It was one of those days when a pie is always a pie, no matter how hard you look at it. You think it might be changing, slowly, maybe even quickly, into something else. Maybe if you squinted the right way it would become a cactus, or even a little television set. But then you shake your head, no, it’s just a pie. Pies didn’t turn into other things on days like this one, and there was nothing anyone could do about that.

             The linoleum floor of St. Ives Mental Hospital glistened in the morning sun as I pushed my breakfast cart along. The hallways were long and stereotypical – fluorescent lighting, pale green and white patterns, disturbing smells of incontinence covered by soap, bustling hospital noises. Of course they had a more lived-in quality, those hallways, since the patients usually stayed longer. I stopped at the very first room of the day, the home of one Mrs. Baum, with a cheery whistle on my lips and a bounce in my steps. I like sunny mornings.

            She opened the door promptly, still dressed in a heavy nightgown but seemingly wide awake. Ms. Baum was an old woman with thin silver hair and a sagging bosom. The light shone out from behind her momentarily, so that her hair was white and her figure was obscured. Then my eyes adjusted and she was simply old Ms. Baum, stooped and slow. She always had these recurring nightmares which kept her up and screaming at odd hours, but the rest of the time she was just a nice old lady. She had a penchant for telling long, winding stories about a man named either Jim, James, or Jack, interchangeably.

            I had time to listen to these stories because no one wanted to push me around. I was the orderly in charge of food for the patients too crazy to leave their rooms, or those that refused to. A job like that gives you a certain leverage with the doctors, the administration, even with the patients themselves. I was the man who knew all the patients – I was, for some, their only contact with other people. I was the messenger.

            That day, as I was saying, was a very down-to-earth day, which isn’t anything remarkable normally, I suppose, but stands out in a mental hospital. Ms. Baum was happy to see me.

            “Jack,” she said in greeting, holding out her arms. My name is not Jack.

            After a perfunctory hug I unloaded breakfast of eggs and toast from my cart and settled into an armchair, at her insistence. The rooms at St. Ives each had their own character, though small. This one had mauve carpeting and dark wallpaper with a heavy oak desk and a thick layer of dust on all the hard-to-reach places. I didn’t mind spending some time with Ms. Baum, so I helped myself to a piece of toast and settled in.

            “It was a perfect April afternoon when my young Jimmy died,” she started in, without preamble. This was not typical for Ms. Baum, who usually only started telling me about James or Jim or John after any number of incoherent mumblings. I found that the patients at St. Ives typically had their coherent days where they made more sense at about the same frequency as any sane person. The average level of comprehensibility was lower, is all. Ms. Baum looked at me expectantly, caught up in my own thoughts as I was, so I nodded sagely, motioning her to continue. The shadows of the Venetian blinds moved slowly across the floor.

            “He left right after lunch. I’d cooked him fried chicken and bacon strips, his favorites, a fitting last meal, I suppose. I remember that he sat contentedly for a long time and then got up with a start, saying that he had to go visit a girl. What girl? I hadn’t known about a girl. He was 19, you know.”

            Here she paused, seemingly done with the story. I was disappointed. That was it? There had to be more.

            “So?” I said, gently, “did he go see the girl?”

            “Oh, he went,” she said, her thin and scratchy voice suddenly bitter, “but he never saw the girl. The police talked to her the next day. He was supposed to come, but he never did. It’s a long story, what happened.”

            This was a shame, because I wanted to hear it. But she didn’t seem inclined to tell the story, and I did have patients to feed. Every day was a new set of meals, every meal a new set of trays. I bid her good morning and wheeled out into the hall, still thinking about the fate of her son. A bit later I arrived at the corner room where the painter lived. I counted him as a friend and was delighted to see him up and about as well that morning – he was sitting on his bed, naked, with his feet covered in paint. Stretched all across the floor were numerous canvases across which he had walked, and he was using his toes to paint a large pig on the canvas beneath him. As I watched, not wanting to interrupt, he painted a large daisy coming out of the pig’s mouth. He was mumbling about the Federal Exchange Commission, as he sometimes did. Then he noticed his breakfast.

