New American Stories

MADMEN by Lucy Corin

The day I got my period, my mother and father took me to pick my madman. The whole time, my dad kept his hands in his pockets and my mom acted like it was her show. I hadn’t let her in on how scared I was that I might be a freak born with endometrial tissue of steel. Apparently it didn’t cross her mind that I might be worried, watching all my friends go through it and what was up with my body. I stopped digging, looked in my pants, and told her what was going on in there, and what she said was, “All right, but hurry and get back out here.”

It was getting toward lunch and we were digging a drainage ditch from the shed down to the woods. With my lateness, our preparations had become elaborate. We thought of everything, and my madman was going to really like his situation, I felt sure. We had a couple chickens he could take care of or else eat. Some of the almond trees still dropped nuts, and who doesn’t like nuts? We had a circle of rocks for a fire pit with a view of the creek and an iron pot handed down from my grandmother, the one that her madman used and her father’s madman used before that. In the shed I’d hung the curtains from my room before I was old enough to make my own decisions. They had a tassel fringe that I thought looked like paper-chain dolls with their hands merged together.

So I ran inside and did my best to remember what she’d told me about tampons when I was like ten, and then I ran back out and we finished the ditch even though I felt heavy and gross. In the shed we freshened up the straw, and then I went back inside again to shower while my mom called my dad at work so he could meet us. A lot of people would consider my mother grim, but I could hear her on the phone, at least until I turned on the water, and she sounded excited about taking me for my big day.

In the shower, I thought about my madman. It was getting hotter, so there were going to be a lot to choose from. Over the weekend, at my friend Carrie’s birthday, we’d told our fortunes with a questionnaire we found online. Her madman wouldn’t come out but we’d heard the basics about him. For what kind of house I wanted I put Treehouse, Houseboat, Malibu Mansion, and for my risk choice, Outhouse. If you don’t put a risk, it undermines the integrity. For what kind of job I put Parachuter, Famous Scientist, Hang-Gliding Instructor, and World Peace—which isn’t a job, but it’s the thought that counts. For who I was going to marry I put Anthony, No One, A Lesbian, and Yo’ Mama. For pet I put Yo’ Mama, Giraffe, Ant Farm, and Crabs. I was completely not being serious by the time I got to car because I know I’m never getting a car so I just put Anything, Flying Saucer, Argh!!! and Who cares my parents are never getting me a car (though the window only had room for twenty characters, so it ended up Who cares my parents). But the point is I got serious with the madman question. Even kids who seem like they don’t care about their madman are faking it. They care.

“How did you know which madman was yours?” I asked Carrie later, in private. She said she looked each of them in the eyes, even just for a fraction of a second with the fast ones, but then with her madman she got them to take her into his cell — he was in the far back corner and she’d almost thought the cell was empty. He was pale and “Seriously,” she said, “I know it’s hard to believe, but he blended in.” I wondered if he was an albino madman, which suddenly seemed exotic and perfect.

“Is that how you knew?” I asked.

“No,” she said. All the other girls were asleep. It was dark and we were near the window, face to face with our legs over opposite arms of a giant overstuffed chair, with the black sky surrounding us and everyone’s sleeping bags covering the living room floor. It was like we were in a rowboat, bobbing in a sea made of our sleeping friends. “I went in and he wouldn’t look at me. I put my hand on his chin like this, you know, like when an older man wants to kiss you in the movies.” She shrugged. It seemed like our boat rocked. “I know that sounds creepy, but it’s not. I just felt older than him, and he kept turning his chin and not looking at me.”

“Will he look at you now?” I asked.

“That’s not the point,” she said. “Plus none of your beeswax.” She said she picked that phrase up from her madman.

I wanted one like my uncle had, who was an accomplished musician. Special. Or one time I was downtown, some girl was totally engrossed in window shopping, and her madman was sniffing around the sidewalk, lifting pebbles with his toes, humming very low, very soothing. I pretended like I was window shopping too, to get closer, and when I caught the tune, it didn’t even seem to be coming from him. More like it was surrounding him, moving through him, something like religion, or wisdom. Some people would be surprised how important wisdom is to me. I try to remember what he hummed, but I was young and I can’t remember. I mean, I know I’m still young. But your brain changes.

Deep in the night I woke up and it was just me in the giant chair. Across the room, across the ocean of sleeping girls like waves, I saw Carrie and her madman in the doorway that went into the kitchen. They were silhouetted, standing forehead to forehead, passing a sandwich back and forth. Then the madman reached over and tugged on a handful of her hair. Like ringing a bell, but soft. Then Carrie reached over for a handful of his hair and tugged back.

Of course I don’t remember my online fortune, that’s never the part that sticks, and no one believes it anyhow. It’s more about answering the questions plus what you’re willing to tell people.

—

The shower went predictably. After my shower, I went right for the skirt and blouse I thought were a perfect balance of mature and still had hints of my personality. But once I put it on it was more like a combination of pretentious and someone who was not trustworthy. I started from scratch. I picked my underwear — serious underwear, but new. Car-crash undies. Then I picked footwear: dressy boots with square heels. Once you know the shoes, that narrows your options. Soon my mom was screaming for me. “It’s not a beauty pageant!” I don’t know why she has to scream, the house is not that big. I guess it doesn’t matter what I was wearing. But it does to me.

All the way in the car I wished I had skipped the tampon and went with a pad. It must have been in crooked, but at the time I thought this must be what it’s like. My mom, who is a bad driver and also incredibly opinionated about driving, was on her cell phone talking a hundred percent understandingly about someone in the hospital after an incident in the home, and then suddenly on another call, a hundred percent enthusiastically about someone’s idea for self-catering a wedding in a schoolhouse on a cliff. She’s not faking, either. Endless empathy, one person after another, all day long, like a buffet. I just wanted my madman.

