Crazy in Berlin (53 page)

When everybody had gone to sleep he wandered into the toilets and counting them again and again at last made his choice of one to sit upon and read a comic book. He had not finished a page when a wardboy whom he did not recognize entered and ordered him back to bed.

“You been in here two hours.”

Reinhart snarled contempt. “I’ve been in the Army since Christ was a PFC, and don’t you forget it, you prick of misery.”

But he went. Someone kept putting a flashlight in his eyes and forced him to eat sulfa pills and drink four glasses of water.

One day Marsala, whom he was forced to admit knowing, sat on the edge of the bed and whispered, so that the bastard with the red eyebrows couldn’t hear: “Carlo, whadduh yuh doin’? You been here three weeks, your cheek is almost healed. But you keep acting crazy, they send you to Psycho. I don’t shit you, pal. I heard Captain Cage talk about it this morning.”

Reinhart had all he could do to keep from spitting in his ugly face. “Here’s what I say to you: go to hell.”

“See what I mean. Whadduh yuh want to be sore for? Jesus, I’m distracted.” He rubbed his thick and whorled temples. “So you took too much sulfa, but that don’t stay on permanent. Your white-corpuscle count is okay—”

“You flunky, what do you know about medicine? You traitor, you make me puke.” He stared fiercely at the quondam buddy, stared through him as if he were cellophane—a gift he had nowadays and would have done anything to get rid of.

“Okay,” said Marsala. “Okay then. You and I are through.

Get it? As soon as I get back to the apartment your crap goes out inna street.” He symbolically spat. “And the same goes for your lousy
putana,
that little kid who’s young enough to be ya granddaughter, dirty guy.”

The return on his aggression soothed Reinhart, convinced him that even wounded and mad he was potent. In delight, he said: “I hurt your feelings, didn’t I?”

Marsala looked at him a long time, his ferocity melting into a kind of grief. “Nah, I consider the source. ... Look, what for did you tell that kid Trudy she could have your extra OD shirt and pants? Don’t you think you will ever get out of here?”

“Did you give them to her?” He saw the whole thing and was serene.

Marsala clicked his teeth in lascivious regret. “You didn’t say she could have them, you ain’t even seen her since you’re here, am I right? She talked me into it, kid. I’m sorry. When we get through and are in there washing up she says she is thirteen. Jesus I’m a dirty guy.” He slapped his wrist with two fingers.

Happily, Reinhart lied: “Of course I did. I sent her a note. I’m going home soon and don’t need that extra stuff. Give it all to her and take her for yourself. She is really sixteen and if she’s old enough to have it, that’s old enough to use it. I apologize for being nasty. You’re the best buddy I ever had, and when I get home I’ll write you a letter once a month. ...” He closed his eyes and kept on talking. When he opened them again Marsala was gone and Red Eyebrows, who he also noticed had red hair, was peering at him most curiously.

“Hey Red,” he called. “I didn’t mean what I said yesterday about your watch. I was still a little dizzy from this trouble I had the other night. Have a luxury cigarette.” He picked up the Parliaments and handed them over. They were strangely dry and friable for a fresh pack.

“Yesterday?” asked Red. “That was almost a month ago.” He laughed as if he were insane.

But when later in the day they transferred a patient to the Neuropsychiatry Ward, it was not Red.

Veronica’s shadow flowed back into the black cavity of the office, meaning all was quiet on the ward. Reinhart himself certainly never made a sound. In the latrine he had even perfected a technique for micturating without noise. He wished to call no attention to himself, because he was altogether mad.

It owed to that kick in the head which couldn’t be proved. The staff in Superficial Wounds assured him he suffered from a mild toxic psychosis, the effects of an overdose of sulfa, for which they took full responsibility. Having admitted their guilt, they insisted it make him free, especially since the technical manual,
Guides to Therapy for Medical Officers,
called the reaction rare. And as to Reinhart’s confession that he habitually swung the pills into the deep socket of his jaw, drank the water, and spit them out when the nurse turned her back: in their view this illusion was rather an index to how many he had swallowed and been deranged by. Apologizing, they force-fed him gallons of water. Drowning, he was still mad.

