Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (3 page)

“There’d just better be some
cee
-real left when I get down there,” Ira Hayes used to grunt—“that’s all
Γ m
gonna say.” We all tried not to drink the water, but Troop knew that we’d have to if he kept us long enough. Since Nixon wouldn’t have been fed yet either, we’d hear his grunts and howls from his room, and Holden, who had a way of turning into Gore Vidal before your very eyes, would start in on his favorite joke. “Doctor Troop!” he’d yelp, although Troop wasn’t there. “Can Nixon come out to campaign?”

“Why,
Holden
,” one of us always played along. “You know that Nixon has no arms and no legs.”

“Oh, we don’t want him as a
candidate
,” Holden would snicker in his malicious prep-school whine. “We just need to use him as a
power base
!
”

“Ragh. Urgh,” we’d hear from Nixon’s room. “Gagh. Cough.”

Then Julia would unlock the door, and we’d shuffle out to the stairs that took us to the cafeteria. “Man, I’m draggin’,” Ira Hayes would groan. “My feet feel like they’re made a’ bronze this mornin’.” That was
his
favorite joke.

“Which one were you, anyhow?” I asked him one afternoon, when we were all sitting around the Cleaver Ward.

“In the picture? I still am. Second from the left, I think.” He stood up to demonstrate for us, his arms straining toward an invisible flag as it went up and away from him; of course, it just looked goofy, with him in his flapping Mayo gown. Then his fingers started shaking, the way they always did, and he dropped his hands fast, wiping them on his gown. “Shit, but I could use a drink,” he said, trying to sound at home with it. “Yeah, some fuckin’ firewater over here for fuckin’ Tonto, whatcha say, Doctor Troop—Sergeant Stryker, Major Treaty, Colonel Custer, General Hospital. Man, if I ever get out of this place…”

“You know what I’d like to do?” Holden said dreamily. He was lying on his bunk face upwards, watching a blue treasure map waft from his Chesterfield to the ceiling. “I think I’d like to shoot a really, really famous musician. That’s what
Vm
going to do, if they ever let me out of here. Maybe I’ll even get his autograph first!” he giggled. “God, it’ll be beautiful. I hope you can all be there.”

“Sure, Holden,” Ira said, grateful for the change of topic. “But not Gene Krupa, okay?”

“No, not Gene Krupa,” Holden said, with a strange, far-seeing smile. “Bigger.”

“Nobody bigger’n Krupa in my book,” Ira shrugged. His hands had finally stopped trembling. “Blast away at whoever you want.”

“If they ever let
me
out,” I said, surprising myself, “I’d like to go sailing.”

“Me,” Edsel Ford said at the window. For all we knew, the car going by outside just then really was an Edsel—the one his father named for him. From the sound of it, the traffic was heavy just now: “Me-me-me-me-me-me-me,” he said.

Then he said, “Mom?”

“Gil—”

“Krebs,” I said firmly, before Troop could finish. “Call me Maynard G. Krebs.”

“Whatever. Well, that tears it,” he said, tearing up a fat little booklet
on his desk. “The truth is, we’re not making progress. You’re not responding as well as you should.”

“The truth is, there just isn’t a whole lot on the ward to respond
to,
Doc,” I said. “Unless you’re finally coming clean about the water, daddy-o.”

“There is nothing in the water except water. But do you know what’s in the basement?”

“No. But I don’t want to go down there.”

“The basement,” Troop said, “is where we perform electroshock therapy on the patients we can’t help the normal way. It’s a last resort, but then,” he grinned, “that’s what some people call us.”

“Do it to Julia, not to me,” I said. “Being the only black person in the whole Mayo Clinic has been driving your nurse absolutely goofy, Doc, or hadn’t you noticed?”

“You think she’s black? That’s damned interesting. You must not know any real Negroes.” Troop jotted down something on a pad. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “I hate to be the one to tell you this. But hell"—with a sudden, Lark-packed chuckle—”that’s how it goes when you’rein
-chargel
Or so my predecessor, the great Dr. Benway Casey, used to say. Tony is no longer with us.”

