The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “I can get you red-tagged. That will get us around an admission physical or anything like that—you’ll go straight into their system. The good news is, a red tag is permanent. The bad news is, it’s nearly impossible to enforce. That’s the risk factor: what goes on inside any hospital, there’s just no way to know. Getting admitted is the easy part. Anyone can commit himself; it’s a free country. It’s staying there that’s difficult. Understand that once you sign yourself over to their care, it becomes their decision whether to judge you safe or dangerous for society. Let me be blunt. You will have to convince them that you are dangerous.”

  “Easy,” said I. “I am as crazy as a fox.”

  Rigby took off his glasses and massaged eyes sore from too little sleep.

  “Mr. Beauregard across the hall is seventy-four and can’t put together two sentences. All the years you’ve lived, all the things you’ve seen, and you’re still making sense? You still don’t see how extraordinary you are. In that respect, you haven’t changed.”

  These compliments I tossed beneath the bed next to the bottle of pills, before approving Rigby’s plan, despite his every caution and caveat. Rigby held his tongue, nodded, and asked for a few more days to stabilize the particulars. Again he told me to skedaddle and again I did, but not before pausing at the 24E door.

  “These data-boxes you speak of . . .”

  “Databases.”

  “You say they compile information on every U.S. citizen?”

  “If they’ve got a Social Security number, yes.”

  “Were I to provide you with a list of names, might you . . . ?”

  Rigby slapped shut his folder. “This whole business is cockeyed! What do you want now?”

  “I forget myself. Disregard the question.”

  I opened the door, but a wheelchair race forced me to wait long enough for Rigby to groan.

  “Will you give me the damn names? I’ll see what I can do.”

  That is why, Dearest Reader, before we tumble down the last hill I’d ever tumble, I can provide eulogistic denouements to those whose fates otherwise might have weighed upon me, and perhaps you, until the end. Jason Stavros, the one member of the Third Battalion who ought not to ever have died, had done just that, succumbing to colon cancer while I’d been overseeing desert atrocities. Detective Fergus Roseborough, he of the orange hair and freckles and crooked nose, who’d made haranguing me a sport before he’d saved Church’s life in the Cotton Club—remember him? He’d died in 1939, not under the rain of bullets he’d have preferred but from a heart attack, probably brought on by one of his overstrenuous interrogations. What about his nemesis, know-it-all newshound Kip McKenzie? His muckraking caught up with him in 1940, when a disgraced politico had him stabbed the same night I’d escorted Bridey Valentine to the twelfth annual Academy Awards. Speaking of Bridey, her favorite director and my least favorite taxidermist, Maximilian Chernoff, blew his head off in 1949, after having been forcibly removed from a war picture a million dollars overbudget. He did it deep in his beloved San Bernardino mountains concurrent with my own mountain wanderings in Montana. Charles White Jr. and his sister, Franny, were still struggling through life, middle aged and middle-class, but their mother, Shirley White, was dead. She’d been only fifty when an eighteen-wheel semi truck had struck her car head-on not two miles outside her Heavenly Hills home. Jolami Tiombe was gone as well, shot down at age thirty, along with other activists in an unsolved drive-by murder in 1980 Los Angeles. The last name on my list was, of course, Burt Churchwell—I needed to confirm that it had been his ghost urging me to avert the Savage Tragedy. Indeed it had.

  No disease was as terminal as Zebulon Finch.

  “How is it,” posed I after Rigby had finished this necrology, “that of all the people I’ve crashed into over the last one hundred and six years, you alone have survived intact?”

  Bingo Saturday was in full trot. “G-53” buzzed from a hot mike. Rigby, beholder of war, rescue, love, death, and the promise of intergalactic eternity, he who’d been tugged through the blackest of tar yet still was able to see the softest pinprick of light, offered a bittersweet smile, as if he’d been keeping track of a mental Bingo card all his life and was but one letter-number combo from the prize.

  “Surviving intact,” mused he. “I don’t think that’s the point.”

  II.

