Somebody Up There Hates You (5 page)

When Uncle Phil comes out of her room, that's all he says. “Pretty girl.” And his voice is all rough and shaky.

Our next stop is the little lobby by the elevator, and here Phil stops dead. He's staring at the harpy, who's just setting up for the day. Phil leans over my shoulder and breathes, “What the fuck?” into my ear.

I raise one finger. “Exactamundo. Just wait,” I say.

The harpy, who today has her creepy white hair loose on her shoulders like a frizzy cloud, smiles at us. “Welcome, Richard,” she whispers. (She always whispers. That ups the weirdness quotient a notch, I say.) She settles herself on the little stool thing. She's got on a long fuzzy skirt, black, with a shiny white blouse. She closes her eyes and raises her hands—long, crooked, creepy fingers—to the strings.

“Just wait,” I say again to Phil, soft. “Here it comes.”

But the harpy's eyes spring back open and she smiles, dropping her hands. “Happy Halloween, Richard,” she says. And she reaches into one of the pockets in that black skirt and brings up a package of Good & Plenty. “I believe you're allowed candy.” She tosses that little pink-and-black-and-white box into my lap, then lifts her hands to the harp, shuts her eyes, and starts to strum. The lobby fills up with sweet, sad sounds.

Phil's hands jerk on the handles of the chair, and before you can say “Jack Robinson” (that's an expression my grandma always says), we're gone, backed right up into our hallway, wheels up against the nurses' station. He stops and picks the Good & Plenty out of my lap with two fingers, like it was laced with arsenic or something, and drops it on the counter. He opens it up and pours out the little pink and white lozenges that look like pills. “Do not eat those, my liege,” he says. “Good & Plenty has been known to kill perfectly healthy monarchs. This was sent by your enemies.” He raises his voice and addresses the floor clerk, Mrs. Lee, a woman in her fifties who's mean and cranky with everybody, but who, I heard, cries like a baby whenever they wheel one of us, covered head to toe with a white sheet, out the doors. Since this is a near-daily occurrence, the woman keeps a huge box of Kleenex at her side. The rest of the time, she's universally rude, and that seems fair to me. Phil leans over and says to her, “That apparition in the lobby gave my nephew a box of these, these . . . items. For Halloween, she said.” He pokes a finger into the pile of candy. “Clearly, she is a servant of”—he lowers his voice and hisses—“what I will call only the Lower Regions.”

Mrs. Lee eyes the Good & Plenty, and she eyes Phil. Then she picks up one of the little pink pills and puts it in her mouth and chews it up, smiling wide with licorice-blackened teeth. “The white ones will kill you,” she says. “Pink ones are yummy.”

I laugh—the woman's all right, and she's left Phil speechless, which is not easy.

After that, the rest of our tour is quick, just the west side of the hall. My side. Mrs. Elkins in 301, two old women in 303, another old woman in 307—and in 305,
moi.
I don't know why I'm the only guy on what seems to be the female side. When I asked Edward, he shrugged and said, “Doesn't matter. The rooms change all the time.” And then he sort of blushed, because he realized what that meant. Out with the dead, in with the dying. The king is dead, long live the king.

My room, I have to say, isn't the absolute worst in terms of color or border. It's what my mom calls mauve, and the border, she says, that's lilacs and violets and ivy, all looped all over one another. It's springy, she says. I don't much notice, most of the time. Except at night, when I can't sleep and I'm looking up at all those bunches of flowers, just hanging there on the wall. I wish they'd, like, wither or something. I mean, change, somehow. It's not right when things stay exactly the same, day after day. Sometimes I think about all the other people who've slept—or not—in this bed and looked at those damn lilacs. But mostly I don't think about them. What's the use?

Phil sits down on my bed, staring out the window for a minute, kind of quiet. But then he says, “Great view.” And, you know, it is—that's the whole beauty of the west side and the main reason I'm happy I got put here. We're at the top of the hill, and the city of Hudson runs right down to the river. I can see all the way down Warren Street and, on a clear fall day like today, the river sparkles all blue and clean down there. Up close, believe me, the Hudson is not so sparkly. But from up here it is. And behind it, the Catskill Mountains rise up, darker blue and curvy on top. Look at those mountains like that, against the sky, and you see the shape of a naked woman on her back. I'm not making that up—everybody sees it. In fact, it was my mom who pointed it out, long time back. The Catskill woman, she's lying down, and the mountains to the south are her hair, all sort of spread out. Then there's her face, profile, sort of turned away, toward the west. Then her breasts, clear as day, two nice pointy ones. Then a sort of dip—her belly. And then two raised-up, bent knees. Like she's lying there, all open and ready, like some sort of sky god or something is going to come down and make her day.

