Two-Headed Dog

Two-Headed Dog

A Novel

By Mitch Grabois

Copyright Mitch Grabois 2012

Published by Dirt e-books

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Part I

Tuesday, September 16, 1997

Tiffany crosses Main Street, the borderline between FLOPSIE (staff shorthand for Florida Panhandle State Hospital) and the town of Chippahitchka. Unless reminded, she often forgets to watch for traffic, but most drivers have learned to keep an eye out for distracted patients. She makes a cigarette stop at Rebel Market, then ducks next door to The Gate for a cup of coffee. She fills her lungs with the cool luxury of menthol and the waitress’s ears with delusions.

In Highcastle Pharmacy, she meanders the aisles, always returning to the discount lipstick rack with its blurry mirror. Tiffany’s hands tend to shake from medication and, if I’m not with her to blot the edges of her lips with a tissue, she invariably smoothes the garish color beyond its intended boundaries. The effect is, I hate to admit, nearly clown-like. Her attempts to restore her wounded beauty are never better than awkward approximations.

She’s also been getting her brains fucked out, in the woods behind the hospital buildings. That’s another way she’s been taking advantage of the grounds privileges that she and I worked so hard for her to earn.

I surmise that her main fuck buddies are Theot Hess, from Ward D, down on the second floor of our unit; P. Rodriguez, a Casanova from Unit 5; and Otis Crenshaw, a young orderly from the Forensic Unit who comes our way to troll during his breaks and, if he’s careful, may never be caught. I complain to my Unit Director, but he merely shrugs his shoulders and asks if I think he should spend his days crawling around in the bushes monitoring patient liaisons.

They don’t use condoms —what does safe sex mean to an institutionalized, chronic schizophrenic? At least her medications, though unreliable in controlling her symptoms, have the side effect of infertility.

I can tell what Tiffany’s been doing when she comes back to the ward with a smug look, a mincing walk— I’m a cathode, she says, sneering, and you’re my cathode-follower, an electrical enigma that has recently dominated her speech.

I hear that she also has a lesbian lover, a woman from Unit 26, with veined hands and darting eyes who smells of lighter fluid and moth balls, and who is probably manic-depressive but has consistently been diagnosed as schizophrenic, misdiagnosis being all too common here. Our foreign doctors have huge caseloads, tenuous English, and disdain for our patients. FLOPSIE is still the well-documented bughouse of years past, though not crammed so full.

The knock I heard on my office door was not the awaited one. When she’s in her zone of not-quite-remission, Tiffany’s knock is coy; when her symptoms are florid, her knuckles are self-righteous and angry, like a wife who feels she’s been badly treated and seeks a fervent apology before she falls, tearful, into her husband’s arms.

I recognized the current knock as Nurse Amy’s, hardly a knock at all, a grazing of the door as if she were strumming a Spanish guitar. I got up to let her in, then returned to my desk. Though of Scandinavian descent, Amy is short and dark, thick-bodied, yet graceful.

I hate to tell you this, Hank, but Tiffany has escaped.

She has an appointment with me in five minutes.

Well… she went out on grounds privileges right after second shift came on yesterday...

Yes…?

It looks like she just kept going.

The main road through Chippahitchka becomes a highway as it leaves town on both the east and west, but we don’t think of grounds privileges as an escape risk. Despite the hospital’s indignities, despite being at the mercy of ward staff who are uneducated and often mean, only a tiny fraction of patients have the nerve and the wherewithal to plunge back into the predatory world.

The roadway is not asphalt but the bodies of Doberman Pinschers laid side by side, Tiffany had written, bodies of black men with huge blue muscles Sometimes all the Dobermans come back to life The black men stink of pesticide.

Still, a yearning to swim in her father’s pool, a desperate longing for her children, so immaculately conceived that they didn’t exist at all, or an urge to feel the dangerous textures of the world against her skin, any of those could have pushed Tiffany to leave Highcastle’s and, with a new smear of lipstick, to saunter the two blocks to the edge of town, her jeans slung low, her lower back tattooed with wings, her pants’ legs fraying against the sidewalk, her feet bony but surprisingly wide in dime store flip-flops.

She would have taken a position at the grainy edge of the road, where it passed an abandoned hotel and momentarily had a scenic view of swamps and woods before it fell almost to the river, passed over the Victory Bridge, and headed straight west.

Listen you can hear them now

The angels slice into my head like crystal

I don't need to be in the Mental Hell System I can hitchhike to the Golden State

At night I hear the waves calling

Tiffany your babies are awaiting you Where are you Tiffany? Where are you?

