The Madman - Страница 52

"What about the nurse on duty?"

"I couldn't see her, either."

"Where was she?"

"I don't know. In the bathroom? Taking a walk? Maybe upstairs, talking with the upstairs nurse on duty? Asleep in her chair?"

"What do you think?" I'd asked, nervousness starting to creep into my voice.

"I'd like to think it was a hallucination. We have lots of those in here."

"Was it?"

Peter had smiled, and shook his head. "No such luck."

"Who do you think it was?"

He laughed, but without much humor and not because there was some pending joke. "C-Bird, you already know who I think it was."

I stopped and took a deep breath and bit down on all the echoes within me.

"Why do you think he came to the doorway?"

"He wanted to see us."

That was what I remembered with complete clarity. I remembered where we were, how we were dressed. Peter had on his Red Sox cap, slightly pushed back from his forehead. I recalled what we ate that morning: Pancakes that tasted like cardboard inundated in thick, sweet syrup that had more to do with some food scientist's chemical concoction than a New England maple tree. I stubbed out my cigarette on the bare apartment floor and chewed over my recollections instead of the food I undoubtedly needed. That was what he had told me. I guessed about all the other stuff. I wasn't swear-on-the-Bible sure that the night before he was trapped in the web of sleeplessness by what he'd done so many months earlier. He didn't directly tell me that was what kept him lying awake in his bunk, so that when the sensation of being watched came over him, he was alert to it. I don't know if I even thought about it back then. But now, years later, I just figured that that was what it had to be. It made sense, of course, because Peter was ensnared in the briar patch of memory. And, before too long, all these things became conf lated and so, to tell his story, and Lucy's and my own, too, as well, I realize that I have to take some liberties. Truth is a slippery thing, and I'm not all that comfortable with it. Nobody mad is. So, if I get it down right, maybe it's wrong. Maybe it's exaggerated. Maybe it didn't happen quite the way I remember it, or else, maybe my memory is so stretched and tortured by so many years of drugs that the truth will forever elude me.

I think it is only poets who romanticize that insanity is somehow liberating, when the opposite is true. Every voice I heard, every fear I felt, every delusion, every compulsion, every little thing that pulled together to create the sad me who was banished from the house where I had grown up and sent off in restraints to the Western State Hospital, none of it had anything in common with freedom or liberation or even being unique in some positive way. The Western State Hospital was just the place where we were kept while we engaged in the construction of our own internal sort of detention.

Not so true for Peter, because he was never as crazy as the rest of us were.

Not true either, for the Angel.

And, in a curious way, Lucy was the bridge between the two of them.

We were still standing outside the dining room, waiting for Lucy to appear. Peter seemed to be thinking hard, replaying in his mind what he'd seen and what had happened the prior night. I watched him as he seemed to pick up every piece of those few moments, lift them into the light and slowly turn them, like an archaeologist might, as he came across some relic, gently blowing the dust of time away. Peter was much the same with observations; it was as if he thought that if he just twisted whatever it was mentally into the right angle, holding it up to the right shaft of light, he would see it for what it truly was.

As I watched him, he turned to me, and said, "We know this, now: The Angel doesn't live in the dormitory with us. He might be upstairs in the other dormitory room. He might come from another building, although I haven't figured out how, yet. But at least we can exclude our roommates. And we know another thing. He has learned that we are somehow involved in all this, but he doesn't know us, not well enough, and so he is watching."

I spun about in the corridor.

Cato was leaning up against a wall, eyes fixed on the ceiling beyond us. He might have been listening to Peter. He might have been listening to some hidden voice deep within himself. Impossible to tell. A senile old man, his hospital pajama pants having come loose, wandered past us, drooling slightly around an unshaven jaw, mumbling and staggering, as if he couldn't understand that the reason he was having trouble walking stemmed from the pants dropped around his ankles. And the hulking retarded man, who'd been threatening the other day, lurched past, in the old man's wake, but when he briefly turned toward us, his eyes were filled with fear and gone was all the anger and aggression from the other day. His medications must have been altered, I thought.

"How can we tell who is watching?" I asked. My head pivoted to the right and left, and I felt a cold shaft slide through me, when I thought that any one of the hundreds of men staring ahead in reverie could actually be assessing and measuring, taking stock of me.

Peter shrugged. "Well, that's the trick, isn't it. We're the ones doing the searching, but the Angel's the one doing the watching. Just stay alert. Something will come up."

I looked up and saw Lucy Jones coming through the front entrance to Amherst. She paused to speak with one of the nurses and! saw Big Black amble over to join her. I saw her hand him a couple of manila case files from the top of the overflowing file box that she had carried in and then set down on the glistening floor. Peter and I took a step toward her. But we were interrupted by Newsman, who saw us and skipped up into our path. His eyeglasses were slightly askew on his face, and a shock of hair jumped off his scalp like a rocket ship. His grin was as lopsided as his attitude.

"Bad news, Peter," he said, although he was smiling, as if that could somehow deflate the information. "It's always bad news."

Peter did not reply and Newsman looked a little disappointed bending his head slightly to the side, "Okay," he said, slowly. Then he looked down toward Lucy Jones, and he seemed to begin to concentrate hard. It was almost as if the act of remembering took a physical effort. After a few moments straining, he broke into a grin. "Boston Globe. September 20th, 1977. Local News Section, page 2B: Refusing to Be A Victim; Harvard Law Grad Named Sex Crimes Unit Head."

Peter stopped. He turned quietly to Newsman. "How much of the rest do you remember?"

Newsman hesitated again, doing the heavy lifting of searching his memory, and then he recited: "Lucy K. Jones, twenty-eight, a three-year veteran of the traffic and felony divisions, has been named to head up the newly formed Sex Crimes Unit of the Suffolk County Prosecutor's Office, a spokesman announced today. Miss Jones, a 1974 graduate of Harvard Law School will be in charge of handling sexual assaults and coordinate with the homicide division on killings that stem from rapes, the spokesman said."

Newsman took a breath, then rushed on. "In an interview, Miss Jones said that she was uniquely qualified for the position, because she had been the victim of an assault during her first year at Harvard. She was driven to join the prosecutor's office, she said, despite numerous offers from corporate law firms, because the man who'd assaulted her had never been arrested. Her perspective on sex crimes, she said, came from an intimate knowledge of the emotional damage an assault can create and the frustration with a criminal justice system ill equipped to deal with these sorts of violent acts. She said she hoped to establish a model unit that other district attorneys around the state and nation can copy…"

Newsman hesitated, and then said, "There was a picture, too. And a little more. I'm trying to remember."

Peter nodded. "No follow-up feature in the Lifestyle Section in the next day or so?" he asked quietly.;' Again, Newsman scoured his memory. "No…," he said slowly. The smaller man grinned, and then, as he always did, immediately wandered off, looking for a copy of that day's newspaper. Peter watched him walk off, then turned back to me. "Well, that explains one thing and starts to explain others, doesn't it, C-Bird?" I thought so, but instead of answering the question, responded, "What?"

"Well, for one thing, the scar on her cheek," Peter said.

The scar, of course.

I should have paid more attention to the scar.

As I sat in my apartment picturing the white line that straggled down Lucy Jones's face, I repeated the same mistake I'd made so many years earlier. I saw the flaw in her perfect skin and wondered how it had changed her life. I thought to myself that I would have liked to have touched it once.