Stories From the Plague Years (14 page)

I’ve read about psychologists posing as patients in places like this, to find out what conditions were like. They often went crazy themselves. Madness is deadly because it’s so tempting to touch, the way fire is to a child.

The idea of going mad terrifies me, because as one who has lived and killed as an idea, my madness would be complete. Especially in this God-forsaken place. Here, where the winds blow constantly, whistling through the corridors of cement and steel . . . here I wouldn’t just lose my mind. My spirit would die. It would wither in a depression that could never be broken. Ennui would devour me a nibble at a time, breaking my soul with the slowness of an earwig biting the tissues of my brain. I have offered myself to this danger. In becoming a spirit, I’ve made myself permeable, as vulnerable as a shaman in a deep trance.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Yet for me there’s light at the end of the tunnel, an earthen darkness comforting in its finality.

Soon I’ll be shipped to another facility. This place can’t care for me, not while a rosary of tumours stalks up my innards like ivy crawling up a trellis. Soon I’ll be taken to the security wing of a hospital. Cuffed to a comfortable bed, with decent food and quiet. To not provide me with adequate care would be cruel and unusual.

Despite the awful pain I’ll be in at the time, I look forward to my last breath.

In my dream, I was aware of October. I can’t remember the substance of the dream, and I know there is a mercy to that. But I recall the impression of standing beneath a fantastically big sky, under trees so tall, they loomed in my sight as they’d seem to a toddler. I breathed air full of the smokeless burning of leaves rotting into the rich soil they blanketed. October died in my dream, made dim by those un-breathing shadows unique to corners of grey cinder block. Still sleeping, I knew on some deep level that this was Halloween morning, just as I once could know before waking that snow had fallen in the night.

My sleep was ripped like the skin of Keene’s throat, by a scream that woke me and threw me from my cot with the violence of a seizure.

Tuttle, in the cell opposite, crouched atop the steel sink in his cell. He screamed with all the strength of his lungs, all the volume of his barrel chest. His features twisted, as if his grimace would pull the corners of his mouth below his jaw. His powder-blue eyes bulged, and when my gaze touched his through the bars, the man wailed like an infant as he dropped to the cement floor with a sickening thud, more lifeless when he struck than was Catherine’s body.

The attendants rushed to Tuttle in less than a minute, along with the head psychiatric nurse, an ex-Marine named Richard who weighed two-hundred and eighty pounds. One held a strait-jacket, another had a hypo at the ready. But as they neared him, Tuttle rolled on the floor like an autistic child on the verge of exhaustion, mumbling or praying in a language of his own.

Tuttle’s monstrosity is unique, even here. Six foot three, with arms like logs, an IQ of about fifty, and the inability to come unless he snaps the neck of the prostitute he fucks. He had been a bogeyman of my youth, a monster culled out of newspapers into schoolyard folklore. A bogeyman I’d feared as a kid now lived close enough for me to smell the stink of his morning shit.

They had Tuttle upright now. The nightmare being of my youth was still bawling, pointing toward the door of his cell and saying,
Kitty, kitty
. Or maybe it was
Kiddie
, I couldn’t tell. His face was the color of turned wine and his mouth spilled frothy spit that mixed with the tears that leaked from his idiot child’s eyes.

Madness collects here, as if in a great battery or dynamo, and it arcs now and then in the minds of people like Tuttle. The bars hum with the threat of a discharge.

The wind surges. Over Tuttle’s quieting sobs, I hear dead leaves flying against the outside wall through the slot-like window of my cell. And although the window can’t be opened, I feel a draft coalesce around me and drift like river fog out of my cell. The tumours in my lower guts twitch like hatchlings.

Tuttle screams again, and covers his face with his blanket.

Three hours later, I sit in Doctor Johansson’s office, chained to my usual seat. For days now, in short sessions of less than an hour, we’ve gone over the particulars of my ten avengings . . . details that won’t help my twin in his portrait of me as a fascinating monster, but that will help the police, and perhaps the Anne Rule wannabes who’ll make meager advances dashing off my story for paperback houses.

Doctor Johansson has his files placed before him. I think I’ve partly figured out his system. The placement of files is like a series of Japanese fans, spread in semi-circles, slightly overlapping. His mind operates on many levels. He’s not the sort to impose phenomena into the linear formations that are the delight of the arrogant and stupid. He’s not afraid to use a maze-like model, or a model like a house of cards. I wish I had time to know him better.

He looks at a new file, not like the others: it’s stapled and has several differently coloured pages, white, pink, goldenrod, and blue. The folder seems unstable in my sight, as if made of television static.

—How do you feel, Dean? he asked, puffing on his cold and empty pipe.

—Fine. For the time being.

The draft came again, making me uneasy, bringing thoughts of Tuttle and his shrieking tirade. The eyes of my twin from behind the silvered glass seemed a fleshy, oppressive presence. The light of the last October morning I’ll ever see streamed from the window. Dust motes didn’t churn in the light, but seemed to stay almost suspended, despite the draft.

—From the time you killed Molino to the time you killed Catherine, how had you been handling stress?

He massaged his right temple as he spoke, the pipe nearly touching his wrist. Had it been lit, it would have burned him. Looking at the bowl, I felt the
anticipation
of it burning him, the involuntary flinch of seeing someone about to suffer pain. My spine compressed, my shoulders hunched, until a
pulling
changed the tilt of my vertebrae, so that the cartilage between them felt packed with shaved ice.

