The Tao of Apathy (11 page)

“
Yeeaah but.. nah.”

“
Do you know what your lte status
means? It means you have to do the same amount of work as the
person next to you, but he gets more pay and benefits. It means if
a guy calls in sick, you have to do his work too while he gets paid
sick time, while if you get sick, its just another day I don’t have
to pay you. Its like I’ve singled you out to get paid less and if I
feel like it I can just fire you.”

“
Ok boss man. But you can’t fire
anybody just because you feel like it. ”

Joe piped up. “He hired you just so that he
could fire you.”

“
Dude,” the newbie fired
back.

“
Both you guys have good points.
Bigger I guess you are baking bread alone.”

“
Harsh,” Bigger let
out.

Bigger began to bake bread at O dark hundred.
The first week, only half of the patients got fresh bread because
Bigger could not make enough for the whole hospital by seven. The
second week, none of the patients got fresh bread because the
administrators and doctors became jealous of the patients and
demanded that it be delivered to their offices.

Seuss was happy to do that. Every morning when
his bosses and colleagues put something warm and yeasty to their
lips, they would think of him. However, he soon found out that to
justify their usurping of the manna, the rest of the directors put
out a memo that berated Seuss’s system for serving food for being
so slow that the patients would not gain maximum sensory benefit of
the fresh bread by the time it got to them. Suddenly it felt to
Seuss like Bigger was volunteering to make him look bad.

Chapter 19

Dykes tossed his keys to the floor inside his
front door and dropped down on a ragged orange recliner that didn’t
unrecline anymore. After a humid day, the early evening sky
darkened with an impending thunderstorm. His small upstairs
apartment above a dry-cleaning store was stifling, but he did not
bother turning on his fan. He did not turn on any lights or the TV.
He would not be making dinner. Out the window, he heard voices and
he turned his head to see a couple taking a walk before a storm.
The couple looked to be in their thirties, both overweight. They
were holding hands and talking about something John couldn’t make
out. But he liked the way the woman would laugh and pull on the
man’s arm.

June disappointed John. It had been a humid,
storming May, but June was worse. When he had been in his early
twenties, those first years when he still had four fingers on the
ledge of adolescence, it had been a month of seeing friends home
from college, waking early to hit the golf course, and finding beer
gardens. But those times had faded away leaving him wondering how
everyone else had made a transition to busy summers of going to
cousins’ weddings, the spouse’s family reunion, and coaching little
league. Even the flow of sick people to the hospital slowed during
the summer to let people take their vacations and talk in the
hallways of summer plans.

But he knew that he was different even before
all his rowdy friends had settled down. The last time he had felt
that he belonged somewhere was smoking pot under the large shade
trees of Eastern High School. Through good weed and bad, his
pothead buddies had always been there.

Then the were not the same as him, when,
during an argument on his sixteenth birthday, his mother decided he
was old enough to know that she had given him up for adoption. “I
was alone, John,” his mother had told him, “and you was a very
colicky baby, so don’t tell me how you need your fucking friends.
You cried all the time and I had no one to help me. I kicked your
father out because of his drinking and other women. Your
grandparents disowned me. Twenty-four hours a day I took care of
you. I did everything, but it wasn’t enough.

“
So I had to give you up,” she
said, hesitating because she had realized that she had said too
much in anger.

Dykes had been listening to her as he leaned
on a kitchen counter with arms crossed. He held his arms tighter,
but did not look up. For an instant, he could not process what she
had said. He tried to figure out how she could have put him up for
adoption and him still be there. He felt her words, though. He
couldn’t speak.

“
That actually brought me and your
dad back together. He helped me through the one-year anniversary of
giving you up. You must not remember the woman who adopted you. You
never talked about her, but she had you until you were three. She
died and we got you back. You talk about having a terrible life and
all the things I do to you, but I’ve been through a lot. You’re
sixteen now and need to take some responsibility for yourself
because I’m done.”

After the secret was out, his parents often
reminded him of all the hardships that they had to go through for
him, but all he could picture was how nobody wanted him.

A bunch of kids, mostly boys, no older than
ten, zigzagged their bikes down the street making noise. John
watched. The he spied on a family bounding by in an undulating
fashion as the two little boys rode their bikes ahead and then back
to their parents as their dad called out to them.

The street below his window cleared and hard
rain spangled the pavement. Dykes poured a glass of cool-aid and
threw some vodka in it. It burned his throat. He thought of his two
miserable years then until he met a girl, Donna. Even now, he could
feel exactly how it felt to be in love with her. He was so happy
with her that he became a fun guy. Being fun, he developed lots of
friends. He went out and partied until he did not have any time for
her, so he dumped her.

Bigger, he thought, as miserable as you think
you are, you are truly lucky. I know no one. I don’t even have
those old bitties in the kitchen to keep me company. Bigger’s
description of his bachelor life ran through his head and it
sounded like a slap in the face. Thoughts of the scenes where he
picked up women believing that one of them would be his salvation
made him wince. He knew he could not recapture Donna’s love that
had comforted him like someone checking his temperature with the
back of her hand. These women were not Donna and he had thrown
Donna away, anyway.

The women themselves may not have seen, but he
had been pathetic. Those that had been there when he had been the
drunkest had seen. In the morning, he felt ashamed, not for the
one-night-stand, but that he had let himself fall into the same
stupid pattern that would get him nowhere. He was so ashamed and
exposed that he could barely talk to the woman as he drove her to
her apartment or car sitting in a bar parking lot. Then there would
be the tormenting silence as she opened the door and got out of the
car, waiting for him to say something. And Bigger idolized his
life.

