My Name Is Nathan Lucius

by Mark Winkler

  My days are simple. I wake up. I get fed breakfast and my meds for the day. They’ve got the meds just right. I’m here and I’m not. I play chess with Mr. Naicker. I watch Socks Ferreira rock, or Old Man Jakes drool. There are no surprises, mostly. When there are, they usually take the form of a new arrival. There are two kinds of new arrival. Those who kick and scream. And those who don’t. Both types make for good stories.

  Other surprises occur on a more random basis. For example, from time to time the orange-haired fellow goes ballistic and does a Ricky Chin. We all watch while Johnson and September wrestle him to the ground. Nobody has quite figured out what sets him off. That’s what makes it surprising, I suppose.

  I have lunch. I watch TV. I read books that Doctor Petrakis lends me.

  “How did you feel after you finished The Road?” she says one day. I shrug. I’m talking again. A shrug’s easier. I’m not trying to be difficult.

  “I really don’t know,” I say. “Very similar to how anyone feels after they finish a book, I suppose. Sleepy, mostly.”

  “Weren’t you moved by the lengths the father goes to in caring for his son?”

  I shrug again. This time I don’t say anything. I don’t know much about protective fathers. Or mothers.

  Sometimes I think of Madge. I try not to. It makes me sad. I miss her.

  I think of Mrs. du Toit and the crazy things we got up to. It makes me horny. When my meds allow it. I try to feel sorry for what I did to her. I can’t. She was leaving. Going away from me. Anyway, I wasn’t there at the time I killed her. You’d remember something like that if you were there.

  Sometimes I think of Sonia and Sarel and the rest trying to sell ad space to people who want it less and less. I bet they’re still at it. I’m sure it’s the same thing every day. Sonia bitching at her troops. One thing, two things. So not very different to my days, actually. They’re the hamsters on the wheel. Their job is to keep the wheel spinning. Here, the wheel runs without us. We don’t have to do anything to make it turn. It’s turned for us. I wonder if Sonia would like the drugs they give you in here. I hope she doesn’t hate me too much.

  I have supper. It’s like the aeroplane food I had once. I swallow my pills without arguing. There are only a few these days. Not even a proper handful. I sleep. Sleeping is possibly the highlight of my day. I know that sounds sad. It’s not. As long as there’s no dark and no pine needles, each sleep is a triumph. I sleep like a drunkard. Even though the nights are now hot and humid. Even though mosquitoes find their way into my room. I still have the special concession of a private ward. I don’t talk about it in case somebody notices. I am allowed to sleep with the light on. It’s a bright white neon. I don’t mind. I’ve never slept better.

  I still see Doctor Petrakis. These days she sits on the chair next to me. Aphrodite is the goddess of love. Petrakis comes from petros, which is Greek for stone. When I point this out to her she puts her head to one side and smiles. It isn’t a real smile. I don’t suppose I’d just given her new information.

  “What do you think that means, Nate?” she says.

  “Not everything has to mean something,” I say. “Sometimes things just are.”

  I don’t see her as often as I used to. I think we’re down to one session a week. I’m trying to persuade myself that she’s not going away.

  It’s hard to understand weeks in here. One day is like the next or the one before. Most of us don’t bother to think about time passing. There are a lot of things we don’t need to think about here. And we don’t really need weeks. Or weekends. A Sunday is as good as a Wednesday to a crazy person.

  It’s perfect.

  Almost.

  “Tell me more about the murders they say I committed,” I say to Doctor Petrakis when we get together again.

  “What do you want to know?” she asks. I’m fine with the answers coming back as questions now. I no longer want to chew my hand off in frustration. Or bite the inside of my cheeks until they bleed. She stands up and pulls a chair close to mine. She brings an aroma of jasmine and lemons with her. Summer means no more scarf. No whispering stockings. The pool at her Rondebosch house must be sparkling now. Clear and leaf-free. She crosses her sun-browned legs at the ankles. She balances her notepad on a knee.

