by D. W. Buffa
Closing the car door, I took one last look up. A pigeon sat on top of the flagpole. Then, eager to get out of the weather, it flew off. For a moment I thought about getting back in the car and driving back home.
I stood in front of the steps, which were covered by an ornate iron canopy, and read the sign posted discreetly next to the entrance. Cascade Hall. It had a nice, northwestern ring about it.
I turned around and headed across the parking lot to the building on the other side, built, by the look of it, in the middle of the twentieth century when the only criterion for a public building was how much it was going to cost. This one, a brick rect-angle with square glass windows and linoleum floors, must have come in under budget. I checked to make sure I was in the right place. Siskiyou Hall. It was the administration building where I had my appointment.
As I started up the steps, I stumbled, a sharp pain in my leg.
I caught my balance and the pain vanished as quickly as it had come. It had been years since that leg had bothered me. It seemed a strange coincidence that it should happen now. I paused in front of the door and read the neatly painted letters. Even after all this time, it was still hard to believe that Elliott Winston was a patient in the Oregon State Hospital for the criminally insane.
Six
_______
Dr. Friedman was going to be a few minutes late. I sat down on a cushioned chair and thumbed through a computer magazine, glanced at the beginning of an article claiming that the printed page was about to become an anachronism, and tossed it aside, wondering if the editor had caught the irony. I heard a voice. “Mr. Antonelli?”
I turned around and found myself under the firm, clear-eyed gaze of a man in his early forties with thick brown hair and a round, perfectly symmetrical face. He was wearing a tweed sports jacket and had a clipboard tucked under his arm. After we shook hands, Dr. Friedman led me back to his office and gestured vaguely toward the two armless chairs in front of his government-issue metal desk. There were two steel bookcases, one on the wall next to where I sat and a smaller one that covered the wall below the window behind the desk.
“Dr. Friedman, I—”
He had begun to concentrate on the page on top of the clipboard. He looked up and, with a brisk smile, raised his hand. “I’ll be with you in just a minute,” he said as he went back to what he was reading.
I tried not to be angry and made a conscious effort to relax.
He flipped over one page and began reading the next. A moment later he went to the next one, and then, apparently satisfied with what he had seen, nodded twice and shoved the clipboard to the side. Leaning back in the swivel chair, he crossed his ankle over his knee and with his hands began to rotate a pencil he held in his lap.
“How can I help you, Mr. Antonelli? You’re here to see one of our patients, correct?”
“Elliott Winston.”
“Elliott. Yes, I know.” The pencil was going back and forth a quarter turn each way. His eyes, now that they were on me, never left.
“Is there a problem?” I asked, wondering why I had to see him before I could see Elliott.
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Friedman’s voice was a warm monotone, and it was starting to make me feel uneasy. And it was not just his voice. He was a trained observer, always looking for symptoms of abnormality, and whether he was aware of it or not, he was studying me with the same clinical detachment with which I imagined he regularly diagnosed the various forms of psychosis.
“I’m not sure it’s really a problem,” I remarked. I looked out the window over his shoulder. “But when I was very young I used to have two dreams every night. In one of them I killed my father; in the other I slept with my mother.” My eyes came back to him.
“But that’s just a normal part of growing up, isn’t it?”
For half a second he believed me, and even when he knew I was kidding, he was not quite prepared to laugh. It was my turn to study him.
“There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask.”
“Yes?” he replied carefully.
“You know that old line about if you speak to God, you’re okay, but if God speaks to you, you’re not?”
He hesitated, not sure where I might be going with this. “Yes,”
he said, dragging out the word.
“What about the person who decides he must be God, because every time he prays he finds he’s talking to himself?”
His eyebrows shot straight up. “That’s quite good. I’ll have to remember that one. But, after all, it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? Whether God talks to him or he thinks he’s God and he’s talking to himself. In both cases he’s clearly delusional.”
“Insane?”
He shrugged. “Yes, of course.”
“That leaves us with an interesting problem, doesn’t it? Either Moses lied when he claimed God gave him the tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them, or he was delusional—insane according to your diagnosis. The result of course is that the entire moral and legal framework of the western world either rests on a falsehood or is part of an insane delusion. Which do you think it is?”
“I shouldn’t like to think it was either, Mr. Antonelli,” he said in that practiced, well-modulated voice of his. “We’re talking about the kind of mental disease that affects normal people, ordinary human beings. We’re talking about the kind of thing that happened to Elliott Winston,” he added, trying to steer the conversation back to safer ground.
“Does Elliott talk to God?” I asked, curious.
Pursing his lips, Friedman narrowed his eyes and peered into the distance. Once again, he began to spin the pencil back and forth between his fingers.
“You mean, does God talk to him,” he said. His eyes came back around. “The answer is, I’m not quite sure I know. Sometimes he hears voices, all right, but whose voices … ?” The question hung in the silence, unanswered and, from the doubtful expression on his face, I assumed unanswerable.
