by James Grady
“I don’t think so,” said Dr. Friedman.
Russell arched his eyebrows above the black lens of his sunglasses. Grinned. “Doesn’t really matter what you think, now does it, Doc? You’re leaving us.”
Nurse said: “Dr. Friedman? Our schedule.”
He nodded. She passed out water cups and our meds like candy for the movie: uppers, downers, smoother-outers, sugar pills in Hailey’s cup, a rainbow of pebbles geared to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome with icings of schizophrenic disorders.
“We’ve got one last Group this afternoon,” said Dr. Friedman. “I’ll see some of you individually before then, but I’m leaving here before dinner.”
Eric raised his hand to blurt out that it was meatloaf night, but didn’t get the nod.
“There’s something we need to talk about this afternoon,” continued Dr. Friedman, “and we should all look forward to that. Have a nice lunch.”
He smiled as he left the Ward. The nurse collected our empty pill cups. I watched her thick brown hair in its pinned bun, watched her round hips in white slacks as she pushed the cart out of our Ward. Russell and Zane, even Hailey and Eric watched her: the substitute nurse was new and thus interesting, though she’d kept a professional distance from us. Then the Ward door closed. Locked. We drifted to our private rooms not knowing that we had less than five hours of safe time left before.
We should have known.
The tell was there for us to see.
We had the training. The experience. But we missed it, each and every one of us.
What the hell. We were crazy.
2
Crazy is why we were all locked up at RAVENS Castle.
Actually, the whole truth includes Our Special Circumstances.
“Our” being “us”: Russell, Zane, Eric, Hailey, and me.
“Special Circumstances” includes that we’re Code Word Access/TOP SECRET.
RAVENS is one of America’s first and most secret “black sites”, an acronym that appears in no directory of Federal programs and decodes as Research And Verification Epidemiology Network Systems.
Sounds like Horrible Scary Infectious Death Disease. Which is what it’s supposed to sound like. Nobody likes to linger around a door with that plaque. Of course, that door is itself almost impossible to find, because it’s for a phantom facility in a nowhere place called Waterburg, Maine.
Waterburg is a rural crossroads. A gas station, one motel, a few houses—and a big square red brick hulk set back from the road, with the RAVENS plaque screwed next to the double-locked front door. The “medical facilities” reputation of RAVENS accounts for the nurses and doctors who live in normal Maine towns and commute there. The doctors and nurses park their cars behind the RAVENS brick building, ride a blue bus through the woods to work in the Castle.
The Castle is a looming complex built by a timber baron who went bankrupt. Our home hides in woods where the aspens and birch trees grow thick around a chain link fence topped with razor wire. The Castle is a hospital. An asylum protecting us from the world and the world from us.
Our Ward held only the five of us in that spring of America’s empire daze. We each had a private bedroom with bath, a sitting room with a TV and bookshelves. Paintings had to be approved. Knick-knacks and art transformable into a weapon were taboo, but truthfully, all art is a weapon.
Like Harvard, the Castle is hard to get into.
First, you must be one of Uncle Sam’s Intelligence or Security Officers, Executives, Analysts, Administrators, Operatives, or Agents.
A spy.
Then you have to go crazy.
Where else can Uncle Sam put us? Some cut-rate maniac barn with a revolving door where anybody can get in and snatch Globe Changing Secrets from a drooling mouth, then cycle back out to go Over To The Other Side? Some “normal” insane asylum where if we told actual reality they’d call us crazy but if we told cover stories, we’d be set free to run wild in the streets?
America needs RAVENS Castle.
Where on that April Tuesday after our Morning Group when Russell lied about garroting the Serb colonel, Dr. Leon Friedman came to my private room for my last Individual Session before the big oh-oh changed everything.
3
First he knocked on my open door.
Said: “Hey, Victor, may I come in?”
I shrugged: “I’m just a guy who can’t say no.”
“If only that were true,” he said as he entered my quarters. “You’re not Eric.”
But I didn’t take the bait. Didn’t turn my back on him as I sat in my comfy red leather chair and let him take the lumpy faded blue sofa.
From down the hall came the rolling scream of Russell singing Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”
Dr. Friedman said: “Do you like that song, too?”
“Let’s say I identify with it. We all do, not just Russell.”
“Speaking of Russell,” said Dr. F, “what did you think of his story in Group?”
“Good story. He lied.”
“How do you know?”
“Come on, Doc, we all know. Knew the first time he told that story years ago.”
“How do you know?”
“The wire. We knew he lied because of the wire.”
“Because…”
“Because if you use a wire to garrote an oaf like that fucking Colonel Herzgl, the least that’ll happen is that the wire will cut your bare hands. As you strangle the guy, the wire cuts into his neck, slices his jugular, so whoa, we’re talking a waterfall of blood spraying the walls, the bathroom mirror, on him, on you. Russell would have been all bloody and cut when he came out of that bathroom. He said he walked back to the table where the Colonel’s two goons were waiting, and that they didn’t say boo. They might have been stupid. They might have been drunk. They might have hated the Colonel. But they’d have noticed blood on the American who supposedly just went to the bathroom. Self-preservation would have made them ask what’s-up-with-that? But Russell says they didn’t. So his story is a lie.”
