by D. W. Buffa
Dr. Friedman rocked back and forth in his chair, pressing together the tips of his outstretched fingers. “The rules were relaxed because of who he was, because the relationship between them was more than just that of lawyer and judge. And the relationship was even closer now because they had done something together that they had to keep secret. I see. Yes.”
“A few months later, it happened again, or rather, it happened again and I knew it. I don’t know how often it may have happened in between. He was working on a motion, and he came into my office to talk to me about it. The issue was interesting, and the more we talked, the more I thought he was on to something, that he actually had a chance, if not to win at the trial court level, to take it up to the appellate courts and help make some new law. We talked for a couple of hours, and at the end he thanked me and told me I had given him some new ideas he wanted to pursue. I asked him when his brief was due. He told me it was due the next morning, but he thought he would work on it through the weekend and get it in on Monday. I must have looked alarmed, because he just laughed and assured me there was nothing to worry about. ‘They always give me a few more days, if I need them.’
” ‘But you can’t do that,’ I blurted out, angry that he could so blithely dismiss the obligation to follow the rules.
” ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘It doesn’t hurt anyone.’ That was his answer, and I remember how struck I was, not so much by what he said, as by the almost cynical indifference with which he said it. It was as if the rules had been made for other people, people who did not know how things really worked, people, he seemed to believe, who could not be trusted to do the right thing on their own. There was something else—I still can’t quite put my finger on it—but something that told me that he thought I was one of those people, too.
“I didn’t see him quite so much after that. He was an associate in the firm, and I probably saw him several times every day, but we did not talk, not the way we had before. But if you had asked me at the time whether there had been any change in our relations, I probably would not have thought so. It was impercepti-ble, one of those things that happen and you don’t become aware of it until, suddenly, one day, you realize that everything has changed. And with Elliott, of course, there was no question of when that day came.”
Friedman knew what I meant, or thought he did. “The day of the shooting.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “The shooting happened later.
It would not have happened at all if any of us had had a whit of intelligence about us. Think of it. We see it all the time, but when it happens to one of our own, it’s the last thing we think of. Elliott was tired, overworked, and he had a breakdown, so of course it must have been stress. Give him some time off, get him into counseling; everything will be fine. No one wanted to be the first to say: Elliott Winston is insane and needs to be in a hospital.
“The twelve jurors on the case he was trying that day would not have hesitated to say so. He had just finished the direct examination of a witness for the defense. He sat down, scratching at something on the back of his wrist. As the prosecutor began to ask his first, preliminary question on cross, the scratching grew more rapid, more intense. Jurors started to look. Elliott was tearing at his skin, digging into it, drawing blood. A juror screamed and as everyone turned to look, Elliott shot out of his chair, stabbing the air with his hand, the fingernails glistening red with his own blood, shouting at his own witness, ‘You’re part of it, aren’t you? I saw the way you were looking at the prosecutor. I saw the two of you giving each other messages with your eyes!’ He wheeled around and began to challenge the jury. ‘And I’ve seen the way you look at him, and the way you look at each other!’ He turned to the judge, one of the most fair-minded men on the bench.
‘Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on here! What’s the case number?’ he demanded.
“That stopped everyone cold. No one had any idea what he meant. ‘It’s the number of the year I was born,’ he announced as if it proved everything. ‘You’re in it, too, aren’t you?’
“A long time after it happened, months after the shooting in fact, I read the transcript, trying to figure out what had happened.
I could not believe it. The day before, he seemed as normal as anyone else.”
“That isn’t surprising,” Friedman assured me. “It’s a classic case.
Acute schizophrenia, the sudden onset of symptoms in a person who until that point appears to be functioning quite well. The delusions you describe are exactly what you would expect. There is a sudden, perhaps slight change in the chemistry of the brain.
That is all it takes, I’m afraid. It is usually precipitated by precisely the kind of crisis you described, some kind of emotional trauma from which they can see no way of escape.”
The doctor got up from his chair. “We better go. Elliott is waiting.”
The rain was pounding down, exploding on the pavement when it hit. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the sky was lit up with lightning. Pulling our coats over our heads, we ducked down and jogged across the parking lot to the hospital on the other side.
“Tell me,” Friedman asked once we were inside. “You obviously have a great interest in what happened to Elliott. You read the transcript because you wanted to know what happened at the time of the first episode—what you call his breakdown. What do you know about the shooting, the crime for which he was committed?”
I stopped and looked at him, searching his eyes until I was certain he really did not know. Then I turned and we started to walk again down the long gray corridor.
“I’m the one he shot,” I explained.
Seven
_______
The voice of the doctor was speaking his name, but I was looking at the face of someone I did not know. It had been twelve years, but the changes I saw had not been produced by time alone.
The Elliott Winston I knew had been quick, alert, easygoing, and always affable; the man standing in front of me waiting for Dr.
Friedman to unlock the heavy gauge wire screen was tense, expectant, impatient. He was wearing an old suit that was too tight for him. Buttoned in front, the lapels bowed out from his chest.
