Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  “I’m tired now. Can I go back to my room?”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  After two weeks in the Sanctuary, exasperation had worn Cornelia out more than the drugs or the mind-crushing tedium of her daily routine.

  Eat. Therapy. Eat. Watch All My Children. Meds. Eat.

  They served all the patients on pink plastic plates in the small dining room of her wing, Astor II. The food was too high in caloric value for a sedentary lifestyle. Her daily menu card boasted of “quenelles” and “boeuf nouvel,” but proved to be a pretentious guise for institutional food heavy on macaroni and cheese, Swiss steaks, and tapioca dolled up in fancy molds. She had already developed a minor potbelly.

  She couldn’t drag herself, much as she wanted to, from the mirror. Her face looked wan, and slightly greasy from the institutional food. Tonight, when the meds had ground down and she felt more able to lift her weighty arms, she would do some jumping jacks. Then she’d have the small satisfaction of a task completed.

  At least she had not completely lost her work ethic.

  Corny tried to tie the sash around her bathrobe but couldn’t find it. Giving up, she decided to shuffle out with her robe open, revealing her black bikini underwear, her breasts, her small belly. Or maybe she should just go back to sleep. It was what they all wanted.

  No. A line must be drawn.

  Struggling, Cornelia tied the robe, slowly and carefully, in a running bowline knot recalled from her sailing lessons so long ago, and walked to the dayroom to sit with other patients. She had a friend, of sorts, nicknamed Creamcheese for the white pallor of her skin.

  The women of Astor II, diverse in age and behavioral quirks, shared little in common other than the imminent risk of falling completely off the planet.

  Her own thoughts, while infinitely slower than usual, still managed to pierce the veil of her medication. She thought about Chester and Tucker occasionally.

  But she thought about Kevin Doyle at least once every ten minutes.

  He wanted to shout “Corny” through every doorway he passed.

  Instead he joined the patients chanting about a “yellow brick road” as they marched through the tunnels, inspired by the bright yellow bathroom tiles that covered the walls.

  Located beneath the Sanctuary, protected from the elements, the tunnel system served as the asylum’s highways and byways. Staff could move around the hospital easily, and high-security patients could be transported through the passageways using locked metal doors at each crossing.

  Kevin bounced along with two other patients from his new wing, Vanderbilt II. He had already been moved up from Vanderbilt I, considered a step up on the hierarchy of sanity. Two beefy male aides escorted his group.

  Kevin watched his wing mate Richard, who had zipped his massive layers of baby fat into a tight-fitting, all-cotton jogging suit. Kevin resisted the staff’s attempted makeover for him using country-club style outfits from the Sanctuary Boutique, which they added onto his Platinum Health Plan. They had bought him a green blazer, pleated flannel slacks, some button-down oxford shirts, and several ties with the S logo. Instead, Kevin dressed in his old jeans with the patched knees, sweatshirts, and turtlenecks.

  He watched Richard march ahead, oblivious to the others, tossing a Maalox bottle high in the air almost to the yellow ceiling, just far enough ahead that he could catch the plastic bottle easily without modifying his speed or gait. He looked into middle space, his big round face placid. Today, as usual, he recited airframe specifications in a monotone.

  “Messerschmitt 262, first jet fighter…”

  “Richard, what did you do on the outside?” Kevin whispered to him.

  “Aeronautical engineer,” Richard snapped in a higher-pitched voice, annoyed to break his recitation.

  “You do any commercial planes?” In case his plans ever called for air travel.

  Richard smiled enigmatically. “I was a bad boy,” he cackled.

  The aides steered Richard and Kevin into the group therapy room. His pulse quickening, Kevin scanned the group of eight or ten people making a fuss settling into a circle of chairs.

  The group consisted of ten men and women in various stages of disturbance, many dressed in a severely wardrobe-challenged style. The men wore what looked like expensive clothing, no grunge or real shab-biness, but mixed and matched badly. One older patient, with a pink face and small nose like a rabbit’s, wore only one sock but a perfectly knotted tie under his green Sanctuary blazer. The women, most of them young, favored mismatched sports clothes, tops, and slacks. Neither the men nor the women, no matter how loony, wore anything other than textured wools and cottons—not an ounce of polyester.

