The Gendarme (21 page)

“Do you smoke?”

The question is puzzling. I had smoked in Aleppo.

“No,” I say, after much hesitation.

He nods. “Smokers are permitted two cigarettes each break—every two hours.”

He backtracks, unlocks another door, motions me inside. “This is the men’s dayroom.” We enter a stark, open area, devoid of any pictures, peppered with bits of furniture. A vinyl-covered couch occupies the middle of the room, in front of a TV draped in plastic. A handful of other chairs are scattered about, some facing the TV, others turned away. Several drugged-looking men glance up at our entrance. An older man stands, winds up his arm, and hurls something in our direction. I duck in response but he has thrown only air.

“That’s Elmo. Elmo, this is Emmett.”

Elmo gazes with disinterest. He is bald and rather short, with a yellow oxford shirt and a pallor mixed with pink at his temples.

“He doesn’t say much,” Andre continues. “But he tends to pitch a lot. He told me once he was better than Ferguson Jenkins.”

“Was he a ballplayer?”

Andre shakes his head. “Nah. I think he was a stockbroker.”

He extends his arm. “That’s Alfonso, and Leo.” He indicates two men. “We call Alfonso ‘Puff.’ Gentlemen, this is Emmett.” He pauses. “The fellow over there”—he indicates a sullen man slumped in a corner—“is William.”

It is a hospital for the infirm, like Recep’s—shiny polished floors, nurses in rubber shoes, the smell of urine and disinfectant. The patients slow and shuffling, medicated. Puff, a black man with tufts of hair in each ear, seeks to shake my hand as we pass. Leo, a stringy-haired white man, bows prayerfully toward me.

Andre takes a few more steps. “This is your room.” He points to an open doorway, through which two metal beds can be seen. “The bathroom’s over there.” He points across the large room, behind the TV.

I enter the small room and sit on one of the beds. Andre drops my bag on the floor. I’ve been allowed to keep my wallet, my keys and watch.

“Dinner’s at five-thirty, breakfast at eight, lunch at noon. Lights out at ten. They’ll have a program set up for you: medication, treatment, all that. Dr. Mahoney will be by to talk to you about it.” He pauses, glancing about the room, as if he has not seen it before. “Your roommate is John Paul. He’s around here somewhere.” He turns back to me. “You got any questions?”

I shake my head.

“Okay, then.” He shows a gap between broad teeth. “Cheer up, Mr. Conn. You’ll be all right.”

All right. I remain sitting. I count the ceiling tiles (twelve, with parts of four others). I examine the walls. I glance at my watch. Thoughts of the dream come, but in a muffled sort of way, as if the building itself blocks them out. My limbs are sluggish, the result of the deadening drugs, but we are all dead here. My stomach protests. Life beyond seems so far, like faint dots on the moon, fleeting and graying, then gone. I think of Wilfred, and Violet. I think of her.

“Hey. What’s your name?”

A serpentlike head pokes its way into view, dark hair mixed with oversized glasses, brown stubble spread across a powdery face. The voice is deep and almost breathless, the voice of a much larger man.

“Emmett Conn.”

“I’m John Paul.” He slithers into the room. He is young, maybe thirty, the first flecks of gray at the base of his temples. His hair is short but swept in different directions, his face thin, blue veins stretched in hollowed eye sockets. His arms have bright scars crosshatched at the wrists. He holds out a pale, slender hand, and I shake it. He keeps his head turned away.

“Welcome. What are you in for?” He has a rushed way of speaking, such that his words run together to form strange constructions: “I’mJohnPaul”; “youinfor.”

I run my hand through my hair. “I had a brain tumor,” I say slowly. “It has caused these . . . visions.” I pause. “My daughter had me committed.”

He glances at me briefly before turning away. “Acute schizophrenia, for me,” he says in his rapid form. It takes me several seconds to understand him. His head bobs and shifts like a bird’s. “Did your daughter want you out of the way?”

“I . . . do not know.” Did she?

He shrugs, as if it is of no interest. “My mother commits me when she’s tired of me—there’s not much you can do about it. Are you coming to dinner?”

“Perhaps. I am hungry.” I lift up from the bed. “How is the food?”

