“Who doesn’t have those?”
“Ah, yes. But we’re not talking about generalities, other people. We’re talking about particulars. You. Do you have psychological weaknesses that they could exploit? Is there an event or events in your past that could be considered predicating factors to your losing your sanity? So that when they commit you here, and they will, your friends and colleagues will say, ’Of course. He cracked. Finally. And who wouldn’t? It was the war that did it to him. And losing his mother—or what have you—like that.’ Hmm?”
Teddy said, “That could be said about anyone.”
“Well, that’s the point. Don’t you see? Yes, it could be said about anyone, but they’re going to say it about you. How’s your head?”
“My head?”
She chewed on her lower lip and nodded several times. “The block atop your neck, yes. How is it? Any funny dreams lately?”
“Sure.”
“Headaches?”
“I’m prone to migraines.”
“Jesus. You’re not.”
“I am.”
“Have you taken pills since you’ve come here, even aspirin?”
“Yes.”
“Feeling just a bit off, maybe? Not a hundred percent yourself? Oh, it’s no big deal, you say, you just feel a little punkish. Maybe your brain isn’t making connections quite as fast as normal. But you haven’t been sleeping well, you say. A strange bed, a strange place, a storm. You say these things to yourself. Yes?”
Teddy nodded.
“And you’ve eaten in the cafeteria, I assume. Drank the coffee they’ve given you. Tell me, at least, that you’ve been smoking your own cigarettes.”
“My partner’s,” Teddy admitted.
“Never took one from a doctor or an orderly?”
Teddy could feel the cigarettes he’d won in poker that night nestled in his shirt pocket. He remembered smoking one of Cawley’s the day they’d arrived, how it had tasted sweeter than other tobaccos he’d had in his life.
She could see the answer in his face.
“It takes an average of three to four days for neuroleptic narcotics to reach workable levels in the bloodstream. During that time, you’d barely notice their effects. Sometimes, patients have seizures. Seizures can often be dismissed as migraines, particularly if the patient has a migraine history. These seizures are rare, in any event. Usually, the only noticeable effects are that the patient—”
“Stop calling me a patient.”
“—dreams with an increased vividness and for longer sections of time, the dreams often stringing together and piggybacking off one another until they come to resemble a novel written by Picasso. The other noticeable effect is that the patient feels just a bit, oh, foggy. His thoughts are a wee bit less accessible. But he hasn’t been sleeping well, all those dreams you know, and so he can be forgiven for feeling a bit sluggish. And no, Marshal, I wasn’t calling you a ’patient.’ Not yet. I was speaking rhetorically.”
“If I avoid all food, cigarettes, coffee, pills, how much damage could already be done?”
She pulled her hair back off her face and twisted it into a knot behind her head. “A lot, I’m afraid.”
“Let’s say I can’t get off this island until tomorrow. Let’s say the drugs have begun to take effect. How will I know?”
“The most obvious indicators will be a dry mouth coupled paradoxically with a drool impulse and, oh yes, palsy. You’ll notice small tremors. They begin where your wrist meets your thumb and they usually ride along that thumb for a while before they own your hands.”
Own.
Teddy said, “What else?”
“Sensitivity to light, left-brain headaches, words begin to stick. You’ll stutter more.”
Teddy could hear the ocean outside, the tide coming in, smashing against the rocks.
“What goes on in the lighthouse?” he said.
She hugged herself and leaned toward the fire. “Surgery.”
“Surgery? They can do surgery in the hospital.”
“Brain surgery.”
Teddy said, “They can do that there too.”
She stared into the flames. “Exploratory surgery. Not the ’Let’s-open-the-skull-and-fix-that’ kind. No. The ’Let’s-open-the-skull-and-see-what-happens-if-we-pull-on-this’ kind. The illegal kind, Marshal. Learned-it-from-the-Nazis kind.” She smiled at him. “That’s where they try to build their ghosts.”
“Who knows about this? On the island, I mean?”
“About the lighthouse?”
“Yes, the lighthouse.”
“Everyone.”
“Come on. The orderlies, the nurses?”
She held Teddy’s eyes through the flame, and hers were steady and clear.
“Everyone,” she repeated.
HE DIDN’T REMEMBER falling asleep, but he must have, because she was shaking him.
She said, “You have to go. They think I’m dead. They think I drowned. If they come looking for you, they could find me. I’m sorry. But you have to go.”
He stood and rubbed his cheeks just below his eyes.
“There’s a road,” she said. “Just east of the top of this cliff. Follow it and it winds down to the west. It’ll take you out behind the old commander’s mansion after about an hour’s walk.”
“Are you Rachel Solando?” he said. “I know the one I met was a fake.”
“How do you know?”
Teddy thought back to his thumbs the night before. He’d been staring at them as they put him to bed. When he woke, they’d been cleaned. Shoe polish, he’d thought, but then he remembered touching her face…
“Her hair was dyed. Recently,” he said.
“You need to go.” She turned his shoulder gently toward the opening.
“If I need to come back,” he said.
“I won’t be here. I move during the day. New places every night.”
