After one day I was so comfortable in the ICU hallway I began to look like a cowboy leaning against a post with his head down and a blade of grass between his teeth, waiting for his shadow to rise or fall without moving a muscle. I would sit on the ground with my legs elongated because of the twisted depth perception from my amplified vision after months of hallucinating. I became a ten foot tall cowboy who was never going home because he had found his Texas and his Florida.
The stance of the first cowboy is that his post was a place to hitch, relax and wait whereas the second cowboy had a signpost that read like a map to enchanted territories he’s visited without ever leaving. So here I was, never going home without ever having left, while rising and falling never having moved.
By the third day the memories of the open West escaped me so I started pacing the encroaching hallway. At ten feet tall I could pass by ten rooms in twenty strides. I would try to time it just exactly perfectly so when they opened the door that led to the next step of my stay I could just walk right through the doorway and into the ethereal glow of new space.
But there was a clever nurse who was very consistent in shutting the door behind him, as if he was hiding a grand treasure on the other side. I could never time it just right when he came in through the out door and I never saw him leave. I was adamant that the door swung inwards to thwart my efforts to escape. It would actually be harder to shut me down on the way out than to close me in on the way to, if the door gets behind me and I pass the threshold without smacking into it again and again.
I was obsessed with timing then, even though I never looked at a clock. I was trying to get out of the ICU before somebody else beat me to the treasure. I thought if you left of your own volition instead of leaving on a gurney you were cooperating with the program by not violating psychotic people’s sleep, space, or pacing habits, poking at their ribs or the bottom of their feet. Only a handful of other patients on the unit and all but two took a ride to somewhere more permanent I speculated.
I had my work cut out for me because the other guy still on the unit with me had the gift of being able to talk through walls. It was driving me mad to the point where I had to pound my fist into my hand ferociously to make it stop. One of us had to go and since I didn’t talk very much, maybe my timing would have me walking through walls into the open air and out from this enclave upon enclave of impoverished and starving minds.
Francis Erich McElroy 