Asylum

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  The floating sensation was receding. Maybe I should open my eyes, I thought, and see exactly what’s going on here.

  Mistake. Can’t see anything. Panic grabbing at my throat and my stomach. I couldn’t move, I was blind, I was …

  And I remembered, then, the basilica in the night and the man, the lawyer, the one who’d killed those women. Robert Carrigan.

  Maybe he’d killed me, too. That would make sense. Maybe this was purgatory, and I was going to float here until it was time to see God. But hadn’t the Church admitted, finally, that purgatory was a medieval construct with no theological basis? If I wasn’t in purgatory I must be dead.

  More panic. Breathe, Martine, just breathe. I’d tried to live a good life, I really had. I’d tried to do what I read in the Gospels, I fed the hungry, gave to the poor, turned the other cheek. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  More floating. Amazing how you can float and panic at the same time. A rotten feeling, really.

  I’d tried to live a good life. I seized on that thought, clutching at it, perhaps even trying to convince myself. I contributed to my church. I volunteered at a women’s shelter. And then there were the children … I used to think that Lukas and Claudia were a necessary evil that accompanied Ivan whether I liked it or not. To love him meant putting up with them. And that … well, that hadn’t been fair to any of us. Not to Ivan, who struggled with the long absences when he couldn’t see his kids. Not to Lukas or Claudia, who had the right to be people, not just symbols insofar as they related to me as their stepmother.

  And not to me, because I hadn’t allowed them to inhabit anything but the margins of my life. I hadn’t opened myself up to them, not really. Yet despite it all, they had—as the expression goes—grown on me. Now I was wondering: did they know that I loved them? Had I ever told them?

  Too late now, anyway.

  I tried to move again, which only brought on more panic. Can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t think.

  Something touched me and I screamed and flinched, and there was a sense of lightness around my head. And a voice.

  “Ah, there you go. We’ll take these off, now that you’re awake. I’d hate for you to miss anything.”

  Familiar voice. Male. Self-assured.

  Robert Carrigan.

  The name clicked, and it was suddenly blindingly clear that I wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. Who was it that said hell is other people? Sartre?

  I still couldn’t see anything.

  “You’re probably wondering where you are,” he said, his voice casual, a tour guide, slightly bored. Been there, done that. I didn’t respond.

  “If you’re a very good girl,” he continued, “I’ll let you see a little something. Hard to tell what’s going on around you when you’re deprived of your senses.” He chuckled.

  Yeah, I thought, I get it, you don’t have to rub it in too hard. My research over the past week flooded back through my synapses. Sensory deprivation: no sound, no light, nothing to touch or feel. And here he was, playing his own little private MK-Ultra games with me. You don’t really have to underline the obvious; I do still have the odd brain cell or two.

  But maybe he was right to think I was stupid. I’d pretty much done everything he’d wanted, hadn’t I?

  Hands on my head, again, and suddenly, dazzling light. I blinked, closed my eyes, opened them again. Light sparkling all around me. Blessed, blessed light. Can you drink light, savor it, taste it? Why not?

  “Why not?” he asked. Had I spoken those words aloud? I must have done, or he wouldn’t have repeated them. “Well, welcome to the sleep room, Martine.” I still couldn’t really see anything, certainly not him, certainly not the room I was in. It had a familiar ring to it, though, that name: where had I heard it before?

  It was too much work to think it through. Too many shadows there. Keep floating in the light.

  He was talking again, his voice fuzzy. What was he saying? “… effects of soft torture,” the calm monotone was going on. “Always interesting to observe how it works on different individuals.”

  I squinted in the direction of the voice. “Thought you were a lawyer,” I said, my words slurring.

  “What was that? Speak up, Martine.”

  “You don’t sound like a lawyer,” I managed to say. “You sound like one of the doctors. Those doctors experimented on their patients.” I licked my lips: I was determined not to sound afraid. Who could be afraid, anyway, floating in the light like this? “But you remind me of someone specific,” I added. “That guy … One of the CIA’s imports from Germany. You sound a lot like Dr. Mengele.”

