In the Beginning (excerpt 2 from Bob's PEBA novel)

[Arroyos]

Chapter 10: In the Beginning

In the beginning was baseball.
And baseball was the world.
And the world was in a baseball.

He said it over and over, trying to extract every ounce of meaning he could. “In the beginning was baseball …”
But he had no idea what it meant or why those sentences—and not others—kept sounding in his brain like some pop tune you can’t stop hearing. Is that why they thought he was crazy? Because he had some nonsense phrases stuck in his head instead of music?
He knew where he was and he knew when they’d brought him here, last night, so he must know how long he’d been here. But he wasn’t sure. He thought he would made a mark on the floorboard beneath his bed, one for each day he was here, somewhere they wouldn’t find it and where they couldn’t erase it. His record. His journal. His reminder, to himself, to escape from this hell. But when he leaned over his bed tomake the first mark, he discovered dozens of them, already there.

IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII II

Had he made them? Had he been here that long? Or had someone else …? And if so, who? And why? And … and … but he’d lost the train of his thought, it chugged right through the station without stopping.
He was lying face down on his bed, looking at the floor underneath the bed, and he was looking for … what was he looking for? He had no idea. Another sentence lost in the foggy recesses of his brain.
If they found his daily record, they’d know. They’d realize. That he had a plan. But first … first … What was first again? It had slipped away from him and disappeared into the fog. So he returned to the beginning and started over.

In the beginning was baseball.
And baseball …

The drilling next door would drive him crazy, if he wasn’t already. Is it part of the therapy? he wondered. Do they do it to make sure we’re all crazy? Or do crazy-making noises like that manage, in some crazy way, to make crazy people un-crazy?
Stop thinking crazy, he said to himself. Or out loud. He couldn’t always tell the difference.
He had no answers, and the questions were making him restless, so he wandered out of the tiny room he shared with another guy and down the hall to what was called the Social Activities Room. But there was rarely anything social going on in it. Standing just outside the room, he could see two men older than he was, more like 70 than 60, sitting in two corners of the room, watching. They were there from just after breakfast to lights out, sitting, watching, waiting. But waiting for what?
Across the room from the old men sat two women, one an ancient crone who rarely uttered more than one syllable, but whose head kept bouncing to the rhythm of her companion’s sentences like some manic bobblehead doll.
“He’ll save you from all this, I know he will, just put your faith in him,” the crone’s companion was saying. She was a corpulent woman in a flower print dress that exaggerated her size and made her look like some sort of huge shrubbery shaking in the breeze. Only there wasn’t any breeze in the Activities Room, not usually.
He stepped inside the room to make sure, to confirm that, as usual, the air in the room was as still as the corpses in the basement morgue.
Okay, he said to himself, I don’t know there are corpses down there, but they’ve got to take them somewhere. He imagined they had to keep them out of sight until some family member or maybe the coroner picked them up and moved them to their final resting place. I should go check, he thought, but when the fat lady sang her same old tune he forgot about the morgue.
“Let him come into your life, sister,” the fat lady wearing shrubbery crooned in a voice loud enough to be heard in a baseball stadium. He’d heard such voices, he remembered such voices. Like the young guy in Yuma who yelled “Swing, battuh!” with every pitch until his voice gave out, usually in the fourth or fifth inning. Oh, but the one that really got to him, cracked him up actually, was the middle age man who stood up in the middle of the  second inning (always the second—why?) and shouted in a voice you could have heard in the ninth circle of hell:

“PITCHER’S GOT A RUBBER DUCKY!”

He chuckled now, thinking about it. What did it mean? What made the guy do it? Every home game? Why? Didn’t matter, it made him laugh, even now, and his chuckle was heard in the Activities Room. We should give that guy a season ticket, he thought. Do that, he made a note, as soon as you get back to … to where? The fog threatened on the edges of consciousness.
The Fat Lady stopped talking and gave him such a look he forgot what he was thinking. She pointed at him, the flesh under her arms shaking as she spoke, “Jesus is no laughing matter, old man. Salvation is no joke.”
It was the “old man” that got him. When had he become old? Had he always been old? He tried to remember, but the fog in his brain rose up again and threatened to swallow him whole.