Meanwhile I watched the world go by out the side window, comparing regular view versus including the mirror. I kept wondering if the world was going to look different after I had a madman, so I wanted to get a good “before” shot of it. To sum up, the world was: green, green, green, house, street, green, gas station, green, green, strip mall, green with brown, then hillier and hillier. Then, exactly as my mother was saying “schoolhouse” again, we went by this little white schoolhouse I’d never noticed before. It was as if her saying the word “schoolhouse” made it appear — I was so surprised I tried to point it out to her, but she shook her head not to interrupt, and by then she’d missed it. Or maybe it was a church.

It had its own velvet hill. It had a weathervane. A deer ate puffs of grass the mower had missed by its front steps. A motorcycle was parked nearby, tilted on its kickstand. It looked like it was thinking. The weathervane was spinning, so I couldn’t tell what it was, a horse, a whale…It didn’t seem windy out, but it’s hard to tell. Being in the car was like another planet.

I know it sounds stupid, but this was a big day for me, and everything felt like it might be important at any second.

After a few more hills, the facility rose up in the middle of nowhere. Ours was a nice facility, known to be professional and well equipped, but in some counties it could be hard, even dangerous to go, and some kids brought their whole extended families for protection. In those counties some kids ended up with a madman who died almost immediately. That’s meaningful to go through, but it’s better if you have time for a broader perspective. The building looked like a normal white country inn, but closer up you could see it went on and on down the hill. We pulled into the parking lot and my mother stopped the car by as usual bumping into the curb. Maybe three other cars were spaced out in the lot, and two beat-up vans. My mother was still working on her phone call, though she did make some eye contact with me, meaning “just a minute.” The person would never know, from her nodding and assenting noises, that she was in any way ready to get off the phone, which she never really is. It’s the empathy. She loves to empathize. Sometimes I feel bad because maybe I don’t. She dove her hand into her purse, which sat open on the seat beside her, the most crammed thing in history, and dragged out a length of crinkled toilet paper because she doesn’t believe in Kleenex. My mother was admirable — for example, trying to teach me to be the last person on earth resisting the corporate identity takeover of personhood. It made me so angry at myself when I just wanted her to go away, which is not the same as wanting her to die, although she will never understand the difference. She blew her nose using one hand and pushed the toilet paper back into the purse.

Oh my god we were still in the parking lot. When I tapped her on the shoulder she looked about to smack me so I just sat there, probably the fastest route to her hanging up anyway. But I was resenting getting into a bad mood. My phone, for instance, was on vibrate for privacy on the occasion, and the last thing I needed was to be in a bad mood making a decision like this. She kept being herself on the phone. I got angrier and angrier. Then luckily my dad pulled into the spot next to us. I jumped out of the car to meet him, and he’s such a huge dork, he never knows what to do, but then sometimes he does exactly the right thing, and this time he got out of his truck with a shopping bag with a bow stuck on it because he can’t wrap boxes, although it’s funny when he tries.

I hugged him and took the bag. “What have we here!” I said, and dug in. It was a harness for my madman, the best kind, made of real leather with quality hand-stitching and brass appointments. My mother came around the car, stuffing her phone into her purse, saying, “Poor Irene!” She was about to launch into recounting everything from the phone, and it’s true that Irene’s life is pretty shocking and worth hearing about, but all I thought was, Isn’t there a time and a place? I handed her the gift bag for her to put in the car and catch the hint. She put her hand on my head and I could see her deciding whether to say something or not. For good reason she didn’t know if expressing her opinion was the best idea when it came to getting me to feel what she wanted. Finally she just plunked my gift into the back of Dad’s truck and said, “Here we go.”

We stepped up to the giant double doors, the kind with wire netting between the panes, and I buzzed the buzzer. A plaque on a rock by the stoop read AN ATTACHMENT TO ONESELF IS THE FIRST SIGN OF MADNESS. It was riveted under an engraving of a Ship of Fools, a little hard to see but you could tell it was a really good artist. A woman’s face appeared in the window, filling it with puffy red hair, and I thought I was making it up, but she had the kind of eyes a cat has — golden with black diamond-shaped slits instead of pupils. I grabbed my dad’s hand in the midst of a flashback to The Wizard of Oz where I’m Dorothy and Oz is the doorman but you don’t know it yet. My dad held my ID up to the window. She let us in. She wrote some stuff down from my ID and then gave it back to me. She was obviously really nice, but I couldn’t look at her. She sat us in the waiting room with another family and left through another set of double doors. This family was one with a boy who must have been turning thirteen, which is when they get theirs. It’s really unfair. They should have to go when they start splooging in the night or whatever. God, boys are known for being immature in general, but this one seemed especially short, making me feel extra freakish, that everyone has their madman already and here I am with this kid with a cowlick. But I went right over and plunked down next to him and asked, “What is up with her eyes?”

He said, “It’s just a disease. My dad’s a doctor. Dad, what’s it again?”

His dad was reading a magazine about cars. “Coloboma of the iris,” he said. His mother was sitting so close to his dad that their thighs touched all the way to the knee. Her magazine was called Pet City.

I whispered to the boy, “God, if I wasn’t already crazy and she was my nurse, I think I’d go crazy.” I could tell he thought I was making light of the situation, but I wasn’t.

“She’s nice,” he said.

I said, “I know.”

I was nervous, and I was going to remember this for the rest of my life.

