Silent Boy (31 page)

Kevin had the strength and endurance that terror gives. For all his crying and bashing, his energy seemed infinite. The January sky beyond the window started to brighten before Kevin finally slowed down. And even then he did not stop. Still wandering restlessly from wall to wall around the room, he wailed, his voice hoarse and cracking, his steps stumbling.

Then he collapsed. Like one of those slow-motion pictures of a chimney being blown down, he crumbled, knees first, wobbling the rest of the way up his body and then falling face forward onto the linoleum floor. There he remained, like a child’s discarded plaything.

Cautiously, I lowered myself to my knees. He did not move. I inched closer to him. He had collapsed not far away, only a matter of a few feet.

‘Kevin?’ I whispered. ‘Can you hear me, Kevin?’

Crawling on my hands and knees, I came to him and put my hand on his forehead. He stirred. Gently I stroked back his hair. I found myself flushed with a nameless, primal emotion as I touched him. It rose up from its source deep in secret parts, and I think I could have cried just then for the brutal privilege of being human.

Kevin stirred again, his breathing more of a whine, and I wondered if he had hurt himself in all this fury. Opening his eyes, he looked at me.

I smiled for want of something else to do.

Slowly, painfully, he rose up on his elbows and shoved himself forward until his head was against my knees. Bringing a hand up, he clutched at the front of my wool sweater and then like a puppy, pulled himself up and nuzzled into the soft, Ragg weave. He began to cry, his sobs wet but silent, his face buried in the wool. Because the sweater was large and he was strong, he had pulled it far out from my body and I could not feel the warmth of him against me. All I felt was the rhythmic heaviness of his sobbing.

Gently, I reached over and opened his other hand. I took the piece of bedstead from his fingers and laid it on the floor beside me. The door opened and nurses spilled in, but they did not dare come around us on the floor. Only one did, a tiny little woman with hair cut short and the turned-up nose of an elf. She held a small tray with a hypodermic needle. Deftly she went around Kevin, knelt and administered the shot into his hip. Kevin did not flex a muscle.

Recapping the needle, she looked over at me where I sat with my pullover half strangling me. She smiled sweetly. ‘I hope you realize how much we appreciate what you’ve done,’ she said.

Uncomfortable and tired, I only stared at her. How could they appreciate what I had done when I had done nothing?

K
evin sank, curled back up, disappeared once again. He ceased talking, not only to the hospital staff but to me too this time. He refused to respond to anything. Pulling the blankets over his head, he would not budge from his bed. However, the periods of intense depression were now interspersed with outbursts of agonized frenzy, when he would wail for hours on end. During these times Kevin would run from wall to wall to wall of the seclusion room, from corner to corner, back and forth like a caged animal. We could not keep him quiet. His only peace came from a hypodermic.

For the first time since Kevin’s hospitalization clear back in September, I came face to face with the consulting psychiatrist who was officially in charge of Kevin’s treatment. Before this we had spoken only briefly on the telephone. But now, here we were, soul mates suddenly, standing together outside the seclusion-room door.

Dr Winslow was a lean man, tall, much younger than I would have guessed from his voice on the phone, and he was terribly good looking in a traditional way. He also had an extremely charismatic personality, and the nurses swooned right, left and center when he was on the floor. It was difficult not to fall madly in love with that sort of man. However, if I had had any foolish notions of doing so, he quickly dashed them for me, because in spite of all his sterling qualities, Dr Winslow did not suffer from an overdose of compassion.

He had been thankful for my involvement in Kevin’s case. He told me that, as we stood there together outside the seclusion-room door and watched Kevin. The entranceway in front of the small cell was no more than a long concrete arch, made murky by lack of lighting. However, it was a chummy sort of gloom that allowed Dr Winslow and me to talk to one another easily without having to look each other in the eye. Yes, he was glad, he said, thankful I had taken the case. He couldn’t afford the time himself. He sighed, his features wrinkling into a frown. After all, he said, there’s not much point in working with this kid, is there? It’s a sad case but then, where is he going to end up? Rotting away for the rest of his life on the back ward of some state hospital? Most likely. No one wants him. No one cares. No, the doctor said and shook his head. A sad case. He was glad I’d done it. He couldn’t afford the time himself. I was less than pleased to realize how valuable he thought my time was.

