Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) Read Free

going around.”
    The elevator stopped and we stepped out into a secure waiting area outside of a well-lit nurses’ station, the upper half of which was enclosed on all four sides by steel mullions and chicken-wire safety glass.
    A lone nurse was on the telephone, chart open in front of her. She glanced at Bobby and me and smiled, while Bobby opened the door into the station with a key on a chain.
    The nurse pointed at a coffeepot, but we shook our heads. Her name tag said LAUREL WERLING, R.N.
    “She had the ipecac only,” said the nurse into the phone. “Dr. Hook didn’t want her to have anything else because he was afraid of interactions with other drugs she may have taken that we don’t know about.”
    While we waited, I looked around the nurses’ station, which was like none other I’d seen in the Kingdom. Each wall of the quadrangle had a thick dead-bolted wooden door with a little hinged windowpane of chicken-wire glass set into it at eye level. Three of the bolted doors gave out into separate dark hallways, lit at this hour only by exit signs glowing fire-engine red at the far ends. The fourth door opened into the waiting area we’d entered from, and Bobby had bolted it after us.
    I looked through the darkened glass and out onto the ward, where an emaciated elderly man in a frayed and dirty hospital gown appeared out of the darkness in the hallway opposite like an apparition taking shape in a graveyard, gradually becoming visible as he drifted toward the fluorescent lights of the nurses’ station. He stopped in front of the bolted wooden door, his head framed by the inset pane of wired glass, his skull plainly visible under papery hairless, age-spotted flesh. He had a livid ropy scar on the left side of his head that zigzagged like a lightning bolt from his temple all the way behind his ear. I kept feeling I was on the verge of recognizing him, as if I’d known him as a much younger man or seen a photo of him somewhere: William Burroughs from the
Naked Lunch
jacket? The mortician who’d buried my mother and father at the Oak Lawn Funeral Home?
    Behind him on the wall was a fire alarm.
    In case of fire, break glass,
I thought. It didn’t say that anywhere on or near the alarm, and it wasn’t that kind of fire alarm, because you can’t have glass anywhere out on the psychiatric ward itself. I don’t know why I thought it. I just did.
    He raised his bony hand and rapped on the door of the nurses’ station with his knuckles.
    The nurse kept talking into the phone while she opened the hatch in the door and handed out a small paper cup of pills and another with a swallow’s worth of water in it.
    Glaring at me, the old man took the pills and the water and said, “You wanna know what love is?”
    I don’t know why, but his question raised gooseflesh all over my body. I shuddered in the grip of a violent chill.
    The nurse made a face and turned sharply away from the old guy, as if she’d had enough of him weeks ago. She stuck a finger in her open ear and pressed the handset against her other one. “I’m sorry,” she said into the phone, “say again?”
    “I said, Do you wanna know what love is?” the old man in the gown repeated loudly.
    I gasped and stared at him. I
knew
him. The priest from St. Dymphna’s they’d arrested for child abuse? No, but…
    The nurse waved him off and continued her phone conversation.
    The old guy tossed the pills into the back of his mouth, followed with the water, and gulped. He crumpled the paper cups and balled them up, one in each fist.
    “It’s pigs in a litter lying close together to keep warm.”
    He glowered at me as if he was waiting for me to argue with him.
    “I’ll say a prayer for you,” I offered. “God bless you.”
    “Blessed are the young,” he said, “for they shall inherit the national debt. Did you know that God is really three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who are united in one substance or being, kind of like a litle beer that