Ashes, Ashes

by Charles Atkins

  ‘It’s so unfair,’ Lucinda agreed, trying to keep pace with her mentor, while not wanting to appear skittish around the patients – most of them in hospital gowns.

  ‘I’d just like to wipe that smug look off that psychiatrist. Who the hell does he think he is? All of them playing God. Locking people away for years without a trial. They should all spend a few months in one of these places. Let them know what it feels like.’

  ‘A taste of their own medicine,’ Lucinda remarked, brushing a strand of silky blonde hair off her forehead.

  Carla realized her usually serious intern had made a joke. This one has possibilities, she thought, but hesitated about disclosing any of her own history. There was a risk in revealing her manic depression, the three times she’d been locked up in a psyche ward just like this one. Look what it had done to her marriage – although in hindsight she thought Bill had used her illness as a way to get rid of a pushy wife who’d become an embarrassment. At parties and law firm retreats where he’d flit from partner to partner like some ass-licking bumblebee, she’d never played the docile attorney’s wife. Early in their five-year marriage she knew he’d never make partner. She knew she was the better attorney; she would be the one to go places … or so she’d thought.

  She took stock of Lucinda, from her serious navy skirt suit to the recently planted emerald-cut diamond that sparkled on her ring finger. ‘Does anyone in your family suffer from mental illness?’ she asked.

  Lucinda looked away. ‘My dad.’ She didn’t offer anything further.

  ‘Has he ever been hospitalized?’

  ‘He’s dead … shot himself.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Carla said, struck at how each of the interns she’d worked with over the past three years had their own stories of mental illness – just as she did. ‘You know I have bipolar disorder,’ Carla said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Great, so much for confidentiality.’ Carla chuckled. ‘I know that people talk.’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘What do they say?’

  ‘That you’re driven. That you’re determined to make a change. That you want to make things better and that you really care about our clients.’

  ‘Stop blowing smoke up my skirt,’ Carla said. ‘What do they say that you don’t want to repeat?’

  Lucinda was about to answer when a heavy-set nurse in a pink uniform told them the judge was ready.

  They reassembled around the table, and the judge solemnly told Marion, ‘Ms Caldwell, you’re free to leave the hospital at any time. Should you wish to remain that is also your choice.’

  The young psychiatrist stammered, ‘But she’s psychotic. You can’t let her go!’

  Before the hospital’s attorney could intercede the judge angrily responded. ‘It’s as Ms Phelps has said – your patient is psychotic and she probably won’t take her medications; in fact she does not believe there is anything wrong with her. But she’s not hurting anyone, including herself. Just because somebody’s idea of reality differs from yours doesn’t mean you can lock them away. Do you understand that, Dr Bai?’

  Chastised, the psychiatrist nodded, as Marion, grinning widely, shook Carla’s hand and then Lucinda’s. ‘Thank you so much,’ Marion said, not letting go of Lucinda’s slender hand, unbridled joy on her face, like a game-show contestant who’d just hit the jackpot. ‘I had such a wonderful time with the judge; he’s such a lovely man. You’re both such lovely women; I hope you’re not lesbians, because God hates fornicators. And he especially hates lesbians.’

  ‘You’re very welcome,’ Carla told her. ‘I’d recommend you ask the nurses to get you your clothes and get out of here as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marion said, as Carla’s cell rang. ‘I’ve got so much work to do. God’s work, in mysterious ways.’

  As her client strode triumphantly to the nurses’ station, to demand her clothing and personals, Carla answered.

  Lucinda listened in.

  ‘Too fabulous!’ Carla said, and then noted the time on the LED readout of her cell phone. ‘But we can’t assume anything, we have until four thirty this afternoon to insure that nothing goes wrong – that’s five and half hours. They’re going to try to pull something together at the last minute. I can be back at the office in fifteen minutes. I want everyone in the conference room when I get there. We’re right at the gate; it’s just going to take a little more work to bust it open. I want everyone primed and ready to pull out all the stops. This is it. I am so fucking excited!’ She clicked her phone closed.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Lucinda asked.

