Personal Effects: Dark Art

by J. C. Hutchins

  Pause.

  “Library. Messy. Always messy.”

  “Right on,” I said. I grabbed my satchel by the office door. “Stay put. I’ll be right there.”

  It’s criminal, what’s happened to Brinkvale’s library.

  When I first visited this cavernous room three months ago, I’d been amazed by its endless oak bookcases, curved walls and spectacular chandeliers. The room was designed in the art nouveau style, all sweeping lines, brazen and optimistic. The Brink’s library was a paradox, a place that shouldn’t exist in such a hard-cornered, utilitarian building.

  But my amazement had immediately soured. Most of the bookshelves don’t contain real books at all. The once-colorful murals painted on its walls are peeling like sunburned skin. The chandeliers are encrusted with rust and endless, ancient cobwebs. This subterranean cathedral was cursed by unsound architecture and sinful neglect. Patients rarely ventured here.

  It was a lost, heartbroken place.

  The library was maintained by Ezra Goolsby, a man as old and wretched as The Brink itself. The geezer had worked here for decades. Rumors about Goolsby abounded at The Brink: he’d suffered a stroke that made him physically incapable of smiling; he was a “true” Morlock, living in a small room behind the library; he had once been a Brinkvale patient … it went on and on.

  Worse still, Goolsby cared less about books than the people around him. But the man was a news junky, a periodical fiend. So while The Brink’s library was a tragedy, its collection of bound newspapers and magazines dating back to the 1960s was awe-inspiring.

  I entered the library, on the lookout for the grim codger. I heard the distinctive slop-slosh of a mop plunging into a metal bucket, and followed the noise. Malcolm was near the room’s imposing main desk, the place where Goolsby typically reigned over his bibliofiefdom. Malcolm looked up, gave a low-key salute.

  I enjoyed being in the presence of this man. Malcolm Sashington had serenity about him, a “let it ride” vibe that I appreciated, particularly in this madhouse. Whenever I saw him, I was reminded of locksmiths and secrets.

  “How goes, Zach T?” he said. He tugged the mop from the wringer and flopped it onto the tile.

  “Hangin’ in there by my fingernails,” I replied. My eyes ticked around the library, glancing through the rows of bookcases, across the large tables near us. “Where’s the old man?”

  “Gool’s not here. Leaves as soon as he sees me. Were I your age, I’d think he’s got a problem with me. Old enough to know better. Goolsby doesn’t hate black people. Goolsby hates everybody.”

  I laughed. It echoed against the library’s curved walls.

  “Sounded like you needed something,” he said, patting the walkie-talkie on his belt. His hand jostled the large metal hoop next to his radio. The keys there clinked. “Kinda urgent. You here to call in that favor?”

  About a month ago, I’d gone topside to catch a breath of fresh air … and caught a whiff of something else altogether: Malcolm toking up on his dinner break. In typical cucumber-cool style, Malcolm hadn’t freaked. But he had asked me if I’d snitch. My reply had brought me a boon. A Malcolm Favor.

  “I don’t think this compares, but you be the judge. You got a good memory?”

  Malcolm worked the floor with his mop. “If you’re lookin’ for history, talk to Goolsby. He’s The Brink’s elephant. Never forgets.”

  “Goolsby eats human souls,” I snorted. “And it’s got nothing to do with The Brink. Come on. You got a knack for remembering things or not?”

  “How far we goin’ back?”

  “Twenty years.”

  Malcolm let out a low whistle. “Slippin’ into favor territory. Let’s find out.”

  “All right. I don’t know when or where this happened, but it was probably in the city. Guy kills his wife, paints himself with her blood.”

  Malcolm leaned against his mop handle and gave me an insultingly bored look.

  “That’s it?” he asked. “You’re gonna have to do a lot better than that, Zach T. Wouldn’t even make a condo association newsletter in that town.”

  “Would it help if the guy was a crazy vet, and ate her skin?”

  My friend nearly yawned now. “Son, lots of vets came back with lots of problems. Dime a dozen. You’re looking at one, dig? So watch what you say about those who serve.”