In the beginning was baseball.
And baseball was the world …

He shuffled across the room, nearer the Nurses’ Station, where he saw Dotty sitting. Desperate Dotty, he’d overheard one of the orderlies call her. She greeted everyone who entered her limited visual range with a smile, a cliché pickup line, and the offer of her hand. He crossed the room and there it was, her hand, waiting to be squeezed or kissed maybe, connected to her forced smile by an arm as thin and fragile-looking as chicken bones. “Hello, handsome,” Dotty said with a slight Southern accent, “where’ve you been hiding all my life?”
That surprised him. He’d never heard that one before, and he thought he’d heard all of Dotty’s pick-up lines. Lines like “Heh, Sugar, whatcha got for me?” and “Unseasonably warm weather we’re having, isn’t it?” and “Howdy, stranger, you’re not from around these parts, are you?” There were a couple others he’d heard maybe once, maybe long ago—if he’d been here that long. Had he? Who knew. Either way, he’d forgotten which he’d already heard and he assumed Dotty had forgotten as well because she hadn’t repeated them since. But this one, calling him “handsome” and flirting with the “where have you been all my life” line was new to him. Was it new to Dotty as well? Did she pick these phrases up from others? Who from? There were damn few visitors to this hospital, or sanitarium, or retreat—whatever  euphemism you wanted to substitute for what it really was, the Funny Farm—and what few visitors there were never had occasion to use pickup lines, at least not the type Dotty was inclined to utter.
“Hi, Dotty,” he said, because he knew how common it was in this place to be ignored. And he knew how it felt, like a fist to the gut. You ached. Doctors and nurses, orderlies and Candy Stripers could come and go all day long and never see you, never hear you, until it drove you to doubt your own existence. Am I really here? Am I still alive? Is this one of the circles of Dante’s Hell?
When those thoughts began pounding on his brain with more ferocity than the sound of the pneumatic drills on the walls next door, he would recite his mantra over and over, until the interior thumping quieted enough that he could actually think about the exterior noise.

In the beginning was baseball.
And baseball was the world.
And the world …

Inside, the hammering quieted. Outside, the hammering paused. And in the momentary silence he could hear Dotty. She was saying something to him.
“Gunner’s back.”
Gunner? Really? He’s off the DL? His heart leapt at the thought. His pulse quickened. He smiled and said, “That’s the first good news I’ve heard this week.” Dotty smiled back.
“Would a gentleman care to accompany a lady to the cafeteria this evening?”
“Sure, but … why? I mean … why now, Dotty?”
“Gunner’s back,” she said again. Or did she?
As his pulse slowed, his brain kicked on again. Did she say “Gunner”? How would she know when a ballplayer comes off the DL? It’s not like she gets the Yuma Sun here. And if she did, they’d confiscate it. No newspapers, that was the policy. Don’t want to stir up the natives.
So how’d she know? And why would Desperate Dotty, who’s been stuck in this place for years, know who Gunner MacGruder was? The more he thought about it, the less sense it made. Yet he wanted to believe. Gunner, pitching again.

In the beginning was baseball.
Baseball now and forever.
Amen.

“Would you?” Dotty was asking.
“Would I what?”
“Escort a lady to dinner, silly.”
Dinner, he remembered. “Of course, Dotty, I’d be honored.” He knelt beside Dotty’s chair. “If you’ll do me a little favor.”
“Oh, a lady doesn’t just hand out favors to every Tom, Dick and Harry, you know.”
“I know, Dotty, but this one’s important. You said Gunner’s back. How’d you know?”
Dotty looked downright conspiratorial as her eyes scanned the room and she gestured for him to lean in closer. Then she whispered, “I have my sources.”
“So I’ve heard,” he whispered back to her. “Would you tell me—your evening escort remember—which source told you about Gunner?”
“Not gunners, silly. Gummers.”
He looked at her, puzzled.
“Gummers, you know, the sweet chewy little—”
“Gummies? Like gummy bears?” he blurted out, crestfallen.
“You don’t have to shout it out,” Dotty chastised him. “We don’t want everyone to know. There’s not enough to go around. I just love the way they chew, and when they stick to my dentures, oh, well, the nurses get so angry and they tell me I can’t have anymore, but pooh! on them, that’s what I say, I’m not giving up …”
He stopped listening. Gummy bears! Damnit all! For a moment, one brief shining moment, he felt strong enough to walk out of here, just walk right out and catch a cab to the ballpark to see Gunner pitch. That boy was his shining hope, the brightest catch of all his first round draft picks, and on days when the fog rolled in thick as soup, it was that kid’s left arm that kept him from drowning.

In the beginning was baseball.
And baseball was his world.

The fog was coming. There was nothing he could do. The fog came, the fog conquered. Best not to fight it, best to let it come, wait for it to pass. But hold on to something, something to keep you afloat, something to let you know you’re still alive, something …

In the beginning was baseball.

He held on.

[Borealis]

Super Exciting!!

[Arroyos]

Super Exciting!!

Merci, mon ami.