  BARRACLOUGH PSYCHIATRIC CENTER WAS IN Lubec, Maine, at the eastmost prong of Quoddy Head State Park, making it the first place in the continental U.S. to see each day’s sunrise. But the morning I stepped onto the campus, it was murked in a fog so woolly, I could make out but traceries of corbeled towers and hear only distant detonations of Atlantic surf against troll-teethed cliffs. In other words, perfect environs for the raving mad, far-flung from urban centers and defended by water, woods, and the fog, which I cannot emphasize enough, Reader, for how it rolled itself into long gray fingers and beckoned.

  Rigby and I sculled through the salty brume until the central fortification lurched forward like a brontosaurus, four stories of gloomy Chateauesque masonry and pitched roofs bayonetted with sharp turrets. I inhaled cold fog and let it churn inside my chest. When Rigby had listed the four institutions inside which he believed he could insert me, I had had only one question. Which place was the least esteemed, the one most likely to be neglected by state and federal do-gooders? He’d answered without pause: Barraclough, long known to locals, residents, and staff by the informal, and revealing, nickname of  “Bear Claw.”

  Blank faces mooned down at us from the windows of buildings to our immediate north and south. Rigby took my elbow as if afraid I might flee, or perhaps that he might, having realized a grievous error. Too late: The fog eddied back from two orderlies coming at us in sinless white uniforms, but also leather utility belts, concealing who knew what tools of inducement. The first one, a smirking truck-driver type with furry forearms, shook Rigby’s old hand, too hard, by the look of his wince, while the other, a watchful African American (“Afro-American” had lost its cachet), stood at the ready as if accustomed to last-second dashes.

  “Mr. Rigby? I’m Tom Sikes. This is Mr. Glover.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Sikes, Mr. Glover.”

  Sikes extended his hand to me.

  “And Mr. Zipp?”

  Rigby, forced by his clandestine counterfeiters to supply a name to go along with my falsified records, and too pressed for time to gather my creative input, had swapped the opening letters of my first and last names to come up with the imbecilic “Frank Zipp.” The name made me grind my teeth; behind them, I managed a reply.

  “Pleased.”

  Sikes didn’t shrink at my missing arm or blanket decrepitude. He did, however, shiver at my touch.

  “You’re cold. Let’s get you inside, where it’s warm.”

  I nodded, feeling abruptly anxious despite my mental preparations. Rigby, still clutching my arm, took the first steps, which I followed. But Sikes held up a hand.

  “We’ve got it from here, Mr. Rigby.”

  “But don’t we need to check in and—”

  “Everything was taken care of over the phone.”

  “I’d still rather come, if you don’t—”

  “We find it’s better for the patient to make a fresh start. It’s Barraclough policy.”

  Rigby’s hesitation made evident every single day of his eight decades—clever enough when telephoning officials who owed him their careers, but out in the wider world, hard of hearing, weak of lung, and easily outfoxed by younger men. He turned to me, looking like a grandfather who needed help finding his parked car, if indeed he ought to be driving at all.

  “Finch,” said he.

  “Zipp,” reminded I.

  He shook his head in apology; I shook mine, rejecting it. Our good-bye had come suddenly and strangely, beneath a nippy ocean haze and the pressure of Sikes’s impatient eyebrows and Glover’s cracking knuckles. For forty-three implausible years, Rigby and I had played principal parts in each o
ther’s dramas, and it is a rare thing, Reader, when finales are so plainly final.

  “They have telephones,” said Rig. “I’ll call.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Then I’ll write. You can read them or not, it’s up to—”

  “Please,” begged I. “Do not.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed through droops of slack skin. He pressed his lips together and nodded, and inside me a dam of gratefulness broke open. He understood that what I needed was not the “fresh start” Sikes advocated but rather the fast, irrevocable severing of all human relations.

  I held out my hand—scorched, scarred, scuffed, and scored, and all the unseemlier for the tarnished tin ring around a finger. Rigby studied the hand, perhaps reliving the stories it told, perhaps comparing them to those told by his own pallid flesh. His hand, when I took it, was that of any elderly person, frail, trembling, dry, and cool. But bones were bones, and he made sure I felt his. Tears fattened at the edges of his lids, though I hesitate to take credit for them, for the salt-water fog did sting, and old eyes do tend to water. I removed the aviators I’d worn since our NASA years, folded them, and placed them into Rigby’s palm. Maybe if he protected those eyes, they would not be so inclined to cry.

  He wrapped his veined hands around the sunglasses.

