Some Mistakes We Can't Stop Making

The asylum where I work is small, old, and contorted. The long corridors dip and bend in an unsettling, almost organic way. I don't like it and do not want to be here, most of the time.

But I have little choice in the matter; the judge sent me to the parole board, and the parole board sent me here, where I am a night janitor. I work from eleven at night until seven in the morning. Like the patients, I can’t just leave whenever I want to—although I think about leaving all the time.

The patients might not. That is, many of them seem all right with it here. The asylum is supposed to be a halfway house—the residents are either being rotated back into the real world or are under observation to determine if they can be released, or if they need to be locked up deeper still, in some other, more serious hospital somewhere else. But turnover is very, very slow, and everyone—patients, doctors, hospital staff, and myself included—feels trapped, waiting for something to happen. During my graveyard shift, there’s not even sunlight drifting across the floor to mark time, and the view from the small barred windows is always the same.

I don’t understand the patients’ acceptance of the asylum. It’s a terrifically depressing place—it’s all white, for one thing. Maybe no one else notices the whiteness as much as I do, because they don’t have to clean it. The white tile floor joins the white tile walls with a seam of white rubber. From there, ceramic tile climbs about four feet to a wooden molding. The rest of the wall is white plaster, and the ceiling is white as well—a new suspended ceiling that was hung too low, making the place seem even more crowded and compressed. There’s hardly a bit of color to break it up. In one of my more prosaic moments, I described being here as living on a blank page.

On slow nights, I call Shelly.

I use the Patient’s Telephone Room, which is really just a closet with a phone in it. I have a key because I’m supposed to clean the place.

Shelly’s out in California now, having moved from New York while I was in jail. To call her from work, I have to use phone cards because of the long-distance block on the phone. Unwrapping the cards reminds me, oddly, of unwrapping condoms back when Shelly and I lived together.

I drop the plastic wrapper into the barrel of my cleaning cart and begin dialing. It takes a long time—about thirty numbers or so—but then, everything seems to take a long time here. I sit listening to a distant telephone ring and watch the floor I’ve just mopped dry.

“Physician’s Referral Service, can I help you?”

“Hi, Shelly.”

“Hi! How are you?” There’s always a burst of enthusiasm in her voice when I call, and I can hear her smile—I can see it in my mind. My muscles go slack and I shrink to a small percentage of my usual size. I’m not so big to begin with.

“Great,” I tell her, reflecting some of her good feeling back at her. “I’m great. Hey, listen—let’s you and I go out after work.” It’s a little game I play, pretending there isn’t a continent and three time zones between us.

Shelly always giggles at this. “I’d love to, but I have plans,” she says.

“Too bad,” I reply. I know better than to ask what she’s doing, but I ask anyway. “Where are you going?”

“Out with Donny. We’re going to see his folks for the weekend—”

“That’s cool,” I interrupt.

I can’t stand hearing about Donny.

I honestly hate Donny, even though I’ve never met him. Sometimes he appears in my dreams, not as a person but as a bloodshot streak of emotion. “My mother says hi, by the way.”

“That’s nice,” Shelly replies, her voice softening a little. “I didn’t think your mother liked me.”

She didn’t, really, but I’d lie all night to keep Shelly on the phone. “What gave you that idea? She likes you just fine. She was asking how school was going for you.”

“Good,” Shelly says. “I was actually doing some studying just now.”

Maybe she was, but I doubt it. I suspect I’ve just given her an excuse to get off the phone. “What are you studying?” I ask, trying to keep the conversation going.

“Oh, basic stuff,” she says. “Anatomy, mostly.”

“There must be a lot of that. In medical school,” I quip.

“Oh yeah.” Her response is flat; I’m losing her attention. I can feel it slipping away. A long silence stretches between us. I can feel the weight of it: thousands of miles of telephone line, several transformers, a satellite, a million switches—all lying open and pressing down on me as I sit in the Patient’s Telephone Room trying to think of something to say. There’s a soft, muted ring of a phone on her end.

“Hold, please.” The great distance is replaced by the stifling silence of a call on hold.

I sit there and try to think of what we’ll talk about when she comes back. I stare into the blank antique-white wall of the Patient’s Telephone Room. There are faint fingernail scratches in the paint. I spread my hand and try to fit my fingers into the handprint, but my hand is too small. I think that it was probably Dale. He's the biggest one in the ward.

“Are you still there?” Shelly asks.

“Oh yeah.” I hadn’t come up with anything better.

“Listen, I have to go page a doctor, but I’ll talk to you later, all right?”

I hate it when she uses that doctor-patient tone, but I’m suddenly too exhausted to protest.

“Sure,” is all I can manage as she hangs up. I feel as if I’ve just lost a fight.

I make a small deal with myself: I’ll sit here in the chair and recover until the floor is completely dry. Then I’ll go to the ward and check on Bryce, see if he’s spitting blood on the tiles.