A lank hip seductively cocked, a sluttish look on her face, her lips inviting rough kisses, the top two buttons of her blouse unbuttoned, she would have extended her thumb.

If I had my babies I would lay them in a crib and they would glitter like diamonds My legs would splash through surf sending sparkles of infants into the sun

Nurse Amy stood waiting for a response. I realized that I’d been absent-mindedly fingering my yarmulke, feeling its black silkiness, and made myself stop. I’d only completed my morning prayers a few minutes earlier, ending, as always, with Dear God, let everything broken be unbroken. Was Amy’s news an instant answer to today’s prayer? Was this the best God could do?

I put the skullcap back into the thin stationery box in which my uncle had kept it. It joined an identical one (a replacement if need be) and a set of photographs of him modeling a toupee, taken a year before he committed suicide. The hair fell in bangs over his forehead, under which his big beak of a nose protruded. I thought the toupee made him look youthful, a good push against the darkness of depression, but my cousins scoffed, said it looked silly, another bit of nonsense after a too-early retirement, square dancing lessons, and the clarinet. They could not envision him, as I could, in a post-modern Klezmer band, ripping up Polish ghetto melodies and stitching them back together in manic reconstructions.

I looked up at Amy. Has Fez been informed? Fez is Mike Fellows, our Unit Director.

Yes. I let him know before I came to see you.

So the clock was ticking. Law and practice dictated that there would be three days during which the local cops might find the escapee. If not apprehended within that brief period, Tiffany would be officially discharged and, in a few days, her bed would be given to a newly admitted patient. Today was Day One.

There was something else on the desk that had been my uncle’s, a square wooden coin bank about the size of a fist, its sides painted with dots to make a die. He had given it to me for my fourth birthday. Even that early, he was trying to warn me about chance.

Will life make you happy, the die silently asked, or will the octopus arms of melancholy wrap themselves around you and drag you to the depths, where extinct sea creatures with luminescent scales and misplaced eyes, or no eyes at all, will menace you?

If you find yourself there, your family and friends might still love you, or they might conclude that life is too short. Will they turn their cards face down on the table and walk away?

The die was one of the few things I had kept from childhood. Though I loved it, I had never cleaned it, and after forty years its surfaces were darkened and marred. On an impulse I picked it up and tossed it to Amy. It wasn’t a good toss, but she reached out and one-handed it.

I felt in my bones that Tiffany would not be found. Then I shuddered, and felt nothing at all.

Each of Amy’s fingers, gripping the die, posed a question, or offered a comment.

The pointer asked, Where did she go?

The index finger, Will she come back?

The ring finger said, Her leaving, her escape, is totally unacceptable.

The pinkie said, Her return is a necessity.

Nurse Amy’s thumb remained mute, pressed against the die, but there was a hiss from under the cuticle-- Don’t wait, Hank, go find her.

For a few pregnant moments I contemplated the wisdom of Nurse Amy’s fingers. They felt for pulse and blood pressure, heart murmurs and arrhythmias. They pressed foreheads for fever and palpated for psychosis. The warmth and dryness of her hands testified to their reliability.

The pointer said, The worst things you can imagine will come true…

The index finger, …but your professionalism will prevail.

The ring finger seemed to have altered its attitude and now taunted me, Tiffany escaped from you...

The pinkie prophesized, but you’ll give up your self before you give in to cowardice.

The thumb accused me of imaginary crimes it refused to elaborate.

I looked into Amy’s face. It was impassive, as if she lacked awareness of the critical information her fingers were conveying.

I get concerned about you, Hank, she said, when you get that thousand-yard stare.

Farewell old Hank

I see you from on high as if I were with Jesus You look around for me puzzled by my

absence You are naked You are like me

I am by the roadway

The trucks are whooshing by like they always have There is no air

There is dust snowflakes every space is filled I am swimming through pure

texture

through plaster

through a volcanic landscape of drying paint

I suggest to my patients, those few who are capable, that they keep a journal or diary or simply jot a note or two each day. It gives them something to do, provides focus, supports behavior change, helps them understand themselves, and helps me understand them. (I’m not suggesting, however, that schizophrenia can be cured by behavior modification or insight.)

One afternoon, some months ago, Tiffany was sitting on the other side of my desk, pretending not to understand the concept of a journal.

