I Know This Much Is True (75 page)

I didn’t answer him.

“You know where we met?”

I pretended I was dozing.

“At Partners. You know that little steakhouse out on Route 4?

My sister and her husband call me up one night, out of the blue, ask me if I want to go out and grab a bite to eat and that’s where we ended up. We were going someplace else—to the Homestead—but they were closed because of some private party. So we stood at the door and said, ‘Okay, where else can we go?’ and I said, ‘Let’s try that place, Partners.’ Don’t ask me why I said it, but it was
me
who suggested it. I mean, I could have named half a dozen other places, right? But I said ‘Partners.’ So that’s where we ended up.

“And it was a Thursday night, see? They got line-dancing down there on Thursdays.” He stopped, cut a fart. Sighed with relief. “If you told me a year ago that I’d meet my future wife in a line-dance, I would have told you to go get your head examined. Life’s unpredictable, though—that’s the beauty of it. I’m trying not to sweat the variables so much. Gives you ulcers. I started believing in fate about the time I turned fifty—realized I wasn’t ever going to be master of I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 501

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the universe, you know? What do the kids call it? ‘Go with the flow.’

. . . But anyway, she says she knows you. My fiancée. ‘From a past life,’ she says. Kind of defies logic that we got together—we’re nothing alike. Well, we’re
growing
alike, I guess. My first wife, Maureen, she’d blow a gasket if she saw me in that Western outfit. But screw her, right? I’m just going with the flow.”

A growl came from the wall-mounted TV, the sound of stampeding hooves. “
But the sleek antelope is not without resources of its
own,
” the announcer said. . . .

A long
,
curving chain of people stands holding hands in a meadow
.
At the
front of the line
,
Ray holds on to my foot
.
I’m floating in the air
,
tethered
only by my stepfather’s grip
.
If he lets go, if my foot falls off, I’ll rise into
the sky like a helium balloon
. . . .

I opened my eyes. A chubby black nurse was standing beside my bed, taking my pulse. “I’m Vonette,” she said. “I’m going to be your caregiver today. Okay?”

I stretched. Blinked my eyes back in focus. “Okay.”

“Did you see that you have company?”

Sheffer approached the bed, a smile blinking on and off. “Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

“Hi.” She was holding a pot of yellow chrysanthemums and a small wrapped gift. “These are for you,” she said. “The little one’s from Dr. Patel; the flowers are from me.” She thunked the mums down on my nightstand.

We made small talk while the nurse finished checking my vitals.

Away from Hatch, Sheffer looked even scrawnier. Looked a little goofy, really: bib overalls, knit hat squashed down to her eyelids. I noticed her lip right away: orangy powder covering up a purple bruise. When she caught me looking, she raised her hand to cover her mouth. Hand hiding a busted lip: same as Ma.

“I’ll be back to change your bag in about half an hour or so,”

Vonette said. “We wouldn’t want you to float out of here before your lunch arrives.”

“Yeah, what is it?” I said. “Chicken à la wallpaper paste?”

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She turned to Sheffer, shaking her head. “Must be on the mend,”

she said. “You can always tell when they start crabbing about the food.”

I looked over at Steve Felice’s bed. Empty, the sheets rucked up.

TV off. I told Sheffer I appreciated her coming down. Told her she should have skipped the flowers.

“I wish I got carnations instead,” she said. “Something that smells good. I was thinking in the elevator on the way up how chrysanthemums smell like dog urine.”

I sighed. “So?”

“So-
oo
. . .”

“It’s not good, is it?”

She shook her head. “It’s not what you wanted.” She said she should probably begin at the beginning.

When the Psychiatric Security Review Board convened at 4:00

P.M. on Halloween afternoon, Sheffer said, they were scheduled to determine the status of two prisoners. At Sheffer’s request, the board flip-flopped its agenda and put Thomas second, buying more time for me to get there. Sheffer said she’d tried two or three times to call me by then, but all she kept getting was my machine.