  “Is there any way at all that someone else might have committed those murders?”

  She doesn’t answer. She’s probably thinking up another question.

  “Apart from Madge’s, of course,” I say to give her time. “We both know I did Madge.”

  She frowns. Opens her mouth and closes it.

  “Only because she asked me to,” I remind her.

  She opens her mouth again.

  “Why do you ask, Nate?”

  “Because I don’t feel guilty about them. I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel anything. As far as I’m concerned I wasn’t even there. I just want to know if it’s irrefutable.” Refuted doesn’t mean counter-argued or disputed. Many people think it does. Especially journalists like Dino. Refuted means disproved, totally and utterly.

  Doctor Petrakis gets it. “There will always be grey areas, Nate.”

  “Come on, Aphrodite. I’m not looking for appeasement here. I just want to know if there’s a sliver of a chance that it wasn’t me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if there is, it means the guy who really did it might still be out there.”

  Doctor Petrakis looks at me. She sighs.

  “Nate, they found your DNA. Your fingerprints. You had a proven connection with each of the women. Nobody on earth was connected to each of them the way you were. The way they were killed, which was exactly how you tried to kill Sonia, and how you had killed Madge. Fibres from Madge’s scarf on their skin. The photographs you left with the bodies. Those very, very specific, unique photographs. There is just no way someone else could have done it.”

  She sounds like she’s channelling the gentle Mr. Carver.

  “Thank God for that,” I say.

  My name is Nathan Lucius

  My name is Nathan Lucius. I am thirty-two years old. I used to run. I don’t know if I was running from something or towards it. Now I play chess. Every day I wake up into a world that is exactly the same as it was the day before. Whatever the season or the weather or the day of the week, every day is the same. I don’t have to run to get there. Or away from it. I like it. It means I never have to remember anything. Or forget anything. Ever again.

  “I wonder if there are holes in my brain,” I say to Doctor Petrakis one day, mostly because I have nothing else to say. She’s sitting close enough for me to see what she’s writing. Her legs are even browner. Holes in the brain? she’s written. She’s underlined Holes twice. I know what she’s going to say. She says it.

  “What makes you say that, Nate?”

  What makes me say that is, it’s a whole new game to play with Doctor Petrakis.

  “In each hole there’s a tiny glass jar. In one, for instance, Mrs. du Toit is floating. In a red dress and red shoes. Not as a foetus, you understand. As Mrs. du Toit. There’s no umbilical cord. Just Mrs. du Toit suspended in some fluid in a jar in a hole in my brain. Completely isolated from the rest of me. Insulated. Unconnected. Disconnected. And all the others, each in their separate jars floating in their own fluid. Each a separate jar in a separate hole in my brain. With no connection to one another.”

  Doctor Petrakis tilts the pad away from me. She’s writing. I wonder if you can teach yourself to figure out what someone is writing by watching the other end of the pen. She’s got it wrong again. She hasn’t asked the question. The question is “Why?”

  I answer it anyway. I put my sincere face on. “I need to resolve the not-remembering somehow,” I say.

  She looks up. There’s a less than professional wetness in her eyes. The wrinkles at their corners have deepened. I suppose I’ve bee
n more than a little trying. She lowers her pen. She is more beautiful than ever.

  “Oh, Nate,” she says. She reaches out and almost puts her hand on my knee. She retracts it and puts it to her chest, just below her throat.

  Exactly where her scarf will be when winter comes around again.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks are due to Rachel McDermott and Dr. Kevin Stoloff for invaluable advice relating to mental health issues. All blunders in this regard are mine alone.

  I am grateful to Julian Snitcher and Paul Warmeant, who offered encouragement when I needed it most.

  Thanks are also due to my tenacious agent, James Woodhouse, and to my imperturbable editor, Lynda Gilfillan, for so calmly making molehills out of mountains.

  As always, I am indebted to my wife, Michelle, and to our girls, for putting up with my own peculiar brand of madness that descends when I’m writing.