  He seemed to find that uproariously funny, and I winced: too much sound is as bad as too little, the volume of his laughter was jangling nerves in my head I didn’t know I possessed. I was starting to get a sense of where I was, but there wasn’t much to see: there were sheets pinned up all around the bed on which I was lying. A hospital? Above, way high above, a vaulted ceiling. No, not vaulted exactly, not like in the church … but curved. A curved concrete ceiling. Where on earth was there a curved concrete ceiling?

  Church … I’d been in church, I remembered. In the basilica, the biggest church in the city. And that was where he’d hunted me down.

  “Funny you should say that, Martine,” Robert Carrigan was saying. “Funny that you should mention him. Because once upon a time, I nearly was. A doctor, that is. Perhaps even a pupil of Dr. Mengele. You say his name like it’s such a bad thing.”

  “Nazi,” I managed to say. “Human experimentation.”

  He laughed. “You don’t think anything that important could be done with rats and monkeys, do you?”

  “You’re no doctor,” I said.

  “But I might have been. I came close. So close. They were willing to send me to medical school. And apparently I had the aptitude for it, but I decided on the law instead. And, for a long time, I liked it. People respect attorneys. You get to spend all your time playing a chess game, and outsmarting your opponents. I did love the law,” he said on a sigh. “But now, lately, I wonder if I chose the right path after all. I wonder if it was a mistake.”

  I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. “A mistake?” I repeated, just to keep him talking.

  “Well, I’d gotten quite used to the medical side of things, hadn’t I?” he said, and his face swam into view in front of me. “Oh. I see. Really. Now, you surprise me. You didn’t work that one out?”

  “What one?”

  He laughed. “My dear girl, you don’t really think I’d be willing to carry on as I’ve been doing as a benefit to my employer, do you?” He shook his head, still in apparent merriment, and moved, danced almost, out of my line of sight again. He was enjoying this. “Well, it does benefit my employer, of course. And I’m happy to do it, because Lansbury gave me everything. But this goes beyond Lansbury. This is a little more … visceral.” A pause. “You’re so very concerned about the orphans,” he said. “Well, I was one of them. One of the poor Duplessis orphans, living out my sad neglected existence at the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu.”

  Whoa. Merde, alors.

  He was right: I hadn’t seen that one coming. Okay, so maybe he was the right age, but surely even an experience that horrific wouldn’t have driven him to … this. This wholesale torture, this sexual assault, this murder.

  “I was one of the favorites,” Robert Carrigan continued, his voice behind me. “Out of hundreds of children. They recognized that I was special. I was such a good little helper to them, you see. I kept the other kids calm. They liked me. They trusted me. At first I did it to survive. You’d be amazed at what the human psyche will do to survive. What it can take. But after a while … it became exciting.”

  “I have no idea—” I began, but he cut me off.

  “Of course you don’t,” he said. “You’re a blundering idiot and hardly worth my time. But we have time, don’t you know, and it’s such a pleasant stroll down memory lane—”

&nbs
p; We clearly had different takes on what could be construed as pleasant.

  His voice faded for a moment and I thought he moved somewhere else in the room, but then he was back. Not that I could have attempted any kind of escape in his absence. I couldn’t even feel my legs.

  “At first I did it for survival,” Robert Carrigan said again. “Survival and the odd cigarette. We all had jobs, you see. All the orphans, anyone who was compos mentis enough to do anything, had to work. No idle hands at the asylum. No, indeed. There was a farm to run, there was food to prepare, and of course there were medical experiments to conduct.”

  I hadn’t been so far off, then, when I called him a nouveau Mengele.

