The women got up simultaneously. “Nurses do it with all the doctors,” the doll-faced woman explained to Jamie.
“Nuns do it with priests,” Jamie agreed.
The two went one direction, and the nurse went the other, but she paused at the door two beds away. “You can have all the milk you want.”
“I what?”
“On account of your stomach, hon. Doctor Wrigley put it on the orders.”
She sat on the bed and put the toes of one foot on the instep of the other.
“Do you want some milk?”
“Sure—what are you so hot about this milk for? Something in it?”
“Okay, hon,” the nurse said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
She lay crossways on the bed, pillowing her head on the folded bedding and putting her feet out flat on the floor. An odor of honeysuckle came vividly to her nostrils, floating on the warm dark air of Wheeling, and a gust of the steel mills’ breath. Her entire childhood lay immediately outside this place of walls, if she could only get to it by changing into a thing of hours—because she was understanding things now, understanding about time, about its directions and how to change the way of it, and about the many things that were happening moment by moment unbeknownst to the forest of blind dead human shapes, the forest of wooden men—
“What are you supposed to be?”
Jamie sat up. On the edge of the adjacent bed sat a blond and emaciated woman no older than herself.
“We’re on the Marnie Eisenhower ward,” the woman told her. She wore the standard washed-grey cotton gown, but she’d covered the sleeves, and the front of it, with secret writing.
“I’m under observation,” Jamie said. But an understanding of what this meant temporarily eluded her. She rested her elbows on her knees, her head and hair drooping forward. The design of the floor was six-by-six inch square grey patches with a little copper crown in the dead center of each one.
The woman said nothing. She scratched herself between her legs with the obliviousness of a child. She was thinly beautiful, but her teeth were as yellow as her hair, and tiny blue veins showed around her temples. She appeared in need of fixing. She looked broken and thrown away. Jamie said. “So what’s your story? I mean, what are you supposed to be here for?”
“Me?” the woman said. “I’m nuts.” She began laughing; laughter that sounded like: ratatatata. Jamie liked her, but at the same time she wanted to slap the woman’s face.
She woke from a Thorazine unconsciousness because someone was yelling, “Sergeant!” The ceiling was far away, then inches above her face, and then properly positioned. “Sergeant!” She raised up in bed. It was daytime. The large woman with her hair all chopped off, who always wore a man’s blue boxer shorts instead of a gown, was talking to the nurse. Her face was crimson, her eyes pink. Two male orderlies in white stood a yard back, respectfully, at her either side. “I want to see the Sergeant!” the woman insisted. “Do you know where we are?” the nurse said. “The Sergeant’s not here. There isn’t any Sergeant here.” All the patients were quiet and shiny-eyed, watching this exchange. The big woman put her hands on her hips and began to huff uncontrollably, working her jaw as if trying desperately to dislodge something from her throat. One of the orderlies took her in a hammerlock from behind, and the woman lifted him clear off the floor, his legs dangling like a child’s. The other man wrapped his arms around the two of them, and they all three waltzed monstrously toward the Quiet Room, a chamber made completely of tiny tiles with a drain in the center of its floor.
The bed on her left was empty and silver in the darkness, its bedspread thrown back. Jamie was the only one awake to hear the cries. The old woman who slept there next to her was trudging heavily up and down the aisle between the two rows of beds, and at the far end she was silhouetted against the light from the bathroom, a bent figure of helplessness with her hair in a bun. Several afterimages trailed her in Jamie’s sight, and Jamie shook her head violently but they wouldn’t clear away. The old woman seemed to be carrying something close to her belly. “I lost my Catherine! I lost my Catherine,” she cried in a voice as unstopped and mournfully low as a foghorn’s. Jamie had to shut her eyes a minute, because the bathroom light made them burn. When she came awake again, there were curtains full of light drawn around the next bed, and moving human shapes silhouetted on the curtains. They muttered and conspired in there below the level of her hearing—a black form hurriedly approaching and entering said, “We’ve got to catheterize her,” and the other shapes said softly, “Catheterize, catheterize, catheterize.” Jamie began to shake uncontrollably. She couldn’t find her voice to scream. She turned to the right, as if to summon help from the lumps of unconscious and insane people in their beds. When she tried to blink the handfuls of warm sand from her vision, everything changed and it was morning. The old woman was sitting up in the next bed, looking at the pages of a magazine.
