Something Appropriate
by Timothy Quinlan

It is time for the Report. It is nearly the same every night. He tells me how many wives he had and how many times he had sex with each one. He tells me where they had sex. He tells me what positions they liked.

He refers to the past as the Glamorous Life, the time of his many wives.

It is sometimes so depressing, and sometimes it hardly disturbs me.

Nothing here is glamorous.

Here is St. Dymphna Manor. There are three floors, patients on the top two. The first floor is the living space and kitchen. The hallways of St. Dymphna are long and narrow, and over-crowded with doors. This is because the closets are not inside the room, but in the hallway. We keep them locked. The patients don't have keys. That way, there is nowhere for them to hide in the places they hide.

"You're good looking," Richard says after he gives me the Report.

He says it a lot. I don't know what he means by it. He also tells me he loves me. He asks me who my girlfriend is. I don't have a girlfriend.

Richard is sitting under one of the pictures of Christ, or the Virgin, or some other Christian figure. I can't tell from where I am, but I can feel the eyes staring out at me from behind the frame. In the darkness that surrounds us the milky pink walls look like they are coated by a grey film. I like to keep the lights off, or as low as possible here. We don't need them for anything anyway.

"I love you," he says, but it's like drowning in mutters, like he has already forgotten he is saying it. I ask him if he needs anything. There are other patients I need to check on before I get back to Dostoevsky. Or Chekhov. I brought them both.

As if reading my thoughts, Richard asks, "What are you reading?"

"Russian literature," I tell him.

He nods once, like a normal person might. Then he throws his head back and hurls an ear-splitting laugh at the ceiling. He also does this every night after I tell him what I am reading. I keep forgetting not to tell him.

I started working here after I was fired from the restaurant.

"I'm sorry. This was a mistake," the manager had said. "You're not a people person."

I had been out of high school a year. I only worked there for ten days before they fired me.

My dad wanted me to work with him. He owns a home-contracting company. For some reason I was convinced that I couldn't work there, that I wouldn't be able to pick up the skills required of a home contractor. I got a job here instead.

St. Dymphna is privately owned by a pair of Born-again Christians. They did not ask for a reference before they hired me. Richard says he's been Born-again. He also says he has a secret.

His secret is he is Jesus. I'm pretty sure Richard doesn't know what a Born-again Christian is.

When they hired me, the Born-agains asked me three questions.

"Will you fall asleep?"

"No," I told them. "I usually sleep during the day anyway."

"You'll have to cook them breakfast in the mornings before you leave. Can you make scrambled eggs and oatmeal and toast waffles?"

I told them I could, even though I wasn't sure about the scrambled eggs.

"And this is the most important," the husband and founder of St. Dymphna said. He looked like who had been born again. "I know you are young, and young people these days are as far from the Flock as they come. But I sense something...appropriate about you, or else we wouldn't have even considered you for the job. And it takes a certain something to be able to work with the patients here." He cocked his head forward like he was about to fire a gun. "Have you accepted Jesus into your life?" That was the final question.

For some reason I thought about what my manager had said, You're just not a people person, and I wondered how similar this man's question about Jesus was to being a people person. I felt like they were saying the same thing and just calling it by a different name.

I didn't say anything to my new boss. I wouldn't have known how to answer, but I had already reached under the collar of my shirt and brought out a small gold crucifix on a chain. The Born-agains leaned forward in their chairs. They couldn't see what it was until the dim light in their small office reflected off the gold.

I only wear the cross because my dad's cousin gave it to me when he agreed to be my godfather. He died of liver failure, alcoholism really, when I was ten and I don't remember ever being especially close to him. But it is the only thing like that anyone in my family had ever given to me.

More than any specific memory of him, I remember the image from a snapshot someone had taken at my Baptism party, of my godfather with a beer bottle in his hand and my baby bonnet tied to the top of his shiny, balding head.

Most of the patients at St. Dymphna would have been empty husks if not for the stories. They were full of stories. Wore-down, tattered shells brimming with stories. No one in the world had such long lives as these people did. No one had dragged so much behind them through the dirt.

I get depressed, bored, fatigued listening to them. Sometimes, by the end of a story, I loathe them. I imagine going to the medicine cabinet and finding something to shut them up.

