We review my goals. Jwanouskos reviews them. He’s written them down. He’s the goal keeper. He’s perpetually pressed for time. I’ve quit trying to meld Jw into something I can pronounce. Should I laugh when people say what they say in the dailies? I’m thinking no is probably what he’s looking for. They are his goals. Do I still see things? Yes, I see pretty much everything.
“We’re going to step up the dosage of Seroquel, I think. Are you getting along with your roommate?” he asks me.
Umberto? Yes, Umberto. It doesn’t appear as though we trouble one another.
The woman in the corner there with the beaded suede thing on, she looks like a luscious ceremonial drum, like she would softly go fwop in my ear if I thumped her flat belly. Are you allowed to talk to me?
Jwanouskos asks was I addressing him.
“Did I say that out loud?”
“Yes. You said something.”
“Is she real?” Right over there.
“Melanie?”
“Are there more?”
I’m supposed to please go now. They’re getting a volleyball game together in the courtyard. I’m supposed to think about joining them.
The self-involved brunette who won’t eat and has a face like a gaunt horse because of it but would otherwise be very ugly anyway gives me the volleyball. A gap in judgment. The whitecoats are chasing Charles Binny again.
The mannurse says I assaulted another patient. Furthermore, that’s unacceptable.
“I did not. I dinged Charles with the volleyball,”
Tiny Umberto leans on an ironwood cane, behind me.
He adds, “You wouldn’t have caught him.”
“That is unacceptable,” the mannurse says again.
“…right before you clipped him and bloodied him up on the concrete,” I finish.
Did I understand that I was never to do that kind of thing again? Why, yes. I’d add that to the list.
Tuesday, my wife calls during the Monopoly game. I’m playing opposite the plump pouter with the wrist bandages and the Mexican boy she is sexually active with. I don’t even get to eat in the cafeteria since the dinging, but then these two haven’t had their unacceptability exposed yet. Umberto never plays. He sits angry most of the time. I don’t think they give him medicine besides the pills for his leg. The dog’s move. It goes hat, thimble, dog. We lost track of which pewter figurine was the pouter, which the boy, and which was me. I only chose one of the three because there is no globen pewter Earth likeness with a flat spot in China where it won’t roll off the board. I have no idea why they keep rolling the fucking dice.
An enormous white lady who smells like fried chicken says my wife called. Somebody healthy in the head can call you and you get the message and call them back, collect. I ask the big one can I have an Ativan. Jwanouskos said to give me up to four a day. I feel anxious, and I feel like she is morbidly obese and will die a long time before me.
“No. Maybe later.”
But we’ll all be different people by then. Things will have progressed, possibly beyond salvaging. Spun out of control, as it were. Aneurisms are insipid things. What if she has one? What then? She denies me the pill. I try hard to imagine her lying among buttercups, some angle less repulsive. I keep seeing Jersey cows licking her.
My wife says hello, after telling the operator she’ll accept charges. Did I see the doctor? Yes, I saw the doctor. It’s the same.
She ends with: “You don’t have to live your life so hard, Babe.”
Really?
“Life can be interesting as just life. It is,” she tells me.
Sleeping is the one divine thing we do, or the thing most envied by the divine. Turns out divinities can’t sleep. He occupies us for a while, a renter, and sleeps. He leaves impressions behind in the mind bed. Some people recognize the outline and this drives them around the bend. They are convinced God is communicating with them, or worse, that they are divine themselves.
I bug God, but he sleeps in me as much as he did in Plutarch.
Umberto sits on his bed and listens.
Opinions abound here, like assertions that people need not be lunatic to want to end themselves. Though Umberto believes this, he would never try to convince anyone of it. He is not in the right place.
“I am not in the right place. Even if I was, this is illegal.”
The lights are off because we don’t control them.
“Tell me,” I say. “Again.” I hear him draw up to make his case. Several dozen times this week. He moans. He is the slightest person here. At 62, by far the oldest.
