Michael Ginsberg (jewsinspace) wrote in spaceodyssey, @ 2016-12-12 00:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | 1969, 1969.08, } cuckoo |
COULD I BE YOUR RECKLESS FRIEND
August, 1969
It’s been about three months since Michael Ginsberg dove off the top of his tenement building. A lot of things about that night come up blurry when he’s asked to think about them during therapy; they happened too fast and too close, like the pavement going by out a taxi window. Some things, though, are crystal clear. Suspended. The view from the roof; the rush of adrenaline; the beating of the wind; the weightlessness and relief of falling; the overwhelming, unforgiving solidity of that stupid car. The doctors said it was landing on the car that probably saved his life. It hadn’t been there when he’d looked down. What a fucking joke.———
Michael is approximately one month into his forced stay at the state-run sanitarium. It’s about what one would expect. His back and lungs are just good enough now that he can drag himself around on crutches, which he’s very stubborn about but which has caused him to become exponentially more cranky. He suspects he’s getting on every nurse’s last nerve (except maybe Dorothy’s), but it’s hard to hold it in when everything hurts so fucking badly. They’re giving him as many painkillers as they can on top of the antipsychotic and the antidepressant and the antiwhatever-the-hell-else, and it helps—but nothing is going to cut all the way through the aftermath of slamming yourself onto the roof of a car from six stories up.
After a certain amount of time went by, he’d become resigned to the fact that it was probably impossible to finish the job in this place. The windows are sealed shut. Nothing has a sharp edge. They’re pretty thorough about making sure you’re not hoarding pills. Someone is always watching, ready to drug you or tackle you if you go nuts. He thought long and hard about biting his tongue, but that ended up seeming incredibly daunting. Plus, he was haunted by the thought that he’d only be saved again and left mutilated.
Having grudgingly accepted the chore of existence for the moment, he’s begun to eat enough to stave off starvation. It’s lunchtime; he struggles into the caf with Dorothy and she gets a tray for him; she’s the only one he’ll allow to do this. Normally he sits by himself, which she keeps trying to talk him out of. Today, though, he’s here.
Rosenberg. He almost never comes out. Michael stands still, eyeing his back across the room. He’s shoving his food around on his plate, sitting alone as usual. Everyone else seems to give him as wide a berth as possible.
“You should go sit with him,” Dorothy says. “No one else does. I think he’s lonely.”
Michael sighs. It’s probably not a good idea. Rosenberg should hate him. He was awful. He’s still awful. He’ll always be awful.
He hasn’t been able to stop thinking about him.
“Fine.” He makes his way over to the table, the one all the way in the back. Everyone’s staring the whole time, like they already know where he’s headed. Fuck them. They’re always staring at him anyway. When he winds up in front of Rosenberg, someone laughs and hollers, “Fag!” The crudeness makes Dorothy blush and frown.
It takes a minute for him to sit and get situated. Dorothy sets the food down and lets him be, fading into the background. She’s good at that. Then there’s a long, awkward silence. Michael doesn’t know what the fuck to say.
Lee is sitting by herself as usual, still undressed, wrapped in an ill-fitting raggedy bath robe untied in the front with her feet in slippers this time. Her nails are still pink, painted over the sediment of old polish; she can’t get polish remover smuggled in here, not even the most sympathetic nurse will bring her something so easy to kill yourself with. Her appetite is fine, good even, but the food itself is unappealing. Allegedly it’s steak, or at least beef, but there’s some kind of white sauce on it made with milk or cream or something, so Lee can’t (won’t) eat it. It looks like someone ejaculated on it. She ate all of her potatoes and the sad wilted steamed vegetables they get served and now is pushing her beef-something around on her tray, daydreaming about having her own kitchen and being able to make her own food, about being able to eat her fill and not have it rationed and doled out to her according to some hack doctor’s nutritional guidelines. She’s thinking about red wine.
She looks up when someone approaches, wary and skittish like a wild fawn, expecting it to be someone here to make a snide comment or a nurse or orderly threatening her to coax her into eating more, but instead it’s that guy. The new guy, the one with the broken leg. She looks down again, shifting her weight uncomfortably. It’s been a while since she’s spoken to anyone, so when she opens her mouth it comes out rusty, like she forgot how to make words.
“Hi.” She keeps her eyes down.
“Hey,” Michael mumbles, fidgeting. His gaze darts up and down, to Rosenberg and back to his food and then back to Rosenberg again. He notices the nails, remembers them from last time. His stomach twists; the heckle echoes in his skull. He doesn’t want to think about it.
