Spectrum

Ian MacLean
In sleeping, Joseph’s eyes moved under their lids, as if he still searched the ward and the land out the window for phenomena. Planets churned in arcs and stars collapsed somewhere in that blackness, and he searched for this too, his eye movements aligning with the movement of heavenly bodies. When he woke, he lay very still in his cot, listening to the heaves and groans of the others sleeping on Yew Ward.
He had been in this institution since he was a child, placed in various wards, most of which held small round windows placed high on the walls, like portholes on a ship. But Yew Ward lay on the very edge of the institution grounds. The window he slept beside faced winter fields and forest.
He turned over in his cot, his head brushing the half-walls that separated the clustered beds. Support beams rose above him up the walls and along the ceiling, the definitions of which he could not see in the darkness. His anxiety quickened.
The overhead lights came on. Joseph looked around at those who slept near him, or across the rows. Their gray and dull faces. He recognized the faces of those in the surrounding bed clusters best.
He heard a door open and the voice of McNulty, an aide, grow closer. The aides called themselves by their surnames, and their white uniforms bore them as well. The residents were always called by their first names. McNulty spoke to a voice Joseph had not heard before.
Then McNulty turned to them and said loudly, “Listen up everyone, it’s time to get up. This man with me is Fowler. He’s a new aide on the ward. Okay. Headcount.”
Fowler and McNulty with their clipboards did the headcount and woke a few of those who were still sleeping.
They led the thirty-two residents, still in their pajamas, out of the sleep hall, past dining tables and through the locked doors of the day room, then down the main hall to the large shower room, where they stripped and placed their pajamas in laundry hampers. Next, all bathed together under the multiple showerheads, or took turns in the adjacent bathroom stalls. Wrapped in towels, they were led back to the sleep hall, now going to their cubbies and dressing in freshly laundered blue coveralls. They were taken to the dining area, and sat at the tables. A cart holding a large cauldron of oatmeal was wheeled from the kitchen. Everyone ate, washing breakfast down with tap water in tin cups. There was rarely another liquid on the ward, though in his life, Joseph had managed to experience soda and coffee. He finished his food and stood up and turned to face away from the table with his hands clasped behind his back, as they had all been trained to do. He looked at the wall and then to his right and left along the row, where most of the others now stood with their hands behind their backs as well. Some were fidgeting or muttering, and Joseph turned to look at them some more, wondering at this small display of life. Then he noticed Fowler was staring at him, and he faced the wall again.
“Chrysanthemum,” he mumbled to himself.
Soon the group was moved to the day room, a large open room with a television, radio, and a few chairs. Through the north windows, Joseph could see again the trees and fields and fallen snow. Through the south windows he could see the campus. The moon became less clear and a russet light slowed the night and entered the room, fighting with the overhead lights for his attention.
Out of a north window, he stared. In the snow and of the aspen there was an unknowable white that could bring to mind his mother’s hair, which had lost its color when she was sixteen. Snow white like his mother’s hair, like the chrysanthemums and orchids she had grown in the family’s garden.
McNulty entered. He handed out the day’s medication, and Joseph and the others became sluggish. Joseph wandered over to the south window, where he could see lines of other high-grade residents crossing the grounds to perform their various work duties or going to the garages to be driven into the town, where a few of their number kept unpaid jobs.
Fowler entered the day room and he and McNulty spoke in turn.
“We’re going to the rec center, everyone.”
“Let’s use it while it’s new.”
They were taken to the entrance hall and were given parkas, all of them shuffling outside led along by McNulty, while Fowler brought up the rear. They went down the concrete walkways with snow piled at the sides and over garden beds, past the gray buildings. Joseph looked to the nearest women’s facility, called Nightingale Ward. Figures sometimes appeared at the windows. The females were strictly segregated from the males, so they were unknowable beyond those glassed impressions, or the occasional glimpse of them on their way to the laundry facilities or the kitchens.
