Life Goes to the Movies (23 page)

9

At the revolving door entrance of the Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center at First Avenue and 23
^rd
Street he pulls me into a fierce hug,
his three-day stubble scratching my cheek.

“Will you always be my friend? A-a-always, you stinking yuppie greaseball?” He gives my earlobe a lick, then pushes through the revolving
doors.

It’s for his own good, I tell myself, standing there with my briefcase, forgetting to hold the umbrella over my head. His own good.

He faces me, grinning through glaring layers of plate glass, mouthing something.

Steve McQueen, I mouth back. Papillon.

In
Cloud-Cuckoo
Land
(Gritty Grim
Documentary)

“I must be crazy to be in a loony bin like this.”
—Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Pertinent Movie Quote Wall

H
igh-angle crane shot: the illicit lovers holding hands as they climb up the steep driveway toward a cluster of red brick buildings perched on a grassy
acropolis overlooking the wide, silent Hudson River.

Burn in: April, 1984.

At first they don’t notice the walls, then they’re everywhere: walls of stone, brick, metal and cinderblock, some crowned with razor wire,
others spangled with institutional ivy. Surrounding them.

“Are they to keep crazy folk in or sane people out?” Venus wonders.

“Both, I suppose.”

They pass a miniature wooden lighthouse ringed with tulips in full bloom. Planted among the tulips, a varnished wooden sign says:

DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER

VETERAN’S ADMINISTRATION MEDICAL CENTER

A lovely day, the sky a blue bowl dolloped with whipped clouds. It’s spring, but with a wintry nip to the air. A chilled breeze stirs the buds of
a copper beech tree. The beech trees are everywhere, with asphalt sidewalks winding around them and benches parked in their shade, one bench per tree.
The grounds are pristine, no bottle caps, gum wrappers or cigarette butts anywhere to be seen. Except for the walls and fences, they could easily be
the grounds of a typical second-tier northeastern college campus.

Halfway up the driveway a trim memorial garden bristles with budding rosebushes and bronze busts of dead generals.

Nigel shivers. He hasn’t had anything for breakfast, hadn’t been feeling hungry. Now he feels lightheaded. He stops walking.

“You okay?” Venus asks him. She wears dark sunglasses and a canary scarf over her head.

“Fine.” He shivers again, deeply.

“Nervous?”

“Nah, just a bit cold.”

Through Venus’s sunglasses he can’t see her ice-blue eyes, with their pink coronas. Under the yellow scarf her parchment-colored hair is
shaven down to pale fuzz. Martyred to Dwaine’s cause.

“Dwaine will be so glad to see you. You know he asks about you every time we talk. Sometimes I swear he should have married you instead of
me.”

Nigel laughs.

“I’m not kidding. He loves you, Nigel. He really does.”

It’s a steep climb. They pause again to catch their breaths.

“He told me to tell you you’re his best friend.”

“Did he?”

“He did.”

Nigel nods. With friends like me, he thinks.

10

They stop walking, hold each other. Venus wears her red plaid L.L. Beam blazer with the collar up. Nigel closes his eyes and pulls her closer, bringing
her fingers to his nostrils, smelling the residue of that morning’s sex. Her fingernails (he sees when he opens his eyes again) are gnawed to the
quick; her fingers look like tomato grubs. With his free hand he reaches under her coat to feel the swelling there. “Someone might see us,”
she says.

“Let them.” He kisses her.

“No. Not here.” She pulls away. “Not like this.”

A resident escorted by two attendants (“angels,” Dwaine calls them in his letters) passes by: goggle-eyed, making baboon chatter, drooling,
his stubbled chin glossy with spittle. Nigel wonders out loud, “Why docrazy people drool?”

“It’s the drugs that they put them on. They affect the salivary glands.”

“Huh. That explains it, then.”

Clouds drift over the Palisades. A cardinal sings on a beech tree branch, a butterfly embroiders the air. Birds, benches, beeches, butterflies: all
seem to take madness in stride.

The main building’s echoing marble vestibule reminds Nigel of the lobby of the skyscraper where he works. A security guard has them sign a
register and points the way. A dim passageway leads to a sliding door that opens automatically into a bright realm of fluorescent light, where a second
guard has them sign another register. Another passageway, another sliding door. Footsteps echo off bright disinfected walls. With each step
Nigel’s apprehensions grow. What if he lets something slip? What if she does? He’s never been much of a good liar, has never been good at
all at keeping secrets. Should he even be trying? Why not just have everything out in the open?