  “A veterinarian,” I replied. “Dude cuts her up. When she dies, dunks himself in her blood, streaks the town.” I grimaced. “He cooked up her skin and ate it like bacon.”

  The mop stick banged against the floor like a gunshot.

  “Oh hell yes,” he said, his eyes wide. “Not twenty years back. Thirty”

  “Thirty?” I asked. “But that doesn’t … Are you sure?”

  “Hell yeah. Super Bowl Twelve, kiddo. Cowboys versus Steelers. I can’t tell you who won that game anymore, but I remember opening up the paper that morning fully expecting to see a story about my man Harvey Martin and the Cowboys’ ‘Doomsday Defense.’ Instead, we all got that story on the front page. Nearly puked in my Cheerios.”

  Malcolm stooped to pick up the mop. He stared into the bucket’s brackish water.

  “Mighty hard thing to forget,” he said finally.

  I nodded. “Cool, that’s enough.” I turned, now striding through the corridors of bookshelves, searching for the proverbial needle in this moldering haystack. I was surrounded by endless green books, each as tall as a man’s arm, all identical save for the handwritten notes on their spines.

  (TIMES) AUG—SEPT 1984.

  (POST) JAN—FEB 1985.

  I moved from case to case, shelf to shelf, finally finding (TIMES) JAN—FEB from thirty years ago. I hefted the book from its dusty slot, and brought it back to one of the tables.

  If Malcolm was right, then Dad was wrong. I didn’t want Dad to be wrong.

  “Last chance,” I hissed, flipping through the pages. Headlines, halftone photos and ads screamed by, time capsules of 1978 and ’79: “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water …” … Investigation Continues In French Tanker Explosion … “We can do whatever we want. We’re college students!” … More Bodies Found In Gacy Murders … “Ain’t nobody can fly a car like Hooper!”

  Finally, there it was, January 15, and there he was. The “Bloodbath Killer.”

  The face in the mug shot looked nothing like last night’s Invisible Man. Not even thirty years (twenty years, I thought, Dad said twenty years) of hard time could’ve made a difference.

  My stranger was Caucasian. The Bloodbath Killer was Asian.

  My fingers dug into the yellowed paper, tearing it from the book.

  I slumped into a chair, tossing my satchel onto the table, ignoring how the clunk reverberated around the room. I glared at the ripped page in my hand, barely reading the story, finally spotting my father’s name near its end, listed as a first-year associate. That was lawyer-speak for a lowly “assistant to the assistant” position. Last night, Dad pulled a memory from the earliest days of his career and ad-libbed. Lied.

  “That’s what he said back then, too,” Dad had said. “That’s why he bathed in his wife’s blood. To finally become ‘visible.’” But no such detail was mentioned in this news story. And why should it be? It wasn’t true.

  “Dad, you son of a bitch.”

  Tears, bitter and bright, filled my eyes.

  “Hey Zach T,” Malcolm said. He sat down across from me. “You okay, kid?”

  “Past twenty-fours have been pretty rough,” I muttered, wiping my eyes. “A real clusterfuck. Everything’s different now.”

  “You talkin’ about that blind man in Max? Martin Grace?”

  I groaned. “Yeah, sure, why the hell not? I’ve been finding truths and lies all over the place. Grace is a frickin’ ant in amber. Doesn’t have a past, and doesn’t have a future—not without my help, anyway. He’s spent so long flogging himself for things he didn’t do, he thinks he deserves it. He doesn’t.” I sighed. “None of us de
serve it.”

  Malcolm tapped the weathered pages. “What’s this have to do with …?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t,” I said. “Not really. This is just my motif for the day, ‘it ain’t what you thought it was, kid,’ life’s way of taking a crap on you while you’re down …”

  I shrugged, suddenly fed up with myself. “Sorry. Rambling. Usually not like this.”

  “I know you’re not,” Malcolm said. He leaned back in his chair. “So. You want some free advice?”

  “Shit, I’ll pay for it at this point.”

  He laughed.

  “You ain’t Charlie Brown, I ain’t Lucy and the doctor is most definitely not in. I don’t know what’s going on with you or that blind man, or that”—he nodded to the paper in my hand—“but I know the sight of a man who’s been beamed by more than a few curve balls.”

