Graven Images

By Michael Cantwell

No one is more surprised than Philip Nason when an uprising occurs within the walls of a New York rehabilitation hospital. Moments after Phil, director of recreation, hears that a group of mostly paraplegic patients have staged a rebellion, he learns that the hospitals director is furious and thinks the patients were inspired by Phils current-events reading program. Now with his job in jeopardy, Phil is torn between his desire to empower his patients and pleasing hospital bureaucrats.

After the rebel patients beg Phil to create an activity program to help them win the respect of hospital staff and improve their lives, he eventually complies. When Phil acts on a hunch and pops the end of a paint brush into young quadriplegic Clayton Thomass mouth, Clayton begins creating beautiful paintings inspired by the Bible. Phil, spurred by his artistic goals, begins developing a program to showcase the patients artwork. Now all he has to do is convince the hospitals reluctant administrators that unleashing their patients creativity is a good thing.

In this inspiring story, hundreds of chronically ill patients realize the power of art while rising up against the stifling restrictions of institutional bureaucracywith help from their determined recreational director.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491746523

Michael Cantwell

Michael Cantwell, CCIM (1958-present) is an author and commercial real estate agent in South Florida as well as a published photographer. He was born in Ft. Campbell KY, raised in Trenton, NJ, graduated college at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, PA. He now resides in Palm Beach County, Florida. He is married with three children and one dog. He loves music and is a big Miami Marlins, Dolphins, Panthers and Heat fan. He also enjoys strolling South Florida with his camera at hand. He has served on many board of directors and volunteered many hours as a coach for baseball and basketball as well as for Junior Achievement in many schools around South Florida.

Book preview

GRAVEN IMAGES

Copyright © 2014 Michael Cantwell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4653-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4652-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014916693

iUniverse rev. date:    11/13/2014

Contents

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Part II

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Epitaph

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part III

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part IV

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part V

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Part VI

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Part VII

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Part VIII

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Reviews

"Cantwell has created an unusual setting for this wonderful story—an institution populated by fascinating people with broken bodies and broken spirits. This engrossing tale shows how lives are changed by nurturing their untapped creative energy. Graven Images is an extraordinary novel by a gifted writer."

—Jane Dossick

author of Gemma and Inheritance

"Graven Images, a compelling and beautifully written new novel by Michael Cantwell, has an unusual, maybe unique setting. The story is set in a city hospital and home on an island in the East River in New York City. The patients call it the outcast island, the human junkyard.

"Perhaps not since Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has a hospital setting been so vivid. A focal character in Cantwell’s novel is the recreation director, who wants his charges to ‘get rid of a lot of pity and terror’ through art: drawing, painting, writing, playacting. In short, he wants to do something unheard of: stage a patient art show at the end of the summer.

"A patient named Clayton, a quadriplegic who holds his paintbrush in his teeth and who paints those graven images, is another focal character. Clayton lost everything he had to live for one tragic summer afternoon in Georgia. The account of how Clayton ended up in this hospital is a gripping story in itself, involving a seduction, a desperate pastor, and a brutal revenge killing.

"There are other unforgettable characters—a famous sculptor almost as afflicted as Clayton, a pretty young volunteer, an old judge who is brutally beaten by aides, a comical, mouthy secretary.

I didn’t want to leave them.

—Kathleen Daniel

writer and editor

To the memory of my father and mother

and for my sister, Anne-Marie

Part I

Chapter 1

H olding the chicken leg between her fingers, Mabel Starr tore off the meat with her teeth and gnawed at the bone. She dropped the ravaged leg onto the paper plate on her desk, smacked her lips, and began to lick her fingers, when the phone rang. Finishing her right hand with quick, long sweeps of her tongue, she picked up the receiver.

Recreational therapy. Miss Starr speaking. Patrice! What are you doing home from school so early? The field trip to the Bronx Zoo was canceled? No, I don’t want you anywhere near that refrigerator until I get home—you hear? Or I’ll bust your behind. I know that they gave you lunch at the school even if they canceled the trip.

Philip Nason, who was writing at his desk in longhand, looked up as his secretary shook the receiver as if it were an adversary’s throat. He was waiting for her to get off the phone so that she could type his report. His ears were ringing, and the muscles in the back of his neck were bunching up. He cleared his throat as loudly as he could and tried to catch his secretary’s eye.

