The Madman's Tale (60 page)

Peter slowly exhaled. The hospital had a way of making one dwell on all the thoughts that echoed within him. He stopped in midthought, realizing that he had been moving his lips as he spoke with himself.

Again, he breathed out. Close. Almost talking to yourself.

He looked down at his hands, for no real reason other than to reassure himself that he was still intact. Get out, he told himself. Whatever you have to do, just get out.

But as he reached this conclusion, he saw Lucy Jones enter the corridor. She had her head down, and he could see that she was both deep in her own thoughts and upset. And, in that second, he saw a future that frightened him, leaving him with an empty, helpless feeling. He would exit, disappearing off to some program in Oregon. She would exit, returning to her office and the steady processing of crime after crime. Francis would be left behind, with Napoleon, Cleo, and the Moses brothers.

Lanky would go to prison.

And the Angel would find someone else’s fingers to take.

F
rancis spent an unsettled night, sometimes lying rigid on his bunk, listening for any sound that was out of the ordinary in the dormitory that would signal the return of the Angel to his bedside. Dozens of these noises penetrated past his squeezed-shut eyes, echoing as deep as his own heartbeat. A hundred times he thought he felt the Angel’s hot breath against his forehead, and the sensation of the cold knife blade was never far from his memory. Even in the few moments when he slid inexorably away from the night fears that had driven him to sweat and anxiety, into a semblance of sleep, his rest was disturbed by frightening images. He imagined Lucy holding up her own hand, mutilated like Short Blond’s. Then, this image evaporated into one of himself, and he’d felt as if his own throat had been slashed and he was in his nether state desperately trying to hold the gaping wound together.

He welcomed the first morning light that slithered through the window-panes, past the metal bars and grates, if only to signal that the hours when the Angel seemed to own the hospital were finished. For a moment he remained in his bunk, clinging to the oddest of thoughts, which was some half-finished notion that it was somehow wrong for the patients in the hospital to have the same fears of dying as the normal people outside the walls. Inside the walls, life seemed to be much more tenuous, it didn’t seem to have precisely the same quotient as outside. It was, he thought, as if they didn’t amount to as much, and were not quite as valuable and therefore shouldn’t put such a high price on
their lives. He remembered reading in a newspaper once, that the sum total value of the parts of the human body only amounted to something like a dollar or two. He thought to himself that the inmates of Western State were probably worth just pennies. If even that.

Francis went to the washroom and cleaned up, readying himself for the day. He felt a little comforted by the familiar signs of life in the hospital; Little Black and his huge brother were out in the corridor trying to get patients to make their way to the dining room for breakfast, a little like a pair of mechanics tweaking an engine, trying to get it to turn over and start running. He saw Mister Evil cruising the hallway, ignoring the entreaties from various folks about one problem or another. Francis wanted to embrace the routine.

And then, as quickly as this thought hit him, he feared it.

It was how the days slipped away. The hospital, with its compulsion for simply getting through time, was like a drug, even more powerful than those that came as pills or hypodermics. With addiction, came oblivion.

Francis shook his head, for one thing was clear to him: The Angel was much closer to the world outside, and he suspected that if he ever wanted to rejoin it, that was the mountain he would have to climb. He thought: Finding Short Blond’s killer might be the only sane act left in the entire world to him.

Inside his head, his voices were a jumble of turmoil. They were clearly trying to tell him something, but it was as if they couldn’t all agree on precisely what it was.

One warning did come through, however. All the voices agreed that were he to be left behind to face the Angel alone, without Peter and Lucy, he was not likely to survive. He didn’t know how he would die, or precisely when. Sometime on the Angel’s own timetable. Murdered in his bed. Smothered like the Dancer or throat slashed like Short Blond or perhaps some other way of killing that he hadn’t considered yet, but it would happen.

There would be no place to hide, other than to descend into some greater madness, which forced the hospital to lock him up each day, all day, in one of the isolation cells.

He looked around for his two fellow investigators, and thought, for the first time, that it was time for him to answer the questions that the Angel kept asking.

Francis slumped up against the corridor wall.
It’s there. It’s right there in front of you!
He looked up and saw Cleo steaming up the corridor, arms waving, like a great gray battleship slicing through a regatta of timid sailboats. Whatever was disturbing her this morning was lost in an avalanche of obscenities muttered in tempo with the wildly swinging arms, so that each “Goddamn!” “Motherfuckers!” “Sons of bitches!” was issued like the stroke of a clock. Patients shrank aside as she cruised past, and in that second Francis saw
something.
It’s not that the Angel knows how to be different. It’s that he knows how to be the same
.

When he looked up, in Cleo’s wake, he saw Peter. The Fireman seemed to be engaged in a heated conversation with Mister Evil, who was shaking his head negatively, back and forth, as Peter inched first closer to the psychologist, then back. After a moment, Mister Evil seemed to dismiss what Peter had to say, and turned on his heel and cruised back down the corridor. Peter, left standing, raised his voice and shouted after Mister Evil, “You need to tell Gulptilil! Today.” And then he quieted. Mister Evil kept his back turned, as if to refuse to acknowledge what Peter had shouted. Francis peeled himself off the wall, and quickly went over to the Fireman.

“Peter?” Francis asked.

