Michael Ginsberg (jewsinspace) wrote in spaceodyssey, @ 2016-12-11 23:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | 1969, 1969.07, } cuckoo |
WHICH OF YOU NUTS HAS ANY GUTS
July, 1969
Lee Rosenberg almost never comes out of her room; like a ghost haunting the halls of the sanitarium, she’s more rumour than person. She’s barely even there at mealtimes, and when she is she sits by herself as far away from everyone else as possible despite the nurses’ urging to socialise. She refuses to socialise. It’s 1969 and she’s a schizophrenic transvestite homosexual Jew. She has nothing to say to these people.
But one day during group she shuffles out of her room and into the circle of chairs, sitting down with her head down and staring at the floor. She’s not dressed, like most everyone else, and her feet are bare. Her short hair is choppy and uneven like it was hacked off with a knife and the hems of her pyjama trousers are ragged like she’s been walking around in them for a long time. A shiny gold Magen David peeks out of the collar of her shirt. After a while she reaches into the pocket of her shirt and pulls out a packet of cigarettes, waiting for an aid to come around with a lighter, and she sits there smoking moodily and not contributing anything.
Someone makes a sarcastic kissing sound and the aid running the group shushes him but a few men chuckle knowingly. Lee says, “Fuck you,” gets up and leaves.Elsewhere, there is a young man who has emerged from his room for the first time since his arrival. He’s in pajamas as well, because he can’t get dressed. He can’t walk or take a real bath or move his back too much. He can barely do anything. His body won’t work correctly anymore. Shouldn’t be working at all, he thinks crankily, jaw clenched. This is wrong. This is all wrong.
He sits in his chair and leans against the sheet of grating that protects the windowpane. The scenery outside looks like some shitty painting you’d see hanging in a doctor’s office. Fake. Cheesy. Someone else’s idea of reality. Nothing feels connected anymore, it’s all miles away. He’s on the wrong end of the telescope—or, no. No, he’s not even him. Something else possessed this flesh when it hit the ground: shoved him out of the driver’s seat, hid behind his face, pumped dead blood through his veins and forced his zombified heart to keep beating. He wonders why no one else can see it. Why even Morris can’t see it. This is a perversion. This is a cosmic joke.
He hadn’t wanted to leave his room. He hadn’t seen a point. The nurses made him, though—when you’re helpless it’s a lot easier for people to boss you around—so the best he could do was tell them to put him somewhere quiet. Luckily the girl who wound up taking him out was the nice nurse, she never yanks his chain. It’s mostly quiet here, just like she promised. Few others in the room have much to say or anyone to say it to. Some of them talk to themselves or make small repetitive noises. No one bothers asking him who he is.
The stupid, ugly view through the window burns itself onto his retinas. He wants to smash the glass with his face.
Lee is frustrated and upset, feeling rebuffed after having made an actual effort to participate, to try to be understood by anybody. She walks the confines of the room, dodging other lunatics who tend to pace in repetitive circles, and smokes angrily. She’s lucid today but it’s like nobody notices or cares. They only care when she’s a shrieking mess. Every other day of the week she’s just some homo.
She runs out of cigarette soon enough and stubs out the butt in an ashtray. Her arms cross over her chest uncomfortably. They uncross. She leans her weight on one foot, then the other. Crosses her arms again. Flinches when she nearly runs into some guy with a busted leg. Smokes another cigarette.
Eventually she is approached by one of the nurses who smiles at her in a way that only makes Lee feel angry and guilty about being angry. “Mr Rosenberg,” she says, “have you met Mr Ginsberg?” Hint, hint.
Lee flinches again. “Don’t call me that,” she mumbles.
“Um.” The nurse blinks. She’s relatively new to this job and has only seen Rosenberg a few times; he’s so reclusive and shy, and Mr. Ginsberg has kept her busy. She doesn’t know many details about Rosenberg’s case, but she’s been told the basics since he’s been at the sanitarium for so long and everyone is familiar with him. That, and gossip. He’s convinced he’s a woman or something, one of the other nurses had said. He won’t talk to anyone who doesn’t feed his delusion.
In her training she was told to address all patients by their surnames and appropriate title. What’s the harm in doing something a little differently, though, if it helps a patient (or two) feel better? “Is it okay if I just call you Lee?” she asks him.
Lee pulls another cigarette out of her pocket and holds it up, waiting until an aid comes with the lighter. This would be a lot easier if they just let them have their own matches but there are too many pyromaniacs. She doesn’t want to talk to some nurse, not even an inoffensive one. Lee is tired of talking to nurses. She stares out the window through the locked screen, thinking about the sea.
The poor girl blinks and fidgets briefly, then tries on a helpful smile. “I’ll leave you alone a bit,” she suggests. “Let me know if you need anything, Mr Ginsberg,” and she moves to give him a little space, nobody likes to be hovered over.
