Kevin Brown
It was scotch that got him, two years after labor got my mother and baby brother, Eddie.
In his hospital room, before he died he pulled my head to his wheezing mouth and said, “Son, don’t make my mistakes. You drink whiskey straight, eat some bread first so it’s easier on the guts.”
Since my arrest, the room I live in is mostly white, but I don’t have padded walls or any of that other Cuckoo Nest crap in the movies. What I have is a twelve-by-fifteen inch window that looks out at the recreation yard. My small rectangular world where doctors occasionally pass through with clipboards and coffee cups. Where patients sometimes waddle by, watching their feet, ashamed but too gone to realize it.
In his office, Dr. Wynn says this is not a nut house. Behind a miniature globe on his desk, he says to think of it as a vacation resort for the mind.
On the globe, I’m looking at China, where my mother was born.
I’m looking at the western border of Australia.
And, his fingers laced in front of him, Dr. Wynn is talking in fragments: “…Post Traumatic Syndrome…displays of violent behavior…”
Due East, I see Africa.
-The Florida Keys.
“…chronic depression…making you a threat to yourself and society.” Leaning over, Dr. Wynn waves a hand in my face, snaps his fingers, and says, “Your mind just needs a vacation.”
In small plastic cups, they give you five hundred milligrams of pink pills. They give you a thousand milligrams of white. Three thousand baby blue’s and you’re vacationing at a nut house.
So why I’m here, it started with fighting, but I’m almost certain I’ve probably never thrown a punch in my life. It all went down at a school dance with a guy who smiled like Maverick in Top Gun. What happens is, I’m feeling weird again, and in the auditorium, the thump from the speakers makes my head feel like an inflated balloon in handcuffs.
If I black out, I’m not really sure, but suddenly I’m against the wall, tangled in crepe paper decorations draped from the ceiling, with my cheeks gripped in a kiss. Maverick, he’s yelling at me to tell him just who in the fuck am I trying to spit on, and in the strobe lights, he’s screaming in stop animation.
I try to calmly explain that I have a very loud headache, but through my puckered lips it comes out “fuck yourself.” He stop motion slaps me, and every one gathering around us is all black figures and fluorescent teeth.
My dad once showed me, by craning the hand and using the back of the wrist, you can drive a man’s balls into his rib cage cavity like a pinball. When he bends over, he said to bring Mr. Crane up through his teeth and they’ll meet his balls in the middle. “As small as you are, you’ll probably still get your ass kicked,” he said, “but he’ll gum his Fruit Loops in the morning.”
One night after Mom died, crying on the floor, he said it’s an evil bastard who’ll take away the best thing a man has in life. He wiped his eyes on the back of his sleeve and said, “Unless it’s a really good bottle of brandy.”
Tangled in crepe streamers, my head like fork prongs scraping out the cavity of my skull and my lips still blowfished out, my hand cranes at the wrist by my waist. Then I sort of close my eyes and imagine Maverick in a pilot’s uniform, his hand draped dead-bird like over his flight helmet, his dark shades the same color as his black smile where his teeth used to be. After this, the music booming some rock ballad, I start to feel kind of ashamed about what I’m fixing to do. It’s true, only an evil bastard will take away the best thing a man has.
He slaps me again and, my ears ringing, I hear my mother telling me, “Whether people love you or hate you, make sure they remember you.”
So what I do, with my face burning and the hundreds of glowing teeth standing around, I reach down and unsheathe my seven-inch survival knife strapped around my right calf. I raise my shirt, carve a large bloody X into my chest, and say, “If I’ll do this to me, imagine what I’d do to you.”
Dr. Wynn says I wasn’t sent here for fighting so much as for what I did to myself and what I said I’d do to Maverick. He tells me saying this is a threat, like yelling fire in a theater. Or saying bomb on a Cathay Pacific commercial flight. “It’s sort of psychological assault.”
