The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  Peter rushed forward, sprinting down the Amherst Building corridor, knowing that only one thing in the world could generate that sort of despair in a person, even a mad one: death. He dodged the other patients, who were shrinking from the sound, near panicked, unsettled, and filled with explosions of anxiety and fear, as they tried to escape a noise that terrified them. Even the Catos and the retarded men, who so often seemed oblivious to the entirety of the world around them, were pushing to the walls, trying to hide. One man was rocking back and forth in a squat, his hands held tight over his ears. Peter could hear the doleful drumbeat of his own shoes slapping hard against the flooring, and he understood that there was something within him that always drove him hard toward dying.

  Francis was right behind him, fighting the urge to flee in the opposite direction, swept up and carried along by Peter’s headlong rush. He could hear Big Black’s deep voice, shouting commands, “Get back, please! Get back! Let us through!” as the attendant and his brother raced down the hallway. A nurse in white uniform came out from behind the wire mesh station. Her name was Nurse Richards, but of course she was called Nurse Riches instead, but the elegance of her nickname was ruined by the look of unaccustomed distress and outright terror in her eyes.

  By the entrance to the women’s dormitory, a disheveled woman with wiry gray hair was rocking back and forth and keening to herself. Another was pirouetting about in circles. A third had put her forehead against the wall and was mumbling something in what Francis thought might be a foreign language, but might also have been gibberish; it was impossible to tell. Two others were wailing, sobbing, and had thrown themselves to the floor where they twitched and moaned as if possessed by devils. He could not tell if any one of the women he saw had issued the scream. It might have been any one of them, or someone else whom he had not seen. But it seemed to him that the noise of despair was still in the air around them, an unrelenting siren’s call dragging them inexorably forward. Inside his own head, his voices were shouting warnings, trying to get Francis to stop, to retreat, to run away from danger. It took a strong physical effort to ignore them, and he tried hard to keep pace with Peter, as if the Fireman’s sense of reason and understanding might actually carry him along as well.

  Peter hesitated only for a moment by the doorway, turning rapidly toward the disheveled woman, and demanding forcefully, “Where?” in a voice that bellowed authority.

  The woman pointed toward the end of the corridor, to the stairwell behind what were supposed to be locked doors, and then burst out in a cackle and laugh, that disintegrated almost as swiftly into a series of wracking sobs.

  Peter stepped forward, Francis directly behind him, and reached out for the handle on the large steel door. He pushed it open in a single, unafraid motion, then stopped.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God!” he burst out.

  Peter gasped in a deep breath, then whispered the second part of the prayer,“… Pray for us sinners in this the hour of our death …” He started to raise his hand to make the sign of the cross, all that Catholic School training coming back to him in an instant, but he stopped in midmotion.

  Francis craned past him, felt all the air drain from his chest and recoiled sharply. He stepped aside, as if to steady himself, suddenly dizzy. He thought there was no blood in his heart, and he worried that he might pass out.

  “Stay back, C-Bird,” Peter whispered. He probably didn’t mean this, but the words fell like some feathers caught in a gust of wind.

  Big Black and Little Black stopped their own rush forward right behind the two patients, staring up, suddenly quieted. After a second, Little Black quietly said, “Goddamn, goddamn …” but nothing else. Big Black turned his face to the wall.

  Francis made himself look ahead.

  Hanging from a makeshift noose fashioned from a twisted dingy gray bedsheet, tied to the iron railing leading to the second floor, was Cleo.

  Her chubby face was misshapen, blown up and inflated, twisted gargoyle-like in death. The noose fashioned around her neck had creased the folds of skin, cutting in like a knot at the bottom of a child’s balloon. Her hair cascaded wildly around her shoulders in a tangled mess, and her blank eyes were open, but fixed ahead. Her mouth was cracked slightly askew, giving her an appearance of shock. She wore a simple, gray shift that hung from her sloped shoulders like a bag, and one gaudy pink sandal had slipped from her foot to the floor. Francis saw that her toenails were painted red.

