Henry quickly removed his hands from the bottle, stretching his palms wide like a magician revealing the results of a trick. He leaned back in the grey metal chair next to a grey metal table, in the beige colored room, with the grey tiled floors and admired his work for a moment. It was a fine model, well worth the time he’d spent.

He reached for the smoldering cigarette in the metal ashtray and took a deep draw, savoring the taste for a moment, blowing it against the downward draft created by the ceiling fan. Three hundred forty-five seconds. I’ve been sitting here for three hundred forty-five seconds.

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The longer he sat at the table staring at the little ship in the clear glass bottle, the more the noises around him penetrated his imagination. He was no longer somewhere else. He was no longer on the Ghost, sailing with Wolf Larsen and Hump Van Weyden across the Pacific. He was stranded between the walls of activity room number three in Good Samaritan Hospital on South Limestone Avenue. As the voices grew louder, he recognized the same conversations he had heard so many times before.

He took another draw on his cigarette, closed his eyes, laid his head on the back of the chair, and blew the smoke toward the ceiling as he spoke to no one in particular, “Please Lucas, for the love of all that’s good, get me out of here?”

“Who is Lucas, Henry?” a small man wearing a knee-length blue hospital gown asked as he dragged a metal chair over to the table.

“Nobody,” Henry responded without lifting his head from the back of the chair.

“Nobody? He has to be somebody?”

“He’s none of your business, that’s who he is.”

“Your business isn’t a who, Henry. That doesn’t make sense. Lucas is a name. A person’s name, right? Unless he’s a dog… or a cat, or a mouse. Is he a dog, a cat, or a mouse?”

“No Andy, he’s not a dog, a cat, or a mouse.”

“Well, who is he? Can’t you tell me? Why won’t you tell me? I can handle it, Henry, I know I can.”

“You can handle it? What does that even mean?”

“Doc says I have trouble handling things sometimes. That’s why I get hurt. But I know I can handle it. At least I think I can. He didn’t kill anyone, did he? He’s not an axe murderer or anything like that, is he? If he is, maybe Doc is right, I may not be able to handle that.”

Lifting his head from its resting place to consider the person before him, Henry thought about his answer, not because the question required any thought, but because the conversation was worthless and answering Andy only encouraged him. But at least it was something that approached normalcy; two people, sitting at a table, talking about normal things. Well, almost normal. Twenty seconds.

The cigarette still in his mouth, squinting as the smoke irritated his eye, Henry spoke slowly and deliberately, “No, he didn’t kill anyone, you lunatic.”

“Well, who is he? Please, please tell me.”

“If I tell you, will you shut up? If I tell you, will you leave me alone? If I tell you, will you get out of my hair?”

Too caught-up in the in the mystery he was weaving in his mind, Andy ignored Henry’s questions and continued his investigation, “What color is his hair? Does he speak German? What color pants is he wearing? Is he one of those friends the others talk to when they’re off in the corners by themselves?”

“No, Andy, no! No to everything. He’s just my brother. My brother! Do you understand? He’s my brother!”

Andy looked around the room with a vacant, deflated, expression, “Your brother? You’re brother? You mean he’s not a murderer?”

“No Andy, you know that.” Henry replied, tapping ashes into the ashtray, watching them cool before putting the cigarette out for good.

“No? No? Really? Well… that’s good. How do you know him?”

“What?” Henry asked.

“How do you know him? How do you know Lucas?”

Leaning forward and resting his elbows on the table, Henry gently moved the bottle with the model ship to the side and looked Andy in the eyes. He spoke in the same way an annoyed uncle might speak to a bratty nephew, “Because Andy, Lucas is my f-----g brother! I just told you that. I told you that yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and every f------g day since I’ve been here. Can’t you get it through your head that Lucas is my brother, and he is coming to get me out of this place? Why can’t you understand that? Why can’t you remember that?”

“Your brother? You have a brother?” Andy asked with real surprise.