At the very end of the building, my office is long and narrow, almost like a glassed-in porch. Sunshine is itself a curative element, but that day the great wash of light was unkind, blanching Tiffany of uniqueness and charm, as if character were a trick of shade, leaving her a mere mass of symptoms, an unfortunate diagnosis.

She picked up my uncle’s die, held it to her ear, and shook it. It was empty. She was the only patient who had ever pilfered money from it, openly, while I watched, seventy-five cents. It was enough, she’d said, for an orange Popsicle, for her birthday. She would turn thirty-one the following week.

I’ve already selected something for your birthday.

She dropped the coins into her battered black purse.

I blamed myself for her thievery, like a parent who has negligently left hazards for his toddler, and hadn’t asked that she put the money back.

Tiffany, what don’t you understand about writing down your thoughts and feelings?

But which thoughts and feelings?

"You could write this—you could write:

Dexter Troutman played air guitar all day, standing right between me and the TV, right in my line of sight. Sometimes I could see the elbows and knees of the actors, a fleeting view of a pink face-- I wanted to burn Dexter with my cigarette. But I knew if I did the mental hell robots would take my cigarettes away. They didn’t have any right, but they’d take them anyway, and say: Blah blah blah blah blah. They’d say: Tiffany, you have been a bad, bad girl and we are taking away your grounds’ privileges-----."

I thought she’d find my imitation of her funny, but Tiffany’s face darkened with anger, and she pushed herself away from my desk with such force that the old wooden chair toppled backwards.

I hurried around the desk to find her on her back, still in a seated position, the backs of her knees pressed against the front edge of the chair. The front of her loose skirt had ridden up and I could see her bony knees, her thin thighs, the pink panties that she’d been issued from the unit’s clothing room.

Are you okay? I extended my hand.

Stay away from me, Hank. Her voice had the warning timbre of a cornered animal.

She turned sideways onto the linoleum, and crawled to the door on her hands and knees. She reached up, pulled the door open, and crawled out, barely avoiding being squashed as it hydraulically closed.

Oy, the melodrama, I said aloud, but felt a weight at the pit of my stomach. Not an auspicious start for journal writing.

Yet, soon after, Tiffany handed me a note, in the secretive manner of a spy passing her contact on a crowded street, in one of the flimsy little envelopes we make available to patients. I opened it in my office. It read:

These notes are PERSONAL.

After that she didn’t give me anything at all for three weeks, as if she were contemplating whether I could be trusted with her secrets. We’d never discussed confidentiality and, in fact, there is no confidentiality in a mental hospital—all data is available to be shared with all relevant staff, including those who have respect for the patients and those who lack all respect. Technically, I should have made notes in her chart, enclosed in a gray metal binder, referring to these letters as they appeared, and made copies, punched them with three-holes, and inserted them. However, the drag of inertia kept me from acting, and the letters remained clandestine.

It wouldn’t have helped anyone if they had access to Tiffany’s notes. ‘Dr. Tuna Fish,’ our psychiatrist, would likely not have been able to understand them, what with their lack of punctuation, poor grammar, and discontinuity, though it occurred to me that Tiffany’s rhythms might approximate in some way the rhythms of the Vietnamese language.

But that thought was an idle one, when I was on my front porch one evening, in the little town of Peggy Sue, thirty miles west of Chippahitchka, having had a little too much bourbon. Watching the light breeze feather the Spanish Moss, I imagined it was the movement of Confederate ghosts, my paternal ancestors among them, who were responsible for the drift of air. The town’s original cemetery was a stone’s throw away. It was unkempt, like a teenager smoking a cigarette in the dark. So much for Southern pride.

Tiffany’s second letter read:

THANKS FOR THE MILKY WAY HANK

but you don't have to tell me how to eat it Yes it might seem annoying how I pick off the chocolate crust to expose the candys soft flesh but you are picking at me the same way pulling off shards of my shell to expose my soft squirming pink innards

Also kindly shut up about grunge under my nails Ive lost my life to the rapers and murderers and you think I should worry about dirty fingernails?

As if hygiene was a stairway to heaven not just grounds privileges

You better watch it Hank before you become one of them

before you make a religion of the Activities of Daily Living

Hank

I have news for you Hank I will pace the day room like a caged animal with the foulest claws my last claim to respect

I’d kept that one, folded as it had come, in the side drawer of my desk, next to the box with the two yarmulkes.

