Little Nothing (14 page)

A
s on an ocean liner
(or so he remembers being told by the combustible man, who, by habit, left nothing to chance and had studied the plan of the ship on which he was to sail after the season came to an end), there are three classes of accommodation at the Saint Gunther of Bohemia Home for Deteriorating Individuals. First class is reserved for the wealthy insane, the wives and daughters of landed nobility driven mad by purposeless days and a surfeit of embroidery projects, and mother-coddled, milksop sons incited to patricide by demeaning fathers. Danilo has never seen these quarters, but the chattering nurses, who speak freely among rank-and-file lunatics as if madness makes them only capable of infantile comprehension, have described rooms fitted out with gilt mirrors and pastoral watercolors imported from ancestral estates. These comforting details are meant to hasten convalescence or—and this is often the families' truest desire—convince the patients to choose a lifetime at the
asylum over returning home. The rooms also come with maid's or butler's quarters so that the wealthy will be properly bathed and shaved and serviced with afternoon tea. Danilo can well imagine how a perfectly sane lady's maid must feel, trapped inside the labyrinthine building, once a monastery, where the screams of the mad resound against the thick stone walls of the corridors or gather at the upper reaches of the vaulted wards. He often wonders whether some of the shrieks emerging from the upper floor that houses these upscale quarters come not from insane barons and baronesses but from their entrapped and helpless help. The second class is reserved for merchants who have no staff or family heirlooms to keep them company but who, as bereft of sense as they might be, still maintain enough pride to refuse to be housed with the impoverished and the vagrant and the criminally insane. This third-class ward is where men like Danilo are housed, and he shares his quarters with two rapists, a sodomite, and a man who could not have accomplished either crime having cut off his penis. At his trial, the judge told Danilo he was lucky that progressive-minded lady reformers had made it their mission to protect brain-addled felons from the state prison. Danilo was relieved. Like every child he ever knew, he had grown up under the threat of being sent to that penitentiary of horrors for any number of childhood infractions. His mother routinely warned him that a stolen cookie would result in him joining the ranks of convicted thieves who had their wayward fingers crushed by thumbscrews.

Still, he cannot imagine that there is a place on earth more terrifying than the one in which he now finds himself, where on
any given night he might wake to find a glowering cannibal standing above his bed regarding him with disturbing consideration, or where showers are places where men examine and exhort their bodies with the uninhibited abandon he can only remember exercising as a child, when he and his brother hid in the bushes and measured their respective lengths and trajectories. The unnerving freedom of the asylum, where the mad roam the halls and cloistered gardens at will, makes him wish for the confinement of a murderer's cell where the only visitor comes in the form of a tray of inedible slops passed through a slot by monstrously disfigured guards two times a day,
if you are so lucky
! All these years later he can hear his mother's voice. Gnarled and scrofulous hands still invade his dreams.

It would all be easier to bear if he were actually mad. There are times when he envies the man in the bed next to his who is content to hold dramatic and voluble conversations with himself all day long in a language no one can identify. Whatever he is saying makes him alternately laugh and frown or expound as though he were a philosopher playfully toying with the trickiness of his own logic. Or the man who lies so inert in the bed across the ward that Danilo has passed many sleepless nights trying to figure out if he is, in fact, dead. There are times when the behavior of the patients seems not that different from the carnival performers, and he sometimes thinks of his fellow inmates as attractions: the Frozen Man, the Giant Baby, the Drooler, the Twitcher. And what would he be called? The Wolf Lover? But try as he might, and he does try—going over the statements he made at the trial that aroused such derision from
the crowd, anger from the prosecutor, and pity from the judge—to take their point of view and convince himself of the unreasonableness of his position, he can't. He has seen a beating heart in a jar, a man who can tie his limbs into knots, a woman who can clothe herself in her own fat. So why not a girl who transforms into a wolf? Why not a man who loves her?

