Intruder Read online

  He still had the Haldol prescription they gave him after his overnights at Psych Services. Six months’ worth. But if he took one of the pills, he knew it would give him a stiff neck and a clear mind. Two things he didn’t want at the moment.

  The other option was to go around the corner, buy two bottles of crack, and get outside himself a little.

  He looked at Kathie Lee until her pink outfit hurt his eyes. Then he decided to get high. Just for the morning.

  I lost my way. Hey, hey, hey.

  The next day he got up a little later and went out to buy crack a bit earlier. He wasn’t falling into a real habit, he told himself. Just biding his time and saving his strength. He had about $1200 in the bank. There was still plenty of time to go out and look for work.

  By the next week, though, he’d arranged most of his daily schedule around getting high. Instead of spending $10 a day on crack, he was spending $50, $60, and then $70. He was falling into a pattern: wake up, watch the Channel 2 News at Noon with Michele Marsh, buy a jumbo of ten vials, spend the afternoon smoking it in his apartment as the traffic went by on Bailey Avenue.

  For hours, he’d sit there, staring out the window at the exact spot where she’d been standing. As if she might reappear at any minute.

  In the night, questions would come. What had he done? Why was he being punished? Why does God tempt us with a vision of heaven in the perfection of a child’s face and then condemn us to a lonely wretched existence?

  At the beginning of the next month, Mrs. Gordy, the landlady, sent up Curtis, the handyman.

  “You gonna make the May rent?”

  “No problem.” John opened the door only halfway, so Curtis wouldn’t see he’d already sold his TV and microwave to pay for drugs. “I got a few things lined up already. The worm is about to turn.”

  Curtis looked doubtful. He was a tired man with skin as brown and veiny as an old autumn leaf. “Then I guess she’ll be hearing from you.”

  But John knew he wouldn’t come through. He was in the throes of some psychotic need to fuck up. He missed his face-to-face appointment with his caseworker and fell off the Medicaid rolls.

  When he tried to call back his caseworker the next day, he was told she didn’t work for the city anymore; he would have to reapply at a Staten Island office.

  I was in a dark wood.

  A week later, Curtis, the handyman, stood in the doorway, surveying the barren apartment. The May rent still hadn’t been paid and it was almost June. There was $133 left in the checking account. All the living room and bedroom furniture had been sold. The refrigerator was next.

  A part of John G. was standing back and wondering how far he’d let himself go. At some point he had to hit bottom.

  “Maybe I oughta start looking for another place,” he told Curtis.

  The next day, he called the city social services office from a pay phone to ask about getting his benefits back. They put him on hold for forty-five minutes and then told him his case had been transferred out to Queens.

  His mind went back and forth. Sometimes he thought this was just a temporary slipping-down period. Other times he wondered if it was all part of a plan. God was punishing him for a reason.

  In the meantime, he needed another place. But most of his relatives were either dead, living far away, or fed up with him.

  So his old conductor, Ernest Bayard, offered to let him sleep on the red vinyl couch in his apartment for five dollars a night. Just for a couple of weeks until John got his feet on the ground. But they started getting on each other’s nerves almost immediately. Ernest liked to stay home at night watching religious programs and treacly family sitcoms. John hid in the bathroom, puffing on his crack pipe and blowing smoke out into the air shaft.

  One hot morning he woke up headachy and paranoid from smoking a whole jumbo in one night and accused Ernest of stealing his shoes.

  By the afternoon, it was time to move on again.

  The night before Independence Day, he found himself wandering through Central Park, carrying a duffel bag with a few clothes in it and $1.50 in his pants pocket.

  The murderous humidity of June had finally lifted and he took his first deep breath in weeks. In the back of his mind, he had a tingling feeling that things were about to change once more.

  He stopped by the Sheep Meadow, where he’d gone to buy drugs a hundred times before, and found a group of a dozen homeless men lying like beat-up pieces of luggage on the crescent of benches along the periphery. Human wreckage. The seventh semicircle of hell. Two or three of them had clear plastic bags filled with empty soda cans. Diet Coke. Pepsi. Slice. Fresca. They still made Fresca? He remembered bums getting on his train with bags like these and bragging about how they were going to redeem them for five cents a pop at some Gristede’s on the Upper West Side or a Times Square movie theater that’d been converted into a massive recycling center. Pathetic, he used to think, struggling with a sack full of a hundred cans on your back for a lousy $5. How could a man get so desperate?