  He thought he was having trouble breathing, and he wanted to turn his face away and avert his eyes, but the portrait of death in front of him had a sickly, compelling urgency to it, and he stayed rooted in position, fixed on the figure hanging from the stairwell. He found himself trying to reconcile Cleo with her constant torrent of obscenities, her bouncing, energetic devastation of all challengers at the Ping-Pong table, with the lumpy, grotesque figure before him. The stairwell had a shadowy half light, as if the single uncovered bulbs that lit each floor were inadequate to hold back the tendrils of darkness that were eager to creep into the area. The air seemed musty and hot, as if rarely circulated, like inside an attic never visited.

  He let his eyes sweep over her figure again, and then he saw something.

  “Peter,” Francis whispered slowly, “look at her hand.”

  Peter’s eyes dropped from Cleo’s face to her hand and for a moment he was silent. Then he said, “I’ll be damned.”

  Cleo’s right thumb had been severed. A streak of crimson ran down the outside of her shift, and along the side of her naked leg, finally pooling in a black splotch on the floor beneath her body. Francis stared at the circle of blood, then gagged.

  “Damn,” Peter said again.

  The severed thumb was on the floor about a foot, perhaps two, away from the center of the small maroon circle of sticky blood, left there almost as if it had been discarded like some petty afterthought.

  A thought occurred to Francis, and he surveyed the scene rapidly, looking for one single item. His eyes raced right and left, searching as quickly as he could, but he did not see what he was looking for. He wanted to say something, but instead kept his mouth closed. Peter, as well, had grown silent.

  It was Little Black who finally spoke. “There’s going to be hell to pay over this,” he said glumly.

  Francis waited over by the wall, sitting on the floor, while a number of things took place in front of him. He had the odd sensation that he wished that it was all a simple hallucination, or perhaps a dream, and that any moment he would wake up, and the usual day in the Western State Hospital would simply begin all over again.

  Big Black had left Peter, Francis, and his brother in the stairwell, looking up at Cleo’s body, and had dutifully returned to the nursing station and called Security, and then Doctor Gulptilil’s office, and finally, Mister Evil’s apartment number. There had been a short lull, following the phone calls, during which time Peter had moved slowly around Cleo’s dead form, assessing, memorizing, trying to fix it all firmly in his head. Francis admired the Fireman’s diligence and sense of professionalism but he secretly doubted whether he would ever be able to forget any of the details of the death in front of him. Still, both Francis and Peter did as they had done before, when Short Blond’s body was discovered, letting their eyes walk the entire scene, measuring, photographing, the way crime scene specialists might do, except that neither had any tape or camera, so they were left to form their own internal specifications.

  In the corridor, Big Black and Little Black were trying to restore some calm to a setting that defied calm. Patients were distraught, crying, laughing, some giggled, some sobbed, some tried to behave as if nothing had taken place, others cowered in corners. A radio someplace was playing Top 40 hits from the 1960s, and Francis could hear the unmistakable strains of “In the Midnight Hour” followed by “Don’t Walk Away, Renee.” The music seemed to make the whole situation even more demented than it already was, as guitar and vocal harmonies mingled with chaos. Then he heard a pati
ent demanding in a loud voice that breakfast be served immediately, while another asked if they could go outside and pick flowers for a grave.

  It did not take long for Security to arrive, followed in rapid succession by Gulp-a-pill and Mister Evil. Both men hurried with that half run, half walk pace that made them seem slightly out of control. Mister Evil pushed a few patients out of his path, while Gulptilil simply sailed down the corridor oblivious to entreaties and pleas from the nervous crowd of residents.

  “Show me!” Gulptilil demanded of Big Black.

  There were three gray-shirted security personnel standing in the doorway waiting for someone to tell them what to do, blocking his sight. None of the quasicops had done anything except stare up at Cleo’s body since they arrived, and now they stepped aside to let Gulptilil and Evans enter the gloomy stairwell area.

