my notes on the early
dutch renaissance

There were pent-up feelings. I was nineteen and I thought that storming out of Alaska on a mountain bike might solve all my problems. And, you know, if things had gone a little differently, maybe it would have. But from where I sit right now—the rec room at the Snake River Mental Health Center—it seems like it might be some time before I get to pick back up again. 
          At the moment, I’m parked at a card table with my fellow inmate Vivian, playing solitaire while she leafs through a book of Bruegel’s paintings with one hand; her other hand is resting, pretty squarely, on my balls. Nurse Rob, sitting under a clock across the room, hasn’t turned a page in his magazine for five whole minutes. My anxiety about all this is not insignificant. 
          Vivian, however, brings my attention to the painting she’s just opened, a busy panorama of cartoon-ass-looking people going about their business in a village.
          “This is one of my favorites. It’s titled Netherlandish Proverbs. Everything is a proverb.”
          “What do you mean?”
          “This guy,” she points, “is armed to the teeth. And this one is banging his head against the wall.”
          “Those were Netherlandish proverbs?”
          She nods. I point at two pairs of butt cheeks sticking out the side of a building, right next to each other. “These guys?” 
          “They poop through the same hole.” She gives me a quick, wet, Minnie-to-Mickey smooch, and though I can’t believe that’s a real proverb, I guess I get the idea.
          Nurse Rob’s eyebrows go all the way up. I blush, and make a show of putting a playing card down, but Vivian keeps her head leveled in Rob’s direction; she takes her time flipping over to the next page.
   

It might have been night six in the facility when my bedroom door swung open around midnight; I was a little freaked out. 
          “It’s me,” said Vivian, whom I’d talked to maybe three times at this point, and was the only other person close to my age. The sound of her voice didn't set off any alarm bells in my nervous system; if anything, on some level that I can't really explain, it did the opposite. “Can I come in?” she asked.
          “Uh, sure,” I said. 
          She closed the door behind her and sat on the edge of the bed. In the dark I could just barely see her looking at her hands, and then looking at me. She started to say something, and then stopped. After a moment I asked,  “What’s going on?” 
          “Can I touch your head?” 
          “Sure.” 
          She ran her fingers through my hair, back and forth, for a long while. I was too tired to say much. “That feels nice,” I said.
          “It’s okay if you fall asleep,” she said.
          If I was more awake I might have laughed. Instead, I think, I did fall asleep. I would have written it off as a dream if it hadn’t happened again. And that, more or less, is the story of what’s going on with me and Vivian.

 

