He doesn’t speak until the fifth day. The first day he builds and rebuilds a lean-to against the chipped white concrete wall with his plastic mattress and a thin worn sheet. Then he sits inside, clutching at the welcome literature, scrawling letters that only sometimes make up words into the margins of the pages whose cold black text tries to gently read “Welcome to Mercy Providence Hospital.”
Since his mute passivity is consistent the nurses and orderlies simply wait for the meds to kick in and leave him be. When they come with ugly brown molded plastic trays of overcooked food, plastic utensils, and cartons of milk featuring cartoon cows and facts about dairy, he takes them with no question or thanks and brings them with him into his meager little tent, apparently reading over the haphazard miniscule lines of partial english he wrote with the quickly dulling golf pencils he has collected in a stack by his side.
A single nurse is always seated in the door frame. He sometimes watches them from across the room. First it’s a heavy olive-skinned woman with jangling gold and purple bracelets, her two hoop earrings wiggling and catching the light whenever she swings her head to look back at him. She turns away shortly each time to continue reading her pristine paperback with its crisp pink cover. The second day it’s a smiling deep brown skinned man who takes longer to abandon trying to communicate with his ward.
“You won’t be here too long,” he says. “It’s a good time for you to make some changes.” He’s sitting with his foot resting on one knee and smiling. His eye contact falls short. “When you get back to your life you will have new tools to use.” He doesn’t seem to mind his patient’s silence. Since the hunched man under the blanket teepee never answers, he finds other ways to occupy himself.
When they come with his meds, he crawls out with reserved but strong motions and swallows them silently, then crawls back in. He has a few days' growth of beard which, combined with his layered scrubs and greasy mop of hair, makes him look wild. He’s white, though not pale, and does seem to understand English, from the way his dirty sweat-lined face shows an interest in some key phrases. “Dinner soon.” “Lights out.” “Here’s another blanket.”
He doesn’t speak until the fifth day.
Once in a while, during breaks from his writing, he catches the edges of another patient from the open door to his spartan quarters.
Sometimes it’s a man of impressive size, dressed in two overlapping hospital gowns, complaining in honey smooth, booming tones about his need for a second towel or double portions of food.
Sometimes it’s a birdlike woman, short and sharp, with a pinched face and a clipped, soft voice. He can’t hear what she says but her expression is mildly panicked. Her wringing hands press into her stomach.
Whoever it is he sees, and whoever sits in the doorframe through which he sees them, the answer they receive is always the same: either “Ask your doctor when they come to see you,” or far more often, “That’s a question for Madeline, go find her.” By the fifth day, Madeline’s name is prominent in the new patient’s notes, accompanied still by nonwords and strings of English that don’t quite make up thoughts.
“Madeline.” he says on Friday afternoon . It’s the warm and smiling African man who’s there to hear it.
“It’s nice to hear your voice finally.” he says. His smile suggests he means it. “I can see if she’s available for you.”
The patient remains curled against the marked up wall, pencil poised over his scribbled-dark page while he watches the nurse wave down a passing orderly. The two of them speak in tones too soft for him to hear.
“Madeline will be here soon, my friend. Do you want any water? Maybe some new paper?” He gestures at the mass of loose leaves surrounding the sheltered patient. Each page is covered to a glistening metallic gray, the days of writing he did. Writing over writing. The patient nods back to him.
“I’ll be happy to see what I can find while you and Madeline talk,” the nurse says.
Madeline proves to be a short white woman with an incredible mess of bushy brown hair kept passably tame by a series of horn-patterned clips. She has a serious but empathetic demeanor and carries a robust clipboard of a model which can be opened to store further pages inside. She makes her entrance and drags the chair from the doorframe with her to the foot of the bare wooden block bed in the center of the room. A lanyard dangles from her neck as she walks. Swinging at the end of it is a stack of badges and IDs, the frontmost of which includes an old photo of her. She beams wide in the snapshot, her face smooth and free of the scattering of wrinkles it now sports.
She waits a moment, and, observing something, makes a note with a shining metal pen.
“I’m glad to see you’re feeling a little better,” she says. “My name’s Madeline, which I guess you know already.” The man watches her. Waiting.