“I, uh. I’m still here. Obviously.” He pokes at the potatoes. This guy makes him so nervous.
“I know.” Poke, poke. She’s making a sort of tower out of the pieces of beef. It’s really more of a grey slop and it’s making her look a little green. There’s things she could say probably, like don’t sit here, they’ll think you’re a homo too, but she doesn’t. Dorothy is right; she’s lonely, but she doesn’t have much to say. Hard to make small talk in a sanatarium. Hard to make small talk in general.
Michael licks his lips, tense. Technically he hasn’t initiated a single conversation since he got here. Pop and Stan, they come and talk at him whether he likes it or not. So do the nurses and doctors. Rosenberg had been the one to approach him before. He doesn’t know how to do this anymore. He doesn’t think he ever did, actually, but before there had been something snapping at his heels, propelling him forward. He’s hit a wall now. All he can do is be consumed.
“Look,” he says—quietly, because he knows how many people listen to you around here. “About, you know. About before. I didn’t say that because of you. Well. I mean, I did, but not because—“
He sighs. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry.”
“Don’t,” she says, giving up on her beef whatevers. “I’m not offended.” A lot of crazy people say a lot of crazy things around here and that wasn’t even approaching the tip of the iceberg. He’s new; it’s hard.
She’s silent for a while, drinking water to try and make herself less hungry. It isn’t really working. She keeps glancing with surreptitious longing at his potatoes. “What’s your name?” she asks again.
“Michael,” he says. “What’s yours?” His guts twist up a little; he’ll think he’s convinced himself that living is just something he has to deal with for now, and then little things sneak up on him. Giving out his name still feels cruel and masochistic, like extending a limb you know is going to be chopped off.
“I’m Leah.” She looks up, briefly. Her eyes are red. “They call me Lee.”
He frowns. “If your name is Leah, why do they call you Lee?”
“It’s a nickname. No one’s ever called you Mike?”
His entire face scrunches up like he just smelled something awful. “Not if I could help it. Mike is the name of some jerk athlete who chews tobacco. I have a—“ He shuts his mouth, looks down at his food, shifts around. “I have a nickname, but it’s not important here. That’s not who I am here. Just call me Michael.”
“There you go.” She looks down at her tray again, moving bits and crumbs about laconically. What she wants is to go back to her room and lie down some more. “That’s who I am here.”
Michael bites his lip, feeling on edge. He really shouldn’t have done this. Maybe he should just eat part of this and leave Lee alone. He picks up the plastic fork and goes for the potatoes, then stops, remembering something.
“Here,” he says, scooting his tray over. The side with the potatoes and greens is facing Lee. “That’s treyf. Take my other stuff.”
Lee almost goes for it but stops herself, looking guilty. They’ve got her on some heavy duty antipsychotics, and those make her hungry. Not that you’d know it to look at her, because she can’t seem to gain the weight. “Are you sure? They never give enough.”
Michael’s not going to tell Lee how hungry he is. He’s also not going to tell Lee that he’s purposely barely eating anything as a way of torturing himself because that and demanding to use the crutches are the only things he can get away with. He assumes, based on their previous interaction, that he would not be supported in those endeavors.
“Yeah. It’s fine. Take it.”
Lee still looks visibly guilty, but after eating one forkful of potatoes she inhales the rest of it. Her stomach growls. She makes short work of it and could eat more, and even though she knows if she just relaxed her standards she could eat more, the kindness of this gesture makes it taste better.
“One time there was cake,” she mumbles with her eyes closed, mouth full of soggy vegetables. “I still dream about it.”
“Hmm.” He reluctantly starts eating some of the questionable steak product while Lee finishes off everything else. After a minute he says, “Um. I, uh. Have some cake. If you want it.”
“You do?” Her eyes open again, looking right at him. “How?”
He looks down. “My, uh... There’s a couple people. Who come see me. They bring stuff. You can come to my room if you want it.”
“Oh. I don’t want to be a bother.” As if it’s such a hardship, walking the couple feet from one room to the other. She’s being polite but she means it too, she’d feel bad taking food from some guy. And she can’t help the stab of jealousy; no one comes to see her.
She keeps looking at him, which is easier when he’s not looking at her. He’s handsome, and young, especially with his hair trimmed and the bruising faded around his face, but she can’t place his accent. All Americans sound the same to her. They must still be in or near New York, though. She’d been a cab driver in Manhattan before this. “You’re Jewish,” she says. “What temple?”