Part Two will Post on 7/5. We Meet Casper

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I don’t have any say in what goes on here. I don’t know much about the residents. I don’t even know what’s supposed to be wrong with most of them. What I do know is that they’re kind of frightening—most of them, anyway. They flit through the corridors in their whites, or sometimes in their street clothes, looking almost normal as they wander around talking to themselves, gesturing, waving their arms, and making horrible faces at the white tiles. Some of the others are too quiet, moving slowly and cautiously from point to point, as if the floor might come loose beneath their feet. These quiet ones sometimes remind me of the doctors who work here, because both are so passive. I rarely see the doctors. Like policemen in the outside world, they only show up when there’s a problem. And like the criminal I am, I give all problems a wide berth. In that regard, I’m like the patients here—I got this job through my parole board, and many of the residents weren’t sent here by doctors either, but by judges. They were sentenced for observation to determine whether they’re fit to stand trial. As I said, I don’t know what’s wrong with most of the residents, but they don’t seem fit to stand for much of anything. Bryce had eaten a dog. But it’s not just that he ate the dog—it’s that he won’t shut up about it: how he killed, dressed, and ate his neighbor’s dog. I doubt the woman who owned the dog talks about it as much. “It was a little dog,” Bryce will say if you stand next to him for too long. “Cockapoo, I think it was.” The breed is a flexible detail and changes often. “Little, floppy-eared thing. So I cooked it and ate it.” Not much of a story, I would think, but Bryce never seems to get tired of it. Some of the others, by contrast, are better conversationalists—the ones who believe their bellies are filled with swimming fish, or that their dead mothers are calling them from electrical sockets. Tonight, I knew, would be interesting because there was a new guy checking in. As I think I mentioned, new residents are rare, and so they’re always a big deal. The New Guy was young—just a little older than me—with neat hair and neat fingers. His eyes were a little fucked up, probably because before he got sent here, he spent most of his time with his nose pressed against a pocket mirror. I knew his game because I’d played it myself. Back when I got arrested, I pleaded junkie, even though I wasn’t really hooked that hard. I was sent to rehab instead of prison because it was my first offense. The New Guy went for crazy instead of criminal and ended up here. He wanted to be liked—you could tell right away. Life was a popularity contest to him, and he was ready to charm the whole ward. I might have told him it was a waste of time, if I thought it would do any good. Of the guests on the floor tonight, Bryce is a hardcore nutcase, Dean is mute, and Dale can’t say anything other than a stream of curses and swears. And then there’s Casper, who insists he isn’t even a human being. “Tell me more about the dog,” the New Guy asks Bryce—a mistake. Bryce fidgets and hides a secret, confused smile while chewing the inside of his mouth. When pressed, he panics. His pupils dart from one side to the other, searching for answers, clues, a way out—anything. At moments like this, you can almost see Bryce retreat into his own head. You can almost hear his inner voice cry, “More? What does he mean, more? What else is there? I killed and ate the dog.” Two-thirds of the world wouldn’t bat an eye at what he did, but here in America, dog-eating Bryce is considered worthy of injections, prescriptions, beatings, and restraints. Casper is the only one who says anything to the New Guy at first, and it’s just his standard greeting. “Welcome aboard.” He says the same thing to me every night when I start my shift. The New Guy actually puts his hand out, like he’s making new friends on the first day of school instead of being sized up by a room full of certified lunatics. Casper never touches anyone and ignores the gesture. “I already know your name,” Casper tells him. “Is that right?” the New Guy replies, smiling like a game show host as he pulls his hand back. “Casper knows everything,” Bryce explains. “Casper’s an angel.” “Sweet guy, huh?” the New Guy says, smiling away. “No,” I interrupt from my place in the corner, where I lean on my floor mop in anticipation of Bryce expectorating blood. “Casper’s an angel out of Heaven, cast down by the Great Lord Almighty for his part in the revolt against Christ.” Casper—a brief, heavy man with a round head and long, thin fingers—smiles modestly.

There are only a few things I know for sure about Casper: he’s queer, he’s crazy, and he’s dangerous. Soft-spoken and a little pudgy, he was sent away years ago for murder. Someone, somewhere, thinks he’s done enough time and wants to let him out—but this is as far as he’s gotten. “So you’re an angel?” the New Guy asks, breaking the silence. “Well, I wouldn’t want that getting around,” Casper replies. “I’m sort of hiding out.” “From who?” “Everyone,” Casper tells him. The New Guy smiles some more and waits. Casper looks up toward me. “How goes the phone war?” he asks. “No change,” I reply. Sometimes, Casper really does seem to know everything. “Women can be difficult,” Casper tells me in a sympathetic tone. “I’ve always wondered,” the New Guy asks, “are there women in Heaven?” “No,” Casper replies, shaking his great head slowly. “I guess that’s why you all left,” the New Guy jokes, flashing a wide grin. “Oh no,” Casper replies. “We were most certainly chased out. No one leaves Heaven of their own accord.”

Part Three will post on Sunday July 12

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