Tumbledown (8 page)

“That might mean prison.”

He winced. “Not if the tests, you know . . .” He gave Candler a long look. “You’ll email me the report?”

“I can do that.”

“Thank you, sir.” And he was gone, the door thoughtlessly slammed.

“
No,
you ugh-water, the song is called ‘Summer Wind,’ ” Maura said, “not that I was talking to you.”

“If the wind can choose when it blows . . .” Rhine continued but she cut him off.

“Shut the
fuck
up.” She glared, a mock glare, really, but it did the job. It was almost noon, and Crews had not come back. He must be mowing a football field. She was telling Mick about someone in her dorm playing the same song over and over, a dorky Frank Sinatra song, but Rhine couldn’t keep his nose out of it, and now Cecil Fresnay was upset.

“She’s not talking to you, Cecil Something Something,” Mick said. “You’re doing just really fine. Good, fine work.”

Cecil the human trout was on the verge of tears every five minutes. Maura had paid Cecil and Alonso at the hourly breaks. There shouldn’t have been enough left in the cash box to continue paying them, but Cecil hadn’t yet earned a dollar for the whole morning. He was hopelessly out of it. Crews had never been gone this long before, and she imagined him at the emergency room with a mowed-off foot in his pocket.

Mick calmed Cecil down and put him back to molesting spider boxes. The job was different without Crews around. Everyone in the room felt it, Maura especially. A thrumming vibration rattled her bones, demanding she take advantage of his absence. It was stupid to waste opportunity, wasn’t it?

“My mom’s car,” Cecil said, dropping the spider box in his hands. He picked it up. “My mom’s driving car is so big it can hold one mile of people.”

“No car is that big,” Rhine said, “except maybe an army car.” His hands slowed as he pictured an impossibly long, light-green army truck, like the plastic toys he had played with as a boy; it had a square cab and a tent like covering for the enormous bed, with rows of benches along either side. It wouldn’t be called a truck
bed
if there were benches in it, he reasoned. “Is it a bed if there are benches?” he asked. The others looked at him as if he were nuts. He began explaining, which forced him to stop working. He couldn’t talk and work at the same time. A ringing phone in the empty office had ruined his last hour. He could not block out the sound, and with each ring he flinched with the desire to drop everything and answer it. He had tried twice, but the office was locked.

Cecil picked up his elliptical, nonsensical monologue. “I was even born in California,” he announced.

“You find out who was playing the Sinatra?” Mick asked.

Maura nodded. “The house attendant or whatever they call him—the fucking
guard.
He’s trying to learn the words with his daughter. She’s in a talent contest. Though why any normal kid would choose to sing F. Sinatra is beyond me.”

“ ’Tectives follow people,” Cecil continued, “and look for clues, like if you have any fingerprints in those boxes.”

“It’s
de
tective, moron,” Maura said softly, almost to herself.

“And they have cars with special powers.” His arms spread like wings, and he made a whooshing noise.

“You’re an idiot,” Maura said as she dropped completed cartons into the transport box. Cecil kept flying, calling now for mission control. “You mean the
control tower.
”

“You said the I-word.” Rhine pointed at her.

That Rhine could not talk and work was one of the saving graces of the assembly line, but today he had done almost no work and a lot of talking. “Idiot, idiot, idiot,” Maura said. “Get back to work.”

Rhine counted with his fingers. “That’s four I-words, total, Maura.” She did not reply but casually reached inside her purse, which was open on the assembly table. Her cell phone lay on top of the jumble.

It took only a second to hit redial. The phone in the office rang again. Rhine set his carton down. “Can’t anyone hear the phone ringing?”

“I don’t hear a thing,” Maura said. “Karly, you hear anything?” Karly was studying the carton in her hands with what looked like fascination, folding it so slowly you might think she had never seen a spider carton. When she got like this, she didn’t hear anybody.

“Do you ever wonder,” Mick asked Maura, “what people like that hear in their heads? What it’s like to have thoughts and feelings that don’t make you . . . like us?”

“People like what? Like Rhine or like Sinatra?”

“The dorm attendant who’s got a daughter.”

Maura quite literally didn’t know how to think about the question. She didn’t believe her thoughts were different from anyone else’s, except the nimrods and dimwits for whom thoughts were like baths and a new one every few days seemed sufficient.

Mick Coury had been seventeen when schizophrenia unaccountably descended upon him, and he was only twenty-one now, but he didn’t remember much about the fabric of his thoughts before his illness. It seemed to him it was something like the difference between color television and black-and-white. The basic environment of thought was recognizably the same, and yet some element was drained from it. He tried to explain this while he was whipping together cartons.

“Until we get better,” he said, “the best we can hope for is like those colorized movies that make everything too bright and phony looking.”

“Some things look better in black and white,” she said.

“Chess,” Rhine offered, as if he’d been a part of the conversation all along.

“It’s not that I regret getting sick,” Mick said reasonably. “I never would have met Karly if I hadn’t gotten sick. Or you. Or everybody.

I’d be a totally different person, which means that the person I am wouldn’t exist.”

Alonso left the line for the men’s room. Sounds of grunting and squealing quickly followed. He made loud noises when he jerked off, vocalizations, shouts without words. Everyone in the room was used to this rough music and ignored it. It was amazing what you could get used to. Amazing, too, what you couldn’t get used to, like Rhine and the ringing telephone. What was it about this place that she wasn’t yet used to? The green-tasting water. Confinement. She wanted to go to Alonso’s party. She wasn’t in any way suicidal. Shouldn’t her desire to go out and have fun prove that?

