Smack.
"I assume you did check him out, and he wasn't a USCF member or a Liechtenstein grandmaster."
Smack.
"Right. We wouldn't have been at that tournament last week, and he wouldn't be living with me, if I'd found out he hustled us. I'd have put Buster Brown back on his case."
Smack.
"Theo, I think you did a decent thing by taking him in, and by looking out for him now. But just out of curiosity, what percentage of his earnings do you take?"
Smack.
"Uh-uh. Your flag's down."
So it was. I got up off the bench and walked back toward the stone chess tables.
Chapter 5
If the man with the boyish face, brown hair, high forehead, blue eyes, and slightly dazed expression had missed a couple of meals while he was living on the streets, he was rapidly trying to make up for it. He'd already wolfed down two cheeseburgers, a mound of french fries, a side order of coleslaw, and two large Cokes at the small luncheonette across from the park where I had taken him.
"I've never met a dwarf before," Michael Stout said, sipping at his chocolate ice cream soda. "I've never even seen one, except in pictures."
I smiled, said, "It looks like you're surviving the experience."
"You're a nice man, Mr. Mongo. I haven't met many nice people in New York; most can't even bother to be polite."
"Just Mongo will be fine."
He pointed to the fifty-dollar bill resting between us on the marble tabletop. "That's an awful lot of money. You're a friend of Theo's, and you're buying me lunch, so you don't have to pay to talk to me."
"It's all right, Michael. It's worth it to me. I'd like to ask you a few questions."
"Sure. But I don't see how anything I have to say could be worth fifty dollars. I know money doesn't grow on trees."
"Theo tells me you only picked up on chess a couple of weeks ago. Is that true?"
"Well, I only began to understand the game a couple of weeks ago, and I'm learning more every day-even playing here, where the people who pay to play aren't that strong. But I learned the moves of the pieces as a child."
"Can you tell me how this sudden understanding of the game came about?"
He gave it a lot of thought while he sipped at his soda. He ate some of the ice cream left at the bottom, then looked up at me with his wide, innocence-filled blue eyes and shook his head. "No, I don't think I can.
"Give it a try, Michael. For instance, on the day when you first met Theo, Buster Brown, and the others, had you come down here to the park to play chess?"
"No. I was doing what I did every day, just wandering around."
"And then you saw Theo and the others playing, and you were interested. So you stopped and watched."
"Yes. I remembered how I liked to play as a kid. I watched people playing for a while, and-this is what I don't know how to explain-I just suddenly understood all sorts of things about the game that I'd never been taught. You hear people talking about how good players can think nine or ten moves ahead, but it wasn't like that at all. I could look at a position and know what was a good move and what was a bad move, and why. If one player made a bad move, then I could see what moves the other player could make in order to win. Suddenly I just understood certain principles of the game, and the right moves flowed from these principles. Sometimes I could see the right moves all the way to the end of a game. I don't want you to think I'm bragging, Mongo, but beating Theo and the other people who play here regularly isn't hard; beating the people who want to bet with me on a game is usually even easier. Actually, getting used to playing with a clock, and remembering to hit it after I'd made a move, was a lot harder in the beginning than actually playing."
"How do you come to be in New York, Michael? How long have you been here?"
Michael Stout was guileless, his emotions transparent, and now it was as if a curtain had dropped down somewhere behind his expressive blue eyes. Clearly uncomfortable with the question, he quickly averted his gaze. "I, uh, just kind of ended up here."
"Where did you come from?"
"Well. . uh. . that's kind of hard to say. Look, maybe I should-"
"Were you in a mental hospital, Michael?"
His eyes darted back to my face. The curtain behind them had abruptly been raised, and onstage, front and center, were alarm and anxiety. "Why do you ask that?"
"You told Theo, Buster Brown, and the others that you'd been 'out of it' for a long time. I thought you might have been in a mental hospital."
He pushed the remains of his ice cream soda, and the fifty-dollar bill, away from him in a slow, deliberate motion. "I don't mean to be rude, but I don't want to talk anymore. I think I'd better be getting back to the tables. Theo will be wondering where I am."
I took a second black-and-yellow capsule I had brought with me out of my shirt pocket and set it down in the center of the table where the fifty-dollar bill had been. Michael Stout was halfway out of his chair, but when he saw the capsule he let out an audible gasp and collapsed back into the chair as if his legs had been cut out from under him. The expression on his face was not only one of shock but something very close to terror.
"What's the matter, Michael?" I asked quickly. "I'm not going to hurt you."
"But you have one of the pills! You're not one of us!"
"One of whom, Michael? One of what?"
His gaze left the capsule, came back to my face. He stared at me for a few moments, mouth slightly open and eyes still filled with fear, then slowly shook his head. "I can't tell you, Mongo. I'm not supposed to say anything to anybody."
"Michael, I know you're in trouble. You're in danger. I think there are people stalking you who want to kill you, and it has something to do with these pills. I want to help you. I got this one from somebody-"
"Who?!" he interrupted, his eyes growing even wider. "Which one?"