I imagine a lot of things at night, alone in the darkness, when everyone is shut away in their rooms. When you don't do anything all night, for that long, your mind goes to some really weird places.

There is no escaping their stories. So I just sit there, or sometimes stand in the doorway, defenseless against the tangled strings of events, the washed out images of their past as they twist and creep my way. Their stories are like their minds: chopped up, sometimes shredded into hundreds of thin slices, then taped back together.

They never tell stories to each other. It's funny to think about.

I wonder what makes me so special.

Richard is a big man, powerfully built. He looks like someone frozen in time: suspenders, faded plaid pants, he even walks around with a pipe that he never smokes because it's against house rules to smoke indoors. He never goes outside to smoke, at least not during my shift.

One of the nurses during the daytime shift must shave the silver stubble off his face regularly, but no one cuts the grey wires out that spring out of his ears.

"Richard, it's almost midnight," I say. "You should be getting to bed soon."

He doesn't acknowledge hearing me. Instead, he slides his hands on his pants. Even from across the room, I can see his pockets bulging. Inside he's stuffed crumpled paper, paper clips, and candy wrappers. Slowly, just a few pieces at a time, he empties the trash onto the dresser top. His hands are black and torn. I've tried and I can't figure out how they get this way; he never leaves the house.

Sometimes I think about when he was young, and I get depressed. I think about him standing at the altar again and again, just getting older, with a different woman in front of him every time. And still ending up here, alone.

Looking at the man now it is hard to imagine him as a Casanova, but you can tell when they're telling the truth; it sounds farther away than anything else. Anyway, they almost never lie.

"It's all about order. The order," Richard is telling me. "One, two, three. Organized. This and that and the other thing. Here, there, everywhere—Order. Boxes. Then put everything in Boxes. And Expertise." He is talking about his company. His "company." The Company. "Every good company needs order."

He looked vaguely out the window. Then he looked at up at me, like a child who lost a toy.

"You can't see the lights are off," he says.

"Do you want me to turn them on, Richard?"

"No." The child disappears under the rumples and edges of his face. "You know," he continues in his usual voice. "At first I had a lot of trouble getting it off the ground, but then I remembered: every good company needs to order boxes and expertise."

The Company is why Richard is here. When he started the Company he became obsessed with it. Finally people got sick of hearing about it and he was eventually, inevitably, kicked out of the State Diner. The State was where Richard ate all his meals. He couldn't cook or go shopping. He never went anywhere except for the State. So when they kicked him out they sent him here, and he's been here ever since."

"B.B.E. I mean O.B.E. Order. Boxes. Expertise," he says. He sounds confident, almost convincing. "So I made T-shirts."

He did. He has boxes of them under his bed. I have four, one in every color.

I've had one date since I started working at St. Dymphna. I asked her out but she did all the talking. All night I had trouble looking her in the eye.

She asked me where I worked. I told her it was group home for mentally ill people who can't live by themselves. She said that it sounded like it had to be really rewarding. I told her it was. I didn't feel like getting into it with her.

That was the only date we went on. At the end of the night she told me she had a good time but that I wasn't her type and she was probably getting back with her old boyfriend anyway.

It gets harder and harder every time.

Richard is alternating between crying and looking out the window. The window faces the side of another building; you can't see anything out of it except brick. I don't say this out loud at first, but Richard can read my mind. I guess that's how close we are now.

"I know, I know," he says. "But it doesn't make a difference."

"Richard, nothing is there but a wall of bricks."

He looks at me with a child's eyes again.

"Shows how much you know."

"Bricks are bricks, Richard," I tell him. Usually I don't bother; there is nothing to do when he's like this anyway.

He is crying now, again, baby tears running from strangled eyes. His face is green in the darkness. The room is soft pink. On his feet he wears the baby-blue paper slippers we have in boxes downstairs.

I turn and go back to my chair in the hallway and my book. When I hear him get out of bed, I get up again to check on him. He is standing at the window, looking out again.

