Silent Boy (23 page)

Some luck, I thought.

‘I’m sure they’re okay, Kev. Social services would be watching. After your going away, social services would watch your stepdad.’

He shook his head. ‘No. Not really.’ Slowly he let out a long breath of air. ‘They never really care. If you get beat up just a little, they turn their heads and pretend they don’t notice. If you get mucked about with just a little, they never really pay attention. There’s too many big things they got to worry about. But what they don’t know is that it isn’t the big things that get you in the end. It’s the little things. Someone whacks you once every night of your life just for being alive, that hurts a lot worse than being knocked half-dead once.’

I nodded and retreated back to the bed, where I sat down. My heart ached. It was a dreary, disconsolate pain in my chest, weighing down like a wet towel inside me.

He turned again and looked at me. ‘How can you care about a world like this? I don’t really want to even be part of it. I’m crazy. And I think being crazy probably isn’t so bad. I mean, if worse comes to worst, all they do is pump you full of stuff and you don’t feel anything. But Carol wasn’t as lucky as me. She didn’t go crazy first. I think maybe she ought to have. I think there’s lots worse things than crazy.’

K
evin certainly seemed to have settled that matter in his own mind. Whatever had happened to him over the summer during his brief flirt with the outer world, he had returned, deciding normalcy was not for him. He was crazy; he was completely resigned to staying that way. And perhaps it was that resolve that caused his incredible depression. I imagine concluding that the life he was currently living was the best available to him would be pretty shattering news.

I found this attitude no small thing to deal with, particularly in light of the hospital situation he was in, where drugs to dope him into incoherence were distributed every four hours. Just as bad was the token system all the patients were on. They earned points for appropriate behaviors and these points determined all aspects of their day, including going to therapy sessions, attending the on-unit school programs and gaining passes to go off the hospital grounds. It was a perfect setup for someone convinced he wanted to stay crazy.

Kevin refused to cooperate at every turn. If he did not feel like getting up in the morning, he did not get up. And he lost points. If he did not want to wash, he didn’t wash. More points gone. If he did not want to go to the schoolroom, he did not go. Each thing lost him more and more points or at least did not give him the opportunity to earn more, but Kevin was so unmotivated that none of the privileges he was losing was worth enough to make him try. The bottom line was seclusion, either in the patient’s room or ultimately in the seclusion cell. Kevin, after a few weeks, became almost permanently confined to his tiny room. He loved it. What they ought to have done was boarded up his window.

Understandably, the hospital staff was in a frenzy over him. He was so passively uncooperative that they were ill equipped to deal with it. He did not rage or scream or do anything aggressive, which merited time out in the locked seclusion cell, although when they came to the end of their ropes with him, they occasionally put him in for a spell anyway, to see if it might motivate him out of his lethargy. It didn’t. The psychiatrist upped his dose of antidepressants. No change. The staff decided to try the opposite of their normal routine. Kevin was not allowed to enter his room unless he earned the privilege, but the only place to keep him was in the TV room or the games room and they were hardly nonreinforcing. Or in the hallway where he would sit on the floor outside his room, his cloak of silence wrapped around him, and stare at the staff and visitors as they went by, his long legs sticking out across the corridor to trip unsuspecting passersby.

My greatest difficulty grew to be simply seeing him. I couldn’t half the time. He got put on a system where he had to earn points to have Jeff or me come, and often as not, he wouldn’t earn them. Kevin maintained a slightly closer relationship with Jeff, and occasionally he did appear to make a token effort to get Jeff up there on Jeff’s two nights, but even these he lost frequently.

It was like swimming in molasses – a lot of effort and very little progress. Jeff was more troubled by the situation than I was because he objected not only to our stalemated position but also to the types and quantities of medication Kevin was on. I entirely agreed with him but, because I normally couldn’t do much about things like medication, it didn’t eat at me. But for Jeff, who was used to being able to prescribe medication himself, it was agony to live with somebody else’s program when he thought it inappropriate, just because his ignominious status didn’t allow him to say anything.

I almost threw in the towel. Several times I consciously decided it would be better for all concerned to give up on Kevin. I mean, after all, what did we have here? A kid who had been severely deprived and abused in childhood, who had spent most of his life in institutions, who demonstrated violent and aggressive behaviors, and perhaps most importantly, a kid whom nobody wanted. There was absolutely no one on the outside who cared one way or the other if Kevin improved. Just me. And Jeff. And we weren’t much. There’d been a whole lot of kids in my career with a great deal better prognoses than Kevin had and they hadn’t made it. Not a lot of kids did. Why did I bother to think this one might? Why did I keep endlessly chucking time and energy down the sewer? He sure never gave any signs of real promise.

It got so easy to think of giving up. And I knew what they were, those thoughts. I had had them so often before. They were the mind’s way of preparing itself, the process of mentally letting go, so that when the inevitable happened and I had to give up, I could accept it. Even before I had decided, my subconscious was clearing the deck.

God
. The thoughts preyed on me. Especially when I had bothered to make a trip clear over to Mortenson and was turned away at the last minute because Kevin had lost points. Or when I had missed him for four or five sessions running and my life began to move on nicely without that 4:30 trip. Or when we sat face to face – or rather, face to back, because he’d always have his back to me while he stared out of the window – and I’d not talk and not do anything and just sit there feeling the minutes of my life trickling away while this kid did nothing. It was so incredibly easy to consider giving up. I even tried it tentatively a couple of times. I was supposed to come and I didn’t. I phoned with false excuses. A lot different this, than months before when Kevin had become so distraught because I had missed one day. We skipped so often now that I never knew if he missed me or not. If he did, he never said.

