Sins of the Flesh

by Colleen McCullough

  “Jess,” Delia began, choosing her words, “far be it from me to teach you your incredible job, especially when at the moment I’m at an absolute dead end in my own job, but I have a nagging feeling that you should at least confine Walter Jenkins to his HI room while you’re away. Perhaps, since you believe he now possesses a lot of reasoning power, you could find the right words to reconcile him to a very temporary detention in quarters he seems to regard as a home rather than a prison? Don’t give him any drugs to damp his emotions or what pass for emotions, that way he’ll be alert enough to see that you haven’t lied to him about anything.”

  “You’ve inferred a lot from very little implication.”

  “Detectives excell at that, Jess!”

  All the way home to HI, crossing the main roads rather than using them, Jess debated. She had promised him freedom while she was away, now she was contemplating shutting him up. Was he capable of seeing that what she was really doing in shutting him in his room was safeguarding him?

  He was waiting in her office, clad in his T-shirt and shorts uniform, always grey; he was atrociously color-blind, and thought his grey was an entrancing shade of green. But how do any of us know what we see is red, or green—or grey? How he managed the colored stripes of her coded file ribbons she could only guess at; he never got them wrong, and insisted he did see colors. Just not the colors she saw. But how did he know they were different? What was his standard of comparison?

  “Don’t work too late tonight,” he said, with that quaint authority. “Are you driving to Boston?”

  “No, I’ll take the commuter from Holloman airport.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, busy opening the safe.

  “Thinking what, Walter?”

  She had pushed her chair to one side to let him deal with the safe more comfortably; now she swung the chair to stare at him fixedly, her dark eyes wide.

  “How about you lock me in my room here at HI while you’re in Boston, Jess? If the no-Walter appears, the most he can do is to wreck a room. I don’t expect the no-Walter, he’s lost in the old dark, but I’d rather be sure than sorry. Please,” said Walter, twirling the disc as he spoke.

  “One day, Walter dear friend, I won’t be here. But that’s for the years to come, not this weekend. I’ll probably be back quite early on Sunday evening.”

  “Lock me up, Jess, please!”

  “Amazing!” she said, drawing the word out.

  “Will you lock me up?”

  “Since it’s your own idea, Walter, yes, I will. Gladly!”

  SATURDAY/SUNDAY NIGHT, AUGUST 16–17, 1969

  It looked like accommodation in a luxury hotel, complete with an en suite bathroom with a large shower stall and a jacuzzi tub. But behind the tasteful lime-and-ultramarine fabrics and white-painted wood lay the kind of wall construction no hotel of any grade would have possessed: inch-thick steel bars, very special electrical wiring, and, separated by six inches of vacuum, two window panes of armored glass so thick the outside view was yellowed. Once its occupant was inside and the day’s code was punched into its lock, he was inside until the lock was disengaged, and that included an alarm like an ocean liner’s foghorn.

  There was nothing Walter Jenkins didn’t know about his room, which had been specially created for him over two years ago after Jess ended the actual intervention treatments and banished the old Walter. His progress and his promise of future improvement rendered a cell in the Asylum undesirable to the point of posing a threat to progress and improvement; Jess had gone to battle for the money to incarcerate him within HI itself, and won. The Asylum nowadays was not to make Walter safer, but to make those who fraternized with him feel safer. With a record as appalling as Walter’s, people found it extremely difficult to credit that the monster he had been was truly no longer there. Ari Melos and the Castigliones were believers, but HI ran on nurses, aides, technicians and various domestic staff, and it was among these people that vestiges of terror lurked. While Jess was in-house, it was quiescent; when she went away, some staff were uneasy.

  Facts of which Walter was aware, and dealt with in ways no one, including Jess, had ever spotted. Like the time during which the men built his room. In his T-shirt and shorts, with his military look, those workmen had taken a liking to him when he hung around; he had become part-mascot, part-apprentice, for he demonstrated a remarkable manual dexterity, and when given some chore, did it well enough to be admired. As the degree of his technical ability grew more apparent, he was allowed the run of the on-site workshop. Limited in its comprehension of abstract concepts, Walter’s mind couldn’t gauge other people’s reactions as naive, but such they were, and that went as much for the psychiatrists as it did for the builders who constructed his new quarters.

