I'd just been released from a halfway house for the mentally ill, and began translating Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day into Arabic. I had a private room in a Victorian, sharing it with a older man who was recovering from spinal surgery. I was to be his caregiver for about a month or so, at least until he could walk on his own. My papers, dictionaries and Roget's Thesaurus scattered across my table, I grieved over the first word, "Now."
Though my stepmother's grandfather had been Lebanese and passed Arabic on to her, it hadn't conferred thoroughgoing knowledge to me. Possibly a damaged (get bent) neuron wouldn't allow me the talent to learn another language. I'd do much better without the strong medication. They blocked submersion into another language.
"I gotta piss, Gil," Max yelled from his lounge chair. I must've misplaced the urine bottle. "Hurry, damn you." I hated to lose things whether mine or his.
I got placed into a mental hospital after my mother died, for cursing outside the church where the funeral was held. Force fields would destroy me if I stepped near her casket. I screamed my nuts off until the police came. Any sweet-fucking-Christ who yelled at me the way Max just did would've been strangled by my two meat-hook hands if I hadn't been on so much medication.
"Right. Coming." I searched for ten minutes and never found it.
..."I got piss all over. You're supposed to help, not twaddle with books in there."
Max had lots of action and thriller novels as well as self-help books, but having an honest to god translator in his house irked him. In the home they all curried my favor (delusion) saying, "How's it going, Translator?" then smirked or outright bellowed with laughter. I convinced the doctor at the halfway house I'd be able to handle independent living, what with my mother's nursing background. I lied about that. If I flopped, then back to the home.
Max, caught in the donut hole with his prescription drug coverage, having to pay cash for them until he reached about $5,200, should've had a real caregiver. Instead, this "mental cripple," his words, rather a well-trained professional caregiver, irritated the hell out of him. I'd never been called that before, probably because I'd been hospitalized so much and surrounded by mentals like myself; who'd lash out at another head case?
I finally found the plastic bottle and handed it to Max. He had a little dribble left over, then gave it to me because he couldn't bend down and place it nearby, he hurt so much.
"It won't happen again," I said. "I shook it with Lysol, got the smell out, you know." I thought that would've brightened his day, a fresh urine bottle. Probably the fact that I cut in half my daily Haldol turned me compulsive about pee. I needed something to do, somewhere to put my craziness. I couldn't get through the job on the heavy dose, it froze me down, like Leningraders during the 900 days of siege under the Nazis.
"You getting high snorting urine?" he asked, smirking, snot dripping down and into his mouth. "Won't work, I've tried it. Toad shit's good, though," and he laughed so hard he cried. Shaking and contorting his body made the pain snake through him. An old hippie has-been, he had a Jim Morrison poster under glass on the wall.
I was born on the date President Nixon resigned from office, so I missed all that. On my wall in Max's spare bedroom I had before and after newspaper photos of the World Trade Center. Sitting there laced on drugs in the hospital, watching those towers smithereens down, it gladdened my day, even made me horny. Better than erections, the soft penis kind, not the architectural type. Don DeLillo wrote, "Civilizations are erected, history is driven." How they took seconds to miraculously disintegrate, sort of a Lourdes for unbelievers.
"Where's the walker?" I asked. My main task was to shop, help him into bed, and make sure he didn't fall during short walks in the neighborhood.
"Can't remember shit," he said. "You parked it like a car in the garage, looney."
Where his tools were, yeah, I remembered now. Tools, something disdainful for me ever since my father, a foreman of a construction crew, had once threatened using pliers to extract a tooth, saving money rather than taking me to a dentist. Had I known about the tools, I'd never would've stashed the walker there. I'd stopped taking Klonopin completely a few days ago and this morning, after changing Max's dressing, I mistakenly took the walker into the attached garage. Lots of nasty power tools, furniture restoration being Max's trade.
"Let's walk the house," I suggested. I wanted to say "Let's rock," but I hated to give him the satisfaction of elaborating on his psychedelic adventures. I'd seen a lot of longhairs in hospitals, how hippieness had tripped them up so to speak. I noticed how they simmered down after their hair had been cut. Then there wouldn't be excuses for delusional, flashback chatter about window pane or crystal. I never believed the highest of mammals were logical. Bunyan's "Enter ye in at the strait gate," meaning following rational ways, stripped of its religious fantasia—I wanted nothing to do with "strait," its enclosure, after half my life spent behind mental prison walls.
I watched Max taking small then larger steps through his house. Every day he progressed, walking farther and steadier than before. Later, after lunch, I timed him outside. "Good one today, Max," I said, "Five minutes." He said he hadn't felt much pain as yesterday's three-minute exodus. "Why'd you have to be so damn silent when we walked," he said, notching his voice into mid-range anger. "Got some weirdo to look after me, for sure." I just quit my anti-depressants, and his testiness jangled my nerves.