“All of it?”
“We know he won’t do Elvis. Know that his cover was lead guitar and singer in an Oregon bar band touring Europe, playing third-rate dives. Belgrade was where he activated his cover, his ‘Serbian roots’ quest. Infiltrated the slaughterhouse team.”
“What’s the true heart of his story?” asked our shrink.
So I thought about it. Said: “The bathroom.”
“Why?”
“Because in the story it was the kill zone. The hot spot. The powerful place.”
“Like Malaysia was for you?”
Should have seen that one coming. I said: “If you want to talk about Asia, walk down to Zane’s room. He got the secret Congressional Medal of Honor for service there. His war was long gone before I showed up. Now all he’s got is that hunk of metal in his dresser drawer plus what turned his hair white and scares him awake at night.”
“What scares you awake at night, Vic?”
“Look, this is our last time together. Doesn’t make sense to get into all that now.”
“It makes perfect sense. This being our last time makes it safer for you to get into it with me than with Dr. Jacobsen when he comes back.”
“Like you won’t pass notes on to him? Passing notes gets you detention.”
“You’re the one who’s detained, Vic.”
“The Castle is a pretty good place to be trapped.”
“But Vic, isn’t life about freedom? Choosing?” He watched me say nothing. The second hand swept a circle around his watch. “How do you feel about the others?”
“Very carefully. None of them like to be touched.”
“I don’t think you’re a joke. But if you treat me like I am…” He shrugged. “So again: How do you feel about the other four people on this Ward?”
“They’re fried, each and every one. On a good day, they’re frazzled. On a bad day, they’re batshit. They can piss me off or make me laugh. But we get each other better than any of you doctors or nurses, maybe because we’ve been there and off the edge. You haven’t. We’re locked up. You’re not. There’s us. Then there’s all of you. The five of us, the four of them… They’re who I’ve got left.”
“Sounds like family.” He waited for me to say something. Filled my silence with another question. “What’s your role in this family? Father?”
“Don’t lay that on me. Uncle Sam is our father.”
“So you’re all his kids.” Dr. F shrugged. “Are any of you going to grow up?”
“And suddenly get ‘not crazy’? Hey, you tell me, you’re the doctor.”
“Are you still thinking about suicide?”
“Who doesn’t? Who hasn’t?”
“But you’ve tried it. Twice.”
“What, are you saying… You don’t think I am—I was sincere?”
“No. I think you were—excuse the expression—dead serious about suicide.”
“So the CIA must be right and I am incompetent.”
“Bullshit. You’re the most competent crazy I know.”
“Then why couldn’t I kill myself?”
“You’re a hard man to kill—even for you. But the more important question is why have you stopped attempting suicide?”
“Maybe I’m waiting for the right moment.”
“Or for the reason not to.”
Our eyes pointed at each other through a waterfall of silence.
Until Dr. F glanced at his watch: “Now I have to go listen to Hailey run down symptoms that aren’t there.”
“She picks her own scabs to prove she’s right about being sick,” I said.
“If you know that about her…”
“Other people are easy.”
“Of course. Why do you think so many screwed up people become shrinks?”
“Hey, Dr. F: are you screwed up?”
“Not anymore.”
When he left, he closed the door behind him.
Our Ward is on the Castle’s Third Floor. After Dr. F left, I stared through my shatterproof window, looked out over the naked trees, watched white clouds drift across a blue spring sky and felt a lone tear trickle down my cheek.
4
“So here we are again. Final session. Our last chance.”
Call the speaker prophet. Call him the man with the right questions for wrong answers. Call him Dr. F, like we had since the first morning we pulled our folding chairs into a circle in the sun-drenched Day Room for Group, like we did that Tuesday afternoon when we all gathered together for the last time.
“This afternoon,” he told us, “I want to talk about all of you.”
“Clinical practice isn’t my specialty,” said Dr. F. “I apply psychiatry to crisis management and international analysis for the CIA. Soon as I get back to D.C., I will start as a watchdog and profiler for the National Security Council. I won’t even have time to go home to New York. I had two weeks between postings, but when I heard about the staff training furloughs here, rather than go sit on the beach at Hawaii—”
“You’d sunburn, Doc.”
“Good, Russell, looking for the bright side of a closed-out option.”
Russell pushed his sunglasses up his nose. “I’m so bright I gotta wear shades.”
“Too bad being smart isn’t enough,” said Dr. F. “Anyway, the chance to sharpen my clinical skills, the chance to get to know—”
I interrupted: “To get to know us broken tips of the ‘national security’ spear.”
“Always the poet, Victor. But now I want to talk about all of you through the prism of my organizational analysis, not my—”
“Not your psycho—analysis,” said Zane. “Us being psychos.”
“Don’t limit yourselves,” said the real doctor. “You’re more than psychos. Right now, you’re the inmates who have taken over the asylum.”