A look of hopeful encouragement entered his eyes. “As long as he stays on his medication everything seems to be all right.”
He reached forward and grabbed a file from a metal holder on the front corner of the desk. Hunched over the open folder, he drew his index finger from the top to the bottom of the page and then, shaking his head, turned to the next one.
“When he first came here, they had him on some pretty dreadful stuff. Thorazine, mainly.” He closed the file. “Well, it was twelve years ago, and that’s what was available,” he tried to explain. “You have to remember, he was considered quite violent.
Not to put too fine a point on it, they kept him pretty well doped up. Have you ever seen anyone on heavy dosages of that stuff?”
he asked, a distasteful expression on his face. “They’re like zom-bies. They can barely function. I wouldn’t have done it, even if he were violent—and, by the way, I have my doubts about that.
I don’t have any doubt he was mentally ill—he still is—but since he’s been my patient—a little over three years now—I’ve not seen any evidence of a disposition toward violent behavior.
“He was initially diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. That was the diagnosis made before he got here, when it was decided that he was suffering from a mental disease and was committed to the state hospital instead of being dealt with in the normal fashion by the criminal justice system. ‘Guilty, but insane.’ That is the operative phrase,” he started to explain. “Oh, I’m sorry,”
he quickly apologized. “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you? You probably know all about this sort of thing, don’t you?”
I remembered the man who sat next to me for a while that first night I was serving my sentence for contempt, the one who thought I was working undercover to help him because the voice in his head told him that was why I was there.
“I know a little about it,” I replied. I did not tell him what had happened to me in jail; I told him instead about what I had seen in court.
The
rain had started to fall, a steady downpour of gray depression, streaking the window and twisting the view of the things seen through it into strange, monstrous shapes.
“I did commitment cases for a while. The standard was whether they were a danger to others or a danger to themselves. We would gather around a table, sometimes in a conference room, sometimes around the counsel table in the courtroom. Whoever was making the claim that there should be a commitment would give their reasons. And then, because the statute required two doctors, and because you could never find two physicians willing to spend an hour of their time for the small amount that was paid, there would usually be a young general practitioner and a psychologist.”
Friedman had retreated somewhere behind his eyes. He was listening to me the way someone listens to a radio or a television set in the background while they read the newspaper or carry on a conversation with someone else.
“What I learned right away,” I went on, gazing right at him,
“is that the doctors never asked the right questions.”
You could almost hear the slick, sliding sound of a single thin transparent film dropping away from the lenses of his eyes.
“So I decided I’d do it. My client said he heard three voices in his head all the time. That was all the doctors needed to hear.
The judge asked me if I had any questions. ‘These voices you hear. Do you know who they are?’ He looked at me, his face all lit up. ‘Yes,’ he said eagerly, grateful that someone had finally asked. ‘Linda Ronstadt, Roy Orbison, and Conway Twitty.’ “
I was back under Friedman’s clinical gaze. “That’s very amus-ing. But what difference did it make whose voices he heard? He was hearing voices, after all.”
“That’s what one of the doctors said. And then I pointed out to the doctor that while I couldn’t say I ever heard the other two, I heard Linda Ronstadt singing in my head fairly often and that I would frankly be surprised if he hadn’t heard the same thing. And to tell you the truth, depending on the song, there were times when I could not get her voice out of my head at all.
Even right now, sitting right here, if I concentrate, I can hear her. I mean, once it starts, you just can’t get ‘I’ve been cheated, been mistreated’ to stop, can you? Now, tell me, Dr. Friedman, am I going to get to see Elliott Winston or do I have to have myself committed and become a patient first?”
For a moment I thought he was going to take it under advisement. “No,” he said, blinking rapidly, a nervous smile rushing across his face. “Elliott wants to see you. That’s what concerns me.” He immediately qualified it. “Not concerns me, interests me.
You see, Mr. Antonelli, you’re the first visitor he’s ever had.”
He waited for my reaction. I had the feeling he was trying to find out whether I knew something about what had happened to Elliott before he was committed, something that would tell him more about his patient than he already knew.
With a civil smile I expressed a polite doubt. “He has children, parents, relatives, and a great many friends. Surely, some of them must have come to see him?”
Stroking his chin, he gave me a measured look. “I should have said you’re the first person he has allowed to come. Others have tried, though no one now for a long time. You’re the only one he wanted to see. He’s quite eager, actually. Why do you think that is?”
I turned the question back on Friedman. “What reason did he give?”
“He said you were a partner in the law firm where he worked, that you had given him the job, that for a long time he had thought he wanted to be just like you.” He paused. “I’m sure he meant what he said, but I’m also quite sure that that isn’t the real reason he wants to see you,” he added candidly. “There’s something else. Perhaps it’s the same reason you want to see him.”
He put it to me directly. “You’ve never come before, Mr. Antonelli. Why now?”
