The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  In the semidarkness of the madhouse dormitory, Peter the Fireman shook his head, although in denial of precisely what, he was uncertain. That night he’d controlled his murderous rage, and simply taken everything he’d learned about how to conceal the origin of a fire, everything that was about caution and subtlety, and ignored it. He’d left a trail so obvious that even the most callow investigator would have had no trouble finding him. He had set the fire, then walked through the nave to the vestry, voice raised in warning, but believing that he was alone. He had stopped, as he heard the fire start to move eagerly behind him, and stared up at a stained glass window, that suddenly seemed to glow with life, as it caught the reflection of the fire. He’d crossed himself, just as he’d done a thousand times, then stepped outside, to the front lawn, where he’d waited to see it explode in full flower, and then he’d walked home to wait in the darkness on the front steps of his mother’s house for the police to arrive. He knew he had done a good job, and he’d known that even the most dedicated ladder company wouldn’t succeed at extinguishing the blaze until it was too late.

  What he hadn’t known was that the priest whom he had come to hate was inside. On a fold-out cot in the main office, and not, at home in his bed, where he, by all rights and usual behavior, should have been. Sleeping in the arms of a heavy narcotic, no doubt prescribed to him by a physician-parishioner, concerned that the good father looked pale and drawn and that his sermons seemed marred by anxiety. As well they should have been, for he well knew that Peter the Fireman knew what he had done to his little nephew, and knew, as well, that of all the members of the parish, Peter, alone, was likely to do something about it. This had always bothered Peter: There were so many others that the priest could have easily preyed upon, who weren’t related to someone who might rise up. Peter wondered, too, if the same drug that had left the priest asleep in his bed while death crackled all around him, was what Gulp-a-pill liked to give the patients in the hospital. He guessed that they were, a symmetry that he thought pleasantly and almost laughably ironic.

  Peter whispered out loud, “What’s done is done.”

  Then he glanced around, to see if the noise of his words had awakened anyone.

  He tried to close his eyes. He knew he needed to sleep, and yet, held no hope that it would bring him any rest.

  He blew out in frustration, and swung his feet over the side of the bunk. Peter told himself to head into the bathroom, get a drink of water. He rubbed his hands across his face, as if he could wipe away some of his memories.

  And, as he did this, he had the sudden sensation that he was being watched.

  He straightened up abruptly, instantly alert, his eyes immediately darting about the bunk room.

  Most of the men were shrouded in shadow. A little light crept into one corner from the bank of windows. He searched back and forth across the rows of unsettled men, but he could see no one awake, and certainly no one staring in his direction. He tried to dismiss the sensation, but could not. It filled his stomach with a nervous energy, as if all the senses he had of sight, and hearing and smell and taste and touch were suddenly screaming warnings to him. He tried to tell himself to calm down, because he was beginning to think that he might just be turning as paranoid as all the men who surrounded him, but as he reassured himself, he just caught a bit of motion out of the corner of his eye.

  He pivoted in that direction and for a single second, he saw a face staring in through the small observation window in the entranceway door. Their eyes met, and then, just as abruptly, the face disappeared, dropping from view.

  Peter jumped up, and moving fast through the wan darkness, he dodged his way between the sleeping men to the doorway. He thrust his own face up to the thick glass, and peered out into the corridor. He could only see a few feet in either direction, and all he saw was dark emptiness.

  He placed his hand on the doorknob and pulled. It was locked.

  A great surge of anger and frustration swept over him. He gritted his teeth and believed somewhere deep within himself that he was always destined to find that which he wanted was unreachable, beyond a locked door.

