Shades of Eva (27 page)

In my delirium in that dark motel room,
shaking more violently then I had all night; I couldn’t remember
what I told him I wanted to be. But I had told him something. And
something came to me—Dad’s laughter again. Whatever I said I wanted
to be, Dad laughed. But that was okay. He was laughing, not
screaming. He was happy, not hitting. If I had to invent a
ridiculous, unmemorable dream just to make him laugh, then I would
have. If I could have drank my way to oblivion to make Dad happy, I
would have. If it stopped the beatings, it was worth drinking. The
shed was a laugh factory, and the booze and my hangovers a running
joke. My addiction was the court in which Dad’s jester son
performed—and it made us both happy—at least for a while.

But it wasn’t funny anymore.

I kept looking around the motel room
wondering, for some reason, if the ghost of my grandfather Virgil
was going to reappear, and if it was really my grandfather who had
appeared to me earlier. He hadn’t reappeared, yet, whoever he was,
but I had the sense that he wasn’t far in the offing. The longer I
remained awake, and the longer I stayed sober, the closer he was to
returning. The longer I stayed sober, the sooner they would all
return.

Sobriety had always fed these apparitions,
and the only thing that seemed to keep them at bay was the same
thing that brought Dad closer to me—the drinking. I should have
associated alcohol with putrid smells and dark, creepy bugs and
toolsheds and rage and other bitter things, but I hadn’t. When I
was five, drinking was a way to turn off the noise in my head; it
was a way to connect to something besides the maddening hum of my
reality, our poverty, and the dysfunction that permeated our
lives.

I wanted a drink. I needed a drink to stop
the memories, but it was my want to see things clearly, to
experience things as they truly were, that kept me from drinking
that night. It was my respect for Amelia’s quest, to give her plea
a fighting chance that kept me sober that night. And besides,
Amelia had finished her bottle.

I looked outside the window and in the
distance I thought I heard my name being called. It was faint,
almost echoing in the rain-soaked atmosphere, but I heard it.
Mitchell! Mitchell! Somehow something, or someone, was calling me
to come. That voice had something to do with that toolshed and the
spirits within it. And so I left Amelia. I needed to open that shed
door again. I needed a drink. I needed peace.

I left the motel. I walked until
I
came to town, to the bars that would alleviate my tremors, and then
past them, past the convenience stores and markets whose neon
lights and flashing counter signs from within seemed to be calling
me like a siren singing some fated song. I passed them all, hugging
my trembling flesh as if it were freezing, though it was a balmy
seventy-seven degrees outside.

I came to my old block where Mom’s
banshee-like screams used to echo throughout the neighborhood like
a coyote’s cries. I peered eastward into the fields toward the old
Smith cornfield where all the scarecrows used to perch. It was on
this street where my mother gave her life, or where the stress had
taken it. It was in this place where a part of me died, too. I was
in her arms that night sleeping, my flesh pressed warmly into hers,
a five-year-old boy wrapped in his mother’s last embrace.

It was there, in the house I was
approaching, where I struggled to free myself from that hug. I
wondered if there was such a thing as a zero point on the earth,
that place where every other place is relative to it. I wondered if
I had a GPS in my hand if it wouldn’t read zero. Isn’t that where
home is—a zero place—that place that seems the birthplace of your
soul, that place where your conception is numbered, where every
other place stands relative to it?

My house was there. The shed was still
there. The juniper bushes behind the house were still there, though
overgrown now. The old white brick was now a deep red, and the shed
that was once burgundy red was now dirty white.

I stood in the bushes behind my mother’s
window, outside the bedroom in which she died. There was no
activity inside. There were no dogs barking, either. Just the
distant hum of traffic, and if one listened just right, the
ancestral echo of gut-wrenching cries and belly-laughter from
nearby apparitions who seemed somehow connected to this place.

Maybe these were the sounds of genetic
memory, the tangible subject of remembrance brought about through
some chemical aberration or some subtle rupture in space and time,
a chemical aberration similar to that of a dream, perhaps.

