Conditional Voluntary

  By his second Friday at Hillside Hospital, Patrick was kissing Justine on a daily basis. They usually made out on the elevator, a perfect privacy space, especially given that it lacked a security camera. Thursday after lunch, Justine had startled Patrick by pulling out the red emergency stop switch when they were halfway up the shaft.

  “Let’s do it!” Justine had shouted over the buzzer.

  Patrick had been too overwhelmed to say or do anything. But Justine pushed the button back into the panel and the elevator resumed its rise.

  “Just kidding.”

  She kissed him only briefly and then tried to hug away his shakiness. Apparently, no staff on the voluntary ward had heard the buzzer.

  On Friday afternoon, Dr. Kearney raised Patrick’s privilege level to where he could walk outside all by himself. As much as he lusted after Justine, Patrick was afraid to rock the boat. When he took his first opportunity for a walk, shortly after the lunch service in the day room, Patrick went alone. He had been so worried about the ostensibly secret romance that he’d totally forgotten about the DEA. It came to him as he walked uphill from the hospital.

  Patrick stopped in his tracks as he realized how vulnerable he was, out there in the open. He looked around, back and forth. It was a warm summer day in a residential neighborhood. Nobody cared about him. DEA? Kearney was right: they had better things to do than keep Patrick Coyne under surveillance.

  “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,” he muttered softly to himself, degrading his earlier fears.

  The mantra worked and Patrick started walking again.

  Now he understood everything. The War on Drugs had been meant to make dopers paranoid. Especially marijuana smokers like himself. A common side-effect of the weed was to make people self-conscious, anyway. That harsh rhetoric coming from Washington was merely intended to scare people. Of course! It was exactly what had happened in his case. Enough talk like that and anyone would see narcs hiding behind every tree, bush, and fire hydrant.

  “God, I want to get stoned!” Patrick said loudly enough for his voice to be picked up by any hidden microphone within a fifty-foot radius.

  Charley’s erratic behavior had capped his privileges one notch below Patrick’s. When he wanted to go out to a sandwich shop for lunch rather than eat what had come up on his tray, Simon had to escort him off the grounds, asking Charley to wait until the rest of the patients were done with the day room meal.

  Despite his day-to-day limits, Dr. Kearney had ordered a twelve-hour pass for Charley because of a tentative discharge date the following week. About the same time that Patrick was having his Epiphany one block north of the hospital, Charley and Simon were sitting at a table in the sandwich shop farther to the southwest of the facility.

  Simon watched Charley bite into a thickly-stacked sandwich that had four varieties of meat, two kinds of cheese, a heap of lettuce and onions, a dripping mass of mayonnaise, all between halves of a wheat roll. The counselor had just a small cola for himself; Charley’s drink was a 24-ounce cup of Mountain Dew.

  Simon smiled as he remembered one of his favorite work stories, which had occurred in this very restaurant. From what Simon had heard, a former colleague had escorted three lower-functioning patients to the sandwich shop one Saturday afternoon. The counselor was a man named Carl, a person Simon recalled with some fondness. Carl was a little older than he was, dressed sloppily, and often neglected to shave before coming to work. Carl was one of those people whose intellect didn’t go along with a lot of common sense.

  Trudy Maxwell had been in the hospital back then, just as brittle and volatile as she was now. During her visit to this place with Carl, Trudy had become convinced that the counter boy had short-changed her. Being Trudy, she had raised a ruckus over it. The sandwich shop manager had made a frantic call to the hospital, reporting that “you’ve got four patients in here and one of them is going off!”

  Poor Carl, Simon thought. He fit in just too well with the patients, didn’t he? I should’ve been nicer to him while he was around. Or I guess I shouldn’t have joined in when everyone else was attacking him behind his back. But then having Carl around made me look better by comparison. Playground logic; I guess that was it.

  “Enjoying that sandwich?” Simon asked, changing the subject for himself.

  His mouth too full to talk for once, Charley nodded his head eagerly. Then he took a long sip of his drink to help himself swallow.

  “Mmnnn… yeah!” Charley reported.

  “Looking forward to your weekend pass, aren’t you?”

  “Sure am!”

  “Parents coming to pick you up?”

  Charley nodded.

  “Have you decided, Saturday or Sunday?”

  “Guess it’s Sunday. Yeah!”

  Simon nodded, just about done with pumping Charley for the sake of the shift’s progress notes. Then he thought of something else.

  “Got a hometown girlfriend?”

  Charley grinned by way of an answer.

  “I’m sure she’s dying to see you.”

