An Insane World – Chapter Seven
Jesse's right, Tim thinks. He's not so anxious to see Dr. Sullivan this time. They brought him coffee this morning and he figures it's the doctor's doing, so at least he can thank him for that. He's sitting up on his bed. He's made it properly just for something to do that doesn't take too much thinking, tight military corners, but now he's messing the top of it and he doesn't care, leaning against the wall with his arms wrapped around his knees, waiting.
Jesse knocks, peeks in the door, takes it all in, walks over and sits on the bed too. "Hey brother, not so keen today, huh?"
Tim shifts his eyes sideways to look at him. He doesn't mind looking at Jesse. Jesse spent fourteen months on a base in southern Afghanistan. He was mostly bored there, mostly, but still he saw things and heard things and felt the effects of war on a country and on the men flown in and trucked outside the wire. He and Tim exchanged a few stories as Tim slowly got accustomed to his reality on this ward. It was an anchor, talking to someone about something familiar. He's not as afraid when Jesse's around.
"You're right. The novelty wears off."
"But not usually this fast, man. You okay?"
"I don't know. Am I? If I was, would I be here?"
"Brother, if you weren't okay, you wouldn't be here. That's the way it works. I've seen it. I know. They need you to figure out that you're okay. Then when you leave, you won't be doubting yourself. And right now, I can see it – brother, you're doubting yourself, big time."
"They'll just tell me it's the meds."
"It's not the meds, man. It's you. You got to get your mojo back."
"My mojo?" And Tim starts to chuckle. It's a foreign sound in this room. Jesse chuckles with him. Tim tilts his head a little to the left. It reminds him of before, a small bit of himself peeking out from hiding. "Alright, take me to see the wizard."
"That's the way, brother. Have faith."
"I don't want to talk about Afghanistan! I got nothing to say that means anything. I understand shit about it and I was there. I want to talk about why I'm here. Why am I here? What happened? What did I do?"
Alex chews his lip, he looks uncertain. "Tim, I'm not going to describe for you the events from the day you were admitted. It would be counterproductive and I sincerely don't know much. But you didn't do anything wrong. You didn't do anything."
"That's bullshit. If I didn't do anything wrong then why can't I go home?"
Tim's seeing all the outlines today. Things are settling into place, at least the things he knows. He's slotted them into his life, his outside life, his life before the hospital, and he's aware of today and yesterday. But there's a shutdown in communication between his body and his brain that apparently lasted almost a week and it's gnawing at his sanity and he's desperate to throw a bright light on it, sort it out and slot it in too. Then he wants out of here. He's angry at somebody but he's not sure who and Alex is available and Alex has the title, so he's yelling at him.
"This is all bullshit! What aren't you telling me?"
"I've told you everything I can about what happened and I'm sorry that it's, uh…it's not a lot of hard facts. But you've got to trust me on this – you haven't done anything wrong. The events on that day are only important because they were meaningful to you somehow. I need you to remember the circumstances that triggered the psychosis. I'm hoping when you do remember that we can figure out why it had the effect on you that it did. I think something on that day, uh…struck a nerve a little too close to another memory. And we have to work backward, work with what we've got. You've just been through something very traumatic and we need to talk about it, about what you're experiencing…"
Tim's pacing, stops and stares hard at Alex. The anger is large today, too big for the room. Tim yells through it, "How can I have been through something very traumatic, but nothing the fuck happened?" He picks up the garbage bin with the plastic bag neatly tucked in it and heaves it across the room and it bounces hollow off the wall and the bag and the contents spill out onto the floor, then he slams open the door and walks out.
Alex jumps up and out the door, paging Jesse as he goes. He doesn't bother trying to run Tim down but follows at a distance.
Tim rounds a corner and almost collides with the nurse. He sees Jesse signal to someone behind him and he swivels fast, ready, facing Alex. He almost loses his balance.
Jesse is there, again steadying him. "Whoa, slow down Mr. Eveready. Geez, you'd think we were in a dark alley in Kabul. Had enough for today, have you? I bet Dr. Sullivan is tired of your sorry ass too. Do you two need to kiss and make up?"
Tim glares down the hall at Alex but Alex only gives him a smile back.
"All's good," says Alex. "You sleeping okay, Tim?"
Tim backs up to lean against the wall, won't look at either of them. "I'm fine."
"Okay, uh… We'll see you tomorrow then." Alex smiles again, turns and walks away.
Jesse whistles through the tension, whittles it away ridiculously and tunelessly. Tim chuckles finally.
"You alright?" says Jesse.
Tim presses his lips tightly, eyebrows up then down, fatigue in the drop. "I don't wanna talk about Afghanistan. You understand." He repeats Jesse's cue – one veteran to another.
"I get it." Jesse repeats back Tim's reply to him from that first day they met then adds some, "You're a bad-ass Ranger, a mother-fucking Marshal. Nothing gets to you. Nothing can penetrate that thick wall of stupidity."
