EIGHT

That Monday one of Dr. Redding’s attendants, a stooped, paunchy man with burst capillaries in his nose that marked an alcoholic, came to fetch Connie. As the nurse shuffled the papers to sign her out to the attendant, she could feel the palpable envy around her. It did not matter what she was going to: she was going off ward. Nurse Wright started to grab a coat for her but the attendant said, “Don’t bother. It’s raining cats and dogs. I’ll taken ’em through the tunnel.”

Nurse Wright pursed her lips. “You’d better take a coat anyhow. Somebody else might have to bring the patient back.”

The coat was so long it hung to her midcalves and the sleeves concealed her hands, but she knew better than to complain. She plodded after the attendant, folding the sleeves back so that she could use her hands on the two surviving buttons.

All the old buildings were joined by tunnels through which equipment, supplies, and sometimes patients were shipped back and forth. Occasionally patients with grounds privileges hung out in the tunnels smoking, talking, flirting, finding a dark place to sleep. No one on staff with a rank above attendant ever seemed to use them.

“Hi, Mack, Tomo. How ya doing?” Her attendant stopped to greet two men wheeling a covered cart.

“Hokay, hokay,” the short one said briskly. “How goes with you?”

“Hi, Fats. Man, this place is creepy today,” the younger said. “If it keeps on raining like this, the whole damn place is going to grow two inches of mold.”

“I hate it when it rains every day,” Fats said. “Hey, you got something nice this week?”

“Everything, man. Red devils, yellowjackets, rainbows. Genuine Nepalese hash. The stiffest coke you ever snorted. You don’t go for ups–how about sopors? You dig on them, don’t you, Fats? Real mellow.”

The man with the accent blinked at them with faint contempt and began reading what looked like a sports magazine in Japanese, pulled from his pocket under the white coat. As they bargained, she stood in her huge coat, waiting. The mad are invisible. Neither had any fear she could damage them. Indeed, if she cared to try, she would only hurt herself. Revenge came easily to staff.

“What’s under the tablecloth?” Fats poked the bundle on the cart.

“Old geezer from chronic service.” Mack cast back the sheet. Sharp gaunt face of an old woman. Her dark flinty eyes in death stared straight up with a look of rage. Mack flipped the sheet over her again but it caught on her hooked nose. He had to free it. “Kicked off last night. Got to truck it down to the meat department.”

“Don’t know why the doctors want to cut up every crazy that checks out. When you seen one you seen them all.”

“They got to put something on the death certificate.”

“Heart stopped.” Fats punched Mack in the arm. “That’s the ticket.”

“See you around, man.” Mack started pushing the cart and Tomo hastened to take his position, although the cart was obviously light enough for one to handle.

The last time she had been summoned, they had given her the most thorough physical of her life, and as a side effect treated her old burn and sent her to the dentist for work on her battered teeth. As she was thrust in, she looked at the patients lined up on the chairs as usual: the graceful West Indian, Captain Cream; the tiny black woman, Miss Green; Orville; Alvin, who was white, forty‑two, and perhaps the closest of those she had met in the hall here to being really mad; Mrs. Ortiz, a thin bouncy Puerto Rican woman, who winked at her; and Skip, who had saved her a place beside him.

“What’s coming down today?” she asked him.

“What they fondly call a battery of tests. Rorschachs, draw‑a‑person, sentence completion, WAIS, Wechsler Memory Scale, MMPI–”

She clutched her shoulders. “What do they do to us? Does it hurt?”

“Only when you laugh … I don’t believe it! I’ve been tested since I was eleven. You’ve never had these mothers play with you?”

She shook her head no. “What will happen?”

“Oh, like they ask you would you rather fly a plane or play with dolls. Follow the stereotypes. But why should I have to pretend I’d rather watch a football game than a ballet not to be labeled queer? The first man I ever had sex with was an attendant at Wynmont–that’s a private buzz farm they sent me to when I was thirteen.”

“So young. Why did they do that?”

“My parents thought I didn’t work right, so they sent me to be fixed. You know, you send the riding mower back to the factory to be fixed if you get a lemon. Why not a son?”

“Did you figure out yet what this whole thing is?”

“Some research project, with us as the guinea pigs. But I’m on the case. I’ll break their game soon. Fats is queer on me.”

“That Dr. Redding–I don’t like him. He feels so above us. He’s not even scared of us the way some are–scared of catching what we got. It never occurs to him he might crack.”

“Not Morgan, though. If you stare at him a long time, he starts fidgeting. You can get into staring contests with him, and he gets so he wants to win! But Redding, yeah, he’s too cool. He looks through us to something on the other side he’s aiming at.”

A woman was dumped beside her, a tall lean satin black woman with her hair in a big wild Afro.

“I guess we’re the final winners of their screening,” Connie said to her. “I saw you when they were x‑raying us, but we never met. I’m Connie Ramos.”

“Alice Blue Bottom, honey. You Puerto Rican?”

“No, Chicana. I was born in Texas.”

“No lie? You don’t sound like it. Me, I got myself born in Biloxi, Mississippi. You ever been there?”

She shook her head, “I grew up in Chicago from when I was seven.”

“You know what, girl? I put in five years on the South Side of Chicago working as a cocktail waitress in the Kit‑Kat Club. Left and come to Harlem with a man I stupid to cross the street with.”

“I came to New York to get away from a man I was scared of.”

“Better reason than mine, sugar, though I never been scared of a man in my whole life. I eat them for breakfast two at a time. Why you scared of him?”

“He … forced me. He took my pay check off of me and said he’d give me a little. He bribed the super to let him in my flat–or he just pulled a knife on him, who knows? When I got home from work–I was working in an office then, I had a good job as a secretary to a real estate man, Chicano–he was in my flat.”

“No man ever lay a finger on me I didn’t ask for, cause I tote a shiv, and I know how to use it. I carve up more men than you count on your both hands, didn’t treat me right. You take shit and you is shit, girl. A man good to me, then I good to him. Everybody know that about Alice Blue Bottom.”

“How come you call yourself Alice Blue Bottom?” Skip asked, smiling from under his long lashes.

“Long skinny white boy, don’t you wish you know that?” She tided back her tower of a neck and laughed, with her breasts freely jiggling against the red dress. She had her own clothing, for sure. Some attendant had made her sew up the front a couple of inches with the wrong color thread, but the dress was still shorter and fit better than anything else around. “Cause I’m so black, I’m blue–maybe. No way you gonna find out.”

“That’s Skip,” Connie said. “Do you know anything about this project they’re using us for?”

“Papermaking. That’s all. That’s all they ever doing. You know time you be sitting in that jiveassed group therapy, those doctors thinking how they going to write it all up. How they going to tell it on the mountain at they next staff session. Bullshit!”

Alice’s name was called and she strolled after the nurse, swinging her broad, high ass across the waiting room. An attendant brought Sybil out of the office, and Connie half rose. Sybil saw her at once and their eyes exchanged messages of hope. Fats placed Sybil in a chair far down the line. As soon as Fats turned his back, Sybil hopped up and quietly slid into the seat Alice had just left.