Mom always said the Catskills were, like, magical, that the Indians who used to live there way back, they thought the mountains were sort of sacred or something. And the whole valley, it's Sleepy Hollow country. All of it, kind of haunted. Mom used to make up stories to tell me, especially this time of year, to scare my socks off. But from up here, it doesn't look scary. It's real pretty, actually. Church steeples and all that red brick and stone of the old buildings, like a painting.

Hudson has been around forever, and I'm glad that I get to see it from kind of above, you know? All stretched out, all the people who built the buildings and the churches and the railroad tracks and the boats—all long dead. That's what I think about lots of times when I look out this window. Every one of them, dead. And new ones coming along every day. The maternity ward, all those newbie humans, that's right above my head, fourth floor. (Where I myself put in my first appearance, I'd like to note, seventeen years ago.) The morgue? I guess that's in the basement. Like our sign said:
Going down. This means you.
One of the therapists told me that's why he can keep on working here, that's what we all need to understand: the long view. I think about that for a while and we're quiet, me and Phil, taking in the sights.

And then Phil says three interesting things. First, that he's going to make a drawing, soon as he gets home, like a map or sketch, of this hospice and how the city rolls away from it, right down to the river. And how the river rolls away to the ocean. He's going to put in all the rooms and all the occupants, and he's going to put me in my wheelchair right in the middle of the hallway, sort of in the foreground, watching it all, inside and out, and he's going to call it
Richie's World.
And I know that he means it, and I know that that's one thing Phil has always been good at: he can draw. My mom keeps a couple of his drawings on her bedroom wall in frames, ones he did when he was in high school. Cows in a field. A train, coming right at you, funny angle, like you're tied to the tracks. And a portrait of my mom at seventeen, wide eyes, funny little smile, me still a secret inside her. Phil's drawings won all the Hudson High awards. So I'm sure that
Richie's World
will be very cool.

Second, he says, “So what do you
do
around here, my man? I mean, where's your computer, your music, your entertainment center? Okay, there's a TV, but what else?”

I don't want to tell him this, but I don't e-mail and I don't text anymore because, real simple, I don't see all that well these days. I mean, it's just one more thing he doesn't need to know, that when you get to this point, your eyes don't work so hot. And screens, all that light and movement, they're really painful and, I don't know, unstable or something. All flickery and weird. Video games—all those flashy colors—they're like torture. Like you're not on the outside anymore, but got sucked all the way in, where the explosions happen inside your skull. And it's just plain impossible for me to read words on any screen anymore. Even print on a page, it jumps around and makes you want to puke.

But I don't say any of that, don't bother to explain. See, there's a whole lot of stuff you learn in here that you don't necessarily feel you should pass on to the world. Like how sunlight hurts our eyes and how, overall, this whole process is like being hollowed out. Like a cantaloupe or something, you know, after someone's metal spoon has been in there, scraping out all the good stuff—all the fruit and juice. Like what's left is just shell, you know? The rind. So I say to Phil, “Hey, man, I'm entertained by the whole human comedy, that's all. Live-action. There's always something happening here. It's a riot.” And it's funny—that's almost true. I don't miss cyberspace at all.

After a few minutes of thinking about that, Phil says the third interesting thing. “Richard, my liege. You definitely need to get out more. How'd you like to spend Halloween night out in the Real World? Hit some hot spots, pick up chicks, trick or treat? Let's blow this joint, man.”

And you'd think I'd be jumping for joy, right? I mean, a night out with Uncle Phil? My mother not around to say no? That's like a lifetime fantasy come true. But what I feel is more scared than anything else. I haven't been out in a long time. And I'm not so sure I can handle the Real World. Or it can handle me. See, around here, no one winces at how we look—there are no scars too horrible to bear. It's all
normal
here to be hideous. I hate to be a wuss, though, in front of Phil. So I'm waffling when the phone rings.

