Ricky curled his hands around each other, being sure to keep the note hidden. How had he felt the day before during treatment? That might be a good enough answer. It might just be too soon to tell whether the “medicine” was having an effect, but so far he didn’t feel any different, and he didn’t know whether it was safer to tell the truth or tell the warden what he thought he wanted to hear. “Calm,” he said. Play the game. Keep his trust. “Ready to feel better.”
“Such progress! And so quickly!” Then, softer: “I knew it. Born to it. I just knew it.”
It’s something about you specifically.
“What did you know?”
“What don’t I know?” the warden said, brushing him off with the joke. Ricky smiled as brightly as he could.
“Anyway, I’m ready,” he said again, taking a deep breath as the warden cracked a wide smile. “But I wanted to ask you something,” he added.
That smile vanished.
“I . . . want assurances.” Squirming, Ricky looked down at his hands, picking at nothing on his nails. Thinking about devil’s bargains last night had given him this idea. The people who outsmarted the devil were always the ones who weren’t asking for things for themselves. “Kay. Leave her alone. Please, I’ll do whatever I can to help you, but just let her be.”
The warden weighed the request quite visibly, shifting from foot to foot with his hands tucked behind his back. Ricky had to wonder if perhaps he had miscalculated. He’d assumed that Crawford would do anything to get Ricky’s full cooperation, and Kay hardly seemed to matter to the man.
“If your progress continues,” the warden said at last, “I will consider lessening her treatments. But only if your progress continues.”
He made the outer circle of the room, looking everything over, then he returned to Ricky and gave him another brief inspection. Ricky clenched his fists tight when Crawford leaned in, took him by the wrists, and secured his cuffs again. He almost lost his grip on the note, his fingers cramping from curling so hard. The warden stepped back, dusting off his hands in an exaggerated way that irritated Ricky beyond reason.
“Well, I’ll leave you to your thoughts. In a few hours we can start again, Ricky. You have no idea how happy it makes me to hear that you’re ready, my boy. My Patient Zero.”
Ricky had heard those words before. Patient Zero. He shivered. The warden had been planning this for some time. His body relaxed just a little when the door finally closed.
How the hell was he supposed to read this note from Jocelyn when he could barely move his arms? He didn’t have long to grouse; Nurse Ash returned just a few moments later under the pretense of clearing his breakfast tray, though she kept looking over her shoulder like she could get in trouble even for that.
“It’s going to be like this every day?” he asked, sagging against the pillow when she had released him.
Nurse Ash looked just as exhausted as he felt, the skin under her eyes dark and bluish. “I’m afraid so.”
Ricky unrolled the note, smirking.
Heard the room service is terrible up there. You have got to complain to management. Me? I’ve been at the spa all day. —K
“A real comedian, that one,” Nurse Ash said kindly. “She . . . wasn’t at the spa.”
“I know what it means.” They were torturing her again. The shock therapy room. Ricky folded up the note and hid it under his mattress with his other contraband. Hopefully those “spa” days would be numbered now that he had made his devil’s bargain with the warden. It was worth it. At least one of them would be left alone. “Thank you for smuggling that in here.”
“Of course. Do you want me to tell her something for you?” He took the last little bite of his eggs before he let Nurse Ash take the tray. “I can try to get you a crayon and paper, but no promises.”
“Tell her I’m writing the manager a strongly worded letter,” he said, closing his eyes. “And tell her I’ll find a way to check us out of this joint. Somehow. Soon. Tell her I promise.”
“Do you know what this is all about, Ricky?”
The warden’s voice smoothed over him like a parent’s comforting embrace. It was like hearing a bedtime story, one that left him sleepy but unable to nod off entirely. His eyes followed the gem back and forth, and he knew total relaxation. Total emptiness. In fact, he had never felt emptier. Like a vessel. Yes, he was a vessel, and the warden’s words were filling him up.
“Legacy,” Ricky answered from somewhere deep in the back of his mind. “Forever. Eternity.”
