Hob Broun - Odditorium

“Don’t be an eggplant, Boots.” Mikie shouted across the room.

Waldo, one of the night attendants, stood in the doorway. He had just finished counting the sharps, making an inventory of every razor, scissors and kitchen utensil on the ward before clocking out.

“That’s right, Bootsie. Spit the shit out if you have to.” Emboldened by his friend, Harris was shouting too.

Why are these people alert? Waldo asked himself. There is no reason for them to be alert. “Quiet. This is a quiet period.”

“Fuck you,” Mikie whispered.

“What was that?” Waldo came forward fingering the striped top of an athletic sock that dangled from his hip pocket. Everyone knew there was a cake of laundry soap inside that sock — when Waldo hit you, it was just like a blackjack.

“I didn’t say nothing. Just watching teevee here.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, we were talking about the broad on the teevee show, that’s all.” Harris shrugged. “That’s all.”

“No, you were shouting. You were disrupting. I’m going to have to separate you.”

“We’ll be good,” Mikie said, starting to panic.

“Let’s go, asshole.”

“No, no. I wanna be with my friend.” Waldo yanked Mikie’s arm. “Nonono.” Harris looked at the linoleum as Mikie and his chair were dragged into the hall. He broke the filter off his next cigarette. Outside Waldo got some bandages out of his jacket and started to tie Mikie’s ankles to the chair.

Harris could hear Mikie starting to cry. He got the fresh smoke going and looked around. “Jesus,” he said very quietly. Then to himself: Mikie got hijacked out of here and I’m the only one that noticed.

At a low table at the opposite end of the dayroom, another inmate was having an informal interview with his therapist. The inmate had a ten-day growth of beard and thick dark hair that had not been washed in days. He sucked his teeth. The therapist rolled a freshly sharpened pencil between his palms. DR. RECHETTE said his black plastic name tag. “Informal” meant that he didn’t take notes.

“Do you want to tell me about yesterday?”

“The thing with Lightbulb Head?”

Rechette sighed gently. “Let’s refer to her as Nurse Amato, shall we?”

“Whatever. I didn’t make up that name, you know…. Okay. Amato and the others are locked in the nurses’ station. No scoop there. They’re always in there playing cribbage. Sometimes they only come out to get water for the coffee machine.”

“No editorials, Jim.”

“Didn’t I ask you not to call me that?”

“Christo. If that makes you feel more comfortable.”

“Right. There’s this new admission, anyway. Kid’s only been here maybe a week. Yesterday morning he gets this savage migraine attack, doubled over and his face all white. He’s got a history of these things, real gut benders. Yes, Marty, I saw it in his file and don’t tell me it’s against the rules…. You want to hear the story, you can’t keep jumping in. So … The kid is really going through it, but I’m cool. I figure before too long somebody will come out and give him a needle. That’s what they’re here for, right? But now the kid’s wrapped around himself down on the floor, bellowing. I walk over to the station and I suggest — maybe I raised my voice a little — I suggest Amato might want to investigate. Maybe I took a couple of swings at the door, who remembers? Well, Amato wanders out and she’s rubbing her eyes like we were dragging her away from a nap. She says, ‘Larry is being punished. He’s been spoiled by too much easy access to medication and now he has to earn back his privileges.’ I got a little hot at that point. Somebody got me in a hammerlock. They wanted to put me in a body bandage, but I talked them out of it.”

Rechette shook his head forlornly, dug a thumbnail into the spotless pink eraser at the end of his pencil. “Sometimes you make me want to retire.”

Christo reached across the table, jiggled a cigarette out of Rechette’s half-empty pack, and said, “How do you feel about that?”

“You think you did something noble, I’m sure, but it was moronic.” Rechette narrowed his eyes. “How do you suppose this is going to look when it comes time for your review? I’m greasing all kinds of rails to get you released and you pull a stunt like this. Don’t you want to get out of here?”

“More and more.”

“Then make yourself invisible for the next ten days. Fortunately Amato is being transferred to another facility next month so I can probably ease you through. You haven’t blown it yet, but don’t try again.” Rechette stood, smoothed his silk necktie, buttoned his herringbone jacket. He indicated the cigarette pack with a twitch of the head. “You can keep those.”

Christo watched him leave: that side-to-side cowpoke walk. He had to admire the way in which Dr. Martin Rechette grabbed life by the balls. The man was not board certified. He was a former urologist practicing psychiatry for the state. He had published an article in the Journal of Mental Sciences . He was in a lofty tax bracket. He was also the softest touch Christo had ever come across in thirty years of looking.

Later that day, Christo came upon Inocencia Amato in the corridor. She was bent over the drinking fountain; a hank of black hair had escaped from the pinnings of her cap and hung down past one eye. He crept up behind her and she whirled at the touch of his leg, her clawlike hands, with their long peach-enameled nails, prepared to strike.

“Hiya, Nurse Amato. Is it true that back in the Philippines you eat dog? Beat them to death with bamboo poles to tenderize the meat?”

“Yes.” She dried her hands on the front of her skirt.

“I bet puppies are the best.”

Amato batted at her loose hair. “You, sir, are wasting the time of everyone in this hospital.”

“Well, don’t get too excited,” Christo said. And when she had disappeared: “You might burn out your tungsten filament.”

It was in a cramped second-floor office that Christo’s final discharge interview took place. From somewhere nearby came the steady rumble of machinery. Christo adopted a submissive posture in a molded plastic chair from which he could view the parking lot through partially drawn curtains, could be tantalized by the mobility of others: relatives shuffling confusedly across the asphalt having been rebuked, perhaps not even recognized; dishwashers and orderlies still in uniform and hurrying to compact cars that would take them on lunch-hour errands to the bank, the dry cleaner’s; the doctors, distinguished Men of Science in British raincoats, padding along a strip of newly replanted grass to their reserved parking spaces as though prowling a parade ground at dawn, some new wrinkle in the elaboration of chemical warfare pricking the conscience.

As the last person entered and the door clicked shut behind him, Christo thought of teevee dramas in which the desperate hero dives through a cellophane window, lands nimbly, rolling to his feet, and races untouched into the commercial break. But such crude tactics were not his style. He was fully prepared to smarm his way out.

His panel of inquisitors consisted of Rechette; Monica Fortgang, head of nursing; Dr. Mool Dopesh, a Pakistani behaviorist (who in the last twelve months had received a color television set and a microwave oven from a major pharmaceutical manufacturer in exchange for running evaluation tests of their new drugs on fifty inmates); and the clinic director, an abrasively voluble man in a Santa Claus beard who was seated at a pressed steel desk. The others were bunched in on either side.

Rechette made some preliminary remarks, emphasizing Mr. Christo’s sincere desire to remake himself in therapy and the noteworthy progress he had achieved in dealing with such matters as flattened affect, reactive hostility and nihilist delusions.