“Bialystoker.” Oddly, the idea of temple—even though he didn’t go with any kind of devout frequency—seems closer than other memories of the past do. The tenement, the grocery store, the streets at night, the agency: those seem miles away. Unreachable. Temple, though, he feels he could step into through any door. Lately he’s been closing his eyes and hearing his rabbi’s voice singing the service. Sometimes it even drowns out the transmissions.
“It’s orthodox, but I’m not really...” He trails off, staring at the meat. Obviously.
“Yes,” she says, she sees that. “You do things differently here. But that is the same.” She’s never been to that temple, but she’s heard of it. Herself, she can’t claim to be from any one or the other, she keeps moving through them, afraid of being caught out at the tail end of her diagnoses here. The t-word.
“Do you speak Hebrew?” She sounds hopeful, poor thing. Her English is quite good but that accent…
“I know the prayers,” he says, shrugging helplessly and looking apologetic. “I can read. That’s about it. I speak Yiddish, though, some words are almost the same.”
“Mine is rusty,” she says in Yiddish. “My parents and grandparents spoke it. We all, us kids, we learn Hebrew first, then English, they speak the English everywhere else.” She shakes a hand dismissively (it is not her favourite language). What she does know is that the nurses and orderlies and security here definitely do not speak Yiddish.
Michael doesn’t smile, but his eyes get wide and he straightens up and fidgets. “We only learned English when we got to America. I was a kid, so... But this is always what my father spoke in the house.”
“I hate to speak English,” Lee confesses. “I hate to know everyone knows what I am saying. I want some things to be private.” She looks down at the table, fiddling with her nails again. “Is he who comes to see you?”
Michael looks away again too. His jaw clenches and relaxes. He works the awful piece of meat into little chunks. He’s hardly eaten any of it and is ready to give up. “Yeah.”
“Oh.” Lee folds her arms on the table and rests her chin against them. From this angle she’s looking at his tray, not at him, maybe at his chest if she looks a little farther. She’s not looking. This is a really weird relationship already, what do you say to someone you met in the loony bin? How do you make friends that way? She doesn’t want to say something that’s just going to upset him but it seems like that would be everything or else he probably wouldn’t be here. “I miss my mum.”
“Is she in Israel?” Something in Lee’s voice tells Michael that wherever she is, it’s not here.
“Yes.” She sighs. Her eyes glance to the left at nothing in particular. It’s better that she be here, and that they think her dead, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t miss them. It would kill them to see her like this. “It must be hard.” His dad, she means. Him having to see this, how bad it can get, wondering was it something I did, was there anything I could have done? It’s the kind of thing you hide from them. She knows.
Michael swallows. There’s no reason more terrible that he wishes he were dead. Just thinking about the look Morris has on his face every time he comes to visit makes Michael want to puke from guilt. The night he jumped he was too desperate to think of anyone else, but the fact that he knows he’d do it again if they took him off these meds—even now that he’s seen what it would do to his father—says things about him that are uglier than he can swallow. There’s no part of Morris that understands any of it, and that makes it worse. It feels like all they can do is stare at each other through sound-proof glass while they blame themselves.
“It’s... yeah,” he admits, ashamed. “I hate it when he comes here.”
“Mm.” Family is so rough. She doesn’t want to think about hers, either.
“You thought I was dead.”
Right. That. He gives a small shrug, robotically shoves more food in his mouth.
“Sometimes I think I’m already dead. Then it goes away. Then it comes back. No one can prove it isn’t true.” She’s still half-speaking Yiddish, substituting English when she doesn’t know a word or phrase. Yiddlish. “It’s weird to hear from someone else, though. It didn’t feel real then. It just felt like words. I don’t know. I don’t think I want to be dead today.”
Michael chews slowly, speaking completely in Yiddish, figuring that if there’s something Lee doesn’t understand, he’ll ask. “I thought you must be dead because you were the realest thing I’d heard or seen since... you know. Since I woke up, afterward. And that was where I was supposed to be: wherever you were, dead. Not here.” He looks up at Lee, expression uncertain. There’s a slight fear in his eyes. “I don’t think you’re dead anymore. But you are real, I know that. Everything else here looks like props on a set. I don’t think there’s anything inside these people. ...Except Dorothy, she’s okay.”
“Sometimes I don’t think I’m real, either.” She looks at her hands, which are enormous. “I wake up, and I can’t see the walls. I could walk right out of here. I’m full of air… I don’t think you’re right about that.”