I opened the file drawer in which I kept the rest of them, the one labeled, Perverse Secrets of Psychologist Henry Ribinthal. The drawer above it had been labeled Texas Team Atrocities, the one below it, simply Flypaper. The labels’ author is Dexter Troutman, another of my favorite patients. Dexter didn’t ask my permission to re-label the file drawers, but one day had jumped up and yanked the old labels out of their slots with the élan of a magician yanking a tablecloth out from under a full table setting. Then he feverishly went to work, renaming.

I returned to my desk with the file and, once again, read through Tiffany’s notes. Beginning with the third one, they all began with elementary school simplicity—

From Tiffany

To Hank

MY TRAINING

My daddy tied a rough rope tight around my body and made me swim up and down the canal as if I were a dog on a leash and when I faltered he yanked me up There was no sink or swim there was only swim My body was rope burned There were rope burns where my breasts should have been The rope had little bristles that dug into my body as I swam I did the breaststroke the butterflyAfterward I dripped blood and water onto the sidewalk running along the canal He stood ten feet away from me holding the rope and said I'm so proud of my little girl my future Olympian

Then he drove me home in his bright blue Rambler

Daddy was wearing a white button-down sport shirt black slacks shiny black shoes and was humming-- I've got a mule Name is Sal Fifteen years on the Erie Canal She's a good old mule a good old pal Fifteen years on the Erie Canal

He turned to me and said This car meets my every specification

There was something fluttering in the back seat but I didn't turn around because I was still bound The Ramblers engine went taptap taptap taptap taptap

When we got home Daddy went inside for Oreo cookies but he made it clear that the cookies were for him not me and some person —yes it was you Hank—cut the ropes and I went running down the road naked my limbs bulging with swimming and swollen with hate

I WAS AS TOUGH AS A BRILLO PAD

I swim into the loch The gates close behind me and I do the dead girl float for as long as I am able (my lungs are as big as accordions) but then I must come back to life

Next to me is a Panamanian freighter—we are two bodies afloat The water level starts to drop If it drops too far my daddy will have to let go of the rope and then I'll be free of him But the rope would still be around my body—I wouldn’t be able to untie it—and the loose end would dangle down to the depths Who knows what monster would grab hold and drag me down?

I am swimming across oceans across continents This is wonderful exercise my daddy calls

Marvelous training

and you'll probably make the Guinness Book of World Records!

I laid the notes, fragments of an interrupted life, on my desk for a moment and rubbed my eyes. Sometimes Tiffany would shove them into my hands, impatient at having been forced to wait for me while I finished with another patient. She was pleased for having written them, but angry with herself for giving them to me, as if she were giving herself up, into the hands of the machine.

HOW I DISAPPOINTED MY DADDY

I was eighteen

I decided I wanted to return to the sea

To be a dolphin

I walked into the water and started swimmingI thought I would swim forever Then I felt myself sinking

I don't know how he got there My sister's boyfriend threw a carry on me His hand massaged my breast as he towed me

He dragged me onto the sand

I wanted to scream Why are you torturing me? but couldn't get any words out He gave me mouth-to-mouth I thought that meant we were married without violence I sat up and vomited in the sand My sister came over with a child's shovel and covered it up The shovel was bright green

It turned into a mystical frog and squirmed in her hands

She shrieked and dropped it The mystical frog peed in the sand and froze everything for eternity

That was the end of my swimming career I was supposed to make the Olympics I was supposed to beat all the East German women their bodies swollen with steroids A thousand miles of water had lengthened my slim limbs

Instead I was left retching and rolling in sand like a filet being rolled in crumbs

spineless without will-- incapable of even the first and last human skill-- to protest

The water was my element and now I can never return

I had to give up my marvelous swimming career Daddy's only dream

What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so I’ve started journaling too, late in the evening, before the events of the day turn to dust.

But who will ever read this? For that matter, what will happen to the millions of pages of patient notes stored in FLOPSIE’s pulp tombs? What’s the result of any human effort? Of our quest to re-establish normalcy? To assist a weak, damaged nature to reclaim homeostasis?

Well, if nothing else, this will be a record of my life to look back on when I’m old, to remind myself that I did something in the world, however transitory its effect.

Wednesday, September 17, 1997 (Day Two of Tiffany’s Absence)

The sun shone through my bedroom window with such clarity that I awoke as easily and cleanly as if I were newly adolescent, in the farthest reach of the San Fernando Valley. Saturdays I rolled out of bed into jeans and boots and a fresh white t-shirt and rode all day with a small knot of kids, mostly girls, whose ranches were nearby. Through a strange circumstance, they had welcomed me into their