Mad Boys (3 page)

The reporter had a beard and doughy eyes. He typed what I said on a portable computer. “Have you really lost your memory?” he asked.

“I did lose it, but it’s back,” I said. “I remember plain as day what’s happened to me.”

“This is an important development.” Doctor Hitchcock pushed the buzzer to the nurse station. “This is Doctor H. Send for the psych interns, and tell them to come to the amnesiac’s room on the double.” Then he looked at me. “When did your memory return?”

“Middle of last night, I started to remember. The rest came back this morning while I was using the bedpan.”

“Can you tell us your name?” said the reporter.

“May we wait for the interns? He’s part of their training,” said Doctor Hitchcock.

“Makes no difference to me,” said the reporter.

A few minutes later the rookie doctors arrived, and I was allowed to talk. “I was kidnapped,” I said. “Stolen. Put in a cage. Starved.”

“Who did this to you?” the reporter said.

“A doctor,” I said.

“What?” said Doctor Hitchcock.

“A doctor from another planet, an alien. He took me aboard his space ship to study me.”

The reporter stopped typing, but the young doctors started furiously taking notes.

“Oh, no, a schizoid,” said Doctor Hitchcock, as much to himself as to the rest of us. “Can’t they think of anything better than little green men from outer space?”

“Can we tape this?” asked one of the rookie doctors.

“Not important enough. Let him continue while his steam is up,” said Doctor Hitchcock, and he turned to me and smiled with his mouth only. “A flying saucer. Tell us all about it.”

“That’s what the attendant in the ambulance called it—she saw it plain as day,” I said. “But it was only the transfer shuttle. The mother ship is not a flying saucer, but a flying sausage. A hundred-mile-long hot dog. They keep it parked behind the moon, so human spy satellites won’t pick it up. I was playing alone in the orphanage when the Alien came and got me. I was beamed to the transfer shuttle, and then taken to the laboratory behind the moon. The whole trip took only a few seconds.”

“What was this alien being like?” the reporter asked.

“He was more than a being. He was my doctor,” I said. “He looked like a snake with a human face. He wrapped his coils around me, and my eyes bugged out of my head and I couldn’t breathe. Then he’d let me go. ‘Just kidding,’ he said, and slithered away.”

I had started with the idea of telling a big lie, and a lie, I suppose it was, but the more I talked the truer the story sounded to me. I wondered if maybe just talking, talking, talking, talking helped a person find the truth. I didn’t know, so I just kept on. The more I talked, the more marvelous the experience of talking grew.

“Inside the ship were big rooms full of Earth plants and animals, for study,” I said. “I was allowed to go anywhere I wanted, except behind hatches that said ‘Danger. No Earth Atmosphere Behind This Point.’ I opened one of the hatches anyway, but it only led to an air lock where the atmosphere could be changed. The hatches were barely big enough for me to crawl through. After all, the Alien didn’t need tall doors. I tried to open one of the hatches, but it was wired and gave me a shock. I left, realizing that I didn’t really have the run of the ship. The Alien was watching my every move.”

“Can you describe your own personal living accommodations?” the reporter said.

“I had my own room and television. We all did. We could watch TV programs and monitor first-run movies from Earth. Reception was much better than on this pitiful planet. The actors left the screen and came out and played with us. For meals, we would squat on the floor of our tree house and put in our order: ‘A Graphic Burger with the works, fries, and a chocolate shake.’ The food would be served by robots. They were built like the snake doctors, but they didn’t have the smell.”

“The smell?” said the reporter.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you about the smell of my doctor?” I stared hard at Doctor Hitchcock. “It was like something musty and dirty. Like laundry that’s been laying around for ten years beyond the door in the bathroom. Like the puke of sick people. Like the hiney breath of dragons.”

“I think we get the point,” said Doctor Hitchcock.

And on and on I talked, ending with my escape. I told them that they were bringing me on a transfer shuttle back to Earth to pick up some more captives. I was supposed to welcome the new subjects on board, but as the vehicle hovered over Keene I jumped into the transfer beam and ended up in the swamp behind Greenlawn Cemetery.

Middle of the night, my room almost pitch black. A hand on my shoulder and I woke up. I wasn’t scared. I could tell by the whiff of powder it was Nurse Wilder.

“I have the holy water,” she whispered.

