The Value Of Rain (9 page)

Snow found me on my bunk several days later, the razor glistening in the light of the rose purple air of dusk.

“What the fuck are you doing?” His anger was sharp and acute; the muscles in his arms small and tight as he grabbed the razor from me and flung it out into the common area. He took a deep breath, turned back to me and sat down beside me, kissing each of my still naked wrists.

“Why?” he asked, his voice a small brown waver.

“Why not?” I answered. How could I explain that even when we were together I still felt a hidden loneliness lurking beneath my skin; a crude groping that seemed receptive only to the tactile weight of unhappiness?

“Because Charlotte expects to bury you,” Snow replied. “All that will give her” he said, nodding at my wrists,” is an end to her embarrassment. Do you really want to give her that satisfaction?”

I looked at him. His comment made me think back on her note, the audacity of it; the weight of it. I would not buckle under it. I could not.

Two hours later we found out that the Turtle was dead in his office; his head parked on his shoulders, Lester gyrating outside the office screaming about how the vending machines had struck, but missed him, and killed the good doctor instead.

His name was Caufield Smith, pronounced “Co-field”, which he insisted on being called, Doctor of Psychiatry. He took over the case load of the Turtle only two weeks after the Turtle’s death.

He seemed a compassionate man with an effective talent of quiet extraction. He didn’t practice like a dentist; breaking things apart and ripping them out in a froth of bloody nerves and saliva. He was more a florist, selecting one flower at a time, admiring the beauty of its petals, relishing the power of its perfume, placing it just so, before drawing back and saying ‘Look, look here. This is the beauty of your arrangement.’ If it was all shriveled roses and decaying baby’s breath, he still revealed in it; still loved the mental tesserae depicting that hidden id. For him, even insanity had a suffused beauty to it.

He was in his sixties, but by the use of various dyes and gels kept himself looking in his mid forties. Dark chestnut hair and a slightly lighter beard accented hazel green eyes and softened his linear features enough to make his gaze bearable.

I learned quickly that he used silence like a weapon. He simply refused to fill the void of our own muzzled cries and kept looking at us expectantly, his finger tapping our file while his eyes bored past our mental walls and saw the ugliness inside. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. On me, it worked.

Unlike many of the other professionals I met over the years, Caufield didn’t stand on convention. He tried to learn from each of his patients and, in turn, expected each of us to take something of him. As if he could parcel out his soul and tidbits of his sanity and make us whole again.

But why he ever showed up at the Birch Building at all was a question I pondered many times before I finally asked. He shrugged in reply and informed me that he loved the clinical aspect of his job too much to chase the prestige so many of his peers craved. In fact, he found it a hindrance in his exploration of the human mind and intimated, without actually saying so, that this mislaid importance on fame was what had narrowed Freud’s scope to such an extent that he was ultimately vilified by his own theories. Not seeing the forest for the trees, as it were.

“Why are you here?” he countered during our fourth session together, nearly four years after I had entered the Birch Building.

He looked at me closely, his already heavy gaze picking apart the layers of protection I had built up over the years. “Sexual behavior modification,” I finally answered in a blurt.

His eyebrows shot up past the gold wire frames of his glasses and he burst with laughter. I cowered immediately; my fortitude curling in on itself because it sounded too much like Jarrel’s braying.

He saw my reaction and sobered instantly. “Sorry. Good one though. I mean really, why are you here?”

“Because my mother couldn’t tolerate the insult of having a faggot in her house,” I answered precisely.

He cocked his head a bit and studied me, his finger tapping the unopened cover of my file. “Your records indicate quite a bit more.”

“I haven’t had any reason to conform socially, doc. Shock treatment does wonders for the personality.”

“Shock treatment was rejected decades ago,” he informed me.

“And homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973,” I countered,” but here I am. I guess that means I must be delusional.”

He looked down at my file but didn’t open it. “Where’d you come from?”

“Sanctuary. Four years ago.”

A look of apprehension overcame him and he gave me the feeling that I might actually be communicating with a human being that wasn’t plugged in to the psycho-babblic machine of so-called modern psychiatry.

“Your file says you came from a private institution down south,” Caufield told me.

I raised my eyebrows at the prospect, but said nothing.

He looked at me for a moment. “I found your father. He’d like to take you home. Maybe.”

He let that sink in. “Now the bad news.” He prodded my three inch thick file toward me on the desk. “This is a smoking gun. Were I to get you out of here and have you do something stupid….” He didn’t need to say anymore, I knew the risk he’d be taking. That file covered eight years of outbursts, rejection and rage. Someone else wouldn’t even think about it, the key would have already been thrown away. And that was only with what I knew I had done; there was no telling what Minot had written in that file to justify his actions.

“Think about it,” he told me as I got up to leave. “We’ll talk about it some more.”

When I told Snow about it later, he said it was great, but from the shattered expression on his face I should have known it wasn’t.

Five years at the Birch Building had passed when I finally realized that the oil of my living had baked into its walls; my crude black shadow enjoining the tide pool of insanity that surrounded me.

