The elevator began to slide downward, into The Brink.
“The guy is a panther,” he was saying. “All coiled up. Didn’t say anything to me until I got him in his room. Asked me if there was a camera watching him. Asked me if there was a chair. Asked me if the lights were on.”
Yes on all counts, I knew.
“So he’s blind, right?” Emlio said, grinning again. “He shouldn’t care if the lights are on or off. But he tells me to turn ’em off when I leave and lock up. I’m like, ‘Saving taxpayers’ money?’ He says no. Says the buzzing of the lights bothers him.”
“Weird,” I said, and meant it. The sound of florescent lights annoys me, too. Their constant hmmm reminds me of flies in a jar, and puts me on edge. But patient dorms don’t have fluorescent lights. In fact, I couldn’t think of any room in the place with florescent lights. When it comes to state funding, The Brink is as popular as the drunk uncle at the family reunion.
This meant Grace thought he could hear the hum of the incandescent bulbs.
“Yep, that’s what I said, weird,” Emilio agreed. “Dude asked me a bit about my family, the boys, then told me to scram. He switched on and off, just like those lights. Tough cookie.” He gave me another nudge. “Pity the fool who’s gotta crack that nut, huh?”
I took a sip of my coffee. I didn’t know what to say.
The elevator shuddered, slowed and its doors squeaked open. Level 3: therapists’ offices, quarters for higher-functioning patients, housewares, electronics…
“Take it easy,” I said, stepping out. Emilio gave me a thumbs-up. I took another sip from my mug and walked to my office. Martin Grace’s folder felt heavier, and colder, in my hand.
Brinkvale Psychiatric had a cursed existence before it ever existed. In 1828, the rapidly expanding city of New York was hungry for brownstone. Geologists were consulted, surveys taken, contractors hired. The following year, hundreds of laborers came to Central Islip on Long Island, about forty miles west of the city, breaking their backs for pennies to dig up blocks of brownstone destined for the city. The Brinkvale quarry—named after the idyllic apple farm snatched from its owner under the wily law of “eminent domain”—wasn’t so much born as it was carved.
Nine years later, the Brinkvale quarry had closed, its resources depleted. Thanks to corrupt contractors and politicians skimming generous hunks of the quarry’s budget off the top, New York’s “Great Hole” had become a very unsafe place. In under a decade, more than ninety men had died digging that hole in the world. Worse, ten more died in “unrelated accidents” after organizing a committee to share their grievances with the city. Gallons of blood were splashed on those stones, literally and otherwise. The Brinkvale tragedies were partly responsible for the nation’s labor reform acts of the 1840s.
For the next thirty years, the quarry lay quiet, a black dragon with its maw wide open, occasionally claiming the life of a curious child or soused thrill-seeker. But in 1875, the hole caught the interest of overwhelmed alienists desperate for a quiet locale, out of the public eye, in which to house the city’s growing population of criminal lunatics. These were patients either too crazy for prison or too dangerous for the city’s modest sanitariums. In the end, even cannibals, serial rapists, necrophiles, blood drinkers, ultra-violent schizoids and charismatic occult leaders need a place to sleep.
Brinkvale Psychiatric was not built over the quarry, but in it. Nine stories of howling, brain-boiling madness, stacked two hundred feet into the bedrock. The hospital was so large, so secluded, so wonderfully forgettable, it soon housed more than the howl-at-the-moon types. Brinkvale became an Ellis Island of the damned, an oubliette not just for the dangerous and deranged, but also the misunderstood and unwanted. Homosexuals. Troublemaking non-Christians. Ideologues. Opponents of the status quo. Bring me your angry, your rebellious, your nonconformist masses yearning to speak freely… and bury the wretches in a place where no one can hear them scream…
You won’t find windows beneath the topside “attic” level, here at The Brink. There are only cracked walls, wildly uneven floors and a great many cramped, lightless places. The Brink has no sympathy for claustrophobes or nyctophobes, people who are afraid of the dark. People like me.
This is the place where I’d planted my flag to help people. This was where I’d been appointed to get answers from a blind killer.
And the room I finally entered—my fantastically disorganized office, more than sixty feet underground—was where I finally opened the manila folder in my hand, and suddenly realized how desperately I wanted to see the sun.
My office is my refuge, the one place in Brinkvale where I can let my personality shine. One wall, covered in wall-to-ceiling corkboard, is the Me Wall, dedicated to people and things I love: many photos of my tattooed goddess, Rachael; pics of my slang-slinging, living spring of a brother Lucas and my father, Will; a faded, folded photo of my mother, Claire; a painting from my police lab-tech pal Ida “Eye” Jean-Phillipe (who had lent a more-than-helpful hand in achieving Spindle’s breakthrough last week); a cover of the ’80s Creepshow movie-adaptation comic (signed by both Stephen King and—an artist who I think walks on water—Bernie Wrightson); a half-dozen Salvador Dali postcards; some sci-fi memorabilia; and my own artwork. Charcoal sketches on cream-colored Stonehenge drawing paper, mostly.
Another wall—similarly swathed in corkboard—features my patients’ art. Far less cheerful fare. Manic splotches of lush watercolors, pastel scribbles, wordless agony made visible. I use this gallery to showcase their progress, and to gain perspective on what I’m doing here. Strangers might see violent lost causes on this wall. I see glimmers, tiny penlights, of hope. If my patients trust me enough to craft these images, they might trust me enough, someday, to share their stories and secrets.
The rest of the wall space is dedicated to overflowing filing cabinets, bookshelves and sacks of art supplies. Clean freaks wince when they bear witness to my unique “organizational system,” but even the fussiest anal retentives admit that the place projects an optimistic, cheerful vibe. That’s a good thing, because it’s a reflection of me.
But there was no solace for me here, not now. Martin Grace was whispering his past to me, whispering from papers and photos spread out on my desk. I sipped my coffee in silence, slipping further and further into the man’s world.
According to his vitals, Grace was fifty-six years old, white, nearly as tall as Emilio, but slender. Single, lived alone, no children. An arrest mug shot revealed a pale, lean, curiously blank face. His green eyes stared impassively into the camera lens. I found this odd; aside from an acquaintance in middle school, I’d never personally known a blind person. But I vividly remembered that kind’s eyes all those years ago, remembered the cloudy discoloration. And sometimes the eyes jitter; nystagmus, it’s called. The kid back in school had a severe, stomach-churning nystagmus.
But Grace’s eyes had none of this visible damage, no milky cloudlike appearance. Just a clear pine green. I kept reading, plucking a Berol pencil from the jumble on my desk.
Since his incarceration six months ago, Grace had been uncooperative with cops, lawyers and headshrinkers alike. The personal details in the admittance papers came by proxy, from police interviews with neighbors and colleagues. Martin Grace had lived in Brooklyn for two years, after living in Queens for three. He was a transplant from Buffalo. Before Buffalo, he’d spent a year in Albany… and before that, one in Conquest, a town not too far from Syracuse. Before that, some time in Rochester, right across Lake Ontario from Canada. And before that, and before that, and before that… the dude got around.