Shockwave (16 page)

He gave me a long, measuring look. “You’re sure of that?”

“Yeah.”

“Because …?”

“All the cops have is a body. By now, they’ve gone through everything that package came wrapped in. They even know the approximate time it washed up. But that adds up to nothing
but guesses. So the easiest road for them is to talk about tides and shifting currents … anything
nobody
can be sure about.”

“So it didn’t necessarily happen around here at all?” Dolly said, an encouraging tone in her voice. “The man could have been murdered
way
offshore … like, miles, even.”

“They’ve got something else,” Mack said, quietly.

“What?”

“They’ve got Homer.”

“I
want to make sure this is where you stand,” I told Mack once we were alone. “You don’t want Homer found not guilty of killing that Nazi; that wouldn’t change anything for him. You want him kicked loose, right? Put back on the street, like none of this ever happened?”

We were parked in that excuse for a car of his, looking through the windshield at the ocean.

“He has to be,” the young man said. His voice was absolutely flat-lined, all content, no tone. “Forget a verdict; he’d never be found fit to stand trial at all. Even if one of the half-ass clowns who make a living pretending to be lawyers tried to use an insanity defense—and what the hell else
could
they use?—no judge would let it get that far. You don’t need a psychiatrist to see Homer’s on another planet.”

“But on the street he’s harmless?”

“On the street, he’s a target. If anyone asked him for anything Homer had, he’d just give it to them. He wouldn’t even defend himself from any kind of assault. The best he can do is scream.”

“What’s the point, then?”

“What’s the point of what?” he asked, his tone saying he took what I’d said as some kind of personal attack.

“I guess … Look, I don’t know anything about this stuff.
You don’t want him locked up in a mental hospital because he wouldn’t be free. Okay, I get that. But if he has to be on all those drugs anyway …”

“That’s today,” he said, his voice sliding from hot to medium. “Today isn’t always forever.”

“You got some … people like Homer, you got them so they could live like regular people?”

“Oh,
hell
, yes. That’s one of the good things about living around here—there’s always some kind of work that needs doing. Maybe being a ‘barista’ isn’t an option for all of them—the nasty way some customers talk might set them off—but there’s always some manual laboring jobs, all different kinds. And, sometimes, you move one of them off where they were stuck, you find out there’s things they’re really good at. You ever been to the Lead Sled Shed?”

“That’s the custom-car place?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” I said, thinking that the last thing I’d ever want would be to ride around in a car people would remember.

“You stop in there anytime, you’ll always find a guy they call ‘Fineline’ working. That’s because he’s the best freehand pinstriper on the entire coast. Maybe in the whole state. Some of his work, it’s so delicate, you have to look at it a couple of times to even see it.”

“And he was—?”

“Not
was
,” he cut me off, “
is
. He’s always going to be schizophrenic, so he has to take his meds every day, or he’ll decompensate. But he’s got a full-time job, gets paid good, stays in a
nice
rooming house—walking distance from where he works. And people around there … well, they understand him, you know?”

“No, I don’t know. Look, I’m not playing with you. If I say I don’t know something, it’s because I don’t. If I say I need to understand something, it’s because I do.”

“And if you say you’re gonna hurt someone, you’ll—”

“I’d never say anything like that”—cutting him off quick and sharp, so he wouldn’t mistake my meaning.

He was quiet for a couple of moments.

I didn’t break the silence.

Finally, he said, “Schizophrenia is a permanent state of delusion; it may vary in intensity, but it’s always ready to come when it’s called. It’s embedded, but it—”

“Embedded—that’s like you’re born with it?”

“The brain doesn’t work that way. You can be born with some things, like the extra chromosome in Down syndrome. And there’s plenty who’ll tell you schizophrenia
is
congenital. There’s even a movement that’s claiming you can be born a psychopath. But the latest research—scientific research—is all going the other way: there’s a clear connection to early-childhood abuse.”

“What’s the difference between ‘scientific’ research and any other kind? I thought all research was … research, you know?”

