Gray invited me up to the insane asylum hootenanny.

He said there'd be lots of pretty girls, rich food, and non-alcoholic beer. I'd been struggling with the middle of my novel before he went in the bin, and he figured correctly I'd still be stuck dead in pretty much the same place now, six months later. "It'll do you good," he told me over the phone, sounding happier than I'd heard him in years.

I drove the hour north up the Thruway to the Clinic, expecting to see electrified fences topped with razor wire and gun-toting security guards all over the grounds. Or at the very least lots of burly orderlies in white, carrying truncheons, cans of mace. Grinning and waiting for to catch some psychotic climbing down knotted sheets. But the skinny guy reading a supermarket tabloid in the booth at the gate just lifted the semaphore arm and waved me in. No second glance, no crow's feet at his eyes.

At the front desk of the main building I gave my name. A tiny Asian nurse with reams of black hair spilling from beneath her little hat told me that Gray was located in dwelling #4. She handed me a detailed map and made a red X where I was to go. She smiled vacantly at me as if I was a lunatic, and I had the faint impression that the red X might be a booby trap, a pit laid out with sharpened bamboo stakes. It felt very easy to lose control of yourself in a mental hospital because you wouldn't have very far to travel to find a bed.

I walked over to Gray's cottage. It really was a tiny cottage, one of four spaced directly in front of the Olympic-sized pool where several girls were swimming and laughing. They waved at me and I waved back.

The door was open and I stepped in. The place had a Hawaiian motif going, very much like a cabana. He had a large bar with five wooden stools, and there were coconuts, a mini-surfboard, and netting hanging in the corners of the room. The nets were full of papier mâché lobsters with bright blue eyes and broad, smiling faces.

A large L-shaped sofa took up much of the room. Off to one side was an extremely clean kitchenette with a breakfast nook that had a freshly cut rose in a crystal vase sitting on the table. This is the home where you live every night in your dreams, where you are beloved and admired and respected for your talents, and they bow when they bring you the fruity drinks. The bedroom door hung ajar and I spotted the edge of a double bed overflowing with an absurd amount of extravagant pillows.

All in all, the cabana was about three times the size of my apartment in the city.

This is why men climb towers with high-powered rifles. This is why they go to war and learn to hack off ears. Because of this we beat our wives. Brutalize our children. Light ourselves on fire. Simply, small jealousies climb into the back of our skulls, one slimy trail after the other, until they're so densely packed that your thoughts are like sparks thrown from flint striking stone.

Gray sat on the couch facing away from me, typing on his laptop and absorbed by the process, an unsharpened pencil wedged between his even, white teeth. I stared over his shoulder and read the first two paragraphs of the story he was working on. The work was solid, poetic, and distinctive, everything my own writing wasn't anymore.

He'd lost weight and had a deep, rich tan, as if he'd been digging ditches or graves. Maybe boxing in the outdoor rings the way he had in college. He'd dyed the gray out of his beard, had a sharp stylish haircut, and wore slick, new clothes that fit him well.

So it wasn't bedlam. No serpent pits, iron bars, or straight-jackets. No rubber rooms or medieval torture devices designed to drive evil spirits from the lunatics. A loud splash outside was followed by the flutter of provocative giggles.

"How do I get into this place?" I asked.

He turned, looked up, and spit the pencil out. "Just try to kill someone who's done you wrong," he told me. "And be so conflicted about it that you make at least one fairly dramatic suicide attempt."

"I can probably do that," I said.

"I know you can."

It felt like he wanted to get into a serious talk right now, from the first minute, and start hashing out a few of our many unresolved issues, which probably wouldn't be the best thing to do. I steeled myself in case he came at me --perhaps even wanting him to, willing him to-- but he sat back, checked his screen, and corrected a typo. Since there were no doctors or attendants around keeping watch I had to be the one to act the most casual and anchored, which wasn't a good role for me.

"You look great," I told him. "How do you feel?"

