The Madman's Tale (54 page)

“All right, folks,” he heard from the doorway. “Time to rise and shine. Breakfast is waiting.” It was Big Black, greeting the dormitory residents in customary fashion.

Around him, people started to groan their ways out of sleep, leaving behind all the troubled dreams and near-nightmares that plagued them, unaware that a real, breathing nightmare had been in their midst.

Francis remained rigid, as if glued to his bunk. His limbs refused commands.

A few men stared down at him, as they stumbled past.

He heard Napoleon say, “Come on, Francis, let’s go to breakfast …” but the round man’s voice trailed into nothing as he must have seen the look on Francis’s face. “Francis?” he heard, but he did not reply. “C-Bird, are you okay?”

Again, he warred within himself. Inside, his voices had started up. They pleaded, they cajoled, they insisted, over and over,
Get up, Francis! Come on, Francis! Rise up! Put your feet on the floor and wake up! Please, Francis, please get up!

He did not know whether he had the strength. He did not know whether he would ever have the strength again.

“C-Bird? What’s wrong?” He heard Napoleon’s voice grow worried, nearly plaintive.

He did not reply, but continued to stare up at the ceiling, all the time believing more and more firmly that he was dying. Or perhaps he was already dead, and every word he heard was just the last reverberations of life, accompanying his last few heartbeats.

“Mister Moses! Come here! We need help!” Napoleon seemed suddenly on the verge of tears.

Francis could feel himself spiraling in two opposing directions. One that seemed to thrust him down, one that insisted he soar upward. They battled within him.

Big Black pushed to his side. Francis could hear him ordering the remaining members of Amherst out into the corridor. He bent over Francis’s form, looking deep into the younger man’s eyes, muttering rapid-fire obscenities. “Come on, Goddamn it, Francis, get up! What’s wrong?”

“Help him,” Napoleon pleaded.

“I’m trying,” Big Black answered. “Francis, tell me, what’s wrong?” He clapped his hands sharply in front of Francis’s face, trying to get a reaction. He grasped Francis by the shoulder and shook him hard, but Francis remained stiff on the bunk.

Francis thought that he no longer had any words. He doubted his ability to speak. Things inside him were glazing over, like ice forming on a pond.

The garbled voices redoubled commands, pleading, urging him to respond.

The only thought that penetrated Francis’s fear was the single idea that if he didn’t move, he would surely become dead. That the nightmare would become true. It was as if the two had blended together. Just as day and night were no longer different, neither was dream and wakefulness. He teetered again, on the edge of consciousness, a part of him urging him to shut it all down, retreat, find safety in the refusal to live, another part pleading with him to step away from the siren’s song of the blank, dead world that suddenly beckoned him.

Don’t die, Francis!

At first, he thought this was one of his familiar voices speaking to him. Then, in that perilous second, he realized that it was himself.

And so, mustering every minute amount of strength that he had, Francis croaked out words that one second earlier he’d feared were lost to him forever. “He was here …,” Francis said, like a dying man’s last breath, only contradictorily, the mere sound of his voice seemed to energize him.

“Who?” Big Black asked.

“The Angel. He spoke to me.”

The attendant seemed to rock back, then forward.

“Did he hurt you?”

“No. Yes. I can’t be sure,” Francis said. Every word seemed to strengthen him. He felt like a man whose fever suddenly broke.

“Can you stand up?” Big Black said.

“I’ll try,” Francis replied. With Big Black steadying him, and Napoleon holding out his hands as if he would break any fall, Francis lifted himself up, and pivoted his feet out of bed. He was dizzy for a second as blood rushed out of his head. Then he stood.

“That’s good,” Big Black whispered. “You must have gotten some kinda scare.”

Francis didn’t respond. This was obvious.

“You gonna be okay, C-Bird?”

“I hope so.”

“Let’s keep all this to ourselves, okay? Talk to Miss Jones and Peter, when he gets out of isolation.”

Francis nodded. Still shaky. He realized that the huge black attendant understood just how close he had come to not being able to get out of that bed ever again. Or falling into one of the blank holes occupied by the catatonic patients, who looked out on a world that existed only for themselves. He took an unsteady step forward, then another, and he felt blood flowing throughout his body and the risks of a greater madness than the one he already owned falling away from him. He could feel his muscles and his heart, all working. His voices cheered, then quieted, as if taking satisfaction in his every movement. He breathed out slowly, like a man who has just avoided being struck by a piece of falling rock. Then he smiled, regaining some of his familiar grin.

“Okay,” Francis said to Napoleon, still holding Big Black’s massive forearm to steady himself. “I think I could use something to eat.”

Both men nodded, and took a step forward, except it was Napoleon who hesitated.

“Who’s that?” he asked abruptly.

Francis and Big Black pivoted about, following Napoleon’s glance.

They both saw the same thing, at the same moment. Another man had failed to get out of bed that morning. He had gone unnoticed in the attention Napoleon had drawn to Francis. The man lay motionless, a misshapen lump on a steel bunk.

“What the hell,” the huge attendant said, more irritated than anything else.

Francis stepped forward several paces, and saw who it was.

“Hey,” Big Black said loudly, but there was no response.

Francis took a deep breath and then walked across the dormitory room, angling between crowded beds, to the supine man’s side.

It was the Dancer. The elderly man who’d been transferred into Amherst the day before. The retarded man’s bunkmate.

Francis looked down and saw the man’s rigid, stiff limbs. No more flowing, graceful motions listening to music only he could hear, Francis thought.

The Dancer’s face was set hard, almost porcelain in appearance. His skin was white, as if he’d been made up to go onstage. His eyes were wide open, as was his mouth. He looked surprised, maybe even shocked, or even more, perhaps terrified at the death that had come for him that night.

