The Endless Concord, Chapter 1

I. Clean Americans

The Plaza was alive with activity. It was preparation for the street parade that was to take place the following Monday. Colored paper banners were strung up around the gates and balloons were numbered and color-coded. The color-coding of balloons is a special task involving a sharp marker, pressing and stretching the indicative letters across the balloon in such a way as to be read with a single wave of the hand. “For our blind clients,” Robert gargled, drawing in a long puff of menthol tobacco and painfully finishing his sentence, “they should know what color the balloons are…”
It was child visitation day. The little ones ransacked the party favors and were blowing on the whistles. One of the more estranged ones had made his way into the box of balloons, marked “blue,” and was already filling one up when I approached the gate.
Marvin hung around the sidewalk squinting out into the great suburban planes greeting dog-walkers whenever they crossed his field of vision. One man, speed walking by, wearing a yellow parka and checking his pulse, yelled, “No time! No time!”
Annie stood in the garden wearing a bathing suit and cut off shorts holding a hose and watering an already saturated garden. The Morning Glories had long since overflowed out of the soil and were just kind of floating there in the vast pools of water. She was holding a cigarette in her lips periodically taking puffs with her eyes all watery from the smoke.
I could make out Debra between the bars. She was underneath the big striped blue and white awning that roofed a good half of the plaza pavement just kind of panting and drinking Pepsi out of a three liter bottle, periodically pouring shots for the little ones that would gather around the table for just that purpose. There were crusted coffee stains on the large plastic round table and dried nicotine residue on all the chairs. The coffee had welled up in small lakes of nicotine and other calcified relics from Debra’s sessions on the porch making for this permanent discoloration. The children pattered in the table fluids while Debra went on pouring the sun-warmed Pepsi everywhere.

The Plaza looked like a modern two-story house from the outside. One could guess at white walls and white carpet, a crisp intelligent air-conditioning, a multitude of floor lamps and televisions, a kitchen stocked comfortably with dinnerware, and an ominous silence hovering around unoccupied spaces of tile and carpet. There is an office, a medical room, a kitchen, staff bathrooms; to remained locked when not in use, a community dining room, and an accompanied laundry room. There are twenty bedrooms total, each equipped with bathrooms and small kitchens with electric burners that would take over an hour to boil water on. “Just like the real thing!” Willis, the Plaza administrator, had said during the installations, counting the stacked boxes of Fisher Price burners and applying the appropriate check-marks to the clipboard.
The small pavement on the side of the Plaza gets a good amount of traffic; there’s this tar blacktop and bent basketball setup the clients like to utilize. Randall would often stand out there with the deflated basketball making as if to bounce it off of the ground and then bend down, pick it up again and repeat the process. I had contrived a campaign for a new basketball, beginning with the necessary interoffice mail request forms, respectively, but I was told there were channels I would need to go through, the complexities of which I would never finally understand. Anonymous hints were written in the employee logbook, words of advice from Mary whispered in the hallway. “Give it up, it’s no use,” they all seemed to suggest. I had become some kind of Estate Plaza crusader. The basketball began to represent something else; a symbol for justice and change. Clients looked up to me as a leader, “One of our own,” they would murmur amongst one another. Lines would be drawn, employees would get behind one another and distance themselves from others. The basketball began to represent something bigger, something totally beyond our comprehension. Some of us would serve the clients extra mashed potatoes at meal times, others would stick to the allotted portion highlighted in the referendum print-sheet taped to the cupboard above the community sink. Then one morning there it was, the inflated basketball arrived in a box with the little plastic see-through windows and we knew we had won. The object of our fight was right there in my hands, and then gone, three days later, when Randall happened upon a pawnshop somewhere out in Bentley and exchanged it for an ounce of Leroy’s menthol tobacco and a hair-pick.
Sharing the tar blacktop is a Wonder Bread factory outlet. Willis had worked out some kind of deal so they would pay our garbage bill. They were happy to do it. They chose this location specifically because of the proximity to the Plaza –their sales now being through the roof. When I signed on at the Plaza Wonder Bread had just contracted out a bid to build a kind of skyway from the client rooms upstairs straight into the store. The drawings indicated fiber glass, floor to ceiling windows, central air-conditioning. “Like at the airport!” an excited district spokesperson had said. However nothing came of it. Wonder Bread wound up locked in a legal battle now the talk of community locals. The light from the futuristic skyway, imagined to cost more than the company generates in the city on a yearly basis, could reflect into neighbor’s yards, possibly causing blindness. “The neighborhood advocate groups won’t have it,” the melancholy spokesperson let on, sobbing and burying his head into the chest of Willis, who looked on in amazement.

