“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 deserve 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.