The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  “Something’s wrong with him, Dominick,” Ma told me over the phone. “I think it’s more than just nerves.” He kept refusing to see the doctor, she said. But what could she do? She couldn’t pick him up and carry him there if he didn’t want to go. She just hoped he stayed out of Ray’s way. That was all she asked for. Prayed for. She didn’t want to bother me, but she was just sick about it. I should stay up at school and study hard, she said. She was so proud of me. I had enough to worry about. She could handle things at home. She was worried, but she could handle things.

  In February, the Selective Service Board notified my brother that he’d been reclassified from 2-S to 1-A. In early March, Thomas was ordered to New Haven for his preinduction physical. Ray drove him there. Later, Ray told Ma that Thomas was mostly quiet along the way, but fidgety. He’d had to go to the toilet three different times en route. He probably hadn’t said more than ten words. He’d acted “in the normal range,” though, according to Ray. Ray told Thomas that the service would be good for him. Reassured him that more guys stayed stateside or got stationed in Germany or the Philippines than ended up in Nam, anyway. Whatever happened, the military would change him for the better, Ray promised. Toughen him up. Give him something to feel proud about. He’d see.

  Thomas passed the vision, hearing, and coordination tests. His heart rate and blood pressure were fine. He was neither color-blind nor flat-footed.

  He failed the psychiatric examination.

  Ray drove him back home again.

  “I don’t know, Dominick,” Ma said. “If you could manage to get home over the weekend, that would be great. I know you’re busy. But he’s not eating, he won’t take a bath. I hear him traipsing around the house all night long. He won’t even talk to me anymore, honey. Remember how he used to talk to me all the time? ‘Hey, Ma, let’s have one of our talks,’ he always used to say. But now he hardly says anything, except all this mumbling under his breath. And when he does say something, it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What do you mean? What’s he saying?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He keeps talking about the Russians. He’s got Russians on the brain. And I’ve been finding blood in the bathroom sink. I ask him where the blood’s coming from, but he won’t tell me. Maybe he’ll talk to you, Dominick. Maybe he’ll tell you what’s bothering him. If you can make it home, that would be great. If you can’t, you can’t. I understand. But I’m worried sick about him. I used to think it was just his nerves, but I think it’s more than that. I don’t know what it is, honey. I’m afraid to talk to Ray.”

  The following Saturday, Thomas and I went to lunch at McDonald’s. It was my idea: get him to take a bath, get him out of the house. He neither welcomed the idea nor resisted it wholeheartedly. Ma said he was having one of his good days.

  It’s stupid—the things you remember: we both got those shamrock shake things McDonald’s has every year for St. Patrick’s Day. Cheeseburgers and fries and green milkshakes: that’s what we ate. It was crowded; we were seated near a kids’ birthday party. The kids kept looking over, staring at the two identical twins eating their identical orders. I remember asking Thomas if he’d seen in the newspaper that week about Dell and Ralph and that whole mess. The trial was over. Dell had been found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years at Somers Prison; his wife had gotten six months in Niantic. They’d let Ralph off with a suspended sentence. “Weird, isn’t it?” I said. “That all that stuff had been going on and here we were working with those guys? That that shit had been going on since you and me and Ralph were in grammar school?”

  “No comment,” Thomas said. He was doing something weird to his hamburger bun: picking off the crust bit by bit. Examining each little shred he pulled off.

  “What are you doing that for?” I asked him.

  He told me the Communists had targeted places like McDonald’s.

  “Yeah?” I said. “For what?”

  He said it was better for me if I didn’t know.

  “Hey, what’s going on with you, anyway?” I asked him. “Ma says you’re having a hard time. She’s worried about you, man. What’s bothering you?”

  He asked me if I knew that Dr. DiMarco, our dentist since boyhood, was a Communist agent and a member of the Manson family.

  “Dr. DiMarco?” I said. When we were kids, Dr. DiMarco had given us his back issues of Jack and Jill magazine, serenaded us as he worked on our teeth with songs like “Mairzy Doats.” It was so ridiculous, it was funny.

