That didn’t get the reaction he wanted. The warden chuckled lightly, his demeanor once again calm and cool. “I imagine that bold attitude of yours unsettled previous physicians, yes? You will find that method is useless here.”
“Is that so?” He knew it was stupid to back-talk, but sometimes he simply couldn’t help it. He was supposed to be coasting. Blending in. But that hadn’t been enough so far, and he certainly didn’t think it was ever going to get him on the line with his mother and out of here. He just needed to figure out what would instead.
“It is. I welcome your observations. I find them amusing. You see, I have no intention of changing you, Mr. Desmond. I accept you almost exactly as you are. No, I want to perfect you.”
The words rang over and over again in his head.
I accept you almost exactly as you are.
He stumbled over the “almost” each time, but the rest of that phrase made him feel weird—exposed. No adult had said anything like that to him in . . . ever. He blinked back at the warden, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for him to put a pin on that “almost” so he could wipe away the fleeting sense of belonging that urged Ricky to drop his guard.
“Come, I want to show you something.” The warden stood, taking out his little metal tin of mints and having one before offering the open tin to Ricky. He flashed his teeth. “I know, I know—rules. Order and discipline. Go on. I won’t tell. After all, they are my rules.”
Ricky took one, his mouth puckering at once from the strong burst of wintergreen. He hadn’t tasted anything but bland porridge, fake eggs, and watery soup in days. The warden stood and returned to the far door. Like the rest of the asylum, the office was incredibly neat. Folders and papers were stacked in rectangular towers. A shelving unit beside the far door displayed diplomas, awards, and trophies. There were no photos of the brother Ricky had seen that afternoon, just a small picture of the warden himself and more framed pictures of patients. These were more medically leaning than those in the multipurpose room. Some had been taken so close up to an eye or to a specific part of the body that Ricky couldn’t tell what he was looking at. Others showed the warden posing with the patients, but they made him look less like a doctor at work than like a hunter posing with his prized trophies.
“There’s no need to stall,” the warden added, opening the door, keeping it held for Ricky. “We’re just going for a little stroll.”
“Where are we going?” Ricky asked. The steps leading down were unnervingly familiar. He remembered them from his dream of wandering the building. He gulped a nervous breath as the warden swept by him and walked ahead, descending.
Ricky’s curiosity about what was really down below might be strong, but it was the locked door behind him that actually forced him forward. He had experienced déjà vu before, but not like this. Curiosity mixed with dread. At the bottom of the stairs, the warden stood looking for his keys, but if he squinted Ricky could see what lay beyond him.
“The lower levels are reserved for our most trying cases,” the warden explained. Ricky glanced down the corridor, but there were no nurses and no orderlies there, no other doctors. He was alone with the warden, and he could feel the man’s impatience tugging at him.
“Should . . . Should I really be down here?” he asked. Spare emergency lights glowed along the walls, revealing little.
The warden chuckled, beckoning him forward. “Ah. You feel like I’m giving you special privileges.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Of course. There’s even a special fund-raising gala coming up—I like to show our benefactors how Brookline can improve the lives of our patients. I’m hoping to show them patients like you, patients with real potential.” He smiled and continued on, again leaving Ricky to follow or stay. But he followed. Here, at least, he was starting to see an opportunity. If he played along, sucked up to this creep, he might be able to ask him for one more special privilege—a phone call home. Once his mother heard the misery in his voice she’d come racing up from Boston.
“But why?” Ricky couldn’t help asking. “What’s so special about me?”
“What’s this? I thought you considered yourself very special indeed. Unique. Better.”
He squirmed. “I just like to mess around,” he said. “Talk big, that kind of thing.”
“Mm. Well, let me put it this way. I told you that the patients here are individuals, and I believe that. But at the same time, I see you all equally. You are all patients. You must all be treated. The difference is only in the approach.”
