Wichita (9781609458904) Page 17

  Suddenly Seth sits bolt upright. Someone has been screaming for a long time now. Turning, Lewis sees Abby in her bathrobe beside him, her mouth wide.

  The clacking sounds fills the air again. “I said down!” bellows the sheriff and he fires again.

  Seth falls backward, arms flung out, and hits the ground hard, bouncing slightly, and lies still.

  23

  The Tibetan prayer flags snap in a rising wind. A robin lights on the top of the fence then plunges from view with its wings closed. Seth sits on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back.

  Shakily Lewis tips a bottle of water into his mouth; most of it spills down Seth’s chin and throat, mingling with the blood from the slit-like wounds left by the Taser darts. One of them pierced the half-moon part of the “e” in the “Memory” of the banner tattoo. After donning latex gloves like a cafeteria worker the sheriff plucked them out, slipping each one into a breast pocket of his uniform. Waste not. The watery blood runs in rivulets into the shallow folds of Seth’s stomach.

  “You’re down here with me now,” Seth says quietly.

  They watch the first sheriff confer with a second who’s parked his squad car at a hasty, dramatic angle to the curb.

  “This is a good place for us,” Seth says. “I can teach you better down here.”

  Lewis is impressed by how many people have gathered in the street. There must be a neighborhood-watch listserv, a text-message alert system. Lewis recognizes the lawn-inspecting man in his baseball cap and sunglasses and moustache.

  “Look at ’em,” Seth says. But he has his head back now and seems to be watching a jet pass overhead. The drone of the engines drifts down to them in staggered bursts.

  “All the BOYS want to be PIGS,” Seth says, raising his voice, “all the BITCHES want to be RADIO DISPATCHERS.”

  This elicits a muttering from the crowd and the two sheriffs trudge across the yard and seize Seth under the arms and haul him roughly to his feet. The first is still wearing the cream-colored latex gloves.

  Seth goes limp, head hung forward. The sheriffs grunt but don’t complain, as if accustomed to it. The tips of Seth’s sneakers bump and sputter over the ground as he’s dragged forward.

  Abby emerges from the house carrying a bag and talking on her cell, to Harry from the sound of it. The dogs follow at her heels, barking shrilly.

  Halfway across the lawn to the street, Seth stands bolt upright and rigid, digging in the heels of his sneakers and resisting the forward motion of the cops, who take the opportunity to catch their breath.

  “My life peaked when I was five years old,” Seth says, addressing the crowd, who give rapt audience, Oren among them now, Lewis sees, gazing with his brown hangdog eyes over the top of his wife’s bouffant.

  The sheriffs resume pulling him toward the cruisers.

  “I died when I was fourteen,” Seth says. “Can I get a witness, Oren?” he calls, nodding toward Oren in the crowd. “I owe it all to Minister Oren, praise be! Without whose seeds, bro, I would’ve stayed alive and afraid!”

  Abby drapes an unbuttoned dress shirt over his shoulders.

  “After dying,” Seth says, “I hung around to complete a few more sacred tasks—I fucked the Queen Bitch Candy, the love of my afterlife, and got my head bashed in with a brick. I SEE THE LIGHT THROUGH MY WOUND! Oh, yeah, and I burned as many SHITTY U.S. FLAGS as I could get my hands on!”

  This causes a rumble of protest from the crowd. Seth smiles and spits into the street, causing a man to hop backwards to avoid it.

  The first sheriff cups his head with a latex-covered hand to protect it from the top of the door and the crowd surges forward. Lewis, who’s been walking alongside the sheriffs and Seth, is pressed up against the side of the cruiser by an obese woman cradling an asthmatic pug.

  As the cruiser pulls away, Seth seeks out Lewis and says through the open window, “You’re not going ANYWHERE, you’re DEAD BROKE!”

  24

  From the double-parked Escalade, Lewis watches Abby and Harry walk slowly around the benches dividing the wide paved entrance to the Sedgwick County Detention Facility.

  Watery sunlight bathes everything in an air of inconsequence and irreality, the light of a dream in which some crucial thing can’t be accomplished.

