The Walls of the Castle Page 2

  Kasteel must’ve passed out for a few minutes in the pool of warm sunlight at the bottom of the Fool’s Tower. When he opened his eyes again his cigarette had gone out and Hedgwick was leaning over him.

  “Do you have any Percocet?” he asked.

  It took Kasteel three tries to find his voice. “I just took the last of them. You want Codeine?”

  He reared in disgust. “Christ, no, it reacts badly with the Lithium. And it gives me the runs.” He felt around in his pockets. “You running low on cigarettes?”

  “Yes.”

  He handed Kasteel a couple packs of Lucky Strikes. Hedgwick’s mother sent him a care package twice a week and he used the contents to barter with, the same way they did it in prison. Kasteel found his lighter and relit his cigarette.

  Hedgwick was twenty-five, stood six-one, slim, with waving, wild curly blonde hair that all the young nurses liked. His wide dark eyes glowed like black embers, and when he hit you with his glare full-on you knew this was how zealots or revolutionaries stared into a crowd. He was wearing his thick fluffy red robe and cartwheeling clown PJs today. He’d traded away his sophisticated leather slippers and now wore purple bunnies. The bunnies suited him better.

  His pockets bulged and Kasteel could smell mayonnaise and ham that had gone bad. He had a thing about packing ham sandwiches and never eating them. He sometimes had three or four stuffed in his robe. It had something to do with the way his mother used to make his father lunch every day when Hedgwick was a kid. He’d ask his father for a bite of the sandwich before the man left, and his father would unseal the wax paper and let his son nibble at a corner. His old man worked high steel. One day he took a wrong step and fell sixteen floors into a newly poured section of foundation. There was no way for them to get him out so they let the concrete seal around his corpse and dedicated the building to him.

  When Hedgwick got older he used to call in bomb threats to the building and run around naked trying to chase his father’s ghost out of the place.

  Hedgwick said he still saw and even talked to his father’s phantom occasionally. He said his old man looked much the same, hadn’t aged, was stuck in time and space, moved very slowly and didn’t seem to notice that Hedgwick or anybody else was around. He said the psychiatrists had yet to prove to him that his father’s ghost didn’t exist. He didn’t blame the shrinks for failing in that regard since it was impossible to prove a negative.

  He woke screaming some nights gagging and gasping, imagining himself slowly drowning in millions of metric tons of concrete. He told Kasteel that the orderlies in Ward Eight sometimes would stage death matches between the paranoids, the firebugs, chronic masturbators, bi-polars, claustrophobes, walking comatose, the sociopaths, and depressives, and bet on the outcomes. Kasteel doubted a lot of what Hedgwick told him, but he wasn’t sure that he doubted that.

  Hedgwick laid on the floor beside Kasteel and traced the names in the dust. He spoke them aloud, something Kasteel could no longer do.

  “Eddie. Kathy.”

  Kasteel shut his eyes. Hedgwick ran a hand through Kasteel’s gray patch. He had a thing about gray patches because his father had had a gray patch. Kasteel didn’t mind it most of the time but now he knocked the kid’s hand aside, turned over and spit more blood.

  “ I...I’m sorry,” Hedgwick whispered. “I’m sorry I didn’t help you. I was frightened. I followed you through the halls. I saw what they did. I should have helped. My father would have helped. He was strong. He had big muscles. He helped people.”

  “It’s okay, Hedge. You did the right thing.”

  “In the ward matches we at least have garbage can lid shields and two-by-fours with nails hammered through them.”

  “It’s time for you to make some new sandwiches. They’re going to take those away from you soon.”

  “I know. Maybe tomorrow Mom will bring more.”

  Lying on the floor like that, listening to the rhythmic thrum of his breathing reminded Kasteel of the ventilator Eddie had been on, a ten million dollar machine rigged to force air in and out of his small, frail body. A sob tried to work up Kasteel’s throat but it died long before it got there.

  “Are you going to hurt them?” he asked. “Those prick security guards who beat you? Conrad and Watkins.”

