Personal Effects: Dark Art

by J. C. Hutchins

  New York County District Attorney’s Office.

  William V. Taylor, District Attorney.

  By lunchtime, my mind was throbbing from a Google-, DSM-and textbook-powered crash course in psychosomatic blindness. (Did you know that, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, conversion disorders are very uncommon, representing only three percent of mental hospital admissions each year—and even fewer cases deal specifically with sight loss?) I was half-jumping at shadows, at Dark Men. Rattled. Something more than Martin Grace’s graphic, delusional death visions was gnawing at my brain. It was something cold and faraway, familiar … but ultimately unreachable.

  At noon, I was thrilled to escape The Brink, if only for an hour. I surfaced and sat beneath Primoris Maximus, the hospital grounds’ spectacular oak tree. Primoris’ name was bastardized Latin meaning, “The first, the most important.”

  And it was. The tree was so old, awesome and iconic that a stylized rendition of its image played brand-friendly logo for the hospital. It was triumphant this time of year, leaves ablaze in autumnal amber and crimson. A crisp breeze rushed through the grass around me, rustling the large art pad in my lap, giving the sketch pencil resting on its surface a good reason to roll about.

  I had just finished reviewing the notes I’d taken in my office, and slipped the smaller Moleskine sketchpad back into my satchel. Before coming topside, I’d concocted a vague strategy on how to approach Martin Grace, and had even settled on a personal mantra for my sessions with him: Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound … he’s blind, but help him see. The man was a musician. It suited him.

  I reached into the wrinkled brown paper bag resting by my thigh and pulled out a Granny Smith apple. Lunches in The Brink’s cobwebby cafeteria might be free for employees, but they’re ashen, antiseptic things. Withered green beans, flavorless chicken breasts, meatloaf so soggy it was better suited for sloppy joes. Give me ten-cent fruit from a Chinatown street vendor any day. Make that every day.

  I took a bite, grinning and grimacing at the apple’s blissful tartness. The rest of my lunch—a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and yogurt—would have to wait.

  The crux of my strategy with Grace was to learn more about his vision loss. This event two years ago had prevented him from killing even more people—or more appropriately, had coincided with the end of death around him. Unlike Dr. Peterson, I wasn’t convinced that Grace had committed these crimes. According to the report, even investigators admitted that his alibis were solid.

  He might have conspired to kill these people, but that would’ve required an accomplice. The district attorney’s office wasn’t charging anyone else with the crimes. Grace was the horse those folks were betting on, and they’d beat his ass until they crossed the finish line.

  Grace’s guilt or innocence was certainly important to me … but I suspected I wouldn’t unearth that information until I unlocked the secret to his blindness. What did it represent, in Grace’s mind? Psychic self-flagellation? An escape for the chilling visions he’d insisted he’d had? A way to silence the killer’s voice inside him, the thing he called the Inkstain?

  Like basketball—an art form in its own right, a thing I reckoned more full-court dance than press—there are rules in art therapy, as well as tactics for sneaking past a sharp defense. These methods are cornerstones in sessions. Assume a calm and non-judgmental demeanor. Ask the patient to draw a tree, or a family, or a person. Have the patient discuss the picture, reflect about what’s on the page and what it might represent. Armed with those techniques … and enough backstory on the patient … you can slowly guide him toward insight. Insight begets vision. Vision begets revelation. Revelations beget breakthroughs.

  With Martin Grace, insight wasn’t the only thing I was hoping for. Sight was my goal.

  I’d had enough experience to know that my book-cramming and armchair strategies would only go so far. My job is a lot like the creative process itself: if you treat the playbook as gospel, you’re doomed. Therapists must be adaptive, fleet-footed and improvisational. The way you interact with a patient—and the art the patient creates—must be as unique as the person you’re treating. Unfortunately, my blind man in the basement was so “unique” he was in his own psychological zip code.

  I leaned my back against the oak tree’s rugged trunk and closed my eyes. I made an effort to listen, really listen to the world, its heartbeat. I heard the faraway voices of other lunching Brinkvale employees. The faint roar of a motorcycle on Veterans Memorial Highway, a quarter-mile away. I raised the apple to my mouth and took a bite, relishing the snap of its peel against my teeth. I savored the sounds and wondered if this is what being blind feels like.

