Morning Is Dead (3 page)

A Hospital at Night

Part Four

April hadn’t said anything for some time. She sat with her elbows in her lap, her hands covering her eyes, shuddering and crying and trying to breathe steadily.

“How’s the arm feeling?” Mirabel asked.

“I think I need to use the restroom.”

April shakily stood and walked to the bathroom at the corner of the room. She flipped on the light. It was white, fluorescent, and stinging. She had the vague sense it had torn something apart. She shut the door and didn’t bother to lock it. She lifted the crescent seat of the toilet, dropped to her knees, and vomited into it, black swirling with clear mucous. She had a desire to reach into the bowl and grab the vomit and lift it out by the handful and put it back in her mouth. She was tired of losing parts of herself.

Mirabel tapped gently on the door. “You okay, honey?”

April put the seat back down with a pristine plastic clapping sound.

“I’m okay. I’ll be out in just a second.”

She turned the faucet to the sink on and splashed some cold water in her face. She refused to look directly at the mirror. She patted her face dry with a hand towel, opened the door, and turned off the light. Mirabel was there, putting a heavy arm around her shoulders, guiding her back to the chair.

She sat down and stared at Alvin and his tubes. She didn’t know what to feel. Pity. Anger. Sadness. Love. Hate. Maybe it was all the same in the end.

“Morning’s dead. Does that make you feel better? Does that make you happy?”

“Now now.” Mirabel patted her good arm. “That’s not gonna do anybody any good.”

Now April clutched Mirabel’s hand and gave it a little shake. “I might need a minute to be alone.”

Mirabel stood up and ran a hand along the top of April’s head. “I should probably be doing my rounds anyway. Give Jackie a chance to go have a cigarette. You gonna be okay?”

“You’ll come back?”

“As soon as I can.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You need anything, you know how to get me here. You need anything before I go?”

“I’m okay.”

Mirabel turned to leave and then stopped. She spoke to April’s back. “This isn’t gonna end here tonight, you know. Regardless of what happens with Alvin, you’re gonna need someone to talk to after you get home and maybe for a long time to come. I’ll always listen. I just want you to know that.”

April nodded so Mirabel could see she understood because, of all the people who could have said this to April, she knew Mirabel was the only one who meant it.

Mirabel’s shoes squeaked away and then April was left with the relative silence of the room.

The beeping from the machines.

The dry hiss of the breathing apparatus.

The same sounds from a dozen other rooms.

The hushed conversations of the night shift.

The distant sound of a train.

The clanking from a warehouse next to the hospital.

The wind howling through the trees.

The clouds billowing in on themselves.

The insectoid drone of the moon.

The clicking of the stars.

The cold crackle of space.

Silence wasn’t really silent at all.

Four

Fuckpants ran the car up onto the curb in front of the police station. Alvin’s head smacked into the passenger side window and he barked out in pain. He thought the joint would have mellowed Fuckpants out but it seemed to have sent him into a furor. Or maybe Alvin had sent him into a furor. Fuckpants threw open the driver’s side door, not bothering to turn off the car, went around to the passenger side, and dragged Alvin out. He grabbed him around the right arm and marched him up the steps leading to the station. He threw open the doors, walked Alvin to a chair, and sat him down.

“I gotta go cool off,” he said to an officer sitting at the desk across from Alvin. Fuckpants stormed into an office off the main area and slammed the door. Reggae music soon wafted out from behind it.

Looking around the police station made Alvin think of an opium den. The officers were sitting at desks or on brightly colored beanbags. None of them looked older than twenty-five. A cloud of smoke had collected at the ceiling and the whole place was redolent with marijuana, opium, and quite possibly crack. One officer sat at his desk reading a Nietzsche book and taking slugs from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. A male officer and what may have been a prostitute made out on a desk to Alvin’s left. The officer across the desk from him had his sleeve rolled up and slid a needle out of his arm before unstrapping the tubing and holding the syringe out to Alvin.

