by Wally Lamb
Ray spat on the grass. “Any of those clowns come around here, I’ll take a baseball bat to them.” He probably would, too. Fuckin’ Ray.
I backed onto the road and threw her into first. “Hey!” he called. He was walking toward the truck. I rolled down the window and braced myself.
“Just answer me one thing,” he said. “Why didn’t you let them at least try to put his hand back on? Now he’s got a physical disability on top of a mental one. How come you didn’t have them at least try?”
I’d been flogging myself with the same question for the past two days. But it pissed me off—him asking it. A little late for fatherly concern, wasn’t it?
“For one thing, they were only giving the reattachment a fifty-fifty chance,” I said. “If it didn’t work, it would have just sat there, dead, sewn to his wrist. And for another thing . . . for another thing. . . . You didn’t hear him, Ray. It was the first time in twenty years he was in charge of something. And so I couldn’t. . . . I mean, okay, you’re right—it doesn’t make him a hero.” I looked up from the steering wheel. Looked him in the eye—that trick I’d taught myself way back when. “It was his hand, Ray. . . . It was his choice.”
He stood there, hands in his pockets. Half a minute or more went by.
“You know what the funny thing is?” he said. “I never even bought that goddamned knife. I won it in a card game from this guy in my outfit. Big, beefy Swede, came from Minnesota. I can see him plain as the nose on your face, but I been trying all afternoon to think what that guy’s name was. Isn’t that something? My kid cuts his hand off with that knife, and I can’t even remember the guy’s name I won the damn thing from.”
“My kid.” It struck me that he said that. Claimed Thomas.
That night, Joy brought home Chinese food as an apology. I sat there, eating without really tasting it. “How is it?” she asked me.
“It’s great,” I said. “Great.”
Later, in bed, she rolled over to my side and started getting friendly. “Dominick?” she said. “I’m sorry about this morning. I just want things to get back to normal.” She rubbed her leg against my leg, flicked her finger in and out of the waistband on my underpants. Got me interested with her hands. I just lay there, letting her do me without doing anything back.
She got on top and put me inside of her. Put my hand, my fingers, where she wanted them. I was just going through the motions at first—performing a service. Then I started thinking about Dessa out there in the hospital parking lot, in her jeans and little jacket. I was making love to Dessa . . .
Joy came quickly—intensely. Her orgasm felt like a relief, a burden lifted off my shoulders. I was almost there myself, almost ready, when I just stopped. I didn’t mean to. I just started thinking of things: the way the state hospital corridors smell like dead farts and cigarettes, and the way Dan the Man had painted that happily-ever-after mailbox out there for them, and the picture I’d conjured up for Ray to get myself off the hook: Thomas’s severed hand, stitched to his wrist like dead gray meat.
I went soft on her. Slipped out. Nudged her off me and rolled away.
“Hey, you?” she said. Her hand curled around my shoulder.
“Hey me what?”
She grabbed my earlobe, pulled it a little. “It’s okay. No biggie.”
“Now there’s a compliment,” I said.
She jabbed me one. “You know what I mean.”
Yanking up the covers, I turned further away from her—swung my hand up for the light switch. “God, I’m whipped,” I said. But a few minutes later, it was her breathing that was soft and regular.
I couldn’t sleep at all that night. Spent hour after hour staring up at the void that, in the daytime, was nothing but our goddamned bedroom ceiling.
“Finish, Dominick,” Thomas said. “Finish the psalm.”
I felt, rather than saw, the cop look over at me. I opened my brother’s Bible. Give me not up to the wishes of my foes, I read, for false witnesses have risen up against me, and such as breathe out violence. I believe that I shall see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage; be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.
The police cruiser took the familiar turn off the parkway, the cop waved to the security guard, and eased over the speed bump. We rode by the boarded-up Dix Building. Coasted past Tweed, Libby, Payne. . . . Someone had told me once that back during the state hospital’s heyday, those brick monstrosities had housed over four thousand patients. Now, the inpatient population was down to around two hundred. Decay and downsizing had closed every building but Settle and Hatch.
