night of day

jack fell diaries 003

I’m posted up in the male dayroom. My back to the murder tree. It’s a black and white print of a print of a barren winter landscape with a looming black ogre of a tree set behind recessed grubby scratched fingerworn shatterproof plexi and bolted deep into the bones of a cinderblock wall. The patients won’t go near it. Somebody started calling it the murder tree and it stuck. It does look like the sort of tree the KKK would love to use for a lynching. Nobody wants to linger there. Oh fuck no boss. Murder tree haunted Jack nah I’m good I’m uh uh uh stand someplace else uh huh. So inevitably I end up standing there to survey the melee. The murder tree does provide a superior vantage. I can scope the TV room, the med line, patient phones, serenity room, the rear exit, and the door to the laundry rooms from this spot. My skull steady on a swivel. Close my eyes and let the voices wash. I’m safe, untouchable. My back against the murder tree. The men shamble round me in ragged figure eights muttering at each other at themselves at shadows seen and unseen. In another life or past less complicated not so high tech millennia they might have been mad saints wandering the countryside. Messengers of the trickster gods. Opium addicts and highway outlaws. Zenful beggars. In this one they shudder and sigh. Babble and groan and grind teeth against teeth. Throw punches at empty spaces. They thrash beneath their skin.

Close your eyes for a beat and let the voices wash. Nah nah shut fuck up trick you can’t see me can’t nobody see me I’m a ghost. Hey man hey man hey what day today what day tomorrow nevermind all the same no way uh oh my shoes gone my jordans bro somebody walkin round in my new jordans yo hey uncle hey uncle billy run like hell son they chasing you they coming for your head. Lil miss sunshine you gonna die in the sunshine best run like hell son they coming for your insides. Open your eyes and it’s just Kenny Mac, 33, black male manic paraschiz, talking back and forth to the little dude on his shoulder. The mass of flesh throbs and blurs over his shoulder. Sunlight from the far window enters the churn and disappears. It might as well be Dante’s fifth spiral down here. Bring me the sodomites, the fools. The lepers and thieves. The untouchables. The end timers. 

Two hours into sixteen hour shift and so far I’ve helped to medicate Bambi against her will. Then wrestled a sweating stinking naked behemoth to the ground for a safety search. Next talked a pathologically depressed suicidal self-harming sophomore psych major into surrendering without a struggle the knife she’d nicked from the cafeteria. Next did a half hour on a stool in a doorway watching a starved shadow creature named Billy, an illiterate abused somewhere on the spectrum opioid addicted hillbilly kid rocking back and forth in the seclusion cell picking scabs off his arms and singing smooth criminal softly under his breath, eerily not off key. There’s never not someone singing on the unit. For that matter there’s rarely not quite never not someone screaming sobbing praying crying howling gibbering or preaching hellfire. But a hell of a lot of patients sing bump mutter and flow pop lyrics and rap rhymes like the words might lead them back to the beach back to sanity safe from deep water and long shadows. In the dayroom right now two or three cats are slinging rhymes back and forth.