  Kasteel kept hissing while his bruised ribs clawed at him, scratching deep from the inside. He needed to get them taped up soon.

  “Do you think I should?”

  “Yes. Those bastards. They’re thugs. They’ve all failed the police psych exam because of violent behavioral tendencies. So they’ve followed up with the next best job they could get that gives them handcuffs and billy clubs. Admin is hiring the biggest and freshest of them, instead of the kindly grandpa types who have experience working with people. Admin likes to keep a youthful healthy face. The old men remind them too much of the geriatric wing, the stroke victims, the Alzheimer patients who wander around in their shitty diapers.” He reached for Kasteel’s gray patch again. “They shouldn’t bring more pain to a grieving father.”

  Kasteel could find out where Conrad and Watkins lived. He had access to all the staff files and hospital records. He could visit their homes and creep their bedrooms while they slept and bring the goods to a variety of fences and have his cut sent back to Kathy. He could hurt them. He could rob them. He could scare them. He could prove he was still alive, assuming he was. Sometimes he felt like Hedge’s father, stuck out of time and place, moving slowly when he was moving at all.

  Maybe tonight.

  The Castle let him loose at night. Sometimes.

  KASTEEL.

  Before the American Revolution, the original Castle consisted of five fortress‑like circular buildings constructed by the Dutch settlers of the area, who used it as a base stronghold to fight off Indian attacks. It grew into a village and then a town. In its strict geometrical form and simplicity, the original compound was considered a high point of European classicism. A military hospital was established during the war but was soon shifted to being an epidemic hostel during an outbreak of yellow fever.

  Soon the emerging small city’s primary employer was the hospital. Catering trades and smaller enterprises died off. The Castle had its own bakery, butcher, ironworks, and cemetery. After the worst of the epidemic had passed, disabled soldiers and their families were quartered in the epidemic wards. What had once been nearly two hundred acres of farming tract became the patient yard, student yard, craftsman center, the house supervisor yard, and a mental asylum. Over the last hundred and fifty years the complex had attached to it a medical school, university campus, personnel lodging, child medicine clinics, and the mental‑scientific institute.

  The Castle became a city unto itself. Currently over nine thousand people were employed at the hospital. Sixteen hundred physicians and forty-five hundred health and nursing workers attended to the patients. The mental wing consisted of fifteen separate wards and kept a rotating staff of about two hundred psychiatrists and therapists. Included among them were dozens of holistic healers in case your emotional disturbances ran in that direction. If your chakras were out of alignment, your chi wasn’t flowing right, your crystals were too cloudy.

  Annually, nearly a hundred thousand people were treated as in‑patients and another half‑million attend the Castle’s outpatient clinics. Along with the parking garages, geriatric facilities, coma wings, gardens, and rehab centers, the Castle compound covered more than two square miles.

  You could read all the historical facts off plaques placed along the nature trails threading through the grounds. The hospital had its own station on the TVs in the waiting rooms and clinics. Admin had hired a pretty actress who’d never been sick a day in her life to promenade through the place and wave to doctors and show smiling pregnant women up in the maternity wards.

  It took Kasteel twenty-five minutes of navigating the inner courtyards and moving from one medical building to the next before he finally made it to the ER.

  It
was another savage night. Ambulances wheeled past, sirens whining like rampaging children, EMTs shouting, chubby nurses rushing back and forth, swinging their wide hips in uniforms two sizes too small. Heart attack victims were wheeled past

  A teenage girl was lying half on the curb, half in the street, clawing at her face, streaks of blood down her cheeks, wailing uncontrollably. She was ten yards from the heart of the ER activity and no one else had seen her yet. Kasteel rushed for the automatic doors wondering if they’d open for him, wondering if he still existed enough in this world to set off the electric eye. He held his breath until he was through and standing outside once again.

  He moved through the chill air to her side as she began to choke on her own vomit. Seemed like another OD whose friends had dumped her out in front and then driven off, afraid of being busted. They couldn’t even walk her in. They couldn’t even get her up out of the gutter.