“Hey, you just passed it,” I told the cop when the cruiser rolled past the Settle Building. “Turn back.”
He looked in the rearview mirror, exchanged a look with his partner. “He’s not going to Settle,” the other one said.
“What do you mean, he’s not going to Settle? That’s where he always goes. He runs the news rack at Settle. He runs the coffee cart.”
“We don’t know anything about the coffee cart,” the escort said. “All we know is our orders say to take him to Hatch.”
“Oh no, not Hatch!” Thomas groaned. He pulled and struggled against the restraints they’d put on him; his resistance rocked the cruiser. “Oh, God, Dominick! Help me! Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!”
4
The maximum-security Hatch Forensic Institute, located at the rear of the Three Rivers State Hospital grounds, is a squat concrete-and-steel building surrounded by chain link and razor wire. Hatch houses most of the front-page boys: the vet from Mystic who mistook his family for the Viet Cong, the kid at Wesleyan who brought his .22-caliber semiautomatic to class. But Hatch is also the end of the line for a lot of less sexy psychos: drug fry-outs, shopping mall nuisances, manic-depressive alcoholics—your basic disturbing-the-peace-type wackos with no place else to go. Occasionally, someone actually gets better down at Hatch. Gets released. But that tends to happen in spite of things. For most of the patients there, the door swings only one way, which is just fine with the town of Three Rivers. Most people around here are less interested in rehabilitation than they are in warehousing the spooks and kooks—keeping the Boston Strangler and the Son of Sam off the streets, keeping Norman Bates locked up at the Hatch Hotel.
There’s never been an escape from Hatch. Circular in shape, the place is divided into four independent units, each with its own security station. The outside wall of the building is windowless; the inside windows look onto a small, circular courtyard—the hub of the wheel, so to speak. There are some picnic tables out there and a rusted basketball hoop that pretty much gets ignored because most of the guys are fat and sluggish from Thorazine. Unit by unit, twice a day, patients whose submissiveness has won them the privilege can enter that concrete-floored courtyard for a twenty-minute hit of fresh air and nicotine.
I’ve heard motormouths on the radio and on the barstool next to me complain that the insanity plea is one of the things that’s wrong with this country—that we let rapists and killers get away with murder by letting them hide out at “country clubs” like Hatch. Well, guess again, folks. I’ve been there. Walked out with the stink of the place still on my clothes and my brother’s screaming still in my ears. If there’s a hell worse than Hatch Forensic Institute, then God must be one vengeful motherfucker.
The cruiser’s blue lights winked on and off. The cop who was driving us stopped at Hatch’s front gate and handed a guard some paperwork. “It was a sacrifice!” Thomas kept shouting. “It was a sacrifice!”
I turned around and told him to take it easy—that I’d get the whole thing straightened out and get him back to Settle that night. But I only half-believed that myself. The steel grid between the front and back seats of the cruiser—between my brother and me—was beginning to feel like a preview of coming attractions.
There was a whirring sound. The gate glided open and clunked to a stop, and the cruiser eased past, over a speed bump, and around the building. W
e came to a halt at a double door marked “Patients Receiving—Unit Two.” A red light above the door flashed. We sat and waited with the motor running.
“What law did I break?” my brother blurted out. “Who did I hurt?”
The answer to the last question was as obvious as the bandaged stump on the end of his arm, but how did that make him a criminal? It had to be a mistake, I told myself. It made no sense. But as I sat there staring ahead at those double doors, that winking light, I felt a yank in my chest—one of those fight-or-flight rushes. “Hey,” I said, turning to the cop next to me. “What’s your name?”
The question surprised him. “My name? Mercado. Sergeant Mercado.”
“All right, look, Mercado. Just do me a favor, will you? Just bring him over to the Settle Building for five minutes. I know the night people there. They can call his doctor and get this sorted out. Because this whole thing is a big mistake.”
