David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘…’

‘It’s actually a disease of the muscle of the heart. Cardiomyopathy.’

‘I thought that the heart was itself a muscle,’ Shane Drinion says.

‘It means as opposed to the vasculature of the heart. Trust me, I’m kind of an expert on this. What they call heart disease is the major vessels. As in a heart attack. Cardiomyopathy is the muscle of the heart, the stuff of it, the thing that squeezes and relaxes. Especially when it’s of unknown cause. Which it is. They aren’t sure what caused it. The theory was that he’d had a terrible flu or some virus when he was in college that seemed to get better but nobody knew it had settled in his myocardium somehow, the muscle tissue of his heart, and gradually infected it and compromised it.’

‘I think I understand.’

‘You’re thinking how sad, maybe, to fall in love and get married and then have your husband get a fatal disease — because it is, it’s fatal. Like the rich kid in that movie, what’s it called, except there it’s the wife, who’s kind of a lump if you want my opinion, but the rich kid gets disinherited and everything and marries her and then she gets fatally ill. It’s a tear-jerker.’ Rand’s eyes, too, change slightly when she’s scanning some kind of memory. ‘It’s a little like congestive heart failure. Actually, in many cases of cardiomyopathy the actual cause of death when the person finally dies is listed as congestive heart failure.’

Shane Drinion has his hand around his glass with a little beer but does not raise the glass. ‘Is this because the muscle of the heart becomes compromised and can’t squeeze well enough to circulate the blood?’

‘Yes, and he had it before we got married, he had it even before I met him, and I met him when I was super young, I wasn’t even eighteen yet. And he was thirty-two, and a ward attendant in Zeller.’ She is extracting a cigarette. ‘Do you happen to know what Zeller is?’

‘I think you mean the mental health center building near the Exposition Gardens on Northmoor.’ Drinion’s bottom is hovering very slightly — perhaps one or two millimeters at most — above the seat of his wooden chair.

‘It’s actually on University, the main entrance is.’

‘…’

‘It’s a psych hospital. Do you know what a psych hospital is?’

‘In a general sense, yes.’

‘Are you just being polite?’

‘No.’

‘The bin. The mental Marriott. A nut ward. Do you want to know why I was there?’

‘Were you visiting someone important to you?’

‘Negative. I was a patient there for three and a half weeks. Do you want to know how come?’

‘I can’t tell whether you’re really asking me, or whether this question is simply an overture to telling me.’

Meredith Rand makes her mouth into a sardonic sideways shape and clicks her tongue a couple times. ‘All right. That’s kind of annoying, but I can’t say you don’t have a point. I was a cutter. Do you know what a cutter is?’

There is no difference — Drinion’s face remains composed and neutral without seeming in any way to be trying to stay neutral. Meredith Rand has a very good subliminal antenna for this sort of thing — she’s allergic to performance. ‘My assumption is that it’s someone who cuts.’

‘Was that like a witticism?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t know why I did it. I’m still not sure, except he taught me that trying to analyze it or understand all the whys was bullshit — the only important thing was knocking it off, because if I didn’t it would land me right back in the psych ward, that the idea I could hide it with bandages or sleeves and keep it a totally private thing that didn’t affect anybody else was arrogant bullshit. And he’s right. No matter where you do it or how carefully you do it, there’s always a time when somebody sees something and says something, or when somebody is funking around in the hall and pretending to beg you to cut algebra and go to the park and get stoned and climb on the statue of Lincoln and grabs your arm too hard and some of the cuts open up and you bleed through your long sleeves, even if you’ve got two shirts on, and somebody sends for the nurse even if you tell them to fuck off and it was an accident and you’ll just go home and get it seen to at home. There always comes a day when somebody sees something in your face that tells them you’re lying and then the next thing you know there you are, in a lit room with your arms and legs uncovered, trying to explain yourself to somebody with zero sense of humor, actually a little bit like talking to you right now.’ With a quick tight smile.

Drinion nods slowly.

‘That was kind of nasty. I need to apologize for that.’

‘I don’t have a very good sense of humor, it’s true.’

‘This is different. It’s like they do this initial intake interview, with a legal form on a white clipboard they ask you questions from as required by law, and if they ask you if you ever hear voices and you say sure, I hear yours right now asking me a question, they don’t think it’s funny or even acknowledge you’re even trying to be funny but just sit there looking at you. Like they’re a computer and you can’t proceed until you give the properly formatted answer.’

‘The question itself seems ambiguous. For instance, what voices are they referring to?’

‘So they have, like, three different kinds of wards at Zeller, and two of them are locked, and the one they put me on as a mental patient is the one that he also worked on, on the third floor, with mostly rich girls from the Heights who wouldn’t eat or took a bottle of Tylenol when their boyfriend dumped them, et cetera, or stuck their finger down their throat every time they ate something. There were a lot of barfers there.’

Drinion keeps looking at her. Now no part of his bottom or back is touching the chair, although the separation is so slight that no one else could see this unless somehow a very bright light were shined from the side, illuminating the slight gap between Drinion and the chair.

‘You might be asking how I got in there, since we definitely were not rich or from the Heights.’

‘…’

‘The answer is good insurance through my dad’s union. He ran the baling wire line at American Twine and Wire from 1956 until it closed down. The only days of work he ever missed were some of the days I was in Zeller.’ Rand makes a very brief distended horror-face whose exact meaning is unclear and lights the cigarette she has been holding and looking at. ‘To give you an idea.’

Drinion finishes the last bit of the Michelob and wipes his mouth a little on the napkin the glass has rested on. He then replaces the napkin and the glass. His beer’s been at room temperature for much too long to produce any new condensation.

‘And it’s true that he already looked sick when I met him. Not gross or anything, it’s not like he oozed or went around coughing or anything, but pale, even for winter. He looked delicate, like somebody old. He was totally skinny, too, although compared to the anorexic girls it was hard to see right off how skinny he was — it was more like he was so pale and got tired easily; he couldn’t move very fast. With the terrible dark circles under his eyes. Some of the time he looked tired or sleepy, although it was also late at night, because he was the second-shift ward attendant on the ward, from five to the middle of the night when the night guy came on, who we never even really saw except for breakfast or if somebody had a crisis in the middle of the night.’

‘He wasn’t a doctor, then,’ Drinion says.

‘The doctors were a joke. At Zeller. The psychiatrists. They came in in the afternoon for like an hour, in suits — they always wore nice suits; they were professionals — and talked more to the RNs and the parents when they came in, mostly. And then they’d finally come in and you’d have a weird, stiff conversation, like they were your dad or something. And they had zero sense of humor, and looked at their watch the whole time. Even the ones who you could halfway see might be human beings were more interested in your case, not in you. Like in what your case might mean, how it was like or different than other cases in the textbooks. Don’t get me started on the medical establishment at psych wards. They were bizarre to deal with; it could really mess with your head. If you said you hated it there and it wasn’t helping and you wanted to leave, they saw it as a symptom of your case, not as you wanting to leave. It was like you weren’t a human being, you were a piece of machinery they could take apart and figure out how it worked.’ She snaps and unsnaps her cigarette case. ‘It was really scary, actually, because they could sign papers to keep you in there or move you to a worse ward, the other locked ward was a lot worse and people talked about it, you don’t want to hear about it. Or they could decide to give you meds that turned some of the girls into zombies; it’s like one day they were there and the next there was nobody home. Like zomboids in really nice bathrobes from home. It was just very creepy.’