The Shibboleth (8 page)

There are no walls now, and everything comes crashing in.

I wake up slow, caught in the sluggish tide between knowing nothing and wakefulness. I had no dreams, neither mine nor someone else's.

So I've got that going for me.

On the other hand, I do have a vague recollection of motion, of bouncing. Ambulance, I suspect. And of Schneider leaning over me as my eyelids fluttered. “She said you were a thief,” he said, the words thick and hesitant. “I didn't know what she meant.
She
didn't know what she meant. But I saw you, last night—something is different now, and I should want to kill you—” He had a deep, barreled voice. “But I don't. I feel—I feel lighter. I remember what I did, and all the things that came after, but it's like it all happened to someone else. I'm calmer than I have been in …” He looked at my face for a long time. “Something's seriously wrong with you, kid—though we knew that already. But I think you stole something from me that I
needed
stolen.”

Still, no dream. That's something.

It's a hallway I'm in, a long one, full of cots under fluorescent lights. Green tile. The stink of urine and chemicals. It takes a moment for the sounds to percolate through my consciousness.
Painful laughing, sobbing, screeches, hoots and catcalls, cursing. Steady cursing. Boys in blue hospital gowns lie in their beds, read, gibber to themselves. Make strange geometrical symbols with their hands.

I've woken to a nightmare. I put my head in my hands, crush my eyes shut, and rub, hoping when I'm through, this will all have been a dream and I'm back on my bunk in Casimir, safely incarcerado.

Down the hall, one boy masturbates furiously, his head tilted back, saying, “I just want to sleep.
I just want to sleep!
” There's no pleasure in it, and the other boys move away from him. One kid makes a weird ululation deep in his throat as he watches. Another kid trots over to the bulls. He says something I can't hear and points. The bulls hop up and immediately approach the boy with their Tasers out. His body contorts when they zap him, and I can't help but wonder if he came at the moment of electrification. When they're done giving him the charge—
click, click, click, click
—his body relaxes, and he slumps back on his cot. “Pull up your damned pants,” the bull says, reluctant to touch the boy. “Or you'll go into solitary. No more beating off, you hear?”

The bulls are both good old American football players. Their biceps strain at their nurse uniforms.

The other one says, “No more room in solitary. Doc Sinequa says we'll have to rotate some out and ship off the others to the Fort Smith psych ward, if things don't change.”

The first bull shrugs. “Not my problem. I need to get a damned night's sleep myself.”

“I heard that loud and clear,” the other says. He looks at the boy, who's crying now and trying to pull up his pants. “Try to sleep, kid. Okay? It'll get better.”

The first bull shakes his head as he walks back to the plexi-glass nurse's station by the doors.

My head is full of cotton, and my eyes feel gummy and slow to respond. I look at my hands for a long while, tracing the lines on my palm, and I'm surprised at how interesting my own flesh has become. I want to focus on anything other than the hell I'm in. I try to leave the meatsuit, to cast out my awareness beyond myself. I try to exert my shibboleth self.

Nothing. I look at my hands. No more Ghost Dance. No more shibboleth.

There's a chart at the end of my cot. I pick it up, look at it, but the small type and black scribbles swim before my eyes. Sore all over. Head, back, ass, legs, shoulders. Every muscle aches—but dully. I'm aware of the pain, but it's far away and muffled. It takes a while to realize my bladder is full. I stand, shuffle down the hall. At some point, maybe they'll assign me a room.

Screaming in one of the cells, and a boy sits on his cot and watches me blankly, saying over and over, “The best they is, the best they is,” as I walk down the hall to where the two bulls sit at the entrance to the male ward. They've taken my shoes but given me these nice slippers.

At the Berlin Wall checkpoint, they scan my wrist and wave me through. The men's restroom has no door, just a curved glass block wall. And inside, there are no partitions between urinals and no doors on the johns. A fat kid in glasses blinks owlishly at me from one of the toilets. I do my business as quickly as I can. And leave.

A short, dumpy lady bull stops me coming out. She's holding a clipboard, and her gaze bounces between it and me. “Been told to find you. Shreve? That your name?”

“Yes.”

“You're to have breakfast. The cafeteria is there.” She points a nubby finger toward another set of double doors, these standing open. “Then please report there.” Her blunt finger jabs out at an area beside the main nurse's station. Another sliding expanse of Plexiglas, a counter. A small sign says DISPENSARY, and a sour-faced man sits framed in the open window, glaring into the glow of a computer monitor. Behind him, white shelves and racks full of white bottles and bins and cabinets. The drug slinger.

I guess I'm standing there, looking about dully with my jaw hanging, because the nurse touches my shoulder and says, “Earth to Shreve. Earth to Shreve. You hear me?”

“Sure.”

“So, go eat breakfast. You can't take your medicine on an empty stomach.”

That sounds reasonable, but I don't know if I
want
to take the medicine.

