He looked at me, Charon sizing up a strange passenger, one who it seemed would be making a round trip. — Sure, all right. You coming?
— No, Irma said softly. — You can bring him to me afterward.
So Dr. Tumulty took me through the wards alone. I will not say everything I saw. There were mysteries in that initiation that will not go down into words. It is all the soul is worth and more to say less than all when you have come back from that place where, if only they knew, what men live and do asleep is done waking and in truth each endless day.
Yes, there were extreme cases of mongolism, cretins and imbeciles, dwarfs and things with enormous heads and bulging eyes, ears like tubes, mouths placed on the sides of their heads. There was an albino without nose or eyes or lips, and it sat in a chair, teeth exposed in a grin that could not be erased, its hands making a series of extremely complicated gestures over and over again, each lengthy sequence a perfect reproduction of the preceding one. The gestures were perfectly symmetrical and the repetition exact and made without pause, a formalism of mindlessness worthy of a Balinese dancer or a penance — performance of a secret prayer — played out before the catatonic admiration of three small blacks who sat on the floor before the albino watching its art with a concentration unknown among those who imagine themselves without defect.
This was the tidy ward, and all these inventions of a Bosch whose medium is flesh wore coveralls of dark gray cloth with a name patch on the left breast. This is Paul whose tongue, abnormally long and almost black and dry, hangs down his chin, and that, the hairless one with the enormous head and tiny face, who coughs and pets a filthy toy elephant, that is Larry. The dead-white one, the maker of rituals, is Anthony. Watching him are Edward and Joseph and Michael, microcephalics all, looking almost identical in their shared malady.
— Does... Anthony, I began.
— All day. Every day, Dr. Tumulty said. — And the others watch. We give him tranquilizers at night. It used to be... all night too.
In another ward they kept the females. It was much the same there, except that wandering from one chair to another, watching the others, was a young girl, perhaps sixteen. She would have been pretty — no, she was pretty, despite the gray coverall and the pallor of her skin. — Hello, doctor, she said. Her voice sounded as if it had been recorded — cracked and scratchy. But her body seemed sound, her face normal except for small patches of what looked like eczema on her face. That, and her eyes were a little out of focus. She was carrying a small book covered in imitation red leather. My Diary, it said on the cover.
— Does she belong here? I asked Tumulty.
He nodded. — She’s been here over a year.
The girl cuddled against him, and I could see that she was trying to press her breasts against him. Her hand wandered down toward his leg. He took her hand gently and stroked her hair. — Hello, doctor, she croaked again.
— Hi, Nancy, he answered. — Are you keeping up your diary?
She smiled. — For home. Hello, doctor.
— For home, sure, he said, and sat her down in a chair opposite an ancient television locked in a wire cage and tuned, I remember, to Underdog. She seemed to lose interest in us, to find her way quickly into the role of Sweet Polly, awaiting the inevitable rescue. Around her on the floor were scattered others of the less desperate cases. They watched the animated comedy on the snow-flecked, badly focused screen with absolute concentration. As we moved on, I heard Nancy whisper, — There’s no need to fear...
— Congenital syphilis, Tumulty said. — It incubates for years, sometimes. She was in high school. Now she’s here. It’s easier for her now than at first. Most of her mind is gone. In a year she’ll be dead.
He paused by a barred window, and looked out on the rolling Louisiana countryside beyond the distant fence. — About graduation time.
— There’s no treatment...?
— The cure is dying.
What I can remember of the untidy wards is fragmentary. The stench was very bad, the sounds were nonhuman, and the inmates, divided by sex, were naked in large concrete rooms, sitting on the damp floors, unable to control their bodily functions, obese mostly, and utterly asexual with tiny misshappen heads. There were benches along the sides of the concrete rooms, and the floors sloped down to a central caged drain in the center. One of the things — I mean inmates — was down trying slowly, in a fashion almost reptilian, to lick up filthy moisture from the drain. Another was chewing on a plastic bracelet by which it was identified. Most of the rest, young and older, sat on the benches or the floor staring at nothing, blubbering once in a while, scratching occasionally.
— Once, Dr. Tumulty said thoughtfully, — a legislator came. A budgetary inspection. We didn’t get any more money. But he complained that we identified the untidy patients by number. He came and saw everything, and that’s... what bothered him.
By then we were outside again, walking in the cool Louisiana summer morning. We had been inside less than an hour. I had thought it longer.
— It’s the same everywhere. Massachusetts, Wyoming, Texas. Don’t think badly of us. There’s no money, no personnel, and even if there were...
— Then you could only... cover it.
— Cosmetics, yes. I’ve been in this work for eighteen years. I’ve never forgotten anything I saw. Not anything. You know what I think? What I really know?
— ...?
Tumulty paused and rubbed his hands together. He shivered a little, that sudden inexplicable thrill of cold inside that has no relationship to the temperature in the world, that represents, according to the old story, someone walking across the ground where your grave will one day be. A mockingbird flashed past us, a dark blur of gray, touched with the white of its wings. Tumulty started to say something, then shrugged and pointed at a small building a little way off.
— They’re over there. One of the attendants will show you.
He looked from one building to another, shaking his head. — There’s so much to do. So many of them...
— Yes, I said. — Thank you. Then I began walking toward the building he had indicated.
— Do... whatever you can... for her, Dr. Tumulty called after me. — I wish...
I turned back toward him. We stood perhaps thirty yards apart then. — Was there... something else you wanted to say? I asked.
He looked at me for a long moment, then away. — No, he said. — Nothing.
I stood there as he walked back into the clutter of central buildings, and finally vanished into one of them. Then, before I walked back to join Irma, I found a bench under an old magnolia and sat down for a few minutes. It was on the way to becoming warm now, and the sun’s softness and the morning breeze were both going rapidly. The sky was absolutely clear, and by noon it would be very hot indeed. A few people were moving across the grounds. A nurse carrying something on a tray, two attendants talking animatedly to each other, one gesturing madly. Another attendant was herding a patient toward the medical building. It was a black inmate, male or female I could not say, since all the patients’ heads were close-cropped for hygienic purposes, and the coverall obscured any other sign of sex. It staggered from one side of the cinder path to the other, swaying as if it were negotiating the deck of a ship in heavy weather out on the Gulf. Its arms flailed, seeking a balance it could never attain, and its eyes seemed to be seeking some point of reference in a world awash. But there was no point, the trees whirling and the buildings losing their way, and so the thing looked skyward, squinted terribly at the sun, pointed upward toward that brazen glory, almost fell down, its contorted black face now fixed undeviatingly toward that burning place in the sky which did not shift and whirl. But the attendant took its shoulder and urged it along, since it could not make its way on earth staring into the sky.