Chapter 1 - Comments appreciated
I'm still hacking away at my first chapter, polishing and polishing. Here it is. I know there are many of you who are experienced and talented writers, or (at least) intelligent and savvy readers.
Please, please, take a look at this and let me know if anything bugs you, turns you off, breaks the flow for you, or otherwise doesn't make it impossible for you to turn to chapter 2.
Thanks so much!
Chapter 1
I was the night supervisor in the laundry facility at the Vince Malum Residential Living Center, a long-term care home for the mentally ill. I was nobody, an everywoman who didn’t stand out or make a fuss, and I liked it that way. I got the job done.
When I was a little girl, Grandpa used to take me down to the public pool in the summer. It was always filled with screaming boys and girls. The smell of coconut and chlorine could make me woozy with happiness.
There was a high dive. The older kids would climb the long ladder, ease out to the edge, then dive or jump off. The cacophony of the crowd was punctuated by their regular kersplooshes.
The first time I climbed that ladder, I was shocked at how high up I was. I stood there, clinging to the steel railing at the back of the board, knocked-kneed and terrified. I was in the clouds, above the din.
The people below looked small, their heads bobbing in the water like petals on a puddle. The distance between me and the water seemed unbridgeable.
I lost my nerve and had to back down the ladder to the angry cries and jeering of the other children.
I never did climb back up, but I did remember how it felt to stand at the edge, looking out into the open air with no promise that there would be anything but pain-and maybe even death-to catch me.
That’s how it felt to have a mental illness too. When most people admit to being crazy, it’s wishful thinking. I spent twenty years trying to hide my illness. All I wanted was security, stability-the doldrums. I wanted my feet firmly planted on the ground.
I kept every day the same, more or less. Tick tock. The clock ruled my world. I paced myself to the beat of the metronome that droned in my subconscious day after day, night after night.
If you spend your life at the edge of a precipice, you remain ever-vigilant for those unexpected gusts of wind or ground tremors. I knew the day would eventually come when I’d lose my footing, though I avoided thinking about it too often. Instead, I focused on my mentally ill mother, my relationship with my fiancé, and on my job.
Poised on the threshold to the laundry room, I watched my employees perform their duties. We had three hours left in the graveyard shift. The gargantuan laundry machines-two washers and two dryers-created a constant cacophony, making the soundtrack of my life more like the orchestra’s chaotic warm-up than the melodious rifts of a Tchaikovsky ballet or even the dramatic arias of a Wagner opera.
Still, I’d grown used to it over the years. I felt sheltered by the noise, protected by it even. The laundry facility was the one place where I was in control-of my world and of my mind. It was the only place where I had never experienced a hallucination.
Vertigo shifted my center of gravity, and I felt the floor open in front of me. I grabbed for the doorframe and took a deep breath, focusing my eyes-to the best of my ability-on the great white washer ahead. I was on a new anti-psychotic prescription, and my psychiatrist had warned me that I might experience some dizziness in the beginning. I was grateful it wasn’t accompanied by nausea, like other times.
I felt the chasm close, and my body settled back into normal gravity. I glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. The others were all pre-occupied.
Several minutes later, Jasmin “Jazz” Belonescu peeled away from the sorting table and crossed toward me. Even in the laundry smock and pants, he looked like a desert nomad, skin tanned by a harsh sun, mouth hardened by a harsh life.
For the thousandth time, I thought, He moves like a panther. I’d read that phrase somewhere, though I’d never met anyone else who actually did-only Jazz. His entire demeanor made him a little scary and a lot sexy. Though I’d never seen evidence of it, I was convinced that he was-or had been at one time-involved in criminal activities.
“That load’s done.” he said when he was within earshot. “You want me to start the next one?”
I nodded and watched him turn away. If I slept with my employees, which I didn’t, then he’d have been my first choice.
I ticked off another load on the big board. That made ten for the night. We were right on schedule.
The laundry had a natural rhythm. Dirty piles were sorted, then moved on to the washers. There were lulls between transitions during which the machines did their part.
Julio Marcos Fernandez Quinones was working the washers that night. As he hit a lull, he turned away from his machine and came my way.
“Señorita Rose,” he shouted.
I caught his eye, and he signaled that he was leaving his post for a smoke, two fingers to his lips. I nodded.
Julio’s smoke breaks never conformed to the official 15-30-15 break schedule, but I didn’t care. He did his job well and never complained. He was the joker on the team. Earlier that night, he’d had us in stitches, telling us how his gringa girlfriend had dumped him to join a community of vegan hippies. He said it was his own fault. He should have stuck with Latinas, like his mother advised.