“I’m a social worker here. It looks like you didn’t have any ID with you when the police picked you up. Can I ask your name? If you don’t mind?” Her earnestness seems a comfort to him. His body relaxes minutely.
“My name is [garbage],” he answers. His voice is rough. He half-contains a ragged cough.
“[garbage],” she echoes. The metal pen flashes. “Can you tell me anything about what brings you here [garbage]?”
Still hunched against a wall, underneath his tent, [garbage] seems to contemplate the question for a long moment.
“Last thing I can remember for sure is that damn house.”
Then the waters begin to surge, as if the memory, or the vocalization of it, is a chink in a past-due abandoned dam.
“I was just going in to fucking find him, and to see what all the goddamn beautiful rapture it had to be, to hole up and mainline that shit. Sorry, Gus, I mean. My boyfriend. Anyway, I don’t have a clue what happened after that, but if you want my guess I'd say I decided to take some too.”
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Madeline diligently writes across her pad as he talks.
“You mean the (_____),” she says.
[garbage] laughs, a derisive mirthless sound. “Yeah, I guess you saw it in my blood. Serves me right though, huh? That’s what all the ads on the bus stops say, right? ‘Not even once’, and I go and try it anyway. Now look,” He waves his hands in a flutter, taking in the makeshift tent, the bare white walls, Madeline herself. She leans forward slightly, making a point of stowing the pen away.
“Can you tell me more about your boyfriend Gus?” she asks. Her hands are folded over the paper now. [garbage] shifts his weight and casts his eyes out as if looking for help. A dance of emotion flits across his face. Finally his gaze lands on her again and he expels a short gust of air.
“Alright fine yeah,” he says. “But I don’t know how to talk about Gus without running at the mouth a bit, so, hope you’ve got a few minutes.”
Madeline puts her clipboard down on the bed where it clacks to rest. “Take as much time as you need.”
____________________________________________________________________________
I was just starting at PCC and only 18 years old when I met Gus. This was right out of the Home where I grew up. Not that kind of home, with a mommy and daddy and brother and half a sister, more of a place like this, but just kids there, and all of us were ‘troubled’. Anyway I was glad to get out of there. I had a little money saved up, and I was getting loans fed into my account from good old sallie mae. I tried to get a scholarship to make it easier but I’m not smart enough, whatever.
The class I was starting with was film studies. I had a whole schedule of shit to try out, just random stuff mostly. I still didn’t know what I wanted out of life back then. I don’t now either but at the time it seemed a lot more important. I was nervous going in, kinda kept to the back you know, tried to act like college was just another high school class. I was pretty right about that actually. Gus sat down right next to me and shot his hand out to introduce himself.
“Hi there, haven’t seen you before,” he said.
I took his hand. I remember it was warm and big, and even then, just seeing him out of nowhere like that, the words were stuck to him all over. Warm and big. The guy was six six, long legs and arms but still a kind of muscular that drew the eye. Drew my eye anyway, and everything about him radiated warmth. The smile, the lazy way he turned his chair toward me.
“No, I’m new,” I managed. “[garbage].”
“Gus.” He propped his head up on his hand, elbow resting on the desk next to him. “So [garbage], what brings you to film one oh one? Are you an aspiring director? Maybe a writer?” He seemed actually interested, too. In a warm way.
“No, I’m not sure, maybe.”
One thing I remember like it was last week is the way he made my mind just drain away. I never could find the right words, which is weird for me. That silence I’ve been stuck in for, well for however many days I’ve been in this ridiculous tent, yeah that’s not my usual modus operandi. I like talking, and I tend to just find the words as I go. Not so around Gus, at least not in the beginning. For one thing he had this great laugh that always disarmed me. Wiped all the words right out. At first I just heard the music of it. His deep voice was a weird contrast to the song of that laugh. Later on I came to love it. I called it his tidal force. As I grew close to him that laugh could wash over me and smooth away all my whatever, my hesitation, all the anxiety of the moment. Maybe it should’ve been a warning that the guy could have such a grip on me. Even in that first conversation it was him in control and me trailing behind him like an eager puppy.
