Why the Tree Loves the Axe. Jim Lewis

I was scheduled to go, five days a week, eight hours a shift, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes at night. As soon as I got home again, no matter what time it was, I’d take a shower and fall asleep right away; there was nothing else I could do, and soon my days were divided so irregularly that I could hardly tell dawn from dusk, and the only forms of consciousness I could recognize were other people’s fear and my own sleep.

      There was no place on earth so filled with terrified people as Eden View. It was a death row populated by the innocent, they had long since exhausted every appeal, all they had left was waiting. So they waited, some for judgment, some for extinction, some just to know what they were waiting for. The idleness made them feel as if the waiting itself was all they were ever going to experience; it was punishment by eternal apprehension, which grew until they couldn’t stand it any longer, and then grew some more. Some of them screamed and some of them shook until I thought their bones would come apart; some complained to children who had long since left them and some cried without shedding any tears. It didn’t help them at all. Death was coming for them in pieces, taking their hair, their teeth, their organs, their memories, leaving them dazed, fatless, and compliant. And they were wrinkled, they were filthy, they smelled strange, and they frightened me. I tried very hard to love them all, each for what each was losing, but I’d be lying if I said I always succeeded.

      There was Judith, with ninety years out of her mother and a meantime spent God knows where, she crooned to gone ghosts in a language no one could understand; she had long ago stopped eating, she lived on cups of air and the mysterious syllables of her singular vernacular. Bart, a retired businessman, who had lost his entire family in a burning house and was always trying to explain how tired he was. A colonel named Farley, a quiet man in a black shirt and a bolo tie, who would go for days without doing much more than coughing and saying, Ah! now and again, releasing a little puff of being that drifted lazily up to the ceiling. Colonel, it’s time to go to sleep, please. For God’s sake.—Cough. Ah! Cough. All right. Please.

      I was putting the Colonel to bed one night when an old man I hadn’t seen before came striding down the hall. He had enormous pale pink ears, from which tufts of reddish white hair grew, and that was all the hair he had; his nose was fleshy and hooked and his eyes were nearly black. He was wearing a dapper dark blue suit and a white shirt that was yellow with age, and he was strutting along without shoes or socks. When he was close by me, he stopped and held up his foot so that I could see the dust that had blackened its thick underside. See this? he said. See this, all this dirt? This is a slovenly place. Aren’t any of you working? Look at this.—I looked. I want my money back, he said. Give me my fucking money, or I’ll set the dogs on you.

      I stared at him. What?

      Who the fuck are you, anyway? he demanded.

      I froze.

      Come on, he said.

      … Caroline, I said. I’m new … Where did you come from? Where is your room?

      Ah! he said, and dismissed me with a wave of his long ivory fingers. Get out of my way. And before I could react he disappeared down around the corner, muttering something vicious, and that was how I met Billy.

      

      The doctors believed that he was dying, and when he waved away their recommendations they told him so, softly but insistently. Still, they never said what was killing him, and in fact he was never at all weakened. He would spend hours in the rec room, banging a basketball against the wall and catching it again with one hand. The noise drove the doctors crazy and they would send orderlies to make him stop; instead, he would pick fistfights with them, and they would have to restrain him by pinning his arms behind his back while he struggled to free himself and called them all cocksuckers and cunts.

      Billy had been at Eden View longer than anyone else; in fact, he’d outlasted all of the staff, and there was no one there who remembered when he’d arrived. Once I checked his file in the main office and found that he’d been admitted about twelve years earlier, but he used to insist, sometimes that he’d just arrived, and other times that he’d been there forever. In any case, he’d managed to get himself moved into the best of the residents’ rooms, a large single in a corner of the third floor, with a tiny balcony from which he could look out on the whole of Sugartown, the hills behind it and the sky above. On clear evenings he would sit outside with a penknife and carve pieces of wood into fantastic shapes, a guitar, a woman, a rosebush complete with delicate buds, which he would pass off on the staff, always warning them in a low voice that the things were hexed and might kill them if they weren’t careful. Later still, he would lock himself in his room, turn his desk light on, and take out a canvas bag. Inside of it there was a rolled-up piece of cloth, and inside of that there were dozens of delicate implements—they looked liked dentist’s tools—which he would use to meticulously engrave on something about the size of an envelope. No one ever saw what he was working on; if someone came to his door, he would hide it in his lap and hold it there until he was left alone again.

      The orderlies said that he was the Devil’s servant and he was never going to die. André told me that flowers withered and turned brown when he breathed on them, that he could light a match just by looking at it, that he had wings on his back and wore his suits to cover them, that he hid bottles of codeine in his room and had pornographic magazines delivered by mail, that he kept five thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills rolled up in a sock in his dresser drawer. I’m telling you, Eden View ran with gossip like blood runs with sugar. But I began to watch old Billy, just out of curiosity; I couldn’t help myself, the rumors were an itch. I hung by his room, playing temptation and waiting to see what he would do. I made excuses to be there: I had his pills, I needed to change his sheets, I wanted to be sure his room was not too warm.

      I tried to get him into one of the games that the other orderlies played with their favorites, brief rituals that meant nothing, fair questions and simple tests. Do you know what day today is?

      Do I know what day today is? Of course I do. Today is the twenty-seventy-seventh of Pestember. I don’t care for a second what day it is.

      What day of the week.

      If it isn’t Sunday, I don’t know. I know it isn’t Sunday.

      Is it Thursday?

      I don’t know.

      It’s Thursday, yeah.

      Well, shit, he said in a tone of utter disgust at my dumbness. What difference does that make?

      Never mind, I said brusquely, and tried to dismiss him with a blank expression. But my cheeks were hot; I was betrayed by my face and Billy noticed it right away. Caroline is angry, he said in a schoolyard singsong voice. I don’t give a shit. Caroline doesn’t think it’s fair that I should be so mean to her, when she’s trying to make nice with an old man. She wants to be all over me, like a mood. She wants to go through my pockets, she wants what I’ve got. And who knows? She may be right, maybe I can help her, maybe I can use her. But—he wagged a finger at me—is she smart enough? Brave enough? Confident enough? Oh, I know I’m not supposed to ask anything like that. Because you people … Take a look at these, he said, holding out a pair of small pale green pills in his palm. They give me these to sleep, so I’ll dream, so I won’t remember what they’ve said to me, so every day we can start all over again at the beginning. Take them, go on, try them, you’ll see.

      Billy, these are yours.

      I don’t want them, he said. I’m giving them to you. You take them.

      I put them in the breast pocket of my uniform, where I found them again a few days later, dissolved into dust and crumbs that clung to my fingertips, and as I hurried to the bathroom to wash my hands I spoke under my breath to an imaginary inquiry. I don’t know what they are, I said. I don’t know where they came from.

      One afternoon I went to invite him to a game of bingo in the cafeteria and found him sitting cross-legged on his bed, staring down at something that was lying in his lap. For a long moment he didn’t move, just watched the thing; then he sighed and lifted it before him and I saw a chrome pistol in his hands, staring steadily back at him like a snake. He turned it, brought it to his