The residents entered the recreation center and walked past the gymnasium and exercise machines to the changing room, where folded towels and swimming trunks waited for them in the lockers. They changed and showered and made their way to the swimming pool, and began the descent down the steps. The water rippled with movement and geometry, things existing before language hovered over them. The residents swam, some without flotation devices, some with. Others stood in the shallow end splashing the water, or sat on the stairs leading out. Fowler, McNulty, and aides from other wards sat on chairs two meters away, in their white uniforms.
Joseph touched his wet, matted hair. He recognized Ben swimming past him. Ben was short and stocky with wide eyes and an always open mouth. His bathing trunks were slipping, his bottom out, and two aides pointed and laughed amongst themselves. Joseph glanced at another resident he recognized, Clarence, a man almost bereft of hair, who sat at pool’s edge, his head swaying and his eyes above his pointed nose darting up and down as he watched the light that came through the nearest window, which bounced off the pool’s surface and danced along the ceiling.
After the pool they were to change and be taken to the gymnasium to play basketball or some form of it, but after Joseph had changed, Fowler appeared with a clipboard.
“You, Joseph. Clarence. Tom. You’re coming with me. Change into your coveralls and get your coats.”
They were taken to a nearby storehouse where they were tasked with a few odd jobs. Clarence placed labels on paint-cans, telling the color. Joseph sorted through boxes of toiletries, placing one miniature soap and shampoo and toothbrush and toothpaste into individual zippered pouches. Tom checked shelves of canned goods for expiration dates, but kept getting lost in time, not knowing the present date, or what was forwards or backwards from it. Joseph overheard Fowler reprimanding Tom.
“Don’t you understand that if you fuck up with these cans, the food will go bad and poison you?” Fowler said to him.
“Why did you curse? It’s not good to curse.” “Forget it.”
“You can’t curse. I’ll tell someone.”
“Okay.”
“They said for us not to curse. You cursed. Can I curse?”
McNulty interjected, “Tom tends to perseverate.”
“What’s perseverate?”
“I’ve told you, Tom.”
“I guess you have.”
“Can you tell me what it means?”
“Yes. But McNulty, why are we working on the weekend?”
“So, you do know the date?” asked Fowler.
“No. It’s a seventh day.”
“Okay. Well. Out there, you know, in town, in towns, people even got to work weekends sometimes to make ends meet.”
The moving shapes from a window beckoned Joseph, and he moved
towards it. Clouds like fingers, a hand that disperses snow. His bladder pinched. He looked around, but he could not see Fowler, who had perhaps gone out for a smoke break. He tried the doors, looking for a bathroom. They were all locked. The third door he tried brought him to the laundry facilities, where a few laundresses looked up from their work, and he stood transfixed by the face of the nearest. She asked him what he was doing there and after he eventually said the word, she disappeared and soon Fowler appeared and he was led to a bathroom.
When the three residents finished their tasks, Fowler led them back across the campus to their ward.
During the walk, Joseph clapped his hands together over his head, intermittently and loudly, knowing the areas where the buildings were closely clumped together so he could hear the echo. Fowler told him to stop, so he stopped. He stared at his hands instead. His flesh looked similar to the color of gooseberry leaf. Faint and perishable. Hiding the brilliant colors of his hanging bursting heart.
He bumped into someone who yelped and Fowler told Joseph to put his hands in his pockets, so he did. When they were back on Yew Ward, they were taken to the tables where they were served a late lunch of cheese and raw mushroom sandwiches. Afterwards they joined the others in the day room. Joseph walked to the northern window again. His vision rushed on, out of the room, past the window to the fields, as if his consciousness moved into the distance, or the world was growing, stretching. But he remained in his body, standing still. He had walked to the window and stopped suddenly, and his brain perhaps didn’t quite take hold of that fact.
When his vertigo left him, the world became utterly clear. He had the ability to reproduce in drawings what he saw, with the most minute of detail, as if the images had been inscribed on his eye-lens. No pencils or paper had been set out that day.
His heart beat. He looked to the corners. Mice on the wing. Vines grew up the windows and lattices in summer. More children would be admitted to the wards he had outgrown.