"You don't know her; she's not one of you either. They were given to her by a man I'm sure knew he was about to be killed, and he gave his bag of capsules to the first person he came across who he thought could be helped by them. Right after he gave them to my friend, he was shot on the street. My friend suffers from severe psychosis-she's schizophrenic. Is that what you are, Michael-a schizophrenic who's able to function normally on this particular medication?"
He stared at me, clearly frightened, for what seemed a long time, then slowly, reluctantly, nodded his head.
"Do you know that if you stop taking this medication, even if you skip just one dose, you'll lapse back into madness, and maybe die?"
"Mongo, I can't talk about it!"
"You can talk about it to me. I want to help you-you, and my friend, and however many more there are of you in the city. But I can't do that unless you tell me everything. Now, do you know what will happen to you if you stop taking the capsules?"
I wasn't sure he was going to answer me, but after another long pause he finally nodded his head again. Now he had the startled expression of a deer caught in headlights. "I just know I have to take one every day or I'll end up nutty again."
"What are you supposed to do when you run out of the supply of capsules you have now? I don't know how many you have, but my friend only has enough to last her another couple of weeks or so. How can she get more?"
Michael Stout swallowed hard, said quietly, "Dr. Sharon is trying to get us more. We're supposed to meet her on Christmas Eve at the big Christmas tree by the skating rink uptown."
"You mean Rockefeller Center?"
"Yes, I think that's the name of it. Besides the Christmas tree, there's a big statue there."
"Who's this Dr. Sharon?"
"Sharon Stephens. She's a psychiatrist. She was the only nice one there."
"Where, Michael? A mental hospital? Is that where you came from?"
He nodded in a timid, birdlike fashion.
"What's the name of it?"
"Rivercliff. It's about a four-hour drive from here, north up the Thruway."
"How did you get to New York City?"
"Dr. Sharon brought us, in a bus that belonged to the hospital. She helped us get away. Raymond was running around with a surgical saw and scalpel killing everybody. She took as many of us with her as she could, and she brought us here. There were twelve of us on the bus, besides Dr. Sharon."
I suddenly realized I was breathing rapidly and shallowly, and my stomach muscles had knotted. I took a deep breath, slowly let it out, then leaned back in my chair and tried to relax. "All right, Michael," I said in what I hoped was a soothing, reassuring tone, "let's slow down and back up. You trust me, right? You believe I want to help you:
"Yes, I do," the boyish-faced man said quietly. There were still shadows of anxiety moving in his eyes, but he was starting to look a bit more at ease. "But Theo's going to be mad at me if I don't get back soon and start playing. He'll say I'm mooching off him and costing him money. Without Theo, I don't have a place to stay, or any way to support myself."
"You let me worry about Theo. Like I said, in order to help you and my friend, I need to know everything so that I can begin to understand what's going on. I think it may be easier if I just ask questions and you answer them-but if you think of anything to add to an answer, don't hesitate to do so. Don't worry yourself about Theo, or playing chess, or anything else except the conversation that's taking place right now. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Let's start with Rivercliff. Were all of the patients there schizophrenics like you and my friend, or were there also patients there who had been diagnosed with other types of mental illness?"
"I don't know. You'd have to ask Dr. Sharon."
"Where can I find her?"
"I don't know. She just told us to meet her by the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. How did you know about me, Mongo?"
"I was at the Manhattan Chess Club the night you were playing in the tournament. When I saw my friend's capsules, I realized they were just like the one I saw you take. You say this Dr. Sharon helped you escape from Rivercliff after a patient named Raymond started running amok and killing people. Is that right?"
"Yes."
"Raymond was a patient?"
"Yes."
"What's Raymond's last name?"
"Rogers."
"Michael, why was it necessary to have someone help you to escape in the first place?"
"Because Raymond was-"
"No, I'm asking why you were still there before this Raymond started killing people. Whatever else it may do, the medication in these capsules you're taking seems incredibly effective in relieving your symptoms. Both you and my friend seem to be functioning perfectly normally-in your case, better than normally. How long have you been able to do this-think, speak, and act like you do now?"
"Oh, I don't know. . years. Except for the chess, of course."
'Tears?"
"Uh-huh."
I felt a chill. "Michael, if your symptoms were being controlled by medication, why didn't they just release you and treat you on an outpatient basis? There are thousands of mentally ill people wandering around New York City, some taking medication as outpatients, and they're in nowhere as good shape mentally as you seem to be. Did you do something wrong to get you put there? Were you judged to be criminally insane?"
"I don't think so. I don't remember doing anything wrong."
"What about this Raymond Rogers? Was he diagnosed as criminally insane?"
"I don't know. Nobody was ever released from Rivercliff. Sometimes the doctors would say somebody was going to be released, but they lied. I was there for more than twelve years. I saw new patients brought in, but I never saw anybody released. When a patient died, they just buried him in the cemetery on the grounds. When that happened, they'd bring in a new patient."