Patrice, my boss is giving me the evil eye, so I got to hang up. Just do as I say. And go out and buy me another steak! Mabel slammed down the phone, picked up another french fry, and dropped it down her throat. Phil would have sworn she swallowed it whole. Then she turned around in her chair and attacked her typewriter with flying fingers.

Phil had never imagined himself as having an evil eye or the ability to affect a formidable look. But ever since the hospital administrator had given him a secretary and two assistants, all of whom were black, he’d been uncomfortably aware that there were people in the world to whom he was the man. Phil was the director of recreation at Riverview Hospital, a public institution for chronically ill patients, located on an island in New York City’s East River. Unmarried at the age of thirty-four, he was boyish looking, with untrainable russet hair. His long body was as lean as it had been when he was a cross-country runner at Brown University. There were, however, signs of intervening troubles under the warm hazel eyes that often stared dreamily into space. Phil was by no means a lady-killer, but he had good looks, and many women were attracted to him.

Mabel stopped typing, rose from her chair, and faced him. She had a round, young face that was as pretty as a little girl’s when she smiled. Her reddish wig was tilting over her brow, and steam was forming on her owlish gold-framed eyeglasses.

Mabel Starr was tall and willowy, with thin, shapely legs and a slightly bulging waistline. She had the vitality of a hysterical schoolgirl, and it seemed remarkable to him that at the age of thirty-eight, she had borne children of two generations and was a grandmother. Having entered his thirties without establishing a family, Phil felt like an eternal adolescent.

You could pass for one of the candy stripers, he lied.

Thank you. That’s because I knows how to stay young. Lots of sex with a young lover is what does it. But I don’t have to tell you, do I? She sat at her desk again, smiling, and pulled her pocketbook out of her drawer. He knew it was a sign she was preparing to leave for lunch.

Mabel, before you go anywhere, I’d like you to type this proposal for me. It’s the one for the rolling newsstand to go to the wards.

She looked up quickly at the wall clock.

Mr. Nason, it’s time for my lunch hour.

It seems to me you’ve just had your lunch hour, he said, glancing at the ravaged tinfoil plate on her desk.

Mabel leaned her elbows on her big pocketbook, which she had propped up on her typewriter. Her wig appeared to shift as she raised her eyebrows to express outrage. How can you say a thing like that? My lunch hour begins at one o’clock. You know I got to watch my stories. I’m going to sit by the TV in the first-floor dayroom.

Mabel, I have to have this proposal upstairs by two o’clock. I told you that this morning. Now, let’s be honest—you’ve been eating and talking on the phone for the last hour. There was a hint of irritation in his voice now.

Not the whole hour, Mr. Nason. Her voice rose with indignation. I was on my break for part of it. I can’t take my lunch hour in this office with the phone ringing all the time.

Phil threw up his hands in frustration. Those were all personal calls.

I didn’t make all the calls. The people called me. You mean to tell me my son can’t call me in an emergency?

He knew he would lose the argument, as his adversary refused to let the rules of logic encumber her. But he pressed on just the same. I’ll grant you an emergency. But what about the long call before?

Mabel was collecting her cigarettes and other personal effects from her desk and putting them in her pocketbook. That call before was from Doctor Gold’s office, reminding you that you got to go to the rehab meeting today.

He reached out with his hands as if he were trying to catch a greased pig. It may have started that way, but whatever you and Doctor Gold’s secretary were discussing for twenty minutes was not hospital business. I couldn’t help but listen while I was trying to concentrate on my report. It was something about a psychiatrist whose young wife is having an affair with one of his patients. Who are these crazy people?

Mabel laughed as she snapped her purse shut and stood up. He knew she was waiting for an opportunity to break for the door.

Mr. Nason, you are funny, you know. Them’s the people in the stories that are on TV. Her voice took on a hoarse, confidential whisper. Now the wife is trying to decide whether to tell her husband before the patient does. You know that when you go to a psychiatrist, you’re suppose to tell him everything. Don—that’s the patient’s name—is afraid that if he don’t tell his doctor about the affair, he won’t get better, and they’ll have to put him away. I got to see what happens. I’ll type your proposal when I get back.