In any case, I didn’t end up here, with Vivian, because I couldn't find someone to run their fingers through my hair out in the real world.
          I had bought the mountain bike, and shortly thereafter I found a trailer. It was at that point that I packed up my shit and told my parents I was leaving in two weeks. Neither was thrilled but that was the point. I was angry they’d moved to Ass End of No Place, Alaska, from the perfectly serviceable city of Victoria, BC when I was six years old, and then expected me to stay. No fucking way, man.
          I hit the road, camped as I went, and probably the highlight of the trip was holing up at Jerome’s place, a friend of a friend. This was in eastern Washington, where he ran his own farm with a bunch of other unwashed Washingtonian hippies, none of whom smelled as bad as you might expect. Jerome himself was a scruffy twenty-five-year-old with two missing front teeth. He and his crew lived in a ramshackle barn with a half-assed drywalling job that made for a few rooms, and you could see daylight through Jerome’s bedroom, but since it doesn’t get as frigid in Walla Walla as it does in Ass End of No Place, Alaska, no one really gives a shit. They let me stay for a couple days. We ate stew with vegetables from his farm and a rabbit that he’d found dead by the road. Jerome said that he and his friends ate fresh roadkill for the protein all the time, that with a rabbit it was almost Italian-style, cacciatore. This was a new experience for me.  It wasn’t bad.
          Add it all up and I had been down 1,700 miles of road by then. It had taken me 1,000 just to get out of AK. There was a lot of roughing it going on in the Alaskan wilds, a lot of meticulous planning because stops for food were 50, 60 miles apart. And then, you hit the coast, the grub is abundant and the bathrooms are porcelain but the white noise comes screaming back. A welcome improvement was the Columbia River Gorge. The 14 on the Washington side is a two lane road with waterfalls and hairpin curves that I mostly shared with rattling semi-trucks. If that didn’t shake the static, nothing would’ve. You better believe I was riding high when I rolled into Walla Walla, but eventually, after a couple days there, I still needed to see a little more.
          So, I boogied out of Jerome’s heading to Idaho. Went along the Snake, climbed Alpowa, went through Lewiston, and started my 170-mile ascent into Montana. There are a handful of towns in there, but for the most part it is thick forest. Not a bright-eyed, I’m-about-to-eat-the-whole-world-for-dinner hosteler in sight. On the second night I made camp in a clearing near some hot springs. I tried to build a fire, but failed. All the kindling was damp that side of the summit. Some people can make it work anyways. Reader, I'm not too proud to say: that wasn’t me. I ate my beans cold, with a little cheese, and settled in for the night.
          I kept hearing persistent little footfalls. Opossums, probably, and I’d hung my food, but you dance with enough of these, you learn to keep an eye on your drink. I stepped outside my tent to investigate, looked around with the flashlight and didn’t see anything right away. Then I heard a branch break behind me and knew I was dealing with something a lot bigger than a possum. My response system kicked in, thump-thump-thump in the ticker. 
          And then I go sprawling into a mass of roots. My head’s bleeding in the front and the back, and there’s a pain along my spine that I’m conscious of without exactly feeling. I look at what just hit me and I almost make my peace with becoming one with nature. This behemoth stares down at me with a face the shape of a horse’s and the expression of a goddamn dragon, and after about a precious second I understand that somebody has shaved a bear and—mother of shit—tattooed it. On its chest, there’s a skull and crossbones set over an American flag, with writing beneath it I can’t make out. Its paws, furless, almost look like hands—the claws more individuated, sticking out more. I roll away as it lunges at me.
          At this point, there’s time for one conscious thought, which is: hard fucking pass. And then that thought exits stage left once my fight or flight takes over. I stand up and scream at the bear, and I try to cross the thing over with my one middle school basketball skill, thinking, man, maybe I can break this thing’s ankles, and for a minute it looks good—it looks great. I’m off. And then I run smack into the arms of a bald man in a fishing vest with a bad mustache, who smiles at me before I go black. 

