The Plague of Doves (25 page)

“Listen to this,” Mrs. L. laughed. “Don't worry, there's plenty. None of the patients are up yet.”

“Except Warren,” said the nurse who was going off duty. “Warren's always up.”

I walked out of the office into the hall, which opened onto a huge square room floored with pink and black linoleum squares. The walls were a strange lavender-gray, perhaps meant to be soothing.
The curtainless windows were rectangles of electric blue sky that turned to normal daylight as the patients rose and slowly, in their striped cotton robes, began wandering down another corridor that led into the big room from the left. Everyone looked the same at first, men and women, young and old. Mrs. L. handed out medications in small paper cups and said to me, pointing, “Go with Warren there, and make sure he takes it.”

So I went with Warren, the night owl, an elderly—no, really
old
—man with long arms and the rope-muscled and leathery body of a farmer who has worked so hard he will now live forever—or certainly past the reach of his mind. His tan was now permanent, burnt into the lower half of his face and hands. There was a V of leather at his neck from a lifetime of open shirt collars. His legs and stomach and chest and upper arms would be deadly pale. He was already dressed neatly—he always dressed and shaved himself. He was wearing clean brown pants and a frayed but ironed plaid shirt and he was starting to walk. He popped the pills down and didn't miss a step. He walked and walked. He was from Pluto and probably related to Marn Wolde, but she'd never mentioned him. I watched Warren a lot that first day because I couldn't believe he'd keep it up, but he didn't stop for more than a breath, filling up on food quickly at the designated times, then strolling up and down the corridors, crisscrossing the common room, in and out of every bedroom. To everyone he met, he nodded and said, “I'll slaughter them all.” The patients answered, “Shut up.” The staff didn't seem to hear.

 

The first day's schedule became routine. I woke early to record my dreams and sensations, then I dressed, putting a pen and small notebook in my pocket, plus a tiny book I'd sent away for—a miniature French dictionary made of blue plastic. I'd not given up. I noted everything, jotted quickly in a stall on bathroom breaks. At breakfast time I walked down through the steam tunnels to the dining room. My job as an escort was to see that no one hid in the tunnels or got lost. I ate with the patients, put my tray in line and waited to see what landed on it. Farina, cold toast, a pat of butter, a carton of milk, juice if I was early enough, and coffee. There was always coffee, endless, black acid
in sterilized and stained Melmac cups. I ate what they gave me, no matter what, ravenous and forgetful. I did the same at lunch. Mashed turnips. Macaroni and meat sauce. Extra bread, extra butter. I began to think of food all day. Food occupied my thoughts. The food began to take up too much of my diary. There was nothing new to say about it in English, so I began to describe the food in French. Soon, there was nothing new to say about it in either language.

 

I was assigned to an open ward. The patients could sign out if they wanted to walk the ice-blasted grounds. As long as they were not gone past curfew they could go anywhere. There was also a lot of sitting. It was supposed to be part of my job to listen to people, draw them out, provide a conversational backdrop of reality, tell them when they were having fantasies.

Warren talked of the war sometimes, but one of the nurses told me that he wasn't a veteran. “I was reviewing the troops. They marched by and turned their eyes upon me as they passed. I turned to General Eisenhower and I said, ‘Mentally, you're not a very good president.' His aide turned and looked at me. He was in civilian clothes…” And so on. His monologues always ended with “I'll slaughter them all.” Always the same. I wanted to edit his mental loop, instead I walked with him. He would try to give me money—dollar bills folded fine in a peculiar way. We took a few turns around the halls, always at the same time. I knew everyone's routine. I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.

Lucille, in the patients' coffee room where snacks were fixed, ate cornstarch from a box by the spoonful.

“We must put that away,” I told her. My voice was changing, growing singsong, indulgent and coaxing, like the other staff. I couldn't stand the sound of myself.

“I ate this when I was pregnant,” said Lucille. “Did you know I was artificially inseminated nine times?”

“Please, Lucille, give me the spoon.”

“I put all nine of the kids up for adoption, one after the other, but they didn't like it. Know what they did?”

“They didn't blow spiders under your door. You just imagined that. So don't say it, and give me the spoon.”

“They blew spiders under my door.”

“Hey!”

