The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  There was a collective groan from the gathering of inmates when they saw the body bag. A few men started crying, and others turned away, as if by averting their gaze they could avoid understanding what happened. Others went rigid at the sight, and a few simply continued doing whatever they were doing, which was mostly weaving and waving, dancing about or staring at the walls. Francis could hear some muttering sounds as they spoke to one another. The women’s wing had been quieted, but when the body came out, although they were locked away, they must have sensed something, because the deep pounding on the door resumed momentarily, like a drumroll at a military funeral. Francis looked back at Lanky, whose eyes seemed frozen on the apparition of the nurse’s body as it creaked past him on the gurney. In the bright corridor lights, Francis could see deep swaths of maroon blood on the tall man’s billowing nightshirt. “That the guy that woke you up, Franny?” the first detective demanded, his question carrying with it all the authority of a man accustomed to being in charge of things.

  Francis nodded.

  “… And after he woke you up, you went out to the corridor where you found the nurse already dead, right? Then you called Security, right?”

  Again Francis nodded. The detective looked over at the policemen standing next to Peter the Fireman, who also bent their heads in agreement. One replied, as if to an unspoken question, “That’s what this guy said, too.”

  Lanky seemed to be quivering. His face was pale, and his lower lip shook with fear. He looked down at the handcuffs restraining him, then put his hands together, as if in prayer. He stared across the hallway to Francis and Peter. “C-Bird,” he said, his voice quavering with every word, his hands pushed forward like a supplicant at a church service, “Tell them about the Angel. Tell them about the Angel who came in the middle of the night and told me that the evil had been taken care of. We’re safe now, tell them, please C-Bird.” His voice gathered a plaintive, lost tone, as if each word he spoke seemed to plummet him further into despair.

  The detective instead, suddenly half shouted at Lanky, who shrank back at the force of the questions shot at him like so many sharpened spears or arrows. “How’d you get that blood on your shirt, old man? How’d you get that nurse’s blood on your hands?”

  Lanky looked down at his fingers and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe the Angel brought it to me?”

  As he was replying, a uniformed officer came walking down the corridor, holding a small plastic bag. At first Francis could not see what it contained, but as the policeman approached, he recognized it as the small, white, three-peaked cap that hospital nurses often wore. Only this one seemed crumpled and the rim was stained in the same color as the streaks on Lanky’s nightshirt. The uniformed officer said, “Look’s like he tried to keep a souvenir. Found this underneath his mattress.”

  “Did you find the knife?” the detective asked the officer.

  The policeman shook his head.

  “What about the fingertips?”

  Again a negative from the uniformed officer.

  The detective seemed to think for a moment, assessing things, then he spun abruptly to face Lanky, who continued to cower against the wall, encircled by officers, all of whom were shorter than he was, but all of whom seemed, in that second, to be larger.

  “How’d you get that hat?” the detective demanded of Lanky.

  The tall man shook his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he cried. “I didn’t get it.”

  “It was underneath your mattress. Why did you put it there?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t.”

  “Doesn’t make much difference,” the detective replied with a shrug. “We’ve got a lot more than we need. Someone read him his rights. We’re out of this loony bin right now.”

  The policemen started to push and prod Lanky down the hallway. Francis could see panic striking like lightning bolts right throughout the tall man’s body. He twitched as if electric current was flooding him, as if each step he was forced to take was on hot coals. “No, please, I didn’t do anything. Please. Oh, evil, evil, it’s all around us, please don’t take me away, this is my home, please!” As Lanky cried pitifully, despair echoing throughout the corridor, Francis felt his own handcuffs being removed. He looked up, and Lanky caught his eye. “C-Bird, Peter, please help me,” he called out. Francis could not imagine ever hearing so much pain in so few words. “Tell them it was an Angel. An Angel came to me in the middle of the night. Tell them. Help me, please.”