“No, listen. I am. It doesn’t matter what you’re made of or what you see. You are real. Do you understand? Because if you’re not, then neither am I. Then we’re both something else. Somewhere else. We’re in the same realm. You can feel it, right?” Michael looks at him expectantly.
Lee leans back in her seat, her eyes still down on her hands, gripping the edge of the table. “I don’t really feel anything. I take a lot of pills. Isn’t that just proof?” That she’s not real.
Michael’s eyebrows slowly crumple together, then ease apart just a bit. He looks back down at his food, takes another thoughtless bite.
“No. Maybe it’s all diverted somewhere else. Energy’s like that, you know. Maybe it’s not circulating right. See, I feel way too much, I feel everything. It never stops, it only gets worse, even with the pills. So does that make me more real somehow? I don’t know about that. Because it only makes me want to disappear.”
“I don’t know… I don’t know.” Lee shakes her head. She feels upset, all this talk about real or not real, it makes her feel far away and transparent, and she keeps thinking about how human beings are just a bunch of electrical impulses in a five pound organ. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
A sadness sweeps over Michael like a tide. In its wake, he feels absolutely insane—he’s so crazy he’s upsetting another lunatic now. He closes his eyes. Behind his lids are all the violent desires, the impossibilities, the messages. He squeezes them tighter until he sees lights. Disgusting.
“I’m—“ It comes out stilted, like a hiccup. Too ashamed to try again and not wanting the rest of the food anyway, he grabs his crutches and hauls himself up with a rough sigh. Dorothy appears again, obviously disapproving of yet another failure to eat but also aware of some kind of emotional exchange with Lee that has made Michael want to leave. She spares him any nagging until further notice. He shuffles away without another word; Dorothy follows, throwing Lee a concerned glance as they go.
Well, there’s that. Lee is not especially perturbed; she’s been here a while, when you have conversations with other damaged, crazy people, they tend to be upsetting. She lets it go. Stays as long as she has to. Then shuffles back to her room, foregoing group again, not participating in any of the afternoon’s activities. She’s a lifer; they’ve stopped trying so hard to get her to participate. She’s not going anywhere.
She curls up in her bed and pulls her blanket over her head, immediately falling asleep and not getting up again until they call for evening meds. She has to be shaken awake and dragged into line. She goes right back to sleep after. Her meds always make her so sleepy…
When she wakes up, it’s morning again, very early, before breakfast, before meds even. Some of the inmates are still strapped into bed. They’ve got to be or they’ll hurt themselves or get up and wander around. Lee’s not sure how she feels about seeing it.
She gets up and wanders out; no one else is up, or at least no one else is about, so she feels safe out here, wrapped in her blanket with her cold bare feet against the tile floor. The ward is bluish with predawn light, bouncing off all the white walls. When she sees a light on she follows it and ends up standing in Ginsberg’s doorway, sleepy and slightly lost. She doesn’t say anything. Not sure what to say.
Michael is sitting on the edge of his bed, dressed only in shorts and an undershirt. His hair is a bigger mess than it is during the day, the bags under his eyes darker. He’s staring at the floor, absently rubbing his right thigh; the visible skin is blotchy and ugly with reds and purples and yellows all the way to the line of the cast. There’s an angry surgical scar on the side of his knee. It doesn’t look like it’s healing well.
All of his injuries seem to be healing slowly, in fact, and he doesn’t think his mind is healing at all. At best he’s skeptical of the medicine; at his worst moments he’s terrified of it, becomes certain they’re poisoning him, has tried to vomit it up a few times. Even though the pills make his eyes heavy during the day, he can only sleep at night when they sedate him and he can’t always bring himself to submit to that. Last night he’d just pretended, laid there silently for long enough to be ignored and then spent hours trying to convince himself his hands still belonged to him.
Here and now, the shuffling noise of bare feet startles him out of whatever distant drift he’d been in since lights out. His eyes dart up. It’s Rosenberg. Michael fidgets, a thread of nervous energy and shame spiraling through him.
“...You here for that cake?” he asks hesitantly, voice husky with his first words of the day.
“No one else is awake,” she says. She leans against the door, her head on the frame. She feels heavy. Still sleepy, but there’s no getting back to bed until meds time. She looks like she just stepped out of the pages of Elle; he looks like they just carried him out of the morgue.
“But now that you mention it…”
“I’m always awake,” he claims. No one else in the room is, even though Michael has rudely turned the lights on at God-knows-what-time in the morning. A couple guys have subconsciously covered their heads with blankets. He should probably turn it back off—he’d wanted to write in his journal, forgetting it was too early to ask for a pencil—but it’s too annoying to limp over to the switch again.
