Jacob Rubin - The Poser

When the pills worked, however, this body — I—could stand to perceive this place. After breakfast, a square-jawed man in white scrubs rounded us up and led us outside to the front lawn, clean and aromatic, where we were organized into rows and exhorted to follow energetic movements he made, doing jumping jacks when he did and squats and jogging in place. It was like he was a volunteer and the twenty of us men and women were slow-footed, self-conscious impersonators. We did push-ups and sit-ups and I did not weep or die, as I feared, and soon we were taken to a side entrance of the building, the men and women separated into different locker rooms.

In the men’s room we were each allotted a locker inside of which hung a towel and swimsuit. After changing, we padded across the blue tile to a pool, lined on one side by a bank of Jacuzzis, for what the blond man called Water Therapy. Water Therapy was this: Ten times we walked across the pool, which was long and clean and without a deep end, and then soaked in the Jacuzzis for a half hour. Afterward we were led back to our rooms to shower and change back into our blue scrubs. The same two men came to my door at lunchtime and escorted me again to the mess hall, where I ate untoasted bread, a grapefruit, and some peanuts.

But before dinner there were “Free Hours.”

The first day, during this unstructured period, I kept to my room, a taupe square with a cot, bathroom, and closet. In the closet stood a dresser. One drawer held a collection of white ankle socks, the other a pile of neatly folded blue scrubs, identical to the ones I currently wore. On the floor of the closet were three pairs of white sneakers. The medicine cabinet in the bathroom kept an unlabeled tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush. The wall behind the bed was no wall at all, I discovered, but a floor-to-ceiling window covered by a taupe-colored blind that, when raised, faced a sparkling lawn where figures in blue scrubs squatted on stone benches or stumbled, woozily, as though recently struck on the head.

The next day during these Free Hours I explored the house. There was a screening room, commissary, greenhouse, library, and bowling alley, even a squeaky-clean racquetball court. All of this exploration unnerved me, however, and I soon returned to my room, where I tossed in bed, humming to ward off the silence. I did nothing that next day (feeling like I might collapse again), but the following one, during Free Hours, I wandered the grounds. The house, I saw from the lawn, resembled a venerable prep school except for those odd architectural choices: the floor-to-ceiling windows, for example; the marble colonnades on the north and south sides of the building. The property was vast, encompassing two lawns, an apple orchard, small pond, and rose garden, all (I discovered after some cautious exploring through thickets and pine) enclosed by a high white fence.

That night I learned the story of the place. A man at a nearby table went on and on, and I eavesdropped zealously. As far as I could tell, he referred to everyone, himself included, as George. My back to him, I chewed on a napkin, blocking the escape of his faux-British accent (at night, as the pills wore off, the old urges surged back). Given the oscillations of his tone, I could not tell if he was addressing a lover, child, or himself. “Yes, he had a real millionaire’s name . Sandy Lewis, I think. An eccentric philanthropist — watch your sleeve now, come on. Well one day he had an epiphany, you see. Walls cause all the world’s misery. So what does Lewis do? He hires contractors, squadrons of them — with their wrecking balls and hard hats — orders the men to raze every wall on his property and replace them with windows, pillars, colonnades. Just about anything that isn’t a wall. Will you stop it, really?! Sit still now, c’mon. Well, then Mr. Lewis extends an invitation to all the homeless in the area to come in and live here. He gives each of them a studio and a bicycle. An artist colony for the mad. Except three years later our millionaire expires. Buried under the stand of birch trees on the north lawn. They say he had syphilis. Later they changed it all, of course. Now it’s for us nuts . Why, of course, yes, George, they do just spectacular business.” He switched to a stage whisper. “That George there, you don’t recognize him? He was an archbishop, for heaven’s sake. Yes, oh, and that George there was a baseball star, he was, why, of course.” I was petrified he would point to me next and say, “This George there was that actor-politician type, wasn’t he then?” but he didn’t, thank God. And I got up soon after that, all but running to my room.

It’s true, no one seemed to recognize me. The beard, I suppose, helped ensure my anonymity. And yet, even if it hadn’t, I might not have been disturbed. Among the patients reigned, I soon discovered, a kind of wary discretion, disrupted only rarely by a scene: a shiny-headed man raising his plate in the middle of the cafeteria and then smashing it into pieces on the smooth floor; a woman weeping naked in the middle of the lawn. These transgressors disappeared for a few days, a week sometimes, and then rejoined the buffet line with the same shuffling obedience, the same covetous reaching for breakfast buns.

When I first arrived at No More Walls (if that was its real name), I feared I would make such a scene myself. That I would begin to howl. That when the pills ebbed in their effect, I would steal George’s voice. Yet with each passing day, this fear diminished. The medication helped in this, yet so did the routine, whose sheer repetition was its own kind of medicine. I hoped to live like some ball left on the beach, pushed in and out by the ocean — yes, I wanted to be pushed around by the routine. But that day, instead of walking me down to the mess hall my escorts ascended the stairs. “To the doctor,” they explained.

• • •

The previous day the routine had also been severed. I was told I had a visitor and was led down a gravel path to a picnic table where Max waited.

Maybe I hadn’t looked at him in years, for he had aged tremendously, it seemed, magically, as if some painting of Max had for years been interposed between us, the living man tumbling out behind it only then. Why did people always age this way? Purple-black bags hung under his eyes. He had lost weight, and his face dripped with skin.

Of the days after the incident at the Jupiter Theater I remembered little. My name hollered down a prison hall, the acoustics like a drained pool’s. A country through my porthole. I said, “You’ll have to be the talker.” I was thankful for his thumbs knocking the table, as I was for the breeze raking through the trees and the birds squeaking above us, all saviors against silence. The bursting feeling had returned the previous night. It began with the dream of Jesse Unheim, and then the silence, the first furniture of every room.

Max attempted a grin. His eyes creased with the effort. “A reputable place, Giovanni. The head psychiatrist, a Doctor Orchfee — Orgall — Ori ganief— a genius. Experimental , they say, but top-notch. I’ve been in touch with the accountant. He’s managing your funds until you’re, um, in a greater position to — well, you understand.” Normally my manager made a religion of looking a person in the eye — it was the eager salesman inside him — but he didn’t then, squinting, instead, in the direction of the house. “It’s part of the agreement. Legally, I mean. That you spend a little time here. Bernard’s dropped all charges, but the judge insisted. Apparently, they’re having a new special election, given the circumstances. You are relieved of all duties as governor-elect, thank the Lord Jesus Holy Christ Almighty. I’ve alerted the authorities here that he’s not allowed to visit or call. Not that I think he will, boy. He knows it’s done. Whatever it was in the first place, it’s done.” He snickered. “He thinks life’s a game, boy. That people don’t have blood in their veins…” When Max spoke next, his voice sounded like embers in a fireplace. “I’ve been in touch with your mother’s neighbor in Sea View. He said he’d look after the house and make sure it stays as your mother had it until you’re well enough to go there yourself.” He said, “I don’t know if you want to hear it, but there’s word of Jesse Unheim, too.”