He had to think about it for a while. "Clear-headed," he finally admitted. "For the first time in a very long while. Some of the static seems to have faded, you know?"

I stared out the window. A couple of gorgeous women went by in bikinis, holding froo-froo drinks and magazines. They looked over and caught me watching. They waved again, and I waved back again.

"You sure this is really a mental hospital?"

"More like a preserve. You get to see the wildlife in its natural habitat."

"A cabana is your natural habitat?"

"In the best of all possible worlds I suppose it would be."

He let out a laugh that wasn't a laugh. It was a sound I was familiar with, and there was a tinge of sorrow and hate in it. He was trying to tell me, or himself, something that he couldn't say aloud, so it just circled inside his chest for a time, hunting for a way to get out.

"So this is it? The best world for you?"

"Better than Manhattan."

"Well, yeah"

"You still watering my plants?" he asked, genuinely interested.

"You only have one plant and it's a cactus. It's pretty low-maintenance."

"Unlike the rest of us."

He said it with that strained chuckle once more. He missed his digs. The harsh action of the street, the museums and bookstores, the overbearing weight of history, art, and literature laid across his shoulders, reminding him he was alive. His three ex-wives. The whores he met in the alleys, and the sweethearts he took to the theater. You could become addicted to dichotomy. The nuns and priests who guided his worship. Maybe even me. All the things that had sent him over the big edge in the first place.

I knew better than to ask him about his work. We often clashed on the approach and execution of the writing, the development of style, the procedure of publication. It had been our dream as kids, our passion as teenagers, and our downfall as adults.

But it would be a good way to gauge how the Clinic might be helping Gray to get past his trouble areas, many of which I shared with him. I stepped over to his coffee table and glanced again at the laptop. I saw him jerk as the muscles in his back tightened, but at least he didn't tackle me. That was progress so far as I was concerned.

He struck the chord first and asked, "So why are you snagged in the latest book?"

"I'm not certain, "I said, surprised at how effortlessly I'd answered. What you hold back the most becomes the easiest to part with. "My concentration isn't worth shit nowadays. I can knock out short stories and I've been busy with freelance non-fiction crap, but whenever I try to duck my chin and go in for the long haul, something bounces me out again. It's getting on my nerves, to be honest. I'm pacing the apartment at all hours. My neighbors are starting to put in complaints to the building manager."

"You need to spend more time outside, in the park. People watch, take some notes. The fresh air will do you good. It might help if you bought yourself a laptop. Your never without a chance to produce."

"I can't compose directly onto those things," I told him. "I can transcribe my handwritten notes, but that's it."

"Don't be so resolute. Give it a try."

The idea of Gray giving me advice, consoling me about my work, made me jerk as the muscles tightened in my back. Man, it took no time at all for the two of us to get under each other's skins. Sometimes it felt good to have that kind of power in your life, an sometimes you had to ponder why you cared. He put a hand on my shoulder and I looked around at the shining bar top and the little happy lobster faces, wondering if there was any chance I could get a margarita. I sat in one of the stools and thought about how much it was like the small restaurants where our fathers used to drink wine together.

Gray smiled, showing off those perfect teeth again. He'd had some dental work done here too. Jesus, no wonder my taxes were so high. Who the fuck was footing the bill for his vacation?

"How about you?" I asked. "You seem to be back on your stride. What're you working on?"

He'd been thinking about his response since before I'd walked in the door. It rolled off his lips like he'd been practicing his dialogue in front of a mirror. Which he used to do. Which we both used to do. "A supernatural suspense about two brothers who find out they're the sons of a fallen archangel. One follows his father's will to try to destroy the world and the other refuses. They both end up in Jerusalem gathering various biblical artifacts as Armageddon approaches. Monty has the first three chapters and there's interest from three editors. He's trying to drive them into a bidding war."

