Carmen Lau

The Last Real Cake

At that time, there were no fewer than three Jesuses and one Satan on Unit 35. As Dr. Aremu said, slapping his knee with a heavy night-black hand so that a small shock of thunder cracked through the room: “Armageddon could happen at any moment, friends.” Bets were made in the nurses’ station on who would be the first to start something.


Mr. Nils spent most of his time in bed building hotels for God. The big Polynesian man, once a ruthless pimp of teenage girls, could now hardly be expected to get up for breakfast, much less get into a fist fight. Jimenez (pronounced JIM-as-in-The-Office-Jim-en-ess) by his own tongue, however, was forever pacing the hall making the insignia of the Eye in the Sky with his right hand, the one that didn’t tremble from the Haldol. And Petrovich Rubio, whose name on last admission had been Oscar Hale, would certainly warrant observation once he came out of wrist-and-posey restraints, which he had been in for nearly a week for throwing lukewarm coffee in Linda the RN’s face.


Satan was one Mr. Pahl, a hazel-eyed light-skinned black man, young-looking for his seventy-five years, whose Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity case had been predicated on the lie that everything he had done was because he believed at the time that he was the Devil incarnate, horns and tail and all. In truth, Mr. Pahl had never believed in anything whose existence could not be proven by the senses, and what he sensed more or less matched up with general consensus. No one had expected him to be found insane, but luck had been on his side in the guise of a very expensive team of lawyers financed by his very wealthy grandfather. Of course, the place had not lived up to his expectations, but he worked with what he had. He climbed to Level 4 in the hospital’s level system for never obviously flouting the rules. In fact, because he kept to himself and rarely spoke, existing as a pleasantly smiling shadow, he was declared Patient of the Month at least three times a year and voted Ice Captain on the unit’s ward government. Every few days, when the fridge in the dayroom ran low, he and a staff member would leave the unit and walk down the long main hall to the ice machines, where they filled a large garbage bag with ice cubes. Once back on the unit, Mr. Pahl with his long taper-fingered hands in pale blue nitrile gloves (to be given back to staff once he was done) would scoop portions of ice into zip-loc baggies with a large medicine cup, seal them and place them in neat rows and stacks in the freezer. A model patient, one who staff members were relieved to have on the unit. Unlike others.


“The police state IS the state,” Jimenez was saying to the patient in the room next to his, an old black man whose bugged eyes fixed their gaze warily on him. Jimenez stood with his foot propping the old man’s door open. “What we have to realize is everyone – our teachers, our salespeople, our supervisors, our presidents, our civil workers – ARE the police state.” “Uh huh,” the old man, who was sitting on the edge of his thin metal-framed bed, said. “Look, I don’t have canteen to give you. Go ask Simons. He got three boxes of Debbie-O’s today.”


“My brother is the police state. He committed suicide in nineteen-eighty-three. Dr. Amin is the police state. I caught Dr. Amin injecting flu nanoparticles into my skin, while I slept.” Jimenez held up his left forearm and fingered the tattoo of a bulldog’s face on it. “See that? My skin’s been getting darker.”


“You’re getting a tan.” The old man opened the black soft-covered Bible the chaplains handed out and studiously stared at a page. “And it’s Dr. Aremu, not Amin.”

“None of it is right, man. They got us locked up in here like lab rats. Well, I ain’t no lab rat. I’m Jesus fucking Christ.”

The old man furrowed his brow and turned a page. Jimenez lingered, then turned away to pace the hall.


The woman and the kid were loud today. He couldn’t tell what they were saying. They were whispering, yet it was loud. That was why he believed they were witches. The man who shouted obscenities at him was absent, but that made it worse, because when he came back - and he always came back - what he said would be really bad. It was like standing on a beach that was dry for now and waiting for the next freezing wave to wash over you.


“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said under his breath. “J.F.C. I can get a thousand hit-men to end you all right now. I got pull in the White House. ‘This is a hospital, not a prison.’ This is a CIA-operated funhouse.”