Venus stops, faces him.

“You won’t say anything, Nigel, will you? About us, or the baby? Please promise me you won’t.”

He shakes his head.

3

Was just interviewed by the psychiatrist in charge of my “case,” a Filipino whose accent was so thick I could barely make out every
third syllable. He wrote out my “meds”: sincquion(sp?) trilathon(??) and chloral hydrate PRN, with which I’ve been duly and
doubly dosed and which make me feel like a very soft car whose motor keeps idling. The Filipino watched the drugs take effect, made note of my
psychic “adjustment,” then led me down a hallway smelling of Spic ‘n’ Span, Clorox, coffee, piss, cigarette smoke, vomit,
cum, and carbolic-acid to my new home, where a dozen haggard residents danced the Thorazine shuffle, all giving off the sour wine-and-cheese smell
of neglected flesh (why is it, I wonder, that the insane and the dying give off the same cheesy odor?). The first words spoken to me were,
“You want me to give you a blow job?” whispered in my ear by a beady-eyed, dandruff-ridden, skeletal chronic …

At the entrance to the Level III Psychiatric Ward (a.k.a. The Bubble), they’re greeted by the duty nurse, one Margaret O’Shan, according to
the plastic name tag clinging to her bosom. True to Dwaine’s description, the living article’s face does indeed resemble “a soft pink
toilet seat, wide and flat.” She wears dark red lipstick, smells of drugstore perfume, and bears an uncanny resemblance to Nurse Rachet inOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“Wait here please,” Ms. O’Shan says, pointing to a pair of steel chairs, then goes off to summon the resident. Nigel’s eyes
follow her professional white nursing sneakers as they recede down the corridor, kicking up plumes of brightness that echo the fluorescent bulbs
slithering along the ceiling. Minutes later she returns with a man who, though not yet middle-aged, is clearly past the glow of youth and whose
features, sunken under the faintly strobing lights, bear a sickly caramel hue. He wears a backwards Yankee’s baseball cap, dark blue with the
initials NY stitched in white, forming an ersatz ideogram. He smiles a gap-toothed smile, the hole where his false tooth used to be. He twitches his
lips and shoulders like Bogie. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world, they walk into mine.”

The gap in Dwaine’s smile grows bigger, the corridor gets smaller. The bright walls close in until there’s nothing but a black hole into
which Nigel falls, tumbles, swallowed up by a wave of dizziness that starts in his eyes and moves down to his knees, which buckle.

4

All of my personal belongings have been tagged and bagged and stored away in various institutional hiding places, to wit:

1 shoulder bag and portable typewriter: room KG (bldg 12)

1 notebook, 1 gold Claddagh ring, 1 black book & 3 pens (Patient Effects).

1 travel bag containing electric razor & other small valuables (?)

1 patch jacket, Navy pea coat, 2 vests, three shirts & four pairs pants (Patient Effects);

1 knife & scissors: Montrose Police Department …

Close-up: Nigel sipping water from a Dixie cup. Dwaine stands there smiling. He wears a brown pinstriped robe and soft black slippers. He looks dusty
and soft, like a charcoal sketch smudged by a kneaded eraser.

It’s been three months since Nigel last saw him, three months since the day the police led him off in handcuffs. They had put out an APB a week
before, ten days after Dwaine’s escape—his third—from the V.A. center in Manhattan, two days after Venus received a letter postmarked
Coney Island and containing a small, dense object that Venus for some reason assumed was her husband’s false tooth that a dentist had replaced.
But when she tore the envelope open a shiny, .44-caliber bullet clattered onto her linoleum kitchen floor. The letter (if you could call it that) was a
single sheet of lined paper covered with names in capital letters, with no punctuation or spaces in between. Among those named were two former U.S.
Presidents, one former Secretary of State, six former Joint Chiefs of Staff, one Armed Forces Recruiting Station Staff Sergeant Rubin Joseph Fisher, a
Dr. Maurice Shattnuck, Dwaine’s parents, Venus Wiggins and Nigel DePoli. The letter was pocked with cigarette burns and smudged with what at
first looked like chocolate syrup. Then Nigel realized it wasn’t chocolate, it was dried blood.

