Woman On The Edge Of Time (37 page)

“This isn’t no jive loony bin,” Captain Cream said. “This is a Hilton!” Captain Cream was a light-skinned numbers runner born in Trinidad, who believed he was a comic book hero. Even the doctors called him Captain. He was lean and fastidious and spoke with a lilt and grace that kept her from noticing much of the time that he was walleyed.

Sybil sniffed. “You can be sure it’s for their convenience and not ours! They’re important gentlemen! Even the laboratory mice must have nice clean cages.” Sybil had recovered some energy.

Captain Cream, Sybil, and Tina Ortiz stood gathered in the doorway with Connie to see what the new men’s attendant, Tony, was doing to Skip, bending over him with scissors. Skip’s fine brown ringlets were falling on white towels. “Alas, Delilah, you do me wrong!” Skip sang to Tony. Snip, snip. The hair tumbled. It looked as if he was being drafted. His big, curiously vulnerable-looking skull showed gray. This too they would do to her in time, this too.

“And will I get a wig, Tony?”

“Only the women, punk,” Tony grunted. “Hold still, or I’ll cut your ear off.”

“Like Van Gogh. He was mad too. But he did it to himself. Why don’t you let me have a scissors so I can do it?” Skip made a half-playful, half-serious grab.

Tony clouted him in the chest, and Skip fell back coughing. “Stop trying to hold the doctors up.”

Snip, snip, past his left ear, coming around. Only one long cluster of curls clung to his cheek. Tony sliced through that and then swept up. When he returned with a razor, Skip stopped joking. He had been given no breakfast. Soon he would be taken away to a hospital near Columbia, where Redding and Morgan would drill a hole in his skull and insert their electrodes. Skip would return to them violated.

She stood with Tina and Alvin as he was carted out. His eyes were open but without expression. After the outer door had shut on him, the patients hung around, as if by staring at the door they might read something of what was happening.

“You like that kid, uh?” Tina asked her. Her new roommate was about her own age, with a long record of drug busts and commitments and disorderly conducts.

“He loaned me money to call mi sobrina, and he knew I couldn’t even pay him back.”

“He’s got it to loan. Easy to be nice if you can afford it, hey? But I guess he’s in plenty trouble now, like the rest of us.” Tina was Puerto Rican, born in the Bronx, skinny with only a little extra meat on her hips. She talked fast but her sentences often trailed away as if she did not expect to be listened to. She was scrappy and would not settle down to being a good patient. She never stopped hating the hospital. “Just one more way to get busted,” she said, glaring at their room. She was the first one on any newspaper that came into the ward, after the staff, although she would read only the first section, the news, muttering to herself, sneering as if she could not be fooled, “Crooks, big crooks!”

They went off together to visit Alice, who lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, as she did most of the time now. She looked ten years older, she looked her full age and then some, all the sass and vinegar bled from her long body.

“Hey, Alice, you know what them bums are trying to pull now?” Tina asked, trying to rouse her.

But Alice only shook her head. The black pageboy wig was stuck on her head crooked, and she did not straighten it. When it fell off, she did not replace it. When the attendant found it on the floor, she scolded Alice, telling her how ungrateful she was. Alice lay and blinked.

The only time Connie saw her look like her old self was when one of the doctors came to use her for a demonstration to an interested visitor. Then her eyes shone blood red and she sang long chains of bitter curses until the doctor pushed the button that shut her up. Now that Dr. Morgan had lost his fear of her, there was something ugly in his demonstrations. He particularly liked to stimulate the point that produced in Alice a sensual rush, until once she kissed his hand and told him he was good to her.

“I got to fool those wiseasses,” she told them, “or they going to stick more needles in. I just stringing them along.” But she did not sound as if she believed that. When she tried to fight
back, the monitor turned off her rage and left her confused. Alice seemed closer to being mad than she ever had. She made up stories to account for what she did, because she literally did not know what she would do next. Yet she felt as if she were deciding. “You wait and see,” she said, winking blearily, “who come out on top in the end.”

