Demon Box

To firm up this fantasy I was limousined up to Portland by the producers to meet the head doctor, Superintendent Malachi Mortimer. Dr. Mortimer was a fatherly Jew of fifty with a gray pompadour and a jovial singsong voice. He sounded like a tour guide when he showed the hospital to me and the high-stepping herd of moguls up from Hollywood. Hype of moguls might be better.

As I followed through the dilapidated wards, memories of those long-ago graveyard shifts were brought sharply back to me—by the sound of heavy keychains jangling, by the reek of Pine Sol over urine, especially by the faces. All those curious stares from doorways and corridors gave me a very curious feeling. It wasn’t exactly a memory but there was something familiar about it. It was the kind of tugging sensation you get when you feel that something is needed from you but have no notion what it is, and neither does the thing needing it. I guessed that maybe it was just information. Over and over I was drawn from our parade by looks so starved to know what was going on that I felt obliged to stop and try to shed some light. The faces did brighten. The likelihood that their sorry situation might be exploited as the set for a Hollywood movie didn’t seem to disturb them. If Superintendent Mortimer decided it was all right, then they had no objections.

I was touched by their trust and I was impressed with Mortimer. All his charges seemed to like him. In turn he admired my book and liked the changes it had wrought in the industry. The producers liked that we liked each other, and before the day was over everything was agreed: Dr. Mortimer would permit use of his hospital if the movie company would foot the bill for a much-needed sprucing up, the patients would be paid extras, I would write the screenplay, the hype of moguls would pull in a heap of Oscars. Everyone would be fulfilled and happy.

“This baby’s got big box written all over her!” was the way one enthusiastic second assistant something-or-other expressed it.

But driving back to Eugene that evening I found it difficult to hold up my end of the enthusiasm. That tugging sensation continued to hook at me, reeling my mind back to that haunted countenance at the hospital like a fish to a phantom fisherman. I hadn’t confronted that face in years. Or wanted to. Nobody wants to. We learn to turn away whenever we detect the barbed cast of it—in the sticky eyes of a wino, or behind a hustler’s come-on, or out the side of a street dealer’s mouth. It’s the loser’s profile, the side of society’s face that the other side always tries to turn away from. Maybe that’s why the screenplay I eventually hacked out never appealed to the moguls—they know a loser when they have to look away from one.

Weeks passed but I couldn’t shake that nebulous nagging. It put a terrible drag on my adaptation efforts. Turning a novel into a screenplay is mainly a job of cutting, condensing; yet I felt compelled to try to say not only more but something else. My first attempt was way long and long overdue. I declined the producers’ offer to rent me a place up near the hospital so I could browse around the wards and maybe recharge my muse. My muse was still overcharged from that first browse. I wasn’t ready to take another. For one thing, whatever it was that had got me so good was still waiting with baited looks; if it got me any better I feared it was liable to have me for good.

For another, it seemed to be communicable, a virus that might be transmitted eye to eye. I was beginning to imagine I could detect traces of it in friends and family—in fretful glances, flickers of despair escaping from cracked lids, particularly in my father’s face. It was as though something picked up from the hospital had passed on to him, the way the fear inside a fallen rider can become the horse’s. It was hard to believe that a mean old mustang raised on the plains of west Texas would inexplicably develop a fear of emptiness. He had always been too tough. Hadn’t he already outlasted all the experts’ estimates by nearly five years, more from his own stiff-necked grit than from any help they had given? But suddenly all that grit seemed gone, and the sponge collar that he wore to keep his head up just wasn’t doing the trick any more.

“What’d this Lou Gehrig accomplish that was so dadgum great?” was the sort of thing he had taken to asking. “No matter how many times you make it all the way around the bases, you’re still right back where you started—in the dirt. That’s no accomplishment.”

He swept the sports page from his lap and across the lawn, exposing the withered remnant of his legs. I had dropped by and caught him out on the backyard lawn chair, reading the newspaper in his shorts.

“I’m sick of home plate is what it is! I feel like a potted plant.”