He had temporary pain in the first six vertebrae. But my permanent suffering (was suffering worse than pain? how about affliction?) lolly-gagged in the Rocky-Mountain-High pressure- and stress-zones from being alive. And when Max no longer needed assistance, I'd better get Section 8 housing, or back into the halfway house.
I called this time in my life the Interregnum, I, Protectorate, an imaginary Oliver Cromwell, between Charles the First's beheading and restoration of Charles II. I savored power, Cromwell between two kings, how rich my delusions, how fertile (flayed?) my mind.
Thinking about my state of affairs, making a smoothie for Max, I vowed to whack the head off the one responsible for not giving me a place to live. But I always allowed space for ironies and contradictions, great and looming paradoxes. And I wanted to live alone, the damned human race and all. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," that old standby Emerson quote applied to me, unlike the kindred Green Goblin, the super villain in Spider Man comics. Who went around thinking themselves evil? Max would've tacked the Emerson aphorism on the wall if his skills hadn't rested in his hands, toolcraft over abstractions. I could always tell. Max grumbled, like a real curmudgeon; they were always cliché-mongers.
Never a big fan of parallelism, more likely to mix metaphors, I enjoyed the surge intellectualism (I'm no intellectual, though) gave me, flinging historical morsels any old way I felt like it. All schizies were intelligent or so they acted and believed. All you had to do was word salad, throwing morsels of information at one another, doctors, and even Max here.
In a week, I made the leap of faith, not Kierkegaard's but a religious chum's remark about the leap of faith it took to stay alive with so much Zyprexa after breakfast. My "leap" would be doing away with all my Haldol. On only the stale bedroom air, I felt liberated. Not sleeping, I switched the light on and tried once again to translate the Pynchon novel. Making great progress by the time Max hollered from his bedroom, "Wake up in there," I'd translated the first eight pages. I showed it to Max after I helped him to the bathroom and then into his lounge chair.
"What do you think of my Arabic?" I asked.
"Arabic? These are scribbles or code. Maybe what you call Art Brut." He handed them back and I couldn't read what I'd written. I'd translate the translations tonight.
"Who needs sleep anyway." I smiled, telling Max I'd show him more translation in the coming days. But then I jerked my head, twisting it and yelled, "Are you insulting my mother?"
"Mother?" Max was exasperated.
"She taught me Arabic. Never challenge me. Never." My, it felt good, no devastating guilt screaming at Max, poor Max.
"OK. All right. I won't," he said. "Let's not quibble and go for my walk."
"Majestics never quibble. That's for sissies," I told him firmly, though Majestics, where had that come from? Born again, med-less.
Max walked much better now, going ten blocks round-trip. Instead of helping him climb the stairs into the Vic, something like an interrogator in rendition overcame me. Each act a personal decision into freedom, according to Mr. Sartre, I pushed Max from behind, sending him crashing down on to the porch. He bellowed something, I couldn't make it out. I then helped him up, which took about ten minutes.
"I'll see you pay for this," Max told me. I eased him in the lounge chair and opened the bottle of Percocet. He took three, having been down to only one per day now. I grabbed his mobile phone and unplugged the cord of the old one, taking them to my bedroom.
"I'll be making the calls from now on, Max." Something about power, how much I lacked and how much I gained by way of cruelty. Would anyone like to live in a neighborhood of unmedicated mental patients? That was a challenge to your liberalism or libertarianism remaining in the Year of out-of-our Gourd. Punning allowed here or get another story, reader, for shit sake.
He nodded, looking relaxed, with even a tiny smile on his face. I showed him, a person who'd no linguistical skills himself to mock my knack for translation. It was noon, when I was supposed to prepare lunch for Max and me. I ate quickly a quart of cherry-red Häagen Dazs, giving nothing for hipster Max. He looked blissful, a serene Pre-Raphaelite but I wanted more Francis Bacon, more discombulatedness.
I speed-walked to the garage, scanning the tools arranged on the wall. That cordless, circular power saw looked good for my artistic purposes. I tested it and it almost yanked out of my hand. Had better hunker down, I thought, power-walking back to Max. Hunkering not as in squatting, more like gaining poise, finding my own voice whether in darkness or light.
I tilted Max's head back, he groggily resisting. Then the dynamo, the circular blade closing in on his Adam's apple. I flinched at first, all that blood flying around us, then sunk the blade deeper and deeper into his neck until I beheaded him. Blood, the color of borscht, flew through the living room, warm chunks of his cartilage, Max the Hunchback's brainstem and hindbrain, bits and pieces of spine grazed my hands and splattered my face.
The borscht tasted so good I didn't need lunch.