  The hospital director stepped forward, and gasped. “My goodness!” he said, astonished. “Oh, my, but this is terrible.” He shook his head back and forth.

  Evans craned past him, also taking in the sight. His response, at least at first, was limited to “Damn!”

  The two administrators continued to examine the scene. Francis saw that they both absorbed the severed thumb, and the noose fastened to the stairway railing. But he had the curious thought that the two men saw something different from what he did. Not that they didn’t see Cleo hanging dead. But that they were reacting differently. It was a little like standing in front of a famous work of art in a museum, and having the person next to him reach some opposing assessment, emitting a laugh, instead of a sigh, or a groan in place of a smile.

  “What bad luck,” Gulptilil said quietly. Then he turned to Mister Evans. “Has there been any indication …,” he started, not truly needing to finish the question for the unit supervisor.

  Evans was already nodding his head. “I made a notation in the daily log yesterday that her sense of distress seemed to be increasing. There were other signs over the past week or so that she was decompensating. I sent you a memo last week about a number of patients who needed to be reassessed medically, and she was on it, right at the top. Perhaps I should have moved a little more aggressively, but she did not seem to be in such an immediate crisis that it was warranted. Clearly, that was in error.”

  Gulptilil nodded. “I recall the memo. Alas, sometimes even the best intentions …,” he said. He added, “Ah, well, it is difficult to anticipate these things, is it not?” He did not act like he expected an answer to this question. Hearing none, he shrugged. “You will take careful notes, will you not?”

  “Of course,” Evans said.

  Gulp-a-pill then turned to the three security guards. “All right, gentlemen. Mister Moses will show you how to get Cleo down. Bring a body bag and a gurney Let’s get her over to the morgue promptly …”

  “Wait just a second!”

  The objection came from behind all of them, and they turned to the sound of the voice. It was Lucy Jones, standing a few feet back, and staring past them all toward Cleo’s body.

  “My goodness!” Gulptilil said, almost breathlessly. “Miss Jones? My lord, what have you done?”

  But the answer to this, Francis thought, was utterly obvious. Her long black hair was gone, replaced by a sheet of streaky blond dyed hair, cropped closely, almost haphazardly. He stared at her dizzily. It was a little, he thought, like seeing a work of art defaced.

  I pushed myself away from the words on the wall, scurrying back across the floor of the apartment a little like a frightened spider, trying to avoid a heavy boot. I came to a rest with my back against the opposite wall, and I stopped, taking the time first to light a cigarette, then pausing for a moment with my head up against my knees. I held the cigarette in my hand, letting the thin trail of smoke waft up toward my nostrils. I was listening for the Angel’s voice, waiting for the sensation of his breath against the small hairs on the back of my neck. If he wasn’t there, I knew he wasn’t far. There was no sign of Peter or anyone else, although, for an instant I wondered if Cleo might not visit me in that moment.

  All my ghosts were close by.

  For a moment I thought of myself like some medieval necromancer, standing over a cauldron of bats’ eyes and mandrake root, bubbling along, able to summon up whatever evil vision I needed.

  When I opened my eyes to the small world around me, I asked her, “Cleo? What happened? You didn’t have to die.” I shook my head back and forth, closed my eyes, but in the darkness, I heard her speak in the gruff, rollicking tones that I had grown accustomed to.

  “Oh, C-Bird, but I did. Goddamn bastards. I had to die. The sons of bitches killed me for sure. I knew they would, right from the first.”

  I looked around to see her, but at first she was only a sound. Then slowly, like a sailboat emerging from the fog, Cleo took shape in front of me. She leaned up against the wall of writing, and lit her own smoke. She wore a frilly pastel house-dress and the same pink flip-flops I remembered from her death. In one hand she waved her cigarette, in the other, as I should have expected, a Ping-Pong paddle. Her eyes were lit with a kind of maniacal pleasure, as if she had been set free from something difficult and troubling.

  “Who killed you, Cleo?”

  “The bastards.”

  “Who, in particular, Cleo?”