—What do you mean?

—Were you having sweats? Grinding your teeth? Stomach-aches? Shaky hands?

—Not as much as before.

The
anticipation
of seeing him burned personified itself, brought itself into being.

—And you felt better about the people you killed?

I tried to not pay heed to the
tugging
I felt on the chain around my waist, like a child trying to get my attention. It was very hard to stay focused.

—I’ve told you that.

The tugging stopped, and I heard the quick
click-click
like dog’s paws on the tile by my feet, receding as if the paws walked toward the door.

My shoulders fell.

—And better about yourself, too?

The paws ran towards my back, wide long steps like a high jumper going towards his mark. A weight thudded against my shoulders and a wet mouth pressed to the nape of my neck. Fever-hot hands gripped my collarbones. The warmth of moist palms bled through my jumpsuit.

Don’t scream. Don’t scream. Don’t . . .

—Yes, I felt better about myself.

I trembled like a man freezing from blood loss.

Ignore it. Ignore the little shit. He’s nothing without attention. Ignore him . . .

—Your cancer has gone into remission, Dean. Whatever internalized stress that fueled it is gone. The cancer has stopped.

Within a heartbeat, all I’d ever been and felt and tasted and done crowded through the doors of my consciousness. Blinders of perception ripped, awareness of everything sluiced into my mind, the inverse of what I’d felt as Evan died: an
inward
awareness, abrasive, wounding. Each thread and seam of my clothing itched. I smelled the oily links of my chains, the dust baking atop the buzzing fluorescent lights, the residue of nicotine in the long-dormant air filter. I felt the vibrations of the heating pipes, each nail of the fingers digging into my flesh, each tooth of the mouth, each nodule of the sliding tongue, each crease of the lips.

I heard the timber-creak of Doctor Johansson closing the cardboard file and the tumble of motes.

And like a crease of lightning against a pitch-black void, I felt my mind cracking and folding and crushing under its own weight as the gift of my mortality dropped from my grasp.

Because I knew then, and understood.

Doctor Johansson’s mouth cracked open, and the words he spoke struck my chest with a force that could snap my ribs.

—The court recommended you stay here

. . .I knew and understood.

. . . under our care . . .

I knew and understood.

. . . unfit to stand trial . . .

I knew and understood.

. . . incompetent . . .

I was going to stay here.

. . . medication . . .

And I was going to go mad.

. . . intensive therapy . . .

No way out.

The tiny mouth detached from my neck and the spot where it had been felt cold and wet. Little feet scraped against my back and I heard faint laughter and felt the warmth of breath against my ear, felt the noose of flesh that had never lived tighten around my neck as little arms hugged my throat.

I screamed.

Doctor Johansson flew back from his desk.

—YOU LITTLE SHIT!!! YOU BROUGHT ME HERE!!! YOU
PLANNED
THIS!!

My throat ripped within as I yelled and jerked in the rattling chair, trying to detach the little fuck from my back. I felt it drop off, then heard it run to the door. Like the hands of a diabetic going into shock, my mind grasped and clenched and groped as what I had wrought shivved itself into the core of my awareness.

The little being ran towards me again and its hand grabbed my hair. The thing
hung
off my scalp, dangling, jerking my neck to the sides, and Oh, God, why couldn’t I see it, like before? Why was it hiding behind the air, now? Why was it laughing like a happy child?

The door opened, I heard it over the hollow and hoarse sounds my torn throat made in lieu of screams, and suddenly Richard stood over me with three attendants.

—Get it off me, Richard. Please.

But my voice was too mutilated to be heard.

Richard had a hypo in his hand.

Oh God, no.

I started crying.

A prick on my shoulder and a grey cloudy void.

I’m going mad.

I know this, for I have written this poem, and have only now discovered its last stanza.

It’s as if I’m going senile, parts of my mind strobe out, leaving holes in my consciousness. I’m aware of the hollow spaces left behind, like the soft sockets that mark where a tooth has been pulled.

The bars hum deafeningly with the madness of this place, and the barn-stench of psychotherapeutic drugs taints my own sweat now. The chemicals paint my mouth with a taste like burnt tin foil. I rewrote myself as myth, and all myths are defined by their endings. Warrior kings become great because of the final battles that await them. Killing avatars such as I, Grendels of this day, who invade the white-carpeted halls of those we kill, are defined by the normality that is restored by our capture and our deaths. By the catharsis those who drink of our fictions feel as they close the book or watch end credits roll. By our being invaded by the dybbuks that are our downfalls, as we are tormented by our suppressed selves. By our Others. The fiction demands it. I made myself a Trickster, and in so doing, I’ve been tricked. I am not Loki. In becoming an archetype, I am ruined by my own Trickster son whom I exiled . . . just as I, an exiled son, have ruined my father.

Why has my little victim done this to me? I try hard not to use its name, anymore. Because there’s a power, a magic, to Names that can make things real . . . imaginary things. Spectres can accost you in the broad light of day if you give them the right Name, even if you’ve made yourself an accosting spectre.

That’s the real question.
How
could he have done this to me? He’s a goblin.
The Velveteen Rabbit
told how things can attain the gift of life through nursery magic. The Velveteen Rabbit was given life for helping a little boy cope with sickness. My little twin, my Other, was brought to life through nursery magic, the same magic that turned me into a god over the smaller things I tormented. Maybe my little victim was given life for helping me endure my torturedchildhood.