After Hours (InterMix)(6)
Lonnie. Sixty-one, another schizophrenic. Lonnie was chatty, moving with quick, birdlike twitches accenting each gesture, an effect that didn’t match his doughy frame. He wore thick glasses strapped to his head with an athletic band, dividing his frizzy, graying hair into two lobes.
The resident Kelly had asked about in the morning meeting, Don, was plump and pale, as chipper as one could expect of a middle-aged man at seven thirty. I asked Jenny why Kelly had inquired about him, of all the patients.
“Don and Kelly have a . . . special relationship. When Don goes into a psychotic episode, Kelly’s the only one who can ever seem to settle him down, short of a jab.”
“What does he do?”
She shrugged. “Nothing extraordinary. Nothing any other orderly wouldn’t. But Kelly’s got a certain calm about him. Like a wall. You can fight a man and maybe win, but you can’t fight a wall.”
“How often do Don’s episodes happen?”
“He’ll have a violent one twice, maybe three times a week, nearly always in the early afternoon. Kelly shadows him between lunch and about four, and just knowing he’s there seems to keep Don under control. I think Kelly’s a comfort to him. Some people like having a wall near them, especially paranoid people. Something to lean against. Some sense of security at their backs.”
Junior nurses’, techs’, and orderlies’ shifts were long and irregular. Mine were all 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., two days on, then one or two days off in between. One week I’d work Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday; the next just Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Plus Sundays on a rotating, monthly schedule. After six years with an exceedingly rigid daily routine, I found it all at once confusing and luxurious. Weekends? What were those? And some weeks I got four entire days to myself? I might need to cultivate some kind of social life. Whatever that was.
“How does Don do on Kelly’s days off?”
“Worse,” Jenny said, melancholy in her voice. “But what can you do?”
Some of the patients lingered in the lounge after receiving their medication, gossiping in small groups or staring out the windows, but most eventually disappeared down a hall, to the recreation room, I was told.
The rec room had a television, mounted below the ceiling in one corner. It was tuned to a game show when Jenny took me there after post-meds paperwork. Beneath it stood a shelf stacked with books and a small selection of board games. No Monopoly, no cribbage board. Nothing with sharp metal bits, basically, nothing that required a pen to record scores. It didn’t leave much.
“But a lack of variety beats a tiny metal knife in the eye,” Jenny told me, surely dooming me to tear up every time I thought of playing Clue again.
Kelly had been off doing his orderly rounds in the patients’ residential wing, but he appeared in the dining room toward the end of the breakfast period, accompanying a slow-moving older man I hadn’t met during morning meds. Once again, I mistook Kelly for a patient at first, in his light gray shirt and pants.
They could have been a father and son having a friendly talk, except for the way the man’s hands and elbows jabbed the air as he spoke . . . just a bit off. Just a bit manic, if you knew how to spot it. Kelly led him to a table, then commenced patrolling the room’s periphery, strolling silently with his hands clasped behind his back. It’d take more than that show of deference to make a bruiser like him pass for nonthreatening, I thought, but he looked as calm as he did alert.
We were in a sliver of downtime before the various morning therapy sessions and support groups began, one of a limited number of unstructured “social” periods that peppered a given day. Kelly circled like a prowling animal—fluid and silent, watchful. His sharp eyes scanned everything, but they didn’t dart. Nothing about him promised sudden movement, and I could understand what Jenny had meant. He was an impenetrable, unscalable presence, gray and huge and immovable. Comforting to everyone in the room. Me in particular.
There were lots of boring lulls between intermittent administration and meds prep, and I passed much of it—too much of it—watching Kelly Robak. He was on general duty, playing UNO with two patients during the pre-lunch break, until one became agitated. Such a normal scene suddenly launched into crisis.
“Here we go,” Jenny said, getting to her feet beside me. I followed her into the rec room’s little nurses’ booth, where she prepped a Haldol dose with shocking speed—those shots were a bitch to draw, but she snapped the vial open and switched out the needles, smooth as a close-up magician.