  Dr. DiMarco had drugged him and planted tiny radio receivers in his fillings, Thomas said. It was part of an elaborate plan by the Soviets to brainwash him. They sent messages to him twenty-four hours a day. They were trying to enlist his help in blowing up the submarine base in Groton. Thomas was key to their success, he said—the “linchpin” of their entire plan—but so far he’d been able to resist. “The body of Christ,” he said, placing a shred of his hamburger bun on his tongue. “Amen.”

  The birthday kids and their parents got up and left, taking the noise with them. In the sudden quiet, I looked around to see if anyone was listening. Watching him. Was he just yanking my chain—putting me on for some sick reason. “Dr. DiMarco?” I said. “Our Dr. DiMarco?”

  Now something had malfunctioned, Thomas said. The radio receivers were heat-sensitive and Thomas had made himself a cup of hot cocoa and scalded the inside of his mouth. Since then, he’d begun to pick up other messages as well. He’d tried to rip out the receivers but he’d only cut the inside of his mouth.

  “Yeah?” I said. “Let’s see.”

  He opened wide and pulled at both sides of his cheeks. There were raw, purple gashes on his gums and tongue, slashes in the roof of his mouth. That’s when I started to get really scared: when I saw how he’d mutilated himself like that—saw where that blood Ma had seen had come from.

  “What . . . what do these messages say?” I asked. I was afraid to hear his answer.

  He told me about a voice that had been encouraging him to hang our mother’s crucifixes upside down, another that kept ordering him to go to the maternity ward at the hospital and strangle the infants. He wasn’t sure whose the latter voice was, but it might have been someone from the Manson family. Maybe Charles Manson himself. He wasn’t sure. “You should hear the way he talks,” Thomas said. “It’s disgusting.” He took a sip of his shamrock shake. “Nothing I can repeat in public.”

  “Thomas?” I said.

  “Then there’s another voice—a religious voice. He keeps telling me to memorize the Bible. It makes sense, really. Once the Communists take over, watch out! The first thing they’re going to do is burn every single Bible in the United States. Don’t think they won’t, either. That’s why I’ve started memorizing it. Who else would do it if I didn’t?”

  I felt light-headed, robbed of oxygen. This wasn’t happening, I promised myself.

  “Is this . . . is this the same voice that’s telling you to do the other stuff?”

  “What other stuff?”

  “The bad stuff.”

  Thomas sighed like a parent whose patience was ebbing. “I just told you, Dominick. It’s a religious voice. He disapproves of everything the other voices say. They bicker all night long. It gives me headaches. Sometimes they scream at each other. You know who it might be? That priest that Ma used to listen to on television. On Saturday nights. Remember? He had white hair. I can see him, but I can’t remember his name.”

  “Bishop Sheen?” I said.

  “That’s it. Bishop Sheen. He’s our father, you know? He impregnated Ma through the television. It can be done; it’s more common than anyone thinks. ‘This is Bishop Fulton J. Sheen saying good night and God loves you.’ . . . I don’t know. It might be him, but it might not. You know that Dr. DiMarco and the Manson family have orgies, don’t you? In Dr. DiMarco’s office. One of them guards the door so that patients don’t walk in on them accidentally. They do anything they want to each other. Anything. It’s disgusting. That’s why I’m in
danger. Because I know about the link between Manson and the Communists. I shouldn’t even be out here in public like this. It’s a risk. I know too much—about the plan to blow up the sub base, for instance. They’re very, very dangerous people, Dominick—the Communists. If they ever suspected I’ve begun to memorize the Bible, I’d be shot in the head. There’d be orders to shoot on sight. Listen! ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; the earth was waste and void; darkness covered the abyss, and the spirit of God was stirring above the waters.’ I’m only up to chapter 2, verse 3. It’s a lifetime’s work. It’s risky business. How’s Dessa?”

  “Dessa?” I said. “Dessa’s . . . “

  “That’s why I had to break it off with her sister, you know. It was too dangerous. They might have hurt her to get at me. What was her name again?”

  “Her . . . ? Angie? You mean Angie?”

