Authors: Brandon Shire
It's okay,” he announced. “I like you anyway. My gift sets people off at first, praise Jesus for it, but once they get to know me they're not so scared.
I nodded as he squatted to the trap in my door and motioned me down to join him.
“They think I'm crazy, but they can't understand how I know what they're thinking. If that makes me crazy...” He shrugged. “I'll still be king.”
“King?” I repeated.
“Sure, Jesus told me I'd be king after I got rid of some people for him.”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded again and moved back from the trap.
He tried to explain. “See, the first time I didn't listen. This voice in the ceiling told me to play the lottery if I wanted to be a millionaire. I says to myself, I'm going fucking bat shit. You know? Well, the next day the numbers came up for forty three million. Jesus came back and asked why I doubted and if I'd listen next time. I said sure, and he told me to get rid of my wife and her friend if I wanted to be king, and .....“ He shrugged again. “Here I am.”
“King,” I said.
He smiled. “Not yet, but soon.”
“Rodriguez!” a voice bellowed. “Get the hell away from there.”
He looked down the hall at someone outside my line of sight. “Gotta go.” He stood, hitched his pants up, and continued mopping his way down the hall after Joseph.
A large hairless black man in orderly whites appeared outside my cell. His shoulders were four feet across and his chest at least half that thick. He didn't seem malicious, just big. Big enough that I would never want him pissed at me.
“You meet the king?” he asked me.
“Yeah. And Joseph.”
He looked over at Rodriguez, who nodded, and turned back to me. “The king says you're okay, so we'll get rid of the chains while you wait for the doc. Put your hands out.”
I shook out my hands and wrists after he took off the cuffs and thanked him.
“Name’s Mo.” He informed me. “Mr. Tucker when the white folks is about.”
“That my initial?” I asked glancing at Rodriguez and Joseph as they continued on down the hall.
Mo cut his eyes in their direction. “The doc can only guess what you're thinking. The King knows. I don't know how, but he does. And he ain't never been wrong yet. Makes my job easier if I know who to watch my back around. Understand?”
I nodded. “Now what happens?”
“You'll have your eval with the doc and then be assigned a dorm.”
“Meds?” I asked him.
“You don't take 'em, we boot you up in the jacket and stick you.”
Not unlike Sanctuary. But from Mo's demeanor I had the inclination that the Birch Building operated in a completely different manner. And if I was lucky, this dump had removed shock therapy as a part of their treatment regime.
Mo walked back to his unseen post and Rodriguez zipped back to impart one final salutation. “Welcome to the viva loca.”
*****
The next day I met Dr. James Solomon, dubbed “the Turtle” because of his habit of settling his head on his collar bone and extending it upward only when a point of interest propelled him to acknowledgement, which was rarely. My interview consisted of a silent review of my file, a nod, and I was whisked away to a dormitory full of shadow and muted chaos.
When my escort left I was immediately encircled; an anonymous stranger loose among the insane. I could only stare back at the leaden corpses around me; their eyes lidded heavy with the hundred thousand demons that cavorted below the buzz of psychotropic drugs.
As I watched them study me, I knew that my war of minds would have to be fought on a different level here. It was an alternative reality; one cagey with the indelicacies of psychological disturbance. I was also aware that when I left this place, if I ever left it, I would not leave without some alteration; some taint of madness. It dawned on me that in order to survive I would have to reach out and grasp reasoning in a choke hold; knowing that if I allowed it to slip away, my illusion of lucidity would be lost in the arrowroot-like thickening of dementia that already threatened to engulf me.
Later, I would learn that this group around me wasn’t staring at me specifically, but at my unexplored aberrance; the change that I had affected on their monotonous environment. They stared at me as they stared at the enmeshed television, or the barred outside world. I was only a momentary flicker of life intruding and tickling them with a vision of normalcy.
A man named Lester skulked up to me first, inspecting every crevice of the dayroom before advancing the few final feet between us.
“You with them, or us?” he asked me.
I leaned close, my eyes jutting out to either side before I spoke. “Double agent,” I said, doing another sweep of the room for eavesdroppers.
My new co-conspirator walked off with a complicit nod, still convinced that vending machines had acquired intelligence and were conspiring to form a new world order.
“Don’t fuck with him, he’s bat shit.”
I turned to find a young man in his twenties. He had a medium stature and a shock of white-blonde hair. His arms were scarred with a thick pelt of self inflicted hatred and an emotional pain so deep that the only way he knew how to purify himself was with the cutting edge of some sharp instrument.
“You got a razor?” he asked me.
“No.” I shook my head for emphasis.
“Damn. Sometimes they slip up and let one in.” He sulked for a moment then brightened at a new thought. “They call me Snow. You wanna fuck?”
I stared at him. “Ah…, not right now. Maybe later?”
“Okay.” He wandered off with a slight skip and a smile.
I couldn’t tell if he was friend number two or not.
Mr. Bryant greeted me next, his eyes doing a thorough scan of the floor and his brain unconsciously tabulating the number of human feet on its surface. The authorized number varied indiscriminately, if there was an excess then Mr. Bryant would start warbling at the top of his lungs and not stop until the required number of people had leapt onto the nearest bed. This included staff.