​

Events around here get fuzzy and I have stuff to do. We’re going sailing on the lake today and eating barbecued food. Vivian is talking to me about paintings again. This time it’s Big Fish Eats Little Fish, literally the most disturbing painting I’ve ever seen. We were looking at it in the common room fifteen minutes ago. It’s a gigantic fish stuffed with smaller fish which are in turn stuffed with smaller fish. Fishermen pull all the little fish out of the big fish, which by the looks of it has been killed and dragged ashore. Like I said, terrifying. We’re the last ones out of the van, walking over to the picnic area. Vivian is laying out her analysis, which concerns the reproduction of power dynamics, and it’s smart. Above my reading level. 
          “Did you major in art?” I ask. We haven’t talked about college—I don’t know if she went—though she has a college hoodie in her room that I’ve never seen her wear, only seen draped over a chair. 
          “I did my senior project on Bruegel. Do you think you’ll want to go to college?”
          “Should I want to?” 
          “It’s worth it, if you know what you want to study, which I did.”
          “Can you major in 80’s action movies?”
          “Humanities would be your best bet,” she says. “Maybe you should wait a couple years.”
          We amble up to the site, near a bigger lake than you think you’d find among the Alice-in-Wonderland world of rolling farmland that is the territory here in southeast Washington. Nurse Rob is setting up the grills with two of his colleagues. Me and Vivian walk over to help unpack picnic supplies while a few other nurses arrange a couple sailboats. 
          “Are we eating hotdogs today?” I ask. 
          “Burgers, Hank!” says Nurse Rob.
          Vivian puts her hand on my balls. Rob’s eyes widen, and one of the nurses nearby, Candace, clears her throat. 
          “I don’t know if you should be doing that, Viv.”
          “Why not?” she asks. 
          “Some of what we’re trying to do is help residents calibrate to the outside world. So, like, social norms. Norming.”
          “And this falls outside of that?”
          Nurse Candace squints and grimaces, putting a little Robert DeNiro into it, and turns up her palms. “Don’t you think so?” she asks.
          “If I weren’t in here, though, and I were in the comfort of my own home, would it be a big deal?” 
          “Of course not. But at some point the not-following-the-norms stops being the problem so much as the constantly flouting them.”
          “But if there’s no privacy here, then how can anybody have any intimacy without it being a transgression of these ‘norms’ you’re talking about?”
          Candace acknowledges the point with a nod of her head. “This might not be a great space for that, but it’s not meant to be a permanent space either.”
          “Do you understand how that’s a deeply unsatisfying answer to somebody who’s been here over a year?” she asks.
          “Yes,” Candace says. “I do.”
          Vivian’s hand drifts away from my junk and towards Candace, for a handshake. 
          “Oh . . . I’m good,” Candace says, and laughs uncomfortably. Vivian allows herself a cackle. 
          “Alright hey!” I say. “Let’s sail! Looking forward to the burgers, Rob!” 
          “They’re gonna be good, man,” he says, returning about 50% of my enthusiasm.
          As we walk away, Viv’s hand drifts closer to my junk again, and I can tell the new nurse, Marie, hates this whole thing. She just transferred in from another facility, and she doesn’t want to negotiate with terrorists. But she defers to Rob and Candace, higher up the food chain. My thumbnail sketch is, Rob and Candace are a little wary about this situation but aren’t code red on it. Marie seems to see something else, probably because of her own previous experience; I’m not sure where that leaves me and Vivian, or what we should do.
          “Why’d you do that?” she asks.
          “Do what?”
          “Do the panicked bro thing with Rob and start walking away?”
          “My tolerance for that level of awkwardness is lower than yours, I think.” 
          “It might have been better if we had hashed it out a little more.”
          “Maybe,” I say.  
          By this point, the boats are ready, and me and Vivian and Nurse Mike, the young guy on the staff, hop on one and I help with the operation of the sail, taking orders from the nurse, and it feels good to be blown free on the water. It feels good to see trees and waves. Vivian dips her hand in the water, making a cut into the surface of the pond, and it looks like it feels like the best thing in the world, so I do the same. 
          And it does. The cold water feels real, perfect. Vivian locks eyes with me. Neither of us has to say anything. One of her hands finds mine. We smooch. 
          Her other hand splashes onto my side, which startles me, and it’s cold at first, and a little unpleasant, but then I feel her warmth through my wet shirt, and I keep kissing her, and she kisses me back, and a little tongue happens, and that’s when Nurse Mike pipes up. 
          “Whoa, guys, enough, whoa, we need to sail, Hank I need your help,” he says. “Guys.” He puts a gentle hand on my shoulder and another on Vivian’s and we have to stop. Vivian smiles at me before giggling and looking off at the water, and I have to laugh too.
          “That’s discrimination,” I say. “You just don’t like watching the inmates kissing.” Vivian’s eyes sharpen in my direction. Her expression is pleasantly surprised.
          “You know, I happen to think you’re a very capable sailing assistant, Hank, and really I just need your help,” he says.
          “Thanks,” I say. 
          “I mean it,” he says. “You have a knack. And if you and Vivian want to get lost in the broom closet sometime I’ll look the other way.”
          “I’m sure you will,” I say, “because you hate looking at it so much.”
          Mike buries his face in the palm of his hand, and Vivian laughs.
          We set our bearing towards shore; we make landfall. We eat burgers and chips and French onion dip. Vivian puts her hand on my balls again and shoves her hamburger into my mouth. It’s a perfect day.

​

I woke up sore in my chest and my back. My feet felt heavy, and when I reached to feel my ankles I realized they were in manacles. In the weeks since, just thinking about it, it’s been enough to send my ticker from normal to two hundred in the space of a minute. 
          I was in a cellar—a little light streamed through from the door—and there was nothing down there but bones and the smells of rotting meat, cold wet stone, and, humiliatingly, my own shit. 
          Obviously, there were hours of blind terror. I couldn’t tell you how long. Eventually, the human mind adapts. You start to problem solve. I ran through different scenarios in my mind and tried to see if there was some means of thinking my way out of this. My frame of reference was mostly Silence of the Lambs and Lethal Weapon. Persistence seemed to be the main theme.
          Most of these thoughts evaporated sometime later, when my captor brought me company; the shaved bear, whom I heard more than saw, walking with soft steps, probably feeling the tranquilizer at that point as much as I had been earlier. He chained him up to the other side of the basement, but gave him enough slack that he could just about reach me, unless I pressed myself up to the wall. That much became clear after about an hour. He also brought me a bowl of water, which he placed in front of me without saying anything. 
          And so, the guy leaves and an hour later I’m pressed to the wall and the bear’s taking swings, pulling against its chains, pushing its face out towards me, and it goes on for an hour and a half or a day, and I’m crying, really grieving my existence at this point, and eventually—finally—the shaved bear gives up on the lunging and hunkers into the corner, taking deeper, ragged breaths.