  “I’ll miss you,” admitted he.

  “But the world won’t,” said I. “And that is what matters.”

  With that I turned away, concentrating on the gravel crunch as I followed Sikes up the path and the steps of the manor; carved over the arched doorway was the word “PLATO.” Once upon a dream, Plato Manor’s central hallway had been designed to instill Bear Claw visitors with reverence. It was double the standard width and height, ran the length of the building, and was furbelowed with stained-glass windows that matched the stenciled border of the coffered, box-beamed ceiling. The luxurious blond walls incandesced off the polished tile. Our shoes squeaked, a chipper sound that spoke of clean, responsible institutions.

  But, as I’ve indicated, the hall was long. Twenty feet along, the overhead lights began to ebb. The stained glass sprouted cracks. Twenty feet farther, the blond coloring quit, as if the painters had stopped being paid. After that, each foot peeled back another decade. The cauliflowered water damage of the northern face dated back to the sixties. That rusted fire extinguisher had been installed in the forties. Sections of broken tile revealed a whorled underfloor from the twenties. By the time we reached the end, we’d time-traveled to the era of my death: pebbled brickwork, an overriding ambiance of slag, and geometries of shadows that had known no light since century’s turn.

  My escorts, too, devolved, Sikes sinking into a predacious hunch and Glover snorting and huffing like primitive man. We stopped outside a door. Sikes held his hands as if to play patty-cake, so I mirrored him, and he shook me down like the mobster I was, working the Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring from my finger and emptying my pockets right down to the sealed envelope of Ruthie’s thousands and, much harder to bear, the Excelsior. I’d expected as much—there was no point in keeping money, much less time—yet still felt as if my heart, too, had been burglarized.

  “No bags?” grunted Sikes.

  I shook my head.

  He rapped the door, paused three seconds, and opened it.

  The office, though spacious, was crowded toward the center, as if the furniture were being sucked down a drain. The central piece was a desk the size of a barge, once effulgent of cherrywood and copper, now as achromatic and lusterless as the seventy-some-year-old behind the desk. He sat as still as the portrait of President Reagan above him and glanced at us as if we were three houseflies. While Sikes and Glover took prison-guard positions on either side of me, the last guest, a curly-haired, curly-mustached man a decade younger than the sitter, cleared his throat.

  “Superintendent,” cued he.

  The man behind the desk blinked. His eyes were huge, though only in comparison to his tiny head. Age seemed to have whittled it until it was no more than a skull. His body, too, was bones; his dusty black suit looked ten sizes too big. He was, in short, precisely the grim reaper one might expect to find at the end of a century-long hall.

  “Oh, my,” said the skeleton. “This is Mr. Zipp, isn’t it?”

  The standing man gave me a perfunctory smile.

  “I’m Dr. Dobbin, chief clinical officer. This is Dr. Orrin Scrimm. He’s CEO of Barraclough.”

  Scrimm pshawed. “Superintendent. That’s the only title I ever wanted.”

  The ensuing silence was edgy. At last Scrimm sighed, discovered a whale of paper, and flensed the topmost sheet. I was surprised to see that Rigby’s “red tag” was literal: a scarlet card had been stapled to the page.

  “I haven’t seen one of these since . . .” Scrimm frowned as much as his tight-fleshed skull would permit. “All people do anymore is tell me how to run my asylum.”

  “Hospital,” corrected Dobbin.

  “Who ever heard of admitting a patient without X-rays or an EKG? It says we’re not even authorized to Kwell your hair. And here we just got through a lice infestation. Oh, this is not good, not at all.”

  Scrimm dropped the paper and exhaled as if it had been a fifty-pound weight. He angled his skull at various corners of the room, neck bones crackling like chewed ice.

  “There was a time when Bear Claw was the greatest asylum in America.”

  Again Dobbin grimaced at the word, but this time held his tongue. Behind me, I heard the key-ring jangle of Sikes and Glover squaring their feet for a story they’d heard before. I, too, knew this brand of bewailing nostalgia. The Barker, old Dr. Whistler himself, had loved pining after the vintage theatrics of forced bleeding, heat blistering, and mercury diarrheals.