I say, “Hi, Ma, how you feeling?” and I watch as Phil waves his hands and shakes his head, the classic
I am not here
gesture. I nod: right, he's not here. Like I said, phoning is not seeing, is it?

5

M
OM'S VOICE IS ALL
hoarse and low. Hard to say if that's from the flu or from crying, which she does whenever she thinks I can't see her. It hits me that, this week at home, the woman is probably in tears about 98 percent of the time, and I feel pretty lousy that I've been enjoying myself so much. “Hey, Ma,” I say, “you okay?”

There's one loud, throat-clearing hack and then she says, “Sweetie, I'm fine. You?”

“Fine. Doing good.” This is my standard lie. There's absolutely no sense saying anything else, because if you do, you have to get all into it, and that's just repetitive and boring.

“I'm so worried that you're lonely. Anybody been in to see you?”

I close my eyes and try to come up with some version of the truth. “A couple of counselors. One of the Br'ers. Oh, yeah, Sylvie's dad.”

There's surprise in her voice. “Sylvie's dad? He's not usually a sociable man, I've got to say. Why did he . . . Oh, god. Is Sylvie . . .?”

That question pisses me right off. I want to scream:
Is Sylvie what? Where?
Sylvie?
I just cannot go there. “Shit, Ma. Sylvie's fine, okay? She's
fine
. Listen, I got to go take a shower. Talk to you later.” I'm short of breath and I can feel my heart pounding in my ears. I get all dizzy and have to lean back on my pillows.

Phil's been listening, not even pretending not to. He takes the phone out of my hand and clicks it shut. “Mothers, huh? What a pain in the ass.” He frowns. “So, Sisco have anything interesting to say?”

Sisco is Phil's name for my mother, his big sister. I shake my head, not enough breath to speak.

Phil slides up the bed until he's sitting right next to me. We're both leaning on the pillows now. “Hey, man, forget it.” He nudges me with his elbow. “I bet there's good Halloween stuff on TV. Like, Monster Movie Marathon or something.”

So that's what we do, all afternoon: watch old horror flicks on TCM. There are the silly ones, the stupid ones and the ones that scare your socks off. Like
The Haunting
—the old one, that is, not that new piece-of-crap version. No, this is the one where this woman named Eleanor—Nell, they call her—is, like, half nuts, half sane. Half in love with Hill House, half scared as shit. The house wins. The last thing she says, driving straight into a tree, is “Why don't they stop me?” Jeez Louise. Mom and me, we read the book,
The Haunting of Hill House,
together when I was about twelve. We had to read it together because we were both too scared to read it alone. We'd sit on my bed—I was hooked up to IVs, even at home, every night, long story, not worth going into—and we'd read, silently, turning a page only when both of us were done with it. Then we went on to
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
. That Shirley Jackson, man, she can throw a lump of pure darkness into your chest, you know? She can spin your head around and make you totally, like, off balance. But I got to say that, looking back, those were sweet times for Mom and me. I was home, we were scared together, not alone. Kind of nice, really.

The supper tray comes at five. I've got such a headache from TV overload that I can't even look at it. Phil makes fake gagging sounds, pointing at the food. But he sits down and eats it all while I sip the coffee. Then he claps his hands and says, “Okay, my liege, your food taster has declared this safe for your consumption.” He waves at the empty tray, and we both laugh like hyenas. He paces around the room a few times, looks out the window and puts his hands on his hips. “It's time to go, pal.” He makes his voice all dramatic and fake spooky: “As darkness falls on the city of Hudson this hallowed night, strange figures appear on the streets. Children in costume? Or the denizens of the deep, showing their true faces? Who really knows? Who can really tell innocence from evil on this Halloween night?” He gives a long, loud, monstrous laugh:
“Bwaaaa, ha, ha, ha.”

There's applause from the doorway. Jeannette's back on duty and she's smiling. In fact, she's got a funny, shy kind of look in her eyes. “My god, it's Philip Casey,” she says. “I haven't seen your ugly face since, what, freshman year of high school? Fancy running into you here.”