“Three words,” Mack said. “Theoretical, cumulative, and nonethical.”

“What?”

He lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke out his window, away from me. “You start with a theory. Any theory, it doesn’t matter what. Then you test that theory. Usually, you publish the results. Then other people—people you don’t know—they test the same theory, to see if they get the same results themselves. Finally, enough evidence accumulates from different trial runs to make a judgment. That judgment becomes ‘factual’ … until some new body of research disproves it, or finds some flaw in the methodology.”

“What’s unethical about that?”

“Not
un
ethical,
non
ethical. You have to start with a question, not the answer. No opinion one way or the other. No belief system driving the research. A blank slate, see?”

“Yeah. I think so, anyway. You’re saying, when it comes to schizophrenia, kids who get beat up are more—?”

“It’s not that simple. Not even close. Physical abuse, that’s probably not even a factor when it comes to causality. Neglect, that makes it most probable. And when early neglect coexists with emotional abuse, schizophrenia is most likely to show up. But you almost never see it before puberty.”

“Why not before then?”

“We don’t know. But it usually doesn’t get florid—to the point where everyone knows there’s something off—until at least adolescence. The hormone bomb could be the last straw, too much stress. But even then, it’s not always recognized. Kids don’t pick up on ‘symptoms’ when they know plenty of others who act the same way. When they say ‘party,’ they mean get drunk. Or high. Or both.

“A lot of young people act crazy when they’re messed up. So they could have a schizophrenic as part of their crowd, and never see him for what he is. It’s not like they all live together, or see each other all the time. Understand? Even if every time they see … whoever, he’s acting all fucked up, they just figure it’s from the same things that fuck
them
up. Again.

“What it really depends on isn’t the disease, it’s the
type
of it. The kind I’m talking about, that’s a disorganized schizophrenic. Talks to himself, thinks he’s the king of some country that doesn’t exist. Or even one that does, it’s just that other people don’t know it. Or won’t admit they know it.

“They all hear voices inside their heads, but it’s not the
same
voice—frequency, volume, even the commands themselves, those vary. But that doesn’t necessarily make them dangerous to other people, even if you wouldn’t invite them over for dinner. The thing is, schizophrenia may not make them dangerous to you, but it
always
makes them a danger to themselves. If the voices keep telling them to do things they don’t want to do, they might do anything to make them stop. Stab a pencil
into their ear to write something different, smoke crack, drink canned heat, bang their head against a wall …

“That’s what I was saying before, about not being born with the damn disease. Emotional abuse, it won’t leave marks on the skin, but it digs in the deepest. There’s only one thing they all have in common—there’s nothing they won’t do to make those voices
stop
.

“Some go catatonic. Some go mute. Some just make sounds. Some freeze their facial muscles. But the ones who
really
terrify people are the paranoids. Not the kind of paranoia that makes you think everyone’s plotting against you, the kind people make jokes about. You’d have to take that level of paranoia, multiply it by a hundred, throw in some magical thinking … and you’ve got some serious trouble.”

“How could they tell what something ‘really’ means?” I asked him.

“That’s what we call ‘ideas of reference.’ Like, if they stumble over a curb just before it starts to rain, they think their stumble
caused
the rain.

“But the true danger is always the ‘voices,’ the ones only they can hear. A paranoid schizophrenic is perfectly capable of picking up an ax and chopping his way through a whole school bus full of kids, because that’s what the voices ordered him to do. They may
look
like kids, but they can’t fool the voices—
the voices
know those kids are really all lizards under their skin. Poisonous lizards. So he has to cut them open to see for himself.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah. This has got nothing to do with intelligence. There’ve been geniuses with schizophrenia, but the life they live keeps it at bay. Bobby Fischer was the greatest chess player on the planet until the voices got so strong that they took over his life. He was always ‘eccentric’ and ‘demanding’ and … well, pick any label you like. Then he suddenly stopped playing chess,
started muttering about Zionist conspiracies—all out to get him, of course—before he died.”

