"The Madman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Katzenbach John)

Part One. The Unreliable Narrator

Chapter 1

I can no longer hear my voices, so I am a little lost. My suspicion is they would know far better how to tell this story. At least they would have opinions and suggestions and definite ideas as to what should go first and what should go last and what should go in the middle. They would inform me when to add detail, when to omit extraneous information, what was important and what was trivial. After so much time slipping past, I am not particularly good at remembering these things myself and could certainly use their help. A great many events took place, and it is hard for me to know precisely where to put what. And sometimes I'm unsure that incidents I clearly remember actually did happen. A memory that seems one instant to be as solid as stone, the next seems as vaporous as a mist above the river. That's one of the major problems with being crazy: you're just naturally uncertain about things.

For a long time, I thought it all began with a death and ended with a death, a little like a nice set of bookends, but now I'm less positive. Perhaps what truly put all those moments in motion all those years back when I was young and truly mad was something far smaller or more elusive, like a hidden jealousy or an unseen anger, or much larger and louder, like the positions of the stars in the heavens or the forces of the ocean tides and the inexorable spin of the earth. I do know that some people died, and I was a lucky child not to join them, which was one of the last observations my voices made, before they abruptly disappeared from my side.

Instead, what I get now instead of their whispered words are medications to quiet their noises. Once a day I dutifully take a psychotropic, which is an oval-shaped, eggshell blue pill and which makes my mouth so dry that when I speak I sound like a wheezing old man after too many cigarettes or maybe some parched deserter from the Foreign Legion who has crossed the Sahara and is begging for a drink of water. This is followed immediately by a foul-tasting and bitter mood-elevator to combat the occasional black hearted and suicidal depression I am constantly being told by my social worker that I am likely to tumble into at just about any minute regardless of how I actually do feel. In truth, I think I could walk into her office and click up my heels in pure joy and exaltation over the positive course of my life, and she would still ask me whether I had taken my daily dosage. This heartless little pill makes me both constipated and bloated with excess water, sort of like having a blood pressure cuff wrapped around my midsection instead of my left arm, and then pumped up tight. So I need to take a diuretic and then a laxative to alleviate these symptoms. Of course, the diuretic gives me a screaming migraine headache, like someone especially cruel and nasty is taking a hammer to my forehead, so there are codeine-laced painkillers to deal with that little side effect as I race to the toilet to resolve the other. And every two weeks I get a powerful antipsychotic agent in a shot by going to the local health clinic and dropping my pants for the nurse there who always smiles in precisely the same fashion and asks me in exactly the same tone of voice how I am that day, to which I reply "Just fine" whether I am or not, because it is pretty obvious to me, even through the various fogs of madness, a little bit of cynicism and drugs, that she doesn't really give a damn one way or the other, but still considers it part of her job to take note of my reassurance. The problem is the antipsychotic, which prevents me from all sorts of evil or despicable behavior, or so they like to tell me, also gives me a bit of palsy in my hands, making them shake as if I was some nervously dishonest taxpayer confronting an accountant from the IRS. It also makes the corners of my mouth twitch slightly, so I need to take a muscle relaxant to prevent my face from freezing into a permanent scare-the-neighborhood-kids mask. All these concoctions zip around willy-nilly through my veins, assaulting various innocent and probably completely befuddled organs on their way to calming the irresponsible electrical impulses that crackle about in my brain like so many unruly teenagers. Sometimes I feel like my imagination is similar to a wayward domino that has suddenly lost its balance, first teetering back and forth and then tumbling against all the other forces in my body, triggering a great linked chain reaction of pieces haphazardly falling click click click around inside of me.

It was easier, by far, when I was still a young man and all I had to do was listen to the voices. They weren't even all that bad, most of the time. Usually, they were faint, like fading echoes across a valley, or maybe like whispers you would hear between children sharing secrets in the back of a playroom, although when things grew tense, their volume increased rapidly. And generally, my voices weren't all that demanding. They were more, well, suggestions. Advice. Probing questions. A little nagging, sometimes, like a spinster great-aunt who no one knows precisely what to do with at a holiday dinner, but is nevertheless included in the festivities and occasionally blurts out something rude or nonsensical or politically incorrect, but is mostly ignored.

In a way, the voices were company, especially at the many times I had no friends.

I did have two friends, once, and they were a part of the story. Once I thought they were the biggest part, but I am no longer so sure.