He said, “Latinas don’t go vegan, and they don’t leave an employed boyfriend to join a tits-free commune.” Then, he spit into one of the garbage cans and walked away, leaving us laughing behind him. That’s how he was.
After the day I’d had, maybe I needed more of that laughter. Maybe the thought of a bummed smoke was calling to me. Whatever it was, something turned my steps that way. A few minutes after he left, I followed him.
As soon as I was through the back fire door of the laundry, the noise level dropped significantly. I followed a long, concrete-block corridor that turned at the end. Storage rooms lined the hall on one side. We were in the basement of the Center, hidden beneath it all, where the noise wouldn’t disturb the mental patients. The stairwell was the best place to smoke. No one ever came down the back way, so the likelihood of getting caught was slim.
My footsteps echoed in the empty, cold tunnel. I hit the door to the stairwell without stopping, pressed the bar, and pushed it open with one smooth, practiced move.
“Hey, Julio,” I said. “It’s me. Gimme a…”
Julio was collapsing, sliding slowly down the wall as if someone had just spit him out. His arms were twitching, hands jangling like spiders riding their webs on a windy day.
After a moment’s stunned inaction, I rushed to him and knelt at his side.
His eyes rolled back in his head.
“Julio!” I cried, shaking his shoulder. “Julio, can you hear me? Julio. What’s happening to you?”
He didn’t respond.
“Julio. Fuck.” I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my cell phone. I had to keep it on me because I’d never know it was ringing otherwise, not in the laundry. I opened it and dialed the Center’s security desk. Nothing happened. I had no bars.
“Fuck!”
I stepped over Julio and ran up the stairs to the first floor. I was buzzing, my body three steps ahead of my brain. I raised the phone as I climbed and watched the bars until I got a signal. Then, I dialed again.
Gratitude coursed through me when I heard Esteban, the night watchman, answer.
“Esteban! I need a doctor or an ambulance. Julio is sick. I don’t think he’s breathing. We’re in the back stairwell, in the basement. This is Viviane Rose. Please, hurry.”
He replied, “I’ll get-” and our connection broke because I’d already started back down the stairs. I knelt beside Julio and dropped my phone.
“Julio?”
I’d had training, American Red Cross certification in first aid and C.P.R. It was a requirement of my job. Although everything I’d learned was jumbled up in my head, I did the best I could. I checked him.
He wasn’t breathing.
He had no pulse.
I grabbed him by the shoulders of his smock and pulled him down onto the flat concrete floor, then gave him my version of pulmonary resuscitation until Andrea, the night nurse from the women’s wing, arrived.
“What happened?” she asked, positioning herself on the other side of Julio.
“I don’t know,” I told her between chest pumps. “He was…on his break…and I was…looking for him…when I found him…he was having...some kind of fit…maybe a seizure…a stroke…I don’t know.”
Andrea checked his pulse. “I’ll take over the heart massage for awhile. You breathe for him. I’ll tell you when.”
“Okay.”
Andrea took over, and I scooted toward his head, getting ready to do my part.
I was so relieved to have someone else there, helping me, that I felt tears crawling up into my nose and sinuses. I sniffled. I had to keep it together. I slid my hand into my smock pocket and felt for the needle I kept there. It was my anchor, my lifeline to sanity. I found it.
I pushed it into the pad of my middle finger. The pain brought everything back into focus. It cleared my vision and quieted my mind. In the space of a second, I was fine again.
I positioned Julio’s head, pinched off his nose, and watched Andrea.
“Breathe,” Andrea said, pausing long enough for me to give Julio the kiss of life.
We continued like that until the paramedics arrived, accompanied by Esteban.
Andrea and I moved aside to watch the paramedics do their jobs. They had equipment, a defibrillator. It took two shocks, but Julio breathed. He sucked in air as if he had a black hole of emptiness inside him.
Andrea and I both gasped with him.
“I have a pulse,” said one of the paramedics.
Julio began to talk then, rambling in Spanish. “Ella se enoja. Coatlicue se enoja. Se enoja.”
The paramedics lifted him onto a stretcher.
As they rolled him away, he latched onto my sleeve, hissed my name, “Señorita Rose,” and hung on for dear life. “Ella se enoja,” he croaked.
“It’s okay, Julio,” I told him. “Nobody’s angry. It’s okay.”
I peeled away his fingers and stayed behind. I had to return to the laundry.