Lee smokes and stares harder out the window. If she’s very quiet she can hear the ocean. It’s been years. For a long time she doesn’t say anything, trying to tune out the noise behind her, the walls around her, the fluorescent lights above her. It feels like a cage, this place, her skin.
“Do you see the birds?” There are no birds.
Michael doesn’t hear anything—not even his own name—until this stranger asks him a question. He’s not sure whether it’s supposed to be some kind of deep metaphorical bullshit or they’re hallucinating (or both); either way, his answer is the same.
“You shouldn’t ask me. I’m an unreliable witness.” It’s embarrassing how weak he sounds, how short his breath is. His voice isn’t even his own anymore.
“Well, I am an unreliable narrator.” Her accent is something strange, something nonspecifically foreign, and her voice is soft, almost hard to hear. It’s also awfully high for a man, though not outside the realm of believability. “I say it’s there and no one else can see it. But it’s there. They say I’m not seeing right.”
Michael swallows thickly. This person—he hasn’t looked at them, can’t tell if they’re a man or a woman—feels like an echo. Quiet, yes, but louder than any of the transmissions. Coming from outside his skull. Resonating until it hurts.
“I’m not seeing right,” he repeats, staring so hard out the window that his eyes burn. “It’s not right. And they won’t let me fix it.”
“If we all got fixed tomorrow they would have no jobs,” Lee observes cynically. She’s tempted to drop her cigarette and stub it out with her foot but she’d feel guilty for making a mess someone else would have to clean up. “What do you see?”
Michael doesn’t have any sense of humor left; the bitter jab at the system sails by, garnering no reaction. The voice doesn’t know what it’s talking about, anyway. He’s not going to get fixed. He needs to sort things out himself, for good this time, because no one is going to help him. Not ever. If there’s one lesson he’s gotten out of life, it’s that one.
His semi-obscured view of the outdoors blurs and refocuses in turns. The question hangs between them for a time. It’s so hard to explain. He’s never had to try.
“I dunno how to describe it,” he finally admits, and it feels like another failure. “Everything looks like a lie. But I’m not true, either.”
“What’s true?” She’d be interested to know, because she’s not sure. She thinks something is real, but then people tell her it isn’t, but it’s there right in front of her. Like the birds, which she assumes are real, because what a terribly mundane thing to hallucinate, birds in a yard. She trusts another loony’s version of the truth more than any of the doctors around here, anyway.
The reply doesn’t take much thought. “Your voice,” he says. “It’s the only real thing that’s happened since then.”
Lee pauses, then turns her head and looks at him. She’s hyper aware of the way she looks (a mess, with ugly hair), but she’s not seeing much else clearly these days. Things are kind of wobbly, like when you smoke too much dope. She sees a man with hair more disheveled than hers, leg busted, face kind of busted too, with sad eyes that keep changing sizes.
She turns her head back to the window. “I don’t have much to say.”
“I figured,” he says, all weary acceptance. “You probably got more important shit to do. ...Can I ask you something, though? It might be rude, I’m not sure, I’ve never talked directly with someone like you before so I don’t know how it is.” He’s still not looking at them.
Lee’s not sure what ‘someone like you’ means in this context, but usually it’s bad. Before here, it was usually Jew. Here, it’s usually the word cross-dresser. She supposes after here it’s going to be crazy. Either way, there’s no question he can ask them that’s any ruder than they’ve already been asked. “What?”
“How did you die?” His throat gets tight. He swallows and it makes his whole chest hurt. “Was it the way you wanted?”
“What?” Lee doesn’t understand what he’s asking her, and instead looks at her wrists. She thinks he saw her scars. She hopes she’s not dead, sometimes she’s not sure. How do you tell, where’s the proof? “I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I was trying to get the bad blood out.”
Michael sighs. That hurts, too. Everything hurts now. Who thought they were being merciful? “Go figure. We should have traded places.”
“Why?” She tries to cover her wrists, but it’s hard in short sleeves. She ends up awkwardly rubbing them against her hips. “Is that why you’re in here?” That’s not to say he looks normal (everyone looks normal), it’s that you can never be sure where someone is on a scale of one to ten.
“Allegedly. You never know, though, not really. They’re putting all those drugs in me all day long and I can’t stop them. Maybe they just need me for experiments. Probably going after Jews again.”
“You’re Jewish?” Well that’s a huge surprise. His name is Ginsberg, for God’s sake. “I’m from Israel.” There’s no point keeping that a secret here. What are they going to do, deport her? Good luck. They don’t want her crazy ass back. “They’re giving the goyim pills and shocks too. They give you shocks yet? Those make you crazy.” She rubs the side of her head.
It’s hard for him now not to turn and look, to see who or what this voice is coming from. A Jewish voice. Of course it is. He should have known. As if the spirit of a dead gentile would bother with him.
