In the state hospital, time doesn’t flow, it doesn’t fly, it doesn’t tick or tock itself away. It stumbles down the hallway like a blind patient with a missing leg, uncertain of each step, fearful of what awaits, indecisive, out of place. Time is incontinent, unpredictable, then constipated. It falls into a room like the unbidden guest, then stands around waiting its next turn like an adolescent at a sock hop. Time is convulsive. 

Finding youknowwho proved to be more difficult than Head Nurse Peters expected. He wasn’t in his room or the Social Activities room or the tv room or the men’s ward or any of the men’s toilets situated along the long hallway that connected the various wings of the hospital.

On a hunch, Day Nurse Boogey even checked the women’s ward, because she had once secretly met with him there, to deliver a stolen cell phone. But no youknowwho was to be found.

“Time’s running out!” Peters called to her staff. “There’s only so many places he can be hiding. Find youknowwho now!”

To Nurse Peters, time is a unruly child. She can never get it to do quite what she wants it to. She expects it to show up, and it doesn’t. She wishes it would slow down when it bolts beyond her grasp. And though she yell herself hoarse, time pays her no never-you-mind.

“I don’t think he’s inside the hospital,” Nurse Boogey told Nurse Peters.

“He’s not on the grounds,” Peters said. “They’ve checked the grounds. North Quad, South Quad and every courtyard in between. They even checked the off-limits area behind the car pool. He’s not outside.” Peters looked at her Day Nurse. “And Nurse Boogey, when we’ve eliminated the impossibe solutions, what can we conclude?”

“That the remaining solution,” Nurse Boogey recited from memory, “no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

“Ergo?” Nurse Peters prompted.

“Ergo,” the Day Nurse repeated, “he must be inside,” then quickly added, “but he isn’t!”

“He has to be!” Peters shouted in her face. “Not another word! Find him!”

Day Nurse Boogey reluctantly departed to search the women’s ward, again.

To the orderlies and shift nurses, time is an arbitrary task master, commanding them to go here and there and back again, whipping them into a frenzy, then ignoring them, letting them languish in lassitude before the next foot race.

So they languished. And they waited. And still no sighting of the mysterious youknowho.

Time, to the patients on the other hand, is a remote concept, something the nurses are in control of, a mysterious thread that ties one event to the next without ever revealing how those events relate. Time eludes most patients, confounds them, and keeps them locked in their rooms long after they have awakened in the morning and long before they wish to retire in the evening. Time is cruel.

But for a few, the lucky few, time doesn’t exist.

Clocks don’t tick, second hands don’t sweep, LED numerals don’t change, and the shadows criss-crossing the hospital floors are the result not of the rotation of the earth, nor the rise and fall of some mythical orbiting sun, but rather ghosts from a past that has collapsed into the present, leaving today and tomorrow and yesterday shuffled together like playing cards.

Time, for these few, is timeless. The game is suspended, the score perpetually tied, played out in an infinity of extra innings, no clock to stop it as in other sports, no curfews to curtail it, an endless string of zeroes across all the innings of … well, not time, no.

All the innings … of life.

Youknowwho sat theydon’tknowwhere for whoknowshowlong and contemplated the timelessness of baseball.

In the beginning, he thought, was baseball. And baseball rolled up centuries of history until somewhere deep in the past, but not quite at the beginning, he began to remember it, remember teams and players and records and scores. Those memories piled up in a heap so tall he could never see over it, or around it, or see all sides of it, but could only see a portion of the whole heap at a time, a fraction, a mere grain of sand on the endless beach of baseball. Yet all those grains of sand were part of the past and Now, this fleeting present we can never hold still, Now was a new and different grain of sand and every Now another grain, the grains piling up so fast he couldn’t keep track, couldn’t count, and before he knew it, he’d lost count.

The present grains adding to the pile of past grains in a collection of sand so massive he could never hope to understand it.

That’s how timeless baseball was. In the beginning, is now, and forever shall be. Baseball without end. Ah, man, he was losing it again.