Rhine left his spot to show Karly the wrapper to a McDonald’s double cheeseburger that had no grease stain. He kept it in his wallet. He had quit eating animals several months earlier, a fact he announced to the group with some regularity. “I don’t have any trouble being vegetarian,” he told Karly, “as long as I know at the end of the week I can have thirty minutes of meat.” He revealed that he could eat five double cheeseburgers in thirty minutes.

Maura’s sophomore year of high school she had been in love with a senior, Skinner, who was addicted to amphetamines, which suited her fine since he was a bastard without them. Speed made him chummy and sweet. He wanted to give her things and have her jerk him off. The next day he’d want his stuff back. She would return it and jerk him off again. Maybe it hadn’t been love, but she’d gotten used to him in a way that was more than habit. She didn’t get off with him, speed or anything else, except to smoke a joint now and then, or drink some rum. They dropped acid together twice, smoked hash a couple of times, did ecstasy if they didn’t have to pay for it, sniffed cocaine if it was around, and took downers if they didn’t have money for booze. But that was it. She wasn’t into drugs. She did the scoring, though, because Skinner had a wussy side to him that kept thinking he’d get arrested, which he finally did.

Maura got along fine with Skinner until his right leg swelled to the size of his waist. He passed out on the way to the hospital. She drove him there even though she didn’t have a license. She saved his life, which no one seemed to notice. The doctors cut his pants off, and he got busted in the emergency room for the stuff in his pockets, right while they were rolling him into surgery to amputate. A tough day, no question, but he never did go to prison. Instead, he spent a few months in drug and no-leg rehab, a local, crappy place, not much like Onyx Rehab. The nurses there didn’t like Maura, and neither did Skinner. She had nothing to do with the blood clot that almost killed him, and she didn’t understand why he quit liking her, except that he wasn’t doing speed anymore. A person would think if he lost his leg he’d be happy to have a girl who still wanted to jerk him off, stump and all. She smuggled amphetamines into the clinic, but he wouldn’t take them. He wound up going to some college in the northwest his parents wouldn’t name, as if Maura was the bad influence.

The last time she saw him, he had called her
fat
and a
bitch,
and—thinking she might have missed the substance of his mood—
a fat bitch.
She had thought:
This fight is going to be nasty.
It would include screaming and accusations. Each would bring up hurtful memories, and there’d be temporary truces, and when one of them broke the truce, the other would get to throw something or slam a door. Realizing this pleased her. It promised they would remain together for at least the duration of the fight, and if they made it that far, there would be make-up sex—just a hand-job, but sometimes she took off her shirt, and his mouth on her breasts was like the plucking of strings, as if she were a bass fiddle and he knew how to play. And she liked his cock, too, in her fist, how it grew and trembled, how it made their connection literal. They were denied their fight. His parents arrived and ushered her out. Thinking about it pissed her off, and she reached again into her purse.

“Sometimes,” Mick said, “I wonder about those years when I’d think without thinking about it, and how I wasted all those ordinary thoughts, like I blew my sanity on
The Simpsons
or which shirt to wear with which pair of socks, and I wish I had some of that clearheadedness now, but then I wonder which thoughts I would have kept and how I’d know to keep them.”

The unmedicated Mick liked to talk, the words building up speed until his tongue could no longer keep up with his brain. Right up to that point, though, he could sound like a philosopher. When the phone rang again, she had a moment of regret, thinking it might interrupt his train of thought. Rhine, that human dildo, should have guessed she was doing the calling. They were not supposed to bring cell phones to the sheltered workshop; therefore, she must not have one. She understood how Rhine’s teensy brain worked. She also understood that she cared more about Mick, whom she had never even kissed, than she ever cared about Skinner.

“I know I’d keep the thoughts about serious things,” Mick went on as the phone recommenced its ringing, “like love and being a good person and whether there’s a god, but I can’t actually remember ever thinking about those things, which makes me think that sanity is when you don’t have to work hard to think nothing and it’s not frightening to yourself or others to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.”

Rhine shrieked, “That could be a very important call!”

“I used to smoke pot all the time,” Maura said. Rhine ran past her to the office and rattled the door. “It made me chill out, but maybe chilled out was bad for me. I was high when I cut myself up. You, on the other hand, could use some chill.”

“When we get better,” he said, “how do you think we’ll remember being like this?”

At this moment she realized something she had long worked to avoid understanding: he was more fucked up than she was. Maybe a lot more, despite how he could talk, how he could be nice even to that Cecil character. She gave her head the tiniest of shakes. “I wouldn’t mind if we were always just like this.”

Rhine disappeared into the kitchen, which was off-limits, and he quickly returned, apologizing to the cooks, who didn’t like anyone from the sheltered workshop. He returned to the line, but the phone rang again and he dropped his spider carton and jerked around, his agitation palpable to everyone in the room.

“It’s not humorous, Maura,” Rhine said.

“Look for Crews outside,” she suggested.

“We’re not supposed to go
outside.
It is forbidden for workshop members to go outside during working hours except for breaks or in case of emergency.”

“If it’s not an emergency, then just cool out.”

“All right,” he said and nodded convincingly. “That’s the way to think about it.”

Almost immediately, the phone in the office rang again.

Rhine picked up Crews’s chair on the way to the office. He swung the chair at the window, which shattered. He stepped onto the chair and reached over the ragged glass in the frame to pick up the phone. “Onyx Springs Sheltered Workshop,” he said. “Rhine speaking.”

A few things that have been omitted: