Mania

by Craig Larsen

  chapter 33

  “Where am I?”

  A man dressed in a white polyester uniform was holding a small Dixie cup toward him. By now Nick understood that the cup would contain three tablets. A large one that was difficult to swallow. A small one that tasted acridly bitter. And then one of the medicines Barnes had given him, a tiny daisy-yellow pill that left a strong aftertaste in his mouth. At nighttime, before he went to sleep, the cup would include a fourth tablet as well, one of the orange tranquillizers from the brown bottle with the white cap. Nick had begun craving these pills. He would wait for them in the windowless room as nighttime approached, trying to measure the hours, a growing hunger yawning inside him that could only be satisfied with the grains of the miniscule orange pill.

  Nick took the Dixie cup from the man and obediently dropped the pills into his mouth, then took another cup from him and swallowed them down with the rancid-tasting water it contained. He had learned a couple of days before that it was pointless to refuse the medication. The straitjacket had come back into the room, and, unable to resist, Nick had been tied back down to the metal bed. A man with strong hands that smelled like iron had squeezed his nose while another man had force-fed him the pills like a dog. After that, he had spent twenty-four hours in restraints. It was better to take the pills voluntarily and remain free in the room. The door was locked from the outside. There was no TV, and they had left him nothing to read. There wasn’t anything at all to do. Without a window, he couldn’t even look outside. The pills they were giving him kept him asleep most of the day anyway, but time hardly passed when the straitjacket was on.

  The orderly froze for a split second when Nick spoke, then looked at Nick with eyebrows raised. He was a short, wiry Hispanic man. These were the first words Nick had uttered since his incarceration, and it stunned the man to hear Nick’s voice.

  “This is Western State,” he said as he took the cup back from him, answering Nick’s question. He crumpled the cup in one of his silicone-clad hands. “You’re inside.”

  “The asylum?”

  “It’s a psychiatric hospital, man,” the orderly said.

  Nick became aware of the pills he had just swallowed breaking down in his stomach. He could feel microscopic particles of the medicine beginning to circulate through his system, dulling his senses. “How long have I been here?”

  “Five days.”

  “I want to see a lawyer,” Nick heard himself say.

  “I don’t know nothing about that, man.”

  “How long are they going to keep me here?”

  “From what I understand, they can only keep you here fifteen days,” the orderly said. “For a psychiatric evaluation, to make sure you can stand trial.”

  “Stand trial for what?”

  The orderly was straightening his bed. He shook his head, deciding not to answer. “You got questions, ask the doctor.”

  “The doctor?”

  “Dr. Barnes, man.” The orderly glanced at his watch. “He told me to give you your medicine now so he can come see you in an hour.”

  “Barnes is here?” Nick felt a wave of relief course through his body. “Dr. Barnes is going to see me?”

  “Yeah, man. Dr. Barnes is here. Dr. Barnes runs this place.”

  “He’ll be here in an hour?” Nick’s question was interrupted by the sound of happy laughter. It took seeing the startled expression on the orderly’s face for Nick to realize that it belonged to him.

  “Lie back down,” the orderly said. “Some of this shit can make you dizzy, man. You better be lying down when it hits your blood.”

  Nick acquiesced. “Dr. Barnes will be here in one hour,” he said, settling back onto his uncomfortable bed, repeating the words like a mantra. “Dr. Barnes will be here in one hour.”

  “That’s right, man. Take it easy. I’ll see you again at three.”

  Nick closed his eyes. “Dr. Barnes will be here in one hour,” he said one last time as the orderly shut and locked the huge steel door behind him.

  Nick was dreaming about the flight to San Juan Island. The sky was crisply blue, without a cloud in sight, and the state of Washington spread out beneath them like a gigantic diorama. The water of the Sound was a steely sapphire plane, and the mountains were covered with the growth of the Pacific Northwest rain forest. Sara turned to him and, burying her hands between his thighs, gave him a kiss. Nick’s heart burst with happiness as the aircraft soared over the undulating landscape as effortlessly and gracefully as a giant eagle. Then, interrupting the gentle solace of his vision, out of nowhere Jason Hamlin’s hand shoved Nick aggressively backward. You’re one hell of a lucky son of a bitch to get a taste of lips as sweet as that.