She tossed her tinfoil plate and other remnants of her preliminary lunch into the wastebasket. The move to the basket brought her closer to the door. He knew that if he didn’t insist that she type the proposal now, things would get further out of hand. It would eventually lead to a hearing with union representatives and the labor relations officer all screaming in tandem. God, why did he have to care when Mabel ate her lunch or whom she talked to on the phone? He had been happier before they’d given him any staff to work with at all. The job had been more tolerable then. He had done more things with the patients and gone home at night with enough energy left to write a poem or read a book or see friends. Now he went home and made a martini.

Just as Phil was about to speak, the phone rang. Mabel ran back to her desk for it.

If it’s one of your friends with another TV story, just ice it, he said, shaking his head.

I like it when you talk black. Mabel chortled as she picked up the receiver. Recreational therapy. Miss Starr speaking. She dropped her purse onto her desk, straightened her lanky body, and smiled into the receiver. Why, hello, Miss Webster. How are you feeling today? That’s good. Ooooh, Mr. Nason just now left for that meeting in South Wing you wanted him to go to. Hold on—maybe I can catch him in the hall. She pressed the Hold button and looked over at Phil with conspiratorial eyes. It’s your boss, she said in a hoarse whisper. Are you here?

Of course I’m here. He shrugged wearily. He appreciated his secretary’s loyalty but realized that she had compromised him in one swift stroke. He couldn’t reprove her for her work habits now.

Pick up on eight in five seconds. I told you all the calls wasn’t for me.

Phil placed a hand over the phone on his desk and drummed his fingers over the dial. It was an unnecessary ruse. However, Mabel had rightly surmised that he didn’t want to talk to his administrator. Whenever she called, it was to carp about something—his reluctance to establish a dress code for his staff, his failure to balance his budget, his inability to relate to the medical staff as a team player. What was she going to carp about now?

He lifted the receiver to his ear. What can I do for you, Miss Webster? He spoke with guarded amiability.

Phil, we are very displeased with you up here. Miss Webster’s voice crackled with anger. This was no ordinary carping. Mr. Saunders is absolutely furious.

He was stunned. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

You don’t? She sounded incredulous. "I’m talking about the supper rebellion. Your supper rebellion. Two reporters from the Village Voice were here a little over an hour ago. Mr. Saunders had security throw them out because they were taking pictures of patients in the hall without their written consent. Those reporters wanted to talk to Willie Santana, Phil."

Phil thought quickly. When he’d come in to work in the morning, one of the patients in the coffee shop had told him about some patients in North Wing who had thrown their meal trays, filled with uneaten food, into the air the night before. There weren’t many details. Five or six patients had been involved, and most of them were paraplegics.

Oh, yes. I did hear about an incident in North Wing last night, he said finally, leaning on his elbow and curling a hand over his brow. But Willie Santana couldn’t have thrown any trays. His hands are too spastic to hold on to anything, let alone throw it. Besides, his ward is in South Wing.

Well, Mr. Saunders thinks he organized it, and I know he’s the one who called the newspaper, Miss Webster fired back. Phil pictured her sitting behind her desk, an erect peppery-haired black woman in a business suit, eyes steaming and breasts jutting out like cannons. She was the only person of her sex and color in the administration, and she became a combat officer under stress. I went to see Willie right after the reporters left. Do you know what he told me? He said that what the patients did was an act of civil disobedience. He talked about Henry David Thoreau. Phil, Willie would never have heard of Henry David Thoreau or civil disobedience if it hadn’t been for your current-events group.

Phil couldn’t resist a short burst of laughter. Do you really think my current-events group is a training ground for revolutionaries?

No, I don’t, not really, she said, relenting briefly. But Jack Saunders does, and he’s the executive director of this hospital. Phil, you know we’ve been unhappy about the way you’ve been running your department for quite some time. Mr. Saunders says the patients wouldn’t be discontented if you gave them the right kind of diversions.

It always came down to the same thing: for all the medical, rehab, and other support services in the hospital, the behavioral problems of the patients were inevitably examples of his failure.