I felt another chill, and this time I actually shuddered. "How many patients were there at Rivercliff?"
"I guess maybe forty."
"What about your family? Why didn't they press for your release?
And what about the families of the other patients who died? Didn't anybody want to claim the bodies?"
"None of us had families-in fact, I think that's one of the reasons we were selected to go to Rivercliff. I'd been transferred from a state hospital in Oklahoma. Everyone I ever talked to had been transferred to Rivercliff from some state hospital. And nobody there had families-at least not families that cared about what happened to them. I'd been abandoned when I was a child, but a lot of the patients there had been orphaned."
"Jesus Christ," I mumbled to myself. I'd stumbled into a nightmare. What I'd witnessed the night before with Mama Spit was horrible enough, but the nightmare was just growing darker and deeper. And I was merely hearing about it; the man sitting across the table from me had lived it. It all made me very sad, and very, very angry.
"Mongo, you all right? You look funny."
"Yes, Michael, I'm all right," I replied, looking up at him and forcing a smile. "Just a touch of indigestion. Look, let's assume you're right: one criterion for selecting a patient for transfer to Rivercliff was that the person had nobody on the outside who would be asking questions about him. Why? None of you was ever released, even after your symptoms had been brought under control. Why?"
The questions had been rhetorical, but Michael answered them anyway. "I don't know, Mongo."
"I assume Rivercliff was the only place you were ever given that medication?"
"Yes."
"Well, they had to be up to more than just the testing of a new drug they could never hope to market; they wouldn't even be able to publish papers or data, because they'd end up in prison for illegal and dangerous human experimentation. I think it's safe to assume they weren't acting out of humanitarian impulses. So what did the doctors at Rivercliff want with you? What could they hope to accomplish when they'd broken every canon of medical ethics in the book and could never hope to see the drug they'd developed used in any patient population outside the hospital?"
"I don't know, Mongo."
"All of the patients there took these capsules?"
He nodded.
"Were you or anybody else there ever given any other kind of medication?"
"No. We didn't need any other medication. I remember when I first went there I was on all sorts of different medications, and I was a mess. I was making these uncontrollable movements-"
"Dyskinesia."
"Yeah, I guess that's what they call it. Anyway, the first thing the doctors did when I got there was take away all my other meds and give me one of those capsules. When I woke up the next morning, I felt. . like I feel now. The voices in my head had stopped, and I could think clearly. And there weren't any of the lousy side effects I used to suffer from with the old meds."
"And they never talked about releasing you?"
"They talked about it, but I knew they wouldn't do it. They never released anybody."
I pointed to the capsule in the center of the table. "What do they call this stuff?"
"They never called it anything; it was just our meds."
"All right, Michael, describe your daily routine for me, if you will. Did you have individual therapy sessions, group counseling, what?"
He shook his head. "Mostly, we could do whatever we wanted all day-there were game rooms, a gym, and a swimming pool. They always had videotapes of the latest movies, and there was a good library. The doctors only seemed interested in asking us questions, and they'd do that, oh, maybe two or three times a week. If they were interested in what you had to say, they'd take you to another part of the hospital and give you some tests. That never happened to me, but I heard about it from others."
"What kinds of questions did the doctors ask?"
"They wanted to know how we were feeling."
"You mean whether you were feeling disoriented, hearing voices, feeling paranoid, that sort of thing?"
"No. They wanted to know if we felt anything, or could do anything, we hadn't felt or done before. You see, people had different reactions to the m
eds. We all got better mentally, and for the most part we stayed that way. But some people started to change in different ways; sometimes they'd get really good at things. I think this is what the doctors were interested in. And I know they made changes in the meds from time to time."
"How could you tell that if the meds always came in the same black-and-yellow capsules?"
"Aftertaste-sometimes it would change. Also, my stomach could tell; sometimes the meds made me sick, sometimes not. And I would feel different; I could still think clearly, but my emotions would be stronger, or weaker. Sometimes I'd have diarrhea, and other times I'd be constipated. The meds I have now work pretty good."
"Michael, I'm still not sure I'm following you. What kinds of things would people get good at? You mean like chess?"
"Yeah, but that's just me. I didn't know I could play chess like I do now while I was there, because nobody played. They didn't even have any sets. But there was one guy who suddenly got real good at music; there was a piano in one of the recreation lounges, and he taught himself to play. Hum him any tune, and he could sit down at the piano and play it. He even started writing music."
"Like you, he discovered a talent he hadn't realized he had?"
"Yes-but it wasn't always a talent. There was a woman there- her name is Greta Wurlitzer, and she was on the bus with us-who suddenly developed incredible night vision. She could see at night like a cat. The problem was that the daylight hurt her eyes, so she had to wear dark glasses during the day. Greta used to joke about it, call herself 'the night owl.'
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