And why was I there? Dr Winslow asked me on one occasion. Was this for my research? Was I writing a journal article on this case? What was my motivation? I shrugged. A pointless case basically, Dr Winslow had added. He’s hopeless. He has no redeeming qualities, not even for research. He’s human, I had said, sounding like a sophomore psychology major even in my own ears, but the pause between us had grown too long and I couldn’t think of anything else. Yes, Winslow agreed, he was human. And that wasn’t so very remarkable, was it? It’s a sad case, but the more you get these stories, these bits of human refuse, he said, the more immune you become in the end. They just don’t affect you anymore, human or not.

How heartbreaking, I thought, as I stood in the concrete alcove and watched through the safety glass in the door, to grow hardened against real histories of real people’s lives, to become inured to real tragedies. There’s something more misanthropic about that ability than self-protective. Maybe all Kevin was was human, I said to Dr Winslow, but then that was all any of us were, really, including him and me. Maybe that wasn’t much but who were we to judge that it wasn’t enough? And Dr Winslow sniggered and patted me on the head and walked away.

After a sufficient number of encounters with Dr Winslow outside the seclusion-room door, I found myself avoiding him. Increasingly, he was only making me angry, and I knew the time would come when I could not hold my tongue. And I knew I had to. Nothing would be accomplished by alienating Winslow, and I couldn’t afford to spare the effort anyway. There was too much else to do. However, I was thankful to him for one thing. His comments galvanized my own feelings toward Kevin. Maybe he didn’t matter much to anyone else but for the first time I was fully aware that Kevin did very definitely matter to me.

I came and I came again to the hospital. After Jeff left, I couldn’t afford to resume coming every day because I was struggling under the weight of some of Jeff’s other cases as well as the ones we had been splitting and of course my own workload. And there were all the emergency calls on Kevin as well, when I had to show up in the middle of the night. But I came when I could and as often as I could.

We didn’t do much together. Kevin had been moved into a small single room just off the nurses’ desk. It had none of the advantages of either of Kevin’s previous rooms: no window, no Loopy Larry. Most of the time Kevin just lay on his bed with the blankets over his head anyway, and I sat on the bed beside him and made inane, one-way small talk. Or if he was in the seclusion room, I did even less. I just came in and stood until either he calmed down or I had to leave. It was a traumatic and draining couple of weeks for both of us but I tried not to let that stop me. I kept coming back. Someone had to. And it looked like someone was me.

After a while even my ability to make one-sided conversation waned, and to fend off the silence, I started bringing books and reading them aloud to him while he lay huddled under his blankets. What a clever idea, Dr Winslow said, when he caught me at it one day, bibliotherapy. Bibliotherapy, hell. I had just run out of other ideas of what to do with the kid and I still wanted to be there. It was a painless time killer. It had worked when I was a teacher, so I reckoned it wouldn’t let me down now. Anyway, I don’t think it was especially important what I did, as long as I did it.

So there I was reading to him. I had one of C. S. Lewis’s books from the
Chronicles of Narnia, The Silver Chair
. We were immersed in a world of mugwumps and giants and princes. At one point in the story a witch captures the main characters and forces them to acknowledge that there is no sun. There is no sun. It is all a dream. The sun is just a dream.

Kevin stirred. ‘There are a lot of things that are only dreams,’ he said. It was the first time he had spoken to me in almost two weeks.

From where I was sitting, I looked up. I only raised my eyes without lifting my head.

‘There are so many things that are no more than only dreams’, he said again, ‘and then there are things that aren’t dreams.’

I nodded.

‘And sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart.’

He still lay on his side, the blankets up over his shoulders. He stared ahead of him and not in my direction. ‘Sometimes I don’t want to tell the two apart. Sometimes I don’t know if things are real or if they’re only dreams.’

