His eyes were waiting for me. “I wrote you a letter once. A long time ago.”
“I never got it.”
“I never sent it. I knew what I wanted to say. I had finally understood what had happened-all of it-everything. My mind was thinking quite clearly, more clearly than it ever had. In an instant I could see all there was to see. I could take it all in, all of it, all of the relationships, all the subtle nuances, every shade of meaning,” he explained. His eyes were glistening. “But then, when I sat down and started to write, it all disappeared-everything-
and all I could remember was that I had lost something I had thought was unforgettable. This was not the last time this happened. Finally, I gave up trying to write anything down. Nothing ever sounded the way I meant it, or was really what I wanted to say.”
As I listened I began to smile. He was describing what I had so often experienced myself: the inability to connect the thought with the word.
“But that isn’t-” I blurted out before I realized what I was saying.
“Isn’t a sign of insanity?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “What is?” The wry expression that had taken possession of his features faded away. “In any event, I could not write it the way I wanted to write it.”
“What did you want to write me about?”
His eyes seemed to lose a little of their intensity, as if he were turning inward on himself. When I repeated the question, he became even more introspective, staring down at the table with the troubled aspect of someone searching for the answer to a riddle.
Finally, he lifted his head, but instead of looking at me, he stared straight ahead.
“When I tried to kill…” His mouth hung open and his body began to tense. Then it started, a shrill, staccato stutter, one word rushing after the other in a mindless, rhyming speech. “Kill…
thrill… will… ill…” His face became rigid, and then began to quiver as if it was on the verge of blowing itself apart. His eyes became enormous hollow black voids. “… chill… till…
dill… quill.” He gasped the words, each one requiring more effort than the one before. Then, as if it had never happened, the life came back into his eyes, the expression returned to his face.
“I wanted to write to you about the time I tried to kill you,” he said in a voice completely normal.
Whether he was unaware of what he had just done, or had become so accustomed to it that he assumed it was taken for granted by everyone with whom he came in contact, he mistook my silence as a sign that I was not entirely comfortable with the subject of my own attempted murder. That is what he had been charged with, and that was the reason he had been sent here, to the forensic ward of the state hospital, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, clearly a danger to others and probably a danger to himself.
“I would have, too, if you hadn’t wrestled the gun away from me.” He said it with a kind of gay indifference, the way someone might explain how they would have won the last set of a tennis match if you had not made a ridiculously lucky return of serve right at the end.
I had been waiting for a long time to tell him he was wrong.
“I don’t believe you ever intended to kill me or anyone else. You were sick, Elliott. You didn’t know what you were doing. You came into the building that day, started walking up and down the hallways, screaming all those unintelligible threats no one could understand. Then you came into my office and you started waving that gun around. The truth is, if I had just talked to you, calmed you down, instead of going after the gun, it never would have gone off and I wouldn’t have been hit in the leg and we could have gotten you the help you needed. Listen to me. I had never had anyone point a gun at me before. It scared me, more than I had ever been scared in my life. I didn’t think, I just reacted. I should have known better, and I’m sorry for that. I know you never meant to hurt me.”
I had put off saying this for twelve years, even though I had known at some level of my subconscious mind that it would lift a great weight off my shoulders when I did. Elliott reached across the table and, as if he wanted to console me for what I had been through, laid his hand on my shoulder. A moment later, he pulled it away. “You were sleeping with my wife,” he said, his eyes flashing.
“I hardly knew your wife,” I sputtered, suddenly defensive.
“Whatever made you think…? Who made you think…?”
A detached, faintly ironic smile on his lips, he watched me, amused at the vehemence with which I denied something I had never done.
“I know you weren’t,” he said, nodding his assurance of the truth of it. “But I thought so then, and it was a long time before I realized I had been wrong. Even after the divorce, I didn’t know what had really been going on. What else was she going to do?
I was in here. You couldn’t expect her to stay married to a lunatic-a criminal lunatic-could you? It was only after she re-married that things fell into place. It was only then, at the very end, so to speak, that I understood what had happened, all of it, even the beginning. I’m not saying that they planned it all out,”
he added, with a quick, rueful glance. “They couldn’t have known what would happen to me. Though it would not have made any difference to them if they had.”
His head sunk down between his shoulders and his eyes focused on a spot just below my chin. “You warned me about him.
Do you remember?”
“Jeffries?”
His eyes narrowed even more. “I used to think he was evil. I was wrong. He was just indecent. People who are evil do interesting things. There wasn’t anything interesting about Jeffries.”
Slowly, without any movement of his head, his eyes climbed up my face until they met my own.
“Did you know Jeffries was dead?” I asked.
He raised his head and his eyes flared open. “Death and betrayal, the fortunate circumstances of my life.”
“The fortunate circumstances of your life?” I asked, confused.
With a quick movement of his hand, and a strange, triumphant look in his eyes, he started to wave my question away.
“I can’t really explain. All I can tell you is that sometimes the only way you can deal with what happens to you is not just to accept it, but make it your own.”
He seemed to regret that he had said as much as he had, though he had not said nearly enough to make his meaning-if there was a meaning-intelligible to me.
“I don’t have any interest in thinking of myself as a victim,”
he said. His eyes darted across to the other table. “Will you stop turning that damn magazine around!” he demanded in a high-pitched scream that set my teeth on edge. Without so much as a glance to see where the shouting had come from, the inmate stopped the constant rotation and held the magazine perfectly still, directly in front of his eyes. It was upside down.
“So Jeffries is dead!” he remarked in a civil tone, looking at me as if he had never in his life so much as thought about raising his voice.
It had all happened so quickly, and had been so isolated from what he had been like just before and then immediately after, that I was forced again to wonder whether he was himself always aware of what he was doing.
“How did he die?”
“You really don’t know? It was the front-page story in the newspapers for weeks.”
“I let my subscription lapse,” he said dryly.
He might not have access to the papers, but a television set, sitting on a plywood platform halfway up the wall, was flickering in the far corner of the day room.
“I never watch,” he said, surprised that anyone might ever think he would. “Tell me how he died,” he insisted with avid curiosity.