Monty Stobbs was Gray's agent, a shark in the chum-filled waters of publishing. He'd made Gray a major hit out of the gate ten years ago, and since then Gray had completed five cinder block-sized novels, and not one was worth a damn. Monty had been mishandled my career for a time, and even though I'd made some good cash up front, Monty's deals had screwed me over in my royalties and reprint rights.

Gray's book actually sounded intriguing and marketable, and from what I'd read of it just now I knew it had some narrative muscle to it. But I couldn't shake the feeling that the publishing world would only be attracted to his book because they could push it as a novel written in a mental hospital. They wouldn't know Gray had cottage #4. They'd play up the electroshock angle, make it seem like he wrote the whole thing with a crayon stuck between his teeth while he was tied down to a bed. Frontal lobe surgery, the sexually heinous acts of deviant attendants. How could it not rocket to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list?

"I'm glad for you," I told him. "You deserve to have them perk up and take notice."

"You're full of shit, but thanks for trying." It was such a left-handed comment that I actually shook my head as if he'd tagged me with a jab. "I appreciate you making the effort to pretend to care about my career." He said it with a tight grin of authority, as if he'd seen through me and found me utterly lacking.

Now that got me pissed, and the familiar heat rushed up into my chest and into my throat. The way he always implied I could never really be happy for him. "I meant it."

"Okay."

"Not only okay... I meant what I said."

"You're just repeating yourself now."

"Because I want you to believe me."

"Is that what you want, Eddie?"

"Yes." I held in the thrashing animal. We all had to hold in the thrashing animal, I knew, though I'd forgotten exactly why. Some stupid prick had once thought it was better that way. "Is there some reason why you can't simply accept my good will towards you?"

"Good will?" Gray's smile was little more than a leer. "I see. So that what you call it?"

"What the hell are you going on about now?"

"You figure it out."

"Listen to me, you-!"

A shadow crossed before me. A short, elfin blonde about twenty-five years old with eager eyes and a cautious smile stood in the entrance to the cottage. Her presence snapped me back into myself and I stepped away from Gray, kind of humbled before her.

She was pretty in the way that we both liked, blonde with freckles, with an innocence in her manner, especially the slightly shy way she didn't meet anyone's gaze dead-on.

My imagination burned like kindling. Showing me images of she and I on a front porch of an old Victorian homestead, drinking lemonade in the summer twilight, waving to neighbors while the kids played inside. It was a stupid, romanticized notion of a life that never was and never could be, but it kept me from giving in whenever the unbearable darkness hit.

She had a girl next door smile even though I lived next door to a bodega on the upper west side.
She said, "Excuse me, Mr. Gray. Will you be coming over to Ward C for the assembly?"

"Yes, Trudy."

"That's wonderful. I made apple fritters, brownies, oatmeal raisin cookies, and devil's food cake."

"I'm not sure what I should bring. Do you have any preference?"

"No, but I think my friend might."

I tried not to take it as a dig that I'd gained weight while he'd trimmed up. I took a step forward and she did a little dodge, adeptly moving aside. "I've always had a penchant for oatmeal raisin cookies myself," I said.

She smiled bashfully and sort of toed the carpet, then spun and rushed outside again.

Gray pursed his lips and said, "You can crash on the couch, if you like."

"Thanks, maybe I will."

"Or if it makes you uncomfortable being here, there's a motel right outside the Clinic grounds where the families of patients occasionally stay. The town's called Griffinsville. Three stop lights and lots of antique shops for the tourists. Lots of farming back roads. Abundant in small lakes and ponds. It might be the kind of vacation you need. A chance to go fishing."

I glanced through the window again as another lovely young woman in a string bikini walked by. I let out a sigh. I was a very good sigher. I'd had a lot of practice.

The girl Trudy bounded back in. She had the brownies and said, "Let's go, the dance will be starting soon."

I followed them out past the folks playing volley ball in the pool, my mouth watering for everything and nothing.

 

©2007 Tom Piccirilli