Commitment (Fiction) Part I of IV

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

Thank You for Reading