Shades of Eva (32 page)

Further back toward the ravine there’s a
side door to the infirmary that more resembles the sidewalk
entrance of your typical street-side hotel. There, a small walkway
leads to a small porch beneath an Infirmary East entrance sign.
There is a green awning covering the porch. All that’s missing to
finish the feel is a doorman and maybe a revolving door.

The south or back of the square is called
Ward E. Ward E has a gateway cut into it through which a driveway
passes. This is the place where food and supply enter. The entryway
is secured by means of a large, black iron gate. This port, if you
will, allows one to see into the vast, central courtyard—the center
of the complex—which doubles as a recreation area for the Asylum’s
inhabitants.

I didn’t have a lot of time to gawk, but the
interior of the yard—what Dr. Podjen referred to as the Quad—struck
me as something akin to a sort of purgatory. It wasn’t a prison
yard; it wasn’t a playground. It wasn’t barren, either. It was
oddly gardenesque, a space that had a tranquil, almost serene look
about it, one that seemed to prompt the sort of meditation and
introspection necessary for such purgation, I suppose.

Punctuating the center of the Quad was the
enormous base of the water tower. I thought immediately of the
postcard Amelia had shown me in my grandfather’s attic. It
displayed a picture of this very water tower from 1954. The tower,
from a distance, appeared more like a wall. It shot straight up
110-feet like a giant Redwood tree sprouting from the middle of an
old English garden. It appeared as if the entire institution had
been built up around this one gigantic structure. And it had.

I noticed what looked like a little house at
the tower’s apex. That detail wasn’t visible in the postcard
picture. Dr. Podjen, in his book, identified this “little house” as
the pump-house, the mechanics of the water tower, the machinery
that provides hydration to the campus and its patrons, and power
for the all of the sprinkler systems, as well.

There’s a camera affixed to every
wall around Coastal State, about every thirty feet apart. Seeing
them prompted me to don my Ray Bans and start walking like I didn’t
appear too out of place.

I continued to follow the east wing back
toward the Sax halfway house at the rear of the grounds. Just
behind the halfway house you can get a good feel for just how steep
the ravines are. These evergreen-lined slopes drop off at about a
sixty-degree slant, and descend about eighty feet. Cascadia creek
cuts a path east- and westward at the bottom of the slopes, and you
can hear its faint trickle as it works its way through the hills.
It’s a rather peaceful place given all things.

Oddly enough, and I’m not sure most people
would have noticed this, but I was standing at the edge of the
ravine alongside the one and only black oak tree growing on the
premises. It sprang out of an otherwise small forest of exclusive
pines along the ravine. It was as out of place as a pine tree would
have been in a grove of oaks.

I put my hand on it and ran my fingers in an
arc around its trunk. It was a relatively young tree, perhaps
forty-years-old or so. Beneath me, a bed of acorns made a crunch
beneath my boots that reminded me of my days in Neah Bay and the
sounds of lumberjacking trees much like that one. Perhaps it was
planted there by someone, I remember thinking, but I saw no marker
indicating it was any kind of memorial tree. It was just there,
seemingly out of place, much like I felt.

Just beyond the creek at the nearest rim of
the valley in the distance there are a set of railroad tracks. The
Michigan Central Railroad used to run through there, and also the
Norfolk Southern. Freight still passes through the valley by train,
and on any given day, I’d learn, it isn’t uncommon to see patients
with an affinity for trains (not unlike my own) standing atop the
ravine, near to where I was standing, peering down into the valley
to simply watch and listen to the trains pass, staring out over the
canopy of those pines into the distance beyond toward the campus of
Southwestern and its bright, city lights at night, as I imagine my
parents did on many occasions.

I could remember riding the Norfolk Southern
through River Bluff a few times, through that very valley below, in
fact. That was Mitchell Rennix the Drifter, or some alias of his,
an alias with no desire to explore these higher grounds. He’d
stared upward toward these pines, upward in probable drunkenness
and certain resentment, toward the water tower—a structure that
symbolized little more to him than a stake driven into the ground
where his parents had met. It had been a symbol of degradation and
shame to him, and what lay around that stake was a God-forsaken
place, not a garden or arboretum.