  He was still talking. “I was assigned to the doctors. There was always a lot to do. Prepare the operating theater. Prepare the instruments. Clean up—aye, there’s the rub, there was always a lot to clean up afterward. And I won’t lie to you, it wasn’t easy at first. No: you mustn’t think I’m a monster. It wasn’t always easy. There was a time, yes, there was, a time when it made me sick. A time when I was like everybody else. Even like you, Martine. Some of the children—well, here’s the thing: I knew them. That made it more difficult. But the more I helped the doctors, the stronger I got. And the more I liked what I was doing.”

  I was following, if at a distance. “You worked at the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu,” I said, wishing I could do more than lick my lips. My mouth felt like I’d swallowed ashes. “You helped the doctors.”

  “You’re a little slow tonight, my dear. Try and keep up. Of course I helped the doctors. At first, it was just clean-up detail. Mopping up their mistakes, you might say. I was young and untested. They didn’t yet know my full potential. Even I didn’t know my full potential.”

  There was a clatter as he dropped something, and he grunted as he bent down, presumably to pick it up. “Then I started taking an interest. It was extraordinary what I learned. I’ll be honest: I’d had no idea I could feel anything anymore. I thought the nuns had beaten that out of me. But down in the basement … my whole being, my whole inner self … words fail me, they really do. The best way to explain it is to say that I was uncaged.” His voice grew gentle, reverent. “It wasn’t just a coming of age, of having my way with the girls, the sort of thing that every young man goes through. This was different. It was more than that, deeper than that. It was spiritual.” Another pause. “There’s something remarkable that happens when someone’s about to die and they look into your eyes. Something deep and holy passes between you. It’s an incredible intimacy.”

  You are incredibly off your rocker, I was thinking. “How did you get from being an orphan in an asylum to Lansbury Pharmaceuticals?” I asked. I had to ask something; I really didn’t want to hear any more about how magical it was to kill somebody.

  “They weren’t monsters,” Robert Carrigan said. “Everyone has the wrong idea about them. They were trying to advance science. They wanted to learn the limits of the human brain, the human body, the human spirit. They were willing to keep at it, to try again and again and again to learn. They were the bravest of the brave. No one understood; no one ever understands. The world wants medical breakthroughs but the world doesn’t want to pay the price for them.”

  “So the orphans did,” I said.

  “Come on, Martine! Oh … I can call you Martine, can’t I? It’s a custom with me, a ritual, you might say. I always knew their names: I always said their names at that last moment. It was the least I could do for them, really. And my darling Martine, we’re going to get very, very intimate, you and I, very, very soon.” He paused, and then, as though bestowing a great privilege, he added, “And you may call me Bobby.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t liking the way he was using the word intimate. I wondered how much of this he had shared with Isabelle, Caroline, Annie, Danielle.

  “They were of no importance, the orphans,” Robert said. “Persons of no importance. Hadn’t their families made that clear? Hadn’t society made that clear? You can’t require us to lock people up, tuck them away so you don’t have to think about them—and then have issues with how they’re treated. It’s absurd. People can’t have it both ways.”

  “Lansbury,” I reminded him. I didn’t want to start gagging.

  “Lansbury was part of it from the start,” he replied. “Even when I was a boy in the asylum, when I was first getting involved, Lansbury Pharmaceuticals was underwriting the experiments. You think it was the hospital that paid the doctors? You think Ewen Cameron made money from the asylum? Not for a second. It was all Lansbury, from the beginning.” His voice got dreamy again. “From my beginning, too. My first awakening.”

  He stopped and I heard the screech of a metal drawer opening. I didn’t want to think about what he was doing, what horrible instruments he was taking out of that drawer. Panic was rising and I was finding it hard to breathe. There was a voice inside me that was starting a mantra: I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die …

  Robert found whatever he was looking for and shut the drawer. “Lansbury’s rep was almost always around. Everyone thought he was one of the doctors, but he wasn’t, he was the pharmaceutical rep. The salesman. And he’s the one who got to know me best. The doctors appreciated my help, but it was the rep who really saw my value. He was the one who offered to send me to medical school. I was in seventh heaven!”

