The Madman's Tale (4 page)

He nodded. “I don’t know about getting up in front of all those people,” he said. “But my treating physician is one of the movers and shakers in the hospital
redevelopment plan and it was all his idea. He said it would be good therapy. A solid demonstration of the golden road to total recovery.”

I hesitated, then asked, “What do you think?”

Napoleon sat down on the bench. “I think he’s the crazy one,” he said, breaking into a slightly manic giggle, a high-pitched sound that joined nervousness and joy at once and that I remembered from our time together. “Of course, it helps that everyone still believes you’re completely crazy, because then you can’t really embarrass yourself too badly,” he added, and I grinned along with him. That was the sort of observation only someone who had spent time in a mental hospital would make. I sat back down next to him and we both stared over at the Amherst Building. After a moment or two, he sighed. “Did you go inside?”

“Yes. It’s a mess. Ready for the wrecker’s ball.”

“I thought the same back when we were there. And everyone thought it was the best place to be. At least that’s what they told me when I was processed in. State-of-the-art mental health facility. The best way to treat the mentally ill in a residential setting. What a lie.”

He caught his breath, then added, “A damn lie.”

Now it was my turn to nod in agreement.

“Is that what you will tell them. In the speech, I mean.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what they want to hear. I think it makes more sense to tell them nice things. Positive things. I’m planning a series of raging falsehoods.”

I thought about this for a moment, then smiled. “That might be a sign of mental health,” I said.

Napoleon laughed. “I hope you’re right.”

We were both silent for a few seconds, then, in a wistful tone, he whispered, “I’m not going to tell them about the killings. And not a word about the Fireman or the lady investigator that came to visit or anything that happened at the end.” He looked up at the Amherst Building, then added, “It would really be your story to tell, anyway.”

I didn’t reply.

Napoleon was quiet for a moment, then he asked me, “Do you think about what happened?”

I shook my head, but we both understood this was a falsehood. “I dream about it, sometimes,” I told him. “But it’s hard to remember what was real and what wasn’t.”

“That makes sense,” he said. “You know one thing that bothered me,” he added slowly, “I never knew where they buried the people. The people who died while they were here. I mean, one minute they were in the dayroom or
hanging in the hallways along with everyone else, and the next they might be dead, but what then? Did you ever know?”

“Yes,” I said, after a moment or two. “They had a little makeshift graveyard over at the edge of the hospital, back toward the woods behind administration and Harvard. It was behind the little garden. I think now it’s part of a youth soccer field.”

Napoleon wiped his forehead. “I’m glad to know that,” he said. “I always wondered. Now I know.”

Again we were quiet for a few seconds, then he said, “You know what I hated learning. Afterward and everything, when we were released and put into outpatient clinics and getting all the treatment and all the newer drugs. You know what I hated?”

“What?”

“That the delusion that I’d clung to so hard for so many years wasn’t just a delusion, but it wasn’t even a special delusion. That I wasn’t the only person to have fantasies that I was the reincarnation of a French emperor. In fact, I bet Paris is chockablock filled with them. I hated that understanding. In my delusional state, I was special. Unique. And now, I’m just an ordinary guy who has to take pills and whose hands shake all the time and who can’t really hold anything more than the simplest job and whose family probably wishes would find a way to disappear. I wonder what the French word for
poof!
is.”

I thought about this, then told him, “Well, personally, for whatever it’s worth, I always had the impression that you were a damn fine French emperor. Cliché or not. And if it had really been you ordering troops around at Waterloo, why hell, you would have won.”

He giggled a sound of release. “C-Bird, all of us always knew that you were better at paying attention to the world around us than anyone else. People liked you, even if we were all deluded and crazy.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

“What about the Fireman. He was your friend. Whatever happened to him? Afterward, I mean.”

I paused, then answered: “He got out. He straightened out all his problems, moved to the South, and made a lot of money. Had a family. Big house. Big car. Very successful all around. Last I heard, he was heading up some charitable foundation. Happy and healthy.”

Napoleon nodded. “I can believe it. And the woman who came to investigate? Did she go with him?”

“No. She went on to a judgeship. All sorts of honors. She had a wonderful life.”

“I knew it. You could just tell.”

Of course, this was all a lie.

He looked down at his watch. “I need to get back. Get ready for my great moment. Wish me luck.”

“Good luck,” I said.

“It’s good seeing you again,” Napoleon added. “I hope your life goes okay.”

“You, too,” I said. “You look good.”

“Really? I doubt it. I doubt very many of us look good. But that’s okay. Thanks for saying it.”

He stood and I joined him. We both looked back at the Amherst Building.

“I’ll be happy when they tear it down,” Napoleon said with a sudden burst of bitterness. “It was a dangerous, evil place and not much good happened there.”

Then he turned back to me. “C-Bird, you were there. You saw it all. You tell everyone.”

“Who would listen?”

“Someone might. Write the story. You can do it.”

“Some stories should be left unwritten,” I said.

Napoleon shrugged his rounded shoulders. “If you write it, then it will be real. If all it does is stay in our memories, then it’s like it never happened. Like it was some dream. Or hallucination thought up by all of us madmen. No one trusts us when we say something. But if you write it down, well, that gives it some substance. Makes it all true enough.”

I shook my head. “The trouble with being mad,” I said, “was it was real hard to tell what was true and what wasn’t. That doesn’t change, just because we can take enough pills to scrape along now in the world with all the others.”