  I snorted. Even with my eyelids closed, the sunlight was creeping onto my rods and cones, warm and red. My eyes still worked. Grace’s didn’t. Or at least, a part of him thought they didn’t. He had willed himself blind to escape his demon, his Dark Man.

  The wind gusted again, colder now. I shivered. I sensed another faraway whisper in my mind—I knew this tickling sensation, welcomed its intimacy—and opened my art pad.

  The creative inspiration swam and somersaulted inside my mind. I let my hand breeze over the paper in brisk elliptical motions, my pencil a half-inch above the textured surface, letting the tickle find shape. A moment later, the charcoal etched a light, curved horizontal line, and then—bisecting it—a longer, curved vertical line.

  Yes. I’d thought that’s where we were going with this. I let it take over.

  The rest came in a blur of swift, gray arcs and tighter, darker crosshatchings: his eyes, sunken and sullen; the tiny trenches of crow’s feet, stretching back to his ears; the impassive lines of his thin lips; the slight, asymmetrical nose, likely from a break long ago; the close-cut hair.

  I pulled the pencil away for a moment, my hand still itching to say more, and saw Martin Grace staring back at me. The eyes. My pencil insisted that they weren’t quite right. I darkened the pupils, made them bigger. No. Bigger still. Inspiration insisted, and I ran with it, like I always do, unthinking, filling the white space beneath his eyelids now … yes, more, the tickle whispered … and now the stuff was squirting from his tear ducts, spilling out onto his cheekbones, surging and gurgling like crude oil down his face, dark gray, darker now, no, black, blacker, where are my brushes, where is my India ink, it’s gotta be darker—

  “Wait!”

  I snapped out of my zone—my creative place, my cave—and nearly yelped. The pencil slipped in my hand, slicing a panicked, manic line across the page.

  I looked up at the person standing in front of me. A middle-aged woman gazed back, her expression equal parts wary and concerned. I felt hot blood swell under my cheeks, felt my eyebrows kick upward in chagrin. Good God, I thought. So effing embarrassed. Few people see this side of me, the spirit slice that takes over when I create and pour myself into that whole-wide-world of white space.

  I blinked, and recognized the woman. Annie Jackson. Night shift.

  “Ah … heh. Hi, Annie,” I said. I placed the pencil beside me and picked up the Granny Smith off the grass. Feeling stupid, I kept it simple. “Hi.”

  Still blushing. I wanted to scramble up the side of Primoris, build a treehouse and never come down. I smiled, praying I looked more Brinkvale employee than patient.

  The look on Annie’s round face softened, and she returned my smile. Annie was an eleven-to-seven gal. I was almost as befuddled by her presence here during sunshine hours as I was by the frenetic sketch in my lap. I glanced down at the pad. Half of Martin Grace’s face was covered in hastily scribbled ooze.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt.” She gave a little laugh. It was a throaty, lovely staccato, a perfect complement to her Southern accent. “It’s just, I thought, it’s a fantastic portrait.” She eyed the page and shrugged. The large purse under her arm bounced with her shoulder, its black strap a marionette string. “Too late now. Mind if I sit down? My dogs are barkin’.”
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  I nodded, and patted my palm on the grass. My grin was a bit more genuine now.

  “Take a load off, Annie.”

  The nurse rolled her brown eyes, but gave another chuckle. She tugged a long slice of blonde-gray hair behind her ear.

  “Yeah, like I haven’t heard that before,” she said, groaning slightly as she sagged down beside me. “Still. Gets me every time. You know, my husband wooed me with that line.” She dug a hand into her purse.

  “No kidding?” I asked. I didn’t know Annie Jackson very well—I’d only chatted with her the few times I’d burned the midnight oil here—but I knew that her wit was Ginsu-sharp, and that she smoked like a fiend. Sure enough, Annie produced a pink disposable lighter from her purse, and a cigarette so long and thin it looked like a joint run through a pasta press.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, lighting her smoke. “Met M.J. at a party. This was years ago, back in the ’80s.” She gave me a motherly smile that was so convincing, I barely noticed the sly twinkle in her eyes. “You were just a baby then, God bless your little heart.”

