Psychopath (12 page)

"I won’t say anything," she said.

He smiled. "Can you come here tomorrow?"

"Okay."

Okay
.  Another victory against Naomi’s isolation.  A rout.  Naomi walked back to her room, and Jonah stayed in his office.  But now he knew that little by little, day by day, she would come closer.  By appearing vulnerable with her, he would give her the permission she needed to be vulnerable with him.  And, together, as victims, they would give her demons an audience, let them scream and cry and mourn and rage as loudly and as long as they needed to.

Jonah opened his eyes and stared at his bedroom ceiling again.  He could almost smell Naomi’s fresh skin.  He wished she were with him at that very moment.  He wished Tommy Magellan and Mike Pansky and all his other patients were there, too.  He wished he never had to leave the locked unit.  He wished he could eat, sleep, and bathe there, among the little broken people.  Because locking the door behind him every night was like locking away pieces of himself.

That image of the locked door, with him on one side and them on the other, stuck in his mind and in his throat.  Suddenly, he felt more alone than free.  And loneliness was the danger zone.  Loneliness was the thing that made him want to leave the apartment and walk the streets, searching for truth, scavenging intimacies.

He had never given in to the impulse to take a life in the very town in which he worked, but he had come close.  Too close.  He had spent November and December of 1995 in Frills Corners, Pennsylvania, just outside the Allegheny National Forest, working at the Venango Regional Medical Center.  The child psychiatry unit there was not locked and admitted only patients who could ‘contract for safety,’ promising not to harm themselves.  That meant the kids could go home for visits or out on ‘passes’ with their parents.  The place pretty much emptied out from the day before Christmas until the following Monday.  For Jonah, that meant five days of solitude.  And late that Sunday night it had all started again — the throbbing inside his skull, the burning in his skin, the awful struggle to get air into his lungs.  So he had gone for a walk just after midnight.  To breathe.  To stop the heat.

She had been waiting for him.  Like the rest.  Ally Bartlett, twenty-eight years old, not short and not tall, perhaps twenty pounds overweight, with medium brown eyes and curly black hair, sitting at a bus stop outside a bar, dressed in tan wool slacks and a blue wool peacoat.  She wore a thick, red scarf wrapped twice around her neck.  No hat.  No gloves.  She was staring at him from the moment he turned the corner.  She never looked away as he walked toward her.  "You must be freezing," she said, smiling as he sat down a respectful distance from her.

Jonah was wearing faded blue jeans and a gray turtleneck sweater.  No coat.  But he didn’t feel cold.  "Someone stole my coat," he told her.

"The bus should be here in a few minutes," she said.  "Take this," she said, unwrapping her scarf.  "At least until it comes."

"I couldn’t," Jonah said, knowing that he would.

"Don’t be a hero," she said.  "It’s freezing."  She finished taking off the scarf, revealing the gold cross she wore around her neck.

Jonah nodded in silent acknowledgment of this sign, of God’s offering to him.  He took the scarf and wrapped it around his neck, breathing in Ally’s enrapturing scent, a bouquet of her perfume, makeup, sweat, breath.  "My name is Phillip," he said.  "Phillip Keane.  I’m a doctor at Venango Regional."

"Ally Bartlett," she said.  She looked down the street.  "Any second now, I bet," she said.

His hunger had him off-balance, and he moved awkwardly into questioning her.  "How was your holiday?"

"Terrible," she said, with an even wider smile.

"Why?"  He thought he sounded desperate.  "What was terrible?"

The smile disappeared.  "Long story."

So Ally was closing the door already.  Baiting him with kindness, then shutting him out.  In the freezing cold.  She would give more to a homeless man on a street corner, begging for change.  Jonah, she would happily shortchange.  Jonah, a man dedicated to healing others, she would ignore.  His head felt like it would split in two.  He could picture his basilar artery, along the base of his brain, pulsating, the angry nerve cells in its fibrous wall screaming in agony as they stretched with every beat of his heart.  He needed relief, if only the relief that would come with hearing Ally’s muffled scream, looking into her terrified eyes, knowing her pain.  He reached into his pocket, grasping the stiletto knife he was carrying.  He glanced at the all but deserted bar room behind them, then scanned the street.  They were alone.  "Where is that bus?" he said, his voice shaking.  He stood up.  And he would have started over to her, would have — with no more joy than Abraham raising a dagger over Isaac — taken the life he needed, the life God was giving him.  But she spoke.

