Ghost of a Flea (5 page)

A FEW DAYS LATER, I was able to tell Don: “You look like shit.”

I don’t know why I had been thinking about that incident back in basic on my way to see Don. Just musing on mayhem in general, maybe. Or sending telegrams to myself in code. Sometimes memories are like dreams, artifacts of unknowable civilizations falling into ruin even as you approach them.

Santos had come in with me, then after a few minutes’ badinage left us alone. Don was in one of fifteen glassed-in rooms set like petals of a flower around a central nurses’ station. Phones rang unrelentingly at the station, buzzers and mysterious, unsettling pneumatic sounds came from other rooms, snatches of conversation ricocheted off walls and ceiling.

“Well, that’s some comfort, at least. Good to know I look better than I feel.”

“You’ll want this coffee.” I set the cup down by him. “And today’s newspaper.”

“You could have saved yourself the trouble—”

“—and brought last week’s, I know.” It was an old joke with us: they’re all the same. “Doctors tell me you’re going to live.”

“Ah, still more reassurance. Interesting … They look to be happy with this news?”

“Hard to say. Consensus seems to be you’re one thoroughgoing, uncooperative son of a bitch.”

“All because I told that male nurse I couldn’t use a bedpan, never had been able to use a bedpan, and if he brought the damn thing in here one more time I’d put it away for good where no one would ever find it. You could tell he was giving it some thought.”

“On the other hand, they probably figure that means they’ll eventually get rid of you.”

Don sipped tepid coffee. “My God, that’s wonderful. You forget all the small things, don’t you? Take them for granted. Taste of coffee, or the feel of clean sheets against your skin. When maybe in the end they’re what’s important, what stays with you once most of the rest is gone.”

I sat by his bed. “You’re going to be okay.”

“We always are, you and me.”

“Way a philosopher friend of mine once put it, we carry our okay with us.”

He laughed. A tube went from the upper part of his left chest to a plastic box sitting on the floor beside his bed. When he laughed, valves of some sort fluttered in the box, making a sound like grasshopper wings. Don looked down at the box. Then he laughed again, at a different tempo and rhythm. “Hey, maybe I could learn a few tunes while I’m lying here.” He shifted on the bed. Plastic mattress covers crinkled. “Feel like something from a horror movie, all these tubes growing out of me.”

“Ze pain, it ees not-ing. Endure it, Herr Valshman, endure it in ze knowledge that zoon jew vill be … more than human.”

Don finished his coffee and set the cup down with a soft click.

“I’m tired, Lew. Used up.”

“Been a rough few days. Then there’s that retirement thing, wear down the best of men.”

“You see a wheelchair coming in?”

“Yeah, there’s one right outside your room.”

“You wanta get it? I don’t think I can walk and carry all this shit. Hell, I’m not sure I can walk at all.”

“We’re going somewhere?”

“Just down the hall.”

Seeing me fetch the chair, a nurse came flying out of the central station and through the room’s open doorway with a shrill litany of can’t-allow-its and absolutely-nots.
Rose Price-Jamison
, her name tag read. I stood quietly by and let her and Don talk it through, their discourse a stew of pigheadedness, tacit invective and (for me) the all-too-familiar condescension of medical personnel. Authorities were called to bear, a charge nurse, a baffled and battle-fatigued surgical resident, a hospital administrator; finally Dr. Lieber, who after listening to the resident’s summary said more or less, Man thinks he can do it, let him. Miss Price-Jamison helped us gather up tubes, monitor lines and IVs and hang them strategically about the chair.

“And you wonder why phrases like ‘thoroughgoing, uncooperative son of a bitch’ follow you around.”

“Image is everything.”

“Yeah. Well right now you look like something from a cheapie version of
Mad Max
. Big finale’s gonna be you and the bad guy chasing one another in wheelchairs across the wasteland.” I rolled us out into the circle. It suddenly occurred to me how much the layout of the ICU resembled a roulette wheel. “Where we going?”

“Prison ward. Up one floor, go to the end of the corridor, Santos says.”