It felt so good to be right. He would be rewarded.
“That’s right. That’s very good, Ricky.” That was the reward. Praise. He was doing well. The red stone went back and forth. He could feel the sunlight coming in through the window. Smell the mint on the warden’s breath. Some senses sharpened as others faded completely away. “Very, very good. What else?”
“Immortality.”
“Exactly. You’re getting this so fast. Do you know why I chose you, Ricky? Do you know why you had to be my Patient Zero?”
He didn’t know, but the stone, the rhythm, the back and forth, all of it told him that he dearly wanted to know. In fact, knowing the answer was the only important thing. The only thing, period.
“Why? Why was it me?”
“Others were clever,” the warden said. “Others were brighter, more educated, more eager to please, more interested in the science of it or the philosophy. But it turned out—to my dismay, I admit—that none of that was enough. In fact, the results were so far from what I wanted to achieve, they weren’t even truly part of the same experiment that you are. Then fate, the opposite of science but also its necessary partner, intervened, and the patient before you came very close, absolutely by accident. So I formed a new hypothesis. Biology. Biology was the key all along.” The warden sighed as if disappointed in himself, but he soon rallied. “You . . . You are curious like he was. Curiosity has movement, Ricky. It propels you always onward. It has momentum.”
Yes, momentum, just like the stone. Just like the stone swinging back and forth.
“Now relax, Ricky, and open your mind completely. There’s so much I need to tell you, so much you must carry onward into the future . . .”
He felt like his head had been sawed open and closed back up, but something had been left behind. His head ached—pounded—like his brain was too much stuffing in a small turkey. Too many words crowding the page.
Groaning, Ricky rolled back and forth on the bed, moving as much as he could with his hands restrained. This was a torture of a different kind. A vicious hangover when he hadn’t swallowed a drop. He grasped for what had happened, for the blank spot right there in the middle of the day. There was waking up, then breakfast, then reading Kay’s note, and then the orderlies had taken him to a room down the hall and sprayed him with icy water, giving him a hosing down that felt like it would tear his skin off. And then he was back in his room and the warden was waiting for him.
The red stone had come out of the leather case again and then . . . Nothing. There was the blank spot. But Ricky could feel that something was different, that he was somehow changed.
Ricky was no Eagle Scout, but he could tell it was now dusk. The warden had left open the blinds on his outside window, and the once bright light in the room had darkened to mellower orange.
This time of day always reminded Ricky of looking out over the water with Martin, Martin eating a shaved ice while Ricky pretend-sang whatever song came to mind. It was harder to picture now, like someone had taken scissors to his memories. He remembered he’d once sung a song by a man named Otis Redding, for example, even though now he couldn’t think of a single one of the man’s lyrics.
“What’s happening to me?” he whispered. Maybe it was a small thing, forgetting the words to a song, but it stuck in his mind. He would never forget a musician. That wasn’t him.
The door opened and he started banging his cuffed hands against the bed frame. Nurse Ash hurried in, a dinn
er tray balanced on her palms. Her hair was a wreck, hastily pinned under her hat but uneven on both sides, and Ricky spied the orderly he’d dubbed Lurch lingering right outside the door.
“Not much time tonight,” she said, glancing over her shoulder and making certain the door was shut before she unshackled him. “I don’t know if the warden is catching on. I hope not. Be careful tonight if you leave the room, all right? I’ll do my best to cause a scene downstairs. Maybe I can bribe Kay to throw a tantrum.”
“Try a book,” he said groggily. “She likes to read.”
“I’ll think about it, but maybe it’s better just to leave her out of it.”
“Keep her safe, okay?” His wrists ached and he sat up to rub them, feeling incredibly woozy the instant he lifted his head. “Did she send another note?”
“Of course.” Nurse Ash handed it to him, along with a crayon from her pocket. “I’ll try to grab you some paper tomorrow.”
She had brought his little cup of pills, too, and they looked the same. The warden wasn’t there to watch him take the medicine in the evenings, so he felt more confident they were aspirin. He took them, grateful for any kind of pain relief.