In my room, staring out the window, I’m vomiting every thirty minutes. My head feels swollen inside and my hands won’t stop shaking. I remember a newspaper cartoon my mother cut out and hung on the refrigerator. On it, an ape is holding out a wrench in half of the picture, while a robot is holding out a man in the other. Tired and thinking about this, with Mom starting to talk in my head, I tell him psychological assault is our high-speed relationships. Personal contact, my mom says through me, is a web page. The chat room is the sign language of the masses.
You type “lol” to laugh out loud. A smiley face means happy. A frowning face means you’re sad.
Click “Enter.” Click “Send.”
Everyone’s walking around in their own twelve-by-fifteen inch worlds. “The beauty of communication,” we tell him, “is lost in the speed.”
My father, he hated personal contact. Any communication. He said the more people you know, the more you’ll owe. “Anyone who extends a hand, they always have a wrist attached.”
Dr. Wynn tells me times change. Cultures and societies transform and we adapt. “This is order,” he says. “What separates us from the animals.”
Still staring out the window, me and Mom tell him, “The only thing separating us from machines is the orgasm.”
In his office, with the lights off Dr. Wynn says he is going to teach my mind to relax through hypnotherapy. He tells me this will help me focus and give me breathing space, which may help ease the headaches, which have started blurring my vision again.
On his desk there's a metallic device, a contraption with five chrome balls hung motionless from strings like bodies from nooses after the kicking is done. He's saying something about focusing my attention on them while he counts down from five.
"In your mind," he says, "you'll see a red door. When you see it, go in." The balls start to tick tick tick, and he says that inside this door is my comfort place.
"Focus," he tells me, and then, with the clicking balls starting to echo, I see red. My hand is stretched out, and I float toward it and take the doorknob.
The doctor, outside my head, he's saying five.
Through the door, by the smell of incense, I know I'm in my old house. When Mom was alive. When Dad was sober.
And by the Post-It notes clinging to the lampshade, I can tell I'm in the living room. Mom's Post-It notes, she told me you can teach someone the length of a book, but the real lesson will always fit on a Post-It.
In our old living room, Mom and Dad are lying on each end of the sofa, their bare feet meeting in a pyramid. I see it's the night she was trying to teach him Chinese, and he's asking, "How are you doing?" in broken Mandarin. “Ni…hao…ma?” he says, his eyes turned up in thought.
The Post-It notes shadow the walls like peeling skin.
One of the notes says, Don't think of outcomes, but of the actions that lead to them.
Another one says, Use no way as the only way. You are bound by nothing.
Dad stumbles over, "How do you feel today?" and Mom throws her head back over the arm of the sofa, laughing.
Then, they are gone. No Mandarin or pyramiding feet. No Post-Its. No echo of Mom's laugh.
Outside my red door, the doctor is saying four.
I go left into the dining room, and Mom and Dad and I are having dinner. She's rubbing my cheek over her salad and saying, "Son, always live the length of an arm in the span of a finger." Across the table, laughing, Dad nudges Mom's elbow and holds up his middle finger. "Just make sure it's this one and you'll live longer."
Then, we also vanish. The table is clear except for a thin layer of dust like some forgotten tablecloth.
Three.
By the scales of curled notes on the refrigerator, I know I’ve moved into the kitchen.
One of the notes says, No limit should be your only limit.
Another says, Whether people like you or hate you, make sure they remember you. Beside this, a cartoon cutout of an ape and a robot.
Through the kitchen entryway, to the left is their bedroom. On the bed, Dad's rolled on his side and Mom's hand is slid out of the covers around his tanned waist. Both of them are snoring.
From behind, a thump like dropped bricks makes them disappear. It's dark at the other end of the hall, and as I start to move closer to where the sound was, blood puddles out of the black as if the shadow is bleeding.
Two.
In the dark, I hear Mom breathing short and quick, like when she practiced to have Eddie. I lean forward, and a bloody hand reaches out of the shadow and grabs my arm. Then, in Chinese Dad is trying to say, "It's all right. Everything's all right."