            “My good man!” he fairly shouted. His nakedness didn’t bother me in the slightest. He was hairy, flabby, pale but, then again, aren’t we all, to some extent? Unless you lack a body yourself, can the sight of someone else’s really be so terrible?

            “Here you are, sir,” I said. I always enjoyed the painter’s company. He looked at his eggs and toast (everyone ate eggs and toast on Mondays) without interest.

            “Ms. Baum was screaming again last night,” he said in between mumblings, “kept us all awake.”

            “What was she screaming about?” I asked.

            “Her son. Jack, or someone.” The painter then launched into a rendition of “Jack and Jill.” I felt sorry for Ms. Baum. I was also about to be late for lunch, so I took my leave. I don’t think the painter really noticed.

            As I loaded up my cart in the kitchen, one of the nurses walked by. She stopped to say hello, so I figured I’d ask her about Ms. Baum’s son. It had to be in the patient history, I figured, and though I knew it was improper to discuss a patient’s personal life, I had a certain clout around the hospital, as I’ve mentioned. Also, this nurse and I were friends. I posed the question delicately, standing by my cart in the dirty steel kitchen in the bowels of St. Ives. “What,” I asked her, “happened to Ms. Baum’s son?”

            So, maybe it wasn’t so delicate, now that I think back. The nurse answered readily enough, having read the history recently.

            “He was driving from his house to his girlfriend’s on his Ducati motorcycle when he got in an accident, somehow, and ended up a tangled mess of flesh and metal, baking in the afternoon sun. He never made it to the girlfriend.”

            I remembered reading that they lived in rural Pennsylvania. All I could think about was the motorcycle. “He had a Ducati? That’s surprising.”

            She just shrugged. I should have figured she wouldn’t have any more to say at that point. Some people just don’t like to dig deep into the heart of things. I do, though. I doubt she even realized how unsatisfied I was with our conversation as she walked away, all pert and prim in her pressed nurse’s uniform. I finished collecting my trays and took the freight elevator back up to my wing, but my heart wasn’t in it. The rest of that day I didn’t really socialize with the patients; I was all business. It wasn’t just the boring nurse that had me feeling low, nor James’ death. I couldn’t quite pin it down, so I numbly floated through the day and then went to bed early. My last thought before sleep came was of Ms. Baum’s silver hair and the way her hands shook when she ate her breakfast.

 

            The next day was nothing like the previous one. I think days, or our perception of days, mostly segue from one to the next in a smooth and graduated fashion. Otherwise we’d all be St. Ives by now, and not as orderlies. But the day in which I next found myself in was a radical departure from the previous one, at least for me. The sun was still shining, I still had a whistle on my lips, but I was feeling different. Quick on my feet. Reckless, maybe.

            I stopped at Ms. Baum’s again, intent on hearing the story that I’d missed the day before. I wanted to know why her son had a Ducati; I wanted to know why the nurse said he’d died in the afternoon if Ms. Baum said he’d left in the morning. Don’t people think about this sort of thing?

            When I got to her room I received a huge shock. She was not alone – my friend the painter was there with her. My initial reaction was completely professional – I quickly walked to them, interposed myself between them, and made ready to take the painter back to his room. Only then did I notice two psychologists and a head doctor sitting in the room as well, near the door. I think I choked out a, “huh?”

            “Don’t worry, orderly,” the doctor said, in his deep and professional voice. I hated how he never learned my name – he certainly knew exactly who I was; I was orderly – but he’d never bothered to learn my name. He continued, “we’re trialing a new program in your wing with patient interactions.”

            “I see,” I said, my composure somewhat recovered. And I had to admit, it looked pretty good, now that I could evaluate the situation. The painter was on his best behavior: dressed, mumbling quietly in a high sing-song voice, painting with watercolor on a little pad. He’d propped his palette on a chair next to him. Ms. Baum was sitting nervously, watching him paint, and the psychologists were taking notes. I must admit that I couldn’t see any benefit to this program, but then again I’m not a doctor.

            “Shall I…” I ventured, not sure what to do with myself. The doctor seemed to notice me anew, as if he’d forgotten my presence, and gruffly told me to serve breakfast as if nothing was changed. Everything was changed! – couldn’t he see?

