Just yesterday they made us watch one. Or – Let us watch, let us watch David, that’s what you mean. I’m writing it all down because I have to, I have to get it right.
Sally’s voice came over the loudspeaker, she’s the head nurse so she gets to do that even though we might get fixated on her. That’s what they call it, fixated. We can’t have girls as friends here, that’s a fixation.
Her voice was loud and she coughed and said Okay boys, Mr. Baron has been nice enough to fund a screening in Kransky for you all. Now everybody put your hands high where I can see them! Can you do that for me?
Basically, what that means is we all have to decide whether to go or not, we have to vote and we all have to agree, or no one gets to go. That’s how it works on our ward. Which really just means they don’t have enough nurses on staff for us to split up.
We all raised our hands and the aides came around and counted us up and made sure we all had clearance, if you don’t have clearance you automatically have to go into an isolation room while everyone else goes to Movies.
We all lined up to see Girl, Interrupted. It’s always a movie like that, always like that. One week, we got to see The Virgin Suicides and last week, we saw Lilith, which is a really old movie but still just the same thing. Just the same thing. They say it’s unhealthy for us to sexualize sane girls, but I guess this is OK.
We line up with our backs to the wall, tile walls the color of mucous that are sticky like mucous when you put your hands on them behind your back. We have to stand there Heel! and the guard gets buzzed in from downstairs. He has a big key and he puts the key in the lock and turns it in that exacting way that takes so long. Then he walks in and we all stand there watching as he swings the door closed behind him. We’re not allowed out until he calls the nurses over to walk us there.
The guard, usually Walter these days, keeps his eyes on us as he waits for the nurses, and then they walk us out of the ward and then they go through the same compulsions every time. Except with them it’s not called compulsion, it’s just called safety.
Lock the door behind us Click! guide us down the hall, unlock the door to the elevator room, shuffle us all in until our stink mixes together, then Click! lock the door behind us, unlock the elevators with the smallest key and push the down button, the only button, so the elevator will come up. There is no up button because we are on the top floor, we are maximum security and therefore a danger to the Earth.
In the elevator, packed in like sardines – even smelling like sardines – Morgan decides to hock a loogie. We know it’s coming by the way his face gets all screwed up, glasses almost falling off as he works his nose in concentration, but Walter’s looking the other way, assessing nail scratch damage to the elevator door, and the nurses are chatting about manicures and permanents, although probably not, more like penis sizes and who they caught trying to masturbate on the ward last night.
When Morgan lets it go, his phlegm hits the wall of the elevator like a glowing ball of moon dust, spittle flies into Charlie’s face and he starts crying, laughing and crying at the same time because he’s not stupid, he knows it’s funny, but he also knows getting a man’s mucous in your eye isn’t really a laughing matter.
The elevator slams to a stop and the nurses are desperate, they have to calm Charlie down because otherwise we all have to go back to the ward, nobody wants that, but he’s a great shining baby and most often happy so he’s quickly won over by a new whistle and some contraband Starburst that will come back to haunt the nurses ten hours later when they’re trying to get him to sleep and he’s still running around the ward, high on his sugar rush.
Morgan knows he’ll be in trouble later, but for now, the unaddressed phlegm slides down the wall like a meteor and we all watch it’s progress as the elevator starts up again, sliding down to it’s destination on the first floor, and I’m wondering if I just reached out and grabbed on, would it take me to Mars, or at least the Moon, somewhere a little closer to the sun?
Like nothing happened, it’s the same thing again when the elevator lands, shuttle us out, unlock the door to the hall, guide us down the hall until Amrita bursts out We are your shepherds! trying to make a joke because she is the newest nurse and she doesn’t know that she will be gone in a month or two, her legs are too shiny for government work.
As we make it to the lobby where we have to get buzzed through a small room attached to the security guards’ station by a glass wall, Max starts to clown around with a passing guard who plays spades with him sometimes, grabbing out at the pens tucked into his shirt pocket and pretending to jab him with them as the man laughs, feigning a seizure.
Max is young and forgets that we have to be pretty obedient to get through the glass room, but Walter whacks him on the head, grabbing the pens and shoving them back into the pocket of the guard, which shuts Max up.
We’re finally buzzed through, and I can see leaves whirling in the eddies of wind that gather outside of the concave front of the John Howard Building. We’re shuttled through the metal maze of bars – we were sardines, now we’re cattle – and finally, we make it outside. From here we can see Kransky lit up in the dusk – it’s taken us two hours to get this far – and the orange glow makes me think of the blaze on the hill, the old barn lit up against the night sky, how close I felt to the sun, how far away from the screaming.
