The two attendants kept to a leisurely pace as they moved through the hospital grounds toward the rear of the complex, where there was a small garden. A picnic table that had been through a rough winter, its surface warped and scarred by the weather, held some boxes of seeds and a red child’s play bucket with a few trowels and hand shovels arranged within. There was an aluminum watering pail and a hose attached to a single faucet that rose up on a lone pipe directly from the ground. Within a few seconds, Big Black and Little Black had the outdoor group on their hands and knees in the swatch of dirt, raking and tilling with the small hand tools, preparing the earth for planting. Francis kept at this for a few moments, then he looked up.
Beyond the garden was another piece of ground, a long rectangle enclosed by an old wooden picket fence that had once been painted white, but had faded over time to a dull gray. Weeds and unkempt grasses pushed up in tufts through the hardscrabble earth. He guessed that it was a cemetery of sorts, because there were two faded granite headstones, each slightly out of kilter, so that they looked like uneven teeth in a child’s mouth. Then behind the back picket fence was a line of trees, planted closely together to form a natural barrier and obscure a metal link fence.
Then he glanced around, back toward the hospital itself. To his left, partially obscured by a dormitory, was the power plant, with a smokestack that released a thin plume of white smoke into the blue sky. Hidden under the ground, leading to all the buildings, were tunnels with heating ducts. He could see some sheds, with equipment stored to their sides. The remaining buildings looked much the same, brick and ivy, with slate gray rooflines. Most were designed to hold patients, but one had been converted to a dormitory for nurse-trainees, and several others redesigned into duplex apartments where some of the younger psychiatric residents and their families stayed. These were discernible because they had telltale children’s toys scattered about in front, and one had a sandbox. Near the administration building there was also a security building, where the hospital’s guard staff checked in and out. He took note that the administration building had a wing with an auditorium, where, he guessed staff meetings and lectures were given. But all in all, there was a depressing similarity to the complex. It was hard to discern precisely what the designer’s layout had meant to suggest, for the buildings had a haphazard arrangement that defied rational planning. Two would be right next to each other, but a third would be angled away. It was almost as if they had been slapped down into space without any sense of order.
The front of the hospital complex was enclosed by a tall redbrick wall, with an ornate black wrought-iron entranceway. He couldn’t see a sign out front, but he doubted there would be one, anyway. If one approached the hospital, he guessed, one already knew what it was, and what it was for, so a sign would have been redundant.
He stared at the wall and tried to measure it with his eyes. He thought the wall at least ten to twelve feet high. The wall was replaced on the sides, and on the back end of the hospital by chain-link fencing, which was rusted in many spots and topped with strands of rusted barbed wire. In addition to the garden, there was an exercise area, a swatch of black macadam, which had a basketball hoop at one end and a volleyball net in the center, but both these items were bent and broken, blackened by disuse and lack of care. He couldn’t imagine anyone using either.
“What you looking at C-Bird?” Little Black asked.
“The hospital,” Francis replied. “I just didn’t know how big it was.”
“Many, too many, here now,” Little Black said quietly. “Every dormitory filled to bursting. Beds jammed up close together. People with nothing to do, just hanging in the hallways. Not enough games. Not enough therapy. Just everybody in here getting real close together. That ain’t good.”
Francis looked over at the huge gate that he’d passed through on his first day at the hospital. It was wide open.
“They lock it at night,” Little Black said, anticipating his question.
“Mister Evans thought I was going to try to run away,” Francis said.
Little Black shook his head and smiled. “People always think that’s what the folks here will do, but it don’t happen,” he said. “Even Mister Evil, he’s been here a couple of years, but he should know better.”
“Why not?” Francis asked. “Why don’t people try to run away?”
Little Black sighed. “You know the answer to that C-Bird. It ain’t about fences, and it ain’t about locked doors, although we got plenty of those. There’s lotsa ways to keep a person locked up. You think about it. But the best way of all doesn’t have anything to do with drugs or deadbolt locks, C-Bird. It’s that hardly anybody in here has some place to run to. With no place to go, nobody goes. It’s that simple.”
With that, he turned away and tried to help Cleo with her seeds. She hadn’t dug the furrows deep enough or wide enough. She showed some frustration on her face, until Little Black reminded her that servants spread flower petals in her path, when her namesake entered Rome. This made her pause, and then redouble her efforts, until Cleo was digging and scraping through the moldy, gravelly ground with a determination that seemed genuinely profound. Cleo was a large woman, who wore brightly colored smocks that billowed around her, concealing her extensive bulk. She wheezed often, smoked too much, and wore her dark hair in scraggly streams down around her shoulders. When she walked, she seemed to lurch back and forth, like a rudderless ship blown off course by high winds and choppy waves. But Francis knew she was transformed, when she took up a Ping-Pong paddle, shedding her unwieldy size almost magically, and becoming svelte, catlike, and quick.