He opened his eyes. He saw nothing.

His mind was playing tricks. Doing the old didgeridoo, the Convulsive Two-Step, the now-you-remember-it, now-you-don’t.

He had to focus. He held his hand up.

“Had enough?” a voice asked.

“Enough?” he echoed as he squinted to see his hand.

“Good,” the voice said and the room went silent.

“What was that?” he asked.

“I said ‘good,’” the voice replied.

“No,” he said, “what was, what is … this silence?”

“Whadda you mean?”

“Suddenly it’s all so silent, like …” He had no idea what it was like.

“Like a great humming was turned off?” the voice prompted.

“Exactly! Like the before was turned off and what is left is …”

“I turned off the machine,” the voice said. And then a face swung into view.

The face of the voice he wondered?

“The machine,” the voice said and the face moved its lips in time with the sound. “Don’t want to do too much. ‘Sides, they’re looking for us. Time to get outa here.”

With that the face turned away, busying itself with something else, and he lay there, his eyes beginning to focus. He recognized the ceiling, the white acoustic tiles with their different sized holes and the suspended flourescent lights, and the borders of the room, where ceiling met wall, lined with tubing and power cables that brought electricity inside the adobe walls of a building built before electrical power was available out here in the boonies, miles from the sleepy pueblo called Camarillo.

He remembered all of that, recognized it in the ceiling and walls, and if he remembered that then maybe he remembered more. Maybe he could remember when they put him in here, and why. And if he could figure out why, he could figure out what he had to do to get out.

And that, he suddenly remembered with a flash brighter than the flash of the shock machine, was why he was in here now. Why he convinced this orderly to help him. So he could remember. And get out.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Here to serve,” the orderly said. “At least that’s what Nurse Peters keeps telling us. We’re here to serve the patients.” He guffawed. “Like she ever served anyone or anything but her own sweet self.”

“Your name,” he asked.

“My name,” the orderly repeated, and his face appeared again.

“I don’t know your name.”

The orderly smiled. “May be better that way,” he said, then laughed again. “Ah, what the hell. No one’s gonna believe you anyway! Name’s Brad. Can you ‘member that?”

He nodded. At least, he tried to nod. It felt like he nodded. But his head still felt disconnected, so he wasn’t sure.

“‘Member your name?” the orderly asked.

It washed over him like a gentle wave, a timeless wave, tumbling him in the circular path of the water particles, over and over, like a front-loading washing machine, around and around, up and down, a timeless tumbling, over and over, and then it washed him right up on the shore.

Of memory.

“Bob,” he said. Then after a moment, he added, “At least, I think that’s …”

“No, you got it,” the orderly said. “Bob and Brad. The Bad Boys of Camarillo. The B&B Boys. Wacha!”

Two knocks sounded on the door.

“That’s our cue,” Brad said. “Hallway’s clear. Let’s roll.”

The whole room started to spin, then slide off in one direction, until he realized it wasn’t the room that was moving, but the guerney he lay on.

“Who …?”

“Standing lookout for us?” Brad asked. “Your Day Nurse. She’s sweet on you.”

The door yawned open, the guerney clattered over the threshold, the familiar color of the off-white hallway walls came into view, the wheels clattered, the bed trembled, doorways ticked by, and Brad and Bob and their guerney descended the long sloping hallway of Camarillo State Hospital, from the Electroshock Therapy Room past the Recovery Room and the janitor’s closet, past the women’s ward and the private rooms, down and down the slope toward the wing that held the Men’s Ward, the guerney wheels dancing down the cement hallway, lights swinging by madly, the trio of boys and bed bouncing down the descent, picking up speed, a guerney sheet flapping in the breeze, until Brad stopped pushing and just climbed on for the rest of the ride, rollercoastering the length of the hospital, faces flush, hands gripped tightly, eyes wide open as the wall at the end of the hall began to fall toward them, the patient laughing aloud, the orderly crying out “Geronimo!” as the rush of speed and the flush of cool air brought youknowwho and his accomplice crashing into the impenetrable wall of Time.