The Shibboleth (9 page)

“My name's Sylvester, but everyone around here calls me Buster. Follow me.”

It takes me a bit to catch up with Buster. When I do, he cocks an eye at me and says, “Chart says you had a schizophrenic break and you were violent to an old lady.”

“I—”

“Hey, kid, don't make excuses. All you got to hear is this: I can rip your arm out of its socket like I was pulling a wing from a roasted chicken. You know?” Matter of fact.

“That right, hoss? I can go in your head and blow out all your lights and then work you like a meat puppet.”

He lifts the chart, peers at it awhile, pulls out the pencil and scratches at the paper, and then looks at me again. Slow. Deliberate. Then he begins walking. “Right. Come on.”

We bank around the back of the nurse's station—a couple of massive orderlies eyeball me—and approach a small window at the back of the building. At least Rollie isn't following anymore.

“Not gonna repeat myself, right, kid? This here's where you come every morning, right after breakfast—all meals in are in there—or we'll find you. You won't like it if we have to hunt you down. There's the male ward; there's the female ward. Do not try to enter the female ward. Fraternizing with our female guests is fine, but no sex. No mutual masturbation. No nothing.
Got me? You start messing with one of the young ladies here, you'll find yourself in isolation so fast your head will spin. Got me?”

“You said ‘got me' twice.”

He ignores that. “I'm gonna make Rollie your tour guide for the common areas, since she's obviously sweet on you. You've got an evaluation in that office there—”

“You think that's a good idea? Putting me with a girl?”

“No one else seems interested in you. Might as well be her.” He jabs a thick finger at a frosted glass door. “You've got an appointment with Dr. Sinequa immediately following lunch.” He steps up to the window and pats the lime-green counter. The sour man glaring at the computer monitor is framed in the window and surrounded by shelves full of drugs. He's got a Taser at his waist.

Buster says, “I need Shreve Cannon's morning candy, if you please, Steve-O.”

Steve-O turns to the nearby computer and clacks on the keyboard for a few moments and then disappears back among the shelves of drugs.

“You noticed the Taser, right? Don't know what your problem is, kid, but if any patient is found behind this counter, Steve-O is allowed to put you down.”

“What's with the
sturm und drang
routine, hoss?”

He turns to me and snatches my wrist and gives a little jerk.

“Don't call me ‘hoss,' kid. Look around this place.” He stops, puts his massive hands on his waist, and looks at me. “Seriously, take a good look.”

I look. Robed zombies wander the hall, passing in and out of the cafeteria, the recreation rooms, the reading area.
They murmur, mutter, moan, rock. Buster's radio squelches and hisses, and a strange garbled noise comes from the tinny speaker. The air stinks of disinfectant and a whiff of raw sewage. The nurses, men and women alike, keep to the nurse station or move very fast toward their destination, as if the toddling shamblers were real zombies instead of medicated ones.

I try, for an instant, to get out of my skin and go behind Buster's eyes—not to do what I said, but just to understand. Time becomes elastic for that moment, and I'm out and looking from behind his eyes at me, but then the moment is up and the elastic tether that keeps me associated with my meatsuit snaps me back.

Almost had it.

Buster says, “This locked-down psychiatric ward has a forty-eight-patient capacity. You wanna know how many patients we have in here?”

No, not really, but I can tell he's going to tell me anyway. “More?”

“One hundred and twenty. You're Mister One Hundred and Twenty-One.”

“That's crazy.”

“You hit the nail on the head.” He stops, and then something about his expression clouds. “The whole world is going batty at the same time. It wasn't like this a year ago.”

“The insomnia?”

He looks at me like I'm a moron. “Bingo, kid. And these poor souls—” He taps me on the shoulder. “Including your little ass—are the first ones to stampede off the cliff.”

Steve-O returns with a small tray holding two small paper cups.

“There's your candy, Shreve. Take it.”

I pick up the cups. There are two large capsules in one and a few ounces of water in the other. The pills most assuredly do not have the look of candy, and I would know.

“What is this?”

He bristles. “The red-and-blue one makes you smaller; the yellow one makes you larger. Ain't got time for twenty questions. Take them.”

“What if I don't?”

“I hold you down and make you take them.” He looks around for support. “Steve-O, this one's gonna be trouble. Come out here.”

Steve-O moves away from the computer station, puts his hand on his Taser, and exits the dispensary through a nearby door.

“You have three seconds to eat that candy, kid.”

It's all happening too fast, and I can't tell if it's because of the gauze of the drugs swaddling my brain and preventing me from touching the shibboleth or if it's really just happening too fast.

“Three, two…”

Everything locks. My whole body goes rigid and there's an electric crackling sound—
pop pop pop pop pop
—and I have no control over anything because every muscle is tight and contracted and I teeter and hit the ground.

I try to do the Ghost Dance like so long ago, back in Casimir, when the admin bull ordered me to stay behind the line, but the candy swims through my bloodstream, full bore, and I'm locked incarcerado. Blocked from the shibboleth.

Buster fills my vision, a half-sad, half-determined look
on his face, saying to Steve-O, “Get the pills. One went over there!” He forces open my mouth with his big paws—there's no resisting him—and after a moment of scrabbling and muttered profanity, Steve-O roughly shoves them in.

Buster covers everything that can take in air on my face and says, “Swallow or you'll suffocate. More paperwork for us, but no one's gonna bat an eye at some punk kid who asphyxiates. You got me?”

With his face in mine, I make one more attempt to get behind his eyes. There's the faintest scent of flame, and for a moment, I think I'm about to fly into the wild blue yonder, to touch the shibboleth, but the spark dies and I'm still firmly seated in good ole Shreve.