My hair pushes back on itself, pulled by the wind, and I see tangles of white and grey. My hair is too long. I hate to see what it’s become, what I’ve become, the years spent here, longer in than out and still not an old man. I don’t belong here, none of us do, it’s not right it’s not right it’s not right! – Don’t think about that, David. You can’t think trapped, cause then you will be.
Outside, I start running around, my breath is catching on my nose and I spray it on McQueen’s head. He’s so short he just makes a loop around me because he can’t duck out of the way. His high laugh pierces the November air as he runs out of breath, stopping to hug Charlie around the waist, pulling a half-used tissue out of his pocket to remove the tears from Charlie’s face that will soon freeze in the cold.
McQueen calls himself everyone’s father because he never got to have one, and I start to giggle because the image I get of him protecting us all with his tiny hands is too funny, too sad.
We’re farther away from our home on the ward than we have been in weeks and the freedom is killing us. Max is jumping up and down, trying to climb on Clarence’s back as his tongue wags in a toothless face and Walter has to say it for him since Clarence can’t: No, Max! Don’t jump on him! These days, we only get to go outside once a week in a good month, since max security doesn’t get free time privileges. Everything we need is in the John Howard building, except for Kransky Auditorium.
So we do this thing they want us to do and we see a movie about our condition, except they’re never about our condition, they’re not even about a woman’s condition, not really. Max loves the actresses they pick to play these women because they remind him of the fucked up girls he dated a couple of years ago before he killed his buddy and landed himself here.
Those women, they’re always these weak pixies, sweethearts with fucked up brains and big gorgeous dark circles under their eyes. They always want to fuck you, in the movies, but I know what they’re really like. I saw a group of them once, the real ones. I was standing on our patio, a wide room with barred windows all around. We used to smoke out there, back when cigarettes were our currency before we became a smoke-free facility thank you so much Mayor Fenty.
I was the only one out there because it was Clarence’s birthday and I hated him, the way his jaws smacked and his talk about being God, Superman, the ladies’ man, the way he drooled over a nurse’s breast, touching himself in the steam shower. He was ancient, horrible, a predator no longer in control, Clarence was – I said don’t talk about him, David.
And that’s when I smelled them. Nothing like Marlena, all warm soap and husky clove; they reeked of sweat and old fish mostly. Their dark bodies moved like crustaceans across the grass and I could almost see them underwater, their bodies moved like that. They were wild, wilder than us and wilder than the women in the movies, that’s for sure. They just didn’t give a shit.
I watched one of them whizzing by the cat farm, she just pulled her pants down and started doing it and I had to crane my neck to see past the sign where it says DON’T FEED THE CATS which I could always see from the ward but no one would ever tell me what it said. On our first movie day, I had to see it, and I ran as fast as I could to read it before they noticed me missing.
I started laughing, remembering that day and how funny the sign seemed to me then with all those hundreds of cats roaming around, but I stifled it because I wanted to see if she’d be able to pull her overalls back up before the nurses figured out what she was up to. Sure enough, just as she stood up, pants still around her ankles but hooked in her fists, ready to hike them up, a nurse ran over.
The crazy girl paused for a second and I thought she was just going to hike her pants up and be done with it, but just as the nurse got within striking distance, she dropped those pants back down, clocked the nurse right in the nose and tore off down the street, leaving her pants where they had fallen. Of course, two guards tackled her within seconds, but they had to be very careful or they would have been charged with sexual harassment.
I saw that girl’s naked brown ass whenever I closed my eyes for weeks, but it never did me any good. In here, they put a chemical in the water so we can’t get hard, ever. They took away our erections and gave us the Tyra Banks Show, which is on in the common room all hours of the day.
The night after the movie, I wake up in a cold sweat, dreaming of Marlena, the way her hair looked fanned out on the pillow next to mine, always the smell of her. Even in my dream I couldn’t get to her, she was so far away; I wish I could get back to her. Maybe she wasn’t so different from the girls in the movies they show us.
Sometimes, when they lock me in for the night and my mind goes numb, I can see myself breaking away from this flock of rancid men and just running up the hill and around the bend straight into Southeast. I’d jump over an electrical fence, I think, if I had to. I’d kick out a guard station for sure. I think about doing all of this just about every time I go outside, until I’m play wrestling with McQueen, which he always initiates. He distracts me every time.
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