“You’re hopeless,” Henry said as he got up from the table, “I’ve got things to do. Don’t follow me, Andy. I swear if you follow me, I’m going to smash you in the face. I don’t want to do that, Andy, so don’t follow me, okay?”

“Okay Henry, we can talk more later. Say hello to Lucas for me.”

Three hundred sixty-four seconds. I have wasted three hundred sixty-four seconds on this imbecile.

Henry watched incredulously as Andy dragged his metal chair to the next table and began talking to the catatonic man sitting alone. He picked-up his model ship, left activity room three, and walked down the corridor to his room. No one said anything or tried to stop him. They knew he was scheduled to go home. He was better. Thirty-seven seconds.

After spending months in his room, measuring its annoyances, Henry was certain the people who remodeled it wanted to drive patients crazy. The room was just as plain as the rest of the floor except everything was yellow or white instead of grey. There was a bed with squeaky springs, a nightstand, and a desk with a chair made just like the chair Andy loved to drag around the activity room. The furniture was white. The walls and ceiling were yellow. There were smudges and dark fingerprints everywhere, left by previous occupants who probably hated the yellow and white as much as he did. On the fourth night of his stay, Henry spent seven-hundred twenty-three seconds trying to clean the smudges off the locked door, but the remnants of others could not be scrubbed away.

Above the bed, a small window twelve inches high and two feet wide was placed near the top of the wall, opposite the thick metal door that opened to the hallway. The window’s position annoyed Henry to no end. It was off-center to the room and too close to the drop ceiling. It had a small crack in the lower left-hand corner. When the wind blew with any force, the air passing through the crack made a whistling sound that was maddening.

The most prominent feature though was the black clock above the door. It was a cheap clock, enclosed in a white metal cage, and the second hand made a loud ticking sound. After lights out each night, Henry would lay there for hours, the wind whistling through the broken window that was off-center, in a metal bed that squeaked in rhythm with his breathing, listening to the clock tick every second of every day, an incessant reminder of time passing, time wasted, time lost. Passing seconds burned into his mind, penetrated his subconscious, and assigned a pattern to every thought and action.

Before the hospital, he never really thought about time. After a year with the clock, time became part of him. Marking everything he did, giving it measurement, eliminating the arbitrary and the impulsive, assigning everything quantity and depth. Without thinking he knew exactly how long everything took, and the numbers that randomly popped into his head became comforting. Several months went by and he started mumbling the numbers out loud. People would ask what they meant. That annoyed him. Time was his and he did not want anyone to steal or waste it.

The orderly brought the clothes he was wearing when he came to the hospital and placed them neatly on the bed. They were washed, no longer smelled like marijuana, alcohol, and bile, and were folded. A small yellow piece of paper sat atop the bundle. “Good luck Henry! Sincerely, Dr. Walker.” Twenty-four seconds.

Setting the note aside, Henry changed out of the gown, red robe, and slippers provided by the hospital and into his own clothes, enjoying the feel of something that belonged to him for the first time in a long while. His favorite item was the jacket his brother had given him years before. Custom tailored at Corbin’s Quality Clothing, the sportscoat was a patchwork of different fabrics, variously patterned and colored, stitched together in a single-breasted style. Henry cherished the jacket and wore it every day. It made him happy when he needed to show Lucas he was okay, even when he was not. Seventy-three seconds.

Fully dressed, Henry pulled a brown paper bag out of the nightstand drawer and placed the few items he accumulated during his stay inside. There were the journals he was required to write in every day, a copy of Jack London’s greatest works, some pencils, and the model ship he had so painstakingly built during his free time in the activity room. The model was a replica of the Sea Wolf. A schooner that traveled the world, its crew of broken men, flawed, and violent. One hundred three seconds.

His treasures safely packed away, Henry folded the paper bag over and set it on the nightstand. Rubbing his hands with nervous anticipation, he looked at the clock. Two hours before Lucas was scheduled to pick him up. Seven thousand two hundred seconds.

