“Linoleum People” is generous toward its characters, and faithful to the strangeness, the boredom, the safety of routines set out for one by other people. The sentences are energetic, colorful, rich in the kind of specificity of detail that, stripped down, feels exactly right. I’m intrigued by the shifts in POV, and I’m interested in everyone we meet. And—no small thing!—I appreciate the humor, which serves as another kind of texture layered in over everything else. — Guest Judge Kelly Link
This, too, is a kind of lexicon: mornings mean Wake-Up at 6:30 AM; Medication Line at 7:00 AM; Vital/Daily Assessment at 7:30 AM. Nights mean Evening Walk at 6:00 PM; Dinner at 6:30 PM; Wheel of Fortune at 7:30 PM. In between are Psychiatrist Appointments, Visitation Times, Goal-Setting Groups, and Prepare for Beds. Round and round like this we go. Translating the hours.
I prefer evenings to mornings for the fact of the day ending. That’s a solid, immutable thing—that the day always ends. One of those rare objects that’s just true on the ward as it is anywhere else. Still, there also stands a more niche, on-the-ward truth; evenings are by far our most exciting paragraph of time. If time in this place is a Ferris wheel, the 6-8 PM spell is its undeniable zenith. All day, we stake out night. Beforehand, in the empty hours, we watch the parking lot. The group room has an excellent view of the hospital parking lot. Whenever I mention how excellent this view is, Terry #2 begins to riff about Melville’s “Bartleby,” the rhetorical significance of the narrator describing his office as having a nice view of a brick wall.
“Not ‘nice,’ Grace,” Terry #2 says. “‘Unobstructed.’ He says he has an unobstructed view of the brick wall.”
“So?”
“So, he is chronically obstructed by his misunderstanding of obstruction. I thought you were studying English.”
“I was,” I say. “Now, I’m studying the parking lot.”
He clucks a few times, all slick and staccato. “Mmm. Mm mm mm. Aren’t we all?”
We watch our nurses slump into their Hondas, watch our doctors greet their doctor spouses, watch a scraggly med student fumble for his keys, a Juul clutched like a rosary between his teeth. We watch the shifts change. We watch the light change. We are goldfish and guppies and neon tetras glancing the tank walls, learning the world and its impenetrable rhythms through glass thick as a keloid. To the east, the courtyard glints in miniature, peppered by crows. It’s 5:44. I press my forehead to the window-wall and urge our murder to wait up for us.
Static descends. The light goes blue, then bluer. Cataract-colored fog gums up the view. I drift away from the glass and join Terry #2 at the crafts table. He’s sketching rabbits in Safety Pen. All other writing utensils fall on the blacklist of sharp objects. I happen to think Safety Pens are just as dangerous. They’re made of rubber. They bow and bend like molten cartilage. I’m not convinced they’re of this world. Why introduce such horrifying whimsy into a place already so glutted with it?
“Let me tell you, Grace,” Terry #2 says, as the Safety Pen swoops and keels, “I desperately miss my MUJI Smooth Ink Ballpoints. I think about them every day. I think about how they roll.” He makes a reminiscing sound. “How was your bloodletting this morning, my dear?”
“Awful,” I say. “I got the intern. The chirpy one. She missed the vein twice.”
“Hah. I got Janet. Slid in that sucker smooth as butter.”
“Lucky bastard.”
The psychiatrists are on a Tegretol kick. Anti-epileptics are the new Prozac. Terry #2 and I are recent victims of this fad, and we require lab monitoring while our plasma adjusts. On the ward, when you require lab monitoring, your blood is collected at the sparsest peek of dawn. As soon as five AM slips into your bedroom, as does some faceless nurse with the blood cart. You won’t hear them; you’ll be clinging to the heels of your sleep meds. Instead, you’ll wake to the bite of a butterfly needle in your elbow. And when you wake, everything will be so dim and gooey that you’ll half-expect a mother to be there, looming like a mountainside, the projectile angle giving her a religious look, but don’t kid yourself. This is not the sickbed of the before times. If you vomit, there will be chunks of pill in it. No one is going to bring you the blue popcorn bowl.
