How worn and dusty were the places we had been holding on to. Deep in the ruts where everything settled. We wanted to rise up and out. See the moonlight amid the mountains. Breathe dry air and drink soft water. We began to build our castles in the air, hoping sooner or later they’d carry us off. New days came like clockwork without becoming tomorrows. We slept less and less, dipped in darkness through the daytime and heated by burning light in the endless evening. And only when we finally got up, threw on our clothes and walked away, did we realize that we had all been gone for years already.
ZUGZWANG, WARD III, 2010
JANUARY
During his first year working at Anchorage House, Jacob had stepped off the bus each day in front of Winston, the daytime guard, with satisfaction. While others rode on to their frictionless white office towers, he had but to give Winston a quick sarcastic salute to make the imposing wrought-iron gates creak open. Up and up the gravel driveway he’d climbed, past semicollapsed stables and yawning gray oaks. In a former life it had been a convent to the Bonnes Sœurs de la Grande Miséricorde with a giant statue of Jesus on the front lawn. Now it was a 125-bed private psychiatric facility accepting Blue Cross/Blue Shield, United Healthcare, and Medicaid, for adolescents who were persistently suffering from a host of mental ailments or required rapid stabilization in a “secure twenty-four-hour therapeutic sphere.” Jesus had been hauled around to the back, near where the nuns were still buried.
That first year Jacob had come in early just to spend an hour outside under the big willow tree by the duck pond, feeling like Keats, gazing up at the haunted spires and the patched, leaky roofs that were home to hunchbacks and gargoyles of his mind. At night he’d ducked out during moonless evening shifts and paced the snowy graveyard that still claimed the bodies of three dozen Wives of Christ, his heart stinging in his ribcage as the shadows whispered poems in his freezing ears.
But now the great gray fortress stood indifferent to Jacob’s return. He kept his eyes downcast on the slush-eaten driveway, wary of slipping and breaking his neck. The ducks had all gone south, and the iced-over pond was an opaque prison to last year’s leaves and the trash that had blown over from the Chinese Boys Academy across the way. Jacob paused beside it, trying not to feel cold and trying to think how exactly it had all come to this.
He’d gotten the job mainly because of his size — of that he was certain — and he’d accepted because being a poet wasn’t exactly lucrative. He remembered a professor, the hoary poet Penn Hazelwood, once telling their class, “Stop any guy on the street and ask him for the name of any living poet. Nine out of ten of them will say ‘Robert Frost’ or ‘Shakespeare’ or someone who’s been dead for decades or centuries. The other one will say ‘Billy Collins.’ And that’s the ball game, chowderheads. Sorry to drag you into this mess.”
From his spot beside the pond, Jacob closed his eyes and with no effort at all, summoned an image of Irene just seconds after she’d died. He’d never seen that kind of pale before. What skin looks like without any blood left beneath it. Easy to remember, hard to think about. But from this memory he could rewind to the moments just before she’d died, when he had, true to form, gotten the last word in. He’d sneaked up to her bedside while the nurses were increasing her morphine drip and preparing to remove the breathing tube, and he’d whispered in her ear before “they” eased him out of the way again. He swore he’d seen the corners of her lips creak up.
To Sara, he reported that he’d told Irene that, in her hospital gown, she was the spitting image of Grace Kelly in Rear Window. To George, he’d said that he had finally confessed to completely forgetting to water her plants when she’d gone upstate three summers earlier. But these had both been lies. As far as he was concerned, only two people needed to know what he’d actually said, and he was the only one left.
Inside, at least, Anchorage House was warm, and the combination wheel to his locker felt familiar under his fingertips: 3–8–25. Orderly whites had been hanging there since November. Still a faint smell of bleach. In the men’s room, the same old graffiti — a three-inch hirsute penis, a misspelled Young Jeezy lyric, an offer for a good time if bibjguy4you@msn.com was contacted. In his clean white uniform, he felt like a new person, freshly born, rather than someone who had, forty days ago, watched his friend die.
The door to Ward III was keycard-locked, but just past it the door to Oliver’s office was always open to both patients and staff. Because no one at work knew they were dating, Jacob fired off a casual “Hey, Dr. B,” while barely tapping the door frame. Inside, Oliver was chatting with Sissy Coltrane, head of art therapy, but instead of repeating Jacob’s “Hey!” Oliver froze as if he’d seen a ghost. Sissy turned, eyes wide. Jacob had spent enough time talking crap behind other people’s backs to see he’d just caught them speaking about him.
“You’re back!” Sissy chirped, rushing to the door, her arms extended inside a scratchy, sleeveless wool sweater. It was like being hugged by a bird’s nest.
“We’ve missed you! Oliver said you were with your poor friend in the hospital! That can be so tough. My mother had this operation on her rotator cuff once, and she was in bed for six weeks. I mean, I’m still reliving it. Terrible. Anyway, I hope everything worked out okay—”
She kept talking, but Jacob was more intent on glaring at Oliver than listening. He had told Sissy about Irene, this much was clear. But had he not then also told her that Irene had died?
Oliver mouthed a helpless apology behind Sissy’s back, making that look he always made. For how would he know that kind of personal information?
Jacob didn’t know what to say. Sara had been the one to call people, afterward. Then she’d posted this kind of creepy announcement onto Irene’s Facebook wall, prompting distraught replies from “friends” who hadn’t actually spoken to her in half a decade. Long, memorial messages filled with frowny faces and little hearts. Jacob had read every entry, waiting to be really nailed. Why not? Everyone else was crying all over the place. Even George was sniffling as he’d helped him snip obituaries out of all the newspapers Sara had notified. But Jacob had just sat there scissoring, quietly inhuman, as he stood now in Oliver’s doorway, Sissy’s eyes already beginning to leak.
“Yeah. It wasn’t — it didn’t — she didn’t end up making it.”
At least Sissy released him from her hug, as she turned to Oliver, horrified.
Oliver looked worried, as if Jacob were a giant mess of wires and plastic explosives that he’d just deliberately kicked. But Jacob had been getting this look from nearly everyone since it happened. They expected him, of all people, to lose his ever-loving shit. It was, after all, what Jacob Blaumann always did. But they didn’t see — there was no “always” anymore. Sara, George, Oliver, his own mother — everyone had told him once or a dozen times to just let it out. It’s okay to be upset! Pitch a fit, pound some walls, you’ll feel better. But surely he owed Irene more than that. He could hold on to this thing for however many years he had left. Long, long after everyone else had forgotten, he would remain Irene’s cold, stone memorial. So all he did was say thank you politely — and, he hoped, not crazily — before walking away.