Marvin greeted me warmly as I pressed on the buzzer to be let in. He offered to let me use his key but I told him, “That’s okay, those are your keys.”
“Okay,” he replied, and turned back to a fresh pile of joggers to smile at.
The gate unlocked with a drawn-out buzz and I was immediately surrounded by the children. There must have been five or six of them, all huddled together and noticeably caffeinated. Child day is once a month from seven to eleven and we were considering pushing it back to once every two months but decided against it on further examination. “It would cause an uprising if they can’t see their kids,” Willis, who lived in constant fear of mutiny, imagined.
“Hi Clemy!” Annie hollered, wearing a serene smile as I passed the garden on my way inside, a few Morning Glories spilling over the edge of the embankment and falling at her feet.
“Hello Annie, you look well,” I said, approaching gently and trying not to make any sudden movements, fearing one of Annie’s hose assaults she’s known for when especially excited.
“Thanks, you don’t look so bad yourself, ha!”
“Uh huh, say Annie,” I began cautiously, “I thought you might be a little cold in the bathing suit there?”
“Cold?” She looked down at her cutoff’s and suspiciously tan body and back up at me with a wide smile.
“…I noticed you were using the staff garden hose. Do you remember? We use the green one and you guys use the yellow one?”
She pointed over to the boy filling up the water balloons, “It’s in use.”
“Hmm…well maybe we can turn the water off now okay?”
“Okay.”
The yellow hose, another Willis idea, “They can water the garden all they like with this,” I remember him saying as he screwed on a bolt that reduced water pressure down to a dribble.
On my way inside I thought about asking Debra to stop feeding the kids caffeine but thought better of it. She’s known for smoking several packs of cigarettes in only a few hours when worked up. Her file was switched over to red label, meaning she was now in the hands of Terry, who is responsible for Medical Evaluation Concern, or MEC. MEC people are brought in from some other facility, kind of forged there in drywall and carpet, and placed around various institutions to ritualize the complex destitution of medical paperwork. MEC people operated in an area of time and space comfortably removed from our own. When filling out incident reports and such things I often wondered if I weren’t perhaps moving too fast. I would study him all bent over a form that needed only a simple explanation and a signature, just kind of deeply entrenched, finding something there in the typeset blocks of ink that opened a door to more ink, more signatures, a form that spiraled into a million others, jettisoning him down there in a World of ink and white carbon.
Debra would remain a permanent red.
I paused by the door and watched Mason get too close to the children, smile sheepishly, and continue contriving to prune the Plaza tree, and followed the pink and white tile to the office. The Juniper tree on the grass, the only tree on the grass, hung perpetually in the motion of a man tipping his hat, shaped as if prostrated before a World too big for it. Mason was the sole caretaker of this tree.
“Where’s Terry?” I asked, walking into the large office looking out onto the pavement area.
The office is well equipped with a kitchen, a large L-shaped desk/countertop that encases a good half of the room, several fax machines, and four IBM computers. The IBM’s are a recent development, chosen for their seductive curves and deep shade of black. Near these there are a multitude of charts and file cabinets, a number of pamphlets on medication adherence, and large volumes numbering 1-5 on schizophrenia and malpractice. These are color volumes boasting cut out instruction sheets, crosswords, and portraits drawn by Norman Rockwell.
The shelves above the L-desk are numbered 1-6 and include the names of the employees. We’re allowed personal stickers, newspaper clippings, and comic strips, provided they are inoffensive and keep to the code of ethics highlighted in chapter nine of the employee handbook under the heading, Essential to the Workplace. In keeping with our rights, Terry keeps in his cubby, aligned with pictures of Walt Whitman and Charles Darwin, several science fiction novels, medical guide books, and a bottle of irregular vitamins. Mary’s cubby includes similar articles, with the addition of a few more guide books. Pictures of boy-band figures with their eyes all crossed out adorn Libby’s cubby, and pictures of these very same boy-bands, free of graffiti and in mint condition, adorn Erica’s, with the addition of a Yiddish dictionary and a book entitled, Coping with Coping by Dr. Marlow Caruthers. Teresa and Tonya have almost identical cubby paraphernalia, this inventory consisting of several crosses, dishes of Thanksgiving popuri, and the inevitable celebrity tabloids.
Willis believed the collective existence of the Plaza staff is a macrocosm to the cubbies; “Terry’s life story being written in irregular vitamins and Walt Whitman…generalizations can be made through sociological surveys…this type of thing.”
“And our cubby holes?” I asked him, leaning back in my chair one day with a wry smile. Willis and I looked in our cubbies. Mine contained a picture of a girl from a dated relationship that ended badly and his was completely empty.
“Well there you have it,” Willis said dejectedly, heading over to the coffee machine in resignation.

