The pills made him feel strange. Murky, as if the air around him were thicker than usual. But he decided it was worth it. For the first time in weeks, his appetite had come back. He was genuinely hungry, and he couldn’t believe how good it felt to want food.
He made for the dining hall.
On his way, he ran into Allyson Morrone. And Naomi Reed. And – hey, now – it looked like the entire Dartmouth women’s swim team. They were all headed to lunch in a group. Garrett would have rubbed his hands together at the sight of the girls, but he didn’t want to seem too obvious. He slowed his walk to a casual saunter, and waited for the right moment. He needed eye-contact before he could start.
There it was. Allyson. She had noticed him, and Garrett saw his chance.
That was when things started to go wrong. Something about his head suddenly felt peculiar. The pain was still there, but there was something else, too. Something different. It was as if he had been drinking. He had a quick flashback of an especially late night the year before, when he had let a friend give him one too many cups of cheap beer. He had said some very stupid things that night.
Garrett tried to ignore the feeling. There was work to be done here. “Hey, Allyson!” he called out. “How are you – ”
And then, without warning, his own mouth betrayed him.
“Hello – ” He stopped short. “Hi… it’s Garrett.” He paused for another second, and his expression turned from bravado to concern. “See you!” he managed to blurt out.
Whoah.
He stopped walking and opened his eyes very wide. His voice just now – it had sounded horrible. Strained, and far too loud. And nasal. Nothing like the laid-back, smoking-jacket style he had cultivated over the last few years.
And what the hell did I just say? It’s Garrett… see you?
What does that even mean?
Allyson Morrone’s brow furrowed briefly, but she shook it off. Probably she had misheard. “Hey, Lemke.” She waved at him and smiled. “What’s up?”
Garrett couldn’t help himself. His habits were too strongly ingrained, and he responded without waiting to think. “Hey, Allyson, not much… but I’m… I’m looking forward to bringing you back to my place tonight… so bring your bathing suit because it’ll be on the floor before long… can’t wait!”
Fucking hell.
Garrett lowered his head slowly, like a man who had just lost his house on a single hand of poker. Allyson looked at him and frowned. So did Naomi and the rest of the swim team. If he was trying to be funny, their faces said, it wasn’t working.
He waved a hand at them without looking up. Go away, never mind, forget you saw me here. This is all just a dream. A horrible dream.
And please, don’t say anything else to me.
But Allyson tried one last time. Her tenacity was maddening. “You going to lunch?” she said.
Garrett’s head didn’t come up, but his voice came out just the same, as if he were speaking to the ground: “Wanted to go to lunch on you but – ”
He clamped a hand over his mouth and ran. A car honked at him as he sprinted through a red-light intersection. Allyson Morrone and her swim team companions watched him go, confusion in their eyes.
He didn’t look back.
The swim team shrugged collectively and headed up the stairs to the dining hall.
Garrett ran all the way back to Zimmerman house. When he got there, he locked himself in his room and pulled the shades. He lay down and waited for his breathing and heart rate to slow.
After a few minutes, he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.
“Hello,” he said slowly, to the air in the room.
Shit.
It was still there. His voice was pinched. He sounded like a thirteen-year-old going through puberty.
He tried another one: “Hey, Allyson.”
Garrett waited, but nothing else came out. No sexual comments about bathing suits. No bursts of uncensored innuendo.
Must be the pills.
That was it. He had taken too many Tylenol codeine tablets, and he was having some sort of psycho reaction. No problem; he would just stop taking them. A replacement would be necessary, of course – he couldn’t endure these headaches without some kind of drug – but he had to fix this… thing. Immediately. Whatever was happening to him, it needed to stop. Right now.
After a few hours without the benefit of codeine in his system, Garrett’s headaches returned, and with authority. As the pressure above his neck grew steadily worse, he found himself reconsidering his convictions. Maybe it didn’t matter if the pills made him talk in a strange voice.
Getting laid isn’t worth this much pain, he thought. Nothing is.
It was too quiet in his room, too easy to think about the pounding in his head, so he stumbled out into the commons area, turned the television to ESPN, and collapsed onto the couch in a heap. His breathing was faster than normal, and sweat dripped down his nose. He clenched his teeth as an extra-heavy wave of pain hit him. His head lolled back on the cushions of the couch, and the whites of his eyes began to show. After another minute, the mercy of unconsciousness came at last. Garrett’s body went limp, and he slept.
That was the way Melissa Hartman found him three hours later: on the couch, passed out, looking like something barely alive. She came walking through the Zimmerman commons, and Garrett was still unconscious. She had gone to the library after her first day of classes. Not because she wanted quiet – everyone still seemed to be avoiding her for some reason – but because academics at Dartmouth were surprisingly difficult. She had known it would be hard, but not like this. Classes at Fitchburg High had never challenged her. She showed up consistently and paid attention, and that had been enough. She was smart, after all. But everyone at Dartmouth seemed smart. And the stack of homework she had accumulated after just one day was unreasonable. She couldn’t understand where she would find the time.
