"That's nice to hear."
"What about the Fireman. He was your friend. Whatever happened to him? Afterward, I mean."
I paused, then answered: "He got out. He straightened out all his problems, moved to the South, and made a lot of money. Had a family. Big house. Big car. Very successful all around. Last I heard, he was heading up some charitable foundation. Happy and healthy."
Napoleon nodded. "I can believe it. And the woman who came to investigate? Did she go with him?"
"No. She went on to a judgeship. All sorts of honors. She had a wonderful life."
"I knew it. You could just tell."
Of course, this was all a lie.
He looked down at his watch. "I need to get back. Get ready for my great moment. Wish me luck."
"Good luck," I said.
"It's good seeing you again," Napoleon added. "I hope your life goes okay."
"You, too," I said. "You look good."
"Really? I doubt it. I doubt very many of us look good. But that's okay. Thanks for saying it."
He stood and I joined him. We both looked back at the Amherst Building.
"I'll be happy when they tear it down," Napoleon said with a sudden burst of bitterness. "It was a dangerous, evil place and not much good happened there."
Then he turned back to me. "C-Bird, you were there. You saw it all. You tell everyone."
"Who would listen?"
"Someone might. Write the story. You can do it."
"Some stories should be left unwritten," I said.
Napoleon shrugged his rounded shoulders. "If you write it, then it will be real. If all it does is stay in our memories, then it's like it never happened. Like it was some dream. Or hallucination thought up by all of us madmen. No one trusts us when we say something. But if you write it down, well, that gives it some substance. Makes it all true enough."
I shook my head. "The trouble with being mad," I said, "was it was real hard to tell what was true and what wasn't. That doesn't change, just because we can take enough pills to scrape along now in the world with all the others."
Napoleon smiled. "You're right," he said. "But maybe not, too. I don't know. I just know that you could tell it and maybe a few people would believe it, and that's a good enough thing. No one ever believed us, back then. Even when we took the medications, no one ever believed us."
He looked at his watch again, and shifted his feet nervously.
"You should get back," I said.
"I must get back," he repeated.
We stood awkwardly until he finally turned, and walked away. About midway down the path, Napoleon turned, and gave me the same unsure little wave that he had when he'd first spotted me. "Tell it," he called. Then he turned and walked quickly away, a little duck like in his style. I could see that his hands were shaking again.
It was after dark when I finally quick marched up the sidewalk to my apartment, and climbed the stairs and locked myself into the safety of the small space. A nervous fatigue seemed to pulse through my veins, carried along the bloodstream with the red cells and the white cells. Seeing Napoleon and hearing myself called by the nickname that I'd received when I first went to the hospital startled emotions within me. I thought hard about taking some pills. I knew I had some that were designed to calm me, should I get overly excited. But I did not. "Tell the story," he'd said to me. "How?" I said out loud in the quiet of my own home.
The room echoed around me.
"You can't tell it," I said to myself.
Then I asked the question: Why not?
I had some pens and pencils, but no paper.
Then an idea came to me. For a second, I wondered whether it was one of my voices, returning, filling my ear with a quick suggestion and modest command. I stopped, listening carefully, trying to pluck the unmistakable tones of my familiar guides from the street sounds that penetrated past the laboring of my old window air conditioning unit. But they were elusive. I didn't know whether they were there, or not. But uncertainty was something I had grown accustomed to.
I took a slightly worn and scratched table chair and placed it against the side of the wall deep in the corner of the room. I didn't have any paper, I told myself. But what I did have were white-painted walls unadorned by posters or art or anything.
Balancing myself on the seat, I could reach almost to the ceiling. I gripped a pencil in my hand and leaned forward. Then I wrote quickly, in a tiny, pinched, but legible script:
Francis Xavier Petrel arrived in tears at the Western State Hospital in the hack of an ambulance. It was raining hard, darkness was falling rapidly, and his arms and legs were cuffed and restrained. He was twenty-one years old and more scared than he'd ever been in his entire short, and to that point, relatively uneventful life…
Chapter 2
Francis Xavier Petrel arrived in tears at the Western State Hospital in the back of an ambulance. It was raining hard, darkness was falling rapidly, and his arms and legs were cuffed and restrained. He was twenty-one years old and more scared than he'd ever been in his short, and to that point, relatively uneventful life.
The two men who had driven him to the hospital had mostly kept their mouths closed during the ride, except to mutter complaints about the unseasonable weather, or make caustic remarks about the other drivers on the roads, none of whom seemed to meet the standards of excellence that the they jointly held. The ambulance had bumped along the roadway at a moderate speed, flashing lights and urgency both ignored. There was something of dull routine in the way the two men had acted, as if the trip to the hospital was nothing more than a way-stop in the midst of an oppressively normal, decidedly boring day. One man occasionally slurped from a soda can, making a smacking noise with his lips. The other whistled snatches of popular songs. The first sported Elvis sideburns. The second had a bushy lion's mane of hair.
It might have been a trivial journey for the two attendants, but to the young man rigid with tension in the back, his breathing coming in short sprinter's spurts, it was nothing of the sort. Every sound, every sensation seemed to signal something to him, each more terrifying and more threatening than the next. The beat of the windshield wipers was like some deep jungle drum playing a roll of doom. The humming of the tires against the slick road surface was a siren's song of despair. Even the noise of his own labored wind seemed to echo, as if he were encased in a tomb. The restraints dug into his flesh, and he opened his mouth to scream for help, but could not make the right sound. All that emerged was a gargling burst of despair. One thought penetrated the symphony of discord that if he survived the day, he was likely to never have a worse one.