Chapter Text
Ginsberg woke up with a start. The room was striped with light and shadow and Floyd was sawing logs, a motionless heap under the blankets. Ginsberg didn’t understand how he could sleep like that - it was too hot for even a sheet. And nobody was going to open a window for obvious reasons.
He lay on his back and thought about asking whatever orderly was out there if he could have a glass of water. There was a big oak outside the window and the branches scraped loudly against it, but that wouldn’t keep him awake. Very little did these days.
A voice floated out of the darkness, thin and spooky. “I dreamt about it again.”
Ginsberg jumped. The hair on his arms stood up. “For fuck’s sake, Sandy. Warn someone before you do that.”
He was sitting in the corner of the room with his legs crossed. His pale hair was sticking up all over and even from the bed Ginsberg could tell that his eyes were swollen. “I’m sorry,” he said, and wiped his nose on his shirtsleeve.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Ginsberg said, and forced himself to sit up. He sounded exhausted even to his own ears. “But you’re gonna get in trouble if you get caught. We talked about this.”
Sandy nodded. “I remember, I remember. But it was hard to think.”
“Yeah,” said Ginsberg. “I got some idea of how that feels.” He stood up and gestured for Sandy to join him. “Come on. I’ll walk you back.”
The hallway was as dark as the inside of a coffin. He held Sandy’s elbow so he wouldn’t bump into anything. It was so quiet that the sound of their footsteps bounced of the walls.They looked like ghosts wearing pyjamas instead of burial shrouds, wandering the halls, searching for something they would never find - lost loves or lost children. Sandy was barely more than a child himself. He was the most frightened person Ginsberg had ever met.
“I hate him,” said Sandy, suddenly, savagely, as Ginsberg got him back into bed. “I hate him so much.”
“I know,” said Ginsberg, even though he had no idea what Sandy was talking about. “So do I.”
He took a bath in the morning. It had horrified him, in the beginning, the lack of privacy. The burning indignity of undressing in the presence of someone he didn’t even know. Why aren’t there shower stalls, he had asked. Can I just have a minute alone, he had begged.
It had stopped mattering at some point. He didn’t fight anymore. They cut his hair, they told him when to eat and when to take his pills, he had to strip off in front of his roommate and an orderly - it was all the same. He was too tired to care. He lost track of time so easily, days or even weeks. It had become curiously featureless, a long unmarked highway.
Floyd didn’t give a fuck. He had been in the army when he was young, he told Ginsberg, scrubbing his toes cheerfully. That was routine, routine, routine, too.
“Was it as mind-numbing as this?” Ginsberg asked, because that was how he felt; frozen right through, like he was sleepwalking through each hour. I just want to go back to bed, he thought, but he always wanted to go back to bed.
Floyd didn’t hear. He was talking with the orderly - it was Sean, Sean was okay - because he had been in the army too and now they were comparing infantries or something. Gossiping like a couple of old hens.
Ginsberg tipped his head back and let the lukewarm water rise around his ears, blocking out the sound.
Stan came to visit him on the weekend. They walked around the grounds and made small talk. Ginsberg didn’t ask about work. He especially didn’t ask about Peggy. Stan tried to find out if Ginsberg was feeling any better without letting on that was what he was doing.
“Here,” he said, once the conversation dried up due to Ginsberg’s monosyllabic answers. “I got you something.” He looked shifty and reached inside his jacket.
“That better not be a dirty magazine,” Ginsberg warned. “They’re gonna take it away.”
“Why would I - you know what, don’t tell me. Just take it.” He shoved a box at him.
It was a carton of cigarettes.
“Thanks?” said Ginsberg. “I don’t smoke.”
“I know that. They’re for trading - like in prison.” There was an odd beat of silence, and then Stan nudged him. “It’s a joke, man.”
“Oh,” said Ginsberg.
Stan looked concerned. He always did. Ginsberg tried to keep a game face on for him but it was so hard. He couldn’t even fool his old man anymore, and on some level he was used to telling Morris comforting lies. Sure, I got some friends at school. They’re too busy to come over, is all. So we can’t afford college - I’ll do something else with my life. I’m just bad at meeting girls. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not half bad here, Pop. They treat me real nice. I’m getting stronger every day.
“So did they make you go see the shrink again?” Stan asked.