  And then, with a final shove and push from the collected police officers, Lanky was rushed out the front door of the Amherst Building and swallowed up by what remained of the night.

  chapter 7

  I suppose I slept some that night, but I cannot recall actually closing my eyes.

  I can’t even remember breathing.

  My swollen lip stung, and even after washing up a little, I could still taste blood where the policeman had struck me. My legs were sore from the blow from the security guard’s nightstick and my head spun from all that I’d seen. It makes no difference how many years have passed since that night, the number of days that stretch into decades, I can still feel the pain of my encounter with the authorities who thought—even if briefly—that I was the killer. When I lay stiffly on my bunk, it was hard for me to connect Short Blond, who had been alive earlier that day, with the gory figure that was taken away zipped up in a body bag, then probably dumped on some cold steel table, to await a pathologist’s scalpel. It remains just as difficult to reconcile today. It was almost as if they were two separate entities, worlds apart, having little, if any, relationship to each other.

  My memory is clear: I remained motionless in the darkness, feeling the restless pressure of each passing second, aware that the entire dormitory was unsettled; the usual night noises of unquiet sleep were exaggerated, underscored by a busy nervousness and nasty tension that seemed to layer the tight air in the room like a new coat of paint. Around me, people shifted and twitched, despite the extra course of medications that had been handed out before we were all shuffled back into the room. Chemical quiet. At least, that was what Gulp-a-pill and Mr. Evil and the rest of the staff wanted, but all the fears and anxieties created that night were far beyond even the medications’ capabilities. We twisted and turned uneasily, groaning and grunting, crying and sobbing, our feelings taut and raw. We were all afraid of the night that remained, and just as afraid of whatever the morning would bring.

  Absent one, of course. Having Lanky so abruptly severed from our little madhouse community seemed to leave a shadow behind. In the days since I’d arrived in the Amherst Building, one or two of the truly old and infirm had died of what were called natural causes, but which could be better summed up in the word neglect or the word abandonment. Occasionally and miraculously someone with a little bit of life left would actually be released. More often, Security had moved someone frantic and unruly or out of control screaming into one of the upstairs isolation cells. But they were likely to return in a couple of days, their medications increased, their shuffling movements a little more pronounced and the twitching in the corners of their faces exaggerated. So disappearances weren’t uncommon. But the manner that Lanky had been taken from our side was, and that was what caused our ricocheting emotions as we watched for the first streaks of daylight to slide through the bars on the windows.

  I made two grilled cheese sandwiches, filled an only slightly dirty glass with cold tap water, and leaned back against the kitchen counter, munching away. A forgotten cigarette burned in a jammed ashtray a few feet away, and I watched as its slender plume of smoke rose through the stale air of my home.

  Peter the Fireman smoked.

  I took another bite of the sandwich, then a gulp from the glass of water. When I looked back across the room, he was standing there. He reached down for the stub of my cigarette and lifted it to his lips. “Ah, back in the hospital one could smoke without guilt,” he said, a little slyly. “I mean, which was w
orse: risking cancer or being crazy?”

  “Peter,” I said, smiling. “I haven’t seen you in years.”

  “Have you missed me, C-Bird?”

  I nodded my reply. He shrugged, as if to apologize.

  “You’re looking good, C-Bird. A little thin, maybe, but you’ve hardly aged at all.” Then he blew a pair of insouciant smoke rings as he began to look around the room. “So, this is your place? It’s not bad. Things working out, I see.”

  “I don’t know I’d say they were working out exactly. As best as could be expected, maybe.”

  “That’s right. That was the unusual thing about being mad, wasn’t it, C-Bird? Our expectations got all skewed and changed about. Ordinary things, like holding a job and having a family and getting to go to Little League games on nice summer afternoons, those things got real hard to accomplish. So we revamped, right? Revised and retrenched and reconsidered.”

  I grinned. “Yes, that’s right. Like just owning a sofa, that’s a big achievement.”