  Walter took what Walter wanted, understanding what “want” was. So he hung around to watch, would trot off to fiddle with wires and solder in the workshop, then tender his efforts knowing they would be accepted. For they were helpful and beautifully made. Because it was done en bloc at the very last moment and tucked behind a steel bar, none of the workers noticed him introduce a bypass that both opened his door and cut off the alarm; the contractors were running dangerously near penalty rates for lateness, and by now they treated Walter like a workmate. Cameras and microphones were also installed, but there was no way he could bypass them. However, when he had lived in his luxury cell for six months he went to Jess and formally objected to his complete lack of privacy. It retarded his progress by inhibiting him, he said—weren’t six months enough of it? The panel met, and agreed that visual and acoustic supervision of Walter Jenkins were unnecessary. His sensitivity in reaching that conclusion was so exciting! Walter covered lenses and devices with plasticene just to make sure, and if anyone tried to watch or listen, no one admitted to it.

  Imprisoned since childhood, he had never driven a car or a stick-shift truck. Ari Melos thought of offering Walter a treat and using it as an opportunity to see how well Walter’s reflexes would work while his mind was occupied in controlling a heavy mass of metal moving at speed. And Walter excelled; whatever the damage to his forebrain and its subservient pathways, his controlling and driving skills were superb. So superb that Ari brought in his Harley-Davidson motorcycle and examined Walter’s skills riding what he jokingly called his “hog.”

  “A Harley is a hog because it has grunt,” he explained.

  Walter knew what hogs were for the same reason he knew what most things were: he had seen them on television. Books were static, just pictures, but TV moved. If Ari’s jest was no jest to him, that lay in his lack of a sense of humor. Even Jess couldn’t provoke a smile, nor had anyone ever heard Walter Jenkins laugh. The subject of a hundred and more conferences, Walter remained an engima to those who studied him, including Jess. Where were his limits? Was he capable of feeling?

  “Tabula rasa,” Ari Melos had said. A blank page.

  On a motorcycle Walter proved to be so good that, after some negotiations with Warden Hanrahan and Asylum Security, a section of internal roadway had been cleared of all traffic and Walter permitted to ride the Harley at speed for a total of twenty miles—fifteen minutes. That the experience thrilled him was beyond doubt, but he didn’t smile, and his heart rate had never increased at the end of his ride. It had only happened the once, ten months ago; Walter had never expressed a wish to repeat the experience.

  At eleven, Walter turned his lights out. Inmates’ lights were centrally extinguished at nine-thirty, Walter alone exempted; only he decided when to go to bed, no matter how late the hour. With Jess away, he was locked in; she had done it herself before leaving to catch the Boston shuttle at six Saturday morning, her own eyes checking that he had sufficient reading material. The big television screen was permanently on, volume usually a murmur, and he was connected to cable networks; he liked natural history shows, scientific documentaries and all kinds of films.

  Disengaging his door lock and alarm, he opened the door. The overhead lights were o
ff, the hallway well lit near floor level by inset lamps; it was empty, silent, tucked up for the night. Good! The green ON bulb was glowing above his door combination, telling the curious that the lock was engaged, he was inside. His was the only inmate room upstairs save for the hospital sector, which held no patients at the moment. The night staff would be drinking coffee or tea in their wardroom at this hour, fresh from their first rounds, girding their loins for the next patrol.

  Still in his grey T-shirt and short shorts, Walter raced down the corridor toward the bright green EXIT sign, and there punched in Saturday’s code to open the door into the escape stairwell. Not four seconds later he was through it, down the stairs five at a time, and at the bottom. No need to open the inside door; he had the correct code to open the fire door that led outside. That was one little item of information he hadn’t confided to Jess—his scary ability to remember codes and numbers.

