“W.F.?”
“What?” Already at the doorway, W.F. turned to look back.
“Did you see a blond woman here last night? A visitor?”
“Somebody come while you sleep last night, huh?”
He nodded, then added, “Not really while I was asleep. I was awake, and I saw her just as she was stepping out into the hallway.” He indicated the golden card attached to the roses. “This woman.”
“Listen.” W.F. stepped toward the bed again and lowered his voice. “Lots of dudes have some dreams like that. Don’t matter—don’t you worry ’bout it.”
Breakfast was Corn Flakes with a sliced banana, milk, and coffee. He ate listlessly, trying to recall what he had eaten for dinner the night before. The only thing he could be sure of was W.F.’s promised chocolate pudding. Had there been potatoes? He seemed to remember green beans and a scoop of mashed potatoes with a half tablespoon of gravy.
Was this what patients did? He had not thought of himself as a patient before, but as a wounded animal, a lost adventurer briefly exiled from the fields of life. Perhaps no one thought of himself as a patient until he was well, or almost well. He’d had a concussion, after all—a bad concussion. Perhaps this was how patients felt, how patients lived, waiting from one meal to the next, marking their whole lives with soggy Corn Flakes and cold coffee.
He tried to finish the coffee before it got any colder and discovered that his hand was shaking too much to hold the cup. This was a mental hospital. He had a concussion—or was that just what they told you? He felt his bandaged head.
There was a knock at the doorway; a man in coveralls stood there, artfully pretending that there was an actual door before him—a door impenetrable to the human eye.
“Yes?” he said.
“TV repair. You have a broken set?”
He had forgotten about it. “Yes,” he said again. “Or at least it was broken yesterday.” He picked up the remote control and pressed the On button. Nothing happened.
The man had stepped inside. “No picture. No sound.”
“That’s right,” he said.
“You didn’t mess with the knobs, did you?” The man edged in the direction of the set, keeping an eye on him.
“I’m not crazy,” he said. “I’m an alcoholic, a drunk. I fell down and hit my head. Read my chart. No, I didn’t touch the knobs at all; there’s nothing but that little chair to stand on, and it’s on wheels.”
Somewhat to his surprise, the television repair man did as he had suggested, bending to study the chart at the foot of his bed.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Okay.” The man straightened up, smiling. “You know how it is—some of the guys in this place are really nuts. I guess it’s worse for you, being in here all the time.”
“I haven’t met many of them. I only got here yesterday.” It struck him that he did not really know whether what he had said was true or not. “Or anyhow, I only woke up yesterday.”
“I had one guy try to jump me once. I had one guy tell me he was God.” The man chuckled. “And he hadn’t liked how the world was going, so he changed it. But he didn’t like the new way either, and he wanted it changed back. He was real mad.”
He smiled dutifully.
“There was a woman too that said she was a pilot. You ever hear of a woman that could fly an airplane?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Maybe she was, then. Only she said she was way up above all the clouds, and she didn’t know quite where she was, and she didn’t want to come down through them because sometimes you hit something doing that. So she saw this little bitty hole in the clouds, and lights on the ground, and she went through it, and everything was different.” The man chuckled again. “They used to have the women mixed in with the men, you know, what do some of these guys know? But one of the papers found out about it.” Expertly the man lifted the television from its slanted bracket.
He had put the telephone in his lap. Without much hope, he dialed his apartment.
“Knobs don’t work,” the man said. “Now I gotta see if you got power. Some of the outlets here are bad.”
Somewhere (where?) a telephone rang and rang again.
“You got power, so it’s the main fuse. Power, no light, no sound, it can’t be anything else.” The man whipped out a large screwdriver and began to take the back off the set.
“Hello?” It was a harsh male voice.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“You called me. Who do you want?”
“Lara.”
There was a long pause in which he heard faint music and children’s voices, as though a radio were playing in the next apartment, as though the apartment were by a school (it was not) and all its windows were open in this bitter cold, admitting the sounds of the playground with the snow.
“Lara’s not here. Who’s calling?”
