/lit/ - Literature

Along comes Zachary, creeping noisily up on the high central dome with its flanking campaniles in which no bells have ever rung, as they are only disguised ventilation shafts designed to suck the rotten fetor from the asylum . . . Along comes Zachary . . . avoiding the unseeing eyes of the tarnished bronze statue that hides behind some forsythia – a young man clearly hebephrenic . . . his face immobile forever in its suffering, the folds of his clothing plausibly heavy . . . for he looks altogether weighed down by existence itself. Along comes Zachary . . . chomping beside the arched windows now, and the arched doorways, and then the arched windows again. He admits himself into this monumental piece of trompe l’œil not by the grand main doors – which are permanently bolted – but by an inconspicuous side one – and this is only right, as it begins the end of the delusion that he will encounter some Foscari or Pisani, whereas the reality is: a low banquette covered with dried-egg vinyl, and slumped upon this a malefactor, his face – like those of so many of the mentally ill – a paradoxical neoplasm, the agèd features just this second formed to quail behind a defensively raised shoulder. A hectoring voice says, You will be confined to your ward and receive no allowance this week, DO YOU UN-DER-STAND? Oh, yes, I understand well enough . . . which is why he continues apace, not wishing to see any more of this routine meanness . . . Along comes Zachary – and along a short corridor panelled with damp chipboard, then down some stairs into the lower corridor. Along comes Zachary – and along – he has clutched his briefcase to his chest, unfastened it, and now pulls his white coat out in stiff little billows. You’ll be needing one, Busner, Whitcomb had said – a jolly arsehole, his long face a fraction: eyes divided by moustache into mouth – else the patients’ll think . . . Think what? Think what?! But the consultant’s attention span was so short he had lost interest in his own phrase and fallen to reaming the charred socket of his briar with the end of a teaspoon, the fiddly task performed inefficiently on the knobbly topy tops of his knock-knees. – Why were the staffroom chairs all too low or too high? Along comes Zachary – and along . . . his splayed shoes crêping along the floor, sliding across patches of lino, slapping on stone-flagged sections, their toes scraping on the ancient bitumen – wherever that was exposed. Scrrr-aping. He wonders: Who would dream of such a thing – to floor the corridors, even the wards, of a hospital with a road surface? Yet there is a rationale to it – a hectoring, wheedling, savage rationale – that explains itself via the voices that resound inside the patients’ bony-stony heads, their cerebral corridors and cortical dormitories . . . because these are roadway distances – a hundred yards, a hundred feet, a hundred more, a North Circular of the soul. No signs