 

You should, ah, let me tell you about my burgeoning relationship with the game of solitaire. I had never thought much about it until they gave me a deck of cards, here, at the center, and almost nothing else. I’d opened it up on my PC like twice before coming here and couldn’t figure it out. But, I gotta say, I’ve become decent at it since. I’m playing again now, while Vivian sits next to me, sipping a large glass of orange juice, paging through Bruegel.
          “Today, I wanna talk about one of my favorite aspects of PB’s work.”
          “Oh?”
          “The way he depicts children, what they mean, morally, in his paintings.”
          Vivian flips through a half-dozen paintings in her over-sized book and makes a case for Bruegel as an “idiosyncratic moralist,” who sees kids as agents of innocent chaos, which in Bruegel’s view isn’t great, but is superior to the bogus institutions they grow up to create. Part of my interest in what she’s saying could be because she’s holding my balls through my pants the way a pitcher holds a change-up, but that’s definitely not all of it—I can smell what she’s stepping in. Every now and then she gives me a little extra squeeze, and I make the kind of involuntary sound that you make when these things happen, and then I laugh uncomfortably.
I can basically feel Nurse Marie’s eyes boring into me at this point. She’s wondering how I’m going to handle this, and I have no idea how, but I also suspect that none of this is that big a deal. Eventually, she makes up her mind and walks over.
          “You guys can’t do that,” she says from across the table.
          “Alright,” I say. “Viv, we should stop.” 
          “Vivian, you don’t need to touch Henry there all the time. It doesn’t make him like you any more or less when you do that or when you don’t.”
          “I know that, Marie,” she says.
          “Henry, I need you guys to not sit together right now.”
          “Who are we bothering?” Vivian says.   
          “It’s not about other people. He’s taking advantage of you, Vivian.”
          Clearly there has been a massive misunderstanding. “That is fucking insane,” I say, which probably doesn’t help anything. 
          “Henry, you can’t use that kind of language with me.”
          “I don’t think what you’re saying is fair at all,” I say. 
          “I’m going to have to report this,” she says. She walks behind us and puts a hand on each of our shoulders. “You two need to separate.” She starts to push us apart. 
          I turn around and stand up. Marie starts back. “What is your fucking deal?” I ask.
          “Vivian is a human being, Henry. She doesn’t exist for your gratification,” she says, her voice quavering just a bit.
          I howl, loudly, which brings Nurse Rob into the room, and then I do something really bad, which is that I grab Vivian’s orange juice and turn it upside down over Nurse Marie. It mats her hair down and spills behind her glasses and drips down her cheeks. Her mouth opens in surprise. Nurse Rob is between us instantly.
          “What’s going on?” he asks.
          “It was my fault,” Vivian says. “I picked a fight.”
          “It was not your fault,” I say to Vivian. I point at myself, turn to Rob, then Marie. “My fault.” I barely get the words out. For some reason I’m crying. 
          Nurse Marie shares a long look with Nurse Rob, then looks at me.
          “I think everybody needs to talk to Dr. Sara,” Rob says. “You’re coming with me, Hank,” he says, and puts a hand on my shoulder. 