“But I could come get you, take you off here.”
She gave him a sad smile and brushed the hair back along his temples. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”
“I have.”
“You’ll never get off here. You’re one of us now.” She pressed her fingers to his shoulder, nudged him toward the opening.
Teddy stopped at the ledge, looked back at her. “I had a friend. He was with me tonight and we got separated. Have you seen him?”
She gave him the same sad smile.
“Marshal,” she said, “you have no friends.”
18
BY THE TIME he reached the back of Cawley’s house, he could barely walk.
He made his way out from behind the house and started up the road to the main gate, feeling as if the distance had quadrupled since this morning, and a man came out of the dark on the road beside him and slid his arm under Teddy’s and said, “We’ve been wondering when you’d show up.”
The warden.
His skin was the white of candle wax, as smooth as if it were lacquered, and vaguely translucent. His nails, Teddy noticed, were as long and white as his skin, their points stopping just short of hooking and meticulously filed. But his eyes were the most disruptive thing about him. A silken blue, filled with a strange wonderment. The eyes of a baby.
“Nice to finally meet you, Warden. How are you?”
“Oh,” the man said, “I’m tip-top. Yourself?”
“Never better.”
The warden squeezed his arm. “Good to hear. Taking a leisurely stroll, were we?”
“Well, now that the patient’s been found, I thought I’d tour the island.”
“Enjoyed yourself, I trust.”
“Completely.”
“Wonderful. Did you come across our natives?”
It took Teddy a minute. His head was buzzing constantly now. His legs were barely holding him up.
“Oh, the rats,” he said.
The warden clapped his back. “The rats, yes! There’s something strangely regal about them, don’t you think?”
> Teddy looked into the man’s eyes and said, “They’re rats.”
“Vermin, yes. I understand. But the way they sit on their haunches and stare at you if they believe they’re at a safe distance, and how swiftly they move, in and out of a hole before you can blink…” He looked up at the stars. “Well, maybe regal is the wrong word. How about utile? They’re exceptionally utile creatures.”
They’d reached the main gate and the warden kept his grip on Teddy’s arm and turned in place until they were looking back at Cawley’s house and the sea beyond.
“Did you enjoy God’s latest gift?” the warden said.
Teddy looked at the man and sensed disease in those perfect eyes. “I’m sorry?”
“God’s gift,” the warden said, and his arm swept the torn grounds. “His violence. When I first came downstairs in my home and saw the tree in my living room, it reached toward me like a divine hand. Not literally, of course. But figuratively, it stretched. God loves violence. You understand that, don’t you?”
“No,” Teddy said, “I don’t.”
The warden walked a few steps forward and turned to face Teddy. “Why else would there be so much of it? It’s in us. It comes out of us. It is what we do more naturally than we breathe. We wage war. We burn sacrifices. We pillage and tear at the flesh of our brothers. We fill great fields with our stinking dead. And why? To show Him that we’ve learned from His example.”
Teddy watched the man’s hand stroking the binding of the small book he pressed to his abdomen.
He smiled and his teeth were yellow.
“God gives us earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes. He gives us mountains that spew fire onto our heads. Oceans that swallow ships. He gives us nature, and nature is a smiling killer. He gives us disease so that in our death we believe He gave us orifices only so that we could feel our life bleed out of them. He gave us lust and fury and greed and our filthy hearts. So that we could wage violence in His honor. There is no moral order as pure as this storm we’ve just seen. There is no moral order at all. There is only this—can my violence conquer yours?”
Teddy said, “I’m not sure I—”
“Can it?” The warden stepped in close, and Teddy could smell his stale breath.
“Can what?” Teddy asked.
“Can my violence conquer yours?”
“I’m not violent,” Teddy said.
The warden spit on the ground near their feet. “You’re as violent as they come. I know, because I’m as violent as they come. Don’t embarrass yourself by denying your own blood lust, son. Don’t embarrass me. If the constraints of society were removed, and I was all that stood between you and a meal, you’d crack my skull with a rock and eat my meaty parts.” He leaned in. “If my teeth sank into your eye right now, could you stop me before I blinded you?”
Teddy saw glee in his baby eyes. He pictured the man’s heart, black and beating, behind the wall of his chest.
“Give it a try,” he said.
“That’s the spirit,” the warden whispered.
Teddy set his feet, could feel the blood rushing through his arms.
“Yes, yes,” the warden whispered. “’My very chains and I grew friends.’”
“What?” Teddy found himself whispering, his body vibrating with a strange tingling.
“That’s Byron,” the warden said. “You’ll remember that line, won’t you?”
Teddy smiled as the man took a step back. “They really broke the mold with you, didn’t they, Warden?”
A thin smile to match Teddy’s own.
“He thinks it’s okay.”
“What’s okay?”
“You. Your little endgame. He thinks it’s relatively harmless. But I don’t.”
“No, huh?”
“No.” The warden dropped his arm and took a few steps forward. He crossed his hands behind his back so that his book was pressed against the base of his spine and then turned and set his feet apart in the military fashion and stared at Teddy. “You say you were out for a stroll, but I know better. I know you, son.”