We shared the elevator with another reverse-rickshaw pair, pusher and pushee alike twentyish black men. Urine in the bag attached to the latter’s wheelchair was the dull red of rust. His head kept falling onto his chest, then he’d catch himself and come around again. His unfocused eyes were that startling gold color you see often around New Orleans.

I pushed Don off the elevator and down the hall. He thumbed the buzzer by locked double doors beyond which only a wall could be seen. Within moments a voice issued from the tiny speaker: “Can I help you?”

“Yes, ma’am. This is Captain Don Walsh, NOPD. There’s an officer on duty in there, I take it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Could you ask him to step out here, please?”

“I would, sir, but he can’t—”

“Just to the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thanks.”

Shortly an officer stepped into sight around the wall and stood close behind the doors, squinting out. Not old, in his forties maybe, but had an old man’s gait and posture. His head jutted forward rather than upward from his neck, making him look turtlelike. He moved head and neck together from left to right and back, then smiled with a lipless mouth.

“What can I do for you, Captain?”

“Boy apprehended during a robbery over on Louisiana, a Circle K—he doing okay?”

“I think. Looks like someone took a tenderizer to him. Bad concussion, they say. But I’ve seen ’em hurt far worse get up and do more damage.”

“I want to see him.”

For just a moment the officer looked doubtful, as though he were going to recite regulations Don probably knew better than anybody else in the department, but then he said, “You got it,” and sprang the door. He hesitated again before asking,

“Be okay if I came along?”

“You bet.”

“Down this way.”

“What do we know about him?” Don asked.

“About this much.” The officer held up thumb and index finger joined in a circle. “Looks to be about eighteen, says he’s sixteen. No ID on him, no police, juvenile or court records. No mailing address or record of residence. Not a shred of paperwork anywhere, that we’ve been able to find.”

“Boy doesn’t exist.”

“Probably more of them like that out there than you’d think.”

“Could be.”

“Joe Papi works that ward pretty hard,” the officer continued after a moment. “Came up there himself. He says he remembers seeing the kid around, starting maybe four, five months back.”

“Boy was on the streets.”

The officer nodded. With his weird neck, it put me in mind of those dogs with bobbing heads you see in cars, on back window ledges.

We were at the door by then. Inside, looking a bit like Claude Rains, the kid had the bed cranked up high and was sitting there watching Ricki Lake. One after another, fat black women hanging four-fifths out of various outfits strutted from the wings, paraded through the audience and settled into overstuffed chairs onstage before launching into harangues about how sexy they were and how they could have any man they wanted anytime.
Big and Bootieful
showed at one corner of the screen, the first B stylized to suggest breasts, the second tipped on its side and bulging ludicrously in a caricature of buttocks. Wholly untouched by irony or by any sensibility at all, this spectacle was a kind of assault, as insulting to the audience as it was degrading to the women. Still, it bore manifest of a certain crude innocence; and to every appearance the kid found it hilarious.

He looked over finally at the three of us crowding into the room, eyes in their field of bandage moving from Don and his barge to me, the toter.

“Ain’t that
always
the way it is, though.”

Then his eyes went back to Don. Briefly his tongue, shockingly pink, naked-looking, larval, protruded past bandages.

“You don’t look so good neither, man.”

Don glanced over his shoulder at me. I shrugged. “Second opinion.”

“Shit, man.” The kid shook his head. “Shit.” His eyes went back to the TV. “Look-a that. Man could hide under there, no one goan ever find him. Whoa! Hold that thing still, mama!”

He watched several moments before saying, “I’d lack that beer now, officer.”

Don smiled up at him. “Could use one myself. More than one.”

“I hear that.” His eyes swung towards me. “You think they pay them bitches or what, they go up there, shake it loose like that? Why they do that?”

“Got me. Maybe they just want the attention.”

“
Gotta
be it.”

“My name’s Don Walsh. How you doing?”

“Man, whatchu care? You the one did this. Now you goan come in here, ’pologize?”

