the call of the wild

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The Call of the Wild

In the morning they came with the medicines. The pills were pink and blue and yellow, variegated, and sometimes the capsules were multicolored. These were doled out by the lab-coated charge nurse, who extracted the tablets from white, plastic bottles or from cards of silver foil. The patients were clad in pajamas, and were bleary-eyed from too much sleep, too much of hell and sleeping pills, as they queued around the dispensing nurse for their morning dose.

Breakfast consisted of tea and two buttered slices of white bread. Chivers in the next bed would always open the day’s grim asides by remarking that he thought the electricity was doing him good.  Chivers always seemed to say that in the morning, but as the day advanced, or rather retreated into disarray, Chivers fled into the consolations of the silent, the remote, the recluse lost in the crowd. When he looked at Chivers, he felt that Chivers was trying to persuade himself that he was rising from his hole, telling himself that his hopelessness was not hopeless – not really.

He watched as the young, white-coated nurses painted cortisone creams on the big, black bedsores of the old men. These customers slept on plastic sheets, and he could smell their nighttime incontinences. The smells were everywhere, and these odours were lorded over by the whiff of fear, and when he studied the dense, tense faces of his fellow sufferers, he saw all of mortality written in their blank stares. Their skins were oily, pallid and white with anxiety, and they hunched about the ward, carrying the weight of ten worlds on their curved shoulders.

The days seemed to pass in slow-motion tension, in quanta of boredoms, in long stretches where ennui and melancholy dragged the jagged forms of their caricatured selves almost as far as the graveyard wails. When someone’s clock sounded the hour, it made them look up as if it were the last post, or the coming of doom on the last day. Hope was a dead man, and love was a mere corpse, which was cadaverous and rotten to the core. Yet, they had faith of a sort. They took their coloured chemicals and bent their buttocks for injections that they knew squirted something exotic up through the muscles of their rear cheeks.

Chivers swore the new drug that he had been given was doing him good. It was the best thing yet, thanks be to God, and the clever doctor.  Later that week, he watched as Chivers held his head between his two hands and wept a silent requiem for the life he once had. He liked to read, and The Call of the Wild was his favourite book. That’s why he liked dogs, and he said that his dream holiday would be to traverse the snows alone with a sled and a pack of dogs. He liked snow because it was white, pristine, virginal. It wasn’t like the world which was slushy, dark and treacherous. He didn’t need people; he just wanted sleds and dogs. Dogs were good, and they loved with an unconditional love. And dogs were faithful - not like his ex-wife. His tears were as copious as the waterfalls in the toilet urinals, which seeded the atmosphere in the ward with stale urine, smelling like a cattery of untrained moggies had invaded the place. Indeed, the abiding theme of the non-drama was the stench of urine, and the smell of Jeyes fluid haunted him as it ran its rogue programme into those neural circuits, which lay hidden and unseen behind the bony pillbox of the skull.

The ward consisted of two rows of beds facing across a wide aisle, and the gods of that place strode down it in their morning rituals, going the twenty yards from the door to the nurses station at the end, clad in their suits and suitable ties, ready to dispense with strokes of their pens. The beds were tightly made, and the sheets were stiff with starch, and they bore the blue and white logo of the Health Authority. The doctors came mostly in the mornings on their rounds. Sometimes they just checked the files and the nightly reports, or they filled in another chapter of someone’s foggy saga, took some notes on the domestic wars that riddled the denizens there with ill feeling, or they wrote someone up for a higher dose, or for a different coloured tablet, another form of the chemical armoury. When a patient was called in to be examined or questioned, the pajama clad person hastily pulled on a pair of shoes or slippers and entered the holy presence with relish and hope alive in their wilting selves. Hope rose and fell during the long days that ran into interminable and anonymous time.  Time ran into the months, and he observed the passage of winds and rains and snows with increasing restlessness and agitation, rising from the depths of a sea where no light could enter and where the pressure could squash anything. That’s when Chivers went missing, absent without leave. The nurses rushed about, checking the toilets, trying to see where the fugitive from treatment had gotten to. When all the searches were done, it was clear that Chivers had gone. It seemed that Chivers’ tension had transferred to the staff. They looked worried, and the tans that had lately come from Tenerife, Malaga, Lanzarote or from a local sun bed were lined with ruts and cuts and crow’s claws, as if a tiny donkey and cart had wheeled up that way along their faces. Chiver was the donkey and the cart, and Chivers had escaped the best scrutiny.

The news came later in the week, spreading from mouth to mouth, casting darkness further into the shadows and the badlands of psychosis. Had Chivers finally agreed with himself? He had felt that he was hopeless, but feelings were not always fact - not always. This time must have been different. Chivers had lost faith in chemistry and electricity, lost faith in the world and human existence. He had agreed with his hopeless mind.

He heard the funeral bell coming from the little church on the hospital grounds.  Grief and sadness and remorseless anguish had taken their prey, and Chivers clock had chimed out, never to be rewound. All that remained was the stench of urine, the quiet, normal routine, and Chivers’ perfectly made and empty bed. The call of the wild had untamed him – finally.

He looked out the big window and saw the first snowflakes of winter falling, drifting lazily to the ground, staining its dry surfaces, disappearing into the lonely light of half-light, and the mourners coming from the chapel seemed like aliens who were lost in a universe that they couldn’t understand