  I chuckled, feeling my tension ebb. I now knew Annie also had a gift for putting people at ease.

  “Now this was a party, Zach,” she continued. “I don’t know how you New York kids do things, but in Atlanta, we do things big, and we do ’em right. There wasn’t a place to put your buns, this party was so packed. So we’re introduced, he’s sitting on a comfy chair—‘Annie Stormand, meet Michael Jeremy Jackson; M.J., meet Annie’—and that audacious soul slaps his lap with both hands, does a ‘come hither’ with his eyes and says what you just said.”

  I giggled, and took a bite of my apple. “What’d you do?”

  “I said what any self-respecting woman says to a lyric-quotin’ man named Michael Jackson,” Annie said. She took a drag off her cigarette for dramatic effect. “I told him to beat it.”

  Now we were both cackling, Annie blowing smoke into the sky and me wiping away tears, and I was so grateful she was here because after the morning I’d had, the art my hand had just spun—and the somber evening to come—goddamn, I needed a good belly laugh.

  We smiled in the noon sunlight, enjoying the buzzy, giddy afterglow you get after sharing a good joke. I reached into my lunch bag and pulled out my sandwich. She finally nodded at the art pad still in my lap.

  “You’re really good,” she said. “Maybe it’s even better than it was before. You get into a zone, don’t you?”

  I took a bite of my sandwich and nodded, enjoying the salty-sweetness of the peanut butter and raspberry preserves.

  “Michelle’s like that, too,” Annie said. “Twelve years old, but she’s gonna be a star someday. She bangs the hell out of those drums, Zach. Practices all the time. But when she plays, oh dear, look out. She’s in another place.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We all have that secret, safe place inside.” I paused, noodling over her words. I tapped the sketch. “You said it was better than it was before …”

  She inhaled an emphatic uh-huh, and then exhaled. “This black stuff you drew on him. Makes it less real, but more … realistic. I bet that’s what he’s like on the inside. I’m here today because I’m pulling a double shift, Zach. I was the one who admitted him last night. Midnight, to avoid the media.” Her face faltered. Her voice was low now. “He’s cruel.”

  My stomach tightened, again. I stopped in mid-bite, felt the raspberry jam squirt between my teeth, sensed a glob of the stuff land on my shirt. I swallowed, hard.

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked. It came out sounding more like a dry-throated croak than a question, but Annie didn’t seem to notice. “I’m … ah. Doc Peterson assigned me to him. I’m going down in a few hours.”

  Annie’s chocolate eyes narrowed.

  “Sonuvawhore,” she said, and then immediately pressed a hand over her lips. Now it was her turn to blush. “I’m sorry about that, I truly am.” I shook my head: It doesn’t matter. Her eyes flitted to my art pad, then back to my face. “I just can’t imagine why our attic madman would put you on this. You know this cat’s story, don’t you? You’ve seen the papers, right?”

  “His admittance report, some of his background.”

  “Not his papers, hon,” Annie said. She rummaged in her purse again. “Newspapers. Here.”

  She passed over a crumpled page torn from that morning’s New York Times. I read the headline—MURDER TRIAL BEGINS NEXT WEEK FOR ‘BLIND’ MAN—and scanned the article, which was mercifully short. My eyes reached the end of the story. They stopped. They doubled back to the last paragraph.

  There was my surname, in the walk-off quote.

  “I cannot understate my office’s dedication to convicting Mr. Grace,” said New York District Attorney William V. Taylor. “We will not allow a serial killer to walk these streets. The man might be blind, he might not be. But he is guilty, and I’ll personally ensure that he is punished to the law’s fullest extent—including the death penalty, if the jury allows it and the moratorium is lifted.”

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  Annie placed her hand on my shoulder. Her voice was gentle, sympathetic. “Yeah. I’m sorry, darlin’, but it looks like you’re in a real professional pickle.”

  I pulled my eyes away from the newspaper, to Annie’s worried face. So. She knew, too. I wasn’t upset by this. I’ve never tried to hide whose son I was (well, not since back in my Anti-Zach days), but I’ve never flaunted it, either. Within days of being hired at The Brink, people had deduced that my dad was the D.A., confirmed it with me, and tweeted the news like little songbirds. I was a little surprised that the gossip had crept up the clock to the night shift staff … but them’s the breaks.