A long, piercing wail came from the depths of the asylum. Ricky almost missed a step from the shock of it, grabbing for the wall on his right to keep from toppling. The warden didn’t seem to notice, moving briskly down the very narrow hallway with practiced ease.
“The patients down here are waiting,” he said, pausing at the top of another staircase—one that wound down in a spiral and had a single railing for support. Ricky had no idea the underbelly of Brookline was so vast or so cold. “Waiting for us to find cures for what ails them. Techniques. Physicians have failed them. They cannot be helped. Not yet.”
Ricky thought of the cards, of the patients who had died within these very walls. Those weren’t just failures, he thought, not just a shortcoming of science. Those people were killed.
Deceased, deceased, deceased
Unknown, unknown, unknown
“They are certainly mad. They are mad just as you are, just as I am,” the warden added, continuing the journey downward.
“What do you mean?” Ricky asked.
He didn’t like this. He wanted to go back up. Above them, out of sight, he heard the door to the stairwell close, the sound echoing in the cavernous basement.
“No man is truly sane in his time,” was the answer. “Was Galileo mad? Michelangelo? Darwin? No. Geniuses all, but their contemporaries would never admit as much. And if I must be called insane for what I wish to accomplish in our time, dear boy, then so be it.”
The bottom level of the basement, well below his little cell in Brookline, was just how he remembered it. How could he have seen this? It had to be some psychological trick, Ricky thought, like how when you heard a word for the first time, you could swear you started seeing it everywhere. Still, he felt chilled to the bone, his thin patient’s clothing about as insulating as paper.
He heard voices coming from the tall, arched doorway ahead and to the left of the stairwell. Something banged arrhythmically against a metal surface, a hollow thud that reminded him of the heartbeat, his heartbeat.
“Galileo’s dream of our solar system, Michelangelo’s of our inner workings, Darwin’s of our origin . . . All masterful thinking. All productive uses of their lives. Their thinking endured, certainly, but their lives ended.” The warden stopped just short of the archway and Ricky did, too, shooting a single, nervous glance down the corridor to see the closed doors of his dream. Here, three orderlies mingled, talking among themselves. “And that—those ended lives—is a real shame.”
Ricky didn’t follow. Of course they died. Everyone did eventually.
Some sooner than others, and many right here.
He rubbed futilely at his forearms, freezing. The warden studied him, interested even in his uncomfortable silence. “Why are we down here?”
“The lost cases,” the warden said sadly, sighing. “The incurable ones. We keep them here. I wanted to show you what we all can become so that you never do. Medicine can’t help them, not yet, and the waiting must be awful. It’s why I do what I do, why we all do, here at Brookline. It’s why we work so hard, why there are so many rules, so many guidelines we must obey.”
Warden Crawford led Ricky into the ward. The metallic banging grew louder, and as they moved farther down the hall he realized it was coming from one of the rooms. Someone was ramming against the door with shattering force. Bang! Ba-Bang! Ricky jumped with each hit, the noise so close and loud now that it rattled his brain. The door didn’t give, but
the ward vibrated with the force of it.
“Isn’t someone going to go in there?” Ricky asked in a tiny voice. “What if they hurt themselves?”
“Oh, they’re already hurt. They’ll tire themselves out eventually. That particular case just has a flair for the dramatic.”
Dramatic? It sounded more like panicked.
The noise had distracted Ricky away from their journey. But now he realized they were nearing the end of the ward. A door led into another set of rooms beyond, but he wasn’t thinking about that. They had almost reached the final door on the right. It was impossible that the girl would really be in there. But Warden Crawford had pulled out a set of keys and walked swiftly to the door. God, he was really going to open it. Ricky didn’t know—didn’t want to know—what he would see inside.
“What are you doing!?”
The cry came from behind them. Ricky swung around, and there was Nurse Ash, watching them from just a few feet away, her mouth still open, frozen in horror. Her heels clicked on the raw stone floor, and she reached them in a second, taking Ricky by the wrist and dragging him away from the door.
