Owl Dreams

by John T. Biggs

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sarah found Robert Collins milling around the Flanders common area. The morning nursing shift chased clients out of their rooms by 9:00 a.m. Unless they had “outside privileges” or therapy sessions, there was no other place to go.

  “Come with me.” A yellow legal pad and an arrogant facial expression gave Sarah untouchable status within the mental institution. People who take notes are to be avoided at all costs. She could be an attorney or a community organizer or a relative looking to cause trouble. No one—not the clients nor the orderlies nor the doctors nor the nurses—wanted their names written down on a yellow legal pad.

  Sarah led Robert to a bench on the periphery of the Commons and chased the occupants away with a series of meaningless questions. “Who was Brittany Spears’s first husband? What is the capitol of South Dakota? Where were you on September 11, 200l?” She printed the month, day and year in large Catholic School block letters across the top of the page and underlined it twice. By the time she finished, the clients had moved on.

  “Paranoids are easy.” She pointed at the precise spot where Robert was to sit. He responded like an obedient dog, but Sarah wasn’t quite ready to reward him with a treat.

  “Tell me again about your encounter with Dr. Moon in the cemetery.” She listened carefully while Robert repeated the story. He paused and stumbled over words. He struggled with the time line. But the elements didn’t change. Robert had hidden a paper in a dead man’s pocket—evidence Dr. Moon was a kidnapper.

  Sarah made him repeat the story two more times. No evolution or elaboration of the facts. Some of Robert’s story might be delusion or hallucination, but the essential parts were grounded in reality.

  “I’m going to break you out of here,” she told him. “But first we

  need a plan.”

  Sarah had two pens, red for problems, black for solutions. She learned this strategy from a CPA her mother had once taken as a lover.

  “A criminal without a plan is an inmate in training,” she said. Robert was already an inmate of sorts, but it didn’t pay to dwell on that. “What can we try and what could go wrong? Tell me anything you can think of.”

  “Well . . . .” The worry lines on Robert’s forehead looked like a study in contour plowing.

  “We’re brainstorming here,” Sarah told him. “There are no stupid suggestions.”

  “I guess we could run for it,” Robert said. “But then we might get caught.”

  “Ok, right.” He wasn’t going to be much help.

  “Harry Potter used a cloak of invisibility,” Robert said. “I don’t suppose you have one of those.”

  “Robert, please . . . .”

  “Or a shrink ray, like in Fantastic Voyage.”

  “Ok, so there is such a thing as a stupid suggestion.”

  “I usually get my best ideas from the wind.” Robert said. “And the wind doesn’t blow much inside Flanders.”

  “I guess that explains it.” If things went dreadfully wrong, Sarah supposed there might be dissertation possibilities for an anthropology student in a women’s prison.

  “Just sit quietly,” she said, “And let me work on the plan.”

  “No sooner said than . . . .” Robert made a zipper sign across his lips and affected a blank stare. It looked like he’d been practicing. Sarah waved a hand in front of his face. No response. Just like the Royal Guards at Buckingham palace. Good-looking ornaments without apparent function.

  For as long as Sarah could remember, she’d watched Marie’s boyfriends engage in all manner of criminal activities. Bad guys like to act on ideas while they are fresh and new, before they blur into incomprehensible smudges like prison tattoos. That’s why they steal cars with sleeping children in the back seats, televisions they can’t carry, jewelry they can’t sell, and drugs they can’t identify.

  Not one of them had ever stolen a schizophrenic? Was that even a crime? If so, was it a felony or a misdemeanor? She might run a few words through Google later on and see what the Internet had to say.

  ‘Run away, but they might catch us,’ Sarah wrote in red. Maybe it wasn’t such a stupid idea. “Walk, don’t run,” she wrote in black. Robert didn’t look all that crazy. He could be a visitor, or a staff member, or even a resident. She’d mistaken him for a doctor when they first met. Sarah could walk Robert out of Flanders if she could think of some place within the institution where people wouldn’t know him.

  Some place with exits. Sarah had become well acquainted with the institution’s security system over the years, thanks to her mother’s frequent involuntary admissions.