But I didn’t give up. I don’t know why. There were a whole lot more reasons why I should have. But I didn’t. I never quite ever got around to doing it. I meant to, but I didn’t. I kept on.

Kevin, however, seemed to have given up long ago. He got worse and worse and worse. It got harder and harder to see him and harder to do anything with him when I did see him. I wanted to be understanding. In the office with Jeff or at night when we were eating, I’d keep coming up with intellectual reasons for what Kevin was doing to himself and why. But when I was in the room with him, frustration overpowered me. My own insecurities would surface eventually. Maybe he didn’t like me. Maybe he was angry with me. Maybe he thought I’d let him down or not done enough. Maybe he just thought I was stupid. But mostly I just grew angry. As the days continued to string out and September became October, I became angrier and angrier with him, resenting him and the time I gave to him. We became in the end like troubled lovers, unable to live with one another and yet unable to live without each other either.

I came after several days of being absent because Kevin had not earned sufficient points to see me. He had missed Jeff as well that week. In the end I suspect it was the hospital staff who capitulated and let me in because, when I reviewed his chart, there was no evidence Kevin had done anything more to earn my presence that day than any other.

The weather outside was fierce. It was late October and the cadaveric feel of November was in the wind. Daylight saving time still smuggled us an extra hour at evening but it really wasn’t enough. I arrived late that afternoon, and the day was bound into darkness.

Kevin stood before the window, as usual. He did not bother to acknowledge my arrival. There were no lights on in his room, and he peered out into the half-gloom, his silhouette blending into the grayness beyond the window.

I flipped the light switch on.

No response.

‘Kev, it’s me.’

No response.

‘What do you see out that window?’ I asked.

No response.

‘Kevin?’

I studied his form. His hands were behind his back, one clasping the wrist of the other. I set my box down.

‘Kevin.’ The seconds slid by.

‘
Kevin!
’

No movement. No nothing, as if he hadn’t heard me.

The anger over all these wasted weeks began to froth up inside me. ‘Kevin,’ I said, ‘turn around.’

When he did not respond I approached him. ‘I said, turn around, Kevin.’

Nothing.

‘I said turn around, Kevin. When I say turn around, I
mean
turn around.’ I grabbed his shoulder. While he did not turn to acknowledge me, he resisted my grip, his muscles going rock hard under my fingers. Yet, he wasn’t a match for me. When I gave him a shove, it turned him.

‘Damn you, Kevin, turn around when I’m talking to you. I’m sick of this. I’m sick to death of sitting here in this stupid room and having you ignore me. So turn around and stay turned.’

He glared at me.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Kevin? Acting like this? Do you want to stay in this place?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘What’s the matter with you? You’re wasting your whole life in here.’

‘So what?’ He shrugged and turned back to the window. ‘I couldn’t care less.’

With force, I grabbed his shoulder and yanked him around to face me. The power of it set him off balance and he fell back against the window. He remained there, regarding me. I could not read his feelings.

Silence. We sized one another up.

‘What have you got in this life, Kevin? Are you going to just lie down and die? Are you going to confirm everything your stepfather said about you? Are you just going to give up?’

‘I don’t care. Go away. Just leave me alone, would you?’

‘You’ve got to care, Kevin.’

‘Why?’

‘Because. Because this is all you’ve got, Kevin, and the only way to make it better is to change it. Nothing else will, no dreams, no fantasies, no fairy godmothers. You’ve got to do it. Nothing else will.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘You’ve
got
to care,’ I cried.

‘Why?’

‘
I
care!’

‘Why? Who ever asked you to care? Who asked you to come butting into my life anyway?’

‘You did, as I recall.’

‘I did not. I never did. I never asked them back at Garson Gayer to go get you. And I never asked you to come back this time. And I sure never asked you to stay.’

That was a rather hard thing to rebut.

‘So how come you’re here then? What have you got to be mad about, when you never were asked here in the first place? How come you keep coming back when I don’t want you?’

There must have been a good answer to that. ‘Because,’ I said. It sounded like an answer to me.

‘Because why? Because someone pays you? Because you make your living off other people’s suffering?’

‘No.’

‘Because why then? Because you think you can help me? Are you coming because you think if you bleed on me enough, you’re going to save me from myself or something?’

I shook my head.

‘Then
why?
What
do
you care for? It isn’t any of your business.’

‘Because that’s just the way I am. Just like you’re the way you are.’

‘Then it’s a pretty stupid way to be. You’re pretty dumb, that’s all I can say. Dumber even than I thought.’

‘I never said I wasn’t.’

Dead silence. We glared at one another.

‘To be perfectly honest,’ he said, ‘I hate you.’ His voice was soft and matter-of-fact. ‘You come in here where no person has a right to be and you pry where no person has a right to pry. You made me hope I could be like everybody else. You made me think I deserved to be. When we both knew I’m not and I don’t.

‘Who are you anyway, to think you know anything? You’ve never been me. You just sit there and you pretend to know. But nothing’s ever happened to you like’s happened to me. All you’ve ever done is read about it in books. I lived it. So who do you think you are to believe you can help me?’

I hurt. Quite unexpectedly he had taken what was supposed to be my argument and had turned it against me. And he had hurt my feelings doing it. I found myself remarkably close to tears. Desperate not to cry, I spent a couple of exceedingly uncomfortable minutes.

Kevin looked me over. His gaze was hard, and I knew what he had said about hate was in its way very true.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I may not be much. And yes, I get paid for coming up here and maybe that makes me some sort of emotional prostitute to you, but I am here, aren’t I? Of all the possible people in your life who could be here, Kevin, I’m the one who is. If you don’t want me, then I’ll go. If that’s what you want, then that’s what I want too.’