“I was drunk when they brought me in. Whatever I signed don’t count.”
So far so good.
“That hearing last week? The judge says I’m a danger to myself. My doctor, my whole family took the stand against me. That felt like a street fight. He says, ‘more evaluation.’ And I’m here but I don’t want to be.”
Who does.
“But for drinking? That’s illegal.”
Good point.
Tuesday, Jwanouskos tells me I’m doing much better. He doesn’t support this conclusion to my satisfaction. I’m on a pharmaceutical buffet, having one of everything, three of some, but I’ll be going home soon. I will never be able to afford what I’m taking in here, but the State will help a little. I hear he tells Umberto that neither chronic alcoholism nor binge drinking meet the statutory requirements for involuntary hospitalization. The staff’s considered opinion. Though, Umberto, you will die if you keep drinking. This is fact.
The lights are off again. Umberto is clicking his dentures.
“I’m going home tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Crusas,” he says, is home.
“That’s good.”
“Finally. I like you,” he says. “You are the smartest one to ever talk to me. I’m getting a restraining order to keep my daughter away from my house.”
I have no roommate since Umberto left. Business seems to have slacked off somewhat. There is a lull in admissions. Charles Binny is still here, but he is crazy way beyond interesting. I don’t fill the hours I used to spend talking with Umberto. There is a week of hours twice every day now.
Tuesday, Jwanouskos tells me to pack my room. I’m on tomorrow morning’s release schedule. Good luck.
“What?”
“Good luck.”
“I thought you said something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Anything but that.”
He shakes my hand and smiles. We wish you the best. Remember the things we talked about.
It’s a long bus ride over the mountains. Streaming scenery should feel better than painted cinder blocks and the same black man slapping Clorox water on the linoleum in the morning. But feelings are restricted by the drugs. The thoughts wandering around in their absence are unclothed, like Charles Binny.
My wife is surely glad I’m back. The dog almost died of a centipede bite while I was gone. Sorry she didn’t have time to clean the trailer better. It’s been one hell of a day for me, much more than I’m accustomed to. I’m fatigued to unexplored depths, deeper than desire. The medication probably warns of this in a pamphlet somewhere. We used to have a house.
I am capable of tying a rock on a rope and twirling it at whistling speed and flinging it far into the high dessert air. Fetching it and doing it again, in the other direction, until I knock out the phone line. I am unwilling to consider car payments, regular like an expectant tide, and collection letters that we collect that look like repetitious smudge art, elementary from a distance. My unwillingness does not trouble me.
Tuesday, a letter comes for me with a yellow sticker on it. The handwriting is shit or I’m not seeing so well right now. I ask my wife to open it. She reads:
Dear Sir,My wife looks at the envelope and says it was forwarded from the hospital. It is a week old. More than that. They’ve probably already gotten the headstone, so I can ignore it if I want. I can’t want to ignore it. I take the letter to the kitchen table with a pen and loose bitter war on The Meds to claim my grief but they have me surrounded on low, stable asphalt and they are apishly strong. I turn the letter over and smooth it out and write:
You knew my father. His name was Umberto Garza.
My father died today. He was shot in the stomach at Bolin’s Running Indian two days ago.
He asked me to ask you to write his epitaph. If you don’t want to, that’s fine. The funeral is for family only.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Harns
Let me beWould she address an envelope and send it back to them? Yes, but you don’t want to send that. True. I don’t want to send it more than I have not wanted to do anything lately. Seditious want will lay me down alongside my friend. I know this. But send it.
Umberto Garza
date to date
About the author:
Marc Phillips is from Texas. He writes fiction, essays, and poetry. This year, his fiction is nominated for The Pushcart Prize and inclusion in Best American Short Stories. Read a review of Marc's fiction from INK POT, Number 2 in New Pages Literary Magazine or contact Marc at rms2@att.net.
© 2009 Word Riot