  Barnes had unlocked the door and stepped into the room. Nick’s eyes were moving rapidly from side to side beneath his eyelids. The doctor shook him, yanking him from his sleep.

  The orderly was looking at Nick over the doctor’s shoulder. “He’s been sleeping eighteen or nineteen hours a day,” he said. “Sometimes I have to wake him up with a cold towel on his face to feed him the pills. I could get you a wet towel if you want.”

  “No, thanks,” Barnes said. “His eyes are opening. He’s coming out of it now.” Nick became aware of the doctor’s bright blue eyes—as bright, he thought, as the sky had been the day of that flight. The memory brought him back into his dream. “Nick? Can you see me? Do you recognize me?”

  A smile spread across Nick’s face.

  “That’s good,” the doctor said. He turned to the orderly. “I’m going to be taking him outside for a little walk. I think he needs some air.”

  “That’s up to you, Doc.”

  “We’ll need a wheelchair. One of the chairs fixed with restraints.”

  “Sure, Doc.”

  Barnes turned back toward Nick. “Can you speak, Nick?”

  Nick nodded.

  “That’s good. That’s really good. I’d like to have a little talk with you.”

  Once again Nick’s face lit with a weak smile. He was grateful for the doctor’s presence, grateful for a friendly face. “I just have to close my eyes for a minute,” he said. He was aware of the medicine working its way through the membrane of his brain. The room went dark. He tried to cling to the thought that Barnes was here at last, standing with him in his room, talking to him. But the pull of the medicine was too strong, and he was abruptly gone.

  Nick awoke in weak sunshine. A few rays of light were filtering through the branches of a giant maple tree in the hospital gardens. Nick squinted at the fiery ball of flames peeking at him from between the tree’s branches, then became aware of the doctor’s face hovering above him, looking down at him curiously. Nick tried to raise one of his hands, to shield his eyes from the glare, but he couldn’t move his arms. He tried harder to lift them, then began to struggle, trying to pull his legs free as well. “You can’t move,” the doctor said to him. “You’re strapped in, Nick. It’s pointless to try.”

  Nick stopped moving. He looked down at his arms, imprisoned by wide black Velcro straps against the steel rails of the wheelchair. His body and legs were strapped into the chair as well, too tightly. Nick looked up at the doctor, a weak appeal shadowing his eyes, but Barnes shook his head.

  Gradually, Nick took in the surprising beauty of the hospital gardens. It felt good to be outside in the sun. The doctor had wheeled him to the far side of the property, to a remote area behind a chain-link fence that required a security clearance for entry. The lawn was carefully tended here, and the rolling landscape was artfully planted with shrubs and trees. “How long?” Nick heard himself say.

  “Good, Nick. It’s nice to hear your voice.”

  “How long have I been inside?” he asked the doctor, forgetting that the orderly had already told him.

  “Five days, Nick.”

  Nick heard himself laugh. “It feels much longer,” he said. “I almost don’t remember—” Being anywhere else, he thought, finishing the sentence in his mind.


  “Luis tells me that you started speaking again today.”

  Nick nodded his head and tried his best to smile at the doctor. He congratulated himself for figuring out that the orderly’s name must have been Luis. “How is she, Doctor?” he managed to ask.

  The doctor ignored his question. “I was surprised to hear it.”

  Nick fought to remember what the doctor was talking about.

  “And I’m surprised to find you so coherent now.”

  “How is Sara, Dr. Barnes?” Nick repeated, unable to follow what the doctor was telling him.

  “I’ve got you on some pretty heavy meds, Nick. I’m surprised to find you awake at all.”

  Nick shook his head. “I’m starting to remember things.”

  “I know you are,” Barnes said.

  “There was someone else there,” Nick said. “The night Sam was killed.”

  “Who, Nick?”

