Back to the Garden
Harrison Kim
Psychiatrist Nestor Almond smokes a marijuana cigarette in the view room of his ninth-floor condo.
“I want to bring my patients back into the garden,” he says, and steps into a fur suit, like he’s doing up a tent, but zipping from the inside. It’s a complicated costume he’s created, a bear and a cat and a rabbit combined, artificial fur, it took him months to make. He stands and smooths down the material.
“The world has no boundaries,” he talks into his computer.
He’s seven feet tall with his bunny ears. He chuckles, stretches, and makes some dance moves.
“Reality is terrifying and random,” he says. “We find our own limits.”
He likes the way he moves in the suit, how he can be himself and something else.
He’s talking with Rena, a woman with a master’s degree in library science who traps stray cats and does peer counselling for mentally ill people. She’s dressed in a cougar outfit with fox ears, watching on her computer, listening to Dr. Almond.
“I love the natural world,” she says. “I adore back yards,” and she begins to tell him about all the different kinds “like the different types of people.”
Nestor can’t see her eyes but knows they’re green as ivy edges.
“We’re safe now,” he tells her. “Inside our fur Edens,” and he is relaxed, his breath rising and falling, his bearlike shadow solidly beside him.
On his way to work at the Tranquille Psychiatric Hospital, Doctor Almond notices curly-haired patient Pierre hiking the road towards the hospital, flapping his arms under the massive oak trees that line the drive. Dr. Almond knows its Pierre because of his red striped pants and the skinniness of the waving arms.
“Hey, would you like a ride?” Nestor stops and opens his car door.
Pierre turns his head. He looks at the doctor’s smiling face. “I’d like to fly away,” he says. “But I cannot.”
He turns and slowly lifts his leg into the car.
“Where did you go?” Nestor asks, driving much slower than the speed limit.
“Oh, I went downtown, smoked a bit of weed.”
“I’m glad you came back on your own,” says Dr. Almond.
The doctor and Pierre walk to the security gates from the hospital parking lot.
“I see you’ve returned our runaway,” says Cooper Charles, the security man on duty. “That was a risky move.”
“He’s my patient,” says Dr. Almond. “Please treat us with respect.”
Later, at a treatment planning meeting, Almond must decide what to do about Pierre.
“It’s the medication, doctor,” the elfin-faced patient says. “That’s why I ran away from my day leave. I couldn’t stop moving because of the side effects. At the same time, I could not fly off the ground.” He looks at Almond. “It’s frustrating. So, I tried the weed. I found that it really helped.”
Nurse Tom Hardy, a shaven-headed man with a huge walrus moustache, guffaws.
Doctor Almond studies Pierre. “If we took you off your meds, we’d have to monitor you more closely.”
“He should lose his day leaves right now” says Tom. “He’s an escape risk.”
“I would be okay to lose privileges” says Pierre. “To slow down and be myself again.”
“We’ll gradually drop your Risperidone dose over the next month.” says Dr. Almond. “We’ll leave you with staff escorted outings for now.”
Tom Hardy shakes his head. “You’re the doctor,” he says.
Dr. Almond muses about Pierre and his moving around, the poor fellow wanted to fly away somewhere but ended up back at the hospital. “We all do a dance with the physical,” he types to Rena. “Depending on what state our bodies and minds are in.”
Rena writes back “What does Pierre feel, inside his skin? If he had a different covering, let’s say feathers like a bird, might he find more confidence and contentment?”
“Maybe his problem is he doesn’t have a useful covering,” Almond hypothesizes. “Except for a medication coat all over his brain.”
“Nestor, maybe you can help him feed in the garden without that coat,” says Rena. “Hopping from branch to branch.”
“Maybe,” he replies, laughing. “Anyway, no more shop talk. Time for us to skip. Let’s do some howling.”
Rena laughs too and begins to yip, and they are both dancing the wolf and the fox and the coyote at their separate computers.
