The Madman's Tale (41 page)

All these thoughts must have been coming somewhere from the filmy world between sleep and wakefulness, because I suddenly opened my eyes in my apartment. I must have dozed for a bit, my back thrust up against a blank piece of wall. They were all thoughts that my medications used to stifle. There was a crick in my neck, and I rose unsteadily. Once again, the day had faded around me, and I was alone again, except for memories, ghosts, and the familiar murmurings of those long-suppressed voices. They all seemed quite enthused to have rediscovered a grip on my imagination. In a way, it seemed as if they were awakening alongside me, the way I imagined a real lover would, had I ever had a real lover. In my mind’s
ear, they clamored for attention, a little bit like a happy crew at a busy auction, making bids on any number of different items
.

I stretched nervously and walked over to the window. I looked out at the creeping night strands moving across the city, just as I had done dozens of times before, only this time, I fixated on one shadow, behind a stodgy brick auto parts store down the block. I watched the edge of the shadow spread, and thought it was an eerie thing, that each shadow bore only the most tangential resemblance to the building or tree or fast-walking person that birthed it. It takes a form of its own, evoking its ancestry, but remaining independent. The same, but different. Shadows, I thought, can tell me much about my world. Maybe I was closer to being one of them, than I was to being alive. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a patrol car moving slowly down my block
.

I was suddenly fired with the thought that it was there to check on me. I could feel the two sets of eyes inside the darkened vehicle turned up, moving across the front of the apartment building like sets of spotlights, until they rested directly on my window. I tossed myself to the side, so that I couldn’t be seen
.

I shrank back, huddled against the wall
.

They were here to get me. I knew this, just as surely as I knew that day follows night and that the night follows day. My eyes searched the apartment, trying to find a place to hide. I held my breath. I had the sensation that every heartbeat in my chest echoed like a foghorn. I tried to push myself deeper against the wall, as if it could camouflage me. I could sense the officers outside the door
.

But then nothing
.

There was no insistent pounding at the door
.

No raised voices with that single word
Police!
that says everything all at once
.

Silence surrounded me, and after a second, I leaned forward slightly, craning my head around the window and seeing the street empty in front of me
.

No car. No policemen. Just more shadows
.

I stopped for a moment. Had it even been there?

I breathed out slowly. When I turned back to the wall, I insisted to myself that nothing was wrong, and that there was nothing to worry about, which reminded me that that was precisely what I’d tried to tell myself all those years earlier in the hospital
.

The faces remained in my memory, if sometimes not the names. Slowly, over the course of that day, and the next, Lucy had brought in, one after the other, men that she believed had some of the elements of the profile she was building deep in her own head. Men of anger. It was, in a way, a crash course in one slice of the humanity that made up the hospital clientele, a cut from the fringe. All sorts of mental illnesses were herded into that room, and seated in the chair in front of her, sometimes with a little nudge from Big Black, sometimes, with no more than a gesture from Lucy and a nod from Mister Evans
.

As for myself, I kept quiet and listened
.

It was a parade of impossibility. Some of the men were furtive, eyes darting back and forth, evasive in every response to each question. Some seemed terrified, shrinking back in their chairs, sweat leaping onto their foreheads, quaver in their voices, as they seemed pummeled by every question that Lucy posed, no matter how routine, benign, or insignificant. Others were aggressive, instantly raising their voices, shouting in newly encouraged rage, and, on more than one instance slamming their fists on her desktop, filled with righteous indignation and denial. A few were mute, staring blankly across the room, as if each statement that fell from Lucy’s mouth, each question that hovered in the air was something rendered on some totally different plane of existence, something that meant nothing in any language that they knew, and so to answer was impossible. Some men responded with gibberish, some with fantasy, some with anger, some with fear. A couple of men stared at the ceiling, and a couple made strangling motions with their hands. Some looked at the crime scene photographs with fear, some with an unsettling fascination. One man instantly confessed, blubbering “I did it, I did it” over and over again, not allowing Lucy to ask any of the questions that might have indicated that he actually had done it. One man said nothing, but grinned, and dropped his hand into his pants to excite himself until the uniquely discouraging pressure of Big Black’s massive grip on his shoulder forced him to stop. Throughout the process, Mister Evil sat at her side, always quick, when the patient had been escorted out by Big Black, to explain why this man or that man was disqualified for this reason or that reason. There was a certain irritating clarity to his approach; it was supposed to be helpful and informative, while, in reality it was obstructive and obfuscating. Mister Evil, I thought, wasn’t nearly as clever as he thought, nor as stupid as some of us believed, which was, when I think back upon it, a most dangerous combination
.

