Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

He was still in a fine mood when he went to the bathroom to change. He had been eyeing a few of the longer novels in the common area library. Anna Karenina ? Did they assume the kids would simply never finish it? Not like there were trains around, but still. Either way he was rather looking forward to the solitude. Only as he stood up, about to leave, did he notice something on the stall a few inches above his head where he’d etched his heart a month ago.

Someone had turned it into the top of the letter R, in the word PRAY.

Whatever. Probably one of the visitors had done it. No big deal. He left the bathroom.

By midnight he’d abandoned the Tolstoy with barely ten pages read. Anchorage House was practically silent with all the patients in their beds. After another hour he was desperate for some kind of incident: nightmares or insomnia were common, but only rarely did they erupt into anything that required an orderly’s help. The doctor on staff was Patrick Limon, a slow-moving man in his seventies whose white hair burst Koosh-like from his skull and flowed seamlessly from his nostrils to his mustache and beard. In his white lab coat he glided from room to room, administering the odd night dosage and then sliding off again.

Jacob walked the length of every hallway. Then he walked them all backward. Then he tried the stairs backward and nearly broke his neck. Finally he marched back to the bathroom, looked again at the defacement of his graffiti. PRAY. So imperative! He took out his keys and scratched a response beneath it, in gigantic letters: WHAT FOR? But he didn’t feel better. He checked his watch again. Four in the morning, and nothing left to do but tackle Dr. Limon and demand to be given a sedative. Something — anything — to stop the running commentary in his own head.

Once he’d heard beautiful whispering, poems begging him to write them down. He still heard whispering, only now it was considerably nastier. All you’ve done is get her hopes up. Why? So she can head on back out into the world only to find that it is exactly as twisted and black and sick and fucked up as she thought it was? She isn’t depressed, she’s just thinking fucking clearly. Mind your own business. Haven’t you learned anything? You can’t save her. You are not special.

He couldn’t handle another hour, let alone another month, of this solitary confinement — which is what it was. How did these kids do it? Two hours left to go. There was no way. He was never going to make it. After another twenty minutes he’d decided to just leave. It was long overdue. He could probably walk to the bus station in an hour and then just go right on up to Boston. He sure as hell couldn’t stay here. He went to his locker and took his real clothes — not even bothering to change into them — and then went back to the common area and grabbed Anna Karenina , thinking that if he got picked up by some creepy trucker, he could at least club the guy with it if he tried to get fresh.

As he shoved it into his bag, he spotted Ella’s portrait still hanging, gray, on the wall in the dark. She’d be back at school soon, and not even too far behind schedule. He worried, though, that she might get depressed again when she found out he’d quit. He figured he had better leave some kind of goodbye, so he tore a page out of the back of the Tolstoy and went over to the chessboard, thinking he’d write something and leave it there for Ella to find the next day.

Only when he sat down he found there was already a piece of paper wedged under there. He’d sworn he’d checked earlier, and there was no way Ella had left her room, but there it was — not a poem this time, but a letter, which read:

Hope you get back on your old schedule soon! Paul was up here watching group as usual. Did you know he picks his nose? There was a guy in here last year with OCD who picked his nose so much that they had to actually put mittens on his hands. I asked Dr. Wilkins about it. Rhinotillexomania. It’s a real thing! Before Maura, I had a roommate with OCD, and when she got nervous, she would pluck out her eyebrow hairs. The doctors warned her that it wasn’t like when you shave your leg hair. It doesn’t just grow back, but she couldn’t help it. After a week she didn’t have any eyebrows left! She tried to draw them back on with eyeliner, but it looked totally deranged, so I found a pen and shaded them a little, and that looked a little better, but then it came off in the shower a few days later. I told her we could just do it again… it wasn’t like I had anything better to do, but she said it was pointless. I heard they sent her someplace down in Florida that specializes in OCD. I kept thinking, “She’s right. It ispointless.” Was she going to spend her whole life drawing her eyebrows back on every time she showered? Someone told me they can tattoo them back on again, but that’s got to be pretty obvious. And if they ever did grow back, wouldn’t she pluck them out again? It wasn’t like walking around eyebrow-less was making her less anxious. So it was doubly pointless. Pointless squared. Just a pointlessness spiral, and then I got stuck in it. That’s how I get about things. That’s why I’m here. That’s what my parents don’t see. For them it’s easy to just say, “Well, it could be worse! She could have plucked out her eyelashes too!” and they’ll actually laugh about it and then go eat soup. I mean, hypothetically. They don’t eat, like, odd amounts of soup. It’s just that they do soup things. They do normal everyday soup things instead of, I don’t know, caring. You’re the first person I’ve met here, or really anywhere, who doesn’t just go eat soup. I hope that’s not weird to say. That day you talked to me about my picture was the first time anybody in this whole place ever asked me about something like that. Nobody looks closely. Not the other kids here. Not even doctors whose jobit is to look. Everybody’s just got their nose in their own soup. They say they care, but they don’t put poems in books for me to read. They don’t tell me I can be a poet or call me chowderhead. They talk to me about “adjusting my expectations for the world.” And how I need to be realistic and just accept that this is how things work and that life is unfair and some people just don’t get to have eyebrows, which is at least better than being a baby who is born starving and sick which is at least better than being raped and murdered and I ought to be happy that I am smart and well-fed and have loving parents and clothes and a house and all that means I won’t have to think about those other things which aren’t in my control anyway so that’s why I’ve just got to “work on me” and stop worrying so much so I can get better and get out of here and do something with my life, which is a precious gift I never asked for. I know, I know, I know. Anyways, I hope you get back to your old shift again soon because Paul is the worst.

Jacob sat there a long time, reading the note twice more in the dark. He stared down at the pieces on the chessboard, both sides still trapped in their zugzwang, equally poised to lose. But then what was so bad about losing? he wondered. At least then you could start a new game. Worse to stand there forever. Idly by. Taking time off when there was so little time in the first place.

On the page from the book he’d ripped out, he wrote first in huge letters, “MAKE THE WORLD ADJUST ITS EXPECTATIONS OF YOU.” Then he added, in smaller letters, “Assignment: Write me a sestina about soup for Tuesday. And a sonnet about eyebrows for Sunday.” Then he folded it up and placed it back under the chessboard.

AUGUST

Solitude, it turned out, was something you could get used to, like anything else. Jacob finished Anna Karenina in two weeks and came up with a complete lesson plan for Ella. He continued to communicate with her via the chessboard, discussing poems along with whatever was going on during the daylight hours: Maura had a crush on one of the new patients named Roy, Paul’s nose-picking was continuing, and Sissy was teaching them all to crochet, though they had to use cumbersome plastic hooks that nobody could hurt themselves with and they were forbidden from making scarves or anything with long sleeves. There were a lot of potholders happening. Ella was attempting a beret. Also word must have somehow gotten out that Dr. Dorothy was the one who had ratted on Jacob, because someone (Maura) had apparently stolen her glasses during a dog-petting session (not even at Ella’s behest) and dropped the pieces into a vent.