  There was just one locked-down area, reserved for clients with a recent history of violence. Fortunately for Sarah, Robert Collins did not fall into that category.

  The internal security force consisted mostly of burly orderlies and male nurses who could immobilize disruptive clients long enough to inject them with pharmaceuticals designed to quench their inner fires.

  Unarmed Rent-a-Cops restricted access to the institution by walking visitors through a metal detector and going through purses. They kept a naughty-list and checked it twice just like Santa.

  The most important thing about psychiatric patients is that no one except for hospital administration wants them out. A client might stumble onto a clever escape plan, like walking through the front door when no one was looking, but friends and family members usually wouldn’t help. Breaking Robert Collins out of Flanders should be as easy as stealing garbage from a city dump.

  “I can pick locks if it comes to that,” Sarah told Robert. “Marie’s old boyfriends taught me how to forge ID’s, disable alarms, and hotwire cars.” He looked at her, but kept his vow of silence. Sarah hoped the emotion in Robert’s eyes was admiration, but it looked a lot like love.

  “There are lots of ways to get you out of here,” she said. “The best plans are usually the simplest.”

  Non-confined clients moved freely within unrestricted areas of the hospital. They could read, play games, or watch television in the common area. There was a makeshift movie theater, complete with automated popcorn and soft drink concessions. There was a cafeteria where clients could enjoy institutionally prepared meals with visitors, alongside doctors and other staff members.

  “Cafeteria.” Sarah wrote that word in black. Thanks to her mother, she had eaten many meals in that facility. The cafeteria was a gaping hole in the flimsy fabric of the hospital’s security net. The food service workers entered and exited the kitchen through a back door that opened onto a small employee parking lot.

  “Cafeteria workers won’t talk to crazy people or anyone who earns more than twelve dollars an hour.” Sarah had overheard one food service employee advise another, “Don’t look them in the eye. It turns them wild.” She was never certain exactly who might be provoked to violence by an incautious brush with minimum wage eyes, but neither were the workers. Their gazes moved from the unsightly tubs of overcooked meat and vegetables to the abstract pointillist patterns of the terrazzo floor. They might be able to identify doctors, staff or patients by the styles of their shoes, but never by their faces.

  The only glitch in Sarah’s plan was that it might succeed and then she would have a schizophrenic on her hands. So far Robert had been reasonable and well mannered. But stability was not a hallmark of mental illness, and God only knew how he’d behave after she broke him out.

  Would he wander off to attend conventions of aliens and talking buildings? Would he become her permanent inconvenient sidekick, filling in when her mother lapsed into periods of relative sanity? How would she get rid of him, once he’d helped her find the evidence she needed to rescue Baby Andrew?

  Sarah resisted the impulse to write that problem on her legal pad in bright red letters. Maybe she wouldn’t want to get rid of him. Sarah’s experience with men was limited to say the least, but aside from a few major-league quirks, Robert was better than most. If she set aside the fact that he talked with the wind, he was perhaps the m
ost down to earth man she had ever met. Is this how her mother started out?

  She put her doubts aside for the moment. She wasn’t taking Robert as a lover, even though she wasn’t totally repelled by the idea. She was enlisting his help in recovering Andrew Tiger. She was acting purely out of altruism.

  Altruism! The word had a nice ring to it, so much better than delusion or rationalization. Sarah didn’t like to spend too much time considering what she was about to do. It reminded her too much of her crazy mother’s past adventures.

  Marie Ferraro scowled at Robert and Sarah from the far side of the commons. The famous Dr. Moon had told her all about Robert Collins. She’d warned her daughter, but Sarah wasn’t listening.

  Robert smiled at Marie and waved. The boy was charming, just the kind of man who routinely swept her off her feet when she was Sarah’s age. A good-looking man with an easy smile and a way with words is dangerous as a rattlesnake—more dangerous. Men seldom give a warning before they strike.

  But you survive the poison. Marie knew that from hard experience; when it came to men, Marie knew everything there was to know. Even the worst of them had shining moments and it’s easy to be taken in when their motives seem so pure. Like when Robert taught her how to be close to her true love, even though Archie was locked in prison fifty miles away.