And throughout the interview process, the most curious thing came over me: I started to see. It was as if I could envision where every pain came from. And how all those accumulated pains had over the years evolved into madness
.

I felt a darkness coming over my heart
.

My every fiber screamed at me to rise up and run, to get out of that room, that everything I saw and heard and learned was terrible, was information and knowledge I had no right to possess, no need to have, no desire to collect. But I remained frozen, unable to move, as frightened in those moments of myself, as I was of the hard men that came through the door who had all done something terrible
.

I wasn’t like them. And yet, I was
.

The first time Peter the Fireman stepped outside the Amherst Building he was almost overcome, and he had to grip the banister to keep from stumbling.
Bright sunlight seemed to flood over him, a warm, late spring breeze ruffled his hair, the scent of hibiscus blooming along the pathways filled his nostrils. He hesitated unsteadily on the top step of the stairs leading to the side door, a little drunkenly, or dizzy, as if he’d been spun around for weeks on end inside the building, and this was the first moment when his head wasn’t turning. He could hear traffic from the roadway beyond the hospital walls, and off to the side some children playing in the front yard of one of the staff housing units. He listened carefully, and from beyond the happy voices, he picked out the strands of a radio playing. Motown, he thought. Something with a seductively catchy big beat and sirenlike harmonies on the refrain.

Peter was flanked by Little Black and his large brother, but it was the smaller of the two attendants who whispered urgently, “Peter, you got to keep you head down. Don’t let anyone get a good look at you.”

The Fireman was dressed in white duck slacks and short lab coat, like the two attendants, although they wore regulation thick black shoes, and he was shod in high-topped canvas basketball sneakers, and anyone alert to charades would have picked up on that distinction. He nodded, and hunched himself over a little, but it was difficult for him to keep his eyes on the ground for long. It had been too many weeks since he’d actually been outside, and longer still since he’d walked anywhere without the restraints of handcuffs and his past hobbling his steps.

To his right, he could see a small motley group of patients working in the garden, and over on the decrepit black macadam onetime basketball court a half-dozen other patients were simply wandering back and forth around the remains of the volleyball net, while two other attendants smoked cigarettes and kept a vague eye on the shuffling crowd, almost all of whom had their faces lifted to the warm afternoon sunshine. One wiry, middle-aged woman was dancing, just a little, moving her arms in wide gyrations, and striding first to her right, then back to her left, a waltz without rhythm or purpose, but as genteel as some Renaissance court.

They had worked out the system of the search in advance. Little Black had called ahead to the other housing facilities on the interhospital intercom system, and they would enter through the side door, and as Big Black went to get the subject from Lucy’s list to take them back to Amherst, Peter and Little Black would process the man’s living area. What this had devolved into was Little Black’s keeping an eye out for any of the other nurses or attendants, who might be curious, while Peter moved swiftly through whatever pathetically small collection of possessions the man in question had managed to keep. He was very good at this, able to finger his way through clothes and papers and bedding without disrupting much, if anything, moving very rapidly. It was,
he’d learned during the first searches in his own building, impossible to keep what he was doing secret from everyone—there was always some patient or another lurking in the corner, perched on his bed, or merely glued to the far wall, where they could safely see out the window and across the room, preventing anyone from sneaking up on them. No limit, Peter thought, more than once, to paranoia in the hospital. The problem was, a man behaving suspiciously in the context of the mental hospital didn’t mean the same thing as it did out in the real world. Inside the Western State Hospital, paranoia was the norm, and accepted as a part of the daily routine of the hospital, as regular and expected as meals, fights, and tears.