There was a nurses’ station, but when I went over no one was at it. I slid the window open and put my head through. All I saw was extra pamphlets and forms piled around a computer, but I still felt sneaky so I stopped looking. Soon enough the red-haired cat-eyed nurse returned and the boy went through the double doors into the back with his mom, dad, and cowlick. My mom took another call and the room echoed with her voice. My dad walked around inspecting things — looking into the nurses’ station to see what I’d been looking at, squinting at a poster, pressing a thumb into the cushion on the chair like meat to test it for doneness, picking a stray bit of paint from the glass of the window that looked onto the parking lot. He was trying to find something to comment on. He picked up a pamphlet from a rack and started to say something but swallowed it and pretended to be chuckling to himself. There’s no such thing as chuckling to yourself. You do it so someone will notice, even if you’re by yourself and the person is imaginary. My parents are such a classic couple. They’ll either get divorced or he’ll get smaller and smaller and she’ll get bigger and bigger until they die. Then the red-haired cat-eyed nurse came through the double doors with a smile like homemade pie and said, “Ready, sweetheart?”

“Remember,” my mother said, “you, too, could grow up to be a madman.”

Shut up, Mom. No one cares about this more than I do.

—

The gallery was white and clean, and everything — the bars on the cells, the bars on the beds in the cells, even the chamber pots — seemed thicker because of layers of white paint, the sheets fragile by comparison. How could Carrie have looked each one in the eyes? The hall was narrow and endless, like a mirror facing a mirror. You could never look into all those eyes. The space swam with light and occasional arms of madmen waved through the bars. The ceiling was so white it disappeared. Cells lined one side, and the other side was a vast blank wall to walk along. This meant that you could only look into one cell at a time, but if you stayed near the wall you could keep out of reach. I could hear, dimly, that there was an army, like millions of them, beyond the walls. It was the sound of madmen who were not ready. My mother gripped my elbow and adjusted the strap of her purse.

I know from case studies in our Health and Human Development book that when a madman is reeling with madness it’s like his skin is ripped off, his consciousness is that naked. Just stepping from the entryway into view of the first cell I felt something — a wave — like there was empty space left where all these people had been so naked and now I was standing in it. The madman in there wasn’t even looking at me and I felt it. In fact, he was facing the back wall. He was bare and yellowish, with the knobs of his spine poking out and a cloth tied around his waist. He might have been peeing, my first potential madman. But he might have just been standing there, looking at the wall. I was just standing there, looking at the bars, with my mom latched to my elbow. Hands deep in his pockets, my father approached the laminated information card at the first madman’s cell and read it for our information in a low voice while I took in this prospect with my eyes.

He was a Melancholic madman. He glanced at us absently and then took a seat in a back corner of the cell on a three-legged stool, resting his chin on his fist.

“ ‘Appearance: gloomy brow, shrunken head, lethargic, passive,’ ” my father read. “ ‘Medical history: mad with grief after violating his word to his wife; shunned men and fled to the forest.’ ”

“I don’t know, what do you think?” said my mother.

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t know what to do — imagine my life as his, or imagine him in my life, or what. At some point the nurse had left, and I felt very alone.

“Let’s look at another,” my mother said, and I knew that meant he would be fine for another girl, but not for us. I’d settled on picturing him on his stool by the window in our shed with his gloomy brow, in his thinking position. Where was I in this picture? Was I stirring his pot? Was I pulling up a stool of my own to sit beside him? Was he starting to cry? We stepped to the next cell.

This madman paced and a broken chain from one arm dragged on the ground. He had heaping wads of wiry hair.

“ ‘Appearance,’ ” read my father. My mother craned her neck over his shoulder at the card, to keep an eye on if he’d miss something. “ ‘A bold, threatening mien, a hurried step, splayed gait, restless hands, violent breathing.’ ” In the madman’s hair I could see a bird’s nest and part of a blue eggshell. His eyes moved mechanically in his head, like they had little rollers behind them, but I could hear him making low animal noises of being alive. His sandals slapped the floor as he paced, making angrier slaps than I thought sandals could even make. Heat came off him like from a toaster. Then he whirled to face me, looked right at me, and said, “I heard that, pussy,” and before I could even register this, my mother had yanked me to the next cell.

“Perverts are still madmen, but don’t pick a pervert just to pick a pervert,” she said.

The madman with the nest called, “I can fucking hear you!”

But it was interesting — as soon as we were no longer in front of his cell, it was as if we’d changed the channel. I could hear the dull white noise of whatever world tumbled down the hill behind the gallery, but it must have been something with the acoustics because I could no longer hear the madman at all — not his breathing or his sandals or his chain or anything he might have yelled — not once I was looking into the next cell. They’d really made things orderly. Or my brain had done it. But either way. I saw so many madmen that day: the whole world was made of one madman, and then it was made of the next.

The next was a Decadent Hedon, hunched under a burlap robe, but I could tell by the way the folds fell that he was leaning on a crook: “ ‘Appearance’ ” (my mother reading this time), “ ‘slothful, bloated, swarthy, indolent, irresolute, fair hair, eburnated protrusions, overall sour.’ ” His sleeve slipped and showed a hand, but immediately he shifted just enough for the cloth to cover it again. He had long nails. “ ‘Medical history: succumbed to the folly of the idle rich. Discovered inebriated at a marina.’ ” My mother read it like a schoolchild, or a schoolteacher, that voice. Even though the Decadent Hedon ignored us, I felt embarrassed with my parents reading as if he wasn’t there. I kept trying to look at him in a way that would let him know. Then I thought, What, should we not read the information? That’s when I said, “Hello, I’m Alice.” I didn’t expect any one thing or another. On impulse I guess I thought he might appreciate it.

“Fantastico,” said the madman, rolling his eyes either at me or because that’s what madmen do. The tone, though, was pretty obviously “You know what I mean, you pawn/idiot/cracker/et cetera.”