  Peter tossed his head back, laughing. “Sofa ownership and the road to mental health. Sounds like one of the papers that Mister Evil was always working on for his doctorate that never got published.”

  Peter continued to look around. “Got any friends?”

  I shook my head. “Not really.”

  “Still hearing voices?”

  “A little bit, sometimes. Just echoes, really. Echoes or whispers. The meds they have me on all the damn time pretty much squelch the racket they used to make.”

  “The medication can’t be all that bad,” Peter said, winking, “because I’m here.”

  This was true.

  Peter moved to the kitchen entranceway and looked over at the wall of writing. He moved with the same athletic grace, a kind of highly defined control over his motions that I recalled from hours spent walking through the ward corridors of the Amherst Building. No shuffling or staggering for Peter the Fireman. He looked exactly as he had twenty years earlier, except that the Red Sox baseball cap that he often jauntily wore back then was stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans. But his hair was still full and long, and his smile was just as I remembered it, worn on his face in the same way it would be, if someone had told a joke a few moments earlier, and the humor had lingered. “How’s the story going?” he asked.

  “It’s coming back.”

  He started to say something, then stopped, and stared at the columns of words scribbled on the wall. “What have you told them about me?” he asked.

  “Not enough,” I said. “But they’ve probably already figured out that you were never crazy. No voices. No delusions. No bizarre beliefs and lurid thoughts. At least, not crazy like Lanky or Napoleon or Cleo or any of the others. Or even me, for that matter.”

  Peter made a little, wry smile.

  “Good Catholic lad, big Irish Dorchester second-generation family. A dad who drank too much on Saturday night and a mother who believed in Democrats and the power of prayer. Civil servants, elementary school teachers, cops and soldiers. Regular attendance at Mass on Sunday, followed by Catechism class. A bunch of altar boys. The girls learned step dancing and sang in the choir. The boys went to Latin High and played football. When it came time for the draft, we signed right up. No student deferments for us. And we didn’t get to be mentally ill. At least not exactly. Not in that diagnosable, defined way that Gulp-a-pill liked, where he could look up your disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and read precisely what sort of treatment plan to come up with. No, in my family, we got to be peculiar. Or eccentric. Or perhaps a little weird, or slightly off base, out of whack or off-kilter.”

  “You weren’t even all that peculiar, Peter,” I said.

  He laughed, a short, amused burst. “A fireman who deliberately sets a fire? In the church where he was baptized? What would you call that? At least a little strange, huh? A little more than just odd, dont you think?”

  I didn’t answer. Instead I watched him move through my small apartment. Even if he wasn’t really there, it was still good to have company.

  “You know what bothered me, sometimes, C-Bird?”

  “What?”

  “There were so many moments in my life that should have driven me insane. I mean, clear-cut, no-holds-barred, genuinely terrible moments that should have added up to a nice, fine frothing at the mouth madness. Growing up moments. War moments. Death moments. Anger moments. And yet the one that seemed to make the most sense, that had the most clarity to it, was what put me in the hospital.”

  He paused, continuing to survey my wall. Then he added, in a low voice, “When I was barely nine my brother died. He was the one closest to me in age, just a year older, Irish twins was the family joke. But his hair was much lighter than mine, and his skin seemed always pale, like it had been stretched thinner than my own. And I could run, jump, play sports, stay out all day, but he could barely breathe. Asthma and heart troubles and kidneys that barely worked. God wanted him to be special that way, or so I was told. Why God decided that was considered beyond me. So there we were, nine and ten, and we both knew he was dying, and it didn’t make any difference to us, we still laughed and joked, and made all the little secrets brothers do. On the day they took him for the last time to the hospital, he told me that I would have to be the boy for the both of us. I wanted so badly to help him. I told my mother that Billy could have my right lung and my heart, that the doctors could give me his, and we’d just trade off for a while. But of course, they didn’t do that.”