Don didn’t say anything more, just kept eye contact, his expression neutral. After a moment the kid said, “I’m okay, man. You know.” Then he looked away.

“Yeah. Well, case you didn’t notice, I ain’t gonna be up dancing much sooner than you are.”

“Won’t look near as good when you
do
, neither.”

“That’s for damn sure…. You ever get tired of watching that TV?”

“Sometimes. Mornings ’specially. Ain’t never much on then. News ’n’ shit, all them ol’ dudes in their richass suits.”

“Could I get you some books or something?”

“What the fuck’m I gonna do with books?”

“Okay…. How about this, then? We’re both gonna be here awhile. You don’t mind, I could come over now and then, maybe a couple times a day, we could hang out.”

“Why would you wanta do that?”

“Hey, there’s not any more to do in my room than there is in yours. Nothing else, it’d help pass the time. We could talk.” Don glanced up at the TV. “Or just watch all these fine women.”

“You wanta come, how’m I gonna stop you? Yeah. Yeah, I guess that be all right.”

“Good.”

Don motioned, and I started backing out the door. Just as I was about to swing the chair around, the kid said, “My name’s Derick. Derick Soames. Most ever’one calls me Jeeter, though.”

“Good to meet you, Jeeter,” Don said. “This is Lew. You’re on the streets, he’s a good man to know.”

“He is, huh, him and his richass suit. Why? He goan save me from getting myself punked by the like of you?” What might have been a laugh almost made it out of him. We started out the door again.

“Don Walsh.”

“Yeah?”

“I did used to play some checkers, back when I was a kid.” Don nodded.

“One more thing …”

“Okay.”

“You know where my tooth is?”

THINGS ARE THE MIND’S mute looking glass, Walter de la Mare, another on the long list of forgotten writers, said. And Whitman, that things, objects, are a coherent world to themselves, the “dumb, beautiful ministers of reality.”

Certainly they become that when you’re drunk. You watch for hours as shadows from a palm or banana tree toss heads, sway and sweep wings across the wall beside your bed, doing all the creative things you should be doing. Towels tossed on the floor by the tub suddenly seem to harbor both great beauty and codes never before suspected, kennings just beyond reach, the towels’ folds and convolutions catching up, as a phonograph record does sound, those of your own mind.

Drinking also maroons you without provisions on the island of self. Like most other promises it makes, alcohol’s vow of kinship, that it will bridge your life to others, smooth the way, proves false. Fooled again: you’re alone. The path remains treacherous—stones in your passway, as Robert Johnson would say. And not another footprint on the whole island.

Emerson: Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole object we study and learn. A solipsism that America took to its clanky, pragmatic heart not as philosophy but as operator’s manual. Humanism was from the first, of course, a matchless arrogance. And American individualism was humanism writ large, not just arrogant but colossally arrogant: Emerson’s “infinitude of the private man” turned out for the masses like bins of polyester shirts marked down for quick sale, durable, practical, all but indestructible, unlovely.

Still and well enough, there on your island of Scotch or gin, palm trees swaying, mind become this curious suspension bridge built from scraps of driftwood and salvage, everything remains fraught with meaning. Whitman also wrote

and I have to wonder if that’s not what my life, all our lives, finally, are about, that imperative and the misreadings to which it forces us.

When I was a kid, parents would tell us not to cross our eyes because they’d get stuck and we’d never be able to uncross them, we’d have to walk around like that the rest of our lives. That’s what introspection can come down to. You keep on with it, sinking through level after level, after a while you can’t get back to the top. You just go on pounding out the same thoughts on the stone over and over, fitting your feet into old footprints. Alcohol’s the same way.