A solid-color tie was off center at his throat, and one of the collar points of his soiled white shirt bent up. His hands were clasped behind his back and his feet were spread the width of his shoulders. Though I was just a few feet away from him, he stared straight ahead as if there was no one else around.
We stepped inside, and Friedman rolled the gate shut behind us. Elliott did not move. He stood there, erect, immobile, locked in that rigid stare.
“Elliott,” Friedman said in a calm, unhurried voice, “you remember Joseph Antonelli, don’t you?”
There was no reaction, no movement of any kind, not even a slight flutter of the lashes over his eyes. I wondered if he had slipped into a catatonic state where he could not hear anything.
“He does this sometimes,” Friedman explained. “When he’s thinking about something.” With a hopeless shrug, he added, “I’ve seen him do it for hours. When it happens, I’m afraid there really isn’t—”
He never finished. Elliott had turned toward me and extended his hand. “Joseph Antonelli. I knew you’d come one day.”
I took his hand, and then, when I saw his face, had to force myself not to let go. He was looking at me with such enormous concentration that I thought his eyes would burn right through me. There was a power about him that was extraordinary.
“It was good of you to bring Mr. Antonelli,” he said, looking over my shoulder. “Thank you, Dr. Friedman.”
He said it the way someone might address a subordinate, not with a tone of command, but with that benevolence which underscores the distance between the one who bestows it and the one who receives it. No doubt used to the strange eccentricities of his patient, Friedman seemed not to mind. He signaled a white-coated orderly who was standing at the far end of the large, open ward.
“Mr.
Antonelli will be visiting with Elliott for a while,” he said when the orderly drew near. “Make sure he has anything he needs.”
After Friedman had gone, Elliott and I sat down at a square wooden table in front of a wire-covered window at the side of the room. Farther down, in the corner, three patients, dressed in white short-sleeve V-neck tops and baggy drawstring trousers, were sitting in a semicircle on plastic chairs. One of them, one leg folded under the other, held a magazine in his hands, turning it around and around, upside down, then right side up, over and over again. Another one, short, balding, with thick, stubby fingers, kept throwing out one or the other of his hands, clutching at the air, and then, bringing it back in, slowly opening his fist to see what he had caught. The third scarcely moved at all. He slumped forward, eyes glazed, mumbling to himself.
Elliott caught me looking. “Watch this,” he whispered.
“Chester!” The mumbling stopped, and the third man lifted his head, a bewildered expression on his face.
“What is 3,182 times 5,997?”
The third man blinked, then answered, “19,082,454,” and then blinked again.
“I’ll ask him something difficult this time,” Winston remarked under his breath. “Chester,” he called out. “What is 8.105698
times 10.00787?”
Chester blinked. “81.120771.” And then blinked once more.
“Chester, who is the president of the United States?”
This time he did not blink. He smiled, a foolish, heartbreak-ing smile. “George Washington.”
“Very good,” Elliott remarked with a glance of approval. “Now, if Lincoln freed the slaves, what did Washington do?”
“Freed the cherry trees,” he answered with a childlike grin.
“Thank you, Chester,” Elliott said in the same supremely confident voice with which he had dismissed Dr. Friedman.
“Chester was a high school history teacher,” he explained. “In the other world.”
“The other world? You mean, before he was sick, in the real world?”
This last phrase seemed to bother him. A dark look swept across his visage. “The other world,” he insisted. His mood switched again. “And I think that is the way he taught it, too,”
he said, laughing. Abruptly, the laughter stopped. “That’s not true.
In the other world he taught history the way they all teach history, and he could not balance his checkbook. Then, when he became sane, he forgot all the names and dates and all the other unimportant things they cram their heads full of, and as soon as his mind was clear he knew everything about numbers.”
He looked at me for a moment. “You don’t believe me. Go ahead, ask him anything you want, any combination, any calculation. He can do it in his head instantaneously. I should know.
I’ve been trying to catch him in a mistake for years.”
“How would you know if he did?” I asked without thinking.
He felt sorry for me. “Didn’t you notice? He only makes a mistake when he doesn’t blink.”
I was wrong. He did not feel sorry for me, not the way I had thought. He was playing with me. I could see it in his eyes.
“It’s true though, isn’t it?” he asked. “Whenever the answer is right, he blinks before he gives it. Isn’t that a perfect example of reasoning from effect back to cause?”
I did not know what to say. There really was nothing I could say. I tried to change the subject. “You’ve changed a lot, Elliott.
I’m not sure I would have recognized you.”
A smile passed quickly over his face. “You didn’t recognize me.
You thought I was someone else.” He seemed to be enjoying some small private joke. “It must be the mustache. I didn’t have one when you knew me. I had a beard, too,” he admitted with what I thought was a rueful expression. “And my hair was long. I’m afraid there were people in here who began to think I looked a little like Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ! Can you imagine! Then the next thing you know, some of these people started to think I was Jesus Christ. That might not have been too bad. At least that way I could have saved Christianity from itself. But there was someone here—not right here, but over in one of the other wards—who really believed he was Jesus Christ. He might have been for all I know,” he added, his eyes feverish with delight. “I did not want anyone to have to start questioning his own identity because of me, so I got rid of it—the beard—cut my hair short, and almost got rid of the mustache, too, but I changed my mind—or my mind changed me. Either way, I kept it. How have you been?”