  I listened, and didn’t interrupt Peter, because as he spoke, he walked closer to the wall where I’d begun to write our story, but he wasn’t reading the words scrawled there, he was telling his own. He took a drag from the cigarette and then continued speaking slowly.

  “In Vietnam, C-Bird, did I tell you about the point man who got shot?”

  “Yes, Peter. You did.”

  “You should put that in what you write. About the point man and my brother who died young. I think they’re part of the same story.”

  “I’ll have to tell them about your nephew and the fire, as well.”

  He nodded. “I knew you would. But not yet. Just tell them about the point man. You know what I remember the most about that day? That it was so damn hot. Not hot like you or I or anyone growing up in New England knew hot. We knew hot like in August, when it was a scorcher, and we went down and swam in the harbor. This was an awful, sickly hot that felt poisonous. We were snaking through the bush single file and the sun was high overhead. The pack on my back felt like it had every item I needed and every care I had in the world packed inside. The bad guys had a simple policy for their snipers, you know. Shoot the guy in front on the point and drop him. Wound him, if you could. Aim for the legs, not the head. At the sound of the shot, everyone else would take cover, except for the medic you see, and that was me. The medic would go for the wounded man. Every time. You know, in training, they told us not to foolishly risk our own lives, but we always went. And then the sniper would try to drop the medic, because he was the one guy in the platoon that everyone owed, and this would bring everyone else out into the open, trying to get to the medic. A remarkably elemental process. How a single shot gives you an opportunity to kill many. So, that was what happened this day, they shot the point man, and I could hear him calling for me. But the platoon leader and two other guys were holding me back. I was short. Less than two weeks in my tour left. So instead, we listened while he bled to death. And that’s the way it was reported back at headquarters later, making it seem inevitable. Except it wasn’t true. They held me back, and I struggled and complained and pleaded, but all the time I knew that if I wanted, I could break free. That I could go for him, all it would take was a little more effort. And that was what I wouldn’t spend. That little extra push. So, instead, we had this little charade in the jungle while a man died. It was the type of situation where what is right is what will be fatal. I didn’t go, and no one blamed me, and I lived and went home to Dorchest
er and the point man died. I didn’t even know him all that well. He’d been in the platoon for less than a month. I mean, it wasn’t like I was listening to my friend die, C-Bird. He was just someone who was there, and then he cried for help, and kept crying until he couldn’t cry any longer because he was dead.”

  “He might not have lived, even if you’d reached him.”

  Peter nodded, smiling. “Sure. Right. I told myself that, too.”

  He sighed. “All my life, I had nightmares about people calling for help. And I didn’t go.”

  “But you became a fireman …”

  “Easiest way to do penance, C-Bird. Everyone loves the fireman.”

  Peter slowly faded from my side. It was midmorning, I remembered, before we got a chance to speak. The Amherst Building was filled with sunlight that sent creases through the thick leftover smell of violent death. The white walls seemed to glow with intensity. The patients were walking around, doing their regular shuffle and lurch, but a little more gingerly. Moving cautiously, because all of us, even in our mad states, knew that something had happened and sensed that something was still to happen. I looked around and found my pencil.

  It was midmorning before Francis had a chance to speak with Peter the Fireman. A deceptive, glaring spring sunshine burst past the windows and steel bars, sending explosions of light through the corridors, reflecting off the floor that had been cleaned of all the outward signs of murder. But a residue of death lurked in the stale air of the hospital; patients moved singly or in small groups, silently avoiding the places where murder had left its signs. No one stepped in the spots where the nurse’s blood had pooled up. Everyone gave the storage closet a wide berth, as if getting too close to the scene of the crime might somehow rub some of its evil off on them. Voices were muted, conversation was dulled. Patients shuffled a little more slowly, as if the hospital ward had been transformed into a church. Even the delusions that afflicted so many of the inmates seemed quieted, as if for once taking a backseat to a much more real and frightening madness.