I sat up in bed and stretched, and Nurse Wilder flipped on the television, turned the sound down but left the picture on. Colors flickered in the dust molts around us like our own private northern lights.

“Next best thing to a holy candle,” Nurse Wilder said. She took my hand and pulled me gently out of bed. We knelt on the hard floor. It wasn’t until afterward that I realized she cheated by resting her butt on her calves.

“Now we are in our church,” she whispered.

“Yes,” I said in a return whisper, in awe.

“Tip your head back.” I did as I was told and she poured water from a vial on my forehead. It dripped down into my eyes, and I blinked and my nose itched. Nurse Wilder whispered the sacred words, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”

She put the vial in her breast pocket and took my hands in her own. “Now pray with me. Oh, God in heaven, welcome this soul into your realm. We trust in your goodness.” Nurse Wilder paused, then added in a lower, sidelong whisper to yours truly, “Say amen.”

“Amen,” I said.

She let go of my hands, stood, and put on the light. “I’ve got to go down to ICU and look in on my husband. He’s dropped into a coma.” She took a deep breath. “I’m so tired, I could join him. If only I could shut my eyes. If only. . . .”

“Where’s my guardian angel?” I looked around.

“You can’t see him, but he’s here. Now that you’re baptized, he will help you when you are in trouble. Now pray with me. Repeat these words from the good book: ‘See first the kingdom of God and everything else will be added unto you.’
”

I spoke the holy words, as I tried to “see first the kingdom of God.” But I didn’t
see
anything. I did, however, hear the voice/voices of the three-headed God, arguing with Himself/Herself/Themselves.
He’s made
,
but he’s not doing much. Give him time, he’s just a kid. Brand new
,
they squeak
.

Nurse Wilder kissed me on the forehead, shut off the TV, and was gone. I lay in bed and I tried to pray, but I had nothing to say to any of the three persons of the one God. I wasn’t worthy. I called for my guardian angel, but he was a no show.

WEB

The next day another nurse came in with some good news, some bad news, and some middling news. Nurse Wilder’s husband had passed away, and she was taking a few days off to make the burial arrangements. That was the bad news. The good news was that I was given some clothes. The nurse opened a bundle, and dumped out jockey shorts, blue jeans, a T-shirt, and track shoes. The middling news was that I was scheduled to talk to a psychiatrist who was supposed to help me remember.

“I need some exercise,” I said to the nurse.

“I guess it’s all right for you to walk up and down the corridor,” the nurse said. “Get dressed and go ahead.”

After I put the clothes on, I felt more like a boy, less like a hospital patient. I cruised the hallways of the hospital, pretending to be woozier than I was. The exits were clearly marked. You didn’t have to be Houdini to get out of this place.

Doctor Thatcher, the psychiatrist, showed up while I was wearing the bedpan on my head. She was a dark woman, square-built as a toy dump truck with dark eyes for headlights, and gray hair over her cab and a few white chin whiskers where the bumper would be, and she dressed like a guy. She said I should ramble on about whatever was on my mind. I asked if it was all right to wear the bedpan when I talked, and she said okay. That relaxed me a little.

“Do you want to lay on the bed or sit on a chair?” she asked.

I was thinking that I wanted to sit on the window sill and pretend I was on a ledge, but I said, “I want to pace around.”

“All right, I will sit in the chair and you pace around,” she said.

“Do I have to tell the truth?” I started pacing.

“Do you know what the truth is?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Say what is on your mind.” Her voice was soft and dry, almost friendly. She wasn’t a know-it-all like Doctor Hitchcock, but close.

“I’m an orphan,” I said. “An alien infected my mother with a disease while she was pregnant with me. Luckily, she had a huge inheritance, so she could afford to give me nothing but the best. For an infected boy, that meant a world without germs. I was brought up in a plastic bubble.”

“A plastic bubble, that’s interesting,” said Doctor Thatcher. “Tell me some more about this environment.”

“I had my own bedroom and bathroom. All the comforts. Radio, TV, video games, trucks, cars, baseball glove, basketball, hockey puck, football, bowling ball, golf ball, tennis ball, skateboard, bicycle, knives, and hundreds of toy guns. But I had no direct contact with the outside world. My food and everything else came to me through a series of chambers, where the germs were killed with radiation.”