“It’s a hit list,” Venus explained as they stood side by side examining the instrument by the dull lavender light through her Canal
Street window. Venus had painted the brick living room wall a richly lurid shade and hung matching translucent drapes over the sooty windows and gone
to town with Chinese paper lanterns, yet still the place felt as tentative and dreary as shirt cardboard. There were pretty things in the apartment but
no one seemed to live there, really.

“He’s got it all planned. He wants to kill us all, Nigel.”

“Dwaine’s not going to kill anyone.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because—he’s never killed anyone.” Though as a matter of fact Nigel wasn’t—couldn’t be—sure. What
about the tales in Dwaine’s black books? What about that Belfast pub, or hotel lounge, or whatever it was? The Egg-something? Of all people
Dwaine was not the least capable of murder.

Venus shook her head. “I don’t know what thought scares me more, him not coming back home or him coming home.”

That same morning Nigel phoned Dwaine’s V.A. hospital psychiatrist, the Dr. Shattnuck whose name appeared in the letter. He drew up the
commitment papers. That same afternoon the papers were signed by a judge Terrance Morrell. The police were informed, the APB put out.

The next few nights Nigel stayed at Venus’s Chinatown apartment. She wanted him there if and when Dwaine came home. Nigel was asleep on the couch
when the sound of the door opening quietly woke him. He saw Dwaine’s creeping shadow, and smelled the sour smell that came with it, wrapped like
a piece of strong cheese in a draft of cold air. As Dwaine draped his coat over the back of a kitchen chair he said, “Dwaine?”

“Babe, what are you doing here?”

“Venus asked me to stay.”

“Where is she?”

Nigel sat up and watched as Dwaine opened the door to their bedroom and slipped silently inside. He heard their voices whispering. As they went on
whispering Nigel rifled the pockets of Dwaine’s pea coat, which reeked of vomit. Nothing, no gun or pistol, just the empty silver flask. He heard
the shower go on. When it stopped he lay perfectly still on the sofa, listening for other sounds, hearing only murmurs. He lay there that way until
dawn. Then he phoned the local precinct.

“Give us an hour,” he said.

When the police came Dwaine was already up and dressed. Two uniformed officers stood at the door. Dwaine held his arms out for the handcuffs.

“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up now.”

5

That night there was supposed to be a full lunar eclipse. Venus and Nigel stayed up late watching Rear Window. During the scene where Jimmy
Stewart watches Raymond Burr walking out of his apartment with a big suitcase, Nigel fell asleep. When he woke Venus stood there in a kimono. She bent
forward and kissed him deeply, her tongue taking the measure of his mouth like a blind person groping inside a cave. Like a pair of sleepwalkers they
walked into the bedroom. As Venus let the kimono fall it seemed to dissolve into bare flesh. Moonlight through her fire-escape window painted thick
slabs of light, bright as burning magnesium, across her skin.

To what at first sounded like a distant foghorn Nigel awoke. Somewhere down in the street below a car alarm whooped. The room was filled with an oddly
non-discriminating darkness. He woke Venus and pointed out the window and through the fire escape just as the last red-rimmed wedge of moon slipped
behind earth’s shadow, like the lid of an eye closing.

6

It’s not quite defined yet, but there appear to be those on this gone-ward who’ve been here forever, tied to beds, strapped to chairs,
pumped full of enough psychotropic drugs to make a whole herd of elephant drool … Mind you, this place has its advantages. Where
else can you watch Channel 5 all day long to a pall of people’s chain smoking, the volume drowned out by stream-of-consciousness bellowing
along the lines of Christohchristmakeitgoawayit’sworsethan
mywifeafterIstuckthesteakknifeinherear and stuff like that that makes me laugh so hard I fart out loud …

Dwaine puts an arm around Nigel and hugs him. The short hairs poking out from under his backwards Yankees cap have turned gray. The visible skin above
the gown’s neckline is stamped with a grid-like pattern, like he’s been sleeping on a waffle iron. “It’s been a long time since
anyone has swooned for me,” he says, kissing Nigel under his ear, then turning and giving Venus an almost identical kiss.

“You look good. Both of you. Really good.”

He kisses Venus again, a real kiss, giving her hind parts a squeeze. She yelps. Then he grabs Nigel and pulls him into a fierce sudden bear hug that
takes Nigel’s breath away. Instantly Nurse O’Shan is there, a bleached white wall of authority erected spontaneously between them.