  Kasteel turned her over, cleared her breathing passageway, and called for help over his shoulder. All the ER staff and EMTs were already busy. He shouted louder but no one paid any attention. She began convulsing as he was trying to get her up. She was young but had been doing crank for a while. Several of her teeth were missing and others were black shards. She weighed almost nothing, meth-starved and burned down to ash. With his joints creaking, his muscles like sandbags, his nervous system practically as wrecked as hers, he lifted her over his shoulder and carried her inside the ER. The pain med cocktail was still doing its job, but the come down later was going to be bad.

  The girl coughed up and spewed bile down his back. It wasn’t going to make him smell much worse. As he clutched her and hauled her forward they were immediately lost in a flood of groaning men, crying children, pregnant ladies, beaten tough guys, the crippled, the feverish, the hobbled, all them seated, vacant-faced, with eyes like his eyes, like twin slashes made in rotting fruit, waiting patiently while they suffered and went right on dying.

  As Kasteel maneuvered among them she whimpered a word, perhaps “Calico...” Sounded like she was calling out to a boyfriend. Maybe admonishing him.

  “Who’s that?” he asked. “Keep talking to me. Who’s Calico?”

  “Cal...”

  “Is he the one who left you?”

  “Cal...!”

  Her body thrashed as she convulsed again. Kasteel started shouting, his tight voice full of centuries of dust, the decimated mortar of the Castle, the cremations in the morgue, the destroyed biological hazards, the dirt scrubbed from the nails of the surgeons after playing the back nine. He shouted and the sound of him raised a wave of noise from the others, tired of sitting, tired of staving off death, tired of following rules. They shouldered their way to the registration desk and started demanding to see a doctor. The fat nurses formed a line, and so did the patients. The lights flashed red out at the curb and the ambulances kept coming in and going out.

  By the time he got her onto a free gurney she was barely breathing. The stink of sex and urine wafted through the hall. He kept her mouth clear and muttered to her words of encouragement that he hoped would keep her conscious. Her pitted face began to twitch. Her eyes opened and rolled. Her lips framed the word or name Calico again. Two attendants shoved him aside and wheeled her away while a stern supervisor from Admin asked him for the girl’s name and insurance information. He said he didn’t know.

  Admin didn’t like hearing that. Admin needed insurance information. They could skip your name and address and whether you were allergic to penicillin, but they had to have insurance info. He’d been run up and down the wall by the financial department. His insurance was good. He’d paid extra into it. He figured the way things had gone for him in the world he was as likely to catch a bullet in the back as lung cancer. He’d watched his old man die a long long horrible death from lung cancer, the docs taking small pieces of him for months and months until the man was hardly recognizable anymore. Kasteel had been fifteen when the man died. He never should have started smoking. But he did. It was one of his better vices, when you looked at them all together.

  He had first-rate insurance, for first-rate machinery, and first-rate care for his boy, but in the end it would’ve been kinder if the kid hadn’t been hooked up to the tubes and ventilators and dialysis and everything else. The boy so weak at the end he couldn’t eat, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t use the bathroom, couldn’t speak, couldn’t hold his head up, couldn’t die.

  Admin asked again. “Her insurance?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your relation to the patient?”

  “There is none. I found her on the curb.”

  “Your name?”

  Even check-in had a long line. He watched a hangdog family of five, all of them sick and sullen, the kids not even whining, just wheezing, eyes red and spinning. Each of them waiting their turn, bleeding onto the floor, hacking up virus, swallowing pain.

  Admin didn’t bother to raise her chin. It was easier for her not to look.

  “Your name, sir?” she asked again.

  His name, like his son and his marriage and his freedom, had somehow slipped away from him. He didn’t remember the old name anymore.

  He said, “Kasteel.”

  She wrote it down, typed it into the computer, and handed him a clipboard without meeting his eyes. She underlined the insurance box with a red pen. “Please fill out this paperwork, including insurance information. When you’re done, return it to me. Someone will see you shortly.”

  “But I don’t need a doctor.”

  “You need a doctor, sir.”