I snatched the spoon and box away. One quick grab and they were both mine.

“Nobody blew spiders under your door.”

“My children did,” Lucille said stubbornly. “My children hated me.”

Warren came in. He had been looking more disorganized, unshaved, his shirt buttoned wrong, his pants unzipped. His hair stuck to all sides in clumps. But for about five minutes, we held a perfectly normal conversation. Then he mentioned General Eisenhower and was off. I left, carrying the box of cornstarch.

Nonette

MRS. L. WAS
admitting a new patient, a young woman sitting with her back to me. I paused in the door of the office. There was something about the woman—I felt it immediately. A heat. She was wearing a black dress. Her eyes were angry blue and her lips very red. Her skin was pasty and shiny, as though she had a fever. Her blond hair, maybe dyed hair, was greasy and dull. She swiveled in the chair and smiled. She was about my age. Each of her teeth was separated from the next by a thin space, which gave her a predatory look. I handed the cornstarch box to Mrs. L., who put it absently on the windowsill.

“This is Nonette,” she said.

“Is that French?” I asked. That was it. She looked French.

The new patient didn't answer but looked at me steadily, her smile becoming a false leer.

Mrs. L. pursed her lips and filled in blank spots on the forms. “Nonette can sleep in twenty. Here's the linen key. Why don't you help her settle in?”

“Fetch my things along,” Nonette ordered.

“Evelina's not a bellhop,” said Mrs. L.

“That's all right.” I lugged one of Nonette's suitcases down the corridor. She smiled in an underhanded way and dropped the other suitcase once we were out of Mrs. L.'s sight. She waited while I carried it to her room, and watched as I took her sheets, a pillowcase, a heavy blanket, and a thin spread of cotton waffle-weave from the linen closet. Her room was one of the nicer ones, with only two roommates. It had built-in wooden furniture, not flimsy tin dressers, and the bed was solid. It even had all four casters on the legs.

“Fuck this dump,” said Nonette.

“It's not bad.”

“You're a bitch.”

“You're a bidet.”

In a Salvation Army store I had acquired a 1924 edition of a French dictionary called
Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustr
. I'd gotten to the B's. The page with the word
bidet
also had beautiful tiny engraved pictures of a biberon, a biche, a bicyclette, and a bidon.

Nonette's mouth twisted open in scorn. I left. The next day Nonette was extremely friendly to me. When I walked onto the ward, she immediately grabbed my hand as though we'd interrupted some wonderful conversation the day before, and she tugged me toward the glassed-in porch, which was freezing cold but where patients went to talk privately. I sat down beside Nonette in an aluminum lawn chair. I was wearing a sweater. She had on a thin cotton shirt, button-down style, a man's shirt with a necktie and men's chino pants. Her shoes were feminine kitten heels. Her hair was slicked back with water or Vitalis. She was an odd mixture of elements—she looked depressed but, it could not be denied, also chic. Today she wore black eyeliner and her face was prettier, more harmonious in the subdued light.

She didn't smoke. “It's a stinking habit,” she said when I lit up. I was smoking the ones with low tar and nicotine because I was smoking too much there, constantly, like everyone else, and my chest ached.

“I should quit.” I stubbed out my cigarette. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I wanted to talk to someone my age, not those jerks, shrinks, whatever. You're not bad-looking either. That helps. I wanted to talk
about what's bothering me. I came to get well, didn't I? So I want to talk about how really, truly, sick I am. I've talked about it, I know I have, but I haven't really
told
it. Or if I have, then nothing happened anyway. So that's why I want to talk about it.”

She paused for a moment and leaned toward me. When she did her whole face sharpened, her eyebrows flowed back into her temples, her mouth deepened.

“If I could just be born over,” she said, “I'd be born neutral. Woman or man, that's not what I mean. I wouldn't have a sex drive. I wouldn't care about it, need it or anything. It's just a problem, things that you do, which you hate yourself for afterward. Like take when I was nine years old, when I had it first. He was a relative, a cousin, something like that, living with us for a summer.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Not in stupid France,” she answered. “Anyway, he comes in without knocking and kneels by my bed. He uncovers me and he starts giving it to me with his mouth. And I'm like, at first I don't know what, ashamed of it. I could buy a hook for my door, though; I could tell on him. I don't, though, because I get so I want it. He strips himself naked. He teaches me how to jerk him off. And then he does it to me again.

