A Promise Made is a Promise Kept

techgrrl@pobox.com

Blair walked down the familiar hallways. The walls weren't white, like you'd expect in a hospital. They were beige--wallpapered, in fact, with a slight texture to make them look like cloth. The floors were white--white linoleum with multicolored flecks. They clashed with the walls, just subtly enough to make him nervous.

Yet, the halls were clean and shining, sterile and quiet. Behind closed doors, he could hear the sporadic murmur of television sets, playing the late-afternoon talk shows. Once in a while, he heard the hushed tones of patients talking to each other, or themselves.

So many rooms.

He knew Patty, the nurse who escorted him down the hall. They made easy small talk as they approached room 442.

"I wish you'd come here more often, Blair," she said.

"I can't." He swallowed. "I have other commitments. You have no idea how difficult... You just have no idea what this is like for me."

Patty smiled. "Yes, but everything goes so much better the day after you visit."

Blair had been coming every week now, for almost six months. For six months, he'd talked with Patty about her children, and her new haircut, and her pets, and the news, and the weather. They talked about his new career at the community college, and whether or not he would stay.

But he couldn't tell her, couldn't explain, why it was only once a week that he could drag himself here--every week saying it was the last time.

Patty had been a nurse here for almost twenty-two years. She looked at Blair, hoping to try once again to convince him how important his visits were. But you didn't work in a place like this for twenty-two years without learning when to talk and when to listen.

She gave Blair an understanding smile and thanked him. She walked back to the nurses' station, leaving him alone at the door to Room 442.

The hospital had been built in the thirties, back in the days when buildings were still made out of real wood and brick, not cinder block and drywall like they used now. The door was solid oak; he stared at it, as he had many times before. He traced the grain with a finger and waited for his stomach to stop fluttering and his breathing to even out, so that he could enter the room and speak in a normal tone of voice.

After he'd traced the designs in the wood for the fifth time, he knew that standing there wouldn't change anything. He swallowed and turned the knob, though his heart still pounded and his palms were still sweating. The door opened with a gentle creak, though of course his arrival was no surprise to the current tenant of Room 442.

He carried a clipboard with a soft-tipped marker hooked over it--no backpack, no laptop today. They weren't allowed here; too much of a security risk. Attached to the board was a list of several checkboxes. Too many items were still unchecked.

It had been weeks since the... end... of the thesis. That time was done now, yet he couldn't seem to get out of the habit of checkboxes and to-do lists, sensory skills to be worked on and results to be judged. According to Patty, the process seemed to be working, so he went with the flow.

"Hi," he greeted, "Patty said you'd been doing better this week. That you opened your eyes and fed yourself and spoke to the doctors."

The figure on the bed didn't speak, or look at him, just stared toward the television which flickered its bluish light back across slack features.

He walked over to the bed, reaching up to turn off the television along the way, and pulled up a chair close to the bed. The chair, too, was a relic from the thirties, expertly crafted of the same oak as the door. It looked formal and uncomfortable, but he knew from long experience you could sit in one for hours. The pink and turquoise upholstery looked authentic, too. He wished he could swipe it for his office, but even if that were possible, the colors wouldn't go with the horrible orange carpet and cheap plastic-and-steel furniture.

Blair wondered, not for the first time, if the hospital had been a WPA project. You'd think that FDR wouldn't have had funds during the depression for the mentally ill--an "asylum," they'd have said back then. The expert craftsmanship said otherwise, though. The careful design of the chair, of the ornamented mouldings around the doors and windows--they were the hallmark of a true artist. And who hired artists during the depression except the WPA? Blair found himself gripped by an odd temptation to rip off the beige wallpaper and see if beauty still lay beneath it.

Blair sat and crossed one ankle over the other knee. He looked at his clipboard, reviewing the checklist by habit even though he knew its contents by heart.

"It's raining outside," he said. "Can you feel it? Can you smell it? The air conditioning keeps it so dry in here in the summer, I bet it'll be just as bad in the winter with the heat. Can even you tell the difference?" There was no answer, but Blair wasn't expecting one. Not really.

Room 442 had no window. The doctors had said at first that there was no hope, that stimulation and sunlight wouldn't help. Why waste good real estate on a hopeless case? So there was just speckle-tiled flooring and cheap institutional wallpaper the television playing Oprah reruns. Given that choice, Blair might have stayed catatonic, too.

But his arguments, though passionate as usual, had been ignored. Who was he, of all people, to argue for a window? Why did he think they'd listen to him anyway? So, of course, the lack of stimuli only exacerbated the condition--made the subject withdraw even further from reality.