I thought of our shed and the curtains from my bedroom. I knew a madman like that wouldn’t like me. He didn’t say anything else, in fact he went right back to not acknowledging that we were there, just gazed, lazy-eyed, as if over a vast tabletop, through the wall behind me, through the waiting area beyond it, and out over the hills and valleys of whatever the hell he thought of the world.

I felt ashamed that I wanted so badly for my madman to like me. Like this was all about me. Which it was. I was the one coming of age.

I don’t know how I got us to the next one. Oh, yes I do: my mother said, “Honey, have a look at this.”

This one was Contemporary Bipolar. Like two for one. He was low, now, “sickly, peevish, having suffered a recent rejection of a manuscript he’d sent to an important publisher.” I’m paraphrasing what my father read. They’d found him holding court in a city park, where everyone called him Professor, wearing round glasses with no glass in them. He had this enthusiastic teenage boy who’d follow him around with an apple crate to stand on. Mom observed that you could tell different doctors wrote up the information cards. She said this one had been in a creative mood. The conclusion of the medical history was that this madman was the son of a lowly cleaning lady and had never been to college. It marveled that he could be so erudite in his philosophies, though the doctor confessed he had not heard of many of the figures the madman liked to quote. He was not sure if this was a measure of his own ignorance, as he had only taken introductory courses in the classics, and although he had done very well in them, it had been a long time ago. My father attempted a knowing glance at my mother, which she rejected. He whispered to me, “Next thing you know, that doctor’s gonna be eating a madeleine.”

I said, “What are you talking about?” and then I felt bad.

Next there was a woman madman: “with monstrous breasts, contorted, black”—actually, the madmen were a variety of races and racial mixtures, but this card pointed out black for some reason—“eyes bulging, head and arms thrown back, clothes discarded on the floor” (all noted on the card, as well as true to my observation), “with a madman’s staff, clenching hands, found biting her own arm, broken out of chains, bold, brazen, brainless”; then a Cretin, with his wiener in a bottle, peeing, then holding the bottle up and looking in it with a monocle (“He’s imitating his physician,” my father interpreted, “monkey see monkey do”; to which my mother flashed him a look about insensitively using a monkey analogy and he said, “I’m just explaining!”); a Cuckold wearing a Cuckold’s horns, I don’t know what they were made out of but they looked real; a Schizo-affective who on his card it said “mute” and explained that like so many, he’d latched on, in an early delusion, to where the Bible says, “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” a sentence which, gathering from my education, has resulted in madmen missing just about every body part you can think of, but this madman had cut his tongue out, and then, to cauterize it, stuffed a flaming torch down his throat. Mom: “Cauterize means seal up”; me: “I know,” but I didn’t. Then a Possessed guy with landscape tattoos. Then a short guy evolving into a divine being, officially Monomaniac, with sticks stuck into his hair like a crown, trying to look down on us. Next a Wildman dragging a club, with a face like a “panther or a goat,” this heavy lumpy body, like he’d broken everything and healed back wrong; then a Phlegmatic, “sad, recumbent, forgetful, pale, eating the bread of the workers of iniquity…protruding eyes, weak chin, terror”; and next a rich girl whose secret lover had joined the army and died. Then Frenetic. Fevered delirium, “raving but seated, ready to be purged.” Drawings on one wall of his cell showed a warden after a patient with a billy club and a doctor after a patient with a needle, and on another wall a drawing of being looked at by two tall people with a short one. The one with most detail I recognized from our textbook: an operation to remove the Stone of Folly. The doctor had given the madman the stone just cut from his head, and the madman held it in the air like a jewel. The drawing showed it glinting with light. The drawings were good, considering they’d been done with a stick and fingers and who knows what for paint.

I got dizzy on and off through the madmen, partly because all the iron in my body was rushing out between my legs but also because of the madness. After the Recumbent Frenetic was a pair of cells each containing a Fool, dancing, a man fool and next door to him a woman fool: one with a feather headdress, one with bells around the wrists and ankles. Lighthearted types, goiter on the neck of one, one with a pink balloon on a branch of a bifurcated stick, counterparts dancing like mirror images — how could they know through the wall? It didn’t make sense to look at them individually, but I couldn’t see both cells at once. The gallery was too narrow, I couldn’t back up enough, so I looked from one to the other trying, but it made me feel seasick. I felt at odds with myself, that phrase came to me. Like I was related to whatever invisible puppet master was making them dance together when they couldn’t even see each other. I think I spent less time with them than anyone, but the effect went straight to my body.

Plus there was the madman in the cell right after them.

This one had an information card that folded out like an accordion. “ ‘At sixteen,’ ” my father read, “ ‘she became insane over the favor her older sister received from a young man, her husband, so that she was institutionalized.’ ”

“Whose husband?” my mother asked. “Who lets these people write?” My mother had continued her commentary all through the gallery; I’d just tuned most of it out. But the point here is this madman’s huge long history:

“Periodic manias, daily three to six in the afternoon. Much of the day she behaved normally, but from noon until three sank into the deepest melancholy. Following that she would become lively, and at exactly three in the afternoon she would get a fit of rage and smash everything, attack her attendants and drink enormous amounts of ice water. At six she would become calm again. Taken in by a family when she was seventeen, who, within a year, interrupted three suicide attempts with a silk cord.” My mother, again concerned with grammar, wondered how the family might have used a silk cord thusly. But the story went that the girl was finally found so dead she was almost black (I hadn’t known this about death), but they revived her, and while they were deciding what to do with her next, she disappeared. Turned out she wanted to be a dancer, which I used to want to be myself, and started working at strip clubs by night and taking dance classes by day and through her stripper and dance friends met up with a troupe of trapeze artists who went across the country and Europe, meeting up with circuses and innovative performing groups, putting on intense acts that, for certain invite-only audiences, were rumored to contain explicit sex with emotional and intellectual depth. A distinguished artist within this community, her prison record called it Live Queer Porn. “And yet,” said the account, “such transgressions often bear the germs of healing in them.”