  “Yeah, but she is ug-lee! For real, she is!”

  “That’s not very nice, Charley.”

  “But it’s true!”

  “Well, what do you like about her?”

  “She’s nice to me. So what if she’s ugly?”

  “That’s better. But you still shouldn’t say she’s ugly. Keep her individual beauty in mind.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “Is that what I do about what?”

  “About your girlfriend, man!”

  I don’t have a girlfriend, Simon thought ruefully. But damned if I’m going to tell any patients about that.

  “Finish your sandwich.”

  “Hey, don’t be mad. I was just askin’. Like when Patrick…”

  Charley laughed and slapped the table.

  “Fuck me!”

  “Language,” Simon cautioned him automatically. “So, what about Patrick?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to say nothin’,” Charley muttered, looking down.

  “Never mind, it’s okay. I… I won’t tell Patrick you said anything.”

  “He’s a cool guy, Patrick. Yeah…”

  “Don’t worry,” Simon insisted. “Just remember to think before you talk a little more often.”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Talking’s just thinking with my mouth open. That’s what my Mom says I do.”

  Patrick was up to the busy street at the crest of the hill by then. He had just walked out of a convenience store, having spent some of the money Scott have given him. He was carrying a small paper bag containing a candy bar, a small bag of potato chips, and a pack of cigarettes for Justine. Patrick had also tried his luck with a lottery scratch ticket. He had rubbed the edge of a penny over the designated areas as he stood near the doorway outside the store. No small fortune for him, not even a free ticket.

  Then Patrick looked up and thought that his luck could be changing. He saw a bus down the street, paused at a stop a couple of blocks away. The bus would pulling up to the traffic light on the other side of the intersection in a matter of seconds.

  The “Don’t Walk” signal was flashing. Patrick made an impulsive dash though the crosswalk so that he could intercept the bus… if he really wanted to. The hospital was on this side of the street as well, three or four blocks downhill.

  Patrick’s heart started to pound as reached into his pocket and felt for the coins he already knew were there. Exact change for a ride out of here. The route number and the word “Lechmere” was displayed above the bus windshield. That was the name of a Green Line streetcar station.

  Fifty cents for the bus farebox, another sixty for a streetcar token. A ride from Lechmere to Kenmore Square and…

  “Shit, it would be so easy,” Patrick whispered as the driver set the right turn signal blinking, meaning he was about to pull over at
the stop.

  Then again, Patrick thought as he turned away from the bus, Scott might turn me in. Besides, my damned apartment keys are back in the locker!

  Patrick marched down the hill. He hoped that Justine would give him a nice, affectionate reward for the cigarettes.

  There was a commanding view from the window in Justine’s room. She could see the street that lead down towards Cambridge. Harvard Square was more or less within walking distance. She looked at the rooftops of neighborhood houses spread out like scale models in front of her. Leaning her hands on the sill, Justine peered down at the sidewalk. It was a steep, three-story drop to the concrete. A killing fall, almost certainly.

  Could the window glass be broken easily? Justine touched it with her right-hand fingertips. Was this what Plexiglas felt like? Maybe it was shatterproof. Next to big picture window was a small, rectangular one that could be opened slightly, enough to let the breeze come in through the screen. If the crank-open window itself could be removed and the screen kicked out, Justine figured she could easily shimmy through the frame.

  But she wasn’t suicidal. Her ruminations were not on her own behalf; she was thinking of her new roommate. Justine didn’t know whether the roommate was suicidal but she didn’t want her there. No way that girl could fit through the small window.

  Her name was Cindy and she was the latest to join the contingent of younger patients. Cindy was eighteen years old, a brunette with long hair. Cindy was almost as tall as Justine but weighed much more. Her flabby body was an affront to Justine.

  “Ought to be suicidal,” she muttered to herself. “I’d be suicidal if I looked like her.”

  It had been bad enough just looking at her but it turned out that Cindy was bulimic. Utterly disgusting! At least there hadn’t been any vomiting yet. The first whiff of any and Justine would demand to be reassigned to a better room.

  She dropped down onto her bed and thought angrily about Dr. Adams. The big jerk wasn’t going to give her a discharge date anytime soon. The dirty bastard! Justine had said maybe she’d sign the three-day notice to leave against medical advice. But the doctor had wrinkled his big nose, twitched his thick mustache and warned her that she was courting commitment.

  Although Justine thought her psychiatrist had been bluffing, it hadn’t been worth risking it. Hillside had been a big step down from McLean and God only knew what was going to be next. Keeping that “next” from being unbearable was all that really mattered.