“Want some?”

“I don’t think so,” Alvin said.

“Very well.” The officer’s eyes threatened to close, his head bobbing forward. “Then.”

He put the syringe in a drawer and held out his hand. He spoke very slowly. “I’m sorry to see you... here.”

Jesus, Alvin thought. This guy’s threatening to nod off.

“I suppose you’ve come to be... processed?”

“Let me try and reason with you, Officer... Bitchhole?”

“That’s right.” He tried to smile but his pale face wasn’t working very well.

“I don’t know why I’m here. My wife is at home with a strange man in the house. He could be doing God knows what to her and I’m stuck in this lunacy.”

“Not lunacy. The law.”

“Whatever. I need to get home to her. I would ask you to send an officer there but you all seem pretty incapacitated.”

“We have a... good time.”

“I need to go.”

Alvin stood up to head for the door. A gunshot rang out and splintered the jamb to his right. His ears rang loudly. He turned back around to see Bitchhole trying to hold the gun. He probably could have just left but figured if Bitchhole tried to wing him he might end up shooting him in the head instead.

“I’m afraid... you won’t be able to go for... long time.” He thunked the gun back down on the wooden desk. It discharged again and took out a window. “You need... processed.” He swiveled in his chair and pointed with an arm gone floppy and limp. “Go down that hall on... left.”

Alvin crossed the room. The makeout couple on his left had now graduated to open sex. The cop had the woman’s skirt up around her waist, bending her over the desk. His hips moved slowly, buttocks pale under the harsh fluorescent station lights. “Need any help finding it?” he asked casually.

“No. I think I can manage. You look busy anyway.”

“Fuck yeah.”

The woman moaned in ecstasy. They were probably
on
ecstasy.

Alvin continued walking toward the barred back wall of the station. Three cells lined the wall. Two of them were occupied by what looked like a sleeping homeless guy and a very intense wiry man wearing a mint green outfit made from bath towels. Alvin started down the hallway. It was long and dark. There were no doors lining it. Like it was designed specifically to be a hallway and nothing more. At the end of the hall, pale yellow light bled from a partially cracked door.

He felt a little nervous. He had no idea what to expect. He reached the door, put his hand on it, and took a deep breath.

He pushed it open to reveal a withered, hunchbacked crone with wildly frizzy hair standing in the middle of the room. Her right hand, gnarled and heavy-looking, was roughly ten times the size of her left. A small camera hung suspended from the far right corner of the room. He couldn’t imagine this place being under surveillance and still running the way it did. Otherwise, the room was completely empty. Just gray walls and the gray tiled floor.

“Come to be processed, eh?” the crone asked.

“Yeah, I guess. I heard this was the place.”

“It is. It is.”

He continued to hover around the door, not wanting to venture further into this emptiness. Since the crone was the only other person in the room, he couldn’t help but think she would be vital to the processing process.

“Come closer.” She beckoned with her normal hand.

“I’m not sure how to do this.”

“Just do what I say. Come closer now.”

Cautiously, he crept toward her.

“Closer,” she hissed.

He moved closer.

“
Closer
.”

Closer still.

Once he was within arm’s length of her, she looked him up and down and, for a brief and horrifying moment, he thought he was going to have to have sex with this awful creature.

“There there,” she said. “Now this won’t hurt a bit.”

She hauled back her gigantic right hand and took a massive roundhouse slap at his face. Her hand tore into his cheek, the force knocking him across the room.

He barked out in pain, collapsing onto his stomach and holding his left cheek. It was bleeding profusely. It felt like hamburger meat against his palm.

Now the crone scampered over to him and he braced himself, thinking she was going to kick him or something. But she didn’t. She pulled out a slender rod about a foot in length from her skirt and ran it over his body. She turned to the camera in the corner and shouted, “He’s clear!”

He curled into a fetal position.

“Can you tell me what’s going on?”