​

The corpse of a deer got thrown into the cellar and the bear started to devour it straight away, tearing at it with its paws and teeth. And I heard the man say, “If you let him eat everything I throw down there, you’re probably not going to last too long.” I didn’t say anything back. This was the only thing I ever heard him say. His voice sounded like—it mighta been anyone else’s. 
          In his corner, the bear lay prone, his naked head buried in his naked paws, his eyes just peeking out. He was eyeing me. I eyed him back. This poor guy didn’t have any way out. The body art and the lack of hair made it clear I was dealing with somebody who could plan and plan, and put that energy towards the most dubious ends possible.
          I wanted, for all the world, to have my bike back and to be on the road again, somewhere on the coast, or back in Walla Walla, where shit like this didn’t happen. I’ve tried to tell my betters, here, at the men cen, that I’m not going to get better until I can get back to my old life, riding my bike around and not showering much and sleeping by the ocean, or maybe heading back to Walla Walla to help grow vegetables. But when you have enough periodic meltdowns, even your intelligent thoughts are confabulation.
          That night I waited for the bear to fall asleep, and I felt my heartbeat behind my eyes when I decided to move towards the bones in the center of the basement, crawling as quietly as I could. The locks on my manacles were primitive; a flathead screwdriver could have gotten them off. So I go searching for bones, fragments, anything that might basically resemble a flathead screwdriver. I’m not going to fold for nothing. To save myself what? Wasted time? I take two trips to the bone pile: the first trip results in me wearing the nails off my thumbs and forefingers trying to find something that would work. Nothing does, so a little later I go back. And after sticking my hand all the way into the center of the pile, raking it back, trying to find anything that might feel right, one of my fingertips lands on top of an ancient, decrepit piece of metal, markedly more uniform to the touch than anything else in that morass.
          Because that’s how this guy’s fucking mind works: his fucking basement, his fucking rules. The key fits right into the locks, first the one and then the other. I feel the tumblers move, I hear the bear’s paws shuffle against the floor as it sleeps, maybe dreams, and I swear I can smell the morning dew outside, even from within that awful cellar. It feels like being on drugs. For what might be ten minutes I sit there, listening to the bear’s heavy breathing, ragged but regular, before I get up. 
          Through the crack in the cellar door the night sky has turned vaguely from black to blue. I push against it gently; it’s locked from outside. But the wood’s old and shitty. If the bear’s chains won’t let him all the way to where I am, then I’ve got a chance. I step quietly down and get the skull from the bone pile, and bring it back to the door. I put everything I have into banging the shit out of it.
          Wood panels separate from each other. The bear inhales sharply. I bang again. The door gives a little more. Chains rattle behind me. I bang again, then lose my grip on the head and drop it. It tumbles down the steps, towards the bear, who is roaring and lunging. I punch at the door with my fists, gashing my wrist against a nail, and the door gives, finally, enough. I hurl myself through it, scraping up my forearms and shoulders and stomach until my body is through and I’m out, not believing any of this, lying on my back in the shadow of a farmhouse. I take one deep breath before getting up.

​

Dr. Sara sits with her fingers steepled, her elbows on the desk. It’s the late afternoon, right on the verge of needing to turn the lights on in the office, but she's left them off for now. I set myself down in the chair that’s waiting for me.
          “I’ve heard Marie’s side of the story. I’d like to hear what you have to say, too.” 
          I take a deep breath and shake my head. She doesn’t say anything.
          “I don’t have an excuse for losing control. I was wrong.”
          Sara nods at me. For a long time, neither of us says anything. “You have feelings, Hank. Your actions today were not acceptable; we will revisit that reality. In the meantime, tell me what was going on up here.” She taps her forehead. “As honestly as you can.”
          “Do you think I’m taking advantage of Vivian?” I ask.
          “Do you?” 
          “I don't think so.” 
          “Do you understand how somebody could perceive it that way?”
          “Obviously now I do.”  
          “In your words, Hank: how did all this start?”
          I give her the short version. “Vivian decided we were going to be friends and maybe for a day she grabbed my thigh and not my balls. I didn’t tell her to stop and it progressed. I’m fine with it but it’s not something that I started.” 
          “What do you think she means by it?”
          “I don’t know.”
          “Extemporize. First thing that comes to mind.”
          “I think it makes her feel close to people.”
          “Why do you think that is?”
          I don’t say anything. For a minute, Sara doesn’t either. 
          “Vivian is vulnerable, Hank. She has a case history. Just like you do.” She lets that last sentence hang for a moment, and then continues: “I don’t think what happened in Idaho was your fault.”
          It’s the first time I’ve heard her or anybody else say anything like this. She starts talking again before I have a chance to process:
          “However, Nurse Marie’s concerns are hardly on the bleeding edge. Leaving aside everyone’s backgrounds, one of Marie’s very accurate observations is that our facility is not a great place for residents to engage in sexual activity.”
          “So, we’re not having sex.”
          “Let’s categorize sex pretty broadly as intimate physical contact.”
          “I don’t think that’s what this is to Vivian.”
          “All the nurses have seen you guys make out.”
          “It’s more like the odd, you know, wet smooch—”
          “And you visit each other after hours.” 
          I don’t say anything. I didn’t think she knew. 
          Sara continues. “What is it to her, and what is it to you?”
          “I know what you think is happening, but it’s actually not that,” I say.
          “You don’t know what I think,” she says, calmly. “What happens after you leave?”
          “She’ll be out of here before I am.”
          “You don’t know that,” she says. “Neither one of you needs to be here forever.”
          She pauses, and I can’t tell if I’m supposed to say something, until she continues:
          “At this point separating you guys seems wrong to me. I don’t think anybody ever suffers from being cared for. But you need to be dealing with Vivian genuinely and honestly, and frankly, your capacity to do that, at this moment, might not be up to our standards. What happens between you two is off our radar. No one is there to help the two of you navigate that. Do you understand the ways in which Nurse Marie is watching out for Vivian?”
          “Yes,” I say, after a minute.
          “I’m going to talk to Vivian, too. But I think the answer is that you and she need to limit your interactions to the common room; we’re not going to over-regulate your dynamic but in return we don’t want the two of you alone. Those after-hours visits have to stop. It’s not because I don’t trust you or don’t think well of you, Hank. This is my attempt at doing right by you, too.”
          “Okay,” I say.
          “This isn’t anything-goes in the common areas, either. We reserve the right to maintain some decorum.”
          “I understand,” I say.
          “And if Nurse Marie tells you guys to separate, you separate.”
          I nod.
          “We get better by pulling together and being there for each other. In a very real way you’re making a difference for Vivian by being somebody she can relax around. But first, we do no harm.” She looks at me seriously. “To her, or the people that work here,” she says. “You owe Marie an apology. That’s a mistake you get to make once.” 