“
Not even Bigger can tell my
feelings. I do everything I can to show people how miserable I am.
I bare all, but nobody sees me.

“
How in the hell do I get out of
this?”

Chapter 20

In spite of the fact that everyone believed
that Mr. Annunzio was haunting the hospital, Mrs. Annunzio remained
in the psychiatric ward because she continued to have visions of
her dead husband. Her doctor, Dr. James Young Simpson, had a theory
that her hallucinations were linked to her diet and that her
sickness was caused by an allergic reaction to food. “Her
hallucinations,” Simpson told a colleague as he stood next to Mrs.
Annunzio outside the psychiatric patients’ dining room, “always
correspond to the time periods just before breakfast and lunch and
an hour after breakfast and lunch. Why before and after? I am
treating her aggressively with drugs so I really don’t need to know
why, but I am doing a lot of research on it. It will get published
for sure.”

“
Excuse me, huh?” Bigger asked of
the two doctors as he adjusted his white hat on his frosty head. “I
have to put this cart right where you are standing. If I don’t put
it exactly there, someone will call down and complain.” Bigger
nudged the cart into them when they didn’t move. “Come on. The
staff up here insists that it be in the same spot everyday with 23
napkins stacked in two piles lengthwise on top. Please? They are
probably calling my supervisor already.”

“
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. It’s him.
It’s him,” Mrs. Annunzio screamed. She beat her breast. “It’s him,
right there.” Bigger let go of his cart and hurried toward the door
before he had to help restrain the lady. Two large nursing
assistants grabbed Mrs. Annunzio, put her in a hold, and took her
to a padded room.

The two doctors got up from behind the food
cart where they had been crouching. “We may never find the cause,”
Simpson said shaking his head. “The answer may just be too
complex.”

“
Doctor, please come give her a
sedative. She is starting to feel her grief.”

Bigger jumped into the elevator and punched
the door shut button. Dykes was in the elevator and looked up.
“Biggs.”

“
Dykes. What ya up to?”

Dykes scribbled a signature on an invoice. “I
am signing all these invoices for the supplies I dropped off for
each department.”

“
Ah, Dykes, the people that you
deliver to are supposed to sign those.”

John scribbled on another invoice. “I didn’t
feel like talking, so I am just signing them.”

“
With your name?”

“
That wouldn’t make sense, Biggs.
I am signing them H.R. Pufnstuf. Nobody reads the signature anyway.
Christ, everyone around has others sign an invoice or a form. It
makes them feel official or that they are holding other people
accountable, yet nobody has noticed that I sign all my invoices
either Mary Eddy or the mayor of Living Island. It’s all bullshit.
It makes me want to go on a killing spree.”

The door opened on the ground floor. “Good
talking to you, Dykes.”

Going down the hall, Bigger watched a stout,
well-dressed lady fumble with the keys to her office. She held an
armful of folders and a book bag with more papers. Bigger knew she
had something to do with patients’ rights or something and knew she
always gathered up armloads of paperwork to take home and bring
back the next day. Bigger took the time as he walked toward her to
debate if he could become a Patients’ Rights
Coordinator.

“
Hey, get your butt over here and
open the damn door for me,” she said.

Dan, the audio/visual specialist/ union
representative/ self-appointed employee advocate witnessed the
whole scene as he came in the opposite direction. “Bigger,” he
called out, “Employees have rights. You don’t have to accept being
talked to like that.”

“
Yes, I do, Dan.”

Dan looked at Bigger. Bigger glanced back at
him then dragged his eyes to the woman. “Coming, Mom.”

Bigger took his mom’s keys and opened the door
and left Dan to wander back to his office/storage room. “Mom, I
don’t know why you carry that much home. You couldn’t have possibly
got that much done last night.”

She plopped her load on her desk. “I have a
job with a lot of responsibility, Bigger. Its not just some low
paying job my mother had to get me.”

“
Oh,” he said.

“
I have to get all this work done.
Being the Patient’s Rights Coordinator requires that I work a
couple of hours after I get home, which is late. It requires it
just like your father’s job requires him to go to all those faculty
parties.” She turned on the computer that she never used. “I
actually envy you, sometimes, Bigger. I wish I could just wad up my
paper hat and throw it away at the end of eight hours and be done,
but I can’t.”

“
I gotta go, Mom.” Bigger turned
and went back to work. Behind him he could hear his mom talk about
how she wished she could dye her hair and look like a freak, but
she needed to be professional. He decided against being whatever it
was his mom was.

Chapter 21

Joe sat naked, sweating in the humidity of the
mid-July evening and watched Susan towel off after her shower. He
watched her dry her breasts and philosophized how boobs were globes
of ecstasy to men, but just another body part or something to
women. It made him mad. What really pissed him off was that having
those breasts around all the time was un-glamorizing them for him,
too. He was close to not even looking up from the TV to watch her
get dressed.

“
You should come with me,” Susan
said. “The meetings are starting to make great progress. They
really are. I think this meeting is really going to get things
going for the union.”

“
It will never work,
Susan.”

“
You don’t believe anything will
ever work.”

“
So?”

“
Including us.”

“
Oh, God.”

Joe got up and got a beer from the fridge.
Then he put his pants on. He did not like to have a fight without
his pants on. “This is how things are going to work out, baby.
Whether we end up with a union or not, the employees are going to
pull in one direction and the nuns runnin’ this place are going to
pull in the opposite direction just for spite. Stalemate. So then
the nurses are going to go for themselves because they will think
of it first. But everyone will try to fuck everyone else over for
more. There is going to be talk and talk and talk and no
decisions.”