  You have your ways, Robert Collins. I’ll give you that. Thanks to Robert, Marie could sense the bits of Archie floating in the world around her like miniature swarms of invisible insects. When conditions were right, Marie felt her lover’s presence as clearly and completely as if he were standing right beside her.

  When Archie breathed, he released his bittersweet Apache essence into the wind. Wild Indian molecules tantalized the olfactory centers of Marie’s brain. They mixed with her saliva and left a taste that reminded her of champagne. When she walked outside, the wind carried Archie’s voice to her. Proper nouns and adjectives, never a complete thought. Just enough to let Marie know her name was on his lips.

  Thank you for that, Robert Collins.

  Marie would have been taken in if not for the famous Dr. Moon. “The boy is not all bad,” the doctor told her. “But the bad outweighs the good. It’s his nature to be devious.” The young man’s helping hand would finally close on her soul in a relentless grip of death.

  Sarah and Robert huddled together on a couch as far away from the televisions as they could get. Planning something, and Marie couldn’t stop it. All she could do was stand apart and scream at them with her body language. No use. Men never listened to Marie unless they were in love, and Sarah never listened at all.

  “I won’t let you down,” Robert promised Sarah. “I’m desperate to get out of here. The medications make my mouth dry and the wind doesn’t talk to me.”

  Sarah tried her best to ignore Robert’s motives for wanting to escape. She needed something tangible to take to the police, something that would convince them Andrew Tiger had been kidnapped, in spite of denials by the boy’s parents.

  “Do what I say, and don’t start acting crazy,” Sarah said.

  Robert wanted to take Marie along. “We need to get her out of here, away from Dr. Moon.”

  “How many inmates do you think I can break out of this asylum?”

  “Clients,” Robert said. “They call us clients.”

  Lunch at Flanders Mental Hospital blended seamlessly with breakfast and dinner to accommodate rotating staff schedules and clients whose internal clocks had been reset. It passed for enlightened therapy.

  Snacks kept mental patients on the straight and narrow better than Prozac. They were cheaper too, bought with good behavior commissary credits, redeemable Monday through Saturday from nine to five and noon to six on Sunday.

  Psychiatrists called the policy “passive socialization.” It turned the cafeteria into a demilitarized zone, where everyone ignored aberrant behaviors and unprofessional activities unless they got too loud or too disgusting. No one paid the slightest attention when Sarah led Robert into the facility with two white clinic coats tucked under her arm.

  “Borrowed from a laundry hamper,” she told him. The jackets smelled like Gillette Sports Stick and isopropyl alcohol.

  “With any luck, no one will notice you’re gone until the evening count.” She made Robert sit at a table while she purchased them club sandwiches and coffee. Sarah hoped the food and the caffeine would reduce the effects of his medications and allow him to walk more like a fatigued psychiatric resident and less like an actor in the latest Living Dead movie.

  Robert ate with gusto. His eyes were sharp. His speech was crisp.

  “I ditched my morning meds,” he told Sarah. “Pouched them like a hamster.” He inflated his cheeks to demonstrate the technique.

  “Stop it.” Her right hand squeezed the air out of Robert’s mouth along with a stray piece of lettuce.

  “I hope your coordination is as good as your appetite.”

  “I’m hardly crazy at all right now.” He was in a zone of sanity his therapists could never consistently produce. Somewhere between being doped into oblivion and talking to the wind.

  Sarah could see that Robert’s sense of taste was fully functional. He obviously relished the whole wheat bread and the turkey bacon in his sandwich. His other senses were awakening too. When she stood and pushed her hands through the arms of her clinic jacket, Robert checked her out.

  So damned obvious. But it felt good to be appreciated, even by a mental patient.

  “Keep your mind on business.”

  Her comment elicited a blush. Another sign the meds were wearing off.

  So few men made Sarah want to smile. Robert had his winning ways. No guile, no undercurrent of violence. Totally different from Marie’s boyfriends. Except for the poorly concealed sexual agenda. Every man had that.

  “It’s time,” she said. “Walk beside me. Let me do the talking.”

  Before Robert could object, Sarah grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the entrance to the kitchen.