“Hey, C-Bird,” Peter responded, looking up a little like someone who has been interrupted. “What is it?”

Francis whispered. “Peter, when you look at us, the rest of the patients here, what do you see?”

He hesitated, then responded, “I don’t know, Francis. It’s a little bit like Alice in Wonderland. Everything is curiouser and curiouser.”

“But you’ve seen all the types of crazy that there are in here, haven’t you?”

Peter hesitated, suddenly bending forward. Lucy was coming down the corridor, and Peter gave her a little wave, as he stepped closer to Francis. “C-Bird sees something,” he said quietly. “What is it?”

“The man we’re looking for,” Francis whispered, just as Lucy hovered close, “is no more crazy than you. But he’s hiding by pretending to be something else.”

“Keep going,” Peter said softly.

“All of his madness, at least, the murdering madness and the finger-cutting madness, all that isn’t like any of the regular craziness we have in here. He plans. He thinks. It’s all about being evil, just like Lanky kept saying. It’s not about hearing voices or being deluded, or anything else. But in here, he hides because no one would think to look at him and not see a crazy person, but instead see something evil …”

Francis shook his head, as if speaking the thoughts that were echoing inside of him was painful.

“What are you saying, C-Bird? What do you think?” Peter had lowered his voice some.

“What I’m saying is that we went all over all those admissions forms and conducted all those interviews because we’re looking for something that connects someone in here with the outside world. You and Lucy, what were you searching for? Men with violence in their past. Psychopaths. Men with obvious anger. Police records. Maybe people hearing voices that order them to do evil
things to women. You want to find someone who is both crazy and criminal, right?”

Lucy finally spoke up. “That’s the only approach that makes sense …”

“But in here,
everyone
has some crazy impulse or another. And any number of them could be killers, right?
Everyone
is walking some sort of thin line in here.”

“Yes, but …” Lucy was chewing on what Francis was saying.

Francis pivoted toward her. “But don’t you think the Angel knows that, too?”

She didn’t reply to this.

Francis took a deep breath. “The Angel is someone with nothing in his record that anyone could point to. On the outside, he’s one person. In here, he’s something else. Like a chameleon who changes color with his surroundings. And he’s someone we would never think of looking at. That’s how he can be safe. And that’s how he can do what he wants.”

Peter looked skeptical and Lucy, too, wore a look that seemed to need more convincing. She spoke first, “So, Francis, you think the Angel is faking his mental illness?” She let this question drag out and linger, as if in the word
faking
she had already implied the impossibility of that action.

Francis shook his head, and then nodded. Contradictions that seemed so clear to him weren’t to the other two. “He can’t fake voices. He can’t fake delusions. He couldn’t fake being …” Francis took a deep breath, before continuing, “… like me. The doctors could see through that. Even Mister Evil would recognize that before too long.”

“So?” Peter asked.

“Look around,” Francis answered. He pointed across the hallway to where the large, hulking retarded man who’d been transferred from Williams was leaning against the wall, clutching his Raggedy Andy doll and crooning softly to the gaily colored bits of fabric with its jaunty hat and crooked smile. Then Francis saw a Cato standing motionless in the center of the corridor, eyes raised to the ceiling, as if his vision could penetrate the soundproofing, the support beams, the flooring and furniture on the second floor, straight through, past everything, right through the roof and up into the morning blue sky above. “How hard,” Francis asked quietly, “would it be to be dumb? Or quiet? And if you were like one of them, who in here would ever pay any attention to you?”

Howling, screeching, caterwauling noise like a hundred screaming feral cats scraped at every nerve ending in my body. Clammy, moist sweat dripped down between my eyes, blinding me, stinging. I was short of breath, wheezing like a sick
man, my hands quivering. I barely trusted my voice to make any sound other than a low, helpless moan
.

The Angel hovered next to me, spitting with rage
.

He did not have to say why, for every word I’d written told him
.

I twisted on the floor, as if some electric current were charging through my body. They never gave me electric shock treatment at Western State. Probably that was the only cruelty masquerading as a cure that I haven’t had to endure. But I suspected the pain that I was in this moment was little different
.

I could see
.

That was what hurt me
.

When I turned in that corridor inside the hospital and spoke those words to Peter and Lucy, it was as if I were opening the one door within myself that I had never wanted to open. The greatest barricaded, nailed shut and sealed tight door within me. When you are mad, you’re capable of nothing. But you’re also capable of everything. To be caught between the two extremes is agony
.

All my life, all I wanted was to be normal. Even tortured, like Peter and Lucy were, but normal. Able to modestly function in the outside world, enjoy the simplest of things. A fine morning. A greeting from a friend. A tasty meal. A routine conversation. A sense of belonging. But I couldn’t, because I knew, right in that moment, that I would forever be doomed to be closer in spirit and action to the man I hated and the man that scared me. The Angel was giving in and luxuriating in all the murderous evil thoughts that lurked within me. He was a fun house mirror version of myself. I had the same rage. The same desire. The same evil. I had just concealed it, shunted it away, thrown it into the deepest hole within me that I could find and covered it up with every mad thought, like boulders and dirt, so that it was buried where I hoped it could never burst forth
.

In the hospital, the Angel truly made only one mistake
.

He should have killed me when he could
.

“
So,” he whispered in my ear, “I’m here now to rectify that error in judgment
.”