  “And in Hamlin’s room.” Nick’s hand was on the doorknob. He was twisting the knob, pushing the door open, entering Hamlin’s large, elegantly furnished room. The curtains were drawn back from the windows, and Nick looked down at the kitchen knife in his hands, shimmering in the moonlight. Next to him, a dark figure seemed to emerge from the shadows, too blurry to see. There was someone there in the room with him. Someone standing next to him.

  The doctor smiled. “Your schizophrenia is progressing pretty aggressively, Nick. Much more dramatically than I ever would have predicted.”

  Nick looked up at the doctor, trying to make sense of what he was saying.

  “You only think there was someone else there.”

  “No, Dr. Barnes.”

  “Yes, Nick. You know who that other person was?”

  Nick’s blood suddenly turned cold. He knew what the doctor’s next words were going to be.

  “It was you, Nick. You. You watched yourself kill Sam. You watched yourself kill Hamlin, too.”

  The image of Sam’s body lying on the asphalt burst back into Nick’s mind like a slow-motion explosion. His hand was on the handle of the knife, and the blade was sinking into his brother’s chest. Just like the doctor said, he was watching himself murder his own brother. “I killed Sam,” Nick said, shaking his head from side to side, trying to bring the doctor back into focus in front of him. “I killed him, Dr. Barnes. I killed him.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said quietly. “You did.” Hitching his trousers up on his thighs, he squatted down in front of the wheelchair so that he could look Nick in the eye. He rested his hands on the wheelchair’s armrests, just in front of Nick’s fingers, balancing himself. “The thing is, Nick, I wouldn’t blame myself too much if I were you. You killed Sam, yes. But it wasn’t really your fault. Not with all the Zarconia he was feeding you. It’s kind of ironic, really. Sam pretty much brought the tragedy onto himself.”

  Tears sprang into Nick’s eyes, blurring his vision. He wasn’t able to follow what the doctor had said. He understood, though, that Sam had been poisoning him somehow, with the drug that Matrix Zarcon had been developing.

  “Your brother was doing genetic research to create a drug to treat advanced forms of schizophrenia,” Barnes explained. “He needed subjects to test the drug on. The FDA would never allow the kind of testing a company like Matrix Zarcon needs to perform. So where else would a man like your brother turn?”

  Nick didn’t want to hear more.

  “He turned to me, Nick. I’m sitting on hundreds of cases of schizophrenia in the free clinic, manifested in people without families—people without a past or a future, people without friends.”

  Revolted, Nick pulled hard on his restraints. He torqued his arms from one side to the next, twisting them against the tight bands. The Velcro on his right arm crackled a little as it began to give. Vigorously he wriggled, struggling to get free.

  “There’s a lot of money in a new drug, Nick. More millions than you can conceive of. Your brother knew, though. And he knew that I would understand, too.”

  Nick felt the Velcro begin to loosen, and, laboring to keep his face from reflecting the effort, he twisted his wrist even harder, until it felt as if his bones would snap.

  “The drug worked wonders at first. Sam and I thought we were sitting on a gold mine, and we convinced Jason Hamlin of it, too. The problem was, Nick, that a few of our test subjects began developing a proclivity for violence. You met a couple of our failures. Henry Dean in New York. James Warren, now incarcerated in Wisconsin.”

  You’re the one who told me to do it. Aren’t you, Doc? James Warren, Nick realized, had mistaken him for Sam. Just like Daniel Scott, too, had confused him for one of the doctors treating the homeless.

  “We needed a control subject to test the drug on. You know what a control subject is, don’t you, Nick?” The doctor looked at Nick expectantly, as if he thought Nick would answer. “A control is someone without schizophrenia. A subject whose reaction to the drug we could test and analyze apart from any mental illness. It was Sam’s idea to test the drug on you, Nick. Not mine.”

  “No.” Nick’s teeth were gritted together. The Velcro made a loud scraping noise as he levered his forearm. All he had to do was get one hand free, and he would be able to tear the other restraints off as well. “No. You’re lying.”