I craved something to stem the brooding fear
in my heart and the pain in my chest and in my ribs, and all of the
noise in my head, but there was nothing at hand. I thought,
instead, about the penetrating strength of Amelia’s personality and
the directness of her advice: to be with my memories and to embrace
them as parts of my heritage, as disturbing and as smothering as
that embrace might be.

I was to be present, but I wasn’t to forget
the eternity of all that came before, or all that lay ahead. I was
simply to be, and that would have to be enough.

Then a face flashed before me. It was the
face of our neighbor, and the mask he wore that night he raped me.
I turned to the yard next door where he used to be, and then to the
shed, wondering if Fred Elms’ wife was still alive. How she hated
my mother and me! I was the child who got her husband shot. Mom was
the monster who ruined everything. We were the demons she targeted
for days after that; the reason she incited older boys in the
neighborhood to throw stones through our windows, rocks with tiny
messages painted on them like
get out, murderer
,
liar
, and
crazy bitch
. They were messages of
retaliation, of the kind of rage only those who have lost a husband
in violent fashion could ever understand. How she hated my mother
and I!

I thought I heard the gunshots again, the
snaps that sounded like firecrackers, but weren’t. I watched the
neighbor’s head snap in succession with the gunfire, and the
burlap—yes, it was burlap that he wore—turn a dark red or purplish
black. I saw him fall, just like the smoking peacemaker falling
from my mother’s hand, and then I vomited—just like the little boy
vomited in that shed.

I vomited in the juniper bushes, not from
the effects of whiskey, but from the re-experience of that
violation and the detoxifying pain of withdrawal. I needed to purge
whatever poison had infected my spirit, and with every upheaval I
cursed the shed and Fred Elms and Fred Levantle, standing,
hovering, just feet from my zero place.

I left the junipers, calming myself as best
I could, zeroing out my world. I turned one last time to the
neighbor’s house, then to my mother’s window, then to the shed, and
then to the field. I trembled. I listened to the voices in my head
and the cries and the laughing. I watched the troubled faces of the
spirits around me, spirits wondering how long it would be until I
drank again, wondering if I would drink again, or if they could
stay for a little while longer, or maybe even, forever.

I took a deep breath in and took that first
step toward vengeance. I was drunk with the same kind of thirst for
violence that seemed to permeate my ancestry. It was all that kept
me from imploding that night, that and Amelia’s insistence that I
feel everything, especially this pain. Rage, she said, was a
component of grief, just like despair, and I should feel them
all.

If that retaliatory spirit of rage was part
of my inheritance, if that was what Amelia wanted me to accept,
then so it would be. I would proceed back to the motel to suffer
the night in delirium with my ancestral family whose single intent
seemed only to lead me back to the Asylum to reclaim one of us and
fulfill Mom’s prophesy. I had no doubt it was Elmer’s destiny, from
the poem my mother sang:

Babies don’t die when they are taken,

They lay still, but they reawaken.

Father and brother, he will slay,

And burn this place amidst I lay.

I made my way back to the Furley, finally
feeling something like fatigue. If only I could simply lay down and
stop remembering. If only I could sleep.

Amelia heard me knocking, and she let me in
without asking, without prying, and without digging. She had
something in her hand, and she seemed very relieved. It was the
poem I had written earlier.

“I missed you,” she said, and with a hug she
took me in.

***

Monday, April 22, 1995 

Sometime that Monday morning when I was
somewhere between hell’s bells and total neurological collapse, the
door opened and Amelia strolled in. I’d been watching the news
about the McVeigh bombing. Turns out he wasn’t alone in his
operation. Some guy named Terri Nichols had been assisting him.

Amelia came in carrying a newspaper and
flipped a light on and tossed two pill bottles at me, interrupting
the report, and said, “Here, take these. I went to a lot of
trouble.”

I looked at the digital reds on the clock
beside my bed. They read 7:42 AM. The bottles’ labels read
Lorazepam and Dilaudid. “This is Valium,” I said. “I don’t need a
tranquilizer, I need something for pain.”