A hardening scoop of reconstituted potatoes and mushy, overcooked peas made up dinner tonight. He ate, losing his appetite with each mouthful. Kay’s note bolstered him, but only marginally. It was amazing to him that she could manage to get one to him every day—he hoped she would keep it up, because he had to hope for something.
Nothing new to report on the first floor. I think the nurse has a crush on you. She’s probably reading this, too—hi, nurse! You won a popularity contest in a mental hospital. You must feel so exceptional.
He chuckled softly and tucked the scrap of paper under his mattress to join the others. Running his spoon through the potatoes, he glanced at Nurse Ash, who seemed suddenly fascinated by the cracks in the tiles.
“Why are you helping us so much?” he asked. “Why help me?”
“Honestly?”
He nodded. Her cheeks turned a dark shade of magenta and she rubbed at an invisible stain on her dress. It didn’t bother him that she avoided eye contact. Whatever her reasons for helping, he doubted they were good. Maybe she had woken up to some kind of truth about the warden after he killed her friend.
Or maybe she was just a good person. One of the few.
“From the first day that I arrived here, I knew the warden was a rotten egg,” she said sadly. “But I got . . . I don’t know. Swept up. He gave me all these grand talks about how far I could go, you know? He said I could be a doctor, not just a nurse. That I could actually advance. It felt like he was on my side. I’d run up against a lot of old-fashioned ideas in nursing school, and I was naive enough to think he was different. It’s too late to help that girl now, but it’s not too late to help you and Kay.”
“Grand talks,” Ricky repeated. “That does sound like him.”
“You can’t take anything he says in here seriously,” she hastened on, lowering her voice with a glance over her shoulder, as if she’d suddenly remembered about Lurch. She whispered, “It’s all just hot air. Lies. He thinks he can live forever. It’s total insanity.”
He almost made a joke about the irony of that statement but saved it, feeling the potatoes stick to his throat. “And can he?”
Nurse Ash looked up at him, her eyes wide with confusion. “Can he what?”
“Live forever. He seems to think it’s possible and he’s willing to go to all this trouble. Isn’t that what he’s doing with me? I’m his specimen or whatever. His Patient Zero. What if he’s right?”
“It’s not possible, Rick. You can’t listen to him, all right? You can’t fall for it.”
“I’m losing parts of myself,” he said after a moment, and he saw her freeze out of the corner of his eye. “I can’t remember my last birthday. Or the words to my favorite songs. I can hardly remember anything that happened since I’ve been at Brookline. It’s like it’s all there, but behind glass. I can’t touch it and it’s getting farther away.”
Nurse Ash wouldn’t look at him again, gathering up the tray and medicine cup, nearly dropping both. The plate rattled noisily on the tray from her shaking hands. “You’re just tired. Maybe you shouldn’t go exploring tonight, just rest before I have to come back and put you in the cuffs.”
Right. Go back to bed. Forget everything. Get some sleep. He would be lucky if any of those things were possible again. But he said nothing, nodding and yawning, playing a part, as if he was in a play about being a patient, good night, sweet prince.
The hall was empty by the time full darkness fell. Nurse Ash had done her part, and Ricky found the hall of his floor quiet as always, so quiet he could hear the muttered conversations going on beneath his feet. It was impossible to make out words, but he would hear a laugh here or a louder-than-average comment there . . .
He tiptoed down the hall, cringing as he passed the room immediately next to his. Creepy. It was just too creepy to think about that little girl waiting inside. The temptation to reopen the window in the wall and see if she was still there had been strong but he resisted, choosing to ignore it even as the thought scratched at the back of his mind. She was real and right there.
At least, he thought bleakly, in real life she had a face.
The room at the opposite end of the floor loomed large in his thoughts. While waiting for the floor to clear, he had obsessed over what might be inside. Old brooms and mops were the likely answer, but a tiny shred of curiosity kept his hope alive. Ricky shivered at that. Curiosity. Wasn’t that why the warden had picked him to be his Patient Zero in the first place?
