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

  I sighed. “So?”

  “So-oo . . .”

  “It’s not good, is it?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not what you wanted.” She said she should probably begin at the beginning.

  When the Psychiatric Security Review Board convened at 4:00 P.M. on Halloween afternoon, Sheffer said, they were scheduled to determine the status of two prisoners. At Sheffer’s request, the board flip-flopped its agenda and put Thomas second, buying more time for me to get there. Sheffer said she’d tried two or three times to call me by then, but all she kept getting was my machine.

  As Sheffer, my brother, and a security guard waited outside the meeting room, Thomas became more and more agitated about my failure to show. He told Sheffer he feared the worst: that I’d been kidnapped by the Syrians. Both Bush and Assad had a lot to gain if America and Iraq went to war, he said. Since he, Thomas, was an instrument of peace, he was vulnerable and so were his loved ones. Sheffer shook her head. “You know how he gets when he starts perseverating.”

  I nodded. I was feeling a little queasy.

  My brother had described to Sheffer the vision he saw: me, bound and gagged in some makeshift Syrian prison—my feet battered and broken by thugs with wooden bats. When she’d attempted to reason him out of it, he’d gotten testy, reminding her that identical twins communicated in ways she knew nothing about. He’d shouted for her to just shut up. “Then the guard warned him that that was enough of that kind of talk and Thomas started giving him an argument. ‘My brother’s hurt!’ he kept insisting. ‘I know he’s hurt!’” She shrugged. “Which, my god, you were.”

  In an attempt to calm everyone down, Sheffer had reached to take Thomas by the hand. That’s when he’d freaked—hauled off and whacked her in the face. The guard had leapt forward and put him in a choke hold, knocking Sheffer to the floor in the process. He’d let go of Thomas only after Sheffer’s repeated pleas.

  “He hit you?” I said. “That bruise on your mouth is from Thomas?”

  “Well, so much for me trying to cover it up,” she said. “I’ve always sucked at makeup.”

  “He hit you?”

  She told me she’d tried as best she could to downplay the assault, both to the guard and to the medical secretary who came running from a nearby office. Dabbing at her lip—it was bleeding “a little”—she kept trying to get my brother refocused on the hearing. Sheffer was scared the Board might hear the commotion.

  “I can’t believe . . . He’s never done anything like that before,” I said.

  “Are you sure you want to hear all this, Dominick? I can skip the details and cut to the chase. I brought a copy of the transcript. You want me to just leave it here and—”

  “No, go ahead,” I told her. “Jesus, it’s just . . . I can’t believe he hit you.”

  She said it was her own stupid fault—that even someone without her training knew enough to keep their distance when a patient was in an agitated state. She’d had a moment of temporary insanity herself, she said. She was, admittedly, a wreck about things, going into the hearing.

  By the time the conference room door had opened and the other patient’s entourage had exited, Sheffer’s lip had stopped bleeding, she said, but by then it had begun to swell. Thomas and the guard had both calmed down a little. Dr. Richard Hume, the psychiatrist who presided as the Review Board’s chair, refused Sheffer’s request for a postponement. Given the public’s perception and the media attention that had surrounded Thomas’s case, he said, the Board felt that action of some sort was preferable to stasis.

  Sheffer reminded the Board that the patient’s welfare needed to come before the state’s concern about negative media attention. Given the publicity Thomas’s case had generated, she wondered aloud if it was even possible for them to listen objectively to an argument about his being freed. “It was so stupid of me, Dominick,” Sheffer moaned. “I’d meant to challenge them a little—play devil’s advocate—but it came out wrong. I mean, there I am, moving my mouth like a ventriloquist so they won’t notice my fat lip, my bloody teeth. I’m scared to death he’s going to start losing it in front of them. I didn’t know where the hell you were. I just . . . I was just so nervous. I committed the mortal sin of questioning their almighty judgment. It was exactly what I shouldn’t have done.”

