EIGHTEEN
One gray morning, Job walked into my room and said, get rid of it.
I nodded, and Job walked out.
An hour or so later, after I had taken the little case of vials and the white robe with its badge to the incinerator chute — burning my hand on the chute’s handle in the process — he came back.
He said, we’ve got difficulties — they called the cops after that last one.
Yeah? I said.
So we stop. Call a temporary halt until things quiet down. It should be O.K., all good, you know, but keep cool. They talk to you, you don’t know anything, right?
I remember, I said.
Job went away. I never saw him again. The next day I heard from a new nurse that he had gotten himself picked up walking out of his apartment door with a suitcase and a fat wallet, had made some commentary, and had gotten smacked a couple of times, before being encouraged to kiss the pavement while he was cuffed.
I was sure I was next. In fact, I could practically hear them coming down the hall, a whole lot of them, probably more than was necessary. Since they were about to arrive at any second, I tried to get myself in the right frame of mind to be hauled off, imagining how I would act (tough, impervious) and what I would say (nothing) and what kind of look (devil-may-care, baby) I would give Dr. Tulp, standing in the door of the hospital as they shoved me into the car, and to Mr. Kindt, standing beside her (noble, resigned), and what I would do to Job (unmentionable) when I saw him, if I saw him.
For a couple of days (they didn’t come), I ran through a lot of permutations of this basic scenario, permutations that got pretty strange when I’d get my meds. I won’t get into all of them, because that would just be too boring, but, as an example, in one I hugged Mr. Kindt, who had very awful, very fishy breath, then kicked Dr. Tulp’s shin as the police were dragging me away.
Mr. Kindt, you’re my friend, Dr. Tulp, I hate you, I called as they stuffed me into the waiting patrol car.
It would probably be only fair to note, as a kind of corrective to the above-expressed sentiment, that most of the permutations in fact only involved Dr. Tulp. I mean there were no police and there was no Mr. Kindt and no hospital in them, and believe me, I wasn’t kicking shins. I was both elegant and gallant as I escorted Dr. Tulp to various local purveyors of handsome vintage apparel so that she could appropriately outfit herself for her upcoming green card proceedings and subsequent celebratory gatherings with her colleagues in the medical profession. At said gatherings, I would stand beside her in appropriate apparel of my own, holding a handsomely housed Cape Cod or Campari and soda, whose rich colors would add that subtle touch of depth to the convivial atmosphere. Occasionally, Dr. Tulp would flick her hand out and stab me with her pen, or lean close and sink her teeth into the soft flesh of my neck, but no one would take any notice and the smiles and soft chatter would go on and on. It is true that both Job and Mr. Kindt occasionally trespassed into these scenarios, but they invariably appeared in a service capacity, moving in and out of the crowd with trays of drinks and small, mysterious edibles encased in puffed pastry.
A few days went by like this, or maybe it was more than a few. In addition to the mental space taken up by my dismal flights of fancy, the subject of lost cats came into my mind and lodged there, unpleasantly, as did that of lost love. Thinking of this latter, I took to positioning myself on a bench by the ward’s main entrance in the hope that some remnant thereof would find its way through those tall metal doors. If Aunt Lulu — whom I had lost or let go or let sink forward toward her bowl of soup — had found me, I reasoned, why couldn’t Carine, whom I had lost in a different way but just as definitively? Dr. Tulp got concerned after I began to talk a lot about saliva in one of our sessions and upped my meds. I smacked the new nurse, an outrageously comely individual wearing a silver charm necklace with little devils on it, because the way she lifted her arm reminded me of Aunt Lulu, and passed a night in restraining straps with a slab of cold lead on my chest. Then I heard they weren’t going after anyone except Job, who was wanted for a couple of other, more complicated things.
This news calmed me down to some extent, but I did spend time obsessing over what Job’s other operations might have been. He’d talked one night about what had sounded at the time like a condominium deal in Florida, so I imagined him taking big, illicit bites of mob-related bogus property deals and eventually bilking the wrong guy. Because another time he had mentioned a predilection for indulging in a certain variety of late-night extracurricular activity and had remarked on its probable profitability, I pictured him running a ring of prostitutes, one catering exclusively to lower-middle-class East Village shop owners, maybe hiring someone to slip flyers under security grates at night. Job, as I imagined it, would sit at the center of this handsomely functioning mechanism with a green visor and violet glasses placing phone calls, delivering comportment lectures, and tallying receipts. When this line of thought began to lose its freshness, I decided that I needed to start getting some exercise and began jumping up and down and pumping my fists and doing other calisthenics in front of my mesh-covered window.
The new nurse came in then went out.
That is not acceptable behavior in a public facility, Henry, Dr. Tulp said.
But is it productive? I said.
It is neither productive nor acceptable, Henry. That bed you were jumping up and down on like it was your own personal property is the property of this facility and is not to be damaged. And jumping up and down without any clothes on anywhere in this facility besides your bathroom is out-of-bounds, period.
Well, fuck you.
That’s not very productive either, Henry.
No, I don’t suppose it fucking is, I said.
Dr. Tulp put one of her long, thin fingers on the intercom button and asked an attendant to come in. Two of them answered her call. They were small but persuasive.
That’s when I started talking about Aunt Lulu.
I talked and related and described, and after a while Dr. Tulp told the attendants it was all right for them to step back.
Ah, Aunt Lulu, I said. Aunt Lulu in her dirty housedress. Aunt Lulu with the protruding veins in her calves. Aunt Lulu and her cats before school. Big fat fucking huge and mean-as-hell Aunt Lulu.
Tell me about this meanness.
She used to kill her cats. After she had had them for a while, she would coax them into a double-ply plastic bag and seal it.
That is mean. But do you think it was inappropriate?
I thought so. I found some of them one day when I was building a fort at the back of the yard. My friend and I actually played with them for a while. The bags. We used them to build a dike.
And your father?
Long gone.
You used to own cats, didn’t you?
I shook my head.
Good, Henry, she said. That’s some progress, we’ve made some progress now.
I’m lying, I said.
What are you lying about, Henry?
About the fort. About Aunt Lulu. About everything.
Dr. Tulp’s long, thin finger flicked out, and the attendants came back in when I got out of my seat and started to shout.
Mr. Kindt helped me get out of this sorry rut. One day he came into my room, tapped me on the shoulder, and took me for a little walk around the ward. When I got back I felt different, better. Actually, better is overstating it. Especially given the way things evolved. Maybe what I should give Mr. Kindt credit for is helping me get out of one rut and into another, and everyone knows that change, in the grand scheme of things, is rarely good.
Anyway, it was quiet time, when the doctors are off in their offices and the nurses and attendants sit quietly behind counters and the patients are in their beds, maybe thumbing through magazines or books or watching television or staring out the window, maybe mired in nightmares, awake or asleep.