  ‘Judge Garrett is not happy.’ Carla’s grin was infectious.

  ‘And?’ Lucinda asked, watching her boss, and smiling herself.

  ‘Corrections and Mental Health have until the end of the business day to comply with the consent decree.’

  ‘And if they can’t?’ Lucinda asked.

  ‘No doubt about it,’ Carla said, ‘they’re not going to, and come tomorrow morning all four of them will get transferred to a forensic hospital, but that’s just the beginning.’

  ‘How do you know they won’t come up with something? They’ve managed to stall things this far.’

  ‘It wasn’t them,’ Carla chuckled. ‘Come, Lucinda, it’s time to watch and learn.’ They walked to the outer door of the inpatient unit. Carla looked back as the clerk pressed the release button for the lock. In the distance she saw Marion, who had rapidly dressed in two shirts, a stained plaid wool skirt and a dark overcoat. She was waving. Carla smiled and waved back.

  ‘God hates lesbians!’ Marion shouted, still smiling and waving.

  ‘Oi, that one needs to get out of here fast,’ Carla commented, as she opened the door. ‘OK,’ she said, needing to strategize and deciding that Lucinda could be trusted. ‘This is how things work … You have two bureaucratic state agencies – Mental Health and Corrections – that need to construct and implement complex plans for each of the prisoners by the end of the workday today. Aren’t you curious as to why over the past two years they haven’t been able to accomplish this?’

  Lucinda stopped at the stairwell entrance. She had a perplexed expression. ‘Yeah. That doesn’t seem like such a hard thing. I’d just assumed they weren’t taking things seriously. But that’s not it, is it?’

  ‘No,’ Carla said, as she opened the stairwell door. ‘Let me teach you about state government, and how you can bring everything to a dead stop. You start with a call to a union representative, preferably someone well connected and high up. On the Mental Health side of the field, let them know that very dangerous prisoners are being transferred to their facility. Prisoners that they are not equipped or trained to manage; prisoners that will invariably cause staff injuries, or worse. I think I used the phrase “people will get hurt; it’s just a matter of time”. On the Corrections side, I tell them, confidentially of course, that this is just the start of a massive shift from Corrections to Mental Health, so massive in fact that it is part of an administrative plan to eliminate over a thousand state positions in the Department of Corrections.’

  As they got into the elevator Lucinda seemed perplexed. ‘Is it? I wasn’t aware of any of this …’

  Carla threw back her head and laughed. ‘I made it all up … and for all I know it could be entirely true. What it did was start simultaneous rounds of grievances in the two agencies. Workers and their families were given instruction by their union to get their state representatives involved and … that’s step one.’

  ‘There’s more? This is amazing. Is this legal?’

  ‘Of course it is … just don’t get caught. Next comes the importance of friends and knowing how to bury and “lose” paperwork. Because the consent decree is so high profile you have the top brass in both agencies wanting to be involved. That means lots of people signing off on every document. Stuff gets lost, and because it’s state government, no one thinks twice about the delays and the mistakes.’

  ‘That’s reall
y devious,’ Lucinda said, as they pushed through the revolving door in the hospital lobby.

  ‘Not at all,’ Carla remarked, as she felt the sweltering August sun on her face. She took a deep breath, and not even the smell of the hospital’s dumpsters baking in the heat could dampen the glorious feeling of being on the cusp of something important – three years of hard work about to come to fruition. ‘Lucinda, it’s called doing what works.’

  Four

  Richard Glash gazes out the back of the air-conditioned Department of Corrections wagon as it transports him from the maximum security Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville to Croton State Forensic Hospital. It’s early Tuesday morning. Handcuffed and shackled, an armed Marshal sits next to him; a second one drives and can be glimpsed through steel mesh. They wear nametags, but Glash labels them ‘A’ and ‘B’. He calculates the amount of time they’ve been on the road; he ticks off seconds and runs equations that let him know how much remains of the thirty-minute drive. He visualizes a digital clock with glowing numbers ticking down – twenty-two minutes, thirteen seconds.

  He enjoys the streaming sensations, and knows that his brain is superior to his guards’, whose thoughts are likely tuned in to their breakfast or some trivial joke from last night’s late show.