"This will sound crazy," she said, "but do you want to get a drink or something?  I mean, you never know who you’re really meeting — or why."

A drink
or something
.  Jonah relaxed his grip on the knife.  He took a deep breath, let it out.

Ally tilted her head.  "I mean, here you are.  Here I am.  No bus.  Freezing cold.  And there’s a bar about fifteen feet away."  She held her palms in the air.  "It’s kind of like God’s trying to tell us something, don’t you think?"

"You never know with God," Jonah said.  He pretended to hesitate.  He let go of the knife.  "Why not?" he said, after a few seconds.

The two of them took a table at the back of Sawyer’s Grub and Pub, ordered a couple beers.

"You have an incredible voice," Ally said.  "Do people tell you that?"

"Sometimes."

"It’s strange, almost."

Jonah raised an eyebrow.

"I didn’t mean it that way," she said, with a delightful laugh.  "Not strange, weird.  Strange in a good way.  Kind.  But more than kind.  Comforting or something."

"So why was your holiday so terrible?" Jonah asked.

She looked down at her beer.  "Persistent, aren’t you?"

"People do tell me that.  All the time."

She looked back at him.  "My father" — her voice fell off to a whisper, her eyes started to close — "is dying."  Then she began to weep.

Jonah sat silently, transfixed.  Maybe, despite what he had become, despite all the terrible things he had done, God had truly sent him an angel.

Ally opened her eyes, looked back at him.  She kept wiping away her tears, but more and more streamed out of her eyes.  "I’m sorry.  I didn’t ask you to come in here so I could fall apart like this.  I just can’t seem to..."

"To..."  He leaned forward.

She let her tears roll down her face. "Deal with this."

Jonah reached across the table and took one of her hands in both of his.  She didn’t resist his touch at all.  "What is your father dying from?" he asked her.

"Some kind of virus infecting his heart," she said.  "It’s swollen and won’t pump right.  Endo..."

"Viral endocarditis," he said.

She used the sleeve of her sweater to dry her eyes.  "You really are a doctor."

"I really am."

"A heart doctor?" she asked.

"In a way, I suppose," he said.  "A psychiatrist."

She smiled again.  "Ah, no wonder," she said.

"No wonder, what?"

Her smile mellowed to something especially warm, almost loving.  "No wonder I feel like I could tell you anything," she said.

Jonah felt the tension leaving his muscles, the heat leaving his skin.  He realized his head had stopped aching.  "Tell me about him," he said.

And Ally had.  Without Jonah having to pry or prod or threaten, she gave him her truth.  She told him the things she loved about her father and the things she hated.  She told him what growing up in Ithaca, New York, had been like for her.  She told him about being raped by a Cornell college sophomore when she was fourteen.  She told him that her father had asked her what she had done to make the boy think she wanted sex, and that her father had held her as she cried, stroked her hair, and promised her that everything would be all right.  She told him she wished she could do the same for him now.  She told him her mother, a religious woman, was remarried and had visited her father in the hospital just twice.  She told him her older brother was in a federal penitentiary, sentenced to ten years for transporting cocaine across state lines.  She told him how memories of her rape still got in the way of her sexual pleasure.

Ally Bartlett, Jonah concluded, was indeed an angel.  And he had taken her home with him and made love with her and slept beside her that night.  That night and never again.  Because he knew that Ally would ultimately want to know him in the ways she had let him know her.  She would not be fooled by the pieces of lives he had harvested from others.

Jonah sat up in bed.  The memory of Ally Bartlett, like the memories of his patients on the locked unit at Canaan Memorial, only made him feel more alone.  His apartment was beginning to feel more like a prison than a fortress.

It was nearly two o’clock.  He hungered to wander the streets.  He hungered to find someone.  To have someone.  He reached for the bottle of Haldol on the bedside table, opened it, and chewed three milligrams of the stuff, the pill fragments scratching his throat as he forced them down.  Then he looked out the bedroom door at his old, belted briefcase sitting on the floor of the living room.

