Thomas Trofimuk - Waiting for Columbus

© 2009

Imagine a man standing on a rocky shoreline looking out to sea, pondering the question, the same question we whisper when we look up at night into a star-crazed sky-swirls of light millions of years old-everything moving away, or toward, or around: What’s out there?

This man is an average guy except for this need he has when it comes to the ocean. He is a man who will go out of his way to stand on beaches and look out to sea. He will pull over to the side of a highway or a road, he will get off a train or disembark a bus and then stand at the edge of whatever ocean is there with his awe and wonder vibrating. Often, depending on how he feels, he will hum Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” He thinks he remembers this music was one of the pieces played at JFK’s funeral. He could be wrong about this, but it is easy for him to imagine this music: a military band playing stately, painfully, marching in front of a long line of black vehicles. It is the perfect music for the funeral procession of a president, and it is the ideal music for oceans. Oceans are big enough to handle the sorrow of Barber’s “Adagio.” Sometimes the first notes of this music are just there, in the back of his throat, waiting, ready. He begins to hum the first note and the following notes seem to know what they must do to make the melody.

It’s raining. He’s wearing a ratty dark-blue baseball cap that’s seen better days. It’s pulled down to his eyebrows as protection from the rain. He shakes his head, marvels at the redundancy of rain while standing next to an ocean. So much water just there in the rising and falling swells, in the ebb and flow, in wave after wave-so much water and yet it rains. He smiles at the ocean.

This is a desolate, rocky place. Its rocks seem old, as if they have been written down in an ancient, forgotten language. He read somewhere there were fossil beds along this shore. He does not doubt this. He inhales deeply. Thinks: green, humid, incomprehensible.

He glances up, squints through the streaky gray sky, and drifts back to the only question that matters. He knows he is not the first to stand in wonder at the edge of an ocean. Human beings across the spectrum of time have stood at the edges of things they couldn’t comprehend and drifted in the mystery of not knowing. We no longer think of oceans as frightening, mysterious, or forbidding. Not today. We have lost our deference and awe for oceans because we are no longer dependent. We fly over them, look down from 35,000 feet, maybe notice a glint of sunlight, or the way color dances.

But this man can easily conjure up respect and even fear. He can easily muster a meditation on courage. He looks out and feels the ocean’s coldness-understands the uncaring green and gray, the undulating deep heart of it. It takes courage to face the unknown with gusto. He wishes he didn’t know about oceans. That way he could be certain that he has the courage. But you cannot erase your own knowledge, he thinks, so this rumination is only a game played by an idiot who fears the unknown.

Sometimes the best map will not guide you

You can’t see what’s round the bend

Sometimes the road leads through dark places

Sometimes the darkness is your friend

BRUCE COCKBURN,

from “Pacing the Cage”

Sevilla Institute for the Mentally Ill

Sevilla, Spain

The passage from freedom to incarceration is never an easy one. The passage from an unacknowledged, untested sanity to a diagnosed insanity is equally problematic. The first time Nurse Consuela Emma Lopez entered his world, it was with nervousness-with the trepidation of a sparrow pecking the ground a few meters in front of a perfectly motionless cat. He was immobile on a bed in the admitting area, restrained and drugged. He’d arrived at the institute kicking and screaming.

Consuela heard the shouting, wondered who it was and what it was that had him so upset. She could have written this off as just another ugly and loud admittance in a long string of ugly and loud admittances. But the sound of someone in pain or distress always gets through to her heart. The sound of this man’s voice caused her to pause, to look up from her work and ache a little. The timbre of this particular voice vibrated in her. She cared, immediately. This is not something she likes about herself. Not that there’s anything wrong with caring. It’s a good quality for a nurse. It’s just that she wishes she were tougher, more thick-skinned.

Consuela almost tiptoes into the room-silently but not so timidly as to suggest she is uncomfortable in the admitting room. The lights have been dimmed and a curtain drawn around his bed. They’ve drugged him, she thinks, and they’re waiting for the drugs to kick in. She peeks through a slit in the curtain. It’s difficult to say how old he is but she would guess thirty-five, maybe thirty-eight, despite the graying-verging-on-white hair. He has a kind, narrow face but he’s obviously been through something, some sort of trying experience, an ordeal of some kind. There are bags under his eyes, and there are scratches-some deeper than others-across his forehead. His jaw has been bandaged.

Consuela finds his chart hanging on the far wall. She flips it open and finds an exercise in ambiguity. Scant details about where he was found. The words “ Strait of Gibraltar ” and “Palos.” No name. A notation on the sedative he’d been given-a hefty dose of Rohypnol. And a number.

Nurses talk. They tell stories at coffee. Two hours earlier a black van had arrived and out climbed three members of the National Police Force with the new patient wedged between them. They delivered him, wrapped tightly in a straitjacket, to the admitting area. His clothes were bloodstained, his shirt ripped. Despite the restraints, he was wild. He’d broken the nose of one of the policemen with a lurching head butt to the face. They’d said something about his name being Bolivar and that he’d been found in the Strait of Gibraltar. “In the strait?” a nurse asks. “Surely you mean near the strait?” The policeman looked at her with dehumanizing, flat disdain, signed the papers that were thrust toward him, dropped the pen on the counter, and departed quickly. It seemed that the transport and handoff of this patient had been a trying experience for these men. They were glad to be rid of him. Consuela saw them as they were leaving-remembers thinking they were very serious, severe-if they’d had clowns in both pockets of their trousers, they wouldn’t have smiled. They reminded her of her ex. The black, stiff uniforms. Those intensely earnest faces. The type that follow orders unquestioningly.

When Bolivar opens his eyes two days later, he is calm and seems rational. He’s restrained in the bed and there is still one policeman outside in the hallway-just in case. The guard sits straight in a wooden chair to the left of the door. He checks identification badges of everyone who enters, makes a note on his clipboard. This is Consuela’s fifth time in, and the guard barely looks at her.

“¿Qué día es éste? Por favor.” The new patient stares at Consuela. His voice is demanding, almost commanding. It’s a voice that is perhaps used to giving orders. His head is lifted and he’s trying to see what it is that’s keeping him down in the bed.

“¿Qué?”

“¿Qué día es éste? What day is it?”

“It is Sunday,” Consuela says.