As Sheffer, my brother, and a security guard waited outside the meeting room, Thomas became more and more agitated about my failure to show. He told Sheffer he feared the worst: that I’d been kidnapped by the Syrians. Both Bush and Assad had a lot to gain if America and Iraq went to war, he said. Since he, Thomas, was an instrument of peace, he was vulnerable and so were his loved ones.

Sheffer shook her head. “You know how he gets when he starts perseverating.”

I nodded. I was feeling a little queasy.

My brother had described to Sheffer the vision he saw: me, bound and gagged in some makeshift Syrian prison—my feet battered and broken by thugs with wooden bats. When she’d attempted to reason him out of it, he’d gotten testy, reminding her that identical twins communicated in ways she knew nothing about. He’d shouted for her to just shut up. “Then the guard warned him that I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 503

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that was enough of that kind of talk and Thomas started giving
him
an argument. ‘My brother’s hurt!’ he kept insisting. ‘I
know
he’s hurt!’” She shrugged. “Which, my god, you
were
.”

In an attempt to calm everyone down, Sheffer had reached to take Thomas by the hand. That’s when he’d freaked—hauled off and whacked her in the face. The guard had leapt forward and put him in a choke hold, knocking Sheffer to the floor in the process.

He’d let go of Thomas only after Sheffer’s repeated pleas.

“He
hit
you?” I said. “That bruise on your mouth is from
Thomas
?”

“Well, so much for me trying to cover it up,” she said. “I’ve always sucked at makeup.”

“He
hit
you?”

She told me she’d tried as best she could to downplay the assault, both to the guard and to the medical secretary who came running from a nearby office. Dabbing at her lip—it was bleeding “a little”—she kept trying to get my brother refocused on the hearing. Sheffer was scared the Board might hear the commotion.

“I can’t believe . . . He’s never done anything like that before,” I said.

“Are you sure you want to hear all this, Dominick? I can skip the details and cut to the chase. I brought a copy of the transcript. You want me to just leave it here and—”

“No, go ahead,” I told her. “Jesus, it’s just . . . I can’t believe he
hit
you.”

She said it was her own stupid fault—that even someone
without
her training knew enough to keep their distance when a patient was in an agitated state. She’d had a moment of temporary insanity herself, she said. She was, admittedly, a wreck about things, going into the hearing.

By the time the conference room door had opened and the other patient’s entourage had exited, Sheffer’s lip had stopped bleeding, she said, but by then it had begun to swell. Thomas and the guard had both calmed down a little. Dr. Richard Hume, the psychiatrist who presided as the Review Board’s chair, refused Sheffer’s request for a postponement. Given the public’s perception and the media attention I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 504

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that had surrounded Thomas’s case, he said, the Board felt that action of some sort was preferable to stasis.

Sheffer reminded the Board that the patient’s welfare needed to come before the state’s concern about negative media attention.

Given the publicity Thomas’s case had generated, she wondered aloud if it was even possible for them to listen objectively to an argument about his being freed. “It was so
stupid
of me, Dominick,”

Sheffer moaned. “I’d meant to challenge them a little—play devil’s advocate—but it came out wrong. I mean, there I am, moving my mouth like a ventriloquist so they won’t notice my fat lip, my bloody teeth. I’m scared to death he’s going to start losing it in front of them. I didn’t know where the hell
you
were. I just . . . I was just so
nervous
. I committed the mortal sin of questioning their almighty judgment. It was exactly what I
shouldn’t
have done.”

Looks were exchanged among the Board members, Sheffer said.

Dr. Hume told her that while they appreciated the “missionary zeal”

with which she was advocating for her client, they needed no reminders of their obligations—to the patient
or
to the community. After that, Sheffer said, the proceedings were polite, efficient, and frosty.