He looked back over at the gate, and then to his fellow patients and slowly began to grasp what Little Black had been saying. One of the older men was having trouble with his trowel; it was shaking hard in a palsied hand. Another had become distracted, and was staring up at a raucous crow perched in a nearby tree.
Deep inside him, he heard one of his voices speak sullenly, repeating what Little Black had told him, as if to underscore each word: No one runs, because no one has any place to run to. And neither do you, Francis.
Then a chorus of assent.
For a moment, Francis spun about, his head pivoting wildly. For in that second, beneath the sunlight and the mild spring breezes, his hands already caked with dirt from the garden, he saw what could be his future. And it terrified him more than anything that had happened so far. He could see that his life was a slippery thin rope, and he needed to grasp hold of it. It was the worst feeling he had ever had. He knew he was mad, and knew, just as surely, that he couldn’t be. And, in that second, he realized, he had to find something that would keep him sane. Or make him appear to be sane.
Francis breathed in hard. He did not think this would be easy.
And, as if to underline the problem, within him his voices argued loudly, making a racket. He tried to quiet them, but this was difficult. It took a few moments for them all to reduce their volume so that he could make some sense out of what they were saying. Francis glanced over at the other patients, and saw that a couple of them were eyeing him closely. He must have been mumbling something out loud, as he’d tried to impose order on the assembly within him. But neither Big Black nor his brother seemed to have noticed the sudden struggle that had engaged him.
Lanky had, however. He had been working on some dirt a few feet away, and he lurched over to Francis’s side.
“You’ll be okay, C-Bird,” he said, his voice cracking a little with some emotion that abruptly seemed to be spinning a bit out of control. “We all will. As long as we keep up our guard, and keep a weather eye out. Got to keep close watch,” he continued. “And don’t turn your back for a minute. It’s all around us, and it could happen any time. We have to be prepared. Like Boy Scouts. Ready for it when it comes.” The tall man seemed more agitated and desperate than usual.
Francis thought he knew what Lanky was speaking about, but then understood that it could be almost anything, but most likely
concerned a satanic presence on earth. Lanky had a curious manner, where he could slide from manic to almost gentle in the course of seconds. One instant, he would be all arms and angles, moving like a marionette, strings being pulled by unseen forces, and the next diminished, where his height made him seem no more threatening than a lamppost. Francis nodded, took a few seeds from a package and pushed them into the dirt.
Big Black rose up and shook his white attendant’s outfit clean of dirt. “Okay, folks,” he said cheerily, “gonna spray this place with some water and head on in.” He looked over at Francis, and asked, “C-Bird, what did you plant?”
Francis looked down at the seed package and said, “Roses. Red ones. Pretty to look at, but hard to handle. They’ve got thorns.” Then he got up, got into line with the others, and marched back toward the dormitory. He tried to drink in and store up as much fresh air as he could, for he feared it might be some time before he got out again.
Whatever had caused Lanky to loosen his already weak grip on the day, persisted at the group session that afternoon. They gathered, as usual, in one of the odd rooms inside Amherst, a little like a small classroom, with twenty or so gray metal folding chairs arranged in a rough circle. Francis liked to position himself where he could stare out past the bars on the window if the conversation got boring. Mister Evil had brought in that morning’s paper to spur a discussion on current events, but it only seemed to agitate the tall man even more. He sat across from where Francis perched next to Peter the Fireman, shifting about constantly in his chair, as Mister Evil turned to Newsman to recite the day’s headlines. This the patient did extravagantly, his voice rising and falling with each reading. There was little good news. The hostage crisis in Iran continued relentlessly. A protest in San Francisco had turned violent, with a number of arrests and tear gas deployed by helmeted police officers. In both Paris and Rome, anti-American demonstrators had burned flags and effigies of Uncle Sam before running wild in the streets. In London, authorities had used water cannon against similar protestors. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had taken a beating and there had been a riot in a prison in Arizona that hadn’t been quelled without grisly injury to both inmates and guards. In Boston, police were still puzzled by several homicides that had taken place during the prior year, and reported no new leads in the cases which involved young women being abducted and molested, before being killed. A three-car accident on Route 91 outside Greenfield had claimed a pair of lives, and a lawsuit had been filed by an environmental group accusing a large local employer of dumping untreated waste into the Connecticut River.
Every time Newsman paused in his reading, and Mister Evil launched into an effort to discuss any of these stories, or others, all discouragingly similar, Lanky nodded his head vigorously and started mumbling, “There! See. That’s what I mean!” It was a little like being in some bizarre revivalist church. Evans ignored these statements, trying to engage the other members of the group in some sort of give-and-take conversation.
Peter the Fireman, however, took notice. He abruptly turned to Lanky and asked him directly, “Big Guy, what’s wrong?”
Lanky’s voice quavered, as he spoke: “Don’t you see, Peter? The signs are everywhere! Unrest, hatred, war, killing …” He abruptly turned to Evans and asked, “Isn’t there some story in the paper about famine, as well?”