​

Around two a.m., I hear the night nurse snoring through my door; I poke my head out and confirm. Then, I tiptoe around the corner, and see that the light is still on in Vivian’s room. I push the door open a crack and she says, softly, “Come in.”
          Her room is double mine in size. Maybe it’s a seniority thing, maybe she comes from a little dough. In it there’s a painting by Andrew Wyeth hanging on the wall. It’s one of the last paintings I would ever allow a sad soul to hang up in their room if I were running the place, next to Big Fish Eats Little Fish. It’s the one of the woman on the hill, with the wasted limbs, reaching towards her home. Something about it feels demoralizing to me: the gray sky, the run-down farmhouse, I’m not sure what. The whole fucking thing. 
          Vivian’s paintings have their own eerie qualities, though I think they’re pretty cool. There’s one of a beekeeper, in his white spacesuit, tending to his multi-colored bee boxes. Another one, of a solemn-looking picnic in front of a rural church building. There’s a painting—one she just started, but is already nearly done with—of the ocean that’s almost nothing but water, except for a small cut into it, a track or a wound, near the right-bottom corner, the foreground. It looks like an image of the beginning or the end of the world, I can’t decide which. 
          She’s sitting on a stool and working on that one when I walk into her room. 
          “C’mere,” she says, and pats her thigh. I sit on the floor next to her chair, and rest my head on her lap. She bends down to kiss my forehead, then runs her fingers through my hair. 
          “Should we?” I ask. 
          “What did Sara say to you?” 
          “She said I probably shouldn’t visit you in your room at two a.m.”
          “She said something similar to me.”
          “What do you think?” 
          “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” she says.
          She gently lifts my head off her lap and walks to the bed, then sits on the edge. I sit next to her.
          “I don’t really care about that,” I say.
          “You can’t live here forever.”
          “Neither can you.”
          “I’m working on it, like you are.”
          “I would miss this.”
          “Of course,” she says. “Lay down.”
          I lay down and she turns the lights off. She gets on top of me and we make out. I know that she only wants to kiss until she gets tired of it, usually after ten or fifteen minutes but sometimes after more like half an hour, and that’s okay. I’m not sure that I’d want a whole lot more. It’s just nice to not have to think. I wonder if that’s what she gets out of it, too. Vivian opens her eyes wide and locks them onto me after we kiss; even in the dark I can see that they are set into her face like gems. 

         

There is a painting in the Bruegel book that is straight up titled Two Chained Monkeys. Obviously, I’m not trying to have a conversation with Vivian about it. I know that what she’ll say is along the lines of, “that’s us,” and she’ll laugh, but what gets under my skin about it is the one monkey who isn’t looking outside the window. One power system reproduces another power system and if you get caught up in the wrong one the timeline slips away from you. You have a one hour counseling session and get packed off to Snake River for the next six months or six years. 
          Oh, I get it about the fish. I mean, they’re everywhere. Stuffed in the walls. In the hard wooden armrests on the institutional couches. Under the grass out front and packed in, ready to burst, from under the check-in desk. Fish, fish, fish.

