The Madman - Страница 2

There is a trick to spotting the fish, because they are sleek and silver-sided from their travels in the salt of the ocean so many scores of miles away. It is a shimmering presence in the glistening water, invisible to the uneducated eye, almost as if a ghostly force has entered the small window where I keep watch. I get so I can almost feel the arrival of a salmon before it actually appears at the base of the ladder. It is satisfying to count the fish, even though hours can pass without one arriving and there are never enough of them to please the wildlife folks, who stare at the charts of returnees and shake their heads in frustration.

But the benefits of my ability to spot them translates into other advantages. It was my boss at the Wildlife Service who called the local police and informed them I was completely harmless, although I always wondered how he deduced that and have my sincere doubts as to its overall truthfulness. So I am tolerated at the football games and other events, and now, really, if not precisely welcomed in this little, former mill town, at least I am accepted. My routine isn't questioned, and I am seen less as crazy and more as eccentric, which, I have learned over the years is a safe enough status to maintain.

I live in a small one-bedroom apartment paid for by a state subsidy. My place is furnished in what I call sidewalk-abandoned modern. My clothes come from the Salvation Army or from either of my two younger sisters, who live a couple of towns away, and occasionally, bothered by some odd guilt that I don't really understand, feel the need to try to do something for me by raiding their husbands' closets. They purchased me a secondhand television that I seldom watch and a radio I infrequently listen to. Every few weeks they will visit, bringing slightly congealed home-cooked meals in plastic containers and we spend a little time talking together awkwardly, mostly about my elderly parents, who don't care to see me much anymore, for I am a reminder of lost hopes and the bitterness that life can deliver so unexpectedly. I accept this, and try to keep my distance. My sisters make sure the heat and electric bills are paid. They make certain that I remember to cash the meager checks that arrive from various government aid agencies. They double-check to make absolutely sure that I have taken all my medications. Sometimes they cry, I think, to see how close to despair that I live, but this is their perception, not mine, for, in actuality, I'm pretty comfortable. Being insane gives one an interesting take on life. It certainly makes you more accepting of certain lots that befall you, except for those times when the medications wear a bit thin, and then I can get pretty exercised and angry at the way life has treated me.

But for the most part, I am, if not happy, at least understanding.

And there are some intriguing sidelights to my existence, not the least of which is how much of a student I have become of life in this little town. You would be surprised how much I learn in my daily travels. If I keep my eyes open and ears cocked, I pick up all sorts of little slivers of knowledge. Over the years, since I was released from the hospital, after all the things that were going to happen there did happen, I have used what I learned, which is: to be observant. Pounding out my daily travels, I come to know who's having a tawdry little affair with which neighbor, whose husband is leaving home, who drinks too much, who beats their children. I can tell which businesses are struggling, and who has come into some money from a dead parent or lucky lottery ticket. I discover which teenager hopes for a college football or basketball scholarship, and which teenager will be shipped off for a few months to visit some distant aunt and perhaps deal with a surprise pregnancy. I have come to know which cops will cut you a break, and which are quick with the nightstick or the ticket book, depending on the transgression. And there are all sorts of littler observations, as well, ones that come with who I am and who I've become for example the lady hairdresser who signals me at the end of the day to come in and cuts my hair so that I am more presentable during my daily travels, and then slips me an extra five dollars from her day's tips, or the manager of the local McDonald's who spots me pacing past, and runs after me with a bag filled with burgers and fries and has come to know that I am partial to vanilla shakes, not chocolate. Being mad and walking abroad is the clearest window on human nature; it is a little like watching the town flow along like the water cascading past the fish ladder window.

And it isn't as if I am useless. I once spotted a factory door ajar at a time it was always closed and locked, and found a policeman, who took all the credit for the burglary that he interrupted. But the police did give me a certificate when I got the license plate of a hit-and-run driver who knocked a bicyclist senseless one spring afternoon. And in something awkwardly close to the takes-one-to-know-one category, as I cruised past a park where children were playing one fall weekend, I spotted a man and I knew as soon as I saw him, hanging by the entranceway, that something was completely wrong. Once my voices would have noticed him, and they would have shouted out a warning, but this time I took it upon myself to mention him to the young preschool teacher I knew who was reading a woman's magazine on the bench ten yards from the sandbox and swing set and not quite paying enough attention to her charges. It turned out the man was recently released and had been registered just that morning as a sex offender.

This time, I didn't get a certificate, but the teacher had the children paint me a colorful picture of themselves at play, and they wrote a thank-you across it in that wondrously crazy script that children have before we burden them with reason and opinions. I carried the picture back to my little apartment and placed it on the wall above my bed, where it is now. I have a musty brown life, and it reminds me of the colors I might have experienced if I hadn't stumbled onto the path that had brought me here.

That, then, more or less, is the sum of my existence, as it is now. A man on the fringe of the sane world.

And, I suspect I would have simply passed the remainder of my days this way, and never really bothered to tell what I know about all those events I witnessed had I not received the letter from the state.

It was suspiciously thick and had my name typed on the outside. Amid the usual pile of grocery store flyers and discount coupons, it stood out dramatically. You don't get much personal mail when you live as isolated a life as I do, so when something out of the ordinary arrives, it seems to glow with the need to be examined. I threw the useless papers away and tore this open, curiosity pricked. The first thing I noticed was that they got my name right.

Dear Mr. Francis X. Petrel:

It started well enough. The trouble with having a first name that one shares with the opposite sex, is that it breeds confusion. It is not uncommon for me to get form letters from the Medicare people concerned that they have no record of the results of my latest pap smear, and have I had myself checked for breast cancer? I have given up trying to correct these misguided computers.

The Committee to Preserve the Western State Hospital has identified you as one of the last patients to be released from the institution before its doors were permanently closed some twenty years ago. As you may know, there is a movement under way to turn part of the hospital grounds into a museum, while releasing the remainder for development. As part of that effort, the Committee is sponsoring a daylong "examination" of the hospital, its history, the important role it played in this state, and the current approach to treatment of the mentally ill. We invite you to join in the upcoming day. There are seminars, speeches, and entertainment planned. A tentative event program is enclosed. If you can attend, please contact the person below at your earliest convenience.

I glanced down at the name and number whose title was Planning Board Co-chairperson. Then I flipped to the enclosure, which was a list of activities planned for the day. These included, as the letter said, some speeches by politicians whose names I recognized, right up to the lieutenant governor and the State Senate Minority leader. There would be discussion groups, headed up by doctors and social historians from several of the nearby colleges and universities. One item caught my eye: a session entitled "The Reality of the Hospital Experience A Presentation." This was followed by the name of someone I thought I might remember from my own days in the hospital. The celebration was then to finish off with a musical interlude by a chamber orchestra.

I put the invitation down on a table and stared at it for a moment. My first instinct was to toss it with the rest of the day's trash, but I did not. I picked it up again, read through it a second time, and then went and sat on a rickety chair in a corner of the room, assessing the question that had been posed. I knew people were forever going to reunions. Pearl Harbor or D-Day veterans get together. High school classmates show up after a decade or two to examine expanding waistlines, balding pates, or augmented breasts. Colleges use re unions as a way of extorting funds from misty-eyed graduates, who go stumbling around the old ivy-decked halls recalling only the good moments and forgetting the bad. Reunions are a constant part of the normal world. Folks are always trying to relive times that in their memory were better than they really were, rekindle emotions that in truth far best belong in their past.