For that drifter, and for his harshness, I
felt a certain pity. I threw my hand in the air and waved as a kind
of pitiful gesture to the man I once was. It was a gesture of
newfound appreciation for what my mother went through, and for the
sacrifices she made to preserve her dignity and the truths she knew
defined it. I wanted that drifter to see the man I was
becoming.

After seeing my grandfather’s attic
treasure, and allowing Amelia’s wash of the whole perspective to
cascade over me, the water tower pictured in that postcard no
longer symbolized shame and degradation. It was a stake in time,
one that symbolized a rare instance of happiness in my parents’
lives, a place where they’d met, an intersection between the
promise of what might have been and the reality of what ultimately
came to be, much like the intersection between good and evil, much
like a scar, and it marked another zero point in my life. It was a
place where my parents met, a time that no longer symbolized a
fracture; for if they had never met, I would have never been. That
wasn’t a fracture in time—that was a moment of fate, and that was a
blessing.

Standing at the edge of that ravine, I
realized, perhaps for the first time, that my life had meaning, and
for once I was happy to have been born. It was a good feeling. And
then again, maybe it was the Dilaudid!

***

1:00 P.M.

I made my way back up the east walkway past
the infirmary, past the ambulance entrance and around to the front
of the admin center past the Chapel, Ray Bans and gloves donned,
walking as if I owned the place. I walked to the front steps,
pulled her door open, and finally entered her.  

I gave pause to take in the Victorian
architecture of her space; an architecture suggestive of a bygone
era. Her marble floors and her vaulted ceilings gave an acoustic
hollowness to her foyer, one you might expect from an old, aging
mental institution. It reminded me of a fifties-era train depot.
Her marble’s checkerboard pattern echoed that sentiment, and I
could faintly hear the voice of Elvis singing in her corridors: Are
you lonesome tonight? Do you miss me tonight?

A long, rather ornate staircase stood before
me like something out of a plantation mansion, not an insane
asylum. I could almost see the Belle’s of the Asylum ball strolling
up and down those stairs, hoopskirts swaying and smiles being flung
like blown kisses toward every onlooker and every admirer.

I looked to my right where my attention was
being drawn in by an elevator. Its stainless steel door was shining
like an opaque, silvery window through which something seemed to be
calling to me. The sensation scared me, and I turned away.

My attention was then drawn to a rack of
brochures near the wall to my left. One got my attention. It was
titled Facts for Consumers and Families. It outlined the Asylum’s
procedures for admission, guidelines for prospective patients, and
a chronology of the place. The brochure told me I that was in a
mental hospital, but the elevator door, now whispering, or
vibrating more like it, seemed as if it was begging to differ. It
seemed to be whispering, step in here and I’ll show you where you
really are!  

I reached a hand into the pocket cradling my
Valium, opened the bottle and withdrew one—or two—I don’t remember,
tempting Happy-Face’s return. I withdrew a couple more Dilaudid to
go along with the Valium, and swallowed.

I made my way to the reception area and
entered a small office. A thin wooden table with an adjoining bench
furnished the space, each bolted ominously to the floor. No sooner
had I noticed the water cooler was secured in the same manner,
someone appeared behind the Plexiglas.

“Can I help you?” said a pretty brunette of
perhaps twenty-five. Her nametag read Daisy Jenkins. It was
her.

“Think we talked to you on the phone—"

“We?”

“Yes, you and me.”

“Yes, it was me you talked to.”

Daisy smiled. She seemed a happy, carefree
spirit. She looked to be around Amelia’s age, maybe a bit younger.
She had long brown hair that she had pulled into a ponytail,
bedroom-brown eyes, and fair skin. She was athletic, about the same
height as Amelia, not as ripped, but trim in her own way…and that
smile. What a good man wouldn’t give to wake up to that smile every
day.

She slid a manuscript through a slot built
into the countertop, and said, “Here, fill this out.”

I took the packet, doing my best not to
burst out laughing.

