The whole idea is you take in a madman and that teaches you about Facing the Incomprehensible and Understanding Across Difference, and soon we are one big family. Without looking at her again, I left my place in front of the cell of the rosy woman I’d wanted and stared into the cell of the Imbecile who was next. What had he been doing through all that with his lumpy head and beaky honker? It felt like a betrayal to even stand there, to even try to imagine who he was, so I turned around.
Turning around meant I faced a white wall. It occurred to me that I was seeing exactly what all the madmen see, but without the bars. What’s that developmental stage called when you can finally do abstract thinking? Algebra? Just kidding.
I didn’t want to look at any more madmen. I sat down on the floor. I kept looking at the wall. It was so white.
Then the double doors swung open and smacked the walls with an echoing bang, and then thump thump came the cat-eyed nurse with her outward-reaching hair and rubber shoes making squeaks every few steps. Hands came waving through bars as she stomped toward me, though as she neared I could see she wasn’t angry at all, or stomping, it was just the sound of moving down that unpredictable gallery. Some hands she slapped five or did twinkle fingers with, and quips went back and forth that I couldn’t hear. She got to me and stood with her hands on her hips and gazed down at me mock-somethingly, which got me sheepish, as I’m sure she intended.
“You seriously want the Dancing Fools,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That I would not have predicted.” She walked a little circle around me, shaking her red mane, and I pretended I wasn’t freaked out to look at her, and after a few seconds of pretending, it was true. I’m not freaked out by a cat, I thought, and I’m not freaked out by a nurse. So where’s the problem? That’s where I was, emotionally. “Do you dare me to give you the Fools?” she asked.
“No, I don’t dare you, it’s just what I pick.”
She stopped and crouched next to me. She was wearing orange tights with her white uniform and I hadn’t even noticed it before. Now that the rest of her was normal, the tights could look crazy.
“Look, miss. I get ‘rude’ all day from people like them,” she said. “Do you think I need ‘rude’ from you?” I could feel her looking at me, but no matter how much of a problem I didn’t have with her I could not look directly into those fucked-up golden orbs of doom, and just like that, her life stretched before me: one endless gallery of madmen seen as if through a keyhole because of my catty eyes. I had one cat-eyed kid left from a litter lost tragically, and a husband always out on the prowl.
I’m kidding.
What happened is off I hopped from my high horse because she was nice, she was right about me, and I didn’t need to understand her back.
She pulled a small spiral notebook from the front pocket of her skirt. There was a list of names in handwriting that looked like calligraphy: Bobo, Kai, Armand, Kelly. “These are all fine choices, and they all like you fine,” she said. I hadn’t seen any of them yet. They were farther down the gallery. Maybe there was an information card on me. The kingdom of the mad is inexhaustible, as they say. I knew a kid once whose parents were against the madman system, and he got out of it by spending summers building houses for the poor and taking a test on human rights history. I was glad my parents weren’t around to interfere, but I still thought of that kid’s parents, parents like one thing, like conjoined twins, but reverse: of two bodies and one mind.
Then suddenly I thought I felt blood spilling out of me and I stood up in a panic, like a rabbit on the highway, no idea which way to go. It was awful. Along with my boots, I was wearing brown pants that were plain but just cut really nice for my body, but I hadn’t been thinking, when I put them on, about my period and all that could happen. I had no idea what would happen with this color pants if I leaked. The madman in the cell behind me, the imbecile with the head and the beak, who at some point had snuggled up with his sheet on his cot and was possibly sleeping, sat up with a jerk and said, in a voice that sounded not like an Imbecile talking back to a dream, not like an Imbecile at alclass="underline" “No, please, not me. I’ll do anything. I’ve got a bad feeling about you.”
“You want to meet them?” said the nurse, still holding out her spiral notebook.
“I need to go to deal with my period,” I said. “I’ll take Armand.”
—
Honestly, I know that in some cultures girls are supposed to feel shame over their period, and it’s not like I feel anyone should be ashamed of what they are, but if you’re like, “Oh, the flow of my blood, the essence of my womanhood,” well, that is just stupid and disgusting. There I am with my responsible-looking pants on the handbag hook in the stall, standing in my socks and, oh yeah, my naked ass, at the counter wiping blood off my crash-appropriate underwear with a paper towel. What, then, is least disgusting: put your underwear back on all damp and horrific, put your underwear on inside out so the damp part rubs up on your favorite and nicest pants, put them back on and stuff them with toilet paper that might fall down your leg at any second, don’t put them back on and hope you don’t leak again until you can get more underwear and perhaps a panty liner which why didn’t your mother fucking suggest this ever, and why have you never seen any panty liners in the house? Perhaps it is your mother that is disgusting. And even then where do you put your underwear, in your pocket or what? Because you left your bag in the car because you wanted your hands free for picking out your madman. Not to mention I thought this place was so well equipped, and hasn’t anyone ever noticed that girls who are on the first day of their first period and don’t know what they’re doing come here all the time? So where’s looking that in the eyes and understanding it? So also, as Carrie would say, none of your beeswax about what is least disgusting in my worldview.
Outside the bathroom the nurse was waiting for me, leaning on the wall like she was from the fifties.
“You okay?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Armand, still? You sure?”
“Yes.”
She smiled, then, a 100 percent genuine smile which there’s no faking. I know, because I have watched myself in the mirror and tried.
So his name was Armand, and in that way my madman transformed from a madman to the name of a man, which is only a little different but counts at least some. The nurse pushed back through one set of double doors to go get him ready, and I pushed through another, into the waiting room with a pile of forms and my vacant parents, who were staring at posters on opposite ends as if they were looking out portholes in a ship. Where their heads weren’t blocking, I could see that one poster was a phrenology diagram, and the other was a color-coded brain scan. Were they even looking at what they were looking at? Twinges in my belly were either anxiety or cramps or both. I didn’t know anyone who’d just picked a name from a list on advice from a psychiatric/psychotic-looking nurse. But I know you can never pick exactly right. There’d be a whole other batch any other day. One day you could walk in and it’s your old friend Bitsy from second grade wearing a rag and picking her butt and looking at you and the space next to you like it’s the same thing. Which maybe it is. I didn’t throw a dart, but the way I chose my madman had very little magic in it, and what should I learn from that?