• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1141 0

Medication. BM, they call it. Sometimes it’s a wife visiting there on high heels with her purse held tight over her belly. Sometimes it’s a clutch of grade school teachers being led on a tour by that fool Public Relation man who’s always clapping his wet hands together and saying how overjoyed he is that mental hospitals have eliminated all the old-fashioned cruelty. “What a cheery atmosphere, don’t you agree?” He’ll bustle around the schoolteachers who are bunched together for safety, clapping his hands together. “Oh, when I think back on the old days, on the filth, the bad food, even, yes, brutality, oh, I realize, ladies, that we have come a long way in our campaign!” Whoever comes in the door is usually somebody disappointing, but there’s always a chance otherwise, and when a key hits the lock all the heads come up like there’s strings on them.

This morning the lockworks rattle strange; it’s not a regular visitor at the door. An Escort Man’s voice calls down, edgy and impatient, “Admission, come sign for him,” and the black boys go.

Admission. Everybody stops playing cards and Monopoly, turns toward the day-room door. Most days I’d be out sweeping the hall and see who they’re signing in, but this morning, like I explain to you, the Big Nurse put a thousand pounds down me and I can’t budge out of the chair. Most days I’m the first one to see the Admission, watch him creep in the door and slide along the wall and stand scared till the black boys come sign for him and take him into the shower room, where they strip him and leave him shivering with the door open while they all three run grinning up and down the halls looking for the Vaseline. “We need that Vaseline,” they’ll tell the Big Nurse, “for the thermometer.” She looks from one to the other: “I’m sure you do,” and hands them a jar holds at least a gallon, “but mind you boys don’t group up in there.” Then I see two, maybe all three of them in there, in that shower room with the Admission, running that thermometer around in the grease till it’s coated the size of your finger, crooning, “Tha’s right, mothah, that’s right,” and then shut the door and turn all the showers up to where you can’t hear anything but the vicious hiss of water on the green tile. I’m out there most days, and I see it like that.

But this morning I have to sit in the chair and only listen to them bring him in. Still, even though I can’t see him, I know he’s no ordinary Admission. I don’t hear him slide scared along the wall, and when they tell him about the shower he don’t just submit with a weak little yes, he tells them right back in a loud, brassy voice that he’s already plenty damn clean, thank you.

“They showered me this morning at the courthouse and last night at the jail. And I swear I believe they’d of washed my ears for me on the taxi ride over if they coulda found the vacilities. Hoo boy, seems like everytime they ship me someplace I gotta get scrubbed down before, after, and during the operation. I’m gettin’ so the sound of water makes me start gathering up my belongings. And get back away from me with that thermometer, Sam, and give me a minute to look my new home over; I never been in a Institute of Psychology before.”

The patients look at one another’s puzzled faces, then back to the door, where his voice is still coming in. Talking louder’n you’d think he needed to if the black boys were anywhere near him. He sounds like he’s way above them, talking down, like he’s sailing fifty yards overhead, hollering at those below on the ground. He sounds big. I hear him coming down the hall, and he sounds big in the way he walks, and he sure don’t slide; he’s got iron on his heels and he rings it on the floor like horseshoes. He shows up in the door and stops and hitches his thumbs in his pockets, boots wide apart, and stands there with the guys looking at him.

“Good mornin’, buddies.”

There’s a paper Halloween bat hanging on a string above his head; he reaches up and flicks it so it spins around.

“Mighty nice fall day.”

He talks a little the way Papa used to, voice loud and full of