“And if the family has enough money …”

“Sure. That’d do it. Instead of throwing him in some dungeon, they could keep him on an M&M diet.”

I just looked at him.

“Medication and maintenance,” he explained. “But the ones who don’t have a dime, they get their meds from the government.”

“Those don’t work?”

“The sad thing is that some of them work almost
too
well. Say nobody figures out that a brilliant college student’s a schizophrenic until his delusions get out of control. He goes on meds in some hospital, stabilizes … and they cut him loose. With a scrip if his family’s got money, with a Medicaid card if they don’t. What happens—especially with the highest-IQ ones—they figure they’re doing so good—you know, back in school, getting good grades—they convince themselves they’re ‘cured.’ They don’t need the meds anymore. And they hate the side effects, anyway. Doesn’t take too long after that before they’re back in some hospital. Or prison, depending on what the voices tell them to do. And some of those voices tell them to kill themselves … but not until
after
they’ve gunned down the whole audience at a movie.”

“Jesus. But, once they’re back to doing okay, can’t you tell them that they need the meds to
stay
that way? Wouldn’t they be able to understand what’s happening then?”

“You can
tell
them, sure. And we do. But, like I said, there’s so many really unpleasant side effects—to the meds, I mean—that they’re all eager as hell to come up with any excuse to stop taking them.”

“Side effects like what?”

“Tardive dyskinesia, that’s the most common. Those weird movements you see in some of the walking wounded around
here. Like they can’t control the muscles in their face, or their arms. It’s embarrassing, and it’s painful. All the meds for schizophrenia are some form of neuroleptic—and the longer you use them, the more ingrained the side effects become. The meds designed to counteract the side effects only go so far.”

“And they have to be on them for life?”

“Pretty much.”

“Nice choices.”

“Choices? Drug addicts, alcoholics, they’ve got choices. They know if they don’t stop they’re gonna die. And that last choice—too many make it anyway. For a schizophrenic, the only way they even understand there
is
a choice is when they’ve been stabilized on the antipsychotic meds.”

“You’re saying you’ve only got the choices you
think
you have?”

“Yeah. But the intensity varies with the individual. ‘Fineline’ used to cut himself. They had him down as a cutter—self-mutilation isn’t uncommon in borderlines. But we noticed he always preferred the most precise instruments he could find—he wasn’t cutting himself to
feel
something, like true cutters do; he was
drawing
. That’s when we realized what was really going on.

“Now he’s okay about taking his meds. We don’t know why they don’t make his hands shake, and neither does he. But he doesn’t care. What he
wants
to do, the meds
let
him do, so he looks at them the same way a diabetic looks at insulin.

“Truth is, there’s a
lot
we don’t know. Mental health is really in an infancy stage—there’s a lot more emphasis on what to call things than on how to treat them.”

“Why?”

“For the billing,” he said, with a laugh you wouldn’t want to touch with your fingertips. “A good coding-and-billing person can earn a better living than anyone doing my kind of work does. But when I’m paid by a program that’s run by any kind of
agency—or even a whole county, like out here—they can bill my time out.
I
get freedom from paperwork, health coverage, a two-bit 403(b), and enough life insurance to bury me.
They
get enough to hire a dozen of their pals as ‘administrators,’ or whatever title they want to give them. A good grant-writer can turn a whole town’s problem into a financial surplus, depending on what’s fashionable.”

“How can one kind of crazy be more fashionable than another?”

“It depends on the area, for one thing. There’s so-called programs that say they ‘cure’ homosexuality. Now,
that’s
as crazy as any other delusion, but that doesn’t stop people from making the claim. Once they give some behavior a mental-health
name
, the government will help fund any state program that says it’s ‘curing’ it. Like … say, ‘pedophilia.’ That’s a crock. Even if a person could be diagnosed with ‘pedophilia,’ nobody would give a damn unless they actually
did
something. Sex offenders are scary, so ‘treatment’ programs for them always get money—probably every prison in America has one.”