Miss Webster, it would take a lot more than the few diversions my small staff and I have to offer to take away the bitterness many patients feel. He struggled to control the mounting anger in his voice. I don’t know why those patients in North Wing threw their supper trays in the air, but I really don’t think it was because I inspired them to read Jean Jacques Rousseau or Leon Trotsky or the Marquis de Sade, although I’d be tickled silly to think it was.

He heard a gasp on the other end of the line.

I find that attitude unacceptable, Phil. Miss Webster was seething now. Let me make one thing absolutely clear to you. My main responsibility to this hospital right now is public relations. And dammit, I won’t have you working at cross-purposes with me!

Her voice had risen to a near screech, and she paused to prevent it from skidding out of control. Listen carefully to this, Phil. I have assigned you to today’s medical meeting for a special reason. One of the patients on the agenda has not responded to the rehab program and is a problem to the nurses on the ward. The nursing director has asked me for support-service help. I want you to find the right diversions for this patient so he can make a successful adjustment. This is your last chance. I’m not making excuses for you any longer.

Phil next heard a mechanical squawk and the whine of the dial tone. He dropped the receiver into its carriage, whistled through his teeth, and leaned back in his swivel chair, rocking briskly and running his thumbs over one another. It was an ultimatum all right. She was telling him to buckle under or get out. He had taken the position as director of recreation in the first place because he’d thought it would give him freedom to shape his job as he saw fit. The position had started out that way, but more and more, he had to bend to administrative demands. Mabel and his two assistants were freer to do as they pleased than he was. The system protected their jobs, but Miss Webster could fire him as easily as she had just hung up her phone on him. He was a civil servant without certification. He’d been promoted in-house, made head of the department because he had been the only one left in it when Miss Wells retired three years ago. They’d kept him at his entry-level salary with the vague promise of a management title once he’d proven himself. Jack Saunders was happy to have a graduate of Brown University on his staff, but Phil did not fit in. In light of his long, perpetually tousled hair, faded work shirts, and rumpled corduroys, the administration and most career civil servants had come to regard him as an overgrown hippie—a somewhat inaccurate description that he found amusing and did little to correct.

Well, the hell with it then. He crumpled the handwritten pages of his proposal for a rolling newsstand and tossed them at Mabel’s wastebasket, missing. He’d been around too long and was becoming a burnout fixture. His six years at Riverview Hospital were a loss as far as the main enterprise of his life was concerned. He enjoyed working with patients, but what he had achieved with them was of almost stoical indifference to him. Poetry was his true vocation. His job at Riverview was, at best, a way of marking time until his dream of artistic greatness came true. But time was running out. The epic poem remained unwritten. At home, he had a drawer filled with rejection slips.

However, the job was ideal for a writer. It paid the rent, granted him long vacations, and made no demands on his time after he’d finished a day’s work. His own health had flourished in the constant presence of disease and death. The misfortunes of the patients had made him believe, at times, that the gods had given him a protective suit of armor. Another part of him felt repelled by such Calvinistic notions of grace, but he knew he had prospered in this human junkyard.

That was the rub. The job at Riverview was the only one he’d stayed with for more than a year, the only one he’d felt good about going to in the morning. He discovered talents he never knew he had. Perhaps the Irish Catholic upbringing he’d repudiated as a young man had left him with a gift for doing God’s work. He’d been unhappy writing copy for Thornhill and Baxter Advertising Agency and had left after a year. If you want to write first-rate copy, you have to write it in your sleep, Baxter had told him. A good copywriter doesn’t have time to read poetry, let alone fuck up his mind by writing it.

So Phil had resigned and taken the job at Riverview Hospital in the hope of liberating his creative energies. That hadn’t worked out, but he had to thank Riverview for Rosemary. Well, they’d been quarreling a lot lately, and if he got fired now, it wouldn’t help matters.

It was just a bad time. Rosemary was graduating from college in the spring, and he would have to make a decision about their future together, if they had one. Losing the job would limit his options. There were no opportunities in his field, and it was rather late in life to start over at something else. Of course, Rosemary would want him to tell the administration to stuff it and to lead the patients to the barricades. But she was young and didn’t know that when a man lost his job, he lost his girl. It had happened to Phil before. He had lost as many women as he had lost jobs. He was tired of seeing the pattern of his life repeat itself like the patterns on the wallpaper in all the lonely rented rooms of his youth.