—

E
ACH
DAY
UNFOLDS
exactly the same as the one before. If he has managed to sleep, he is awoken by a nurse who stands at the head of the ward ringing a hand bell with more exuberance than is necessary. Along with the twenty other men, he visits the toilets where he must do his business in front of anyone who cares to watch, and there are a few. Next, the men are marched through long, dim hallways to the third-class refectory. That the nurses insist on using the old monastery designations only highlights the difference between what Danilo imagines was once a place where monks earnestly and silently ate their daily bread and the chaotic, sometimes violent place it is now. The dining room resounds with the voices of the patients, the clatter of dishware, and the occasional warning bark from one of the burly guards. Even though it is summer, the stone walls still harbor winter cold, and Danilo has to blow on his fingers before he can wrap them around a spoon. A serving girl who looks as furtive and tortured as the patients serves morning porridge that always smells sweet and stale, as if it has been predigested. A few of the inmates who have proved themselves unpredictable with
tableware sit with their hands tied behind their backs and are fed by orderlies.

When Danilo first arrived at the asylum, he was brought to see the warden, a blunt but not unkind man whose hair, perhaps in deference to the building's history, naturally took the form of a monk's tonsure. Danilo expected to be questioned about the murder, but the man treated the meeting like an interview for a job. He asked Danilo to name his skills.

“I have none,” Danilo said.

“Every man has something that he secretly feels he can do better than anyone else. I, for instance, can tie my shoes one-handed.”

“What use is that?” Danilo asked.

“It dazzles my nieces and nephews. They think I'm an old fool, but it gets a smile out of them.”

Put at ease, Danilo admitted that he could build torture devices, perform in pantomimes with half-human creatures, and shoot men in the back at close range, but not wolves. He could also, he said, make shoes, but not very well, as his apprenticeship was cut short.

The warden did not flinch during Danilo's recitation, having heard far more disturbing information from far more troubled men. His expression brightened, however, at the mention of shoemaking, and Danilo was assigned to the sewing detail.

Danilo understands that this “work therapy,” as the man called it, not bothering to hide his skepticism, is a new program, although only the more stable of the patients participate. The delusional, the babblers, the ones who claim they are the
Emperor of Ethiopia spend their days wandering the unkempt gardens, staring, smoking their allotment of cigarettes, and getting into fistfights over cast-off butts. Danilo is grateful for the work. It passes the hours and gives him some idea of what is happening outside the asylum where talk of worldly events is forbidden. It is not considered palliative to suggest to the patients that there is a life beyond the walls that they can hope to rejoin. In the few months of his imprisonment, Danilo's work in the converted sacristy has changed from sewing priestly cassocks and surplices to making uniforms for soldiers. In this way, he has learned that the war still rages.

—

O
NCE
A
WEEK
,
he sees his doctor, an excitable man named Mašek who always greets his patient with wide-eyed surprise even though they meet regularly on Thursday afternoons. At each meeting, the doctor is unkempt in some new way. One week his jacket is wrongly buttoned, one side lolling down his thigh as if it were trying to lick something off the ground. His hair is a mass of curls that corkscrew in different directions, giving him the look of a boy whose mother has not performed the customary spit and smooth before Sunday Mass. Sometimes, when Mašek speaks, his enthusiasm is such that bubbles of spit gather at the corners of his mouth. Occasionally, when his chin becomes slick with drool, Danilo tries to draw the man's attention to the problem with a pointed throat clearing, but this only prompts the doctor to ask him about his persistent tic. Mašek
speaks at such a rapid clip that his inhalations often come as great, desperate gasps, leading Danilo to wonder if a person can be asphyxiated by speech. The doctor's office desk is piled with papers and files, and sometimes, when he is trying to explain something to Danilo, he will paw through the disorganization, knocking his hand against the bell that sits there, claiming that a certain article will make his point perfectly clear. More often than not, he gives up the search or simply forgets that he is looking, or the conversation has leapfrogged with such dizzying nonlinearity that the article in question is no longer germane.

