Friendly Henry
Photography: Artem Balashevsky
Tweedledum ushers Amelia down a dingy hallway – The stench of human urine on the side of Harold’s Chicken Shack on Wabash Avenue. She wrinkles her sensitive nose.
“It smells like piss.”
“Well, it’s not the fanciest place in Chicago, but I think you’ll get what you need here.” Amelia’s stomach turns.
He’s got the little bitty babies / in His hands / He’s got the little bitty babies / in His hands / He’s got the little bitty babies / in His hands / He's got the whole world in His hands.
They reach a large common room filled with an odd assortment of people. Amelia is the only one in a “safety gown.” You belong here you sick piece of shit. A few people are in various stages of stretching within a rectangle formed by two dilapidated couches and a spindly wooden chair. Go make friends with the Isle of Misfit Toys. TAKE OUT THE EYES! There are lightweight plastic card tables along the walls, accompanied by lightweight plastic chairs. Two people occupy each corner of a Goodwill-reject sofa. The crow’s claws dig into her shoulder. It bobs its head. Amelia cringes at the New Age music playing on a small CD player next to the therapist. It sounds tinny to her auditory palate. Wimpy, limp massage hands – What the fuck did you think? Rachael and the olives.
Tweedledum tells Amelia, “This is the therapeutic movement session. Every Tuesday and Thursday from five to six.”
Amelia is silent. I might be able to crack a sharp shard from the chair. Stab out the eyes. Nothing really to do with the plastic. Maybe I can break the glass if there’s a TV.
“It’s fun! At least, it’s better than sitting around being bored.”
Could there be wires in the sofa?
As soon as Tweedledum leaves, Amelia is accosted by a thin, greying, older man. He jumps off the couch, menacing and grandiose, speaking rapidly – Obscenely graphic life-sized wooden crucifix – There is no escape from this man’s tenacious, lined face, his wild eyes.
“Hey what’s your name? I’m Maxwell, what’re you in for, what’re you in for? I’m in here for—” his voice goes sotto voce, “—drugs. What’re you…” He suddenly yanks Amelia’s right arm and examines the stitches on her inner elbow. He squeezes her arm, hard, a mean glint in his eyes. HURT the bitch! STAB the bitch – Rip out her stitches RIP HER STITCHES OUT! She thinks she sees a third, reptilian eyelid flash across his eyes.
“We have a cutter!” he yells, gleefully. “We have a cutter, ladies and gentlemen, an attention-seeking freak! Give her attention! Give her attention!”
The movement therapist in downward-facing dog lifts her head up to look at the man. “Sit down, please, Max.”
Amelia wishes he would strangle her to death but he only grins through tar-stained teeth. “You can have my seat, freak. Henry won’t mind.” Maxwell points to the open space on a decrepit couch, next to a young man with a likable face. Amelia sits. Goddamnit I am sick of blue eyes.
Chris. ::panic:: I’ll be dead, soon. I’ll be really dead soon and I won’t even have to talk to him.
The movement session continues and Amelia searches her mind for a song to drown it out. Why don’t they just play classical music? She tunes in to the third movement of Moonlight Sonata. Fast. Vigorous. Only Amelia and the handsome young man are not participating.
“I like your hair,” he says under his breath.
Amelia looks at him sideways. “Thanks. It was an accident.” She considers telling him the story of how her dyed black hair wouldn’t relinquish the color, and how she slowly created the white roots, red shafts, and black ends that hang down to her waist, but she cannot manage even an intentional breath so she stays silent and listens to Beethoven.
When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting place, but it finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ When it comes, it finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the last state of that person is worse than the first.
Amelia and Henry sit quietly while the movement therapist encourages the others to stand in tree pose. The disembodied hands type a message on an ancient typewriter, roll up the paper, cork it in a bottle, and send it out to sea.
“Henry, why don’t you help our new friend become a tall, relaxed tree?”
Amelia lashes out with her forked tongue, “I don’t want to be a tree. I want to die.”
“Well… just don’t want you two to miss out!” says the woman balancing on one leg.
Henry finds the bottle on a distant shore and opens it. It says, MURDER ME? Circle one: YES or NO.
