Closing the car door, I took one last look up. A pigeon sat on top of the flagpole. Then, eager to get out of the weather, it flew off. For a moment I thought about getting back in the car and driving back home.
I stood in front of the steps, which were covered by an ornate iron canopy, and read the sign posted discreetly next to the entrance. Cascade Hall. It had a nice, northwestern ring about it.
I turned around and headed across the parking lot to the building on the other side, built, by the look of it, in the middle of the twentieth century when the only criterion for a public building was how much it was going to cost. This one, a brick rect-angle with square glass windows and linoleum floors, must have come in under budget. I checked to make sure I was in the right place. Siskiyou Hall. It was the administration building where I had my appointment.
As I started up the steps, I stumbled, a sharp pain in my leg.
I caught my balance and the pain vanished as quickly as it had come. It had been years since that leg had bothered me. It seemed a strange coincidence that it should happen now. I paused in front of the door and read the neatly painted letters. Even after all this time, it was still hard to believe that Elliott Winston was a patient in the Oregon State Hospital for the criminally insane.
Six
Dr. Friedman was going to be a few minutes late. I sat down on a cushioned chair and thumbed through a computer magazine, glanced at the beginning of an article claiming that the printed page was about to become an anachronism, and tossed it aside, wondering if the editor had caught the irony. I heard a voice. “Mr. Antonelli?”
I turned around and found myself under the firm, clear-eyed gaze of a man in his early forties with thick brown hair and a round, perfectly symmetrical face. He was wearing a tweed sports jacket and had a clipboard tucked under his arm. After we shook hands, Dr. Friedman led me back to his office and gestured vaguely toward the two armless chairs in front of his government-issue metal desk. There were two steel bookcases, one on the wall next to where I sat and a smaller one that covered the wall below the window behind the desk.
“Dr. Friedman, I-”
He had begun to concentrate on the page on top of the clipboard. He looked up and, with a brisk smile, raised his hand. “I’ll be with you in just a minute,” he said as he went back to what he was reading.
I tried not to be angry and made a conscious effort to relax.
He flipped over one page and began reading the next. A moment later he went to the next one, and then, apparently satisfied with what he had seen, nodded twice and shoved the clipboard to the side. Leaning back in the swivel chair, he crossed his ankle over his knee and with his hands began to rotate a pencil he held in his lap.
“How can I help you, Mr. Antonelli? You’re here to see one of our patients, correct?”
“Elliott Winston.”
“Elliott. Yes, I know.” The pencil was going back and forth a quarter turn each way. His eyes, now that they were on me, never left.
“Is there a problem?” I asked, wondering why I had to see him before I could see Elliott.
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Friedman’s voice was a warm monotone, and it was starting to make me feel uneasy. And it was not just his voice. He was a trained observer, always looking for symptoms of abnormality, and whether he was aware of it or not, he was studying me with the same clinical detachment with which I imagined he regularly diagnosed the various forms of psychosis.
“I’m not sure it’s really a problem,” I remarked. I looked out the window over his shoulder. “But when I was very young I used to have two dreams every night. In one of them I killed my father; in the other I slept with my mother.” My eyes came back to him.
“But that’s just a normal part of growing up, isn’t it?”
For half a second he believed me, and even when he knew I was kidding, he was not quite prepared to laugh. It was my turn to study him.
“There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask.”
“Yes?” he replied carefully.
“You know that old line about if you speak to God, you’re okay, but if God speaks to you, you’re not?”
He hesitated, not sure where I might be going with this. “Yes,”
he said, dragging out the word.
“What about the person who decides he must be God, because every time he prays he finds he’s talking to himself?”
His eyebrows shot straight up. “That’s quite good. I’ll have to remember that one. But, after all, it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? Whether God talks to him or he thinks he’s God and he’s talking to himself. In both cases he’s clearly delusional.”
“Insane?”
He shrugged. “Yes, of course.”
“That leaves us with an interesting problem, doesn’t it? Either Moses lied when he claimed God gave him the tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them, or he was delusional-insane according to your diagnosis. The result of course is that the entire moral and legal framework of the western world either rests on a falsehood or is part of an insane delusion. Which do you think it is?”
“I shouldn’t like to think it was either, Mr. Antonelli,” he said in that practiced, well-modulated voice of his. “We’re talking about the kind of mental disease that affects normal people, ordinary human beings. We’re talking about the kind of thing that happened to Elliott Winston,” he added, trying to steer the conversation back to safer ground.
“Does Elliott talk to God?” I asked, curious.
Pursing his lips, Friedman narrowed his eyes and peered into the distance. Once again, he began to spin the pencil back and forth between his fingers.
“You mean, does God talk to him,” he said. His eyes came back around. “The answer is, I’m not quite sure I know. Sometimes he hears voices, all right, but whose voices…?” The question hung in the silence, unanswered and, from the doubtful expression on his face, I assumed unanswerable.
A look of hopeful encouragement entered his eyes. “As long as he stays on his medication everything seems to be all right.”
He reached forward and grabbed a file from a metal holder on the front corner of the desk. Hunched over the open folder, he drew his index finger from the top to the bottom of the page and then, shaking his head, turned to the next one.
“When he first came here, they had him on some pretty dreadful stuff. Thorazine, mainly.” He closed the file. “Well, it was twelve years ago, and that’s what was available,” he tried to explain. “You have to remember, he was considered quite violent.
Not to put too fine a point on it, they kept him pretty well doped up. Have you ever seen anyone on heavy dosages of that stuff?”
he asked, a distasteful expression on his face. “They’re like zom-bies. They can barely function. I wouldn’t have done it, even if he were violent-and, by the way, I have my doubts about that.
I don’t have any doubt he was mentally ill-he still is-but since he’s been my patient-a little over three years now-I’ve not seen any evidence of a disposition toward violent behavior.
“He was initially diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. That was the diagnosis made before he got here, when it was decided that he was suffering from a mental disease and was committed to the state hospital instead of being dealt with in the normal fashion by the criminal justice system. ‘Guilty, but insane.’ That is the operative phrase,” he started to explain. “Oh, I’m sorry,”
he quickly apologized. “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you? You probably know all about this sort of thing, don’t you?”
I remembered the man who sat next to me for a while that first night I was serving my sentence for contempt, the one who thought I was working undercover to help him because the voice in his head told him that was why I was there.