You’ll stare at the nurse, who will stare at your inner elbow. You’ll flex your bicep just to feel the needle shift. Everything will be dark except for the doorway, which will siphon the unbearable yellow of the hall, turning the nurse into a shadow puppet. The gloves gripping your forearm will be freezing, unless they belong to Janet, the oldest nurse, the best nurse, whose kindness will seep through the blue latex.
“Sh sh sh,” Janet will whisper. “Sh sh sh.”
You’ll watch the vials fill together. In the lowlight, your blood will look almost black. Janet will apply a Band-Aid like a very small blanket. Like the blanket on the rocking chair in your childhood bedroom going gray and scraggly with love. Once, softly, Janet will pat the crook of your elbow, as if to say, There. This will be the gentlest part of your day.
* * *
When the little bell by the nurses’ station sings, we float from the group room out into the ward’s great white gullet. No better than Pavlov’s dogs, Terry #1 always mutters. And Old Mary, swaying slightly beneath the briny overheads, will nod once, sharply, as if to say yes, right on, Terry #1, we are Pavlov’s dogs, and we’re drooling all over the linoleum. The sight of the steel doors down the hallway, some dangled promise. The thought of real, honest air as good as kibble.
The nurses produce our shoes. Old Mary, who is possessionless, has to wear rabbit slippers from the downstairs gift shop. Paired with the compression socks and the shin-length scrub top and the bright white eyelashes, she has an unreal look to her, Old Mary. Like she wandered out of a Jim Henson movie.
Before we start down the wide, blank hallway, the nurses check our hands. Presumably for sharp objects. Possibly for translucency. When they scribble on their clipboards, I imagine them charting our poltergeistic urges, our ectoplasm quotients. On a scale from one to ten, how haunted are you feeling today? Any thoughts of haunting yourself? Others? Any concrete plan or intent to haunt?
The nurse with the lip piercing of which I am nastily jealous asks Terry #1, the younger Terry with the purple hair, to stop biting his nails. A reasonable request. Terry #1’s nail-biting habit could very well be considered a violation of the sharp object rule. He gnashes with passion. I’m occasionally nicked by shrapnel.
“I’m serious, Terry,” the nurse says. “Cut it out.”
Terry’s eyes flit up quick. There’s a sleepy sort of glory to his posture. “Woof,” he says, and spits a shard from the side of his teeth. But in the end, he shows his hands.
Terry #2 hums “Walking on Sunshine,” snapping on the downbeats. I muster up two ‘OK’ signs. Old Mary pinches her nipples through her scrub top. Check, check, check. All hands visible. All hands opaque. We are good to go.
We centipede down the wide, blank hallway. One nurse mans the head, another, the tail, and a third drifts up and down the flank. We pass the plexiglass group room lit like a giant fish tank. Then, the line of anonymous bedrooms, some occupied. We wave to the flight risks, the nappers, and those who simply aren’t interested in venturing beyond the ward. We pass the Quiet Room, where there is nothing. The light is like chicken stock. Our shoes have no laces. We squeak across the linoleum, cheese curds scritching between some weirdo god’s molars. An old woman, a warbling man, a purple-haired boy, and me. I wonder if this is a kind of afterlife.
* * *
They take us down the backroads.
There are always backroads. The presence of a direct route demands the presence of an indirect route—one that’s shadowy by nature and never taken by accident. Terry #1 has christened this the Rule of Long Ways. Terry #1 was halfway through an MS in Applied Physics at Columbia, researching holographic wormholes, when the buzzing started up in his brain. He’s known they were there since high school, the tiny animatronic bees, with their tiny fingers and tiny venom sacs, but they kept to themselves back then. Besides a few strays skittering around on the underside of his skullcap, the hive seemed almost dormant. It wasn’t until last year that the swarm awoke from their decade-long dream.
“I’m speaking allegorically, of course,” he always says of the bees. “But also, not.”
Now, Terry #1 is on Zyprexa and medical leave. Still, the nest remains tucked between the folds of his frontal lobe. You can’t see it on the MRI, but it’s there. Whirring, wriggling. As angrily alive as a cat in a box.