Sheffer explained to the Board that the treatment team had failed to reach a consensus about Thomas’s placement and therefore was not making a specific recommendation. She read aloud the two letters we’d gotten that advocated Thomas’s transferral to a nonforensic facility. She assured the Board that the patient’s brother was committed to his well-being and recovery and that they should not misread my absence from the hearing as indifference or tacit approval of Thomas’s remaining there at Hatch. “They all just sat there, listening politely,” she said. “No questions. No concerns raised. It was all so streamlined and civil. Then it was time to question Thomas directly. Here.”

She handed me the transcript. “Hey, you know what?” she said.

“We ran out of coffee at my house and I’ve got this major caffeine headache going on. I tell you what? Let me go downstairs, get a fix, and let you read through that thing. I’ll come back in ten or fifteen minutes, and if you have any questions . . .”

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“Read it and weep, eh?” I said.

She nodded. Backed away. “I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

I skimmed through the first part—the Board’s refusal to postpone, the skirmish between Sheffer and Hume about what was good for the public versus what was good for the patient. Sheffer was right: it had been a tactical error on her part, antagonizing them like that. I slowed down when I got to my brother’s interview.

The Board wanted to know, in Thomas’s own words, why he’d cut off his hand.

He answered them from Scripture:
“If thy right hand offend thee
,
cut it off and cast it from thee.
”

So, was he saying that he had mutilated himself to atone for his sins?

No, he answered; he’d done it to atone for
America’s
sins.

Which were?

“Warmongering, greed, the bloodletting of children.”

And did he think he might ever feel compelled, at some point in the future, to commit any other acts of self-harm?

He wouldn’t
want
to, he said, but he took his direction from the Lord God Almighty. He was God’s instrument. He’d do anything that was necessary.

Anything? Including harming someone who stood in his way?

“I didn’t mean to hit her,” Thomas said. “I lost my temper.”

What? Whom had he hit?

“Her. Lisa.”

Sheffer had volunteered for the Board a version of what had happened out in the waiting room. An accident, she told them—bad judgment on her part. Thomas was upset because his brother had been detained. His arm had just flailed out and hit her accidentally, that was all.

A Board member named Mrs. Birdsall wanted to know how Thomas was getting on with the day-to-day routines at Hatch?

He said he hated it there. You were watched like a hawk. You couldn’t smoke when you wanted to. He had found insects in his I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 506

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food, he said. He was awakened and violated repeatedly in the middle of the night. His mail was stolen.

Stolen?

Thomas said he knew for a fact that Jimmy Carter had sent him three registered letters and that each had been intercepted.

Why did Thomas feel the former president was trying to contact him?

He was attempting to invite him to join him as an envoy to the Middle East on a mission of peace, Thomas said.

And who did he think it was that was intercepting his mail?

Thomas took off on his George Bush refrain, lecturing the Board like they were the village idiots. Wasn’t it obvious? War was profitable; Bush’s hands were stained with the blood of the CIA. If they would all just go back and reread American history, they’d realize there was a fundamental crack in America’s foundation. He ricocheted from the Trail of Tears to the Japanese-American internment camps to the conditions that ghetto children lived in today.

Drive-by shootings, crack houses: it all had to do with profit, the price of crude oil. It was so obvious to him, he said. Why couldn’t anyone else see it?

See what, specifically?

The conspiracy!

Thomas must have broken down at that point, because someone asked him if he needed a moment to compose himself.

Jesus had wanted us to re-create Jerusalem, he answered, and we had rebuilt Babylon instead. He went on and on. If it had been Jesse Jackson saying it instead of Thomas, he might have brought down the house. Great sermon, wrong congregation.

One of the Board members wanted to know if Thomas understood
why
he had been detained at Hatch.

Yes, he told them; he was a political prisoner. Throughout history, America had gone to war because war was profitable. Now, finally, we had arrived at the critical crossroads prophesied in the Bible—the Book of Apocalypse. As a nation, our only hope was to quit the path of greed and walk the path of spirituality instead. He, Thomas, had I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 507