a man / the questions

One man is waiting for his wife. She left him twenty years ago, with much love and little reserve left for a life plagued by fixed false beliefs. When asked where he will go from here, he tells us his wife will be picking him up. If your wife doesn't come, will you be willing to return to your apartment until she does? A loose shrug with eyebrows raised just as lightly, his body giving into his mind, and agreement. Yes, I'll go back, but she should be coming. He combs the gray strands of hair on the side of his head before he talks to you, and he shakes your hand after every meeting, something people normally reserve for a more permanent goodbye. When asked what he's looking forward to when he leaves, he says, nothing really. Just to be with my wife. You know how it is. What about your music? He has spent his life making music, but here he is distant from it; "it's different here, less free." What about your music? Yes, I'll go back to the piano and writing music, but really, just to be with my wife. Today he is told again that he will likely have to return to his apartment if she doesn't come; he nods: but she will come. At the end he says, I hope she comes. What is it like to be in a state of perpetual anticipation?

One man has a large tongue that moves with his words so that his speech flows as if through a thick wall. A meeting lasts for an hour and a half among a dozen different people, a meeting about where he will go from here. He is brought in for a few minutes at the end, and asked where he would like to go. He imagines himself in his own apartment somewhere, maybe West Haven, and the faces meeting his are sad, amused, and used to it all. They don't tell him what they have decided for him. Having given him his allotted time, they continue in their knowledge and let him continue in his. In the end when all control is taken from a person, only honesty is left, and when that becomes elusive, it suddenly becomes a mystery as to what we want to save. So many people taking so much time for this one man, but what do we give and what do we take away?

One man spent sixty-four years in silence before speaking about the experiences that make him talk without pause, take your hand with tight warmth, and change the glint in his eyes from a reflection of lamplight to something fighting inside. He speaks now for all those who were with him, for those he ordered to die, for those he watched die, for those who died on the other side of the ditch. He held the hand of a prisoner of war, a man on the other side who had no one but him to look at as he passed away, a man who makes it so that any mention of nationality makes this man so angry. Who CARES, it's just human beings. "Do you know what that did to me?" and that glint becomes something else. I don't know. An infantry ranger during World War II, he carries the Normandy invasion in the ridges that set his eyes apart and uphold his blunted nose. When depressed he goes down to his basement and writes, writes about these things. Later he reads them, "just to check for spelling," and when he reads them again, he hates the words and rips up the papers. He says, it's hard, it's hard to speak about this, but I want to do something good; there's so much guilt. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most good you could do, I hope, I just hope this is a 2 or 3. When asked what gives life meaning for him, with the evident hope that he sees his sharing as purpose and a means to turn pain into worth, he says, I like living but I don't like life. And later--I don't like myself, I hate myself. And then later--I do this because maybe, maybe, I say MAYBE and not that this will be, maybe this will make things better for people. How does someone whose sense of worth has been so damaged, ever come to feel and believe what seems so true to those who receive his good, that his capacity to live for maybe is a tremendous thing?

One man is still a child, in the literal sense. He is small, guarded but polite and sweet in his non-effusive openness, and spends most of the day hunched over a table with a book, or playing games with staff. At little over twenty years old, his home has suffocated him with the accumulation of things collected by a mother who can't throw away, with the carelessness of a father who can only consume. It's like a museum, he says; you can look but you can't touch. Dust is forced to layer on objects. He articulates his thoughts of jumping off a cliff (one that sits in his backyard) as a way to escape his current state, as a sort of fantasy, a way to place himself somewhere other than where he is. He doesn't step on the cliff, nor does he imagine himself on the other end of it, but there is a freedom in that jump that doesn't exist elsewhere. He knows the trajectory of the questions posed to him: I'm not manic. I'm not schizophrenic. Yes, I'm depressed. He came here because he wanted people to talk to, to have some sort of connection, and to go somewhere else from here. When a life is so crowded that space is defined only by crevices in between, how do you begin to make room?