Big Black saw Peter lifting his eyes up to the sunshine, and he smiled. “Makes you kinda forget, don’t it,” he said quietly. “Nice day like this.”

Peter nodded.

“Day like this,” the big man continued, “it don’t seem fair to be sick.”

Little Black joined in, unexpectedly. “You know, Peter, day like this actually makes things worse around here. Makes everyone get this little taste of what they missing. You can smell the world happening, like it’s just out there beyond the walls. Cold day. Rainy day. Windy and snowy. Those are the days that everyone just gets up and goes along. Never take any notice. But a beautiful day like this one, right hard on just about everybody.”

Peter didn’t reply, until Big Black added, “Really hard on your little friend. C-Bird still got hopes and dreams. This is the sort of day that is real hard on those, because it makes you see just how far away all those things are.”

“He’ll get out,” Peter said. “And soon, too. There can’t be all that much holding him in here.”

Big Black sighed. “I wish that were true. C-Bird, he’s got a world of trouble.”

“Francis?” Peter asked incredulously. “But he’s harmless. Any damn fool can see that. I mean, he probably shouldn’t be here at all …”

Little Black shook his head, as if indicating that neither what Peter said was true, nor could the Fireman see what they saw, but didn’t say anything. Peter stole a glance toward the main entrance to the hospital, with its huge wrought-iron gate and solid brick wall. In prison, he thought, confinement was always an issue of time. The act defined the time. It could be one or two years, or twenty or thirty, but it was always a finite amount, even for those condemned to life, because it was still measured in days, weeks, and months, and eventually, inevitably, there was either a parole board hearing scheduled or death awaiting. That wasn’t true for the mental hospital, he realized, because one’s stay there was defined by something far more elusive and far more difficult to obtain.

Big Black seemed to be able to guess what Peter was thinking, because he
chimed in again, sadness still lurking in his voice. “Even if he gets hisself a release hearing, he’s got a long way to go before they let him out of here.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Peter said. “Francis is smart and wouldn’t hurt a flea …”

“Yeah,” Little Black jumped in,“… and he’s still hearing voices even with the medications and the big doc can’t get him to understand why he’s here, and Mister Evil don’t like him none, though can’t see why not. What all that adds up to, Peter, is your friend is gonna be here, and there ain’t no hearing gonna be scheduled for him. Not like some of the others here. And sure as hell not like you.”

Peter started to reply, then clamped his mouth shut. They walked on for a moment in silence, as he let the day’s warmth try to erase the cold thoughts that the two attendants had chilled him with. Finally, he said, “You’re wrong. You’re both wrong. He’s going to get out. Go home. I know it.”

“Ain’t nobody at his home wants him,” Big Black said.

“Not like you,” Little Black said. “Everybody wants a piece of the Fireman. You gonna end up somewhere, but it ain’t gonna be here.”

“Yeah,” Peter said, bitterly. “Back in prison. Where I belong. Doing twenty to life.”

Little Black shrugged, as if to say that once again Peter had managed to get something if not precisely wrong, at least skewed slightly. They took a few more strides toward the Williams dormitory.

“Keep your head down,” Little Black said, as they approached the side entrance to Williams.

Peter lowered his head again, and dropped his eyes so that he was staring at the dusty black path they walked. It was difficult, he thought, because every shaft of sunlight that hit his back reminded him of being someplace else, and every breath of warm wind suggested happier times. He stepped forward, insisting to himself that it served no purpose to remember what he had once been, and what he now was, and that he should only look to what he would become. This was hard, he realized, because every time he looked at Lucy he saw a life that might have been his, but which had eluded him, and he thought, not for the first time, that every step he took only brought him a bit closer to some fearsome precipice, where he teetered unsteadily, maintaining his balance only with the most tenuous grip on icy rocks, held in place by thin ropes that were fraying quickly.