  He studied the patients carefully. They displayed various facial tics and other traits which Kevin knew to be a sign of either their problems or a reaction to the drugs used to manage their problem.

  But none of the patients was Cornelia.

  Kevin’s therapist, Dr. Lester, was in charge of group therapy. She already sat in the center chair.

  “Good morning, Richard,” Dr. Lester spoke soothingly. “Hello, Kevin.”

  Some of the group muttered greetings, tense and wary.

  The door opened again and Cornelia entered with an aide.

  She stood with her perfect legs in tight blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. Her blond thatch fell over her forehead artlessly, and her skin looked slightly pasty and transparent from being kept indoors. Kevin thought that tiny flaw made her even more beautiful. Her eyes seemed washed out, the sparkling points of violet submerged in the gray as she tried to smile.

  Then she saw him and reared back. She looked so startled, he worried that she would fall over backward. Her gray dull eyes blinked. When they opened, the little violet stars made a round bouquet for him.

  “Hi, Cornelia,” Dr. Lester greeted her.

  She walked very slowly to a chair directly across from Kevin and sat carefully, not taking her eyes off him.

  “This is Kevin. He prefers to be called Sebastian,” Dr. Lester watched them. “Cornelia, do you know Sebastian?”

  “Not personally,” she replied slowly, as if considering the possibility for the first time. “He looks like a painting I’ve seen.”

  Kevin sat in the dayroom of Vanderbilt II, his medium-security wing.

  It was decorated in the hospital’s plush green and pink motif, like country clubs he’d seen in movies. The only way he could identify it as a hospital ward was by the glass nurses’ station. It jutted out into the room like a giant tollbooth with a young nursing staff in white uniforms bustling around inside.

  Tonight, a “Happy New Year” sign had been hung carelessly across the nurses’ station. Patients were rounded up from their private rooms and corralled into the dayroom to socialize. Most looked as though they’d rather be sleeping off their meds. They stared blankly at their party hats, tried to open their baby-proofed party poppers.

  Kevin tried to wrap his mind around the New Year spirit with the rest of his only moderately disturbed wing mates. He declined a funny hat out of a sense of dignity, but accepted a plastic glass of bubbling nonalcoholic champagne.

  “Hail,” he toasted the other patients and the staff so new or despised by their supervisors that they drew shift duty on New Year’s Eve. Then they all sang a ragged chorus of “Auld Lange Syne.”

  When the staff retreated to hold a glum party of their own inside their glass-wrapped room, one of the student nurses named Ms. Bab-cock approached him. Kevin liked Ms. Babcock. She had regular, pretty Irish features like Marne, and wore dark hair pulled in a tight bun under her cap.

  “Happy New Year, Sebastian,” she said to Kevin. “You have a visitor.”

  Kevin followed Ms. Babcock to the visitors room. His visitor hadn’t arrived yet. The windowless room was empty except for the floral print couch facing two chairs and a still-life print of flowers on the wall. Flowers were supposed to be soothing, he had heard, but they overdid them and the result was more
like jungle rot.

  He would have to stay in character. He quickly stripped to his underwear, so he looked more like Saint Sebastian, naked except for his white loincloth. He stood bravely and looked toward the ceiling like a martyr searching for a sign.

  He heard a harsh laugh as the door closed.

  “Cute,” Marne told him. “But it’s only me.”

  Kevin sat down in a plump chair next to his sister.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “Couldn’t come. He had a double shift. He said to tell you, he’s proud to have a saint in the family.”

  “I left him laughing his ass off, Marne. It’s like he finally got one over on Eddie.”

  She shrugged. “He’s not upset at you or anything. But he won’t say the psychiatrists are wrong either. He thinks you’re crazy for doing this.”

  “You think maybe Dad has too much faith in authority figures?”

  “Somebody’s got to.”

  “What about Helen?”

  Marne said. “She doesn’t ask, I don’t tell. So do you see Cornelia tonight?”

  “She’s on her wing. I start socials next weekend.”