  Annie patted my shoulder again. “I’ve seen him on TV. I bet he’s just putting on a show for the reporters, right? You gotta be a bulldog on crime in this town. But I think it’s just an act, just for the cameras.”

  I shook my head. “It isn’t,” I whispered. “It never has been.”

  After a minute of strained silence, Annie and I stood and walked away from Primoris Maximus, back toward The Brink. As Annie made small talk and I half-listened, I gazed up into the bright autumn sky, marveling at the battleship clouds scraping across the horizon, knowing that it would be sunset when I saw the sky again, knowing that it would be far darker, long before that.

  It was time to make my rounds and tend to my people.

  And then, time to meet Martin Grace.

  4

  Brinkvale is the mental health equivalent of Tatooine.

  “If there’s a bright center to the universe,” my hero Luke Sky-walker once said, “you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.” My patients’ stories are stranger than anything you’d find in that planet’s intergalactic cantina, but luckily this day’s sessions were brief and mostly positive that afternoon.

  Understanding my patients requires patience, the kind reserved for puzzle boxes and correspondence chess. Today, I finally understood a message that Nam Ngo, a benign Vietnamese watch repairman from Brooklyn, had built into a sculpture. The man hasn’t said a word in twenty years. But when I poured a boxful of clockwork parts onto his dorm table two weeks ago and asked him to tell me about himself, Nam’s bespectacled face brightened, and he’d gotten to work.

  Brinkvale staff now called him “The Clocktalker” (many of my patients seem to acquire these superhero-like nicknames), and I’ve been charged with deciphering the meanings behind his tick-tock sculptures.

  Today, Ngo’s sculpture was a man-shaped thing with a watch for a head. Nam twisted a key in the tiny mechanoid’s back and beamed. The metal man ran in place, its head ratcheting to look over its shoulder. As it repeated this, Nam had made a circle with one hand and placed it to his eye. His other hand turned an invisible crank near his face.

  Ten minutes later, I’d deduced that his favorite movie was North By Northwest. The compass-like position of the hands on the watch’s face was the critical clue. The automaton’s movements repl
icated Nam’s favorite scene: Cary Grant being chased by the crop-duster.

  That was the session. No blaring breakthrough “Hallelujah chorus”; Nam was simply telling me his story. I considered his case a long-term project.

  After my visit with The Clocktalker, I spent time with “Bloody Mary”—Mary Winfield, a beautiful thirty-something with a phobia of reflective surfaces. When we met a month ago, she painted the same image, day after day, with her elegant brown fingers: Mary’s mirror image, covered in streaks of blood, holding a decomposing infant. “Baby Blue” represented the son she’d drowned a year ago at a public pool in Queens.

  Since then, Mary’s art had slowly pulled away from this horror. In today’s finger painting, Baby Blue was beginning to leave his mother’s arms. The child would ascend as the weeks went on, I suspected—rising higher and higher on the canvas, until Mary finally found peace.

  Jaded Morlocks say that The Brink’s foundations slide a little deeper into New York’s bedrock each year. The structure is home to vermin of all kinds: spiders the size of silver dollars, rats as fast as they are large, legions of fat, black cockroaches. Our charitably named “pest control problem” has been a source of shrieking, screaming madness for Gerald Carver, a former bug spray chemist.

  Today, Carver—aka “The Bug Man”—drew pictures of his own hands, insects and worms burrowing tunnels deep into the flesh. Carver believed that the critters had finally corralled him here, in their territory, to exact vengeance. I admitted that the multi-legged masses have their run of the place, but gently insisted that Carver was neither the target of an insect conspiracy, nor victim of a karmic bitch-slap. I left the session feeling itchy, slapping at invisible fleas.

  And there was Jane Doe, the amnesiac. And Jimmy “Park Place” Van Zandt, the Monopoly-obsessed autistic. And others. All of my visits were abbreviated, brisk things.

  I wished for more time with them; I found the plights of these patients comforting, compared to the idea of meeting Martin Grace.