  He nodded. “Angie. It was just too dangerous, Dominick. Do you want the rest of my fries?”

  That conversation—and the psychiatric lockup that followed it later that night, Thomas’s first—occurred a full ten months after the panic attack that had made my brother trash our jointly-owned typewriter in May of the previous year. In the interim, the war had escalated, man had walked on the moon, and I’d tried as hard as possible not to see what was coming—what, inch by inch, had already arrived.

  On that first night of many nights when I drove my brother between the brick pillars and onto the grounds of the Three Rivers State Hospital, I went home to our shared bedroom on Hollyhock Avenue and dreamed a dream I have remembered ever since.

  In it, my brother, Ralph Drinkwater, and I are together, lost somewhere in the Vietnamese jungle, wading ankle-deep in muck. A sniper, perched in a tree, raises his rifle and aims. No one sees him but me; there’s no time to tell the others.

  I duck, pulling Ralph down with me. There’s a dull crack. A bullet rips through my brother’s brain. . . .

  25

  “Almond, peanut butter, or crunch?” Lisa Sheffer asked.

  “The usual,” I said. “One of each.” I fished into my wallet, slid three bucks across the desktop.

  Since my brother’s commitment at Hatch, I’d had five meetings with Sheffer and had bought fund-raiser candy bars for Thomas each time. It was part ritual and part thanks to Sheffer for watching out for him. Part connection between me and my brother during our state-enforced separation: a candy bar bridge, a link of chocolate, nuts, and sugar. It was the first thing Thomas asked about whenever she saw him, Sheffer said. Had she seen me? Had I bought him any candy bars?

  “Make sure your daughter remembers me when she graduates from Midget Football and becomes a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader,” I said.

  “Oh, please,” Sheffer groaned. “I’d have to shoot myself.”

  I asked her if her daughter looked like her.

  “Jesse? No, she looks like the sperm donor.” I guess I must have looked at her funny. “My ex-husband,” she said. “If I think of him as the sperm donor instead of the toad I was stupid enough to marry, it doesn’t make me seem like such a bad judge of character.” She fished a picture out of her desk and passed it over: a chubby brunette in a pink leotard.

  “She’s a cutie,” I said. “Seven, right?”

  “Seven going on thirteen. You know what she wants to do when she grows up? Wear eye shadow. That’s it—the sum total of her future goals: wear blue eye shadow with glitter in it. Gloria Steinem would be furious with me.”

  I had to smile. “I met Gloria Steinem once,” I said.

  “Yeah? Where?”

  “Down in New York. At a Ms. magazine party. Me and my wife.”

  “Really? Geez, Domenico, I wouldn’t have automatically assumed you were on the guest list. What was the occasion?”

  “My wife—my ex-wife—had started a day care program with her friend at Electric Boat. For working women, single moms. It was right after the Boat started—”

  The phone rang. “Excuse me,” Sheffer said.

  I told myself I had to stop doing that: talking about Dessa all the time, forgetting to put the ex in ex-wife. It was pathetic, really: the abandoned husband who couldn’t let go. You got a divorce decree and a live-in girlfriend, I reminded myself. Get over it.

  “Yeah, but Steve, what you’re not understanding is that I’m in the middle of a meeting,” Sheffer told whoever was on the other end of the phone. I picked up the picture of her kid again. It was kind of funny: this little girlie-looking girl belonging to Sheffer, with her crewcut and her wrist tattoos.

  “I’m not saying I forbid it, Steve. I’m not in a position to forbid anything. I’m just saying it’s not particularly convenient right now because I have someone in the office with me.” She held the phone in front of her and mouthed the word asshole. “Fine,” she said. “Fine. Send him up then.”

  She banged the phone back down and moaned. “God forbid that clinical needs should interfere with the maintenance schedule,” she said. “I’ve been asking for two weeks to have that light replaced.” Her head nodded toward the dead fluorescent tube above my head. “Suddenly, it’s now or never, meeting or no meeting.”

  I shook my head in sympathy. “So, anyway,” I said. “You told me over the phone you wanted to talk about the hearing? Wanted to ‘brainstorm’ or something?”