“Nurse Ash. Jocelyn.” The warden’s voice was like steel. His face was a cold, white mask again. “What do you think you are doing with my patient?”
She struggled for a moment, opening and closing her mouth around what sounded like a choked sigh. Still, she didn’t let go of Ricky’s wrist. He was relieved, he realized. It felt like a rescue, even if he had no idea what from.
“He . . . complained of a migraine this morning,” Nurse Ash stammered out. She searched Ricky’s face. “Didn’t you?”
“Um, yeah,” Ricky replied, mimicking her slow, slow nod. “A migraine.”
“Our codeine replacement just came in,” she hurried on. “We couldn’t dose him earlier, but we shouldn’t leave him in pain, Warden Crawford.”
“A migraine.” The warden had lost interest in Ricky for the moment, pinning the nurse with one of his razor-sharp looks. Ricky had to pity her. He could feel her hand shaking on his wrist, her skin growing clammy. What was so urgent? Did she know what was in that room and wanted to protect him? “Ricky Desmond is suffering from a migraine,” he said, slowly, as if trying out the logic of the statement word by word.
“It’s . . . It’s so bad I haven’t been sleeping well,” Ricky said, elaborating the lie for her with a seed of the truth. “I should have said something. The um, the pain made me forgetful and confused.”
“Well, we can help you out right away.” She pulled on his wrist, yanking him away from the warden and not gently. “Come along. Come with me, Ricky. Now.”
He didn’t feel free of the warden’s gaze until they were all the way back in his cell, three floors and a whole world away. Nurse Ash all but tossed him into his room, leaning hard into the door as if to brace it from anyone who could follow.
She hadn’t spoken a single word since pulling him out of the basement, ignoring the obvious staring of her colleagues on the way. Order and discipline. They’d not been walking calmly down the corridor, and Ricky could only imagine that he’d looked as flustered as he’d felt.
“What’s going on?” he demanded, planting himself in the middle of the room. It was hard to believe, but he was actually happy to be back in that dumpy little cell. “Something is going on, isn’t it? Why did you lie to the warden like that?”
Nurse Ash didn’t respond, still leaning against the door and breathing hard. She looked at him though, intently, carefully, squinting as if she didn’t quite recognize him. Then she straightened, set her jaw, and smoothed back the frizzy red hair poking out from under her nurse’s cap. Part of it had come unpinned.
She approached him wildly, but Ricky didn’t budge. “Do you know what’s in that room? What did he want me to see in there?”
“Nothing,” she said in a hoarse whisper. Her eyes were still huge. Huge and haunted. “There’s nothing in that room anymore. There used to be a little girl, but not anymore. I don’t . . . I don’t know where he put her.”
“What?” The blood rushed out of his face and hands, leaving him even colder than the basement. That wasn’t possible. He couldn’t have known that. It couldn’t have been a dream.
Nurse Ash tucked her clipboard under her elbow, taking him by the wrists with both hands. “You have to promise me, Ricky—you have to promise me you won’t go down there with him again.”
“Where is this coming from?” he asked, shaking his head. “Isn’t he your boss?”
“Just . . .” She glanced over her shoulder at the door, stopping to consider something. “Just promise me,” she finally said, swiveling back to him. Ricky had to meet her eye to get her to speak again. Her hands were still shaking and sweating. “Promise me you won’t go down there. You can’t trust him.”
“But he’s your boss,” Ricky insisted again. “What the hell is going on?”
“Do you trust me?” she asked, worrying her lip.
He hated when people answered a question with a question. She was deflecting, maybe, but he nodded. Sure. At least this way he could keep her talking and squeeze out more information.
“Yes, I think I trust you.”
“That will have to be good enough,” she said quickly. Her lip looked raw where she had been biting it. “This place . . . It’s not quite what it looks like. It’s not what it seems.”
“Well, I pieced that together,” Ricky muttered.
“How?” she asked. “What specifically? What have you seen? What do you know?”
