David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘…’

‘They couldn’t do horror-movie stuff, though, they couldn’t give you electroshock treatments like in that one movie, because everybody’s parents were right there practically every day and knew what was going on. If you were on that ward you weren’t committed to Zeller, you were admitted, and after seven days they actually had to let you go if your parents said so. Which some of them did, of the zombie girls. But they could legally sign forms that changed you to committed. The doctors in the suits could, so they were the scariest ones.’

‘…’

‘Plus the food was beyond gross.’

‘You had been giving yourself small, hidden cuts as some sort of psychological compensation,’ Shane Drinion says.

Meredith Rand gives him a level look. She does notice that he seems to be sitting up slightly straighter or something, because the very lowest part of the display of different kinds of hats is obscured, and she knows she isn’t slumped down. ‘It felt good. It was creepy, and I knew it couldn’t be good if I was so secret and creepy about it, but it felt good. I don’t know that else to say.’ Every time she taps ash, it’s three taps of the same speed and angle with a red-nailed finger. ‘But I had fantasies about cutting on my neck, my face, which was creepy, and I’d been moving further up my arms all year without being able to help it, which scared me in hindsight. It was good I was in there; it was crazy — so maybe they were right after all.’

Drinion simply watches her. There is no way to tell whether it is building up to really rain or if the mass will miss them. The light outside is the approximate color of a spent flashbulb. It’s too loud in here to know if there is thunder. Sometimes the air-conditioning seems to get colder or more insistent when it is about to storm, but that is not what it feels like is happening now.

Meredith Rand says: ‘You have to say little things occasionally, like it’s a real conversation, to show you’re at least interested. Otherwise the person just feels like they’re yammering and the other person could be thinking about God only knows what.’

‘But putting cuts on your face would have externalized the situation too much,’ Drinion says.

‘There you go. Plus I didn’t want to cut my face. As he ended up showing me, my surface face was all I really thought I had. My face and my body, that I was supposedly a fox. I was one of the foxes at Central Catholic. That’s a high school here. They called us that — the foxes. Most of them were cheerleaders, too.’

Drinion says: ‘So you were raised in the Catholic faith.’

Rand shakes her head as she taps the cigarette. ‘That’s not relevant. That’s not the kind of little occasional response I meant.’

‘…’

‘The connection is the stuff about prettiness and loneliness you were talking about. Or we were, which is hard to understand, probably, given how supposedly being considered as good-looking in high school is the female ticket to popularity and being accepted and all the things that are supposed to be the opposite of loneliness.’ She sometimes uses direct questions as an excuse to meet his gaze directly: ‘Were you lonely in high school?’

‘Not really.’

‘Right. Oh, right. Plus beauty is a form of power. People pay attention to you. It can be very seductive.’

‘Yes.’

Only in close retrospect does Meredith Rand consider the strange intensity of talking to the utility examiner. Ordinarily very conscious of her surroundings and what other people around her were doing, Rand later realized that large blocks of the tête-à-tête at Meibeyer’s seemed removed from any kind of environment at all. That within these blocks of intense engagement she had been unconscious of the jukebox’s intrusive music or the thud of its excessive bass in her breastbone, the insistent burbles and dings of the pinball machines and video raceway game, the televised baseball above the bar, the normally distracting roar of surrounding conversations in which different audible snatches sometimes rose out and commanded attention and then receded into the ambient distracting noise of mixed-together voices all raised to overcome the room’s own noise. The only way she is able to explain it to Beth Rath is that it was as if a sort of insulated container had formed around their table and sometimes hardly anything else had penetrated through it. Even though it wasn’t like she just sat there looking right at the utility man all the time; it wasn’t like a hypnotic thing. She also hadn’t been aware of how much time had passed or was passing, which for Meredith Rand was a very unusual thing. *The best theory Meredith Rand could come up with was that it was that ‘Mr. X’ paid such close, intense attention to what she was saying — an intensity that had nothing to do with flirting or anything romantic; this was a whole different type of intensity — although it was also true to say that Meredith Rand had experienced absolutely zero romantic or sexual attraction to Shane Drinion at that table in Meibeyer’s. It was something else entirely.

‘It was him who told me this. Who laid it out that way. At night, after dinner, after all the groups and OT were over and the doctors in their nice suits went home and there was just one nurse on the meds desk and him. He had the white staff coat with a sweater and these plastic sneakers and a big ring of keys. You could hear him down the hall without looking, just from the ring of keys. We used to tell him it looked like the ring of keys weighed more than he did. Some of the girls gave him a lot of grief, because it wasn’t like he could really do anything to them.’

‘…’

‘There wasn’t anything to do after visits at night except watch TV in the community room, or play Ping-Pong on a table that had a really low net so even the girls on heavy meds could feel like they could play, too, and all he had to do was do med checks and give people passes for the phone, and at the end of his shift he had to fill out evals on everybody, which was totally routine unless there was some kind of psych crisis.’

‘So you observed him closely, it seems,’ Shane Drinion says.

‘It wasn’t like he was much to look at if you were going to call somebody good-looking or not. Some of the girls called him the corpse. They had to have their mean little names for everybody. Or they called him the grim reaper. It was all just physical. But it was like no part of him touched his clothes on the inside; they just hung on him. He moved like he was about sixty. But he was funny, and he really talked to you. If anybody wanted to talk about something, meaning really talk, he’d go in the conference room off the kitchen with them and talk.’ Meredith Rand has a set of routines for putting the cigarette out, all of which, whether fast and stabbing or slow and more grinding from the side, are quite thorough. ‘He didn’t make anybody do it. It wasn’t like he was tugging on your sleeve to go do tête-à-tête or let him practice on you. Most people just vegged out in front of the TV, or the ones in for drugs had to go to their drug meeting in the van. He had to put his feet up on the table, usually, when you had a one-on-one with him. The table in the conference room that the doctors spread out their files to talk to the parents at. He’d lean way back and put his sneakers up on the table, which he said it was because he had a bad back, but really it was because of the cardiomyopathy, which he’d gotten mysteriously in college and was why he didn’t finish college, which was why he was working this shitty nut ward attendant job, even though he was about seven thousand times smarter and more perceptive about what was really going on with people than the doctors and so-called counselors were. They saw everybody through this professional lens that was about half an inch across — whatever didn’t fit in the lens they either didn’t see or twisted it or squished it in so it fit. And having his feet in those chintzy Kmart shoes up on the table like that made him seem more like at least a person, like somebody you were really talking to instead of somebody trying to just diagnose you or trace your etiology so they’d have something to say that fit their little lens. They were a total joke, those shoes.’