The squeak of the wheels.
Nurse Ann leaving the wing. A door. Another door. Gone.
I should feel relief. Misery gnaws at my gut instead.
If I can endure the boredom and pain of this place, I can endure her gentle touch.
I shut my eyes to close out the feelings. Three things to escape. The path I cut back home will run with the blood of anybody who tries to stop me.
Does he escape by turning into The Incredible Hulk?
It’s coincidence that she talked about The Hulk. It’s been so long since I thought of my boyhood before the forest. The piano wire. The tree. The root cellar.
She’s a new torment, that’s all.
A new torment that hurts more than Donny’s stun gun.
Chapter Three
Ann
After we finishour rounds, Zara and I head to the general room, which is a type of rec room with bolted-down chairs and tables and a TV on the wall that only staff—meaning Donny—controls. Two dozen patients are in here, coloring and watching TV. Zara tells me about where the different groups sit, who doesn’t get along with whom.
These are the most well-behaved patients, but still, orderlies hover all around, watching, tracking things on tablets. This is a place of immense bureaucracy and paper trails denoting every action of every patient right down to when they take a piss, and I mean that literally.
We head to the staff room, where it’s a little easier to breathe thanks to the cooking smells overpowering the antiseptic smell. In a way, though, it’s worse, because I’m in a room full of people who don’t want me here.
I hold up my head. Stay pleasant. This isn’t my life, right?
There are more than a dozen nurses and nurse aides: a few guys out of the army, some older women from the float pool—substitute nurses, basically. There are full-timing young mothers—the sister hospital across town has a great free day-care program they get to take advantage of.
Sometimes in a strange group of mostly women, I’ll try to get the talk around to kids and get people pulling out pictures. It’s nice as an icebreaker. And the truth is, I really do love seeing the kids. I love the way women’s faces look when they show you. I love to hear the little stories they tell about pictures. Stories bond people, humanize people to each other.
When I first entered journalism, I believed that understanding each other’s stories could solve all of the world’s problems.
It takes strength to believe big things like that, and I don’t have that kind of strength anymore.
And I have a feeling that, in this group, my questions will be seen as nosy.
When they ask me whether I have kids, I tell them no, I don’t have kids. The truth. I tell them I’m from Idaho and that I did a ton of travelling and volunteer work around the world, which is close to the truth. I know my story doesn’t make sense to them, to go from worldwide travel to a notorious MI&D facility in an impoverished rural northern Minnesota town, a place where I have no friends or relatives. They may not acknowledge it consciously, but deep down, they know I don’t add up.
The best lie would be to say that I’m really into camping and that I want to be at the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Quetico, the massive swath of pristine wilderness between Minnesota and Canada. But I can’t talk outdoors talk, so I tell them instead that I think it’s gorgeous, and that I want to buy a canoe and explore this beautiful area. Zara warns me about winter. It’s early October and already cold as fuck. She asks me whether I’m ready for the true cold.
“So far, so good,” I say.
She proceeds to tell me the horror stories about six-foot snowdrifts and stretches of subzero temps. The group joins in; they seem to enjoy telling me how bad it’s going to be, like,you made your bed, now lie in it.
Will this be their attitude if I have trouble with Donny?
Somebody has brought cake along with bright paper plates and plastic forks in celebration of a young nurse’s birthday, and I find I’m hugely conflicted about taking a piece. Will they dislike me even more if I pass up this offering or if I take one? I decide it won’t matter either way, so I take one.
Talk ceases as we eat our cake. Back in the magazine office where I worked in New York, we would celebrate birthdays just like this, except nobody would actually eat the cake.
The cake is delicious, and in spite of their vague hostility, I’m seriously hoping that if there is a meth supply pipeline running through here, it’s all Donny.
If there’s a pipeline at all.
Murray Moliter, my editor atStormline, could be smoking crack with the whole thing. He got a tip he felt was credible for whatever reason, and the tipster suggested the cops weren’t investigating because they’re in on it.