During his time at the asylum, Danilo has observed the therapies that have been applied to other patients. Some are dosed so heavily that if they don't sleep all day and night, they look vacant, as if their souls have been sucked out through their eyes. Others have suppurating blisters on their wrists and ankles from restraints. A course of purgatives administered to a patient is so intense that the man dies after twenty-four hours of constant heaving. Danilo is terrified of these treatments, which is why, in his first session with Mašek months earlier, he was determined to convince the man of his sanity.

“You may speak freely,” MaÅ¡ek said during that encounter. “Do not judge your words. Say whatever you wish.”

“You want me to talk?” Danilo said.

“Yes. Certainly.”

“But you're the doctor.”

“Freely, then,” MaÅ¡ek repeated hopefully. He sat across the desk from Danilo, his pen poised over a notebook, ready to take down whatever free words Danilo might offer him.

“What should I talk about?”

“Whatever comes to mind.”

“What comes to mind is wondering what I should talk about.”

“Good. Good,” the man said, nodding his head rapidly, scribbling on the page.

“And now what comes to mind is wondering why what I just said is good.”

“Yes,” the man said.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes!”

“I'm not sure I belong here,” Danilo said. “I'm not mad. In fact, I think I'm very sane.”

Mašek made a hurried note, then looked up again expectantly. Danilo waited for a follow-up question but none came.

“I'm confused,” Danilo said.

“Yes, you are,” the man said sympathetically. “Terribly.”

“I mean I'm confused here. Now. With you.”

“Exactly.”

The doctors had been injecting the Twitcher with something that calmed his nerves but created such craving for the drug that the man had begun to scratch his skin off during the time between waking from his calm stupor and the next dose of the narcotic. His bedsheets were streaked with blood. Danilo hoped his new and zealous doctor would not prescribe such a treatment.

MaÅ¡ek put down his pen. “We've made great progress,” he said gravely. “I will see you in one week.” When he stood, he somehow managed to upset his desktop so that papers and books
spilled off the edges. He looked as distressed as a boy who has woken to a wet bed. When Danilo helped collect everything, he saw the doctor's open notebook where he had written the words
Self-aggrandizing
.
Delusional.
Roast of pork?

All these months later, during each weekly meeting, Danilo feels obligated to speak but incapable of saying anything to prove his sanity that the doctor does not interpret as evidence of his mental incompetence. This problem makes him wonder if the difference between the sane and the demented is only a matter of language. He spends the long days at his sewing machine, pumping the treadle until his ankle hurts, trying to solve this latest problem of his life: people are only determined to be sane by virtue of not being considered insane, and so, having been proven mad in a court of law, it is now impossible for him to prove the opposite. He tries to behave normally. He sits and smiles and offers polite nods at appropriate times in conversations. He asks after the nurses' health and makes pleasant remarks about the weather. He lets the staff know that he understands just how disturbed the others around him are, aligning himself with the official side of things. But none of this seems to help his case. Each Thursday afternoon, Mašek sits silently, smiles obliquely, holds his pen above his paper, and waits for Danilo to further his doom. All the while, Danilo's attention is snagged by a bit of the day's lunch that is trapped in the doctor's mustache, and there he is again, clearing his throat, and there is the doctor, once more asking him what is making him so terribly anxious.

The doctor is a master of prolonged and miserably uncomfortable silence and, one day, when Danilo can't think of anything to
say, he seizes on the list the doctor made at their first meeting. “Do you like pork roast?” he says.

“Mmm,” the doctor says. Neither affirming nor denying.

“Do you like cabbage?” Danilo says.

“Do you?”

“Yes! Both red and white!” Danilo says enthusiastically. You see? he means to say. I am a normal person who has no strange preference for one sort of cabbage over another. I am not like the patient who must cut his meal into a hundred tiny bites and eat each one separately, or the one who sobs like a baby when he does not feel he is given as large a dumpling as his tablemates. “My mother makes a good pork roast, although I haven't had it for many years now.”