“No. They’re probably concerned about accidentally killing me.” It’s not hard to believe; he looks and sounds like he was hit by a train. “I wouldn’t be upset, obviously, but my wishes are irrelevant.”
“They’ll give you shocks,” Lee says, sagely, like of course, it’s only a matter of time. “If you don’t do what they want, when they want it. You can’t just take a rest. They come and take you away.” She’s exaggerating, because for Lee ‘take a rest’ can mean ‘lay in bed for two weeks straight’ if nobody stops her. The ECT is to combat her episodes of catatonia, which is unresponsive to medication, but in her mind it’s a punishment for disobeying arbitrary rules.
She sits on the ground, curling up like a snail, her knees pulled to her chest. She can’t get away with this for long, you’re not supposed to sit on the floor. “But they feed you,” she says brightly, the optimist as always. “They give you a bed. There is heat. The toilets have doors. It’s nice.” The food is like prison food and the beds are like prison cots and a nurse watches you take a shit if you’re bad enough but she doesn’t have to mention any of that stuff. It’s not nice. What is nice is that he’s not looking at her, it takes the pressure off. If she’s not a body she doesn’t have to look any type of way. She can sit here and be a snail instead of a person. “Jiminy Cricket,” she explains.
Michael blinks slowly, taking all of that in. The medical punishments for disobedience have already begun, though much like his initial rescue, he thinks his captors may consider some of their actions to be kindnesses. When they think he needs to calm down or is in danger of re-injuring himself, they sedate him so heavily he can’t even lift his fingers. He sinks so deep it feels like dying sometimes. More than once he’s really believed, expected it at any moment, felt at peace—just to be yanked back up again into the harsh, ugly lights and the smell of his own sweat. The nurses don’t understand why he keeps crying every time the drugs wear off.
“Jiminy Cricket?” It takes him a minute. “Oh. That’s... I was thinking more, you know. Ghosty.”
“I’m not a ghost.” But not a person either, she fancies herself. An insect, like a cricket or a beetle. But one that talks. Her head tilts slightly, enough that out of the corner of her eye she can see a nurse approaching and knows she’s about to be in trouble for sitting on the floor and not in a chair. “Why won’t you look at me?”
“Wait, what? But—” He doesn’t understand. If the owner of the voice isn’t dead, how can the sound of them be so comforting? It’s so real it’s almost tangible. Soft, undemanding. It resonates.
He sighs and closes his eyes. The light from outside lingers in a haze behind his lids. His fingers flex slowly. Faded bruises, now turned sickly yellow and brown, peak out from underneath the cuffs of his shirt’s long sleeves and bloom over the tops of his hands. “I thought maybe they didn’t like that. Ghosts.”
“I see them. They don’t mind.” At least, they don’t seem to, or they’d probably not let themselves be seen. After a moment she turns her head back to the window. “You don’t have to look if you do not want to.”
A nurse approaches. “Mr Rosenberg, you’re going to need to get off the floor, now.”
Lee flinches to be called that again, thinks of fighting this unfair ruling, decides making a stink about it is too much trouble and she’ll get privileges taken away or something. She reluctantly rises to her feet. “Am I dead?” she asks the nurse, just to be sure, and is rewarded with a patronizing smile.
“Of course not.”
“Oh.” Lee sighs. It sounded like a nice idea, being dead. Then she could have walked through the walls right out of here, among other things. Being dead must be like being asleep all the time.
Michael’s mood immediately sours. This was a calm, private moment—or at least it had the illusion of privacy, and with shit the way it is, that had been good enough. It was the first moment like that he’d been able to have since he caused this disaster. Being interrupted for such a stupid reason has him feeling weak with frustration.
“You really had to butt in because someone was sitting on the fucking floor for a minute?” he mutters to the window, just loud enough to be heard.
“It’s inappropriate behaviour,” the nurse explains kindly. “I’ll bring a chair so you can sit. Or maybe you two would like to join the group?”
It’s too soon for this, even Lee can see that, that whatever’s going on with this man is too much to deal with on top of trying to navigate the group dynamics of the mental institution. She’s crazy, not stupid. “We’re fine,” Lee says tersely. She’d been enjoying this conversation up until now. Not a lot of people here have been nice to her.
The nurse nods and gets the aforementioned chair for Rosenberg, then retreats again. Michael is freshly aware of their presence in the room, of the fact that they’re constantly watching him—them—and it makes his skin crawl and all his muscles go tense. His heart starts to beat faster. This shit again.
“I can’t do this,” he whispers, clearly unsettled. “I can’t. I have to fix it.”
“You can,” Lee says. She doesn’t really know him, but she knows that much. She won’t sit down out of spite. It’s the floor or nothing. “It’s not so bad. Don’t listen to them, listen to me. You know they won’t serve kosher food in the caf? I had to tell them I am a vegetarian and they gave me fish. I don’t think that is what that means.”
