Part 10 (1/2)

The dog owner was Fenske. He'd been in repeatedly, like so many others, for drug rehab. I noticed him right away because he looked like a New Yorker, a college-educated bohemian East Village type, who'd somehow been airlifted to this desolate place and left to languish among the drab, doltish natives. He had luxurious wavy shoulder-length blond hair and a pale freckled complexion. He wore horn-rimmed gla.s.ses, jeans, red Puma Clyde sneakers, and a beat-up black leather blazer.

He made an impression on me right away, as I must have on him, because going up in the elevator after one of the breaks he looked across the group of us, all crammed in like cattle, focused on me, and said, ”You,” he pointed thoughtfully. ”You're some kind of emotional parasite, aren't you?”

”A spy, actually,” I murmured.

”Thought so.”

”Nah. Just an emotional cripple like the rest of us. Wrist-slasher, oven-header, that sort of thing.”

”Oh, okay. Gotcha.”

He said this like I was telling him what I did for a living at a barbecue, which is what we all learned to do in there when we heard even the most extreme stories.

I found myself doing it when I made the mistake of asking the shaved-headed handlebar-mustachioed guy in the Marines sweats.h.i.+rt what he was in for.

”Drinking. Drugs.”

”Were you in Iraq?”

”First time around. Got discharged.”

Post-traumatic stress, I presumed, but feigned ignorance.

”Why?”

”Liked it.”

”Liked what?”

”Killing.”

”Oh, right.”

”Volunteered for one too many missions and they were on to me.”

I remembered reading a recent article about sociopaths flying under the radar in the military and then surfacing as the henchmen of some civilian ma.s.sacre or Abu Ghraib-type fiasco.

We crowded into the elevator right after he told me this. I was standing close enough to practically lick the scorpion tattooed on his scalp.

”Uh-huh,” I said, pretend-thoughtfully. ”Gotcha.”

In the ICU, I had a room to myself. It was a double, but I didn't have a roommate. It was just me and the empty bed next to mine, and the deliriously clean tiled bathroom.

I was in love with that bathroom. I sat in there a lot with the light out and the door shut, like a kid playing fort in a closet. I forgot myself in there, where there was only the thick enveloping dark and the band of light around the door frame, and the close, cool quiet. I was whole in it, unseen and unseeing, crept away in a cleared place so perfect in remove, like a pod gliding in s.p.a.ce.

Sometimes when I sat in there I thought about odd things, more of those depressive thought patterns I had come to recognize. I thought, for example, about the woman who cleaned my bathroom. Like everyone else here, Fridge excepted, she was white. Scandinavian white and chirpy cheerful even as she mopped. I imagined she baked pies on the weekends for her extended family and smiled at the weather from the porch, where she rocked away her aching back and what I thought must be her quiet desperation. For all I knew she was happy. But I couldn't imagine that. I inhabited her bland life as I saw it, and grew sadder.

As with everyone else I encountered when I was depressed, I went way too deep too fast. I was like a sponge, or a medium, soaking up the pain and dissatisfaction of strangers. The minute my eyes took them in, I took them in. This was another aspect of my disease, my problem, or my way of being in the world, whatever tag you want to put on it. It was a habit of mind that had no filter, no sh.e.l.l or thick skin that separated me and my pain from everyone else's. Call it depression as a form of extreme empathy, and then overstimulation, as if every person I met or pa.s.sed in the street was a loud radio blaring.

This was why I hid in the bathroom or in the tub or on the couch curled up in a ball, because even to leave the house was like stepping into some relentless Russian play. I was overwhelmed immediately-by the post-man whose shorts were his humiliation, and the dog walker whose acting career was not going so well, and the cas.h.i.+er at the drugstore whose life happened behind a counter, and even the filthy rich lady sitting alone at the bar at Bergdorf's at noon in her kelly green broad-brimmed hat that said ”Notice me.”

Pain. Too much pain. Loneliness, frustration, loss, the broadcast of each striving mind, the malaise of a failed attempt, so common, or the vortex of one never made, commoner still.

And me sitting in the bathroom in the dark thinking about it.

The truth was, I was spending too much time alone. The thoughts were too heavy again. Besides, I thought I should have been working. Or spying, I guess, so I wandered into the kitchen to join another game of cards.

Bunny was playing bulls.h.i.+t with Bard, Clay, and Fridge. Bard was a nineteen-year-old Ritalin wastoid committed by the state for ninety days. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade, after having done the grade twice, moved into an apartment with his father, worked at a thrift store, and sat around doing ”hot rails” (crystal meth inhaled through a superheated gla.s.s straw) for the rest of his adolescence. When he was eighteen he came home one day to find that his father had left him, just took the furniture and moved without a word.

They had him on the antipsychotic Zyprexa, but true to form in that joint, he was as clear as a bell. He admitted to paranoid moments in the past, but to see him you would have thought he was just like any other jacked-up parap.u.b.escent vandal with too many muscles and nothing to do with them.

He was small, but built and wired to do damage, with a buzz cut, black wife beater, and a bulbous pair of ever susurrating headphones, which the nurses had lent him as a pacifier. He looked and acted like he was raised backstage at a rock concert, weaned on noise and petty crime, like a mascot of dystopia. He was singing along with the radio as he put down his cards.

”If you want to undo my sweater . . .”

”Five jacks,” he blurted.

”Buuuuulll s.h.i.+ttt,” shouted Bunny.

Bard flipped the cards. There were indeed five jacks.

”Suck on that, b.i.t.c.h.”

Bunny laughed, and so did the rest of us.

In bulls.h.i.+t you use two or three decks, depending on the number of players. The decks are dealt evenly among the players, so it's possible to have as many as eight to twelve of any suit. The object of the game is to be the first to get rid of all your cards, so fibbing about what you've discarded, and catching other players in their fibs is the sole object. Hence the name of the game.

These games of cards were another gold mine for me. People will talk about almost anything if their conscious minds are otherwise engaged, and they don't have to look you in the eye. That was part of what was so relaxing about a game of cards in there. It functioned as a form of group therapy, but for my purposes, far better, because people would spill everything they wouldn't dream of saying in front of the staff.

Bard, for example, who was peevish and monosyllabic in social work group or activity therapy or any of the other meetings that formed the backbone of the treatment at St. Luke's, was positively chatty in a game of bulls.h.i.+t. He even produced his commitment papers, which Bunny had asked to see, because she had once worked as a paralegal, and because she'd been committed enough times to at least claim to know the minutiae of state law on mental hygiene.

I was peering over her shoulder as she read.

”So you were committed initially for two weeks,” she said, perusing the doc.u.ment, ”and then at the end of that time you were recommitted for ninety days. I a.s.sume you had a lawyer?”

”Yeah,” said Bard, ”but he was insane himself.” Stretching out an exaggeratedly shaking hand to mime the action, he added, ”He signed the papers like this.”

Bunny flipped through the pages of the order. ”Yeah, you're pretty screwed.”