Now, some of the other people I met during what I like to think of as my truly mad years had it far worse than I. Their voices shouted out orders like so many unseen Marine drill sergeants, the sort that wear those dark brown green wide-brimmed hats perched just above their eyebrows, so that their shaved skulls are visible from the rear. Step lively! Do this! Do that!

Or worse: Kill yourself.

Or even worse: Kill someone else.

The voices that shrieked at those folks came from God or Jesus or Mohammad or the neighbor's dog or their long-dead great-uncle or extraterrestrials or maybe a chorus of archangels or perhaps a choir of demons. These voices would be insistent and demanding and utterly without compromise and I got so that I could recognize in the tautness that these people would wear in their eyes, the tension that tightened their muscles, that they were hearing something quite loud and insistent, and it rarely promised any good. At moments like those, I would simply walk away, and wait near the entranceway or on the opposite side of the dayroom, because something altogether unfortunate was likely to happen. It was a little like a detail I remembered from grade school, one of those odd facts that stay with you: In the event of an earthquake, the best place to hide is in a doorway, because the arched structure of the opening is architecturally stronger than a wall, and less likely to collapse on your head. So when I saw the turbulence in one of my fellow patients become volcanic, I would find the arch where I thought the best chance of surviving lay. And once there, I could listen to my own voices, which generally seemed to watch out for me, more often than not warning me when to make tracks and hide. They had a curiously self-preservative streak to them, and if I hadn't been so stupidly obvious in replying out loud to them when I was young and they first joined my side, I probably never would have been diagnosed and shipped off in the first place, as I was. But that is part of the story, although not the greatest part by any means, but still, I miss them in an odd way, for now I am mostly lonely.

It is a very hard thing, in this time of ours, to be mad and middle-aged.

Or ex-mad, as long as I keep taking the pills.

My days are now spent in search of motion. I don't like to be sedentary for too long. So I walk, fast-paced, a quick march around the town, from parks to shopping areas, to industrial sections, watching and observing, but keeping myself on the move. Or else I seek out events where there is a waterfall of movement in my view, like a high school football or basketball game, or even a youth soccer game. If there is something busy going on in front of me, then I can take a rest. Otherwise, I keep my feet going five, six, seven or more hours per day. A daily marathon that wears through the soles of my shoes, and keeps me lean and sinewy. In the winter, I beg unwieldy, clunky boots from the Salvation Army. The rest of the year, I wear running shoes that I get from the local sports store. Every few months the owner kindly slides me a pair of some discontinued model, size twelve, to replace the ones that have been side walked into tatters upon my feet.

In the early spring, after the first melt-out of ice, I march my way up to the Falls, where there is a fish ladder, and I daily volunteer to monitor the return of salmon to the Connecticut River watershed. This requires me to watch endless gallons of water flow through the dam, and occasionally spot a fish climbing against the current, driven by great instincts to return to where it was itself spawned where, in that greatest of all mysteries, it will in its own turn, spawn and then die. I admire the salmon, because I can appreciate what it is like to be driven by forces others cannot see or feel or hear and to feel the imperative of a duty that is greater than oneself. Psychotic fish. After years of gallivanting about most pleasantly in the great wide ocean, they hear a mighty fish-voice deep inside them resonating and that insists they head on this impossible journey toward their own death. Perfect. I like to think of the salmon as if they are as mad as I once was. When I see one, I make a pencil notation on a form the state Wildlife Service provides me and sometimes whisper a quiet greeting: Hello, my brother. Welcome to the society of the crazed.

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.

Not me. One of the by-products of my state of mind is a devotion to looking ahead. The past is a runaway jumble of dangerous and painful memories. Why would I want to go back?

And yet, I hesitated. I found myself staring at the invitation with a fascination that seemed to flower within me. Although the Western State Hospital was only an hour's ride away, I had never returned there in any of the years after my release. I doubted anyone who'd spent a single minute behind those doors had.

I looked down at my hand and saw that it was shaking slightly. Perhaps my medications were wearing thin. Again, I told myself to toss the letter in the wastebasket and then take off across town. This was dangerous. Unsettling. It threatened the very careful existence that I had stitched together. Walk fast, I told myself. Travel quickly. Pace out your normal routine, because it is your salvation. Put this behind you. I started to do exactly that, then stopped.

Instead, I reached out for the phone and punched in the numbers for the chairperson. I waited through two rings, then heard a voice:

"Hello?"