  Glash realizes that he has more in common with computers than with other humans. He thinks of himself as a machine that can maintain several functions at the same time, as he does now.

  ‘A’ attempts to strike up a conversation. ‘You got a beautiful day for the drive,’ he remarks.

  Glash never stops the running calculations of time remaining – eighteen minutes, twenty seconds. ‘Yes,’ he answers dully, ‘the weather is lovely.’

  ‘A’ regales Glash about his weekend’s camping expedition at a state park near the Ashokan Reservoir. ‘God’s country,’ he says, ‘unspoiled and no one around for miles.’

  Glash monitors the conversation, and allows his mouth to answer with an occasional rejoinder. ‘Uhuh … interesting … really? … That’s great.’

  Like watching several TV monitors at the same time, Glash observes the moment, and where it fits into the story of his own life. He replays scenes that he’s painted, carefully keeping them in their proper order, like photos in an album, preserving the details. He is four years old and enters a basement storage room of the family’s candy business in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father – Peter – stands over the battered remains of his mother – Dorothea. The side of her head has been badly damaged; he can see bits of brain tissue through her shattered skull. Father holds an eight-pound steel hammer that he uses to drive the iron wedge that pries apart the wooden candy crates. The hammer is red with old paint and his mother’s fresh blood. The colors are different, Richard observes, yet they are both still called red – fifteen minutes, forty-one seconds. It was Father’s only murder, a deed that Richard surpassed a mere seven days after his eighteenth birthday. He catches himself jumping forward in time; it’s important to keep the story in order.

  ‘Won’t be much longer,’ ‘A’ speculates.

  ‘No,’ Glash answers – twelve-minutes, zero seconds.

  He lets the scene shift. His mother now dead, his father goes to prison and four-year-old Richard becomes a ward of the state. He flips through the faces of the Youth Services social workers, the case managers and the judges. He sees them alive with their smiles and their promises of a new home with loving parents. He puts names to each of the perfectly remembered faces – nine minutes, fourteen seconds. He keeps them on a list, those he’s killed and those yet to be killed. He chides himself for again skipping ahead in the sequence – six minutes, nineteen seconds.

  They placed him with a family – a mother, a father and two older sisters. He starts to deepen his breathing.

  ‘You feeling OK?’ ‘A’ asks.

  ‘Yes.’ And he quietly pumps his breath fast and deep, while taking inventory of ‘A’: his clothing, his firearm, his reach, his weight. ‘B’ has unknown variables, yet Glash extrapolates similarities – both armed and dressed alike, therefore with a high certainty the firearms will be the same and in similar holsters. ‘B’ is taller, estimated age of forty-four; ‘A’ is five-foot-ten, estimated age of twenty-six and a weight of 204 pounds – three minutes, fifty-eight seconds.

  Glash moves to the next picture. He is four and a half, watching a movie on the television set in the living room of his foster family. It’s a Western starring Gary Cooper – a famous actor – two minutes, ten seconds. Indians surround a wagon train and attack. They wave tomahawks in the air. They scalp and kill – one minute, thirty-two seconds.

  He is four and a half years old in his foster family’s kitchen. No tomahawk in the knife drawer. He picks up a meat cleaver close in size and shape. But no painted handle with feathers and beads; it’s black with two steel rivets that hold the big blade in place. He takes it from the drawer and leaves the apartment – forty-two seconds. He rings the buzzer on the next-door apartment; it’s where Mary lives – she is three and has long blonde hair. She is three inches shorter than he is – she is not famous – twelve seconds. She opens the door because she knows it’s him. Since moving in with his foster family, he and Mary have played together every day.

  The Correction’s wagon turns, a dark-clad motorcyclist on a vintage R series BMW zooms past in the opposite direction, gravel pings against the sides of the van. Glash, who has been hyperventilating for six minutes, begins to twitch. His arms and legs start to jump, seemingly uncontrollably. His lids flutter and his eyes roll back.

  ‘A’ calls out to ‘B’: ‘Shit! He’s having a seizure.’