Clouds white and trowelled along the greater cloudmasses, in some outer heaven. A vague part of him knew it was his sister’s birthday. Smell of woodsmoke and rotting leaves. Yet pure snow, out the window.
“Chrysanthemum,” he said.
“Aye McNulty did you hear him?”
“What?”
“This one here, he said Chrysanthemum.”
“Pretty big word for him, I agree.”
“Hey man.”
“This one’s Joseph.”
“Joseph, say it again.”
“Say it again.”
“Orchid.”
“What did you say? This one’s faking. Hey, man? You understand what I’m saying? You trying to make fun of me?”
“Smarter than you thought, eh.”
“This one’s faking. He can speak normally, I’ll bet it.”
“Ow,” yelped Joseph.
“Turn him loose, Fowler.”
“Orchids orchis orshricsh.”
“Shut up that babbling. What? I’ve turned him loose.”
Joseph ran off to a different corner and concentrated again out a window. Snow fell hard like little bright stones, sinking into the lain- snow of the buried fields. Some winter afternoons, the sun would grow stronger and the snow and ice would begin to melt, so too the icicles of trees and the humped fields, turning partially to water and moving where it could. In the night the temperature dropped and it all froze again, in new shapes and mass, these cold nights creating the bonds of the land.
A magpie flew past the window, clutching something in its claws: A field turnip from the farm’s winter stores, its roots dangling in the never-met air. Joseph waved his hands and whistled, trying to simulate the bird. Glottal stops followed, his throat going uh uh uh, the vocal cords coming together to stop the sound forming and releasing nothing.
He felt an intense feeling of weariness then. The medication’s effect, this day so tiring. Yet somehow, he stood, invisible wedges hammered into his base and keeping him aloft. Out there past the whited dome of the world the sun burned faultlessly and the earth revolved in prescribed rhythm.
Joseph lay on the floor and listened to his fellow residents caught in each other’s turning or snuffling, the aides listening for any disruption on the ward, everyone listening for any threat, and he, Joseph, listening to all of this.
He was sweating profusely. He noticed Danek, a resident from a nearby bed-cluster. Wiry and tall, over six feet. Glasses and messy hair. A strong and chaotic presence on the ward. At the moment, he was licking his fingers in a rare moment of docility. He had recently stopped taking his medication, so the aides were coating the pills in peanut butter now.
Tom spoke up. McNulty wasn’t there anymore.
“Excuse me, Fowler, I think someone took my glasses by mistake.”
“They look brand new.”
“Everything is blurry and it hurts.”
“I’m sure your eyes are just adjusting.”
“Wait for Genet’s shift,” said Randy, an older resident, with a well- groomed moustache. “He listens. Isn’t that right, Clarence?”
Clarence faced them but looked past them all, in concentration, very deep within himself, taking a few moments to climb out of his depths and speak.
“Listens,” he said.
Herschel appeared, a resident with dark features and a bent back, bent
limbs. He was stuttering wearily after a thought of his own nature, and Joseph leaned against the wall beside him.
“Yi-Yi-Yizkor,” said Herschel.
The small hairline cracks on the wall filled with their sweat. Joseph noticed there was a newly placed green wreath hanging on the door across the room. He tried to remember his mother’s face, but it seemed lost to him.
There was a commotion. Someone had received a candy bar in a package from home and a fight ensued. Then there was a red handprint on Tom’s bald head. Glimmers from Danek’s mouth from the pieces of the tinfoil he had licked were shining from the corners of his mouth.
Joseph moved again to the north window and approached it from the left, trying to look out as far northeast as he could. There was the walkway that led to an area of torn up pavestones, evidence of the campus grounds extension plans. Towards the trees.
Then Fowler selected Joseph and a few others to assist with the feeding of low-grade residents. They got on their coats and were led outside. Joseph noticed this time as they passed the landscaped grounds that the bare bushes and branches had pierced and caught pieces of litter and debris, bags, candy wrappers.
