the windows.
The door burst open. People spilled in. Relieved to be rescued, I slumped back against the far wall and slid down to the floor. They swarmed over Kevin and tried to pull him from the window. He shrieked louder and fought like a wounded tiger. The Marines were there and they had his legs and his pants. They pulled his shoes off as they tugged him down from the sill. I heard the sound of cloth tearing as they struggled to lift him. There were six of them this time, six big burly men with tattooed arms and Charles Atlas muscles rippling under their shirts. Still they could not maneuver Kevin. They got him down from the windows but now he was on the floor, wiggling and squirming. Kevin escaped their grasp and, like a caged bird, battered himself against the window again. Two more men came and then a nurse. Dana was there too. So was the psychologist and two people in business suits whom I did not recognize. I stayed away from them all, clear over to the far side because I was still afraid I would only add fuel to Kevin’s delirium, if I approached. In the end, it took nine men to defeat that one cornstalk of a boy and bear him out. All the way down the corridor I could hear him screaming, the pitch of it high and hysterical.
Dana came over to me, righting chairs and the table as she came. Of all the people in the room, she was the only one to come to me in the aftermath of the commotion. I was rolling up the sleeve of my shirt to look at my arm.
All of me hurt. There was no point in denying that. Now that Kevin had been borne away, I was feeling sorely in need of a little comfort myself.
The chair had hit my arm, and already a red-and-purple bruise stretched out along the upper half. Dana touched it gently.
‘They’ll have a doctor in for Kevin,’ she said. ‘You ought to have him look at that before he goes. Does it hurt?’
I nodded.
‘You’ve got a scratch on your nose too.’ She fingered it and then refocused her gaze on me. ‘What happened?’
‘I wish I knew for sure. I don’t.’
‘He just went off?’
I shrugged.
I intended to stay until Kevin quieted down and then go talk to him. However, when I went up to the ward, he was still in the seclusion room, still screaming and throwing himself against the walls. So I went down to see the doctor. There normally was not a physician at the residence, but to increase psychotropic tranquilizers in emergencies and to put an individual in seclusion with the door locked, the affiliated psychiatrist had to come over and sign orders. Thus, when I was unable to go in and see Kevin, I went down to where the psychiatrist was sitting in the back of the reception office, drinking coffee. He was a big, heavyset fellow in his late fifties, white haired and very jolly. He set me awash with antiseptic and plastered Band-Aids all over me while telling me about the king-sized sunflowers he had grown in his garden for a competition. Afterward, I treated myself to a can of Dr Pepper and went into Dana’s office to begin the nasty job of recording all this in Kevin’s chart. Most of the staff I encountered had a wry smile for me, a manifestation of the sort of gallows humor one develops working in such places. At least, they said, they had all heard Kevin now.
When I went back up to the ward an hour later, Kevin had been given a second tranquilizing injection. He was still banging around in the seclusion room, however. Briefly I gazed through the window in the door. He was entirely naked. Everything had been removed to prevent him hurting himself, even his glasses. He careened from side to side of the padded cell, knocking himself against the walls, bouncing off, falling into them again. His movements were woozy from the medication or perhaps just from sheer exhaustion but he kept at it. He was still screaming, although it was just a banshee cry now, thin and reedy and keening. His eyes were closed, his head back as he staggered around. With his hands he clawed at his face and his chest, as if to rip them open.
I stood at the window but stared instead at the grain in the wood of the door. It felt eerie to know I had the power to frighten somebody that much. One of the aides came up beside me. She said nothing but stood very close to me and I could feel the warmth of her body, while still not touching her.
‘He’s psychotic,’ she said. She spoke gently, as if they were comforting words, and I suppose she meant that they should be. My own emotions were in an awesome state. They pressed outward against my ribs and chest and upward until they almost forced tears into my eyes. I wanted to cry without really understanding why. I wasn’t disappointed by what had happened. It was natural enough. Nor was I depressed. I had no special expectations of this boy. In fact, I don’t think my emotions were even over Kevin, himself. But I was so near to tears. My arm hurt. I was tired and feeling very vulnerable. The single thing I wanted most just then was for that unknown aide standing next to me to put her arms around me. I needed comfort. I could not even give conscious thought to what was hurting so much inside of me. It was too deep, too complex for words.
Finally, I had to leave. I couldn’t wait any longer. That perhaps was the worst of all, having to leave Kevin like that. But there wasn’t any choice. I would be late as it was for my next commitment, and Kevin’s siege showed no signs of abating. So I left him there alone in his padded cell, alone with his fear.
The next day Kevin did not come. I sat in the small white room, waiting. Finally an aide arrived to tell me Kevin would not be there. When I asked why, the aide said he was ill. I asked if I might go up and see Kevin. The aide couldn’t see any reason why not.
I had never been in Kevin’s room before. It was a small cubicle in a larger dormitorylike room, Garson Gayer’s attempt to give each child some privacy. They felt themselves quite progressive in this matter and advertised it in their brochure.
Kevin lay on his bed, his back to the door, when I entered. I glanced around the small space. It was as bare as our little white room.
‘Kev?’ I said softly, in case he was still going to be frightened of me. He had been or still was weeping and he had his hands over his face. It was a heavy, silent kind of misery. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, I ran my hand along his arm. ‘Kev, it’s our time together. Don’t you want to come down?’
He shook his head.
I leaned against him to see his face. ‘Look, Kevin, I know things didn’t work out so well yesterday. Things went wrong. But that’s the way of things. They do go wrong sometimes. But it doesn’t matter so much. We’ll get over it.’
He shook his head again. I could see the tears running down along his fingers as he continued to cover his face from me.
‘Sure they will. Right now it doesn’t seem very much that way. It feels like the whole world came to an end, doesn’t it? But it hasn’t. I’m here, aren’t I? I wouldn’t have come back, if I hadn’t wanted to. But I do. Because I like being with you so much.’
Kevin did not respond.
I tried again, telling him things would be all right and that I was all recovered from what had happened the day before. Kevin did absolutely nothing but lie there with his hands to his face. I feared perhaps he had decided to stop talking to me.
‘Kevin, won’t you come down? We only have half an hour left. Come on. Get up and come down and we’ll do crossword puzzles together. You like crossword puzzles. Okay? All right?’
He refused to budge. He refused to move, to respond, to even look at me. After another five minutes,
