“Thanks,” the little man said. “I like ta sit around and gab—makes me feel like I’m about ta cut a deal for Joe, ya know what I mean? So listen up! We gotta have a ’undred thousand up front, or we don’t play.”
He said, “You’ll get it, don’t worry.”
The little man nodded. “That’s the way, pal. ’Ey, I got ya name from the chart on ya bed. I’m Eddie Walsh, President, Walsh Promotions.” Walsh’s hand was small, cool, and hard.
“Pleased to meet you. Where are we anyway, Eddie? What is this place?”
“United,” Walsh told him. “I thought ya was thinking of getting out.” Then, seeing his look of incomprehension, Walsh added, “The United General Psychiatric Hospital, they call it. This ’ere’s the good wing.”
North
He lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head once again; this time he was trying to sleep. The ward, or wing, or whatever the hell it was, slept already. Occasionally he heard the soft footsteps of the rubber-shod nurses; even more rarely, the shuffle of a patient’s thin slippers. He was thinking about the world.
Not the world in which he now found himself, but the real world, the normal world.
There, Chinese-Americans spoke ordinary English and became nuclear physicists; the girls on floats did not invite men into their floats. In the real world, he thought, alcoholics did not get private rooms. Probably.
Most significant of all, in the real world streetcars had been done away with long, long ago, their very tracks entombed in layer upon layer of asphalt. True, it hadn’t made sense to do away with them. They had been cheap, energy efficient, and nonpolluting. Yet they had been done away with, and a hundred harmful gadgets had been allowed to stay—that was the way you knew it was the normal world.
A trolley car was going past the hospital now. He heard the faint clang of its bell, and he knew that should he go to the window he would see its single headlight, shining golden through the falling snow.
The room had no door, and some feeble illumination entered from the softly night-lit hallway outside. Its sudden darkening made him sit up in bed.
A man was standing there. For a moment he thought the man was Walsh. But Walsh had been smoothly bald; this silhouetted man, although not much taller, had a luxuriant head of tousled hair.
“You’re awake,” the man whispered.
“Yes,” he said.
“I wanted to tell you—we have a kind of bush telegraph. Each one tells one. Know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“That way, whatever one knows, we all know. It’s the way we stay alive here. That Gloria Brooks, she did it to Bailey tonight. Billy North went to Al’s room to bum a smoke, and he caught her at it. Each one tells one.”
He nodded. “Okay, I’ll tell somebody. Who should I tell?”
“I saw you talking to Eddie.”
“Okay, I’ll tell him. Where is he?”
“Down the hall to the first turn, then two or three doors down.”
“Okay,” he said again. By the time he sat up the man was gone.
As he told himself, he had not been sleepy anyway, and he had been getting more and more depressed. A dozen times he had reached for the telephone; a dozen times he had pulled back his hand, telling himself that he would wake up Lara, that she would be angry with him; he knew that the truth was that he was afraid she would not be there, that there would be no one there, no one in the apartment at all. That there had never been anybody in the apartment but himself.
His chart said alcoholism. He remembered drinking a lot a few times, and he had drunk too much last night with Lara. His mother had said his grandfather had drunk a lot. Before he had died, he had seen a little boy with golden hair—a golden-haired boy no one else had ever seen. Was Lara like that? He tried to recall the golden-haired little boy’s name. Chester? Mortimer? She had said that his grandfather had mentioned it often in the months before he died, but it was gone now, gone utterly; nobody else had ever seen the little boy after his grandfather died.
Had anybody else ever seen Lara? Would anyone else ever see her if he died tonight? He did not intend to die tonight, yet he felt that this night would never end, that the brick-red trolleys would run on through the dark and the snow forever and ever.
Faint lights burned yellow-green in the hall. Chartreuse, he said to himself, and wondered if he were indeed an alcoholic, if naming colors for drinks was not some sign of his alcoholism, a vice he concealed even from himself. They had—once—had him in some kind of program at the store, hadn’t they? Had it been an alcoholism treatment program?
“Down the hall to the first turn, then two or three doors down.”
But was it two? Or three? He decided to try two first, and discovered that it was in fact no doors down, that all the rooms were as doorless as his own. Brass numbers on the wall beside each doorway told him that the second was 86E. A brass track below the number should have held a slip of paper with the occupant’s name. It was empty, though he could hear the soft sighing of the occupant’s breath within.
Briefly he considered the possibility that the occupant of the room was a homicidal maniac. This was some kind of mental hospital, after all. Walsh had said it was the good wing; that sounded encouraging.
He had not realized how dim the room would seem after the lights of the hall. The window looked out on a new scene, much darker than the busy street outside his own. He decided it was probably a park—a park full of large trees whose tops were as high as the windows on this floor, whatever floor this might be. The breathing of the occupant was as regular as the slow tick of a grandfather’s clock.
“Walsh?” he whispered. “Eddie?”
The occupant stirred in his sleep. “Yes, Mama?”
It was not a propitious beginning.
“Eddie, is that you?”
As though at the flick of a switch, the occupant was awake and sitting up. “Who are you?”
He gave his name and, idiotically, tried to touch the other man’s head.
At once his wrist was caught in a grip of steel. “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know,” he said desperately.
“You know!”
“I fell. I got onto a float with this skater, and when I was coming out I slipped on her ice.”
The grip relaxed ever so slightly. “You didn’t make it with her.” It was a statement, not a question.
“No.”
“That’s why, then. It’s a trick that they use to put more pressure on the rest, see? If you start and then you think my God, I’m going to die, and you back out, they say you’re crazy. Same thing happened to me.”
He said, “My chart says alcoholism.”
“You’re lucky.”
“Would you please let go of my hand?”
“No. And if you don’t keep the other one to yourself, I’ll take it too.”
He groped for a way to prolong the conversation; it seemed dangerous to let it lapse. “I don’t think alcoholism’s lucky.”
“Could have been acute manic schizophrenia. How’d you like that? Know what the stuff they do to you for acute manic schiz does to you? Do you?”
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”
“Drives you crazy. Want to read what it says on my chart?”
“Sure, but I’ll have to turn on the light.”
“I’ll tell you. Acute manic schizophrenia. Ask me the President’s name.”
“Okay,” he said. It seemed to him that the room was colder than his own had been; he shivered in his thin hospital pajamas. There was an odor like almond blossoms.
“Go on, ask! ‘Who is the President of the United States?”’
Obediently he said, “Who’s President of the United States?”
“Richard Milhous Nixon!”
“Now how about letting go of my wrist?”