Terry’s Rule of Long Ways states that the most painless distance between two points is usually a squiggle—one that circumvents the prescribed straight line. For example; we could get to the courtyard in ten minutes by passing through the second-floor waiting room, hooking a left at the geriatric ward, catching the front elevator to the lobby, and strolling out the large revolving doors. But no. We might make a scene. We are known for our scenes. Action, and a daughter flings a glob of spit at her mother’s windshield, and cut, and the director calls for the extras in the Homegoods parking lot to stop their goddamn staring. We are here to forgo such scripts. So we squiggle. We pace thin, forgotten hallways. We take a thin, forgotten elevator. We avoid foot traffic. We skirt chaos. We obey physics.
* * *
The clouds are at even strength with the pre-dusk and Old Mary is crushing chokecherries with her white rabbit slippers. The terrycloth grows bloody. The flagstone grows bloody. She smiles so wide her gums glow. Even wider than she does during Wheel of Fortune’s first toss-up puzzle.
The nurses gossip and guard the exit while Terry and Terry and I watch the crows. Every day, when they walk us, when we come to this corner of the sad April courtyard with its coinless fountain and bushes of brittle sage, we watch the crows. This murder belongs to us in the same way the whole hospital belongs to us. Unlike the nurses and doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists and security guards and social workers and therapy Shih Tzus, we don’t disappear when it’s time to change shifts. We are the truest residents. This place is a little bit ours.
The two largest crows are Vanna White and Pat Sajak. She’s sleek and smart and full-breasted; he’s stout, scruffy, as charmingly disheveled as his namesake. True to life, Vanna and Pat are probably secretly in love. They have definitely fucked. There’s almost certainly a bastard fledgling.
Alex Trebek and Jeff Probst are easily confused, but Jeff’s got a leaner trunk, and the sickle in Alex’s beak is exceptionally steep. Steve Harvey has a fivehead and no discernable neck; when RuPaul’s wings catch the light, they glint a brilliant blue. Mel and Sue keep to themselves and their walnut seeds.
Ryan Seacrest is dead. My left ass cheek aches. These truths are impossible to tease apart. It’s almost like DBT, Terry #1 told me last night, when I returned, full of Haldol, from the pale grip of the Quiet Room, where there is nothing.
“A schism of DBT, maybe,” he said, and through the mist of drugs he sounded like a prophet in a cave. “Instead of two opposite things being true at once, it’s two bizarre things that can’t be separated. The Rule of Ryan Seacrest.”
He was my favorite. Ryan. He had peppercorn eyes and a crooked left wing. He was small, the runt, and he liked to dip his sharp little face into the hollows of daylilies. I loved him the moment I saw him, alone by the westmost corner, rubbing his cheek against the Klonopin-orange petals as though they were a mother’s hands. He walked as though he were walking on choppy water. He was perfect. Dumb and lovely.
I met Ryan on the first day of my first admission, two months ago. When my mother drove me back here last week, he was what got me out of the car, back through the revolving doors. Not that I wanted to return to this place—not that I had missed the psychiatrists or the therapy Shih Tzus or even Janet—but I thought maybe I could handle it all if I could see the crow with the upside-down wing.
The Terries thought I had another screw loose, sneaking Clif bars out of the cafeteria, feeding Ryan Seacrest the chocolate detritus. I guess they were right. Yesterday, on the morning walk, when I found his body toppled before the daylilies, that crooked wing splayed flat, I forgot all about physics. Dialectics and long ways. I opened my mouth and chewed chaos like cud. It took two security guards to get me back up to the ward, where the needle had already been sterilized. Bootyjuice, we call it. Our gluteal god.
“Just pick a new favorite,” Terry #1 says, kicking an acorn at Tom Bergeron.
I shake my head. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Jesus. You’re losing it.”
“I’m not losing it. I’m finding it.”
“That’s what they all say.”
He doesn’t understand, so I explain it again: how I loved Ryan Seacrest, the crow, despite my total ambivalence toward Ryan Seacrest, the man, and how at first I thought this was a consequence of being a mental patient, but have since revised my theory.
“I’m not in the psych ward because I fall in love with crows,” I say. “I fall in love with crows because I’m in the psych ward.”
I ask Terry #1 if there’s a law of motion for this. He says he doesn’t know. He says you could make an argument for intransitivity but it might not hold water, and anyway, we’re categorically unreliable narrators, not to mention theorists. He says he doesn’t want to be here. He says sometimes when he bites his nails he swallows the pieces which means technically his stomach is full of sharp objects, and what does that make his body? A skin-sheathed shiv? It’s almost Easter, he says. The pollinators will be returning soon. Somebody better resurrect the sage.
