Plumdale was in several respects an unusual institution. One of its inmates, before amputating his son’s penis with a bread knife, had been head chef at Galatoire’s in New Orleans and, since he spent all his free time in the hospital kitchen, the food that came out of there was nearly good. The chief administrator of Plumdale actually lived on the premises. He was a 72-year-old Alsatian widower who believed that tobacco was a tranquilizing agent and that the last event that could be truly marked as progress for mankind was the invention of the pop-up toaster. Under his aegis, hydrotherapy, a curative method first codified in the mid-seventeenth century was still practiced on a regular basis at Plumdale.
Subbasement A, two levels below ground, was a huge vaulted room of pastel green tile, fitted with shower stalls and canvas-covered tubs, called the “soup tank.” There was a heavily chlorinated wading pool in which the water was piss-warm. There was a sauna that only the staff was allowed to use. Intransigent patients were sometimes strapped into chairs under small-bore pipes from which water poured directly onto their heads. Flow and temperature were controlled from a panel of valves and wheel cocks in an adjoining room that had a long, shatterproof window.
Long a watersports enthusiast, Christo visited the soup tank frequently. Also, this was one of a very few unsegregated activities and afforded the best contact with female inmates. There was one in particular who interested him, an emaciated girl with a white streak in her hair. She was always there, silently cross-legged in one of the shower stalls with her leotard full of holes. He imagined her to have once worn fashionable clothes and French cologne, to have made witty conversation in ritzy cafés where domestic champagne was never served. It took hours of cajolery to elicit the single fact that her name was Sara.
Christo brought her sourballs and pictures he’d cut out of magazines, which she accepted with a small and wordless smile. But it was not until he slipped on the wet tiles and fell, ripping open his hand on a screwhead not quite flush, that he won her. Sara knelt beside him and applied a shred of her drenched leotard to the wound. She cried as she licked the blood off her fingers. She permitted him to towel her off and comb the knots out of her hair. And she spoke.
More than two years ago, she said, her parents had arrived one night unannounced at the tenement apartment she shared with her lover, a 34-year-old body builder and part-time bouncer. For months they had been bombarding her with letters and phone calls, berating her for the aimless and degenerate life she was leading. But they seemed calmer now, conciliatory. Let’s go for a drive, they said. We’ll stop somewhere for coffee and a nice long talk. They had a friend waiting downstairs, a member of their tennis club, named Dr. Soberin. After a ten-minute interview in the back seat of the car as they drove to the hospital amid shouted abuse from Dad, waterworks from Mom, he signed Sara’s commitment papers. Dr. Soberin listed such symptoms as: sexual acting out, masculine role playing (she was wearing cowboy boots and a denim jacket that night) and refusal to accept responsibility for her actions.
Sara’s mother sent her a book on crewel embroidery that Christmas, but that was the last she’d heard. Chuck, the body builder, sent a few letters promising a visit but never showed.
“I’m dead to them I think,” Sara said, plucking devotedly at her split ends. “I have a brother and he cares about me. But I’m not allowed to see him or even speak to him on the phone.”
“Is that legal?”
“They say he’s a negative influence…. I don’t know, maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life here. Sometimes I think about eloping, but I’m not strong enough. Not yet anyway.”
“Eloping” was the term inmates used to describe a permanent and unauthorized self-removal from the facility.
“I’ve been thinking about that ever since I got here,” Christo said. “We ought to put our heads together.”
Sara fervently agreed but by the following afternoon had retreated into the egregious nullity that was her food and shelter.
Christo moved ahead on his own. He began shining up to a new aide on the ward, a blond smart-mouth he’d instantly pegged as a colleague, a fellow delinquent. The kid had skipped bail in San Diego and the proceeds of a fast drug-store robbery were eaten up on the trip east. Broke, forced to spend his first night in town at a 24-hour laundromat, he’d answered a want ad in the paper.
“Be gone soon as I get a shot at the narcotics closet,” he confided.
In exchange for intelligence on who carried master key sets and their lunch hour routines, he told Christo of a little out-of-the-way office where a set of hospital blueprints was on file. Late that night Christo broke into the office with the aid of a nail file stolen from the nurses’ lounge.
He studied the blueprints for almost an hour and discovered a serviceable escape path through a series of heating ducts to the ground-level parking garage. Facing budget cuts, the chief administrator had instituted an austerity program; the heating system was shut down from one till five in the morning. The parking garage was at the rear of the hospital facing a narrow residential street. There was one security guard at the gate and if he wasn’t asleep, Christo would have to take him out. He’d need a blunt instrument. And clothes. And good breaks.
Early on a Friday morning, when the last portion of the heating system’s off cycle coincided with the hour when several of the nurses were wont to gather in a vacant supply room for gossip and cigarettes, Christo slipped down to Sara’s ward on pilfered crepe-soled shoes. He carried with him in a pillowcase two janitor uniforms and a steel support bar it had taken less than two minutes to unscrew from his bed.
Sara was fast asleep. Christo peeled back the covers and gently pinched her behind.
“Time to go, Sara.”
Her only response was to brush once, twice at her cheek as though a fly had landed there. He whispered urgently, prodding her ribs. But Sara slept on, burrowing deeper into the pillows. He cursed her aloud, convinced she would foul him up, but unwilling to leave without her. One of Sara’s roommates sat up in bed, moving her hands in front of her as if she could part the darkness like living room drapes.
“I would like a glass of water, please,” she said.
Christo took Sara in his arms and carried her out the door.
“Taking her away for repainting?” said the roommate. “It’s fine with me.”
Sara came awake as they moved down the hall, kicked feebly and said, “Put me down. I’m sick.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Christo said, propping her against the wall. “It’s all been figured out for you.” He handed her a pair of cracked vinyl slippers he’d found next to her bed. “Here. Put these on…. Come on, come on, we have to move fast.”
Sara’s knees were shaking. With the metal bar, Christo pried off the grate, pointed into the dark mouth of the heating duct.
“I’ll go first and you hold on to my ankles. We’ll take a left and then our second right. It’s a sharp angle so watch out.”
“No.” Sara shook her head hopelessly. “You go on, I can’t. I can’t deal with closed spaces like that. I can only say goodbye.”
As she swayed forward to kiss him, Christo rapped her upside the head, caught her by the shoulders, shook her. “Listen to me, you cunt. You don’t have a choice, understand? I’m taking you. You’re going out of here if I have to strap you to my back like a knapsack.”
Frightened, doll-like, she obeyed and, only moments after stuffing herself into the cramped and stifling shaft, passed out. Christo heard a diminuendo moan behind him and felt her grip relax. He had to slither down to a junction point, where a smaller pipe fed into the main line, in order to turn himself around and drag her the rest of the way. It was very noisy work — sweaty, too, since the tin walls were still warm — and he was amazed that no one intercepted them at the other end. He kicked out the grate and pulled Sara free; her eyes fluttered open and she looked like a movie star at the finish of a deathbed monologue.