At noon the next day, the doctor power-walks around the hospital grounds with seven-foot-tall hospital director, Doctor Anash Sanghera. It’s good to take a break and stretch the arms and legs, match footsteps and wits with Anash. Dr. Almond waves his fingers in the air. They move just over the top of Sanghera’s head.
“It is conscience that separates us from instinct,” says Dr. Sanghera. “It’s the layer that keeps us safe.”
“Some might say conscience is cowardice,” Dr. Almond retorts. “You know, you should have played basketball.”
“Truth is that the world has no boundaries, no edges, and no limits.” Sanghera continues. “Sometimes I have to stop thinking about it.”
He tells Almond about his three-year-old grandchild Eva and all the boundaries she must learn in order to be safe.
“Truth is learning to live within limits,” says Sanghera. “Truthfully, I rarely hit the basket.”
“I think exactly like you,” agrees Almond. “We need a sense of reality to be safe.”
Almond finds he likes to spend more and more time inside his fur suit after work, especially after he takes Pierre and several other patients off their medication. From the nurses’ office, he watches them out of the corners of his eyes. Pierre stops him in the ward corridor and states “I feel so much more relaxed now, Doctor.”
“That must be wonderful,” Almond responds, speaking from his own skin, not from the hospital procedures manual.
“I’m outside of troubles,” Pierre states. “Floating and looking down from afar.”
“Are you hearing any voices in your head?”
“All is silent, Doctor. What I need now is the community re-integration.”
“If you were an animal, Pierre,” says Dr. Almond, “what animal would you be?”
Pierre thinks. “I’d be an eagle,” he says.
Tom Hardy smiles tightly from the nursing office door. “A predator,” he states.
“A watcher,” says Pierre.
“An eagle has good eyes for watching,” says Dr. Almond.
The next Saturday, he and Rena hike up behind Hawk Mountain. They undress, then enter their animal suits. They zip each other up. They lumber about role playing bears, then they switch to playing mountain lions, cavorting while naked inside the fur suits, growling and play fighting. Almond runs so fast sweat runs down his back, he rolls in leftover snow and Rena rolls with him, she laughs loud from inside her black and white fox-cougar suit, Almond shouts and yells out of his slippery fur holes, they’re on top of one another in the wild, snarling mating cat hybrids.
On his next walk with Dr. Sanghera, Almond tells the Director that maybe the patients should go on retreats to find their true selves, “their true names, like the indigenous people used to do.”
“I read about that,” says Sanghera. “Usually, they named themselves after an animal.”
“Then they moved like that animal,” Almond says, “they centred themselves within that animal’s potential and its limits.”
“You think the patients should be more like animals?” Sanghera laughs.
“I don’t think our identities are totally chemically formed,” says Almond. “We learn who we are through life experience.”
“Your patient Pierre’s going around saying he’s an eagle,” says Sanghera.
“Let’s let him fly with that a while,” Almond replies.
Almond spends more and more home time in his fur suit. When he’s not in it, he’s stitching together another covering, that of an insect, part butterfly and part grasshopper and maybe some ladybug. At night, he sleeps alone inside his first suit. He sleeps on the floor, on the rug, with a bunched-up wool blanket as a pillow.
He goes out stray cat trapping with Rena. She seems less joyful without her covering, or the computer screen. She prowls through people’s yards, focussing finding strays. She checks her traps, making sure the bait is hanging freely.
“I love intensity,” she tells him. “But it stresses me out.”
Almond jokes, “Are you worried about your experience with a furry psychiatrist? Maybe I’m too wild in my rituals.”
“It’s stimulating yet frightening for me to commit myself,” she answers.
“So, what kind of garden then, would grow in your life?
“One that shades,” she tells him. “One offering shelter from the bright light.” She hikes into a stranger’s backyard, lifting the bushes. “What attracts you to me?” she asks, and he tells her “a certain unpredictability,” She lays down one of her patented cat catchers under a lilac bush.
He watches the waving lilac flowers above her. “Unpredictability and scent,” he concludes.