  The man from Lucky’s Bail Bonds is late. Abby found the outfit online, a shamrock-green website playing “Folsom Prison Blues” with a flashing CALL NOW to speak to a LIVE bondsman standing by! The charges are obstruction of justice and resisting arrest, with bail set at five hundred dollars, the Birthday Party ante, it occurred to Lewis, though he had the tact not to mention it.

  On the parched front lawn, a seatless bike is chained to the single enormous light pole with a mushroom-cap shade. The wire halyard on the flagless flagpole clanks in the gusty wind. Abby and Harry reach the curb again, where the red No Standing paint is like cracked lipstick, then turn in unison and walk back up the slight incline in the direction of the entrance.

  They asked Lewis to come along in case they needed help with Seth, physical help, but to wait in the car lest he feel ganged up on. OK, but if Seth is so volatile, if he’s apt to bolt or attack, why the rush to spring him from the psych pod? Why not leave him in there for a lot longer?

  Harry reaches back to flick his vestigial ponytail free of his shirt collar then lights a cigarette, which he stabs out in the ashtray under the slab-like portico, and resumes discussion with Abby. Lewis has been haunted by the feeling, watching them, that their earnest talk, however well-intentioned and sensitive and intelligent, however informed by years of interventions in Seth’s crises, is profoundly pointless. In terms of having any bearing or causal relation to Seth, it may as well be wind in the trees. He’s punchy from sleeping poorly or not at all but keeps being washed over by the sense that what they hope to avert has already occurred: it’s actually over and done with, the way a building is built and eventually: there it stands. And out beyond the Sedgwick County Detention Facility, there’s another structure called What Actually Happens or What Will Have Happened. If you travel far enough, you’ll arrive at it.

  Then he has another thought: The one consolation is that because it’s already happened, it won’t happen in the future. Because it’s already happened.

  Lying on the front passenger seat is a bulging green spiral binder held shut by a wide, ink-smudged rubber band. Virgil has seventeen of this make of binder on the shelf beside his desk, one for each of the first seventeen centuries of reaction to his namesake.

  Lewis picks up the binder and slips off the rubber band, glancing over to be sure Harry can’t see what he’s doing: breaking an official seal of sorts. There are tabs with different names, Askins, Melissa; Buford, Greg; Chopik, Seth. Odd to see that Harry has other patients. Lewis fans through Seth’s file—copies of documents, arrest records, psych-ward intake forms. At random, he reads one that has written across it in Harry’s hand: “San Francisco, post-breakup with Candy Mueller”

  NAME: CHOPIK, SETH

  A. CIRCUMSTANCES OF ADMISSION

  Mr. Seth Chopik is an eighteen-year-old white male charged with threats who was admitted to the Psychiatric Unit forthwith from the San Francisco Superior Court.

  No medical or psychiatric information accompanied him.

  B. PRESENT ILLNESS

  Upon admission he said he was a street person who was too happy for this “disintegrating society.” He said that he was both “God” and “Satan” and that he experienced “astral projections.” He gave an inconsistent report of decreased sleep time. He denied depression, hallucinations, suicidal/homicidal ideas or memory problems.

  Upon mental status examination, he was alert, cooperative, and bizarre in appearance with an odd hairstyle and extensive tattoos, notably one on his right cheek and jaw. His affect was euphoric. His speech was spontaneous, increased in production and loosely associated at times. It was normal in volume and rate. There was evidence of religiosity and grandiose delusions. His recent
and remote memory was questionably impaired. He was oriented as to person, time and place. He was unable to subtract serial “sevens.” Some of his interpretations of abstractions were bizarre. His insight was questionably impaired. His judgment was grossly normal.

  C. PAST HISTORY

  Mr. Chopik dropped out of school when he was in tenth grade for reasons not clear to me. He has used cocaine, methamphetamine, phencyclidine, marijuana, lysergic acid, and other drugs. He and his wife used fifteen thousand dollars worth of cocaine in six months, seven months ago. He has lived in the streets for an unrecalled period of time and has had short periods of depression. He claimed that he tried to gas himself several months ago. He usually feels very good and can stay awake for up to two days at a time.