  I had to shut him up. My inner voice with its stupid mantra wasn’t getting me anywhere. And it was scaring me. “So how did you end up an attorney, Counselor?” I asked instead. “Second choice? Medical school didn’t want you?”

  A louder clatter this time, and Robert swore viciously from behind me. I must have hit a nerve. Too bad I couldn’t hit any of my own. “They said”—and his voice was filled with rage—“they said that I didn’t qualify on psychological grounds.”

  I laughed. Well, I tried to laugh, but it came out sounding like something between a squeak and a rumble. I moistened my lips before I tried to talk again. “You wanted to go into medicine so you could continue torturing people, and the medical establishment didn’t feel that was okay? You surprise me.”

  “Lansbury Pharmaceuticals sent me to law school instead,” he said, and I was sobered to realize how quickly he’d gotten control of his anger back. That didn’t bode well for me. “They’ve taken care of me, every step of the way. I owe them everything.”

  “So much that you have to repay it with murder?”

  He laughed. “Actually, I probably owe that to them, too,” he said. “When I found out that that little pute was getting too close and I realized I had to do something about her … well, in the process, I rediscovered a part of myself that had been buried too long. Inadvertent but strangely logical, isn’t it, to come full circle like this? Poetic, almost.”

  “Isabelle Hubert,” I said, nodding again like I’d discovered something significant. Pute was a rude colloquialism for prostitute.

  “Isabelle Hubert,” he agreed. “Stupid cow thought she owed it to her mother—her mother, of all people—to expose the asylum. Asking all her clients questions about it. Trying to find out what no one was supposed to find out. I had to close her down. It doesn’t work like that.”

  Light dawned. “She asked the wrong person,” I said slowly. “One of her clients was a bigwig at Lansbury.”

  “Senior vice president of research,” Robert agreed, and I could almost feel him nodding behind me at the terrible gaffe that had cost Isabelle her life.

  “And he told you that something had to be done?”

  “Exactly. Though I don’t imagine he thought I’d take such a personal interest in it all. I expect that he meant me to do something to stop her legally, rather than permanently. But my solution was much neater.”

  “They don’t know it’s you who’s been doing this?”

  “Of course not. This wasn’t anyone’s idea but my own. Give me credit for some creativity here.” There was the sound of liquid being poured behind me; it was u
nnerving. I was so parched I wished it were being poured down my throat. “No one at Lansbury told me to kill anybody. That was all my own doing. Oh, someone there may have had suspicions. But I doubt it. I’ve been very, very careful. No one could prove anything, even if they thought they knew what I was doing. I was on my own with the killing.” A pause. “But what a discovery it was. All these years since I left the asylum,” he said reverently. “All these years had passed, and I’d thought that part of me had been cut off. That I’d never feel those feelings again. But it was only dormant. When I got her alone, I knew right away what I had to do. I didn’t even have to think about it. It brought back such memories! I felt alive again, alive for the first time in years.”

  “Torturing her, you mean.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Martine. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re misinformed by the popular press, by stupid TV shows. It’s nothing like that. I’m telling you, by the end, the torturer and the victim are bonded forever as one. There’s no greater intimacy than being there for the last breath, for being responsible for that last breath. Being with her, it was like the first time I ever did it, back at the asylum. And she screamed beautifully. It was touching, really, amazing. I could almost feel her pain, we were that close. We were so close.”

  “But—”

  “You see, words just can’t explain it,” he interrupted. “The wonder of it. The magic of it all. You’ll understand, Martine, you’ll see, and you’ll agree, there’s nothing else like it. Being locked together, gazing into each other’s eyes while you take your last breath. There’s nothing in the world more exciting.”

  I tried to fight down the panic. Lansbury had no idea what they’d unleashed. They must’ve asked their attorney to make the problem go away, expecting it to be done through paperwork and settlements and nondisclosure agreements. But Robert found his own way to make the problem go away, and he wasn’t going to stop. Not once he’d rediscovered his darkest demons.