“My job is only to process.”

“To process me for what?”

“Deeper into the night. They always tell prisoners that before sending them in to me. I don’t know why they wouldn’t have told you.”

“Deeper into the night. Why do I have to be processed into the night? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense. You belong to the night now. You’re a night person. Morning is dead.”

“Morning is dead?”

“You’ll never see another one. It’s just night for you now. Night. All the time. The night has levels. You go deeper and deeper. You can look for morning all you want. You can wait as long as you want. You can see it coming. You can taste it and feel it and sense it in your sinuses but it won’t come.”

The door creaked open and two officers came into the room. One of them was dressed, though shabbily, as a cop. The other wore baby blue footed sleeping pajamas. Positioning themselves on either side of him, they hoisted him to his feet.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To your cell, douchebag.”

He thought about struggling but knew there wasn’t any reason. He could only go back through the police station and there were too many cops out there, unless they had all passed out by now. They dragged him back down the hall. The one in uniform pulled a comically huge key ring from his belt and unlocked the door to the cell with the man in the towel outfit.

“Why can’t I have the empty one?”

“Saving it. Now get in there and shut the hell up. Besides, it’s not empty.”

They tossed him roughly into the cell. He went sliding across the sickly wet floor. He curled his left arm around his head and bled onto it.

The intense man rocked back and forth on his bed, the only one in the cell, and said, “So, you into frottage?” His voice was high and nasally.

Alvin continued to lie there with his head on his arm, smelling the ammonia on the floor. He didn’t know if it was from piss or cleaner. “I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s like, uh, rubbing up against each other, you know? We don’t have to penetrate or anything. We could leave our clothes on, even. Although it’s better without.”

“I don’t think I’m into frottage.”

“Damn,” the man said before going back to rocking. “I’m Lars, by the way.”

“I’m Alvin.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Alvin.”

“Nice to meet you too, Lars.” He figured he might as well be nice to him. After all, they were both in the same boat.

“I really wish you were into frottage.”

“Me too.”

“Really? I mean, we could always try it. If you didn’t like it we could stop.”

“I’m kind of tired right now. I might try to rest for a little bit.”

“Oh. All right. Okay.”

Alvin tried to forget everything that had happened to him. Lars went back to rocking. The springs on the bed squeaked as he did this. Alvin managed to either drift off or pass out.

When he came to, Lars was humping him. He had mounted his buttocks and was thrusting against him. Alvin could feel his stiff penis.

Alvin batted at him with his right hand and tried to stand up.

Lars hopped off and jumped back on the bed. “Sorry. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t help it.”

His words were lost in the dizzy swim of Alvin’s head. He pulled himself up to his knees, his body threatening to collapse, his stomach threatening to heave. Lars came over to him, helping him up, apologizing continuously. “I really am sorry. I just can’t help myself. Don’t you see that? I’ve got a condition. I’ll do anything to make it up to you. Anything. Just say it. You wanna hump me? Here, you can hump me until you can’t hump no more.”

Alvin reached out a hand and put it on Lars’s shoulder. “Will you just please be quiet? That’s all I want you to do right now. Just be quiet... Can I have the bed?”

“Oh, sure, sure. It’s all yours.”

Alvin sat down on the bed and Lars stood twittering before him.

“Can you stop staring at me?”

“Definitely. Not staring anymore.” Lars crossed the cell to the bars and looked out over the police station.

Alvin followed his gaze and, for just a few seconds, it looked like an actual police station. He smelled coffee in the air and saw real cops sitting around desks, typing things into computers, eating morning donuts. He saw what had to be secretaries and police dispatchers. Then it was gone. Back to the hobo cops. Most of them were sprawled out on the floor in various states of undress. The air was ripe with vice. One cop vomited into a trash can. Another cop wore a bib and sat devouring something that looked like a roasted dog.

Alvin delicately touched his cheek and tried to think of a way out.