“I totally get what you mean,” he said. “I can’t decide myself what to focus on, you know?”
I smiled back at him, thinking just ‘thank fuck he doesn’t know I’m an idiot yet.’ He might’ve, maybe he’s just good with idiots.
“I work at a bookshop downtown, Douglass Books,” I said. I was trying to keep my hands still to be honest. It’s fucked but literally that’s how shook I was. Like I was meeting a celebrity.
“I’ve been there since I was like fifteen. All I’m sure of now is that I love stories. Movies, books, plays, whatever.”
Gus’s eyes could sparkle in a near concerning way. They could’ve been any damn color at all and I would’ve called it the best color eye’s came in. And damn the boy’s freakish luck they were bright blue, like an actual viking. Blue eyes get all the poetic attention.
“I’m in love with movies,” He said. His bass lilt dropped to a genial hush, like he was telling some embarrassing secret. Damn those eyes. You can obviously tell at this point I was smitten. Pulled toward him might be the best way to put it. Drawn in. Whatever it was, I was pretty decided about how to handle it. I’d put it safely in my pocket, and fucking leave it there. I was too stupid to be stupid about love, and I knew it.
Despite my resolve to keep my feelings in my pants, we became friends pretty quick. I’ll spare you the gory details. Well, I’m probably sparing myself having to say them out loud really. But yeah, a few months into the class, we were close enough to go to movies and plays and all that friend shit. We started a book at the same time and talked about it, that kind of thing. I wouldn’t call any of that dating though, and of course it was Gus who broke down that wall. Shattered it.
“How bout we go together?” He asked one day at the end of class. He had dropped a little pamphlet on the table in front of me, subtle like an exotic bird. It was a rally by the capitol building. March for gay rights. I might’ve turned red enough to wedge right into the little rainbow flag printed on the front of it.
“I don’t know.” But I did, and that was the problem. I’d wanted to pounce on Gus since that first warm handshake, but something was holding me back.
____________________________________________________________________________
Madeline patiently waits for [garbage] to explain. When it becomes clear that he’s not simply searching for the right words she gently prompts him.
“What was it that held you back?” she asks, and lets the question sit.
[garbage]’s eyes are fixed on the corner behind her, where the wall meets the ceiling. His jaw is slack and his brow furrowed. A slight, slow movement draws his gaze there, where it falls on something impossible. A line, like a water stain, seems to be inching out across the wall, oozing slowly down. He places the familiar shape of its edges with a snap: frost. The crystalline structure is clear, the glittering specks of white that wink and flash. He remains silent, eyeing the encroaching frozen wave as it reaches its spiny feelers forward. He can even hear, so faintly, the metallic squeaking groans, like ice shifting, like snow underfoot.
“Garbage.” He says, his eyes still on the wall behind Madeline. She tilts her head.
“What does ‘Garbage’ mean to you?”
The ice has reached the floor. [garbage] begins to scoot back against the wall, his eyes widening.
“Garbage is. Well I don’t want to tell you, honestly. You’ll probably just keep me locked up longer for it.”
He presses against the concrete. The ice is speeding, the air has grown sharp with cold. He can see his breath in clouds, panting out as they quicken. Little trees of white frost are sprouting along the bare bed, making their way toward Madeline. [garbage] lets out a small strangled sound. He rises up and reaches his hand out toward her, whether to pull her to safety or push her away is unclear, but she sidesteps him and backs toward the door. He can see her mouth moving, can see the concern on her face, but the sound of the frost has grown thunderous, he can’t make out what she says. The cold is overwhelming, a spasm wracks his frame.
Then it reaches him.
The floor below him becomes slick and reflective. The freezing air seizes his lungs and he coughs a dry clapping rejection of the biting cold. He tries to step again toward Madeline, toward the door, but he slips backward and lands hard on his elbow and tailbone. He hears and feels below him the ominous gun-sharp sound of the ice cracking. Before he can skitter away, a web of lines extends outward. Pieces of the floor begin to fall away, into darkness.
He sees, as he falls, a worried Madeline, leading his nurse into the room. But before she reaches him, he’s gone. He watches their faces fly upward. He spins in the dark and the cold.