Outside, in the sky, small fists of white unfolded into snowflakes, the brown winter wind whisking them away like fallen angels. I looked through the barred windows with the rest of the inanimate at the first heavy snow and wondered how I had made it this far; how I had survived and not succumbed to the undertow of Charlotte’s final note.

But my friends had not survived.

The procession carrying Snow through the snow was a testament to that; his white shrouded body shouldered by white shrouded orderlies in a white shrouded world.

Two days ago I found him in a steam filled shower, the tiny brown tiles pitying the decay of feet above them; the ceiling peeling a grey relief into the black cloud of hopelessness and mildew. A flower of red had bloomed under the white white rose of Snow, one opened by the silver petal of a razor.

I sat down slowly, holding myself against the wall as I pushed my body down into the warmth of the shower. His hand was pale and rubbery when I grasped it; warm, yet lifeless. All I could do was pull him close and wail.

As I watched his procession leave the building a tear slipped, then two. The flood following it pushed those with me at the window back a few feet; the raw sanity of the emotion throwing them even more off kilter.

Lester, who hesitated on the periphery of the crowd that had formed around me, finally pushed through; his normally restless eyes steady and pink. “We’ll get them for this. I promise! We’ll get the sons-of bitches!” He patted me on the shoulder and pushed back through the circle.

Yes, I thought as I turned back to the window. We would get them, every fucking one.

A faint odor of ginger and daikon washed over me and I turned to find Thai at my side, knowing it would be him without looking. He pointed outside with a look of concern tangling the wrinkles of his face.

I nodded and made a slashing motion at my arms. He knew Snow, everyone had.

Thai shook his head no, and pointed outside again, up at the sky this time.

“The storm?” I asked. This intangible flaky mooring anchoring me to the concept of an outside world?

He nodded excitedly, pushed the window up an inch and came back with a handful of snow. He pointed at it and I threw my hands up to show him that I didn’t understand.

Frustrated, he dumped the snow on the floor and stuck his hand through the bars again. This time he came back with just a few flakes balanced on his fingertips. He pointed at them before they had a chance to melt to their element.

I shrugged again. I hated charades. I looked around the circle but no one else seemed to understand either, and at this particular moment I just didn’t care.

“Coin of the Gods,” a voice rumbled outside our small group of miscreant mourners. The circle parted like a wave. It was Tiny.

“Water is life.” Tiny said.”Coin of the Gods. It has value. Its absence equals death.”

I looked at Thai who nodded enthusiastically. The gods were displaying their reverence for that tortured young soul by filling the world with his namesake. I put my hand on Thai’s shoulder and thanked him. The circle broke up and I was left alone to watch a silent ambulance penetrate the mute night and disappear in a dance of angels.

*****

“He wasn’t stable Charles. It wasn’t your fault,” Caufield told me first thing the next day.

I said nothing. I stared at the floor in his office. All the tears I had to shed had fallen. I knew Snow’s death wasn’t my fault, yet I still felt responsible, as if I had failed him somehow; the news of my possible release pushing him to the very act of permanence he had always sought to avoid.

“Are you ready for this?” Caufield asked me.

I looked up at him. “No.”

“Me either,” he replied. I stopped looking through him and looked at him.

He shrugged. “It’s a big step. I want you out of here and I want you to succeed, but that lever you hold against the dam of malice you think no one sees is liable to snap once you get beyond these walls.

“And you don’t think it’s justified?” I demanded, suddenly red faced and hostile.

“I think it’s very justified,” Caufield answered quietly. “But I don’t think exchanging this institution for another is a very wise choice. Do you?”

I stood and held my arms out, the same pose I would strike for Charlotte a decade later. It showed the strength of my weakness. Like Charlotte, Caufield didn’t buy it either. He motioned me to sit, an unamused frown on his face.

“We have a hundred men here who’ve committed acts more savage than you would think Tiny capable of. Most of them had much less provocation and substantially less time to brood.” He let that sit between us for a moment before we moved on to the true reason for me being in his office this morning. “What are your expectations from this meeting?”

“None. I don’t expect shit.”

“So you can’t be disappointed.”

“Exactly,” I answered.

“Valid, but not exactly honest, is it?”

I queried the floor again with my eyes. He was talking validity, and I was thinking about how all three of the men I had grown attached to were putrefying in the ground somewhere. How everything I attached myself to was yanked away from me.

There was a hesitant knock on the door and I looked up at Caufield in a panic.

“You have nothing to fear, Charles. We’ve spoken dozens of times. He just wants to reassure himself that you’re not some raving madman.”

“But I am.”

Caufield froze me to my seat with a look before he got up and answered the door.

When it opened I heard the whispery paper noises of a handshake but could not bring myself to turn around; my neck was too stiff and my eyes deadened by all the accolades and frustrations I had poured on this stranger over the years. All I could focus on was the snow trickling down through the window behind Caufield’s desk.