“You got me?”

The air in my lungs is exhausted of oxygen, and black is pushing around at the edges, but,
yeah
, I get him.

I swallow and the pills, without the sluice of water, feel like stones traveling down my throat, rough and gigantic and full of sleep.

He pats me on my cheek and says, “Good boy,” and lifts me off the floor and places me on my feet once again. Turning his head, he nods at Steve-O, saying, “Okay, he'll be good from here on out.” He looks back to me. “I'm watching you, kid. There's no fun and games in here. Next time you don't want to eat your candy, Steve-O will pop you in the ass with a syringe full of juice. Understand?”

“Oui, oui.”

“What?”

I can't understand why my tongue said that so I just nod and duck my head.

“All right, be a good boy and don't cause any trouble.” He pats my head.

I toddle off. My body is sore all over from the electrical charge and my shoulder hurts where Buster almost pulled out my arm and my back stings where the Taser's prongs pricked my skin.

Not my favorite morning ever, that's for sure.

Rollie catches up with me as I shamble over to the reading room.

“Hey, beautiful,” she says, putting a bony hand on my shoulder—the smarting one—and stopping my forward movement. “When Buster gives an order, you
gotta
do it.” Her ammonia breath washes over my face. “
He doesn't play, you know?
”

“Yeah, I kinda figured that out.”

“Makes you all jumpy, don't it? The zapping?”

She's looking at me with those big liquid eyes and a grin on her face. She's too happy for a prisoner in a mental ward.

“Don't you ever want to bust out of this place?”

“You mean, escape?” Rollie grimaces and looks at me as if I am insane. More insane. Whatever.

“Yeah, escape. You know—” I wave my hand at the green walls and unbreakable plastic windows. “The wild blue yonder? Baseball fields? Children of the corn?”

She shudders. Her emotions seesaw across her face. Her bony shoulders hunch up into a tight knot. Her hands jitter. “No. It's terrible out there. That's why I'm here. Safe.” Her face clears. She tries her smile back on.

“Safe? I just had a gorilla electrocute me. It's not safe in here,” I say.

Her newfound smile withers and dies. She whispers, “It's terrible out there. Something's coming. Some cancer is growing, and I can feel it.”

“Have you slept recently?”

She ignores that, closing her big peepers and touching her eyelids with her two tremulous index fingers. “Sometimes I can feel it growing behind here. My eyes. Growing. Passing into the world.”

I'm cold for a moment, colder than normal, colder than the air of the ward, colder than the tiles of the building.

“What is it?” I whisper back.

Eyes open now, Rollie's giving me the lip-nibbling look of worry, like she's said too much. So I give her the old salesman grin, my tool of the trade back before Jack and the shibboleth busted up the party. When she smiled mean—that hurt and desperate smile—it didn't do much for her appearance. But now, this vulnerability softens her and for a moment I feel like I can see her how she should be: whole, 11 percent body fat, olive-skinned, and smiling wholeheartedly on a softball field with other girls, her hair pulled back and threaded through the rear of her cap. Not this rattled bundle of nerves, fingernails eroded to nubs, hair as short as a prisoner's, breathing out the ammoniac poisons her body generates as it devours itself.

No, for an instant, I can see her beauty.

And maybe that's what the shibboleth is. It's the commonality of human existence. It lets me get in their heads because we're the same, all of us, this human utterance.

She blinks and says, “I don't know,” shaking her head. And the moment evaporates.

We've been standing right outside the open double doorway, yet no one seems to notice two patients in gowns furiously whispering in their midst. A big bull-nurse sits on a stool by the door as zombies shamble in and out, humming, using their fingertips to trace invisible patterns in the air.

We enter the reading room. There are magazines and
National Geographics
and books for teens, Judy Blume and Madeleine L'Engle. There's a full set of smudged and threadbare Harry Potters and the requisite Tolkien. Fantasy is the preferred literature of the psych ward, it seems.

I find a book of poetry called
The Sorrow of Architecture
by Liam Rector and paw through it. Rollie picks up a
Glamour
magazine. She's silent now, and I have much to think about, but it's hard keeping a single idea in my head with the medication thrumming and shivering in my system. It's as if I cannot concentrate on anything for more than an instant, but each instant is an eternity. But Rollie stays close, occasionally glancing at me as if making sure I haven't gone too far away.

I can't say how long I've stared at the same poem before moving on to a copy of
Songs of Innocence and Experience
and then, because the words begin to swim on the page, onto an issue of
People
, where everyone is beautiful and smiling. Flipping through the pages, I realize that in Hollywood, everyone gets a good night's sleep.

“Aren't you supposed to be showing me around?” I ask when I can't look at any more magazines.

“You've seen the cafeteria. This is the reading room. That leaves the Wreck Room. Wreck with a
W
.”

“Gotcha. Because it's a wreck.”

“No, because we are.” She tosses her
Glamour
onto the pile on the table and stands. “Come on, we can go play Chutes and Ladders. That's not a euphemism for anything.” She winks at me. “Unless you want it to be.”

In the Wreck Room, there's a smattering of zombies pushing plastic figures around on printed cardboard. There's one table of boys and girls seriously engaged in a card game. One of the boys is just bawling his head off, tears streaming down his face and snot running from his nose, and none of them seem to notice. In the corner, a very tall, very fat girl sings a song and tosses brightly colored Uno cards into a box, one by one.

I am you, and you are me, though we always disagree
… It's a strange little song, yet she's got a wonderful voice, a choir voice. Rich timbre, throaty. She's found a melody, minor, lilting.
Me is you and you am he, one and two and one make three.
I feel like I've heard the song before, somewhere.