I can’t work on art projects if I’m buried under history essays and chemistry labs, she thought.
So she went to the library, where there were few freshmen doing any work – only a scattering of graduate students surrounded by thick reference volumes.
When she finally got back to Zimmerman House at eleven that night, at first she didn’t see Garrett’s sleeping form. She did see the blaring television, though, and she stopped on her way through the common room to silence it. There was a groan behind her. Melissa turned around, and what she saw made her mouth drop open.
It wasn’t that the boy on the couch actually resembled Melissa’s mother. Not really. Janet Hartman had been a slight, limp-haired woman, and this was a 20-year-old college student. He had stubble on his face. His long frame sunk into the cushions in a way her mother’s bony body never could have. He took up space.
But Garrett Lemke had also broken out into a full, cold sweat, and his face was pale. He was not sleeping peacefully; he had taken his arms out of the sleeves of his oxford shirt and created a little cotton cocoon. His dark hair fell on his forehead in damp threads. He shivered.
And so Melissa shifted into caregiver mode. It was not a conscious decision. She sat him up slowly on the couch, being careful with his head. As she would have with a newborn. “Okay,” she said softly. “Okay, now.” Garrett’s eyes fluttered open, and Melissa saw the pain there as easily as she smelled the ammonia musk of his sickness-sweat.
“Hi,” Garrett said weakly. “You look like Teresa my ex-girlfriend but stronger and that’s okay but where is she now she was so beautiful…” He trailed off as his strength failed him.
“Where’s your room?” Melissa said gently. Her voice was perfectly clear, and very kind.
Garrett thought about the question. “8-C but don’t go there it’s dark and lonely and Allyson will never meet me there not after today.” He looked at Melissa with sad, bloodshot eyes. “Oh my head hurts,” he added.
She nodded and took hold of him under the armpits. With a strength that would have surprised eve
n Ms. Cooper, Melissa leaned back and hauled the sick boy up, off the couch, onto his feet. She lifted him slowly, so that he would not fall.
Garrett suddenly found himself standing, and he looked at Melissa with surprise. “You’re very nice and pretty like Teresa but I don’t think we’d be good together but I don’t know why okay?”
“Okay.” She smiled and tried to ignore the smell of sickness. It was very strong on him. “Let’s walk slowly. You said 8-C, right?”
Garrett looked at her suspiciously, as though wondering how she had come by this information. Then he nodded.
“Okay,” Melissa said. “Here we go.” She guided him into his room, and then down onto the bed. She took a blanket off the floor and wrapped it around him snugly. She put out the lights and turned to go.
“Wait wait wait no wait.”
Melissa looked back. Garrett was pointing at something on the desk.
She picked up the bottle of pills and studied them. The date on the prescription was two months old. “Are you supposed to have these?”
Garrett nodded frantically at her. “Yes please yes please my head hurts so much.”
Melissa considered. “I’ll give you one.”
“Three.”
“One. That’s it. And I’m taking these to my room. I’ll come and give you another in a few hours. If you’re awake.”
Garrett looked disappointed, but he held out his hand. Melissa gave him a Tylenol, which he popped into his mouth like an M&M.
She walked to the door, then paused and looked behind her before stepping out of the room. Garrett’s eyes were already closed. He gathered the blanket tighter around his shivering body.
Melissa did set her alarm for a few hours later, and she did check room 8-C at around four that morning. Getting up in the middle of the night for such things was a familiar task for her. It was almost automatic. She poked her head inside Garrett’s door, and the smell of sweat inside the room nearly made her choke.
Always the sweat, she thought. I need an off-switch for my nose.
She listened carefully. There was the steady breathing of sleep, but no tremor anymore. He had stopped shivering, which was probably good. Melissa crept to the far wall and opened the window a crack, being careful not to make any noise.
Her patient slept on.
She checked on him once more that night, and found him still asleep. She nodded to herself, then closed the door and went back to bed. Fifteen years after first holding the hand of her sobbing mother, Melissa Hartman was still wrapping people in blankets, comforting them, putting them to sleep. It was a habit she had hoped to leave behind.
Kline’s First Kill
1
From Getting to Know Patient Nathan:
The standard neurological workup on Patient Nathan yielded nothing useful. His EEG showed the sharp fluctuations of an epileptic, but with periods of electrical quiet – almost as if portions of his brain were dying rather than becoming excited. The Functional MRI and SPECT tests confirmed it: Kline’s cerebral functions were shutting down and powering back up like a computer system performing self-diagnostics.
Unfortunately, the data didn’t fit my own observations. Nathan was experiencing some depressed states – the balance problems, the memory deficits – but most of his symptoms involved excited behaviors. The paranoia, for instance. The euphoria, and the hyperphasia. None of it made any sense.
At least, it didn’t make sense to me at the time.
In any case, I had decided that the only sensible way to treat Nathan was with an empirical approach; that is, to focus my efforts on precisely what I could see and hear, rather than what my diagnostic instruments were telling me. I would watch him, rather than his test results. We continued the interviews, and I kept prescribing low doses of various antipsychotics.