So many questions. Well, he had just said he trusted her, and appealing to the order and discipline mantra of the place hadn’t gotten him anywhere with her before, so he decided he might as well go for broke. “I’ve been seeing strange things. I think I hallucinated going into the basement and seeing a little girl, but I don’t know how I could have imagined it all. I’ve never been down there until today. And in the storage closet I felt a presence and saw . . . I don’t know what I saw. A ghost maybe. A figure. Oh, and outside the warden’s office, when I tried to touch his door it was hot, like the room was on fire.”
Nurse Ash was quiet, taking it all in.
“I’m sure that sounds crazy,” he said. “But you’re probably used to that here.”
“No, Ricky, things go on here that I can’t explain either,” Nurse Ash said with a sigh. “And I want so badly to help you, to help everyone here.”
“The warden said something similar to me.”
“No.” She turned, clutching her hat and squishing it down onto her head. Then she thought better of that impulse and fixed the hat, carefully. Her voice sounded almost tearful. “No, I’m not like him, Ricky. I actually want to do good.”
“And he doesn’t.” It wasn’t a question, and she didn’t refute it.
“There are things I want to tell you but I can’t. The warden has a way with people. I know that doesn’t make sense now, and I hope for your sake it never will.”
“But I—”
“Just listen. Listen and remember this, no matter what else I say or what else I tell you tomorrow or the day after. It doesn’t matter if he’s my boss,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut. “Whatever else he is, he’s also a butcher. A monster.”
Her eyes snapped open suddenly and she covered her mouth. The nurse looked ashen, sick, like she was about to vomit into her hands, like just saying the words had made her ill. Then she was up and running for the door, slamming it in her wake.
Journal of Ricky Desmond—June
I just have to last until September. Mom will come for me then. School will start. She won’t want to answer any questions about why I’m not there. This is just for the summer, just for a few months. I just have to last until school starts.
Keep up appearances, Mom. Come for me. It’s what you’re good at, pretending everything is fine in the family, but that’s okay. I’ll forgive you for it if you just come back and take me out of this place. I don’t know how you can abandon me when it
was only the one time. So it was one really bad time. I know I hurt Butch and it scared you. But I would apologize. I would say anything you wanted me to if you would just be a goddamn mother and take your little boy home.
The warden is a butcher. The warden is a monster. There, Nurse Ash, I wrote it down so I can’t forget it. Happy now? Next time answer my questions before you turn chicken and run away. The warden has a way with people! I’m sure he does. This is probably some stupid game the two of you are playing. You’re trying to confuse me. I’m too sure of my own sanity for your liking, and that’s why you won’t just leave me alone. And it’s why you won’t let me leave. I bet you’d get a real lecture, a real tongue-lashing, if I got out before being treated. Is that why you acted the way you did tonight? Why you saved me from the warden but won’t let me call my mom? Jesus. I don’t know whether to thank you or hate you. Or him.
No, I hate both of you. I hate both of you for keeping me in this place. What the hell is going on? When aren’t you coming for me, Mom? Is it easier, more convenient, to forget me?
Ricky had never folded so many cloth napkins in his entire life.
It was mind-numbing work. Repetitive. Not what he’d call an ideal way to spend an afternoon. His hands were beginning to cramp. Every single square of fabric had to be elaborately knotted and twisted and then tied with a precut piece of twine. Just precious. A bow, of course, with the loops slightly smaller than the tails.
The man Dennis was folding across from him at the cafeteria table; he was surprisingly deft at the whole exercise. He didn’t exactly look built for fine motor skills. His hands were gigantic, with sausage fingers long and thick enough to crush Ricky’s skull without breaking a sweat. He was silent now, standing very still while he did his work. The staff treated him like a jumpy Clydesdale, cooing at him and only ever touching him at arm’s length. Ricky was surprised they didn’t wiggle a carrot in front of his nose to get him to move from place to place.