Then something happened. The account said: “suddenly.” Suddenly she quit the troupe, burned her costumes, wrapped herself in rags, took up a staff of madness decorated with shells, strung a crucifix around her neck, and joined a group of pilgrims on their way to Rome. They were a whole group of people who felt bad about themselves so they went to Rome, but when they got there, the girl threw her rags into the Tiber and wouldn’t go into the cathedral. She slept in the Colosseum for months. Then something else happened which I forgot, and probably they skipped some stuff, and she ended up at a mission taking care of orphans even though she refused to wear the crucifix or explain what she was praying, which she was allowed to do because she’d impressed all the religious people, one of whom eventually fell in love with her, ruining his career, but she wasn’t interested in him like that, and this whole episode seemed to wear her out, so she kissed her orphans goodbye one by one and then left on a boat in the night, which wrecked in a storm near Messina, where she washed up and was taken in by a group of shepherds — her feet were all cut up — until she could walk, by which time the local doctor had fallen for her and kept inventing medical problems so she’d stay. But once she figured that out, he just left everything and went with her through a junglelike landscape until one night they were accosted. She cut the thumbs off the assailant and escaped, but the doctor was killed. There was definitely some more religion, stone temples, shamans and stuff, Amazons, and a battle she helped win with poison she discovered in local sap, but she started drinking heavily and rather than admit her addiction to her tribe, she slunk into the jungle, where she lived on fruit and roots — that’ll dry you out — and then something else and she ended up here, in godforsaken nowhere California, after an episode not far from my school actually, where she had been “excessively frightened by soldiers” is how the write-up put it, please note the air quotes which are so annoying but I’m serious because I believe I’ve heard about those assholes.

You’d think she’d look like a model but she didn’t — she was plump and ordinary, with small features and a round, almost silly nose, her eyes and skin sort of pulled out of place a fraction. And you’d think to have done all those things she’d be old, but she seemed more like she could be my sister just done with college with a place of her own. My mother said the doctors were obviously believing her delusions, and she was going to ask the cat-eyed nurse if this was some kind of test, but god, Mom, can’t you just have an interesting life? Or is it like everyone really does end up with one of four kinds of cars and one of four kinds of house and one of four kids you met in junior high?

Obviously, this is the madman I wanted. Obviously, my mother said no.

I’m paraphrasing.

This is my day, I told her. This is the one day that of all days is my day and it’s not up to you. This decision is going to make me who I am. The woman madman, round and rosy, watched me yelling at my mother with a small smile on her face, looking somewhere between our yelling heads. I don’t know what my father was doing. I was so angry. Sometimes when I get really angry, I get really articulate. I said exactly what I was thinking, exactly the way I would want to have said it. But it doesn’t matter if you’re right, if you made your case, and it doesn’t matter if god, somewhere, is on your side. Whatever happens, happens anyway. My mother said obviously they were trying to pawn this madman off, otherwise why would her case history be ten times longer than anyone else’s? I said I didn’t care if it was all lies, I loved her. I said I felt inspired and connected, at which point the rosy woman looked at me like I was crazy, and her eyes went right into mine, and I could feel my feelings flaring behind my eyes, just as her feelings were flaring behind hers, lighting them up, so I knew we were both lit up, so I knew at least in that way I was right.

Well, that’s what it was like at the time. I don’t know. You get caught up in a moment.

It seemed real.

I said okay, whatever, I’ll take the Dancing Fools. My mother was so mad her lips had disappeared. I still don’t know where my father was. And I don’t know what the madmen were thinking of all this yelling. They’ve seen it all, anyway. I could sort of hear some laughing, but who knows at what, and again the acoustics. Me and my mom having out this scene, and in front of a completely undeterminable audience, if that’s even a word. When we were finally silent and I finally looked at her again, she was building up to say something and then swallowing it and then building up again. When she finally said it, she said it like it was the worst, meanest thing she could possibly say.

“You are on your own” is what she finally pronounced, and because she said it to be the meanest possible thing to say, it was.

As we learned in class, when madness comes, it comes up the spine and radiates. Madman after madman has described it this way through history, often saying they were touched by god. Of course that’s not what I felt from my mother — boy, she would love that — but my point is it was very physical receiving her words, like being iced over and then cracked. I thought of madness while I felt it. Then she stormed away down the hall, which would have had more of the abrupt effect she was after except the hall was so long she kind of dissipated down it. Plus, after a couple minutes of me watching her recede, still gasping from how mean she was, my father appeared from behind me and followed after her like a can trailing a car when you just got married. Boom went the double doors, way far away, or whoosh or something. I don’t even remember, but it seemed to let noise out from behind the scenes, and even though I know the doors went to the waiting room, what came out was what you’d expect from those vast back rooms that spilled down the hill behind the asylum: babbling, screaming.

The whole idea is you take in a madman and that teaches you about Facing the Incomprehensible and Understanding Across Difference, and soon we are one big family. Without looking at her again, I left my place in front of the cell of the rosy woman I’d wanted and stared into the cell of the Imbecile who was next. What had he been doing through all that with his lumpy head and beaky honker? It felt like a betrayal to even stand there, to even try to imagine who he was, so I turned around.

Turning around meant I faced a white wall. It occurred to me that I was seeing exactly what all the madmen see, but without the bars. What’s that developmental stage called when you can finally do abstract thinking? Algebra? Just kidding.

I didn’t want to look at any more madmen. I sat down on the floor. I kept looking at the wall. It was so white.