"Mom?" I ask the bloody hand holding my arm, and the hall lights up. On the floor, Dad's holding Mom across his lap. He's covered in the blood pooling out below her like wings. "Ni hao ma?" he says, and he’s starting to cry. "Ni hao ma?"
Looking up at me, without much breath, Mom holds up here middle finger, smiles, and says, “Live longer.”
After this, like rewind I'm back down the hall, past the bedroom, and through the kitchen. I'm past the dusty dining table and into the empty living room. I'm through my red door and out, where the hung chrome balls are still tick tick ticking.
Where my head is still killing me.
Where the doctor is saying one.
I've been at the hospital eleven months now. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think the new medication is making me hallucinate.
They give you a million milligrams of something yellow.
In the TV room, the other patients slide around in their white gowns like cliché ghosts. What people call insane, they're mostly just trapped in memories.
Sanity is really the ability to forget.
The lady on my left, Ellie, speaks only in mother quotes and practices the Heimlich on all the other patients. Her daughter choked at dinner two years ago and Ellie panicked. Her daughter died, but since her stay in the hospital Ellie's perfected the Heimlich.
When God closes one door, he opens a window to jump out.
Tommy, a six-year patient, always sings songs his mother taught him. She used to sing him to sleep until one night she mixed a gin on muscle relaxer rocks and went to sleep herself.
I'm coloring in a notebook and Ellie comes up to me. I stand and raise my arms, and she steps behind me, wrapping her arms around my waist, opened hand over fist. In quick, forceful jerks she squeezes in and up below my ribcage. After the third jerk, a half-dissolved pill shoots up into my mouth.
In the corner, Tommy's singing "We'll Gather at the River."
Ellie finishes and I swallow the pill again. I lower my arms and say, “Thank you.” With lifeless eyes she says, "Mother is the shame for God on the lips and hearts of all the children."
I tell her Mother is the name for God, and she walks over to another patient and begins the Heimlich again.
"Gather with the saints at the river!" Tommy sings.
A poster on the wall has a picture of an egg in a frying pan. It says: "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?"
With a crayon, I scribble out the word "questions" and above it write “difference.”
After Eddie and Mom died, Dad got drunk and stayed that way the rest of his life.
After their funeral, he came home, took all my mother's clothes out, and smoothed them lengthwise on her side of the bed. He put her underwear and stockings on her pillow and pulled the covers up over the pile. He tucked the sides in firm.
He told me he might be falling apart after he started to hear her snoring in the bedroom. Walking by the barely cracked door of the room, he would peek in as if to see if the pile of clothes, still smelling like Mom, was sleeping peacefully. He talked in whispers and if you spoke too loud, he'd slap you on the head, put his finger to his lips, and point toward the room. Then he went around the house, picking up strands of Mom's dark hair off the floor and all the furniture. At first, he put the hair together in long locks and kept them balled up in his shirt pocket. After his skin began to turn red from drinking, he put the balls of hair in his whiskey bottles and drank them like tequila worms.
My school counselor was who noticed I was getting sick. When the headaches got worse, and the black outs started. Dad, he stopped eating and started forgetting to feed me. The counselor called the police and told them my bones looked knotted out of my skin like spikes.
After that, my father and I went to two different kinds of homes—I moved into a foster home. He took a mind vacation. I only saw him once more, a few minutes before he died, twitching and purple and asking for one more drink for the long road.
My father gone, the day I was taken away I looked into Mom and Dad's bedroom and could still see him lying there, like the night I looked in at him passed out by the covered pile of clothes. He'd pulled one of Mom's dress sleeves out of the pile and draped it over his waist. The sleeve rose and fell with his breathing, and for an instant, the pile began to rise and fall as well, swelling and deflating in perfect unison with Dad's sleep.