I found Willis in the office standing and looking out of the window using his thumb, forefinger, and middle finger to pry the blinds open. His left hand supported his bent hip and would occasionally finger its way through his mass of hair making him look puzzled. This would be the constant disarray of confusion and bewilderment that is Willis. Annie was spraying the part of the window where Willis stood from the outside. A glare of blurry sunlight and green could be seen through the constant barrage of water. Willis looked unimpressed. The lights had been turned off for the viewing, and, when I thought about it, are always off when Willis is in the office.
The sunlight shot through the room in beams and left a razor-like pattern on the beige tile flooring. The room looked empty when doused with sunlight.
“Terry called in sick, I worked the grave,” he said, not turning around and sounding foreboding.
“You worked the grave…” I muttered, letting the door close behind me and attaching my jacket to the metal hanger on the backside.
“Yep.”
“And now you’re working the day?” I asked, trying not to sound distraught over this recent loss of daytime Terry.
Terry was a chance to bounce my thoughts off of the walls. A quiet, looming intelligence to share a seat next to. Someone to make one talk for no other reason than to fill the space he leaves around, like talking to a vacuum. We were impressed. He could endure hours in the community room, legs crossed, hands folded over one another and resting on a kneecap, starring the client directly into the eyes, nodding his head emphatically and occasionally opening his thin lips to say, “Well…”
A real corpse, Willis would say. But I sensed something else there; my daytime sessions with him were beginning to unearth it. I felt I was beginning to understand. I just needed more time. And here was Willis in his place today, the situation now being reversed with Willis here unearthing me, something I wouldn’t mind if it hadn’t been for the expression on his face, which I couldn't see but knew to be there.
“Actually, you’re working the day,” Willis said finally.
“Alone?”
“Maybe, I don’t know, pretend like I’m not here.”
“How did the grave go?” I asked, anticipating the answer.
He rubbed the back of his neck still looking out of the window where a confused Annie tightened her grip on the hose, relentless in her efforts to spray Willis with water. “Don’t worry about it.”
I went to the kitchen to see if breakfast had been made yet. It hadn’t. The clock read 9:08. Already a small collection of grumbling clients gathered around the countertop clanging plates together and shuffling around one another to get prime positioning for the serving. Doris was seated patiently at one of the long, chalk pink tables, with her knife, fork, and spoon folded over her plate. Her arms were also folded and her head was bent downward.
Randall was standing in the kitchen and looming over the sink half asleep. He wore thick grey sweat pants covered with what looked like coffee stains and a big red nylon jacket, half unzipped, revealing a bare, hairy chest. He had an untamed afro covered in what looked like mashed potatoes and a thick mustache. I thought about the time I dyed the grey out of his hair and mustache. He thought the girls would be all over him. I told him I would do it if he promised to bathe. “Okay,” he had said. He didn’t bathe...and it’s been a few weeks so it was sure to come up at the next community meeting.
He kind of wavered from left foot to right foot with his hands by his side, seemingly looking down the drain of the sink for something he might have dropped in there. I walked through the community room and into the kitchen, finding that on closer inspection his eyes were closed.
“Hey Randall,” I said.
He didn't respond, just continued to waver.
“Randall!” I said again.
The kitchen looked relatively clean. He couldn’t have been in there long.
“Randall!”
He was wearing the gold pendant; he was going out on the town today.
“Randall!”
“What?” he said finally, opening his eyes and slowly turning to me. His cheeks and his mouth were moving rapidly: symptoms of high-blood pressure and blood-sugar, agitation, an excess of hormones, adrenaline…annoyance. His eyes are bright red, I thought.
Don’t worry about it.
I followed protocol and took a step back, showing him my hands were empty and that I meant no harm, that I simply wanted to talk to him.
“Okay…okay…okay…easy…” I chimed calmly.
“Why you come in here stagnating my whole process? I’m just trying to relax like Willis told me to,” he said in a plaintive voice that meant he was de-escalating.
I asked him to sit on the couch for a while. Robert was in there talking to himself about the color coding of balloons and watching Woody Allen, “You like Woody.”
“Okay,” Randall said, and ambled into the living room. There was a marathon on. It reached that part in the movie where they were at a party in California and everyone was talking about having a meeting.
According to the referendum taped above the sink, which meant according to Willis, breakfast today would be Lerry’s Top Pops and hard-boiled eggs. After I inspected the cereal cabinet for signs of breaking and entering I poured the cereal into a large basin. We were out of regular milk. There was just the strawberry for pouring. I put it together with the cereal and went to work on the eggs. There are a few constants, one being hard-boiled eggs. There must always be hard-boiled eggs. This is something the Plaza guarantees. We’ve never had a morning without them and we ensure there never will be, unsure of the kind of outcome we’d be looking at.
I rang the breakfast bell above the alcove. Clients solemnly grumbled and pushed one another shuffling into place half asleep. Justin was the first, jiving up to the counter in long strides and muttering something about the Chinese.