Then the double doors swung open and smacked the walls with an echoing bang, and then thump thump came the cat-eyed nurse with her outward-reaching hair and rubber shoes making squeaks every few steps. Hands came waving through bars as she stomped toward me, though as she neared I could see she wasn’t angry at all, or stomping, it was just the sound of moving down that unpredictable gallery. Some hands she slapped five or did twinkle fingers with, and quips went back and forth that I couldn’t hear. She got to me and stood with her hands on her hips and gazed down at me mock-somethingly, which got me sheepish, as I’m sure she intended.

“You seriously want the Dancing Fools,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That I would not have predicted.” She walked a little circle around me, shaking her red mane, and I pretended I wasn’t freaked out to look at her, and after a few seconds of pretending, it was true. I’m not freaked out by a cat, I thought, and I’m not freaked out by a nurse. So where’s the problem? That’s where I was, emotionally. “Do you dare me to give you the Fools?” she asked.

“No, I don’t dare you, it’s just what I pick.”

She stopped and crouched next to me. She was wearing orange tights with her white uniform and I hadn’t even noticed it before. Now that the rest of her was normal, the tights could look crazy.

“Look, miss. I get ‘rude’ all day from people like them,” she said. “Do you think I need ‘rude’ from you?” I could feel her looking at me, but no matter how much of a problem I didn’t have with her I could not look directly into those fucked-up golden orbs of doom, and just like that, her life stretched before me: one endless gallery of madmen seen as if through a keyhole because of my catty eyes. I had one cat-eyed kid left from a litter lost tragically, and a husband always out on the prowl.

I’m kidding.

What happened is off I hopped from my high horse because she was nice, she was right about me, and I didn’t need to understand her back.

She pulled a small spiral notebook from the front pocket of her skirt. There was a list of names in handwriting that looked like calligraphy: Bobo, Kai, Armand, Kelly. “These are all fine choices, and they all like you fine,” she said. I hadn’t seen any of them yet. They were farther down the gallery. Maybe there was an information card on me. The kingdom of the mad is inexhaustible, as they say. I knew a kid once whose parents were against the madman system, and he got out of it by spending summers building houses for the poor and taking a test on human rights history. I was glad my parents weren’t around to interfere, but I still thought of that kid’s parents, parents like one thing, like conjoined twins, but reverse: of two bodies and one mind.

Then suddenly I thought I felt blood spilling out of me and I stood up in a panic, like a rabbit on the highway, no idea which way to go. It was awful. Along with my boots, I was wearing brown pants that were plain but just cut really nice for my body, but I hadn’t been thinking, when I put them on, about my period and all that could happen. I had no idea what would happen with this color pants if I leaked. The madman in the cell behind me, the imbecile with the head and the beak, who at some point had snuggled up with his sheet on his cot and was possibly sleeping, sat up with a jerk and said, in a voice that sounded not like an Imbecile talking back to a dream, not like an Imbecile at all: “No, please, not me. I’ll do anything. I’ve got a bad feeling about you.”

“You want to meet them?” said the nurse, still holding out her spiral notebook.

“I need to go to deal with my period,” I said. “I’ll take Armand.”

—

Honestly, I know that in some cultures girls are supposed to feel shame over their period, and it’s not like I feel anyone should be ashamed of what they are, but if you’re like, “Oh, the flow of my blood, the essence of my womanhood,” well, that is just stupid and disgusting. There I am with my responsible-looking pants on the handbag hook in the stall, standing in my socks and, oh yeah, my naked ass, at the counter wiping blood off my crash-appropriate underwear with a paper towel. What, then, is least disgusting: put your underwear back on all damp and horrific, put your underwear on inside out so the damp part rubs up on your favorite and nicest pants, put them back on and stuff them with toilet paper that might fall down your leg at any second, don’t put them back on and hope you don’t leak again until you can get more underwear and perhaps a panty liner which why didn’t your mother fucking suggest this ever, and why have you never seen any panty liners in the house? Perhaps it is your mother that is disgusting. And even then where do you put your underwear, in your pocket or what? Because you left your bag in the car because you wanted your hands free for picking out your madman. Not to mention I thought this place was so well equipped, and hasn’t anyone ever noticed that girls who are on the first day of their first period and don’t know what they’re doing come here all the time? So where’s looking that in the eyes and understanding it? So also, as Carrie would say, none of your beeswax about what is least disgusting in my worldview.

Outside the bathroom the nurse was waiting for me, leaning on the wall like she was from the fifties.

“You okay?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Armand, still? You sure?”

“Yes.”

She smiled, then, a 100 percent genuine smile which there’s no faking. I know, because I have watched myself in the mirror and tried.

So his name was Armand, and in that way my madman transformed from a madman to the name of a man, which is only a little different but counts at least some. The nurse pushed back through one set of double doors to go get him ready, and I pushed through another, into the waiting room with a pile of forms and my vacant parents, who were staring at posters on opposite ends as if they were looking out portholes in a ship. Where their heads weren’t blocking, I could see that one poster was a phrenology diagram, and the other was a color-coded brain scan. Were they even looking at what they were looking at? Twinges in my belly were either anxiety or cramps or both. I didn’t know anyone who’d just picked a name from a list on advice from a psychiatric/psychotic-looking nurse. But I know you can never pick exactly right. There’d be a whole other batch any other day. One day you could walk in and it’s your old friend Bitsy from second grade wearing a rag and picking her butt and looking at you and the space next to you like it’s the same thing. Which maybe it is. I didn’t throw a dart, but the way I chose my madman had very little magic in it, and what should I learn from that?

Well, it had a little magic, like a pebble in a setting forged for a diamond.

Oh, Armand, I thought. My own little pebble. The phrase came back to me: coloboma of the iris, and it sounded like a lullaby.