  The weak light, the shadowy darkness, the thick glass, all had conspired to prevent Peter from noting even the smallest of details in the face. All he could take away was the ferocity in the eyes that had settled on him. The look had been uncompromising and evil, and, perhaps for the first time, he thought that maybe Lanky was strangely correct in all his protests and entreaties. Something evil had crept unbidden into the hospital, and Peter knew that this evil knew all about him. He tried to tell himself that his understanding this indicated strength. But he suspected that this was perhaps a lie.

  chapter 15

  By the arrival of midday, I was exhausted. Too little sleep. Too many electric thoughts running rippity-zip through my imagination. I sat alone, taking a modest break, cross-legged on the floor, smoking a cigarette. I believed that the shafts of sunlight streaming through the windows, carrying with it the daytime’s ration of thickly oppressive valley heat, had chased away the Angel. Like some Gothic novelist’s creature, he was a charter member of the night. All the noon sounds of commerce, of people moving about the city, the diesel rumble of a truck or bus, a distant siren from a patrolman’s car, the thump of the newspaper deliveryman tossing his bundle to the sidewalk, school children talking loudly as they made their way down the pavement, all conspired to drive him away. He and I both knew that I was far more vulnerable in the silent midnight hours. Night brings doubt. Darkness sows fears. I expected him to return as soon as the sun fled. There’s no pill as yet invented that can alleviate the symptoms of loneliness and isolation that the end of the day brings. But in the meantime, I was safe, or, at least as safe as I could reasonably expect. No matter how many locks and bolts I had on my door, they wouldn’t keep out my worst fears. This observation made me laugh out loud.

  I reviewed the text that had flown from my pencil and thought: I’ve taken far too many liberties. Peter the Fireman had taken me aside the following morning shortly after breakfast and whispered to me: “I saw someone. In the main entranceway observation window. Staring in, just like he was looking for one of us.

  I couldn’t sleep, and as I lay there in my bunk I got the sensation that someone was watching me. When I looked up, I saw him.”

  “Did you recognize him?” I asked.

  “Not a chance.” Peter had shaken his head slowly. “Just one second, he was there, then, when I swung out of bed, he was gone. I went to the window and looked out, but couldn’t see anyone.”

  “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 was
n’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 conflated, 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 I 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, 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.

  I lit another cigarette. Acrid smoke spiraled in the still air. I might have sat there, lost in memory, had there not been a series of sharp knocks at my door.

  I struggled to my feet in alarm. My train of thought fled, replaced by a sense of nervousness. I stepped toward the entranceway, and then I heard my name called out sharply. “Francis!” This was followed by another series of blows against the thick wood of the door. “Francis! Open up! Are you there?”

  I stopped, and for a moment considered the curious juxtaposition of the demand: Open up! followed by the query: Are you there? At best backward.

  Of course, I recognized the voice. I waited a moment, because I suspected that within a second or two, I would hear another familiar tone.

  “Francis, please. Open the door
so we can see you …”

  Sister One and Sister Two. Megan, who was slender and demanding as a child, but grew into the size of a professional linebacker and developed the same temperament, and Colleen, half her bulk and the shy sort who combines a sense of timidity with a dizzy can-you-do-it-for-me-because-I-wouldn’t-know-where-to-start incompetence about the simplest things in life. I had no patience for either of them.

  “Francis, we know you’re in there, and I want you to open this door immediately!”

  This was followed by another bang bang bang against the door.

  I leaned my forehead up against the hard wood, then pivoted, so that my back was against it, as if I could help block their entrance. After a moment or two, I turned around again, and spoke out loud: “What do you want?”

  Sister One: “We want you to open up!”

  Sister Two: “We want to make sure you’re okay.”

  Predictable.

  “I’m fine,” I said, lying easily. “I’m busy right now. Come back some other time.”

  “Francis, are you taking your medications? Open up right now!” Megan’s voice had all the authority and about the same amount of patience as a Marine Corps drill sergeant on an exceptionally hot day at Parris Island.

  “Francis, we’re worried about you!” Colleen probably worried about everyone. She worried constantly about me, about her own family, about the folks and her sister, about people she read about in the morning paper, or saw on the news at night, about the mayor and the governor and probably the president as well, and the neighbors or the family down the street from her who seemed to have fallen on hard times. Worrying was her style. She was the sister closest to my elderly and inattentive parents, had been since we were children, always seeking their approval for everything she did and probably everything she even thought.