Friday afternoon is social games time in the patient recreation area. It’s in a separate building across from the main hospital. Dr. Almond likes to mingle there, to be among the patients. He’s the only staff present, besides the activity workers, and he’s always wondered why more employees don’t come over. He sits at a table with uneven legs and talks with slow moving patient Romero about all the different dogs Romero’s owned. “I had one that was part Mexican, part Burmese,” says Romero, in his halting voice. it seems that all dogs have nationalities, the patient tells Almond.
When it’s time to return to the wards, everyone slowly files out to walk up the stairs to the main building. There’s a yell, and someone pushes by. It’s Pierre, flapping his arms. He’s racing somewhere, and soon it’s clear. He leaps towards the main hospital doors, swings and scrambles from the steel stair rail to the windowsill to the lower roof, then scuttles up along its length then heaves himself to the upper roof. It takes less than a minute. Pierre’s up on top of the hospital roof and he’s yelling.
“I will fly, I will save the world!”
Everyone looks up. Activity worker Sonja pulls her hair back and hollers up at him “Come down right now, Pierre!”
“I’m going to soar,” he cries.
Dr. Almond cranes his neck to see Pierre’s narrow face staring across at the clouds beyond. He leans back and shouts. “You cannot fly!”
“Oh yes I can,” says Pierre. “And with this miracle, witnessed by God and you, my Doctor Prince, I will save my family and my friends!”
He points towards some thunderheads rising against the evening sunset. Dr. Almond thinks “What will save Pierre?” and it comes to him.
“I have already flown off that roof,” Dr. Almond cries out. “I have already rescued the world. You don’t have to.”
Pierre stops looking at the cloud and stares down at the doctor.
“You’re the one who took me off the medication,” the young man says. “And I thank you.” He pauses. “You have already jumped?”
“You have to believe me,” says Almond. “If you walk back down here, I will give you a cigarette.”
He holds up a piece of a joint he has hidden at the bottom of his jacket pocket.
“I am an eagle on the rooftop,” Pierre tells him.
“What does the eagle see?” asks Almond.
“Your offering. And the truth,” says Pierre, and he begins to laugh, and he flaps his arms and jumps straight up, and comes straight down, at the same place. “Don’t go away, Dr. Almond!” he yells, and steps back a few paces. “Here I come.”
“I’m not going away,” says Almond. “I’m here for you, Pierre. Take the long way down.”
It’s too late. Dave Charles and the other security staff are out on the roof. They scramble across to where the slight man stands. “Stay right there, Pierre.” Dave calls. “We’re not here to hurt you.”
“No, stop!” yells Almond, “He’s coming down slowly!”
On the roof, the security slowly circles Pierre. “We’re here to help,” they tell him.
Pierre leaps forward, zig zags at lightning speed between two of the staff, flies off the roof and into space, arms and legs flailing as his body falls crashing to the cement right in front of Almond. Nobody moves. Pierre’s head lies twisted at a ninety-degree angle to his torso. Almond drops down on the ground, holding his patient, feeling for the heartbeat.
It’s almost midnight when Almond completes a six-page report on the incident. He writes what he saw and heard, and in his opinion how the panicked staff practically pushed Pierre off the roof.
“They did not give him enough space,” he writes, “To make a clear decision.”
He spends over an hour watching the security camera replay again and again. He replays Pierre on the roof flapping his arms, “why can’t I remember that?” he wonders, yet at the end of the hour he knows reality clearly. “He jumped right after,” Dr. Almond repeats to himself. “Right after he flapped.”
The doctor drives home from the hospital. Halfway down the long driveway he pulls into the side of the road and takes a fur suit from the back seat. He opens a gate, goes into the field, and puts the fur suit on, with runners over the feet. Then he runs in the dark, fast through the knee-high grass, feeling the strength of his legs pushing, and his voice making sounds, sobs maybe or perhaps simply expressions, and at the corners of his eyes he sees real coyotes, or maybe it’s his thoughts racing, it’s all blurry but the way ahead is clear, into the night and the forest. He runs for an hour then stops and turns around. He returns to his car as fog billows in from off the river.
