Stones in a Creek

                                  Photo: ForestWander.

Noises that I hear sometimes get louder and turn into voices -talking to me, whispering to me, even shouting at me.  Other days are really quiet.  Once before morning meds, I felt someone tickling my stomach really hard, and the fingers were churning inside my belly, so I told Nurse Claussen.  “Does it hurt, Erbid?” she asked, and I said “No, not really.”  “Then don’t worry about it,” she said, and she gave me my meds and a little white paper cup filled with cold water.  We have morning meds at 8:30 a.m. every day.

Last week I was in the arts and crafts room, making a lanyard, twisting the green and white cords together when I heard a growling from out in the hall, and I was scared because I thought that it was Pepper, the neighbor’s dog who bit me on my right arm when I was nine, 28 years ago, on Wednesday, September 3, 1958.  Kenny was in the room too, but I don’t think that he heard it, because he was coloring with a big red marker and he didn’t look up, and the marker kept going squeak-squeak-squeak.  Anthony, one of the security guards, was also there, but he just sat there smoking a cigarette, which he isn’t supposed to do, but he does anyway.

Then I put down my half-finished lanyard, stood up, and started walking toward the hall, because even though I was still scared, I wanted to make sure that Pepper wasn’t there, and that it was just another bad sound. 

 “Walker!” Anthony said.  “Where you goin’?”

“To see if Pepper is in the hall,” I explained.

Then Anthony got a really strange look on his face, like a mixture of what’re you talking about? and I don’t even care at the same time, and he pointed a long black finger at me and he said, “Don’t you give me no trouble, you hear?”

Then I remembered on Monday, July 1, 1985, five years after I came here, when I was in the arts and crafts room, painting a picture of a ship on the ocean, and Abraham Lincoln’s ghost tried to possess me, and I started screaming, “Get away from me!  Get out of my body!” and I was throwing brushes and jars of paint.  Anthony, Jimmy –another security guard- and one of the orderlies tied me to my bed for two days, and they wouldn’t even let me up to go to the bathroom, and I wet myself.  So this time I just said, “Okay,” and I sat back down to finish my lanyard, and I didn’t hear any more bad noises that day, which was Tuesday, December 9, 1986.

A week later, right after breakfast, I was sitting in the Van de Meer Lounge watching TV, and I heard a really high-pitched shrieking from behind me, almost like a baby’s whine, but not quite as irritating, but still pretty irritating.  Then I heard it again, and again, about every 10 seconds, but I tried to ignore it, and just keep watching TV.  Then Oakley, who was sitting on one of the couches and also watching TV, yelled “Will you shut up?” and I turned around and saw a tall, thin man with a long, bald, oval head, which was kind of pointy, and I didn’t know who he was, but I saw that he was the one who was shrieking, but then he stopped.  Oakley’s really big and sometimes he’s mean, and most people are afraid of him.

Then when a commercial came on I heard whispering, and the words were really angry words, about hurting Nurse Claussen.  Oakley didn’t hear anything this time, so I decided myself to turn around and tell the tall, thin man with the long, bald, oval head to shut up, but he was gone. I went to the nurses’ station to tell Nurse Claussen what I heard, because she isn’t so bad, one of the better ones, not like some of them. But when I tried to tell her she just said that I needed to relax, and after I kept on telling her she got angry and told me that she didn’t have time for this nonsense and to go away.

So I sat back down in the Van de Meer Lounge and I waited until 4:57 p.m., because that’s when Nurse Claussen leaves every day.  Then I opened the back door and went out to the landing on the second floor, and Nurse Claussen was holding her keys in her right hand, and standing at the top of the stairs.  I remembered how on Friday, June 13, six months ago, a man named Eric fell down the steps and died.  Anthony said that Eric had no business being there anyway.

Then I thought that maybe someone was behind Nurse Claussen, even though I couldn’t see them, waiting to push her down the stairs and break her neck or crack her head open.  I ran up, shouting “Get away from her!” and I grabbed Nurse Claussen’s arm and pulled her back away from the stairs.  

“It’s okay,” I told her.  “You’re safe now.”

She didn’t thank me for saving her, though, instead she started screaming until Anthony and Jimmy came out onto the landing, and ran up and tackled me.  Nurse Claussen was very upset, and she was shouting, “How did he get through that door?  That door is supposed to lock behind me!” and Anthony said that he was very sorry, and that it wouldn’t happen again, and Nurse Claussen said it had better not. 

Nobody tied me to my bed this time, but Dr. Gardener stuck a needle in my arm, and I got really tired.  I slept for a long time.  When I woke up I was in my bed, and everything was dark and quiet, then somebody was knocking on my door.  So I got out of bed and went to the door, but I almost fell because I was really wobbly.  There wasn’t anybody there, so I got back into bed.  

I had to mop the floor in the Brandenburg Wing the next day, even though my shoulder hurt from where Anthony and Jimmy had tackled me. I didn’t mind because I like mopping the floor, dipping the mop head into the warm, soapy water and making circles on the floor, polishing my reflection in the shiny tan tiles. Once an old man named Marshall urinated on the floor in the Brandenburg Wing, and Jimmy and Anthony yelled and cursed and him, and they made him mop it up.  Then Anthony pushed Marshall when he was mopping the floor, and Marshall fell down and couldn’t get back up, and Anthony and Jimmy got really scared, but I didn’t want to watch, so I walked away.  A few days later I asked Nurse Clonnick where Marshall was, and she said that Marshall got better and was allowed to leave.