  D. DIAGNOSTIC IMPRESSION

  Mr. Chopik was thought to have Mixed Substance Intoxication (305.9); Mixed Substance Abuse (305.9) and Possibly Bipolar Disorder, Manic Type (296.4).

  E. INITIAL TREATMENT RECOMMENDATIONS

  Mr. Chopik said that he suffered a recent skull fracture with no loss of consciousness and no sequelae. He has a large, sutured scar in the middle of his forehead. Medical evaluation of this will be obtained.

  _______________________

  William D. Moskowitz, MD

  Program Chief

  Adult Inpatient Care Branch

  From somewhere above the smear of white clouds an airliner pours down its doleful flyover song. The remark about Seth’s attempt to gas himself came as news—jarring, sickening. Lewis sits staring at the signature of William D. Moskowitz, MD then closes the file and the notebook and stretches the rubber band around, resealing it.

  The bondsman, wearing, as promised, a shamrock-green baseball cap, is walking up the entrance pathway. As if there were a danger of his being missed in a crowd when other than a guard taking a cigarette break there’s been no one here but Abby and Harry for the past twenty minutes. As the three of them go inside, Lewis’s cell thrums in his front pocket.

  He fishes it out and checks the screen: it’s Virgil calling again, from his own cell. Lewis has been letting them go to voice mail but this time he picks up. Instead of hello he says, “Seth’s in jail again.”

  “Oh my,” Virgil says. “What now?”

  “He attacked a cop,” Lewis says, his own voice trembling, as if released of the need for self-control by the civilized constraint and pinch of his father’s voice.

  “Oh, Lewis. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Lewis says. “I mean, I have an idea but I’m not sure.” He knows Virgil won’t pry for details; Virgil doesn’t want to know any more than necessary. He would prefer to know nothing.

  As if turned aside and speaking to someone else, Virgil says, “Seth’s in jail again. For attacking a police officer.”

  “Who’s there?” Lewis asks.

  “Grandma,” Virgil says. “I’m in Cambridge.” He pictures them in the orderly, scoured kitchen that smells faintly of brisket, the neatly folded hand towels hung just-so through the handle of the stove, polished-aluminum toaster shining like a shield. Against the chill of the central air, which is turned down to frosty levels, Gerty would be wearing a thin cardigan over her broad thick shoulders. She bars doors with those shoulders, and she opens doors.

  Lewis asks to speak to his grandmother. Virgil turns away from the phone to announce this with relief and anxiety.

  “Hello, Lewis,” Gerty says.

  “I just wanted to say,” Lewis says quickly, like driving a nail in, “I’m sorry about everything, Grandma.”

  “Everything?” she says. Slow down there, suggests the tone: first you say nothing at all, now you want to cast some hasty blanket statement over the whole matter.

  “About the emails and everything.” He needs to stop saying “everything.”

  There’s a pause on Gerty’s end, a silence like a chemical solution in which Lewis’s words are being assayed. “Is there anything else you care to apologize for?”

  Lewis closes his eyes as if he could prevent himself from seeing himself. Then he opens them and notices, running parallel to the sidewalk in front of the county jail, a narrow footpath beaten into the grass like a people’s history. Where it meets the entrance walkway, the bald ground broadens into an ugly irregular delta.

  What’s so hideous about what he’s doing? He’s apologizing for failing to acknowledge a gift he asked to be given. “Yes,” he says, “I’m sorry I never wrote Grandpa a thank-you note for the Musil study.”

  She sniffs. “And I’m sorry it took you so long,” she says. “It upset your Grandpa more than you realize, getting no acknowledgment whatsoever for something that took him years to complete. That was really quite inconsiderate, quite thoughtless.”

  There’s another silence. She sighs. “But I accept your apology, Lewis. On Grandpa’s behalf.” It goes without saying that at this hour Cyrus is in his study, tilted back in his desk chair gazing at his computer screen or reading a book open on one of his folding oak bookstands with the pegs and holes. None of this multigenerational Sturm und Drang can reach him there, at the end of the tunnel he’s dug with the pickax of his will, one sentence at a time, Gerty standing guard at the entrance.

  She passes the phone back to Virgil, who asks Lewis a few more questions about Seth. But Lewis has trouble concentrating because in the background Gerty can be heard hissing, “Tell him he needs to get out of there, Virgil! It’s time to decide!”

