We held hands until the psych tech dragged me away.
That day I ditched all my schemes, tore up my racket sheets, and took a vow of chastity. I swallowed my Irish pride with two cans of diet root beer and ceased to respond to provocations from patients and staffers alike. I had known all along how to talk to the shrinks but now I saw the wisdom of actually doing it. Like any good conversation, it works best when you show interest in the person you’re talking to, so along with agreeing when it was useful, volunteering shopworn phrases such as “becoming proactive,” “changing my ways,” and “accepting responsibility,” guarding their dirty little Bedlam secrets, and massaging regions of credibility that would one day be regarded as fairy tales or mass delusion, I always tried to chat about the doctor’s home life — the lawn mower, the daughter at Stanford, and that frustration in the bedroom, whatever they were comfortable discussing. It was not about milking them for information. It was about building trust, making them believe, as Sofia had done, that I was on the mend, that pharmaceuticals and neuroscience and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders were the only road to social re-entry for me.
Morris was the hardest to appease. I apologized for all the crap I’d pulled: buying him a muscle magazine subscription, enlisting him in the U. S. Marines, wedging pennies in the jamb of his office door so he couldn’t get out, making him look bad on the basketball court, and blowing his cover on the female patients he took home on the weekends. I told Morris he’d have no more problems with me, then bewildered him by giving him all my coffee, cigarettes, and bingo cards. I took over recycling for our unit and within the month we had $147, enough for tri-tip and potato salad instead of the usual nachos and ice cream. I started working fourteen hours a week in the cafeteria, eight in the library, and reluctantly signed up for that sexual harassment class offered twice a year. Whenever Jody, the gay nurse, would give me my Haldol injections he would try and hit my sciatic nerve just to see me jump, but I pretended he was making love to me and moaned with pleasure. I could do anything for Sofia. She stood in the center of my mind like the light of God. I pored over the letters she wrote daily, held them, and smelled them, and taped them to my walls.
Then one day the letters stopped coming. I thought at first that they’d been intercepted, a common practice. The last letter was full of remarks about futility and death and had been signed “Persephone.” When I asked that Dinky Russian Stinkpot Dr. Fasstink, he told me with a wiry little smile that Sofia had taken her life. I said in dull shock that I did not believe him. She had jumped from a window, he said, and if I cared to look, the obituary was in the Chronicle. I had not been told the news because it would have upset me and possibly required another increase in my antipsychotic regimen, and we didn’t want that, did we? The old doctor, wearing an ill-concealed simper, had to help me to the door, saying over and over, “I’m sorry, my lad. I’m sorry, my boy.”
3.Dyskinesia
THE YEARS WHIRLED AWAY LIKE THE VAPOR FROM A BAD DREAM. But I believe from a comment made by one of the drug nurses after it happened that I was thirty-six when I got into a fight with double-felon Kenny Monique. I probably should not have fought him since he was a habitual criminal who had once boxed professionally, and I had been wandering numbly up and down the corridors, refusing to speak and only eating enough to keep them from feeding me through a tube. But I did not like Kenny, who had murdered a pharmacist and gotten off with an insanity plea, nor did I like being called a “dicklicking Mick.” A meth addict with access to Ritalin, he had also learned how to steal diabetic syringes from the treatment room. I had stopped fighting on a regular basis since Sofia had died, so he quickly got the better of me and rammed me headfirst into a wall. Just before I blacked out I thought he had broken my neck and I thought good, but I came to some indeterminable time later with nothing but a black void and buzzing prism-shaped bats across my field of vision, the flesh of my forehead wired together with what felt like guitar string. For a while there was talk of moving me out of circulation, especially since I could see the intermeshing cogs of time and how you could jump between them like a nursery rhyme cow and know for instance the name of the unnerved person who had just entered your room. If I had not regained my eyesight within a few weeks I’m certain I would have gotten discharged from Mudville.
I remember the ceaseless monsoon of winter, and then another wet gray winter, and then Arn Boothby, the three-hundred-pound paranoid schizophrenic who threw a fellow inmate through a glass case, though he really wasn’t such a bad guy, died. They said natural causes, but he was only forty-six. He had always told me that after he died he’d come back and tell me what it was like on the other side, so I think it was his spirit that woke me up one day when there was no one else in my room: “None of this is as bad as you think,” the voice whispered, “and God is a chocolate donut.” It was Boothby’s laugh, without a doubt, and I laughed too, the first time a sound like that had passed from my lips since Kenny Monique had bulldozed me into that wall.
Since random sex takes about fifteen minutes