“Volleyball, you guys,” Nurse Helen said.
“Volleyball?” Jamie said, looking at Sally for confirmation.
Sally appeared too starved and weak for games. She lay back on her bed and pulled a fall of her blond hair over her blue-veined face, going into some kind of trance. Volleyball.
“Raphael!” Nurse Helen sang.
“Do I have to go and play volleyball?” Jamie asked her. Last night, until dawn, screams had come out of the tiled Quiet Room. She couldn’t put these screams together in her mind with volleyball.
“Doctor Wrigley doesn’t have you down for sports,” Helen said, and looked up at Raphael, the stocky Chicano orderly, who was just approaching. “She doesn’t like volleyball,” Nurse Helen said, gesturing at Sally on the bed. Together they took Sally—Raphael by the feet, Nurse Helen by the hands—and carried her like a sack from the ward. Sally began laughing, and they did, too.
In a minute the nurse was back, breathing hard. “Hey,” Jamie said, “are we supposed to be crazy, or what? How come people have to play volleyball when they’re supposed to be crazy?”
“Physical activity’s important, Jamie. And I don’t like the word crazy. You’re sick people trying to get well. This is a hospital, right?”
Jamie could feel the back of her neck getting tight again. She knew it was a hospital, for God’s sake.
“I think you should play volleyball, too. I’ll talk to the doctor about it Monday when he comes in.”
Jamie felt angry, because she didn’t want them to figure out that she wanted to play volleyball. She was flustered. She wanted to be out there right now. Why didn’t the nurse just tell her to play volleyball right now?
“Matter of fact,” Nurse Helen said, “if you want to, why don’t you go out there now? Always room for one more.”
“Are you shitting me?” Jamie cried. “Who told you to say that?” She was all pins and needles. She took hold of her own head with both hands. “They’re reading me! What did you do to me?” The enormity of her situation pressed in against her. She didn’t want to face it.
She stood on the bed, balancing with difficulty there, and pointed a finger at Nurse Helen. She wanted to explain something important, but the only word she could think of was, “Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya!”
Raphael came in. Some boy in a doctor’s smock came in. She was completely enraged that they thought it necessary to hold her down and give her a shot. Nerves popped in her skull, voices chanted incomprehensibly, and the event accelerated into a white smear.
The doctor sat on her bed with his legs crossed one over the other—a new doctor, one she hadn’t met before. “Just what are we talking about here?” she said.
“Well,” the doctor said, “essentially we’re talking about anything you want to talk about. Anything that concerns you, anything that bothers you right now. Do you want a cup of coffee?”
“Coffee?” she said. “Why are you trying to give me coffee? I’m coughing enough as it is. I have tuberculosis,” she told him, “that’s why I lost all this weight.”
“Okay then,
let me ask you a few questions. Can you tell me the day and the date, Jamie?”
“It’s the fifteenth of whenever, nineteen hundred and fuck-all. You think I don’t see through that one?”
“Maybe you see through it, but I’m not trying to fool you. The date is right on the wall.” He pointed at a sign on the wall that said:
TODAY IS
thurs june 27
YOUR DAY
“My only reason for asking is to find out if you take an interest in what day it is. Can you tell me where we are today, Jamie?”
“We’re in the goddamn looney bin.”
“Can you tell me the name of the hospital?”
“Arizona State Hospital.”
“Great. Very good. Now—please don’t object to my asking you these very obvious questions, okay? Just trying to get our bearings. So how about telling me what wing of the hospital we’re in right now?”
“Wing? You mean, like of a bird? Of a dove? ‘The Wings of a Dove?’”
“No, that’s not quite what I mean. I’m asking you to tell me the name of this part of the hospital. All the parts are named after famous people.”