Down the hall, where the four corridors meet, I heard footsteps clomping, and there was Bradley, one of the maintenance men, in his heavy black boots, and he was carrying a stepladder under one arm and a long, white fluorescent tube under the other as he walked past.  I heard a banging sound, then six thumps of booted feet climbing up the stepladder.  Then something dark and blurry crept past the intersection down the hallway.  I thought that maybe I should just forget it this time, mind my own business, the way that Delray, an orderly, told me to mind my own business when Darby was having a seizure once and I tried to tell Delray.  But something made me walk down the hall this time, gripping the mop tight in my hands, one foot in front of the other, and the heel of my right shoe kept clicking as I walked, like I had stepped on something and it was stuck in the bottom of my shoe.  When I was about halfway down the hall I heard metal scraping against the linoleum floor tiles, a crash like breaking glass, then a thump.  There was gagging and choking, like somebody was being strangled, and I dropped the mop on the floor and ran all the way to the intersection, and I turned the corner.  
Bradley was standing on the fourth step of the stepladder, and he had his arms stretched way above his head, and his hands were grabbing the sides of the plastic cover over the fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling.  The fluorescent tube was lying on the floor under the stepladder.  He looked down at me, kind of surprised then kind of disgusted, and said, “What do you want?”

“I heard bad sounds,” I told him, and I was shaking a little because the sounds scared me.

“I didn’t hear nothing,” Bradley said.

On Monday Hector, the other maintenance man, was painting the metal stalls in the bathroom, because people had written a lot of very bad words on them with black markers and red markers and even paint.  He was sitting on a little metal stool, and next to him on the floor was an open bucket of light blue paint, and lots of newspapers underneath.  Without looking, he just dipped the brush in the light blue paint and slapped the brush hard against the stall, like he was angry, trying to hurt it.  Then again, dip and slap, dip and slap, dip and slap.  Then he started shouting in Spanish I think, and I thought that maybe I should leave, so I did, and then Anthony came in.  I heard them yelling, and finally Anthony walked out, looking kind of angry but kind of satisfied. 

Right before Nurse Claussen left at 4:57 that afternoon she and Anthony were near the office talking, and I heard Nurse Claussen say “He’s on thin ice,” and I wondered if they meant me, but I guess that they probably didn’t.  Later that night when I was in bed, I heard Bradley talking to me, and he kept saying “What do you want?  What do you want?  What do you want?” louder and louder, then he just stopped.  Then I heard a woman saying “We’ll just poison Erbid, we’ll poison him.”  

I didn’t want to take my meds the next morning, because I thought that there was cyanide in them, and Nurse Claussen told Dr. Abramoff, and he talked to me for a very long time, and he told me that everything was all right, and he promised me that there was no cyanide.  

“The doctors and the nurses and everyone at Burberry want you to be well,” Dr. Abramoff said, and he talked to me like I was a little kid, but I believed him that there was no cyanide, and I took my meds.  Then Dr. Abramoff and Nurse Claussen told me to open my mouth really wide, and stick my tongue out, then lift up my tongue, then move my tongue to the left and to the right.  

Once in group, Dr. Abramoff told us to be stones in a creek.  Stones don’t fight the current, he said, they just lie in the sand and let the water wash over them, taking away all of the bumps and jagged edges until they are smooth and round.  Dr. Abramoff is right, I thought.   I’ll just be a stone in a creek.  We  have group Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:30 ‘til 4:30 p.m.

The smell of fresh paint coming from the bathroom on Thursday made me think of gasoline and of thick ink markers, which I always thought smelled kind of good, but I know are bad for you to breathe them.  But I went into the bathroom anyway, even though I didn’t have to go, and I saw Bradley painting the stalls, and he was almost finished, and he looked kind of angry.  I asked him where Hector was, and he said that he didn’t know, and I talked to him a little more, but he wouldn’t answer me, so I left.  

Later that day, from 12:42 p.m. until 4:31 p.m., I heard music playing very softly, like in the background, but I didn’t know what song it was, and nobody else said anything, so I didn’t either.   I just tried to be a stone. A couple of hours later I went back to the bathroom, and just sat there in the stall with the door closed, staring at and smelling the light blue paint.  I felt relaxed, and everything was so quiet. 

They sometimes show us movies on Friday nights, in the Community Room, but last time they showed us The Cowboys with John Wayne, and after that, I think that Bruce Dern started putting ground up glass in my food.  I wrote him a letter and told him to stop it, but I don’t know if Nurse Claussen ever mailed it for me.  I was sitting in the back this Friday, so when the movie, which was Casablanca, started, I snuck out and went to my room.

I was sitting in my room reading a Richie Rich comic book, and I got bored and wanted to go to the bathroom to smell the light blue paint, even though I know that it isn’t good to breathe it too much.  So I was walking down the hall and I heard shouting from the bathroom, two voices that sounded like Anthony’s and Hector’s, and I stopped.  But I knew that it was just another bad sound, and that it couldn’t really hurt me, like Dr. Abramoff had told me lots of times before, and I started walking toward the bathroom again.  

Then the voices were shouting, and very loud, so I covered my ears with my hands and I whispered, “Go away, go away, go away,” and there were two popping sounds, then another popping sound, and everything was quiet again.  Finally I heard Anthony, but not really Anthony, saying “Help me.  Somebody, help me.” I didn’t want to smell the paint anymore, so I just covered my ears, and kept saying “I’m a stone, I’m a stone, I’m a stone in a creek.”  And I walked back to the Community Room and watched Casablanca.  


I woke up really early this morning, Saturday, December 20, because I heard voices in the hall, and at first I wasn’t going to look, but then I did.  There were lots of police, and Nurse Claussen was talking to one of them, and she looked very upset, and a man was taking pictures, and there were thick yellow pieces of tape in front of the bathroom door.  Then I saw two ambulance men carrying a long, zippered plastic bag on a stretcher, then they came back and took another one.   I hope that they let me go back into the bathroom soon.  I can’t get Peter Lorre’s voice out of my head, and I need to sit in the stall with the light blue paint.