Later that night, as I filed the paperwork requesting a temporary replacement for Julio, I thought about calling Richard, but eventually decided against it. I didn’t need my psychiatrist as much as I needed a good stiff drink.
Please, please, take a look at this and let me know if anything bugs you, turns you off, breaks the flow for you, or otherwise doesn't make it impossible for you to turn to chapter 2.
Thanks so much!
Chapter 1
I was the night supervisor in the laundry facility at the Vince Malum Residential Living Center, a long-term care home for the mentally ill. I was nobody, an everywoman who didn’t stand out or make a fuss, and I liked it that way. I got the job done.
When I was a little girl, Grandpa used to take me down to the public pool in the summer. It was always filled with screaming boys and girls. The smell of coconut and chlorine could make me woozy with happiness.
There was a high dive. The older kids would climb the long ladder, ease out to the edge, then dive or jump off. The cacophony of the crowd was punctuated by their regular kersplooshes.
The first time I climbed that ladder, I was shocked at how high up I was. I stood there, clinging to the steel railing at the back of the board, knocked-kneed and terrified. I was in the clouds, above the din.
The people below looked small, their heads bobbing in the water like petals on a puddle. The distance between me and the water seemed unbridgeable.
I lost my nerve and had to back down the ladder to the angry cries and jeering of the other children.
I never did climb back up, but I did remember how it felt to stand at the edge, looking out into the open air with no promise that there would be anything but pain-and maybe even death-to catch me.
That’s how it felt to have a mental illness too. When most people admit to being crazy, it’s wishful thinking. I spent twenty years trying to hide my illness. All I wanted was security, stability-the doldrums. I wanted my feet firmly planted on the ground.
I kept every day the same, more or less. Tick tock. The clock ruled my world. I paced myself to the beat of the metronome that droned in my subconscious day after day, night after night.
If you spend your life at the edge of a precipice, you remain ever-vigilant for those unexpected gusts of wind or ground tremors. I knew the day would eventually come when I’d lose my footing, though I avoided thinking about it too often. Instead, I focused on my mentally ill mother, my relationship with my fiancé, and on my job.
Poised on the threshold to the laundry room, I watched my employees perform their duties. We had three hours left in the graveyard shift. The gargantuan laundry machines-two washers and two dryers-created a constant cacophony, making the soundtrack of my life more like the orchestra’s chaotic warm-up than the melodious rifts of a Tchaikovsky ballet or even the dramatic arias of a Wagner opera.
Still, I’d grown used to it over the years. I felt sheltered by the noise, protected by it even. The laundry facility was the one place where I was in control-of my world and of my mind. It was the only place where I had never experienced a hallucination.
Vertigo shifted my center of gravity, and I felt the floor open in front of me. I grabbed for the doorframe and took a deep breath, focusing my eyes-to the best of my ability-on the great white washer ahead. I was on a new anti-psychotic prescription, and my psychiatrist had warned me that I might experience some dizziness in the beginning. I was grateful it wasn’t accompanied by nausea, like other times.
I felt the chasm close, and my body settled back into normal gravity. I glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. The others were all pre-occupied.
Several minutes later, Jasmin “Jazz” Belonescu peeled away from the sorting table and crossed toward me. Even in the laundry smock and pants, he looked like a desert nomad, skin tanned by a harsh sun, mouth hardened by a harsh life.
For the thousandth time, I thought, He moves like a panther. I’d read that phrase somewhere, though I’d never met anyone else who actually did-only Jazz. His entire demeanor made him a little scary and a lot sexy. Though I’d never seen evidence of it, I was convinced that he was-or had been at one time-involved in criminal activities.
“That load’s done.” he said when he was within earshot. “You want me to start the next one?”
I nodded and watched him turn away. If I slept with my employees, which I didn’t, then he’d have been my first choice.
I ticked off another load on the big board. That made ten for the night. We were right on schedule.
The laundry had a natural rhythm. Dirty piles were sorted, then moved on to the washers. There were lulls between transitions during which the machines did their part.
Julio Marcos Fernandez Quinones was working the washers that night. As he hit a lull, he turned away from his machine and came my way.
“Señorita Rose,” he shouted.
I caught his eye, and he signaled that he was leaving his post for a smoke, two fingers to his lips. I nodded.
Julio’s smoke breaks never conformed to the official 15-30-15 break schedule, but I didn’t care. He did his job well and never complained. He was the joker on the team. Earlier that night, he’d had us in stitches, telling us how his gringa girlfriend had dumped him to join a community of vegan hippies. He said it was his own fault. He should have stuck with Latinas, like his mother advised.