“You don’t quite look like your voice
sounded,” Daisy said, smiling again. I wasn’t sure what she meant,
and squinted at her, trying to stifle my laughter like some
giggling, pre-pubescent boy.

“I mean you’re taller.”

“Oh. Came out that way,” I replied. “What do
short men sound like?”

“Not like you,” Daisy answered, batting
those long eyelashes of hers.

I hurried back to my seat afraid I was
smiling more than the conversation demanded. After a few minutes
filling out the papers, I had to ask, “Am I in some sort of
danger?”

“What do you mean?” Daisy replied.

“These windows…and the bolted
furniture?”

“Oh, those are precautions.  They don’t
like open doors in this place.”

“Why not?” I said, smiling cautiously.

“Well, not everyone is nice to everyone in
here.”

“So, that why they got you working behind
Plexiglas?”

Daisy began laughing, picking up on my
humor, I suppose. “I’m nice. It’s the patients you have to worry
about. And this isn’t Plexiglas.” Daisy knocked on whatever it was.
“It’s an explosion-grade carbon polyethylene composite. Would you
like to tap it?” 

Would I like to tap it?

I looked at the window more closely, and
then carefully at my reflection. I was smiling like someone was
tickling my left armpit with a peacock’s feather. I shifted my eyes
from the reflection of Happy-Face to Daisy’s pretty face. She was
smiling, too—just about as broadly as I was, but she wasn’t looking
at me. I think she had embarrassed herself by her question.

I tapped the glass, anyway, smiled at her,
hoping I wasn’t coming across too creepy. Demurely, she turned
away.

The Asylum wanted to know
the basics:
age, address, criminal background, employment history, education,
medical background, and references. I did my best to try and
remember the profile Amelia had cooked for me. Chester Imil, an
armed security guard with a mercenary mentality. I had to laugh,
the drifting drunk hoping for sobriety that I was seemed to be
screaming at me from between the lines of the lies I was writing.
And then the face of the Joker out of a Batman comic book lunged at
me and grabbed the sides of my mouth and pulled them upwards. I
thought I heard him say, ‘Riddle me this, you pusswad!’–and then it
dawned on me: that was something the Riddler might say?

I shook my head at the chances of success
for any of this. I finally reached the back section of the
application, that of Catell’s rather long 16 Personality Factor
Test. Taking a test like the 16PF is sort of like having God’s eye
on you, a questioning eye that searches out truth, two truths
really: those you’re aware of and those truths to which you aren’t.
It’s hard to beat a good personality test with an eye like Catell’s
watching you.

Catell’s 16PF was his generation’s lie
detector test. In essence I was hooked up to William Catell’s
version of the polygraph. The best minds of Coastal State would be
deciphering the answers that I gave it. They’d rank me, somehow, on
the spectrum of humanity I was so unfamiliar with.  And once
ranked, it would be either a yes or a no. I was almost hoping for a
no. The place scared me. She was off-putting as grand institutions
such as her are to those who’ve never strolled through her
corridors or set foot on her premises.

I finished in remarkable, almost unblinking
time, though, and handed the finished product to Daisy.

Good thing I had read Catell’s book. If I
had answered those questions honestly, the docs at Coastal State
might have wanted to commit me instead of hire me. I answered with
good humor. I denied any alcoholism or substance abuse; I denied
sobriety, too. Somewhere in there I admitted that I drank on
occasion, an occasion that happened only ten to twenty times a
year, but one that had not happened in the last week.

I also said I’d never pissed on anyone
else’s lawn, but wasn’t averse to pissing on my own. I hoped the
docs weren’t going to make me piss in a cup to make sure I wasn’t
drunk when I took the test, or worse—high. I had to trust Amelia
had done her homework on that one. She certainly hadn’t expressed
any concern for a drug screen—hell, she’d just handed me
tranquilizers and a narcotic and had made love to High-Face to
boot.

Turns out the Asylum biggies didn’t question
my urine.

I denied any history of hallucinations or
mental illness. That denial, too, was a lie. My entire life had
seemed one long hallucination. I denied any malicious intentions. I
feigned compassion and I feigned a protective spirit, although
compassion and protection were about the last things I had to offer
this place.