The Value Of Rain (8 page)

“They can’t separate you forever. He’ll find a way. He might write,” Snow offered.

“He can’t,” I said before I burst into tears again. When I calmed some time later I explained to him how Charlotte on her one and only visit to Sanctuary had broken the news of his death.

*****

Robbins came and collected me from my room with a sneer. “You got a visit.”

“A visit?” I asked with excitement. I jumped from the bed and watched Robbins’s grin grow long across his face, then I remembered. The Bug. “No. I don’t want it.”

“They said it’s your mom, fag boy. She might decide to let you out. But either way, visit or not, you’re going to the Bug just for making me walk all the way down here for you.”

“Just go, Charles,” my roommate said. “It might be a chance to get out.”

I nodded resolutely, following Robbins down to the White Room like a martyr. But trepidation gripped me as we got closer and Robbins grabbed me to propel me forward, laughing that no one ever made it all the way down there without chickening out.

When I finally saw Charlotte some time later I was still trembling with aftershocks. She was dressed as if going to a Sunday outing after church; a long creamy dress, short flat shoes and a wide brimmed hat. She looked down her nose at me with a sneer, her lips tight against her teeth. “You look like you’re developing tics, Charles.”

When she flouted Minot’s credo any fantasy I might have had of going home evaporated into pure malice. My eyes cinched tight around her lips, watching them move but not hearing anything until she spoke Robert’s name.

“He’s dead. He committed suicide three days after you got here. I hope you’re happy.” She stared at me for a long minute, pulled her gloves out of her purse and left without another word.

*****

“I got this letter, and haven’t heard from her since,” I told Snow, pulling Charlotte’s note from among my things.

“What a fucking bitch,” he declared after reading it.

“She never wanted me,” I said.

“You can’t know that”

I recalled a conversation I walked in on between Jarrel and my grandfather.

*****

“She’s never wanted him,” Jarrel was saying as I came in.

“Of course she wanted him you damn fool! What kind of mother doesn’t want her own child?”

The silence that followed answered it all. But it was the convictionless edge in my grandfather’s words that I remembered most; their defensiveness, and their bold proclamation of a truth he did not want to face. I finally knew what it was like to feel truly unwanted; to understand the cold stare of life-long contempt. It made me acknowledge that old feeling of emptiness that I had always had but never quite understood.

My grandfather noticed me only moments after, the shocked realization on my face paining his own and confirming the truth of it.

Jarrel walked out of the room wordlessly.

“I’m sorry, Snapper” my grandfather said.

For what, I wanted to ask. That he had raised her? Spoken the truth? That he had not been able to eliminate Charlotte’s hostile greed and selfishness? I realized just at that moment what the slow drip of acid she’d always carried in her eyes for me was about.

I was like the rain; an annoyance that tousled her hair and muddied her life. But rain had no value unless you were farmers, which we weren’t. Sharecroppers neither; unless you count the delusions we so generously shared with the rest of the world. Our family had only pain to share; a windswept misery that made outsiders nervous and a lightening potential for revenge that scared the rest of the family senseless.

*****

“Life kind of went downhill from there,” I told Snow. It was the first time I had ever spoken to anyone about my conversation with my grandfather.

“Too much, too heavy,” Snow pronounced, after a momentary silence. “Watch this.” He began stripping his clothes off and with a mad grin streaked off into the common area, naked and shouting.

The commotion was immediate. Half the wards joined him; the other half chased them around or simply panicked. Mr. Bryant went off immediately, the warble of his vocal siren proclaiming that the apocalypse was finally upon us.

I stood in the doorway to my room bent over in a peal of hysteria; crying because of the pure hilarity of the scene and touched that Snow would wrestle with the orderlies just to give me this small bit of respite. Eventually Snow and I became lovers and friends. In between his trips to the infirmary and his post-lacerate calm, we would discuss the so-called simplicities of life and how complicated they really were, and sometimes we would feed Lester’s belief by procuring some new evidence we’d heard or discovered in the newspaper.

Months went by, then years. The monotony of the institution became my monotony. The Turtle never wavered in his review of my file and I sat around staring at the walls until I pestered the staff enough that they gave me a job cleaning the commodes.

People with mental health problems are simply not the most sanitary in the world, and after a particularly pissy day of cleaning I came back and found Snow lounging on my bed. 

“I’ve got a question for you,” I said as I threw my arms to my hips. “Every time I go to clean the commodes there’s a puddle of piss on the floor. Now my question is, is it the little dicks with a lack of aim, or the big dicks with a lack of control?”

Snow cocked his head in a reflective gesture of his sexuality. “Honey, trust me. It’s the big dicks. A little man’s got to have finesse. He knows control. Take that as knowledge from experience.”

We studied each other a moment and burst into laughter. After our chuckles died off I asked him what was wrong. He had that look about him that said he was planning another trip to the infirmary.

“Actually, I was thinking about you,” he told me. “I was curious. What got you over Robert?”

I pulled in a deep breath and let it out slowly before I answered. “I’m not over Robert. I don’t think I’ll ever be.”

“Not like that,” Snow said. “I mean those first few weeks after you found out he was dead.”

