Norma scuffles up to the Institute, unsure if it’s trespassing.
A BMX bicycle with fluorescent-green tires has been deposited in the grass by the front door. One wheel spins slowly in the breeze. The warm afternoon. Larre Road feels intimate like a password whispered down a phone line made from two paper cups and a piece of string. Norma thinks, That terrifying toadish mouse of a woman is waiting inside. Maybe she has come to meet her married boyfriend. This derangement of the mind is something that happens to women whose husbands cheat on them: the world begins to overflow with people, animals, aunts and uncles all having sex. Everywhere, fucking is going on. The world is an algae-covered pond in spring and Norma alone is standing on the dry bank.
Through a narrow pane of glass by the front door, she sees the tile’s been ripped up in a few spots. Water has stained the wallpaper brown but it doesn’t look too scary inside. There’s sunlight and debris that is nearly modern, an ashtray, a clunky remote control, a pair of Naugahyde chairs. A chain that once secured the doors closed dangles in the breeze.
Norma slips inside. “Hello?”
No one answers.
The air in the sanitarium is holding on to winter. Norma backs herself up against the foyer wall, standing very still, like a moth against mottled bark, blending in. Her eyeballs beat left, right, left, right. She calls again, “Hello?”
No one answers.
The house smells foul, a mouth of rotten teeth. The air’s not been stirred in a long time and whatever’s in the basement (dead bodies, raccoon poop) lingers. Most furnishings have been stolen or damaged by bad kids throwing parties in the old house. They wrote their names, the devil’s names, their sweethearts’ names on the walls. They peed in the corners, liberated the fire axe from its glass box and splintered a large reception desk with it. One wall has a chair sticking straight out of it, all four legs reamed into the plaster. Still, there are remnants of a former glory. Ornate moldings whose details hold hope for a better future, eight different colors of Italian marble, and a mantel raised on the back of a carved oak deer. Norma wonders how long it took to build such a house. A long time.
The central staircase twists smoothly. “Hello?” she calls again, but there is no answer. Many of the banister’s supports have been kicked free. From the landing she can see out the back window to what must have once been the pool. After an accident involving some schoolgirls, the town filled the hole with dirt, leaving a square cement corona.
Upstairs she looks left and right. The wings are identical hallways filled with doors. Norma goes right.
“Hello?” she says, nervous now. She glances behind herself, then up. Directly above her the ceiling is stained. A large brown mass of dripping discoloration has spread out in uneven rings. There must be a leak. She circles below, neck craned backward, arms linked across her chest. She’s mesmerized, as though the blob were telling her the long secrets of such a stain, thirty-six years of leaking into a mark as dark and deep as this one. Thirty-six years is exactly as long as Norma has been alive. No wonder she feels so empty. Norma exhales. Norma rights her head. And there she is. Standing no more than a narrow foot away. The prostitute/drug dealer stares at Norma as if she is hungry.
“Hello,” Norma says.
“What are you doing?”
“Not much.”
This woman is filthy. Tiny capillary lines of sweaty grit swoop across her neck, following the contours there. Her fingernails are rimmed with dirt, as if she crawled out of a dug grave. A dark mole on the woman’s collarbone is so large it could be the mother ship to all this dirt. Norma feels a shiver. There’s power to this woman’s filth, a strength in knowing there’s nowhere further one can fall.
“What’s your name?” the woman asks.
“Norma,” Norma says. “What’s yours?”
“Norma,” the dirty woman answers.
“No really.”
“Really. It is.”
Norma does not believe her.
“Why are you here?” Dirty Norma asks.
“I don’t know.”
“They don’t accept crazies here anymore, you know.”
“What?” Norma asks.
“That’s what this place once used to be. A place for crazy people. In each of the rooms.” She points down the hall. “Behind each one of these doors doctors used to sit with clipboards asking each and every patient, ‘So what’s the problem?’ and the patients would start again at the beginning, telling the same stories over and over. How they were abused by their fathers or how they were forced to raise monkeys for laboratory testing or how they saw the first atomic bombs blow up in the New Mexico desert or whatever it was that haunted them. Day in and day out the patients would sit in these rooms and tell their stories again and again, and sure, it might change a little each time, until finally the patients realized, after years of talking, that they were fucked and there wasn’t much they could do about it.
“That’s how it works. Everybody knows that. Don’t you know that? You tell the doctor the same story over and over and then one day you realize that the story has changed, and that the new story, well, that’s your real problem.”
Norma doesn’t know what to say. “Behind each one of these doors?”
“Yup,” Dirty Norma says. She starts to walk down the hallway. Norma hesitates for a moment and then quickly follows. The patients’ rooms are small, and many of the metal-frame beds are still there. In the door of the first room Dirty Norma says, “Look,” and points to a murderously filthy mattress. “That’s where the kids come to do it now. I’ve seen them.”
Clean Norma studies the mattress.
Dirty Norma watches her. “What? Do you think you’re better than them? Better than me?” Her question’s not entirely out of the blue. In fact, Norma had just been thinking, I am better than Dirty Norma. I bet she sleeps on that dirty mattress.
Though she tries not to, in a whisper Norma answers, “Yes.”
“Hmm. Well, you’re not. And I can prove it.”
“Fine. Prove it.”
“We’ll have a contest.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll see who knows more.”
“Okay,” Norma says, though recently she has been allergic to knowledge. She feels that people, her husband, Ted, in particular, with the hefty stack of biographies and histories he keeps piling beside their bed, collect knowledge in the same way that people go shopping and buy a year’s supply of antibacterial soap, paper towels, wedding presents, fake ficus trees. Just to have, just in case. Norma’s more interested in intuition. Still, she agrees to the contest, certain she knows more than Dirty Norma.
“To start, I know who your husband is sleeping with,” Dirty Norma says.
“Who?”
“I’m not just going to just tell you. You have to trade. You have to tell me something I don’t know.”