Amelia sits and stares at the wall. Look at all these fucking Dasein. Maybe if I had taken home economics in middle school… or ballet. I don’t know what could have been done differently that might have saved me from this lovelessness and self-hate. Nothing. I am here in this absurd, self-righteous world with all the other Dasein. Bored out of my mind just like all the other Dasein. Silent like a snot-nosed cow staring bleary-eyed into a water-sheet mirage of hot desert air. DIE DIE DIE DIE! At least I got a bikini wax. The slut’s equivalent of wearing a clean pair of underwear.
Two large, metal carts pushed by orderlies squeal down the hallway. Amelia’s body contracts at the sound of the three bad wheels – Knives in her tympanic membrane. Beethoven gets louder in an attempt to drown out the screeching.
Henry smiles. “Now you get to see the REAL freak show: dinner time.”
The carts smell like blood. Taste it – Metallic. Maxwell is wildly gesticulating while talking to the orderlies. He convinces them to let him hand out the trays of food. “For the retard!” Maxwell slides a tray in front of a Hispanic woman. “For the nun!” That one is for a woman already in the stages of prayer. Cut out the eyes. He balances several trays of food, sliding each one to the person described. “For the schitzo! For the darkie! For the zombie!”
Then a demon-oppressed man who was blind and mute was brought to him, and he healed him, so that the man spoke and saw.
The grisly wind-burnt figure whirls toward Henry and Amelia at their own table. “For the lady…” he says with a curtsy, setting a tray in front of Henry. “And last, and certainly least, the attention-seeking freak.” Her food bounces sickeningly when the tray makes contact with the table. Jack-in-the-box. “You like that? You like people bringing your food, all special?”
“Fuck off, Max,” Henry dismisses him. The man scampers away to badger other patients.
Amelia raises her eyebrows to Henry. “Lady?”
“I’m in here for bulimia,” admits the young man. Jack-in-the-box. “My name’s Henry.”
“Amelia.” He smiles and pours a mysterious dressing on his wilted salad. Amelia takes a long look at the meal served to her. Split the cow. Crack her empty-open, rib cage yawning – Roaring, swallowing insects and long white arms. Up to the elbows. We’re up to the elbows in blood. The chicken breast appears to be undercooked. Amelia sets the microwaved roll to the side on a napkin to prevent it from soaking up any liquid pooled around the meat. Fat fucking piece of shit pig ass disgusting piece of shit. It doesn’t need to eat. “Looks like cafeteria food.” The insides are on the outside now. Look at the fat; the puke; the waste.
“It’s not too bad on the way up,” he shrugs.
Hypocrite, she thinks.
“You can have mine.”
“No, I can’t. They record everything you eat for each meal; sharing is ‘strictly prohibited.’ You get charted for that.”
“Charted?”
“They use a point system. Everything they see you do, or hear you say, gets written down. Whether or not you get out depends on your score.”
The rest of the sonata seems droll at the moment. Beethoven trails off into the tuneless hum of her perspectives all talking at once, canceling each other out.
For several minutes, they sit across from each other, poking their food with sporks. Unable to conjure another song, Amelia entertains herself. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23 – Now, 23 – That’s a great number because 2+3=5 which is also a prime number. Lucky number for softball, but not soccer. 173 is similar, only it’s 11, of course. 181, 191, 193, 197, 199, 211… Her mind skims through numbers like index cards and lands on 457, her absolute favorite number of all time. It’s my favorite time of day, she tells Henry in her head. Dusk. Gravestones. I wanted to kill myself on 4/5/2007 at 4:57 but 1) I couldn’t wait that long, and 2) That would be my brother’s birthday.
“What are you thinking about?” he interrupts as her thoughts race.
“I’m thinking about prime numbers and that alarm clock everyone had in the nineties and the way I see the world without my glasses and carrot sticks and the sound of rain on a tin roof and the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire during Vietnam—” sunflowers and atom bombs and Build-a-Bear and cast-iron frying pans and Pantera’s entire discography and boiled peanuts and my neighbor Nora and echolocation and box jellyfish “—and other things I won’t bore you with. I’m sure it’s tedious to hear a list without details; that would take too long. My thoughts would have moved on by the time I finished explaining one anyway.”
“Interesting train of thought,” he says before taking a bite of his roll.