“You’re tampering with an agreement between God and me!” Thomas warned. “The Lord God Almighty has commanded me to prevent an unholy war!”
Mercado looked straight ahead. “No can do,” the cop in back answered for him. “They’d have our ass in a sling if we ignored signed orders.”
“No, they won’t,” I said. I turned around to look at the guy. His face and Thomas’s were crisscrossed by that metal screen that divided us. “They’ll be glad that you straightened out the mix-up before any shit hit the fan. They’ll be grateful.”
“I run the news rack at Settle!” Thomas pleaded. “I run the coffee cart!”
“Hey, I can sympathize with you,” Mercado told me. “I got brothers myself. But the thing is, we can’t just—”
“No, don’t!” I said, interrupting him. I was wired, pumped on sheer desperation. “Just think about it for a second before you let some knee-jerk police response come out of your mouth. All I’m asking you to do is be a human being instead of a cop for five minutes, okay? All I’m asking is that you throw this thing in reverse and drive—what?—one-sixteenth of a mile over to Settle. You don’t even have to leave the hospital grounds, Mercado. One-sixteenth of a mile, man. Five minutes, tops. That’s all I’m asking.”
Mercado looked in the rearview mirror. “What do you think, Al? We could just—”
“Uh-uh,” from the backseat. “No way, José. No can do.”
“Then you get up tomorrow morning at five-thirty and start the coffee!” Thomas shouted. “You make sure there’s enough change in the change box and that nobody buys Mrs. Semel’s Drake’s cakes. You make sure none of the other doctors get Dr. Ahamed’s Wall Street Journal !”
Mercado and I looked at each other. “You got brothers?” I said. “How many?”
“Four.”
“Come on, man,” I whispered. “Follow your gut. Five minutes.”
Reflected in the flashing light over the “Patients Receiving” door, Mercado’s face turned red, not red, red. I saw the hesitation in his eyes, the struggle. That’s when I blew it. I reached over to touch his arm—make some human contact with the guy—and he freaked. Batted my hand away so hard that it hit the windshield.
“Keep your hands to yourself!” he said. “Understand?” His own hand was down at his holster, a shield over the butt of his gun. “That’s the last thing you want to do is grab an armed officer. Understand? You could end up real sorry next time you did that.”
I looked out the side window. Took a deep breath. Gave it up.
A uniformed guard unlocked the double doors and motioned us inside. Mercado got out and opened the back door, easing my brother out of the cruiser. “Watch your head now,” he said. “Watch your head.”
A part of me wanted to stay right there inside that cruiser: to secure my status as the uncrazy twin, the one who wasn’t going into that place. I’m not talking about major abandonment, just five seconds’ worth of hesitation. But I admit it. I hesitated.
“Here,” the older cop said when I got out of the cruiser. He handed me Thomas’s duffel bag. I was already holding his Bible.
Thomas stood, hunched over a little from his restraints. He told the older cop he had to go to the bathroom. Was there a bathroom inside that he could use? He’d had to go most of the way there.
His leg chains rattled with each small step he took toward the building. I had a bitter taste in my mouth and a dull, thudding feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was like I’d swallowed those chains or something. What was going on? Why were they doing this?
The guard let my brother and the two escorts through but stopped me at the door. “Who are you?” he said. He was one of those short, gung-ho types. Late twenties, early thirties, maybe. Robocop.
“I’m his brother,” I said. As if he couldn’t tell. As if he couldn’t see that by looking at our faces.
He and Mercado exchanged a look. “Mr. Birdsey was visiting the patient when we arrived for the escort,” Mercado said. “The patient requested that he accompany us.”
“We thought it might make him less combative,” the other cop added.
“He’s not combative,” I said. “He’s never hurt anyone in his whole life.”
Robocop looked down at my brother’s stump, then back at me.
