The Madman - Страница 37

"Mister Petrel?"

"I'm okay, Mister Santiago, thank you."

"Are you sure?" We were speaking through the closed door, and I could sense he was inches distant, right on the other side. "Please, you should open up. I just want to make sure everything is okay."

Mister Santiago knocked again, and this time, I reached out and turned the handle of the deadbolt lock, opening the door just a sliver. Our eyes met, and he looked closely at me.

"We heard shouting," he said. "It was like somebody was getting ready for a fight"

"No," I replied, "I'm alone."

"I could hear you talking. Like you was having an argument with somebody. You sure you're okay?"

Ramon Santiago was a slight man, but a couple of years lifting heavy trash containers in the predawn city hours had built up his arms and shoulders. He would be a formidable opponent for anyone, and, I suspected, rarely had to resort to confrontation in order to get his opinions heard.

"No. Thank you, but I'm fine."

"You don't look so good, Mister Petrel. You feeling sick?"

"I've just been a little stressed out lately. Missed a few meals."

"You want I should call someone? Maybe one of your sisters?"

I shook my head. "Please, Mister Santiago, they'd be the last folks I'd want to see."

He smiled back at me. "I know. Relatives. Sometimes they can just drive you crazy." As soon as that word fell from his lips, he looked stricken, as if he'd just insulted me.

I laughed. "No, you're right. They can. And in my case, they most certainly have. And, I'm guessing, they probably will again, some day. But I'm all right for now."

He continued to eye me cautiously.

"Still, man, you got me a little worried. You taking your pills okay?"

I shrugged. "Yes," I lied. I could tell he didn't believe me. He continued to look closely at me, his eyes fixed on my face, as if he was searching every wrinkle, every line, for something that he would recognize, as if the illness I carried could be identified like some rash on my skin, or jaundice. Without taking his eyes off me, he threw a couple of words back over his shoulder in Spanish, and I saw his wife and their little child, hanging in the entranceway to their apartment. Rosalita looked a little frightened, and she lifted her hand and gave me a little wave. The baby, too, returned my own smile. Then Mister Santiago switched back into English.

"Rosie," he said, demanding, yet not angrily, "go fix up Mister Petrel a paper plate with some of that rice and chicken we're having for dinner. He looks like he could use a good solid meal."

I saw her nod, give me a shy little smile of her own, and disappear inside their apartment. "Really, Mister Santiago, that's kind of you, but not necessary…"

"It's not a problem. Arroz con polio. Where I come from, Mister Petrel, it fixes just about everything. You sick, you get rice and chicken. You get fired from your job? You get rice and chicken. You got a broken heart?"

"… Rice and chicken," I said, finishing the sentence for him.

"That's one hundred percent right." We grinned together.

Rosie returned a few seconds later with a paper plate piled high with steaming chicken and fluffy yellow rice. She brought it across the corridor to me and I took it from her, just grazing her hand slightly, and thinking that it had been some time since I'd actually felt another human's touch. "You don't have to…" I started again, but both the Santiagos were shaking their heads.

"You sure you don't want me to call somebody? If not your family, how 'bout social services? Or a friend, maybe?"

"Don't have too many friends anymore, Mister Santiago."

"Ah, Mister Petrel, you got more folks care about you than you think," he said.

I shook my head again. "Someone else then?"

"No. Really."

"You sure you weren't being bothered by somebody? I heard voices raised.

Sounds to me like a fight about to be starting…"

I smiled, because the truth was that I was being bothered by someone. They just weren't there. I cracked open my door and let him peer inside. "All alone, I promise," I said. But I saw his eyes leap across the room and catch a glimpse of the words I was placing on the walls. In that instant, I thought he would say something, but then he stopped. He reached out, and put a hand on my shoulder.

"You need some help, Mister Petrel, you just knock on my door. Anytime. Day or night. You got that?"

"Thank you, Mister Santiago," I said, nodding my head. "And thank you for the dinner."

I closed the door, and took a deep breath, filling my nostrils with the aroma of the food. It seemed suddenly as if it had been days since I'd eaten. Perhaps it had been, although I remembered grilled cheese. But when was that? I found a fork in a drawer and tore into Rosalita's specialty. I wondered whether arroz con polio, which was good for so many ailments of the spirit, might help my own. To my surprise, each bite seemed to energize me, and as I chewed away, I saw the progress I had made on the wall. Columns of history.

And I realized I was alone again.

He would be back. I had no doubt about that. He was lurking, vaporous, in some space just beyond my reach, and eluding my consciousness. Avoiding me. Avoiding the Santiago family. Avoiding the arroz con polio. Hiding from my memory. But for the moment, to my great relief, all I had was chicken, rice, and words. I thought to myself: All that talk in Gulp-a-pill's office about keeping things confidential had been nothing but showy emptiness.

It did not take long for all the patients and staff to become aware of Lucy Jones's presence in the Amherst Building. It was not merely the way she dressed, in loose dark slacks and sweater, carrying her leather briefcase with an orderliness that defied the more slovenly character of the hospital. Nor was it her height and bearing, or the distinctive scar on her face, that separated her from the regulars. It was more in the way she passed through the corridors, heels clicking on the linoleum floor, with an alertness in her eyes that made it seem as if she was inspecting everything and everyone, and searching for some telltale sign that might lead her in the direction she needed. It was an awareness that wasn't defined by paranoia, visions, or voices. Even the Catos standing in the corners, or leaning up against the walls, or the senile elderly locked into their wheelchairs, all seemingly lost inside their own reveries, or the mentally retarded, who stared dully at almost all that happened around them, seemed to take some strange note that Lucy was driven by forces every bit as powerful as those they all struggled with, but that hers were somehow more appropriate. More connected to the world. So when she paced past them, the patients would follow her with their eyes, not interrupting their murmuring and mumbling, or the shakiness in their hands, but still watching her with an attentiveness that seemed to defy their own illnesses. Even at mealtimes, which she took in the cafeteria with the patients and staff, waiting in line like everyone else for the plates of nondescript, institutionalized food, she was someone apart. She took to sitting at a corner table, where she could look out at the other people in the room, her back to a painted lime green cinder block wall.

Occasionally, someone would join her at the table, either Mister Evil, who seemed most interested in everything she was doing, or Big Black or Little Black, who immediately turned any conversation over to sports. Sometimes some of the nursing staff would sit with her, but their stark white uniforms and peaked caps set her even more apart from the regular hospital routine. And when she conversed with one of her companions, she seemed to constantly slip-slide her glance around the room, giving Francis the impression that she was a little like a field hawk soaring on wind currents above them all, looking down, trying to spot some movement in the withered brown stalks of the early New England spring and isolating her prey.

None of the patients sat with her, including, at the start, Francis or Peter the Fireman. This had been Peter's suggestion. He had told her that there was no sense in letting too many folks know that they were working with her, although people would figure it out for themselves before too much time had passed. So, at least for the first days, Francis and Peter ignored her in the dining hall.

Cleo, however, did not.