Future Home of the Living God(48)
“Oh gosh, somebody’s happy,” says Orielee.
“Where were they?”
“They were just mislaid, you know. They always were okay, I mean, one’s by a monk and the rest are about saints. Except for the Mad.”
Orielee’s face never moves but her laugh is a burbling little chuckle, like the noise water makes under ice. She spooks me—simultaneously way too friendly, then her eyes so calculating and her laugh so odd. Her laugh is what I do not trust. It’s cold, the real her. She might be trying to win my trust so that she can rat me out.
Like Phil.
“Thanks!”
I don’t dare thank her too much, either. I don’t dare let her know how much these books mean to me—sanity, other intimate voices, other perilous survivals. I immediately open St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, and read hungrily. The first lines quiet me. On a dark night, kindled in love with yearning—oh, happy chance—I went forth without being observed, my house being now at rest. In darkness and secure, by the secret ladder, disguised—oh, happy chance. In darkness and concealment, my house being now at rest. In the happy night, in secret, where none saw me, nor I beheld naught. Without light or guide, save that which burned in my breast.
Over and over, as I pick apart and wind, unknot, unravel, wind, by the inch, by the hour, by the piece, by the skein, my freedom and your life, I repeat these lines that seem so perfect to me. I’m working on the secret ladder. St. John’s words bring me peace. For it shall be as it was, I think. The meek shall inherit the earth, the undone shall take it over, the backward shall take it back, the unformed and ancient shall form it new.
October 13
I find out that Spider Nun flushes her vitamin too; actually, she holds it somewhere in her throat and then coughs it into a Kleenex when the nurse leaves. She wads up the Kleenex, puts it under her pillow, and then smiles at me with an alert, even-tempered sweetness. Later, she flushes the pill. She’s a dear, say the nurses. Spider Nun keeps the balls of yarn in the mechanism of the bed, underneath her mattress. I quickly see why she has begun to weave the balls of yarn so quickly into sash or rope. The yarn balls are difficult to hide, awkward, unruly, ready to roll out unexpectedly and reveal us, while the rope itself need only be thrust between the pillow and pillowcase, or even, in an emergency, rolled up and stuffed inside of our nightgowns. So just as soon as we can, we turn the blankets to yarn, then to rope. She has done about six feet already, and I’ve finished two on the rope, taking turns. We’ve worked most of the night weaving what yarn we had, then picking apart our respective blankets, winding again, weaving, so that by morning we’re in need and cannot ask for blankets again since the same nurse, Geri, on today, gave us the blankets the day before yesterday.
Geri is a little slow—one of those soft, brown-haired women with melting eyes who registers things a beat behind normal, and gets things wrong, and is forever being told what to do by the other nurses. She often seems to exasperate them and might, in fact, be the one nurse we could actually get away with asking for more blankets as she could easily forget she gave us two already. But I think that we should save her for an emergency, and I indicate that I’ll go out into the hall and try to take the blankets on my two or three times daily walk.
First, though, we hide our rope in the safest place we can find, inside the heating duct along with your notebook. I use the nail file I’d tucked into the seam of my backpack to screw and unscrew the duct plate. Then I press the nail file into a crack where the bathroom mirror meets the wall. Sometimes Spider Nun puts the rope into her pillowcase—if it isn’t the day that they change the bed linens on our side of the hall. Spider Nun has nothing to do until I return with the blankets, and I can see this bothers her. Her expression’s worried, jumpy. She pulls at her hair, sniffles, stares out the window, nods anxiously at me.
“She’s up and about,” says Geri, popping into the room. Geri has an annoying habit of referring to everyone around her in the third person. Perhaps it serves to distance her from her patients.
“Yup.” I’m pleasant, chipper.
“Is she wearing her slippers? Oh, what a good preggerpot she is!”
I want to deck Geri for calling me a preggerpot, that or fall down laughing. Preggerpot! Behind Geri’s back, Spider Nun’s cute look turns poisonous. Could she be outraged on my behalf? Gives me the warm fuzzies.
We are supposed to wear our sticky green foam hospital booties everywhere, to prevent falls and the spread of foot diseases. And yes, like a good preggerpot, I’ve got mine on. Like elf shoes, they come to a little point in the front. The elastic cuts my instep. I wish I had a pair of polar fleece socks, some really nice booties, lamb’s wool, maybe real moccasins like Grandma Virginia. I shuffle off in my flimsy nightgown and voluminous, lightweight hospital robe. The hall is bright. Sunlight enters either end from tall banks of shatterproof windows. I know they are impossible to break, because I’ve stood near, looking out. I noticed that the windows are actually double thick with a sandwich of extremely fine wire running diamond-patterned in between. This may have been the Psych Ward before—which would also explain our window’s restricted openings, though I think that is standard in hospitals and maybe in hotels now, too.
The handsome Somali man, who seems to have forgiven me for sitting on him, smiles as I pass. I greet him and ask after his wife, who is apparently responsible for preparing our awful food on some days.