  “Bear Claw was America, as far as I’m concerned. We had our north and our south. We were our own founding fathers. We wrote our own Constitution. We were pioneers: lobotomy, hydropathy, insulin therapy, psychodrama. Presidents, senators, governors, all the best people sent their loved ones to me. To me. Bear Claw or nowhere, they said. But then came the longhairs with their peace and love, too many of whom grew up to be professional troublemakers waving red tags. State asylums had six hundred thousand patients in 1954. What’s it today? A hundred thousand? If that? Our beautiful facilities—just look at them. The money’s been reappropriated to community centers. They have lots of nice phrases. ‘Speech impaired.’ ‘Disabled.’ ‘Special needs.’ But what do they truly know about the mad? My, my, my.”

  This reaper’s scythe, thought I, had a point. Those on the outside wouldn’t try to contain me. They’d try to help me, the damned fools.

  Scrimm’s rolling eyes found me by accident.

  “A red tag does not preclude an interview, young man. Tell me why you’ve decided to give yourself to our care.”

  I tilted my head. The simplicity of the request bollixed me.

  “Come, come,” urged Scrimm. “What have you done to bring you here?”

  What had I done, Grim Reaper? Where in Gød’s besmudged name should I begin? A century of affronts, atrocities, improprieties, and obscenities spread out before me like a deck of lewd playing cards.

  “Shall I tell you about how I nearly killed Adolf Hitler?”

  My question was meant to faze the superintendent, but it had the opposite effect; I would come to learn that fancied relationships with Adolf Hitler were among the most common of psychopathic pipe dreams. Scrimm closed his eyes and nestled his bone-shoulders into the chair like a child eager to hear his favorite bedtime story.

  “Oh, please do. Tell us all about it.”

  From Rigby’s paratrooper plunge and Meixelsperger’s bomb shelter to Himmler’s Wewelsburg and Ziereis’s Mauthausen, I did just that, each truth so impregnated with detail that it proved, beyond any doubt, my sheer insanity. To Scrimm, it was music. His pale lips rippled back to flaunt his skull’s sickles of teeth.

  “Dr. Dobbin,” said he. “Your prescription?”
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  Dobbin cracked open his valise. “Two hundred milligrams of Moban in fifty-milligram oral doses four times a day.”

  There came the plastic clack of an upended bottle, the ring of capsules against china, and then, held out to me like a dish of crème brûlée, a plate containing five pills. In his other hand Dobbin held a paper cup of water filled from a leaking corner watercooler. Keen though I was to kneel to Bear Claw’s demands, I disfavored the idea of putting foreign matter into my stomach. I did not move to accept the offerings.

  My reticence came as no more surprise than my Hitler hallucinations. Dobbin issued a coded look, and Sikes and Glover clomped their boots so that I would take note of their crowding. Dobbin smiled and held the pills and water closer. I felt as if back in the Yankee Doodle as Margeaux steered it toward the Highway 1 guard rail; once struck, there was no reversing. Rigby had warned me that I would need to prove that I was dangerous, and I’d be a fool not to take an early opportunity.

  I swiped sideways with my hand, sending both water and pills into Scrimm’s face. He did not react, but Dobbin jerked away, and the shadows of the orderlies lurched. Instinct hadn’t left me. I juked from Glover, giving Sikes my tougher-to-grab armless side, at which he floundered long enough for me to hurl myself at Dobbin. He stumbled into the watercooler, which cracked and gushed, and then I was pressed against him muscle to muscle.

  Yet when I bit the man’s nose, there was no Black Hand excitation. When the salty slurp of his blood washed my tongue, it aroused no gustatorial lust. Dobbin screamed and whipped his head, and it took all I had to keep my jaws fast, for the sounds of pain no longer brought me joy. Zebulon Finch had changed, Dearest Reader; hurting people was the antithesis of what he wanted.

  Judging the damage sufficient, I let Glover pull me off. Dobbin reeled away, blood fanning through his fingers, and I saw Scrimm daintily unfold a handkerchief, should Dobbin wish to avail himself of it. Glover’s choke-hold did not, of course, choke me, but did drive me to my knees in time for me to see Sikes charging forward with a snarl on his lips and a garment in his hands, a thing of yellow canvas, dangling arms, and leather belt-straps. I smiled. A straitjacket, how baroque.