Happy Juneteenth!
The Glitter Is in Everything
Kalem was sitting at a picnic table, blowing stylized smoke clouds, and talking to two other blokes. Kalem seemed to be ranting. The blokes kept their heads down, glimpsing up once a while to show they were listening. Nick had developed a habit of standing aloof and eavesdropping, like he was listening in on aliens and he was trying to get to the lucent lode behind the small talk. Nick loathed the interminable days of boredom on the ward. Nick didn't know who the blokes were, but they seemed to know him. Or, he got that feeling; but maybe it was part of his diagnostically assessed paranoia. On the other hand, Kalem, an aboriginal fella was animated in his conversation, telling the blokes something about someone, in singsong ragtime cadences. For a moment Nick thought Kalem might be referring to him because of the way they held their heads down conspiratorially and, it seemed, eying him peripherally. Kalem gave a quick glance at Nick, and said back to the blokes, "Nah, I think he's probably alright."
Kalem was in his early twenties. Athletic. Reminded Nick of a black guy who was on his baseball team -- guy some of his teammates kept ragging and baiting about his culture. Guy's name? Guy ended up moving to Melbourne. Great hitter. We plummeted in the standings. The day before Kalem had told Nick about his personal problems, pretty much against Nick's wanting to hear them. But, at the same time, Nick also didn't mind, as listening to others was something to do. It helped distract Nick from his own problems, and sometimes gave him an idea for a story. He enjoyed writing. And he enjoyed listening. People told some strange stories; even the most banal-seeming account he had heard over the past two weeks in the hospital, where he was being re-evaluated and set up with new meds, often suddenly blossomed into some exotic, privatized metaphor. Separated. Sometimes when people went el tropo or lost the plot or skipped the light fandango into some kind of personal mysticism, their language skills went with them, and what you heard in their narrative was words weaselling their way out of meaning. Nick drew the conclusion that at this hospital there were some real f*cking nutters who were reduced to speaking ragtime gobbledy-goo. They weren't interested in co-producing a shared reality through language with you. Nick got it. But instead of carrying on, like something from cheap Shakespeare, he just kept his mouth shut. Numbed by meds.
But Kalem had taken Nick on a walk around the hospital grounds and was more open, more 'normal' in his illness than the crypto-sh*t he'd overheard from some of the other patients -- Mate this, Mate that, Oy, You little ripper, etc,, much ado about, apparently, nothing -- when Kalem told Nick of having two kids at home he missed and a marriage he fucked up by drinking and being violent. Nick found Kalem's directness refreshing. And bizarre in some of its details. Nick said little back, even when Kalem asked about his family.
His own story? Too fractured. He'd tried to articulate it to the psychiatrist on intake: The glitter is in everything. Mind is in everything. Like the rocks know they're rocks. Meryl, holding his hand, had sighed: "He gets like this," she told the doctor." Stares off into space for hours." The doctor scribbled, unimpressed. Later in the interview, Nick asked: "Do you believe it? Mind in everything?" The doctor gave him a look with a barbed light, his voice reassuring. "Just keep taking your pills, Nick. They'll help."
Nick hung out by the picnic table waiting for his spouse to arrive to bring him home. He didn't smoke any longer and moved around to avoid the cigarette smoke of the two blokes. He didn't want the cigarette odor on his clothing. He hadn't noticed how ugly the smoke smelled on clothing until he quit. As he moved about, he noticed an old nurse (maybe in her 70s) who gave him a quick piercing glance and went back out of sight. Two nights before she'd been on overnight duty in the closed ward, and he seemed to imagine that she was talking with other nursing staff about allowing him to be taken off the ward by underworld elements, and he got so roiled that he barricaded the double room he was put in (he was alone in the room) with all the furniture, including his own bed. When the "hag" came around with her flashlight to check on him she peeked through the glass of the door and saw him looking up at her from the bed that was pushed against the door. After a momentary startle and sizing up on her part, she went away nonchalantly, as if barricades there, on the closed ward, were pretty typical. No nursing staff said a word about the barricade the next day. As this seemed like abnormal behavior for a hospital staff, Nick's sense of paranoia increased. Her quick look carried intention.
His wife, Meryl, walked up, while he was musing, and surprised him with a hug and kiss. "Ready to go?" she said. She smelled nice. "Yup," said Nick. The blokes looked up. One of them dashed out his cigarette angrily, while the other just kept putting out smoke in such a way. Kalem smiled. The couple began to walk toward the car parked several meters away. Kalem followed them. He got in front of the couple, impeding their movement, as they tried to hop in the car.
He held out a rock to Nick and said, "Here, take this. It's gold. Take it to the Perth Mint and get some money for it."
"They do that? Take a rock and give you money?"
'Yeah," Kalem said. "Take it there and get the money and we'll split it." Nick looked at the rock skeptically.
Meryl noted Nick's expression, and said to Kalem, "Thanks. We'll take it there." And then to Nick she said, gesturing at the car, "Ready?" Kalem seemed grateful that they took the stone. They drove off, Kalem turning and walking back to the picnic bench. The blokes had gone inside. Meryl pulled out and drove on. When they were near the exit of the hospital, Nick opened his window and threw the 'gold' away. He immediately felt guilty, thinking maybe he should have kept it as a souvenir. But, for what? Someone else's mental illness? And why did Kalem have gold on his mind, anyway?
Then he thought of the old nurse, who seemed to him like some witch out of the Black Forest. Or out of Rosemary's Baby -- the nurse with vestigial horns you see when her cap falls off. He tried to shake the vision, but it wouldn't go away. That f*cking Roman Polanski. Meryl squeezed his hand and told him how great it would be to have him home again. Nick smiled. Then he looked out the window and wondered if he'd ever be free again.
All that glitters is not gold -- the aphorism flitted through his mind. And he thought that he really didn't know Kalem, or that much about anything at all, and felt his days were numbered and that nothing but barricades lay ahead. Nurses with horns peering into the darkness, flashlight flick, making the rounds.
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