It’s getting hard to concentrate. Listen to me, the voice is saying. He’s trying. Something about fish? Michael’s been refusing to eat, maybe Rosenberg knows about that somehow. Transmissions—they never stop now—begin to drown out everything else, even Rosenberg. It heightens his panic. He doesn’t want the voice to drift away like everything else has.
“You don’t understand. I was never supposed to be here. I’m a mistake. I should have been destroyed a long time ago. I don’t know why something so simple keeps going wrong.”
“God doesn’t make mistakes,” Lee says.
Before he can help it, Michael turns his head and looks. Standing beside him is a person, or person-like being. Tall. Very, very tall. Pale, rail-thin, brunette. It’s unclear whether Rosenberg is a man or a woman, though it’s unimportant anyway. (Most things are, now.)
He stares at their face, wide-eyed. Rosenberg is both sickly and beautiful. It seems cruel to put someone who looks like that in a place like this. A princess wasting away in a tower.
“Nothing makes sense that way,” he says sadly, “and you know it.”
“But I’ve got to believe it,” Lee says. “Or I am one too.”
She wants another cigarette, but she’s out. She’s been looked at a lot of ways since coming here, some of them very frightening, but this is the most unnerving, with her hair unbrushed and her face sallow and angular, and after a few seconds she turns her eyes away, focuses on the remains of the cigarette butt in her hand, tries to get a little more smoke out of it, but it just tastes like ashes and is extinguished, so she puts it in her pocket. “I don’t think God makes any sense anyway. Not to us.”
Michael does his best to look away, too, but can’t, not completely. He keeps his gaze on Rosenberg’s hand. It’s amazing how real it is. “It makes sense to me,” he says, blinking as the transmissions quiet down a bit. “God is Creation, and the act of creating. Destruction, purposeful destruction—that’s what evil is. That kills the Spark. Hashem isn’t anyone’s father. He doesn’t punish and decide. We are the ones who punish.”
Lee crosses her arms over her chest, her fingers still visible under her arm, long and slender. Her nails are painted pink. That can’t be within the rules. “So don’t destroy yourself.”
“This isn’t destruction,” he argues, pained. “This is just balancing the scales. This was never going to work from the beginning. Nothing comes back out of a black hole, nothing survives a fall from space. What’s a human being without the Spark? That’s why the energy won’t flow the right way. The computer knew. Those things know everything.”
“The spark is in everything. It’s our job to bring them together. I don’t believe you.” She looks out the window, reflexively tossing what isn’t there of her hair. “I don’t believe you are a mistake, I don’t believe you are evil. Not without evidence.”
This isn’t what Michael wants to hear. He doesn’t want Rosenberg’s logic or levelheadedness, and he especially doesn’t want their kindness. This isn’t the time to be forming new earthly bonds. He should let them know they’re wasting their energy. He should tell them to go away.
He can’t.
“Are you... Are you a messenger, then? A malekh?” He doesn’t want to say it in English. It sounds too crude. Too inaccurate.
“What?” She looks at him, startled. First she’s a ghost, now an angel? No one talks to her like this unless they want something and it makes her visibly nervous. “I’m usually a person. Not today.”
He didn’t mean to disturb them—which is novel. A few minutes ago he wouldn’t have cared who he disturbed. The echoes in his head are really giving him hell about that. “What are you today?” he asks.
“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir, because I’m not myself, you see.”
A deep, hot, unexpected ache twists in Michael’s chest. He looks away again, eyes glassy.
“I don’t see.”
“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly.” She’s pleased to make the quotation and have someone understand it. Unless he doesn’t understand it and he really doesn’t understand. Sometimes the nurses understand, though. Just not the men.
Her hand raises to her hair and then stops, self-consciously. She keeps forgetting it’s brown now.
His reply is a shaky murmur. “I can’t understand it myself to begin with.”
He doesn’t even mean it to come out, he shouldn’t be encouraging this, but the words are pulled from him as though they’re tethered to Rosenberg’s.
“What’s your name?” She doesn’t want to call him Ginsberg like she’s one of the nurses. It’s so impersonal.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says right away, preventing himself from accidentally saying anything else. “It doesn’t matter, okay? You shouldn’t do this. Don’t do this to me. Pop is bad enough.”
Lee isn’t sure what she did, but she’s not going to press it. Maybe she was wrong, he doesn’t want to talk to her. “I’m sorry if I upset you.” She fiddles with the nails of one hand, picking at excess skin, trying not to chip the precious varnish. “I am going to go lie down.”
Michael feels so ugly. The black, hideous, burning thing that’s built up inside of him for weeks throbs and twists and threatens to suffocate him. He crosses his arms, fingers digging in hard, grip blunted by the fabric of his sleeves. Everything is wrong.
“Good,” he chokes out.