  She nodded, refocusing herself. “Okay, look. Here’s the deal. The Security Review Board meets on the thirty-first. Halloween. That gives us less than a week to build our case.”

  “Our case?” I said. “I thought you were undecided about whether he should or shouldn’t stay here.”

  She picked up a paper clip. Moved it end over end across her desk. “Well, Domenico, I had insomnia last night,” she said. “And somewhere around my twelfth or thirteenth game of solitaire, I joined your team.”

  I looked at her. Waited.

  “I really wasn’t sure before—I kept going back and forth—but I’ve come to the conclusion that another year here at Hatch would probably do him more harm than good.”

  “What happened?” I said. “Did something else happen?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing, really. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Which means what?”

  “He’s been taking a little teasing here and there—at meals, at rec time. Don’t worry. We’re monitoring it. The trouble with Thomas—with anyone who’s paranoid—is that he tends to perceive run-of-the-mill ribbing as proof of grand conspiracy. Someone says something, and he immediately sees it as part of some master plan. And, of course, when he gives someone a big reaction, it invites more of the same. But he and Dr. Patel and I are working it out. Developing some strategies he can use when someone starts teasing him.”

  “You know what sucks?” I said. “This security clearance bullshit. The way I can’t even see him.” I picked a candy bar up off her desk and waved it. “The way I gotta communicate with these things.”

  She assured me my security clearance would be coming soon. That the teasing was nothing out of the ordinary. “He’s safe,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah. Safe with all the psycho-killers and pyromaniacs and God knows what else. Not to mention the goons in uniform. If he’s so safe, what made you decide he needs to get out of here?”

  She sighed. “Well, ironically enough, the security. The inspections, the surveillance cameras, room checks—all the routines and precautions that keep it safe. The bottom line is: this is a very threatening environment for a paranoid schizophrenic. People are always watching you. I just think he could be better served, long term, at a facility where security is less of an issue.”

  “But nothing else happened? He didn’t freak out in the dining room again or anything?”

  “He’s better, Dominick. Really. His wound has healed nicely. The psycholeptics are starting to kick in. And he knows what to expect now—what the day-to-day routine is. But I’ll be honest with you. He’s miserable here—scared, withdrawn. It’s sad. I just feel that a maximum-secu
rity forensic hospital is an inappropriate placement for him.”

  “Which is what I’ve been trying to tell everybody right along!”

  She nodded. Smiled. “So, okay, you’re ahead of the rest of us. Go to the head of the class. Anyway, I’m going to help you fight for his release.”

  Sheffer took out a legal pad and we began to plan our arguments for the Review Board: the things she’d say, the things I’d say. It was crucial that I be there to advocate for him, she said. It would show the board that Thomas had family support—a safety net to fall back on. She wanted to know if Ray was planning to attend. Given Ray and Thomas’s past history, I said, I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or not. Sheffer suggested that Ray be there—sit there—but not say anything. “You’ll be the spokesperson; he can be the ‘extra.’ Okay?”

  “Okay with me,” I said. “I’m not sure if it’ll be okay with Ray.”

  “Do you want to ask him about it? Or should I?”

  I looked away. “You,” I said.

  Together, Sheffer and I came up with a list of potential advocates for Thomas’s release: former docs, staff members at Settle, people from the community who might be willing to write a letter on his behalf. We divided the list; each of us promised to approach half. “Now,” Sheffer said. “We have to talk about the unit team recommendation.”

  There was a knock on the door. “Maintenance,” Sheffer said. “Come in!”

  But it was Dr. Patel’s little grapefruit-sized gray head that poked around the door. I’d have preferred the janitor.

  “Hello, Lisa,” she said. “Hello, Dominick.” She explained to me that Sheffer had mentioned I was coming in for a meeting; she wanted to see me for just a minute. Was this a convenient time? “Yeah, sure, Rubina,” Sheffer said. “I’ve got something I should check on, anyway. I’ll be back in five minutes.” She closed the door behind her. It was a setup.