Phil looks at her for a few ticks. She's big, like I said, but she's attractive and she's got a real spark, tonight at least. She's wearing a uniform top with smiling jack-o'-lanterns all over it. Suddenly, this hits me: it's the first time in all my whole life that me and Mom didn't carve one. For a second, it's all there in my head: the newspapers on the kitchen table, the knife in my hand. The deep cut around the stem, careful not to damage the stem, then the tugging off of the top of the pumpkin. It's right there: the orange-gold of the innards and the smell, sharp as anything, of pumpkin guts on my hands. The clumsy triangle eyes and fangs we always went for. That great moment when Mom lit the candle inside and, bammo, the thing came to life. And the taste of the seeds, roasted in our oven and covered with salt. I can feel tears stinging my eyes, and I'm glad that Phil and Jeannette are too busy looking at each other to pay me any mind.

“Jeannie?” Phil's got a big ole grin on his face. “Oh man. Jeannie. Long time, girl. I had no idea you worked here.”

Jeannette comes all the way into the room, sashaying her hips. “Well, I didn't know that you know our Richard,” she said. “Didn't put the names together 'til right this minute.”

“Know him?
Know
him? Hey, I'm his uncle. I'm family. We are both Casey men. We're tight. Aren't we, my man?”

Tight, me and Phil? I wish it were true, so I try to smile. “Yep.”

Phil goes over and gives Jeannette a hug. “Listen, Jeannie,” he says, right in her ear. “Can you, maybe, just not check on our man Richard here? For a couple hours, maybe?”

She pulls back and frowns. “Not check on a patient? I don't think so.”

Phil smooths his hand along her back. “Honey,” he says, soft and sweet. “This is a seventeen-year-old kid we got here. Remember what it was like, being seventeen? It's Halloween night. I'll take care of him, I promise. Don't you allow, like, little leaves of absence? When accompanied by a responsible adult?”

She snorts. “Yeah, sure. And who might that be?”

His voice gets even softer. Maybe he thinks I can't hear him. But that's where he's wrong. The best sense I got these days is hearing. It's sharp as can be. “He's a
kid,
” he says. “And this is his last Halloween.”

I shut my eyes, hard. I don't even know if I'm rooting for him to convince her or not. I don't have the energy right now to plan a breakout. He's the adult—let him do it.

Jeannette's voice is thick and quiet. “Shoot. All right. Two hours. You got two hours. If that boy isn't in his bed, safe and sound, by nine o'clock, I'm calling the state troopers and the county sheriff, both. You got it?”

I let my eyes flick open. Holy moly—she went for it. Phil really is a magician.

Phil kisses her cheek and she stamps out of the room, shaking her head, but smiling. Then he runs around out in the hall and comes back with scissors and some pieces of construction paper. He hunches over the bed table for a few minutes, cutting and folding, then he leaps up and he's got a crown in his hand, like the kind they used to give out at Burger King. And he fusses around, fitting it on my head and taping it together in back. He pulls a little black mask—the Zorro kind—out of his pocket and fits it around my face, elastic snapping in back. Then he takes the blanket off the bottom of the bed—the nice fuzzy one Mom brings to every hospital, dark blue with little gold stars all over it—and he drapes it around my shoulders, like a cape. He pushes my hospital bracelet way up my arm, invisible under the cape. Together, we unwrap the bandages on my hand, which looks nicely badass. He steps back and then smiles and bows. “My lord,” he says. “Your disguise is complete. And your humble servant begs your leave to get you
outta
here.”

I nod. “You got it, man. Let's go.”

How we get out is so simple, I'm surprised I never did it myself. No one says boo as we go down the hallway and into the lobby. (The harpy, thankfully, has closed down for the night.) I sit up straight in the wheelchair, crown on my head, and Phil pushes from behind. He smiles and nods at everyone we pass. He hits the down button for the elevator, and when the doors open, there's Mrs. Elkins's son stepping out. He looks a little surprised, but he holds the doors open for us.

It takes him a minute, but then he recognizes me. “Going out, Richard?” he asks.

I wink, but that's useless behind my mask, so I give him a big grin. “Got a hot date, Mr. E,” I say. “Happy Halloween.”

The look on the guy's face is just, I don't know, weird.

Once we're inside the elevator, Phil and I start to hoot. But it's not until we make it through a whole bunch of corridors and right on out the big glass doors at the front of the hospital that I really believe it. Not until we're actually outside, in the cool October air, does it seem even a little bit real. It's the air that does it: I haven't been out in I don't know how long—came straight from the big New York hospital, by ambulance, to this one.