"I bet you can hear it," he mused. "I bet when the raindrops hit the roof, it sounds like a symphony of drums. Or like a thousand elephants, scrabbling on the shingles."

Blair glanced at his checklist again and frowned. This wasn't the way to start their meeting. Setting the clipboard on the bedside table, he reached out and took a hand. It was white against his own, from lack of sunshine, but the nails were neatly trimmed. Patty and her colleagues had done an admirable job with the bathing, feeding, cleaning, and caring. But there were some things that even the most caring nurse couldn't provide.

With his other hand, he reached over and traced the strong cheekbones and jawline of the slack face. "They cut your hair so short," he murmured. It was to make the bathing easier, he knew. But the spiky strands were barely half an inch long. He ran his fingers over them, coaxing the soft bristles to lie flat instead of sticking straight up.

"I wonder if you'll be colder in the winter, to have such short hair. I wouldn't cut mine, so I can't say." He smiled at his own comment, even though it wasn't funny. "It's almost October already, it'll start cooling off soon. Maybe I can bring you a hat next week, a knit chuke. I know: black, right?" He tried to do that--talk about the weather and the seasons. It was the only orientation available in this timeless place.

He kept on speaking, much as he had to Patty. He talked about small things and trivia and current events. He talked about the approaching fall, of children harvesting pumpkins, and leaves that filled the drains on the street curbs. He talked about football, and how Rainier U. was doing this season: as usual, not very well.

As he spoke, he found that his voice had stopped trembling, and that he could breathe. But his hands... his hands would not be stilled. He couldn't help himself; he touched the hair, the arm, the eyes with a sort of awful fascination. He may as well have been touching furniture: the arm didn't move, the blue eyes didn't focus or track him. They remained forward--slack and motionless except for an occasional lethargic blink.

What did those eyes see? Did they see beyond the speckle-tiled floors and the painted-over woodwork? Could they see every whorl of every fingerprint on the unadorned wall?

Eventually he ran out of small talk, and he sat there in silence for a moment, dreading the thought of the checklist. He pulled his hands away abruptly and rubbed them against his jeans, as if that could undo everything that had gone between them.

"So you're stubborn this week," he said, still wiping his hands. "I know you can hear me," he whispered, and the tremor in his voice was back. "I know you can see.

"You can't hide in there forever. It won't change what's happened.

"Do you still blame me? Do you still think I betrayed you? Revealed you to your enemies?" He imagined the answer to that. "Well, let me tell you: You sure had me fooled. Even after you.... Well, I figured there had to be a reason, you know?"

But there hadn't been a reason, just a big unrequited why? that would probably haunt them the rest of their lives.

"Our meeting wasn't chance! I tried to be as honest--with everyone--as I possibly could. Don't you see that?" There was no reaction except for the slow and steady breathing, unchanged since Blair had entered the room.

"You've got to come out and face this sooner or later," he said, picking up the clipboard again. "When I met you, I just saw a person who needed my help. I promised to give it to you, and I meant it." Despite everything that had happened, no matter how absurd and hopeless and emotionally wrenching this situation was, Blair Sandburg's word still meant something.

So he frowned at the list again, and began to go through the items one by one. It was a sensory exercise, created in a happier time to discover and strengthen and train newfound abilities. Now it was a last-ditch insane attempt to bring the sentinel back from the brink.

Everything seemed cold then, and winter was not just an approaching season, but some terrible force that had taken over his heart. What would happen if he didn't come next week, or the week after that? The possibility of not helping was a horrible temptation, to let this beige purgatory just fade away like so much of his past.

Breathing was suddenly more difficult.

"You're not the only one who has to face this," he said, "so let's just get started."

He ran through the checked-off items, for review. He checked off two more, hoping that variety would elicit a response. He pulled a bright flower out of his jacket pocket (where it had become somewhat crushed) to see and to smell. Blair had hoped that, at least, would get some reaction. Apparently not today.

At length, someone knocked on the door. The hinges creaked, Patty half-entered the room with hesitation, loathe to interrupt Blair's mysterious healing technique. "Visiting hours were over twenty minutes ago," she apologized.

Blair gathered his things and stood. "I'll see you next week." He smoothed the bristly blond hair once again as a farewell.

Patty escorted him down the hall and let him out of the building with her magnetic badge. "I do wish you'd come to Conover more often, Blair," she said softly. "Alex does so much better when you're here."

Blair couldn't even look at her. "I can't," he answered. "I just can't." And then he went home to Jim.