Napoleon smiled. “You’re right,” he said. “But maybe not, too. I don’t know. I just know that you could tell it and maybe a few people would believe it, and that’s a good enough thing. No one ever believed us, back then. Even when we took the medications, no one ever believed us.”

He looked at his watch again, and shifted his feet nervously.

“You should get back,” I said.

“I must get back,” he repeated.

We stood awkwardly until he finally turned, and walked away. About midway down the path, Napoleon turned, and gave me the same unsure little wave that he had when he’d first spotted me. “Tell it,” he called. Then he turned and walked quickly away, a little ducklike in his style. I could see that his hands were shaking again.

It was after dark when I finally quick marched up the sidewalk to my apartment, and climbed the stairs and locked myself into the safety of the small space. A nervous fatigue seemed to pulse through my veins, carried along the
bloodstream with the red cells and the white cells. Seeing Napoleon and hearing myself called by the nickname that I’d received when I first went to the hospital startled emotions within me. I thought hard about taking some pills. I knew I had some that were designed to calm me, should I get overly excited. But I did not. “Tell the story,” he’d said to me. “How?” I said out loud in the quiet of my own home.

The room echoed around me.

“You can’t tell it,” I said to myself.

Then I asked the question: Why not?

I had some pens and pencils, but no paper.

Then an idea came to me. For a second, I wondered whether it was one of my voices, returning, filling my ear with a quick suggestion and modest command. I stopped, listening carefully, trying to pluck the unmistakable tones of my familiar guides from the street sounds that penetrated past the laboring of my old window air conditioning unit. But they were elusive. I didn’t know whether they were there, or not. But uncertainty was something I had grown accustomed to.

I took a slightly worn and scratched table chair and placed it against the side of the wall deep in the corner of the room. I didn’t have any paper, I told myself. But what I did have were white-painted walls unadorned by posters or art or anything.

Balancing myself on the seat, I could reach almost to the ceiling. I gripped a pencil in my hand and leaned forward. Then I wrote quickly, in a tiny, pinched, but legible script:

F
rancis Xavier Petrel arrived in tears at the Western State Hospital in the back of an ambulance. It was raining hard, darkness was falling rapidly, and his arms and legs were cuffed and restrained. He was twenty-one years old and more scared than he’d ever been in his short, and to that point, relatively uneventful life.

The two men who had driven him to the hospital had mostly kept their mouths closed during the ride, except to mutter complaints about the unseasonable weather, or make caustic remarks about the other drivers on the roads, none of whom seemed to meet the standards of excellence that they jointly held. The ambulance had bumped along the roadway at a moderate speed, flashing lights and urgency both ignored. There was something of dull routine in the way the two men had acted, as if the trip to the hospital was nothing more than a way-stop in the midst of an oppressively normal, decidedly boring day. One man occasionally slurped from a soda can, making a smacking noise with his lips. The other whistled snatches of popular songs. The first sported Elvis sideburns. The second had a bushy lion’s mane of hair.

It might have been a trivial journey for the two attendants, but to the young man rigid with tension in the back, his breathing coming in short sprinter’s spurts, it was nothing of the sort. Every sound, every sensation seemed to signal something to him, each more terrifying and more threatening than the next. The beat of the windshield wipers was like some deep jungle
drum playing a roll of doom. The humming of the tires against the slick road surface was a siren’s song of despair. Even the noise of his own labored wind seemed to echo, as if he were encased in a tomb. The restraints dug into his flesh, and he opened his mouth to scream for help, but could not make the right sound. All that emerged was a gargling burst of despair. One thought penetrated the symphony of discord—that if he survived the day, he was likely to never have a worse one.

When the ambulance shuddered to a halt in front of the hospital entrance, he heard one of his voices crying out over the stew of fear:
They will kill you here, if you are not careful
.

The ambulance drivers seemed oblivious to the imminent danger. They opened the doors to the vehicle with a crash, and indelicately pulled Francis out on a gurney. He could feel cold raindrops slapping against his face, mingling with a nervous sweat on his forehead, as the two men wheeled him through a wide set of doors into a world of harshly bright and unforgiving lights. They pushed him down a corridor, gurney wheels squealing against the linoleum, and at first all he could see, as it slid past, was the gray pockmarked ceiling. He was aware that there were other people in the corridor, but he was too scared to turn and face them. Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on the soundproofing above him, counting the number of light fixtures that he rolled beneath. When he reached four, the two men stopped.

He was aware that some other people had stepped to the front of the gurney. In the space just beyond his head, he heard some words spoken: “Okay, guys. We’ll take him from here.”

Then a massive, round, black face, sporting a wide row of uneven, grinning teeth suddenly appeared above him. The face was above an orderly’s white jacket that seemed, at first glance, to be several sizes too small.

“All right, Mister Francis Xavier Petrel, you ain’t gonna cause us no trouble now, are you?” The man had a slightly singsong tenor to his words, so that they came out with equal parts of menace and amusement. Francis did not know what to reply.

A second black face abruptly hovered into his sight on the other side of the gurney, also leaning into the air above him, and this other man said, “I don’t think this boy here is going to be any sort of hassle. Not in the tiniest little bit. Are you, Mister Petrel?” He, too, spoke with a soft Southern-tinged accent.

A voice shouted in his ear:
Tell them no!