Sometimes, if I’m not careful, I see her face in my sleep and I hear that voice again, that dismal warning I failed to heed. At the time, of course, all I did was watch them take her away, that awful laughter shrieking through the courthouse. The only thought I had was that Jeffries had been right after all, that there was too much damage, that there was nothing to be done but put her away in a place where she could get the constant care she needed.
“She had tried to warn me, but even then I still believed in Jeffries. How could I not?” he asked with a shrewd glance. “I had just helped him get rid of his wife. Everyone wants to believe that what they’re doing has a justification. I’m sure Jeffries thought he was justified.”
Elliott was quick, preternaturally so, and he caught immediately the slight glimmer of doubt in my eyes.
“Of course he did. At each step, over all the years he had lived with her. Think of it! She has a slight accident; she’s in pain; the medication works. She stops complaining. He would have noticed that right away. Finally! Relief from her constant, and for him, mindless talk. After that, every time she mentioned pain-
the medication. He could always get it. He knew people. He knew doctors. He knew-oh, yes, how well he knew-the doctor who ran the hospital where my dear, loving, loyal wife, Jean, was working.
“That’s how they met. That’s how it all began. Innocent at first. It usually is, isn’t it? Innocent, I mean. For all the loath-some, filthy thoughts that began to creep into their minds, like worms eating away at a corpse, or, more likely, the spiral-shaped vermin that infest the syphilitic, they were on the outside nothing but a couple of civilized, compassionate people, concerned, both of them, with the welfare of the great man’s wife. I didn’t notice it at the time,” he added confidentially, “but thinking back on it I’m almost certain there was a peculiar odor-a kind of stench-whenever I was with the two of them together.” He paused. “You think I’m making that up, that it’s just my imagination?” he asked with a stern sideways glance. “Don’t they say that when two people are attracted to each other there is a certain chemistry between them? Didn’t you ever mix chemicals together when you were a child to see what the worst smell was you could make?
“But you’re right,” he admitted, waving his hand back and forth in front of his face. “At the time, I noticed nothing.” There was a slightly astonished look on his face. “There was nothing to notice. We were always talking about the law, and she was always asking about his wife. The first time I noticed anything was one night when we were having dinner, the three of us. His wife was-well, you know-’not feeling well.’ Jean had to leave before we had coffee. She had the late shift at the hospital. After she was gone, Jeffries seemed to draw into himself, as if there was something that was bothering him. Finally, after I urged him to speak, he asked if Jean was working some kind of double shift.
When I told him she was not, that she was working nights all week, he looked distressed. He had been out at the hospital that afternoon, he explained, to visit his friend, the doctor who ran the place. He had seen Jean walking down a corridor too far away for him either to catch her eye or say hello, but he was certain it was she.
“I dismissed it as best I could. ‘She was probably called in for some kind of emergency. That happens once in a while.’ He pretended to agree, but I could see he did not believe it.”
Elliott bent his head forward and rubbed the back of his neck.
“It’s a fairly shrewd tactic, don’t you think? Suggest to someone that his wife may be up to something improper? You become the last person he’ll ever suspect as the one she’s doing it with. Jeffries was, after all, a truly brilliant man.” He hesitated before he added, “At least I thought so then.” His eyes sparkled with malice. “I was thirty-three years old when I came here, the same age as Christ when he died. Do you know the best thing ever said about Christ?” For a brief moment he was seized by a look of uncertainty. “Said about him, or did I make it up? It doesn’t matter.” His face brightened. ” ‘If Christ had lived, he would have changed his mind.’ That’s what happened to me, you see. I lived, and I changed my mind. I believed in him, I thought he could do nothing wrong. Then, when I realized what he had done, how utterly corrupt he was, I understood how my own life had been nothing but a lie.” His eyes flashed, and a smile darted across his mouth. “There are certain advantages in losing your mind.”
Eight
Chester, the patient who could do anything with numbers and nothing at all with simple historical facts, was standing in front of our table, trembling from head to toe.
“Elliott,” he said, gulping a breath, “I have to go to the bathroom. What should I do?” Closing his mouth, he pulled his upper lip all the way down over the lower one.
Elliott placed his hand on Chester’s shoulder and, remarkably, the trembling stopped. “It will be all right,” he said in a calm, soothing voice. He nodded toward the orderly, now reading a tattered paperback, at the other end of the room. “Mr. Charles always takes you, remember? Just go tell him you have to go.”
He removed his hand from his shoulder, and the trembling started once more. Gently, he put it back, and again it stopped.
“Don’t you believe me?” he asked, peering into his eyes.
“Yes,” he insisted, “but I’m scared.”
“You’re not scared of Mr. Charles, are you?” Elliott asked evenly.
“He always takes good care of you.”
“I’m scared I’ll go in my pants,” he replied in a childlike voice.
He looked down at the floor, too embarrassed to meet Elliott’s gaze.
“Look at me,” Elliott instructed. Dutifully, Chester raised his eyes. “It’s all right. It won’t happen. I promise. Now, go tell Mr.
Charles what you have to do.” Elliott patted him on the shoulder and then took his hand away for good. The trembling did not come back.
“Thank you, Elliott,” he said as he turned to go. He had taken perhaps three steps, when he stopped and yelled at the top of his lungs: “Mr. Charles, I have to take a piss now!”
I watched the orderly look over the top of his book and then slowly get to his feet. “He seems harmless enough,” I remarked.
“Why is he here?”
“Too much history,” Elliott explained. I waited for the rest of it, but that was all he offered.
“Too much history? I don’t understand.”
“Yes, exactly. Too much history,” he mused. “He spent so much time reading about it, the past finally became his whole reality.
If he had been studying something like the history of music, he might have walked around telling everyone he was Beethoven.
He was studying the Vietnam War and he decided one day that he was in the war, and that he was surrounded by the Vietcong.
He wrapped a bandanna around his forehead, covered his face with grease, and hid on the steam pipes that ran through the underground garage of the apartment building where he lived. No one knows how long he was there, clutching the bayonet he had picked up at some army surplus store. He might have been there for days, waiting for the Vietcong to come. They came all right, wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase. Chester thought he was a scout sent ahead to get his exact location. He jumped down from the pipes above that poor fellow’s car-turned out he was an insurance salesman-slashed his throat, and left him to bleed to death while he went running through the garage looking for more. But you’re right. He’s harmless. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not in here, anyway.”