Mister Evil hesitated, and Newsman gleefully said, “Sudanese Struggle with Crop Failure. Drought and Starvation Cause Refugee Crisis. The New York Times.”
“Hundreds dead?” Lanky asked.
“Yes. In all likelihood,” Mister Evans replied. “Perhaps even more.”
Lanky nodded vigorously, his head bobbing up and down. “I’ve seen the pictures before. Little babies with their bellies swollen and spindly little legs and eyes sunken back all hollow and hopeless. And disease, that’s always with us, right alongside famine. Don’t even need to read Revelations all that carefully to recognize what’s happening. All the signs.” He leaned back abruptly in his steel folding chair, took a single long glance outside the barred window that opened on the hospital grounds, as if assessing the final light of the day, and said, “There is no doubt that Satan’s presence is here. Close by. Look at all that is happening in the world. Bad news everywhere you look. Who else could be responsible?”
With that, he folded his arms in front of him. He was suddenly breathing hard, and small droplets of sweat had formed on his forehead, as if each thought that reverberated within him took a great effort to control. The rest of the dozen members of the group were fixed in their chairs, no one moving, their eyes locked on the tall man, as he struggled with the fears that buffeted around within him.
Mister Evil noticed this, and abruptly steered the topic away from Lanky’s obsession. “Let’s turn to the sports section,” he said. The cheeriness in his voice was transparent, almost insulting.
But Peter the Fireman persisted. “No,” he spoke with an edge of anger in his words. “No. I don’t want to talk about baseball or basketball or the local high school teams. I think we ought to talk about the world around us. And I think Lanky’s truly onto something. All there is outside these doors is awful. Hatred and murder and killing. Where does it come from? Who’s doing it? Who’s good anymore? Maybe it isn’t because Satan is here, like Lanky believes. Maybe it’s because we’ve all turned for the worse, and he doesn’t even need to be here, because we’re doing all his work for him.”
Mr. Evans stared hard at Peter the Fireman. His gaze had narrowed. “I think you have an interesting opinion,” he said slowly, measuring his words in an understated cold fashion, “but you exaggerate things. Regardless, I don’t think it has much to do with the purposes of this group. We’re here to explore ways to rejoin society. Not reasons to hide from it, even if things out in the world aren’t quite the way we might like them to be. Nor do I think it serves a purpose when we indulge our delusions, or lend any credence to them.” These last words were directed both at Peter and Lanky equally.
Peter the Fireman’s face was set. He started to speak, then stopped.
But into that sudden void, Lanky stepped. His voice was quivering, on the verge of tears. “If we are to blame for all that is happening, then there’s no hope for any of us. None.”
This was said with such unbridled despair that several of the other people in the session, who had been quiet until then, immediately muffled cries. One old man started to tear up, and a woman wearing a pink ruffled housecoat, far too much mascara on her eyes, and tufted white bunny rabbit slippers cut loose with a sob. “Oh, that’s sad,” she said. “That’s so sad.”
Francis watched the social worker, as he tried to regain control over the session. “The world is the way the world has always been,” he said. “It’s our own part in it that concerns us here.”
It was the wrong thing to say, because Lanky jumped to his feet. He was waving his arms suddenly above his head, much the way he had when Francis had first encountered him. “But that’s it!” he cried, startling some of the more timid members of the group. “Evil is everywhere! We must find a way to keep it out! We must band together. Form committees. Have watchdog groups. We must organize! Coordinate! Make a plan. Raise defenses. Guard the walls. We’ve got to work hard to keep it out of the hospital!” He took a deep breath, and pivoted, searching out all the members of the group session with his eyes.
Several heads nodded in unison. This made sense.
“We can keep evil out,” Lanky said. “But only if we’re vigilant.”
Then, his body still shaking with the effort speaking out had taken, he sat back down, and once again folded his arms across his chest retreating into silence.
Mr. Evans glared at Peter the Fireman, as if he was to blame for Lanky’s outburst. “So,” he said slowly, “Peter. Tell us. Do you think if we’re to keep Satan outside these walls, perhaps then we should all be going to church on a regular basis?”
Peter the Fireman stiffened in his seat.
“
No,” he said slowly, “I don’t think—”
“Shouldn’t we be praying? Going to services. Saying our Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s and Perfect Acts of Contrition. Taking communion on every Sunday? Shouldn’t we be confessing our sins on a near constant basis?”
Peter the Fireman’s voice grew low and very quiet. “Those things might make you feel better. But I don’t believe—”
But Mr. Evans interrupted him a second time. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, an edgy cynicism in each word. “Going to church and all sorts of organized religious activities would be highly inappropriate for the Fireman, wouldn’t they? Because the Fireman, well, you have a problem with churches, right?”
Peter shifted in his seat. Francis could see a slippery fury behind his eyes, which he had never seen before.
The Madman's Tale Page 8
