The Madman's Tale (63 page)

He told himself that the situation in the hospital was not all that different. A detective takes many disparate clues and pieces them together into a consistent whole, he thought to himself. He was persuaded that everything that he needed to know in order to paint the portrait that would become the Angel had already taken place, but somehow, in the wildly fluctuating, erratic world of the mental hospital, the context had been hidden.

Francis looked over at Peter, who was dashing cold water onto his face at a washbasin.
He will never see what I can see
Francis told himself. There was a chorus within him of agreement.

But before he could go any further with this thinking, Francis saw Peter pull himself off the basin, look up at himself in a mirror and shake his head, as if displeased with what he saw in the reflection. At the same time, Peter saw Francis hovering behind him and smiled. “Ah, C-Bird. Top of the morning to you. We have survived another night here, which, upon reflection and on balance, is no small feat and an accomplishment that should be celebrated with a hearty, if not altogether tasty, breakfast. What do you suppose this fine day will bring?”

Francis shook his head to indicate he was unsure.

“Maybe some progress?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe something good?”

“Unlikely.”

Peter laughed. “Francis, buddy, there’s no pill and certainly no shot they can give you in here to reduce or remove a sense of cynicism.”

Francis nodded. “None that can give you optimism, either.”

“Touché,” Peter said. He lost the grin he wore, and leaned toward Francis. “We’ll make some headway today, I promise.” Then he smiled again, and added, “
Headway
. That’s a little bit of a joke. You’ll get it soon enough.”

Francis had no idea what he was talking about, but asked, “How can you promise that?”

“Because Lucy thinks a different approach might work.”

“A different approach?”

Peter looked around for a moment, then whispered, “If you cannot bring yourself to the man you’re hunting, perhaps you can bring the man to you.”

Francis recoiled slightly, as if pummeled by the noise within him of dozens of voices screaming danger. Peter did not notice the sudden shift in Francis’s appearance, like the abrupt approach of a storm cloud on a distant horizon, as the younger man chewed over what Peter had said. Instead, he clapped Francis on the back and sardonically added, “Come on. Let’s eat soggy pancakes or runny eggs and see what starts to unfold. Big day, today, I’m guessing, C-Bird. Keep your eyes and ears open.”

The two of them stepped from the washroom, to where the men of the dormitory were starting to stumble and shuffle out of the doorway into the corridor. The start of the daily routine. Francis was more than a little unsure what it was that he was supposed to be watching out for, but any questions he might have had were instantly erased in that moment by the high-pitched, shrill and desperate scream that furiously echoed down the hallway, reverberating in the air around them with a complete helplessness that chilled everyone who heard it.

It is easy to remember that scream
.

I have thought about it many times, over many years. There are screams of fear, screams of shock, screams that speak of anxiety, tension, and some even of despair. This seemed to mingle all those qualities together into something so hopeless and terrifying that it defied reason and comfort, amplified by all the terrors of the mental hospital rolled together. A mother’s scream of danger closing in on her child. A soldier’s scream of pain as he sees his wound and knows it speaks of death. Something ancient and animal that emerges only in the rarest and most fearsome of moments. It was as if something fixed firmly in the center of things was suddenly, abruptly gone, and it was too much to bear
.

I never learned who emitted that scream, but it became a part of all of us who heard it. And stayed with us, no matter how much time had passed
.

I pushed out into the corridor directly behind Peter, who was moving quickly toward the sound. I was only peripherally aware of some of the others, who were shrinking to the sides, hugging the walls. I saw Napoleon pushing himself into a corner and Newsman, suddenly not curious in the slightest, huddling down as if he could cloak himself from the vibrant noise. Peter’s footsteps resounded against the corridor floor, as he picked up his pace, and hurried down the path of the echo toward the source of the scream. I caught just the smallest look at his face, which was set with a sudden harshness and clarity that was unfamiliar in the hospital. It was as if the sound had triggered some immense worry within him, and he was trying to outdistance all the fears that accompanied it
.

The scream had come from the far end of the corridor, past the entrance to the women’s dormitory. But the memory of the scream was as real in my mind as it was that morning in the Amherst Building. It curled around me, like smoke from a fire, and I grasped my pencil and wrote furiously on the wall of my apartment, fearing every second that the Angel’s great mocking laughter would supplant it in my recollection, and I needed to get it down before that took place. In my imagination, I could see Peter, running headlong fast, as if he could outrace the echo
.

Peter rushed forward, sprinting down the Amherst Building corridor, knowing that only one thing in the world could generate that sort of despair in a person, even a mad one: death. He dodged the other patients, who were shrinking from the sound, near panicked, unsettled, and filled with explosions of anxiety and fear, as they tried to escape a noise that terrified them. Even the Catos and the retarded men, who so often seemed oblivious to the entirety of the world around them, were pushing to the walls, trying to hide. One man was rocking back and forth in a squat, his hands held tight over his ears. Peter could hear the doleful drumbeat of his own shoes slapping hard against the flooring, and he understood that there was something within him that always drove him hard toward dying.