“They got a new one,” said Ginsberg. “I haven’t met him yet.” What was his name? Takahashi? No, that wasn’t right. Dr. Cunningham had moved on to greener pastures, and good riddance. Ginsberg spent one session with him and it made his skin crawl. The good doctor had expressionless brown eyes behind little glasses and an intense scientific curiosity about the workings of the abnormal mind. Ginsberg hadn’t told him a thing and still walked out of the room feeling like a petri dish. “Why? You think I should?”
“Probably wouldn’t hurt.” Stan said with a shrug. “Isn’t that what the guy is there for?”
“I’m not interested,” said Ginsberg. “He can’t help me.” There was no fixing him. A wire came loose in his head and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Defective from the start, probably. It made him sick to think that it could happen again.
“How do you know that? It could be the first step to getting out of here.”
Ginsberg stared. He searched Stan’s face for some kind of understanding. There was none; he actually thought -
“I’m not gonna get out of here,” Ginsberg said. “I’m a lifer.”
“Ginzo, come on -”
“Stan, look what I did.”
“You weren’t in your right mind.”
“That’s the whole point.” Ginsberg’s chest felt tight and a headache was starting behind his eyes. He closed them for a second to shut out the sunlight, the trees, the birds that were flitting from branch to branch and singing merrily away. He couldn’t enjoy any of it. “There’s something very wrong with me, and it isn’t going away.” He took a deep breath. “And I think - I think you ought not come up so much.”
“So that’s it,” said Stan flatly. “You’re going to give up and just spend the rest of your life locked away.”
“I’m grateful you’re on my side, okay? I am. But I can’t be out there.” Ginsberg pointed towards the road, or at least the direction he thought it was in. “I can’t risk it. If you didn’t know me - if I was a stranger to you - would you want me mingling with the general population?”
“Who gives a fuck? I do know you and you aren’t dangerous.You sound -”
“Crazy?”
“That isn’t what I meant,” Stan muttered. He looked like he’d been told there was no Santa Claus.
“I know,” Ginsberg said. He held up the cigarettes. “You should take these back with you. I’m not gonna use them.”
Stan tucked the carton under his arm. “I still think you should keep them for bribes,” he said, and walked Ginsberg back to the building.
“I can get up next weekend too, if you want,’ Stan said when they reached the door. “You need me to bring you anything?”
I wish you wouldn’t, Ginsberg thought. What was the plan, that Stan was just going to keep dragging his ass up here, on and on through the years, until they were old and gray? He had other things to do. Everyone did. Ginsberg wanted to be left alone. He wanted to finish fading away, to be done with having to put an effort in. To stop pretending to be real person.
“I hate to ask,” Ginsberg started.
“Hey, I offered. What do you want?”
“Could you look in my Pop once in awhile?” Ginsberg asked. “He’s all by himself out there. Sounds real lonely whenever I talk to him on the phone.” Morris couldn’t get up as much as he wanted to. He didn’t have a car, and the neighbours weren’t being very generous in offering to drive him. Nobody wanted to get within twenty feet of the nutcase, apparently. It made him so frustrated - Ginsberg thought he could hear tears in his voice during their last conversation. Just fucking awful.
“Of course. Anything else?”
Ginsberg hesitated at the door. There was one other thing. He didn’t want to talk about it, but he might not get another chance - who knew what kind of state he would be in next weekend, or two days after that, or at any point in the future. Best to get it over with while he still could.
“Can you -” he started, and then stopped. He watched an ant crawl up his shoe because he couldn’t look Stan in the eye. It was a minute before he could force himself to keep going. “Please tell Peggy that I’m sorry. For everything.”
And with that he turned and went back inside.
Ginsberg met the new doctor the next morning. He was sitting by the window, dozing off - he had passed a rough night. One of the nurses kept shining her flashlight into his room every thirty minutes. She must have been new, and overzealous.
Someone dragged up a chair. He heard it scrape the floor but didn’t open his eyes. If that was Floyd wanting to play cards he could piss off.
“Michael, right?” The voice wasn’t familiar.
“So?” he said, annoyed, and then sat straight up when he saw it was the shrink. He felt like he had been caught napping in class.
“I’m Dr. Tanaka,” the doctor said, and shook Ginsberg’s hand as if they were meeting in the Time Life building and not a room with metal grating over all the windows. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
His hair was heavily speckled with gray but he was younger than Ginsberg would have expected. Maybe forty, if his guess was accurate. No suit either, just slacks and a pinstriped shirt. He wasn’t wearing a tie.
“What are your plans for the day?” he asked.