He stopped in front of the nurses’ station. Inside, the staff were eating cake. The occasion was mysterious. A burly black-bearded man with sleeve tattoos roared with laughter at something the shift lead, a petite Hispanic woman wearing a baseball cap through which her long brown ponytail stuck out at the back, said.


The shift lead saw Jimenez and shook her head at him. He walked away.

When was the last time he had had cake? Real cake with layers, cut into pieces. Last year when he had been here, he had not been able to attend the monthly birthday party held in the auditorium because he had been in restraints the day before for telling the shift lead he would stick a shotgun up her ass. They served cake at those parties, he heard. He wondered what flavor he had missed.


Strawberry cake. That was the last kind of cake he had eaten before all this happened. Before he went into that gas station for cigarettes. Before the man behind the counter started yelling at him. Before the cops showed up. Before he tried to explain to them all about the Eye in the Sky and that no, of course the Eye in the Sky wasn’t why he was stealing cigarettes, he was stealing cigarettes because he was hungry and cigarettes were what would sell – the gas station had so many that it wouldn’t matter if he took a few. Before they laid hands on him. Before he knew, upon their touch, that they were only pretending to be cops, that they were robots in disguise who knew he was Jesus Christ and were sent to kill him, and before, like any other person would have, he fought them. Before he was crushed beneath their weight and before he was in the back of their car and before he was behind bars and before they decided he was crazy. Before they stamped him with the label “incompetent to stand trial,” as if that meant anything, and sent him to this place, where they kept telling him he failed, failed, failed. Every damn test he took, he failed. He had eaten other things that had been called “cakes” since then, and they had been good in their way, but that one, the one before all this, had been the last true cake. There were real strawberries on it, he remembered. They were sweet.

He was hungry. They didn't feed them enough here. That, and they poisoned the meat, so he couldn't eat the meat. They poisoned the water too, but there was no good way to avoid that.


He liked water.


He knocked on a door. He didn't look at the name on it. He would find out who it was once it opened. It did not open. He knocked on the next one.


A face appeared at the window, beatific, a glowing moon between clouds. It was Miss Nguyen. The clinicians were the only one who called her that. The others called her Nguyen or Eric or Mr. Nguyen. Miss Nguyen didn't like that but what could she do? She still had a penis even though she was taking pills to make her breasts grow and keep her beard from coming in. Jimenez had seen it, the penis, during showers once, before Miss Nguyen demanded to take her showers last and apart from the men. They had to appease her, legally.


"Hey," Jimenez said. He didn't know what name to use, so he left it at that.


"Hey," Miss Nguyen said. She did not open the door.


"Do you have any food I can have? I can pay you back."


"Pay me back how?"

"When I get my money, I'll pay you back." They all got $12.50 on the books every month as indigents.


"When do you get your money?"


"I don't know."


Miss Nguyen rolled her eyes.


"I'll be back, ok?"


He went to the nurse's station and knocked. The squat Filipino man with jagged black sleeve tattoos answered the door. He was an RN, that Jimenez knew, but he had forgotten his name. Staff came and went on this unit, a lot of overtimes and floats from other units. Regular staff were hardly ever here. It wasn't like this the last unit he was on. He missed the other unit. Miss Tammy especially had been nice.


"When do I get my money again?"


The man squinted at him.


"You're not trading and bartering, are you?"


"What does that mean?" In these cases it was best to play dumb.


"We've been watching you knock on doors. And now you're asking about money." JFC. These assholes.“


Never mind,” he said. As he walked away he could hear the roar of laughter erupt from the nurse’s station. Booming, shrieking. Dimly, the memory of kids spitting at him in the playground and laughing laughing laughing bobbed to the surface of his frantic mind and sank almost immediately. It left, however, a film.

His room, a six-by-twelve foot cell with cream-colored walls, was bare and smelled of old sweat. He didn’t like being in here too long because the woman and the child got even louder, in fact he believed they were living in the walls, but he didn’t feel like being out there anymore either. Didn’t they understand he needed to gain about seventeen more pounds? No one was scared of him here. He was scared of everyone.


There was a knock on the door. He looked out the window. It was the old light-skinned black guy, the one with pale eyes.