​

Mid-morning the next day, I spot Nurse Marie in the common room. I sit down a short distance from her and start talking.
          “I’m sorry I poured the orange juice on you yesterday,” I say. She holds my gaze. “It was wrong. Obviously if somebody poured orange juice on me I would be pissed off at that person. So I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
          “Apology accepted,” Nurse Marie says. She puts her hand out. I stand up, and go to her to shake it. 
          “I realize you’re trying to help,” I say.
          “I am,” she says. 
          I nod at her, and she nods back. It all seems to happen in slow motion. As placid as the green grass on a rolling hill, swaying in the breeze.

​

Lunchtime comes, which means chocolate pudding—a legitimate perk here at the men cen. It’s got chocolate shavings on top, and they serve it twice a week. I have no idea why it is as good as it is, but everybody agrees that it is good. You can have as much of it as you like when they’re serving it, so I usually go for two. I’m in the cafeteria early, trying to drown my nervous energy in food. It’s going to be hard to hit all the right notes with the staff for the next couple days. And Vivian, so far, has stuck to her room today. She might have appointments or something. But it’s left me feeling a little exposed.
          Nurse Candace sits down to join me with a deck of cards, a socially generous move on her end.
          “You wanna play War?” I ask. She laughs.
          “I wanted to show you my favorite version of solitaire. Freecell.”
          “You can play that not on a computer?”
          Candace nods, and starts laying out the cards as she explains the rules. The highlight is, only eight in a million games aren’t winnable—better odds than solitaire. We play a round together, and I’m into my first game on my own, número dos pudding cup, when Vivian walks through the door and waves at me.
          I wave back and Candace turns to look, then looks back at me. She shakes her head, but she smiles, too. More residents stream in while Vivian is getting her food. About the same time Vivian sits down, a few of the staff enter: Doctor Sara, Nurse Rob, Nurse Marie. All of them look at me and Vivian as they walk in. Vivian doesn’t notice; she nudges me with her elbow. 
          “What’s up?” 
          “Candace is showing me how to play Freecell.”
          “There’s no such thing,” Vivian says.
          Me and Candace look at each other, and then at Vivian, and then back at each other.
          “It’s a pretty good version of solitaire,” I say, looking back at Vivian. “The highlight is, if you know how to play, it’s almost always winnable.”
          Vivian looks at me like I’m stupid, holds it for a beat, and finally sits down next to me. As soon as she does, she pinches my waist.
          The staff sits down around us. More residents sit nearby. We start talking about the sequel to the sailing trip, which, it so happens, is a bonfire. 
          And then, you know. It all comes back. The farmhouse is burning up in the rearview mirror of the jeep and I’m failing to get the damn thing in gear, and that poor fucking bear is howling, terrified, choking on the smoke, about to join its owner. For a minute that feels like real life, I am missing a shift, missing a switchback, and the center will not hold: the falcon will not unfuck itself. How do you talk about shit like this in a way that somebody could believe you have actual feelings about it? I am crawling out of a jeep, realizing that my arm is bent in the exact wrong direction at the elbow, thinking about that stupid bear, when Vivian grabs my chin, surprising me, and I caw. 
          Nurse Mike spits pudding back into his cup and laughs, Candace looks at us surprised and grossed out, and I try to say something, but Vivian has my jaw squeezed. She pulls me towards her and gives me a sloppy, pudding-filled kiss, then lets go of my chin and all the pudding that was in my mouth spills out, leaving a mess on her face and making big chocolaty splotches on her cream-colored sweater. “Gross, Hank,” Candace says.     “Guys, stop that.” 
          Two elderly patients near us look scared and their chairs screech back on the floor. Marie looks like she’s been carved out of stone. She turns, slowly, to Dr. Sara. Dr. Sara looks at her, then looks at Nurse Rob; all three of them stand up. Vivian turns back towards me; she grabs my chin again, and for a moment, we just look at each other. A big chocolaty smile forms on her face. I’m sure that I look exactly the same. 
          And then, we kiss. I close my eyes, feel her body against mine, feel her lips that are soft and taste like chocolate, and really, if you’ve never done this type of thing before, given or received a pudding kiss, let me be the first to tell you: everything about it is a goddamn miracle.