There was not a trace of reproval in his voice, no suggestion that I had done something wrong by waiting this long. It was simply a question put to me by someone who I understood was trying to help.
“I always wanted to,” I explained. “I always thought I should.
About a month after he first came here, I started to drive down.
I hadn’t called ahead. I just decided to come. Halfway here I changed my mind. I told myself I needed to make an appointment before I came, but that was just an excuse.”
He moved his head, just a slight turn to the right, enough to create the impression that while his left eye kept me under sur-veillance, his other eye was drawing back, as if there was something else it needed to see.
“I’ve always felt a certain responsibility for what happened.”
“For what happened?” His voice was calm, reassuring, full of reasonable encouragement.
“Yes. I saw it all happen, each step. But I didn’t understand what it meant, not until the end, when it was too late. I should have known. I should have done something before it ever got to that point, though I’m not sure, even now, what I could have done.”
Friedman did not say anything. He did not ask me to explain.
He sat there, watching, waiting for me to go on.
“Have you ever read Sallust?” When he did not answer, I explained: “One of the Roman historians.”
“Oh,” he replied, laughing softly, the willing admission of his ignorance. “But you must have. I’ve always envied people who read serious things. Perhaps someday. When there is more time.”
He smiled and waited.
“I had not read him either, not until about a year ago. And it reminded me, or rather it explained, because it described what I’m almost certain someone did to Elliott Winston. Sallust talks about what he calls the conversion of the zealous and the innocent to a criminal conspiracy. First, they have you tell an innocent lie, a white lie, something that can’t possibly hurt anyone and may even help someone. Then, they bring you around to more substantial lies. You had lied before, and after all, this is only a difference of degree.”
Friedman, the passive observer, was listening intently, caught up in the insidious logic of evil.
“Once they get you to tell lies like these, lies that have consequences, lies that if discovered can get you into trouble, serious trouble, then it is not so difficult to lead you into acts of violence. Not against anybody, you understand, but against somebody who has done something terribly wrong, an enemy, someone who is part of a conspiracy, a conspiracy directed at all the things you believe in. But then, after it’s been done, you discover that it was done to the wrong person, someone falsely accused. You’ve made a terrible mistake, and it has to be covered up. You have to protect your reputation, but you can’t do it alone. They tell you, these friends of yours who taught you how to lie, who convinced you to commit a violent act, that everyone makes mistakes.
They tell you, these friends of yours, that they’ll do everything that has to be done to make sure no one ever finds out what you did. After all, friends have to protect one another. Then, finally, when they do something you never would have dreamed of doing, something that was not the result of some tragic mistake, they come to you and remind you, these friends of yours, how they protected you when you needed them.”
Friedman stared at me. “Someone did that to him?”
“I think so. There was no violence. That came later, after he broke down. But before that, yes, I think so. I think he was taken, step by step, from one thing to the next, until he finally realized he had become someone he did not want to be and he did not know what to do about it.”
“Who would have done a thing like that? How could anyone have done a thing like that? He was a lawyer, after all. He must have known when he was being asked to do something that was wrong.”
How childlike, how trusting, we all are outside the narrow, limited range of our own experience! Dr. Friedman, the student of human behavior, actually believed that the law was a rigid system of unbreakable rules. I began to feel more confident in my o
wn analysis.
“There was a judge,” I began to explain. “A much older man.”
Friedman nodded emphatically. “His parents were divorced when he was a very young child. He was raised by his mother.
He seldom saw his father. Elliott was always drawn to older men as sources of guidance, inspiration. He was drawn to you that way.
You were the older, successful attorney, the model of what he wanted to become. But not only that, of course. He needed someone he admired to give him encouragement and approval. He would have been dependent—extremely dependent—on anyone who could give him that. And a judge—yes, well, that is the source of the most important kind of approval for a lawyer, isn’t it?”
I thought he was wrong about the way Elliott viewed me and almost certain he was right about the way he had become attached to Jeffries.
“And you think this judge abused Elliott’s trust?”
It was a question only someone who had never known Calvin Jeffries could have asked.
“It’s like I told you, there were things that at the time did not seem like much.”
As I said this I began to doubt whether they would seem any more important now. Maybe I had read too much into them.
“A short time after they first became acquainted, Elliott missed a deadline. Or at least he was told he had missed a deadline. It seems odd. He was always very well organized. When you practice law,” I explained parenthetically, “there are time limits on everything. Ten days to file this, twenty days to respond to that, everything has a schedule, and if you fail to meet it the consequences can be lethal: You lose the motion, you pay costs to the other side, you lose the case. Elliott knew that. When he told me what had happened he looked like death itself. But when I saw him the next day, he had that embarrassed, grateful look of someone who has just been saved from his own stupidity. The judge, he informed me, had simply instructed his clerk to back-date the document. So far as anyone would ever know, Elliott had done everything right.”