  “But C-Bird, you know. You knew from the moment you got to the stairwell where I was waiting. You could see, couldn’t you?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “It was so confusing. I couldn’t be sure.”

  “But that was it, C-Bird. That was it. It was all a contradiction, and in that, you could see the truth, couldn’t you?”

  I wanted to say yes, but I still wasn’t certain. I was young back then, and unsure, and it was the same today.

  “He was there, wasn’t he?”

  “Of course. He was always there. Or maybe he wasn’t there. It’s all in how you looked at it, C-Bird. But you saw, didn’t you.”

  I was still undecided.

  “What happened, Cleo? What really happened?”

  “Why C-Bird, I died. You know that.”

  “Yes, but how?”

  “It should have been with an asp held to my breast.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “No, alas, true enough. It wasn’t. But still in my own way, it was close enough. I even got to say the words, C-Bird. ‘I am dying, Egypt. Dying …’ which was satisfying.”

  “Who was there to hear them?”

  “You know.”

  I tried a different tack. “Did you fight, Cleo?”

  “I always fought, C-Bird. My whole sorry goddamn life was a fight.”

  “But did you fight the Angel, Cleo?”

  She grinned and waved the Ping-Pong paddle in the air, rearranging the smoke from her cigarette. “Of course I did, C-Bird. You knew me. I wasn’t going down easy.”

  “He killed you?”

  “No. Not exactly. But sort of, as well. It was like everything in the hospital, C-Bird. The truth was crazy and complicated and as mad as we all were.”

  “I thought so,” I answered.

  She laughed a little. “I knew you could see it. Tell them now, like you tried to tell them back then. It would have been easier if they’d listened to you. But then, who ever wants to listen to the crazy people?”

  This observation made us both smile, for it was the closest thing to the truth that either of us could muster in that moment.

  I took a deep breath. I could feel a great welling loss, like a vacuum within me.

  “I miss you, Cleo.”

  “I miss you, too, C-Bird. I miss living. How about a game of Ping-Pong? I’ll even spot you a couple of points.”

  She smiled before she faded away.

  I sighed, and turned back to the wall. A shadow seemed to have slithered over it, and the next sound I heard was the voice I wanted to forget.

  “Little C-Bird wants answers before he dies, doesn’t he?”

  Each word was confusing, a little like a p
ounding headache, as if there were someone banging against the door of my imagination. I rocked back and wondered if there was someone actually trying to break in, and I cowered, hiding from the darkness that crept through the room. Within my heart I searched for brave words to respond with, but they were elusive. I could feel my hand quiver, and thought I was on the verge of some great pain, but from some recess I found a reply.

  “I have all the answers,” I said. “I always did.”

  But this was as harsh an understanding as any that had ever come to me unbidden. It frightened me almost as much as the sound of the Angel’s voice. I pressed back, and as I cowered, I heard the telephone ringing in the next room. The jangling only added to my nervousness. After a moment, it stopped, and I heard the answering machine that my sisters had purchased for me click on. “Mister Petrel? Are you there?” The voice seemed distant, but familiar. “It’s Mister Klein at the Wellness Center. You have not arrived for the appointment that you promised you would attend. Please pick up the telephone. Mister Petrel? Francis? Please contact this office as soon as you get this message, otherwise I will be forced to take some action …”

  I remained rooted in my spot.

  “They will come for you,” I heard the Angel say. “Can’t you see, C-Bird? You’re in a box and you can’t get out.”

  I closed my eyes, but it did no good. It was as if sounds increased in volume.

  “They will come for you, Francis, and this time they will want to take you away forever. They will think: No more little apartment. No more job counting fish for the wildlife survey. No more Francis walking the streets getting in the way of everyday life. No more burden for your sisters or your elderly parents, Francis, who never loved you all that much anyway, after they saw what you would become. No, they will want to shut Francis away for the rest of his days. Locked up, straitjacketed, drooling mess. That’s what you will become, Francis. Surely you can see that …”