Phil picked up the scattered pages of his proposal and placed them on Mabel’s desk.

Chapter 2

W hen Philip Nason stepped out into the hallway, he had to stand back to let pass a man in a white cap and green uniform who was pushing an empty aluminum steam wagon ahead of him at great speed. It was a sign that lunch had been served to the patients on the first floor. The wagon was taller than the man who pushed it and would have collided with Philip had he not stepped back. He knew that the fast-moving trucks sometimes hit unwary patients in wheelchairs, and he was surprised such accidents didn’t happen more often than they did.

After the wagon passed, Phil walked down the long hospital corridor that led to the medical conference room in South Wing. The corridor was poorly lit, and the bottom sections of the walls were tiled so that the hall looked like an extended public restroom. On hot, airless days, it often smelled like one. Service areas lined the first-floor corridor on both sides: the kitchen, the housekeeping station, the coffee shop, the auditorium, the admitting room, and the morgue. The hall measured a good hundred yards from one end to the other. Now it was a raceway as more steam wagons, discharged from elevators at either end, sped noisily on their return from the wards to the centrally located kitchen. Patients in wheelchairs and stretchers avoided them as best they could, while staff skirted briskly around them. The problems of the speeding wagons had been on the agenda of the Patients’ Care Committee for quite some time, and they had recently appointed a subcommittee to take a hard look.

Phil passed the coffee-shop lounge, where patients and staff sat at segregated tables. Some sat in front of big windows that looked out on a paved courtyard with a flower bed in the middle. Beyond was a lovely tree-shaded lawn that ran down to the river separating East River Island from the tall towers of Manhattan. Phil paused to watch a rust-hulled freighter sail by on its way to the sound and a faraway port. Small clusters of seamen leaned on the rail of the ship and gazed at the island. There was no pier for boats to land here, and there hadn’t been for many years. A bridge connected with Queens on the other side. He wondered if the island appeared to the sailors as remote and inaccessible—one of God’s abandoned places. What did they think of the castaways in wheelchairs and stretchers gazing back at them? Two young men in wheelchairs, sitting by the river, waved at the boat. A few of the seamen waved back. The others remained motionless, their elbows resting on the railing of the ship. For a moment, Phil imagined himself on deck with the men, bound for some fabled port: Venice, Alexandria, Istanbul. Then he saw a Greek flag trailing from the stern. Yes, it would be a nice day to go to Athens, to walk on the shore of a Greek island and listen for voices in the surf that would yield up a work of art.

Above the din in the coffee shop, Phil heard his name called. He looked over to see Willie Santana, his bent-up arm and twisted hands shaking uncontrollably as he cried out from his wheelchair. Carmen Vasquez and George Wilkerson, whom the others called Dancing George, were with him. Carmen was a pretty young woman with long black hair that almost covered the dwarfish legs that stuck straight out over the upraised leg rests of her chair. Dancing George had a clubfoot and sat alongside a table with a cane crossed over his lap. Phil, due at his meeting, knew he couldn’t afford to stop. But they’d seen him pause to watch the ship, and his eyes had met Carmen’s. He went over to them.

We have to talk to you. Willie’s head fell backward as he forced the words out of his palsied jaw. His left arm was wrapped in a cloth restrainer to keep it from thrashing about. His right arm, doubled up by paralysis, dangled freely. When Willie spoke or was otherwise excited, his free arm joggled and both hands twirled like pinwheels. Despite his crippled condition, he was a well-built man, in his late thirties, dressed in light beige pajamas that set off dark good looks. The footrests of his wheelchair were drawn up, and on his right foot—his right leg was his stablest extremity—he wore a high shoe with a metal rod attached to the bottom. Thanks to the rod, Willie was able to push his chair backward and travel throughout the hospital without assistance. The shoe had been Phil’s idea—that was, it had been Phil’s idea to strap a golf club to Willie’s leg with an Ace bandage so that he could play miniature golf. Lisa Bergen in physical therapy had applied the principle of the golf club to the shoe.

I’m on my way to a meeting. Phil waved helplessly in the direction of South Wing. It had been a mistake to stop.