“Okay, I guess. The beef stroganoff on Mondays is deadly. The fried chicken and hamburgers are edible, if you like that sort of thing. The only thing that’s really good are the desserts. They have excellent pecan pie.” He swings into step beside me, his bony arms extending and collapsing, his scars lengthening with movement.

I recall Ted’s formula for preventing bad dreams. “Do they have dill pickles?” I ask.

His face folds. “Dill pickles. No, I don’t think so. There’s a set meal, depending on the diet you’re on.” His back hunches over. “Have you met the other patients? It’s quite a crew—we take clients from a twenty-four-county region. Some have been here for years. Others are back for return visits. Most stay only a week or two.” His head rotates swiftly toward me. “What do you do?”

“I . . . I was a builder.” A plumber, then a builder.

“A builder. Oh, okay, that’s good. A builder. I don’t think we have one of those. We have a lawyer, a stockbroker, a whole flock of teachers, several maintenance men, a banker, a newspaper reporter, but no, no builders.”

I cough. “And you? What . . . do you do?”

“I’m a student. A graduate student. I’m working on my doctorate, in instructional design.”

We walk to the dayroom, the jumble of chairs and couch. Someone has turned on the TV at low volume. Baseball images make shadows on the screen. Puff, Leo, and several others stand in a semicircle, staring, not commenting. Elmo totters over to join them, winds up and throws a pitch, but stops in his follow-through to peer closely at the screen. He looks around at the others.

“Dale Murphy’s getting damned fat.”

I stare at the TV. The group queues for dinner and I fall in line, following the others to the dining room. The food is surprisingly good: roast beef and potatoes, spinach salad, green beans and cornbread. John Paul is right, the pecan pie is outstanding. He stays at my side, John Paul does, acting as my interpreter despite my difficulty in understanding him, explaining, introducing. There are probably forty people in all, including a dozen or so staff. Maybe one-third are women, most appear over fifty. I meet the HSTs (health service technicians), Ralph, John, Stephen, Melissa. I know Andre. I meet Carla, a pleasant-looking lady with wide-set eyes; Esteban, a young, dark-skinned man with a sunken forehead; Max, an old man with a cough and a yellow-stained beard; a pair of twins; a man with one eye. There are others John Paul motors past in his machine-gun manner, names I cannot catch, faces he does not mention. One man, long-haired, with bushy eyebrows, snarls as we pass. They form an odd group, but no odder than forty people found in a bus station, a Chinese restaurant, or for that matter a church. My sluggishness lessens. I chew my cornbread and drink my fruit punch. I think of times past.

John Paul accompanies me back to our room after dinner. His patter continues.

“You know, they normally lock up the rooms during the day, except for nap time after lunch. They don’t want anyone hiding in there. If you’re suicidal, they put you in the secure area—you passed it on the way in. Trust me, it’s much better here. Medications are given at nine, one, six, and nine. Do they have you on psychotropics? Everybody’s on psychotropics. Maybe you’re on something else for your tumor, maybe Dilantin?”

The sound of splashing water bleeds through his questioning—perhaps from the bathroom across the way or a sink or washroom somewhere—the sound growing, overwhelming in its approach, until it washes through my skull like a tidal wave’s lunge. Blood rushes and circles, recedes. A light flashes on as if beamed underwater. I gasp, a liquid formed in my throat, my eyes shut against it. I need to cough or take in air but cannot seem to do either.

I know where I am before I open my eyes, from the dread lurking in the pit of my stomach, the sound of the water still coursing in my ears. The sun beats on my forehead, warm but not comforting, the first drops of moisture amassed at my temples. The air is thick with humidity, with the pungent stench of decay. Shrieks resound over the rush of the water, gasps and wails, protests, directives, commands. I open my eyes to a blade of light. I see it all, clearly. And I remember.

The River Euphrates is thinner at this point, brown and unappealingly muddy, with an island in its middle providing respite for fording. Other caravans have come before us, their debris evident on the riverbank and beyond, abandoned carts melded with blankets, with tents and rope, clothing, cookware, bedding. And bodies. Huge masses of vultures pick at remains so bloated as to be unrecognizable. Strands of hair stream from pecked-out faces, scattered among severed limbs, open skulls, disembodied hands and feet. At least twice during our passing the vultures’ digging punctures a swollen corpse, releasing internal gases in loud pops that send the birds skittering. The stench grows as we reach the water, as the bodies multiply, as the air becomes thick with the brazen vultures and their huge, hand-shaped wings. Farther downstream, black clumps of yet more bodies lie exposed, death birds gathered around. There must be hundreds, thousands. Maybe more.