It was difficult to know whether to be more astonished at the rapid-fire lucidity of his speech or the manner in which he had just brought it to a dead stop.
“I’ve been very well myself,” he said before I could think of what to say or how, now that I was finally face-to-face with him, I should say it. He seemed to sense every doubt, every hesitation, every slight uncertainty. “I mean it,” he continued, speaking now in a quiet, smooth-flowing voice. “I’m much better off here.”
My eyes darted around the drab-colored room, taking in the cheap furniture, and the dull finished floor, and the painted pipes that hung on metal braces as they passed under the ceiling; the sleepy-eyed orderly reading an out-of-date magazine; the three patients at the other table, barely aware of each other’s existence, a fourth inmate I had not noticed before moving like a sleepwalker down the corridor that connected the day room to the rest of the ward.
His eyes were waiting for me. “I wrote you a letter once. A long time ago.”
“I never got it.”
“I never sent it. I knew what I wanted to say. I had finally understood what had happened—all of it—everything. My mind was thinking quite clearly, more clearly than it ever had. In an instant I could see all there was to see. I could take it all in, all of it, all of the relationships, all the subtle nuances, every shade of meaning,” he explained. His eyes were glistening. “But then, when I sat down and started to write, it all disappeared—everything—
and all I could remember was that I had lost something I had thought was unforgettable. This was not the last time this happened. Finally, I gave up trying to write anything down. Nothing ever sounded the way I meant it, or was really what I wanted to say.”
As I listened I began to smile. He was describing what I had so often experienced myself: the inability to connect the thought with the word.
“But that isn’t—” I blurted out before I realized what I was saying.
“Isn’t a sign of insanity?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “What is?” The wry expression that had taken possession of his features faded away. “In any event, I could not write it the way I wanted to write it.”
“What did you want to write me about?”
His eyes seemed to lose a little of their intensity, as if he were turning inward on himself. When I repeated the question, he became even more introspective, staring down at the table with the troubled aspect of someone searching for the answer to a riddle.
Finally, he lifted his head, but instead of looking at me, he stared straight ahead.
“When I tried to kill …” His mouth hung open and his body began to tense. Then it started, a shrill, staccato stutter, one word rushing after the other in a mindless, rhyming speech. “Kill …
thrill … will … ill …” His face became rigid, and then began to quiver as if it was on the verge of blowing itself apart. His eyes became enormous hollow black voids. “… chill … till …
dill … quill.” He gasped the words, each one requiring more effort than the one before. Then, as if it had never happened, the life came back into his eyes, the expression returned to his face.
“I wanted to write to you about the time I tried to kill you,” he said in a voice completely normal.
Whether he was unaware of what he had just done, or had become so accustomed to it that he assumed it was taken for granted by everyone with whom he came in contact, he mistook my silence as a sign that I was not en
tirely comfortable with the subject of my own attempted murder. That is what he had been charged with, and that was the reason he had been sent here, to the forensic ward of the state hospital, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, clearly a danger to others and probably a danger to himself.
“I would have, too, if you hadn’t wrestled the gun away from me.” He said it with a kind of gay indifference, the way someone might explain how they would have won the last set of a tennis match if you had not made a ridiculously lucky return of serve right at the end.
I had been waiting for a long time to tell him he was wrong.
“I don’t believe you ever intended to kill me or anyone else. You were sick, Elliott. You didn’t know what you were doing. You came into the building that day, started walking up and down the hallways, screaming all those unintelligible threats no one could understand. Then you came into my office and you started waving that gun around. The truth is, if I had just talked to you, calmed you down, instead of going after the gun, it never would have gone off and I wouldn’t have been hit in the leg and we could have gotten you the help you needed. Listen to me. I had never had anyone point a gun at me before. It scared me, more than I had ever been scared in my life. I didn’t think, I just reacted. I should have known better, and I’m sorry for that. I know you never meant to hurt me.”
I had put off saying this for twelve years, even though I had known at some level of my subconscious mind that it would lift a great weight off my shoulders when I did. Elliott reached across the table and, as if he wanted to console me for what I had been through, laid his hand on my shoulder. A moment later, he pulled it away. “You were sleeping with my wife,” he said, his eyes flashing.
“I hardly knew your wife,” I sputtered, suddenly defensive.
“Whatever made you think … ? Who made you think … ?”
A detached, faintly ironic smile on his lips, he watched me, amused at the vehemence with which I denied something I had never done.
“I know you weren’t,” he said, nodding his assurance of the truth of it. “But I thought so then, and it was a long time before I realized I had been wrong. Even after the divorce, I didn’t know what had really been going on. What else was she going to do?
