I Need a Spoon

The hospital is small, small enough for the city of Redding, though it bears the grandiose name, "Shasta County Mental Health." It may be intended for all of Shasta County, but the hospital is too small for that.

It is also barely used. I surmise that the people of Redding are healthier mentally than those elsewhere, the hard working types that don't have the time or strength to become mentally ill.

The mental hospital sits as an extension of the main hospital, a ward that juts out towards the parking lot like a peninsula, protected by metal screens so that the patients can't escape and swim to safety.

It is not that the hospital is dangerous or a prison. The staff are competent and friendly. But like any mental hospital, and even more so at the time this story happened, there was nothing to do. Even pacing the halls became boring, and a person would wish for a hospital lunch or hospital dinner, as good as hospital food is, to break the monotony of each day.

Only half of the rooms were ever used, the part that sat within the peninsula. The second half was reserved for the odd child that would appear at random, allowing for a separation of fledgling madmen from those who had made the full journey into the adulthood of delusion. This always worked fine and no one complained. Everyone was safe, the staff kept on top of things, and each day, although boring enough to make you want to physically take out your brain and examine it, passed by quietly.

In this hospital there was a bearded man, hair long. He was not a bum by any means, but he was crazy, and in his natural surroundings. He had come from a Platina, from the monastery there, and was an emergency admittance. He was not suicidal, just plain nuts. If the medication worked for him he would be ok. But the doctors only knew so much in those days and the medication was insufficient.

He had cleared out most of the hospital already. One fellow, a rather fat man, had checked himself in for depression. He was disabled, unable to go back to his former job, and had a mountain of problems. But when the bearded man, in his grandiose style, had told him that doing anything was better than doing nothing and stewing in his plight, the fat man became inspired and checked himself out.

There was another lady, a shuffler having been hammered by thorazine, who paced the halls trying to find relief for the plug of anxiety that afflicted her from the medication. To describe the effects of medication is difficult to one who has not gone through it. It's kind of like someone putting a finger into your brain and stopping you from thinking. But all those thoughts spill over into your body and you become anxious, needing to move around and do something though your strength does not exist anymore.

But the bearded man talked with her, and with his flourish of gab, told her she only needed to cry, and it was a shame she could not. She needed normal human emotions to run through her brain, and tears with their mystical quality to cleanse her mind. She must have realized it to be true, for the next day she checked herself out.

There was the young man who needed to a chance to be a kid and fall down without getting yelled at and without getting babied; there was the older young man who found out he had Hepatitis, and needed encouragement to keep on going; there was the young lady who needed to be reunited with her child: these all checked themselves out, leaving only the bearded man and a couple of others to await his counseling.

Some say the bearded man should have concentrated on his own healing, that his preponderance on the health of others was a sign of running away from his own problems. But in reality the doctor's were unable to help him, and even though he was crazy he wanted to help others who had been failed by the doctors. The doctors were fine, but in his opinion they had missed the most important aspect of mental health - the human heart.

So one fine afternoon, just before the lunch cart came and the wondrous hospital food came to give everyone a respite from the boredom, the bearded man sat at a table, praying to himself. His head was bowed, beard resting on his chest, and he gave the appearance of sleeping.

There came to sit across from him an older lady, one of the patients, maybe in her sixties, face long with the lines of her age. Her hair was balding, sparse and gray. She was skinny, beyond slender, and her clothes hung loosely on her frame.

She sat across from him as I said, watching him, his slow and even breathing, the sporadic scrunching of his eyes.

"You do that very well," she said.

The bearded man looked up, then rubbed his eyes.

"I said you do that very well."

"Thank you," he replied.

"I pray to," she said. Her eyes were so wide, so serious that the bearded man could not turn away from her.

"What do you pray for?" he asked.

She lowered her eyes ever so slightly, lips shrinking.

"I pray for my husband," she said.

"That's good. You must love your husband a lot."

"He's dead, and I've never been the same since."

How sad she is, he thought. Her life gone, lost, as she has wept and mourned for her love. She needs a better life than this.

"How do you pray for him?"

"I was told to do it in tongues," she replied quickly.

"I used to pray in tongues, but haven't in a long time."

There was silence between the two. The staff was behind the counter to the left of the new found friends, one of those times that staff did not want the patients to come up and bother them. They talked in hushed tones, clacked on keyboards and shuffled paper and files.

"How do you pray?" she asked.

How to answer such a question for such a suffering woman? He thought for a minute, thought hard and prayed.

"I do the Jesus Prayer," he said.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Say this: Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me a sinner."

"Lord Jesus have mercy on sinners," she said.

"No, 'have mercy on me a sinner."

"Have mercy on me I'm a sinner Lord."

Better to let her have it simple, he thought.

"That's perfect," he said.

"I pray like this," she said. And from out of her mouth came the guttural sing song of charismatic tongues, starting off slow. But the tension was growing, and the bearded man, well, he was just as crazy if not more, and he got carried away in the suggestion.

So he started speaking in tongues as well. He spoke what she spoke, and she spoke what he spoke, and they spoke at the same time, the same syllables, at the same pace.

The staff started laughing at what was going on.

But the bearded man came to himself, and realized what he was doing.

"I am an Orthodox Christian," he said. "I don't speak in tongues, they are sinful."

There was tension in the air, and his mind was racing. Time had sped up, and life was racing towards an end.

"I'm sorry," she said. She looked down again, eyes on the slender and wrinkled hands in her lap. It was only a second.

"I'm ready," she said.

His mind was moving fast now, and he picked up on her hidden meanings. It is said that the madman loses everything but rationality, yet we can say even more that the madman sees the rational that exists within the irrational. She wanted to take communion, and he asked her flat out if that was what she wanted.

"Yes, I'm ready."

Without waiting, the both of them went back to her room. The staff had already ignored the babbling couple, though the energy and high tension between them was so thick it could have been harnessed to run a fleet of cars.

Once in her room, where two unmade beds sat across from two unused beds, and small dressers were covered with hospital papers and unsent letters, she wasted no time, and gave him a cracker. It was a peanut butter cracker.

He grabbed a Styrofoam cup from off one of the dressers, and filled it with water.

"I'm ready," she said, and sat on the bed, mouth open.

The bearded man, mind racing, held the cup of water in one hand, and the cracker in the other. He dropped the peanut butter cracker in the cup, and making the sign of the cross over the makeshift chalice in the three fingered style of Orthodoxy, prayed, "O Lord, let this turn into thy precious body and blood."

He stood there, knowing something was missing. Something was missing and he could not determine what. Then he realized he could not give her communion with his bare hand.

"I need a spoon," he said.

She reached behind her and grabbed a pen.

"Will this do?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, and stuck the pen in a groove on the cracker.

"The handmaiden of God partakes of the life giving mysteries of Christ..."

She ate the cracker, and thanked the bearded man. Communion at last. But the staff that burst into the room, yelling that he should not be in there, said nothing kind to him, until they realized she was unharmed, and nothing inappropriate had happened.

The lady stayed in her room all day, and did not come out for dinner. The staff checked on her and she seemed to be fine.

But it was in the middle of the night his work was completed and the hospital cleared, and the old lady, the one who pined for her husband every second of a tortured life, went to meet her love to be with him forever. As for the bearded man, he's still crazy, and waiting for his own personal peanut butter cracker to let him rest in the arms of God.