            “Alrighty then,” I said, falsely cheery, “today we have pancakes, Ms. Baum. Would you like some?” A bead of sweat was rolling down my forehead. The painter looked up and noticed me.

            “My good man!” he interrupted, even as Ms. Baum reached out her hands to accept her tray. “Wait till you hear what I have to tell you!”

            At this the psychologists leaned forward, interested. I was taken aback, again. Here was a conflict of interest; I doubted that the painter wanted to tell me whatever it was in front of the psychologists. In fact, I was right. He turned towards the assembled observers and made a shooing motion.

“Out with you all,” he said, “I’ll have no audience to this magnificent missive.” The psychologists hesitated, but the doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“That’s fine,” he said, giving me a significant look, “we were finished here anyway. Orderly, will you take the painter back to his room when this is done? We’ll be down the hall, should you need us.” Before I knew it, I was alone with the two patients.

“Now,” the painter said, shifting his weight while he sketched a distorted and scary face on his pad, “listen to what Ms. Baum just told me.”

I looked at Ms. Baum. She looked at the painter. He was already continuing, though.

“Ms. Baum’s son, Jack James Jim the fourth, left his house at 10 in the morning to meet his girlfriend of three months at her house down the interstate.” The painter was coherent, but his paintings were going in the other direction: as he talked, he painted faster and faster, images darker and darker – hanging bodies, bloody garbage bags, monsters attacking little girls.

“He was riding his aging Ducati, which was the only thing he’d inherited from his father, Jack Jim James the third.” At this Ms. Baum perked up and perhaps tried to add something, but the painter was already continuing. “Jim only rode down the highway for five minutes of the thirty-five minute trip. For a reason no one can understand, he stopped in a burger place at the next exit. There he met a large burly man who helped him load the bike into a gray fourteen-wheeler. They drove away a few minutes later.

“About an hour after that they were loaded with the bike on a ship down the Mississippi. I know nothing about the motives, don’t get me wrong, but if you ask me, it all has to do with the CIA.” I knew better than to interrupt here. The painter went on. “Unfortunately, this ship ran aground half an hour later. Guerrilla attack. Jack and this strange trucker stole the boat’s life raft and made it to shore, where they hailed a truck going further south. At this point I bet you wonder, ‘how did he end up dead next to his Ducati back in Pennsylvania?’

“We’re almost there. The short of it is, the thing with the boat having failed, they parted ways near their original meeting place and forgot about the whole thing. Sometimes what you plan just doesn’t work out. James was down a motorcycle, but he couldn’t complain. He took that risk when he first got mixed up in the whole affair, you know?

“At 2:35 pm, as Jimmy trudged down the interstate the final three miles to his girlfriend’s abode, no doubt excited to see her soon, a large hot air balloon painted blue and white, flying about 800 feet above ground, dropped a Ducati. Don’t ask me how or why – I don’t know. Of course, it was the same Ducati that Jack thought he’d never, ever see again. Imagine his very short-lived surprise when he was crushed under its weight, when man and machine were reduced to a mass of intertwined and useless parts. The police always assumed it had been a traffic accident.”

What a story! The look on Ms. Baum’s face was utterly inscrutable, unfortunately, so I had no idea whether she’d actually told the painter this story before or not. Neither would I ever find out – at this point the painter started flinging his paint this way and that, covering the floor with green watercolor. Ms. Baum started yelling a bit and fidgeting in general, so I decided it was time to get out. I gently guided the painter out the door, making sure he had access to this sketchbook, and I bid Ms. Baum goodbye behind my back. “Tootles, Johnny!” I heard. Pretty soon order was restored and I was back to pushing my cart, delivering the pancakes. Sometimes a pie isn’t just a pie, I started to think, but then dismissed the thought. The reckless energy that I’d felt inside hadn’t left, either, and my head hurt. That’s the difference between me and them, though, I knew. I had to keep going. When I had the urge to put my elbow through the window at the corner of the hallway I had to keep walking, even if it seemed like the thing to do. Then again, why not a cactus, or a TV set? I walked on, pushing my cart, but my mind was elsewhere.