The substitute nurse unlocked the Ward door and entered. She carried a batch of files. Took a chair outside of our circle. A quick glance showed me her reflection trapped in the dark screen of the Day Room’s turned-off TV.
“We haven’t run things for a long time,” said Zane. “Especially around here.”
“You got the keys, Doc,” said Russell.
“And you all like it that way. No, don’t interrupt.”
Dr. F’s gold metal glasses reflected five inmates coiled on metal chairs.
“My field is gestalt dynamics, how groups function, with a specialty of the aberrant individual in a high stress environment. But,” smiled Dr. F, “the description in my CIA file is better. In our shadow world, they call me a spotter.”
“Like for a sniper?” said ex-soldier Zane.
“More like a shepherd, but this isn’t about me, so let’s get through this so nurse and I can get to the Route 1 motel and pack before we go back to…” Dr. F smiled. “Back to the real world.”
“Whoa, you found it?” exclaimed Russell.
“Hey,” I said: “Call Dr. F the peerless spotter.”
“Peerless spotter!” obeyed Eric.
“Call me a taxi and I’m out of here,” said Russell.
“You’re a taxi!” chorused Zane with Eric.
Hailey said: “Go where you gotta go.”
CLAP! Dr. F’s hands slapped together. He yelled: “Shut up!”
Dr. F’s face burned red: “I bust you on being inmates who’ve taken over the asylum, and to avoid dealing with that, you try to riff away the time we’ve got left!”
The visiting shrink shook his head. “Crazy people see with powerful clarity. Distorted vision, sure, but clear. And you’re the most insightful and yet the blindest patients I’ve ever had. Look at the five of you.”
Eric swiveled his head to comply.
Russell pushed his sunglasses on tighter: “We already looked at me today.”
“Oh really?” said the shrink. “Was that you we saw? Or your story?”
“Stories are what we got,” I said.
“What you’ve all got,” said Dr. F, “is your lives made into stories instead of your lives full of stories. OK, Russell, we did you today, so we’ll skip you now. Hailey?”
The Black woman gave our substitute therapist her poker face.
He said: “Do you know why you keep muttering, ‘Gotta be worth it’?”
“Because that’s true.”
“Truth is irrelevant if you use it to drown out meaning or if you inven—” Dr. F shifted to a softer word: “If you use drama to hide what you don’t want to face. I know the horror that happened to you in Nigeria and I know the horror you did, but you’ve got to face it. Face it without… the protection of judgment.”
“Doesn’t matter what you think I have to do: I’m dying.”
“How convenient. But you look fine.”
“Appearances are deceiving,” she snapped.
The therapist said: “So who are you fooling?”
Her ebony skin glowed with anger.
I said: “In the land of the blind, the one eyed person is crazy.”
“All our eyes work, Victor,” said Dr. F, “but good diversion. I was done with Hailey anyway—unless she’s got something new to say to us.”
She glared at him.
Dr. F swung his gaze to Eric. That bespectacled, pudgy engineer stiffened to attention in his chair. Waiting. Ready. The therapist opened his mouth—found no words, closed it. Knew he had to say something about everyone or no one would listen.
“Eric, two days ago, Victor said he agreed with Mark Twain that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes, and then pointed out that Eric rhymes with Iraq.”
Dr. Leon Friedman’s
shaking head broke free his smile.
“If I were a poet like Victor,” said Dr. F, “maybe I’d have more than a notion of the connected sense of all that. But notions are key now—for you. You beat Saddam Hussein’s Iraq way back before our first war there, but they turned you into a robot. Yet I have to believe that somewhere in you, there’s a notion of Eric as a free human being.”
Dr. Leon Friedman told the pudgy hero in thick glasses: “This is not an order, but try to imagine a notion of space between commands of do or don’t.”
“’Xactly what the hell does that mean?” said white-haired Zane.
“Exactly is what you’ve got, right soldier?” replied our therapist.
As Eric frowned. Took Dr. F’s suggestion as an order. Eric’s hands cut a square frame in our circle’s air like a mime building the notion of space.
While Eric mimed his work, Dr. F worked on Zane.
“All you’ve been through,” Dr. F told that white-haired soldier. “Bombs. Heroin. Slaughter beneath your boots. Jungle heat that now makes you melt down. You fought since Vietnam so you can carry that weight and never cry. That’s exactly who you are.”
“What’s your point?” snapped Zane.
“Congratulations. You won. Look what you got. Exactly.”
Zane angled his head toward Eric: “I’m not him. You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I wish I could,” said Dr. F. “We’d drive out of here together.”
“But now it’s time for you to scoot back to the real world,” I said.
“Before I get to you, huh Victor?”
I became ice. He was only an image in my eyes. A sack of red water.
As he said: “Zane, you and Vic here rhyme.”
Zane argued: “He ain’t my generation. Plus, I never tried to kill myself uselessly. And I don’t zone out.”
“But you’re both crazy from responsibility,” answered the therapist. “Though you cling to your weight and Victor uses his to dig his own grave.”
“I did what I did,” I said.
“And if you did anything differently,” Dr. F asked me, “in Malaysia, with 9/11, would anything be different now?”
