I stopped and looked at him, searching his eyes until I was certain he really did not know. Then I turned and we started to walk again down the long gray corridor.
“I’m the one he shot,” I explained.
Seven
The voice of the doctor was speaking his name, but I was looking at the face of someone I did not know. It had been twelve years, but the changes I saw had not been produced by time alone.
The Elliott Winston I knew had been quick, alert, easygoing, and always affable; the man standing in front of me waiting for Dr.
Friedman to unlock the heavy gauge wire screen was tense, expectant, impatient. He was wearing an old suit that was too tight for him. Buttoned in front, the lapels bowed out from his chest.
A solid-color tie was off center at his throat, and one of the collar points of his soiled white shirt bent up. His hands were clasped behind his back and his feet were spread the width of his shoulders. Though I was just a few feet away from him, he stared straight ahead as if there was no one else around.
We stepped inside, and Friedman rolled the gate shut behind us. Elliott did not move. He stood there, erect, immobile, locked in that rigid stare.
“Elliott,” Friedman said in a calm, unhurried voice, “you remember Joseph Antonelli, don’t you?”
There was no reaction, no movement of any kind, not even a slight flutter of the lashes over his eyes. I wondered if he had slipped into a catatonic state where he could not hear anything.
“He does this sometimes,” Friedman explained. “When he’s thinking about something.” With a hopeless shrug, he added, “I’ve seen him do it for hours. When it happens, I’m afraid there really isn’t-”
He never finished. Elliott had turned toward me and extended his hand. “Joseph Antonelli. I knew you’d come one day.”
I took his hand, and then, when I saw his face, had to force myself not to let go. He was looking at me with such enormous concentration that I thought his eyes would burn right through me. There was a power about him that was extraordinary.
“It was good of you to bring Mr. Antonelli,” he said, looking over my shoulder. “Thank you, Dr. Friedman.”
He said it the way someone might address a subordinate, not with a tone of command, but with that benevolence which underscores the distance between the one who bestows it and the one who receives it. No doubt used to the strange eccentricities of his patient, Friedman seemed not to mind. He signaled a white-coated orderly who was standing at the far end of the large, open ward.
“Mr. Antonelli will be visiting with Elliott for a while,” he said when the orderly drew near. “Make sure he has anything he needs.”
After Friedman had gone, Elliott and I sat down at a square wooden table in front of a wire-covered window at the side of the room. Farther down, in the corner, three patients, dressed in white short-sleeve V-neck tops and baggy drawstring trousers, were sitting in a semicircle on plastic chairs. One of them, one leg folded under the other, held a magazine in his hands, turning it around and around, upside down, then right side up, over and over again. Another one, short, balding, with thick, stubby fingers, kept throwing out one or the other of his hands, clutching at the air, and then, bringing it back in, slowly opening his fist to see what he had caught. The third scarcely moved at all. He slumped forward, eyes glazed, mumbling to himself.
Elliott caught me looking. “Watch this,” he whispered.
“Chester!” The mumbling stopped, and the third man lifted his head, a bewildered expression on his face.
“What is 3,182 times 5,997?”
The third man blinked, then answered, “19,082,454,” and then blinked again.
“I’ll ask him something difficult this time,” Winston remarked under his breath. “Chester,” he called out. “What is 8.105698
times 10.00787?”
Chester blinked. “81.120771.” And then blinked once more.
“Chester, who is the president of the United States?”
This time he did not blink. He smiled, a foolish, heartbreak-ing smile. “George Washington.”
“Very good,” Elliott remarked with a glance of approval. “Now, if Lincoln freed the slaves, what did Washington do?”
“Freed the cherry trees,” he answered with a childlike grin.
“Thank you, Chester,” Elliott said in the same supremely confident voice with which he had dismissed Dr. Friedman.
“Chester was a high school history teacher,” he explained. “In the other world.”
“The other world? You mean, before he was sick, in the real world?”
This last phrase seemed to bother him. A dark look swept across his visage. “The other world,” he insisted. His mood switched again. “And I think that is the way he taught it, too,”
he said, laughing. Abruptly, the laughter stopped. “That’s not true.
In the other world he taught history the way they all teach history, and he could not balance his checkbook. Then, when he became sane, he forgot all the names and dates and all the other unimportant things they cram their heads full of, and as soon as his mind was clear he knew everything about numbers.”
He looked at me for a moment. “You don’t believe me. Go ahead, ask him anything you want, any combination, any calculation. He can do it in his head instantaneously. I should know.
I’ve been trying to catch him in a mistake for years.”
“How would you know if he did?” I asked without thinking.
He felt sorry for me. “Didn’t you notice? He only makes a mistake when he doesn’t blink.”
I was wrong. He did not feel sorry for me, not the way I had thought. He was playing with me. I could see it in his eyes.
“It’s true though, isn’t it?” he asked. “Whenever the answer is right, he blinks before he gives it. Isn’t that a perfect example of reasoning from effect back to cause?”
I did not know what to say. There really was nothing I could say. I tried to change the subject. “You’ve changed a lot, Elliott.
I’m not sure I would have recognized you.”
A smile passed quickly over his face. “You didn’t recognize me.
You thought I was someone else.” He seemed to be enjoying some small private joke. “It must be the mustache. I didn’t have one when you knew me. I had a beard, too,” he admitted with what I thought was a rueful expression. “And my hair was long. I’m afraid there were people in here who began to think I looked a little like Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ! Can you imagine! Then the next thing you know, some of these people started to think I was Jesus Christ. That might not have been too bad. At least that way I could have saved Christianity from itself. But there was someone here-not right here, but over in one of the other wards-who really believed he was Jesus Christ. He might have been for all I know,” he added, his eyes feverish with delight. “I did not want anyone to have to start questioning his own identity because of me, so I got rid of it-the beard-cut my hair short, and almost got rid of the mustache, too, but I changed my mind-or my mind changed me. Either way, I kept it. How have you been?”
It was difficult to know whether to be more astonished at the rapid-fire lucidity of his speech or the manner in which he had just brought it to a dead stop.
“I’ve been very well myself,” he said before I could think of what to say or how, now that I was finally face-to-face with him, I should say it. He seemed to sense every doubt, every hesitation, every slight uncertainty. “I mean it,” he continued, speaking now in a quiet, smooth-flowing voice. “I’m much better off here.”
My eyes darted around the drab-colored room, taking in the cheap furniture, and the dull finished floor, and the painted pipes that hung on metal braces as they passed under the ceiling; the sleepy-eyed orderly reading an out-of-date magazine; the three patients at the other table, barely aware of each other’s existence, a fourth inmate I had not noticed before moving like a sleepwalker down the corridor that connected the day room to the rest of the ward.