Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

“You want to meet them?” said the nurse, still holding out her spiral notebook.

“I need to go to deal with my period,” I said. “I’ll take Armand.”

—

Honestly, I know that in some cultures girls are supposed to feel shame over their period, and it’s not like I feel anyone should be ashamed of what they are, but if you’re like, “Oh, the flow of my blood, the essence of my womanhood,” well, that is just stupid and disgusting. There I am with my responsible-looking pants on the handbag hook in the stall, standing in my socks and, oh yeah, my naked ass, at the counter wiping blood off my crash-appropriate underwear with a paper towel. What, then, is least disgusting: put your underwear back on all damp and horrific, put your underwear on inside out so the damp part rubs up on your favorite and nicest pants, put them back on and stuff them with toilet paper that might fall down your leg at any second, don’t put them back on and hope you don’t leak again until you can get more underwear and perhaps a panty liner which why didn’t your mother fucking suggest this ever, and why have you never seen any panty liners in the house? Perhaps it is your mother that is disgusting. And even then where do you put your underwear, in your pocket or what? Because you left your bag in the car because you wanted your hands free for picking out your madman. Not to mention I thought this place was so well equipped, and hasn’t anyone ever noticed that girls who are on the first day of their first period and don’t know what they’re doing come here all the time? So where’s looking that in the eyes and understanding it? So also, as Carrie would say, none of your beeswax about what is least disgusting in my worldview.

Outside the bathroom the nurse was waiting for me, leaning on the wall like she was from the fifties.

“You okay?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Armand, still? You sure?”

“Yes.”

She smiled, then, a 100 percent genuine smile which there’s no faking. I know, because I have watched myself in the mirror and tried.

So his name was Armand, and in that way my madman transformed from a madman to the name of a man, which is only a little different but counts at least some. The nurse pushed back through one set of double doors to go get him ready, and I pushed through another, into the waiting room with a pile of forms and my vacant parents, who were staring at posters on opposite ends as if they were looking out portholes in a ship. Where their heads weren’t blocking, I could see that one poster was a phrenology diagram, and the other was a color-coded brain scan. Were they even looking at what they were looking at? Twinges in my belly were either anxiety or cramps or both. I didn’t know anyone who’d just picked a name from a list on advice from a psychiatric/psychotic-looking nurse. But I know you can never pick exactly right. There’d be a whole other batch any other day. One day you could walk in and it’s your old friend Bitsy from second grade wearing a rag and picking her butt and looking at you and the space next to you like it’s the same thing. Which maybe it is. I didn’t throw a dart, but the way I chose my madman had very little magic in it, and what should I learn from that?

Well, it had a little magic, like a pebble in a setting forged for a diamond.

Oh, Armand, I thought. My own little pebble. The phrase came back to me: coloboma of the iris, and it sounded like a lullaby.

Meanwhile, I handed some forms to my dad and we sat as if peacefully doing paperwork while all the weight in the room slid toward the black hole created by my mother as she ignored us both. I’d missed something, something between them, and probably something with the nurse, as well. I asked my dad, I guess to break the ice, “Why do so many of them have sticks?” because all I knew about my madman was, according to the nurse, he was not going to leave his behind and I should be okay with that. And his cloak.

“Staffs,” my father said, considering. “Shepherds used to carry crooks. Madmen have traditions.”

“What they have,” my mother said, still focused on the phrenology poster, “is a brain disorder.”

I pictured sheep like marbles, always wandering off, pictured a madman named Armand on a grassy hill, his marbles rolling away, trying to pull them back with his crook, useless. How far he must have traveled, hiking back roads and mountain trails, fording creeks with it, balancing with three legs. I pictured that. How he might have speared a fish with it, or clubbed a rabbit over the head to eat, or slain an enemy in the night. Or used it for a wand, to turn seawater potable, to ward off evil, to punish his tormentors. Or the stick was bifurcated. It split. In order to represent his brain.

“Okay, geniuses, perhaps it’s not a brain disorder,” my mother said, as if anyone had said anything. “He’s been emasculated by his madness. In fact, it’s a dick. Let him have it. It makes him feel better.” Unsurprisingly, this seemed to hurt my father’s feelings. It also appeared that while she was not yet talking to me, she wanted me to know she was there, so that was a good sign.

The nurse materialized in the nurses’ station and I met her in the window. I gave her the paperwork and she gave me a SMTWTFS pillbox, a chart that showed how it was set up, and a bag of meds. She gave me the number of a psychopharmacologist named Dr. Sandy and said this is who to call for refills or if Armand seemed too down for too long, or too excited over nothing, or not sleeping, or having trouble talking or moving, or not making sense when he talked, or violent. She must have seen the look in my eyes because she said, “Just call the number if something doesn’t seem right. Trust your instincts.” It felt good for her to say that, although I wondered about the boy with the cowlick and if he should trust his instincts, too, if everyone, no matter how dumb, young, or crazy, should be trusting instincts. The rosy woman with her adventures, the nurse with her crazy eyes and her white uniform. There were instincts all over the place. I looked up to see my mother leaving the building. A length of toilet paper struggled to escape from her jacket pocket.

My dad said, “She sees you growing up and she’s afraid of losing you.”

“She said that?”

“Not exactly.”

In the parking lot our car and truck were staring straight ahead like they weren’t ready to talk, either. My mom’s head was a rock hovering impossibly over her steering wheel. I decided to ride home with my dad because at least he was normal. I felt bad for about three seconds, putting the madman in the back for our first ride, but I enjoyed horrifying my mother by doing it. She glared at me from behind the window while she felt through her purse for her phone. Receipts, her falling-apart checkbook, an extra ring of like forty keys and I don’t know if there’s been forty things in her life that had locks, a separate falling-apart wallet for pictures, open dirty Life Savers and all kinds of crap that why doesn’t she just throw away, like a manual for our Mister Mixer, for god’s sake I’ve seen it in there, all these things I knew were bulging out of her purse and spilling into the car and I’m sure slid under the seat without her noticing because she was so busy glaring at me. I just hopped into the back of the truck, and my dad helped me fit my madman into his harness, which fit perfectly from what I could tell with him enveloped in his cloak. I clipped him to the tarp-ties and hopped into the cab. By that time, her car was gone. And my bag was still in there, too. I made peace with the possibility that I would sacrifice my best pants to my big day.

At first, my madman didn’t seem sure how to position himself and he wouldn’t put his staff down. I watched by using the mirrors so he wouldn’t feel self-conscious. He definitely wobbled while we were backing up but then sat leaning against the cab and held the staff in his lap. He’d been quiet but helpful while we were fitting his harness on. I was so distracted I wasn’t taking it all in, and again, I felt bad about that, but he was helping in this very gentle/unobtrusive way, letting a hand creep out from his cloak and taking a strap and then passing it back through the other side. He didn’t say a thing or make a sound. I should have just put her out of my mind and really taken this opportunity, I mean it was our first impression, and as soon as we got going I felt so bad I wanted to cry for wasting it, but the thing about madmen is most of their memories are fucked up, so you never know when anything you do or don’t do will stick, and they’ve been through so much that you kind of can’t go wrong anyway, as long as you’re not overall abusive or evil. As a group, they really know how to let things go, or else they’d be dead already. The truck had one of those sliding panels in the back window, so I could poke my head out every so often and see the top of his head, still hidden in his cloak, and the fabric blowing around him like a ghost but in reverse, heavy and black instead of filmy white, but still moving around as if there wasn’t anyone in there when of course there was.