"Mrs. Robinson- Smythe, please," I said a little too briskly.

"This is her secretary. Who is calling?"

"My name is Francis Xavier Petrel…"

"Oh, Mr. Petrel, you must be calling about the Western State day…"

"That's correct," I said. "I'll be there."

"That's great. Now let me just put you through…"

But I hung up the phone, almost scared of my own impulsiveness. I was out the door and pounding the pavement as fast as I could, before I had a chance to change my mind. I wondered, as the yards of concrete sidewalk and black macadam highway passed beneath my soles and the storefronts and houses of my town went unnoticed by my eyes, if my voices would have told me to go. Or not.

It was an unseasonably hot day, even for late May. I had to transfer buses three times before reaching the city, and each time it seemed that the mingling of hot air and diesel engine fumes had grown worse. The stink greater. The humidity higher. At each stop I told myself that it was completely wrong to go back, but then refused to take my own advice and kept going.

The hospital was on the outskirts of a small typically New England college town which sported equal numbers of book shops pizzerias, Chinese restaurants, and low-cost clothing stores with a military bent. There was a slightly iconoclastic character to some of the businesses, however like the bookstore that specialized in self-help and spiritual growth tomes, where the clerk behind the counter looked like someone who had read every book offered on the shelves and hadn't found any that helped, or the sushi bar that looked a bit bedraggled, and the sort of place where the fellow slicing the raw fish was likely to be named Tex or Paddy and speak with a drawl or a brogue. The heat of the day seemed to emanate from the sidewalk beneath my feet, radiant warmth like a space heater in winter that has only one setting: hot as hell. The small of my back was sticking unpleasantly to the one white dress shirt I owned, and I would have loosened my tie were I not afraid that I wouldn't be able to straighten it again. I wore the only suit I possessed: a blue wool go-to-a-funeral suit that I had purchased secondhand in anticipation of my parents' deaths, but they had, as yet, managed to stubbornly cling to breath, and so this was the first occasion I'd ever worn it. I definitely thought it would be a good suit to be buried in, because it would undoubtedly keep my remains warm in the cold earth. By the time I was midway up the hill toward the hospital grounds, I was already vowing that it would be the last time I ever consciously put it on, no matter how infuriated my sisters would be when I showed up at the wake they had planned for our parents in shorts and an outrageously loud Hawaiian print shirt. But what could they truly say? After all, I'm the crazy one in the family. A built-in excuse for all sorts of behavior.

In a great, curious joke of construction, the Western State Hospital was built on the top of a hill, overlooking the campus of a famous women's college. The hospital buildings mimicked the college, lots of ivy and brick and white framed windows in rectangular three- and four-story dormitories, laid out in quadrangles with benches and stands of small elm trees. I always suspected that the same architects were involved in both projects, and the hospital contractor simply stole materials from the college. From the sky, a passing crow would have assumed that the hospital and the college were more or less the same place. The same bird would have failed to see how different the two campuses were until one stepped inside each building. Then he would have seen the differences.

The physical line of demarcation was a single-lane black macadam road, not even adorned with a sidewalk, that curved up one side of the hill, and a riding corral on the other, where the even better-heeled students among the already well-heeled, exercised their horses. I saw that the stables and the jumps were still where they had been when I'd last seen them twenty years earlier. A solitary horse and rider were going through their paces, circling endlessly around the oval beneath the early summer sun, then accelerating into the jumps. A Mobius strip of action. I could hear the harsh breathing of the animal as it labored in the heat and see a long blond ponytail protruding from beneath the rider's black helmet. Her shirt was black with sweat, and the horse's flanks glistened. Both seemed oblivious to the activity taking place above them, farther up the hill. I walked past, heading to where I saw a bright yellow-striped tent had been erected, just inside the tall brick wall and iron gate to the hospital. A printed sign said registration.

A large, overly well-intentioned lady behind a card table outfitted me with a name tag, pinning it to my suit coat with a flourish. She also equipped me with a folder that contained reprints of numerous newspaper articles detailing the development plans for the old hospital grounds: condos and luxury homes because the land had a view of the valley and the river in the distance. I thought that was odd. In all the time I spent there, I could never remember seeing the blue band of the river in any distant vision. Of course, I might have thought it was an hallucination, anyway. There was also a brief history of the hospital and some grainy, black-and-white photographs of patients being treated or passing the time in the day rooms I scanned the pictures for faces I recalled, including my own, but saw no one I recognized, except that I recognized everyone. We were all the same, once. Shuffling about in various states of dress and medication.