The next morning, Almond enters an executive meeting about the incident,
Tom Hardy, Director Sanghera, and Dave Charles are all present. Nobody says “Hello” to the doctor.
“Why did you tell Pierre you already saved the world?” asks the Director. He and the others sit behind a wide wooden table. Sanghera directs Almond to sit on the other side.
“Is this an interrogation or a meeting?” Almond asks.
“These are questions to find out what happened,” says Dr. Sanghera.
“I told a story to help Pierre find his limits,” says Almond. “And if the security hadn’t rushed him, he’d still be alive.”
“You took him off his medication,” states Tom Hardy, who won’t look at the doctor. “He was hearing voices that told him he was an eagle or some kind of bird.”
“Security should have blocked off that access to the roof years ago,” Almond says. “That was the safety risk.”
“Nestor, you’ve told me some interesting things on our walks,” Sanghera taps his pen on the table. “I’m reluctant to bring them up, but you said we need reality to be safe.”
“Reality is often a lie,” Almond tells him. “But it’s a convenient one.”
“So, you didn’t jump off a roof?” Dr. Sanghera smiles grimly. “To save the world?”
Almond frowns. “That’s the truth.”
Tom Hardy shakes his head. “You’re way up in your head, you don’t see the truth at all. A man is dead because you didn’t medicate his sickness.”
Almond looks out the window as he speaks. The hospital yard stretches out below his view.
“That is completely false. He’s dead because he wasn’t given enough time to change his mind. Security rushed him. He would have climbed down appropriately for that cigarette.”
“Tom’s telling the facts,” says Charles. “Finger-pointing isn’t going to bring Pierre back.”
“There have to be repercussions,” agrees Hardy.
Sanghera stands up. The top of his slicked down, black hair almost touches the low ceiling.
“I’d like everyone to leave the room except myself and Nestor,” the Director orders.
Hardy and Charles turn away, stand in unison and walk out without looking back.
“I think you may be delusional, my friend.” says Dr. Sanghera. He sits back in his chair. “Does your conscience not bother you? You did take Pierre off his medications.”
“With medications he would have died also,” says Dr. Almond. “In other ways.”
Sanghera makes circles on the table with his pen. “The security did their best,” he continues, “And yes, we’re going to make things safer in the future.” He raises his head and points the pen at Almond. “You let him become an Eagle. Except that wasn’t real.”
Dr. Almond stands at the place where he witnessed Pierre’s fall. Was the poor young man aiming for him? He fell so close. Dr. Almond sees Pierre’s face in his mind, and that face will come up randomly for years, he knows. Or maybe not. It all depends on if or when he lets it go. Now he cannot unsee the eagle.
Almond communicates with Rena on the Zoom.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she says. “You even gave Pierre a ride after he escaped.”
“I never said it was my fault,” Almond tells her.
He’s completed his second animal suit, the insect one, and he’s wearing it as he talks to Rena. His suited arms resemble grasshopper legs.
“I don’t like that outfit as much as your first one,” she says from behind her screen. “It’s got such bulbous eyes.”
“Those are ladybug eyes,” Almond says. “I need to join our two suits together. Zip you and I within them.”
“Then what will we do?” she wonders. “Roll around and make love?”
“To be close is part of it,” Almond says.
“I need some time to think about all this,” Rena says. She stops and stammers as she talks.
Almond asks, “Is it about Pierre?”
“His fate very much disturbs me,” she says. “I don’t want to be around that kind of karma.”
Dr. Almond knows there will be professional consequences, besides the personal ones with Rena. He drives from his house at midnight, over to Tranquille Mountain, where he pulls on the bear-cat-rabbit suit, tugs high quality hiking boots over his feet and ties them tight.
He feels better, much better about things when he’s dressed like this. He knows he’s not like Dr. Sanghera, or Tom Hardy. He’s a bit like Rena, more like Pierre, he’s always been more like Pierre.
“The truth is terrifying and random,” he says out loud, as he jogs up a narrow mountain pathway. He’s a man animal tonight, inside a bear-cat-rabbit suit within a forest, loping through a wild garden.
