Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (12 page)

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.

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,”