The folder contained a program for the day's activities, and I saw a number of people heading in to what I remembered was the main administration building. The lecture scheduled for that time block was a presentation, by a history professor, entitled "The Cultural Significance of the Western State Hospital." Considering that we inmates were limited to the grounds, and more often than not, locked in the dormitories, I wondered what he would find to talk about. I recognized the lieutenant governor, surrounded by several aides, shaking hands with other politicians as he walked through the door. He was smiling, but I couldn't recall anyone else ever smiling when they were escorted into that building. It was the place you were first taken, and where you were processed. There was also a warning in large block letters at the bottom of the program, stating that many of the hospital's buildings were in significant states of disrepair, and dangerous to enter. The warning requested that visitors limit themselves to the administration building and to the quadrangles for safety purposes.

I took a few steps toward the line of people heading into the lecture, then stopped. I watched the crowd dwindle, as the building devoured them. Then I turned, and walked quickly across the quadrangle.

It was a pretty simple realization that struck me: I wasn't there to hear a speech.

It did not take me long to find my old building. I could have walked the paths with my eyes closed.

The metal grates that covered the windows had rusted, the iron burnished by time and dirt. One hung like a broken wing from a single brace. The brick exterior had faded, too, dulled to a earthy brown color. The shoots of ivy that were springing forth green with the season seemed to cling with little energy to the walls, untended, wild. The shrubbery that used to adorn the entranceway had died, and the large double doors that led into the building hung loosely from cracked and splintered jambs. The name of the building, carved into a gray granite slab on the corner, much like a tombstone, had suffered as well: someone had chipped away at the stone, so that the only letters I could make out were mherst. The a that had begun the title was now a jagged scar.

All the housing units had been named after in some person's cosmic sense of irony famous colleges and universities. There had been Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, Williams and Wesleyan, Smith and Mount Holyoke and Wellesley, and, of course, mine, which was Amherst. The building named for the town and the college, which in turn had been named after a British soldier, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, whose original claim to fame had been heartlessly equipping rebellious Indian tribes with blankets infected with smallpox. His gifts managed to swiftly accomplish what bullets, trinkets, and negotiations could not.

There was a sign nailed to the door, and I walked up to read it. The first word was danger, written in large print. Then there was some blah-blah-blah legalese from the county building inspector, which amounted to an official condemnation of the building. It was followed, in equally large letters: NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.

I thought this was interesting. Once it had seemed to those who occupied the building that we were the ones being condemned. It had never occurred to any of us that the walls, bars, and locks that made up our lives would one day face the same status.

It appeared, as well, that someone else had refused to obey the admonishment. The door locks had been worked over with a crowbar, a device that lacks subtlety, and the doors were ajar. I reached out and pulled hard, and with a creaking noise, the entranceway slid open.

A musty smell filled the first corridor. There was a pile of empty wine and beer bottles in the corner, which, I guessed, explained the nature of the other visitors to the building: high school kids searching for a place to drink away from spying parental eyes. The walls were streaked with dirt and odd graffiti slogans in different hues of spray paint. One said bad boys rules I supposed so. Pipes had ripped through the ceilings, dripping fetid dark water onto the linoleum floors. Debris and trash, dust and dirt filled each corner. Mixed with the flat smell of age and disuse was the distinct odor of human waste. I took a few steps forward, but had to stop. A sheet of wallboard had pulled away and fallen across the corridor blocking the path. I saw the center stairs to my left, which led to the upper floors, but they were littered with even more refuse. I wanted to walk through the dayroom, off to my left, and I wanted to see the treatment rooms, which lined the first floor. I also wanted to see the upper floor cells, where we were locked up when we struggled with our medications or our madness, and the dormitory bunk rooms, where we slept like unhappy campers in rows of steel beds. But the stairway looked unstable, as if it would sway and collapse under my weight if I tried to climb it.

I am not sure how long I remained inside, squatted down, bent over, listening to the echoes of all that I had once seen and heard. Just as when I was a patient, time seemed less urgent, less compelling, as if the second hand on my watch slowed to a crawl, and the minutes passed reluctantly.

