Thanks to a sudden April shower, there were only two patients in the little garden courtyard yesterday morning. There was me, wearing a raincoat over my pajamas and robe, carrying an umbrella, and shuffling along in the flat-footed walk I’d copied off the other chemically restrained droolers I saw every day. Then there was a tall, stooped old lunatic with luxurious sorcerer’s eyebrows, who was wearing a transparent poncho over a shapeless, egg-stained brown cardigan.
“Spitting out the old meds again, eh?” he said, when we were out of earshot of the whitecoat assigned to the garden, who had taken refuge on a bench under the eaves.
“Hibbing owza wha?” I replied in a drooler slur: the trick was to pretend your tongue was as thick as a sirloin steak.
“You can fool them,” he said, “but you can’t fool me. I’ve been here forever. I know where the bodies are buried.” He delivered the words in machine-gun bursts: ratta-ta-tat.
Oh great, busted by a full-blown loony. I decided my best bet was to play along with him. “How’d I give myself away?”
“Aura. Your sulfur black has turned to primrose pink.”
“You can see auras?”
“I see everything. That’s why I’m here. Too much input, not enough filter. I used to think it was the antennas.” Pointing toward his upper molars. “Delusional behavior: they don’t need no stinkin’ antennas.”
“I’m C.R. myself,” I told him.
He nodded knowingly. “If I was you, sonny, I’d get the hell out of here. Before your next blood workup. Which will tell them you’ve been spitting out your meds. Which they’ll then start injecting.”
“But…but they took blood from me just the other day.”
“Then my advice to you is make like a banana and split. Decamp, posthaste before the results come back.”
“I can’t: I’m not a voluntary commit.”
“But you are on the third floor, right?” he said with a wink. Or it might have been a tic.
I nodded.
“Spend much time in the lounge?” A huge, dark, high-ceilinged room, oppressively overfurnished with high-backed leather chairs, carved oaken side tables, tasseled lamps, and sofas with deedle-ball trim. Even the television set, encased in a heavy walnut credenza, looked kind of Victorian.
“Of course.” What else was there to do? A guy can only take so many naps and so many walks.
“Ever looked behind the curtains?”
Dusty drapes of eggplant-colored velvet were drawn across the back wall; I’d never seen them opened. “No, but I saw the windows from the outside when they first brought me here. They’re all bricked up.”
“Windows? What windows? Forget the windows. Who said anything about windows?”
“Sorry.” The rain worsened; I angled the umbrella to shield him as well. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“Here’s the tale, boy. Once upon a time, I was lounging in the dayroom when the fire alarm went off. The whitecoat opened the curtains. Voila, a fire door opened onto an enclosed stairwell. Shoo, shoo, down we went. One flight, two flights, three flights. Then the all clear. Shoo, shoo, back up we came. But there must have been an egress down there somewhere. Either that,” the old loon added confidentially, “or they were leading us to our deaths.”
After lunch, I made my way to the lounge. Dressed in drab pajamas, a shapeless robe, and paper slippers, I took a seat at the chess table, and while moving the pieces aimlessly around the inlaid squares of walnut and maple, I discreetly surveyed the room’s inhabitants.
Standing in one corner, staring intently at something no one else could see, was Chuckles, the inmate whose bearing and behavior I had studiously observed and copied in order to perfect my ongoing imitation of a drugged-out drooler.
A few feet away from Chuckles, the saddest-looking man I’d ever seen rocked back and forth in a squeaky red leather armchair that was not made for rocking. Two more inmates, one man, one woman, were sitting together on an overstuffed sofa, watching soap operas on the antique TV, while in the far corner, a female lunatic was braiding a lanyard out of those shiny, linguine-shaped, vomity-smelling plastic strands they give you in occupational therapy.
As my eyes traveled around the big room, my glance inadvertently met that of the whitecoat sitting by the door, who had just looked up from his magazine. I let my eyes glaze over, then formed a spit bubble in my mouth and pushed it out onto my lower lip. The whitecoat’s interest faded instantly, and he broke off eye contact.
A few minutes later, when the lanyard braider, a middle-aged woman wearing a pleated skirt, drab blouse, and fingerless gloves, put down her basket and left the room, I glanced over at the whitecoat, who hadn’t seemed to notice. Nor did he look up from his magazine when she returned, which suggested to me that keeping track of comings and goings in the lounge might not be part of the man’s job description.
To test my theory, I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering in and out of the lounge at random intervals. Each time I left, I stayed away a few minutes longer, and each time I returned I sat in a different part of the room. When I was as sure as I could be that my absence would not be noted by the whitecoat, I returned to the chess table in the corner of the room, which was close enough to the curtains that I could smell the dust and see the faint, slightly lighter stripes where the old purple velvet had faded lengthwise along the pleats.
And there I waited, still as a mime, poised on the edge of my chair, until the lanyard lady broke into tears. When the whitecoat got up to see to her, I slipped behind the curtain and flattened myself against the wall.
There were scarcely eighteen inches of clearance between the wall and the back of the curtains. I sidled along until I reached a wide steel door with a safety-yellow sign above the breaker bar, barely readable in the dusty gloom: EMERGENCY EXIT!!! TO BE LEFT UNLOCKED AT ALL HOURS!!!
I gave the bar a gentle shove. It opened with a click that sounded deafening to my ears, but apparently went unnoticed on the other side of the curtain.
Closing the door quietly behind me, I found myself at the top of an enclosed, dimly lighted stairwell with concrete walls and iron steps. Moving noiselessly in my paper slippers, I descended three flights to the basement, then followed a trail of Day-Glo orange chevrons and illuminated exit signs down a long corridor with cinder-block walls, passing storage rooms, file rooms, branching corridors, and a boiler room with a yellow hazard triangle marked DANGER!!! NATURAL GAS!!! NO OPEN FLAMES!!! on the door. Either the sign painter at Meadows Road was paid by the exclamation mark, I decided, or else they had some manic-phase bipolar making signs in occupational therapy.
The trail of chevrons and exit signs continued on for thirty or forty feet, ending at another steel-plated, breaker-barred door marked EMERGENCY EXIT!!! TO BE LEFT UNLOCKED AT ALL HOURS!!! But on this door there was a second sign that read: TO BE OPENED ONLY IN EVENT OF EMERGENCY!!! ALARM WILL SOUND!!!
Shit. I must have been crazy to let that old nutcase get my hopes up, I told myself as I began retracing my steps, following the yellow chevrons backward through the basement maze. There was no easy way out of here. The second that alarm went off, the whitecoats would be all over me.
But when I passed the boiler room on my way back, the warning signs stopped me dead in my tracks. Danger, natural gas, no open flames!!!! What if there were some way to create a diversion, to set off some kind of explosion before I opened the exit door? I asked myself. The whitecoats would be so busy dealing with that, they might not even notice the alarm, or maybe they’d decide that it was the explosion that had blown it open, or maybe the alarm wouldn’t even work. Whatever happened, at the very worst I’d have a running start on them.
It’s a long shot, I know. And I may very well blow myself up in the process. But compared to the prospect of spending the rest of my life in this shithole, that doesn’t sound all that bad. So wish me luck, Pocket Pal: by this time tomorrow, I’ll either be free or I’ll be dead.