The Psycho people, on the other hand, kept their convictions secret. Lieutenant Llewellyn walked on eggs from bed to bed on his morning tour of inspection, wearing the silky, untrimmed mustache to make himself look older and the plastic-rimmed eyeglasses for wisdom, carrying his mouth slack and moist in an advertisement of patience. He was rather leery of Reinhart; few indeed of his patients had killed a man with their bare hands.

Captain Millet, the chief, stayed always in the office and one went to see him at intervals. From crown to temple he shone bald as Bach; around the ears, a ballet tutu of salt-and-pepper hair. As Llewellyn was listener, Millet questioned, and had a talent for the irrelevant: Do you like girls, did you ever play with yourself, do you have headaches, did you dress up in your mother’s clothes when a boy, what do you think other people think of you, what do you want to be?

To the last Reinhart invariably answered: “Able to tell time again.” For this was the heart of the matter, but Millet, bored, toyed with his pen and never took a note.

His head he had stopped bothering to mention; if Superficial Wounds, in whose area of interest it lay, could not find that seepage of brain fluid, Psycho, devoted to the impalpable, would hardly. On the basis of many motion pictures about amnesiacs he drew up his own strategy of treatment: he could be cured by another raking blow on the skull. But owing to the queer angle, he could not slug himself sufficiently hard, and he was afraid to ask one of the nuts to do it, who might kill him. Which brought to mind an essential feature of his condition: a lack of interest in death as therapy.

Once he had tried strenuously to die, and again the next morning, when it had seemed necessary to the
Gestalt
of himself-Schild-and-Germany. Now it would be a simple missing of the point, for the self within him was already unearthly and losing the rest were impertinent. If someone sought to kill him he might not resist, but he would not raise his hand against himself.

His inner cautions to the contrary, in a burst of bravado he delivered this information to Captain Millet. Who blankly answered: “That is comforting.” And Reinhart was ashamed of his vanity and of his suddenly revealed wish for Millet’s affection, whom he didn’t even like and to whom he had bragged only because, he thought, Millet didn’t care.

The captain went on: “You mean, you will not commit suicide by violence. That is too easy, whereas what always attracts you is the difficult.”

“No,” Reinhart confessed. “The impossible.”

An ear fringe grew as fast as a full head of hair; Millet needed a haircut, which deficiency, however, and now a vulnerable smile—his teeth were crooked—canceled the disapproval from his next remark: “Why do you think you are so important?”

“Because—” Reinhart groped for something smashing; in his bare cupboard was one bone; he seized it—“because I am insane.”

Millet said seriously: “The Army may make errors in assignment, but they were right about me. I can show you my diplomas. I assure you, you are not insane and will not be.”

“Then I am a fake.”

Millet’s pen scratched upon his notepad, but Reinhart saw only doodles, and not imaginative ones at that. “As late as the nineteenth century they used to chain patients to the wall and whip the disorders out of them. The treatment was oftentimes successful. It might be used today except that its good effects were, I believe, only temporary and it required enormous physical exertion on the therapists’ part. Now we have the lazy man’s method. When you decide whether or not you are a fake, come in and tell me.”

Well, he guessed he
had
made a mark on Millet, if Millet talked to him in that ironical way. The captain was softer with the other patients, according to them—for Reinhart sometimes conversed with those who were articulate. The enuretic poseur of a paratrooper, for example, whom Very talked about back in August, had returned. Perhaps he falsified the one symptom, but he had plenty more, couldn’t use a tableknife, thought people were after him, etc.

But having got his special notice from Millet, Reinhart went back to where he started. Because his case was irrelevant to the fundamental proposition by which lunatics and psychiatrists are one: Life goes on. And not only proceeds to the measure of the ticking second hand, but also abides in wondrous detail which perhaps one can only know when on furlough from the process.

Who ever before had opportunity to study the fabric of a pillowcase? The close and naked eye saw no two threads the same. And the canvas slippers: their weave black with dirt, rich with memories of various feet walking diverse floors in many lands; their old human smell, sour, interesting. Chipped was the white paint on the bedstead, revealing multiform corrosions, patina, wounds in ancient iron; whom had it supported and in the aftermath of what: Caesarean sections, irrigations of the maxillary sinus, removal of the vermiform appendix, mere hang-overs, some deaths. Blankets of wealthy white wool, shrunken gray pajamas gaping at the fly and over the heart USAMD embroidered in red; maroon robe of weary corduroy, too short; night table all one’s own offering water in pitcher and glass, and beneath, on the low-slung shelf, colored books random and in shadow.