  But suddenly those $5 had an altered value. Five dollars was dinner at Burger King or a vial of crack. He was tempted to ask one of the guys where he went to return the cans, but he hesitated. He hadn’t fallen that far yet, had he? He hadn’t turned into one of the people he used to step over on the street. He had a skill. He drove a train, goddamn it. He could’ve been making $50,000 in a couple of years.

  On the other hand, the night air was cooling and the benches looked comfortable. It didn’t mean he was turning into a bum. It was just a place to stay awhile. Until the weather changed and motivated him to find something more permanent.

  He threw his bag on an empty bench and stretched out. A great oak tree bent over him and shivered its leaves.

  This wasn’t really his life, he told himself.

  Or maybe it was. This might be his penance, he thought. To end his days here. Maybe this was where he was supposed to finally die.

  All right, so now he’s a bum. For the first few weeks, it doesn’t seem so awful. All right. So he’s stopped shaving. Okay, okay, he’s using bathroom sinks instead of showers to clean up. He’s still alive, isn’t he? He even renews his ‘script and takes his Haldol when he isn’t smoking crack.

  In a way, he feels more alive now, being out here, exposed to the elements. Every moment counts. A bum has to be thinking all the time, searching for shelter, figuring out how to eat.

  The best thing is never knowing what’s going to happen next. The worst thing is never knowing what’s going to happen next.

  Over the second half of July, he learns how to sleep during the day and prowl at night, hustling soda cans. The other guys from the park benches tell him which uptown supermarkets stay open until midnight for recycling. So he gets an abandoned baby stroller out of a Dumpster to transport the cans and starts scavenging.

  He promises himself that he won’t resort to begging, though. Instead, he finds out which restaurants leave relatively fresh food in their Dumpsters. The ones on Forty-sixth Street have the best produce, but some of the local Dunkin’ Donuts managers are evil; they sprinkle coffee grounds on perfectly good donuts in the garbage just to keep the bums out of their trash.

  The whole month, he has only one bad dream, about being in a rotting, oarless dinghy floating away from a rich, green breast of land.

  “Yo, Fonz, what’s up?”

  A voice snaps him out of thought and into the present moment. He’s back in the Sheep Meadow. He looks up and finds himself surrounded. A group of belligerent teenagers seem to have materialized out of nowhere. Four boys and two girls in loose jeans and big shirts, all gangsta pose and slouchy bad attitude. At first he asks himself if he’s imagining them, the way he imagined the man on the tracks all those weeks back.

  “Yo, Fonz, give us a quarter,” says their leader, a lanky boy wearing a Chicago Blackhawks jersey and gold caps over his front teeth.

  John G. tilts his head to the side. He doesn’t want any trouble.

  “Yo,
Fonz, this ain’t no Happy Days rerun. I asked you something.” The kid takes a step closer.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t listening.”

  “Who you calling sir?” The kid pokes his tongue against the side of his mouth and the other guys in his crew giggle. “I look like a sir? Do I look like a old man to you?”

  “No, no, I mean, I just meant it as a sign of respect.”

  “But how can you respect me if you don’t know me?”

  “I don’t know,” John G. mumbles. “Just the way you carry yourself.”

  “Just the way I carry myself. Is that why you respect me? Or are you just frontin’ ‘cause I’m down with the crew?”

  “Well, ah, ah, ah . . .”

  A boy with a pacifier in his mouth imitates John G. in a Gomer Pylish voice. The others crack up, slapping hands and bumping shoulders. Individually, they’d each barely have the nerve to stare a man down across a subway car. But together, they’re a vicious little army.

  It hurts John’s heart, knowing they can treat him so badly. Has he let himself fall that far?

  “Say, what’s the matter with you, bitch?” asks the leader. “You got a stutter? You like a retard?”