P
eter the Fireman sat cross-legged on the steel bunk in the isolation cell, like a young and impatient Buddha eagerly awaiting enlightenment. He had slept little the previous night, although the padding on the walls and ceiling had muffled most of the sounds of the unit, save the occasional high-pitched scream or disconnected angry shout that emerged from one of the other rooms very much like the one he was confined within. These random cries meant as much to him as animal sounds that echoed through a forest after dark; they bore no obvious logic or purpose except for the person that uttered them. Midway through the long night, Peter had wondered whether the screams that he heard were actually happening, or were more likely sounds that had been issued some time in the past by long-dead patients, and like radio beacons shot into space, were destined to reverberate through eternity into the darkness, never stopping, never ceasing and never finding a home. He felt haunted.

As daylight crept hesitantly into the cell through the small observation portal in the door, Peter pondered the bind he was in. He had no doubt that the offer from the Cardinal was sincere, although that was probably not the correct word, because sincerity didn’t seem to have much to do with his situation. The offer simply required him to disappear. Walk away from all the tangible aspects of his life and vanish into a new existence. The only location where his home, his family, his past, would continue to live was in his memory. There would be no returning once he accepted the offer. Who he was, and what
he had done, and why he had done it, were all to evaporate from the collective consciousness of the Boston Archdiocese, to be replaced by something new and shiny and with glistening spires that reached heavenward. In his own family, he’d be the brother who died under hushed circumstances, or the uncle who went away, never to return, and, as years passed, his family would come to believe whatever myth the Church helped to create, and who he had been would crumble away.

He assessed his alternatives: prison; MCI Bridgewater; maximum security; lockdowns and beatings. Probably for much of the rest of his life, because the considerable weight of the Archdiocese, which at this moment was pressuring prosecutors to allow him to vanish into a program in Oregon, would shift if he rejected the plan, and come down heavily on him. He knew there would be no other deals.

Peter could hear the distinctive clanging sound of a jail door being closed and hydraulic locks shutting with a whooshing noise. This made him smile, because he thought it about as close as he was likely to get to one of his friend C-Bird’s hallucinations, only this one was uniquely his.

For a moment, he remembered poor Lanky, filled with fear and delusion, his grasp on the little life that the hospital provided him dropping away, turning and pleading with Peter and Francis to help him. He wished, in that second, that Lucy could have heard those cries. It seemed to him that throughout his entire life people had been calling to him for help and that every time he’d tried to come to their assistance, no matter how fine his intentions, something had always gone wrong.

Peter could hear some sounds from the corridor beyond the bolted door to the isolation cell, and there was a thudding noise of another door being opened, then slammed shut. He couldn’t refuse the Cardinal’s offer. And, he couldn’t leave Francis and Lucy alone to face the Angel.

He understood, that however he managed it, he had to propel the investigation forward, as rapidly as possible. Time no longer allied itself with him.

Peter looked up at the locked door, as if he expected someone to open it right at that second. But there was no sound, not even from the restless corridor beyond, and he remained seated, trying to check his impatience, thinking that in some small way the situation he was in resembled his whole life. Everywhere he’d been, it was as if there was a locked door preventing him from moving freely.

So he waited for someone to come for him, dropping ever deeper into a canyon walled with contradictions, unsure whether he would be able to climb out.

“I see no apparent signs of foul play,” the medical director said stiffly, almost formally.

Doctor Gulptilil was standing next to the Dancer’s body where it lay porcelain-toned and death-rigid on the bunk. Mister Evil was at his side, as were two other psychiatrists and a psychologist from other housing units. One of the men, Francis had learned, doubled as the hospital’s pathologist, and he was bending closely over the Dancer, inspecting him cautiously. This physician was tall and slender, with a hawk nose and thick glasses and the nervous habit of clearing his throat before saying anything and nodding his head up and down so that his slightly unkempt shock of black hair bobbed, regardless whether he was agreeing or disagreeing. He had a clipboard, with a form on it, and he was taking some notes, jotting them down rapidly as Gulp-a-pill spoke.

“No signs of a beating,” Gulptilil said. “No external signs of trauma. No obvious wounds of any note.”

“Sudden heart failure,” the vulturelike doctor said, head moving rapidly. “I see from his records that he had been treated for a heart condition in the past couple of months.”

Lucy Jones was hovering just behind the doctors. “Look at his hands,” she said abruptly. “The nails are torn and bloody. Those could be defensive wounds.”

The doctors all turned to her, but it was Mister Evil that took it upon himself to respond. “He was caught up in a fight yesterday, as you well know. Really, just a bystander who got drawn into it, when two men slammed into him. Not something he would have participated in, but he struggled to get free from the melee. I suspect that’s how his nails were affected.”

“I suppose you would say the same about the scratches on his forearms?”

“Yes.”

“And the way the sheet and blanket are tangled around his feet?”

“Heart attack can be very fast and very painful and he might have twisted about for an instant before being overcome.”

The physicians all murmured in agreement. Gulp-a-pill turned to Lucy.

“Miss Jones,” he said, speaking slowly, patiently, which only underscored how impatient he truly was. “Death, alas, is not uncommon in the hospital. This unfortunate gentleman was elderly and had been confined here for many years. He had suffered one heart attack in the past, and there is little doubt in my mind that the emotional stress of moving from Williams to Amherst in the past days, coupled with the fight he was caught up in through no fault of his own, and the debilitating effect of substantial courses of medications over the years, all had conspired to weaken his cardiovascular system further. A most normal, to be sure, and not remarkable death, here at Western State. I thank you for your observation …”