synchronism

      At an arts and crafts fair by the library in Camden, Maine, I encounter a woman today who looks exactly like—my cousin’s, daughter, maybe?  Only she, this woman, is about 30 years older, 30 pounds lighter (perhaps she’s ill?), and holds an expression deeply absent from the world around us here.  It is the library used in the movie, “In the Bedroom.”  You can still see Sissy Spacek, arms raised conducting the choir of young girls along scales no longer fixed with unblemished beauty and innocence.  Grief tangles in the black staff, its dry net of lines and spaces for the music she follows a bitter harmony of loss and youth, darkening the scene in the candlelit dusk before the harbor.   

     I pause when my eyes catch the sun off a steel silver pole holding up a shivering tent over paintings by local artists, a slash tearing raggedly up the canvas as if in slow motion.  One of the portraits is someone so familiar … decades ago, 30 years or so … the time I washed floors at a state hospital in New England, popping sweaty pills I’d find stashed in the pockets of sleeping patients, sometimes corpses.  Or maybe the colorful capsules and tablets would be mush, soaped in the bubbly effervescence created with each exhausted push and pull of the handle I could muster, tangled in the web of my grungy mop.  Its grey strings rinsed and wrung out repeatedly, weighted, permanently saturated with the sour bile and stench of disillusion that regularly made its way up through raw throats and out of medication-dry mouths. 

     Their cat-rough tongues scratched along my hands and arms, their lips sucking my sweat of 30 plus hours without sleep or shower when I’d pass them spread-eagle on the floor or against the wall.  Waiting.  Posed.  The hairs on my skin startled at first from their grooming me, rising upon the initial sandpaper touch in disgust, then pasted down with grey gobs of drool.  Others roamed hunched, licking the leaded humidity, the spectral vapor of patients and staff, former and current, off olive paint on cinder block walls.  Inhaling the marrow of the dead and dying trapped within those walls.  Their scraped faces ruddied the concrete and wet my own face and palms in a warm red mucus-thickened ink to make fingerprints like I had earlier that week.  In town, before arriving there.  The hot flesh of hands spread, from thumb to pinky upon the walls and bodies touched, measuring grade school palm prints to graveside footprints, past to future.  The shallow cast of small hands pressed into cement drying into a darkness always spreading across a colorfully chalked sidewalk, shading a green hallway graffitied in waste.  Something is set, holds fast: a first name etched in block letters, forgotten, revisited; the printer’s fingers stretch and wrinkle across the years’ quiet disappearance. 

     Everyone was wearing matching tops and bottoms, loosely hung sacks.  Just like the faded beige scrubs they gave me that horribly strange day she didn’t move anymore, her whole body a screaming inflammation.  The drab uniform a weary coarse material, an irritant sticking to febrile skin.  I floated through the heavy front doors, held up by two men helping me walk, pulling up on my leather belt with silver links dangling, once again entering the place I’d never leave.  In the bathroom, black and white tiles set a filthy checkerboard of polar extremes.  Absolutes.  As rock solid beneath pacing feet pounding the floor hard with each step in a mad march, or against the forehead in a face-first free fall, as they were lifelessly cold, sending a chill penetrating the entire body like a curving silver current cutting through struggling unwilling flesh. 

     The wall length mirror before a row of half a dozen gray stalls, beneath the white hot brightness of florescent lights humming overhead, was sluggish, depending on what meds were consumed the day of viewing oneself and awaiting a verdict, too often rendered in phantom flashes.  It was a silver lake streaked with saliva, its mercurial depths resistant to clear comprehension.  The story in the reflection ranged wildly from horror to heaven, from hell to ultimate contentment, peace.  Staring into it forever, through its cold surface until interrupted by a patient ready to evacuate, or vomit, or issue an extremely dark, alien-smelling urine, only half of which made it into porcelain, was the entertainment or torture.  Sometimes staff members entered and merely leaned against the walls massaging keys, or fat cartoon character pens with rainbow-colored feather puffs of hair, hanging low from lanyards around their necks.  Tempting pendulums.  Observing, half smiling, smirking.  How could you tell what they were thinking?  Planning?  When they would jump into precisely chaotic action?  When they would employ their tactics? (A strategy most assuredly designed in secret, we surmised.  To douse the smoldering lives standing at slouching attention into a mush of pale wet ash.  You could see residue on the mirror, sniff its burnt scent.)  It was like watching a movie in a theater whose lights were turned up rather than lowered at the start of a film.

     All night I spread a green path toward a locked door, only to rinse it away retracing my steps back to the unit, following the crying and yelling for direction through the darkness of 20 watt night shift lighting.  The floor above is quiet, a cool storage locker of terminals committed decades ago in the absence of their adolescence.  Their discordant voices long cut, muted with the years’ dull scalpel.  Personal chords once naturally transposed softly inside them no longer vibrated.  Internal strings of thought, reason, pitch dangled like slashed wire void of electrical current.  

     A face in a tempered window, staring out over endless frosted acres spanning the years.

     Beginning and ending paused. 

     On an empty platform before a quiet train station waiting room.

     Its windows sealed breathless with plywood nailed against sunlight and moon glow.

     Crackling in the background through an old cheap transistor radio-tape recorder the size of a large bar of soap, fading in and out, The Doors’ driving “Break On Through (To The Other Side)” distorted the thick overheated air. 

… an island in your arms

Country in your eyes

…

Break on through to the other side

Break on through to the other side

…

 …week to week

Day to day, hour to hour

…

The words scattered about the rooms, throughout the building, like displaced mice.  Disembodied voices ricocheted off the walls in a frenzied loop. 

     A dark private snowfall mounted upon the linoleum floors; drifts engulfed the bedbound in nightmares and vertiginous rapture …

*       *       *

… the woman in the portrait is a nurse she is the patient she is a stranger she is a lover waiting all nights forever posed by unseen hands weightless before an indistinct background leaning into a soft corner of quivering invisible walls her catatonic eyes on the canvas a textured comfort looking beyond the painting’s spreading flat landscape.  Inviting me back into the framed scene I’d left just moments before.