  “You won’t need this.” She threw his clinic jacket over her shoulder like a warrior’s banner. Sarah liked the feel of Robert’s hand in hers. She liked the way he matched his steps to hers, like a male dance student being back led by a more experienced partner. Robert demonstrated no signs of that irritating masculine desire to be in charge. Not manly perhaps, but nice.

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this.” Sarah adopted the tone of a reasonable but angry mother who had decided to administer a spanking but hadn’t quite settled on a target.

  The cafeteria workers scurried out of her way. Now might be a good time to bus dishes or inspect the walk-in freezer. Heads turned away as Sarah as walked briskly through the kitchen with Robert in tow. Pots and pans stopped rattling. Institutional silverware stopped clinking. The only sounds in the kitchen were Sarah’s threatening utterances and the hostile clatter of her shoes punishing the terrazzo floor.

  “Not so fast!” A burly man with a café au lait complexion and three days worth of facial stubble stepped into Sarah’s path. His hair net wasn’t up to its job, and neither was the laundry that cleaned his knee length lab coat. Across his ample left man-breast, the word “Supervisor” was embroidered in faded black thread, just over a beet stain that almost obscured his name.

  “Tommy.” Sarah hadn’t meant to say the name out loud. She gave Robert’s hand a jerk, and he came to rest at her side.

  “You docs don’t belong here,” Tommy said. “Back here it’s just me and my people.” The supervisor smiled. Something green had lodged between his front teeth.

  Sarah worked hard at ignoring it. Robert didn’t.

  “I think its spinach,” he told Sarah, “But it might be a very old piece of lettuce.”

  That was just one of many things Tommy didn’t understand. He pointed toward the dining room. “Get out!”

  Tommy was a man of few words, but Sarah had a few of her own. “Supervisor Tommy, just the man we’re looking for.” Too
bad she’d left her yellow legal pad in the common area.

  “Say what?” Tommy pinched his nose then wiped his fingers on his lab coat.

  “I’m Dr. Sarah Jessica Parker, and this is my assistant, Dr. Robert McNamara. We’re food inspectors, Tommy. Can you guess why we’re here?”

  “I ain’t did nothing wrong.” Tommy smoothed his lab coat with his questionably clean hands, then tucked stray locks of hair under his net.

  “I know my rights.” He recited two of them. “I don’t have to say nothing. I want my union rep.”

  Sarah released her hold on Robert. She held her open hand three inches in front of Tommy’s face, like a traffic cop in a very bad mood.

  Tommy stepped back. Red blotches appeared on his neck and face. His pupils contracted. His jaw muscles tightened. Marie’s boyfriends usually looked this way just before holding up a drugstore.

  Sarah said, “Cool it, Tommy. No biggie, just a standard complaint.” His blotches faded slightly.

  “About the beef tips.” There were always beef tips, weren’t there? Sarah pointed to the serving area without looking. “Robert, bring the tub of beef tips over here. Use oven mitts, in case they’re hot.”

  “Who complained about the tips? Everybody loves the tips. Just like the ones at the Golden Corral.” His blotches went back to their previous shade of red.

  By this time, Robert had lifted the heavy serving tub out of its well. “Not hot at all,” he said. “Barely room temperature.”

  “That’s how the crazy people like ’em.” Tommy took a step toward Sarah. His jaw muscles clenched with the rhythm of a beating heart. “The shrinks like ’em that way too. Even the colored nurses.”

  “Stop!” Sarah raised her hand again, in what felt like a modified Nazi salute. “It’s not the tips. It’s what is in the tips.”

  Robert came to an unsteady stop beside Sarah, his eyes fixed on the heavy serving tub, careful not to spill the gravy. Sarah stepped on his closest foot and gave him the slightest shove—just enough to send Robert and the tub falling in the supervisor’s direction.

  “Damn!” Tommy wasn’t so proud of his beef tips now that he had a closer look.

  He’d need a new lab coat. At least some good would come of this.

  “Damn!” Tommy muttered something about workman’s compensation and official complaints, notarized and signed with a sterling silver ballpoint pen in a lawyer’s office. “As soon as I get cleaned off, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  But by that time, Dr. Sarah Jessica Parker and Dr. Robert MacNamara were in the parking lot, on their way to Sarah’s car.