“And what were your feelings toward this environment?”

“I didn’t have feelings.”

“No feelings? You must have felt something.”

“No, nothing.”

“If you didn’t have feelings what did you have inside of yourself?”

That was a good question, and I had to stop and think for a second before I could make up a good answer. “I was full of imagination,” I said.

“And what did you imagine?”

“I used to imagine I was on the Alien’s spaceship. Actually, maybe I really was on a spaceship, and the Alien left a false memory of that bubble in my mind to cover up what really happened.” Now I was beginning to make sense.

“Intriguing hypothesis. What else about this plastic bubble? If it wasn’t on the spaceship, where was it located?”

“In an exposition,” I said, not sure where I’d gotten that word from.

“Exposition? Like a fair?”

“That’s right. The Exposition of the Uncanny. Everybody there was insane, but I was the only one with his own plastic bubble, left to him by his loving mother.”

“Were you happy in the bubble?”

“Miserable. Absolutely miserable.”

“So you did have feelings.”

“Maybe I did, but they were private.”

“I can respect that. Something that you didn’t have in this bubble was access to parents. Isn’t that so?” said the Doctor.

I didn’t say anything. Her words squeezed me like the coils of the Alien. I listened to the short pants of my breath. Doctor Thatcher said something.

“What?” I said.

“I said tell me where your parents were while you were in the bubble.”

“Both dead.” Saying that relieved the squeezed feeling. “I’ve never seen my father. He was a brave soldier, killed in the line of duty in a faraway country. I can’t tell you which one, because it’s classified information. My mother died when I was six. I barely remember her. She was beautiful and kind, but I could never feel her arms around me. You know, because of the plastic bubble? If I left the bubble, germs would make me sick. I would waste away like my mother and die.

“One day I decided I’d had enough. I was going to see the world. I broke out of the bubble and ran away, but I was disappointed. The world was dirty and smelly. I tried to get back to the bubble, but there was a swamp in the way and I was sucked down into its muck. I remember a choking feeling. Next thing I knew I was coming out of the muck. And here I am. I’ve got a year, maybe two, to live before the disease takes hold and kills me. Which is all I want, really. All I deserve.” Suddenly I could say no more. I wanted to cry; I wanted my mother; but I didn’t want the doctor to think I was a wimp so I held back.

I hadn’t noticed, but I’d stopped pacing, and I was standing stock still and stiff. Doctor Thatcher stood and removed the bedpan from my head.

“Today’s session is over,” she said. Up close she smelled like a woman, all fine powders. I wanted her to put her arms around me, but she left without touching me.

A week went by. I watched television and ate huge amounts of food.

My talks with Doctor Thatcher went on morning and afternoon. I told her nothing but wild stories. She knew I was lying but she never complained, which made me wonder about her. We only had one outstanding session. I asked her what was wrong with me besides losing my memory. She said it was too early to tell, and then she asked me a question: “What do you think about to make your penis get hard?”

“My penis doesn’t get hard,” I said.

“You don’t become excited down there?”

I blinked at her, not knowing what she was talking about. “You mean, peeing?” I said.

“No, I do not mean peeing,” she said. “You’re telling the truth for a change, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m lying.”

“Do you know the facts of life?” she asked.

That question was like opening a door to a pit of screaming demons. “Don’t tell me!” I said. “I don’t want to hear.” I blocked my ears.

“Okay, session’s over. Relax,” she said.

But tongues of light lashed my eyes, and the deep moans of the damned echoed in my head. I hugged myself and jumped up and down. Doctor Thatcher ran to the intercom, calling the desk for help. I screamed at her, “Xiphi! Xiphi! Xiphi!”

A minute later an orderly held me down, while Doctor Thatcher gave me a shot. Somewhere behind the blue sky in black space, the mother ship pulsated like a living thing.

I wiled away my free time thinking about escape. It was during one of those moments when, lying in my bed, TV on but the sound down, I had a visitor, a handsome boy about fifteen. He slipped into my room, closed the door behind him, and looked around, greedy-eyed as a cat in a bird cage. He was well dressed, in an ascot, sunglasses, and an orange baseball cap with the black letters A-Y-G on the visor. He put a finger to his lips. “If somebody comes to the door, I’ll duck under the bed, and you don’t tell I’m here. Gayget aygit?”