  Justine decided that she could put up with her parents long enough to figure out a way to get her freedom. But she’d have to be careful; next time they might really have her committed somewhere. Bad enough they couldn’t afford McLean anymore.

  Maybe some guy would help her out. Some decent boyfriend who had a little money. No more possessive jerkoffs like Todd. Somebody older, probably. Lots of horny older guys out there. Wouldn’t have to be real old, either. Some guy settled in his thirties would be fine.

  Justine smiled up at the ceiling. Poor Patrick. He was such a nice, cute guy but totally out of her league. Dr. Adams had actually brought it up during their last session. She’d denied anything more than a friendship between them but the doctor had continued as if Justine had confessed everything. He talked about a contextual relationship: a “shipboard romance”, as he put it.

  That had really irked Justine, almost enough to make her deny it once too often. As if she was going to lose her head to some patient. Patrick was a good kisser and a welcome distraction but didn’t have the wherewithal to really help her out.

  Justine laughed and crossed her ankles. Maybe she could keep Patrick around later on. See him on the side if the other guy wasn’t such a good kisser. Nice idea as long as Patrick wouldn’t mind being the other man.

  Because Patrick didn’t have any weekend pass to take him back to Waltham over the weekend, Scott came to see him on Friday evening instead. He brought more cash although Patrick hadn’t been able to spend all of the forty dollars from the last time.

  “Another twenty should do it,” Patrick insisted. “There’s not much to spend money on when you’re in here. If I happen to need more, I can always call you, right?”

  Scott nodded. They were sitting in the day room at the same table where Patrick had usually taken his meals with Justine and Charley. Scott seemed preoccupied; he wasn’t giving Patrick a lot of eye contact and kept looking down to the other end of the day room.

  This place scares him, Patrick thought. Yeah… the fucking looney bin! I can’t afford to be scared of it: I have to live here.

  But, as usual, he didn’t care to vocalize his accusations.

  “I… heard from your boss,” Scott reported.

  “Oh, really?”

  Scott had already mentioned that he’d called up old man Martin at Martin’s Liquors to explain Patrick’s absence. Although Patrick was certain that his boss had a typically bigoted impression of the mentally ill, Mr. Martin had told Scott that his brother’s fate was going to be taken under consideration.

  “Has that old goat made up his mind to fire me?”

  “I’m afraid so, Patrick.”

  “So what? I’m sick of that place, anyway. Besides, now I can apply for disability.”

  Scott smiled thinly. It was clearly not an approving smile but Patrick didn’t care.

  “Listen,” Scott said. “How are you doing? I mean, you know…”

  “Yeah I know,” Patrick replied. “You’ll be glad to hear that I know the DEA isn’t watching me, after all.”

  The relief in Scott’s face was plain.

  “As a matter of fact,” Patrick continued, lowering his voice, “I would love to get stoned again.”

  That was bad news to Scott. He licked his lips, glanced back towards the kitchen area again, and tried to figure out what to do with his hands.

  “I don’t know. Don’t care, either.”

  “How would it mix with the medication you’re taking?”

  “One way to find out.”

  “Patrick, you can’t be serious!”

  “I am serious. I’m not talking about lighting up while I’m in here, though. More like as soon as I get home. Have you got a stash right now?”

  “No.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m serious,” Scott snapped. “What’s wrong with you? You haven’t asked about scoring weed in… in months.”

  “I’m not afraid to use it anymore. That’s what Reagan wants, to make us afraid to use ‘bad’ drugs. It made me have my breakdown. I’m fighting back now. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  Scott shook his head slowly. Ever since junior high school, the two of them had smoked dope together. It had declined from a regular, almost daily activity as they’d grown older. But in the several days since Patrick’s psychotic episode, Scott had wondered whether the marijuana had at least contributed to his brother’s condition. The possibility alone had made the whole idea of even smelling weed smoke distasteful.

  What is it? Scott wondered. Two steps forward, one step back? Or could it be the other way around?

  But he had to approach this more diplomatically. After all, Patrick was still in the midst of treatment. Best leave it to the professionals. That gave him an idea.

  “Why don’t you ask your doctor about mixing weed and your pills?”

  “Why ask a question when I already know the answer?”

  “So you admit it wouldn’t be good for you?”

  “No, what I’m saying is, Dr. Kearney wouldn’t encourage me to use illegal drugs. It’d be… unethical. If it was legal, maybe he’d prescribe it for me. Shit, if it was legal, I wouldn’t even be in here.”

  Scott maintained a discreet silence.