I sat on the bed, the blunt edge of his words throbbing in my gut. “I told you about Bruce Livermore?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he got there about a month or two before Charlotte’s visit. I don’t remember if we were in group therapy or what, but somehow we got on the subject of self worth. As you can imagine, Bruce scoffed at the idea. I remember him sitting all tight and cross-armed as he looked out the window and proclaimed that the rain didn’t even have any fucking value, and that’s what made life tick, so how could we.

“I worked myself up and set out to prove him wrong. I don’t know if I was doing it more for him or me, but we had to have something against all that shit they tried to jolt into our heads.

“Anyway, I found this old government report in the library. I don’t know how it got there, but it had rain valued at the acre-foot all throughout the country. They put it against what it would cost a farmer had to buy the water, plus all the costs that would have been associated with it.”

“But it didn’t work for him, did it?” Snow asked.

“No. I even calculated it out to drops per inch, but there was just too much behind Bruce to start looking forward.” I shrugged slightly. “So I kept it for myself. Now I look outside when it’s raining and the calculations start automatically. I don’t even realize I’m doing it. It’s like Mr. Bryant with the feet.”

“What about snow, could you calculate it for that?” Snow asked.

“Sure. There’s just more air and less water involved, so the computation’s a little different. It’s cheaper, unless you get those big fat snowflakes…”

I should have just cut my fucking tongue off. It would have been easier than watching Snow’s face crumble into misery.

“That’s not what I mean!”

But he was up and gone in an instant, and I didn’t see him for another month. Somehow he’d gotten a razor and devalued himself even more.

At the end of a month I began my rounds of annoyance; pleading with anyone who would listen to let Snow out of observation, or to, at least, let me talk to him. But the staff had a hard time fathoming our relationship. Their misconceptions couldn’t get past the sexual aspect and grasp the emotional impact we had on each other. They saw the effects in Snow’s severally diminished outburst, yet could not comprehend its hushed serenity; its ardent tenderness. That type of depth was a little too difficult for them to understand between two men.

Whether it was my pestering or the fact that Snow had bled himself to lucidity, he was finally released. He wore a sneaky smile when he rolled into the dorm and immediately began playing Mr. Bryant like an instrument. Rather than leap when Mr. Bryant went off, Snow skipped over to a bunk, sat down, and began a rhythmic tapping of his feet on the floor. The staff thought Mr. Bryant was going into convulsions and attempted to dose him until keen-eyed Nurse Barr noted Snow’s dance and set off to dose him instead. But it was too late by then, the rest of the wards had caught on and were soon laying bets as to who could make Mr. Bryant yodel closest to the tune of their choice. After a week the nurses gave up and started requesting tunes of their own.

“When did you have your first idea that you were gay?” Snow asked me later that day.

I recounted for him the day that Penny was brought home from the hospital and change for the first time. I watched with the interest and curiosity of a normal ten year old, but was instantly revolted by the cleft between her legs.

Surely something was missing; they had lost some parts on the way home or something. “Why is she like that?” I asked Charlotte, my unbelieving eyes glued to the gory plump little lips of my sister’s vagina.

“All superior creatures are made that way,” Charlotte had informed me.

I puckered and groped myself. I thought that I’d rather be inferior than look like that, but Charlotte saw me checking that my own equipment was still there and pushed me away in disgust, interpreting my actions for something they weren’t.

“I was so ashamed,” I told Snow. “But I think my first inkling of my sexuality came from that dismissal.”

“But you had a choice,” Snow prodded.

“I guess,” I answered. It never seemed to me that I had a choice about any of the events in my life. They merely were.

“The Turtle says all fags are made like I was. That we’re all the product of some form of emotional or sexual abuse,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “And you believe this from a guy that pushes more drugs than the average street corner peddler? Come on, Snow.”

“So you don’t think Charlotte created you?” he countered.

“No. If anything, I think she saw my sexuality as another victory over the male species.”

Snow curled up at the end of my bunk and studied me. “You don’t believe a word of this shit. Where’d you hear it?”

“I… in a group a while back. That counselor that was here for about three weeks, remember her? She said it.” I stared down at the floor. “But you’re right. Whether it’s true or not, Charlotte never gave a damn, straight or gay.” I was silent for a moment. “You know, I used to be able to tell how my day was going to be just by the lipstick she wore.”

Snow’s eyebrow curled up in curiosity.

“It was like a mood ring on her coffee cup. A light airy color meant I was going to have a good day. She would conquer me quick and bloodlessly.

“But on the dark days, when she wore something like the smudged sclera of her eye, I knew she’d be hammering down on me all day. It was like… I don’t know, she would radiate this essence of menace, studying me like a bug under a microscope.” I remembered knowing that I should say nothing on those days. I knew what she was doing. She was calculating my worth in her life. All tabulations coming to zero.

I shrugged. “Maybe she was just too complex for me to ever understand,” I told Snow.

He nodded, but didn’t say anything. Yet his gesture made me reflect on the fantasy I’d been creating over the years to try to pull myself from my constant black pit of despair and rejection. And that made me realize that I’d done nothing more than grope around the bottom of that pit pulling out raw wet clumps of confusion and mistaking them for a rampart for my escape. In actuality, there was no escape, this was reality.