and inappropriate. It is inappropriate that J.P. cannot tell time and it certainly is inappropriate for me to say that he doesn’t need to.
“Do you understand, Mr. Mote?”
I didn’t say anything, but I gave her a small, suppressed smile. I wanted her to be happy.
three
I claimed to be better, but I’m thinking that maybe I’m only different. As I say, the voices haven’t come back as yet, though they’ve orbited away before, only to return. But I’m not so much worried about that. It feels like maybe they’re gone for good this time. The question is, “What takes their place?” They filled a space that now is simply a void. It does little good to get rid of an evil if you don’t replace it with a good. There are plenty of other doubtful things to rush back in. (There I go again, using the exhausted terms of bankrupt ideologies—good and evil, and their siblings true and false, beautiful and ugly. Hopelessly binary. Spray all the herbicide you want, some dandelions keep coming back.)
“More purposeful action,” I claimed. (I love quoting myself.) But action for what purpose? Action without purpose is just activity—Brownian motion. And purpose has to be deeper than survival, than outlasting the circling sun of another day. There needs to be at least a baseline purpose for living, on which the merely pragmatic purposes of this minute and that are set. Don’t you think? (I’d be a heck of a philosopher if I could just develop the philosophical squint.)
No voices, yes, but silence instead. Is that progress? The big threat now is not Disintegration but Normality. Normal—the usual coupled with the meaningless. Alive but trivial. A brief coalescence of electrified matter, soon dispersed. Coagulated pointlessness. Why hang around?
I depress myself. (Therefore I am?)
I got my first taste of Being with Specials in Public only a few days after starting work at New Directions. In an upscale public space no less. You might say it was in obedience to a government mandate, but that requires a bit of explanation.
Government is a wonderful contraption. I think of it as a vast system of interconnected feeding troughs—as in a stockyard. Every branch, bureau, agency, center, department, headquarters, and office gets a trough. And each trough is presided over by a politician, manager, director, chief, supervisor, administrator, officer, controller, overseer, inspector, examiner, or head. All of whom need assistants, underlings, lackeys, workers, enforcers, advisors, consultants, counselors, subordinates, associates, aides, and, of course, secretaries. Needless to say, every one of these people needs offices, furniture, machines, transportation, security, heat and light, computers, and, not unimportant, wall art. Of course “trough” is too static a metaphor to describe what is more an organism than a contraption. These are neuronic troughs, each one connected synaptically to its next closest trough, like cellular structures in the brain, the whole growing day and night, each one eternal and eternally expanding. In such a system the whole point of existence—for bureaucrats and for citizens—is to get access to one of these troughs. And then to feed.
Which is why the residents and I were heading to the theatre. (Dr. Pratt, my deconstructed grad school mentor and erstwhile life coach, would be proud of me for this brilliant analysis.)
For you see, each of the residents is supported by a program, a title this or a title that. And programs administer troughs and therefore require budgets. And budgets require numbers, including numbers for money spent. So each client is a part of the budget of New Directions, and New Directions has informed Government that dollars X are necessary to spend for the entertainment of resident Y, entertainment being a necessary part of the life of a Special, just as it is for a Normal Human Being. And if that entertainment money (better to call it “programming”) is not spent on client Y, it will not be in next year’s budget, which is not good for New Directions or for client Y.
So Cassandra said to me a few days after I began, “Ralph’s account is getting too big. Buy him something—a new area rug or lamp or radio . . . anything. And take everyone out on an activity. Anything. We’ve got a report due at the end of the month and we’ve got to show more spending.”
I don’t think she really wanted to say it exactly like that. She was thinking out loud. She caught herself and looked at me like we were standing next to a cookie jar and she was holding a macaroon.
“You know what I mean.”
Yes, I knew exactly what she meant. Feed at the trough. Keep the slop coming. Oink. Oink.
So we little piggies went to market. High-end market. The Guthrie Theater, in fact. Tyrone’s palace across the street from Loring Park and next to the Walker Sculpture Garden. It was December, and at the Guthrie December means A Christmas Carol, as it has for something like twenty-five years now. Zillah and I had season tickets for the Guthrie for the first stretch of our time together. It was a nice break from a troubled marriage to go see something like The Oresteia or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (This is called irony. I learned it early and it has been my loyal companion lo these many years.)
I’ve been thinking about Zillah a lot lately. It’s easier to keep away from someone physically than to keep them out of your thoughts. I haven’t seen her for more than a year, closer to two, but she pays regular visits to all three sections of my Freudian brain—id, ego, and superego. The psych folks have pretty much junked Freud, but I still like the simplicity of the cancer-jawed old geezer. (Did the gods afflict him for telling us lies, or was it just random bad luck?)
How is it that I miss being with a woman with whom I mostly gave and received pain? (“Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery?”) Maybe it’s that the pain did not lessen when we parted, but the sense of being in something significant together did. Or maybe not.
We arrive for our matinee performance. (Specials, with a lifetime of scheduled bedtimes, tend to turn into pumpkins at around 9 p.m., so afternoon activities work better.) It’s crowded in the big lobby, which serves both the Guthrie and the Walker Art Center. Dickens’s occult, moralistic thriller is the Guthrie’s dependable cash cow. Parents love to bring their children to it (moooo!), never mind that it scares the bejesus out of the younger ones and bores the older kids (who consume slasher movies like popcorn).
The residents stick close to each other and to me, the primal herd instinct when danger (read “the unfamiliar”) is in the air. Bonita stirs things up a bit.
“Watch out!”
She’s points straight up and everyone follows her finger and then crouches down as if death is descending from the sky.
“What the hell is that?”
That, it turns out, is art. An Oldenburg to be specific. A huge, plasticky, leathery, saggy, artsy rendering of an everyday three-way electrical wall plug to be exact. It’s the size of a minivan and hangs over the crowd from the ceiling, looking more than a little forlorn.
“It’s art,” I say.
“Noah’s ark?” Jimmy asks.
“No, art. With a ‘t’.”
It’s Judy’s turn.
“Why, why, I . . . I should say, I like ar . . . art, Jon. It’s . . . it’s very pretty.”
Billy is looking up, but then Billy is always looking up, so I don’t take it as a sign that he has suddenly developed an interest in oversized aesthetic wall plugs. Billy is as Special as they get, and he communicates, if at