  He took a half-hearted stab at the paperwork for both the girl and himself, handed the clipboard back to Admin and sat down among the others.

  It took five hours. Not bad for the Castle.

  The doctor was young, under thirty, with short hair sculpted into place with double handfuls of mousse. Lively brown eyes, a vivid smile, a lot of energy in his face. One of the few ER doctors who could actually interact with you like you were still alive and not already on your way to the morgue. His name was Burroughs. He’d been on duty the night that Eddie was brought in. He didn’t recognize Kasteel.

  He had a good manner, friendly but not happy, the way some of them get. Loud, incessant, beaming, guffawing, telling jokes and talking about Saturday night with the nurses while some kid bleeding from his ears moaned just a few feet away.

  Burroughs flashed a penlight in Kasteel’s eyes checking for a concussion. He spotted all the meds in there but didn’t say anything about them. Kasteel said, “What about the girl?”

  “What girl?”

  “The girl I brought in. She was left in front of the ER, maybe twenty, looked like she was OD’ing on meth.”

  “She’s stable and resting.”

  Kasteel just nodded. Sometimes the machinery and the meds and the specialists couldn’t do a damn thing, and then there were times when somehow it came out all right. “When you transfer her, move her to Ward Nine. Not Eight.”

  “Why would you say that?” Burroughs asked.

  Kasteel didn’t answer. He sat there while Burroughs continued to examine him, noting the billy club bruises, the old knife scars, gunshot grazes, razor slashes, his history written in his flesh.

  “Looks like a pretty bad brawl,” Burroughs said. “Who’d you have it with?”

  “Two assholes.”

  “Have you reported it to the police?”

  “No.”

  “You need x-rays to makes sure your lung hasn’t been punctured. You’re breathing heavily and if the lining of the lung has been breached, it could deflate.”

  An intern wheeled him over to x-ray, where they took a full set of his chest. Then they wheeled him back down again. Burroughs had already moved on to an old Asian lady who was yelling at him without any accent. She was explaining about the benefits of caterpillar juice. Burroughs listened attentively, the same way he had when Kasteel had carried Eddie in four months ago, his dark eyes utterly focused on the moment. He spoke q
uickly and sharply, but he was all there, right with you, without any distractions. He wrote out a scrip for the Chinese woman and then turned back to Kasteel.

  He checked the results of the x-rays and pursed his lips. “Hairline cracks in four ribs, but at least your lung hasn’t been perforated. What are you on?”

  Kasteel gave it his best guess. “Prozac, Xanax, codeine, zinc, assorted vitamins, and vicodin.”

  “Are you under a personal doctor’s care?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think not,” he said. “You’re malnourished. You need to eat more and eat better. You already know you’re suffering from vitamin deficiencies. Pills won’t be enough, you need to eat good food. I’m going to tape you up and you probably won’t feel much where those bad ribs are concerned, but when the meds wear off you’re going to be in a lot of pain.”

  Burroughs taped him up and he didn’t feel much of anything. Then he heard another doc somewhere, one of the loud guffawing ones, and a nurse answering the call like some exotic animal in the brush, squealing, screeching, a laugh that went through your head like the cry of a beast caught in a trap.

  “Why aren’t you eating or spending any time outdoors?” Burroughs asked.

  “Been busy the last few months.”

  “You work at home?”

  “More or less.”

  “You still need to eat right, get a proper amount of sleep, and spend time out in the fresh air.”

  “I’ll try harder.”

  The doc stared at Kasteel, going deep, and Kasteel looked back and saw the face of the man who had saved his gasping son’s life that first night, the beginning of the end. Kasteel remained impressed with him, but also stabbed by awful memories. Eddie fighting for air, Kasteel holding his boy in his arms, Kathy ahead of them and shoving her way into the ER, Admin asking about insurance. Burroughs coming out, asking questions, Kasteel answering them one after the other, Burroughs shouting to interns, calling out code words and asking for 50ccs of one thing or the other. Eddie terrified but not crying, the kid tough, not wanting to let Kasteel down, not wanting to disappoint.