“It’s not ‘interesting’ and it’s not a train. I hold multiple thoughts in my mind at once,” Amelia replies, playing with the salad. “Everything I listed didn’t come to mind in succession; I was thinking about all of those things simultaneously. As I said that, just now, I was thinking about the republic before the Roman Empire and how reliable my washing machine is and Bach’s Invention Number Twelve and this exact shade of blue/green for which I have no name. I can see it in my mind – You might as well not have eyes. Does it help if I say it’s a tiny bit olive?” Henry shakes his head. “Hula hoops and my teacher’s paralyzed son and my dog and insect parts in Hershey chocolate bars. Not bars— the individually wrapped pieces. Also it’s more of an avocado tinge than olive. But just a hint.” And death. Death, death, always death. “What about you?”
“Well I was just gonna say I was thinking that movement therapy is dumb and it was worth it to get charted for not participating today.”
“Yeah, I don’t see how yoga is going to alleviate the compulsion to smash my face into a plate glass window. Does it help you not purge?” Henry gives a charming smirk. Cut up the face – Shards in the pupils, IN the eyes.
In a sudden fit of fear, a young Latino guy picks up his tray and starts smashing at imaginary somethings all around him. Demons? Like mine? …No. Your suffering is unspectacular. Amelia watches as three burly male orderlies approach the teen, talking to him in low, calm voices.
Right then, Maxwell points to an innocuous spot on the wall and shouts, “Pedro, LOOK OUT!” The young man collapses in terror with a scream. The orderlies descend upon him. Amelia’s mind-crows caw and beat their wings. DIE! DIE! DIE! they scream.
She turns to Henry. “How can I be the freak with all these psychos in here? I thought suicide was a pretty common thing in the psych ward.”
“Nah,” he says, finishing his roll. “You’ve got mostly your schitzos, bipolars, and homeless people. Rosemary is a syphilitic. I don’t know what the fuck is up with her,” he gestures to Lucia, still performing an elaborate blessing over her meal, “but she never shuts up. Juanita there is a mute. John Doe lives here, if you call what he does ‘living.’ Maxwell’s just a maniac. I don’t know the black guy; he keeps to himself.”
There will be something in the room. There will be something in the room you can use to hang yourself or electrocute yourself and this will all be over soon. Carve out a new throat. A new smile, red and luscious and writhing with worms.
A squat, middle-aged nurse with dark hair and a sharp face approaches with a clipboard. She does not introduce herself. Amelia dislikes her immediately. Shave off that hair. Piles of brunette. The woman stops in front of their table and glowers at Amelia.
“You’re not eating.”
“I’m not hungry,” she says, the acrid smoke of burnt hair in the back of her nostrils.
“No?” The nurse flips through the charts. “That’s funny because your chart says that you’re trying to starve yourself to death, but you just said you’re ‘not hungry.’ What am I supposed to believe?” Amelia stares into the nurse’s eyes and imagines slicing the fat off her stomach in thick chunks. Her head-fingers feel sticky. “Well, since you’re not eating anyway...” She snatches up Amelia’s tray and walks away.
By . . . MEN-nen
Henry leans forward. “She’s always a bitch and she’ll steal your stuff, so be careful.”
“I don’t have any stuff.”
“I’m just saying she obviously hates her job and wants everyone else to be miserable, too—”
All I need is an electrical cord and a surface to anchor it.
“—The rest of the staff is okay. You should at least eat the roll on your napkin. That will be written up as compliance.” Amelia takes a small bite of bread and immediately sets it back down. The experience is akin to chewing on a kitchen sponge. “See? Not so bad. And only about a hundred calories.”
“It tastes like hamster bedding,” she says, still chewing the same bite. Henry raises his eyebrows, then resumes eating in silence with a shrug.
The kindergarteners have a lot to say about Maxwell but the disembodied hands are more interested in Henry. All of you shut the fuck up, she orders them. They respond with ugly faces and rude gestures. Lucia places her tray into its designated slot in the rolling cart. We all need to focus. We’re not living one second longer than we must.
The old woman named Rosemary summons an orderly as if he were a servant. He scurries like a little white mouse in his uniform. Hotel bellhops. Dancing sailors in Anything Goes. Maxwell throws his tray across the room, mocking the staff as they clean up. Most of the patients take out decks of playing cards and have their trays collected from them.