  The I-Walter hadn’t announced his presence very long ago, though Walter knew he loomed there like an insurmountable pinnacle of rock; but when, less than two months ago he stepped from his pinnacle, Walter looked into the face of the I-Walter, and knew it as his real one. Nothing had made sense until then, not the memory or the ability or the fate or Jess …. But the I-Walter and his layers gave it all meaning, and every single day an opaque sheet between two of his layers would fall away, dissolve into purpose. He didn’t know yet what the I-Walter’s purpose was, just that the I-Walter was the real Walter. And tonight, with Jess away in Boston and his room locked, he was out and about to serve the I-Walter.

  On this back side of HI’s oblong mass all was quiet and dark, no searchlights licking luminous lacework across the night, which sometimes happened if Warden Hanrahan thought his guards were getting sloppy and needed an exercise. The reality of an inmate escape had never happened, never ever. Walter checked out the Asylum itself, equally dark and quiet. The watchtowers were positioned to be of maximum strategic and tactical assistance to the Asylum blocks, which meant that at the far, narrow end of the teardrop-shaped walls, only one watch tower was manned. When the immense reconstruction of the Asylum had taken place between 1950 and 1960, the plan had been to amputate the end of the teardrop, paying for a fairly small section of new outer wall by selling off the land—then the State ran out of money. Dr. Wainfleet’s needs had taken precedence and costs were way over budget, with the result that in 1969 the Asylum was divided into two parts: the blocks housing inmates and research facility clustered inside the gate, and a tapering, progressively narrower section of deserted parkland containing in one again constricted area, the sheds and outbuildings no one at all went near after dark.

  Like a Belgian leech or some other flat, slapping worm, Walter was through the fire escape door and prone on the parched grass in one liquid movement; lifting his head just enough, he saw that everything was as it should be, then got to his feet and ran like a hare for the deep shade of the Asylum’s only grove of trees. There was no moon and thunderheads bulged muttering in the distance, no pallid outriders of wispier cloud to pull them this way; the storm cells were vanishing into Massachusetts.

  Here, the grove of trees inside the Asylum wall met the forest on its outside, and here, buried in a thick clump of mountain laurel, was the rounded bulge of a watchtower that had never been erected above the top of the wall, so was not drawn on the plans as a watchtower, nor noticed thanks to the dense shrubbery. And in the wall just beyond the roundel of the aborted watchtower was a door. Walter’s door. He had found it on one of his illicit, unsuspected night excursions a full year ago.

  It was the size of an ordinary door and wall-colored, a relic of an earlier time that inexplicably had gone unnoticed: a non-door. Pilfering what he needed gradually, he had removed its rusted hinges and simple latch, fitting new ones that he kept well lubricated. Inside the door, he discovered, the wall was hollow and had a similar door into the external forest. More hinges, another new latch, and he, who would become the I-Walter, stepped into the free, untrammeled world. He, who never remembered a time when he hadn’t been imprisoned, was free. The realization provoked no elation or sense of triumph, but he did feel something, and he fully understood that he was an intruder rather than a native. Perhaps because of that, he took his time, time never having been an entity Walter thought about as others did.

  Confinement breeds infinite patience.

  With television to tell him what the real world was like, he had thus far made two forays into it.

  On his first, following a deer path through the forest, he chanced upon Route 133, and skulking in the shadows that loomed right up to it, he found a house and a shed, then more sheds, and an old, noncustomized Harley-Davidson motorcycle. It had been someone’s beloved workhorse rather than a gang bike, for it had a pannier on either side of the rear wheel and a big pillion box connecting them. One pannier held a basic set of Harley tools, and draped between the handlebars was a black Viking helmet. He wheeled the bike the five miles home and put it inside the wall in the circular swelling of the roundel, which he was busy fitting out as a kind of a bolt-hole, a place that really belonged to him. The I-Walter. Pressure lamps, camp cooking gear—it was amazing what was squirreled away in the Asylum sheds! Examination had revealed that the bike’s gas tank was full, but one of the things he couldn’t find was a supply of gas for it.

