A Fan's Notes (12 page)

My first few days at Avalon Valley were spent standing at that window, caressing the illusion that I was in the sheltered bosom of a university. There came reminders to the contrary. Once I noticed a man, looking little more than buglike from where I stood, walking with the stiff, stick-legged trot of the cretin; another time a man bent with the ravages of age. Again, from behind me once came the long, plaintive wail of suffering, and I turned to see a man with whom I had struck an acquaintance, and whom I had till then judged quite sane, curled up, fetus-like, in the corner of the barren ward, sound asleep and dreaming some vision of his private hell, emitting the language of the tortured heart. On one particularly stunning day, when the sky was summer-blue and the autumn colors were defined with the richness of some dream of season, and I had finally succeeded in giving myself up totally to the illusion that I was some other place than I was, I felt an anxious nudging at my elbow and turned to find a short, hideously wasted, blue-black Negro. Speaking between brackish, putrescent teeth which emitted a dizzying, nearly eye-watering, odor, he told me there was a man within him, pestering him, allowing him no peace; then, in a very precise and startling way, he tapped with his forefinger at his diaphragm, indicating the exact location of the man, and asked me to listen—to hear for myself! With great solemnity, I bent down, placed my ear to his chest, and listened, hearing nothing, though I really was prepared to hear.

Lifting my head, I said,
“
What do he say?
”
adopting his manner of speech in the hope he would feel comfortable with me.

“
He say he the
debbil
, an
’
he
gwoan
kill me.
”

There was terror in the poor man
’
s eyes.

“
Dey
gottah
cut
‘
im out,
”
he said, meaning the doctors would literally have to take their scalpels, make their incisions, and reach in and remove the man. The Negro
’
s anguish was so reasonably modulated that I pictured the whole thing, saw the rubber-gloved hand go in between the spread flesh, feel tentatively around, and suddenly grab the little bugger by his slimy neck. It was here I lost the picture. I wondered if the little man would be blue-black, too, though it suddenly occurred to me—and I had smiled then—that he would be white as alabaster. Detecting my smile, and misinterpreting it, the Negro repeated,
“
Dey
got
to. Dey
got
to.
”

“
Dey
will
,
”
I said.
“
Dey
will
.
”

Because I couldn
’
t think of anything else to say, I then put my arm about his shoulder, and together this hideous, unredeemable black paranoiac and I stood at the window for a long time, our eyes in the direction of the stunning autumn valley, though I was conscious now not of any scenery but only of the spasmodic, terrifying pulsations of his furious heart. It was this interruption that forced me finally to accept the knowledge that I was at no university; more importantly, that those apple-cheeked sons and daughters don
’
t really learn much of man
’
s heritage at a university.

In the Reception Building we were moved, according to our condition, or alphabetically, or at the doctor
’
s whim—I never determined which—from the third to the second to the first floors. We were moved until the day came when, our names having been rather too dramatically called from a list by a fatuously inflated attendant, we descended the stairs into a long, concrete room in the basement. There we signed a receipt for what few clothes—all tagged now with white cloths bearing our names—we were permitted to have, gathered the clothes up into our arms, and climbed back up the stairs to await the trucks that would bear us to the main part of the hospital—
down the hill
. As we waited, the doctors, the nurses, the attendants, all approached us with sanguine gaiety.
“
Isn
’
t it grand?
”
they seemed to be asking. Indeed, this was to have been a grand day. We had been told ever so many times that it would be a lovely day—a kind of moving-up day; when this day arrived, it was the sign our cases had been diagnosed. We had now only to go
down the hill
to be cured, and in a matter of weeks be back in the bosoms of our loved ones. Waiting and sitting in silence, wolfing cigarettes and basking in cheerful smiles, we knew better. Our faces showed it. We were not glad.

The Reception Building had been crowded with patients who had been at Avalon Valley before, who had gone
down the hill
and back to those bosoms to find them as cold, obdurate, and insensible as granite; having come back now bitter and defeated, they told us terrifying stories of the indignities that would be heaped upon us
down there
. They told us stories covering everything from the hideousness of the food to the gross inhumanity of the attendants, and they warned us to avoid, as long as possible, that trip downward. (Most of these stories turned out to be untrue; later I was to wonder why the hospital hadn
’
t segregated these repeaters from us new patients, though I eventually came to see that it had been for the best: if one is led to expect the worst, nothing can really touch him.) I was not in the least worried. I had been in a hospital before—a private one, to be sure —and had come to understand that there was in the treatment of patients (I had come to call them inmates) certain overtones of punishment, some subtle, some not so subtle. We had failed our families by
our inability to function properly in society
(as good a definition of insanity as any); our families, tears compounded by self-pity in their eyes, had pleaded with the doctors to give us the goals that would set our legs in motion again. The goals—a wife and family, a vice-presidency, a Cadillac—varied only with the imperceptibility, the bland vision of the relative.

Moreover, I had also come to understand that most doctors —at least those with whom I had come in contact—were a not particularly competent lot, thoroughly accepting the notions of normality that society had imposed upon them. For the most part they did not consider it their duty to probe the strange, anguished, and perverse realities we had fabricated for ourselves. No doubt to a great extent motivated by lack of time and an unconscious awareness of their own shortcomings, they found it simpler to eliminate our realities and substitute those of society. It had seemed to me, too, that these doctors were quite willing—perhaps unconsciously eager—to punish patients for refusing these realities. About their treatment there was a kind of melancholy brutality; hadn
’
t we, after all, long since put aside society
’
s realities as being incompatible with our abilities to live? On discovering this
“
truth
”
about doctors some months before, I had evolved what I had come to call Exley
’
s Law of Institutional Survival. It was simple. It involved leaving the mind as malleable as mush and letting them impose any inanities upon it they wished. It had worked for me once. I was sure it would again.