“We just met,” Teddy said.
The warden shook his head. “Our kind have known each other for centuries. I know you to your core. And I think you’re sad. I really do.” He pursed his lips and considered his shoes. “Sad is fine. Pathetic in a man, but fine because it has no effect on me. But I also think you’re dangerous.”
“Every man has a right to his opinion,” Teddy said.
The warden’s face darkened. “No, he doesn’t. Men are foolish. They eat and drink and pass gas and fornicate and procreate, and this last is particularly unfortunate, because the world would be a much better place with far fewer of us in it. Retards and mud children and lunatics and people of low moral character—that’s what we produce. That’s what we spoil this earth with. In the South now, they’re trying to keep their niggers in line. But I’ll tell you something, I’ve spent time in the South, and they’re all niggers down there, son. White niggers, black niggers, women niggers. Got niggers everywhere and they’re no more use than two-legged dogs. Least the dog can still sniff out a scent from time to time. You’re a nigger, son. You’re of low fiber. I can smell it in you.”
His voice was surprisingly light, almost feminine.
“Well,” Teddy said, “you won’t have to worry about me after the morning, will you, Warden?”
The warden smiled. “No, I won’t, son.”
“I’ll be out of your hair and off your island.”
The warden took two steps toward him, his smile dissolving. He cocked his head at Teddy and held him in his fetal gaze.
“You’re not going anywhere, son.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Beg all you want.” The warden leaned in and sniffed the air to the left of Teddy’s face, then moved his head, sniffed the air to the right of it.
Teddy said, “Smell something?”
“Mmm-hmm.” The warden leaned back. “Smells like fear to me, son.”
“You probably want to take a shower, then,” Teddy said. “Wash that shit off yourself.”
Neither of them spoke for a bit, and then the warden said, “Remember those chains, nigger. They’re your friends. And know that I’m very much looking forward to our final dance. Ah,” he said, “what carnage we’ll achieve.”
And he turned and walked up the road toward his house.
THE MEN’S DORMITORY was abandoned. Not a soul inside the place. Teddy went up to his room and hung his slicker in the closet and looked for any evidence that Chuck had returned there, but there was none.
He thought of sitting on the bed, but he knew if he did, he’d pass out and probably not wake until morning, so he went down to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face and slicked back his crew cut with a wet comb. His bones felt scraped and his blood seemed thick as a malted, and his eyes were sunken and ringed red and his skin was gray. He splashed a few more handfuls of cold water up into his face and then dried off and went outside into the main compound.
No one.
The air was actually warming up, growing humid and sticky, and crickets and cicadas had begun to find their voices. Teddy walked the grounds, hoping that somehow Chuck had arrived ahead of him and was maybe doing the same thing, wandering around until he bumped into Teddy.
There was the guard on the gate, and Teddy could see lights in the rooms, but otherwise, the place was empty. He made his way over to the hospital and went up the steps and pulled on the door only to find it locked. He heard a squeak of hinges and looked out to see that the guard had opened the gate and gone out to join his comrade on the other side, and when the gate swung closed again, Teddy could hear his shoes scrape on the concrete landing as he stepped back from the door.
He sat on the steps for a minute. So much for Noyce’s theory. Teddy was now, beyond any doubt, completely alone. Locked in, yes. But unwatched as far as he could tell.
He walked around to the back of the hospital and his chest filled when he saw an
orderly sitting on the back landing, smoking a cigarette.
Teddy approached, and the kid, a slim, rangy black kid, looked up at him. Teddy pulled a cigarette from his pocket and said, “Got a light?”
“Sure do.”
Teddy leaned in as the kid lit his cigarette, smiled his thanks as he leaned back and remembered what the woman had told him about smoking their cigarettes, and he let the smoke flow slowly out of his mouth without inhaling.
“How you doing tonight?” he said.
“All right, sir. You?”
“I’m okay. Where is everyone?”
The kid jerked his thumb behind him. “In there. Some big meeting. Don’t know about what.”
“All the doctors and nurses?”
The kid nodded. “Some of the patients too. Most of us orderlies. I got stuck with this here door ’cause the latch don’t work real good. Otherwise, though, yeah. Everyone in there.”
Teddy took another cigar puff off his cigarette, hoped the kid didn’t notice. He wondered if he should just bluff his way up the stairs, hope the kid took him for another orderly, one from Ward C maybe.
Then he saw through the window behind the kid that the hallway was filling and people were heading for the front door.
He thanked the kid for the light and walked around out front, was met with a crowd of people milling there, talking, lighting cigarettes. He saw Nurse Marino say something to Trey Washington, put her hand on his shoulder as she did, and Trey threw back his head and laughed.
Teddy started to walk over to them when Cawley called to him from the stairs. “Marshal!”
Teddy turned and Cawley came down the stairs toward him, touched Teddy’s elbow, and began walking toward the wall.
“Where’ve you been?” Cawley said.
“Wandering. Looking at your island.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Find anything amusing?”
“Rats.”
“Well, sure, we have plenty of those.”
“How’s the roof repair coming?” Teddy said.