  “Wing? Socials?” Marne rolled her eyes. “So now what?”

  “Now I have to spend some time with her, just the two of us. No relatives, lawyers, boyfriend.” He still couldn’t handle the word “fiancé.” “She’s not really crazy. It’s just that nobody tries to understand her.”

  Marne snorted, sat back, and gave him her buzz-saw look. “I dunno. They’ve got a whole staff here for therapy.”

  “She doesn’t need therapy,” Kevin said. “She’s aware. She’s kind.”

  “She talks to electrical poles.”

  “No, Marne. She just puts her heart into things.”

  She stared at the ceiling, with a very Sebastian-like why-me look. “She could blow you off anytime, Kevin, like ‘excuse me, time for my pablum, I’ll have my doctor call your doctor.’”

  “That could happen, but—”

  “But what?” Marne turned up her hands, genuinely baffled.

  Kevin let his breath out. “But I feel like I’ve been praying for her all my life and didn’t even know it.”

  He expected a snicker. Instead, Marne looked startled, then her eyes moistened. She took out a tissue.

  “Kevin, that’s the dumbest thing you ever said.”

  “I just need time,” he told her. “At work, they don’t know I’m in here yet, right?”

  “All they know is you’re on sick leave for two weeks,” she said. “They won’t find out until the union gets the hospital bills. Make it count, Kevin.”

  “Okay.”

  She got up to leave. “And put your pants on. Martyrs don’t wear jockey shorts.”

  “I hear you.”

  For his first escorted tour of the grounds, Kevin wore a hospital-issue down coat, puffy and white like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

  He drew in the air, not minding the cold sting on his face. Against the roiling gray soup of winter sky, the Big Circle shone with ice. In the distance, a thin black clump of reedy, denuded trees threw long shadows over the snow like a film noir setting. Beyond the trees, he saw the electrified fence, a jarring note in the wintry postcard. And, behind the fence, he saw the road that led to the parkway he’d driven up with Majik.

  He looked around for her and, as always, became fascinated with the other patients. What is it about rich people’s faces, he wondered, that made them look so undamaged no matter what happened, the confidence that they’d always be looked after somehow.

  “Come here often?” She appeared suddenly.

  A wine-colored scarf covered her to the chin, and her hands were stuck in the pockets of a simple black coat. Her cheeks were flushed, her blond hair driven back by the wind over her small, perfect ears, the tip of her nose a little red from the cold. He felt both cleansed and agitated when he saw her, like going through a washing machine and coming out happier.

  He swallowed. “You look…”

  “Fat?”

  “Oh, no. Definitely in the top one percent of mental patients.”

  No physical contact, he had to remind himself.

  They walked, side by side, as the patient body shuffled forward around the Big Circle like a giant, quivering Jell-O mold, residents of three or four moderate-security wings clumping together.

  A female aide walked ahead to pace them briskly, an impatient trail boss. While the wind lashed his face, Kevin sunned himself in Cornelia’s company.

  “I got your note,” she whispered, pulling out the pink napkin he had sent her, a scrawled note written with a stolen nurse’s pen. “A girl on my wing sneaked it to me. How did you ever send it?”

  “I gave it to a guy. He gave it to somebody else. An underground.”

  She beamed, clutching the crumpled napkin as though it were the most precious gift anyone had ever given her. “Did you mean what you said?”

  “About you being a dance of light? No, that was for some other patient.”

  She chuckled merrily, then leaned in and whispered, “Before you came, I was about to go AWOL. See that electrical fence?”

  Kevin looked in the direction she pointed, to the malevolent wires strung close together eight feet high in the distance behind the trees. The red and white “Danger. High Voltage” signs posted every few feet along the wires could be read from the Big Circle.

  “Please tell me you wouldn’t even touch it. That’s really dangerous.

  “Not for an Electric Girl.” She gave him a wicked grin. “Tesla used to let a million volts of current flow over his suit and hair until the electricity created a blue halo. As long as he kept the frequencies high, it couldn’t hurt him. That fence is high frequency, too. It wouldn’t hurt you too badly. But you’re here now and I don’t want to go anywhere. Kevin, how did you get in here?”