I shuffle off. In the cafeteria there's the normal clang and crash and clamor of trays, but this cafeteria feels more like a cheap hotel buffet than the cafeteria at Casimir. There's a toaster with bread and bagels (but no cream cheese), a hot plate with biscuits and gravy and powdered eggs. A big tub of ice with milk and tiny bottles of juice. Poor, cheap fare. But I am hungry. It takes a long while to get the bread sack untied and two pieces in the toaster.

There's a bank of windows on the far side of the room, high up in the wall. Some kind of plastic. Crazy people and glass windows go together like infants and razor blades. It's cloudy out there, the sky's ashtray gray, washing the dull interior of
the cafeteria in dirty light. Rows of long tables sit crookedly, and many of the tables are full. But where the Casimir cafeteria would be roaring with noise and laughter, the air full of tossed napkins and scraps of food,
this
cafeteria is quiet, hushed, waiting for something. The patients move from cafeteria line to table, bearing trays, slowly.

I have no idea how long I've stood there, blinking in the light and watching the glowing mouths of the toaster, when I hear a voice say, “So, what're you in for?”

I'm surprised to find a girl standing next to me. I've been so long in juvie, surrounded only by boys, it's jarring to find myself rubbing elbows with the other half.

This girl, thin as a guitar string and as tightly strung, has a buzz cut and gigantic, luminous eyes. Her eyes are so large, they make her look like an anime doll come to life, but without the boobs. Or maybe it's the drugs surging through my bloodstream. She moves forward, taking my wrist in cold, papery hands. She turns it over, looking at the light blue hospital bracelet complete with bar code. “Mr. Cannon comma Shreve.”

“Grand theft auto.”

“I don't think that one's in the DSM.”

“DSM?”

“Wow, they've really got you lubed to the gills, don't they? Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Stats for mental disorders. You know, looneyville? The hatch?”

“I'm not crazy.”

She laughs and it transforms her face, but not in a good way. There's a twisted, hurt sound in it, and her eyes go mean. But for all that—beyond the cotton in my head and heart—I feel sorry for her. She looks frail.

“Sure you're not crazy. None of us in here are.” She pauses. “I'm Rollie.”

“Shreve,” I say. “So, uh, what are
you
in here for?”

“Anorexia nervosa. Depression. Cutting. You name it. But mostly, the same as everyone else. I haven't slept for more than a few minutes in a week.”

I understand but don't at the same time—even before they pumped me full of juice, I was sleeping like a baby back in Casimir.

“Cutting?”

“You really are a fish out of water, aren't you?” She glances around the cafeteria as if checking for observers and then leans toward me. Her breath smells of ammonia. She pulls up her robe, showing me skinny, knobby knees. The gesture is slow and—I've lived enough lives to know this—provocative, like she's unveiling something that will give me an immediate boner.

But her leg is scrawny and asexual and, as the hem of her robe rises enough for me to see her thigh, crisscrossed with half-healed scratches and cuts. She smiles at me, lowering her eyes.

“It lets the pain out, you know?”

I don't, but I nod. By habit, I try to make a run at her, to get inside her mind and see if I can help her. But I can't muster the shibboleth with all the Haldol swimming in my bloodstream. Seems I'm grounded for the time being.

And for a moment, I'm relieved. It's a strange, muffled feeling. The wet blanket of whatever they gave me evens out the seesaw of emotions. I'm just plain ole Shreve again. And that's a relief. I feel weightless and untethered for a moment, free from the responsibility of saving this scrawny girl. Or Jack. Or myself.

We shamble over to the tables, carrying our trays, and I eat the toast and drink boxed apple juice while Rollie watches me. She rips the rind from an orange and separates each section. She arranges the pieces in a pinwheel on her plate.

Eventually, she starts talking again, watching my reaction.

“That guy over there is named Digger. See him? The tall kid.”

“Yeah, I see him.”

“They call him Digger because they can't call him Corpsebanger.”

I don't know if I like the direction this conversation has turned, so I focus on the toast for a while.

When I'm done, I notice that Rollie's right beside me, dumping her tray as well. She hasn't eaten a single wedge of her orange.

In the hall by the dispensary, a big male nurse waddles down the hall, his muscles making his walk bowlegged and his arms hard to hang straight at his sides. He's got the gait of a morbidly obese person, but he's got zero fat. His feet squeak on the tiles and echo off the bare green walls.

“Rollie, you making friends with the new …” —he's going to say fish, he's going to say fish, and if he does I might scream if I can even muster the energy to do it, I'm so tired—“patient?”

“You know it, Buster.” Bringing her hands to her face, she begins nibbling at her cuticles—probably the only meal she'll have all day.

He looks at me and raises a clipboard that looks toylike in his massive hands. “Shreve J. Cannon, ward of the state, placed here at the Tulaville Psychiatric Ward until deemed fit to be released back into custody of the state's duly appointed
representative. That you?” He reads this formally, bored of the routine. I don't have to peep inside his head to know he's sore from lifting weights and, judging by how his breath comes heavy through his horselike nostrils, exhausted from not getting enough sleep. A snorer, this one. Apnea, most likely. Didn't get much sleep even before the insomnia epidemic.