Meanwhile, I handed some forms to my dad and we sat as if peacefully doing paperwork while all the weight in the room slid toward the black hole created by my mother as she ignored us both. I’d missed something, something between them, and probably something with the nurse, as well. I asked my dad, I guess to break the ice, “Why do so many of them have sticks?” because all I knew about my madman was, according to the nurse, he was not going to leave his behind and I should be okay with that. And his cloak.

“Staffs,” my father said, considering. “Shepherds used to carry crooks. Madmen have traditions.”

“What they have,” my mother said, still focused on the phrenology poster, “is a brain disorder.”

I pictured sheep like marbles, always wandering off, pictured a madman named Armand on a grassy hill, his marbles rolling away, trying to pull them back with his crook, useless. How far he must have traveled, hiking back roads and mountain trails, fording creeks with it, balancing with three legs. I pictured that. How he might have speared a fish with it, or clubbed a rabbit over the head to eat, or slain an enemy in the night. Or used it for a wand, to turn seawater potable, to ward off evil, to punish his tormentors. Or the stick was bifurcated. It split. In order to represent his brain.

“Okay, geniuses, perhaps it’s not a brain disorder,” my mother said, as if anyone had said anything. “He’s been emasculated by his madness. In fact, it’s a dick. Let him have it. It makes him feel better.” Unsurprisingly, this seemed to hurt my father’s feelings. It also appeared that while she was not yet talking to me, she wanted me to know she was there, so that was a good sign.

The nurse materialized in the nurses’ station and I met her in the window. I gave her the paperwork and she gave me a SMTWTFS pillbox, a chart that showed how it was set up, and a bag of meds. She gave me the number of a psychopharmacologist named Dr. Sandy and said this is who to call for refills or if Armand seemed too down for too long, or too excited over nothing, or not sleeping, or having trouble talking or moving, or not making sense when he talked, or violent. She must have seen the look in my eyes because she said, “Just call the number if something doesn’t seem right. Trust your instincts.” It felt good for her to say that, although I wondered about the boy with the cowlick and if he should trust his instincts, too, if everyone, no matter how dumb, young, or crazy, should be trusting instincts. The rosy woman with her adventures, the nurse with her crazy eyes and her white uniform. There were instincts all over the place. I looked up to see my mother leaving the building. A length of toilet paper struggled to escape from her jacket pocket.

My dad said, “She sees you growing up and she’s afraid of losing you.”

“She said that?”

“Not exactly.”

In the parking lot our car and truck were staring straight ahead like they weren’t ready to talk, either. My mom’s head was a rock hovering impossibly over her steering wheel. I decided to ride home with my dad because at least he was normal. I felt bad for about three seconds, putting the madman in the back for our first ride, but I enjoyed horrifying my mother by doing it. She glared at me from behind the window while she felt through her purse for her phone. Receipts, her falling-apart checkbook, an extra ring of like forty keys and I don’t know if there’s been forty things in her life that had locks, a separate falling-apart wallet for pictures, open dirty Life Savers and all kinds of crap that why doesn’t she just throw away, like a manual for our Mister Mixer, for god’s sake I’ve seen it in there, all these things I knew were bulging out of her purse and spilling into the car and I’m sure slid under the seat without her noticing because she was so busy glaring at me. I just hopped into the back of the truck, and my dad helped me fit my madman into his harness, which fit perfectly from what I could tell with him enveloped in his cloak. I clipped him to the tarp-ties and hopped into the cab. By that time, her car was gone. And my bag was still in there, too. I made peace with the possibility that I would sacrifice my best pants to my big day.

At first, my madman didn’t seem sure how to position himself and he wouldn’t put his staff down. I watched by using the mirrors so he wouldn’t feel self-conscious. He definitely wobbled while we were backing up but then sat leaning against the cab and held the staff in his lap. He’d been quiet but helpful while we were fitting his harness on. I was so distracted I wasn’t taking it all in, and again, I felt bad about that, but he was helping in this very gentle/unobtrusive way, letting a hand creep out from his cloak and taking a strap and then passing it back through the other side. He didn’t say a thing or make a sound. I should have just put her out of my mind and really taken this opportunity, I mean it was our first impression, and as soon as we got going I felt so bad I wanted to cry for wasting it, but the thing about madmen is most of their memories are fucked up, so you never know when anything you do or don’t do will stick, and they’ve been through so much that you kind of can’t go wrong anyway, as long as you’re not overall abusive or evil. As a group, they really know how to let things go, or else they’d be dead already. The truck had one of those sliding panels in the back window, so I could poke my head out every so often and see the top of his head, still hidden in his cloak, and the fabric blowing around him like a ghost but in reverse, heavy and black instead of filmy white, but still moving around as if there wasn’t anyone in there when of course there was.

Then I watched my dad’s head bobbing along the strip of landscape. His cheek looked really soft, even with a not-great shaving job. The plan was we’d go home and let the madman just be by himself or rest in the shed while we had dinner as a family to celebrate. Then I would bring him his plate and I guess get to know him? That’s the part I hadn’t done so much imagining in anticipation. I was also having my doubts about being greeted at the house with any lasagna.

“Whatever happened to your madman, Dad?” I knew it was a woman madman, and I knew it made him nervous to talk about it, and I knew he felt like he hadn’t always done the right thing. I’d heard all about my mother’s madmen, how she’d had one and then another and they’d both been cured, and she had a box tied with ribbons that had letters from them in it, and a certificate of appreciation from California, and invitations to come work for boards of things. The landscape was blurry and peripheral because I was looking at my dad, and I thought of the schoolhouse with the spinning weathervane out of time with everything else, and tried to remember if we’d passed it already, but I felt turned around trying to anchor myself in the recollection, and immediately after that it seemed irrelevant. Things were different, weren’t they? But for some reason my dad was still hesitating the way he always had about his experiences, and I just had this sudden image of him peeling back his face, revealing his own madness, and crying out: “I’ll tell you what happened to my madman! I married her!”