Harrison Kim
Psychiatrist Nestor Almond smokes a marijuana cigarette in the view room of his ninth-floor condo.
“I want to bring my patients back into the garden,” he says, and steps into a fur suit, like he’s doing up a tent, but zipping from the inside. It’s a complicated costume he’s created, a bear and a cat and a rabbit combined, artificial fur, it took him months to make. He stands and smooths down the material.
“The world has no boundaries,” he talks into his computer.
He’s seven feet tall with his bunny ears. He chuckles, stretches, and makes some dance moves.
“Reality is terrifying and random,” he says. “We find our own limits.”
He likes the way he moves in the suit, how he can be himself and something else.
He’s talking with Rena, a woman with a master’s degree in library science who traps stray cats and does peer counselling for mentally ill people. She’s dressed in a cougar outfit with fox ears, watching on her computer, listening to Dr. Almond.
“I love the natural world,” she says. “I adore back yards,” and she begins to tell him about all the different kinds “like the different types of people.”
Nestor can’t see her eyes but knows they’re green as ivy edges.
“We’re safe now,” he tells her. “Inside our fur Edens,” and he is relaxed, his breath rising and falling, his bearlike shadow solidly beside him.
On his way to work at the Tranquille Psychiatric Hospital, Doctor Almond notices curly-haired patient Pierre hiking the road towards the hospital, flapping his arms under the massive oak trees that line the drive. Dr. Almond knows its Pierre because of his red striped pants and the skinniness of the waving arms.
“Hey, would you like a ride?” Nestor stops and opens his car door.
Pierre turns his head. He looks at the doctor’s smiling face. “I’d like to fly away,” he says. “But I cannot.”
He turns and slowly lifts his leg into the car.
“Where did you go?” Nestor asks, driving much slower than the speed limit.
“Oh, I went downtown, smoked a bit of weed.”
“I’m glad you came back on your own,” says Dr. Almond.
The doctor and Pierre walk to the security gates from the hospital parking lot.
“I see you’ve returned our runaway,” says Cooper Charles, the security man on duty. “That was a risky move.”
“He’s my patient,” says Dr. Almond. “Please treat us with respect.”
Later, at a treatment planning meeting, Almond must decide what to do about Pierre.
“It’s the medication, doctor,” the elfin-faced patient says. “That’s why I ran away from my day leave. I couldn’t stop moving because of the side effects. At the same time, I could not fly off the ground.” He looks at Almond. “It’s frustrating. So, I tried the weed. I found that it really helped.”
Nurse Tom Hardy, a shaven-headed man with a huge walrus moustache, guffaws.
Doctor Almond studies Pierre. “If we took you off your meds, we’d have to monitor you more closely.”
“He should lose his day leaves right now” says Tom. “He’s an escape risk.”
“I would be okay to lose privileges” says Pierre. “To slow down and be myself again.”
“We’ll gradually drop your Risperidone dose over the next month.” says Dr. Almond. “We’ll leave you with staff escorted outings for now.”
Tom Hardy shakes his head. “You’re the doctor,” he says.
Dr. Almond muses about Pierre and his moving around, the poor fellow wanted to fly away somewhere but ended up back at the hospital. “We all do a dance with the physical,” he types to Rena. “Depending on what state our bodies and minds are in.”
Rena writes back “What does Pierre feel, inside his skin? If he had a different covering, let’s say feathers like a bird, might he find more confidence and contentment?”
“Maybe his problem is he doesn’t have a useful covering,” Almond hypothesizes. “Except for a medication coat all over his brain.”
“Nestor, maybe you can help him feed in the garden without that coat,” says Rena. “Hopping from branch to branch.”
“Maybe,” he replies, laughing. “Anyway, no more shop talk. Time for us to skip. Let’s do some howling.”
Rena laughs too and begins to yip, and they are both dancing the wolf and the fox and the coyote at their separate computers.