Years ago, I’d known I was in trouble when I found myself weeping uncontrollably over commercials on TV. A beleaguered housewife would smile around at her clean-
as-new
house, a couple’s bitter arguments trickle away as they drove their car towards snow-capped mountains, a man meet his wife for dinner, horribly late, carrying flowers—and I’d sit there sobbing, shaking, ruined. I was supposed to connect with the world, not collide with it, I remember thinking. Back then I’d got on to the habit of reading, listening to music and watching TV all at the same time as I drank. I never failed to think of David Bowie as the alien sitting before his bank of TV screens all tuned to different programs in
The Man Who Fell to Earth.
But I’d discovered that, when I did this, something curious took place. That I was able to follow the TV show without difficulty wasn’t surprising. But I found, and this
was
surprising, that I was more intimately connected with the music than at any other time, that it became impressed upon me in ways and to a degree it otherwise would not have been. And whatever books I read or half-read those times, whether Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
, Vin Packer’s
T
he Twisted Ones
or Himes’s
The End of a Primitive,
remained with me forever.

Then one night it all turned to shit. I’d been listening to Mahler’s Ninth, reading a novel set in Washington by some guy with a Greek name, and watching a movie in which a thirty-year-old actor playing the part of a high-school student confronted his girlfriend at a drive-in. She’d died in a car crash in the first twenty minutes of the film while riding with another young man but refused to stay put, clawing her way up out of the grave to come and tell the thirty-year-old that she’ll love him forever, there by his locker at school when he swings the door shut, now showing up at the drive-in while he’s on a date and rapping at his car window. “Forever,” she tells him, rotted flesh and a few teeth falling away as she mouths the word. “How fuckin’ long can forever be to a thirty-year-old!” I remember yelling at the screen. I’d been drinking pretty hard, apparently, harder than I thought or kept track of. I surfaced half a week or so later in the hospital, not Baptist or Touro or Mercy that time, but the state hospital over in Mandeville, this hulking, gray, utterly silent beast set among green trees and lawn where time was dipped in half-spoonfuls from the heart of glaciers and fossils deep in the earth. I was still going on about the movie as though it were real, as though everything in it had actually taken place.

The incidence of mental illness among Negroes is significantly higher than among the population at large, someone was telling me. This seemed to come from far away and from inside my head at the same time. I swam up, towards light. Away from the voice. Closer to the voice.

We sat facing one another across the kind of table you find in church basements and high school lunchrooms. It looked as if it had just been unpacked from its carton.

He looked the same way. Boy Doctor Ferguson, I thought, taking his name from the narrow slab of brass name tag above a pocket crammed with pens, rulers, tongue depressors, hemostats and, for all I knew, a dental drill. Ever alert to use of language when alert at all, I particularly admired that “population at large.” B. D. Ferguson had sparse hair the color of cotton candy and as insubstantial. He kept reaching up to brush it down, pretty much a losing proposition, since our own breaths bouncing back from the walls would be enough to dislodge it again. Whether from allergies, chronic lack of sleep or tears shed for patients, Ferguson’s eyes were shrimp-red. So, for quite different reasons, were mine. Men always have more in common than they think.

I had no idea, I said.

Few do. Why should you? Professionals who spend a lifetime studying it understand little enough. There’s no doubt the gauges we use are biased. We’ve known that for years. Culturally biased, as with IQ tests. Add in poor prenatal care if any at all, poverty, discrimination, lack of access to medical services—

Think I read about that in
Partisan Review
. This to a man upon whom irony was wasted.

—it’s a hopeless stew. Historically diagnosticians like myself—

Diagnosticians. Nice. And the dinosaur track of a metaphor there in the limestone. Hope for the boy after all?

—are far less reluctant, when confronted with minorities and those from lower socioeconomic levels, to attach such a potentially devastating diagnosis.

Well, I didn’t tell him, that was not my experience of the thing, not at all. Nor did I patiently or otherwise explain that, being well outside our culture, he might have no idea how to read the codes our signals came wrapped in. That mistakenly he took our distrust at being delivered into his hands for paranoia, our dissembling as some innate inability to discern falsehood from truth, when in fact it’s a highly developed form of just such discretion.

I’ve read the history your friend Don Walsh supplied the intake physician, B. D. went on. He’s been quite helpful.