Or wait, what had he said? Biology? Ricky felt his breath grow shorter. The photo he found . . . The patient card Kay stole . . . It seemed outrageous, but he had to wonder if his father had once been a Brookline patient. Insane to contemplate, but casting his father as a jerk who ran out on his mother was exactly the kind of lie she would tell. Appearances. That was all she cared about. She didn’t want a son who kissed other boys and she didn’t want a husband who’d ended up in a lunatic asylum.
If he had ended up there.
To be fair, his father might really have been selfish and cruel, prone to the same violent impulses as Ricky, it sounded like. That wasn’t a fantasy, that was the truth. Biology could mean anything, Ricky reminded himself, blood type, gender, mental disposition . . .
Ricky paused outside the door, testing the knob again to see if the staff had wised up and locked it. His luck held. The door opened with a tiny squeak, and he groped quickly for the lightbulb string, pulling it and shutting the door behind him. He leapt back, certain he had seen the flash of a face as the light came on. Black eyes. A gaping mouth. A hushed whisper.
“Hold it together,” he chided softly, leaning against the wall to catch his breath. He shouldn’t have looked through that window. The image of the little girl was haunting more than his dreams now.
Straightening, he examined this new room. Boxes upon boxes were heaped in sloppy rows. Most were labeled with white rectangles, the contents described in fading marker. Budgets, invoices, expenses . . . None of it interested him. Nobody had dusted the room in ages. As expected, a mop had been shoved into the corner but an industrious spider had webbed it to the wall. Dead flies and gnats gathered in the corners. A nasty pair of old shoes toppled off the one shelf in the middle of the storage room, and he stepped over what looked like a used condom. Maybe the staff used this closet for their trysts; it certainly wasn’t being used for much else.
Frustrated but still determined, Ricky waded into the boxes. He shifted a few of the lids aside, double-checking that the labels matched the contents. Nothing extraordinary. Receipts and lists. His head was beginning to ache with fatigue. He carefully picked up a box and set it on top of one to his left, sorting through the bottom row of storage. A cloud of dust choked him as he did so, but he was rewarded right away—the box underneath had no label at all. What had Warden C
rawford said about science and fate?
Ricky wedged himself against the stacked boxes, keeping them balanced with his side and hip while he tore the lid off the bottom box. Leaning down, he grabbed the top sheet of paper, which proved to be a scribbled-over index card.
DISCARD IMMEDIATELY
“Someone slacked on the job,” he mused, putting the card aside and digging into whatever was supposed to be destroyed but clearly hadn’t been. Inside lay a bounty of folders, some succumbing to the ravages of mold. He opened one after another, finding more patient cards like the ones on the first floor. These were yellowed with moisture and neglect, but he could still read the writing on them. Names. Dates. Symptoms. His heart dropped as he thumbed through them, ignoring the nauseating smell of the dust and mold filling the storage room.
None of the lines describing the patients’ ultimate fate demonstrated improvement. Just like the others. He hit a run of eleven patients in a row, all of them deceased within six months of admittance. No improvement. Worsening symptoms. Increased paranoia. Delusional behavior. Insomnia.
Death.
God. That was quite the bad streak. It went way beyond coincidence, he thought. Some of the blank lines on the back had brief descriptions of treatments or procedures. Others had cryptic notes like “Close” or “Closer still.” He flipped more quickly through the cards, faster, faster, death, death, death. Then he stopped. His heart plummeted. No. It wasn’t possible. He knew that name. He had tried to forget that name.
Your father ran away. Your father left us.
Lies. It was all lies.
Maybe he had known and just refused to accept it. Forgotten it as some kind of coping mechanism, a necessary part of feeling better. Maybe he had known the second he saw the photo in the first-floor storage closet, or maybe when he saw that pale, fragile man hiding among the costume boxes, his eyes wide and pleading. Maybe Ricky knew it when that voice kept speaking to him, trying to help him, trying to tell him to run.