At noon the next day, the doctor power-walks around the hospital grounds with seven-foot-tall hospital director, Doctor Anash Sanghera. It’s good to take a break and stretch the arms and legs, match footsteps and wits with Anash. Dr. Almond waves his fingers in the air. They move just over the top of Sanghera’s head.
“It is conscience that separates us from instinct,” says Dr. Sanghera. “It’s the layer that keeps us safe.”
“Some might say conscience is cowardice,” Dr. Almond retorts. “You know, you should have played basketball.”
“Truth is that the world has no boundaries, no edges, and no limits.” Sanghera continues. “Sometimes I have to stop thinking about it.”
He tells Almond about his three-year-old grandchild Eva and all the boundaries she must learn in order to be safe.
“Truth is learning to live within limits,” says Sanghera. “Truthfully, I rarely hit the basket.”
“I think exactly like you,” agrees Almond. “We need a sense of reality to be safe.”
Almond finds he likes to spend more and more time inside his fur suit after work, especially after he takes Pierre and several other patients off their medication. From the nurses’ office, he watches them out of the corners of his eyes. Pierre stops him in the ward corridor and states “I feel so much more relaxed now, Doctor.”
“That must be wonderful,” Almond responds, speaking from his own skin, not from the hospital procedures manual.
“I’m outside of troubles,” Pierre states. “Floating and looking down from afar.”
“Are you hearing any voices in your head?”
“All is silent, Doctor. What I need now is the community re-integration.”
“If you were an animal, Pierre,” says Dr. Almond, “what animal would you be?”
Pierre thinks. “I’d be an eagle,” he says.
Tom Hardy smiles tightly from the nursing office door. “A predator,” he states.
“A watcher,” says Pierre.
“An eagle has good eyes for watching,” says Dr. Almond.
The next Saturday, he and Rena hike up behind Hawk Mountain. They undress, then enter their animal suits. They zip each other up. They lumber about role playing bears, then they switch to playing mountain lions, cavorting while naked inside the fur suits, growling and play fighting. Almond runs so fast sweat runs down his back, he rolls in leftover snow and Rena rolls with him, she laughs loud from inside her black and white fox-cougar suit, Almond shouts and yells out of his slippery fur holes, they’re on top of one another in the wild, snarling mating cat hybrids.
On his next walk with Dr. Sanghera, Almond tells the Director that maybe the patients should go on retreats to find their true selves, “their true names, like the indigenous people used to do.”
“I read about that,” says Sanghera. “Usually, they named themselves after an animal.”
“Then they moved like that animal,” Almond says, “they centred themselves within that animal’s potential and its limits.”
“You think the patients should be more like animals?” Sanghera laughs.
“I don’t think our identities are totally chemically formed,” says Almond. “We learn who we are through life experience.”
“Your patient Pierre’s going around saying he’s an eagle,” says Sanghera.
“Let’s let him fly with that a while,” Almond replies.
Almond spends more and more home time in his fur suit. When he’s not in it, he’s stitching together another covering, that of an insect, part butterfly and part grasshopper and maybe some ladybug. At night, he sleeps alone inside his first suit. He sleeps on the floor, on the rug, with a bunched-up wool blanket as a pillow.
He goes out stray cat trapping with Rena. She seems less joyful without her covering, or the computer screen. She prowls through people’s yards, focussing finding strays. She checks her traps, making sure the bait is hanging freely.
“I love intensity,” she tells him. “But it stresses me out.”
Almond jokes, “Are you worried about your experience with a furry psychiatrist? Maybe I’m too wild in my rituals.”
“It’s stimulating yet frightening for me to commit myself,” she answers.
“So, what kind of garden then, would grow in your life?
“One that shades,” she tells him. “One offering shelter from the bright light.” She hikes into a stranger’s backyard, lifting the bushes. “What attracts you to me?” she asks, and he tells her “a certain unpredictability,” She lays down one of her patented cat catchers under a lilac bush.
He watches the waving lilac flowers above her. “Unpredictability and scent,” he concludes.