“Tony?”

“I meant Ira. Ira Hayes is dead.” “Oh.”

“He has been for some time,” Dr. Troop said gently. “Maybe
you
just hadn’t noticed.”

“Oh again,” I said.

His voice went back to its usual chipper briskness. “At any rate, I’ve scheduled you for your first session.”

“Will it help?”

“Who knows? We’re really just guessing about whatever it is a jolt of kickapoo joy juice does to whatever’s happening in there. But I can guarantee that it’ll take your mind off Ira, that’s for
damn
sure. Boy, did
he
hate it.”

“When are we doing this?” I asked.

“You, not we. But—well, right now,” Troop said. “I mean, it’s not as
if you’ve got that much else besides that little bit of broccoli on your plate, is it?”

“I guess not,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I followed Burleigh, Troop’s nicotine-stained assistant, down the stairs. The room at the bottom had that unshaded but creviced, crime-scene basement light. I stepped over a cardboard box marked “
XMAS ORNAMENTS
,” and hesitated like the joint was booby-trapped. Its familiar gray-green-white cover now a witch’s hat, an old Scribner paperback lay open and face down on the floor. As I heard Burleigh call “Who’s next?,” the basement’s combined glare and dankness were like the moon, the almost silent whistles, the dull trees and the smell of peat at town’s end.

Out of habit, I started to move toward the sofa. But then I saw I couldn’t sit there, since there was a doghouse on it. Plunking myself down instead in a lawn chair with frayed webbings, I felt Burleigh’s hands attach the electrodes to my ears.

I wondered if this was Maynard G.’s last stand. On my ward alone, Edsel Ford had turned into a car, and thought his mother was one too. Holden Caulfield was just itching to turn into an assassin. Nixon was slouching toward himself as always, hoping someone would ask him to carve the rough beast. Ira Hayes was all over the map, since he’d turned into a Marinę, a photograph, a statue, a memorial, a pauper, a drunk, a corpse, and Tony Curtis. At the start, all he’d been was an Injun; and that was just the Cleaver Ward. Who knew what other metamorphoses were going on in all the Mayo Clinic’s other wards, besides Dr. Kildare F. Troop? Maybe it made me the odd man out here in the Sally fields, but I didn’t want to turn into someone new, voyaging out past full fathom five to parts unknown. I only wanted the electroshock to prove that I could still be what I was, which was Maynard G. Krebs.

ZZZZTl

vast wasteland teenage wasteland sons of he woe gee ma john wayne newton minow who minow
Minnow
Me now No no Krebs
ZZT
Krebs ZZT Maynard Krebs who’s next
ZZZT ZZZT

Ocean waves.

Here it came now. “Boom!” went doom.

Her nipples in sunshine. What I had run there to tell her: he was gone.

Then doom went boom. Here came everybody but me.

Too late to save me, Ferlinghetti, or maybe Dobie, finally got a message through. It said “Maynard! I’m with you in Rochester” and I said
Look here is a postcard that calls me Maynard I am Krebs I tell you I am Krebs ZZT ZZT.
And I said “I bet you wouldn’t do this to Papa” and Burleigh said
We did he thought he was Hemingway there was no cure for it but me ZZZT
oh man what I’d give for some reefer now
ZZT ZZT.

Why couldn’t I remember anything? I used to be able to remember things practically while they were still happening. Somewhere in a part of what was gone now, Thalia or maybe it was Suze and I used to know whole chunks of our favorite novel backwards and forwards. We’d play a game that she named Memory Substitutions, changing names and garbling lines on purpose to turn the passages we knew by heart—each other’s heart—into jokes that only we understood.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years,” I’d start, “my father gave me a dead animal that I’ve been turning over with a stick ever since.” Hugging her knees at her end of the sofa, she’d giggle, with the light brown hair that flowed in two waves from a central part on her high forehead unveiling her mouth as she tossed her chin, and say in an incredulous voice: “Can’t reread the
Washington Post
, old sprout? Why, of course you can!” Or else we’d reverse the game, and rearrange everything
else
we knew—old songs, TV shows, other books, news of the day—to make it refer to our shared text, and so to us:

“Daisy; Daisy—give him your answer; do,”
I’d sing.
“He’sJay Gatsby—all for the love of you.”
And then I’d wait for her to decide what came next.