Pacing back and forth across the room for a moment, he stepped into the hall and walked its length several times but eventually found himself back in his room, crouched in the corner with his back against the wall, smoking the last of his cigarettes. Six hundred seconds.

Rubbing the cigarette out in the clean ashtray on the nightstand, he lay on the bed and stared at the same spot on the ceiling he had considered his entire time at Good Samaritan Hospital on South Limestone Avenue. The clock above the door ticked away. Hoping to help speed up the passage of time, he tried to take a nap, but sleep would not come at first. Like so many times before, so many nights trying to silence the noises, he lay there but eventually gave up, “My God I hate that clock,” he said out loud as he sat up and swung his feet onto the floor. Another seven hundred thirty-seven seconds had passed, “What a waste of f-----g time.”

Henry sat there for an hour, his mind racing, occasionally closing his eyes and taking deep breaths just as Doctor Walker had shown him. He thought of the students in the fourth-grade class he taught in Louisville, and how he tore the covers from their first-grade reading textbooks to make them feel better about not being able to read. Ten seconds.

He thought of his album collection, and how he could not wait to play Johnny Cash, Elvis, and Dave Brubeck. Twelve seconds.

He remembered the time he and a couple of friends saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium and wondered if he would ever see them again. Seventeen seconds.

He thought about his brother, and he thought about his parents. Five seconds. He thought about his dog and hoped Lucas had taken care of him. Seven seconds.

He just thought, thought… seconds… going deeper into his memories… seconds… eventually falling to blackness, dark and calm. He thought. Seconds, seconds, seconds.

There was a knock and Henry woke, startled, and confused. The orderly was standing there, one hand on the open door, the other extended into the hallway, inviting him through like a doorman in one of the nicer hotels downtown, “It’s time to go Henry, your brother is downstairs.” Eight seconds.

Rubbing his eyes to make sure he was fully awake and not dreaming, Henry stood, brushed the wrinkles out of his patchwork sportscoat and smiled. Picking up his brown paper bag, making sure to not jostle the model inside, he took one last look around and exhaled deeply. As he walked through the door and made his way down the hall, the sound of the second hand on the clock above the door stayed with him, beating in rhythm with his steps. When he entered the elevator and started his decent to the lobby, the orderly close by, he hoped he would never see the little yellow room, the squeaky bed, and activity room three again. It took twenty-three seconds for the elevator to reach the ground floor. Henry stepped off, hugged his brother, and walked out the front door of the Good Samaritan Hospital.

“Henry!” Andy said, pounding on the gray table, “Are you listening to me?”

Lifting his head from the back of the grey metal chair, Henry looked around to get his bearings.

Again.

“Henry, are you okay?” Andy asked.

Henry slid his chair forward, placed his elbows on the table and held his head between his hands, pushing his hair back as he regained his senses.

“D—n, Henry, you look like crap,” Andy said.

“I know, Andy, I know,” Henry muttered, leaning back in his chair. Trying to steady his shaking hands, he pulled his cigarettes from the pocket of his robe, lit it, and took quick puffs.

“You were mumbling something about Lucas.”

“I was dreaming again, Andy. Remember, I told you the meds make me dream.”

“I hate the meds. I hate the meds. The doc says I need them though.”

“He says the same to me.”

“Who is Lucas, Henry?”

“He’s my brother, Andy. You know that.”

“Is he coming to take you home? When you were asleep it sounded like you said he was coming to take you home.”

“No, Andy, he is not coming to take me home.”

“Why not? You said he was.”

“Because he died, Andy. He died and it was my fault.”

“Oh, I’m sorry Henry. I’m so sorry.”

“Me too, Andy. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” Henry took another long draw on his cigarette and blew the smoke away from Andy, “How long did I sleep?”

“Nine hundred thirty-seven seconds, Henry.”

“Nine hundred thirty-seven seconds. I wish it could have been longer.”

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