  On his second foray three months later he had wheeled the Harley (already equipped with as efficient a muffler as the emissions would tolerate) far enough not to alert wall or tower guards on Millington, which meant way down 133. Late at night held additional perils when it came to noise, but he could hide a bike, never a car. A trip to the library had seen him memorize the Holloman County road map and locate the whereabouts of the things he needed. So when he set out he knew exactly where he was going: to a group of shops on the Boston Post Road that included a motorcycle emporium. Thirteen miles there and back again—did he have enough gas? He could only hope he did, based on his television experience, and that said he had plenty. He had no money to buy gas or anything else, though if he had to, he could siphon.

  For Walter, busting into the emporium without triggering the alarm was child’s play. He found black leathers that fitted him well, including boots, took two empty plastic containers that would fit inside the pillion box, and, out of a glass-topped counter, a handy hunting knife. When he opened the cash register, all it held were checks. But he left no fingerprints, having sheathed his hands in a pair of surgical gloves. Television again! If the prints of one of the most dangerous prisoners in the nation turned up a few miles away, they’d start looking for his door. So he took special care when choosing a pair of black leather gauntlets. Except—no cash. Where can I find money?

  Tonight, after a long wait familiarizing himself with the Harley and tuning it even better than its erstwhile owner had, he was going out again. The I-Walter had struggled out of his opaque sheets and displayed all his layers, and the I-Walter wanted to ride the Harley. The pathways kept opening up, a source of calm well-being that the I-Walter liked. But he needed money, and that was difficult for a night-man to contend with. Banks were closed, so were shops. The shops that were open, his television told him, were staffed by foreigners who were always a problem in one way or another. Walter decided that his best bet was an area of small factories and workshops like the one marked on his map behind Holloman City Hall; he could crack a small combination safe by sound and feel if the room was quiet enough, and at this hour on a Saturday night, who would be at work? What he hoped for, television fueled, was a cash box or two. He didn’t need a fortune, just money for gasoline.

  As he rode downtown under the speed limit, Walter and the I-Walter finally came together. It wasn’t like that fool movie about the three faces of Eve, because different people couldn’t live inside one and the same body, it didn’t make sense. No, what happened on that ride was an understanding, that it had taken over two years from the end of Jess’s operations to part the sheets of mystery; his made-ov
er brain had been one set of curtains after another, and now they had all vanished he could see what Jess had made of him: the I-Walter. Only the I-Walter was his secret. Knowing about the I-Walter would make Jess a basket case, at least until she could be made to understand, as Walter understood.

  He never saw a squad car or a highway patrol as he rode. Facing the magnificent Green, City Hall was imposing, but behind it lay a different world, one that suited Walter perfectly. No dwellings, just premises. Killing the bike in a pool of darkness fairly close to the back of City Hall, he listened to its engine tick as it cooled off while his eyes roamed in every direction. Then, satisfied that the bike was safe and the area deserted, he moved off into an alley, examining the doors of the buildings as he went.

  Someone moved; Walter froze against the wall, fused into it. If there were neighborhood kids the street lamps would have been shot out long ago, but an occasional lamp was lit in a privacy pattern the prison inmate Walter had no way to understand: loiter under the lamp, move into the darkness for an against-the-wall fuck. The loitering woman was a light-colored African-American, mini-skirted but knickerless, and talking with her was a burbling, bopping black man counting the bills she was handing him.

  “Yo’ done good, Hepzibah,” he said, ceasing his dance.

  “Sattidy night, Marty—mah big night.”

  “Get yo’ ass back on yo’ beat, woman!”

  “Fuck that,” she said. “Home fo’ me.” And melted away.

  Marty Fane resumed his burbling and bopping in Walter’s direction, pleased with the night’s takings. This was his patch, had been for so long that it never occurred to him anyone might try to take it off him. As pimps went, he was a good one, in that he cared for his girls, made sure they were clean, didn’t beat them up for the fun of it, and gave them enough to pay for their habit or their kids, though both was a hassle Marty preferred to avoid by kicking the real hags off of his patch.