On several occasions I tried to broach the subject of the accident itself. And the murder. But I never made any real progress. Nathan’s memory blackout of this short, violent period of his life was total. He had killed his own lab assistant, a young man who had worked with him for several years, but he could not seem to remember anything about the event. At first I was skeptical that such a trauma could be cleanly erased. Memories of the lab assistant himself, for instance, did not seem to have been affected at all. Nathan did not pretend any affection for the young man. “Ah, Stefan,” he said with a frown. “They testified in court that I killed him. I suppose, then, that I must have.”
“Does this bother you?” I asked. “That you killed someone?”
He shrugged. “From an intellectual point of view, perhaps. I don’t think of myself as a murderer. But I don’t remember it. I would feel no different if you told me he had been killed by an unknown assassin.”
“But you knew him. You’re not upset that you killed your own friend?”
Dr. Kline’s face was unreadable. “He was not my friend. He was an employee.”
“Your own employee, then.”
“He had turned lazy. His work was substandard.”
“And for that he should die?”
“No, for that he should be fired. But apparently I killed him before I had the chance to hand him a pink slip.”
“All right, Nathan.” I decided to let the subject drop. “I believe you. And I believe in you.”
Over time, I became convinced that Nathan had truly lost all memory of the murder. His episodes of amnesia during our own interview sessions were certainly authentic – they always left him badly frightened – so I took him at his word. And even now, I don’t think he was ever lying about the memory problems. It would be more accurate to say that he was dodging the issue.
I now believe that Nathan did remember why he killed Stefan, if not exactly where or how. The memory holes served as a sort of mental shield for him. A way to escape the act itself, as well as the sense of responsibility.
I wish I could ask him about these things now.
In any case, I realize it was a terrible oversight. But I never made the connection, even after the incident with Nurse Bailer. The idea that Dr. Kline might kill someone on purpose never occurred to me.
I should have been more cautious.
2
After almost six months of making journal entries in black crayon, Dr. Kline decided that he was making significant progress. He could control himself during the paranoid phases, and he didn’t panic during the amnesia phases. The little plastic container of Haldol on the corner of his desk had not been touched in weeks.
I think I’m ready, he wrote in his journal.
He knew it was true. He would make a good candidate for the out-patient program. Nevertheless, he didn’t want to rush things. After all, he still had over six months until his self-imposed deadline. And there was no reason to hurry into the review procedure.
Better to practice first, he thought. With a more forgiving audience.
But there lay the real problem: practicing. Kline was worried, at first, that he would never find anyone to practice with him. All he needed was someone to talk to, but insane asylums were filled with… insane people. His talking partner couldn’t be some psycho. It had to be someone normal.
He was lying in his bed one night, wondering how long Alexandra’s dark brown hair might be by now, or how tall she might be. His daughter was surely growing more beautiful by the day. He had almost drifted off to sleep when a sound in the corridor made him open his eyes and sit up. One of the night watchmen had walked past the door. Just as they did every night.
Dr. Kline smiled.
Those guards on the midnight shift had nothing to keep them busy. Kline knew most of them were probably bored, and he reasoned that at least one of them would be glad to talk for a while each evening. Just to pass the time.
The security staff worked in shifts: Mr. Simmons covered Monday through Wednesday, and Mr. Door had Thursday through Sunday. Of the two, Kline had his sights set on Simmons, whom he could often hear talking to himself. The man was desperate for conversation.
<
br /> “Hey, there,” Kline called out the next night, when he heard Simmons’ footsteps moving past his room. “I hear the weather’s starting to get nice again.”
The footsteps paused. Turned and came back. “Yup, sun’s coming up earlier these days.”
And that was it. Mr. Simmons and Dr. Kline struck up a friendship of sorts. When they spoke, they did so through the slots in the thick metal door to Kline’s cell. Kline didn’t care what they discussed; he let Simmons dictate the conversations. Often they talked about other patients, one of the few subjects they had in common.
The fearsome Timmy, for example.
The patient who lived two rooms down from Dr. Kline, a giant named Timmy Hollingshead, was a constant source of morbid entertainment. Kline and Simmons talked about Timmy the way teenaged boys would talk about an axe-murderer on the loose. What would happen if that man ever got his hands on you, they wondered. How would you get away? Timmy was a huge, near-mute simpleton. He was also what Dr. Levoir called a ‘pure’ psychopath. Unlike Dr. Kline, Timmy was never allowed out of his room without multiple restraints, and multiple guards. Timmy was not sneaky. Or clever. There were no misunderstandings with Timmy. If you were stupid enough to get near him, he would simply grab you and begin breaking things. Timmy loved breaking things. It made him laugh. His massive hands could snap bones like popsicle sticks.
“How much you give me to go in there?” Simmons asked once.
“I don’t have any money, Ben. I’m locked in a little white room.”
“I know, I know,” Simmons said, waving his hand as though he were swatting away invisible flies. “But I mean, how much would you give me? If you did have the money.”
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