Francis was right behind him, fighting the urge to flee in the opposite direction, swept up and carried along by Peter’s headlong rush. He could hear Big Black’s deep voice, shouting commands, “Get back, please! Get back! Let us through!” as the attendant and his brother raced down the hallway. A nurse in white uniform came out from behind the wire mesh station. Her name was Nurse Richards, but of course she was called Nurse Riches instead, but the elegance of her nickname was ruined by the look of unaccustomed distress and outright terror in her eyes.

By the entrance to the women’s dormitory, a disheveled woman with wiry
gray hair was rocking back and forth and keening to herself. Another was pirouetting about in circles. A third had put her forehead against the wall and was mumbling something in what Francis thought might be a foreign language, but might also have been gibberish; it was impossible to tell. Two others were wailing, sobbing, and had thrown themselves to the floor where they twitched and moaned as if possessed by devils. He could not tell if any one of the women he saw had issued the scream. It might have been any one of them, or someone else whom he had not seen. But it seemed to him that the noise of despair was still in the air around them, an unrelenting siren’s call dragging them inexorably forward. Inside his own head, his voices were shouting warnings, trying to get Francis to stop, to retreat, to run away from danger. It took a strong physical effort to ignore them, and he tried hard to keep pace with Peter, as if the Fireman’s sense of reason and understanding might actually carry him along as well.

Peter hesitated only for a moment by the doorway, turning rapidly toward the disheveled woman, and demanding forcefully, “Where?” in a voice that bellowed authority.

The woman pointed toward the end of the corridor, to the stairwell behind what were supposed to be locked doors, and then burst out in a cackle and laugh, that disintegrated almost as swiftly into a series of wracking sobs.

Peter stepped forward, Francis directly behind him, and reached out for the handle on the large steel door. He pushed it open in a single, unafraid motion, then stopped.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God!” he burst out.

Peter gasped in a deep breath, then whispered the second part of the prayer,“… Pray for us sinners in this the hour of our death …” He started to raise his hand to make the sign of the cross, all that Catholic School training coming back to him in an instant, but he stopped in midmotion.

Francis craned past him, felt all the air drain from his chest and recoiled sharply. He stepped aside, as if to steady himself, suddenly dizzy. He thought there was no blood in his heart, and he worried that he might pass out.

“Stay back, C-Bird,” Peter whispered. He probably didn’t mean this, but the words fell like some feathers caught in a gust of wind.

Big Black and Little Black stopped their own rush forward right behind the two patients, staring up, suddenly quieted. After a second, Little Black quietly said, “Goddamn, goddamn …” but nothing else. Big Black turned his face to the wall.

Francis made himself look ahead.

Hanging from a makeshift noose fashioned from a twisted dingy gray bedsheet, tied to the iron railing leading to the second floor, was Cleo.

Her chubby face was misshapen, blown up and inflated, twisted gargoyle-like in death. The noose fashioned around her neck had creased the folds of skin, cutting in like a knot at the bottom of a child’s balloon. Her hair cascaded wildly around her shoulders in a tangled mess, and her blank eyes were open, but fixed ahead. Her mouth was cracked slightly askew, giving her an appearance of shock. She wore a simple, gray shift that hung from her sloped shoulders like a bag, and one gaudy pink sandal had slipped from her foot to the floor. Francis saw that her toenails were painted red.

He thought he was having trouble breathing, and he wanted to turn his face away and avert his eyes, but the portrait of death in front of him had a sickly, compelling urgency to it, and he stayed rooted in position, fixed on the figure hanging from the stairwell. He found himself trying to reconcile Cleo with her constant torrent of obscenities, her bouncing, energetic devastation of all challengers at the Ping-Pong table, with the lumpy, grotesque figure before him. The stairwell had a shadowy half light, as if the single uncovered bulbs that lit each floor were inadequate to hold back the tendrils of darkness that were eager to creep into the area. The air seemed musty and hot, as if rarely circulated, like inside an attic never visited.

He let his eyes sweep over her figure again, and then he saw something.

“Peter,” Francis whispered slowly, “look at her hand.”

Peter’s eyes dropped from Cleo’s face to her hand and for a moment he was silent. Then he said, “I’ll be damned.”

Cleo’s right thumb had been severed. A streak of crimson ran down the outside of her shift, and along the side of her naked leg, finally pooling in a black splotch on the floor beneath her body. Francis stared at the circle of blood, then gagged.

“Damn,” Peter said again.

The severed thumb was on the floor about a foot, perhaps two, away from the center of the small maroon circle of sticky blood, left there almost as if it had been discarded like some petty afterthought.

A thought occurred to Francis, and he surveyed the scene rapidly, looking for one single item. His eyes raced right and left, searching as quickly as he could, but he did not see what he was looking for. He wanted to say something, but instead kept his mouth closed. Peter, as well, had grown silent.

It was Little Black who finally spoke. “There’s going to be hell to pay over this,” he said glumly.