  Looks were exchanged among the Board members, Sheffer said. Dr. Hume told her that while they appreciated the “missionary zeal” with which she was advocating for her client, they needed no reminders of their obligations—to the patient or to the community. After that, Sheffer said, the proceedings were polite, efficient, and frosty.

  Sheffer explained to the Board that the treatment team had failed to reach a consensus about Thomas’s placement and therefore was not making a specific recommendation. She read aloud the two letters we’d gotten that advocated Thomas’s transferral to a nonforensic facility. She assured the Board that the patient’s brother was committed to his well-being and recovery and that they should not misread my absence from the hearing as indifference or tacit approval of Thomas’s remaining there at Hatch. “They all just sat there, listening politely,” she said. “No questions. No concerns raised. It was all so streamlined and civil. Then it was time to question Thomas directly. Here.”

  She handed me the transcript. “Hey, you know what?” she said. “We ran out of coffee at my house and I’ve got this major caffeine headache going on. I tell you what? Let me go downstairs, get a fix, and let you read through that thing. I’ll come back in ten or fifteen minutes, and if you have any questions . . .”

  “Read it and weep, eh?” I said.

  She nodded. Backed away. “I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

  I skimmed through the first part—the Board’s refusal to postpone, the skirmish between Sheffer and Hume about what was good for the public versus what was good for the patient. Sheffer was right: it had been a tactical error on her part, antagonizing them like that. I slowed down when I got to my brother’s interview.

  The Board wanted to know, in Thomas’s own words, why he’d cut off his hand.

  He answered them from Scripture: “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee.”

  So, was he saying that he had mutilated himself to atone for his sins?

  No, he answered; he’d done it to atone for America’s sins.

  Which were?

  “Warmongering, greed, the bloodletting of children.”

  And did he think he might ever feel compelled, at some point in the future, to commit any other acts of self-harm?

  He wouldn’t want to, he said, but he took his direction from the Lord God Almighty. He was God’s instrument. He’d do anything that was necessary.

  Anything? Including harming someone who stood in his way?

  “I didn’t mean to hit her,” Thomas said. “I lost my temper.”

  What? Whom had he hit?

  “Her. Lisa.”

  Sheffer had volunteered for the Board a version of what had happened out in the waiting room. An accident, she told them—bad judgment on her part. Thomas was upset because his brother had been detained. His arm had just flailed out and hit her accidentally, that was all.

  A Board member named Mrs. Birdsall wanted to know how Thomas was getting on with the day-to-day routines at Hatch?

  He said he hated it there. You were watched like a hawk. You couldn’t smoke when you wanted to. He had found insects in his food, he said. He was awakened and violated repeatedly in the middle of the night. His mail was stolen.

  Stolen?

  Thomas said he knew for a fact that Jimmy Carter had sent him three registered letters and that each had been intercepted.

  Why did Thomas feel the former president was trying to contact him?

  He was attempting to invite him to join him as an envoy to the Middle East on a mission of peace, Thomas said.

  And who did he think it was that was intercepting his mail?

  Thomas took off on his George Bush
refrain, lecturing the Board like they were the village idiots. Wasn’t it obvious? War was profitable; Bush’s hands were stained with the blood of the CIA. If they would all just go back and reread American history, they’d realize there was a fundamental crack in America’s foundation. He ricocheted from the Trail of Tears to the Japanese-American internment camps to the conditions that ghetto children lived in today. Drive-by shootings, crack houses: it all had to do with profit, the price of crude oil. It was so obvious to him, he said. Why couldn’t anyone else see it?

  See what, specifically?

  The conspiracy!

  Thomas must have broken down at that point, because someone asked him if he needed a moment to compose himself.

  Jesus had wanted us to re-create Jerusalem, he answered, and we had rebuilt Babylon instead. He went on and on. If it had been Jesse Jackson saying it instead of Thomas, he might have brought down the house. Great sermon, wrong congregation.

  One of the Board members wanted to know if Thomas understood why he had been detained at Hatch.

