Norman by Ryan Malloy
Norman breathes. A broken sound follows, something frayed and popping like Christmas ornaments being dashed against a wall, like dead leaves swirling through his throat. The room falls to listen. Each head tilts and each mouth frowns in analysis, like it's some opera to drink in and dissect. Whose final act must never be acknowledged.
"This place is a shithole," Norman says, eyes scrubbing the brown stains along the top of the walls, the yellow and leaky window panes. His daughter's face creases, now out of disappointment more than any sadness. Anything but sadness is good, Norman thinks.
"Don't say that," she says, pulling the covers over Norman's form as if to restrain him. Her eyes flit to the nurse, and she smiles like an embarrassed parent. "I'm sorry."
"I'm not too attached to this place myself," the nurse says. She laughs longer than she needs to.
Norman's son-in-law stands by the door like a sycamore teetering in the wind, shifts weight from one foot to the other and crosses tree trunk arms. He chats with a man in the hall about some game the other hardly cares about, and each softened word is an attempt to hush a lion's roar.
"I think we should go," he announces mid-sentence. He glances outside to the white curtain sky, jaundiced by the window glass. "I think it's going to rain."
"Do you think so?" his wife asks. She pulls her cardigan further over her shoulders, as if they're already caught outside in the downpour.
"Yes," he says. "My sister's a meteorologist, you know?"
"I suppose." Eyes turn to Norman. "Will you be okay?"
"Of course," Norman says with a growl. He tries to suppress a cough, because he knows his daughter will never leave if she hears it, that her husband will glare like the muzzle of a gun. The last thing Norman wants is to deal with him any longer.
He softens when they leave. He steadies his breathing, turns his eyes to the blocky television mounted between large splotches of brown. A gale of wind undresses the shivering trees outside, and the grass becomes invisible. A car floats through the parking lot and out into the world.
He doesn't remember falling asleep. The act of waking up feels like a distant, childhood memory. He coughs into the darkness, and when he's done his eyes adjust to everything. Violet walls and dark purple stains. A sky so pure that it's speckled with milk, a clear and unabashed Kentucky starscape.
Something thumps above, followed by a groan. Norman can't decide if it's a person or the floorboards. There are a few more impacts, like balls rolling off a shelf, and something loud follows. He used to hear a sound like this often, the bellow of a skyscraper as wind pushes against its frame.
But this isn't a skyscraper. Norman sits up further.
They're footsteps. Minutes pass and Norman stands with his ear to the wall and he nods to himself and rubs his face in revelation. The thuds sound like footsteps pacing a room, a thousand at once, and Norman imagines the groans parting from some mouth, between bearish teeth.
Norman boosts himself onto his bed, holds his breath to keep his lungs from popping. He presses fingers to the ridges of his popcorn ceiling, as if to gain insight through the vibrations. Perhaps it's a generator, he thinks, the heater flaring to life. Perhaps he has truly lost it, like his daughter has suggested when she thought he couldn't hear.
But a voice carries through the ceiling, a whisper as close as the blood in Norman's ears. "It's got me!" The voice draws it out into an inhuman roar, until it's consumed and ragged and gone. The silence that follows waits for anything in return, another voice to come or someone to rise from another room or for the wind to blow against the building. Seconds pass before a million thudding footsteps firework at once, as if something became bored and rose to action.
Norman drops to the floor, scrambles to the corner of the room. The whole building groans and quakes. The footsteps carry through his teeth, his tongue, and his eyes trace the ceiling as if each bump is an iris watching him. No more words, just screams, the scattered footsteps of a thing that is struggling to silence its prey, a thing, a thing, and Norman finds he is standing and his lungs are a washing machine with rocks in it and the sounds only stop because he covers his ears.
When he removes them, there is nothing more. The brown stains flower fresh with a color he cannot discern in the darkness.
Norman explodes into the black hall. He screams for help, for somebody. A light flits on down the hallway, and there are nurses rushing to meet him as if prepared for his hysteria. He can't breathe, he tries but can't breathe. They return him to his bed, inject him with something that makes his head fuzzier than it already is. He sinks into the bedsheet, welcomes anything that brings him further from that ceiling. There is nothing more, nothing more.
When he comes to, he sees his daughter. The monitor beside him blips, displays numbers he couldn't discern even if his eyes were clear, a singular fighting line. When his daughter smiles, so does the nurse beside her.
"See?" she says. "He is perfectly fine. Just a little shaken." She laughs well too long and the monitor beeps faster.
Norman steadies his eyes on the stains by the television, brown as autumn. He tries to speak but all that comes is a gurgle. He is suddenly aware of the cool metal device that extends down his throat.
"What happened?" his daughter asks.
"Some kind of delirium," the nurse says. "We're going to study him for the next few days."
"This room is rather old," his daughter says softly, pulling her up her cardigan. She peers around at the stains on the wall, the old television, the window. "Maybe it troubles him. He slept in the same room for decades, you know. Maybe he was startled to wake up here."
"We're bringing someone in to clean it," the nurse says. "Don't worry. Norman will be taken care of. We'll be moving him to a better room, to the second floor tomorrow."