Tim Sullivan enters the living area bumping his bulging body into the empty chairs in front of him. Halfheartedly hung wreaths, ribbons, and holly cling to the ward’s walls raising spirits as much as receiving dried flowers in a drought. Tim looks at the circle of seated patients and staff, assembled for morning meeting. Patients fidget, waiting to announce their goals for the day. Tim sits down with his stomach floundering on his knees.
“Everyone here. Good,” says Martha, a nurse on the ward for the last ten years. “Tim, maybe you could begin?”
He stares at an artificial Christmas tree strangled with a string of colored lights and spotted with makeshift ornaments. “My goal today is to burn down the tree. At least melt it.” A few patients laugh.
“Okay, I’ll be serious. I am closing in on three hundred pounds, not bad for a man of 5’8”. I could get there with a little more time at meals. Or maybe some of your leftovers, or home goods, I don’t get any anymore, my parents are sick of me.”
“Tim, you need to stop,” says Martha. She runs her hand through her short white hair.
“I know, get over it. Take a pill.” Tim rises, dancing into the center of the room, singing, Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” His stomach jiggles as he pirouettes. His balding head reflects the Christmas tree’ colored lights.
Martha stands. “Tim, this is inappropriate, if it continues, your level and privileges will be affected.” He stops dancing and looks at Jessie, a kitchen worker piling popcorn boxes on the snack table by the microwave. His mouth opens wide. “No, not popcorn! A guy, once put a package in for ten minutes, caught fire! Hell on Earth! No snacks.”
“Tim . . .” Martha starts.
He leaves the living area and moves down the hall to the nurse’s station; behind the desk, he sees a new face.
“Oh boy . . . who do we have here?”
The nurse looks up. “Hello. I’m the new morning nurse, Colleen. What’s your name?”
“Tim, tim-ety, tim-ety, tim, tim shree.”
“Oh. Hello, Tim.”
Tim stands, staring.
“Need help? Not time for meds yet, in about fifteen minutes, after the meeting” says Colleen. She wipes her glasses. “Is there something you need?”
“Yea. Outta here!”
“Tim, you can’t leave. You know that.”
“Sure, whatever.”
Tim walks to his room. He plops down on the bed. Damn daycare. I am only a bird in a cage, a boy in a bubble, a bump on a log. Nothing happens here. No one visits. No presents, a fake tree.
This institution business started at age 20. Tim was drinking beers with his buddies in the dying days of August. In two days, he was off to the University of New Hampshire and college hockey. He crushed his last Bud can and jumped into his Camaro. The corner came quick and Tim slammed his head into the dashboard. He gained a long purple scar on the forehead announcing brain damage.
At first people gathered around Tim. He had support. However, as time passed, it became apparent that progress had too. Tim was okay in a quick conversation but his old self and his old abilities were gone. Soon after, he lost his college scholarship, his ice hockey, his girlfriend, and his friends. He understandably couldn’t manage things and to his detriment fought all professional help. “I lose, you lose” became his motto. Violence became his companion; he wrecked things and punched people. One doctor called him a tantruming 4 year-old in the body of a WWF wrestler. He had been mandated to the psyche wards about 6 times, primarily for busting up his parent’s house or other people’s stuff.
Recently, he had lost his family’s involvement. They were worn out. Tim’s dad commented, “I’m sixty-eight years old, I love you but can’t do this anymore. You’ve got to help yourself.” At 37, Tim had had seventeen years of this: different hospitals, rules, amnesia, outbursts, being treated as a child, being treated as a prisoner, smashing things in frustration. Sometimes, it would seem all right, and then he would remember back. Sometimes, Tim would even sign himself into the hospital if he knew things were falling apart.
Tim was mandated here this time. It all started on a hot July afternoon. The ice cream truck normally passed Tim’s neighborhood, and when he worked in his parents’ yard, he often went over and got something. That day, the old ice cream driver had said, “I remember you when you were a hockey player, a great player, super slap shot and passer. But dirty, the filthiest player when angered. Trips, slashes, charges, all kinds of penalties. A filthy player.”
“I wasn’t that dirty, I was a goal scorer,” Tim replied.
“Good but dirty is how I saw it.”
“Yea, you’re the one with the dirty stuff.”
The next day, Tim sprayed the hose into the neighborhood ice cream truck to clean up the unsanitary conditions. The driver got out to stop him and Tim shoved the guy down and drove the truck into a nearby shallow stream to finish the job. His parents paid for the damages. He was brought in here: a relatively low security ward. Tim had never hurt anyone significantly before and these hospitals were all overcrowded; when he did something, he could get stuck anywhere that had space available.
A knock sounds on Tim’s door.
“Tim, time for meds?” says Colleen.
“All right, in a minute.”