"Bricks are bricks," he says. He turns to face me; all signs of tears have vanished, soaked up into his skin. His whole face bends up into lines that cross back and forth like a game of pickup sticks. "Bricks are bricks" he says again, and collapses to the floor. He is a big man, and when he lands one of the pictures of Christ, or the Virgin, or some other Christian figure is shaken off its hook. The glass cracks in its frame when it lands on the ground, but doesn't shatter. I am confident that, when I put it back up, whichever Christian it is, no one will notice.

"Richard?"

I move toward the fallen hump. He is facing the wall, so I lean over to see his face. His eyes are open, his mouth quivering. But he doesn't move.

"Richard," I say. "Get up."

I don't know what to do when he gets like this. No one ever trained me to be prepared. No one ever trained me for anything. They'd just assumed I'd pick it up along the way.

There is the name and phone number of one of the daytime nurses on a bulletin board in the office. I was instructed to call her if anything came up that, medically speaking, I couldn't handle.

The first time Richard collapsed and didn't get back up I called that number. I had never actually met the woman; I am always gone by the time she gets here in the morning. She sounded like she was in the middle of lifting something heavy when she answered, but I imagine she was lying in bed, rolled over on her stomach, half-conscious.

I told her what had happened, that Richard was lying comatose on the floor. She told me that it happens everyday, and that she'd kill me if I called again unless someone is puking up organs…

I drag the chair from the hall into Richard's doorway. He is still on the floor. I sit down and try to find the sentence that I left off on.

Richard is on the ground because he sometimes becomes convinced he is paralyzed. He is not; there is nothing physically wrong with him, except for maybe his weight. The reason Richard is on the floor is the same reason we are all in here: our minds.

I glance up from my book every now and then to see if he has gotten up yet. I guess it doesn't matter that your body works fine if you don't let it.

St. Dymphna is an old building on a small hill, back from the road. There is a wrought-iron fence around it that had once been painted white to match the white trim of the pink house. Now it is chipped and rusting. I have a fence around my apartment building too, made of rotting wood. When the Born-agains get enough money, they say they are going to replace the fence. The wife says it's important to have the visual boarder, both for the community inside St. Dymphna and outside as well.

After that I asked my landlord if he was ever going to rebuild to fence around my building. He says he doesn't know. I tell him it's important for the community and he laughs.

On the mantle above the fireplace there is a plaque that tells the story of St. Dymphna. I knew it was there, but I worked there for about a month before I ever read it. St. Dymphna is the patron saint of the mentally afflicted. Her father was an Irish chieftain and, after his wife died, he made advances on Dymphna because she was the only woman in Ireland as beautiful as his late wife. Dymphna fled to Gheel, Belgium, but was caught. When she refused her father's advances again, he was driven insane and decapitated her.

Because the story of St. Dymphna was kept alive by the town, Gheel has been the home of one of the most miraculous sanitariums since the 13th Century. It is known for its unorthodox methods of curing the insane. In Gheel, after only a short period, the patients are released from the ward and taken in by locals. There they work and live among families, as though they were not insane at all.

I try to imagine Richard living in a Belgian home, farming the land.

Gheel would never work here. Here we need a separate home set back from the road, up on a hill, boxed up by a wrought-iron fence. Here we don't expect them to work, just to stay put. That way only people like me ever need to see them.

When I had been working at St. Dymphna for about a month, before I had stopped going out completely, a friend asked me what it was like working the night shift.

"When you don't do anything for that long, it's an emotional rollercoaster. Your mind goes to some really weird places."

"Like what?" he asked.

"Like the importance of the Company's success."

This is the night shift at St. Dymphna. Eleven to seven a.m. I walk to work every night, chased by my reflection in the dark windows of every house I pass. I walk home with the sunrise to my empty apartment. When I fall asleep alone, I can hear the steady sound of morning traffic just outside my window.

I'm halfway through Notes from the Underground before Richard gets up off the floor. He sits back down on the bed and stares out the window again like nothing has happened. I guess, in a way, nothing has happened.

I put the book down.

"What do you see out there, Richard?" I ask him.

"In there," he says.

"What?"

"The thing about windows is that they keep things out," he says. He looks at me with green eyes. "You want to know?"

I want to know.

He waves a black hand up and down. I know what he wants.

I turn on the light.

The bricks outside disappear and I see Richard pointing at himself, reflected small and distorted, but framed neatly in the glass.

"You can still see yourself in there."