“What do you want?” Jimenez said.


The man smiled, the edges of his eyes crinkling.


“I heard you were hungry,” he said.


Jimenez opened the door. The man had a package of honey buns in his hand. He proffered it to Jimenez. Jimenez took it, then remembered to look out the door and down the hall. The staff were still in the nurse’s station, busy with their party. They had not noticed.


“Hey, thanks, man,” Jimenez said. “I mean it, I owe you.”


The man was still smiling.


“Welcome to the club,” he said.


But Jimenez was already busy tearing open the package.

#

He had finished the honey buns by that night. His stomach roiled. Maybe he shouldn’t have eaten the chili colorado at dinner, but the staff would have gotten suspicious otherwise.


There was a knock on his door. JFC, staff were always ready to give him a hard time, but then he remembered he had eaten all evidence of wrongdoing. He went to the door. It was the old man, hazel eyes almost yellow under the turned-down lights.


“Ready?” The man was still smiling.


The NOC shift lead, a heavyset white man with tufts of gray hair sticking out from beneath his ballcap, was watching them from the nurse’s station. The old man met his gaze and smiled. The shift lead flinched and looked away. The old man beckoned Jimenez to the bathroom.

The bathroom reminded Jimenez of autopsy rooms in movies. It had the same kind of lighting, harsh yet somehow dim at the same time, and the walls and floor were a dingy shade of green that seemed to welcome a splash of blood or two. There were three black stalls with black doors. The man beckoned him into the back stall. They crowded into it. They were both thin and the door closed against Jimenez’s back, cool through the worn fabric of his T-shirt, as he tried to keep as much distance from the man as possible while still complying. Which was about a finger-width apart.

“Now,” the man said. He put his head atop Jimenez’s head and pushed. Jimenez sank to his knees before him. The man unzipped and lowered his pants and boxers.

Jimenez looked down for a breath. The floor looked like it was tiled in filthy Chiclets this up close. He looked up again and thought about strawberry cake.

It had been his birthday. No, not his birthday. His sister’s birthday. He was young then, so much younger than he was now. The cake was spongy and light and the color of a cloud on a mostly sunny day. They had gotten it from Chinatown, they said. “They” were his family. Or were his family then. He had had so many families, and somehow none of them had been real. There was a mother, he had forgotten her name, and a father too. And many siblings. They had been nice, maybe the nicest he had known. Joey Jim-en-ess, they called him. They bought him Ninja Turtle sneakers and taught him how to play baseball. If he could choose from his many families a family to call his real one, he would choose them.


The man’s breath above him hitched. Jimenez’s mouth filled with bitter liquid. He swallowed reflexively.


“You could have spit that out, you know.” The old man sounded disgusted.


“I didn’t think of that,” Jimenez said.


They went out into the hall. The NOC shift lead was staring steadily at his computer screen. The old man walked toward his room without a word or a look at Jimenez.


“Hey, wait a minute,” Jimenez said.


“What?” The old man kept walking.


“I want to talk to you about something.”


The old man sighed and turned around.


“Do you have any Snickers? Or Mars bars? Or what about Three Musketeers?”


“Of course. Those do cost more than the honey buns, you know.”


“I can pay you back.”


The old man smiled. “We will be in touch. Good night.”


Jimenez paced the hall before the NOC shift lead came out and told him he wasn’t allowed to pace on NOC shift. Jimenez didn’t mind. He would try being compliant for once, how about that? He ducked his head and went into his room.


The walls of his room were quiet tonight. The man’s voice had not returned yet. Maybe he would never return, and maybe not the woman or the child either. What would life be like then? He normally never thought about things like that. Like life. He got into the narrow bed and pulled the thin blanket over his head so that the light from the hall was at least somewhat filtered. The blanket trapped the sour smell of his feet. He was in a cocoon of feet and breath. He tried to find comfort in that. He was in a cocoon, a little bug. Hush little baby, go to sleep. Only those weren’t the right words. What were they? Hush little baby, don’t you. Something. His face was wet and hot. What was going on? A sound like a strangled cat happened in his throat. Hush, hush, hush.