“The parts?” For a second—just a tick—she saw something breaking out of the doctor’s face. “I don’t know who you are, Mister,” she said, “but if you don’t get out of here you’re finished.” A weasel or something.
“I’m knocked up, is what I think,” Jamie kept telling them. Her stomach churned continually, and it was a rare moment when she came around to the true state of things long enough to appreciate that it was fear, a pure utter terror created by her thoughts, that took hold of her innards and squeezed until she was nauseated. “You’ve got to get yourself organized on a daily basis,” the nurse told her in confidential tones. “Well, fuck you,” Jamie said. She was sorry to talk this way, but it was necessary. You only had to listen to the news to see that the world was splitting apart. She had no idea what was going to break out of the middle of things when the time was finally at hand.
The temperature in the lock-up was uniform. Only by watching those who came and went could he believe the desert summer’s heat had arrived. It blazed in the faces of new arrivals and melted from the pores of the guards as they greeted him at the start of each shift—always the first of their duties, checking the prize defendant at the end of the cellblock. And as the temperature rose out in the world, Bill Houston felt the jaws of his captivity crushing him, and found reason, in the news that Fredericks brought him twice weekly, to count himself among the lost.
“We have a grave situation here,” the lawyer said. “I was misinformed earlier, and I misinformed you. This Crowell—the man who was killed in the hold-up—they’re calling him a cop. He wasn’t a cop. He was retired. But they’re just not looking at that fact. They want to get technical.
“I won’t sit here and quote every law for you, but I’ll get you Xeroxes of every statute they’re charging you under, and you can look at them, along with any other statute that applies, including death penalty statutes, William, because that’s what we’re looking at. These bastards want you. I’m not going to pretend they don’t want you, because they do.” He watched Bill Houston as if Houston might now offer some sign that none of it was true.
The defendant made a gesture of invitation with his hands: play on.
“What I’m saying is we’ve got a nice new judicially acceptable, constitutional, unbeatable death penalty statute, and there’s this huge groundswell all of a sudden—but I mean everybody, all the powers-that-be—I’m telling you they want to off the first killer who comes down the road, without any delays—that’s you, William—and they also intend to gas the oldest remaining denizen of Death Row out there in Florence, who happens to be Richard Clay Wilson, the child-murderer. I really can’t believe that they really believe they can bring all this about. But they’re like kids. They’ve got this new law and now somebody’s got to die.”
By June’s end it was clear that Burris, James, and Bill would all be tried—separately—according to the original schedule. Bill Houston had been identified unanimously in a line-up. And now the lawyer was helpless and nervous most of the time. Houston knew lawyers; he knew when a lawyer had lost. None of their motions for delay was granted. There was a fearsome, inexorable gist to the decisions. Always the Ninth Circuit ruled against Fredericks, his motions to quash evidence, to have witnesses impeached or testimony thrown out. Houston’s trial approached unimpeded, as if no defense whatever had been mounted against it. “We’re going to send you over to have your head checked,” Fredericks told his client. “But I guarantee you right now, they’re going to certify you sane.”
The new man across the catwalk, an Italian sort of guy who’d beaten his father-in-law mercilessly and broken a great many of his bones, asked Bill Houston how it was going. Bill told him the truth: “I’m going up the pipe.”
“Let’s walk Irene down to the Outpatient Area for her appointment,” the nurse would say—this nurse or that nurse, she really didn’t care which nurse.
“Let’s walk over to the commissary,” the nurse would say. “We can’t have you lying on that bed all day, thinking those thoughts of yours.”
“Do you know where you are?” the nurse would say. “It’s July Fourth. This is the Helen Keller ward.”
