoo.” We both had level-three ground passes — you could buy one for one or two cigarettes — and we would share courtyard time and go to the commissary and Crossroads together and at every opportunity wander over to T-13 or the S-Complex to use the Gateway computers. I had begun a story about a man unfairly incarcerated in a mental hospital who meets a wandering goddess trapped among the mortals. Once, Dr. Pettipiece, who was widely known to smoke joints with his patients, found us on the monkey bars and hollered at us until he was red in the face. Sofia screeched at the old doper like a chimp and furiously scratched her armpits while I told him in a German accent that he was obviously a cuckoo.
A hospital is no place to carry on a wine-country romance, so whenever we could we would run off behind the trees. I had not been monogamous since my marriage to my Chinese former wife, Fang-Hua, whom I still loved — though love is neither pain nor betrayal, so I’ve got the wrong word. The grounds teemed with wild peafowls some eccentric had imported long ago from India in the belief that they would cheer up the residents, even if they shrieked and bred like rats. One time after Sofia and I had made love in the shadows of the woods Sofia began to talk about what we were going to do when we got out and it finally dawned on me what all this meant. The course of my life came to light: I’d run this gauntlet of agony and injustice solely to meet her.
Sofia was out in six months, deceiving her team and meeting all the discharge criteria with flying colors. I kissed her at the gate and looked back at this daft palace of damnation that had held me for more than five years. But my time here was coming to a close. I was young enough to start over, and I knew I could do it with Sofia.
“If I can’t get released legitimately,” I whispered to her through the bars, “I’ll saddle up one of these peacocks and fly out.”
“Bring one for me,” she whispered back, her sultry brown eyes shimmering. “I always wanted a peacock as a child.”
“We’ll run away to some foggy little fishing village where you can take gloomy photographs and I’ll crank out the great American loony bin novel. And we’ll have baby peacocks.”
“I love you, Big Eddie,” she said. “And I promise to write you