Q-tip was next. He was an old black man with a snarled white afro at least a foot tall. He had been abducted by aliens and sexually abused and experimented on, as had his father and grandfather before him.
There was Tiny, a 370 pound 6’5’ pound of flesh whom even the staff tried to avoid. He was harmless, but his eyes were perpetually red rimmed and menacing; staring into a past that included watching his wife mix heroin and Magic Shave together and plunging it into her veins, killing her and their unborn child. He rarely spoke of this, or anything else.
The last person I met was Thai. He was a short man of some obscure Asian descent who had a placidity about him that resembled an almost eerie catatonia. He also spoke very rarely, and only in broken English, usually reverting to pointing and nodding to communicate. To me he seemed the sanest man there, but Lester thought him a spy and avoided him at all costs.
There were others that came and went, but this was the core of the group that I lived with for the six years that I was at the Birch Building. All in all, they were some of the gentlest people I ever knew.
“You want some coffee?” a man asked after I’d found my bunk and started putting my things away.
I looked him over before I accepted. At Sanctuary there were several unvocalized meanings behind both the question and the answer, but my interrogator was a stooped old man who hardly seemed the type to be roaming for sex.
“Sure.”
“Hang on.” He left and came back with a small jar from which he placed two scoops into my cup. He waited until I had finished unpacking and brought me on a small tour of the place; showing me the bathrooms, the nurses’ station, the view from the windows, and all the other minute little details that made up this little world.
He introduced himself as Mr. Goss and took me around another time to meet all the residents of the pod, as if they hadn’t already met me the first time. While he was explaining the activities the institution offered to break the monotony, we passed Snow’s room. Snow took one look at me, at Mr. Goss, and then at my cup and burst into laughter.
About an hour later I found out why. Snow stopped in my room with a big shit eating grin on his face. “You been to the bathroom yet?”
“No,” I answered slowly, “I was just going. Why?”
“Mr. Goss is gonna want that.”
“What?” I asked.
“Your piss.”
“What?”
“He wants your piss. That’s why he gave you the coffee,” Snow said with a huge grin of mirth. “Look outside your door.”
I got off the bunk and went to the door. Mr. Goss stood nearby, a cup in his hand, his gaze direct and expectant. I turned back to Snow.
“What the fuck does he want my piss for?”
“Get your essence,” Snow answered. “He won’t stop until he gets it, so you might as well give it to him now.”
“Like hell!”
“He’s not going to drink it or anything, just swish it around in his mouth for a bit, like the old time doctors used to do.”
“No way.” I repeated firmly.
“Suit yourself,” Snow said as he got up and walk out.
I spent the next three days running from Mr. Goss, my bladder the size of an inner tube. He finally caught me one bleary eyed morning as I stood at the urinal. It was a group commode that some smart ass had designed like a round water fountain for elementary schools and psych wards.
I was still half asleep, not quite use to the new anti-depressants I’d been put on, when Goss struck; interrupting my stream with quick cupped hands and an open mouth. In shock I watched him slurp it up and wipe the excess across his face in some parody of the Three Stooges. He stood serenely, smiled, and after some urinary consternation, declared me to be a person with whom he could now associate.
“Good people,” he informed me about myself.
“Mr. Goss always gets his man,” Snow proclaimed with a chuckle as he walked in.
*****
“So what’s your story?” Snow asked after I’d been there a few weeks. “You don’t talk to anyone. You sit in your room all day and read. What the fuck are you doing here?”
Mr. Bryant went off just then, driving Snow onto my bed with a leap.
“Son of a bitch!” he yelped. “I hate it when he does that shit.” He peeked cautiously around the corner of the door, put one foot down, then the other, priming himself for another leap should Mr. Bryant’s alarm go off again. Finally he sat down on the bunk with me and pulled his legs up Indian style. “So?”
“It’s a long story.”
“You going somewhere?” he asked.
“No, I just don’t want to talk about it.”
He put his hand on my arm and rubbed it gently. “I ain’t trying to pry. You just look like you needed someone to talk to. You keep it in and it just fucks with your head. I know,” he added as he turned out his arms and exposed his scars to me.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Like you, it’s a long story. The short of it is that I had teenage cousins that started fucking me when I was six. They took me willingly or unwillingly, they didn’t care. Then they started pimping me out to their friends.” He motioned down to his arms. “It was my only escape. Still is, sometimes.”
“Jesus,” I said as I ran a finger over his pelt of scars.
“It doesn’t hurt, it’s like this big flood of release,” he explained. “Need some coffee?” he joked, swirling his tongue around his lips with a laugh. He got up off the bed and looked down at me. “Well, whenever you want to talk...” he said leaving the room.
“I’m gay,” I blurted.
“Hell, I know that.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“’Cause you’re gay?” he asked as he came back in and sat down again.
I nodded, tears forming before I could stop them. I slumped and let my story flow out of me. I finished by telling him of the dreams I’d had of Robert and myself when I was at Sanctuary.
“I keep trying to put him out of my head,” I explained, “but it feels like he’s right behind me, poking me in the shoulder. I can still smell him, feel his skin, like he’s going to show up and make me feel safe again.”