“I'm a little girl, right, I don't even wash very well. Next time he brings along a washcloth and cleans me first. We have a ritual. Where's my mother and father? They sleep at the other end of the hall, down the stairs, with the fan going in their room. And my cousin is a fucking Boy Scout! Was he going for a fucking merit badge? Anyway, he goes home. Things happen. I think I already feel different, I am different. There is a smell on me, sex, that no one else in my schoolroom has. I look at the older boys. I know what's coming. I go searching for it.

“Look at you…” She laughed suddenly, drawing away. “You're, like, fascinated…”

She stared out the windows onto the snowy grounds. “I'm not French,” she said gently. “I'm messed up. I'm in a state hospital. I think I want a sex-change operation. I want to be a man so I won't have to put up with this shit.”

“I'm not giving you shit.”

Her mouth gaped mockingly. “Oh, look at you, trying to be tough. You're not tough. You're like, a little college girl, right? Who the hell cares. I'm from the university, too, I have a Ph.D. Pretty Hot Dick. I am a man, posing as a woman. You want proof?” Then her face closed in, bored. “I'm just kidding. Get the fuck away from me.”

“I'm sorry,” I said to her. “You're really beautiful.”

She wouldn't say anything, wouldn't look at me now.

“You're an Indian or something, aren't you,” she mumbled. “That's pretty cool.”

I went back into the common room and played gin rummy with Warren, who couldn't concentrate. I didn't think he was taking all of his medication, but if he had discovered a way to hide it he was pretty slick. We watched him every morning. He seemed to swallow. His mouth was empty.

 

A policeman was standing in the office the next morning, drinking a cup of coffee with Mrs. L. He'd just brought Warren back. After we finished playing cards, Warren had marched outside, through fields, down a narrow road that ran west, and twenty miles later was turned in as he crawled into a farmyard. Warren had fallen and bloodied the side of his head. He was sleeping now, sedated, and it was not until late afternoon that he rose, came out to sit in the lounge, one side of his head swollen dark and bandaged. I sat down next to him.

“I hear you had a bad day.” These words popped from my mouth. Yet I was curious. Perhaps it was cruel to be so curious. I asked about the voices he heard—if they were hard on him.

He straightened, shrugged a little. He was wearing a different, almost-new yellow shirt. He ran a hand up his face gently, exploring with his fingers. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out one of his little folded-up dollar bills. He tried to give it to me.

“No,” I said, curling his dry fingers around the money.

“Please.” His old eyes begged, moist and red. “I did it because they told me…,” but he choked on what he might say and his voice was a crow's croak. He rubbed his face and closed his eyes. And then I
saw, just around the edges of his face, in the balled musculature and the set of his eyes and jaw, that he was inside a waking dream. He raised his arms. He recoiled. He sat down in a chair and began taking apart some invisible thing in his lap. Then he went statue-still and lifted his head. Gazed off to the side in a fugue of stillness, listening.

The Kiss

NONETTE AND I
were sitting on the frigid sunporch, and this time she was also smoking.

“I'm only doing this disgusting thing so that I won't be disgusted by the fact that you're doing it,” she said.

I shrugged and dragged hard. She was belligerent in a low-key way that nobody took too seriously. And she had told that story about being raped by her cousin, the Eagle Scout, to every nurse, aide, doctor, and other patient available. It was just a conversation opener. Here, of course, it was not supposed to matter whether or not the story was true because the important thing was her need to tell it. I was now trained to think that. Nonette wore a man's black suit, a gravedigger's suit, a Charlie Chaplin bowler. All too big and comically masculine. She took my cigarette from my hands and crushed it out. Then she suddenly reached out and held my face in the cup of her palm. She leaned toward me and kissed me. There was nothing upsetting about it, at first, it was no different than the other times I'd kissed someone for the first time. There was the same tentative heat, the same curiosity. Only she was supposed to be crazy, I was supposed to be not crazy, and we were women. Or maybe Nonette was just troubled, I was less troubled, and she claimed she was a man. She pretended she was a man. Or she pretended that she was pretending.