  I let out a knowing heh.

  “Listen. People are smart,” he said. “People usually know what they need to do at times like this, they know it in their hearts, but they gotta hear it from someone else. So I’m not going to say anything that’ll surprise you.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay.”

  Malcolm smirked, his face suddenly young and impish. He reached beneath the table, and pulled out his key ring. It clattered onto the table. Malcolm placed his hands on either side of the ring, palms flat against the wood grain.

  “We walk a straight line, brother. Day after day we walk straight lines because it’s easy to do that, because we need to do that, because it’s efficient.” He winked. “Preee-dictability. Right?”

  I opened my mouth, but Malcolm slapped his palms against the table. I watched, befuddled to the bone, as he then banged out a thunderous drum roll. The keys between his hands trembled on the surface.

  “But see?” he called over the noise, pounding harder now. “Shit happens! Earthquakes, curve balls, meteors from space!” I watched, mesmerized, as the keys bounced and skipped, slowly marking a drunken path toward the edge of the table, toward Malcolm’s lap. “Can’t walk a straight line in a earthquake, can ya? Well?”

  “No!” I hollered. I couldn’t help but grin. This was ridiculous library theater, a wind-tunnel “Afterschool Special.”

  “NO!” Malcolm cried, smiling. “Then what do you do?” The keys clinked merrily, dancing ever-onward toward the edge. Malcolm glanced from the keys to my face, his brown eyes now insistent. “What do you do, Zach T? Life’s giving you lemons, life’s sticking it in and breaking it off, it’s got the ground shakin’, and if you can’t walk a straight line cuz walking a straight line is suicide, then what do you do?”

  The keys were a half-inch from the edge now. Now a quarter inch. My hand snaked out, and snatched the ring just before it plummeted from view.

  “You improvise,” I said. The keys were heavy and strangely comforting in my hand. “Do the unexpected.”

  The janitor nodded.

  “That you do,” he said. “If the world is throwing you curve balls, learn to pitch. Learn the rules. Fire back.” He nodded again to the newspaper story. “I bet it’ll work for whatever you’re dealing with there. Shoot, I bet it’ll work for that blind man, too.”

  I tossed the keys to him. “Learn to pitch,” I said.

  “Yep.” Malcolm scooted his chair away from the table. I watched him shuffle back to his mop and bucket. “You learn the rules, know how the dance goes, then you improvise. Dig?”

  “Dug,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I walked toward the library’s curved doorway and the spartan hall beyond. “So. That favor. Did I just call it in?”

  Malcolm looked up from his work and grinned.

  “Hell no, Zach T! You ask me something that’s easy-peasy to remember, and then you give me a chance to scream like a banshee and raise holy hell in Goolsby’s castle. I nearly owe you another … favor for the good times.”

  … He shooed me with his hand. “Go on, git.”

  I returned to my office on Level 3, feeling a bit like my old self. Malcolm’s advice would be good for handling Martin Grace later that day—in fact, I thought a had a solid improvisational curve ball to blast at the blind man this afternoon. Dealing with my father … that was a different story. I filed him away in my mind, buried myself in my work, anything not to deal with it.

  Avoidance, yes. I knew it then, but couldn’t put forth the effort to care.

  I scanned my patients’ artwork and posted it to The Brink’s website. I made mid-morning rounds, briefly checking in with the patients with whom I’d worked yesterday and chatted with their psychiatrists, promising to file paperwork by day’s end.

  And then I was off to work with today’s patients. These were the high-risk, disturbed, violent folk. The people probably destined to spend the rest of their lives here.

  These devastatingly ill patients resided on the eighth floor of The Brink, the level dubbed “Golgotha.” The only thing separating Level 8 from New York bedrock was Level 9, “The Sub,” home to the boiler room and storage.

  Perhaps Level 8’s nickname was meant to be optimistic. After all, Golgotha was where things were at their worst for Jesus Christ, and yet he rose from the dead, good as new. Perhaps the name represented transformation; a beginning.

  I couldn’t think of it in such terms. The patients here were treated with as much dignity and care as possible, but this was where The Brink’s dark legacy breathed on. This was Golgotha, the place of the skull, where crazies were sent to die in the dark.