Afternoon sunlight stretched long fingers across the table. A phone rang in the next room. Two teenage boys with shaved heads walked past the window eating Eskimo Pies. Life goes on.

Your mother shows clear signs of schizophrenia. Has no friends to speak of, avoids family contact—perhaps there’s been a rift of some sort? She lives alone, appears to have neither hobby nor outside interests nor, to all appearances, much of anything at all she enjoys or enjoys doing. I gather she leads a rigorously controlled life, every day exactly the same from hour to hour, growing upset at the slightest disturbance in her routine.

I sat watching this privileged young man, keeping track of sunlight popping knuckles on the tabletop and wondering how long after our talk before B. D. noted
inappropriate affect
in my chart. His handwriting would be cramped, precise. I’d flashed back to another interview, years before, with a psychiatrist who sat rocking in his desk chair the whole time, staring at me out of tiny round eyes with folds of fat like bitesize omelettes at the corner, neither of us speaking. I learned from the best.

The incidence of schizophrenia in the general population is approximately one in a hundred. As with so much else, we don’t understand why, but among children of schizophrenics, the incidence jumps to one in ten.

Sometimes too, he went on when I remained silent, it skips a generation.

Jumps. Skips. There was a poem there somewhere. A limerick or jingle. At very least a groaningly bad joke.

Your son has a frank history of mood disorders, reclusiveness, abrupt life changes. All this giving way to intermittent periods of productive, purposeful behavior.

Maybe you could tell me a little more about that.

After a while he said: Or maybe not.

After which (though his eyes continued to rise like twin red moons in my sky) my unsprightly self and B. D. Ferguson (certainly no son of the Fergus I knew from Joyce, O’Brien and the like) didn’t have much to say to one another. We went on not saying it for six sessions in as many days.

Little chance that my girlfriend would love me forever, of course. With the taste of boiled meat, rice, iceberg lettuce and salty, limp vegetables in mouth and memory, slowly I came to realize this. She wasn’t about to come back from the grave, reemerge from history’s undiscovered country, float to the top of the lake, swim to shore and shamble, slaking away the whole time, towards wherever it was I’d gone on with my life. None of it had been a dream as, coming to, I’d first believed. Only another of society’s makeshift facsimiles of dream, rags and tatters of movies, media, popular literature, this new mythology, that my homeless soul had taken for its own and worn into the street. Precious little protection. And how much shame could a man bear?

At the time I’m writing of, though, time of the storm and Alouette’s second baby rather than that of hospital walkways like cloisters and young men of power with piggish red eyes (I’ve just read back through the past dozen or so pages to see where we’ve got to in all this), Deborah and I remained in sight of one another though borne steadily apart, Don and Jeanette were content on their island, David soon would return from scouting out copses and caves. New lives for us all rattled doors in frames. And I, freshly become a museum diorama, New Age man in his natural habitat, hunched not over campfires but before computers, sat inert in a circle of light at 3 a.m.

I had decided again, after an evening with Deborah, to get some work done. Write the Fearing review at least, since it was due or well past. Maybe start something else, who knows. Even pursue the notion for a novel I’d had a few weeks back in which the narrator would present himself to each of the other characters as a wholly different person. See which way, how far and how fast, that notion ran when chased full throttle. As always, the very idea of such work necessitated my removing to the slave quarters and sitting there staring out through windows so darkened with dust and grime that you could safely watch eclipses through them. Consisted, eventually, of turning on the computer. Its small dynamo whirred and began a rapidly accelerating dialog with itself as Bat minnowed through the half-open doorway to join me, lugging in his wake a contingent of winged insects. With age he’d become a semi-mobile solar battery. Besides food, only sunlight drew him, his days a progression from food bowl to sunshine spot and back. Sunlight was far and away best, but if that proved unavailable, if he had to, he’d make do with artificial sources. One favorite spot was at the back of my desk about three inches below the desk lamp. Hoisting him up there, most of the insects he’d brought in coming along, I keyed in Microsoft Word and began reading my notes for the novel. Halfway down the second page, the ground gave way.