"Fuck you."
Jesse laughs. "And you wonder why I went Air Force. Fucking dumbass Army muscleheads."
Tim pushes away from the wall and he and Jesse walk the corridor back to his room.
"I'm gonna complain to management about your language."
Jesse unlocks the door at the ward. "Oh, is that so? Well, I'm gonna tell Dr. Sullivan about your invisible friends."
"Hey, they're all the friends I got."
"So you're a pathetic fucking dumbass Army musclehead."
The chuckles are a little looser this time.
Alex closes the door to his office and stands there lost. That was the shortest session he's ever had – ten minutes, a new record. He looks at his watch and thinks he'll get caught up on some administrative work but gives up before he sits down. He's too agitated. He decides to spend the extra fifty minutes he has this morning with Sophia.
He drags his feet walking to the ward, thinking about Tim, trying to picture him in Afghanistan. He has no idea how to start drawing that picture and wonders if he should find out more about it, Operation Enduring Freedom – wonderful epithet that – everyone involved is walking around forever in a prison. He knows he's kidding himself. Any information he could get his hands on would be like a blurb on a jacket cover of the real story, and the real story is nothing but blank pages because it'll never get written and it would be different every time anyway. So what's the point. He finishes up thinking he's probably better off hearing Tim's experiences with ears untainted by spin and slant. Memory is water – you can't hold it, fluid, changing, not a good foundation. And it's all he and Tim have to work with.
Alex arrives at Sophia's door more quickly than he intended. He takes a deep breath and walks in, enters her nightmare.
He's disappointed to see it's Christina again on watch. She starts in on him, hissing, telling him her tale of woe when he appears, a verbal spray of the events that played out that morning. She's still riled up, voice shrill with contempt, convinced that Alex will sympathize.
"She was drinking water, finally. But then she peed all over the bed. She did it out of spite. I know it. I could see it in her face. It was hell getting her into the shower. She scratched my arms up real bad. Look!"
He doesn't. He motions for her to leave and she's out the door fast. Alex's eyes stay fixed for a moment on a beam of light smudged across the floor, a little bit of sun in the murky dusk. The room still stinks of urine even through the heavy scent of caramel from the meal replacement drink sitting untouched on the table, a pink straw sticking up past the rim of the glass, listless and leaning.
The pink straw is fucking ridiculous, he thinks, and avoids looking at it. It makes him depressed.
Sophia's asleep or faking it – he's not sure which. Her eyelashes cast spider-leg shadows down her cheeks. She's had a hard day and it's still early. He lets his annoyance at the nurse stew for a bit. Christina doesn't like her job, she doesn't like the patients, she can't handle her spray tan getting wrinkled. She's in the wrong place.
Maybe he's in the wrong place. He straightens his back and tries to pull his resolve up from where it's slipped around his feet. A cigarette would be nice. He shakes the thought, gropes for some optimism.
Sophia's deadly still – Alex has to focus his eyes carefully to see the slight rise and fall of her chest under the blanket – but she moved today, he reminds himself, she held a glass, had something to drink, put up a fight. It doesn't matter if it was spite. It was something.
He repeats it to himself all day. It was something.
Little things, that's what you have to live for. Bridget's advice pops into his head and drags along with it an idea. Alex stops by the men's ward on his way out at the end of the day, gives Jesse a small voice recorder for Tim, leaves instructions.
"Tell him to record anything that comes to mind…when he feels up to it…uh, when he's alone. He can erase anything if he doesn't want me to hear it but… Well, it's better if he doesn't. Tell him I'll be the only one listening to it."
Jesse thwacks Alex's shoulder and knocks him sideways. "I'm on it, Doc."
"Uh…thanks."
There's no booze here. So tonight Tim wishes he'd taken up smoking though that's probably not allowed either – it would set off the alarms. He needs something quiet to do with his hands fidgeting idle in the still hours of the night, something to hide the shaking, something to fill the time when he isn't sleeping but doesn't want to wake the dead, his fellow inmates, all of them shuffling and sharing their troubles in a droning rhythmic hum. He's tired of it, tired of hearing it, tired of hearing his own voice in the chorus and sleeping days to avoid it, pacing the ward at night or sitting by the window in his room hoping to be somewhere else in the morning. It's useless. Here he is, still.
What did he do? What did he do wrong?
Tim lets himself go and it comes out in a stream of tears, then a growl of shame. Crying never solved anything. He feels unarmed, untrained for this battle. The doctor's given him one tool – one – so he might as well use it. He's aggressive rubbing the evidence of futility off of his cheeks and his chin, wiping his hands dry roughly on his sweatpants, then he leans over and grabs the small voice recorder and gives his frustration the soap box until he's tired enough to try sleeping again.
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