  “No, I’m just a little nervous.”

  “Why, ‘cause you got so much respect for me? Let’s get back to that, man. Why you got so much respect? You all afraid we’re gonna fuck you up?”

  “No, no, you seem like reasonable guys. We’re all reasonable people.”

  “Well, what if I did decide we would fuck you up? You got a problem with that?”

  “I don’t think you really want to do that,” says John G., trying not to sound weak.

  “What’re you, a mind reader? You know what’s going on in my mind?”

  “I don’t even know what’s going on in my own mind.”

  “You know what, man?” The kid in the Blackhawks jersey shares a smile with a girl sporting a cathedral of cornrowed hair and gold-painted fingernails. “I really don’t think you’re sincere. I don’t think you know what it means, having respect, after all.”

  “Well, I, uh...”

  “Man, you know what you are?” the kid says. “You are unclean. You know that? White man smelling all bad and bummy. People like you oughta be exterminated.”

  Get to zero, John G. tells himself. Offer zero resistance. Don’t make them feel they have to prove something by beating you up.

  “I guess you’re entitled to your opinion,” he says.

  The leader takes a blue Bic lighter out of his jeans pocket and moves toward him.

  “And what if my opinion is I should set your ass on fire?” he asks, reaching out and knocking the Yankees cap off John G.’s head.

  Is this what’s meant to be? Is this the punishment he’s deserved all along? It doesn’t feel right.

  Don’t come any closer. John finds himself trying to send the kid a mental message. Don’t come any closer or I can’t promise what will happen. Fight or flight.

  “Would you still respect me if I did that?” The lighter in the kid’s right hand flares like a firefly.

  The guys in the crew laugh hysterically. The girls look impatient.

  Fight or flight. Don’t come any closer. John’s right hand goes into his pants pocket and feels the razor-edged box cutter he keeps there.

  “What? Are you gonna beg now?” the leader says.

  Fight or flight. The kid’s moving out of flight range and into fight range. He flicks the lighter right under John G.’s nose, so the hairs curl up inside. There’s no longer any choice. John G.’s hand tightens around the box cutter and pushes out the blade.

  “Come on, bitch, let me hear you beg. I want to hear you say how much you respect me.”

  The kid in the Blackhawks jersey thrusts out his left hand.

  John takes the box cutter out of his pocket. The kid’s mouth falls open. John lunges at him, slashing wildly at the kid’s hand, nicking the side. The boy gives a girlish yelp and jumps back. He puts the hand up to his mouth a second and then lowers it to his waist to look at it, as if it’s not part of his body anymore.

  “Man, why’d you have to do that?!” he says in a high-pitched whine. “We was just fucking with you.”

  All of a sudden, the boy seems smaller, younger. His posture is less threatening. The other kids in his group move away from him, as though he’s disgusted them by the very act of getting hurt.

  “Just get away from me before I cut your fucking eyes out,” John hears himself say.

  The kid in the Blackhawks jersey stares at John and tries to make a fist with his cut hand, but his crew has already started to disperse. One by one, they move across the Sheep Meadow and disappear into the fog like ghosts. Finally it’s just John G. and the kid in the middle of the great field.

  “Later for this shit,” the kid says, scampering after his friends. “Hey, Charlie Ray! Blood! Wait up!”

  Then John is alone again. He looks around and sees someone has kicked over his baby stroller. The empty soda cans look like silver fish lying in the moonlit grass. He starts to gather them up. All this time, he’s been thinking he probably wanted to die. But the fierceness of his own resistance tonight has surprised him. Maybe it’s not his time yet. It’s enough, he tells himself. He’s fallen far enough.

  He finishes putting the cans back in the stroller and starts pushing it across the field, feeling dwarfed by the black starless sky above him. Maybe this isn’t what was intended. Perhaps the problem is that he’s just lost his way and God can’t see him right now. But somehow, he knows, he must get back in his line of sight again.

  4

  The psych ER is in an uproar.

  A stout and surly nurse named Beverly Watkins, who’s always minding everyone else’s business, went into the meds closet with a glass of water and accidentally drank a cup of methadone. They need two gurneys to get her over to the regular emergency room.