Again I nodded.

‘Maybe it’s just a dream I had. Maybe Jeff’s coming back. Maybe he’s not gone at all. Maybe I just dreamed it and I’m going to wake up again.’

‘I don’t think it was a dream, Kevin.’

He looked over the edge of the blanket at me. ‘You’re not a dream, are you?’

‘No, I’m real.’

‘I thought so,’ he said, and I could not tell if the fact relieved or dismayed him.

We sat together, wrapped up in threads of sinewy silence.

‘But I don’t really want to know,’ he said. ‘I wish I didn’t. I wish I could just believe what I wanted. I wish I couldn’t tell the difference.’

I said nothing.

‘I want to stay crazy. It’s better that way.’

And the stillness spun up around me, up around my ears like the silk of a caterpillar. For many minutes there was no sound.

Then Kevin peered over the edge of his blanket at me again. For the first time, he looked right at me. He had to raise up a bit on one elbow to do it. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘It’s better being crazy. I told you that before and I’m right. It’s better being crazy because if you don’t like the way it is here then you can have dreams. And if you don’t like the dreams, then they come and give you shots and you don’t feel anything anyway and you just drift around. Dead. Half-dead. Alive but like you’re dead. You just drift around alive, but dead. And it all seems the same after a while.’

‘That’s no life, Kevin. What kind of life is that?’

‘Who wants life? What kind of life is this?’

‘What kind of life is anything, Kevin, when you think like that?’

He flopped back down, unperturbed, and stared at the ceiling. ‘Being crazy’s not so bad, Tor. People leave you alone.’

‘I don’t think you’re crazy, Kevin. I think you’ve just been playing one big, long game with everyone. I think maybe you’ve been playing it so long now that the game seems more real to you than your real life does. I think you’ve forgotten what it’s like not to play the game. But I don’t think you’re crazy, Kevin. Loopy Larry’s crazy. But not you.’

‘I’m just like Loopy Larry.’

‘No, you’re not, Kevin. You’re a fox. You’re a fox run to ground.’

‘
I
seen him do it.’

I paused, baffled.

‘
I
seen him. He says, Kevin, come here. He says, see what your sister’s done? She peed the floor. He says, you wipe it up. I didn’t have anything to do it with.’

‘Kevin, what are you talking about?’

He looked at me. ‘You want to know why I’m crazy? You want to know why I’m in here, you think you know so much?’

I did not answer.

‘I didn’t have nothing to wipe the pee up with. And I stood there because I was scared to move in case he’d take after me. And he says, use your hands. So I came over and I tried to wipe it up with my hands. He says, what should I do to her, Kevin, for peeing the floor? My mom was standing there, and he says to her, Josie – that was my mother’s name – he says, Josie, go get the hot sauce out of the cupboard. And my mom does. And he takes Carol by the hair. He pulls her over and he says, I’m going to make you drink this, ’cause you peed the floor. This’ll make you remember not to.’

The blankets slipped away from Kevin’s shoulders. He clutched at them with his fingers but he did not pull them up. His face was pale.

‘Carol wouldn’t open her mouth, so he put her between his legs and yanked her hair back so she cried. And he shook the bottle of hot sauce down her. Carol screamed, so I screamed too. I screamed at him for doing that and he laughed. He says to me, that makes you talk, don’t it? Can talk if you feel like it. I wanna hear you talk some more. And he put her head back and he shook the bottle and he shook it and he shook it. And I screamed. I screamed at him to stop. I screamed at my mother. I said, why don’t you make him stop? I hit him and I screamed and he laughed. He let go of Carol and he told her to pee on the floor now. He says you pee when I tell you. He made her take off her clothes and he says, pee. And when she squatted down to pee, he kicked her, hard, right in that private place girls have. And he says, I told you never to pee on the floor. And Carol was crying. And I begged him to stop. I got down on my knees. I told him I’d talk to him. Whatever he’d want if he’d just stop it. I was begging. I prayed to God. I was on my knees and I begged.