“I hear they’re gonna serve meatloaf for lunch,” said Ginsberg. “which is an exciting development. Personally, I’m looking forward to it. After that, a game of backgammon if I’m feeling really wild.”
The doctor didn’t take the bait. “Does that mean you’re free to talk to me for a few minutes?”
“Is this mandatory?”
“No. But I think it could be helpful.”
He went because he didn’t have anything else to do except look at the backs of his eyelids. At least talking to the doctor would keep him awake.
The office had changed since Ginsberg had been in it last. Before there had been fake paintings of fancy naked ladies on the walls and one of those weird looking sofas, the kind that was made for lying down on but not sitting. There was still a couch but it was normal, upholstered in light blue with wooden armrests and a couple of pillows. Dr. Cunningham’s wingback was gone as well - a wicker chair with a fat, patterned cushion sat in its place.
Two prints hung above the desk. They looked to be by the same artist - a central figure done up in vivid, flat colors on a black background. There were words on the bottom - Italian, he thought, or French. The first was a lady in a white sheet sitting on a giant bunch of grapes; the second a green devil uncorking a bottle.
“What are those?” he asked. He felt like he knew them from somewhere.
“Leonetto Cappiello,” answered Dr.Tanaka. “He was a great ad artist - I’m told you’re very talented in that area yourself.”
“No, I was a writer. I can’t do more than doodle.”
“Yes, sorry - that’s what I meant.”
“Yeah, well,” Ginsberg said, uncomfortable. He would rather not talk about work at all if he could help it. “Am I supposed to lie down?”
“Or you can sit. Whichever you would prefer.”
He did sit, in the middle of the couch. “Are you writing a book, too?”
Dr. Tanaka looked puzzled as he took the wicker chair. “I’m not writing a book, no. Did you think I was?”
“That’s what everybody said about Dr. Cunningham. That he was writing a book and he left ‘cause he was finished.”
For a split second Dr.Tanaka looked like he had bitten into a lemon, but his face smoothed out quickly. “No, I won’t be doing that. Nothing we discuss will be in a book. I wanted to ask how things have been going for you here,” he said. “How do you feel you’ve been adjusting?”
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”
“You’ve had a very hard time of it lately and it’s a big change in circumstances. No one could blame you if you felt unsteady.”
Ginsberg shrugged. “I mostly feel tired.”
“Is that normal for you?”
“Normal? You must be talking about some other guy.”
Dr. Tanaka didn’t say anything; just looked at him, calmly and clearly - and Ginsberg dropped his gaze to his knees.
“I used to have lots of energy. And I had a lot of sleepless nights, too,” he admitted. “I don’t know how both those things are true, but they are.”
“They may be related. Was it a nervous energy? Or did it make you happy?”
“I - both?” He had always been an emotional person. His highs were high and his lows were low. But he knew damn well that it was unusual to wake up in the middle of the night with his heart pounding for no reason. That most people didn’t obsess over some horrible thing they had seen on the news for days at a time, or spend a significant portion of their lives certain that something bad was going to happen, but not knowing what, never knowing exactly what. He had always had a tendency to get too wrapped up in his own head. It was just that before he hadn’t known how bad it could get. “I’d say my nerves are bad. I mean, obviously.”
“How did you deal with it, typically?”
Ginsberg stared at him flatly. “By maiming myself and ending up in the nuthouse.”
“That wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t a poor decision - it was a symptom of illness.”
“That’s worse,” Ginsberg said, low and bitter. “I can’t trust my own mind. I thought I could see danger on the horizon, you know? That I had to warn people about it. But it was only me, all along. I had a wrong idea in my head and I burned down my life because of it.”
“You can still have a life,” said Dr. Tanaka said gently. “You have one right now. You’re being very hard on yourself.”
“What life? I’ll be stuck in here for the rest of it. I might as well -”
“Might as well what?”
“Forget about it,” Ginsberg muttered. He wasn’t going to tell some shrink about what he thought about when the lonely hours dragged on, about how he was never going to go see a movie again or bring home takeout for his father or walk past a bakery and smell fresh bread. “I just mean that I might as well have jumped off a bridge. I’d have as much chance of coming back from it.”
“And is suicide something you’ve considered?” Dr. Tanaka sounded concerned, which Ginsberg supposed made sense - it was his job. “Either in the past or now?”
Never before, but - well, he hadn’t had a reason to, before. It wasn’t like he had a plan. He didn’t sit around comparing methods of self annihilation. It was an option, that was all. If things got too bad, if he couldn’t take it any longer. It was just an option.