We force the deportees into the water. Those protesting receive a swift bayonet. Others throw themselves at the water in deliberate efforts to drown. The current is not swift here, but swift enough—it carries a number of our party away, including one pregnant woman, her belly raised like a turtle. Women carry children upon their shoulders, across their backs, in uplifted arms. Those still with carts force them through, oxen bellowing, wheels churning and sticking. The deportees on the opposite side shake like rats seeking shelter, gathering what is left of their scattered belongings. I remain to the end on the eastern shore, pushing the stragglers. All must move on.

It is there that I feel the woman’s pull at my leg, hear her anguished voice, see the plea in her big, gloomy eyes. She holds an infant in one arm, wordlessly offering it up to me—a request, evidently, to ferry the child across the water. I refuse. She says something, something I do not understand, then places the infant on the ground, rips off her clothing, and stands naked before me, her long hair flung back across her shoulders, her breasts full with milk. Again, she says something. I dismount. She prostrates herself in the dust, her white legs parting, revealing. I kneel and enter, heedless of the shouts from afar, the vultures circling and flapping, the splash of the dirty water, the gendarmes picking through trash and bodies, but at the same time aware of it all, as if I or everything else has been stilled. The world rotates around me, spinning so that I see from above the last of our deportees crossing, the bloated bodies, our group on the opposite side, the next wave behind us. And then comes the horseman, his face obscured, approaching, pawing the ground nearby, directing his steed’s hoof squarely onto the infant’s skull, crushing it in a tiny burst of liquid, a smallish squish of sound. I feel myself scream—feel the burn in my throat, the compression of my lungs—but I do not hear it, for the sound has become lost, swept up in an explosion of wind and feather, hoofbeat and wave, all overridden by the writhing, abject agony of the woman beneath me. I gulp for air, my hands at my eyes. My voice becomes audible, my scream deep and raw. And then John Paul’s pocked face and thick glasses are before me, his hands on my shoulders, his rapid voice cracking.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!”

I fight to control my hands, to stop the twisting and burning. My voice continues, muted for now. I gasp for air. My muscles stretch and contract.

“Wow. That was something. Was that a grand mal? Your eyes rolled back in your head, your body was shaking, and you were yelling like you’d seen a monster. You almost levitated off the ground.”

The sound of lapping water becomes the thud of running footsteps, the wordless murmur of voices. A male attendant I have not seen before, a redheaded man with a small goatee, enters the room and rushes to me. A metallic sound comes from an intercom: “Code blue. Code blue.” Another man, a doctor, arrives seconds later.

“What happened?”

“I think he had a seizure.” John Paul’s voice is full of importance.

The doctor edges him out of the way. “How do you feel?” he asks me.

I struggle to speak. My muscles are clenched, as taut now as bowstrings, my lips thick and sealed. A dampness moistens my crotch but I cannot bend to examine it. At least part of my mind remains suspended, reeling from horror and shame, from atrocities perpetrated, abominations allowed. How could I have done this? I know she must have been there, wading through mud and current, watching as friends took their lives and were swept away, dodging swollen corpses, listening to the shriek of the overstuffed vultures. Did she notice me then, as the woman offered her infant, as I dismounted to engage in my pleasure? Did she look on in shock and in hatred, watching as the hoof rose and fell, as life was extinguished, as flesh became sand, as unknowing man ripped out his own heart? Did she cry out to her God, damning his indifference, pleading for justification, asking why why why why WHY?!

My voice finally sounds, a gurgle of gibberish like a car trying to start. A hand grasps my wrist. Others press on my shoulders.

“Just lie down now, okay?”

John Paul’s voice leaps from somewhere, the words unintelligible.

“John Paul, why don’t you go back to the dayroom? We’re going to get Mr. Conn stabilized, maybe take him down to the exam room. I think he’s okay.”

John Paul’s feet tap, slide, tap again. The hands remain on my wrists and shoulders, the voices still in my ears. My muscles begin to slacken, sore now from the strain. I taste blood in my mouth.