  “I think the medical term is Code Green. I was wondering, if you’re not busy tonight, maybe we could have a date.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  The Sanctuary’s Retreat Club could be a hundred other executive dining rooms, Tucker thought, except that everybody jumped up to answer pagers like dogs on a leash.

  Medical degrees hardly intimidated him. He had never wanted to be a doctor, a glorified mechanic wrestling with body parts. A doctor’s only real power was the life-or-death thing, which you could only use on one person at a time.

  It was their third weekly visit, and Cornelia had greeted Chester with her usual sad disgust, and Tucker with sullen apathy. It was time, Tucker decided, for dinner with the Sanctuary’s chief administrator, Dr. Burns, and Cornelia’s therapist, Dr. Loblitz.

  They sat at a corner table. Through a window, he looked at the bleak Westchester scrub outside. Dr. Burns was a celebrity psychiatrist in his late fifties with a full head of gray hair and the lion’s face a Supreme Court justice should have. Dr. Burns obviously didn’t know much about Cornelia’s case, but made plenty of soothing noises to Chester. Tucker suspected that visions of a new “Lord I” and even a “Lord II” wing danced in Dr. Burns’s head, from his smart little nods whenever Chester spoke.

  He regarded Cornelia’s therapist, Dr. Loblitz. He knew the type. An intense young techno with curly black hair, Loblitz fought to steer the conversation to nuts and bolts without stabbing his boss with his fork. Loblitz was doing all the work. And Tucker knew that talking to Chester might be the hardest work the shrink had ever done. In this little world, Tucker sniffed out, Dr. Loblitz wore the unmistakable mantle of rising star. Burns had all the patience in the world with Corny’s psychiatric meter ticking at $3,500 a day. But Tucker sensed impatience in Dr. Loblitz, which created an opportunity. Tucker suspected that the young doctor didn’t believe in coddling family members. Loblitz had his own agenda.

  “You need to be aware,” Dr. Loblitz skated on the brink of lecturing Chester, “of the time-consuming nature of talking therapies.”

  Chester dug in. “I just have the feeling that
if I listen to Cornelia, try to reach her…”

  “That’s admirable,” Dr. Burns cooed. “I wish all family members had the same desire.”

  Loblitz pressed on. “Dr. Bushberg talked to Cornelia for how long?”

  “A year,” Chester replied.

  “I’ve talked to her now for several weeks, and I can tell you that her delusional system is intact. She’s angry, she’s confrontational, and she’s not going to leave this hospital until we switch to a more aggressive treatment.” Loblitz held his course, Tucker was pleased to see.

  Chester looked at Tucker, pleading for help. Tucker held Dr. Loblitz’s eye.

  “No,” Chester insisted. “Just try to reason with her.”

  “Well, that’s a conservative strategy, sir.” You rich idiot.

  Chester said. “She’s very precious to me.”

  “And to us.” Dr. Burns gave Chester’s arm a manly squeeze.

  Chester stood up, raising the two doctors like marionettes. While Chester and Dr. Burns shook hands, Tucker smiled and motioned privately to Dr. Loblitz, telling him to stay put.

  “Chester, give me a minute. I’ll be along.” He waited until Chester and Burns left the Retreat Club.

  “Why don’t you call me Tucker,” he smiled at Dr. Loblitz. “And you’re….”

  “Ken.” Loblitz appeared flattered at this intimacy with Tucker, a mogul no older than he was, whom he might have read about in the Wall Street Journal.

  “Well, Ken, that was definitely the right way to handle Chester Lord. We both care deeply about Cornelia’s recovery.”

  Dr. Loblitz shrugged. “Cornelia presents nonspecific symptoms. But you can waste a lot of time trying to diagnose people.”

  “I understand your specialty is shock treatments,” Tucker said.

  Dr. Loblitz acted surprised, warming to Tucker’s interest in him. “Why, yes. A lot of us who trained more recently like shock. We call it ECT, electroconvulsive therapy. It’s faster and cleaner than talking therapy or even psychotropic drugs. There’s some memory loss, but memories are what disturb the patients. I just give them a clean slate.”