  The doctor was undisturbed by the rip of the Velcro. “You must be able to see the irony, Nick. Not only did the drug give you—a relatively normal subject—exacerbated schizophrenic symptoms, it brought out a very definite violent tendency in you, too. I don’t know the history between your brother and you, but as a psychiatrist I’d say there wasn’t too much love lost on either side, eh, Nick? Jackson Ferry—another one of our subjects—attacked Sam. It seems he didn’t like being a human guinea pig. It seems he didn’t like your brother any more than you did, Nick. He attacked Sam and you. You defended yourself. But then when Ferry left, you finished the job. You killed your brother yourself.”

  At last, with an abrupt rip, the Velcro gave under the force of his effort. Nick’s arm flew up from the chair’s rail. His fingers attached themselves to the doctor’s throat. They dug into the doctor’s flesh, rending his windpipe, ripping his arteries. But the doctor continued smiling. He didn’t even move to react.

  Nick looked down at his hands, realizing with a shock that he was still strapped to the chair. He hadn’t busted through the Velcro at all. He began to cry, whimpering, tossing his head from side to side.

  “I understand exactly how you feel, Nick.”

  “Please,” Nick shouted. Please!

  “You hate me so much right now you would kill me, eh? You’d strangle me to death if you could, wouldn’t you? Stabbing is more your thing, though, I suppose.” The doctor chuckled, then straightened his legs and stood back up. At the same time he reached a hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a syringe and a needle wrapped in clear plastic. The needle’s wrapping fluttered like a butterfly, hanging in the air for a moment before dropping to the ground. The doctor attached the needle to the plunger, then reached into his other pocket and withdrew a small vial of clear liquid. “You have so much methamphetamine in your system right now, Nick,” he said, puncturing the top of the vial with the needle and drawing some of its clear fluid into the syringe, “that a small dose of an MAOI should be enough to give you a good old-fashioned heart attack.” Barnes looked down at Nick, his mouth stretched into a cruel smile.

  As the doctor turned his attention back to the syringe, Nick caught sight of something else behind him: a man approaching him.

  Nick had no idea how the man had gotten there. He had no idea whether he was real or another hallucination. He simply appeared behind Barnes. Nick looked over the doctor’s shoulder, trying to make sense of the man’s face. His features were blurred and jumbled, and Nick had only the faintest idea who the man was.

  “And if you’re lucky enough to survive the heart attack, Nick,” Barnes was continuing, oblivious to the man behind him, “your brain will be so badly damaged that I doubt you’l
l be telling anyone anything about our little conversation. I doubt you’ll even remember it yourself.”

  The doctor finished filling the entire syringe with fluid, then, squirting a little from the needle, lowered the lethal injection toward Nick’s arm. His hand was steady. The needle glinted in the sunlight. Nick felt sweat break out on his forehead.

  The man behind the doctor was resolving himself into Jackson Ferry. Nick was certain as the needle punctured his bicep that he was only imagining him there. Ferry, dressed in white, his ravaged face twisted with repressed rage, was nothing more than another figment from the recesses of his mind, a memory from the night he had burst from the shadows when Sam was killed. As the apparition raised its fists into the air, however, Nick remembered that Ferry, too, had been incarcerated at Western State Hospital, pending his trial for Sam’s murder.

  When Ferry brought his fists down onto the back of the doctor’s head, the doctor crashed forward onto Nick, plunging the syringe deep into his arm. The needle tore through his muscle and dug itself into his bone, but the doctor never pushed the plunger into the tube of the injector. The fluid inside the syringe remained where it was.

  Nick watched helplessly as Ferry battered Barnes in the face with his fists. Blood splattered the white legs of his hospital-issue trousers as Ferry took his thumbs and dug them into the doctor’s bright blue eyes, gouging them from the sockets, plunging his thumbs deep into the doctor’s skull. When the eyeballs popped out from the doctor’s head, dangling loosely from his stretched optic nerves, Ferry began to laugh.

  And Nick at last began to scream.