She was right about lying on the bed. When Jamie was up and doing, things were okay, but when she lay down and considered the way of the world, her picture of life came up shining impossibly, with a molten border around it, and she knew that things were not at all as they had seemed, that it wasn’t July Fourth, that the boiling slimy whores had a grip on the march of time and that everything was happening over and over. She heard the instructions coming out of the walls, affirming that she must kill herself in order to save the others, to get the days going again, and she experienced her own murder at every turn of her breath, repeatedly born into the blazing frame of a moment that never changed. Often she woke up in a place made entirely of green and white squares going away from her infinitely. For a moment, once, she had a handle on the whole situation: this was a small room of tiles with a drain in its floor, and she’d been asleep on a little pad almost like a quilt. But in a minute, it just wasn’t like that at all. It was much, much more horrible. Everything depended on the position of a single green square, and she didn’t know which one, but the certainty with which her heart seized this one, then this one, then another—it was driving her insane. Her mouth was chapped, and both arms were sore. When they opened the door to the little room and came in with the hypodermic—the nurse and the little monkey-man who told her what to do—she remembered about her arms.
“Well!” the nurse said, as if that said it all. ‘Did you remember that today you’re moving over to the Madame Curie wing?” She knew how to make the sheet of the bed float softly.
“What?” Jamie was watching her make the bed.
“Moving day! Oh—” the nurse was disappointed. “You don’t have your things together. Where’s your stuff, honey? Your toothbrush, and your little diary?”
“Here’s what I think,” Jamie said. “Everybody fuck everybody up the ass. I mean—oh, eat everything made of shit. You cunt whore suck.” She could feel her face getting hot.
“You’re going to have to watch that mouth,” the nurse said.
Jamie decided to say Cunt Whore Suck one thousand times, starting now.
“Okay, Sister,” the nurse said. “Over to the Curie wing for you. And if you don’t get straight you’ll end up over in the Mathilda wing.”
“The Middle of Things?” Jamie said. “I’ll kill you!”
“Lane! Raphael!” The orderlies appeared, and the nurse told Jarnie, “You’re going downhill. You’re on that slickety-slide.”
“I put a spell of a curse on you!” Jamie said.
The nurse said something that sounded like Voodoo Dissolve, and as Lane and Raphael carried Jamie along by her arms, she shouted, “Did you call me Voodoo Dissolve? Did
you? Did you?”
She moved from the Curie wing down to the Joan of Arc ward toward the end of July. All the walls were made of tile here, and the floors, too, and there were drains in the floors at intervals the length of sixty-seven tiles. Two of the drains were sixty-eight tiles apart. But she could never be sure. Nothing was ever definite, and once she was done counting anything, if she wanted to know how many, she had to count again. And although the drains stayed the same and the main hall was always eight hundred twenty tiles long, she had to be sure, she couldn’t be sure, she had to count again. She knew the lie was inside of a number. At the very center of one of these numbers, where it was supposed to be nothing, where it was supposed to be only a thought, there was a speck of dirt in your eye.
Whenever they brought her back from the place where they attached her to the wires, she saw the same thing on the wall as they passed by, a picture of herself, a message about her fate, beseeching her to prepare: a bright poster, a whirling orange child-style stick figure on a maroon background under the inscription: If You Catch Fire, DROP AND ROLL . . . In the middle of the night they raped the woman in the bed next to hers. Jamie’s ears roared at the inside of her head as she watched them pull the dividers eagerly around her. People hurried to and fro in the night, carrying pieces of the woman into the bathroom and eating them; in the morning there was nothing left of her.
Scarlet light and white heat awoke her. She was in flames.
The bed rocked on a momentary ocean, and then came to rest in the dark hospital ward. It was not her clothing, but her flesh itself that was burning. The light that came from her splashed shadows on the walls and floor that shifted and changed their minds about what they were, as she leaped out of the bed, stood still a minute at the foot of it, and then was torn up the middle by the agony of her personal heat. “I’m on fire!” She dropped to the floor and began rolling and whirling. Everybody in the room burst into laughter. There were red lights, and sirens. She couldn’t breathe because of the smoke that filled her lungs like water. It was water, they were trying to put her out—but she was burning. It wasn’t water. They were urinating on her profusely. They all had huge floppy shoes. They were clowns, they threw her in a monstrous tub with a drain.