  Yes, he told them; he was a political prisoner. Throughout history, America had gone to war because war was profitable. Now, finally, we had arrived at the critical crossroads prophesied in the Bible—the Book of Apocalypse. As a nation, our only hope was to quit the path of greed and walk the path of spirituality instead. He, Thomas, had been tapped to lead this movement. It was God’s will. Did it come as any surprise to them that the state wanted to keep him locked up? Wanted to demoralize him? He told the Security Board that the CIA paid men to wake him up each night and foul him—make him impure. That they were purposely trying to break his spirit. But his spirit hadn’t been broken. They’d underestimated him, the same as they had underestimated the peasant-warriors in Vietnam. Thomas was on a divine mission. He was trying to do nothing less than subvert an unholy war that would call down on America and the Western world the most hideous of Biblical prophecies. George Bush was the false prophet, he warned them, and Iraq was the sleeping dragon about to wake and devour the world’s children. Capitalism would kill us all.

  A Board member said he’d read in my brother’s report that Thomas had told the police he was inspired to his library sacrifice by voices. Was that accurate?

  It was, Thomas said.

  And did he always feel compelled to obey the voices he heard?

  The voices of good, yes, Thomas said—he battled the voices of evil.

  And he could distinguish between them?

  The voice of Jesus, Thomas told them, was like no other voice.

  Jesus spoke to him, then?

  “Jesus speaks to everyone. I listen.”

  But not all the voices Thomas heard were benign?

  “Benign? Not by a long shot.”

  And what did the bad voices tell him?

  Thomas said he’d rather not repeat, in mixed company, what they said.

  Well, then, suppose one of the voices of good—let’s say the voice of Jesus Christ himself—asked Thomas to hurt someone. Kill someone, say. One of His enemies. Would Thomas feel obliged to obey?

  If Jesus asked him to?

  Yes. If Jesus Himself asked.

  Thomas told them the question was ridiculous. Jesus would never tell him to harm anyone. Jesus had died on the cross to show the world the light.

  But just for example’s sake, suppose He did ask. Would Thomas obey? If it was the voice of Jesus that commanded it? If Jesus said, say, “Go back to the library and cut the throat of the woman behind the desk because she’s an agent of the devil. Because you need to destroy her to save the world. To save innocent children, say.” Would Thomas do it then—take his knife to the woman, if Jesus asked him to?

  Jesus wouldn’t ask him to do that, Thomas repeated.

  But if He did? Would he?

  If He did?

  Yes, if.

  Yes.

  Sheffer returned with her styro-coffee. I handed her the transcript. “Did you finish?” she asked.

  I said I’d stopped at the part where they’d gotten him to say he’d slaughter a librarian for Jesus.

  “Could you believe that? The way they led him? I was so pissed!”

  “So what was the final verdict?” I asked. “As if I don’t already know.”

  By a unanimous vote, Sheffer said, the Psychiatric Security Review Board had decided to retain my brother for a period of one year, citing that he had shown himself to be potentially dangerous to himself and others. His case would be reviewed again in October of 1991 and an appropriate decision would be made at that time as to his release or his placement for a second twelve-month period.

  “Detain him at Hatch?” I asked.

  She nodded. She had requested a follow-up review in six months, rather than twelve, she said. Dr. Hume had reminded her that if Thomas had not been ruled Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, he could have been convicted in the criminal court of a felony and would have faced a prison sentence of three years, minimally. If the Board members were erring at all in their decision, Hume told her, they were perhaps erring on the side of leniency.

  “And I told him, ‘That’s a bunch of bull. If he went to prison, he’d be bounced out in three or four months with a suspended sentence and you know it. Six months, max.’ I’m telling you, paisano,” she said, “my Jewish sense of justice and my Sicilian temper were both doing a hard boil by then. It was hopeless. I knew that. But I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut. They’re going to nail me for it, too. My supervisor’s already called me to schedule ‘some dialogue’ on Monday about my ’emotional outburst.’”

  I asked Sheffer how Thomas had taken the news.

  “Like a stoic,” she said. “But you know who took it hard? The news about Thomas? Your stepfather.”

  “He did? Ray?”