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I’m in one of our meetings and Dr. Wynn is behind his desk, fingers laced on his clipboard, staring over the rims of his glasses, and occasionally glancing down at his Rolex.
I tell him I keep seeing my brother in a baby-swing by my bed.
And Dr. Wynn starts talking in fragments again, his voice a droning monotone with the cadence a professional falls into when they're just going through the motions.
Without really thinking, I jump up, slam my hands on his desk and slide them right typewriter style. Everything on the desk plows over the edge and scatters like blood across the floor.
Pens. Picture frames with photos of his wife and daughter. His "#1 Dad" coffee cup. A few sheets of paper back-flip in the air and feather down.
The miniature globe rolls across the tile, Antarctica over Greenland, and stops in the corner.
I grab a gold letter opener and, reaching over the desk, stab him in the shoulder. Dr. Wynn falls back out of his chair and hits the shelf. With books falling over his head like attacking birds, he yells, "George! George, get the hell in here, now!"
I lay the bloody letter opener on his desk and begin picking up the mess when I’m suddenly slammed to the floor from behind. The orderly is on top of me, and I’m kicking like a trapped rabbit on the doctor's desk decorations. My left shoulder shifts above my ear, and I hear two bones probably not made to touch grinding deep.
Before I pass out, I look at the globe in the corner, Mexico now North, and tell George the whole world's upside down.
I wake up strapped to a bed. My arm hurts, and a new doctor is at the door. He sits in a chair and says, "I'm going to cut to the chase. Can you tell me why you attacked Dr. Wynn? Because, you know, he's a good man who only wanted to help you."
My arm slung in a half-hug, I open my mouth and lick my dry lips. I want to tell him that anymore, the world is just First then second then third. Just next next next. That with Dr. Wynn, everything in his life is routine. I want to say all he needs is a car wreck or an illness. A threat or an attack. Something to make him live the length of an arm in the span of a finger.
This is what I want to tell him, but what I say is, "Boredom."
His lips go tight and his brow m's down. "You're saying you attacked your doctor with a letter opener because you were bored?"
"Not me," I say. "Him."
Since the attack, the room I live in is mostly white, with padded walls and all that Cuckoo Nest crap in the movies. There's no window, no twelve-by-fifteen inch world where patients are framed like memories in photographs. Where doctors occasionally pass through with clipboards and coffee cups, just machines but too unashamed to realize it.
I know the way out, though.
When the doctor tells you your mother's radical views and your father's self-destructive behavior have somehow merged in your psyche, you nod your head. When the doctor says this has created a violent tug-of-war personality in you, you say, "I see." When the doctor tells you it's okay to cry, tell him, "I completely agree," put your head in your hands, and cry.
This is progress. Conformity is rehabilitation.
I'm in my new room and the new doctor is sitting across from me, his hands laced in his lap, occasionally glancing down at his Rolex. "Tell me about your mother," he says, "your best memory of her."
What to say, at first I'm not sure. Then, I tell him about when Mom and I went to the mall a week before she died to get a baby-swing for Eddie. In the food court, Mom eating chocolate ice cream for lunch, she had chocolate running down both sides of her mouth. On her nose. Hanging from her chin.
Everyone was staring and kind of shaking their heads.
Winking at me, she said, "Eat your chicken and walnut crepe in small, delicate bites." Louder, she said, "Above your caviar, you keep your back perfectly straight, your elbows off the table." Leaning over to a table of disgusted women, she said, "But chocolate ice cream, I eat my way!"
After lunch, we were at the foot of the escalators and I asked why people always walk up and down them instead of riding. "If they're gonna walk, why not take the stairs?"
She smiled, her eyes wide, and said, "Let's go up the down way."
I looked at the crowd of people coming down, then at the ones going up. "But everybody's going up this way," I said.
She laughed, all round and beautiful and caked in dried chocolate ice cream. "Yeah, but go this way and you meet more people."
My mother--my God, was she always right?
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