“I’m telling you,” I say, “it’ll never be the same. They’re just crows now. All of their wings are on straight.”
“Quiet,” says Terry #2. “Please. RuPaul is trying to rest.”
Old Mary has run out of chokecherries to stomp. The sky is pushing purple. Our time in the courtyard is up.
* * *
The Rule of Ryan Seacrest, exhibit B: At dinner, I eat spaghetti and meatballs with a plastic spoon. The hole in my nose is closing up.
There is no uncrossing these wires. One truth relies on the other.
Two weeks ago, there was a gold ring in my left nostril and an idling smell in the Nissan. My eyeballs had a lacquered feeling. I remember plasticky sunlight through the windshield. A concave feeling. A sour, medicinal aftertaste.
We were stalled in the parking lot. The windows were down and the day was fresh but my mother still spritzed her little handheld Febreeze every other minute. She thought I smelled stale. Bilious. She kept muttering about the ipecac stains on the new bathroom tile, as if she had not been the one who forced it on me, pushed spoonful after spoonful past my lips.
“Hoodie,” my mother said, and held out her hand.
I pulled the drawstring from my sweatshirt and coiled it like a cottonmouth in her open palm. Next went the shoelaces. Then the cellphone, the loose change, the red Bic, the Juicy Fruit. Finally, the nose ring.
“The hole’s going to close up, you know,” I told her.
She stared into the glowing windshield. “Good.”
And then it was quiet for a while. I watched the revolving doors spin in the distance. Nothing had changed since my last admission. Not the potholes or the potted boxwoods. Not the
flashes of crow’s wing above the courtyard. Not the white clover suturing the sidewalk cracks. It was all so spectacularly the same I could have cried. Wet light caught the wet air. The morning seemed wrapped in cling-film. I eyed the window-wall just left of center on the second floor. I imagined the inner driftings of the fish tank, and was alarmed at how clearly it all appeared to me. The hallways, the light. The keycards and gowns and IV poles. There was a part of this place that felt, unequivocally, like a kind of home. A kind of home I had only been to once before, in a dream.
My mother pressed two mint Tic Tacs into my hand. “Okay,” she said. “You’re good.”
“I’m good?”
“Good to go, I mean.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Admit it,” said Terry #2 when I first told him this story. “I’m right. That parking lot is a brick wall.”
Now, he watches spaghetti slip off my spoon with a look of equal parts pity and amusement. We’re all banned from knives, even plastic ones, but only I face the fork moratorium. I spent my first week here snapping off the tines and shoving them into my nose hole to try and preserve the piercing. This apparently violated some vast, unnameable rule.
Old Mary catches me stroking my nostril and sets down her yogurt, putting a hand on my shoulder.
“Listen carefully,” she whispers. “Get a Creamsicle tomorrow. Snap the popsicle stick, quick, so they don’t see, and stick one of the shards in there good and tight. It won’t close up.”
“It won’t close up?”
“It won’t close up. It’ll stay a hole. You can make it stay a hole.”
* * *
No bell rings at 7:28 or 7:29 or 7:30, but the proverbial drool collects anyway. Jeopardy is wrapping up. The parking lot is swimming in night fog. Vanna is on her way.
I sit jittering on the couch with Old Mary, who has her hands up her scrub top again. She prefers the scrubs to the donated clothes the social worker offered. Actually, she’d prefer to wear nothing at all. Word is, Mary arrived on the ward ass-naked, her leathery skin draped over her skeleton like a vintage gown, flashing her just-barely-hanging-on teeth and just-barely-hanging-on breasts to the whole fluorescent ward with a look of unpuncturable pride, swinging at anyone who tried to clothe her.
This is the lore, anyhow. Old Mary was admitted a week before me; by the time I arrived, the psychiatrists had leveled her meds. She had begun to begrudgingly accept the hydroxyzine-green scrubs tops they inflicted on her. But only the tops. The too-big tops. She wears them similarly to how she wears her skin cells; as beautiful, if extraneous, accessories that she might tear off at any moment.
Old Mary often tells me she likes the feeling of her aging flesh, likes the stretch of it all. It’s pre-chewed taffy, she once proclaimed. It’s wilting orchid petals.