Henry slides his to the edge of the table. “So, do you want a smoke? We’re allowed in the smoking lounge five times a day: when we get up, after breakfast, lunch, dinner, and then right before lights out.”
Black lungs sticky with tar. Chemotherapy. She imagines her bald head. Now can you love me? asks a proud Lenox figurine.
“Smoking is a long, ugly, disgusting death. I could get cancer just sitting in there.”
Henry laughs. “You’re in here because you want to die but you’re worried about cigarettes?”
“Like I said: it’s a long, slow, ugly death. No thanks.”
“Suit yourself,” he shrugs, stands up, and walks to the lounge.
A handsome orderly approaches Amelia, who vaguely considers sucking his dick on first sight. “Amelia?” he asks. She nods and gags a little in her fantasy. “I’m Daniel. Come on, I’ll show you to your room.” Amelia gets up, shakes his hand, and follows Daniel down the hall.
Peel me away from you. I am your skin, clinging. I am naked at your feet. I am sucking your cock. I am spent in your arms and you never give me what I want. I am touching you. I want to kill myself, and I would have to rip them out. RIP OUT THE EYES. I HATE them. Rip out the grey-pink mass inside and tear my brain out through my nose like the Egyptians did. Tear off my face. Cut off my feet so that I balance on hysterical rectangular stumps. Tear out new tear ducts – Burrow into my face and end it all. I could stab myself in the face eight times.
Then would you love me?
Of course not. She lowers her eyes to Daniel’s shoes. But, you know… the option is there. He makes me want to cut off my breasts. Lop them off. Because you don’t deserve them. Yes. Because he probably hates them. Yes, yes, I feel it. ::shiver:: I hate you. The feeling is mutual.
“You’re in 4D. Your roommate’s name is Hailey. She’s about your age but has difficulty communicating. She’ll be discharged tomorrow morning.” Thick and veined – Sew the mouth shut. Demons screaming in orgasm – That’s how I feel every time you sin against Me. They arrive at the room marked 4D. “Here you are. Good luck,” he says, then walks back toward the common room.
Her curiosity piques in octaves. G#— G# 8va Amelia looks for a knob but sees only a keyhole. G#— G# 8va Ravel. G#— G# 8va ‘La vallée des cloches.’ She pushes through the song to open the door, which is on a recessed hinge, and notices that the corners are rounded downward.
She steps in and immediately searches the room for suicide options.
They won’t have curtains but there should be knobs. There are no knobs. There should be…
Her eyes do a preliminary check.
Nothing. The piano booms halfway through measure eight – Sinister and dissonant, B♮ Her eyes bounce from empty space to empty space. The E# hits her three times in the chest. All of her expected suicide options are missing. No lamps or fans. No electrical cords. E# E# E# The dressers are recessed shelves. E# E# E# There are no bars on the window like in the movies. The metal is crisscrossed within the glass, which appears thick and shatterproof. There are no curtains or blinds, not a single cord.
Amelia moves with the song in 5/4 to the adjacent bathroom. Pianissimo. The bathroom is large and clean, but the faucet for the sink is rounded forward and there is no plug. Down a half-step. The toilet flush is a button against the wall that you press. There has to be SOMETHING – I am not living like this one minute longer. The shower has no curtain, liner, or door. The water is operated by a push button with no temperature adjustments. The toilet is accompanied by a plastic chair tucked into the corner. What about the bed?
Ravel modulates into a major key and Amelia searches the sleeping area, desperate. There has to be something! The full bed is flush against the wall and only a few inches off the floor. Bb Bb Bb No headboard and the wood beneath is smooth and rounded. Bb Bb Bb A single, flat pillow, no pillowcase, a waterproof fitted sheet attached to the mattress. Bb Bb Bb There is nothing to use as a noose. There is nothing she can attach it to. They’ve thought of everything.
No corners.
No bars.
No faucets.
No hinges.
No cords.
No sheets.
No sleeves.
No strings.
Her heartbeat skips along with the syncopation.
She is going to have to live.
An orderly knocks on the door, robbing her of Ravel’s empathy. “Someone is on the phone for you, named Chris. You have ten minutes to complete your conversation.”
Music References
He's Got the Whole World in His Hands - Public Domain