This is important, Phil, Willie said, his doubled-up arm lifting so that a wobbling elbow pointed at Phil.

Don’t walk away from us like everybody else, Carmen said in a small, plaintive voice. With her huge, shining eyes and stubby legs, she looked like a doll propped up in a chair. No wonder the old ladies on my ward say all of us in here are damned.

We is damned, sure enough, George said with a laugh that was like the sound of an old car starting up. Dancing George was older than old cars. But what we gonna do? Like I tried to tell them, Mr. Phil, there’s no use bothering you about it. No use at all.

Willie craned his head to look at George. If we can’t bother Phil, we can’t bother anybody.

Phil wanted to say he was the last person in the world to be bothered, but he knew that regardless of what he had told Miss Webster, he was at least partly responsible for the actions these patients had taken. He glanced at his watch and gestured for them to tell their story.

It’s damn frustrating, Phil. Willie squeezed out the words. Everybody on staff is coming on to us like we’re off our rockers. You heard about the incident in North Wing last night, right? His jaw seemed to lock, and he had to force it open again. The effort caused his elbow to rise high above his head and his hands to flap like gas-station flags in a sudden breeze.

Nobody planned it or anything, Carmen said. There were six of us. I was the only woman. You know how the women on my ward eat in the same dining room with the men. Most of them couldn’t throw a tray if they wanted to. I was never a troublemaker, but I joined in because I was fed up like everybody else. Maybe we were acting like spoiled brats, but the piece of meat on my tray was like a rock.

You weren’t just acting like a spoiled brat, Willie objected, finding his voice. Phil, those patients were saying something a lot of us have wanted to say for a long time and can’t. His jaw was loose now, and he was able to speak clearly, although in sudden surges and dying falls. "We are all tired of the same old tasteless food, served cold by aides who don’t give a damn. As soon as I heard about the incident, I remembered what you told us about the politics of civil disobedience and asked George to dial the Village Voice for me. George giggled and put a hand over his face. You said they were muckrakers, and that’s what we need in here. But damn. Willie blew out the words, his head dipping and then rising with his voice at the end of a sentence, his elbow shooting up. Saunders and Webster made sure none of us got to talk to the reporters. I was sent to Doctor Stein for a psychology consult, along with the ones who threw the trays. He asked us questions like if we ever wanted to throw things at our fathers. Hell, I never had a father to throw anything at."

He asked me if I didn’t always wish I was a boy, Carmen said resentfully.

We were all treated like we had complexes or something. Our complaints about the food were completely ignored. So what do we do now, Phil? Willie fixed his eyes on Phil’s. You’re the only person on staff we can turn to about something like this.

What could he say? How could he explain that he could not be involved and that, under any circumstances, he was not the one to turn to? Although he had marched with Rosemary in antiwar demonstrations, Phil had never been a political activist. He had read to the patients from the writings of Thoreau for the same reason he had read to them from the poetry of Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. He wanted them to look at life through the spectacles of literature, those stereoscopic lenses that had enabled him to see the world with an added dimension. Now he wondered whether the patients had seen things beyond his powers to conceive.

You go to those meetings up in administration, Carmen said, her dark eyes brooding under even black bangs. Can’t you make Miss Webster see things our way?

Phil looked over at the surrounding tables, where groups of clerical workers, dietitians, lab technicians, and nurses huddled over cans of Sprite and bags of corn chips. Then he returned his gaze to the grave, suffering eyes fixed on his. I have no influence upstairs. He opened his hands in a helpless gesture. If you want to change things, you have to do it yourselves. You have to organize. Remember what we learned in the discussion group about the labor movement and civil rights movement? Power has to be taken. I can’t do it for you.

If you can’t do anything, then I guess we are all damned, just like the ladies on my ward say, Carmen said sullenly, folding her arms over her chest and staring down at her lap.

I told you there was no use bothering Mr. Phil, George said with a wrinkled smile of resignation. No use at all.