Tim goes to his bathroom. He lathers the soap for three straight minutes, foam pours from his hands. He spreads it across his face.
“Please hurry up. We’ve got a lot of patients to care for, I’ll be at the desk,” says Colleen. She leaves.
In the mirror, he sees a face full of white lather. A poor man’s Santa. “Ho, ho, ho.”
Tim returns to Colleen at the main desk, takes his meds, and fills out the ward’s sign-out sheet. He walks to the hospital cafeteria for breakfast.
Tim starts his ritual of eating, smoking, and staring. Every meal, he methodically eats his food, often taking up to two hours. He says that he can spare the time, plus it fights indigestion. After eating, he heads to the corner of the courtyard attached to the café. There, he smokes three to four cigarettes savoring each hit. He enjoys watching the smoke float over the fence. Then, he returns to the ward. The staff is used to this and pays no attention to his whereabouts around meal times.
Once, Tim had escaped from a psyche ward. He said that he got bored. Tim was housed in an old State Hospital. The buildings looked like old mill factories. A steel fence surrounded the campus. A place of brick, bars, and barricades.
For about three weeks straight, he had taken up shooting baskets to escape the dreary conditions. The basketball court was behind one of the buildings. The court was beat with large sections of tar cracked. On one side of the side of the court sat an old manhole cover. Tim dribbled around it every day. Pieces of tar broke away. He could hear the water rushing beneath it and out into the city. Finally, he yanked it up and climbed into the sewers. He screamed, “Rats, I’m chasing down the cheese!” About an hour later, Tim was caught hitchhiking down the highway. He told the police, “I climbed out of there because it stunk. I was getting lost. I needed a ride home.”
Tim finishes eating and goes outside. Approaching the far corner of the yard, he sizes up the chain-link fence surrounding the yard. “Ya, gotta do, what ya gotta do.” He looks through the steel and sees that mall in the distance. “Smoke always escapes.” Seconds later, he scales skyward, spidering the chain-link fence with the cold metal burning his hands. “Wire time. Ah, the pain of freedom.” At the top of the fence, he catches his breath. He pulls his body up in a horizontal line on the top of the fence’s cross bar. He rests his torso and legs on the upper edge.
In one motion, Tim flings himself up and rolls over the fence, crashing to the ground. “Snow doesn’t help.” Tim rises and turns, glaring at the fence. “Not so tough now.” He walks away from the hospital across a small field to the shopping mall. “Outta there.” He pulls a red cap out of his jacket pocket and puts it on. Tim looks at the mall. “Things, real things, and people, real people.” Tim takes a deep breath. “Too many things and too many people.”
He studies the mall’s parking lot: a maze of mankind and metal. He sees a truck full of Christmas trees in the back of the stores. Tim stares at the trees. That smell, the needles. He loved decorating trees: the tickle of the needles touching his hand as he placed bulbs; his laughter and the laughter of his older brother, his mother, and his father as they dodged each other putting on ornaments. He thought of one Christmas when he and his brother had received a yellow Tonka dump truck and a Tonka crane as presents. They spent the week after Christmas piling, lifting, and dumping wrapping paper and fallen tree needles, even pulling needles off the tree for bigger loads.
Tim hears the clanging of a bell. He smiles. He tugs on his red cap, scanning the front of the stores for the source of the sound. “Ah, the fat man.” Tim jogs to the Sears Entrance. There, a Salvation Army Santa Claus swings a bell. People pitch change into his hanging pot. Tim moves in front of him. “Hey Santa, Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas, sir. Tis the season for giving.”
“Yes, siree,” says Tim, “Tis the season for giving.” Tim walks past him to the edge of the mall complex. A few boys kick slush on each other in the parking lot. In the windows, store employees bustle about trying to keep up with customers. Shoppers are fixated on their purchases; others walk around bewildered by the holiday hustle. Tim moves past all of it.
He looks around the back of the building and spies one Sears Associate smoking a butt. He moves closer. The associate’s name tag states “TOM”.
“Hey, Tommy, I’m Timmy. They want you in there. Heard it myself.”
“Damn.”
“Tommy?”
“What?” he snaps.
“Merry Christmas. Tis the season.”
“Yea, you too.” He mumbles as he stomps off.
Tim looks around then fixates on an unattended truck full of Christmas trees. “Tis the season for giving, and getting. Getting a real one.”
Tim bolts for the truck full of trees and rips a small one off. With the limbs quivering, Tim runs with the tree back across the parking lot and the field. “Yahoo!” He is carrying the tree, just like when he and his dad used to cut one down. Boy, would they be surprised.
Tim runs to the front of the hospital and up the entrance walkway. His hands, frosted in pine pitch, open the door. The main entrance receptionist looks astounded as he pulls the tree through the front door and bellows, “Ho! Ho! Ho!”