He said, “Latinas don’t go vegan, and they don’t leave an employed boyfriend to join a tits-free commune.” Then, he spit into one of the garbage cans and walked away, leaving us laughing behind him. That’s how he was.
After the day I’d had, maybe I needed more of that laughter. Maybe the thought of a bummed smoke was calling to me. Whatever it was, something turned my steps that way. A few minutes after he left, I followed him.
As soon as I was through the back fire door of the laundry, the noise level dropped significantly. I followed a long, concrete-block corridor that turned at the end. Storage rooms lined the hall on one side. We were in the basement of the Center, hidden beneath it all, where the noise wouldn’t disturb the mental patients. The stairwell was the best place to smoke. No one ever came down the back way, so the likelihood of getting caught was slim.
My footsteps echoed in the empty, cold tunnel. I hit the door to the stairwell without stopping, pressed the bar, and pushed it open with one smooth, practiced move.
“Hey, Julio,” I said. “It’s me. Gimme a…”
Julio was collapsing, sliding slowly down the wall as if someone had just spit him out. His arms were twitching, hands jangling like spiders riding their webs on a windy day.
After a moment’s stunned inaction, I rushed to him and knelt at his side.
His eyes rolled back in his head.
“Julio!” I cried, shaking his shoulder. “Julio, can you hear me? Julio. What’s happening to you?”
He didn’t respond.
“Julio. Fuck.” I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my cell phone. I had to keep it on me because I’d never know it was ringing otherwise, not in the laundry. I opened it and dialed the Center’s security desk. Nothing happened. I had no bars.
“Fuck!”
I stepped over Julio and ran up the stairs to the first floor. I was buzzing, my body three steps ahead of my brain. I raised the phone as I climbed and watched the bars until I got a signal. Then, I dialed again.
Gratitude coursed through me when I heard Esteban, the night watchman, answer.
“Esteban! I need a doctor or an ambulance. Julio is sick. I don’t think he’s breathing. We’re in the back stairwell, in the basement. This is Viviane Rose. Please, hurry.”
He replied, “I’ll get-” and our connection broke because I’d already started back down the stairs. I knelt beside Julio and dropped my phone.
“Julio?”
I’d had training, American Red Cross certification in first aid and C.P.R. It was a requirement of my job. Although everything I’d learned was jumbled up in my head, I did the best I could. I checked him.
He wasn’t breathing.
He had no pulse.
I grabbed him by the shoulders of his smock and pulled him down onto the flat concrete floor, then gave him my version of pulmonary resuscitation until Andrea, the night nurse from the women’s wing, arrived.
“What happened?” she asked, positioning herself on the other side of Julio.
“I don’t know,” I told her between chest pumps. “He was…on his break…and I was…looking for him…when I found him…he was having...some kind of fit…maybe a seizure…a stroke…I don’t know.”
Andrea checked his pulse. “I’ll take over the heart massage for awhile. You breathe for him. I’ll tell you when.”
“Okay.”
Andrea took over, and I scooted toward his head, getting ready to do my part.
I was so relieved to have someone else there, helping me, that I felt tears crawling up into my nose and sinuses. I sniffled. I had to keep it together. I slid my hand into my smock pocket and felt for the needle I kept there. It was my anchor, my lifeline to sanity. I found it.
I pushed it into the pad of my middle finger. The pain brought everything back into focus. It cleared my vision and quieted my mind. In the space of a second, I was fine again.
I positioned Julio’s head, pinched off his nose, and watched Andrea.
“Breathe,” Andrea said, pausing long enough for me to give Julio the kiss of life.
We continued like that until the paramedics arrived, accompanied by Esteban.
Andrea and I moved aside to watch the paramedics do their jobs. They had equipment, a defibrillator. It took two shocks, but Julio breathed. He sucked in air as if he had a black hole of emptiness inside him.
Andrea and I both gasped with him.
“I have a pulse,” said one of the paramedics.
Julio began to talk then, rambling in Spanish. “Ella se enoja. Coatlicue se enoja. Se enoja.”
The paramedics lifted him onto a stretcher.
As they rolled him away, he latched onto my sleeve, hissed my name, “Señorita Rose,” and hung on for dear life. “Ella se enoja,” he croaked.
“It’s okay, Julio,” I told him. “Nobody’s angry. It’s okay.”
I peeled away his fingers and stayed behind. I had to return to the laundry.
Later that night, as I filed the paperwork requesting a temporary replacement for Julio, I thought about calling Richard, but eventually decided against it. I didn’t need my psychiatrist as much as I needed a good stiff drink.