“Look, this is just a screwup by some secretary or something,” I said. “He should be over at Settle. He’s in the outpatient program over there. He always checks in at Settle after an episode. One call to his doctor and we can get this whole thing straightened out. But he’s not combative. God, he’s about as combative as Bambi.”
“I run the coffee cart at Settle,” Thomas added. “They need me there first thing in the morning.”
Robocop told me I could enter the building and accompany my brother during the initial part of the admitting process, but that I couldn’t go with him into the ward itself—couldn’t go any further than the security station. Any calls to the doctor would have to be made in the morning.
Whatever you say, asshole, I thought to myself. A foot in the door was some kind of progress. Once I got inside, I could talk to somebody on the medical staff.
Robocop led us down a short corridor: halogen lighting, yellow cinder-block walls. Hatch has a singular smell to it—nothing like the stink over at Settle. Something else. Something sweet and putrid: bad food at the back of the refrigerator. Human rot, I guess. Human decay.
Another guard joined us when we got to the metal detector. He had a gut hanging off the front of him, a puffy pink alcoholic face. He reeked of cologne.
The police escorts unlocked Thomas’s restraints and took them off. Thomas mentioned again that he had to go to the toilet. Mercado frisked him and walked him through the metal detector.
“Did you hear him?” I said. “He has to take a leak.”
“What’s this?” the fat guard asked me. His chin pointed down at the stuff I was carrying: Thomas’s duffel bag, his Bible.
“His personal stuff,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like personal stuff: wallet, toothpaste, comb.”
Fatso took the bag and the Bible away from me. Unzipped the bag and poked around. He was one of those guys who breathes through his nose so that you can hear what work every single breath is for him. He dumped everything out onto a conveyor belt: foot powder, a Bic pen, a tin button that said “Jesus Is the Reason for the Season,” a pair of wingtip shoes with a clip-on necktie coiled inside one of them. It was pathetic: Thomas’s shitty life laid out there like a bunch of groceries at Stop & Shop. Fatso flipped a switch and the belt rolled. Everything passed through one of those X-ray machines like they have at the airport. Big surprise: no hidden daggers, no pipe bomb sewn into the duffel bag lining.
“You’re going to have to be padded, too,” Robocop told me.
“Padded? What’s padded?” I was thinking padded cell.
“Frisked,” Mercado said.
“Frisk me then,” I told Mercado, leaning myself against the wall the way they’d made my brother do it. “Go ahead. Be my guest.”
> But it was Robocop who did it: a little rougher, a little more thorough in the privacy zones than he needed to be—just in case I didn’t get who was the big man around there. I would have said something to him—asked him while he was feeling me up if he enjoyed his work—but I was in no position to throw darts. Not yet. Not if I was going to get Thomas out of there that night.
Just when I thought he was done humiliating me, Robocop had me walk through the metal detector. The thing beeped and whistled and he had me fork over my key ring. I passed the second time, but Robocop told me I’d have to pick up my keys on my way out of there because of the little jackknife I keep on the ring. Like I was going to sneak in there and jackknife all the inmates free. What bullshit.
Robocop told the escorts to put the cuffs back on my brother.
“Why’s that necessary?” I said. “I’m telling you, you’re wasting your time. He’s taking a U-turn out of here as soon as we get ahold of his doctor. Why does he have to be restrained?”
He looked at me without answering, his face as blank as the cinder block. Fatso told Thomas his personal items would be cataloged and stored at the security station. That he’d get state issue for his toiletries. That all reading material would have to be approved first by his doctor or the unit lead.
“Where’s my Bible!” Thomas said. “I want my Bible.”
“All reading material has to be approved first by his doctor or the unit lead,” Fatso repeated.
“He can’t have a Bible?” I said. “You guys even have to approve the goddamned word of God?”
Robocop came forward, close enough so that I could see a chicken pox scar, smell the Juicy Fruit in his mouth. “This is a maximum-security facility, sir,” he said. “There are regulations and procedures. If you have a problem with that, then let us know so you can wait outside instead of accompanying your brother through the rest of the preliminary admit.”