“You ran away because you want to return to society,” Acker was saying to her, his square beard wagging on his chin. “But what you don’t understand is that’s exactly what we want to help you do!”

Ever since she had run away, she had been of particular interest to Acker. She had the feeling he was an uneasy fifth wheel to the project, the psychologist added for some kind of show. He made up reasons for what the others did in terms not exclusively medical. She did not understand more, but she saw his uneasiness, his slippery footing with the doctors. Even the junior partner, Morgan, tried to patronize him. Now Acker took an interest in her. He was proud he had got her to sign the permission forms, but he did not let up his pressure.

“What you don’t see, Connie, is that if it wasn’t for us, you’d face spending the rest of your life where we found you. Now, you don’t want that. Do you? He waited for an answer. He sat with his hands flexed on his spread knees.

As he seemed prepared to wait all day, she mumbled at last, “No, I don’t want to spend my life here. Do you?”

“I certainly wouldn’t. So, Connie, perhaps you can see we’re working for your benefit. After all, why should society care? You’ve proved you can’t live with others. They locked you away where you can’t harm others or yourself. Isn’t that so?”

“But I can be harmed here. Isn’t that so?” She tossed her head.

“You’re together enough to notice what happens to old patients, how they become acclimated to life in the hospital. After a while they can no longer function outside. It’s a secure life.”

“Maybe for you.”

“You know where your next meal is coming from. You have a bed, a roof over your head. All right, you say you don’t want that security. You want to go back to society.”

“I want to go back to my life!”

“This isn’t your life? This admission isn’t the first for you. I think this is likely to be your life for some years to come if we don’t help you. Instead of just warehousing you, we’re prepared to help you. This is the first time in your life you’ve ever had quality medical attention. The affluent hire psychiatrists, but you’ve never had real treatment. We want you to function again, but without risk of committing those out-of-control acts. Without danger of your attacking some child again, or some other person near and dear to you.”

Connie ground her teeth. “Any person not in a wheelchair can hurt somebody. Haven’t you ever hit anybody? Ever?”

“Connie, you’re resisting. You’re the patient. You know why you’re here. The more you resist, the more you punish yourself. Because when you fight us, we can’t help you.”

The orderlies brought Skip back from his two days off the ward. Acker scurried off to see the results, leaving her in peace for a while.

“Think of the stories of heroic prisoners who tried again and again to escape,” Luciente said, clapping her on the back heartily. “One defeat is nothing. You must keep on the lookout for other holes in their security.”

“If only I could get out for a weekend furlough! I know I could get away from Dolly easy. Even Luis would have to sleep sometimes.”

“Why not? But try! You’re important to us, we want you to survive and break out. One attempt, one failure—you have to take that for granted. What works the first time? Poof! If I’m stiffing on a task, I may fail twenty, thirty times to fix the proper gene balance. Each time I neglect some crucial factor. But finally it blossoms! So too you must work at escape. Now you’re stronger for the exercise and your feet will heal tougher.”

“But they’ve taken my money away. They watch me all the time. Every time I go near the door, they watch me.”

“They have a lot to do besides watch you. You have only to watch them. Keep up your courage.”

“Luciente, mercy! Easy. I’m flat on my back. You don’t understand. Never in your life have you been helpless—under
somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!”

Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.”

When they came to play with Skip, the doctors were not satisfied. The violence-triggering electrodes did not cause him to try to attack them, as Alice had. Instead he turned from them and drove his fist into the wall. He pounded his head on the wall and before the attendants could force him down, blood oozed from the bandage.

“That won’t do!” Dr. Argent frowned, passing his hand lightly over his silvery locks. “Don’t bring any visiting firemen in to inspect this one. Hmmmm.” Ever the administrator, whenever anything went wrong he withdrew from the other two, his shoulders, his back seeming to disdain them.

“Suicide attempts are what we started with. We could be playing into the hands of a masochist, eh?” Dr. Redding glanced sideways at Dr. Argent, trying to enlist him in his little joke. “Uh, we’ll discuss the case at staff today. Other procedures may be indicated.”