Ghosts of memory stalked me. I could see faces, hear sounds. Tastes and smells of madness and neglect came back in a steady tidal rush. I listened to my past, as it swirled about me.

When the heat of recollection finally overcame me, I rose stiffly and slowly exited the building. I walked over to a bench in the quadrangle beneath a tree, and sat down, turning my face back to what had once been home. I felt exhausted and breathed in the fresh air with effort, more tired in that moment than I was after any of my usual sorties around my hometown. I did not turn away, until I heard some footsteps on the pathway behind me.

A short, portly man, a little older than I, with thinned-out, slicked-down black hair streaked with silver, was hurrying toward where I was sitting. He wore a wide smile, but a little anxiousness in his eyes, and when I faced him, he made a furtive wave.

"I thought I would find you here," he said, wheezing with the effort and the heat. "I saw your name on the registration list."

He stopped a few feet away, suddenly tentative.

"Hello, C-Bird," he said.

I stood and held out my hand. "Bonjour Napoleon," I replied. "No one has called me by that name in many, many years."

He grasped my hand. His was a little sweaty with exertion and had a palsied weakness to the grip. That would be the result of his medications. But the smile remained. "Me, neither," he said.

"I saw your real name on the program," I told him. "You're going to give a speech?"

He nodded. "I don't know about getting up in front of all those people," he said. "But my treating physician is one of the movers and shakers in the hospital redevelopment plan and it was all his idea. He said it would be good therapy. A solid demonstration of the golden road to total recovery."

I hesitated, then asked, "What do you think?"

Napoleon sat down on the bench. "I think he's the crazy one," he said, breaking into a slightly manic giggle, a high-pitched sound that joined nervousness and joy at once and that I remembered from our time together. "Of course, it helps that everyone still believes you're completely crazy, because then you can't really embarrass yourself too badly," he added, and I grinned along with him. That was the sort of observation only someone who had spent time in a mental hospital would make. I sat back down next to him and we both stared over at the Amherst Building. After a moment or two, he sighed. "Did you go inside?"

"Yes. It's a mess. Ready for the wrecker's ball."

"I thought the same back when we were there. And everyone thought it was the best place to be. At least that's what they told me when I was processed in. State-of-the-art mental health facility. The best way to treat the mentally ill in a residential setting. What a lie."

He caught his breath, then added, "A damn lie."

Now it was my turn to nod in agreement.

"Is that what you will tell them. In the speech, I mean."

He shook his head. "I don't think that's what they want to hear. I think it makes more sense to tell them nice things. Positive things. I'm planning a series of raging falsehoods."

I thought about this for a moment, then smiled. "That might be a sign of mental health," I said.

Napoleon laughed. "I hope you're right."

We were both silent for a few seconds, then, in a wistful tone, he whispered, "I'm not going to tell them about the killings. And not a word about the Fireman or the lady investigator that came to visit or anything that happened at the end." He looked up at the Amherst Building, then added, "It would really be your story to tell, anyway."

I didn't reply.

Napoleon was quiet for a moment, then he asked me, "Do you think about what happened?"

I shook my head, but we both understood this was a falsehood. "I dream about it, sometimes," I told him. "But it's hard to remember what was real and what wasn't."

"That makes sense," he said. "You know one thing that bothered me," he added slowly, "I never knew where they buried the people. The people who died while they were here. I mean, one minute they were in the dayroom or hanging in the hallways along with everyone else, and the next they might be dead, but what then? Did you ever know?"

"Yes," I said, after a moment or two. "They had a little makeshift graveyard over at the edge of the hospital, back toward the woods behind administration and Harvard. It was behind the little garden. I think now it's part of a youth soccer field."

Napoleon wiped his forehead. "I'm glad to know that," he said. "I always wondered. Now I know."

Again we were quiet for a few seconds, then he said, "You know what I hated learning. Afterward and everything, when we were released and put into outpatient clinics and getting all the treatment and all the newer drugs. You know what I hated?"

"What?"

"That the delusion that I'd clung to so hard for so many years wasn't just a delusion, but it wasn't even a special delusion. That I wasn't the only person to have fantasies that I was the reincarnation of a French emperor. In fact, I bet Paris is chockablock filled with them. I hated that understanding. In my delusional state, I was special. Unique. And now, I'm just an ordinary guy who has to take pills and whose hands shake all the time and who can't really hold anything more than the simplest job and whose family probably wishes would find a way to disappear. I wonder what the French word for poof! is."