“That’s what Dilaudid is, stupid. The Valium
will help with the DTs.”

I took in a long sigh. “I told you I don’t
want any pills. I want to do this—

“I know what you told me, but you are going
to have to take something or you’re going to have a freaking
seizure!”

“That would all be fine, but these aren’t
mine,” I said, looking at one of the labels. “Who’s Abigail Fan?
And where did you get these?”

“Corporal Fan just went to the clinic with a
cluster headache and a panic attack. She has PTSD and she was very
convincing.”

If I could have, I would have laughed.

Amelia handed me a glass of water and told
me to take one of each medication. Even though I felt like a bag of
bones being passed through a ringer backwards, I didn’t want them.
I was determined to cleanse my system of the poison I had been
ingesting, a cleansing that didn’t involve getting mixed up with
benzos and opiates.

“I really shouldn’t,” I said, trying again
to give the bottles back to her.

“Listen, I’m not putting up with your
withdrawal bullshit! It’s admirable, but you can’t quit whiskey
cold turkey or you could die! Now take the damn pills!”

Amelia turned around to set her bags on the
dresser. I unscrewed the cap of the Valium and took a couple, then
dumped three or four Dilaudid down my pie hole. Amelia turned back
around. I smiled up at her and stuck out my tongue to demonstrate
I’d taken the pills.

She seemed relieved. She then handed me the
newspaper she had brought in. “Here, you have an application to
fill out later.”

 “Application?”

The paper she had given me was a copy of the
River Bluff Gazette. She pointed to an ad she had circled that
read:

Coastal State Psychiatric Hospital

Wanted: Security Guard.

Experience Preferred.

Must work well with adverse populations!

754-555-3500

“I want you to get some more sleep and get
yourself together. We can’t blow this, and we need to move fast.
There are two other candidates they’re looking at for this guard
position.”

“Guard? What are you talking about?”

“Security guard, Mitchell! Pay attention!
The young woman who is going to handle your application likes men
like you, and she has influence with those who do the hiring. Her
name’s Daisy Jenkins?”

“I’m not a security guard! And what do you
mean men like me?”

“Young and rough around the edges…and
somewhat clueless. Did you forget our conversation last night? We
need to get access to the place, and the best way to do that is to
hire in.”

I guess a part of me didn’t want to
remember, but all the sudden it came back to me. She wanted me to
hire in as an alias…but as a security guard?

“How do you know this Daisy?” I said.

“She’s in reception.”

“How do you know she likes guys like
me?”

“I just know.”

“You seem to have things pretty figured out,
Sherlock!” I said. “You have anything else you want to tell me
before you get me totally wasted?”

“You took one of each pill, right?” Amelia
gestured to the bottles.

“Yes, one of each…or two or three or four. I
don’t know.”

Amelia shook her head at me, picked up the
bottles, and put them in her bag. “Just make sure you wear short
sleeves, and leave a little scruff!” Amelia tossed her purse onto
the room’s lone chest of drawers. “Daisy likes that sort of thing.
Besides, there’s one part of the application that you’ll have a
head start on.”

Amelia crossed to the nightstand and
retrieved a couple books and tossed them on the bed beside me. One
was a hardcover history of the River Bluff Asylum called: Asylum
for the Insane: A Brief History of the Coastal State Psychiatric
Hospital.

Apt title, I thought. Its author was a Dr.
William Podjen, a former medical superintendent of the place.

“You need to read Podjen’s book. It’s a good
primer on the place. Lots of history you need to be aware of.”

The other book was an old hardcover. Its
binder was a bit warped and the pages browning but in-tact. Its
title: The 16 Personality Factor Test, written by William
Catell.

“Coastal State uses the 16PF for screening
employees,” Amelia explained. “It’s kind of a personality test. I’d
get familiar with it. It’s old, but it’s reliable. They want a
mercenary with good morals. That means a leader with principals and
tough poise, not a follower. You need to be shrewd and a loner, but
not psychotic.”