  Dana Gerrity Schiff, Jake’s wife, watches her getting wheeled down the hall and past the sign that says BE CAREFUL WHEN OPENING DOORS, RISK OF ELOPEMENT.

  She remembers when elopement meant something romantic. Before she started working here. She turns back to her patient, Mrs. Lee, a tiny birdlike woman from the Philippines, perched on a hard plastic chair.

  “I was wondering if you could tell me how long you’ve been depressed,” says Dana, who is fair, blonde, and thirty-nine.

  “Kay?” Mrs. Lee flashes a bright eager smile.

  “How long have you been sad?”

  “Kay?”

  Dana scans the case file but finds no mention of the fact that the patient may not speak English. Just some information about how Mrs. Lee took an overdose of an herb containing speed and a line confirming that her husband, a glowering brute of a maintenance engineer, has the proper insurance to cover her.

  “Why did you take too much of that herb?” Dana says slowly. What language do they speak in the Philippines anyway? Filipino?

  “Kay?”

  The phone rings.

  “Dr. Shift?” A Midwestern voice with a lot of air around it.

  “Yes?” No point in correcting either one of the mistakes. She’s not a doctor, she’s a psychiatric social worker.

  “This is Katherine Baldridge from United Health in Atlanta. We had a few more questions about the forms you submitted for a Christopher Domindez.”

  “Dominguez, yes.” Dana tries to give Mrs. Lee an assuring look—this won’t take long—but Mrs. Lee is smiling on obliviously as if she’s enjoying a sunny day in the park.

  “Well, Doctor, we just don’t see any need for an extended hospitalization for this customer,” says Mrs. Baldridge from Atlanta.

  “He has a severe bipolar disorder. He locked himself in a room for two weeks and took a hundred and fifty Bufferin.”

  “We feel he can be treated on an outpatient basis with medication,” says Mrs. Baldridge.

  Dana stares at a pale green wall and wonders what qualifies someone in a corporate office tower
in Georgia to make that decision.

  “Listen,” says Dana, starting to search through the mountains of paper on her desk for the Dominguez file. “If we don’t treat this young man here, his family is going to take him back to the Dominican Republic, where last I heard, their theories about treatment are about seventy-five years behind ours. They’ll perform a lobotomy on him with a hammer and an ice pick.”

  “Be that as it may,” says Mrs. Baldridge primly, “his coverage does not provide for thirty-day hospital stays.”

  Dana looks over and sees Mrs. Lee has somehow gotten up on the windowsill and is standing there grinning like an aging Broadway starlet on the verge of a triumphant comeback.

  “Excuse me, I’m going to have to call you back,” Dana says into the phone.

  She hits the panic button under her desk, calling in security. Then she gently approaches Mrs. Lee the way she’d approach a wounded sparrow on a porch railing.

  “Mrs. Lee, please come down from there,” she says softly.

  “Kay!” says Mrs. Lee cheerily, somehow breaking the word into two syllables.

  She turns toward the window and squints at the sun, basking in its warmth. The light catches a purplish bruise under her right ear.

  “Mrs. Lee, I’m afraid you’re going to hurt yourself.”

  By now, Eduardo, the nervous young hospital cop from the front desk, has come in accompanied by Mr. Lee, a bristle-haired bull in a pink Lacoste polo shirt.

  “Kay, lo-kay,” says Mrs. Lee, as if she’s happy to see both of them.

  Mr. Lee mutters something short and harsh and his wife steps down from the sill, daintily taking his hand. The bowling ball and the pin, Dana thinks when she sees them standing together. He must knock her down twice a day.

  “We go now,” he says, starting to lead his wife out.

  “I really don’t think that’s wise.” Dana follows them out into the waiting area. “There are things we need to discuss.”

  A homeless man in a Yankees cap and an MTA shirt sits there watching them, with an empty baby stroller at his side. A woman from Honduras, in four-point restraints on a bed down the hall, is cursing out the nurses in Spanish. Mrs. Lee whispers something in her husband’s ear and her hands flutter like pieces of paper caught in a sudden updraft.