Willie wasn’t going to give up as easily, and Phil could see the determination in his face. Phil looked at his watch. He was going to be late for the meeting, but he couldn’t leave these patients on such a bad note. How do we take power, Phil? He spat out the words. How do we reach up out of our wheelchairs and grab on to it, when most of us don’t have hands to grab with? A lot of patients have given up. They’ve become zombies. If sickness didn’t do it, Riverview did. We need you to give us all a pull-up. I’ve seen patients do things for you they never dreamed they could do. Take me, for instance. He paused to catch his breath. All my life, I wanted to play golf. I watched games on TV. Kept scores in my head. You found a way for me to actually play. His body almost raised out of his chair in his desire to express his feeling of achievement. I’ll never play in the Florida Cup, but on that little miniature course you rigged up out in the yard, I’m Ben Hogan. Hey, the doctors and nurses all said Jake Weisel was mentally retarded until you taught him how to play chess.

And you started me painting. Carmen looked up suddenly.

Sure, we have to do it ourselves. Willie’s head wagged from side to side. But we need you to jack us up and point us in the right direction.

Phil felt nauseated, as if he were twirling in a maelstrom. The patients seemed to be clutching at his arms, dragging him down into the vortex of disease and alienation that trapped them. He started to say, I’m sorry, but what you want me to do is not in my job description, and my job is on the line. But as the words formed on his lips, he heard harrowing laughter coming from the back of his head. Not my job was the battle cry of civil service. He was finally that thing he had promised himself he would never become: a bureaucrat.

The patients had been right to come to him. Their discontent went deeper than their dissatisfaction with cold, tasteless food. They were asking him for their lost sense of themselves, the selves that years of illness and institutionalization had submerged and mutilated. They wanted him to repair their broken connection with the rest of the human race. That was certainly in his job description. Not even Miss Webster would deny it. He ran his hand over the stubble of beard on his chin.

I know you’re all up against a lot here, he said at last. I can only guess at how much, because remember, I’m on staff too. There’s a kind of invisible wall between you and those of us who work here and go home at night. You can’t see it, but I know you run smack into it every day. It’s a wall of habits and assumptions that have been built up over the years. We’ve all had a hand in putting it up. Patients have done their share. Now it’s more solid than the bricks that hold up the building. It isn’t bad enough you’re on an island, cut off from the city that sent you here in the first place. Now, there really isn’t much I can do about any of that, unless—

Willie’s elbow jumped up. Unless what, Phil?

It was a decisive qualifier. Phil looked over at the next table, where two white-uniformed nursing supervisors sat drinking orange sodas. They appeared to be too engrossed in their own conversation to be listening, but Phil lowered his voice anyway.

Unless I can think of an activity that would attract a lot of patients, bring them together in—I don’t know—some program of general interest. Not necessarily yours—not yours at all—but something that might help them change the way they think about themselves. After that, it would be up to all of you.

That’s good enough for me, Phil! Willie threw his head back and flashed a big smile. In fact, I’d say that’s right on!

I can’t promise you anything, Phil added hurriedly. As of now, I can’t imagine a program on such a grand scale. And under no circumstances will I be involved in anything even remotely political.

Leave that part to us, Willie said, still smiling.

Phil experienced a tightening fear in his bowels that told him he had become as much involved as if he had taken up a banner and called the entire population of patients—patients in wheelchairs, on stretchers, with walkers or crutches, and with IVs dangling from rolling stands, and amputees hopping along on stumps—and led them all through the corridors to break down the doors of the administration offices.

I know you’ll do what you can for us, George said in his ragged voice. You’re all right with me, Mr. Phil. You always were.

Don’t let us down, Phil. Carmen looked at him gravely.

Phil glanced at his watch. The medical meeting had begun without him.

Chapter 3

W hen Philip Nason entered the medical conference room, he saw a half circle of people in white jackets sitting in schoolroom chairs with desktops attached. Dr. Gold sat at a big office desk, facing and addressing them. He stopped to clear his throat as Phil crossed the room. An accusatory silence hung in the air. The others looked quietly through papers on clipboards as Phil struggled to slide his long body under the low desktop. He pulled an empty notebook from his own clipboard and leafed through it nervously. Without looking up, he knew that Doctor Gold was fixing his gaze on him. Unable to bear the tension any longer, Phil lifted his eyes to meet the stare behind the thick glasses of the chief of South Wing and rehabilitation services.

I’m sorry to be late, Phil blurted out. I had to do a, uh, crisis intervention with patients. A