  I spent some time with John Palmetto—aka Lore—a patient here since the 1980s. Palmetto had drawn inspiration from local urban legends, using those stories like cookbook directions to kill eleven teenage girls.

  I painted for—not with, but for—Diana Ellis, a woman so obsessed with the mutilation of human flesh that she’d spent two summer days in her Erie County farmhouse kitchen performing home-brewed autopsies on her family … and had then amputated her own arms. Brink-folk called her June Cleaver.

  I worked with a half-dozen Golgotha patients, and even through these sessions—positively harrowing by yesterday’s standards—I tuned out the crumbling surroundings and found solace in Malcolm’s advice. I found my footing. I improvised. It helped.

  I took The Brink’s elevator back to Level 3 to grab my lunch.

  Dr. Nathan Xavier was waiting by my office door.

  “Taylor, you look like shit.”

  It was clear Xavier took perverse glee in saying this. He grinned his plastic Ken grin, then primly straightened his spotless doctor’s coat. I brushed past him, unlocked the door and hurried inside. The room still reeked from this morning’s coffee spill. He followed me.

  “You’re killing my buzz,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Oh, just stopped by to drop off some paperwork. I don’t agree with many of your conclusions about Nam Ngo, your ‘Clocktalker.’ I slid my comments under your door.” He pointed at my feet. “You’re standing on them.”

  I stared down at the crumpled papers under my Vans. I picked them up. These were carbon copies; the originals had been sent to The Brink’s chief administrator, Dr. Peterson. It is clear that Brinkvale’s art therapist underestimates the psychoses of the patient, it began. I slapped the document on my desk.

  “What’s your problem, Xavier?”

  “Doctor Xavier,” he said. He glanced around my office, wrinkling his nose. “This place is a sty, Taylor. It stinks.” He nodded at the brown pile of soggy paper towels, still on the floor. “You’re a slob.”

  I snatched up the dripping wad and tossed it into my wastebasket. I sighed. My left palm was now soaked with cold coffee. I considered wiping it on my jeans just to appall the guy, but instead I gritted my teeth and took the high road. Again.

  “Xavier, what’s this about? Is Brinkvale life so dull that you have to gun after me again? Didn’t we just do this? Peterson’s on my side. His email said so.”

  I might not have seen much of Peterson since I was hired here, but two
months ago he’d served Xavier a polite smack-down after the young doctor criticized me during a staff meeting. Since then, Xavier’s tormenting was less frequent, but more irritating. Until today, that is.

  “It’s about you being a failure,” he replied. “Word around here is that you’re fucking up the Drake case. You’re losing it, cracking up.”

  “That’s … that’s not true.”

  “You sure? I watched the security footage from yesterday’s session with Grace. You let your guard down, lost control of the situation, and called the patient a son of a bitch. He might be crazy, but Grace was right about one thing: you are an amateur.”

  Xavier was spying on me? I clenched my fists.

  “You had no goddamned right—”

  “And you have no business treating him,” he snapped. “Or anyone else, for that matter. Look, it’s nothing personal, Taylor. It’s merely survival of the fittest … and you’re making yourself an easy target.”

  He extended his hand now. His face was wicked and cheerful.

  “But hey, congratulations on getting your name in the paper last week. You’re out of your mind, playing the ‘no comment’ card with these reporters. And still, a star is born. Daddy D.A. must be so proud.”

  To hell with the damned high road. I shook his hand, gripping it hard. I clapped him on the shoulder with my other hand. I squeezed harder. He squeezed back, growling.

  “You’re an asshole,” I said.

  “And you won’t be here much longer to say so,” he replied.

  I released him, fuming. Xavier grinned again, took a tiny bow, and stepped out of my office.

  I slid into my desk chair, wondering how long it would take Xavier to notice the palm-sized coffee stain on his lab coat.

  I was opening my desk drawer to grab my lunch when someone else knocked at the door. I looked up. The stranger wore a business suit and a brown raincoat. I immediately thought of Karl Malden in those old American Express ads: Don’t leave home without it.

  “Are you Zach Taylor?” he asked.