I thought about this, then told him, "Well, personally, for whatever it's worth, I always had the impression that you were a damn fine French emperor. Cliche or not. And if it had really been you ordering troops around at Waterloo, why hell, you would have won."

He giggled a sound of release. "C-Bird, all of us always knew that you were better at paying attention to the world around us than anyone else. People liked you, even if we were all deluded and crazy."

"That's nice to hear."

"What about the Fireman. He was your friend. Whatever happened to him? Afterward, I mean."

I paused, then answered: "He got out. He straightened out all his problems, moved to the South, and made a lot of money. Had a family. Big house. Big car. Very successful all around. Last I heard, he was heading up some charitable foundation. Happy and healthy."

Napoleon nodded. "I can believe it. And the woman who came to investigate? Did she go with him?"

"No. She went on to a judgeship. All sorts of honors. She had a wonderful life."

"I knew it. You could just tell."

Of course, this was all a lie.

He looked down at his watch. "I need to get back. Get ready for my great moment. Wish me luck."

"Good luck," I said.

"It's good seeing you again," Napoleon added. "I hope your life goes okay."

"You, too," I said. "You look good."

"Really? I doubt it. I doubt very many of us look good. But that's okay. Thanks for saying it."

He stood and I joined him. We both looked back at the Amherst Building.

"I'll be happy when they tear it down," Napoleon said with a sudden burst of bitterness. "It was a dangerous, evil place and not much good happened there."

Then he turned back to me. "C-Bird, you were there. You saw it all. You tell everyone."

"Who would listen?"

"Someone might. Write the story. You can do it."

"Some stories should be left unwritten," I said.

Napoleon shrugged his rounded shoulders. "If you write it, then it will be real. If all it does is stay in our memories, then it's like it never happened. Like it was some dream. Or hallucination thought up by all of us madmen. No one trusts us when we say something. But if you write it down, well, that gives it some substance. Makes it all true enough."

I shook my head. "The trouble with being mad," I said, "was it was real hard to tell what was true and what wasn't. That doesn't change, just because we can take enough pills to scrape along now in the world with all the others."

Napoleon smiled. "You're right," he said. "But maybe not, too. I don't know. I just know that you could tell it and maybe a few people would believe it, and that's a good enough thing. No one ever believed us, back then. Even when we took the medications, no one ever believed us."

He looked at his watch again, and shifted his feet nervously.

"You should get back," I said.

"I must get back," he repeated.

We stood awkwardly until he finally turned, and walked away. About midway down the path, Napoleon turned, and gave me the same unsure little wave that he had when he'd first spotted me. "Tell it," he called. Then he turned and walked quickly away, a little duck like in his style. I could see that his hands were shaking again.

It was after dark when I finally quick marched up the sidewalk to my apartment, and climbed the stairs and locked myself into the safety of the small space. A nervous fatigue seemed to pulse through my veins, carried along the bloodstream with the red cells and the white cells. Seeing Napoleon and hearing myself called by the nickname that I'd received when I first went to the hospital startled emotions within me. I thought hard about taking some pills. I knew I had some that were designed to calm me, should I get overly excited. But I did not. "Tell the story," he'd said to me. "How?" I said out loud in the quiet of my own home.

The room echoed around me.

"You can't tell it," I said to myself.

Then I asked the question: Why not?

I had some pens and pencils, but no paper.

Then an idea came to me. For a second, I wondered whether it was one of my voices, returning, filling my ear with a quick suggestion and modest command. I stopped, listening carefully, trying to pluck the unmistakable tones of my familiar guides from the street sounds that penetrated past the laboring of my old window air conditioning unit. But they were elusive. I didn't know whether they were there, or not. But uncertainty was something I had grown accustomed to.

I took a slightly worn and scratched table chair and placed it against the side of the wall deep in the corner of the room. I didn't have any paper, I told myself. But what I did have were white-painted walls unadorned by posters or art or anything.

Balancing myself on the seat, I could reach almost to the ceiling. I gripped a pencil in my hand and leaned forward. Then I wrote quickly, in a tiny, pinched, but legible script:

Francis Xavier Petrel arrived in tears at the Western State Hospital in the hack of an ambulance. It was raining hard, darkness was falling rapidly, and his arms and legs were cuffed and restrained. He was twenty-one years old and more scared than he'd ever been in his entire short, and to that point, relatively uneventful life…