On Mulberry Ward, as always, he spooned the dinner mush into the anonymous mouths, trying to not look them in the eyes. His own face bore a look of discomfort, or shame, as he avoided their eyes. There was gentleness in his task though, in the slight tilting of the utensil, in the wiping of residue from lips. Gentle, motherly. Esteemed. The low-grade moaned and others on that ward moaned in return, some began to cry out and this reverberated into a distinct wail.
When Joseph and the others finished their rows, they were taken back to their respective wards. Above the buildings there lingered a bright pine scent, the surrounding forest caught on the wind that formed an image of purity, of escape.
As Joseph entered the main hall of Yew Ward, he realized he needed to use the bathroom. To the aide he said “Bathroom” and they went down the hall, Joseph walking quickly as the pressure in his bladder had increased greatly.
“Don’t walk ahead of me. Get behind me,” the aide said. Joseph slowed his pace. The worker fumbled with his keys and unlocked the bathroom door and Joseph proceeded. He lingered on after he had finished his toileting and sat with his coveralls on, staring at the wall, enjoying the privacy and the steady rushing of the sink that he had kept running. He gazed and listened to the flowing water, the sound of pressure in the pipes for six dream-like minutes until the aide banged on the door.
He was led back down the hall and passed off to McNulty, and again to the day room amongst the other residents, whom mostly were slouched and bent over or sitting on the ground at this time of day. They stared at the ground. Perhaps lost in their own childhood memories, their own search for roots. Memories they tried to keep fading from their minds, sometimes faint, sometimes distorted. Joseph wandered over to the radio where instrumental music played. He turned the dial up a little and listened. Then he hummed along in perfect pitch.
Randy was now standing rigidly by Herschel, with whom he spoke. “Well they had some money in the budget and they told me, we got to try and fix your scoliosis.”
“I…I…I could use…I have. Um.”
“Scoliosis.”
“…Yes.”
“Metal rods in my spine. It’s the damndest thing. Fixed my scoliosis. Didn’t you notice when I was gone for a few weeks this fall? How I haven’t been working the same jobs at the mechanics garage?”
“But…but…I would never…do it.”
“What, the rods? Why the hell not? You’re bent all to hell, Hersh.”
Joseph moved to the south window. It was snowing again. He could hear car engines starting and pulling away, tires crunching as the workers drove from the campus to town and perhaps other towns. Though he could not see them, other places besides his known world existed, existed as surely did the snow, naturally occurring without doubt or anxiety, simply another extension of nature, an evolution not to be wondered over and judged to stand fit by some utmost and final expression or definition, nor standing alone, as what from anything could stand alone, was not interdependent on air and light, in an utterly complex plurality.
Fowler squashed a spider against the window.
“Okay everyone, let’s get to dinner,” he said.
They all shuffled out of the dayroom and to the table. It was like his plate had brimmed along with him, the food having improved since his status improved: As a child, before they knew he could work, he was doing poorly in the school’s classrooms, and he was assigned to the low-grade wards. He used to eat the mush of toothless low-grades, but now he ate macaroni with thin slivers of hot dog. He raised the food to his mouth.
After dinner they entered the dayroom again and Genet and Taylor began their shift. A few of their number approached Genet with concerns. Genet checked on everyone’s glasses, having marked each pair uniquely in the past. He found Donald, a sullen and withdrawn elderly resident, in a corner with downcast eyes. Genet traded Donald’s glasses for Tom’s. A crowd had gathered around the television and Joseph sat on the floor and tried to watch as well. Later everyone showered, took more medication, and the door to the sleep hall was unlocked. After everyone was settled in their cots, the aides did a head count, and left the hall, closing the door behind them, the light receding with a corner of the door-bottom grinding loudly on the floor and a great silence following. Light from the other room spilled under the door. The aides would be sitting in the viewing station for the night, but would be back to check on the sleepers intermittently.
Joseph had little knowledge of the lives of the aides outside the institution grounds, and they were constantly rotating in shifts. In his mind, they did not sleep and they did not stop working. As if they were the ones without memories. As if they were the ones without dreams.