“I wouldn’t,” he told the doctor. “It would kill my father.”
They watched him real close after that. He wished he hadn’t said anything at all but there was no use trying to do something about it. All he could do was wait for it to be over. That was the theme of his life as of late.
He let Floyd teach him chess and he read the same books over and over until he could mouth the words without looking. They started up an art therapy program but it was of no use to him. He stared at that canvas until his eyes watered but nothing would come. One morning he talked Sandy into going outside and they made it all the way through the garden before Sandy panicked and had to go back in. That was a good day.
On the bad ones he woke up knowing he was in a cage; either he got jittery and they would make him take an extra dose of sedatives or he would spend the day curled up by the window in the activities room, completely checked out. He spoke when spoken to, but that was it.
It was that kind of day when a nurse materialized by his chair - he could never hear them coming, they must teach that in nursing school - and announced chirpily, “There’s a young lady here to see you!”
“No, there isn’t.” Rain had been threatening for hours and he was watching a summer storm build. The first raindrops were starting to streak against the glass.
“No, there is.” She faltered when he turned to look at her. “She asked for you by name.”
He had maybe a second of blissful ignorance, and then -
No. Fuck no. Why would she even want to be in the same room as him?
“I can’t,” he said in desperation. “Tell her I’m sick in bed. Tell her whatever I got is contagious.”
The nurse drew her eyebrows together in a stern line. “I don’t think I’m allowed to lie.”
“Then tell her whatever you want - just make her go away.” I’m not ready for this, he thought. I’ll never be ready for this. He wiped his hands - suddenly clammy and shaking - on his pants.
The nurse came back in looking pissed off. Ginsberg knew what she was going to say before she opened her mouth. “She says she isn’t leaving. Should I have her removed from the premises?”
“No.” Of course Peggy wasn’t going to go gently into that good night. She never knew when to quit. “But gimme a minute first.”
She probably wanted - he had no idea. What the hell could she want? An apology? He would give that to her a thousand times over if it would do any good.
Briefly he wondered if he was going to have to go throw up. The room went all off kilter when he stood up and he had to put a hand on the wall to steady himself, swallowing hard against the rising tide of nausea. He took one deep breath and then another, slow and rhythmic, until he had it under control.
She was waiting at the nurses station, sitting on a folding chair. Her hair was slightly wavy with the damp and she had her purse on her lap.
“Hi,” she said with horrible false cheer. Her eyes flicked up to his close-cropped hair. When he was nine years old he had let his neighbor who was in beauty school give him a haircut for practice. She had paid him a candy bar and the effect was much the same.
“Yeah,” he said, running a hand over his scalp. It felt bristley and weird. “Can’t have the inmates looking unkempt, I guess.”
One side of her mouth dragged up in an attempt at a smile and fell away again. “How have you been?” she said. She sounded so nervous. He stayed as far away from her as possible.
“Fine,” he said. “I - yeah, fine. I’m keeping busy.”
She nodded. “That’s nice to hear.”
“How’s work?” he asked, and immediately winced at his own stupidity. Why did he always say the wrong thing.
“It’s okay. Speaking of - that’s part of the reason I came up.” She fumbled at the clasp of her purse. Either it was stuck or her fingers weren’t working.
“Mathis cannot have screwed up my accounts that badly.”
She smiled at that, a real smile, though small. “No. But he’s limited.” The purse popped open and she reached inside. “I wanted to bring you this.”
It was a polaroid. He was very careful not to touch her when she handed it to him.
Some kind of - oh. He knew what that was, though he didn’t know why she would bring him a picture of a Clio.
“Congrats,” she said. “You won.”
“This - you’re saying this is mine?” He squinted at it and could almost make out his name etched on the front.
She crossed her legs and plopped her purse onto the floor. “Obviously I couldn’t bring the actual award. But I thought you might like to see it.”
Wasn’t that something. He would have given a hell of a lot to have one of these, once.
“I was good, wasn’t I?” he said.
Her expression softened. She had been holding herself together in a stiff, unnatural way - false bravado that didn’t come easily to her. Now it was gone, and she was sympathetic and worried and so very much Peggy that he had to look away. He didn’t want her to be worried about him. “Michael,” she said. “You still are good. It’s not over yet.”
He shook his head. “Everyone keeps saying so. But I’m not getting out and I know it.”
“How? How do you know that?”