And through the window—lingering on the glass itself, marvelous substance almost invisible, metamorphosis of gritty sand, just as the butterfly comes from a worm and remembers it not—a view of this side of the grove on the other side of which, on the sand, some fellows murdered his only friend while he watched through another window, that glass bell under which he was wax fruit.

In this celebration of matter he got through his mornings, which were worst. From within came spontaneous improvement as the sun traveled towards America; afternoons were fair, he could sleep, and wake up in early evening, glad of life’s refuge from dreams. As natural light failed and Edison’s took over, he was better. Finally, each dark midnight, the absolute cure: bored with the soul’s business he lay unsleeping, yet not sleepless, believing in these hours of exuberant health that everybody should have a goal. During such a period of clarity and courage he decided to take his discharge, when it came, in Berlin and marry Lori.

Or join with her in whatever other relationship external conditions would allow, the mode was irrelevant; internal coherence was all. Even
ménage à trois,
in thinking of which he signified his affection, respect, and pity for Bach, nay his downright love for this man who needed and had a nurse, not a wife. She would continue in that role, plus which he would gain a friend to listen interminably. Reinhart spoke frankly to himself of its romanticism: this boy from distant and simple Ohio oh beautiful for spacious skies and amber waves of grain, in a rathole under the rubble of a dark and evil idea, living in adultery and cuckoldry sanctioned by mutual love, talking art and philosophy: there at last was the old German idealism he had searched for so long.

On the third night of his planning, in the second week of his residence in Psycho, he believed it politic to leave the bed and steal to the office. The paratrooper, next to him, sobbed peacefully; from elsewhere sounded placid onanistic rustles; the coast was clear.

Veronica, back to doorway, sorted files. Before Reinhart could announce himself—because he meant no harm—he was seized from behind by two husky wardboys leaping out of ambush, who were lucky to remind him poignantly of Monster’s dread embrace, and he offered no resistance.

“Oh that’s okay, fellows,” said Very when she saw, holding up parallel fingers—for some reason, all five instead of the standard two—“this kid and I are just like that.” She directed them to the treatment room, to prepare wet cocoons against an expected need towards dawn. They left, grumbling fealty.

“I was wondering when you’d come, you ingrate. I got put on nights so you could.”

She almost leered at him, and he thought: working here gets them all eventually. They sat on either side of the desk, which had kneeholes on both sides, so that his and her legs touched. Soon she squeezed one of his between both of hers and crooned: “I’ve been feeling rational guilt lately. I thought of all I owe you, Carlo, and I could just cry. You were my friend when I had nobody else to turn to, and the fact that it all came to nothing doesn’t make any difference.” She slapped on top of his the right hand of the high-scorer on St. Something’s girls’ basketball squad of 1940.

“Glad to do it, Very,” he answered quickly, for she was in the mood for something and he had little time; at that cursed early first light of Berlin he would lose his wits again. “I—”

“And I thought regardless of what went on you’ve always been my best boy friend, right here.” She indicated her left melon, underneath which lay the heart. “Because you stuck with me, and whether you ever said it or not, that is love.” She winced in ecstasy and pile-drove her linked fists into the back of that same old hand of his, flat upon the table. “Oh darling, you won’t regret it!”

He withdrew; another such love and he was crippled for life. “Look, Very, what I wanted to talk about was—”

“I’ve been a fool,” she said. “All the other men I ever knew wanted only one thing, like, excuse my French, this son of a bitch—”

“I don’t want to know who he was,” Reinhart interrupted. “And I’ll tell you something about me.” He had to do this, it was the only means by which he would ever get to his business. “So do I. Whatta you think I am, a fairy? I just use a different strategy. Now this thing about the abortion. If I could have arranged that, then I would always have something over you, get it? You’d be forced to let me have what I want.” He feared it was too strong: what business was so pressing that one must for its sake kick another human being in love’s groin?