Outside, it's amazing. And it's a perfect night: just a little cool, just a little breeze, clouds skimming through the sky, leaves rustling along the curbs. I get goose bumps all up my shins as that air hits my skin. I take in big gulps of it. And there's noise: buses, cars, kids whooping and hollering somewhere—life noises. Real World noises. And smells: Exhaust, dead leaves, wetness from the storm drains, and beyond all that, the river. The Hudson, moving along down there, slow and deep and full of strong currents. It's always been there, all my life, that river smell. But I never really noticed it like I do tonight. I can almost smell the fish, swimming out there in the black waters, all silvery-eyed and slippery.

Phil moves quickly, through the ER parking lot and out onto the sidewalk. He hardly has to push now: we're at the top of the hill, like I said, and it's an easy roll down to the main streets of the city. Well, maybe not so easy: Phil has to pull back on the handles of my chair so I don't, like, fly off by myself, sailing down the hill. Phil doesn't say a word until we're three blocks from the hospital, just at the top of the 700 block of Warren Street. Then he swerves me into the alley between a bank and some other place. He leans against a wall. “Got to have a smoke,” he says and pulls a joint out of his pocket. He lights it up and takes a long, long pull. He holds it out to me. “Take a hit, Richard,” he says. “You're on vacation.”

I've got my pain patch on, so I'm already getting more dope than Uncle Phil can imagine, but hey—little more can't hurt. I take a hit, and it burns like hell and makes me dizzy. I hand it back to him and say, “Thanks, man. You relax. I'll stand watch.” I roll myself out of the alley, just onto the sidewalk. I don't want to say so, but I don't like the dark in that alley—or the smell of cat piss. Anyway, I want to see the action.

Here's an okay thing about Hudson: the stores stay open for a couple hours in the early part of Halloween night so that the kids in the city can come around and trick or treat. They close three blocks—700, 600 and 500, that's it, because from 400 down, it's pretty dicey, neighborhood-wise—and no cars can come through. The little kids run around and have a ball. I did it myself, back when there were more real stores: Rogerson's Hardware, the Town Fair toy store, Sam's Market, all those good places. Now, it's very strange. All these New York City people came up and opened antique stores and art galleries and stuff. There're no
real
stores anymore—no food or toys or hammers and nails. Just places where me and Mom can't afford one single thing, and the owners know it the second we step inside, you can tell by their faces. More like museums than places to actually buy stuff. But this trend isn't so bad for Halloween. More than half those city people are gay couples, and they love this holiday—they dress up in crazy stuff and celebrate like mad. And candy? They give out great stuff. I'm talking
full-size
Hershey bars here.

Tonight, the place is jumping, I got to say. There's all kinds of music coming out of the shops, and there are guys in weird getups and masks dancing on the sidewalks. Little kids in those cheap costumes you get at the Dollar Store out on Fairview—one piece, cheesy nylon, masks held on by rubber bands. Power Rangers, Snow White, that kind of thing. Nothing even close to as cool as my werewolf costume. All the kids are running from store to store with shopping bags, taking in the loot. Mothers walk about half a block behind their kids, shouting at them to slow down, but not real worried because it's all such a mellow scene.

I'm sitting there, just grooving on the whole thing, when this little girl, like around four, runs up and stares at me in my chair. She's got some kind of ballerina/fairy princess thing on—a purple fluffy skirt that's already in rags around her feet, a fake diamond thing on her head. She's a black kid with a million braids. She comes right on over and points at the wheelchair. Then she grabs on to one of the wheels. “This your costume, mister?” she says.

And I think about it. “Yeah,” I say. “It is.”

She tilts her head back and frowns. “What are you?”

“King of the cripples,” I say. “My legs don't work. But I'm still king.”

“You got no crutches. Where your crutches?” She looks at me hard, like I'm trying to fool her.

I'm thinking that one over when her mother—the youngest healthy woman I've seen in a while, really pretty, with a nice smile, smooth skin, and soft, round cheeks— runs up and grabs the little girl's hand. “Sorry,” she says. She shakes her head. “She's out of control tonight. Too much sugar.”