He didn’t want to do it.  It was dirty and disgusting and he didn’t even know what had possessed him to think of doing it in the first place.  Maybe it was something hardwired in his brain, some genetically programmed aberrant appetite.  Maybe it was a vestige of primitive rituals buried somewhere in the tangle of billions of neurons that made up his cortex.  People were sometimes born with webbed hands or feet, after all.  Maybe his was a behavioral throwback.

Whatever its roots, whatever its strange power, once he had given in to the habit the first time, it became nearly impossible to resist repeating it.  Because it did partly satisfy his hunger.  When he had lasted through days of solitude, it could sometimes get nun through the last terrible hours.

He stood up.  He walked into the living room, picked up his briefcase, and sat down on the couch.  He unfastened one of its straps and then the other.  He aligned the wheels of its combination lock and clicked it open.  Then he pulled apart its jaws, reached inside, and took out a small, zippered black leather case, of the kind that might be used to hold a blood pressure cuff or a stash of diamonds.

He sat back on the couch, fondling the case, feeling the glass tube inside.  Occasionally just touching the thing, knowing it was there, was enough.  But it would not be enough tonight.  He was already sweating.  He was already salivating.  He was already imagining the terror in Anna Beckwith’s eyes that night on Route 90 East.

He unzipped the case and took out the thing he needed — a test tube half-filled with blood.  He rolled it between his palms, warming it.  He ran the smooth glass base along his lips, then past them, into his mouth, almost tasting the precious liquid.

He felt intensely guilty.  Shameful.  But why?  Was an infant to be condemned for suckling?  Did churchgoers feel guilt consuming the body of Christ?  Were we not all, ultimately, one glorious being?  And if Jonah felt this more than others, knew it better than others, was he to be condemned?

He slid off the couch, sinking to his knees.  He pulled the light purple rubber stopper from the top of the tube.  He poured a few drops of the blood onto his tongue, spread another drop over his lips, then carefully pushed the stopper back in place.  The blood was warm and tasted salty, of birth and death and, most important, of others.  All the others.  A fantastic collage of their lives, without boundaries, swirling together, inside him.  A reincarnation of the primordial sea from which all life once sprung.  He began to relax almost immediately.  Within half a minute he began to feel truly at peace.  His heart slowed, and his breathing eased.  The pain in his head evaporated, leaving behind a pleasant tingling at his temples, at the nape of his neck.  God willing, he would make it through the night.  He would make it to the morning, when there would be Naomi and Tommy and Mike and Jessie and Carl and the rest of them.  The rest of him.

*            *            *

Morning came drizzly and gray and cold.  Jonah rushed to the locked unit, arriving just before 7:00
A.M.
, as had become his habit.  He delighted in being there early because the place had yet to fall into its regular rhythm.  No other psychiatrist was there.  The nursing staff was in flux — the night nurses leaving, the day nurses arriving.  Some of the patients were still sleeping, some shaking off sleep, some drowsy from a night without any sleep at all.  Some were fresh from showers, some still wearing pajamas.  Most of their beds were unmade.  Jonah could smell the sweet musk of their sheets, pillowcases and blankets, their matted and tousled hair, their night sweats.  It was the time of day when these five and six and ten-year-old shut-ins felt most homesick, most institutionalized, and it was the time Jonah felt most needed and most at home, most a part of his extended family.

He went immediately to Naomi McMorris’s room.  Her door was ajar.  He looked inside and saw her lying awake in bed, her golden hair fanned over her pillow, her fist clutching the floppy ear of a pale pink bunny.  He knocked softly, pushed the door open a bit further and waited for her eyes to find his.  When they did, it seemed to him that all the love dammed up inside him began to flow, and he felt the kind of exquisite release he imagined a woman feels as her infant begins to nurse at her engorged breast.  "You didn’t tell anyone our secret, did you?" he asked.

She sat up in bed, shook her head.

"Good."

"Did
you
?" she asked.

Jonah felt shivers at the back of his neck.  Naomi wanted all of him as much as he wanted all of her.  "Never," he said.

"Good."

Jonah winked.  "See you later?"

She nodded.