  She’d called and called him after the hearing, she said—hadn’t reached him until the following morning because he’d been at the hospital with me. “He started crying when I told him how the Board had voted,” she said. “He had to hang up and call me back. I felt so bad for the guy.”

  Neither of us said anything for several seconds. Poor Ray, I thought: forty years old and we were still his twin nuisances. But he’d cried? For Thomas?

  “I’m just so sorry, Dominick,” Sheffer said. “I can’t stop thinking that maybe if I’d just not lost my cool at the beginning of the hearing . . .”

  I reminded her that she’d warned me over and over that it was a long shot—that the decision had probably already been made before the Board even met that day.

  “Yeah, but maybe if I had just—”

  “And maybe if I hadn’t fallen off the goddamned roof. And maybe if he just hadn’t gotten schizophrenic in the first place. Don’t drive yourself nuts with the ifs.”

  I lay there, arms across my chest, my head sunk into the pillow. I didn’t have the energy to feel angry or indignant or much of anything anymore. I was spent. Broken. I realized, suddenly, how much Sheffer’s visit had exhausted me.

  “That morning I first met you,” she said. “Remember? That first day in my office? I said to myself, ‘Whew, this guy’s a walking attitude problem. This guy’s got chips on both of his shoulders.’ But, I don’t know, paisano. I somehow got sucked into your brother’s case—began to see how the things that were supposed to keep him safe might end up damaging him instead. It’s the first thing they tell you in the school of social work: don’t get personally involved. Don’t lose your objectivity. But, then, I don’t know . . . Well, for whatever it’s worth, I guess I just began to see why you were so pissed. And then my blood started to boil a little, too.”

  But that was the weird part: I wasn’t pissed anymore. I wasn’t anything.

  “Do me a favor, will you?” I said.

  “Sure. What?”

  “Go someplace nice with your daughter today. You and her: go have some fun.”

  She smiled. Nodded. “Look,” she said, “you know we’ll take good care of him, right? Dr. Patel, Dr. Chase, me—the who
le staff. And you have your security clearance now. You can visit him. He’ll stabilize, Dominick. I know he will.”

  I smiled. Told her I’d see about getting her the Purple Heart for that bruise. She waved me off. Picked up the present from Dr. Patel and handed it to me. “Here,” she said. “Aren’t you going to open this?”

  I unwrapped the package, lifted off the top of the box. Took the small soapstone statue out of its tissue paper nest—a four-inch version of the one in her office.

  “I like her smile,” Sheffer said.

  “It’s not a her,” I told her. “It’s a he. Shiva. The god of destruction.”

  She looked at me funny. “Destruction?”

  Dr. Patel had enclosed a card. “Dear Dominick, I give you Shiva the dancing god in hopes that you will soon be on your feet and dancing past your pain. Do you remember Shiva’s message? With destruction comes renovation. Be well.”

  Sheffer was on her way out the door when Joy arrived. I introduced them. Saw Joy take in Sheffer’s bib overalls, her smooshed-down hat. It was a little odd—how instantly Sheffer’s cocky humor evaporated in Joy’s presence. She seemed almost to sink into those overalls of hers.

  “Who’s the hippie chick?” Joy asked.

  “Thomas’s social worker.”

  I filled Joy in on the Board meeting, Thomas’s sentence down at Hatch. She looked as pretty as ever, Joy—but pale. Frail, even. Whipped. When I started telling her about Thomas’s interview, she bent and kissed my forehead, my nose, my lips. “I love you, Dominick,” she said. And my throat constricted. I could not say it back.

  Between the stress she’d been feeling about me and the nausea from the baby, Joy said, she hadn’t been able to sleep or eat or do much of anything but hug the toilet all day. I’d made her so paranoid earlier about drinking Slim-Fast that she’d called the doctor’s office and talked to the nurse practitioner. He’d told her not to worry about it—that the baby took what it needed first. The fetus was her body’s first priority right now, he’d said, and her body knew it. She should just take it easy and try not to worry. The nausea would pass. Little babies were tougher than she thought.