That is why, waiting for the truck to go
down the hill
, I had no fear at all. I did, in fact, even look forward to the trip with morbid though detached relish, wondering if I weren
’
t about to witness some new essence of man
’
s stupidity or viciousness or cruelty to his fellow man. From the moment these repeaters had started talking, I found I wasn
’
t so much interested in their
“
horror
”
stories as in the tellers, some of whom were back at Avalon Valley for the fifth, sixth, seventh time—well on their way to the permanent and endless listlessness of incarceration. These people fascinated me.

There was in their tone as they told their tales more than the pleasure of upsetting us; there was a very real hope that we wouldn
’
t survive the outrages they described. Talk of these outrages brought our eyebrows into scowls, twisted our mouths in pain, rendered us hideous. It was on noticing this transfiguration that I began to understand. For some time I had detected that if these repeaters had anything in common, it was sheer and naked ugliness—often so marked that it required an enormous effort of will to look directly at them when they were talking. These repeaters were the ugly, the broken, the carrion. They had crossed eyes and bug eyes and cavernous eyes. They had club feet or twisted limbs or—sometimes—no limbs. These people were grotesques. On noticing this, I thought I understood: there was in mid-century America no place for them. America was drunk on physical comeliness. America was on a diet. America did its exercises. America, indeed, brought a spirituality to its dedication to pink-cheeked, straight-legged, clear-eyed, health-exuding attractiveness—a fierce, strident dedication. It was the dedicated spirituality of the dancer to the ballet, except that the dancer might come to that experience we call Art. To what, I asked myself, was America coming? To no more, it seemed to me, than the carmine-hued, ever-sober
“
young-marrieds
”
in the Schlitz beer sign. The sin of these repeaters was that they obtruded frightfully in the billboard sign, rather like fortuitously projecting Quasimodo into an advertisement to delineate the Male Ideal (I saw Julie London, her sensual lips blowing the lazy smoke of Marlboros into the sexually smug and outrageously winking visage of Charles Laughton
’
s
“
Quasi
”
). I was aware of oversimplifying. One didn
’
t know whether these people had been rendered grotesque by their perverseness or whether their grotesqueness had rendered them perverse. Still, I saw the comfort America could purchase itself by getting rid of them. Meeting payment in kind, they delighted in rendering us hideous. If we did not have common humanity on America
’
s level—the level of the advertising commercial—then they would bring to our countenances the ugliness of despair, and at that unhappy level we would come together and make our marriage.
“
Oh, God,
”
I thought,
“
they want nothing more than to be at one with us.
”

So I sat and waited, without fear, guided only by a vow

78 · A Fan
’
s Notes

I had made occasioned by an incident which had taken place the day before. For a number of days I had been putting my head down to the Negro
’
s chest and listening for the devil within him; the other patients, whom he never tired of asking to listen, were apparently too embarrassed to do so. As a result we had become involved. He believed me the only one who accepted his reality. I was standing at the window when I suddenly heard a shrill, indignant, near-hysterical shouting and turned to see an attendant, his body tensed as if with pain, his face livid with rage. He was screaming at the Negro, whose body, in turn, seemed to be bending backward in the onrush of the man
’
s anger. I don
’
t remember the attendant
’
s precise words, but they were enunciated with that chilling clarity that anger sometimes induces and were to the effect that the Negro had no man inside him, that t
here wasn
’
t going to be any
god
dam
operation, and that if he persisted in pestering people, the attendant would
goddam
well see to it that the Negro got an operation he wouldn
’
t forget. There was saliva on the attendant
’
s chin. The Negro began to weep. He wept quite openly, wept as the child he was. I turned away, back to the window. My hands went to the bars, my fingers found a grip on them, and I squeezed and squeezed and squeezed—watching my knuckles go white as hoarfrost and listening to the thunder in my head.

I wanted to kill that attendant, kill him in the same way that I wanted to destroy that America in pursuit of its own loveliness, kill him and it for their utter and unending lack of imagination. Of course the Negro had the devil inside him. Wasn
’
t he the ugliest America of all—the black America? His devil was, like those others, his alienation from his countrymen, and that alienation and that devil were
gwoan
kill him sure, were even now engulfing him in fires more horrible than any of which Beelzebub ever dreamed—the fires of rejection. They might make the d
evil
’
s voice less audible, they
might cool the flames, but to tell him there was no devil was not only lack of imagination, it was a lie. Watching my hands on the bars, a little looser now, the knuckles going from snow-white to crimson, I made a vow. I vowed that never again at Avalon Valley would I get involved with a patient. I knew how to beat the bastards; I had beat them before; and the way was simple—one didn
’
t tell them about one
’
s devils. One didn
’
t give their unimaginative mentalities an opportunity to hear about one
’
s little man. My hands still on the bars and utter murder in my heart, I knew that if I got involved again I was only exposing myself to the risk of suffering another
’
s defeat—a defeat that seemed to me as inevitable as did my victory. As it turned out, that vow was to make my voyage through Avalon Valley swift and painless, or nearly painless, and what pain there would be wouldn
’
t come until the very end. It wouldn
’
t come until I was all but ready to leave the hospital and go back into the America I knew. And though it is indeed best to keep one
’
s devils within, one still has to learn to live with them; and this, when it came time to leave Avalon Valley, I yet hadn
’
t learned to do.