  ‘B’ shouts back, ‘We’re almost there, hold on.’

  Glash falls back hard as the van lurches forward. His movements grow more violent. ‘A’ shouts, ‘He’s hurting himself. Stop the van!’

  The vehicle skids to a sudden halt. Glash has fallen to the floor; he is shaking violently, his legs and arms spasm angrily against his shackles. He’s broken the skin on his wrists, blood oozes around the chains.

  ‘A’ leans over him to try and prevent his head from being injured.

  Glash’s manacled arms reach up. They quickly snake the chain around ‘A’’s neck and snap it with a bone-cracking certainty as ‘B’ unlocks the rear door. Glash liberates ‘A’’s firearm – a Smith & Wesson. He shoots ‘B’ a single time in the head. Using his mouth to steady the gun he shoots off his handcuffs, noting the sharp sting of the powder burn on his hands and the smell of burned flesh. He does not stop, as he fires two more shots to break the chains that restrain his legs. He jumps out of the back of the van. The air is warm, the humidity is low, the sky is a light cerulean blue and dotted with cumulus clouds. His feet are on the gravel driveway. Croton Forensic Hospital, where he spent two months being evaluated after his murders, is to his back; the visitor parking lot is in front of him. He searches in the distance and spots the black pickup truck. He then sees Carla Phelps and Lucinda Peters. He labels them ‘A’ and ‘B’.

  He quickly reaches down and liberates guard ‘B’’s firearm – he was correct; it is a similar, but older, Smith & Wesson – and with a gun in each hand, like Gary Cooper, he races toward his new ‘A’ and ‘B’.

  Five

  It’s 8 A.M. and Barrett hasn’t moved from the Steinway D Grand in the deserted administrative building across from Croton, with its high chain-link fences topped with razor wire and dotted with guard towers – in reality looking far more like a prison than a hospital. She’s not slept and still wears the blue button-down shirt, chinos and navy blazer she put on yesterday – a more casual outfit than usual, something suitable for terminating a pregnancy. For the last three and a half hours she has tried to block out everyone and everything by retreating into her oldest and greatest passion – music. It’s her road not taken, the full Juilliard scholarship turned in for something more practical, a pre-medical degree, four years of med school, a year’s internship, three years�
� psychiatric residency and a final year in forensics. Music has always been her passion, but sometimes – as her beloved piano teacher, Sophie, a holocaust survivor, would remind her – we make sacrifices for those we love.

  It had been a day and night from hell. Yesterday, nothing they did could satisfy Judge Garrett. Faxed treatment plans for each of the prisoners sent to his office had been lost, important documents and prior evaluations had vanished from files. Felicia’s secretary, who swore that a courier had been sent with hard copies of the treatment plans, realized – too late in the day – that they’d been sent to the wrong address. It seemed the harder she and Dr Morgan had worked, the farther they fell behind. At four thirty Judge Garrett had ordered a conference call with the commissioners of Mental Health and Corrections. Barrett and Felicia had listened in, saying nothing, as the judge hurled insults at the two officials, accusing them of incompetence and of interfering with the court. Net result, all four prisoners were to be transferred – immediately – with the judge’s added warning that if adequate treatment was not provided, he’d go the next step and had threatened release.

  ‘Please don’t go,’ Felicia had begged, as the two women, who’d been through training together, grappled with the magnitude of what needed to be done to prepare for the prisoners – a logistical nightmare. Felicia had worked through the night, freeing up four high-security rooms, moving patients, arguing with security guards, aides and enraged nurses who had been mandated to do doubles. When Barrett had last seen her rail-thin friend at 2 A.M. the black-clad director had joked, ‘I get the prize – four grievances in eight hours.’

  As Felicia had plowed through the nuts and bolts of clearing rooms and arranging staff, Barrett oversaw the arrivals, doing the bulk of the intake evaluations herself.

  Frustrated, frightened and tired, she couldn’t help but think about the next to arrive – Glash. She pounded the keys with a Rachmaninoff Prelude. Her left hand easily negotiated the octave-and-a-half chords, her right drawing a haunting theme that filled the deserted auditorium.