“My titties,” she says now, mostly to the Claritin ad on TV, “are sachets of tea. Peppermint.”
Yesterday, Old Mary’s titties were popped pufferfish.
“Quiet,” says Terry #1, who is Model Magicking something unidentifiable and vaguely phallic at the crafts table. “It’s almost time.”
Old Mary makes a face as if she’s about to pull up her scrub top at him again. From the nurse’s station, the rumbles of a counterstrike.
“Mary,” the nurses warn in chorus.
Scowling, Old Mary shows her hands.
“Place your bets, people,” says Terry #2 who is also at the crafts table, who is always at the crafts table, who was an art dealer in Brooklyn before his PCP-induced psychotic break. These days, he’s clear-eyed five-eighths of the time. When his face goes blank and we lose him, he says strange and sad and sometimes wonderful things. Like a few days ago in Art Therapy, when he stood up suddenly and lifted his very long chin and announced that all of us psych patients were linoleum people, our skin no different from the ward’s speckled hallways, our faces membraned with the same slick of the Quiet Room floor, us humanoid globs of molten linseed oil and cork dust, moving between the exam room and the group room and the cafeteria with a shine that seemed amniotic, almost, in its yellow afterlight, but decidedly sterile in smell and sentiment, on account of the Sertraline-blue mopping solution.
The psychiatrists are still working on Terry #2’s meds.
Terry #1 is right; it’s almost time. Under the ever-sharp eyes of nurses and security cameras, we place our bets. Terry #2 logs everything in Safety Pen.
Old Mary guesses a red bodycon. Terry #1 goes with a sequined silver fit-and-flare. Terry #2: a peach peplum. Me: an olive A-line.
And then there she is, a grainy beacon on the TV perched high the in the corner, welded to the walls just in case one of us has the urge to dismantle it and use the HDMI cords in a violent or suicidal or otherwise unacceptable manner.
“Look at her,” Terry #1 whispers, and we do, we look, we gape, spellbound even though Vanna White is wearing a floral maxi dress, which, as usual, none of us guessed correctly. We look long and close. We look with our whole faces. She is a white light before the first toss-up puzzle, a woman-shaped aubade, clapping like her hands are made of tiny hummingbirds she is trying not to crush.
Only Old Mary is unenchanted. Her angel comes later.
“The category is Rhyme Time,” Terry #1 mouths along with Pat Sajak.
The camera pans down. The wheel appears. Old Mary whoops like a young coyote.
“My god,” she says to the whirling neons.
Terry #1 is in love with Pat Sajak; Terry #2 and I are in love with Vanna White; Old Mary is in love with the wheel, the colors, the impossible iridescence of the $5000 slice, the click-clicking of the rubber flipper hitting the pins, like a nail gun or a displeased dolphin.
A nurse comes to the doorway, the same nurse who was supervising our walk around the courtyard the day I found Ryan Seacrest dead in the daylilies. It was this nurse who drove the Haldol-filled needle into my glute. And afterward, in the Quiet Room, where there is nothing, it was this nurse who sat by silently and picked at her red acrylics and watched the pulse oximeter while I breathed like a gut-punched child. I was dizzy. I was limitless. I called her Mom.
“Checks,” the nurse says. We look over to prove our aliveness. She translates this to the clipboard, then ventures a few steps further into the fish tank, squinting at the TV.
“BITTERSWEET GOODBYES,” she guesses with gusto.
Terry #1 and I exchange smirks. She’s got her letter-counting all wrong. The answer is BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATES.
“Damn,” says the nurse, chewing on a pinky nail. “Takes a certain kind of brain to figure these things out, huh?”
“One thing about us linoleum people,” Terry #2 murmurs when she’s gone, “is that we’ve got a certain kind of brain.”
In the parking lot this morning, we watched one of our psychiatrists punch his dashboard seven times. You should’ve seen Old Mary’s spiderweb-gouge wrinkles curl up as she smiled.
The Final Spin. Category: Thing. Solution: A FINE, FINE LINE.
Eliza Gilbert is an undergraduate at Vassar College. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and The Adroit Journal, among others, and her prose can be found in Split Lip Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, and The Forge. She received the 2023 Iowa Review Award for Poetry as well as LitMag’s 2023 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction (2023). She was born and raised in New York City.