“Because people like me don’t get out of places like this.” He said it as gently as he could because he didn’t want her to think he was blaming her. Nothing about this was her fault.
“What about people like me?” Peggy’s jaw was set but her eyes were bright and wet - fear and determination in equal measure. She could be opaque as stone or clear as glass, and this was the latter; he was seeing something private and he didn’t understand why she was letting him. “Do I count?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, because it was impossible, what he was thinking. Impossible.
It took her a few minutes to answer him. She was gearing up, and he didn’t press her. The rain beat steady as a pulse on the roof. If he closed his eyes and concentrated he could almost smell it.
“I was in a place like this. I -” She shivered out a long sigh and went quiet, then started again. “I had a baby, and I gave him up. And I didn’t deal with it very well afterwards. So I - went away. I was there for months. I didn’t think I was going home either - or that there would be any point if I did. But eventually,” she shrugged, looking down at her hands, clasped together in her lap, “eventually you have to start living again. There isn’t any other choice.”
“Jesus,” he said. “That’s rough.” He had known that happened to girls sometimes - sent away by their families to live with an ‘aunt’ until they were conveniently slim again, because god forbid the neighborhood be made uncomfortable by biological fact. After that - the rumors and the gossip and the bullshit. He bet that most of those girls didn’t stay home for very long.
“It was. It just wasn’t the end of the world. When I got out - in the early days - I felt like I was all alone. My family was so disappointed in me. I’d look into people’s faces in the street and I hated them a little, I was jealous - because they didn’t know what it felt like to almost drown. They weren’t missing anything, not like I was. But there are more of us out there than I thought.” She smiled ruefully. “No one has ‘former mental patient’ cross-stitched on their forehead.”
Most days he still felt like he was bleeding out, slow but steady. “Does it get easier?” he asked, because he didn’t know what he was going to do if it didn’t.
“It gets - different. You get different. We’re all in pieces, Michael. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. But we can all learn how to live with it, too.”
He tried to imagine having a life again. Where he didn’t feel like somebody poisoned, like he’d handed down his own death sentence. “Peggy,” he said, “are you happy?”
“Sometimes I am. Sometimes I’m not. I’m told that’s how it is for everybody, funnily enough.”
“What if I’m too sick?” he asked. “What if I can’t get better?”
“I don’t think that’s true. Either way - you’re never going to know if you don’t try. Can you promise me you will?”
He nodded - he felt like crying, it was so stupid - she was telling him something nice, and he wanted to cry. But she didn’t hate him. He thought for sure she did. That she would have to - what he had done was so disgusting.
“You know what,” he said, and there was a definite quiver in his voice, “you are the most unexpected person I ever met.”
“Thanks,” she said, and she didn’t sound too steady herself. “I’ve never talked about this before. Not to anyone who didn’t already know about it. I never even told Abe.”
“Well,” said Ginsberg. “That’s because he was Abe.”
Her burst of laughter was goddamned beautiful. “He wasn’t that bad,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the edge of her hand.
The nurse came back over, drawn by the noise. “They’re serving dinner now. I’m afraid your friend is going to have to leave.” She was very cold about it. Ginsberg wondered what exactly Peggy had said to her.
“I’d invite you to stay,” he said, “but we weren’t expecting company.”
“That’s fine,” Peggy said, retrieving her purse from the floor. “Joyce is waiting for me in the car, anyway. She would have come in, but I wanted to talk to you alone.” The nurse was still looking over their shoulders - Peggy shot her a pointed look until she reluctantly walked off, heels clicking on the floor.
“Hope you brought an umbrella,” Ginsberg said.
“No. But we’re not parked far away.”
She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. He wanted very badly to hug her, but they weren’t there yet and maybe they never would be. So instead he smiled, and he hoped that did it - that it let her know how much it meant, her coming through the rain to see him. They both knew she didn’t have to.
That was important. Even if he never saw her again.
“Remember that you made me a promise,” she said. “I’m going to be checking up on you, so you’d better keep it.”
He went back to the window after she left and saw her heading for the car. She was running through the rain with her arms over her head to ward off the downpour, but when she reached the door she stopped and glanced up. If he could he would have thrown open the window and yelled, “get in the car, you lunatic!”. It was pissing down and she was getting soaked. She saw him watching, caught him in the act, and waved a hand wildly in the air. Goodbye or hello, he couldn’t tell - and she was shouting something, of course he couldn’t hear her, not at all - but he didn’t need to, because she was laughing too.