Percival Everett: Damned If I Do

“I’m not thinking anything” Harry House said, which was not completely true, as he was thinking that the laundry room must have changed detergents because his clothes weren’t making him itch today. The light blue pajama pants and pullover shirt usually tortured him, but not today, and he looked at the doctor and said, “I’m not itching.”

The skinny man brought his body forward and put his elbows on his desk. “This is good, itching? Itching to what? You’re not itching to what?”

Harry knew the man wanted to hear him say that he was not itching to bash in his face or not itching to scale the wall and disappear into the poor black neighborhood on the other side. “My body isn’t itching. I think they changed soaps in the laundry. Do you ever get that? You know, when your skin is so sensitive to stuff?”

The doctor’s face fell, the disappointment couldn’t have been more obvious, though he tried to mask it and move on. “Are you still keeping a journal?”

“Of sorts.” Harry interlaced his fingers and offered his nails a brief examination, noticing that they were in need of trimming. “It’s more a recounting of some memories than it is about my feelings. I know that’s not exactly what you wanted.”

“That’s fine. I’m sure that will be helpful for you as well.” He looked at his pad, then made a note with a short, chewed pencil. “The last time we talked you mentioned the death of your brother as being a really bad time growing up.”

“Wouldn’t it have to be?”

The doctor nodded. “But you said you resented him for dying. I think your words were, ‘He found a way to get everyone to look his way.’ Just what did you mean by that?”

Harry shrugged. “If I did say that, I didn’t feel it. I wouldn’t have resented him. Especially since I never wanted anyone paying attention to me anyway. I would have welcomed the diversion.”

“Why didn’t you want attention?”

“Just didn’t.” Harry watched the man’s eyes, knowing that long ago he had diagnosed him as having schizophrenia. That was how he had overheard the man put it. The patient has schizophrenia. For the doctor it was a disease, but for the orderlies and nurses who dealt with him daily, he was schizophrenic. For those working on the ward at night when patients peed on the floor and screamed bloody murder, it was a matter of interpersonal etiology.

“Did you love your brother? No, wait, let me put it this way: Did you like your brother?”

“Yes.” The answer was automatic and a lie only in the sense that Harry could not actually recall a brother.

“Were the two of you close?”

“He was five years older.” This was indeed a lie.

“Yes, I know, but my question is, were you close?”

“Not terribly.”

“So, you weren’t greatly saddened by his death?”

“I guess I don’t know what actually constitutes greatly saddened in your thinking. My normal sadness might put your great sadness to shame.”

“I see.” The doctor tapped his pad with the eraser of his pencil, a rhythmic tapping and Harry began to count them. “You’re a bright person, Harry.”

“So you tell me.”

The doctor poured himself a glass of water from the clear plastic pitcher on his table. “Would you like a drink?” When Harry shook his head no, the man took a sip and asked, “Any dreams lately?”

“No.”

“No dreams?”

“I don’t dream.”

“Everybody dreams,” he said.

“I don’t.”

“Is this a decision you’ve made? Not to dream?” The doctor leaned back again. Harry could see that the man believed he had lured his prey into some open meadow.

“No more that you’ve decided to dream.”

“Well, I think that’s enough for today.” He looked at his appointment book, which was open on his desk. “I’m on vacation next week, so I won’t see you until a week from next Tueday.”

Harry nodded.

Harry didn’t go to the common room as he usually did to sit and watch televison game shows in which people always appeared a bit green. Instead, he went back to his bed on the ward where he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, smelled the urine that had collected on the floor of the bathroom just twenty feet away, counted the watermarks on the green walls. He pressed his eyes shut and searched for sleep, tried to remember how it was done, sleeping, was pleased he had lied to the shrink about his dreaming.

It was exceedingly difficult for Harry to find sleep on the ward, what with the snoring of the asthmatic old man in the bed to his right and the more than occasional meeting of one particular orderly and any of several nurses in the empty bed to his left. Tonight, the orderly was grunting away over the short nurse from the medication dispensary. Harry had always liked her and didn’t think she would become one of the string, but he could hear her breathing now, could smell her sweat and the orderly’s. He could hear her fingernails as she clutched at the bedding and he knew she didn’t want to be there, didn’t want that hairy orderly inside her and he wondered why she was there then. He knew that the image of her white hose flowing from the mattress to the tiles of the floor would stay with him and also the way her stocky, smooth thighs seemed so clean compared to the hairy legs between them. They were done in just a few minutes, but the sound of it all remained in the room, the mussed sheets seeming to glow in the darkness. Harry had watched them begin, but had then quietly turned away, turned away when for a sharp second the young nurse saw his eyes, saw him watching her, recognizing her.

The following morning as Harry stood at the window to receive the medication, blue and white capsules he never swallowed, the young nurse was abrupt with him, avoiding his eyes, and when he didn’t immediately step away from the station, she cut him a keen glance that embarrassed him. He could see beyond her into the office, the venetian blinds slicing the light coming through the window, and there was the orderly, strutting around, all pumped up like a peacock, his open shirt offering a glimpse of chest hair. Harry felt the smooth scars that halfway encirled his forearms, as he sometimes did for comfort. He then stepped away into the middle of the common room. Harry gave his medication to the quiet vet who always sat in the corner near the window, the vet who constantly tapped his foot, chanting, “One, two, three, boom,” and then went to sit at the card table with the old man, Harold.

“You know, of course, that I’m God,” Harold said, as he always said. “They all pray to me. That’s why they say, ‘Harold be thy name.’ Want to play chess?” Harold didn’t wait for a response, but started arranging the pieces on the folding hard-paper board. His pajama top was stained with the morning’s breakfast. “You’ll be black and I’ll be white because, frankly, that’s the way it is.” He laughed. He said the same thing every day and every day he laughed the same way. Harold pushed his king’s pawn forward two squares. Harry made the same move. “Hmmm,” Harold said as if the move were some complicated trick, then he giggled like a boy and said, “Did you hear them last night?”

Harry shook his head no.

“You must have. They were right there next to you. He was grunting away over her like a dog.” Harold picked up his queen and moved her in spirals through the air before setting her down on the square in front of his king’s knight’s pawn.

Harry studied the illegal move.

“I bet he’s fucked every one of them by now.”

“He’s a pig,” Harry said.

“Well, of course, he is.” Harold didn’t wait for Harry’s response on the board, but moved his king’s rook over its pawn, across the board, and captured Harry’s king’s bishop. “Check. My daughter is a slut. I told her so and she put me in here. I said, ‘Doris, or whatever your name is, you are a slut, a S-L-U-T,’ and then she and that Nazi boyfriend of hers put me in the back of their Toyota four-wheel-drive piece-of-shit pickup truck and brought me here. They told everyone I was violent and that I wandered off frequently and slept in the street.”