  Lewis hangs up as Seth bursts through the double doors. He drops to the sidewalk and kisses the ground out of a push-up then gets up on one knee and points at the sky like a wide receiver cheesily giving all credit to God in the end zone.

  Abby and Harry come out now, scurry like owners of a big dog that has slipped its leash.

  Noticing the bike chained to the lamp post, Seth acts as if he’s going to climb on and ride away. Only, what’s this? The seat’s missing. And it seems to be chained up. Oh, well. He shrugs and turns away and comes loping toward the Escalade with a cocky hitch in his step, his bearing announcing: they have not only failed to break me, I am actually stronger now!

  Lewis holds the door open and Seth climbs in, bringing with him a cloud of institutional soap and some volatile mystery pheromone.

  Did they give him the wrong drugs? His skin has a reddish, oxygen-flushed tone and the veins in his biceps are standing out like he’s just been pumping iron, which maybe he has.

  “Been waiting long, Lew?” Seth asks, turning toward him with tamped-down hilarity. Before Lewis has time to reply, Seth calls, “Yo, right here, Harry!” sliding over and patting the seat beside him.

  Smiling pleasantly but blinking nervously, Harry gets in and closes the door softly. Seth slings an arm over his shoulder. “You and me, Harry! You and me, baby!”

  When Abby takes the wheel it’s clear from her carriage, the set of her mouth, that she’s at the end of her patience, of her resources. As she starts the car and pulls away, Harry shakes pills into his hand from a prescription bottle and gives them to Seth along with a bottle of water. Seth tosses the pills into his mouth like beer nuts and swallows with a gulp of water then turns to stick out his long thick tongue at Lewis: yes, I really took them!

  “But Harry,” he says, turning to Harry. “Did you know that drugs of the sort I just swallowed are really unnecessary? That you can control your bipolar disorder with diet, exercise and a wellness plan?”

  He stares at Harry in openmouthed amazement then lets out a hacking burst of laughter, slaps his leg, elbows Harry in the ribs. “A wellness plan! Oh, sweet Jesus!” He covers his face in his hands and laughs.

  Abby glances warningly, worriedly in the rearview.

  “She’s on the rag for having to cancel on the dykes, am I right?” Seth says in a slightly quieter voice. Abby lets it pass.

  As she turns out onto the street, the ship-like side of the jail, large windows covered with what looks like gray mesh, swings into view.

  Waving, Seth says, “Met a number
of cool dudes in there, number of cool dudes. Yo, bye-bye, Midget! bye-bye, Tiger! Turns out that’s where they keep all the interesting folks in town, Lewis.”

  “Hadn’t heard of DDP though,” Seth says with mock puzzlement and disappointment, glancing at his tiny hand tat.

  “Which came as a shock,” he says, turning to Harry. “Here I thought I joined a national organization!” He chuckles, shifts restlessly in his seat.

  They pass a lawn with a sign planted in it that says This House Believes.

  Seth does an exaggerated double take, twisting around in his seat. “This house bleeds”?

  “Believes,” Harry says placidly.

  “If it believes, it bleeds,” Seth says. “Are you with me, Harry? Am I moving too fast?”

  “Hmm,” says Harry.

  “But also,” Seth says, nodding sagely, “if it bleeds, it believes.”

  “Hmm,” Harry says again.

  “That’s simple karma, Harry,” Seth says. “You don’t need me to tell you that. That’s just your ‘what goes around comes around.’” He falls silent, turns in his seat to look back. “Wait, the house believes?”

  “That’s what it said,” Harry confirms.

  “What the hell is that, Harry? That’s some kind of animism or some shit, am I right? Just hanging out in the open for everyone to see. Wow. A guy goes in for a little rest, leaving behind a Christian nation, comes out and there’s some kind of Japanese paganism running rampant in the streets!” He chuckles at this unfolding scenario. “How long was I in there? Can someone give me some perspective on this?”

  “Abby?” Seth says, leaning forward to speak in her ear. “You’re my mother. At least that’s what I go around telling everyone. Cough cough. Give it to me straight. How long was I in there?”