Friday afternoon is social games time in the patient recreation area. It’s in a separate building across from the main hospital. Dr. Almond likes to mingle there, to be among the patients. He’s the only staff present, besides the activity workers, and he’s always wondered why more employees don’t come over. He sits at a table with uneven legs and talks with slow moving patient Romero about all the different dogs Romero’s owned. “I had one that was part Mexican, part Burmese,” says Romero, in his halting voice. it seems that all dogs have nationalities, the patient tells Almond.
When it’s time to return to the wards, everyone slowly files out to walk up the stairs to the main building. There’s a yell, and someone pushes by. It’s Pierre, flapping his arms. He’s racing somewhere, and soon it’s clear. He leaps towards the main hospital doors, swings and scrambles from the steel stair rail to the windowsill to the lower roof, then scuttles up along its length then heaves himself to the upper roof. It takes less than a minute. Pierre’s up on top of the hospital roof and he’s yelling.
“I will fly, I will save the world!”
Everyone looks up. Activity worker Sonja pulls her hair back and hollers up at him “Come down right now, Pierre!”
“I’m going to soar,” he cries.
Dr. Almond cranes his neck to see Pierre’s narrow face staring across at the clouds beyond. He leans back and shouts. “You cannot fly!”
“Oh yes I can,” says Pierre. “And with this miracle, witnessed by God and you, my Doctor Prince, I will save my family and my friends!”
He points towards some thunderheads rising against the evening sunset. Dr. Almond thinks “What will save Pierre?” and it comes to him.
“I have already flown off that roof,” Dr. Almond cries out. “I have already rescued the world. You don’t have to.”
Pierre stops looking at the cloud and stares down at the doctor.
“You’re the one who took me off the medication,” the young man says. “And I thank you.” He pauses. “You have already jumped?”
“You have to believe me,” says Almond. “If you walk back down here, I will give you a cigarette.”
He holds up a piece of a joint he has hidden at the bottom of his jacket pocket.
“I am an eagle on the rooftop,” Pierre tells him.
“What does the eagle see?” asks Almond.
“Your offering. And the truth,” says Pierre, and he begins to laugh, and he flaps his arms and jumps straight up, and comes straight down, at the same place. “Don’t go away, Dr. Almond!” he yells, and steps back a few paces. “Here I come.”
“I’m not going away,” says Almond. “I’m here for you, Pierre. Take the long way down.”
It’s too late. Dave Charles and the other security staff are out on the roof. They scramble across to where the slight man stands. “Stay right there, Pierre.” Dave calls. “We’re not here to hurt you.”
“No, stop!” yells Almond, “He’s coming down slowly!”
On the roof, the security slowly circles Pierre. “We’re here to help,” they tell him.
Pierre leaps forward, zig zags at lightning speed between two of the staff, flies off the roof and into space, arms and legs flailing as his body falls crashing to the cement right in front of Almond. Nobody moves. Pierre’s head lies twisted at a ninety-degree angle to his torso. Almond drops down on the ground, holding his patient, feeling for the heartbeat.
It’s almost midnight when Almond completes a six-page report on the incident. He writes what he saw and heard, and in his opinion how the panicked staff practically pushed Pierre off the roof.
“They did not give him enough space,” he writes, “To make a clear decision.”
He spends over an hour watching the security camera replay again and again. He replays Pierre on the roof flapping his arms, “why can’t I remember that?” he wonders, yet at the end of the hour he knows reality clearly. “He jumped right after,” Dr. Almond repeats to himself. “Right after he flapped.”
The doctor drives home from the hospital. Halfway down the long driveway he pulls into the side of the road and takes a fur suit from the back seat. He opens a gate, goes into the field, and puts the fur suit on, with runners over the feet. Then he runs in the dark, fast through the knee-high grass, feeling the strength of his legs pushing, and his voice making sounds, sobs maybe or perhaps simply expressions, and at the corners of his eyes he sees real coyotes, or maybe it’s his thoughts racing, it’s all blurry but the way ahead is clear, into the night and the forest. He runs for an hour then stops and turns around. He returns to his car as fog billows in from off the river.