“Randall is pretty far gone today,” I said, leaning up against the door frame in the office and finding Willis where I left him.
“Yep.”
“Did you want to do shift change report?”
“Look at Marvin out there putting the fear of God into the whole goddamn neighborhood. The police came by twice this morning and stood right next to him, just watching him and waiting for him to give them an excuse. I stood right here, just like this, waiting for them to give me an excuse.”
He let go of the blinds and sat in one of the rolling chairs.
“We want to integrate our patients…”
“Clients,” I interrupted with a smile.
He gave me a look.
“…We want to integrate them into the community and when Marvin makes an effort people blow their tops and start calling the local goons.”
“Of course,” he began again, turning towards the window, “he does look like a little pervert out there.”
I wondered about the parade coming up next Monday.
“Some guy from Microsoft moved in across the street, I understand they are already thinking about selling,” I said after a few moments, changing the subject. I closed the door behind me and sat down in the rolling chair.
We looked out of the window towards the house across the street. A woman unloaded groceries from a yellow Escalade parked in the driveway next to a garden of wood chips. A newborn tree was tied to a stake to keep it upright. Little children with bowl-cuts danced around a multicolored plastic swing and beat the hell out of one another with rubber bats while their father stood on the sidewalk barking something into a Bluetooth device. The house was big and new with a two-car garage. Two-car garages are a new development in the neighborhood. Marvin had been giving me all the specs on where I could go about locating them. “They are important because they hold two cars!” he had said. I thought about his first mental breakdown. Dorothy, our case manager, had read it to me out of his case file, giving me all the details. He was sitting in a theme restaurant with his wife of twenty years who was contemplating aloud the tile design in the kitchen. And right there, right when the waiter came up to announce the chefs special, the Monte Cristo; a ham and cheese sandwich deep-fried and covered in powdered sugar and served with jelly and frosted apples, he stabbed his wife in the chest with the steak knife. It would be eleven years of intensive therapy before he would be admitted to the Plaza. His wife went on to marry the waiter, who, after they had attended a number of meetings for Traumatized Victims of Traumatic Events (TVTE), proposed by hiding a wedding ring in one of the jelly custards he knew she liked.
“…I bet those people smell like clean Americans,” Willis said meditatively, still looking out across the street.
“Why do you say that?”
“It just seems probable.”
“What do clean Americans smell like?”
“Wet Douglas Firs and water hoses,” he said smilingly. “Why are they moving out?” Willis turned away from the window and leaned back in his chair putting his arms behind his head.
“Ah, that. Robert told the man’s children that the secret to life is to ‘find something that’s not robotic and mix your testicles with it. Dig deep in there and create something, just like God.’”
“Well…that seems reasonable.”

Willis counted the medication off to me and handed over the keys in the med-room. I signed my name under “Count OK?” and locked everything up. He said he had to take Randall to the social security office to pick up his check and that he might take the rest of the day off. He said he was having someone come in but wasn’t sure. I told him it was fine and that I would hold down the fort.
At 10:00 I did shift change report on the new IBM in the office. We are required to do this four times every twenty-four hours.
Was med-count OK? If no, please explain.
I typed yes.
Were the client symptoms and post-shift diagnostics discussed and evaluated with departing staff?
“Yes.”
Was departing staff clear and intelligible?
“Yes.”
Were there any signs of stress and/or weaknesses that might compromise the well being of the facility?
“No.”
Were all clients up to par with contracted codes of hygiene?
“Yes.”
Please add any additional notes, employee name and number, and press send.
“Main office running low on coffee, cereal cabinet in kitchen has broken lock…fear for safety of cereal…Clement Landers, 0907381761.”

I finished what was left of the coffee and went out on the front patio to have a cigarette and watch the foster parents come and pick their kids up. Hybrid cars and Volkswagens appeared in funeral like processions. Doors opened and seat belts were buckled. Promises of junk food and various plastics were made. The children seemed hesitant to leave. Annie made goodbyes to each of them, offering melted candies and Wonder Breads on their way out.
I watched them drive on into the morning suburban plains, all in a long shiny row that snaked all the way up Crane St., and wondered how the Plaza would fit in their childhoods, how these visits would get filed.
The Wonder Bread wrappers and dismembered Morning Glories blew around the pavement like tumbleweed, moving up and down again in long, exaggerated gusts.