Dr. Argent linked his hands behind his back and rocked on the balls of his feet. “Not a bad idea. Won’t do to leave him around in this condition. The feds will be by next week for a tour. If we want our grant renewed, we’d better be tidy and shipshape.”

Dr. Morgan perked up. “Surgical procedures?”

Skip asked loudly, “You going to take these out?”

“If our tests prove that’s best for your condition, sonny, maybe so,” Dr. Redding said. “We’ll do what’s best.”

“Man, you must think I’m really crazy, to believe that.”

As they turned to leave, Connie fled from her post at the door to sit in the day room. As the doctors and Acker passed, they were arguing amiably among themselves.

“Lots of talent in your field are working to retrain sexual inversion with electroshock keyed to slides and films,” Redding was saying to Acker. “But the recidivism rate isn’t
promising. If we could cure inversion surgically, we’d open up a whole new area.”

“Let’s not get too far off the track, gentlemen,” Dr. Argent said. “We can run some tests, but our major concern is violence. Our funding is specific. Within those perimeters, of course, we have some latitude to fool around.”

“Six to eight thousand for an operation as against hundreds of thousands to keep an invert under treatment or restraint for decades. You can’t tell me that’s not cost-effective.” Dr. Redding risked touching Dr. Argent’s shoulder companionably. “Dear to the heart of taxpayers and public officials alike. If the crime-in-the-streets money dries up, it’s something to keep in mind.”

Dr. Argent looked at the hand. “I want results on this one,
Doctor”
That formal address cut like a blade. “I’m an old man. It’s now or never. For your sake, it had better be now.”

Skip was taken to the other hospital again. When he was brought back, they had removed the electrodes but they had done something else. They had coagulated part of his limbic brain, whatever that was. Amygdalotomy was the word they used. The next day she went to see him. He looked terrible, his face sagging. His eyes were dull and bloodshot.

“Why do you want to know how I am? What’s it to you?”

“Don’t you remember me, Skip? I’m Connie. Your friend. You gave me money to call my niece.”

“Some give and some take. Some take everything.”

“Does it hurt? Your head?”

“They say if you lose a leg, if they cut it off—what they call a resection, they have names for everything—the leg goes on hurting.”

“At least they don’t play games with you, like they do with Alice.”

“Different games.”

“What are you scared they’ll do now?”

“Why should I be scared? Who says I’m scared? You’ll see.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way, Skip.” She touched his hand.

He jerked back as if she had burned it. “Don’t try to get
around me. Now I know better. Give and take, and then it’s all taken.”

Jackrabbit was showing her a bunch of … what? Dream images? Sculptures in light? Shapes that reshaped themselves into other shapes? She felt nervous looking at them with the person who made them, the artist, right there making it happen. She was afraid she wouldn’t seem appreciative or wouldn’t say the right things or look the right way, and he’d think she was stupid. But there at her elbow was Luciente, eating white grapes from a woven basket and grunting rough enjoyment as if it were just a TV program. If she tried to think about what the images were supposed to mean, she felt miserable. But if she looked with her eyes open and let them happen to her, she could not help getting drawn in.

The holi he was showing now had no words, no story, unlike the one he’d done with Bolivar. It was all images having something to do with the ocean and with sex and with power—not power over people, but natural power, energy. Boundaries dissolving. The sea rising, smashing into the land. Under a clear cold blue sky a sea lashed itself into foam and sprang at the shore. Waves with teeth that glinted and hair that tangled and tossed roiled over itself. Wave breaking over wave showed dark bellies arching before they crashed down in froth and slid on the sand spent and hissed dribbling back.

Jackrabbit’s workshop stood near the mill, near enough to hear the wheel turning. There the river ground grains and corn and operated a series of pumps. Four times a day a tidal clock swung the wheel mechanism about so that it was always fixed correctly in the flow of waters. When Jackrabbit did not opaque the window and use only the sliding skylight, ripples danced on his high ceiling. Always, he told her, he could hear the mill wheel, the waves slapping the shore just underneath. The workshop was built out some feet over the river, and the side facing the water had a narrow porch.