There’s a small set of drawers by the head of his bed. He reaches down with some effort and pulls out the bottom one. This reveals a big pile of untidy papers—scribbled notes, drawings, letters and their empty envelopes—with his journal on top, all of which he pries up to reveal a variety of snacks. Kichel, rugelach, halvah, saltine crackers, Twinkies, and beef jerky are squirreled away under there. It doesn’t look like he’s touched any of it.
“Have whatever you want,” Michael says, shoving the papers aside as best he can and then sitting back up.
“You’re not going to eat any of this?” She looks surprised. “All they’ve got here is crap.” Lee goes straight for the sweets, but skips the Twinkies entirely. They never get sweet things here. Not enough, anyway. Dessert usually consists of a sad little pudding or something else barely a forkful, and she’s got a sweet tooth.
She sits on an empty bed that had been occupied the week previous by a patient who got to go home. That must be nice, being able to leave, having a place to go to. Then again, once she’s out of here, a history as a mental patient isn’t going to stop anyone from sponsoring her. If anything, it’s more artistic.
She tucks one leg under her, ladylike in comparison to the ward full of men around here, like a bird of paradise surrounded by Cro-Magnon. She takes tiny bites, too. She’s unbearably curious about all the papers but she would hate it if someone stuck their nose into hers. There’s a reason she never participates in art or music or creative writing or any other kind of activity here.
Michael shrugs, looking away. Anyone with eyes can tell he should be eating whatever’s within reach. Instead of answering Lee’s question, he squirms uncomfortably for a few moments and then asks one of his own.
“How long have you been here?”
Lee squints. “What date is it?” She has to really think about it, it’s been that long, and it’s hard to tell the days apart here. The schedule is always the same, but when you hardly go outside every day feels like the one before. “About a year.”
“Jesus,” Michael says quietly, his expression sad and flinching. “It’s—That’s terrible. To come all the way here and then get stuck in this place.”
“No, it’s nice actually.” She’s started in on these cookies. “There’s a bed and they feed you. There’s heat in the winter. They open the windows in the summer. You don’t have to screw anybody or eat garbage.” She picks crumbs out of the corner of her mouth with her pinkie finger and licks them off, nonchalant. “There’s plumbing.”
“Was it the wars?” he says, finally looking Lee in the eye. “All the fighting, is that why you left?”
“It was a lot of things. It’s everything, all of the time.” She’s looking down, her eyes on her hands, slightly cross-eyed. “It’s not the Promised Land, you know. It’s all the same. Here, there. Paris. You know I am a transsexual, right?”
“Um.” Well. He did not really know that, no. He knows Lee wears nail polish all the time and the other men in the ward are always making fun of him for being a sissy faggot or whatever when he decides to come out of his room. His—or, her room? Michael’s eyebrows knit together. In any case, he hasn’t been examining any of it too closely. It would force him to think too much about himself.
“So... you’re, you... You like to dress like a lady?” Honestly, he’s not sure exactly what the word means. He’s never met a transsexual before. Not to his knowledge, anyway.
Lee looks up, folds her hands in her lap. Her hair is short, her nails long, her eyelashes long too. “I am a lady.”
Michael blinks a few times. Squints a little.
“It’s pretty rude they have you in the men’s ward, then,” he decides. “Why do all these dummies think you’re a homo?”
“They all think I’m a man.” Well. Not hard to see where they got that idea from. She is, after all, here. Someone did an exam and decided what they saw meant a certain thing. She’s stopped being angry about it. Nothing she can do. “It’s not crazy to want a baby. It’s not crazy to give someone a handjob for a place to stay. Sue me, so I’m crazy. Anyway, the point is, they don’t like that here and they certainly don’t like it in Israel.”
Michael wraps one arm around himself, goes back to rubbing his leg with his free hand. “What you said about being a mistake, this is what you meant.”
“No,” she says. “I wasn’t even thinking about it.”
Michael stares at her, falling still. He looks sad—always sad—and somewhat surprised, a pained sort of surprise, as though Lee were a haunting piece of art he’d stumbled upon and found himself reflected in.
“I’m not from here,” he mumbles. “I’m not from this world. You should know that.”
“Well, welcome to Earth,” she says, not flippant but sincere. “It kind of sucks but it’s nice sometimes.” She raises the snack she’s started in on, as if to say, hey, there’s halvah.
He’s quiet for a second, then he makes a noise like a short cough. There’s no smile, no amusement otherwise apparent. It’s the first time he’s laughed.
“Thanks,” he says.