Instead, he winced. He said, “Honey, it’s private. And very sad. And this is your big day.”

I know you don’t show just anyone your madman, like sex, but even people who talk all the time about something that’s supposedly private are covering for something else. The more I was part of the whole adult world, the more turned out as one secret after another. My madman was still just a cloak and a stick, and oh yeah, we call him Armand. But there was my dad, who I’d supposedly known all my life, and what was he?

If the world looked different so far, the difference was it didn’t look so symbolic. That is not what a girl wants when she comes of age.

At the house, my mother’s car was in the driveway with its daytime running lights still on and both doors flopped open. Eyes rolled back, limbs splayed.

“Take Armand to his shed,” said my father.

He was terrified.

—

Back in the gallery of madmen, when my mother was yelling because of what I wanted, I looked at her eyes and tried to see them objectively. Their blueness, whiteness, redness. I tried to look at her eyeballs themselves — not the lids or brow or her crow’s feet or the other muscles in her face. I wanted to know how emotion could come shooting from her eyes the way it did. Maybe I couldn’t block out the rest of her face, maybe that was impossible, like pretending I wasn’t her kid would be impossible. Maybe the feelings came from the situation and not her body. Maybe the situation and her body were the same thing or I will never understand because I don’t have enough empathy.

She said I was romanticizing. She said I’d like anyone if I knew the whole story. She said being free is not being free if you are in pain. She said madness is pain.

I said, “I have pain.”

She said, “It’s different for them because it’s more.”

What do you want to be wearing when your father comes back from checking on your mother and you learn that this time your mother has actually killed herself? This is what I wondered, sitting in the cab of the truck in the driveway, looking at the familiar world, which had become so still. Sweatpants, I thought, because you can sleep in them and be in public in them. Cross-trainers because they have good grip and breathe. Layers on top: a long-sleeved shirt under a short-sleeved shirt because it’s flexible and I’ve seen pictures of her wearing that when I was a baby, also a fleece vest because I might have to sleep in the hospital with air conditioning, or, I kept thinking, you might have to be outside at night. I kept picturing that. Looking for her in the woods behind the house. Which one time I did do. My father was out of town and she had been crying for so many hours, I’d tried being nice, I’d tried leaving her alone, and I threatened to call Dad and she said “Go ahead” in a way I took to mean if I called him, she’d finish herself off for sure. I even put my face up to hers and then screamed in a sudden burst like saying “boo!” but as loud and angry as possible and not funny. It freaked me out about myself when I screamed like that. Eventually it was like two in the morning and I was in my bed holding the phone, trying to decide what would be the moment I would call a hospital, trying to decide what the sign would be, and I heard the front door, and looked out the window, and saw her take off running into the woods. One time our cat had gone missing and years later I found her collar and her bones in the woods while I was walking, and then that night we all went into the woods to bury her, with candles, stones we’d chosen, and a baby tree, and it was beautiful. When my mother took off into the woods, I hesitated to follow her. I had this image of a beautiful candlelight thing and then just, I don’t know, peace, being on my own.

But I did follow her into the woods. It was so dark but I found her curled up on the trail by a fallen mossy log. She was covered in dirt and not crying anymore. She came with me, which I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t, but for some reason I didn’t even have to touch her, she just came with me. At the house she said, “Thank you for saving my life,” and I let her take a bath, even though I was scared of what might happen in there, but I told myself to stop being dramatic, she was my mother and she could take a bath. Maybe I believed that I had saved her life, and that’s what let me go to sleep and next day tell my father a version of it when he came home that was true but unemotional in a way that let him not make a big deal out of it and let me think it wasn’t a big deal after all. But even then I knew it wasn’t me that saved her life. It wasn’t about me. I was just there while she was maybe going to die and maybe not, and then she just didn’t.

I got out of the truck and stood in the driveway, unhooking Armand’s harness. He scrambled to his feet under his cloak and used his staff of madness to steady himself on the ridged bed. I reached out my hand — the idea was he could take it and walk along to the tailgate — and there was a moment when he seemed to be deciding between dropping his stick to take my hand or not. It was impossible to know for sure with the cloak, but I had the distinct impression that he might have only one arm.

The sun was starting to set. The house was behind us. He didn’t take my hand, just made his way to the end of the truck, and I lowered the tailgate, and then he sat on it. His legs dangled. I glanced to see if I could see his feet, if they would be in boots, or shoes, or sandals, or rags, or nothing. If he would have feet. But his cloak floated below them, and only the staff poked out. I hopped up onto the tailgate with him, careful not to touch him, and the truck rocked like a boat, and so, like a lookout at the prow of a ship of fools, I put my hand to my forehead and squinted toward the sun into the distance. I could spy with my little eye the roof of the shed, partway down the hill, and sparks like tiny fires in the low water in the creek, and the woods like a curtain with everything beyond darker than ever, sucking up the light. Soon the sun was setting enough that it was past the time when the pieces of the world are sharp and distinct from each other and on to when everything becomes one fuzzy mass. Our eyes saw and then didn’t see the forms we knew were in there, and then saw again for a second, and then were just making it up. Okay, that’s what my eyes were doing, anyhow. At some point I was going to have to say something to him, and if he had a voice he was probably going to say something back. Maybe something would change then. The sun was so close to set, but it hadn’t set all the way. Instead of saying something, I thought about the weathervane, spinning, because I wanted the moment to last forever.