The next morning, Almond enters an executive meeting about the incident,
Tom Hardy, Director Sanghera, and Dave Charles are all present. Nobody says “Hello” to the doctor.
“Why did you tell Pierre you already saved the world?” asks the Director. He and the others sit behind a wide wooden table. Sanghera directs Almond to sit on the other side.
“Is this an interrogation or a meeting?” Almond asks.
“These are questions to find out what happened,” says Dr. Sanghera.
“I told a story to help Pierre find his limits,” says Almond. “And if the security hadn’t rushed him, he’d still be alive.”
“You took him off his medication,” states Tom Hardy, who won’t look at the doctor. “He was hearing voices that told him he was an eagle or some kind of bird.”
“Security should have blocked off that access to the roof years ago,” Almond says. “That was the safety risk.”
“Nestor, you’ve told me some interesting things on our walks,” Sanghera taps his pen on the table. “I’m reluctant to bring them up, but you said we need reality to be safe.”
“Reality is often a lie,” Almond tells him. “But it’s a convenient one.”
“So, you didn’t jump off a roof?” Dr. Sanghera smiles grimly. “To save the world?”
Almond frowns. “That’s the truth.”
Tom Hardy shakes his head. “You’re way up in your head, you don’t see the truth at all. A man is dead because you didn’t medicate his sickness.”
Almond looks out the window as he speaks. The hospital yard stretches out below his view.
“That is completely false. He’s dead because he wasn’t given enough time to change his mind. Security rushed him. He would have climbed down appropriately for that cigarette.”
“Tom’s telling the facts,” says Charles. “Finger-pointing isn’t going to bring Pierre back.”
“There have to be repercussions,” agrees Hardy.
Sanghera stands up. The top of his slicked down, black hair almost touches the low ceiling.
“I’d like everyone to leave the room except myself and Nestor,” the Director orders.
Hardy and Charles turn away, stand in unison and walk out without looking back.
“I think you may be delusional, my friend.” says Dr. Sanghera. He sits back in his chair. “Does your conscience not bother you? You did take Pierre off his medications.”
“With medications he would have died also,” says Dr. Almond. “In other ways.”
Sanghera makes circles on the table with his pen. “The security did their best,” he continues, “And yes, we’re going to make things safer in the future.” He raises his head and points the pen at Almond. “You let him become an Eagle. Except that wasn’t real.”
Dr. Almond stands at the place where he witnessed Pierre’s fall. Was the poor young man aiming for him? He fell so close. Dr. Almond sees Pierre’s face in his mind, and that face will come up randomly for years, he knows. Or maybe not. It all depends on if or when he lets it go. Now he cannot unsee the eagle.
Almond communicates with Rena on the Zoom.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she says. “You even gave Pierre a ride after he escaped.”
“I never said it was my fault,” Almond tells her.
He’s completed his second animal suit, the insect one, and he’s wearing it as he talks to Rena. His suited arms resemble grasshopper legs.
“I don’t like that outfit as much as your first one,” she says from behind her screen. “It’s got such bulbous eyes.”
“Those are ladybug eyes,” Almond says. “I need to join our two suits together. Zip you and I within them.”
“Then what will we do?” she wonders. “Roll around and make love?”
“To be close is part of it,” Almond says.
“I need some time to think about all this,” Rena says. She stops and stammers as she talks.
Almond asks, “Is it about Pierre?”
“His fate very much disturbs me,” she says. “I don’t want to be around that kind of karma.”
Dr. Almond knows there will be professional consequences, besides the personal ones with Rena. He drives from his house at midnight, over to Tranquille Mountain, where he pulls on the bear-cat-rabbit suit, tugs high quality hiking boots over his feet and ties them tight.
He feels better, much better about things when he’s dressed like this. He knows he’s not like Dr. Sanghera, or Tom Hardy. He’s a bit like Rena, more like Pierre, he’s always been more like Pierre.
“The truth is terrifying and random,” he says out loud, as he jogs up a narrow mountain pathway. He’s a man animal tonight, inside a bear-cat-rabbit suit within a forest, loping through a wild garden.