“ … Don’t swerve to hit that floozy! That drive must be a doozy,”
she’d croon within seconds, giggling, her eyes’ twin pools of dilute green light bright, eager, tender, mocking and observant all at once.

“But don’t you beg, back in East Egg
—
”
and then I hesitated, even
though it wasn’t her turn. But she thought it was, and our two voices tangled:
“For another man to love yooo!” I tried out, just as Suze sang, “Why don’t you escape the zoo?”

Then we’d stop. But soon she’d wiggle free, because she was virgo intacta and she had to go, back up the stairs quick-quick and out the kitchen door. So I’d beat off, a boat against the current, borne ceaselessly back to her ass; and if you find that unromantic, I think you know nothing about youth. But skip her.

Skip her.

In the basement, when I wasn’t getting electroshocked, they’d put me on laundry detail. I didn’t like it, because laundry was the cruelest chore—breeding clean clothes out of the dead wash, mixing Tide and Joy, and so on. There was so much of it, so much more than I thought there would be from our now reduced numbers, a million airy pieces to fluff and fold, and yet all of it kept billowing, teetering, swarming up damply to swamp me,
fear death by laundry,
and I said “Doc be a lovey tonight and take me off the laundry detail” but he wouldn’t, and gingerly I handled laddered hooks and many buttons, tender buttons, I had not thought Suze had undone so many, was she merry as she did it, was she merry and I cried, and still I cried “Krebs Krebs” to dirty socks.

But “Your goatee’s gone,” Holden, who had a way of turning into Paul Lynde before your very eyes, told me snidely when they brought me back up to the ward one day. Since there was no mirror other than his snicker, I touched my chin, and found it bare except for glue. Airplane glue, so clear and pearly when you squeeze it out to fit the bridge to the deck of a PT boat or join the wing and fuselage of a Curtiss P-40 with the sabre-toothy Flying Tigers snarl pasted on the snout, but soon glaucomic as it makes maps of nonexistent countries on your fingers. Even though I hadn’t done it in years, I sniffed mine—and boom, hey daddy-o, I was back in front of Troop, and I said
Just tell me Doc please What was in the water
and Troop said
Kim Novak you damn fool Kim Novak was in the water The water by the Golden Gate
and afterwards naked in lockup with the lights out I whimpered
krebs i was krebs
and the food stinks here.

If I could only say

alia Mennin

If I could only say

Suze

Now I didn’t have a name anymore, but there didn’t seem to be much call for one. Here on the Cleaver Ward, Ira’s old bunk was still empty, and one day I saw its mattress was gone, letting the bare framework underneath show. Wearing a red sweater Edsel Ford had given me before he too went away, I had taken to standing at the window in his place, since he’d made good his escape and it seemed like someone ought to watch the traffic. I never started saying “Me,” though. I still knew the difference, and I wasn’t that far gone.

The cars went past and by and on out of the frame, but then one stopped to drop off a new prisoner. When the pirate who had captured her let her out and caught her arms to show her to us up here in the Cleaver Ward, I saw she had no top on, and that struck me as hard, since it was still and always winter and now there was dirty snow on the ground. Even Captain Teach must have thought so, because he’d just let her put on a dirty prison shift with stains down the front. Then the wind did a wild dance and kicked the light brown hair back off her face, and two green eyes looked up as if the wind had come from me. “Her,” I said, and pressed my fingers to the hard, hard glass. Next to me, Holden’s face was just as hard. “That cooze was sleeping with a
professor
, man, can you believe it?” he said. “I know which one, too—I thought he was after
me
! I wouldn’t have gone along, but I did think better of his
taste
back then. By the way, I’m sorry about your dad. But if you ask me,
she
deserves whatever she gets.”